This program is concerned with studying the interrelationship between politics and modern identity in the 19th and 20th century. The key notion informing the conception of this program is that the implementation of contemporary ideas in Croatian society took place in a context of political, social and cultural inter-dependency. The aim of this program is to overcome the obstacles which until now have prevented a holistic view of the dynamic development of contemporary Croatian history. As a result, this program consists of five projects utilizing an inter-disciplinary approach, that is, it includes research conducted by experts from various scholarly disciplines (history, ethnology, literary history, the history of medicine, philosophy) which are concerned with issues relevant to the history of historical and contemporary Croatian lands. From a chronological point of view, the program is concerned with the experience of several state systems in a wide chronological sweep from the post-Napoleonic war era to contemporary times, conceiving of the formation of modern identity as a long-lasting process. The program initiates the study of questions regarding the assumption of modern identity on various levels in order to determine how Croatian society reacted to outside influences (modernization tendencies from the lands of western and central Europe), how it confronted a crisis of identity and how it created its own identity in an active interrelationship with the identities taking shape among neighboring peoples. The project dealing with political life in Croatia has as its aim the critical study of the activities of relevant political parties, groups and individuals with respect to national integration and political modernization. The project examining Croatian cultural and social identity concentrates on the role of certain paradigms in the creation of modern identity, to which an examination of the relationship between culture and the appearance of mass politics especially applies. The project concerning the role of public health and medicine is focused on research into global processes which shaped the development of health in Croatia, and likewise the influence of Croatian medicine on the world. In the context of this research, Istria will be treated as a distinct whole, which by its specific history made a special contribution to the understanding of politics and modern identity in contemporary Croatia.
Projects within this program:
- Political Life in Croatian Society from the 1840s to the 1940s
- A history of Istria: conception,society and identity during 19th and 20th centuy
- Ivo Pilar, the theoretician of Croatian modernization
- Catholicism, Islam and Orthodoxy in Identity Processes in Bosnia-Herzegovina
