Anthony D. Smith and the Serbs

Abstract

This article examines Anthony D. Smith’s treatment of the Serbian case and argues that his analysis oscillates between ethnosymbolist and modernist positions in a manner that remains theoretically unresolved. Smith repeatedly presents the Serbs as an “old” nation, grounded in medieval statehood, religious tradition, and collective memory—most prominently the Kosovo narrative—yet elsewhere classifies them among nations formed in the nineteenth century through war, treaties, and elite mobilization.

By confronting Smith’s claims with the historical record of Serbian nation-building, the article shows that the core constitutive elements of modern Serbian nationhood—state institutions, political mobilization, linguistic standardization, and mass cultural integration—emerged overwhelmingly in the nineteenth century. Earlier cultural materials, including epic poetry and religious traditions, existed in fragmented, sometimes marginal, and geographically uneven forms and did not amount to a continuous ethnie capable of generating nationhood independently of modern political processes.