GREAT BRITAIN

AND THE
CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA
 James Evans completed his D.Phil at Oriel College, Oxford. He now
works as an Associate Producer on historical and political documentaries
and as a freelance writer.
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 GREAT BRITAIN
AND THE CREATION
OF YUGOSLAVIA
Negotiating Balkan Nationality
and Identity

JAMES EVANS

Tauris Academic Studies

LONDON • NEW YORK
 Contents
Acknowledgements vii

Abbreviations and Orthography viii

Introduction 1

Part I: The Idea of Yugoslav Nationality in British Writing, 1900-1918:

Elements and Themes

1. Race: British Attitudes to the Racial Element in South Slav 13

Nationality

2. Language: Britain and South Slavic Language Questions 34

3. Religion: Faith, Nationality and the South Slavs in British 52

Analysis

4. Tradition: British Attitudes to the Secular History, Tradition 75

and Mythology of the South Slavs

Part II: The New State of Yugoslavia in British Foreign Policy, 1914-1921

5. Introduction to Part II 115

6. ‘Montenegro – finis!’: Britain and the Submergence of 119

Independent Montenegro, 1914-1921

7. Britain and the Idea of Yugoslav Unity, 1914-1918 159

8. Britain and the First Yugoslav Constitution, 1918-1921 186

Conclusion 221

Notes 225

Bibliography 297

Index 321
 Acknowledgements
This monograph had its remote origin in a Masters thesis I wrote on
British attitudes to the emergence of Tito’s regime in Yugoslavia in 1944-
45. The central theme of that work was the manner in which British
observers interpreted the new Communist regime’s proclaimed democratic
credentials, particularly as concerned the tightly-controlled ‘election’ of
November 1945. A subsidiary theme was the way in which Tito’s
seemingly ‘progressive’ and ‘democratic’ treatment of Yugoslavia’s
national question – the federal, six-state solution which endured, with
minor modifications, until the state’s collapse in the early 1990s – secured
him the esteem of the British political mainstream, in spite of his illiberal
ideology and authoritarian instincts.
My initial intention with my doctoral thesis was to look further into
British attitudes to the Yugoslav national question during the period of
Tito’s rise to power. I gradually became conscious, however, that attitudes
and preconceptions prevalent during the Second World War tended to
have their origin in the period of the First, when the demise of Austria-
Hungary paved the way for ‘Yugoslavia’ and obliged British observers to
attend closely for the first time to questions of South Slavic history and
nationality. Since there existed no detailed study of British attitudes to the
formation of the Yugoslav State in 1918, to the notion of a single
Yugoslav ‘nationality’ which underpinned it, or to the process of internal
political wrangling which preceded the state’s first constitution of June
1921, there seemed reason to transfer my focus to the earlier period. This
monograph is based substantially on my doctoral thesis as it was then
written, although I have looked since at a range of French sources –
primary and secondary – which provide useful additional context.
I would like to thank my PhD supervisor, Mark Almond, for reading
numerous drafts and for all his help and encouragement, and Mark
Cornwall, my examiner, who has been very generous with advice. I want
to pay special tribute to my parents, for their constant love and support –
particularly during the early stages of my postgraduate career when ill-
health would have made productive research impossible without their
selfless assistance. And finally I would like to thank my wife Nicola, both
for her practical help – printing, proof-reading and assisting with my
bibliography – and more importantly for being a sympathetic ear and an
unfailing source of love and encouragement.
 Abbreviations and Orthography
The following abbreviations are used:

DMI Director of Military Intelligence

EPD Enemy Propaganda Department
IB Intelligence Bureau
PID Political Intelligence Department
HMG His Majesty’s Government
SCS Serb-Croat-Slovene
HSK Serbo-Croat Coalition (Hrvatsko-Srpska koalicija)
DS Democratic Party (Demokratska stranka)
NRS National Radical Party (Narodna radikalna stranka)
HPSS/HRSS Croat People’s Peasant Party (Hrvatska pučka
seljačka stranka)/ Croat Republican Peasant Party
(Hrvatska republikanska seljačka stranka)
SSP Starčević’s Party of Right (Starčevićeva stranka prava)
HZ Croat Union (Hrvatska zajednica)
JMO Yugoslav Muslim Organisation (Jugoslavenska
muslimanska organizacija)
SLS Slovene People’s Party (Slovenska ljudska stranka)
KPJ Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička
partija Jugoslavije)

In the early 20th century it was common for ‘Yugoslav’ to be used in

Britain in the forms ‘Yugo-Slav’, ‘Jugo-Slav’ and ‘Jugoslav’. When the
hyphenated form is used in quoted text it is reproduced here unchanged.
For the sake of consistency, however, Js are changed to Ys throughout
unless in the titles of cited works.

The common pre-war forms ‘Servia’/ ‘Servian’ are likewise rendered as

‘Serbia’/ ‘Serbian’.
 Introduction
This is a study of British attitudes towards the emergence of the Yugoslav
State in 1918, as well as towards the chronic unrest and acrimonious
debates which preceded the Yugoslav constitutional settlement in June
1921. Scholars have long dismissed the notion that the shape of post-war
Europe was simply decreed by the Council of Four sitting at Versailles.
Before that conference even convened, Yugoslavia had emerged from the
wartime chaos, and the Powers could do little to alter the fact. The allied
chancelleries ‘created’ Yugoslavia only in the negative sense that they
approved its existence, accorded it legal recognition, and cast judgement
on the controversial fine-tuning of its frontiers.1
But this does not mean that British observers of South Slav
unification were purely passive, or that British attitudes had no bearing on
the events themselves. It is largely (if not exclusively) true that those
whose views are analysed here merely watched, and wrote, rather than
contributing directly to the developments they discussed. But during the
war in particular, Yugoslav activists monitored opinion in Allied countries,
convinced – unduly, as it turned out – that their plans depended upon
Great Power sponsorship. (A united Yugoslavia, maintained Frano Supilo,
would be possible only ‘if strongly supported by England’).2 At crucial
moments the behaviour of Yugoslav politicians was governed by a desire
to influence opinion in the Allied countries, and publicists purveyed (often
successfully) a misleading impression of the region’s history and culture.
Nor, in any case, should a study of British attitudes be justified with
reference only to their influence on contemporary events. The manner in
which one ‘nation’ or similar circumscribed group perceives another is apt
to endure. Patterns form, and assumptions ossify, often regardless of their
basis in fact, sheltered by semi-porous linguistic barriers, bequeathed by
senior diplomat to junior official or by seasoned correspondent to
apprentice, lodging in the cultural discourse. If such ideas do not influence
events at the moment of their conception, they may yet. And what is
paramount about the period in question is that it was then, for the first
time, that the great upheaval of the war compelled Britons to study the
Slavs of east-central Europe as independent actors. It was a formative
period, in other words, in which patterns of perception first acquired a
concrete and lasting form. One cannot study later episodes in British-
Yugoslav relations – the dealings in occupied Yugoslavia during World
2 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

War II, the Stalin-Tito rift of 1948, or the demise of Yugoslavia in the
1990s – without marking the longevity of western stereotypes and
preconceptions dating from the early 20th century. And it is clear that
British (and more generally western) attitudes did, in these subsequent
crises, contribute actively to the shaping of events.
Any historical study claiming to analyse the attitudes of a nation, or
of ‘public opinion’, begs a question: whose attitudes precisely? Lacking the
space to attempt a theoretical discussion of the nature of public opinion in
an age before scientific polls, the answer here must be pragmatic: the
attitudes examined are not those of ‘Britons’ in general, but those only of
people in Britain who contemplated the situation of the Yugoslavs, and
who left a record of what they thought. From the attempts such people
made to interest government or public (and from assessments of their
success), from the frequency and the prominence of relevant publications,
from Government sensitivity to parliamentary or perceived wider opinion,
and from other similar indications, one can at least estimate the
impression made by the fate of the South Slavs upon what is vaguely
termed the ‘national consciousness’.
One can talk, of course, of ‘intellectual’, ‘elite’ or ‘educated’ opinion,
and most of those quoted or discussed here fit that loose categorisation (if
only because ‘intellectuals’, almost by definition, are more prone to leave
records of their views). But the labels are not wholly satisfactory. For one
thing, ordinary soldiers and relief workers who found themselves in south-
east or east-central Europe published their experiences and reflections.
For another, one cannot assume, by any stretch of the imagination, that
those in Britain who were ‘intellectual’, ‘educated’ or members of the ‘elite’
(however this term be defined) necessarily had any acquaintance with the
problems of the South Slav region.
Far from it. Historians have often remarked upon the ‘abysmal
ignorance of English society’ regarding continental or world affairs, noting
that late 19th century British travellers approached the Austrian territories
south and east of Vienna ‘in much the same state of mind as to the heart
of darkest Africa’.3 (One contemporary writer who did venture into south-
eastern Europe suggested that it was ‘no exaggeration to say that many
regions of Africa are more familiar to the cultured Englishman […] than
the lands which lie beyond the Adriatic’).4 A long-sighted imperial vision
left parts of the continental middle-ground decidedly out of focus so far as
Britons were concerned, and this was certainly as true of the Yugoslav
region as anywhere. ‘There is scarcely any race in Europe of which most
people in England know less than they do of the Serbs’, one Slav specialist
observed.5 Even the British Government, a historian has claimed, only a
little unfairly, ‘knew little and cared less’ about the subject nationalities of
Eastern Europe on the eve of the First World War.6 Pre-war British
diplomacy, focused upon the great capitals of Berlin, Paris, Vienna,
 INTRODUCTION 3

St.Petersburg and Constantinople, was certainly not closely acquainted

with political tendencies in Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo or Ljubljana.7
A small number of dedicated publicists attempted during the war to
raise the profile of the South Slavs and other national groups, often with
considerable success. But while younger Foreign Office officials often
became enthusiastic supporters of the hitherto suppressed nationalities of
East-Central Europe, certain senior members of Whitehall remained
bluffly cynical. (Wickham Steed, foreign editor of The Times and close ally
of Robert Seton-Watson’s New Europe campaign, was, Lord Derby noted
suspiciously, an ‘idealist’, even if he did know more than most ‘about these
weird people the Czecho-Slovaks and Yugo-Slavs’).8 And if Seton-Watson
felt that public opinion in Britain was ‘far ahead of the British
government’ on the idea of Yugoslav unity, general levels of awareness
nevertheless remained well below those to which idealistic publicists
aspired.9 ‘I am more and more appalled’, J.L.Garvin, editor of The Observer,
told Seton-Watson in October 1917, ‘at the ignorance of foreign affairs
even amongst people who are supposed to be intelligent’.10 Such
disillusion only increased after the war, as the public’s interest in hitherto
little-known allies or grand ideas of a reformed diplomacy withered amid a
renewed preoccupation with domestic issues.11
While it is important to bear this context in mind, however, my
purpose in this monograph is not a comprehensive survey of British
public opinion and the Yugoslavs. For one thing, studies exist which treat
the question at some length, particularly with regard to the wartime
period. (Harry Hanak, for instance, has dealt thoroughly and well with the
spectrum of British attitudes towards the demise of Austria-Hungary, a
subject encompassing the Yugoslav question).12 Nor is it my purpose
simply to study diplomatic attitudes to the creation of a Yugoslav State as
a factor in international affairs.13 Rather, I intend to focus particularly on
the concept of the ‘Yugoslav’ nation as it was understood in Britain in the
early 20th century, and to explore the ways in which Britons reacted to the
idea, suddenly and forcefully propagated, that various groups with
apparently distinct ethnic identities – Serbs, Croats, Slovenes,
Montenegrins, Dalmatians and others – were in fact a single racial and
national group, with aspirations to a corresponding political unity.14
Furthermore, in addition to analysing British attitudes towards the
notion of Yugoslav ‘nationality’, and towards its component national or
sub-national identities, I mean to analyse the way a united Yugoslavia was
conceptualised constitutionally in Britain: how, in other words, Britons
supposed the constitutional structure of the new state should reflect the
varied history, culture and identities of its component parts, how they
reacted to the constitutional debates which did take place in Yugoslavia in
the lead-up to the 1921 settlement, and how they responded to the form
that settlement took.
4 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Essentially, therefore, this monograph attempts to answer two

questions: firstly, what did British observers think of the idea of Yugoslav
nationality during the period of the creation of the Yugoslav state? And
secondly, how did they relate the conclusions they drew on this score to
the putative and then to the actual political structure of the state? The first
question I want to address thematically, exploring in isolation those
factors which contemporary theorists commonly identified as ‘objective’
contributors to ‘subjective’ national feeling – racial kinship, linguistic
unity, religious background, and secular history and mythology. In each
case I have attempted to present a generalised theoretical context before
looking at the ways in which underlying assumptions were related to the
specific and complicated case of the South Slavs. In these thematic
chapters I have drawn from a wide range of contemporary source material
dating from the late 19th century through to the early interwar period on
the basis that, while attitudes to a specific group like the Yugoslavs could
shift quite dramatically in response to short-term circumstances,
background assumptions about the theory and practice of nationality were
less mutable. (They were also, of course, not certain to be voiced explicitly
in material dealing specifically with the Yugoslav case). With British
analyses of the Yugoslavs in particular I have tried to be more careful with
chronology, exploring, for instance, the impact of the war on the way their
national identity was presented.
It is hoped that this first, thematic section of the monograph
provides a valuable backdrop for the second: a more conventional survey
of the constitutional debate leading up to the first Yugoslav constitution
of 1921 as it was portrayed and understood in Britain. A chapter is
devoted to the controversy surrounding the incorporation of Montenegro
into Yugoslavia, because this issue’s peculiar diplomatic complications cast
light on the broader problems of amalgamation, as well as being worthy of
study in their own right. Subsequent chapters survey firstly the wartime
evolution of British attitudes towards a Yugoslav State and towards the
political structure which such a state would be likely to adopt, and
secondly the post-war coverage of the wranglings in Yugoslavia before
and immediately after the controversial centralist settlement. Necessarily,
these chapters are chronological rather than thematic in approach. They
rely much more heavily upon official British diplomatic records, since few
outside the Foreign Office had detailed knowledge of the internal situation
in Yugoslavia during or after the war, and as such they amount effectively
to a study of British Government thinking on the subject.
In general, then, I have preferred to discuss what the minority did
know than what the great majority did not. It has been necessary at times
to draw attention to mistakes and misconceptions. But, particularly as far
as those private individuals who took an interest in the South Slavs are
 INTRODUCTION 5

concerned, it is not forgotten that these were pioneers in the study of a

region remarkably little known or understood before this period.
And if we acknowledge hindsight’s advantages, moreover, no less
should we be alert to its dangers. Inevitably, the events of the early 1990s
have affected the way in which Yugoslav history is perceived. Wherever
the balance is struck in explaining that crisis, between deep socio-
economic forces and cynical political manoeuvring, it plainly revealed
profound tensions within the Yugoslav system. Observing the fervent
nationalism of Serbs and Croats at the end of the 20th century has made it
hard to empathise with an earlier conviction that the two peoples were
really one, and would quickly fuse, within a single state, into a
homogeneous Yugoslav nationality.
It must be right, of course, to question the faith many British
observers had that Yugoslav racial and linguistic kinship not only made a
united Yugoslav state inevitable, but would submerge ethnic varieties
within a shared national consciousness. But, equally obviously, one should
not assume, on the basis of subsequent history, that the unification project
was necessarily misconceived, or naively idealistic, or the state itself the
‘doomed creation’ it has seemed in much modern writing.15 That serious
tensions existed within the Yugoslav population in 1921, unresolved and
probably exacerbated by the constitution of that year, is evident. But who
can say that they might not have been resolved, or that Yugoslav ideology
was any more ‘artificial’ than other, successful national projects?
Yugoslavia’s history as a state, from the instability of the interwar years
and the desperate hardships of Nazi occupation to the authoritarian one-
party ‘federalism’ of the Tito era, has been far too sinuous and complex
(and shaped far too often by events and influences outside its borders) to
be reduced to such crude inexorability. My intention here is not to draw
such sweeping lessons, but merely to study the period in question on its
own terms. Such broader relevance as may fairly be drawn will, in any
case, be more likely to emerge on that basis.
And as in time, so in space: the emergence of Yugoslavia must be
seen now as an element in the wider, revolutionary settlement of 1919, as
must British attitudes towards the Yugoslavs be understood within the
context of the wider war and its aftermath. I can only endeavour,
however, to highlight, where relevant, the ways in which it impinged upon
the narrower subject; and hope that perhaps, in a small way, this detailed
study may cast light back out upon the wider picture of Britain and
Europe at the end of World War I.

I have said that my approach to public opinion will be pragmatic, and that
this will be a survey of those in Britain who – for whatever reason – chose
to record their views of South Slav politics, history or culture. It may help
at the outset, however, to comment briefly on the backgrounds and
6 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

propensities of those various categories of observers whose testimonies

recur most frequently in the pages that follow – to highlight, where
possible, some of the respects in which they tended to be representative,
or unrepresentative, of the wider population. The assigning of an array of
witnesses to neat compartments must inevitably be procrustean. Often the
details of a life rail against such simplification, and examples may easily be
found of individuals who shifted, over time, from one category to another,
or who produced simultaneously works which would assign them to
different categories. Nevertheless, with the caveat that boundaries were in
practice graduated and porous, we may perhaps consider British observers
in four principal categories:

i. Travel writers and other non-expert protagonists who recorded

first-hand experiences in the South Slav lands;
ii. Serious scholars of the South Slav region, or of the Ottoman
Empire or the Habsburg Monarchy and their various subject
peoples;
iii. Students of the theory of nationality, whose interest in the
Yugoslav case was as an interesting and controversial instance of
a general phenomenon;
iv. Career diplomats.16

Exotic places and peoples, rendered in easy-going, colloquial traveller

accounts, were a staple of the Victorian reading public, and remained
popular in the Edwardian period. If south-eastern Europe was,
geographically, less remote than Africa or Central Asia, it nevertheless
possessed – particularly in the case of those territories with a strong
Ottoman heritage – an aura of oriental mystique which travel writers did
little to play down. In the hands of writers like Harry de Windt and P.E.
Henderson, this region of ‘savage Europe’ was one of vivid and heady
sensory perception, but ‘wild and lawless’ and swarming with ‘strange
nationalities’.17 It possessed ‘the attraction and glamour of the East, its
gorgeous colouring, its brilliant costumes, sense of mystery’.18 To many of
these writers the region seemed ‘more part of the extraordinary and exotic
world of Asia than of Europe’.19 ‘Everything’, wrote William Miller, ‘is the
exact opposite of what it might reasonably be expected to be; the traveller
finds himself in the realms of romance, where all his wonted ideas are
turned topsy-turvy’.20 The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed,
as Barbara Korte has noted, a marked rise in attempts to travel
‘unconventionally’ – to walk on paths untrodden and away from what
seemed the mixed blessings of western civilisation.21 In pre-war accounts
of places like Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia-Hercegovina one notes a
common quest and admiration for those primitive, atavistic virtues which
seemed to survive only in the remotest regions.
 INTRODUCTION 7

During the war, of course, such travel accounts dried up. They were
superseded, however, by narratives of personal involvement in Serbia in
particular, as that country’s embattled resistance won it considerable
coverage and sympathy in the British press. Soldiers who had experienced
the Serbian defence and ultimate retreat of 1915-16, and/ or the fighting
return through Macedonia in 1918, recorded their impressions of Serbia
and the Serbs – almost invariably and understandably tinted with
romanticised admiration for their former brothers-in-arms.22 As important
were the vivid testimonies of those who had been involved in Serbia in a
relief capacity, working in military hospitals to cope with the wounded and
the victims of the typhus epidemic that decimated the Serb forces.23
Most of those involved in relief work were women – Lady Paget,
Mabel St.Clair Stobart and Elsie Inglis became revered figures in Serbia,
and numerous others worked in anonymity for organisations like the
Women’s Emergency Corps or the Scottish Women’s Hospital for
Foreign Service. Significantly, many of them also had strong suffragette or
suffragist connections or sympathies – a cause whose righteous
indignation on behalf of a long-disfranchised community translated easily
into a passionate support for Europe’s beleaguered smaller nations.24 A
similar empathy may perhaps also explain the disproportionate
representation of individuals and organisations from non-conformist
(often Methodist) religious backgrounds, and from Britain’s own smaller,
historically marginalised nations – Scotland in particular (a question we
will return to shortly). Though non-political in its direct aims, the charity
work sponsored, organised and carried out by British relief organisations
was, as Harry Hanak points out, often initiated and publicised by
individuals strongly sympathetic to the creation of a single, Yugoslav state,
who tended naturally to reflect this sympathy in their fund-raising and
educational writings.25
A number of these individuals, in fact – men like Robert Seton-
Watson and Sir Arthur Evans – had become sincerely and deeply engaged
with the history, culture and political development of the South Slavs to
the extent that they must be considered within our second category of
observers: the serious British scholars of the region. Also among this
group, with a variety of individual caveats, may be considered such
influential writers as William Miller, Edith Durham, Harold Temperley,
A.H.E. Taylor, Neville Forbes, H.N. Brailsford, J.A. Marriott, Sir Charles
Eliot, G.M. Trevelyan and Wickham Steed. As we will discover during our
discussion, their perspectives and attitudes towards the South Slavs as a
whole, and towards relationships within the South Slav group, differed in
some important respects. But it is worth briefly considering here some
characteristics they broadly shared.
Most importantly, perhaps, it should be borne in mind that the
majority of those who wrote extensively about the South Slavs (and who
8 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

therefore loom large in the ensuing pages) were inclined to be favourably

disposed towards them, and towards the project of a united, independent
state – their enthusiasm for the cause of Yugoslav unity motivating their in
some cases prolific writing and research.26 Those in Britain who were
unsympathetic on intellectual grounds to a Yugoslav cause which entailed
the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire, or who were instinctively
contemptuous of these seemingly new-fangled, conglomerate nationalities
of East-Central Europe (and of those British campaigners who adopted
them), may be under-represented in this monograph. Put bluntly, a lack of
interest was less likely to speak its mind.27
The idea that the group of writers who wrote at length about the
South Slavs were not a representative sample of British political and
intellectual life seems confirmed by a glance at their political affiliations
and sympathies. As Robert Evans has observed, those British historians
drawn to write about Europe’s emergent, hitherto-suppressed nationalities
were overwhelmingly Liberals, commonly with a Radical tinge: ‘they were
inspired by a sort of Gladstonian moral crusade to rectify abuse […] and
by sublime confidence in the ability of the constitutional and
parliamentary process to sustain liberty and social justice’.28 (Robert Seton-
Watson had himself toyed with standing as a Liberal candidate before the
war).29 Interestingly, of those with Balkan or Habsburg expertise, it was
only those like Brailsford or Charles Buxton who tended towards more
radical, socialist politics who were less enthused by the politics of national
liberation, prioritising instead bonds of economic subjection and the need
for large, federal entities.30
The label ‘expert’, of course, is a subjective one. There were, as we
mentioned, caveats in individual cases regarding the validity of claims to
be regarded as such. One general caveat, however, is worth mentioning
here because of its wide application – admittedly, in varying degrees – to
almost all the scholars under discussion. The historic, civilisational divide
which separated the Habsburg realm from the territories of the present
and former Ottoman Empire was one seldom convincingly straddled by
British scholars, who tended to approach the problems of south-eastern
Europe from a perspective either distinctively Habsburg or distinctively
‘Balkan’. As a result, many of the writers in question were markedly more
sure-footed on one side of this divide than the other, with significant
consequences for their perspective on the history and future alignment of
the broader region. Thus, for example Seton-Watson’s familiarity with
pre-war independent Serbia was – as he himself later confessed –
markedly weaker than his knowledge of the South Slav lands of the
Austrian empire. Meanwhile his close ally Wickham Steed was, much more
so, an expert of Central Europe rather than the Balkans. By contrast,
writers like Henry Brailsford and Noel Buxton were Balkan specialists,
deeply knowledgeable about Bulgaria and Macedonia, but relatively
 INTRODUCTION 9

