Abstract
The analysis of notes and other materials collected by the eminent Polish historian and Balkanist, Professor Henryk Batowski, provides fascinating material not only for historians but also for political scientists and cultural scholars, potentially yielding interdisciplinary research that would perfectly capture the Polish scholar's holistic approach to the Balkan reality of the 1930s, which he observed firsthand. Despite belonging to a different discipline, or even field of research (social sciences, international relations), the author was not only captivated by the analysis of nearly a century-old sources depicting reality in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia but also found the process of building the Krakow professor's scholarly workshop fascinating from a scholarly perspective. The direct inspiration for this text came from national issues close to her research, and their approach, both three decades ago and in the first half of the 20th century. This article explores the perception of the Montenegrin nation and its politics based on research and analysis of documents, speeches, discourses in academic journals and the press, as well as the historiography on Montenegrins undertaken in the 1930s by Henryk Batowski (1907–1999), a Polish historian and Slavist renowned in Poland and abroad. Direct inspiration comes from H. Batowski's diverse texts from the early 1920s—correspondence, notes, commentaries, and quotations for academic journals and the press. These constitute a testament to the Professor's research, personal reflections, and views on national issues. A significant portion of the work relates to his recollections of several years spent in the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia (in the 1930s). Documentation on Yugoslav national issues, including state statistics, is also consulted. The article highlights the researcher's approach to history and identity, which currently form the basis for treating Montenegrins as a distinct national community. A political science perspective on the concepts of nation, state, and national identification is adopted. The concepts employed are grounded in the disciplines of political science and international relations (e.g., regional politics and identity, state entity, independence, sovereignty), as is information obtained from the analysis of exceptionally interesting materials.
References
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