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...