unversed in the history and politics of Habsburg Central Europe.31 Edith

Durham, likewise, had travelled in Serbia and had a sophisticated
understanding of highland society in Montenegro and Albania, but was
scarcely the authority on all of central and south-east Europe she
purported to be. At times the demand in wartime Britain for ‘expert’
commentary on hitherto unknown regions exceeded the supply.
In the case of our third category of observers the same caveat more
obviously applies. Themes of national identity and its relationship to
political organisation, widely discussed since the days of Mazzini and the
movements of Italian and German unification, became again during
World War I a focus for intellectual discussion. Numerous theoretical
works attempted to define nationality in general terms and to analyse its
likely significance for a future peace settlement. For their authors the
Yugoslavs were of obvious interest, both as a long-suppressed but
increasingly assertive national group within the Habsburg Empire, and as a
purported single nationality comprising various component identities
grounded in differences of language, religion and historical tradition.
Writers like Alfred Zimmern, James Bryce, Arnold Toynbee, J.Holland
Rose and Sidney Herbert found in the Yugoslavs a telling test-case for
their more general ideas about nationality and the future political
disposition of Europe. Ranging widely in their discussions, however, they
were all of them reliant for the specifics of the Yugoslav case on the more
specialist authors we have discussed.32
Not a few of these writers (as well as those who focused more
specifically on the South Slavs) had in their personal histories, it may also
be noted, elements which seem to have fostered an interest in the vexed
question of national identity and its relationship to the modern state. For
some, like Alfred Zimmern or Lewis Namier, a Jewish heritage and strong
Zionist sympathies, combined with a migrant’s preoccupation with roots
and rootedness, bequeathed a wider interest in the themes of nationality
and identity.33 For a significant number of others, allegiance to one of
Britain’s historically marginalised nations seems to have encouraged an
identification with peoples struggling to assert their identities in the
shadow of dominant neighbours. Some, like James Bryce or the Leeper
brothers, were Protestant Irish in background. A disproportionate number
of the individuals and organisations involved in wartime relief work in
Serbia were Scottish.34 Most notably, perhaps, Robert Seton-Watson
(‘Scotus Viator’) displayed a proud and romanticised conception of
Scottish history and of the union with England which influenced his views
on the Habsburg Monarchy and on the post-Habsburg national states.35
Our fourth and final category of observers includes those whose
careers in government service led them to contribute to the formulation of
official British attitudes and policies towards the South Slavs. The pre-war
Foreign Office and diplomatic service, as Zara Steiner and others have
10 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

shown, conducted much of its business in a state of serene and haughty

isolation – from the organs of domestic government as well as from the
wider British public.36 (After 1906, in particular, a significant degree of
distance developed between the predominantly Eton-educated and
conservative diplomatic service and the ascendant Liberal element within
the political establishment). There is certainly little evidence that clerks or
diplomats were significantly influenced by published accounts of the
Yugoslav region written by independent scholars or travellers. As Roberta
Warman has pointed out, not before the creation of the Political
Intelligence Department in 1918 did the Foreign Office recognise any
responsibility to collect and digest miscellaneous information regarding
foreign countries.37 Few diplomats, it may also be noted, chose to convey
their experiences or impressions to a general readership.38
Even within the official foreign service palpable internal divisions
and tensions remained, between the diplomatic corps and the distinct,
subordinate consular service. In relation to Austria-Hungary, for instance,
the service history of many of the British consuls serving in Sarajevo was
levantine: commonly they had served as interpreters in Constantinople.
This background was rarely shared, however, by British diplomatic
representatives in Vienna or Budapest, and the result, as Robin Okey has
noted, was that ‘a certain fracture entered the reportage’.39 As we will see
later, this variation of perspectives could be marked and significant: as, for
instance, when it came to British attitudes towards the treatment by Serbia
of Muslim minorities in Kosovo and Macedonia.40
During the war, and during the peace conference which followed,
the Foreign Office suffered significant encroachment on its role in the
formulation of foreign policy, and was obliged in response to become
markedly less insular in its approach. An urgent need for expertise which
could not be met from within the service led to the breakdown
(temporarily, at least) of the divide between career diplomats and Foreign
Office clerks on the one hand, and independent academics and journalists
on the other. The erosion of barriers was certainly not complete, and
mutual suspicions and rivalries remained. But it does become easier to
discuss British official and unofficial attitudes as a related, if by no means
homogeneous, whole.
The significance of the role played by independent academics and
writers within British Government in the late war period is a question to
which we will later return.41 Let us now turn directly, however, to the
question of Yugoslav nationality as it was understood in early 20th century
Britain, and first, specifically, to the perceived importance of a shared racial
ancestry among the South Slavs.
 Part I

The Idea of Yugoslav Nationality in

British Writing, 1900-1918: Elements
and Themes
 1

Race: British Attitudes to the Racial

Element in South Slav Nationality

In 1906 the Austrian thinker Otto Bauer distinguished three tendencies

into which nationality theory had effectively divided. These schools of
thought he categorised under the headings ‘metaphysical’, ‘psychological’
and ‘objective’.1 In general, British theoretical debate has been dominated
by the last two: by questions of conscious identity (the psychological
approach) and of external (‘objective’) characteristics such as language,
religion or political tradition. One might easily assume that the
‘metaphysical’ approach – whether ‘spiritualist’ (founded on the posited
existence of an unchanging racial ‘soul’) or materialist (assuming hereditary
transmission of racial characteristics) – played no substantial role in British
thought. After all, British philosophers had tended to distance themselves
from the romantic nationalist tradition, associated with German thinkers
like Herder, Humboldt and Fichte, which presented the nation in ‘organic’
or ‘primordial’ terms as a family with a distinct biological lineage and an
inviolable cultural and linguistic heritage.2 Britain’s historians could
scarcely deny her people’s divergent racial ancestry.3
Many British theorists certainly did denounce the notion of racial
purity. They insisted that no substantial correlation could exist between
‘race’ in a scientific sense and ‘nationality’ as it was then experienced. Any
such doctrine had been sharply rejected by British intellectuals of the
previous generation like Mill, Buckle and Huxley.4 Their successors were
no less wary of those ‘premature exploitations of science’ which brought
reputable anthropological investigation to the service of ‘monstrous
doctrines of “racialism”’.5 Only ‘malice and ignorance’ could assume
national groups were racially homogeneous.6
Nevertheless, the vigour of the flogging administered to ‘racialism’
by British theorists suggests that this was a horse which, however
malnourished beside its German stablemate, had not expired altogether.
On the one hand, in spite of Mill’s insistence on the vulgarity of
‘attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural
14 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

differences’, many scholarly writers were unwilling to dismiss the

contribution of racial strain to national character.7 ‘Strange to say’, one
eminent ethnologist concluded, ‘the element that appears to have
undergone the least change is the racial temperament’.8 The respected
historian Lord Bryce conceded that the significance of race had been
exaggerated; but even his moderate voice insisted that ‘in the thought and
imagination of every civilised people there is an unquestionable racial
strain’.9 When Alfred Zimmern attempted to define ‘nationality’, common
race seemed ‘perhaps the most important factor’.10 Most notably, the
revered figurehead of one school of British nationality theory, Lord
Acton, had stated with customary assurance that ‘the same race of men
preserves its character, not only in every region of the world, but in every
period of history, in spite of moral as well as physical influences’.11
On the other hand (and more important for our purposes) is the
influence these ideas had upon the tacit assumptions of intellectual
discourse. To the concept of ‘national character’, by which was usually
meant ‘racial character’, was attributed an explanatory power which would
now be considered quite unwarranted. Lloyd George could still assert in
Parliament that the intractability of the Irish question was due to a
‘difference of blood’.12 An eminent (and still-respected) historian
considered it an explanation of the comparative failure of state-sponsored
Russianisation in the late 19th century to observe simply that ‘the Russian
nature is averse from system’.13 Robert Seton-Watson, the foremost
British specialist on the Habsburg nationalities, explained the
phenomenon of pan-Slavism with reference to a ‘deep-seated call of the
blood, which rises superior to differences of language, religion, geography
and historical tradition’.14 In his work on Romania he stressed that that
country’s latinate language and culture was evidence of a ‘racial link with
Italy and France’.15 The political and academic discourse of the period
abounds with such examples. ‘Anthropologists, ethnologists, sociologists,
and historians [...]’, one theorist lamented, ‘all alike recognise differences
of national character as giving meaning and unity to national history’.16
It is true that the origin of ‘national character’, for some who
thought carefully about the issue, lay less in racial inheritance than in the
more tangible influences of physical and cultural environment. (To regard
‘complicated social and historical traits as race tendencies’, protested one
writer, was to overlook ‘the importance of environment in the formation
of the character and mental make-up of a group’).17 But for most race
remained not only an important but also an unchanging influence, having
long ago solidified into its contemporary divisions. 18 And the attribution
to races of traits assumed to be the expression of inherited stock remained
a near-universal tendency, of intellectual as well as popular discourse.
To some extent, of course, this broad assumption recurs today.19 It
would be unusual, however, to encounter now the quasi-mystical belief,
 RACE 15

common in early 20th century Britain, in an unalterable ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’,

representing the collective consciousness, values and aspirations of each
nationality. (‘That nations have souls, who can doubt?’, asked one writer in
1916 in response to the bravery of Serb, Polish and Belgian resistance).20
This view, described by one contemporary as ‘at once vaguely and
tenaciously held by the vast majority of civilised people’, was popularised
in Britain by the likes of Gustave Le Bon, for whom each national soul
possessed ‘fundamental characteristics as immutable as the anatomical
characteristics of an animal species’.21 Exposure to wartime German
supremacism may have heightened the reaction of British theorists to the
‘racial fallacy’.22 It did not seriously undermine the facile assumption of a
racial basis for the national ‘soul’. ‘Even when it is not expressly asserted’,
one writer complained, ‘it is tacitly admitted as the premise of important
conclusions’.23 A later writer echoed this verdict, noting that while no
distinguished British writer had tried to vindicate the racial hypothesis, its
influence had permeated the country’s literature and politics.24
That this was true is more remarkable given that the general term
‘race’ was applied with startling inconsistency, its meaning, as one recent
historian has observed, ‘exceptionally amorphous and indeterminate’.25 Its
close association with the concept of nationality extended at times to their
demonstrable confusion, as when the influential American adviser George
D. Herron described the South Slavs as having recently entered into ‘a
racial unity that has no precedent in their past’.26 The concept was
routinely attached, furthermore, often by a single writer within the space
of a few pages, both to large families of peoples and to any of a series of
subdivisions. In popular applications – the ‘French race’, the ‘Slavic race’,
the ‘Latin race’ and so on – it was employed with reference rather to
nationalities or linguistic groups than to physiological types or
relationships.27 It was not unusual, for instance, for allusion to a single
Slavic ‘race’ to coexist unabashedly with comment on the South Slavic
‘race’, with further magnification to the component Serb, Croat or Slovene
‘races’, or even with discussion in racial terms of identities generally
regarded as provincial: the ‘Dalmatian race’, the ‘Bosnian race’ etc.28
Lacking the terminological resources and precision of biological
classification, as well as the objective means of distinction (human races,
unlike animal species, have had a troublesome habit of interbreeding),
analysts resorted to ‘race’ as a flexible label. They did so despite, indeed
partly because of, the difficulty in ascertaining which of these multiple
identities should be considered provincial, cultural or environmental, and
which ‘racial’ in the sense of entailing a shared congenital inheritance.
We cannot, however, become submerged here in theoretical
problems. The important point is that, despite the admonitions and
fulminations of a small group of theorists, significance continued to be
attached to the concept of race in British discourse about nationality. It is
16 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

this which makes it necessary to examine the ways in which Britons

assessed or preconceived the racial relationships of South Slavs with other
groups, and particularly with each other. First, however, we must clarify
some points of terminology which may otherwise become confusing.

Insofar as the group as a whole was concerned, the labels ‘South Slav’ (or
‘Southern Slav’) and ‘Yugoslav’ (often then written ‘Yugo-Slav’) were both
common in English usage by the war period, though they had been little
used before then.29 Technically, of course, they are precisely synonymous,
the latter simply connoting ‘South Slav’ in the Serbo-Croatian language.
Their use in British analysis, however, reveals idiosyncrasies and discrete
ambiguities which make it necessary to consider them separately.
The label ‘South Slav’, as employed in Britain, was generally less
clearly defined, potentially more inclusive and certainly less politically
loaded than the ‘Yugoslav’ alternative. Perhaps as a result, its use to
describe a specific element of the Balkan population declined during and
after the war as ‘Yugoslav’ became the accepted standard form. In the
standard classification of Slavic populations – or rather, fundamentally, of
their languages – ‘South Slav’ was a primary subsection of the Slav group.
It was, as the name suggests, a counterpart of ‘Western Slav’ and ‘Eastern
Slav’, neither of which indicated strictly ‘national’ groups but were rather
collective forms containing their own subset of closely related racial,
linguistic and national identities. Though less common, ‘South Slav’ in this
strict sense encompassed not only Slovenes, Croats and Serbs – those
groups who would in 1919 acquire their own eponymous South Slavic
state – but also Bulgarians and the disputed populations of Macedonia
(often labelled simply ‘Macedonian Slavs’).30
The characterisation in Britain of the relation of the Bulgarians to
other South Slavic groups illustrates the ease with which the supposedly
objective classification of ‘race’ could be co-opted to suit contemporary
political realities and interests – by British observers as well as by the
populations concerned. It was all too apparent after the Serbo-Bulgarian
war of 1885, the war over the Turkish spoils in 1913, and the alleged
atrocities during World War I that feelings of unity and racial brotherhood
between Serb and Bulgarian were at a low ebb and prospects of early
union remote. For the Allies there was no question of including Bulgarians
in a united South Slav bloc viewed as an allied nation. Unlike the Slavs of
the southern Habsburg lands, marched (it was assumed) unwillingly into a
war wrought by the dominant Germans and Magyars, the Bulgarians had
spurned Allied overtures and freely aligned themselves with German
imperialism. In the light of this it is striking, but not perhaps surprising,
that strong emphasis was placed in Britain on the specifically racial
dissimilarity between the two peoples, which rendered union as unnatural
as it was inexpedient. This emphasis had been less marked before 1878
 RACE 17

when the ultimate amalgamation of Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia had

seemed to some a desirable as well as a probable consummation, and was
similarly less marked several years after the war, when hopes of Serbo-
Bulgarian unity within a Balkan federation began to revive.31
Although by the 19th century feelings of Slavonic solidarity were
arguably more potent in Bulgaria than in the lands of her western
neighbours, belief in the enduring influence of ancestral blood led British
writers to dwell upon the non-Slavic element in the Bulgarian make-up.32
Serb historians such as Chedo Miyatovich, much respected by scholars like
Robert Seton-Watson and Harold Temperley, drew British attention to the
fact that Bulgars were ‘a Slavonic nation of a quite different type, created
by the circulation of Tartar blood in Slavonian veins’ – a ‘simple fact
[which] throws much light on the conflicts between the Serbians and
Bulgarians during the Middle Ages, and even in our own days’.33 In his
1915 study, The Southern Slavs, Neville Forbes noted that the Bulgars were
‘far from being purely Slav in origin or in temperament’. In peculiarities of
the Bulgarian language he discovered the linguistic footprint of a non-
Slavic ancestry, and attributed to this racial ingredient an enduring
psychological import.34 Sir Charles Eliot, in his respected history of
Turkey in Europe, similarly characterised the Bulgarian tongue as ‘a
Slavonian language mangled by a non-Slavonic race’, and saw in the
Macedonian peasantry a look of ‘the Finns of the Volga or the hordes of
the Steppes’.35
After Bulgaria signed up with the Central Powers in 1915, the
Bulgarophile element in Britain became subdued, and this alien admixture
to the Slavic stock offered a propagandistic backdrop to Bulgarian perfidy.
Seton-Watson even noted in 1916 that the Bulgars were being talked
about in Britain, along with the Magyars and Turks, as constituting a pan-
Turanian threat.36 The Inter-Allied Commission deputed after the war to
investigate claims of Bulgarian atrocities in Macedonia found itself, ‘forced
to the conclusion that, though the Bulgars wear a thin Slav veneer, they
have retained the cruellest and most bestial instincts of their Tartar-
Mongol origin’.37 Such resort to distant racial origins in the service of a
contemporary political position was, as we shall see, the similar expedient
of those who opposed the narrower ‘Yugoslav’ project. Even after the
war, though some were inclined to re-induct Bulgarians into the project of
South Slavic unity, the emphasis remained upon the different nature of
this ‘amalgam of races’ to that of their ‘purely Slav neighbours’.38
On rare occasions ‘Yugoslav’ was employed in Britain in the broad
sense, encompassing Bulgarian as well as Serb, Croat and Slovene. In his
book The Birth of Yugoslavia Henry Baerlein condemned the use of this
term to describe a state which excluded the Bulgarians.39 During the war
the Serbian Government raised the same objection on the same grounds.40
But Baerlein’s book was not published until four years after the war, and
18 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

the sincerity of the Serbian Government is open to doubt.41 In general,

usage of the term in Britain reflected the fact that it had entered British
vocabulary at a more recent date than the vaguer ‘South Slav’, and had
done so in the service of a unification project which excluded the
Bulgarian element. It was, therefore, less explicitly a racial or linguistic
label. References to a ‘Yugoslav race’ were less common than the
alternative ‘South Slav race’. And, as we will see, ‘Yugoslav’ (perhaps in
small part because of its then composite orthographical form: ‘Yugo-Slav’)
never lost in this period a veneer of artificiality exacerbated by stubborn
official use of the form ‘Serb-Croat-Slovene’.42
The awkward ambiguity of the ‘Yugoslav’ designation in this period
stemmed not from its weak racial implications, which usually embraced
precisely those Slavic groups which would constitute the Yugoslav state
after 1918, but rather from its particular political associations. Prior to
1914 the notion of an independent state consisting of Serbia and
Montenegro on the one hand and the Habsburg South Slav lands on the
other seemed fanciful. The Empire might be in decline but it was far from
collapse and the most ardent enthusiast for South Slavic unity could not
will the conflagration which might bring it to fruition.43 Commonly
envisaged, however, was a reformed ‘trialist’ monarchy, with an
autonomous South Slav unit joining the existing Austro-Hungarian
federation. Before the war, it was this hypothetical conglomeration within
the Empire which was most commonly implied by ‘Yugoslavia’.44
After the outbreak of war, as the Buxtons observed, Serbia ‘stood
forth for the first time distinctly and without equivocation as the
champion not merely of Greater Serbia but of the Southern Slavs as a
whole’.45 The term ‘Yugoslav’ was rapidly co-opted by Serbian officials
and publicists in Britain as a direct synonym for ‘Serb’ or ‘Serbian’, in
accordance with an outlook which conceived the Yugoslav idea as the
expansion of Serbia.46 Thus in late 1914 the Serbian Government released
a statement entitled ‘Serbian (Yugoslav) War Aims’. In Britain the
campaign for a Yugoslav state was an objective of, and was associated
with, the ‘Serbian Society’.47 In a period when Serbia’s military effort and
humanitarian crisis attracted headlines and few knew much of the South
Slavs within the Habsburg Monarchy, the terms ‘Serbian’ and ‘Yugoslav’
came by repeated juxtaposition to seem interchangeable. The message of
Serbian propaganda – that the South Slavs living in Austria and Hungary
were unredeemed Serb brethren – was widely accepted.
As the war progressed there emerged in the usage of ‘Yugoslavia’,
however, a further layer of ambiguity and confusion, with the emergence
of a self-anointed mouthpiece for the Habsburg South Slavs calling itself
the ‘Yugoslav Committee’. From 1915 this body conducted a high-profile
propaganda campaign, one gradual effect of which was to re-appropriate
the label ‘Yugoslav’ as signifying not the Serbs of Serbia and Montenegro
 RACE 19

(along with, only secondarily, their ‘unredeemed brethren’) but, once

more, the assorted Serbs, Croats and Slovenes of Austria-Hungary. As the
Committee campaigned for the creation of a ‘Yugoslav’ army distinct from
that of Serbia, and then pressed to be recognised as representative body of
the ‘Yugoslav’ (ie Habsburg South Slav) nation, diplomatic notes and
published works in Britain began to refer to ‘Serbs’ and ‘Yugoslavs’ as
distinct groups.48 In November 1918, as an unexpectedly sudden military
victory brought belated attention to political questions, Balfour sought
‘reconciliation between the Yugo-Slavs and the Serbs’.49 In December the
noted exponent of Yugoslav unity Arthur Evans reported to Lord Derby
from Paris the institution of ‘one united kingdom of Serbia and
Yugoslavia’.50 Nor is this an end to the complications. As British
observers belatedly appreciated the tension between the unification
projects envisaged by the Serbian government on the one hand and by the
Yugoslav Committee on the other, ‘Yugoslav’ became associated with a
certain form and ethos of unification – by the federal union of equal
parties – which placed it in opposition to a ‘Serbian’ solution.51
We must not yet, however, become immersed in those questions of
culture and politics with which perceptions of the South Slavic racial
make-up became entangled. We will return later to these elements in the
difficult question of Yugoslav ‘nationality’. Here we must address the
extent to which Britons believed in a single, unified South Slav ‘race’ –
bound by deep physical or psychological ties, born of a common ancestry,
which existed, at least by implication, independently of any shared cultural,
linguistic or sociological heritage.52 How did observers assess the racial
relationships between those groups which united to form Yugoslavia?

