Matica Srpska Department of Social Sciences Synaxa Matica Srpska International Journal for Social Sciences, Arts and Culture

MATICA SRPSKA DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCES SYNAXA MATICA SRPSKA INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES, ARTS AND CULTURE Established in 2017 2–3 (1–2/2018) Editor-in-Chief Časlav Ocić (2017‒ ) Editorial Board Dušan Rnjak Katarina Tomašević Editorial Secretary Jovana Trbojević Language Editor and Proof Reader Aleksandar Pavić Articles are available in full-text at the web site of Matica Srpska http://www.maticasrpska.org.rs/ Copyright © Matica Srpska, Novi Sad, 2018 SYNAXA СИН@КСА♦ΣΎΝΑΞΙΣ♦SYN@XIS Matica Srpska International Journal for Social Sciences, Arts and Culture 2–3 (1–2/2018) NOVI SAD 2018 Publication of this issue was supported by City Department for Culture of Novi Sad and Foundation “Novi Sad 2021” CONTENTS ARTICLES AND TREATISES Srđa Trifković FROM UTOPIA TO DYSTOPIA: THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA IN 1918 1–18 Smiljana Đurović THE GREAT ECONOMIC CRISIS IN INTERWAR YUGOSLAVIA: STATE INTERVENTION 19–35 Svetlana V. Mirčov SERBIAN WRITTEN WORD IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR: STRUGGLING FOR NATIONAL AND STATEHOOD SURVIVAL 37–59 Slavenko Terzić COUNT SAVA VLADISLAVIĆ’S EURO-ASIAN HORIZONS 61–74 Bogoljub Šijaković WISDOM IN CONTEXT: PROVERBS AND PHILOSOPHY 75–85 Milomir Stepić FROM (NEO)CLASSICAL TO POSTMODERN GEOPOLITICAL POSTULATES 87–103 Nino Delić DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS IN THE DISTRICT OF SMEDEREVO: 1846–1866 105–113 Miša Đurković IDEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL CONFLICTS ABOUT POPULAR MUSIC IN SERBIA 115–124 Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman TOWARDS A BOTTOMLESS PIT: THE DRAMATURGY OF SILENCE IN THE STRING QUARTET PLAY STRINDBERG BY IVANA STEFANOVIĆ 125–134 Marija Maglov TIME TIIIME TIIIIIIME: CONSIDERING THE PROBLEM OF MUSICAL TIME ON THE EXAMPLE OF VLASTIMIR TRAJKOVIĆ’S POETICS AND THOMAS CLIFTON’S AESTHETICS 135–142 Milan R. Milojković ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC IN VOJVODINA: FROM EXPERIMENT TO ACADEMIC SUBJECT (1960–2000) 143–156 Ljiljana Lazić THE ENDOWMENT OF DR. BRANKO ILIĆ: A VALUABLE COLLECTION OF FOREIGN ART IN SERBIA 157–176 BOOK REVIEWS Jelena Jovanović Beguš BALKAN MUSIC BEYOND THE EAST‒WEST DIVIDE (Ivana Medić and Katarina Tomašević, Beyond the East‒West Divide. Balkan Music and its Poles of Attraction, Institute of Musicology SASA, Department of Fine Arts and Music SASA, Belgrade 2015) 177–178 Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman SOVTIĆ’S MONOGRAPH ON BRUCCI (Nemanja Sovtić, Rudolf Brucci’s Non-Aligned Humanism: The Composer and the Society of Self-Managing Socialism, Matica Srpska, Novi Sad 2017) 179–180 AUTHORS IN THIS ISSUE 181–187 ARTICLES AND TREATISES FROM UTOPIA TO DYSTOPIA: THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA IN 1918 SRĐA TRIFKOVIĆ University of Banja Luka, School of Political Sciences Foreign Affairs Editor, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture [email protected] SUMMARY: The creation of Yugoslavia was not a development that could be predicted, let alone treated as a politically viable project, before the outbreak of the Great War. It was the result of unique circumstances and geopolitical shifts created by the war itself. After it came into being, its advocates tended to reinterpret the past to make the new state look like the natural result of profound long-term forces. This view assumed that the alleged ethnolinguistic-racial kinship provided the foundation for the South Slavs’ cultural and political compatibilities. This was a myth, long outdated even at the time it was applied. Far from con- firming such claims, the unification was rushed following the Croats’ realization that they needed the common state to protect their distinct national interests. On the other hand, the birth of Yugoslavia resulted in the Serbs’ “national demobi- lization,” which ideally served the projects of national integration of others. The scene was thus set for the futile interwar quest for stability, for the horrors of Axis occupation, for Tito’s long dictatorship, and for the final bloody disintegra- tion. Yugoslavia was an imagined community par excellence, based on faulty intellectual constructs. It was flawed ab initio, doomed in any shape or form. KEY WORDS: Yugoslavia, Serbs, Croats, ethnicity, kinship, identity, race, myth INTRODUCTION The Yugoslav experiment was founded on the ideas of the Enlightenment and mixed with the legacy of the romantic era, with its tripartite division of European nations. It was based on an ethnolinguistic-racial myth of blood kinship as the foundation of the South Slavs’ presumed cultural and political compatibilities. That myth was absurdly anachronistic and obsolete already by the time it was applied1. 1 Jovan Cvijić (1865–1927), Serbia’s prominent geographer, was a particularly active pro- moter of a quasi-scientific anthropogeographic theory which asserted a common Dinaric racial identity of most “Yugoslavs.” 