PARIS 1919: YUGOSLAV POSITION PAPER War Experience Throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, as the Balkan peoples achieved their independence from Ottoman rule, a popular notion developed in the area that a common language among the South Slav peoples signified a common nationality as well. While Slovenian had emerged as a distinct language, Serbian and Croatian were almost identical. The Yugoslav idea of one nation-state was always strongest among the Croats inside Austria-Hungary, who feared that they were being made into Germans or Hungarians. Under Ante Trumbic (1864- 1938), a Croat who became the foreign minister of the emerging state, a Yugoslav National Committee formed in June 1915 in order to work for a federation of South Slavs Separate nationalism, however, developed in the Balkans throughout the years leading up to the First World War as well, and such divisions threatened the dream of a Yugoslavia. Experiences during the conflict tended to only exacerbate tensions. Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia remained a part of Austria-Hungary, and many of their soldiers fought loyally for the empire until the very end. Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, and even Serbs, served in the Austrian armies which bombarded Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, and subsequently occupied the country. Whatever their complicity might have been in the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the state of Serbia paid a heavy price. More than 120,000 of its citizens died in the war, out of a population of 4.5 million. Of all the belligerent nations, Serbia lost the highest percentage of troops at the front: 40%. By war’s end, such cooperation between recent enemies was improbable. On the other hand, clear alternatives did not always present themselves to the players involved. As Austria-Hungary began to collapse, its South Slavs turned, many with reluctance, toward independence. Even the Serbians, temporally humbled by defeat and by the collapse of their great protector, Russia, became more receptive to the idea of a Yugoslav state. In exile in Corfu, their leading representative, Nikola Pasic (1845-1926), who had been prime minister of Serbia for years, met with Trumbic. In July 1918, the two men agreed that Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, including those in Bosnia, whether Muslim or not, would be united into one state, with the king of Serbia as ruler. For the Yugoslav National Committee, union with Serbia, whatever its drawbacks (Trumbic regarded the Serbs as barbarians, deeply brutalized by their long years under Ottoman rule), seemed less frightening then the rise of two or three weak and vulnerable little states. Tensions, however, persisted. The two sides, for example, put off discussing a constitution: the issue of federation (which the Croats and Slovenes wanted) or a unity state (which Pasic desired) was never settled. More seriously, in the months after the Corfu declaration, Pasic moved away from a genuine union, working behind the scenes to make certain that the Entente did not recognize the Yugoslav Committee as the voice of the South Slavs from Austria Hungary. Pasic believed that Serbia had liberated the South Slavs from Austria- Hungary, that the Corfu Declaration had been only for propaganda, and that Serbia should head any new state. Anyone who did not like such an arrangement could go elsewhere. Well before the Peace Conference started, the South Slavs took matters into their own hands. In Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, a National Council of Croats, Serbs and Slovenes declared its independence from Austria-Hungary on October 29, 1918. Pasic, however, was already moving quickly to insure Serbian control over the other national groups. Although the Allies compelled 1 him to form a coalition government with the Council in the second week of November, Pasic made sure to neutralize it. On the ground, the Serbian army, as an Allied force, was fanning out across Austrian territory, first to the north and south, and then, by November, into Croatia and Slovenia. When the Yugoslav volunteers, some 80,000 soldiers from Austria-Hungary now fighting on the Allied side, trued to win Allied recognition as an occupation force, Pasic, to the dismay of Trumbic and other Croats, thwarted such efforts. With Serbian encouragement, self- appointed assemblies in the Banat and in Bosnia-Herzegovina voted for union with Serbia. In Montenegro, which was under Serbian occupation, a national assembly, voted hastily to depose their king and unite with Serbia. In Zagreb, the National Council started to panic, for it had no forces of its own. On November 25, it hastily resolved to ask Serbia for union as well. On December 1, 1918, Prince Alexander of Serbia proclaimed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, with its capital in Belgrade. The conviction of many Serbians that they had increased their own territory rather than founded a new country, and their suspicion that the Croats, Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims had not truly tried to liberate themselves from the Habsburgs, did not bode well for future cooperation between national groups. Although Serbs made up less than half the population, they ran the new country. The Serbian army became the Yugoslav army, and within the bureaucracy and various ministries, Serbs held almost all the important posts. Conference Expectations Already by the time of the Conference, the emerging state was in possession of much of what it wanted: Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Slovene heartland in the old Austrian province of Carniola, much of Dalmatia, and the old kingdom of Croatia-but it wished for more. Composed of about hundred members, the delegation comprised Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians and Montenegrins, each group with varying interests. The delegates from the Adriatic side of the country, for example, mainly Slovene and Croat, expressed passionate concern about security from Italy and control over ports and railways that had once belonged to Austria-Hungary, but were quite indifferent to border changes in the east. The Serbs, meanwhile, were prepared to trade away Dalmatia or Istria in order to acquire more territory to the north and east. In order to satisfy all, six of the seven borders were open for discussion. Only the border with Greece in the former Ottoman territory of Macedonia was left alone. In the west, Slovenes insisted on Klagenfurt, on the north side of the southern spur of the Alps, as security against what was left of Austria. The Serbs main concern, including Pasic, who headed the entire Yugoslav delegation, was to push eastward into Bulgaria and north of the Danube, taking Hungarian territory (the Baranya and the Backa) as protection for the capital. The Serbs were to deny that they were asking for non-Slav areas by indicating that the old censuses were unreliable. The peacemakers had little to guide them when grappling with the Balkans. Wilson stressed notions of self-determination and friendships among neighbors in the area, but remained vague concerning specifics. The British preferred strong states to counter Germany and Russia, but was not prepared to do much to secure the well-being of Yugoslavia. France was most supportive of the emerging state, believing that it, along with Czechoslovakia and Poland, would provide a counterbalance to Germany. On the opposite side, the Italians were most concerned, for although they were generally happy to see the end of Austria-Hungary, they did not want any other power to achieve dominance in the Balkans. 2 3 .