Seeing the Albanians through Serbian Eyes: The Inventors of the Tradition of Intolerance and Their Critics,1804-1939

The rise of the modern national states in the post-Ottoman Balkans was accompanied by coercive assimilation, deportation, and even extermination of ethnic minorities, especially the local Muslims. In the formative periods of the Serbian state and Royal Yugoslavia, ethnic Albanians were repeatedly subjected to most exclusionary and discriminatory policies. While these actions of the Serbian élite were guided by the geopolitical security pressures and the coercive utopia of homogeneous nation-state, Serbian policy makers were also influenced by a strong intellectual tradition of intolerance towards Muslim Albanians. While some members of the Serbian élite were planning and implementing repression and expulsion of Albanians, others were calling for tolerance and inclusion of Albanians in a wider Balkan union. The analysis of Serbian policies towards Albanians in the Balkan context enables us to reformulate and extend Miroslav Hroch’s influential theory of minority nationalisms.