2 Subsequently the Yugoslav idea, and the political edifice based upon it, had always been subjected to many incompatible interpretations of its initial content and of the key players’ hidden motives and agendas. The creation of Yugoslavia was not a phenomenon which was (or could be) reliably foreshadowed by the previous development of the various Yugoslav peoples. As a contemporary British historian of the period points out, even those South Slav intellectuals who were enthusiastic about the notion of Yugoslav unity before the war nevertheless considered that any political unification would be the result of a long and gradual evolutionary process taking decades if not longer [Evans 2008: 222]. It was brought about by the unique circumstances and opportunities created by the Great War. That war was not the result of unintended blunders in various courts, foreign offices, and chancelleries, as claimed by revisionist historians2. In reality the Kaiserreich military and political elite welcomed the prospect of war resulting from the attentat in Sarajevo3. Berlin stage-managed the July crisis in 1914 to expand the borders drawn by Bismarck and to affirm hegemony in an extended Mitteleuropa, with France and Russia degraded and Great Britain excluded from Continental affairs. To that end, just one week after Sarajevo, Germany encouraged Austria-Hungary to go to war against Serbia. For Austria-Hungary, crushing Serbia – while Vienna’s back was guarded from Berlin – was considered an existential necessity and a way to reassert the Monarchy’s great power status, in the absence of reforms which were not going to take place while the old Emperor Francis Joseph was still alive. The state’s constitutional and ethnic complexity was reflected in the map of provinces which included the majority-South Slavic Carniola (4) and Dalmatia (5) in the Austrian lands, Croatia-Slavonia (17) in Hungary, and jointly administered Bosnia-Herzegovina (18), each with a distinct set of institutions and ethno- religious composition. The German elite, on the other hand, wanted a “preventive” war against Russia and France, based on the Schlieffen Plan. Effectively, “[t]he international conflict in the summer of 1914 consisted of two wars, not one. Both were started deliberately” [Fromkin 2005]. The Second Reich thus discarded Bis- marck’s prudent cautions about the danger of entanglement in the Southeast4. The Iron Chancellor had warned that, “if there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.” This was an area which, in his words, was “not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” His successors, to their peril, disregarded that advice on both counts. One of the consequences of the war was the unification of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, proclaimed exactly three weeks after Armistice. This event came six decades too late to be successful. Had it happened during the era of Italy’s 2 E.g. Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwakers, an audacious whitewash of the Central Powers. 3 That much has been established by Germany’s foremost historian of the 20th century, Fritz Fischer, in his authoritative 1961 study Griff nach der Weltmacht (published in English as Ger- many’s Aims in the First World War), and by the work of his successors, notably the late Imanuel Geiss and John C. G. Röhl. 4 See e.g. [Trifkovic 2015]. 3 unification it might have stood a chance. This was precluded after the Powers rushed to defeat Russia in 1854‒1856 and later to obstruct her march to the Straits. By 1918, the process of separate cultural and political development and the formation of distinct South Slav national identities had gone too far to be recalled. Their fusion, based on the myth of ethnic kinship which was suppos- edly only masked by religious and political diversity, would not happen because some local intellectuals with scientific aspirations wanted it to happen, or because a few British scholars thought they grasped the “South Slav” destiny better than the putative “Yugoslavs” themselves. Interwar attempts by King Alexander I and his far less convincing successors to enforce the fiction of national and state unity had the unintended consequence of providing an impetus to various non-Serb nationalist projects. The royalist regime provided the institutional framework for the process of national integration and political mobilization of the Croat nation. Other post-Serb and ipso facto Serbophobic ideological nation-building projects also gained traction, notably in Montenegro, Bosnia, and Macedonia. Such processes would have been less likely, if not outright unimaginable, before unification. The scene was thus set, in December 1918, for the tragedies of 1941–1945 and 1991–1995. EARLY YUGOSLAV IDEA In just over a century between the Congress of Vienna and the Versailles Conference, several European nations made a bid to break free from imperial rule – or (as in the case of Italy) to reassemble the fragments of putative nationhood that had been snatched up by foreign powers, or (as in the case of Germany) 4 to bring into being an idea of political unity that had matured well before the victory at Sedan 1870. The “South Slavs” – an imperfect designation for the Slavic speakers of what was to become Yugoslavia – were not the obvious candidates for the execution of a comparable project.

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