Nation-building in Franjo Tuðman's Political Writings

Detecting the gap in the existing literature of Franjo Tuðman's political thought, this article comprehensively analyzes Tuðman's nationalist ideology prior to the 1990s. Using a morphological approach to ideology, the article presents three main clusters of concepts regarding Tuðman's ideology: the narrative on the nature of humankind as teleological struggle to achieve independent national states; the narrative of supranational ideologies - such as liberalism and communism - acting as a pure geopolitical means used by the great nations to subjugate small ones; and finally the narrative of the Croatian thousand-year long struggle to achieve an independent national state. Moreover, the article exposes how Tuðman already by the 1970s created the idea of an all-embracing national movement grounded in the synthesis of abovementioned teleological concept on Croatian history, which would eventually bring about a national reconciliation of Ustasa and the Croatian partisans in a final struggle for the independent state.