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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745318813 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 08/20/2003 |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.50(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
The 'first' Yugoslavia: origins and problems
Yugoslavia, in the geographic form that it was known during its seven decades of existence, was created out of the ruins of two of the great territorial empires of central and eastern Europe at the end of the First World War. The creation of the Yugoslav state was an aspiration of the south slav peoples, first manifested and articulated in the nineteenth century, and decades of struggle for self-determination ensued before the goal was finally achieved. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which laid to rest the Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman Empires, recognized and allowed the establishment of the state of Yugoslavia, together with those of Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Albania.
The desire for the formation of Yugoslavia emerged out of the realization that only a unified south slav state could be viable in the face of competing regional economic and strategic interests. Indeed, Yugoslavia was the only possible antidote to 'Balkanization' – the division of the area into small antagonistic states, which would have no hope of real independence and self-determination. Serbia led the formation of this state – as was indeed desired by the other component parts prior to their liberation – because Serbia was the largest south slav community around which the other communities could cohere. It had already liberated itself from Ottoman rule and established a nation state, and was struggling to liberate other south slav peoples prior to the First World War.
The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires made the longed-for unification achievable and – fortunately for the south slavs – the situation at the end of the war made it desirable for the Great Powers that such a state should exist. While the nation states of central and eastern Europe were ostensibly founded on the Wilsonian principles of national self-determination – named after US President Wilson who championed such principles as a way of weakening the British and French Empires – in fact, wider political and strategic issues were at stake. The containment of Germany, which would urgently seek to revise the conditions of the post-war peace treaty, was of crucial importance. A resurgent Germany was inevitable; therefore the stronger the west's allies to its east, the better. A unified south slav state, led by the Serbs who were war-time allies of Britain, France and the US, and implacably hostile to Germany, was a very positive option for the great powers. Furthermore, a viable state under strong leadership could help to defuse or suppress radical tendencies among peasants and workers in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the devastation wrought by the First World War. Yugoslavia under Serbian leadership could also help bring this type of stability to the region.
The new state of Yugoslavia was complex and diverse, historically, politically and culturally, as were many of the new states of central and eastern Europe. During the inter-war period it faced a three-fold challenge: to maintain its independence and territorial integrity in the face of revisionist claims by the powers defeated in the First World War; to resolve the national question within Yugoslavia thus ensuring the stability of the new state; and to resolve the social questions and ensure the equality and prosperity of the population as a whole. While the new Yugoslav state provided the framework within which all these problems could be resolved, none of them, in fact, were. Economic weakness and diplomatic isolation in the context of the strengthening fascist powers meant that Yugoslavia was vulnerable to German economic and strategic interests. The failure of the centralized state to allow a federal system and ensure equality of the constituent peoples led to dissatisfaction, particularly from the Croatian elites. Insufficient investment in agriculture, in the context of the economic crash of 1929, led to great hardship for the primarily rural population. Thus, when Yugoslavia was broken up by the Axis powers in 1941, the prognosis was not good for the south slav state. A second opportunity to resolve these issues was eventually provided under the leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia: the only pan-Yugoslav political organization, committed to a federal Yugoslavia organized on the basis of social and economic equality.
YUGOSLAVISM AND THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE
As Joseph Rothschild has observed, it was the First World War that 'permitted the political realization of that "Yugoslav dream" whose ideological roots lay in nineteenth-century romanticism and nationalism'. Its material roots, of course, lay in the fact that it was only through banding together that the south slavs could be independent, and it was primarily from the Croats of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who sought independence from Hapsburg rule, that this dream emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. The Croatian national revival had come about partly as a response to Hungarian nationalism within the Austrian Empire in the late eighteenth century. The Hungarian nobility replaced Latin-language usage with Hungarian and subsequently the Croats built their own language-based national movement – the Illyrian movement of the 1830s and 1840s. The orientation of the Illyrian movement – named after the ancient Illyrians who were believed to have been the ancestors of the south slavs – was towards a south slav culture and consciousness. The movement was crushed, however, after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions across Europe, and for a number of years amore straightforward Croatian nationalism dominated the political agenda, as well as what appeared to be a more realizable aspiration of establishing greater Croatian independence within a federal Austria-Hungary. However, it was the Croatian intelligentsia which again gave rise to the Yugoslav idea. As Mihailo Crnobrnja has pointed out: 'The principal proponent of Yugoslavism was Bishop Josip Strossmayer, who, in establishing the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences in Zagreb in 1866, created the first institution ever to bear the Yugoslav name.' Strossmayer's vision was for a federal south slav state, uniting the slavs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Montenegro and Serbia. In the early years of the twentieth century, the first Croat and Serb political party – the Serb-Croat Coalition – was founded and rapidly won a large majority in the Croatian parliament, based on the idea of Croat and Serb national unity. Crnobrnja describes this as 'the most important political idea in pre-war Croatian politics', but it is noteworthy that there were differing interpretations of the concept of national unity. Some considered it to mean unity in action, whereas others considered it to mean unity in being – a unitarist notion of statehood, which would supersede the statehood rights of the component parts of the south slav state. In the years preceding the First World War, the unitarists were dominant in Croatian politics.
