Pan-Slavism

Extensive pan-Slavism began much like Pan-Germanism: both of these movements flourished from the sense of unity and nationalism experienced within ethnic groups after the French Revolution and the consequent Napoleonic Wars against traditional European monarchies.

As in other Romantic nationalist movements, Slavic intellectuals and scholars in the developing fields of history, philology, and folklore actively encouraged Slavs' interest in their shared identity and ancestry.

[1][2][3] Scholars such as Tomasz Kamusella have attributed early manifestations of Pan-Slavic thought within the Habsburg monarchy to the Slovaks Adam Franz Kollár (1718–1783) and Pavel Jozef Šafárik (1795–1861).

), the Slav proportion of the population (Poles, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats) together formed a substantial—if not the largest—ethnic grouping.

Disgusted by the Emperor's policy, in 1849, Ľudovít Štúr, the person who codified the first largely used Slovak language, wrote a book he would name Slavdom and the World of the Future.

His Pan-Slavic views were unleashed in this book, where he stated that the land of Slovaks should be annexed by the Tsar's empire and that eventually, the population could be not only Russified, but also converted into the rite of Orthodoxy, religion originally spread by Cyril and Methodius during the times of Great Moravia, which served as an opposition to the Catholic missionaries from the Franks.

Most Serbian intellectuals sought to unite all of the Southern, Balkan Slavs, whether Catholic (Croats, Slovenes), Muslim (Bosniaks, Pomaks), or Orthodox (Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians) as a "Southern-Slavic nation of three faiths".

"[16] After World War I the creation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, under Serbian royalty of the Karađorđević dynasty, united most Southern Slavic-speaking nations regardless of religion and cultural background.

At the end of the Second World War, the Partisans' mixed heritage leader Josip Broz Tito became Yugoslav president, and the country become a socialist republic, with the motto of "Brotherhood and Unity" between its various Slavic peoples.

With the exception of Russia, the Polish nation has the distinction among other Slavic peoples of having enjoyed independence as a part of various entities for several centuries prior to the advent of Pan-Slavism.

While Pan-Slavism as an ideology was inimical to Austro-Hungarian interests, Poles instead embraced the wide autonomy within the state and assumed a loyalist position towards the Habsburgs.

[citation needed] The authentic idea of the unity of the Slavic people was all but gone after World War I when the maxim "Versailles and Trianon have put an end to all Slavisms".

[19] During the Cold War, all Slavic peoples were in union under the dominance of the USSR, but pan-Slavism was rejected as reactionary to Communist ideals, and this unity was largely put to rest with the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, leading to the breakup of federal states such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

[20][21] Varying relations between the Slavic countries exist nowadays; they range from mutual respect on equal footing and sympathy towards one another through traditional dislike and enmity, to indifference.

[25][26] The concept seeks to resist strong multicultural tendencies from Western Europe, the dominant position of Germany, opposes Slavophilia, and typically encourages democracy and democratic values.

Many Euroslavists believe it is possible to unite Slavic communities without exclusion of Russia from the European cultural area,[27] but are also opposed to Russophilia and concepts of Slavs under Russian domination and irredentism.

In the 2014 turn-based strategy 4X game Civilization: Beyond Earth there is a playable faction called the Slavic Federation – a science fiction vision of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, reformed into a powerful unified state with a focus on aerospace, technological research, and terrestrial engineering.

[35][36] Its leader, a former cosmonaut named Vadim Kozlov voiced by Mateusz Pawluczuk, speaks a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian with a heavy Polish accent.

[37][38] In the historical grand strategy games of Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV, the player is able to unite Slavonic territories via political alliances and multi-ethnic kingdoms.

[39] The real-time strategy games Ancestors Legacy and the HD edition of Age of Empires II feature fictionalised versions of the early Slavs that incorporate and fuse elements from different Slavic nations.