History on the Edge: Izjema od pasivnosti: študentsko gibanje in politika manjšin v medvojni Jugoslaviji
You are kindly invited to a new lecture in the History on the Edge series, which will take place on Wednesday, October 29, 2025, at the INZ premises or via the ZOOM link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85093074535?pwd=chFdSCgScVg8fw1djh3bVz8h9gqWtm.1 . In the new season, lectures will take place at 3 p.m. and if you will be joining us in person, you are welcome to a coffee 20 minutes before the lecture begins.
The lecture will be given by Željka Oparnica, and the title of the lecture is “The Exception to Passivity: Student Movement and Minority Politics in Interwar Yugoslavia”. The lecture will be held in English.
The Exception to Passivity: Student Movement and Minority Politics in Interwar Yugoslavia
In his memoirs, Eric Hobsbawm reflected on the interwar student movement in Yugoslavia as an exception to the general passivity of European students of the time. Indeed, it was a strikingly active movement that persisted across the period, beginning with the establishment of numerous political organizations at the dawn of the new state and continuing with ever larger demonstrations, violent clashes with the police and armed forces, and a student strike in 1936.
This paper examines both the ideological and practical dimensions of the student movement focusing on the 1930s. It offers a closer look at the politically engaged student population, the ways in which they articulated their social and political demands, and the means they used to pursue them. A particular accent will be on the complex, but also overly mythologised, relationship between the movement and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and its affiliated organizations.
The research on the student movement forms part of a broader study of political minorities in interwar Yugoslavia—groups that operated outside the increasingly narrow framework of parliamentary politics. By placing the student movement alongside other case studies such as irredentists and refugees, I aim to highlight how it exemplifies the dynamics of minority politics in this context. In the end, I will give a tentative answer to the burning question: was the student movement successful and why it could not have been?