ABSTRACT
The fulfillment of a thousand-year dream was how Franjo Tudjman, leader of Croatia's independence struggle, described his country's recognition by the international community in 1992. Tomislav's big Croatia in the tenth century, like Tsar Dusan's great Serbia in the fourteenth century, was a temporary phenomenon. Nor did the Croats have a national church that could foster memories of their former statehood. The Croat intellectuals of the nineteenth century were disappointed by the rise of an expansionist and rather belligerent Serbian nationalism. Ritter Vitezovic identified as Croats all the contemporary Slav inhabitants of what the classically educated generally called Illyria. The Dalmatian writers of the Renaissance era were pan-Slavs, using the words Croat, Slav, and Illyrian—the latter term borrowed the classical name for the Balkan peninsula—almost interchangeably. lllyrianism, and its successor, Jugoslavism, was a practical response of a pessimistic nation that had been repeatedly tossed around and cut up in the wars between the great powers.
