OCR
NATIONALISM, MODERNIZATION AND SOCIETY IN CROATIAN LONG CENTURY the ethnic-national and religious dimensions are in homology (and in the corresponding homologous series, they often get that dimension of identity that produces the idea — i.e. the value — of racial purity).”1° The phenomenon of converting the energy of nationalism from patriotism to chauvinistic racial, religious or ethnic content has to be separated from modernization as an essential precondition for the construction of the modern nation. We can, as in the case of the former Second and Third Reich, have the emergence of a powerful industrial force that perceives the surrounding world through an ideological visor of social Darwinism. Modernization is, in this case, the cause and factor of great social change, but it also creates an opinion that the fact of the survival of the strongest is the only truth of a natural human being, and that force is the only law. Plessner notices the problem in the weakening of the religious traditions of antiquity and Christianity in modern man, which causes him to neglect support in generalizing natural morality. Since the emergence of the German nation took place without strong links with the enlightened tradition of rationality and humanism, but through the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, there remains a reality of a crude and false image of the superiority of modernization as a racial superiority. We can say that in this area the idea of the modern state is not spontaneous, that civil society was the project of enlightened absolute monarchs. While in the 18" century it was believed that the British Parliament could do everything except turn a man into a woman and vice versa, in Germany the authority of the emperor was replaced by the authority of a leader. Appellation becomes one of the means of the authoritarian state, and it has the task of providing well-being and culture instead of being the traditional tool in the fight of certain entities of a civil society. Can we, in this day and age, claim that the old European nations, created in the age of Enlightenment, kept any active links with the essential components of this historical period — the Humanity (and what would that mean)? And has the modernization outgrown humans and society?” THE ISSUE OF THE MODERNIZATION OF CROATIAN SOCIETY, CONTINUITY AND CUTS The provincial government of the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia from the time of Ban Ivan Mazurani€¢ tried to regulate the land according to European models, by forming the institutions necessary to transform the country towards the contours of modernism (state administration, 0 Veljak: Metafizicki temelji politika identiteta, 64. 1° Plessner: Zaka$njela nacija, 60-75, 119, 123; Franz Neumann: Demokratska i autoritativna drzava, Zagreb, Naprijed, 1974, 34-36. * 139 +