The article is the analysis of the nation-building processes on the Balkans in the XIX-XXI centuries which took place in the model due to Central Europe. The social elites on the Balkans started to form the nations as the political communities due to the influences from the the Enlightenment and Napoleonic Era. At the turn of the XVIII and XIX centuries two ideas were boosted: illyrian and hellenistic ones. Both lost and the weekness of illyrian and hellenistic ideas was due to the history of the region as mature estate monarchy was not formed in the late Middle Ages. Particular Balkan people came across the will to build four historic communities on their territories from the end of XVIII to the beginning of XX century: Austrian (German-Habsburg), Hungarian (Magyar), Turkish (Osmanli) and Greek (Hellenic). The social elites who claimed to be the carriers of the national ideas began to act to expand the concept to ethnos speaking the mother tongue but with no national identity. The Austrian-Hungarian rivalry on the consciousness of the people and the direction of politicisation took place. Both feuding sides of the conflict agreed upon the necessity to politicize the ethnos which meant the formation of the demographic basis for demos. The demotic classes on particular lands rejected the political claims. The natural answer from the demotic classes was the will to form their own political community. Such the way of thinking formed the base for the national programmes which could be evaluated as the maximum programmes: the Great Serbia, the Great Croatia, the union of the Slovenian lands, the United Macedonia, the United Albania, the union of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the projects România Mare and the Great Bulgaria. Still, the concepts had no real historic-state roots similar to Yugoslavia. Such a situation caused that on the Balkans the consideration about the nation in political categories was rejected by the consideration about the nation in ethnic-cultural categories. The outcome of the process was the ethnicisation of demos.
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