Yugoslavist and Serbian Racial Theories in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia
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CHAPTER FOUR YUGOSLAVIST AND SERBIAN RACIAL THEORIES IN THE KINGDOM OF YUGOSLAVIA Introduction The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was founded in December 1918 upon the notions of ethnic-racial homogeneity derived from nineteenth- century Romanticism. According to the British Slavophile activist Fanny Copeland (1872–1970), ‘from the ordeal of war, pestilence, famine and persecution, the Yugo-Slavs have emerged as one people, as homoge- neous as they were when they first descended from the Carpathians.’1 The Yugoslavist Croat political elite had approved of the unification of the Austro-Hungarian South Slav provinces with the Kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro because the ‘modern principle of nationality’, according to which the Croats were an integral part of the South Slav ethnolinguistic nation, logically demanded the establishment of one nation state for the ‘ Yugo-Slavs.’2 Very soon, however, life in the new state, renamed Yugosla- via in 1929, only highlighted more clearly the glaring differences between Croatian and Serbian political and cultural traditions.3 The Serbs, with more than a century of political experience in running an independent state, and motivated by an expansionist ideology that aimed to unite all Serbs into one state, pursued a policy of centralisation.4 The Croats, on the other hand, were historically accustomed to a federalised state sys- tem that safeguarded Croatia’s traditional autonomy, and wanted equal- ity with Serbia.5 Croatian national aspirations were not met; no separate Croat administrative entity existed before 1939. From 1929, after the intro- duction of dictatorial rule by King Aleksandar Karadjordjević, Croatia was divided between the Banovina (‘banates’ or regions) of Savska (northern 1 Cited in Carmichael, Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans, 11. 2 Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia, 128. 3 Ibid., 141–153. 4 Ibid., 214–225. 5 Trifković, ‘The First Yugoslavia and Origins of Croatian Separatism, 355. 72 chapter four Croatia), Primorska (most of the coastline) and Zetska (southern Dalma- tia with Montenegro). Croatia was simply wiped off the map.6 The Trinomial South Slavic Nation A wide gulf soon arose between Croats and Serbs, since the new South Slav state bore an undeniably dominant Serbian political and cultural stamp. The state was headed by the Serbian royal dynasty of Karadjordjević, while the new army, which had widespread martial powers in the early years of the state, was based entirely on the former Serbian army (includ- ing uniforms, regulations and its predominantly Serbian officer corps).7 The official ideology of the ‘trinomial Yugoslav nation’, whereby Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were considered three equal ‘tribes’ of one ‘people’, in reality implied the Serbianisation of administration and culture through- out Yugoslavia; for example, the ‘Serbian ekavian [dialect] was pushed through as Yugoslavia’s official language, most often in Cyrillic garb.’8 Leading Serbian nationalists (who led the two dominant Yugoslav polit- ical parties, the Democrats and Radicals) soon came around to the belief that they could eventually assimilate the Croats to Serbian nationhood through the ideology of Yugoslavism, for this ideology would extinguish a separate Croatian, but not Serbian, identity, as the Serbs were politi- cally and numerically much stronger than the Croats.9 In any case, both Yugoslav unitarists and Greater Serbian nationalists were in favour of a strongly centralised state, which in effect implied the supremacy of Bel- grade and Serbia.10 There existed, all the same, some tension between the ideologies of Greater Serbianism and Yugoslavist unitarism. For example, sincere British supporters of Yugoslav unification in the pre-war period, such as Henry Wickham-Steed (1871–1956) and R. W. Seton-Watson (1879–1951), considered a single state for the South Slavs as completely natural, but opposed Serbian hegemony in the new state because they, like the Yugoslavist Croat politician Ante Trumbić (1864–1938), viewed it as an obstacle to the ‘internal harmony of a homogeneous race.’11 6 Malcolm, Bosnia, 169. 7 Banac, National Question, 150–151. 8 Ibid., 212. Also see Marko Samardžija, Hrvatski jezik u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, 1993), 9–12. 9 Banac, National Question, 163–164. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 132–133. Also see Hastings, Construction of Nationhood, 125..