On the basis of discourse analysis of the multiligual daily paper Omnibus, the author focuses on the way national identities, national groups and their relations are constructed in Austro- Hungarian Pula. Apart from this, she deals with the way that national indifference and cosmopolitanism are constructed in the national discourse of this paper, as well as the role that the attempt to eliminate them plays in the construction of national identity. The analysis shows that «nations» are seen as taken-for-granted, unproblematic entities, easily distinguishable from one another, and homogeneous within themselves. Belonging to a certain nation is determined by birth and is fixed. The Croatian national identity is constructed to a large degree in relation to the «Italian nation», which acts as the most significant cultural Other. The relation between these two groups is represented in a simplified way as a relation between two homogeneous entities, where the «Croatian nation» is in a lesser position, but it is ascribed moral superiority. «Germans» play a less significant role as Other and are rarely mentioned. National indifference understood as a threat to national consolidation is apparent in the attempt to set strict norms for the public expression of national identification in the readership (particularly of the Croatian-language part of the paper) and primarily so with regard to the use of the Croatian language. National identification is expected to be expressed unambiguously and completely consistently, irragardless of the situation, and cases where this is lacking are exposed critically to the public, with the intention of encouraging greater selfcontrol and self-awareness in the readership. There is an attempt at encouraging a greater degree of groupness, primarily by stimulating the readership to buy «only from their own», in order to create a tighter network of social contacts in the relevant population, which could encourage the development of Croatian national identification among people who are potentially nationally indifferent. This also indirectly discourages cosmopolitan openness, while the same effect is achieved by encouraging prejudices about «other cultures». The author concludes that this kind of national discourse is understandable as a means to politically mobilise a population which had previously been in a bad political and economic position, but also warns of the potential negative effects of discourses which try to set norms 135 to identity and its expression and which, instead of accepting cultural diversity as a good thing, encourage self-sufficiency and self-orientation of rigidly defined «national groups».