Pan-Slavism
Pan-Slavism
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Pan-Slavism

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Pan-Slavism

Pan-Slavism is a political ideology that originated in the mid-19th century, emphasizing integrity and unity among the Slavic peoples. Its main impact occurred in the Balkans, where non-Slavic empires had ruled the South Slavs for centuries. These were mainly the Byzantine Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Venice.

Extensive pan-Slavism emerged much like Pan-Germanism; both movements flourished from the sense of unity and nationalism experienced by members of many European ethnic groups in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the consequent Napoleonic Wars, as a pushback against traditional European monarchies. As in other Romantic nationalist movements, Slavic intellectuals and scholars in the developing fields of history, philology, and folklore actively encouraged Slavs' interest in their shared identity and ancestry. Pan-Slavism co-existed with the Southern Slavic drive towards independence.

Commonly used symbols of the Pan-Slavic movement were the Pan-Slavic colours (blue, white, and red) and the Pan-Slavic anthem, Hey, Slavs.

The first pan-Slavists were the 16th-century Croatian writer Vinko Pribojević, the Dalmatian Aleksandar Komulović (1548–1608), the Croat Bartol Kašić (1575–1650), the Ragusan Ivan Gundulić (1589–1638), and the Croatian Catholic missionary Juraj Križanić (c. 1618 – 1683). Additionally, scholars such as Tomasz Kamusella have attributed early manifestations of Pan-Slavic thought within the Habsburg monarchy to the Slovaks Adam Franz Kollár (1718–1783) and Pavel Jozef Šafárik (1795–1861).[need quotation to verify] The Pan-Slavism movement grew rapidly following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. In the aftermath of the wars, the leaders of Europe sought to restore the pre-war status quo. At the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815, Austria's representative, Prince von Metternich, detected a threat to this status quo in the Austrian Empire through nationalists' demands for independence from the empire. While Vienna's subjects included numerous ethnic groups (such as Germans, Italians, Romanians, Hungarians, etc.), the Slav proportion of the population (Poles, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats) together formed a substantial—if not the largest—ethnic grouping.

The First Pan-Slav congress was held in Prague, Bohemia, in June 1848, during the revolutionary movement of 1848. The Czechs had refused to send representatives to the Frankfurt Assembly, feeling that Slavs had a distinct interest from the Germans. The Austroslav, František Palacký, presided over the event. Most of the delegates were Czech and Slovak. Palacký called for the cooperation of the Habsburgs and had also endorsed the Habsburg monarchy as the political formation most likely to protect the peoples of central Europe. When the Germans asked him to declare himself in favour of their desire for national unity, he replied that he would not, as this would weaken the Habsburg state: “Truly, if it were not that Austria had long existed, it would be necessary, in the interest of Europe, in the interest of humanity itself, to create it.”

The Pan-Slav congress met during the revolutionary turmoil of 1848. Young inhabitants of Prague had taken to the streets and in the confrontation, a stray bullet had killed the wife of Field Marshal Alfred I, Prince of Windisch-Grätz, the commander of the Austrian forces in Prague. Enraged, Windischgrätz seized the city, disbanded the congress, and established martial law throughout Bohemia.

According to Slovak intellectuals Ján Kollár and Andrej Ľudovít Radlinský, along with the prevailing Pan-Slavic views of the time, the Slavic nation consisted of four tribes, the Czechoslovak, the Polish, the Russian (East Slavs), and the Illyrian (Southern Slavs).

The first Pan-Slavic convention was held in Prague on June 2 through 16, 1848. The delegates at the Congress were specifically both anti-Austrian and anti-Russian. Still "the Right"—the moderately liberal wing of the Congress—under the leadership of František Palacký (1798–1876), a Czech historian and politician, and Pavol Jozef Šafárik (1795–1861), a Slovak philologist, historian and archaeologist, favored autonomy of the Slav lands within the framework of Austrian (Habsburg) monarchy. In contrast "the Left"—the radical wing of the Congress—under the leadership of Karel Sabina (1813–1877), a Czech writer and journalist, Josef Václav Frič, a Czech nationalist, Karol Libelt (1817–1861), a Polish writer and politician, and others, pressed for a close alliance with the revolutionary-democratic movement going on in Germany and Hungary in 1848.

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