In 1918 the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was proclaimed, eleven years later, it was called “Yugoslavia”. A quarter of a century of multi-ethnic state, broke. Was he doomed to Failure?
The former Royal Palace of the Yugoslav kings in Belgrade, is today the seat of the Serbian President
Yugoslavia for a Generation dead. However, the term has for many people a meaning – not only for those that are born in this country, even for German, which have made there a holiday or one of the many Yugoslav Restaurants visited, which emerged since the 60s in many places in the Federal Republic of Germany.
But most of Yugoslavia, connect today, especially with the civil war in which the country disintegrated in the 1990s, and its aftermath have shaped the States that emerged from the crumbling country.
The founding of the first state of Yugoslavia, on 1. In December 1918, was the result of a war. As at the end of the First world war broke the Habsburg monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and large parts of Europe were rearranged, there was a Chance, a old dream a reality.
Fatal Birth Defects
Already in the 19th century. Century intellectuals, especially in Croatia, had driven the “Illyrian movement”. It is based on the myth that the Yugoslavs, the South Slavs, descended all of them from the ancient people of the Illyrians and are therefore naturally in a state should live. 1917 met on the Greek island of Corfu, representatives of the South Slavs of Austria-Hungary, including the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and the representatives of the already, in 1835, founded the Serbian state. Together, they agreed on the establishment of a joint state announce.
King Peter I of Serbia in 1918, the king of the common state. Yugoslavia it was first called later
However, the “Declaration of Corfu” was is a key deficit that explains the Munich-based historian Marie-Janine Calic: “the fact that names, symbols, and religions of the Orthodox Serbs and the Catholic Slovenes and Croats on an equal footing should be – but the question of how this should be a political will in a Constitution implemented was left open.”
This proved to be a fatal birth defect. Even then, the violent contrasts between the centralist concept of State of Serbia and the Federal Wish for Croats and Slovenes dominated the political debate.
Federal or KBay?
Therefore, we will be strengthened have been claimed since the 1990s, especially in Croatia, Yugoslavia was – like the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire a “prison of Nations”, in which the Croats and the Slovenes, the Serbs suppressed. Historians disagree with this view: “The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was not formed out of Nothing,” says Ulf Brunnbauer of the University of Regensburg. “There were political elites in Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, which had a variety of different reasons – an interest in the common state and in this state believed in.”
While Serbia saw itself as one of the winners of the First Welkriegs, which had fought for the independence of the new, common state, bloody, wanted to Croats and Slovenians from Austro-Hungarian rule free, to finally live in a country in which they were on an equal footing, says Brunnbauer: “the Slovenes and Croats had in 1918, in fact, have little or no Alternative to Yugoslavia. Statehood was not very popular. Yugoslavia was wanted by many.”
1942: In the partisan struggle against the German and Italian occupiers, the state’s founder, Tito became the leader of
Strife of the elites
Maybe the new state broke apart which is exactly why not to the internal stresses. Was destroyed it in 1941 from the outside, Germans, and Italians of Yugoslavia occupy. From the struggle against the occupiers, the second Yugoslavia was created in 1943. However, the second state of the South Slavs fought with similar problems as the first, especially after the Dead of its founder and President-for-life Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980).
In addition to vast social and economic Differences between the North – Slovenia and Croatia – and the South-West – Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo – there was a lack, in the view of Marie-Janine Calic, the willingness of the elites in the various republics of the Socialist Federation, their particular interests to the common state: “Politically, it was crucial that the consensus that had found the elites 1917/1918 – to build a common state, in the 1980s, broke up.”
The allegedly centuries-old hatred between the national communities in Yugoslavia, however, led since the beginning of the 1990s, often as an explanation for the disintegration and war, there was hardly present, says the historian Hannes Grandits from the Berlin’s Humboldt University: “studies show that up to the beginning of the 1990s animosity between different peoples, with the exception of the ratio of Serbs and Albanians to behave not very pronounced. This changed only after the outbreak of hostilities in 1991.”
Yugoslavia is dead
Only in the course of the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia (1991-99) grew, so the gap between the South Slavic Nations to their present level. A new Yugoslavia, virtually no-one talks between Slovenia and Macedonia today.
The idea of a common state for all South Slavs is probably failed for the time being
“The idea of Yugoslav modernism is dead,” says history Professor Brunnbauer. “It would be nice if that were so, because economically and politically, everything speaks for a close cooperation of the post-Yugoslav countries. It connects to a lot, even if the nationalists deny this.” Therefore, there is no realistic political projects that aim at regional Integration. The only thing that connects the countries of the Region, which is now called “Western Balkans”, today, is the desire for membership in the European Union.
That’s precisely the historian to see the only Chance of the former Yugoslavia. Hannes Grandits says: “The Integration of the Western Balkans into the EU would lead to many of the problems faced by these countries have, to solve alone. Not all but very many.”