Serbia, as an independent nation state, was the obvious focus for the realization of the south slav state, particularly after a number of advances towards the liberation of Serbs still under Ottoman rule in the early part of the twentieth century. Indeed, as Fred Singleton has pointed out, it was only in the early twentieth century that the idea of Serbia as 'the focal point for South Slav unification – a kind of Yugoslav Piedmont' gained significance within Serbia itself, for in the nineteenth century the primary focus of the Serbs was the liberation of the Serbian people. While a number of Serbian leaders in the nineteenth century did promote the south slav idea, 'it was far from being a widely held concept until the twentieth century'. By the twentieth century, of course, the struggle for Serbian independence – while narrower in conception than the south slav idea – had provided the base from which the idea could actually be realized, particularly after the strengthening of Serbia during the Balkan Wars.
The weakened and disintegrating Ottoman Empire found itself unable to maintain effective control of its territories in the Balkans. Having been administered by Austria since 1878, Bosnia was formally annexed in 1908 – a unilateral act which was received with great hostility by Serbia, given that Serbs constituted 40 per cent of the population of Bosnia. Within Bosnia itself there was considerable support for the idea of a south slav state under the leadership of Serbia, and many Bosnians fought with the Serbian and Montenegrin armies in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. During these wars the Ottoman Empire was reduced to a tiny corner of the European landmass and Bulgaria was forced to cede most of Macedonia to Serbia, which also gained half of the Sanjak of Novibazar (a strip of land between Serbia and Montenegro). As a result of the Balkan Wars, Serbia almost doubled in size, and her population rose from 2.9 million to 4.4 million. Notwithstanding this increase in size and status, however, it was almost inconceivable that a south slav state could be created while the Austro-Hungarian Empire continued to exist: the context in which the south slav subjects of the Empire could be liberated just did not exist. However, the increasing strength and confidence of the Serbian state, together with its desire to liberate Bosnia from Austrian rule, set Serbia and Austria on a collision course. Austria was opposed to the emergence of a new power in the Balkans and was clearly determined to defeat the rising star of Serbia, as Crnobrnja points out: 'Serbia was not only unsettling for its [Austria's] great-power interests but also promoted unrest among the Serbian and other Slavic subjects of the empire. The Habsburgs were opposed not only to Serbia but to the idea of Yugoslavism.'
The opportunity came in 1914, when the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip assassinated Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, when he was in Sarajevo to watch a military display. Princip's motivation was clear – as he stated at his trial: 'I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free of Austria.' Austria declared war on Serbia, but of course the matter did not end there. Four years later, the Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist and thus the necessary conditions came into being for the creation of the south slav state.
THE WAR AND ITS OUTCOME
The war was a shattering experience for Serbia – a quarter of the population was lost – but it was also a war from which the Serbs emerged on the winning side and with an enormous stock of sympathy and admiration, for the odds against which they fought and against which they eventually emerged victorious. Serbia had faced a much larger and more powerful opponent; but the Serbs defeated the first two attacks and themselves launched counterattacks into Bosnia. In many cases, the Serbs fought against fellow slavs conscripted into the imperial army. Although, by December 1914, Belgrade had been taken, this was a short-lived victory for the Empire, as their forces were subsequently defeated on the Kolubara River and Belgrade was recaptured.
As the war extended, however, Serbia could not sustain this position. With the entry of Bulgaria into the war, hoping to regain Macedonia, which it had lost to Serbia in the Balkan Wars, the odds increased against Serbia, and in October 1915, German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian forces occupied the country after a six-week campaign. Occupied Serbia was divided between Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria. The experience of occupation was a terrible one. As Tim Judah writes:
In addition to those sent to concentration camps in Hungary, some 30,000 Serbs were sent to Austrian camps or used as forced labour. Factories were plundered of their machinery and a devastating typhus epidemic stalked the land ... Thousands died in desperate uprisings, and in some cases Bulgarian policy was so rigid that it even provoked mutinies among its own soldiers.
