Radical Nationalism and Facist Elements in Political Movements in Slovenia Between the Two World Wars.

Abstract

After the Second World War, European historians of fascist phenomena mainly focused on Italian Fascism and German Nazism, and justly so. In the last two decades, however, an increasing number of studies have been dedicated to various manifestations of fascism in Eastern European countries. These have only occasionally included the territory of the former Yugoslavia. It was mainly due to the Croatian Ustaša movement that Yugoslavia received notice. To date, several monographs have appeared on the Ustaša. They have also covered various aspects of the socalled Independent State of Croatia. Interest in fascism and radical nationalism on Yugoslav territory grew after the inter-ethnic wars of the 1990s (Hory and Broszat 1964, Scotti 1976, MacDonald 2002). In the collection on fascism in Europe edited by S. J. Wolf in 1968, Yugoslavia was not mentioned at all, whereas P. F. Sugar’s collection three years later contained two papers on fascism in Yugoslavia (Wolf 1968, Sugar 1971). While some studies of fascism mention only the Ustaša movement, the most recent one by Sabrina P. Ramet, briefly present the emergence of fascist movements in other Yugoslav nations, cursorily treating the Slovenes as well (2006: 35–111). A number of otherwise excellent recent studies on Yugoslavia or the Balkans after 1930 (Cox 2007, Tomasevich 2001) concentrate on the Ustaša movement or its leader, Ante Pavelić. This holds true as well for the collection of scholarly papers about the Independent State of Croatia edited by Sabrina Ramet (2007).