fascism 6 (2017) 42-74 brill.com/fasc War Veterans, Fascism, and Para-Fascist Departures in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1918–1941 John Paul Newman National University of Ireland Maynooth
[email protected] Abstract This article discusses the role played by war veterans in the various fascist and para- fascist groups present in Yugoslavia in the interwar period. The article finds that sig- nificant numbers of veterans and the nationalist associations to which they belonged contributed to proposed or actual departures from the democratic norm in interwar Yugoslavia, and were especially supportive of King Aleksandar Karadjordjevic’s dic- tatorship of 1929–1934. In this respect, they could be termed ‘para-fascist’. The article also notes that whilst the two groups typically identified in the literature as ‘fascist’, the Croatian Ustashe and Serbian/Yugoslav Zbor, fit into the ‘second-wave’ of 1930s fas- cist forces not usually marked by a strong presence of First World War veterans, their membership and ideological organisation were nevertheless significantly influenced by both the traditions of the war and the men who fought in it. Keywords Yugoslavia – fascism – Ustashe – Zbor – Aleksandar Karadjordjevic – orjuna – National Defence – Chetniks – veterans Comparative studies of European fascism have until recently tended to rel- egate Yugoslavia to the periphery. The two most obvious fascist candidates in Yugoslavia, the Croatian Ustashe and the Serbian/Yugoslav National Move- ment, or Zbor seem to fall into the category of fascist derivatives largely in the shadow of German National Socialism and Italian Fascism. Neither offered sig- nificant ideological or programmatic departures from the fascist mainstream in the way that Hungary’s Arrow Cross or Romania’s Legion of the Archangel © Newman, 2017 | doi 10.1163/22116257-00601003 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License.