Anthems and the Making of Nation States ─ Identity and Nationalism in the Balkans

The states created after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1992 all appointed official national anthems—the purpose of which was to forge new national identities out of the bloody and difficult history of the region. Building on Benedict Anderson’s work on ‘imagined communities’, Identity and Nationalism in the Balkans is the first full-length study into the role of national anthems in engendering feelings of nationalism. A textual analysis of these national songs aims to provide new insights into the history of the nations created after the fall of Yugoslavia, and show how these songs reveal the hopes and fears of the new countries—their future and their past.

Aleksandar Pavkovi is Associate Professor in Politics at Macquarie University, Sydney. He gained his PhD at Oxford after gaining his BA and MA at Yale. He is the author of Creating New States: Theory and Practice of Secession (with Peter Radan, 2007), The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the Balkans (2000) and Slobodan Jovanovic: An Unsentimental Approach to Politics (1993). He has also published widely in peer-reviewed journals and has edited several collections. Christopher Kelen is Professor of English at the University of Macau, China and is the author of Anthem Quality (2014).