Call for a PhD scholarship: Habsburg Legacy in Ustaša Movement
Maynooth University
John & Pat Hume Doctoral Awards 2025-2026
Habsburg Legacies in the Ustasha Movement
Our project will look at the role of imperial legacies on the radical right in Central Europe through a single case study, namely, the Habsburg influence on the Croatian Ustashe. Former Habsburg figures were prominent in the Ustasha movement from its formative ‘pre-history’ as part of the anti-Yugoslav opposition in the 1920s, through to the end of the movement’s state rule at the end of the Second World War. These figures included political leaders associated with the ‘Croatian Party of Right’ (the nucleus of which became the Ustashe in the early 1930s) and former Habsburg officers of Croat descent who were unhappy with their reduced status and the institutional changes wrought by the formation of the South Slav state in 1918. Moreover, the Ustashe often alluded to the Habsburg period of Croatian national history, using this as a counter-example to their unhappy experiences as an ‘oppressed’ part of the South Slav state. But the involvement of former imperial figures such as these, and the allusion to the Habsburg period as an example of state and institutional organisation, created significant tensions within the movement’s ranks. These tensions derived from difficulties the movement’s leadership had in reconciling conservative, bureaucratic traditions and figures from the Habsburg era with the radical-right, fascistic direction in which the Ustashe intended to take their revolution. To date, there has been no systematic study of this imperial influence, its preponderance in the Ustasha movement, and the complex entanglement between two political and cultural visions of the past and of the future that this entailed. Such a study is of crucial importance for understanding the character and the evolution of the radical right in interwar Central Europe. Moreover, it is crucial for understanding the fraught relationship between conservatism and fascism throughout the continent at this time.
The project will benefit from engagement with the team of the ERC Consolidator project Insurgent Temporalities: Fascism as a Global Anti-Universalist Project (INTEMPO) based at the Department, and its findings will simultaneously feed back into it.
Raul Carstocea
https://www.facebook.com/raul.carstocea
John Paul Newman
https://www.facebook.com/john.p.newman.9
https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/graduate-research-academy/john-pat-hume-doctoral-awards