"Historical Roots of the Yugoslav Conflict," by V.P. Gagnon, Jr.

Part 2

Setting the Stage

Since the very concept of a Yugoslav state has been at the center of the current conflict, a review of the first Yugoslav state, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, founded in December 1918, provides some insight into the political currents that helped shape the structures I have outlined. The main axis of conflict in this first Yugoslav state was between political elites in Croatia (including both Croats and, after 1927, Serbs) and in Serbia, and it was the result of different conceptions of what the new joint state of South Slavs should be.

Prior to World War I the lands that came to make up Yugoslavia were divided between the Kingdom of Serbia and the small independent Kingdom of Montenegro, which together included only 35 percent of the total population of the future Yugoslav state (and whose joint population was only 65 percent Serb); and lands inhabited by South Slavic peoples in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (divided between Croats, with 37 percent of the population in the Habsburg lands; Serbs, with 26 percent; Slovenes, 13 percent; and Slavic Muslims, 8 percent). These included the Slovene-inhabited provinces in Austria; Dalmatia; the provinces of Croatia-Slavonia and Vojvodina; and Bosnia-Herzegovina, a former Ottoman province that had been occupied by Austria in 1878 and annexed in 1908. All these lands had been parts of two empires that based political participation and representation on principles of nationality: language in Austria-Hungary, religion in the Ottoman lands. Since political elites had, prior to the formation of Yugoslavia, operated on the basis of these national distinctions, both in the Austro-Hungarian Diet and in Serbia and Montenegro, the political relevance of national sentiment did not disappear in the new state.

As it became clear near the end of World War I that the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which, along with Germany, had fought against the Allies, including Serbia) had disintegrated, its South Slavic population faced the likelihood that Italy would seek to annex formerly Austrian lands. Drawing on the 19th-century romantic Illyrianist or Yugoslavist ideal of a state of all South Slavs, representatives of the empire's Croat, Serb, and Slovene elites agreed to join the Kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro to form a new South Slavic state. In Serbia itself, the ruling Radical party had sought as its main war aim unification of lands with significant Serb populations, in particular Bosnia-Herzegovina and Vojvodina, and an outlet to the Adriatic. With the loss of its tsarist patron to the Russian revolution, however, and under pressure from the Western allies, Belgrade reluctantly agreed to the creation of a state that would also include territories inhabited by Croats and Slovenes.

Yet although the principle of a joint state was accepted, its form and essence were unresolved at the moment of unification. This disagreement over the nature of the new state, not its multiethnicity, was the main reason for conflict between Belgrade and Zagreb. The Habsburg Slavs, especially the Croats, saw the new state as an equal partnership with the Serbian kingdom. In contrast, the Serbian Radicals and much of the political elite in Serbia, citing Serbia's enormous sacrifices during the war (including the loss of one-fourth of its population and 40 percent of its army) treated the new lands as conquered provinces annexed to Serbia. The Serbian regime's attitude also undoubtedly derived from the demographics of the new state, 65 percent of whose population was located in the Austro-Hungarian lands. A fear of being swamped by the more populous and economically developed Habsburg lands was thus not without foundation. The conquérant attitude was reinforced by the fact that the empire's South Slavs had fought in the Austro-Hungarian army against Serbia and the Allies during the war. Thus, for example, most officials and officers who had served Austria-Hungary were barred from serving the new state, and those who were allowed were accepted in a humiliating way [Banac 1984, pp.150-153]. Such an attitude on Belgrade's part rapidly produced disillusionment and dissatisfaction among elites of the former empire.

Non-elites, too, quickly became dissatisfied, as Serbian army units were called in to put down peasant revolts in the chaotic days after the empire's dissolution and as unfamiliar Serbian laws and regulations were rapidly imposed on the Habsburg lands [Banac 1984, pp.129-132, 248-260]. This non-elite sentiment was particularly important because the new Yugoslav state had extended universal male suffrage into the new territories. The political elites during the empire, and thus those who had arranged the Yugoslav union, had been selected on a very restricted basis of suffrage. Now, the new political importance of the peasantry strengthened the hand of the Croatian Peasant party (HSS), which had previously been marginal.

