Abstract
In the evening of 1 December 1918, in a small villa in the centre of Belgrade, the regent of the Kingdom of Serbia, Prince Aleksandar Karad-ordević, flanked by ministers of the Serbian government and members of its general staff received the Delegation of the National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs from Zagreb. The National Council was the legislative body of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, formed on 6 October 1918 out of the South Slav lands of the defeated and disintegrating Austria-Hungary The vice-president of the Council and leader of the Delegation, the Croat deputy Dr Ante Pavelić,1 read the Address of the Delegation to the Throne which informed the regent of the National Council’s decision to pursue a union of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs with Serbia and Montenegro. The unified state, the Address stated, should be based on democratic, constitutional and parliamentary principles. The Address went on to note that ‘large and precious parts’ of the South Slav lands were now under Italian occupation and expressed the hope that the prince regent would endeavour to secure the final borders of the unified South Slav state in accordance with the principle of national self-determination proclaimed by president Wilson and the Entente Powers. In response, Prince Aleksandar declared:
In accepting this announcement, I am convinced that by this act I am fulfilling my duty as a ruler, for I am thereby only at last carrying out that for which the best sons of our blood, of all three religions, all three names, on both sides of the Danube, Sava and Drina, began to work even during the reign of my grandfather of blessed memory Prince Alexander I and of Prince Michael, that which corresponds to the desires and views of my people, and so in the name of His Majesty King Peter I, I proclaim the unification of Serbia with lands of the independent State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs in a single Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.2
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Notes and References
M. B. Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, vol. 2 (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975) p. 682.
See I. Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (London: Cornell University Press, 1985) pp. 72–3.
See P. N. Hehn, ‘The Origins of Modern Pan-Serbism — The 1844 Nacer-tanije of Hija Garašanin: Analysis and Translation’, East European Quarterly vol. 9 (1975) 153–71.
For the politics of the period see N. J. Miller, Between Great Serbianism and Yugoslavism: Serbian Politics in Croatia (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1991, doctoral dissertation, Indiana University 1991).
See W D. Behschnitt, Nationalismus bei Serben und Croaten 1830–1914: Analyse und Typologie der nationalen Ideologie (Munich: R. Oldern-bourg, 1980) pp. 206–7.
Due to a very high tax qualification for the right to vote, the Croatian electorate was a very small proportion of the total population. The electoral law of May 1910 increased the number of enfranchised males from 50 000 to 190 000 in a province which had around 2 500 000 inhabitants. See F. Šišić, Pregled povjesti Hrvatskog naroda (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1962) p. 468.
D. Djordjevic and S. Fischer-Galati, The Balkan Revolutionary Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) p. 150. In 1991 the Bosnian Serbs and Croats proclaimed their respective autonomous states in the very same regions in which they rose in arms against the Ottomans in 1875. These were the regions in which Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats, respectively, form majority populations.
See S. Skendi, The Albanian National Awakening 1878–1912 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967) pp. 36–9
For a concise account of the policies and actions of the Balkan socialist parties see L. S. Stavrianos, Balkan Federation: A History of the Movement toward Balkan Unity in Modern Times (Hamden: Archon Books, 1964, originally published 1942) pp. 182–202.
The extent to which the Serbian government and its premier Nikola Pašić knew of the assassination plot is still debated among historians. See W D. Behschnitt, op. cit., note 346, pp. 307–9. See also M. B. Petrovich, op. cit, pp. 618–20 and M. Cornwall, ‘Serbia’ in K. Wilson (ed.), Decisions for War, 1914 (London: University of California Press, 1995) pp. 56–60. In reviewing recent literature on the subject, John W. Langdon writes: The Serbian government did not inspire the plot and made well-intentioned but ineffective efforts to forestall it. The argument that governments are responsible for terrorist actions launched from their jurisdictions is technically correct but hopelessly abstract… Serbia bears responsibility, in the limited sense just outlined, for the Sarajevo crime. It does not bear responsibility for the outbreak of a general war, for which the murder of Franz Ferdinand was only a pretext.
J. W. Langdon, July 1914: The Long Debate 1918–90 (New York: Berg, 1991) p. 176.
D. Janković, ‘O Niškoj deklaraciji 1914’ in Naucni Skup u povodu 50-god-isnjice raspada Austro-Ugarske monarhije i stvaranja jugoslavenske države (Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, 1969) p. 133.
See M. B. Petrovich, op.cit, pp. 644–5 and S. Trifunovska (ed.), Yugoslavia Through Documents: From its Creation to its Dissolution (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1994) pp. 141–2.
For the text of the speech see I. Mužić, Hrvatska politika i jugoslavenska ideja (Split: author’s edition, 1969) pp. 135–44.
On 5 December 1918 a group of Croat non-commissioned officers and soldiers from a former Austro-Hungarian regiment took to the streets of Zagreb in armed protest against the union. A volunteer force under the orders of the National Council, armed with machine-guns, quickly dispersed the demonstrators (13 people, mainly soldiers from the Austro-Hungarian regiment, were killed). This demonstration entered the Croat nationalist mythology as an armed rebellion against the Serb hegemony. See F Culinović, Jugoslavija izmedu dva rata, Vol. 1 (Zagreb: Izdavacki zavod JAZU, 1961) pp. 160–9
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© 2000 Aleksandar Pavković
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Pavković, A. (2000). Yugoslavia at the Crossroads of Competing National Myths. In: The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375673_1
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