Without wishing to marginalise Slovenes, Montenegrins or other smaller

groups, there is no doubt that the foremost question for British observers,
as for the nascent state itself, was that of ‘Serbo-Croat’ unity. This, as
Seton-Watson observed, fundamentally was the ‘South Slav Question’.53
The label ‘Serbo-Croat’ is itself, of course, ambivalent. The combination
of two commonly-used existing terms, it carries simultaneous implications
both of unity and of difference. To the extent that its composite form
implies an amalgamation of distinct identities, it might seem to testify
against a single primeval racial identity. While it did partially supersede
British references to separate ‘Serb’ and ‘Croat’ groups, it was far from
doing so entirely. In general the amalgamated form was used with greater
frequency by British wartime observers with reference to those areas of
the future Yugoslavia which formed part of the Habsburg Monarchy. This
is perhaps not surprising given that the population was here considerably
more divided between religious confessions and Serb, Croat and Slovene
identities than were the broadly homogeneous ‘Serb’ states of Serbia and
Montenegro.54 For British enthusiasts of Yugoslav unity it was obviously
20 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

preferable to portray regions like Bosnia, Dalmatia and Croatia as of

homogeneous ‘Serbo-Croat’ race rather than to present, in a patchwork of
Serb, Croat and Slovene settlements, a picture of tangled racial
miscegenation. (The same, of course, was true for the Yugoslav unitarists
by whom they were influenced).55 The fact that the most reliable
information for population distribution in these areas derived from
Austro-Hungarian censuses using linguistic data meant that there was, in
any case, no means of accurately differentiating groups recorded simply as
‘Serbo-Croat’. The dispute between Yugoslavs and Italians in Dalmatia –
that ‘wearisome Adriatic Question’ which bored and exasperated British
observers in equal measure – further encouraged this tendency.56 This
mixed region was analysed simply in terms of Slav (‘Serbo-Croat’) versus
Italian for the plausible reason that this seemed the primary and, in the
circumstances, the only significant opposition at work.
We shall return often to the ways in which Britons rationalised ‘Serb’
and ‘Croat’ identities, and the nature of the divisions between them. What
matters here is that they were considered by most in Britain who thought
or wrote about them to be racially either identical or so closely akin as
mattered little. Diplomats and others who had been used to think of the
peoples of Austria-Hungary purely in terms of regional identities (in which
a ‘Croatian’ was simply an inhabitant of the narrow administrative region
of Croatia) were gradually induced by South Slav and British publicists to
think in broader racial terms.57 By late 1918, when the British
representative in Belgrade came to congratulate Serbian Crown Prince
Alexander, he was happy to applaud the unification of Serbia with her
‘blood kin’ of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire.58
Serbs and Croats were almost universally perceived as being by
origin two kindred Slavonic tribes whose single race had acquired its ‘dual
nature’ through subsequent exposure to different cultural traditions.59
A.H.E. Taylor, in his study The Future of the Southern Slavs, noted that Serbs
and Croats were originally distinguished only by ‘slight tribal differences’.
Similarly, while Neville Forbes observed that ‘there must have been some
fundamental difference in early tribal days, otherwise the two names
would hardly have survived’, once again the distinction he drew was tribal
rather than racial. It was over the subsequent centuries, exposed to
contrasting pulls of geography and culture, that these separate identities
‘doubtless grew more marked’.60 Philologists, Seton-Watson noted, had
derived the indigenous forms ‘Srb’ and ‘Hrvat’ from the same root –
testimony, he implied, to the common ancestry of the ‘Croato-Serb race’.61
An assumption of racial homogeneity marks also the account given by the
anthropologist A.H. Keane. Serbs and Croats, he implied, had moved
south of the Danube under the collective name of ‘Sorbs’ (or ‘Srps’).
Croats (‘Crovats’) derived their appellation not from a distinct ethnic
background, but from their previous homeland in the valleys of the Oder
 RACE 21

and Vistula – an etymology he linked to the ‘Carpathian’ mountains.62

Another writer went so far as to insist that, in their original migrations to
the Yugoslav region, the ancestors of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, although
subdivided into clans, were all ‘simply Slavs’, the individual labels emerging
through subsequent religious and political vicissitudes.63
This terminology of tribal rather than deeper ethnic distinctions was,
of course, employed by South Slav unitarists themselves. It cannot be
overstated that Slavic studies as a scholarly discipline was at an embryonic
stage in Britain.64 Those who studied the background to the South Slav
question relied heavily on the work of linguists and historians of Central
and Eastern Europe whose perceptions of history were influenced,
inevitably, by their attitudes towards contemporary events. British
historians, particularly during the war, were similarly caught up in the
region’s difficult present and uncertain future. In general they dealt only at
second hand with key source material for the early history of the South
Slav peoples (such as the crucial tenth century De Administrando Imperio of
Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, which told of the
arrival of Croats and Serbs in the Balkan Peninsula two centuries earlier).65
It is interesting, in relation to British perceptions of the ethnic roots
of Serb and Croat identity, that Seton-Watson among others should have
credited the influence of that ‘greatest living Slavistic scholar’, the Croatian
philologist Vatroslav Jagić. A professor at Vienna University and editor of
‘that mine of Slavonic learning, the Archiv für slavische Philologie’, Jagić was
the leading exponent of a line of thought known as the ‘Slavic school’
which, significantly, viewed Serbs and Croats as essentially one people.66 It
vehemently denied, however, the apparent implication in Constantine that
both peoples were of non-Slavic, possibly Iranian, origin who, like the
Bulgars, had assumed political authority over an established Slavic
population. Accordingly it undermined Constantine’s credibility as a
source, and presented the original Serbs and Croats as closely related
Slavic peoples who had moved to roughly their contemporary locations in
one great migration during the late sixth and early seventh centuries. This
was the view which British historians understandably followed.67
The question of racial miscegenation of Serb and Croat groups over
the subsequent centuries with surviving indigenous populations or other
neighbouring peoples was rarely raised and attributed scant significance. A
few anthropologists rejected the fundamental distinction of South Slavs
into Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and marked out, instead, a division
between human types in the region quite unrelated to contemporary
identities. From the late 19th century, the South Slavs were sometimes
divided into three racial rather than national types: the Dinaric, Pannonian
and Macedonian.68 To these groups, whose distribution cut across
boundaries of administration and identity (though Montenegrins, for
22 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

example, were considered typical exemplars of the ‘Dinaric’ race), were

attributed distinct mental and physiognomic characteristics.69
In general, however, British writers analysed Yugoslavs’ racial
background only within the artificial constraints of modern identities and
assumed the anthropological unity of ‘Serb’ and ‘Croat’ groups. In part
this reflected not any British attitude to the South Slavs in particular, but
was a symptom of the assumptions about racial ossification which we
noted earlier.70 It is interesting to note, however, the impact which the
outbreak of war had upon British analysis. Once the South Slavs were
welcomed as an allied people, united in their opposition to German
oppression (an opposition freely attributed to the South Slav’s innate racial
antagonism towards the German and similar affinity with the English), it
became much more unusual to encounter admissions of racial confusion.71
As greys in wartime resolve to blacks and whites, so ‘lesser’ distinctions
within the South Slav population diminished before the long-projected
clash between Teuton and Slav in East-Central Europe. Certainly, during
the war, it was rare for British commentators to mark the mixed ancestry
of Serb populations as the Encyclopaedia Britannica had done in 1911:

The stature and features of the Serbs vary in different regions;

but the northern peasantry are generally fairer and shorter than
the mountaineers of the south. Those of the Shumadia are
blue-eyed or grey-eyed. In many parts the prevailing types have
been modified by intermarriage with Bulgars, Albanians and
Vlachs; so that, along the Timok, for instance, it is impossible
to make physiognomy a test of nationality.72

Or as the anthropologist H.J. Fleure would do in 1922:

In the west of the [Balkan] peninsula, north of the region of

Albanian speech, many of the people are Slavonised
autochthones rather than real Slav intruders, and this is true of
the mountains of Montenegro and of Bosnia.73

Naturally enough that minority of observers hostile to the Yugoslav idea

did attach much greater emphasis to racial differences. Edith Durham, for
example, resolute in her conviction that the Balkan Slavs were turbulent
and self-serving, lost no opportunity to expose racial as well as historical
divisions within the supposedly homogeneous Serbo-Croat population.
The Slav-speaking peasants of Dalmatia, she noted were:

by no means the same in physical type as the South Slavs of the

Bosnian hinterland. It is obvious that they are of other blood.
They are known as Morlachs, that is Sea Vlachs, and
 RACE 23

historically are in all probability descendants of the pre-Slav

native population which, together with the Roman colonists,
fled coastward before the inrush of the Slav invaders of the
seventh century.

Nor was this purely a matter of ancient history. The ‘Slavizing process’ –
entailing unspecified ‘artificial means’ as well as natural pressure – had, she
stressed, continued until the late nineteenth century.74 Similarly in relation
to the Montenegrins, whose culture she made the object of particular
study, she emphasised the heterogeneity of a group drawing its lineage
from Bosnia, Hercegovina and Albania. The enduring relevance of this
racial diversity she illustrated by observing that the ‘Brda group’ which had
joined Montenegro voluntarily in the eighteenth century and was ‘mainly
of Albanian blood’ was now ‘strenuously resisting annexation by Serbia’.75
Even she, however, while lingering on the South Slav history of religious
strife, conceded almost inadvertently that such divisions occurred between
‘people of the same race and language’ – an admission of overarching
racial unity at odds with her previous anthropological survey.76
The loose fashion in which the term ‘race’ was used did, in general,
create seemingly irreconcilable ambiguities. At one point A.H.E. Taylor
implies fundamental ethnic diversity within the Yugoslav region:

By race the inhabitants of Croatia, a great part of Slavonia with

the exception of Syrmia or Srem, and northern Dalmatia are
Croat, while the inhabitants of Syrmia, the Serb Vojvodina of
Hungary, southern Dalmatia, Bosnia, the Hercegovina,
Montenegro and Serbia belong to the Serb stock.

In general, however, he provides a strong impression of racial unity. A

future Yugoslav state would be, he noted, ‘remarkably homogeneous’
because ‘the Serbs and Croats are ethnologically one people’.77 The
Encyclopaedia Britannica, similarly, had moved from its description of racial
interbreeding to stress that Serbs were ‘ethnically and by language the
same as the Croats’.78 Neville Forbes was similarly unequivocal. Political
divisions in the South Slav territory, he noted, should not hide the fact
that ‘as regards population, it is homogeneous’; Serbs and Croats were
‘identical in kind, but different in name’. And while, as we have seen, the
term ‘race’ was often used loosely to designate divisions within the larger
Yugoslav region (as by Harold Temperley for whom ‘Serbo-Croats of
Croatia’, ‘Bosnians’, ‘Montenegrins’, ‘Serbs of Dalmatia’ and ‘Serbians of
Serbia proper’ are all thus described), concurrent references to a broader
‘Yugoslav’ race display the belief in a fundamental unity.79 Wartime
propaganda accused Austria of cynically masking Yugoslav racial unity
behind regional labels promoted as spurious national identities. And this
24 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

not unjustified claim was helpful, of course, in legitimising the suddenness

of British enthusiasm for ‘Yugoslavia’, which had led opponents to
portray it as purely self-interested and exploitative.80
Similar confusion in the writings of Seton-Watson – the leading
British expert on the South Slavs – does testify to real uncertainty as to the
precise racial relationship of Serbs and Croats, as well as to the subtle
shifts in presentation wrought by contemporary circumstances. In his pre-
war study of the ‘Southern Slav Question’ he appealed to the broader
patriotism which would, he hoped, lead Serbs and Croats to ‘transcend the
sense of racial individuality’ and cited the British conception of citizenship,
‘creating new nations and combining an endless diversity of race and type’.81
Early in the war the emphasis, at least in public, was markedly on unity
rather than diversity. A draft memorandum of May 1915 lamented a ‘civil
war’ that forced Austrian South Slavs to fight their ‘bloodbrothers’ in
Serbia and Montenegro.82 As the war progressed, and the Yugoslav idea
found favour with British and French diplomats and public (and so to
seem a plausible contingency rather than a remote aspiration), Seton-
Watson’s growing concern over Serbian hegemonism influenced his
formulation of South Slav relationships. A leader in his journal The New
Europe, co-written with Wickham Steed at the end of 1916, referred to ‘the
three sister-races of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’.83 By January 1918 a
Serbian Society letter to Lloyd George, again drafted with Steed, stressed
the importance of equal rights for the ‘three Southern Slav races’.84
We have seen how Serbian propaganda and the greater British
acquaintance with Serbia than with the Slav regions of Austria-Hungary
contributed to a widespread assumption, particularly but not exclusively
early in the war, that ‘Serbia’ and ‘Yugoslavia’ were almost synonyms. It is
significant regarding our emphasis on the belief in Serbo-Croat racial unity
that the terms ‘Serb’ and ‘Serbian’ came, as a result, to be used in Britain in
a dual sense.85 On the one hand, as today, they designated a particular
branch of the South Slav group which incorporated also ‘Croat’ and
‘Slovene’ identities. On the other, they were commonly used, as almost
never today, to refer to this whole, broader racial group. Serbo-Croats of
Bosnia and Croats of Croatia were parts of ‘the Serbian race’.86
Simultaneous reference was made to the distinction between Orthodox
Serbs and Catholic Croats, on the one hand, and ‘the scission of Serbians
into three religious groups’, on the other. The ‘westernmost Serbs’, Leon
Dominian noted, ‘are also known as Croats’.87 Croats were ‘Catholic
Serbs’.88 The whole of the country from the Timok in the east as far west
as Istria, bounded on the north by the Danube and Drave, and on the
south by the Adriatic, was, Neville Forbes agreed, ‘inhabited by the Serb
race’.89 The inhabitants of Croatia and Slavonia, Bosnia-Hercegovina,
Dalmatia, Montenegro and the Sanjak were, stressed D.H. Low, all Serbs:
‘there is no excuse nowadays for ignorance of this fundamental truth’.90
 RACE 25

No wonder, Gibbons observed, that Serbia saw in the Austro-Hungarian

occupation of Bosnia a fatal blow to her national aspirations:

The inhabitants of the two Turkish provinces on her west were

Serbian; Bosnia-Hercegovina formed the centre of the Serbian
race. Montenegro on the south was Serbian. Dalmatia on the
west was Serbian. Croatia on the north was Serbian. Everything
was Serbian to the Adriatic Sea. And yet Serbia was
landlocked.91

It is pertinent that the regional-specific form ‘Croatian’ was commoner in

British usage than the broader ethnic label ‘Croat’ (a semantic distinction
which, it is true, was often ignored). At the same time, the juxtaposition of
‘Croatian’ with other regional designations such as ‘Dalmatian’, ‘Istrian’
and ‘Slavonian’ reflects the former’s continued use in reference only to
‘narrow Croatia’ or ‘Croatia proper’ – the administrative region around
Zagreb, rather than a ‘triune’, more closely ethnic Croatia consisting of
Dalmatia, Croatia proper and Slavonia. In a report to the Foreign Office at
the end of the war, the prominent Yugoslav enthusiast Sir Arthur Evans,
for instance, divided the ex-Habsburg ‘Yugo-Slav’ state into regional
rather than ethnic identities: ‘Slovenes, Croats, Dalmatians and
Bosnians’.92
This lack of equivalence between Serb and Croat identities had, of
course, long been reflected in, and was doubtless partly instigated by, a
political reality in which Serbia was an established state and factor in
diplomacy while the Habsburg Yugoslavs were merely an oppressed
minority. It is therefore perhaps not surprising if Serbian nationalist
portrayals of the Austrian South Slavs simply as Serb ‘irredenta’ were
accorded an unquestioning credence. It should be recalled too that
Serbia’s nineteenth century quests for recognition (of its sovereignty, its
Balkan leadership, its interests in Macedonia, and its efforts to expand)
had all been carried out in the name of Serbian nationality rather than any
broader Yugoslav ideal.93 It was natural that Serbian claims during the
First World War continued, to some extent, to be interpreted in this light.
The influence of Serbian claims is apparent in the fact that, while
‘Serb’ identity was often at one level associated with Orthodoxy,
nevertheless Catholic and Muslim Slavs of Dalmatia, Bosnia, and even
Croatia-Slavonia, were routinely described in Britain as ‘pure-blooded
Serbs’.94 Dalmatians and Croatians, Viscount Bryce noted, differed in
religion from the Serbians, but were nevertheless ‘all Serbs’. ‘The
Bosnians’, he continued, ‘are also Serbs, mostly Orthodox, though there
are some Catholics, and a few Muslims remain’.95 The geographical
distribution of the Bosnian confessional communities, with Orthodox
predominant in the north-west, nearest Croatia, seemed confirmation of
26 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Serb claims that Catholics and Muslims enclosed within this Orthodox
band were racially Serb.96 (None were persuaded by, or even aware of,
similar Croat claims that Bosnian Orthodox and Muslims were converted
Croats). The expression ‘Great Serbia’, which late in the war would
become for an observer like Seton-Watson a pejorative allusion to Serbian
chauvinism, had often simply connoted the project of racial unification: as
when he urged MPs in 1916 that only a complete Allied triumph could
‘fulfil the ideal of a Greater Serbia, stretching north to include Croatia’.97
In general, of course, it is scarcely surprising if accounts of the
ancient origins of the Yugoslav peoples were apt to be conceptually
muddled. The task of precisely defining the identities of Serb and Croat
and the relationship between the two had long caused antagonism among
Slavic intellectuals. It is significant that the specifically racial ancestry of the
South Slavs was most emphasised and discussed by those Serb and Croat
intellectuals on the political extremes who, despite the gulf separating their
respective outlooks, largely concurred in the unity of their peoples. Thus
while disciples of the Croatian Ante Starčević and the Serb Vuk Karadžić
were irreconcilably opposed, their arguments were actually, in their
extremist quasi-unitarism, closely aligned. Whether a homogeneous people
was regarded as almost entirely ‘Croat’ in race (Starčević’s view) or almost
entirely ‘Serb’ (Karadžić’s) could seem to an outsider a surmountable
question of semantics: the lasting impression one not of division but of a
shared conviction of unity.98 As the Slovene publicist Bogumil Vošnjak
noted, both figures could be considered, despite their narrow extremism,
as pioneers of the movement for unity. (‘It is distinctly one of history’s
ironies’, he observed, with an appreciation rare in British analyses, ‘that
this very Idea of Unity gave rise to some of the sharpest conflicts between
Croats and Serbs’).99 In Britain these influential but extreme ideologues
were among the very few 19th or 20th century South Slav political
thinkers whose ideas were familiar to those with an interest in the
region.100
Equally significant is the fact that this location of the thought of
Starčević and Karadžić in a unitarist tradition accorded with the dominant
political trends among the Habsburg South Slavs in the early 20th century.
The Croat-Serb coalition (HSK) which emerged in 1905 and broadly
endured until 1918 testified to the feeling that Croats and Serbs must unite
against intensified Austro-Hungarian oppression. Ideologically, it upheld a
form of Yugoslavism revived under the label ‘Croat-Serb national oneness’
(narodno jedinstvo). Similarly, in the thought of an influential group known
as ‘Young Croatians’, the difference between the ideas of Starčević on the
one hand and of Serb expansionist ideologies on the other was reduced
simply to the question of appellation for a single, racially united people.
It was, moreover, largely with leading figures in these groups that
influential British commentators had forged links. Seton-Watson, Steed
 RACE 27

and others corresponded at length with enthusiasts for narodno jedinstvo like
Frano Supilo, Josip Smodlaka, Hinko Hinković, Ivo Lupis-Vukić and the
sculptor Ivan Meštrović.101 And Meštrović, in fact, exerted through his
work a direct influence in Britain. A unitarist ideologue and Serbophile
Croat, the ‘true prophet in stone of the Southern Slav idea’, he gained an
international reputation and the ardent admiration of British cognoscenti
with his ‘racial art’.102 Portraying Serbian history and myth as the joint
heritage of a single South Slav race, it appealed to Britons in the emotional
circumstances of wartime. It seemed ‘instinct with the suppressed fury of
an oppressed land, and the burning spirit of an unquenchable freedom’.103
‘Not since the days that Rodin had exhibited his masterpieces’, notes
Harry Hanak, ‘had London been so impressed by a sculptor’.104
It should be remembered, moreover, that South Slavs who had
espoused unitarism were, as a rule, precisely those who were forced to flee
the vengeance of the Habsburg authorities after the outbreak of war.
Many were among those Yugoslavs-in-exile who decisively influenced
British and French public opinion. Then, as now, the inherently
unrepresentative nature of exile opinion, in terms of vehemence if not
basic direction, was too often overlooked by those sympathetic to its
ideals.105

We have focused thus far on British views of the Serb-Croat relationship.

