Summary: The roots of Serbian propaganda against Albanians originate from racist ideologies present from 1878 to 1930, during which Serbian nationalists rationalized territorial expansion and atrocities against Albanians. The “Arnautaši” thesis emerged, falsely depicting Albanians as converted Serbs. Leading figures like Jovan Cvijić manipulated ethnographic data to frame Albanians as culturally inferior and justify Serbian claims to Kosovo. This narrative, heavily influenced by stereotypes portraying Albanians as barbaric, served to legitimize Serbian aggression. Reports compiled by Serbian consulates depicted Albanians as violent and uncivilized, reinforcing a civilizational dichotomy that framed Serbia as a defender of European culture against perceived Asiatic threats.

Serbian colonialism

“Especially in the context of the Balkan Wars and the First World War, it was part of the standard argument for why Kosovo was a legitimate target for Serbian expansion. It was only in the 1930s, when the contradictions of Belgrade’s Kosovo policy, which oscillated between assimilating the Albanians and Serbian colonizing the region, became apparent and culminated in considerations by Serbian intellectuals and politicians regarding a forced Albanian emigration from Kosovo, that the historian Jovan Hadži-Vasiljević presented studies in which he extensively developed the “Arnautaši” thesis.

The thesis gained high scientific credibility through its use by the internationally renowned anthropogeographer Jovan Cvijić (1865–1927) as early as 1908 and again in 1913 to characterize the ethnographic conditions in Kosovo, Metohija, northern Albania, and western Macedonia.

In his ethnographic maps and explanatory texts, which remained influential until the Paris Peace Conference of 1918/21, he increased the number of “true Serbs” precisely in those areas that Serbia claimed for its desired access to the Adriatic Sea.

However, he focused on the supposedly purely Serbian toponyms of the areas in question, because this allowed a connection to be drawn between Serbia’s historical and demographic rights to Kosovo: A Serbian name in use at the time for a field, a river, or a place not only proved the area’s belonging to the “Dušanovo carstvo” (the Serbian state), but also the speaker’s profound Serbian identity, which lay beneath a very thin Muslim-Albanian veneer, since he was clearly living in a world with Serbian names.

Serbian Albanian Stereotypes

After the Congress of Berlin and the subsequent attempts at an Albanian autonomy movement within the Ottoman Empire, which found strong focal points particularly in Kosovo, a tendency arose in Serbian intellectual and political circles to construct Albanians as negative “significant others.”

Derogatory stereotypes about Albanians were created and circulated, all based on a dualism between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, civilized and savage, and nation and tribe. These stereotypes were most widespread in the context of the Balkan Wars, when the Serbians sought to legitimize the annexation of Kosovo and prevent an independent Albanian state.

After 1878, the target of this discourse was the European public, which, in the form of the governments of the Great Powers, had to be convinced of Serbia’s civilizing mission in Kosovo and beyond, towards the Albanians

The decisive turn towards Europe and away from the Ottoman Empire by local actors in Kosovo becomes clear when one compares a complaint to the Porte written in 1864 by Archimandrite Hadži Serafim Ristić with that of Sima Andrejević Igumanov in 1882.

While Ristić described the Albanian incursions to the Porte as violations-Igumanov, who saw this as an attack against Ottoman and Islamic law, interpreted it eighteen years later as an outflow of an “Asian-Muslim fanaticism” that was apparently common to both Muslim Turks and Albanians.

He compared the situation of the Christian Serbs in Kosovo to the persecutions of early Christianity, for the “suffering people in Kosovo and Macedonia” had defended the blessed Christian-European culture and civilization against Asiatic barbarity for centuries. Since 1889, the Serbian government had been able to maintain a consulate in Pristina, whose staff collected data on the situation in Kosovo and sent it to Belgrade.

These reports, which were to be presented to European diplomats in The Hague in 1899 as the “Blue Book on the Violence and Banditry of the Albanians in Kosovo,” also explained the suffering of the Serbs as being due to Albanian brutality, fanaticism, and hatred of Christian-European civilization in the form of the Serbian nation. This pseudo-religious, anti-Christianity argument, already known from the Romanian context, was thus given a civilizational twist in Serbia from 1878 onwards.

The resulting stereotype described the Albanians as a people who had remained at an extremely low level of culture for centuries, as evidenced by their collective characteristics, customs, and institutions. From this basic topos of the “wildness of the Albanians,” all the others described below were derived until 1914: The religious identity of the Albanians was said to be fluctuating and, like their loyalty, dependent on opportunistic considerations, and they were incapable of independent state and nation formation

As early as the year of the Berlin Congress, Dimitrije Aleksijević lamented that Europe’s level of knowledge about the peoples of Southeast Europe was very low, only to immediately add that “Albania had never been at the same level of civilization (…) as its neighboring peoples” and could still be considered a “nomadic territory” today. ” In a historical study of the Albanians from 1880, D. K. Jovanović noted that the Albanians “are still at almost the same level of education as when they came to Europe.”

Reference

Staatsbürger aus Widerruf Juden und Muslime als Alteritätspartner im rumänischen und serbischen Nationscode : ethnonationale Staatsbürgerschaftskonzepte 1878-1941. Dietmar Müller. https://www.google.se/books/edition/Staatsb%C3%BCrger_aus_Widerruf/0UckOb6n71cC?hl=sv&gbpv=1&dq=ein+albanesische+tracht&pg=PA184&printsec=frontcover