„МИСАО ВОЈВОДИНЕ” НИКОЛЕ МИЛУТИНОВИЋА
“THE VOJVODINIAN THOUGHT” BY NIKOLA MILUTINOVIĆ

Summary/Abstract: Dr. Nikola Milutinović, secretary of Matica srpska during the period of 1932–1941, belonged to the political and intellectual circle of prečani Serbs. He represented the population in the matters of the special constitutional law of Vojvodina in the first Yugoslav state. Milutinović elaborated on this population’s multinational character, the existence of a special, “provincial consciousness” and “identity” of Vojvodina, its “state-building capacities”. With his political, economic and cultural analyses of the position of Vojvodina, published in the Matica srpska’s Glas, which he also founded, he gained the reputation of having an autonomist ideology, that is, the ideology of the federalist movement among the Vojvodina Serbs. Milutinović is the author of the Study on a possible constitutional solution to the problem of Vojvodina, which was supposed to help the authors of the Constitutional draft by a group of intellectuals from Zagreb. The study proceeds from the need to resolve the Serbian-Croatian dispute and the reconciliation of their national interests over the province with the special constitutional position of Vojvodina. After the Cvetković-Maček Agreement and the creation of the Banovina of Croatia, Nikola Milutinović changes his stance on a fundamental level, now advocating for the consistent application of the ethnic principle in the process of the reorganization of the state, that is, the gathering of all Serbs in the “Banovina of Serbia”. By affirming the Serbian identity of Vojvodina, during 1939/1940 Milutinović opposes its special status in the Yugoslav state and the “division of Serbs”. Bringing his views on the reorganization of the state closer to those of the Serbian Cultural Club, Milutinović calls on the Serbs “to gather”, that is, “to build their own Serbian through togetherness and unity”.

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