We must also, however, consider attitudes regarding the racial identity of
other South Slav groups incorporated in the Yugoslav state – notably
Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians. (Whereas it is true that loose,
habitual references occurred, for instance, to ‘Dalmatian’, ‘Bosnian’,
‘Hercegovinian’ or ‘Slavonian’ races, these were rarely considered to have
any basis in ethnic rather than simply regional identities).
Of these labels the one with the strongest claim to represent a
distinct racial heritage was the Slovene – a claim recognised in the official
nomenclature of the new state. The difficulty in analysing British attitudes
to the Slovenes before and during the war, however, is that despite being
one of the three eponymous ‘races’, ‘nations’ (or simply ‘names’) of the
prospective kingdom, they earned scant consideration.106 ‘Western
Europe’, Bogumil Vošnjak chided in 1917, ‘at present knows very little of
the most western branch of the Yugoslavs’. If England had only recently
discovered the Serbs and Croats, it was ‘fairly safe to say that as yet she
knows not enough about the Slovenes’.107 ‘Very little’, Ivan Žolger agreed,
‘is known to the general public concerning the Slovenes’.108 When Harold
Temperley, in his 1917 History of Serbia, distinguished ‘five great divisions
of the Yugo-Slav race’ he separated ‘Serbo-Croats of Croatia’, ‘Serbs of
Dalmatia’, ‘Montenegrins’, ‘Bosnians’ and ‘Serbians of Serbia proper’,
relegating the Slovenes to a cursory footnote.109 A report by the
Department of Enemy Propaganda (in which Steed and Seton-Watson
28 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

served under Lord Northcliffe) referred to territories ‘ethnographically

Serbo-Croatian (Yugo-Slav)’ – evidence of the low priority given to the
Slovenes beside the dominant question of Serbo-Croat unity.110
Certainly the Slovenes were much less discussed in Britain than
either Montenegrins or Macedonians, neither of whom were considered
nationalities in the new state. But it would be a mistake to conclude that a
distinct Slovene identity was denied by British observers. The lack of
attention they commanded was the result not only of ignorance but also of
the relative lack of controversy regarding either their incorporation in the
South Slav group or their individual heritage. They seemed to British
observers to have become ‘fully possessed of the consciousness of their
race brotherhood with their Serbo-Croat neighbours’.111 Suddenly and
decisively during the war they had moved from ‘timid’ loyalty to the
Habsburg state to a desire for ‘national’ union with Serbs and Croats.
‘Before the war’, Rumbold informed Balfour in March 1918, ‘[the
Slovenes] seemed quite satisfied to remain Austrian subjects; now they are
firm in their demand for independence’.112 More knowledgeable observers
did recognise a longer gestation. Back in 1914 Seton-Watson had advised
the Foreign Office of the Yugoslav feeling of the Slovenes, ‘one of the
three kindred races’. But he too was struck by the sudden development of
national allegiance among a ‘clerical’ people, a phenomenon which was
‘perhaps the most remarkable feature of the whole [Yugoslav]
movement’.113 This dramatic transition seemed aptly symbolised by the
attitude of Prince-Bishop Jeglić of Laibach (Ljubljana) who, having
blessed the Austro-Hungarian soldiers marching to fight Serbia in 1914,
had since been charged with high treason for supporting the South Slav
movement.114 As with the Habsburg Croats, Slovene destiny now seemed
conclusively bound up with their racial ‘kindred’. (The movement for a
Slovene state within the Monarchy was thought to have petered out with
the disappearance of its leader Dr Šuštersić into exile and obscurity). ‘All
three branches of Yugoslavdom, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, Allen
Leeper emphasised in 1918, ‘are indivisibly bound together, not only by
language and blood, but also by their common life’.115
Within the Yugoslav grouping, however, a genuine and enduring
Slovene identity was largely acknowledged in Britain. Indeed, whereas
Slovenes were sometimes incorporated by British analysts within the
broad concept of a ‘Serb race’, by and large they were more secure in their
racial individuality, so far as Britons were concerned, than the Croats.
Sometimes viewed as the remnant of an old, largely undifferentiated Slavic
population which inhabited the Yugoslav region prior to the arrival of the
Serbs and Croats, little credence was given to the claims of Croat
ideologues like Starčević that Slovenes were in truth only ‘mountain
Croats’.116 (The tendency to regard Croat identity as primarily regional or
religious rather than racial mitigated against the recognition of any such
 RACE 29

underlying ‘Croat-ness’ – much more than was the case with Serb
identity). A crucial factor, of course, was their language – a question of
central importance in contemporary ideas about national identity. While
Yugoslav enthusiasts in Britain were often reluctant to consider Slovene a
separate language, and stressed its mutual intelligibility with Serbo-
Croatian, few could deny that it was at least a peculiar ‘dialect’ of the
dominant tongue.117 Importantly, this linguistic consideration influenced
the claims of narrower and noisier South Slavic nationalisms in Britain.
Serb propagandists in particular, having absorbed Karadžić’s argument
that Serb identity could be linked to the štokavian dialect used by many
Croats as well as Serbs, were obliged to acknowledge the non-Serb
heritage of kajkavian Slovene-speakers. Slovene populations were not
often, therefore, the object of Serb as opposed to ‘Yugoslav’ claims. Non-
nationalist Serbs like Chedo Mijatović also assumed the Slovenes to be
ethnographically as well as geographically more distant from Serbia than
the Croats. If the latter were ‘twin brothers’, the Slovenes were
‘cousins’.118
If the question of Montenegrin identity and inclusion in a Yugoslav
state was, as we will see later, controversial in Britain, this was certainly
not due to any informed dispute about racial make-up. It may have been
true, as Neville Forbes claimed, that many simply did not know that the
label ‘Montenegrin’ conveyed a regional rather than an ethnic identity.119
(A similar uncertainty existed for those unacquainted with the area
regarding other, particularly Austrian, South Slav regions – ‘Bosnian’,
‘Hercegovinian’, ‘Dalmatian’ etc). But, for those who felt qualified to
comment publicly on the Yugoslavs, it was a near-unanimous assumption
that, however admirable this small state’s tradition of independence,
ethnically the Montenegrins were Serbs. Subsequent Montenegrin authors
may have claimed that the self-applied label ‘Serb’ connoted a feeling only
of religious (Orthodox) identity with Serbs of Serbia. But there is little
doubt that, despite a strong regional consciousness, Montenegrins in the
period up to 1918 did consider themselves Serbs in a broader ethnic
sense.120 Outside observers tended, understandably, to take them at their
word. ‘The little state of Montenegro’, Laffan affirmed, ‘differs on no test
of race, language, or religion from Serbia, and its inhabitants are but an
independent and allied portion of the Serbian nation’.121 Bryce agreed:
Montenegro was ‘hardly a nationality, for its people are racially identical
with those of Serbia, Bosnia, and Dalmatia’.122 Even a tireless campaigner
for Montenegrin independence within a Yugoslav federation did not deny
that Serbs and Montenegrins shared an underlying racial identity.123
It is true, as we have seen, that an unsympathetic observer like Edith
Durham emphasised the recent absorption into Montenegro of groups of
non-Serb, even non-Slavic, ancestry. She later pressed on Sir John Myres
‘a point of which I am more and more certain viz: that the Montenegrins
30 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

are not Slavs but Albanian and Vlah [Vlach] by origin’.124 Paradoxically,
however, the acknowledgement of racial divergences between
Montenegrin and Serbian was more often used to affirm the former’s Serb
identity. The observation that Montenegrins tended to be more physically
impressive than northern Serbs (that they were, indeed, among the most
imposing in Europe – ‘a race of giants’)125 was combined with the folk
history of the flight of independent-minded Serbian aristocracy in the face
of the Ottoman incursion. (A poetic account which, fostered by an earlier
generation of British admirers including Gladstone and Tennyson, found
an emotive parallel in the heroism and suffering of the Serbian retreat in
the winter of 1915-16).126 Montenegrins, therefore, were portrayed as the
descendants of this fugitive nobility, as ‘pure Serbs, [...] a pure-blooded
race, descended largely from the old Serbian nobles’.127 While the
population of northern Serbia was, Eliot sniffed, ‘not a good or
characteristic specimen of the race’, ‘the descendants of the least vigorous
and enterprising portion of the nation’, in Montenegro, ‘the refuge of the
Serbian aristocracy after the Turkish conquest’:

they are all chiefs and princes, and have that air of well-built,
well-mannered aristocracy which is so rare in the plains. A
series of brilliant marriages attests that the royal house of
Europe consider the blood of the Princes of Montenegro as
good as their own.128

Durham’s killjoy insistence that Montenegro had been created not by

refugees from the field of Kosovo but by migrants from Bosnia,
Hercegovina and Albania (a fact she related to Montenegrin reluctance to
amalgamate with Serbia) little affected the common perception.129 And of
course, here again, British accounts were shaped by the self-projection of
South Slavs, absorbing a rationale for Montenegrin feelings of superiority
over lowland Serbians seen as corrupted by exposure to alien influences.

If British attitudes to Montenegrin racial identity were broadly unanimous,

the same could not be said regarding the peoples of Macedonia, a region
central to the Balkans’ reputation for impenetrable complexity and ethnic
conflict. Needless to say, the question of Western perceptions of race and
nationality in Macedonia is a formidable topic. Our concern here is
specifically with the population of those regions incorporated into Serbia
after the Balkan Wars, which became part of the Yugoslav state and which
were – at least insofar as the Slavonic element was concerned – almost
invariably treated by the Serbian and Yugoslav regimes as liberated Serbs
with no claim to an independent identity or administrative autonomy.130
If the Macedonian population was the object of numerous
conflicting claims by bordering states and ethnic groups – Serbians,
 RACE 31

Bulgarians, Greeks, Albanians, Turks, even Romanians – some individual

or organisation popped up in Britain to support each cause (though many
more bemoaned the impossibly fissiparous nature of Balkan politics).
Certainly the different bases on which claims were made rendered them
utterly irreconcilable. While Serbs and Bulgarians traded claims based
variously on race, history and language, Greeks focused on religious
identity (itinerant Britons during the 18th and 19th centuries had, after all,
identified all the Orthodox of the Balkans as ‘Greek’).131 The claims of
Albanians and Romanians, meanwhile, neither as audible nor as credited in
Britain, were premised on racial ancestry (on the assumption, in the
Romanian case, that Vlachs were their ethnic kin) and the allegedly
involuntary conversion of their racial brothers to other, alien identities.132
Insofar as British views of the racial origins of Yugoslav
Macedonians were concerned, most commentators hedged their bets. The
commonly-used phrase ‘Macedonian Slav’ was deliberately non-committal
about both ethnic identity and national allegiance.133 Sir Charles Eliot
referred to this population as ‘intermediate between the Serbs and the
Bulgarians’.134 Seton-Watson scorned Bulgarian claims. ‘Every novice in
Balkan affairs’, he wrote, ‘knows that [...] the Macedonian Slavs are neither
pure Bulgar nor pure Serb, but something between the two’.135 The
chaotic history of this ‘Naboth’s Vineyard’,136 two unusually sympathetic
observers noted, had ‘produced a hybrid race’.137 Meanwhile H.N.
Brailsford, a firm Bulgarophile and believer in the allegiance of most
Macedonians to Bulgaria, also admitted that, racially, they represented a
primitive Slav stock, akin to both Serb and Bulgarian:

They are not Serbs, for their blood can hardly be purely
Slavonic. There must be in it some admixture of Bulgarian and
other non-Aryan stock (Kuman Tartars, Pechenegs, &c). On
the other hand, they can hardly be Bulgarians, for quite clearly
the Serbian immigrations and conquests must have left much
Serbian blood in their veins, and the admixture of non-Aryan
blood can scarcely be so considerable as it is in Bulgaria. They
are probably very much what they were before either a
Bulgarian or a Serbian Empire existed – a Slav people derived
from rather various stocks, who invaded the peninsula at
different periods.138

It was agreed by the impartial, A.H.E. Taylor concluded, that these Slavs
were ‘neither pure Serbs nor pure Bulgars’.139 It was when confronted with
situations as tangled as that in Macedonia that some British observers
were obliged to admit what nationality theorists had often pointed out:
that ‘race’ need not be correlated to national identity at all. The analysis of
Sir Charles Eliot, for instance, was unusually clear on this point:
32 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

We can hardly be wrong in considering that the original

Bulgarian type is preserved in the somewhat Mongolian figure
and features which are common in the eastern part of the
Balkans [...]. As the Serbian type may be taken the tall, broad-
headed men who are found in South Serbia, Bosnia and
Montenegro. But these two types by no means coincide with
the people who call themselves Serbians and Bulgarians. The
Bulgarian type is found all over Northern Serbia as far as
Belgrade; and the Albanians, though so clearly separated from
the surrounding Slavs in language and customs, are physically
indistinguishable from them. The tall, broad-headed men form
an anthropological but not a political or linguistic unit.140

Nor, as we shall see, was the linguistic evidence to which analysts

invariably turned in discussions of racial and national identities conclusive.
The Macedonians seemed, for the most part, to be descendants of
undifferentiated Slavic migrants, while the innumerable subsequent
population movements and cultural pressures experienced in the region
made any anthropological clarification unlikely. In general, however,
British commentators construed the mixture of objective evidence and
subjective national consciousness as indicating that the population in the
vicinity of the Serbian border – those areas north-west of Skopje absorbed
by Serbia in 1913 – either was Serb, or was close enough that, after
cohabiting for a generation or two, it would be considered so. (The town
of Niš, it was noted – seemingly Bulgarian before 1876 – had since the
Serbian occupation become ‘thoroughly Serbian’).141 Racially, Eliot
observed, ‘the Slavonic population of the vilayet of Kossovo, north-west
of Uskub, is homogeneous with that on the other side of the Serbian,
Montenegrin, and Bosnian frontiers, the mountaineers of South Serbia
being very unlike the tradesmen and farmers of the north’.142
Few writers, it must finally be noted, appreciated or considered the
non-Slavonic element in these regions. The name ‘Kosovo’, as we shall
see, had been so thoroughly appropriated by Serb nationalist
historiography as indicating the historic cradle of Serbian civilisation that it
came as a great surprise to those few intrepid Britons who visited the
region to discover it in fact largely inhabited by Albanians. ‘I came
expecting to find’, Brailsford admitted, ‘as one finds elsewhere in
Macedonia, a population by majority Christian, living under the rule of a
Muslim minority’. But ‘in all Old Serbia’, he reported, ‘there are not as
many Serbian families as there are Albanian families in Ipek and Prizrend
alone’.143 The liberal weekly The Nation, hostile to Serbia as the ‘least
scrupulous and the least civilised’ of the Balkan allies of 1912, observed
before the outbreak of the Second Balkan War that ‘Servia has a mainly
 RACE 33

Albanian population to deal with in the country which is already hers’.144

This information seems not, however, to have permeated the general
intellectual awareness of a region which, with the outbreak of the Great
War and the dramatic rise in Serbia’s esteem, was almost universally
accepted as natural Serbian territory.

We must now turn, however, to examine the role in British eyes of an

element in the modern phenomenon of nationality which was attributed
greater and indeed often paramount importance: language. It is one, as we
shall see, which can in any case only with a certain degree of arbitrariness
be separated from considerations of ‘race’ which were often assumed to
be directly correlated with linguistic identity. In the case of British
perceptions of South Slavic unity in particular, furthermore, language
would play an unusually dominant role.
 2

Language: Britain and South Slavic

Language Questions

Whatever the significance accorded to race in this period, there is no

doubt that, among British theorists of the ‘objective’ school, the primary
criterion by which nationality was assessed externally was language. An
individual’s linguistic identity, more even than his racial origin, was widely
regarded as synonymous with his ‘nationality’.
It is misleading, however, to imply that race and language were
treated as discrete categories (as we would now assume them to be). It is
true that, back in 1870, Henry Pelham had noted the lack of correlation
between boundaries of physical type and language.1 But we have seen that
in popular usage the term ‘race’ was often used for groups whose
common bond was in fact linguistic. While in part this was simply an
inexactitude to which the concept was particularly prone, it would be
mistaken to view it solely as a lay corruption of anthropological or
linguistic science.
The Herderian tradition which associated race, language and national
identity, and regarded language as the profound expression of a particular
racial ‘soul’, certainly had its critics in Britain. We have noted the reaction
among British theorists against the equation of race and nationality, and
there was no less hostility towards the correlation of language and race.2
T.H. Huxley, one early opponent of this tendency, denied vigorously that
‘what is true of speech is true of the speaker’, a facile hypothesis ‘as
questionable in science as it is in ordinary life’.3 Viscount Bryce was
similarly sceptical of language as a test of racial affinity. Known instances
in which peoples had lost one tongue and adopted another, he argued,
made such a theory untenable. But while it might be true, as he noted, that
the scholarly tendency to associate certain political and social institutions
with particular linguistic families had lately ‘withered up and died’, such
supremacist assumptions retained a hold on popular thought.4 (‘Correct
errors of concrete fact’, as J.M. Robertson observed after George Eliot,
 LANGUAGE 35

‘and you leave still lingering the errors of feeling which were their
atmosphere, partly cause, partly effect’).5
And in fact there did exist in the English-speaking world a
‘scientific’ tradition which treated race and language as coterminous
expressions of ancient ethnic identity. Nations, in an essentialist and
determinist scheme given little credence today, were viewed as both
natural and linguistically determined, or as one recent writer has put it, as
‘bounded cultural objects’.6 Philology might have been, as Eric
Hobsbawm has observed, ‘the first science which regarded evolution at its
very core’, but this was no immediate obstacle to a philosophy conceiving
language, like race, less as an evolving or exchangeable property than an
immutable inheritance.7 And this position, however flawed, imbued
language with unique significance as the encrypted expression of a racial
psychology: a window onto the social predilections and mental
peculiarities by which it was assumed (though with great difficulty proven)
that all races were differentiated.8 ‘From every language’, as von Humboldt
put the claim in its extreme form, ‘we can infer backwards to the national
character’.9
The belief was certainly widespread in Britain and America as well as
in continental Europe that race, culture and language were, as one
historian has noted, ‘different manifestations of the one inherent entity’,
an assumption which legitimated ‘the use of cultural and linguistic data to
delineate racial taxonomy’.10 The pre-eminent American anthropologist
suggested tentatively in 1911 that ‘[racial] type, language and type of
culture, may not be closely and permanently connected’, but nevertheless
noted in a later edition of the same work the general assumption ‘that race
and culture must be intimately associated, that racial descent determines
cultural life’.11 This position was fortified by evidence from the Balkans
and elsewhere (Franks, Bulgars, Manchus in China, Swedes in Russia) that
language reflected majority descent even in cases where a population had
been subjugated by an alien aristocracy.12 For the adopted British writer
Alfred Zimmern language and race were one and unchanging, German
and Magyar policies of linguistic assimilation equivalent to ‘trying by Act
of Parliament to whiten the Ethiopian or to change the leopard’s spots’.13
As late as 1939 an anthropologist denounced the continued equation of
race and language used in Britain to justify the Munich settlement and
other boundary revisions. ‘The claim that cultural evidence of such a kind
can be taken to indicate that the peoples separated had very different
origins is’, he complained, ‘accepted far too often by writers and speakers
who have little sympathy with racial ideology’.14
With regard to ‘nationality’, as opposed to the background question
of race with which it was often associated, the role accorded to language
was paramount. Exceptions little threatened the assumption noted by
Bernard Joseph that ‘each nationality speaks one language, and that its
36 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

own’.15 This tendency was most marked in theorists with an interest in

East-Central Europe and the Balkans, regions in which language and
‘fatherland’ seemed strikingly coterminous.16 In the Habsburg Monarchy
Czech leaders like František Palacky, and German socialists like Otto
Bauer and Karl Kautsky, had considered language the essential feature of
national identity, and nationality within a multinational empire a linguistic-
cultural issue rather than a political one. Some in Britain agreed that
nationality was a ‘spiritual’ question, bound up exclusively with language
and culture.17 In most British discussions of German or Magyar
‘oppression’ before 1914, it was specifically linguistic oppression which
was cited: the imposition of German or Hungarian as languages of
administration and restriction of ‘the sacred rights of the mother tongue’.18
It was as readily assumed by British supporters of the Habsburg minorities
(few of whom before the war thought the Empire’s dissolution likely or
desirable), as it was by leaders of the minorities themselves, that the
solution to ‘national’ tensions lay in linguistic freedom in political as well
as personal life. The identification of language and nation, noted H.A.
Gibbons, ‘explains in a nutshell the Austro-Hungarian and Balkan
problems’: ‘to the Slav, there can be no other test of nationality’.19
Of course, for those who insisted that nationality was a question of
conscious feeling, no objective test could determine identity. By stressing
the emergence of national consciousness within a previously-existing
national group – locating ‘nationality’, in other words, at the culmination
of a process – many theorists had to believe that common language might
exist, like other common traditions, without a mature national identity.20
For Arnold Toynbee national culture was not imparted by the mere
possession of a mother tongue but only by its ‘consecration’ by an effort
of will.21 Nationality, Sidney Herbert insisted after Renan, required active
assent: ‘to take an outward and material sign as expressing this inward and
spiritual will is to run the risk of inflicting grave injustice’.22 ‘Community
of language’, Pillsbury agreed, ‘does not mean community of spirit’.23
Given that Britain could itself provide – in Wales, Ireland and
Scotland – examples of national identities only in small part attributable to
linguistic individuality, it is surprising that such reservations did not run
deeper.24 But while theorists rejected a simplistic equation of language and
nationality, invoking the obvious counter-examples from Alsace, Belgium
and Switzerland to French Canada and South America, they emphasised
language’s formative role in the inculcation and consolidation of national
identity. Herder, it seemed, had been on the mark: in a people’s speech
resided ‘its whole thought-domain, its traditions, history, religion and basis
of life, all its heart and soul’.25 To realise its full powers, wrote J.H. Rose, a
people must wed its thought and aspirations ‘to a mother tongue [which]
ceases to stammer and learns to sing’.26 Language above all fostered that
‘fancied unity of race’ which promoted a feeling of national community.27
 LANGUAGE 37

It was ‘the most visible and tangible of the fundamentals of that like-
mindedness which is indispensable to a fully developed nationality’.28
Philosophy’s exploration of the relationship between language-
structure and thought had suggested language might succeed where race
had failed in providing a firm basis for national stereotype. While language
differences ‘transcend and run counter to those of colour and physical
conformation’, noted one writer, ‘they coincide, so far as we know, with
those of character’.29 ‘There is’, agreed wrote, ‘a natural and mutual
attraction amongst persons who speak the same language’. Language was a
‘part of the national soul’ whose ‘importance in cementing the various
elements of a nationality cannot be overestimated’.30 The obvious import
of this analysis for the Southern Slavs, a group seen to share linguistic and
racial ties but little political or religious tradition, will be discussed below.
The widespread acceptance of language’s role in shaping patterns of
nationality led even students of the phenomenon to overlook its
deficiencies as a guide to identity. (‘The national language’, one sceptic
later lamented, ‘has become one of the idols of a new religion’).31
Deprived of race as a test of nationality, Madison Grant noted in 1917,
‘we are compelled to resort to language’.32 And as Bernard Joseph
observed ten years after the Paris settlement: ‘if it were not that language
serves as a distinguishing mark the political rearrangement of the nations
of Europe could not be considered to be other than purely arbitrary’.33 A
1944 Foreign Office Research Department paper referred to the doubt
which plebiscites had cast upon ‘the assumption, upon which so much of
the distribution of territory in 1919 was based, that language provides an
automatic test of national sentiment’.34
Only a few had voiced reservations. One, Arnold Toynbee, argued
that if all the peoples of Europe were to group themselves on the principle
of self-determination, there would be notable departures from the
confines of identity of language. He was one of surprisingly few British
writers to raise the case of Ireland, a country unified by the almost
complete predominance of a single language but divided by religious and
historical tradition into what must be deemed separate nationalities (an
example whose parallels with the Serbo-Croat relationship make it of
particular interest to our study).35 A few others noticed the fact that, in
cases where similar languages merged gradually into one another, linguistic
criteria were no more able than those of ‘race’ to provide clear frontiers.
In general, however, British theorists cautious of ‘race’ as a primary
factor in the process of national amalgamation were obliged to elevate
language in its place. Only thus could they rationalise the apparently
voluntary union of peoples with little else obvious in common. (And as we
have seen, those who embraced or assumed a correlation between race
and nationality were happy to refer to language as a mark of racial
background). In the framing of the 1919 treaties it was taken for granted,
38 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

as Frederick Hertz later observed, that ‘people of approximately the same

language wished to form a common nation, and that no further proofs of
their common nationality were required’.36 Nor did theorists weigh the
significance of this ‘approximately’. Few asked whether mutual
intelligibility alone sufficed for language to operate as a wholly unifying
force, or considered, for example, the role in perpetuating feelings of
difference which dialectal variation, divergences in written language, or
contrasting scripts might exert within a ‘single language’ area. This
oversight would have important ramifications in the Yugoslav case.