The HSS, which with universal suffrage became the largest single party in Croatia-Slavonia, had initially been the lone voice among representatives of the Empire's South Slavs to raise objections about the rapid and unplanned unification. In particular the HSS had been a strong partisan of a peasant republic and had vigorously objected to imposing the Serbian monarchy. Now that the HSS had become a major factor in the political dynamic of the state, the Radicals' attempts to force through ground rules for drafting the new constitution, which included a pledge of loyalty to the monarchy, only served to further undermine support for the joint state among Croats. Indeed, the HSS boycotted the constituent assembly, which was therefore able to pass a centralist constitution. The HSS, which in both the 1923 and 1925 elections won the second largest number of seats in parliament (21 percent of the total), eventually accepted the Yugoslav state and even joined a Radical-led government. But the assassination of the HSS's founder, Stjepan Radic, on the floor of parliament by a Montenegrin deputy and the subsequent suspension of democratic institutions and imposition of a strong authoritarian dictatorship by the king in January 1929 marked a further deterioration of relations. Although the government, working with the HSS, agreed in 1939 to the formation of a separate Croatian federal unit (banovina) with a degree of autonomy, the onset of World War II and Germany's attack on Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941 deprived the new arrangement of a chance to overcome the past conflicts.

Although the main conflict in the first Yugoslavia could be described as a national one, between divergent social and economic interests of the elites of the two regions, it would be a mistake to describe it as being purely "ethnic," as Serbs against Croats. Indeed, the leader of Croatia's Serbs, Svetozar Pribicevic, who in the first years of the new state had been one of the most outspoken and forceful advocates of a unitarist and centralist Yugoslav state, by the late 1920s was actively cooperating with the HSS and denouncing the Belgrade government for purposely inciting conflicts between Serbs and Croats and for labeling any Serb who disagreed with the government as a "traitor to the Serbian people" [Boban 1973, 36-38]. Pribicevic's Independent Democrats, the main political party of Croatia's Serbs, after 1927 formed with the HSS the Croat-Serb Coalition, running a single slate of candidates in the 1935 and 1938 elections against the official Belgrade-sponsored party. The Independent Democrats also as early as 1929 called for federalization of Yugoslavia, and in 1939 openly supported the creation of the Croatian banovina [Roksandic 1991, 129-132].

So while nationality politics and even differing national ideologies played a role in the conflict, it was not mainly an ethnic conflict. The weakness of the interwar Yugoslav state, and the main source of political conflict, was the disagreement over the nature of the state and the disregard by the center of the need to compromise and to integrate the 65 percent of the population in the Habsburg lands, especially its elite--Slovene, Croat, and Serb--into the joint state.

Thus when German forces entered the country in April 1941 and set up the Independent State of Croatia (which included Croatia-Slavonia, parts of Dalmatia and Vojvodina, and all of Bosnia-Herzegovina) many Croats saw it as liberation from Belgrade's dictatorial control. But when the HSS refused to collaborate with the invaders, the Germans and Italians installed in power a marginal political group, the Ustashe, whose leaders had been living in exile. The Ustashe pursued a narrowly chauvinist Croatian line that was strongly anti-Yugoslav and anti-Serb, and massacres of hundreds of thousands of Serbs (as well as Jews and Gypsies) followed. This reign of terror, along with harsh authoritarian rule, alienated much of their initial support among Croats [Jelic-Butic 1978].

The main opposition to the Ustashe was the communist-led multiethnic Partisan movement, which because of the massacres had a natural base of support among Croatian and Bosnian Serbs. But it also included large numbers of Croats and Muslims. Notably, Serbs in Croatia joined the multiethnic Partisans rather than the Serbian nationalist Chetniks (who were loyal to the Belgrade regime in exile).

Forward to part 3, The Second Yugoslavia

Back to part 1, Introduction

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