Only in 1928, at the fourth Congress of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), was Montenegro defined as one of the special units of the federalist system. Then the danger of Greater Serbian hegemony, which could be applied in Montenegro, is also noted.
Adnan Prekić from the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšić said this at the panel "All colors of nationalism", within the Bookiranje festival of contemporary literature.
According to the moderator, historian Miloš Vukanović, this panel had the task of shedding light on how nationalities and identities have changed in the last 100 years in Montenegro and how they affect the political scene.
"When we talk about national identities in Yugoslavia, we should start from where peoples and nations come to that Yugoslavia," said Professor Hrvoje Klasić from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb.
According to him, Yugoslavia had no chance before it was created because it was not what it was supposed to be, he reports Focalizer.
"After Austria-Hungary, after the Ottoman Empire, it will be a space for South Slavic brothers where we will be equal, where we will have equal opportunities for development, equal opportunities for personnel solutions, equal opportunities for religious observances and beliefs... This has not happened since 1918. In 1945, she tried to solve it in another way, but we saw how it ended. Neither the insistence on brotherhood and unity, nor the strong fight against nationalism succeeded, but in principle it pushed under the carpet some things that accumulated and exploded in the XNUMXs," Klasić said.
When asked what stages the Montenegrin identity went through during Yugoslavia, and especially in the period before the referendum, Prekić started with the state-building idea that was current in the first half of the 19th century.
"And as the first state-building idea that appears in this area, it appears during the time of Peter II and Prince Danilo, and that is the idea of restoring Ivanbegovina. This refers to the state of Ivan Crnojević, and that is the first idea of restoring some territorial integrity and some statehood," said Prekić and explained that the death of Prince Danilo is proof of the reach of that idea.
According to him, the year 1918 was particularly disappointing, and then came communism, which, he says, had a strong foundation in Montenegro.
"We come to May 1945 and to that famous text in Borba by Milovan Đilas where he tries to define what the Montenegrin nation and the Montenegrin national community are. There we have the definition of that concept of duality. In a simplified version, Đilas says that the Montenegrin and Serbian people belong to the same ethnic community, but that through historical processes the Montenegrin people have built their national identity and therefore have the right to their own nation," said Prekić.
Daliborka Uljarević, director of the Center for Civic Education, referred to the role of identity issues in the process of political turmoil.
"I think that sensitive, intimate identity issues have been subject to heavy abuse by political actors all these years and continue to be so today. Of course, it was approached in different ways. I will look back at the period since the restoration of independence. We are in that period missed an opportunity as a society, and I appreciate that the decision-makers bear the greatest responsibility, to invest what was their potential, and their resources in strengthening identity, in rounding off all identity and foundations and building institutions. We pay the price today, because a society that has not established this kind of stability is very easy to shake, it is very easy to cause this kind of earthquake that we are witnessing," said Uljarević and added that "someone of us five or ten years ago, whether we are a religious society or not, that we could put it in the Montenegrin context".
"In the meantime, we got something that is the closest to a popular expression of religion. He actually abuses those feelings of identity in the most dangerous way," said Uljarević.
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