‘Serbo-Croat’: Language, Dialect, Nation

Language unquestionably lay at the heart of the movement for South Slav
unity. The sense of common ethnicity which underpinned the tentative
progress of Yugoslavism among intellectuals from the late 18th century
onwards was founded on awareness of a shared linguistic heritage which
(it was assumed in accordance with the prevailing romantic view of
nationality) indicated common descent. Educated South Slavs were no less
influenced than British commentators by the tradition identifying language
as the truest expression of a national ‘soul’. Indeed, they were probably
more so. The linguistic reforms and standardisation of philologists like
Ljudevit Gaj and Vuk Karadžić was motivated by an overt sense of
language’s significance in paving the way for cultural and political
unification. Yugoslavism was derived from ethnicity (a concept more
bound up with ‘race’ than in modern theories of ‘constructed’ identities)
and language was both symptom and agent of this common bond.37
The importance of the reforms instituted by Gaj, Karadžić and
others in fashioning linguistic unity in the South Slav lands was greatly
emphasised by British writers. While Karadžić was credited with creating
from a variety of dialects a unified Serbian language, standardising the
demotic speech and undermining conservative veneration for Old Church
Slavonic, Gaj was associated with the Croat literati’s decision (much
admired among British pro-Yugoslavs) to abandon a distinctive Croatian
form in favour of Karadžić’s standard. Both, it seemed, had promoted
broader cultural and political amalgamation. ‘The linguistic unity which
has been wrought by philologists and men of letters’, Seton-Watson
observed in 1911, ‘may be regarded as a happy omen for the achievement
of that wider unity upon which the future of the race depends’.38 In 1915
he was more confident. In bringing the ‘various Serbo-Croat dialects’ into
line, Karadžić (‘the Grimm of Serbia’) had prepared the way for ‘that
literary unity which is the sure forerunner of political union’.39 With the
creation of a single Serbo-Croat literature, Taylor agreed, ‘the way was
now clear for a real Serbo-Croat unity’.40 (There was an unacknowledged
 LANGUAGE 39

inconsistency here. Analysts recognised the malleability of language in

forging a nation-state, yet assumed it to be part of that primordial racial
inheritance which underpinned national identity).
For British enthusiasts of Yugoslav unity the question of language
was, in any case, fundamental. For those who saw in language ‘the most
potent ingredient of nationality’, it was no less than ‘the foundation of
modern Yugoslavia’.41 Even those who adopted a subjectivist position,
preferring evidence of shared national feeling to external signposts, could
not explain or back the demand for unification without reference to the
shared traditions which might underpin it and augur well for its future.
With few historical or religious bonds (indeed, in the face of evident
divisions in these respects) it is not surprising that the ‘Serbo-Croat’
language was embraced as demonstrating that shared mentality – widely
associated with a common ‘racial’ and linguistic inheritance – which must
underpin a stable nation. Laffan was one of many to stress the unity of the
‘Serbian’ race on this ground. Croats might be Catholics, but they used the
‘Serbian language’. ‘Not unnaturally’, therefore, Serbia’s friends expected
her ‘to be the nucleus round which a state would grow up, embracing all
the Slav peoples of southern Austria-Hungary, as well as the Serbian
portions of the old Turkish Empire’.42 ‘By any doctrine of political
philosophy’, Herbert Vivian had proclaimed some time before the war,
‘the whole [Yugoslav] district should be one country’. The ‘all-important
point’ was linguistic unity.43
Some, it is true, continued to juxtapose ‘Serbian’ and ‘Croatian’ in a
linguistic context. The journalist Harry de Windt included both among
that ‘babel’ of tongues he confronted in Mostar in 1907.44 But this habit
reflected that tendency to view the Monarchy in provincial rather than
ethnic terms which exasperated Yugoslav enthusiasts, and which declined
during the Balkan and 1914-18 wars as the notion of South Slav unity took
hold in Britain. As late as 1915 Neville Forbes noted that ‘very few people
outside Austria-Hungary realise that the Croatians are Slavs and speak the
same language as the Serbs’.45 (During the peace negotiations Lloyd
George himself asked the Serbian Prime Minister whether this was so).46
Seton-Watson later defended Jagić’s claim that inhabitants of Bosnia had
historically thought of their tongue as ‘Bosnian’ rather than as ‘Serbian’ or
‘Serbo-Croat’, but thought this a sign of their subsequent progression
‘from provincial to national consciousness’ rather than a defence of
Habsburg attempts to foster an ‘entirely artificial’ Bosnian nationality.47
It was, indeed, widely agreed that Serbo-Croat was essentially a
single, uniform language and that it represented as such a uniform (if not
yet wholly conscious) nation. Serbs and Croats were, Seton-Watson wrote,
‘a homogeneous population, speaking a single language’;48 ‘Serb’ and
‘Croat’ were ‘two names for one and the same language’.49 Herbert
Gibbons referred to the ‘Serbian-speaking peoples, known as the
40 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Yugoslavs’.50 ‘Whatever be the name applied to Croats, Dalmatians,

Slavonians, Bosnians or Serbs’, agreed Dominian, ‘all speak the Serbian
language’.51 Ipso facto, it was implied, all were in fact Serbs, or ‘Serbo-
Croats’, in the linguistic unitarian’s more tactful formulation. (British
insensitivity to Croat pride meant that the choice between ‘Serbian’ and
‘Serbo-Croatian’ as language label seemed of minor importance, while to
Yugoslavs it was ‘a great change in emphasis’).52 Provided Bulgarians and
Slovenes were excluded, Toynbee agreed, South Slav unity was promoted
by shared use of ‘an absolutely homogeneous dialect’ – an analysis which
was misleading, as we shall see.53 Meanwhile, in Whitehall, a conference
paper on South-East Europe by Sir Ralph Paget, Harold Nicolson and
Allen Leeper noted, in a telling elision of linguistic and racial identity, that
the Yugoslavs were ‘indisputably of one race: linguistically the only
division that can be made is between the Serbo-Croats, forming the great
majority of the race, and the Slovenes’.54
Others did show some appreciation of dialectal variations within the
‘Serbo-Croat’ area. Alfred Stead wrote in 1909 of a ‘Croatian language’
closely related to the ‘Serbian’, before noting that ‘the two languages are
not more different than two dialects of the same language’.55 Sir Charles
Eliot had similarly observed that the Serbian language ‘includes Bosnian,
Montenegrin, and Croatian, which only differ in slight dialectic
peculiarities’.56 But such variations were granted no significance. The
Croatian language, Eliot concluded, ‘is indubitably Serbian’.57 For Herbert
Vivian, as for almost every subsequent informed observer up to and
including the interwar period, the whole Yugoslav area (excluding the
Slovene lands) was characterised by ‘one self-same language, whose
dialects are as homogeneous as those of Yorkshire and Sussex’.58 There
was, wrote Taylor, no reason to dwell on the existence of dialect forms
‘which are to be found in all languages’.59 ‘Slight dialectic differences in
pronunciation’ were of no import, Forbes agreed: Serbs and Croats ‘are of
the same race and speak the same language’.60
With hindsight these analyses seem deficient. (One must recall the
embryonic state of British Slavic studies; Edith Durham had found it
almost impossible to find a teacher of ‘Serbo-Croat’ in London in 1900;
Seton-Watson wrote to Ronald Burrows in 1915 that while a Russian
department had opened at the University of Liverpool, other Slavonic
languages had ‘hardly been thought of anywhere’).61 Particularly striking is
the failure to appreciate that the dialectal reforms and debates of the
preceding generations had played out within a context of intra-Yugoslav
rivalries as well as of desire for unification and standardisation. Few in
Britain recognised the regional and national sensitivities provoked by
language questions in a world of persistent provincialism, substantial
illiteracy, and Yugoslav aspirations which remained fragile, nebulous and
restricted to a minority intellectual class. Nor was any awareness shown of
 LANGUAGE 41

the narrow nationalism which had motivated much work of linguistic

reform and classification, which flourished in its wake, and which ensured
that unification campaigns waged (to British eyes) in a generous spirit of
compromise proved often in fact divisive and inflammatory.

Most important of the questions facing 19th century Yugoslav philologists

and unitarists was the division of the ‘Serbo-Croat’ linguistic area into
three fundamental dialects, labelled ‘štokavian’, ‘čakavian’ and ‘kajkavian’
after their respective words for ‘what’ (što, ča and kaj).62 The centuries
between the medieval and modern periods saw significant fluctuations.
The čakavian dialect, having extended as far south as Dubrovnik, became
confined to Istria and the northern Dalmatian islands. Kajkavian was
largely restricted to the area around and to the north of Zagreb – early
medieval Slavonia or roughly what was known in the early 20th century as
‘Croatia proper’. Štokavian, having been divided into western and eastern
branches (the former considered close to čakavian), converged into a new
dialect – ‘neoštokavian’ – which was substantially spread by East-West
migrations in the wake of the Ottoman conquest.
The question of dialectal consistency was therefore one which
weighed more heavily upon Croats, divided between all three branches
and with literary traditions in each, than it did upon Serbs. (It should be
remembered too that while wide areas of Dalmatia, Croatia ‘proper’ and
Slavonia boasted a literary culture, most Serb intellectuals shared a
linguistic heritage as a result of their common provenance from the more
affluent Serb regions of southern Hungary). The grand gesture of Ljudevit
Gaj and the pro-Yugoslav ‘Illyrian’ movement, most of whom came from
the kajkavian region around Zagreb, was to agree to abandon their
exclusively Croat literary heritage in favour of the neoštokavian dialect
spoken by almost all Serbs and a substantial body of Croats.63
Though most British writers on the South Slavs were, perhaps
understandably, little aware of such detailed linguistic questions, some did
recognise and admire this move, which chimed with that spirit of
tolerance associated with the Illyrian movement and with 19th century
Yugoslavist Croats such as the respected Archbishop Strossmayer (known
in Britain for resisting the doctrine of Papal Infallibility).64 British
observers did not appreciate, however, the extent to which Croatian
Illyrianism had provoked a hostile rather than a warm response among
many Serbs. In particular they showed no awareness of the ways in which
Serb philologists (most notably Karadžić) had exploited the question of
dialectal variation in pursuit of a narrowly Serb nationalist agenda which
was anathema not only to all Croats but also to moderate Serbs.
The famous (or infamous) article Srbi svi i svuda (‘Serbs all and
everywhere’) in which Karadžić used the mistaken assumptions of Central
42 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

European scholars to classify all štokavian speakers as Serbs regardless of

religion or conscious identity (in opposition to the conservative tendency
in Serbia to tie Serb identity to Orthodoxy) was cited by Bogumil Vošnjak
in his English-language work on the Slovenes but was unnoticed in British
studies.65 Text-books in Serbia, Charles Jelavich has shown, ‘laid claim to
all the Croatian lands – Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia’, and based their
case ‘primarily on a linguistic argument’, an element of pan-Serb ideology
unparalleled in Croatian nationalism.66 Language was in some respects:

the crucial issue in the development of Serbian nationalism.

The authors [of Serbian textbooks] accepted the premise held
by many nineteenth century European scholars that a nation
was defined by its language. Since the Serbs spoke the što
dialect of Serbo-Croatian, they concluded that anyone who
used it was a Serb.67

But even the few British works which did remark on Serb nationalist
claims that Catholic Croats were ‘really’ Serbs, made no mention of the
linguistic criterion which was their ideological foundation.68
This oversight certainly increased the susceptibility of British writers
to Serbian claims. Many, for instance, unquestioningly repeated the
assertion made regarding the disputed province of Bosnia that Catholic
and Muslim Slavs were actually (racially) ‘pure Serbs’.69 Had it been
appreciated that the premise for this claim, formulated by Karadžić and
embraced by other Serb maximalists, lay in the province’s štokavian dialect
which was presumed to demonstrate Serb race, and had it been realised
that this claim also encompassed large populations in Dalmatia, Slavonia
and Croatia, its extremity and implausibility might have been apparent.70
Nor was this tripartite dialectal division the end of the difficulties
facing philologists and others of both unitarist and narrower nationalist
persuasions. Important too, symbolically and emotionally, and equally
ignored by British observers, was the separation of the dominant
štokavian dialect (and in part the kajkavian and čakavian) into three sub-
dialectal groups known, after their transliteration of a Church Slavonic
vowel, as ijekavian, ikavian and ekavian.71 Again, it was not the variations
themselves which mattered, since most languages contain similar
discrepancies. And in terms of mutual comprehension this divide was (and
is) much less substantial than that between the što-, kaj- and ča- forms.
But in the context of the Yugoslav ‘national question’ they assumed,
nevertheless, a definite political significance.
The Croat Illyrianist ‘awakeners’, with their romantic Yugoslav
unitarism, had adopted the ijekavian subdialect despite it being in fact least
prevalent among the Croats. They did so in part because it was the idiom
of Dubrovnik’s great literary heritage (much cherished among Croatian
 LANGUAGE 43

intellectuals despite its subsequent decline), and in part too because its
prevalence among Serbs and Muslims of Eastern Bosnia, Hercegovina,
southern Dalmatia and Montenegro offered the prospect of substantial
harmonisation. Significantly, it had also been favoured by Karadžić
himself, who adopted the demotic speech of Eastern Hercegovina as the
purest and most euphonious form of the Serbian tongue. Partly as a result
of his efforts, in Vienna in 1850 Serb and Croat linguists and literati signed
an agreement establishing štokavian ijekavian as the literary standard for
both peoples, laying the foundations for full linguistic unity.72 But while
this form was standardised in Croatian intellectual and administrative usage
(despite opposition from the Magyarophile petty nobility), Belgrade and
Novi Sad favoured the ekavian ‘eastern dialect’ of Šumadija-Vojvodina.
‘The Serbs of these politically and intellectually dominant areas’, Banac
notes, ‘understandably preferred their own influential idiom as the basis
for literary activity centred on Belgrade’.73 The result was two literary
standards which, however mutually comprehensible, could continue to
develop in divergent directions, and which, though imperfectly aligned
with the pattern of Serb and Croat populations, could become associated
with the rival nationalisms centred on Belgrade and Zagreb.74
Naturally one should not overstate the importance of these linguistic
variations to the subjective national sense of ‘ordinary’ early 20th century
Serbs and Croats, many of whom remained illiterate, and for whom lofty if
acrimonious debates about dialectal norms were remote to say the least.
(Though it was the primitive, patriarchal and religiously-intolerant world in
which most of the population lived which, as Milorad Ekmečić has
argued, ultimately made the linguistic case for unity unrealistic).75 Some
historians, Yugoslavs among them, have denied the significance of
language variation within the ‘Serbo-Croat’ area, insisting that Yugoslavs
(excepting Slovenes and Macedonians) ‘all speak one language’, and that
no linguistic barriers separate the ethnic groups.76 Some modern
nationality theory has similarly downplayed the contribution of language
to separate Serb and Croat identities. ‘The old enmity between Orthodox
Serbs and Catholic Croats’, a leading scholar has written, ‘is, in practice,
one of religious community, since language differences are very slight; for
all practical purposes, Serbo-Croat represents a unified language which
affords no basis for two nationalisms’.77
But a lack of ‘linguistic barriers’ implies only mutual intelligibility. It is
true that the variations between ‘Croatian’ and ‘Serbian’ standards provide
no major obstacles in this respect (although the čakavski and kajkavski
branches remain markedly divergent). The error made, however, and that
invariably made by early 20th century observers, is to assume that
intelligibility per se is enough for language to act as a unifying force (or at
least to prevent it being divisive). The fact that ‘Croatian’ and ‘Serbian’ are
linguistically very close does not preclude the importance of what are now
44 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

called ‘socio-linguistic’ differences.78 The problem, as one recent writer

has expressed it, is that ‘language as a cultural, let alone political
phenomenon is quite different from philology’: ‘From this perspective
Serbian and Croatian were culturally different languages and culture [...]
has a central role in the definition of nationhood through ethnicity’.79
As the cases of Britain and the US show, words in the same
language, used in discrete communities undergoing different experiences,
‘acquire different meanings, carry different emotional charges and evoke
different responses’.80 And such minor variations, overlaid on pre-existing
ethnic difference in a context of ‘historically conditioned emotionalism’,
acquire greater importance as markers of identity than is easily appreciated
by outside observers.81 Disputes over grammar and orthography within
the Serbo-Croat zone can seem now, as Robert Auty recognised, ‘petty,
even comic’. But we should recall that the protagonists, ‘were not dealing
with language for its own sake’ since ‘even minute questions of
orthography reflected attitudes towards wider issues’.82 As a theorist noted
in 1945, while Dutch and Flemish, Czech and Slovak, Serbian and
Croatian, Danish and Norwegian, are all in effect sibling dialects, ‘mere
dialectical differences often contribute to national antagonism or are
regarded as precious peculiarities’.83 The ‘rather modest range of
differentiation in the variants of standard štokavian’ implies, as Katičić
observes, ‘sharp distinctions of identity, stylistic values and cultural
affinities’.84
From a theoretical perspective, moreover, recent writers have
stressed that the very distinction between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ is ‘purely
relative’: ultimately not linguistic at all but political.85 It matters little
whether ‘Serbian’ and ‘Croatian’ are characterised as distinct dialects of a
single language, or as two literary languages of a larger ‘diasystem’.86 What
does matter is the degree to which the relationship between politics and
language can be seen to operate causally in both directions, with politics
shaping language as well as being shaped by it. As Stephen May has noted,
language and dialect cannot be distinguished on the basis of mutual
intelligibility: there are groups of languages which are mutually intelligible,
and single languages which encompass dialects mutually
incomprehensible:

Rather, the distinction between language and dialect is primarily

a political consequence of the language legitimation process
undertaken by nation-states [...]. The boundaries between
languages, and the classification of dialects, have invariably
followed the politics of state-making rather than the other way
around.87
 LANGUAGE 45

The force of this argument in relation to Yugoslavia has become manifest

in the last decade, with the drive to establish distinct Serbian and Croatian
language varieties in the wake of the country’s separation into constituent
national units.88 But this has not only been, as is sometimes implied, a
response to the events of the 1990s. Croatian cultural institutions suffered
oppression in Communist Yugoslavia for attempting to maintain linguistic
differences, unhappy at the imposition of distinctively ‘Serbian’ dialect for
official administration.89 A declaration issued in Croatia in 1967 rejected
the 1954 Novi Sad agreement on a single Serbo-Croat standard, and
demanded a constitutional separation of Croatian and Serbian literary
languages.90 Centralist policy, well served by the premise of a single Serbo-
Croat norm, and promulgated by linguists of ‘pan-Slavic orientation’, had
only exacerbated ‘the smouldering conflict between Croats and Serbs on
the linguistic issue’.91 ‘Serbo-Croat’, in its official, largely Serbian form, had
in Croatia been limited to the armed forces and diplomatic service, and as
such was associated with the Belgrade government. The Croatian-Serbian
language controversy of the 1960s testified, as Ivo Lederer notes, to the
fact that language served ‘as the living symbol of a nation’s franchise’.92
All of which, insofar as it concerns sensitivities in the post-World
War II era, is germane to our discussion only as evidence that linguistic
issues can acquire political and emotional importance within a near-
homogeneous language area. In fact the very process of homogenisation,
in a context of pre-existing ethnic identities, can cause ‘a passionate
clinging to the remaining differences’. As a result, in Yugoslav lands in
which Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins and Slavic Muslims shared ‘basically
one language’, this language became ‘an important political tool’, as Serbs
used linguistic criteria to promote assimilation while non-Serbs clung to
linguistic idiosyncracies to protect their identity.93 It was this attachment
of closely-related peoples to seemingly insubstantial symbols of
individuality that Sigmund Freud termed the ‘narcissism of minor
differences’.94
Particularly pertinent to the early 20th century Yugoslav case is the
emphasis put by recent theorists on the social function of language. If,
within a given language area, a recognised elite exists with a characteristic
vernacular, it is this norm, Einar Haugen notes, which ‘will almost
inevitably prevail’. Where ‘there are socially coordinate groups of people
within the community, usually distributed regionally or tribally’, however,
‘the choice of any one will meet with resistance from the rest’.95 We must,
in other words, heed the register of regional language forms, to distinguish
between dialects serviceable only in informal and low-prestige situations,
and those which, adopted by local or national elites, serve a high-level,
literary and official function.96 In Croatia, as observers knew, an elite
existed which considered itself not only equal to any equivalent class in
Serbia, but its cultural superior: which had ‘never been willing to play
46 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

understudy to the Serbians’ and which considered Zagreb not Belgrade the
centre of the Serbo-Croat movement.97 Most in Britain shared this sense
of the cultural superiority of ex-Habsburg Yugoslavia, with its proximity
to the intellectual currents of Central Europe. None, however, considered
the obstacle this might present to the standardisation of language on a
largely Serbian model. It was not appreciated that linguistic disputes
mattered because they were ‘conflicts involving prestige’; that
‘disagreements over language […] were actually disagreements over its
social background’.98
The symbolic significance of dialectal questions was missed even by
the few British writers who knew of their existence. The modern trend, it
was often noted, was for languages to amalgamate in response to
economic pressures towards integration and homogenisation.99 With no
grasp of the link between language and national identities in Yugoslavia, it
was assumed that variations would rapidly diminish within a single
economic and administrative unit. As late as 1941, the most thorough and
accurate British treatment of ‘Serbo-Croat’ dialects hitherto published
continued to reject any wider significance. While it might be ‘regrettable’,
it noted, that Belgrade had not followed Croatia’s adoption of the
ijekevian standard, the difference between literary Croat and literary
(Belgrade) Serb remained ‘fundamentally nothing more than that between
subdivisions of one and the same dialect’.100 (This is inaccurate, of course,
not in what it says but in what it omits to say). Popular and general works
continued to state baldly that Serbs and Croats were ‘one by race and
language’.101

Script

In considering dialectal differences, we have ignored thus far the one

difference between Croatian and Serbian language usage which could not
elude the most superficial observer: that of script. It was, of course, widely
observed in Britain that Serbs used the cyrillic, Croats and Slovenes the
latin alphabet. This ‘curious phenomen[on] of [a] people speaking
practically the same language yet using a different alphabet’ seemed to
many an intriguing instance of Balkan exoticism.102 Opinion diverged not
on whether this difference existed, but on whether it mattered.
In general, not surprisingly, those enthused by Yugoslav unity were
disinclined to give weight to this obvious distinction between Croat and
Serb, West and East. Neville Forbes was typical in noting simply that
Serbs and Croats spoke the same language, ‘the only difference’ being that
of alphabet.103 Seton-Watson agreed that the ‘only’ linguistic difference
was that of script.104 A.H.E. Taylor, who unlike Seton-Watson approached
South Slav issues invariably from a Serb angle, was particularly bluff. Since
 LANGUAGE 47

moves to introduce cyrillic in Croatia had foundered, he noted, both

orthographies would remain on an equal footing. But, he continued:

