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Underpinning the idea of the ‘unification of all Serbs’ was a mental image of Serbia that bore little relation to the political map of the Balkans at the turn of the twentieth century. Its most influential political expression was a secret memorandum drawn up by the Serbian interior minister Ilija Garašanin for Prince Alexandar Karadjordjević in 1844. Known after its publication in 1906 as Načertanije (from the Old Serbian náčrt, ‘draft’), Garašanin’s proposal sketched out a ‘Programme for the National and Foreign Policy of Serbia’. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of this document on generations of Serb politicians and patriots; in time it became the Magna Carta of Serb nationalism.* Garašanin opened his memorandum with the observation that Serbia is ‘small, but must not remain in this condition’.37 The first commandment of Serbian policy, he argued, must be the ‘principle of national unity’; by which he meant the unification of all Serbs within the boundaries of a Serbian state: ‘Where a Serb dwells, that is Serbia.’ The historical template for this expansive vision of Serbian statehood was the medieval empire of Stepan Dušan, a vast swathe of territory encompassing most of the present-day Serbian republic, along with the entirety of present-day Albania, most of Macedonia, and all of Central and Northern Greece, but not Bosnia, interestingly enough.

Tsar Dušan’s empire had supposedly collapsed after a defeat at the hands of the Turks on Kosovo Field on 28 June 1389. But this setback, Garašanin argued, had not undermined the Serbian state’s legitimacy; it had merely interrupted its historical existence. The ‘restoration’ of a Greater Serbia unifying all Serbs was thus no innovation, but the expression of an ancient historical right. ‘They cannot accuse [us] of seeking something new, unfounded, of constituting a revolution or an upheaval, but rather everyone must acknowledge that it is politically necessary, that it was founded in very ancient times and has its roots in the former political and national life of the Serbs.’38 Garašanin’s argument thus exhibited that dramatic foreshortening of historical time that can sometimes be observed in the discourses of integral nationalism; it rested, moreover, upon the fiction that Tsar Dušan’s sprawling, multi-ethnic, composite, medieval polity could be conflated with the modern idea of a culturally and linguistically homogenous nation-state. Serb patriots saw no inconsistency here, since they argued that virtually all the inhabitants of these lands were essentially Serbs. Vuk Karadžić, the architect of the modern Serbo-Croat literary language and author of a famous nationalist tract, Srbi svi i svuda (‘Serbs all and everywhere’, published in 1836), spoke of a nation of 5 million Serbs speaking the ‘Serbian language’ and scattered from Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Banat of Temesvar (eastern Hungary, now in western Romania), the Bačka (a region extending from northern Serbia into southern Hungary), Croatia, Dalmatia and the Adriatic coast from Trieste to northern Albania. Of course there were some in these lands, Karadžić conceded (he was referring in particular to the Croats), ‘who still find it difficult to call themselves Serbs, but it seems likely that they will gradually become used to it’.39