John Paul Newman

Those people who find the story of Yugoslavian conflict confusing will likely not find much relief here, as the the goal of the author is to provide a deep dive into the intra-ethnic political conflicts of the so-called "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes." The easiest way to summarize this book is to note that very few of the inhabitants of the new polity were interested in the "Yugoslavian" idea. Most Serbs aspired to the recreation of the medieval Serbian empire, with the Serbs being their own masters. Practically speaking this meant the raw annexation of Macedonia and Montenegro on one hand and the expropriation of the lands of the Muslim landlords of Bosnia and the German settlers of the Banat on the other.

This is as compared to the Croatian people who wanted to retain the autonomy they enjoyed under the Austro-Hungarian system, and were largely done with kings. Unless they were Croatian officers of the old Habsburg state who had no use for nationalism in the first place, and who now found themselves a barely tolerated and largely reviled clique in the new order.

As for the Slovenes, they might have been the one major group who had some interest in the Yugoslavian idea, but only as a buttress against annexation by Italy.

All these attitudes would have been hard to transcend with the best aspirations in the world. But when even Serbian aspirations could not be satisfied, as witnessed by the new state's inability to offer land to its soldiers and succor to its wounded veterans, this only led to further protest and politicized violence by the supposed beneficiaries of victory. A glorious origin myth will only take you so far without practical performance.

Again, I got a great deal out of this monograph, which has a higher aim of placing the Yugoslavian example into the wider experience of post-1918 political violence in the successor states to the fallen dynastic empires, but it is admittedly not the first book you want to read on the subject.… (més)