The central administrative documents will doubtless continue

to be written in the Cyrillic script in order to avoid confusion
as the central administration of the enlarged kingdom will be an
extension of the present government offices. Any remains of
the old jealousy on this score should be assuaged, and the
matter regarded as being quite divorced, as naturally it is, from
any question of religion or tribal difference, and the field left
clear to the eventual predominance of whichever script forms
the best vehicle of the common language.105

The blindness of this analysis to Croatian concerns that Yugoslavia would

be treated as an expanded Serbia is striking. No less so is its unwarranted
assurance that script was divorced from religious and ‘tribal’ sensitivities.
In any case the orthographic distinction, Taylor and others were clear, was
superficial: a curiosity rather than a factor of moment. The 1917 Corfu
Agreement, hailed in Britain as testimony to the appetite among Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes for compromise and unity, had specified equality for
alphabets as for religions. There, for many, the matter ended.
But the Corfu Agreement had serious flaws. On the one hand it
represented rather the aspirations of idealists than prevailing attitudes. On
the other, each contracting party – most notably Pašić’s government – had
been brought to the table more by the pressure of political circumstances
than by any genuine desire to cooperate, least of all on an equal basis. It
was, in other words, a superficial gloss over the real differences in
background and outlook which existed between representatives of the
Serbian government and of the Yugoslav Committee.106 The question of
alphabet, it seemed to some, was in reality at least representative of, and
might even be a factor in, the great division assumed to split the Yugoslav
lands between East and West, Byzantium and Rome, Ottoman and
Habsburg, Orthodox and Catholic. It was, in other words, symbolic
(literally!) of a cultural gulf stemming from the different historical
experiences of the East-looking South Slavs of independent Serbia,
Montenegro, Macedonia and (pre-1878) Bosnia on the one hand, and the
non-Orthodox of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia on the other.
William Miller, in his influential survey of the Balkans, had included
the difference of alphabet among the ‘[considerable] difficulties’ which
stood in the way of union between Croats of Western mentality and Serbs
of Eastern.107 Seton-Watson showed, in his private correspondence, an
awareness of linguistic sensitivities which he downplayed or denied
entirely in his published work (which sought to promote the Yugoslav
cause). Setting up his magazine, New Europe, he was unsure whether a
48 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

translated edition in ‘Croat’ would suffice for Serbia also. By ‘Croat’, it is

clear, he meant simply the Latin as opposed to the ‘Cyrilline’ alphabet.
Producing separate Serb and Croat editions would, he felt, compel him to
produce Bulgar and ‘perhaps even Slovene’ editions also.108
The use of cyrillic script, along with the Orthodox element of Serb
identity, often seemed indicative of a psychological bond between Serbs
and Russians, an impression reinforced by pan-Slavist ideology and
diplomatic history. Fellow-feeling with Russia was an emotion Catholic
Croats were not presumed to share. A wartime intelligence report on ‘the
Yugo-Slav Problem’ by Harold Temperley went so far as to describe the
division between cyrillic and latin orthography as ‘an even more serious
difference’ than that between Orthodoxy and Catholicism with which it
was associated.109 While the Foreign Office’s pre-Conference report
considered, as we have seen, that the Serbo-Croat language was entirely
uniform, it nevertheless listed the orthographic divide as one of those
‘incompletely conciliated rivalries’ which made the Yugoslav situation
more difficult than that of any other country in South-Eastern Europe.110
Nor was such caution unwarranted, for, contrary to Taylor’s blithe
assurance that a mere question of alphabet need not inflame nationalist
pride, it had already shown signs of doing so. The compromise proposal
by one Serb writer in 1913 that a standardised language might be achieved
by Croats adopting the eastern ekavian dialect in return for Serbs
foregoing their cyrillic script, was taken up by ‘Yugoslav’ enthusiasts in
Serbia and Croatia but soon met opposition. Not only did some Croats
reject a second linguistic sacrifice, but Serbs, particularly after the outbreak
of war (and the Habsburg attempt to suppress cyrillic in Bosnia), came to
view their script as a cherished national symbol. While the Serb national
existence was endangered, one nationalist averred, the Cyrillic script would
remain an ‘[emblem] that cannot be abandoned, a banner under which we
must endure’.111 For many Serbian Radical politicians during and after the
war, cyrillic remained the only truly Slavic and national alphabet.112 No less
did it seem, in the western regions, a symbol of hegemonic tendencies in
Belgrade which viewed Croats as liberated members of an expanded
Serbia rather than as equal partners in a new state.
As British observers became aware in the immediate post-war period
of the conflicts of interest and identity which stood in the way of a
harmonious new ‘national’ state, a few observers began to emphasise
factors which seemed representative of the divisions they perceived. For
H.J. Fleure, discussing the peace settlement in 1921, Yugoslavia’s language
divide remained, at root, ‘not very deep’. The significance of the
divergence in scripts was, however, he recognised, precisely what Taylor
had indicated it should not be: language, and (through the central
importance of the written word) alphabet, were not distinct from but were
intimately tied up with the religious divide which still seemed to underpin
 LANGUAGE 49

rival Serb and Croat identities. And whereas dialectal differences were not
linked by British observers with this divide, its connection with the pattern
of cyrillic and latinate orthography was clear. The dominant view, as Hugh
Seton-Watson later expressed it, was that:

The normal distinction between Serb and Croat was religious.

Both spoke the same language (differences of dialect were a
matter of regional not of religious division), but Orthodox were
Serbs and used the Cyrillic alphabet, while Catholics were
Croats and used the Latin alphabet.113

Awareness of the complications resulting from ‘the association of alphabet

difference with religion’ has been echoed by some modern theorists of
language and ethnicity.114 They have stressed more explicitly the perennial
link between language and religion, the latter conferring on the former a
‘sacred’ status particularly potent in cultures where religious identity has
been strongly linked to ethnicity.115 In fact the importance of the South
Slavic association between alphabet and religion has been illustrated not
simply with reference to the modern latin-cyrillic divide. Attention has
been drawn to the development by Bosnian Muslims of a significant if
modest štokavian literature in the Arabic script.116 Similarly, examination
of orthographic controversies in 19th century Croatia has shown the
religious motivation for the opposition by, for instance, the anti-Illyrianist
Slovene Jernej Kopitar, to diacritical innovations derived from Czech (and
therefore Protestant) usage.117 Historians of the wider Balkans, meanwhile,
have noted a similar alignment of script and religion among Greek
Catholics, Turcophone Orthodox, and Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim
Albanians prior to imposed latin standardisation.118
We will shortly examine the perceived role of religion in Yugoslav
national identities. First, however, we must look at British observers’
treatment of the clearest challenge to their notion of a South Slavic
linguistic unity that had prepared the way for a single ‘nation state’.

Slovene: language or dialect?

Most scholars of emerging nationalities now consider that by 1860, if not

earlier, three distinct literary languages had crystallised among the South
Slavs: Bulgarian, Serbian/Croatian and Slovenian.119 It is true, as Robert
Auty has noted, that the Slovene area had long been characterised by
‘extreme dialectal fragmentation [...], no dialect having become sufficiently
extensive or influential to form the national written language in its own
image’. Nevertheless, the essential features of the modern standard were
established in the late 1850s.120 While the Slovene philologist Jernej
50 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Kopitar followed his predecessors in considering his native tongue a

dialect of a single great Slavonic language, he used ‘dialect’ to mean a
written standard within a large linguistic family, and certainly did not imply
a status inferior to the written language of Belgrade or Zagreb.121 On the
contrary, the erroneous teaching of early Slavicists that all kajkavians were
Slovenes, regardless of their subjective identity, strengthened Slovene faith
in their sense of linguistic nationality. ‘Separate linguistic traditions’, as Ivo
Banac observes, ‘were at the root of Slovene nationalism’.122
Albert H. Putney, head of the US State Department Near Eastern
Division assigned to consider the future of the Habsburg Empire,
recommended in May 1917 a Serbo-Croat Yugoslav state which excluded
Slovenes on the grounds of their historical bonds with Austria and their
clear linguistic differences.123 The first official census of the new state,
carried out in 1921, offered the Slavic population a threefold choice:
‘Serbian or Croatian’, ‘Slovene’ or ‘other Slavic’.124 And although the 1921
Constitution declared the existence of a single official language, ‘Serb-
Croat-Slovene’, this label was deliberately used, as a Foreign Office report
later noted, ‘to cover the linguistic differences of the Yugoslavs’.125 Plainly
Slovene linguistic traditions offered a challenge, at least, to those observers
who considered language the principal argument for Yugoslav unity.
Some commentators – even otherwise informed ones – either
ignored this challenge or denied it entirely, maintaining the complete
linguistic unity of the Yugoslav region. In the post-war edition of his
respected survey of the Balkans, William Miller noted differences in script
and culture within the new Serb-Croat-Slovene State, but recorded that,
‘the oral speech of all the three contracting parties is the same’.126 Neville
Forbes, treating all western South Slavs as of purely Serb race with only
minor dialectal distinctions, entirely overlooked Slovene linguistic
individuality.127 Similarly, Noel Buxton’s assertion that Croats and
Slovenes were ‘akin in race and language’, and H.A. Gibbons’ statement
that the Slavs of the southern Monarchy spoke ‘practically the same
language’ as the Serbs (without referring specifically to the Slovenes), were
typical of the vagaries exhibited by enthusiasts for the ‘nationality
principle’, who were often either ignorant of the detail of individual cases
or reluctant to admit complexities which muddied the ideological
waters.128 Seton-Watson, though aware of Slovene linguistic individuality,
was content to repeat the Prince-Regent’s claim that Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes were all ‘one people’ with ‘the same traditions’ and ‘the same
tongue’.129 And similar Yugoslav propaganda was met equally uncritically:
the Yugoslav Committee claim that Yugoslavs were a single nation ‘alike
by identity of language’, and numerous other statements that Serbs, Croats
and Slovenes were ‘a single indivisible people’.130 The Slovene Bogumil
Vošnjak – whose speculation that Slovene might gradually merge back
into a single South Slav language may have seemed plausible to British
 LANGUAGE 51

readers – nevertheless expressed pleasant surprise at the rapidity with

which British analysts had accepted Yugoslavs as a single ‘culture-
nation’.131
Most British writers on the South Slavs did, of course, acknowledge
a degree of individuality in the Slovene linguistic heritage. Toynbee
observed that both Slovenes and Bulgarians possessed dialectal
characteristics which ‘distinguish them sharply’ from the main body of
South Slavs in between; the Slovene dialect, he continued, was ‘distinctly
different’.132 This degree of emphasis, however, was unusual. The majority
preferred to acknowledge, but at the same time to downplay, any linguistic
frontier between Slovene and Serbian/ Croatian. They talked, like Bernard
Joseph, of the ‘virtual identity of their languages’, or characterised Slovene,
like Laffan, simply as ‘closely akin to Serbian’.133 Almost none, among the
many who emphasised language’s formative role in the modern
phenomenon of ‘nationality’, considered Slovene linguistic individuality a
challenge to the much-credited single ‘Yugoslav’ identity.
 3

Religion: Faith, Nationality and the

South Slavs in British Analysis

In the assessment of a population’s nationality (in the modern sense of

‘ethnicity’) language was attributed unrivalled pre-eminence in the early
20th century as an indicator of race, or at least of ‘sense of race’. Certainly
no other objective criterion was treated in isolation as a test of subjective
allegiance, and many considered it the sole important catalyst of national
consciousness. A few writers did worry, however, that this single factor
might be dangerously over-extended. One sceptic feared the vogue for a
linguistically-defined conception of race might ‘force into common
national organisations peoples claimed as belonging to the same race, but
separated by different institutions, different laws and customs, […]
different sympathies and different hates’. Hardly one of the ‘numerous
volumes’ dealing with Austria and the Balkan States, he cautioned, was
without ‘dangerous examples of this fallacy’.1
There was substance to this concern. Nevertheless, most
commentators, particularly those with a theoretical interest in the concept
of ‘nationality’, were willing to consider the role of other factors in
creating and binding the modern nation. Invariably foremost in language’s
wake were the related themes of religion and historical tradition, both
plainly germane to the Yugoslav case.2 Let us look first, then, at the
treatment of religion in British analysis of the South Slavs.

Theorists recognised the paramount contribution that religion had made

to the growth and maintenance of national feeling in certain cases. In the
Jews they found ‘the crowning manifestation of religion as a fundamental
factor in nationality’, an ethnic identity scarcely separable from a body of
religious traditions and beliefs.3 The separation and distinct national
development of Holland and Belgium was commonly attributed to
contrasting religious identities. And in Ireland Britain had rather too close
at hand a territory united by geography and (overwhelmingly) by language
in which it was recognised that ‘absence of common tradition combines
 RELIGION 53

with religious differences to divide the country into two nationalities’.4

The formative significance of religion varied, to be sure; unlike ‘blood’ or
language it seemed a contingent rather than a necessary ingredient of
ethnic identity. But some influential writers continued, nevertheless, to sell
it strong. ‘In every case [...]’, argued C. Delisle Burns, ‘religion seems to
have an important influence on the formation of nationality’.5
Theorists interested in the nationalities of Central and Eastern
Europe particularly emphasised religion’s formative role. They observed
that the Ottoman ‘millet’ system, by allowing substantial administrative
and judicial autonomy to religious hierarchies, had identified religious
affiliation with emergent national consciousness. The Turkish ascendancy,
H.N. Brailsford noted, had rested ‘not upon race but on religion’; and as
such the emergent nationalist opposition of the late 18th and 19th
centuries assumed a religious as well as a national coloration. For the
Balkan peasant apostasy meant ‘a forswearing of his nationality and a
treason to the cause of his own race’.6 ‘In the East’, observed William
Miller, ‘ties of religion count for more than anything else’.7
The Orthodox Church, lacking the centralised, supra-national
structure of its Roman rival, seemed to have a particularly close affinity
with nationalism. ‘A Christian Greek or Bulgarian who [...] converted to
Mohammedanism’, it was observed, ‘would hardly be deemed to remain a
Greek or Bulgarian’.8 Vatican control of the Catholic Church had
discouraged the same alignment of national and ecclesiastical identity.
Nevertheless, it was often remarked that in practice Poland or Ireland, for
example, displayed a similar elision of religious and ‘ethnic’ allegiance.
Among emerging nations of both confessions religion, it seemed, had
provided a rallying cry – had constituted ‘the cornerstone in the earliest
edifice of nationality’.9 Even age-old struggles once considered purely
religious seemed with hindsight to have been ‘a groping after nationality’.10
Having said this, however, the work both of nationality theorists and
Balkan analysts was pervaded by the assumption that the war marked a
watershed in European civilisation, revolutionising the way populations
defined themselves and their relations with others. The violent end to
ancién régime Europe seemed the culmination of a process, quietly at work
since the French Revolution, in which ‘race’ and language (commonly
equated, as we have seen) had assumed the pre-eminent formative role
which religion had once enjoyed. Linguistic nationality, it was now widely
argued, had become to European consciousness what religion had once
been – the primary category of personal identity. This sense of change, of
a new dawn, meant the revolutionary peace many assumed must follow a
decisive Allied victory was compared not with that which was commonly
portrayed as reinstating the old order in 1815, but with that of 1648. It was
this that seemed the most obvious precedent to the ‘new map of Europe’
contemplated at Versailles. And it would be Versailles that, after 270 years,
54 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

would finally supersede the equation of religious and state authority in the
famous Westphalian formula, ‘cuius regio eius religio’.
So while religion’s historical role in the gestation of nationality was
admitted, modern nationalism seemed to have rendered it ‘no longer a
factor of much consequence’.11 With the rise of religious toleration and
the multi-confessional state, Sidney Herbert wrote, ‘the influence of
religion in aiding or hindering the growth of nationality grows steadily
less’.12 To many writers (including those enthusiasts for a ‘new’, ethnically-
divided Europe) religion was an element of identity less profound, less
real, than race or language. The influential theorist Alfred Zimmern
stressed that race was an involuntary inheritance: permanent, and thus
deeper than religion.13 And while a few sceptics protested that populations
had changed their language, and with it their sense of race, they remained a
minority.
This sense that religion was the defining symbol of a previous, now
obsolete age (‘byzantine, medieval, reactionary’)14 helps explain why it was,
as we will see, largely overlooked in 1918 as a factor of ethnic identity.
Perhaps inevitably there was a wistful optimism that the victors could
inaugurate, on a post-war tabula rasa, a new order of national self-
determination. In the Balkans, one British official emphasised, ‘we are
really out for a comprehensive and permanent, and not merely an
opportunist, settlement’.15 To the sceptical eye of a later observer it
seemed that the vogue for nationality had itself become ‘a new religion’.16

In the case of the Yugoslav populations, of course, commentators could

scarcely avoid the question of religious affiliation, or the impact it had
upon national or ‘ethnic’ identity. Though racially united, Seton-Watson
noted, the ‘true line of cleavage’ was religious, every Croat a Catholic and
every Serb a member of the Orthodox Church.17 In fact, long before
awareness developed in Britain of the South Slavs’ ethno-linguistic affinity,
the religious divides separating the Western Church from the Eastern, and
Christian rule from that of Ottoman Islam, had been among the
fundamental geopolitical facts of European life. (For much of the 19th
century the English public had vaguely considered all Muslims in south-
east Europe ‘Turks’, all Orthodox ‘Greeks’, and Catholics either Austrian,
Hungarian or Italian).18 Once awareness did develop of the kinship of the
Serb, Croat and Slovene regions, their position athwart these religious
boundaries became, for British observers, a defining characteristic.
John Allcock has argued that only in Yugoslavia did Serbs and
Croats become defined as antagonistic groups, and this opposition come
to be regarded as ‘perpetual’. He is right that other oppositions – Serbs
with Turks and Albanians; Croats with Hungarians – had contributed
more to the genesis of Serb and Croat identities. A few British observers
belatedly noticed the struggle of Croats in particular against Habsburg
 RELIGION 55

domination.19 But in fact well before the war the Serb-Croat relationship
had come to seem in Britain one fraught with religious enmity. The two
peoples, William Miller had noted in 1898, were separated by ‘the wide
chasm which keeps the Roman and the Orthodox Greek asunder’.20 The
‘only difference’ between Croat and Serb, agreed a pre-war student of the
Orthodox Church, was religious: one looked to Austria-Hungary, the
other to the Russian Tsar, and the result was a ‘great hatred’ between the
two peoples.21 And though occasional developments (like the emergence
of the Serbo-Croat Coalition) might have seemed to suggest a ‘weakening
of their religious dissensions’, in general pre-war Foreign Office reports
likewise stressed the ‘bitter hostility’ between the confessions.22 ‘The
difference of religion’, Fairfax Cartwright observed in 1913, ‘must always
be a bar between the Slavs of Austria and those of the Balkans’.23
Allcock’s point about a recent rivalry becoming regarded as
‘perpetual’, however, certainly applies to British attitudes. Despite (or
perhaps because of) Britons’ short acquaintance with the South Slavs, the
confessional tension they observed, in the Zagreb riots of 1902-3 for
instance, was rationalised as manifesting an ‘age-old’ enmity. As with the
simultaneous unrest in Macedonia, an appreciation of events based upon
traceable political history was eschewed in favour of an assumption of
timeless ‘Balkan’ norms. Before the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia, Noel
Buxton averred, Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox had lived ‘in perpetual
and blood-stained feud’.24 If Austria-Hungary ever withdrew from the
province, William Miller agreed, the different creeds would be immediately
at each other’s throats: Pax Austriana alone prevented a recrudescence of
those religious quarrels which had ‘stained with blood’ the annals of
medieval Bosnia.25 Only in ‘most recent times’, Harold Temperley argued
in his 1917 history of Serbia, had Orthodox and Catholic in Bosnia and
Croatia been induced to cooperate as fellow Slavs.26
Maria Todorova has made a similar argument to Allcock’s in relation
to the broader conflict between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds. Only
in the inter-war period, she argues, did Westerners embrace the image of a
profound cultural ‘fault-line’ in east-central Europe, between the
incompatible mindsets of Rome and Byzantium, Vienna and
Constantinople.27 It is true that obvious tensions in the Yugoslav state
during the 1920s and 1930s produced a greater emphasis on this theme.
But once again, at least in relation to British observers of the South Slav
regions, this post-dates the phenomenon. Already in pre-war works one
finds argued a fundamental psychological incompatibility of the major
religious cultures, far transcending differences of dogma or ritual. Even an
early and sanguine Yugoslavist like Seton-Watson noted the ‘eternal strife
[...] of two opposing systems of thought and culture’ which had lent the
Serbo-Croat race its ‘dual nature’.28 That ‘insuperable gulf, difference of
religion’ mattered not only for the superficial symbols of identity dividing
56 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Catholic and Orthodox.29 Over the centuries it had engendered a

‘profound difference of mentality, rather than of doctrine, between the
Western and Eastern Church’.30 Many in Britain concurred with the
eminent German historian whose comparative study found a deep,
unbridgeable gulf between Eastern and Western civilisation, attributable to
the influence of their churches, more profound even than that which
divided the Orthodox and Islamic worlds.31
Let us now look at British assumptions about each of the region’s
major religious communities, before assessing the impact of the war on
attitudes towards religion’s role in Yugoslav national identities.

