Interwar Croats vs. Yugoslavia

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 377-379:

The elections of 1919 produced stunning majorities in Croatia for the Croat Peasant Party, led by the mercurial, charismatic, popular, and erratic but principled Stjepan Radić, who decided to boycott the meetings that drafted the new state’s constitution. He told other Croat politicians before they rushed off to join the Serb Kingdom in 1918 that they were acting like “drunken geese in fog,” having learned nothing from the fall of Emperor Wilhelm in Germany a few weeks earlier. Like the fallen emperor, they were in a hurry to impose power on the people, rather than fostering self-governance by involving the people. No one had asked Croats if they wanted to belong to the new state, and that was an irrational, imprudent, and as time would show, self-defeating act.

Radić then led Croats in boycotting Yugoslav political institutions, and was arrested frequently, once for seeking support for Croat independence in Moscow (an act considered seditious). The other major political forces in Yugoslavia—Serbs from the old kingdom (Radicals), Serbs from Habsburg lands (Democrats), Muslims from Bosnia, and Slovene Catholics—thus ruled the new state without the Croats. Things seemed to change for the better in 1925, when Radić suddenly agreed to take a post as education minister and King Alexander made his first visit to Zagreb. Yet because of incompatibilities of the leaders, this relative harmony only lasted for just over a year.

The differences between Serbs and Croats in political vision proved unbridgable. Croat leaders insisted that Croatia must be guaranteed local autonomy in recognition of centuries of Croatian state’s rights that had been respected even under Hungarian rule. Yet Serbs had no tradition of federal rule. Having borne the costs of liberating Yugoslav territory from the Austrians—while Croats were fighting for Austria—Serbs claimed a moral right to rule the new state from the center. The determination to rule was reflected in a stranglehold Serbs established on institutions of state that lasted until 1941. Yet Serbs also argued compellingly that Yugoslavia had not been a Serb idea in the first place, and their political elite had acceded to unity in response to the urgent wishes of Croat politicians, first at Corfu in 1917, then in Belgrade with the delegation that appeared the following December. Without Serb backing, much of Croatia would have been divided between Hungary and Italy.

Nikola Pašić, the respected leader of the Serb Radical Party, died in 1927, and the parliamentary deputies in Belgrade sank into a routine of lobbing insults across the lines of ethnicity. In June 1928, Radić called Montenegrin deputies “apes,” and the next day, the Serb Radical Puniša Račić shot Radić on the floor of parliament along with two other Croat deputies. The two deputies died immediately, but Radić held on for several weeks, finally succumbing to complications from an operation in early August. The king reputedly offered to separate Croatia from Yugoslavia, but Radić refused, perhaps anticipating the difficulties of separating Croats from Serbs in the old military frontier (krajina) in Croatia and fearing Italian domination of the rump state that would be left.

In the end, Radić also acknowledged the basic need for a state that could secure the peaceful coexistence of the peoples on Yugoslav territory. Yet in contrast to Serb elites in Belgrade, his hope, and the hope of his deputy and successor Vladko Maček, was a federal Yugoslavia, perhaps even a Serb-Croat sharing of rule akin to the 1867 agreement between Austria and Hungary. One sign of hope was that since 1926, his Croatian Peasant Party worked in coalition with the Independent Democrats, a mostly Serb party from former Habsburg areas led by Svetozar Pribićević, also a target of the assassination in June 1928.

But with Radić’s death, the king felt a compulsion to act, and in January 1929, he declared a royal dictatorship, hoping simply to keep the state together. Parliament had proved a “hindrance to any fruitful work in the state” and to permit it to continue its work would expose Yugoslavia to the predations of its neighbors.49 In a modernizing frenzy meant to force Yugoslavia to become a state, Alexander made historic borders irrelevant and divided the country into nine banovine, or districts, named after rivers and with little relation to any district that had ever existed. Bosnia and Croatia simply disappeared from the map. In the army he abolished all insignias and standards that were attached to historic Serbia, thus alienating many Serbs. The country was now officially Yugoslavia and no longer the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

Perhaps the king’s scheme was not so outlandish. After all, the very idea of a united South Slav state went against all prior history, and to some extent all interwar Eastern European politics involved creation of new units in disregard of old ones. And he was not a nationalist: far from a tool of the Serb bureaucracy, Alexander acted to reduce Serb predominance. (As we will see, like the region’s other intemperate centralizer, Joseph II, he failed in almost everything he attempted.)