Unwilling to passively accept occupation, a mass retreat was organized and undertaken by the government, army, king and thousands of civilians towards the Adriatic coast, where they were rescued by Allied forces. From the Albanian coast, the Serb army was evacuated by the French to Corfu, where thousands died in epidemics. From Corfu the survivors were taken to French Tunisia and subsequently to the Allied front in Salonika in Greece, where they fought alongside the Allies. At the end of the war they fought their way back to Belgrade with the French. Total Serbian losses in the war amounted to 275,000 military deaths and 800,000 civilian deaths as a result of war-time diseases and devastation. Two-thirds of the male population between the ages of 15 and 55 died.
The massive upheaval of the war and the increasing likelihood of an Allied victory led to a resurgence of the aspiration for a south slav state to be formed out of the wreckage at the end of the war. To this end a Yugoslav Committee was constituted in London in April 1915 by a group of pro-Yugoslav leaders from Austria-Hungary. Their intention was to represent the south slavs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and work for unity with Serbia. Indications that the Anglo-French Allies were planning to give away pieces of the south slav lands, to Italy and Bulgaria, in return for participation on the Allied side, led to outrage amongst the south slavs and acted as a catalyst for an agreement between them on the project of founding a Yugoslav state at the end of the war. In 1917, the Yugoslav Committee and the Serbian government, in exile in Corfu, signed the Corfu Declaration, calling for a kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes – a constitutional monarchy under the Serbian royal family. The document emphasized that 'anything less than the complete liberation of the South Slavs living under Habsburg rule, and their union with Serbia and Montenegro, was unacceptable'.
On 1 December 1918 the Serbian Prince Regent Alexander proclaimed the new kingdom, on behalf of his father, King Peter. The proclamation was supported by the National Council in Zagreb (formed by the slavs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and by the Montenegrins who deposed their own king in order to join the new state. The moral high ground which the Serbs occupied thanks to their enormous war-time losses, combined with their obvious effectiveness at independent nation-building and the absence of any other real alternative in the post-war chaos, meant that the Serbs were pre-eminent in establishing the new state in a framework of their own choosing – basically more or less an expansion of the pre-war Serbian monarchy.
Yugoslavia could not have emerged without the backing of the victorious great powers – the United States, Britain and France. Their fundamental goal in endorsing the creation of Yugoslavia was the containment of Germany. The Allies backed the creation of a single Yugoslav state – under Serbian leadership – as a more effective bulwark against a revival of German ambitions in the Balkans than any collection of smaller states could possibly be. At the same time a larger unified south slav state would be more economically viable and therefore less susceptible to any extension of the Russian revolution into south-east Europe. Nonetheless, in the context of the severe economic problems of the inter-war period, Yugoslavia proved to be too weak to resist economic penetration by Germany in the 1930s.
The new state included the two independent kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia-Slavonia and the Vojvodina from the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Slovenia and Dalmatia from the Austrian part, Bosnia-Hercegovina from the joint Austro-Hungarian administration, and Macedonia and the Sanjak of Novibazar, which had been under Ottoman rule until the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.
The state census of 1921 indicated that almost 84 per cent of the population was slav, albeit from differing backgrounds, and the remainder of the population was drawn from German, Hungarian, Albanian, Turkish, Romanian, Vlach, Roma and other communities. Religious affiliation cut across other lines of identity, so that the slav community was not homogeneous on a religious basis: Serbs, Montenegrins and Macedonians tended to be Orthodox Christians, Croats and Slovenes to be Catholics, and Bosnians to be Orthodox, Catholic or Muslim, following widespread conversion during the Ottoman period. In fact, the line dividing Orthodox and Catholic worlds cut through Yugoslavia, which comprised, in 1921, a population that was almost 47 per cent Orthodox and almost 40 per cent Catholic. A further complication was added by the fact that two different scripts were used within the new state: the Latin script was in use primarily in the former Austro-Hungarian territories, and the Cyrillic script in those lands previously under Ottoman domination. So, by any measure, the new Yugoslav state was a diverse and complex entity.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Breaking the South Slav Dream"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Kate Hudson.
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