The Orthodox Church

Historically, British attitudes to the Orthodox Church had been influenced

less by spiritual than by diplomatic considerations. The expansion of
Russia – a threat to British interests in India and the Middle East – had
nurtured a deep suspicion of the whole Orthodox bloc.32 Pan-Orthodox
ideology, and Russian interest in the ‘emancipation’ of Orthodox peoples,
were considered a smokescreen for an imperialism which deliberately
incited dissent to justify intervention. In Britain ‘Christianity in the East’
seemed to have ‘degenerated from a religion into a secret society
comparable to Fenianism’.33 A determination grew, particularly in the
Conservative Party, to bolster the seemingly moribund Ottoman Empire.
Insofar as the Yugoslavs were concerned, many in Britain believed
that, despite talk of pan-Slavism, Russia was genuinely protective only of
the Orthodox Serbs. Some saw her ultimate aim as the assimilation of all
Orthodox in one empire. Adrian Fortescue, for instance, argued in his
1907 study of the Eastern Church that Russia’s policy was rooted in
militant pan-Orthodoxy, which encouraged the Balkan states to consider
the Tsar their natural protector in preparation for their absorption. ‘All the
Orthodox’, Fortescue concluded, ‘will apparently soon be Russian’.34 And
though the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907 revolutionised European
diplomacy, such deep-rooted suspicions died hard. While a Serb
propagandist argued in 1916 that the Franco-Russian alliance had silenced
all claims of division between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, in
truth only the 1917 revolutions eased British fears of Orthodox
militancy.35 These (and the Yugoslav Corfu Agreement which they helped
to foster by leaving Pašić dangerously isolated) had, Temperley noted,
finally removed ‘the Russian-Orthodox bogey, which sought to erect a
barrier of religious hatred between Serb and Croat’.36
This view of pan-Orthodoxy as a screen for secular ambition chimed
with a tendency to regard Orthodox communities, particularly those of the
Balkans, as scantily religious in any genuinely spiritual sense. The turbulent
 RELIGION 57

rivalries in Macedonia between adherents of Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek

Churches, separated by no significant points of doctrine, encouraged
British observers to regard Orthodoxy in southeast Europe simply as a
badge of national allegiance. This battle of ‘Churches’ was ‘simply a
political or more properly a racial conflict’.37 Paradoxically, fears of
Russian sway over her Balkan coreligionists coexisted with the observation
that, while the Eastern Church was ecumenical in principle, in practice it
was fissiparous in the extreme. Having invoked the dangers of pan-
Orthodoxy, Fortescue derided the ‘extreme quarrelsomeness’ that
constituted the ‘dominant note’ within the Orthodox community.38 The
appeal to religion as a marker of nationality was encouraged, another
writer observed, by ‘the fact that Eastern Christianity tends to encourage
national churches and has education in its hands’. Education on a religious
basis would be ‘a serious problem for the new state of Yugoslavia’.39
Numerous observers remarked upon the seeming indifference of
Serbs in particular to religion in its spiritual rather than purely patriotic
manifestations. The Yugoslavs in general, wrote Neville Forbes, were ‘not
naturally an intensely religious people’, while the Eastern was ‘the most
conservative and the most passive of the Churches’.40 The Encyclopaedia
Britannica saw in the pitiful membership of Serbia’s famous monasteries
evidence of a lack of sincere religiosity in a nation whose priests had
always been more active in the struggle for independence than in the care
of souls.41 Serbian church services, Sir Charles Eliot agreed, were ‘little
frequented’. For Seton-Watson the Balkans had really no religious life at
all in a Western sense, the Orthodox Churches ‘mere formalist machines
which exist for political propaganda’.42 And Brailsford was blunter still:
the clergy’s lack of education and preoccupation with secular nationalism
revealed the ‘essential barbarism of the [Orthodox] Church’.43
And yet a different tradition also existed in Britain. Anglican
churchmen and theologians, hostile to the anational despotism of Rome,
warmed to Orthodoxy’s perceived national and democratic character, its
vernacular language and resistance to centralised Patriarchal control. This
line of thought strongly influenced Gladstone and those Liberal circles
averse to Disraeli’s pro-Turkish response to the ‘Eastern Question’.44 It
remained evident during the war when Serbian requests to send
ecclesiastical students to Britain were welcomed by the Anglican
establishment and by Whitehall. It was a plea, W.H. Carnegie noted on
behalf of the Archbishops of Canterbury, York and Dublin, Lord
Salisbury, the Speaker of the House of Commons and other eminent
figures, which ‘appeals strongly to our sympathies as Churchmen’.45
But for the lay majority Orthodoxy’s appeal as a contrast to the off-
putting aspects of Catholicism was blunted by serious reservations.
Representatives of Eastern Christianity and Anglicanism might feel strong
‘mutual affinities’ but there were also, to the western mind, fundamental
58 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

differences. The image of Orthodoxy as more conducive to national

development than Catholicism was thought misleading. Religious doctrine
and observance were believed to shape the basic patterns of thought
which constituted the national ‘soul’ or ‘character’. But Eastern
Christianity, for all its subtle theological speculation, seemed not to have
engendered the philosophical, moral and political enquiry of Western
scholastics. On the contrary, Orthodoxy’s mysticism and asceticism had
apparently militated against that individual initiative and intellectual
freedom considered central to the rise of Western democratic nationalism.
‘The religion of their laity’, observed one writer, ‘has been a very
wonderful, unquestioning belief in the spiritual and the unseen’. But there
had been ‘far too little [instruction] to meet the needs of the inquiring
mind and the critical spirit’.46 It was this, married to a belief in salvation by
faith rather than works, which, many British observers assumed,
underpinned the seeming impassivity and stagnation of the Orthodox
world. Nationalism might be a western export, another argued, but
without the ethical and economic components provided by western
Christianity and capitalism, genuine civilisation was impossible. An
‘unholy alliance between Orthodox obscurantism and Asiatic autocracy’
had failed to provide the ‘moral civilising force’ exerted by the Papacy:

We ourselves, products of western civilization established by

the Catholic Church – whose national renascence was
engendered by the Protestant Reformation – […] can scarcely
realise the disadvantage to the growth of a community whose
progressive forces get no inspiration from Protestantism and
whose conservative forces are not firmly founded in
Catholicity.47

The Orthodox God, the ‘characterless natural force of Eastern Fatalism’,

had failed to foster that individualistic spirit considered the mark of
‘European’ civilisation.48 This sociological analysis of Orthodoxy sat
comfortably with less sophisticated popular conceptions of the ‘fatalistic
tendency’ of Slavs in general, and of the ‘unchanging East’.49
Insofar as it related simply and directly to the Serbian sense of
nationality, however, British observers were impressed by the Church’s
unifying and affirming role. ‘A Church should be the soul of a nation’,
declared one early 20th century writer, ‘and is so most emphatically in
Serbia’.50 Emphasis was given to its role as ‘the nursing mother of national
independence’ – preserving ‘the spirit of nationality through the centuries
of Turkish oppression’ – before an autonomous state provided a new
focus for national feeling.51 Here again we may notice writers who
purported to treat the South Slavs as one unitary ‘nationality’ also applying
this label to a branch distinguished by their religious identity. In the early
 RELIGION 59

years of the century, before the shift of opinion produced by the war, this
association of Orthodoxy with a Serb ‘nation’ was predominant in Britain.
In 1908, the Encyclopaedia Britannica noted, many Serbs still aspired to
the ‘so-called “Great Serbian Idea”’: the union of Serbia, Bosnia,
Montenegro and ‘Old Serbia’, countries largely or near-exclusively
Orthodox Serb.52 In 1909 the British minister in Belgrade wrote of the
‘religious element which underlies Serbian aspirations’.53 We have seen
before that some British analysts testified to an underlying, racial Serb-
ness, distinct from confessional allegiance, which allowed Catholic and
Muslim Slavs of Bosnia to be deemed Serb in a narrow sense (rather than
simply as a synonym for South Slav). But there was no doubt in British
minds that to be South Slav and to be Orthodox was to be a Serb.
Specialists like Seton-Watson ridiculed the ‘absurd theory’ of Croatian
extremists that Serbs living in Croatia might be Orthodox Croats.54
Though there were exceptions to the rule that Orthodox South Slavs
considered themselves Serbs, in general, in the wake of 19th century
nationalist ‘awakening’, the assumption was a fair one.55 British observers
inclined, nevertheless, to overstate the uniform nature of this identity. We
will look in the next chapter at Yugoslav regionalism, which rendered
over-simple the picture of a population in which the only significant
divisions were religious. But even in the religious sphere it was overlooked
that, before the creation of Yugoslavia, the Serbian Church was not a
single entity but five autocephalous churches: the Metropolitanates of the
Kingdom of Serbia, of the Kingdom of Montenegro, of Karlovci
(Hungary, Croatia-Slavonia) and of Bukovina-Dalmatia (in the Austrian
half of the Monarchy), and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople
(Bosnia, Sandžak, Kosovo-Metohia, Macedonia). Only in 1920 was the
Church unified canonically under a restored Patriarchate.56
It is pertinent to consider this in relation to the one subset of this
group which could plausibly claim a distinct heritage and identity: the
Montenegrins. As the Britannica did recognise, not only was the
Montenegrin Church an autocephalous branch of the Eastern Orthodox
communion rather than an ecclesiastical subsidiary of Serbia, but the
historical tradition of vladikas (prince-bishops) meant religious and secular
authority were combined. Though temporal and spiritual powers were re-
divided in 1851, the practice had served ‘to unite the patriotic and the
religious instincts of the people’ – a statement which implies, in the past at
least, a strong regional Montenegrin identity.57 But very few in Britain
noticed the independence of Montenegro’s Church. It was simply
assumed that since the inhabitants were Orthodox and South Slav, they
must be of identical nationality to the Serbians. Certainly few in wartime
Whitehall troubled to study the Montenegrin question closely. It was
‘inevitable’, Harold Nicolson minuted, ‘that so small a country should tend
60 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

to be fused in general statements regarding Serbia and the Southern

Slavs’.58

The Catholic Church

It is scarcely necessary to elaborate here on the suspicion and hostility

with which the Catholic Church had for centuries been eyed in Britain.
But by the turn of the 20th century there was no longer the fear of
Catholicism itself as militant or expansionist in the way that Orthodoxy
seemed in its association with the Russian state. Conflicts of interest with
Catholic powers such as France were rarely interpreted in a religious
context. And Austria-Hungary seemed a threat more by its weakness and
instability than by any residual imperialist momentum (for all that its
annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1908 had extended its direct rule in
Europe).
Croat identity was of course associated in Britain with Catholicism.
A Croat, as we have seen, was often misleadingly identified as a ‘Catholic
Serb’. But a closer analysis suggests that the equations Croat-Catholic and
Serb-Orthodox were not symmetrical. Unfounded fears of pan-Orthodox
amalgamation coexisted with but did not undermine the association of
Orthodoxy with national units and identities. Catholicism, however,
seemed in name and principle to transcend national allegiances. While
commentators could discuss the Serbian Church’s relationship with a
particular ‘Serbian’ identity, they could not tie Croat identity to religion in
the same direct way. Here religion seemed a distinguishing mark of a
negative nature – necessary but insufficient. The inclusion of Slovenes
among the South Slavs meant that even within this group one could
assume a Croat was a Catholic but not that a Catholic was a Croat.
And whereas the Serbian Church had defined itself in opposition to
the religion of the imperial power against which Serb identity was itself
long primarily affirmed, religion could not define Croat consciousness in
an empire whose German and Magyar hegemons largely shared the same
faith. It is true that even before the war British officials recognised in the
‘Rightist’ Frankist-Starčevist movements a strand of Croatian opinion
more hostile to Orthodox Serbs than to Catholic Hungarians.59 But as we
will see, the importance of this element in Croatian culture which did bind
Catholicism into a Croat national identity was consistently understated in
Britain.60 It is therefore not surprising that for as long as Budapest seemed
the primary opposition to Croatian aspiration, British observers did not
much stress Catholicism as defining Croat identity, though the standard
modern interpretation holds that already in 19th century Croatia ‘religion
and nationalism were in effect synonymous’.61
 RELIGION 61

Nor was it simply that Catholicism was a factor of unity rather than
division between rival Croat and Hungarian ‘nations’. Identification of the
Roman Church as a pillar of the Habsburg realm ensured that, while
Orthodoxy became associated with the rise of ‘nationality’ in East-Central
Europe, Catholicism seemed not merely neutral but associated with the
anational or anti-national ancien régime against which the new nations
defined themselves, helping to nurture the wartime view of religion as
outmoded in an age of ethno-linguistic nationalism. Seton-Watson’s
memorandum on Austria-Hungary listed the Church as one of those key
political factors ‘which hold power not in theory and law but in real fact’.62
It was as a potent force for reaction within the Monarchy that Catholicism
was perceived in Britain. ‘The Emperor and Court have no real national
feeling’, another report noted, ‘but they are strongly clerical, and are
inclined to settle national questions along Catholic lines’.63
We will look shortly at the ways in which, during the war, British
observers reconciled Croatian Catholicism (and Serb Orthodoxy) with a
new-found faith in a single Yugoslav nation. We should briefly look first,
however, at how they analysed the Catholicism of the monarchy’s little-
noticed Slovene population. The analysis itself was somewhat in contrast
to that of Croatian religious allegiance, but the implication of that analysis
only reaffirms the sense that to pre-war Britons Catholicism seemed rather
at odds with national consolidation than its catalyst.
Clerical influences were generally believed stronger in the Slovene
territories than in Croatia, to the extent that religious identity among
Slovenes was thought to precede any ethnic or ‘national’ identity based
upon race or language. As a result, the Slovenes were regarded in Britain
(when they were regarded at all) as loyal Habsburg subjects.64 It may be
true, as historians have pointed out, that political Catholicism among
Slovenes – seen in Britain as an immemorial feature of Slovene life – had
been a ‘marked novelty’ as recently as the 1880s.65 It may also be true that
the devotion to the Monarchy suggested by the early 20th century strength
of the clericalist party (seemingly, like other Catholic parties, a ‘pillar of
Habsburg order’) owed as much to political realism as to genuine popular
emotion.66 But the British perception that Slovenes were both strongly
clerical and loyal to the Habsburg dynasty fortified their association of
Catholicism with supranational dynasticism rather than with ethno-
linguistic nationalism. To be an overtly Catholic South Slav seemed in
Britain to be less a Slovene or a Croat than an Austrian – in the non-
ethnic sense of a supporter of the dynasty. This contrasted with
Orthodoxy’s association with the national movement (in spite of it being,
in the context of a ‘Yugoslav’ nation, rather divisive than unifying).
62 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Islam

The Yugoslav region’s significant Muslim populations impressed travellers

and analysts with their flavour of oriental exoticism. They reminded
British observers of the area’s long association with the Ottoman Middle
East (until 1878, in the case of Bosnia, 1912-13 in Macedonia).67 While it
had tolerated other faiths within its borders, the Ottoman had remained
an overtly Islamic empire. As a result attitudes in Britain towards Turkish
rule on the one hand, and towards Islam on the other, were interwoven
and it is not easy to disentangle the threads. But it is important to
understand the ways in which the legacies of Ottoman rule, and of Islam
in general, were viewed in relation to these European Muslim populations.
The old assumption that ethnic allegiance in southeast Europe
followed the contours of religious affiliation – that the Orthodox were all
‘Greeks’ and the Muslims ‘Turks’ – had given way to racial and linguistic
classification. It was significantly slower to do so in the case of Muslim
populations, however, than in the case of Orthodox peoples whose
‘national’ churches and mutual antipathies proclaimed a lack of unitary
consciousness. As late as Gladstone’s celebrated foray into the Balkans the
British premier could still, as Edith Durham remarked, presume all the
region’s Muslims were ‘Turks’.68 While few later observers made quite the
same mistake, the sense still thrived of the Islamic world as impervious to
modern nationalism (a presumption in which Britons had an interest due
to their dominion over a third of the world’s Muslims). If religious identity
in general seemed to count for more in Ottoman and ex-Ottoman lands
than other, conflicting bonds of ethnicity, this seemed most significantly
the case in regard to Islam. In 1898 the respected Balkanist William Miller
thought that among Bosnian Muslims religious affinities with the Turks
counted ‘for far more than the community of blood’.69
An aspect of British perceptions that is striking, in this connection,
concerns the social position of Bosnian Muslims. It was assumed, with
reason, that one legacy of Ottoman rule in this religiously-divided and
economically-stagnant region was an imbalance in the distribution of
wealth, and particularly of land. Whereas Catholics and Orthodox
constituted a substantial majority (the Orthodox the single largest group)
most estates belonged to a Muslim aristocracy. Since 1878 Austrian
administrators had felt obliged to adopt a conservative approach to land
reform in return for this class’s support in quelling peasant unrest.70 And
Britons were right also to note the social conservatism of this Muslim
upper class which, despite its elite status, tended to be poorly educated by
western standards. What was skewed, however, was the assumption that
Bosnian Muslims in general were of this privileged class. Typical was Sir
Charles Eliot’s view of the province’s population as consisting of
‘Mohammedan Beys, being Serbians who adopted Islam to acquire or
 RELIGION 63

preserve a privileged position, and a Christian peasantry’.71 Diplomats and

others likewise treated the Muslims simply as a privileged conservative
class, exploiting a Christian majority. The dominant feature of the
situation in Bosnia, the Foreign Office Historical Department’s post-war
report noted, was the juxtaposition of a strong, conservative, land-holding
Muslim aristocracy and ‘an oppressed Christian peasantry’.
The reality, however, was that this Bosnian upper stratum was small,
consisting, according to the 1910 census, of only 2% of the Muslim
population. While it is true that Catholic and (especially) Orthodox Slavs
made up the great majority of the class known as kmets, customarily if
loosely rendered in English as ‘serfs’, of the ‘free’ peasants a large majority
were Muslim.72 The latter’s standard of living ‘closely approximated that of
their Christian fellow peasants who were serfs’.73
This distorted view of the position of most Muslims in Bosnian
society served to encourage the British stereotype of Muslims in general as
unwilling or temperamentally unable to move with the modern world.
British observers, particularly among middle-class, liberal and non-
conformist circles, tended to regard Islam as inherently primitive,
backward and monolithic. To a progressive thinker like Arnold Toynbee it
seemed a ‘simplified version of Christianity lagging half a millennium
behind its prototype’. It was, he argued in a government research paper,
‘still in the stage of Christianity in the Middle Ages, when it was the
strongest bond of union between those who professed it’.74
Such pejorative assumptions about Islam in general led observers
into facile verdicts of religious ‘fanaticism’ among Balkan Muslims, a
tendency encouraged by the fact that Muslims had been slower than
Bosnian Orthodox or Catholics to give up traditional forms of dress after
1878.75 The picture of Bosnia as a centre of Islamic opinion ‘in its most
reactionary and fanatical form’, as Seton-Watson put it, seems not to have
been thought inconsistent with the common view of the South Slavs as
lacking, in their racial make-up, any innate religiosity.76 It certainly gelled
with the belief in an Islamic consciousness unified by what Toynbee
characterised as a pronounced hostility towards the culture and values of
the European middle class. That any such hostility was fully reciprocated
is indicated by his subsequent judgement that European opinion
considered Turkish rule over Christians a ‘curious anachronism’ in the
modern age, and even an ‘unnatural domination’.77 Commenting on this
report in the Foreign Office, T.W. Arnold warmly concurred with
Toynbee’s view that the Muslim (or ‘Oriental’) was inherently incapable of
modern administration. ‘The Muhammedans should recognise’, he
averred, ‘that the days of the political independence of Islam are at an
end’.78
But as Maria Todorova has shown, British attitudes towards the
Ottoman Muslims had never flowed entirely in one channel. A tendency
64 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

existed concurrently in aristocratic circles to view the Turkish ruling class

less as Muslims than as heirs to a proud imperial tradition, upholding a
code of honour and values much more appealing to the British elite than
the unruly pretensions of subject nationalities.79 More importantly (for our
purposes), a growing tendency in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
enhanced by the 1908 revolution of the ‘Young Turks’, perceived the label
‘Turk’ rather in an ethno-linguistic than a religious sense. The natural
corollary of this development was that the Empire’s Muslims were no
longer automatically bracketed as ‘Turks’, in the sense of being identified
with the imperial hierarchy or sympathetic to its ambitions. Where Miller
had assumed, as we have seen, a loyalty among Bosnian Muslims towards
Constantinople, ten years later Sir Charles Eliot denied this. The Muslims
of Bosnia, he insisted, ‘do not regret Turkey’. They embraced Islam ‘out of
policy’, and their ideas were ‘not essentially different from those of other
Serbians’. Islam could not override those more profound, racial affinities
and antipathies which distinguished the modern (European) world. All
South Slavs shared an aversion to Ottoman rule, and to the general
‘Asiatic’ indifference to good government. ‘It is in vain’, he wrote, ‘that
you offer the Asiatic liberty, security, and good government’, and in this
there was ‘a great gulf fixed between Europeans and Asiatics’.80
It is noticeable in this connection that the many writers who
criticised the legacy and present reality of Turkish government (and any
vein of aristocratic respect for an empire of increasingly obvious
decrepitude was certainly much diminished by the early 20th century) were
much less likely than their mid-19th century predecessors to implicate
Islam directly. The ‘Muslim yoke’ had invariably become the ‘Turkish
yoke’, the phrases no longer treated as synonymous. Increasingly unusual,
too, was the sort of direct Christian identification with ‘our oppressed
brethren in the East’ which had marked earlier British works.81 Lloyd
George himself, in the post-war debate about Turkish possession of
‘Constantinople’, denounced what he considered ‘something of the old
feeling of Christendom against the Crescent’ in the anti-Turkish
movement in Britain, an attitude he considered unbecoming of an Empire
with a substantial Muslim population. While hostility to this Muslim
presence in Europe remained, particularly among Lloyd George’s fellow
non-conformists, most of the British press and political world took the
side of the Prime Minister.82
How, then, did British observers interpret the conscious identity of
Bosnian Muslims within the complex of South Slav ‘nationality’? We have
seen before that, despite the identification of Serbdom with Orthodoxy, it
was often assumed that Muslims were in a profound racial sense ‘really’
Serbs. Influenced by the more audible claims of Serbian (as opposed to
Croatian) nationalism, Bosnia was accepted unquestioningly as being ‘by
blood, by language and by historical connection [...] purely Serbian’.83 ‘The
 RELIGION 65

traditions even of the Muslim Serbs of Bosnia-Hercegovina’, A.H.E.

