Summary/Abstract: The disappearance of traditional empires in the vortex of the Great War led to the emergence of new national and transnational states in the Balkans as well as Central Europe. As one of the successors to a former empire, the Balkan Kingdom of Yugoslavia had the task of integrating (in a small territory and over a short time span) a heterogeneous population with entirely different and often directly opposed religious and cultural roots into a political and civilizational whole. The author shows the influence of this political experiment on the national identity of Serbs as the most numerous nationality in the former transnational state. Owning to numerous changes in the government/legitimacy framework and social structure, modern-age Serbs were torn between an imparted (ethnic, „conservative“, Orthodox) national identity and a transnational (Yugoslav) one, self-interpreted as „progressive“ and necessarily atheistic. The shared features of these two opposite identities are exclusiveness, romanticism, Slavophilism, Caesarism, and occasionally, the illusion of self-sufficiency.