Taylor noted, ‘were purely Serb and told of the glories of the ancient Serb
Empire’.84 Nor were the terms ‘Serb’ and ‘Serbian’ being used broadly
here to mean ‘Yugoslav’. Even in the context of intra-Yugoslav identities
writers made it clear that racially the Muslims (and sometimes the Catholics
too) were Serbs. A War Office report on Yugoslav unification broke the
population down by province into Serb, Croat and Slovene groups. In the
case of Bosnia ‘Muslim Serbs’ were, as the label indicates, included
unquestioningly in the first camp.85
But if it was generally agreed that Bosnian Muslims were Serbs,
racially and linguistically, harder was to know how this confessional group
perceived themselves. Unlike the Orthodox Serbs, and to a lesser extent
the Catholic Croats, the Yugoslav Muslims had no international voice.
Before the emergence of the JMO (the Yugoslav Muslim Organisation) in
the first decade of the 20th century, they had no political organisation at
all.86 While some British observers considered (or assumed) that Muslim
loyalties followed their alleged racial affinity with the Serbs of Serbia, most
detected no clear allegiance to Serbs or Croats. Their strong religious faith
– or ‘fanaticism’ – seemed rather to suggest a lack of ‘national’ identity.
The Bosnian Muslims might tend towards the Croat side, Seton-Watson
wrote, but they had really ‘no strong national consciousness’.87 Though
‘purely Serb in origin and in language’, Forbes agreed, ‘neither the
Orthodox Serbs nor the Roman Catholic Croatians have as yet been able
to enlist their political sympathies’.88 The paradoxical situation was that
this element of the Yugoslav population was both clearly ‘Serbo-Croat’
and at the same time, in its conscious ‘political’ identity at least, neither
‘Serb’ nor ‘Croat’. Indeed, the self-identification of prominent Bosnian
Muslims as Croatian Muslim or Serb Muslim was understood by British
observers, as it has been by subsequent historians, as pragmatic political
manoeuvring and no more than a superficial indication of ethnic identity.89
One prominent theme of recent historical treatments was, however,
distinctly lacking from British analysis. No credence was given to the
notion that there existed, aside from ‘Serb’ and ‘Croat’ identities, a genuine
‘Bosnian’ consciousness in which Muslims in particular took refuge.90
Though the term ‘Bosnian’ was often used by pre-war British writers, it
was intended, as we have seen, merely to entail residence in Bosnia rather
than an ‘ethnic’ identity. Any who presumed from such usage the
existence of Bosnian ‘nationality’ were disabused. Moreover, as a result of
Austrian attempts to foster just such a phenomenon as a counterweight to
Serbian or Yugoslav nationalism, they were dismissed as the dupes of
Habsburg imperialism.
Nationality theorists did not, as today, consider that ‘ethnic’ identity
could be multi-layered – that an individual could feel genuinely English
and British, Catalan and Spanish, Croat and Yugoslav.91 It was recognised
66 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

that a person’s sense of belonging was complex and rooted in a variety of

potential milieus (family, locality, class, religion, trade, gender, nationality),
but it was generally accepted that in the modern world this last had
become qualitatively different and had acquired an ultimate status.
‘National’ identity seemed unique in being grounded not only in subjective
consciousness, or in transient contingencies, but in the objective realities
of race and (its seeming relation) language. The modern view that such
‘objectivity’ is no less illusory – or ‘constructed’ – than other levels of
identity was largely absent from theoretical works.
And yet, examining the case of the Yugoslav Muslims, we do find
pragmatic assumptions which in some ways anticipate the trends of
modern theory. It was assumed that they were Serbs by race, that they
lacked a distinct language, state tradition or any other such qualification
for ‘national’ identity. But there appears nevertheless, in British writing, a
sense that this group must for practical purposes be considered distinct,
for no other or better reason than that they thought of themselves as such.
For the time being at least Muslims clearly did possess something of the
shared identity and common aspirations which characterised the
Orthodox Serb and Catholic Croat populations. Wartime reports, dealing
only in de facto realities, found it natural to refer to a deputation from
Bosnia as consisting of ‘a Serb, a Croat and a Mahommedan’.92 As
awareness grew after the war that Bosnian Muslims were not simply a
landlord class but were a socially diverse community, this pragmatic
assumption increased of a ‘Muslim’ identity, distinct from ‘Serb’ and
‘Croat’, conveying an ethnic as well as confessional allegiance.

The Impact of the War

We have seen that pre-war British commentators were accustomed to

attach significance to religious affiliation as a determinant of identity
within the South Slav group. (Though Catholicism might not have defined
a Croat in opposition to a Hungarian or a Slovene, it clearly did so in
opposition to a Serb). It was not the case that only the travails of a unitary
Yugoslavia after 1918 established the paradigm of an ‘ancient’ rivalry
between Catholic Croat and Orthodox Serb. We have also touched,
however, on the increasing emphasis given to race and language as the
ultimate arbiters of nationality in the period immediately before and
during the war, and the concomitant sense that religion was outmoded as
a primary category of personal identification. Nowhere can the effects of
this transition have been more evident than in the case of British attitudes
towards the religious divisions among the South Slavs.
In general this was a shift of which British analysts were conscious,
and which they justified by pointing to a change in attitudes in the
 RELIGION 67

Yugoslav territories. Indigenous publicists, like the influential Serbian

Archbishop Nikolai Velimirović (who wrote and lectured widely in Britain
during the war), talked fervently of a trend towards national unity within
the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and of an end to the sectarian
divide.93 Chedo Mijatovich insisted that religion had ‘ceased to be the
discordant and disuniting element in the life of the [Yugoslav] nations’.94
This message was embraced in Britain. Robert Seton-Watson eulogised, in
a preface to one of Velimirović’s books, the ‘new spirit’ awakening in the
Serbian Church, and praised the ‘great work’ of the Orthodox and
Catholic clergy in ‘kindling the flame of national feeling among the
Southern Slavs’.95 In his own propagandistic writings he was equally
unequivocal. ‘The old dividing-line of religion’ had, he insisted, been ‘well-
nigh effaced’. Only ‘here and there’ were the ‘last lingering traces of
religious fanaticism’ to be found. While as recently as 1909 the ‘ultra-
Clerical Croat fanatics’ had demonstrated violently in Zagreb, ‘four years
later some of these very men were volunteers in the Serbian army’.96
Another writer agreed that the Serb-Croat religious division ‘no
longer operates as it has done’. Orthodox and Catholic priests had
‘enlisted under the same national banner’ and ‘suffered in the same cause
as good Southern Slavs’. Under the strains of war a new-found unity had
been forged, ensuring that difficulties resulting from differing religious
traditions within a Yugoslav state would be ‘less than would formerly have
been the case’.97 And many writers marked the generational nature of this
transition. The war, it seemed, had heralded the ascendancy in the South
Slav lands of a younger age-group who, reared in a sectarian world, would
‘have none of such ideas’. ‘The old bitter Catholic Croat anti-Serb feeling’,
observed Crawfurd Price, was now ‘dead except among a few politicians
and their followers of the older generation’.98
In government and civil service the view was largely the same. A
conference report on South-East Europe admitted that the religious
divide, once fundamental, was still ‘not altogether to be disregarded’, but
concluded that the ‘idea of racial unity’ had now ‘to a very large extent
swamped it’. It noted the role of Roman Catholic clergy, especially among
the Slovenes, as the ‘foremost protagonists of Yugoslav union’.99 A War
Office report agreed with Count Burian that, over the Southern Slav
question, the war had acted as ‘a hot house for forcing plants’. Political
conditions in Croatia had ‘only been assimilated with those of the
Slovenes and Serbo-Croats of Bosnia and Dalmatia by the gradual
realisation that all Yugo-Slavs are threatened by Austro-German
domination’.100 Austrian Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, reports reaching
Whitehall in the summer of 1918 observed, had ‘never been so united
before’: ‘From the Catholic Priest to the Progressist the only cry is “Away
with Austria”’.101 Indeed it was among the Slovenes, who had been
considered least responsive to the call of their South Slavonic blood, that
68 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

British observers noted the most remarkable shift. A memorandum on the

prospects of revolution in Austria argued that, while the Yugoslav
movement had begun later in Slovenia, it had ‘gained ground even more
rapidly than in Croatia itself’, with the result that the hitherto conservative
and loyalist Slovene Catholic clergy now appeared ‘completely infected
with Serbophilism’.102
Among Croatian clerical circles, it was later admitted, the picture was
a little more equivocal: the clergy had not in fact been foremost in the
Yugoslav movement before or during the war. They were, Charles Oman
noted in a memorandum on the ‘past history and present aspirations’ of
the Yugoslavs, among those unwilling to accept the ‘new orientation’ in
Croatia towards amalgamation with Serbia.103 Similarly, Temperley
counted the Croatian clergy among those ‘undercurrents of opposition’ to
a united Yugoslav state at the end of the war. Though ‘national’, he noted,
they took no leading part in the Yugoslav movement.104 But as far as the
general Croat population was concerned, a different line was taken. In his
influential report on the Yugoslav problem of June 1918 Temperley
argued that Croats were nationalists first and Catholics only second. By
‘nationalists’, crucially, he meant not Croat but Yugoslav nationalists: an
identification, in other words, which eschewed religious community as the
primary mark of ethnicity in Yugoslavia.105 Pre-war reservations in Croatia
about Yugoslav union were attributed rather to pragmatic concerns – the
desire to retain advantages; doubts about the pan-Orthodox intentions of
Tsarist Russia – than to any strong, distinct ‘national’ identity.
And Whitehall officials referred routinely to the ‘ethnographic
principle’ which was assumed to bind all South Slavs in a single, indivisible
unit.106 (‘Ethnological Notes’ drawn up on Dalmatia did not distinguish
Serbs and Croats, but only Serbo-Croats and Italians).107 While, as we have
seen, Temperley’s important reports did allude to differences of creed,
script and so on, they also tended to assume that the guarantees of
religious freedom in the Corfu Agreement (the ‘Yugoslav Magna Carta’)
should allay fears of confessional strife, and that the Croats were, as the
Hungarian press reported, ‘saturated in national [ie Yugoslav] ideas’.108 In
his highly-regarded history of Serbia he was bolder. ‘The spiritual unity of
the Yugo-Slav race’, he argued, ‘has already been achieved’.109
As observers became increasingly impressed by a spirit of religious
reconciliation and unity, their portrayal of past history shifted. ‘Religious
antagonism’ in Serb and Croat history, the Foreign Office Historical
Department’s report on the Yugoslav movement noted, appeared ‘on the
whole to have been conspicuous by its absence’; the tie of blood and
language had ‘counted for more than religious differences’.110 Added
emphasis was given to those currents within both communities which
seemed, with hindsight, to presage contemporary ecumenism.
 RELIGION 69

On the Croatian side, this meant over-emphasising the ‘progressive’

tendency in Croat Catholicism – the broad-minded tradition associated
with Archbishop Strossmayer which stressed the racial-linguistic unity of
Yugoslavs over religious differences. In fact, as Pedro Ramet has noted,
late 19th and early 20th century Croatian politics were deeply divided
between this ‘Illyrianism’ – the ‘integrating, embracing strand in Croatian
national ideology’ – and an alternative, historicist project aiming to restore
Croatia’s medieval independence. Ultimately it was the latter tendency
which ‘became more closely identified with the Catholic church’ and
which, led by ex-seminarist Ante Starčević, ‘was in essence a Catholic
movement working for the political independence of a Catholic Croatia’.
(So consonant were the aims of the Church’s Croatian Social Party and the
Starčevist Party of Right that the two organisations merged in 1910).111
But British observers, particularly in the crucial late-war years, tended to
treat Starčević rather as an isolated extremist than as the representative of
an important and enduring element in Croatian politics.112
On the Serbian side it meant finding in a Church long portrayed in
Britain as absorbed in the struggles of secular Serb nationalism, an
opposite vein of broad-minded tolerance. One writer applauded the
Catholic clergy’s adoption of a ‘national point of view’ for which ‘the
Orthodox Church has always stood’.113 Given that the word ‘national’ is
used here to connote ‘Yugoslav’, this is a remarkable (and misguided)
transition. Crawfurd Price thought it in keeping with Serbian democracy
and political liberalism that religious tolerance had developed ‘to a marked
extent’.114 Laffan found it remarkable that a people so recently emerged
from Turkish misrule should be ‘so tolerant and open-minded and so
progressive’.115 An article published shortly after the war hailed a ‘spirit of
toleration’ in the Serbian Church which had ‘considerably facilitated the
recent union of the Croat and Slovene Catholics, and, indeed, the Bosnian
Mussulmans, with their Serbian brethren of Orthodox faith’.116

Inseparable from the shift in British assumptions about South Slav

religion, and the Yugoslav cause in general, was the change in attitudes
towards the Austro-Hungarian regime wrought by the war, which it is
worth pausing to consider.
As historians have pointed out, Austria had long been favourably
regarded in Britain. On a continent in which Russia and Germany had
seemed the most likely threats to British interests, this ‘ramshackle empire’
seemed rather a benign presence.117 A strong Austrophile tradition
pervades British writings relating to the Yugoslav lands during the pre-war
decades. Even those, like Seton-Watson and Steed, who would come to
advocate full freedom for the Empire’s submerged nationalities, staunchly
supported the Habsburg realm (while advocating its internal reform).
70 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Particularly pertinent to our focus on South Slav religion is the

portrayal by British observers of Austrian administration in Bosnia (a
region which in its confessional diversity seemed a microcosm of the
Yugoslav region). Pre-war travellers and analysts who described Austrian
rule after 1878 were markedly well-disposed to a colonial mission which
seemed vastly preferable to the Ottoman rule which it replaced. Typical in
his enthusiasm, William Miller eulogised this ‘model Balkan state’. The
region was administered, he wrote, with an ‘utmost thoroughness, which
forms an immense contrast with the slovenly government of the Turks’.
In a country fractured by religious confession, the Austrian regime had
handled delicate questions ‘with great tact’. Only its ‘impartial rule’ had
kept ‘the various confessions of the country at peace’.118
Other travellers painted a similar picture. With the arrival of
competent European administration the province had been ‘rescued from
Turkish rule’.119 ‘We in England’, another writer observed, ‘can form no
conception of the marvellous transformation effected here by Austria […],
nor even faintly realise the almost magical rapidity with which the recently
barbaric provinces of Herzegovina and Bosnia have been converted into
growing centres of commerce and civilisation’.120 Only a tiny minority
disputed this orthodoxy. ‘All the English and most of the European press’,
one such writer complained, ‘take its inspirations from Vienna, the
correspondents in the Balkans being all Austrians or Austrophil’:

Our view of Austrian rule in Bosnia is therefore almost

exclusively through what may be called the Kállaydoscope; we
read nothing but eulogies of Herr von Kállay and the
wonderful way in which he has developed a barbarous district
into a civilised and prosperous province.121

While it is true that British diplomats had opposed the 1908 annexation of
the province, in general such exceptions to the standard view of the nature
of Austrian administration were few.122 Murray Beaven was stating a
simple fact when he observed in 1914 that the British consensus that
Austria had effectively carried out the task entrusted to her in Bosnia was
‘not now disputed’: the region had been ‘effectively ‘pacified’’, with
‘western civilisation [...] substituted for oriental anarchy’.123 Sir Harry
Johnston warmly approved Austria’s ambitions in the direction of
Salonika and looked forward to her bright future as a Slav power.124
Even during the war there was never the animosity towards Austria
that there was towards Germany. But there was a significant shift in
opinion, which affected perceptions not only of Austria’s wartime policy
but also of her past administration of peoples now regarded as allies of the
Entente. In the face of vocal claims of national unity by leading Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes, it became accepted in Britain, quite contrary to
 RELIGION 71

previous assumptions, that the disunity long noticed among the South
Slavs had been deliberately and cynically fostered by Vienna. And as the
war dragged on, and Austria’s internal cohesion increasingly seemed a
target for Allied propaganda, British publicists enthused by ethno-
linguistic nationalism found ideology and self-interest in alignment. The
more the Yugoslavs were portrayed as a homogeneous national group,
bound by a powerful racial kinship, the more it seemed fair to assume that
in the past outside influences had perpetuated an unnatural disunity. Turks
and Austrians were found guilty of a deliberate policy of ‘divide and rule’.
From 1914, therefore, British accounts became much more reserved
about Habsburg policies in Bosnia and other South Slav lands. The
Magyars in particular, it was often noted, had inflamed religious
differences as a matter of policy.125 The strategy of the Hungarian Ban of
Croatia, Count Károlyi Khuen-Héderváry, had been, Seton-Watson
insisted, one of ‘playing off Croat and Serb against each other, [...]
inflaming the petty passions and religious bigotry of Catholic and
Orthodox’.126 But while Magyar rule in Croatia had been criticised by a
minority of pre-war writers, a widespread sense now emerged that this
direction had emanated from Vienna as much as from Budapest. ‘To keep
Catholic Croatians and Orthodox Serbians in antagonism with each other
and with the Muslims’, Herbert Gibbons argued, ‘[...] has been the Austro-
Hungarian programme’; Vienna had used the Catholic Church to ‘[divide]
the Orthodox Serbians in Bosnia from their Croatian brothers of the
Catholic rite’.127 The governments of Vienna and Budapest, Forbes
agreed, had in their South Slav territories encouraged the ‘rivalry and
discord between Roman Catholic Croat and Orthodox Serb’. In Dalmatia
and Serbia as well as Bosnia their legacy had been one of severe
persecution of the Orthodox faith.128 Marriott even implied that Austrian
rule in Bosnia had largely created the bitter confessional division. It was
bringing the Habsburgs ‘into the heart of Balkan affairs’, he argued, which
had ‘made a tremendous breach in the solidarity of the Yugo-Slav race’.129
It was natural for British commentators to connect the apparent
wartime surge of Yugoslav sentiment with the weakening of Habsburg
authority in South Slav territories (though such sentiment, as historians
have noted, was not marked in Bosnia as it was, for instance, in Dalmatia
or the Slovene lands).130 Observers surmised that such feeling had existed
all along, in suppressed form. The war had shown, F.S. Copeland
observed, that the political division by ecclesiastical demarcation was the
result of ‘mere external influences’. It had only taken time, he wrote, with
the teleological sense that infused so many accounts of nationality, for the
deeper bonds of ‘language, blood and temperament’ to overcome the ties
of foreign allegiance. With ‘the relaxation of alien force’, in the context of
war, ‘the various branches of the nation drew together again’.131 Another
72 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

writer alluded to previous favourable perceptions of Austrian rule, before

undermining them with similar arguments:

To the casual traveller in Bosnia-Hercegovina it often appears

as if Austria-Hungary had accomplished a fine work of
civilisation there. She has established good roads, good hotels,
and many other things […]. Anyone, however, who saw behind
the scenes and really came into contact with the people of
Bosnia-Hercegovina found a condition of seething discontent
[...]. One of the results of the war has been union between the
various subject nationalities of Austria-Hungary such as, thanks
to Austrian divide et impera policy, never existed before [...].132

The Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, expressed the same view in a

speech to the Serbian (Yugo-Slav) National War Aims Committee,
attended by numerous British luminaries in July 1918. Historically it was
‘the Turk’, he argued, ‘that really prevented the union of the Yugo-Slav
people’. And ‘what the Turk began Austrian bureaucracy has contrived to
complete’.133 His implication was clear: Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
belonged together by the laws of race and language, and would have been
so long ago but for the machinations of neighbouring empires. Only a few
sceptics, like Edith Durham, protested that it was divisions among the
South Slavs that had left them open to repeated conquest in the first place.
Most British observers, indeed, went further and blamed the prior
appreciation of Habsburg rule on deliberate misrepresentation. In
expressing contempt for the ‘barbarous, turbulent and unprogressive
Serbs’, Laffan observed, Western nations had been ‘largely misled by the
exaggerations and misrepresentations of the Austrian press’.134 Events
since 1912, Seton-Watson agreed, had exploded ‘the false and superficial
estimation of Serbia with which the news service of Vienna and Budapest
had so skilfully inoculated our press’.135 It was with the assistance of ‘the
organs of the Jewish press both within and without the Monarchy’, A.H.E.
Taylor argued, (‘for the Jews have for occult reasons been constantly
opposed to Serb expansion’) that Austria-Hungary had ‘filled Europe with
tales of Serb disorders, of Serb corruption and barbarism, and thus strove
to prepare the way for acquiescence in a further move forward on her
part’.136 Of course this was in part simply wartime propaganda. But it had
a real impact on the way Yugoslav nationalism was perceived in Britain.
Traditional patterns of denigration, based on assumptions of religious
bigotry and aggressive nationalism, were portrayed as – and increasingly
believed to be – the fruit of cynical Viennese misrepresentation.
It is not perhaps surprising, given intelligence reports of the growth
in Yugoslav feeling, that British observers should have reached the
conclusions they did. In the wake of the Pact of Corfu in July 1917, and
 RELIGION 73

events in Russia of that year (which calmed Catholic fears of a Russian-

imposed pan-Orthodoxy), the evidence for a dramatic spread of Yugoslav
feeling increased.137 But we do not need to question all of this evidence, as
few historians have sought to do, to wonder at the uncritical attitude in
Britain towards a phenomenon which had apparently developed with such
speed, and in the face of such obstacles.
Little allowance was made for the fact that many Yugoslav
spokesmen hailed from Dalmatia, a province unusually advanced in terms
of Yugoslav sentiment, rather than from the more conservative, Catholic
Croatia.138 Evidence of such sentiment was enthusiastically greeted by
British officials with little consideration of the differences of local
circumstance which rendered it greatly more potent, and socially
dispersed, in Dalmatia and the Slovene lands than in Hungarian Croatia-
Slavonia.139 Perhaps more importantly, there was a complete lack of
appreciation during the war for the fact that Yugoslav feeling, and the
easing of inter-confessional tension in particular, had developed in highly
unusual circumstances, and might prove impermanent once peace was
restored. A few well-informed commentators like Seton-Watson did
express anxiety, in their non-populist writings at least, about a Serbian
hegemonic strain personified by Pašić. But even these cautionary voices
portrayed this as the minority voice of a fading generation, rather than a
widespread tendency among educated Yugoslavs.140
It is interesting to contrast this complacency in Britain towards
Yugoslav ‘nationality’ with attitudes towards certain comparable situations.
Perhaps the most obvious parallel for British observers was the fraught
Irish question – a parallel so superficially close (a territory united by race
and language but sharply divided by religious identity) that it is surprising
how rarely it was invoked by students of the Yugoslav question during the
crucial late-war period. Here was a case, as Lloyd George himself stated in
July 1919, in which language and race had failed to forge an integrated
nationality: ‘in religion, in temperament, in tradition [...], in everything that
constitutes the fundamental essentials of a nation, unfortunately they
differ’.141 In December 1918 Bonar Law was asked in Parliament whether
a definition of the term ‘nation’ had been reached, and, if so, whether it
was to be taken ‘that the Yugo-Slavs are a nation and the Irish and
Scottish peoples are not a nation’. Since the answer to the first part was in
the negative, came the reply, ‘the latter parts do not, therefore, arise’.142
And while it is true that Protestant and Catholic Irish had not of late
shown that desire to live in a unified state apparently manifest among
Yugoslavs, nevertheless the unreliability of such impressions of mass
opinion during wartime was scarcely allowed for. Another comparison is
afforded by the following 1918 verdict on the Scandinavian question:
74 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

There can be no doubt that it is the stress of circumstances due

to belligerent pressure which has led to the strong development
of the Scandinavian co-operative movement. When the war is
over it is more than likely that the old jealousies and antipathies
will come to the fore and seriously handicap, if not frustrate,
the efforts of those Scandinavians who believe that the closest
cooperation in every field is essential to the future welfare of
the Northern countries.143

One need not insist on a perfect parallel between the two situations to
consider pertinent the contrast between this analysis and the British
reading of the South Slav situation.
 4

Tradition: British Attitudes to the

Secular History, Tradition and
Mythology of the South Slavs

For all the significance attributed to race and language as related

determinants of nationality, clearly they were not decisive in all cases. The
English language had not excluded a sense of American nationality, and
‘race’ could not be considered cohesive in such a diverse immigrant
community. In Alsace a population apparently Germanic in race and
language considered themselves French. Modern Columbians or Peruvians
did not feel themselves Spanish; nor the Brazilians Portuguese. (And
South America, like the North, was racially mixed).
Sometimes organised religion could explain divergent national
identities within a language group: the two ‘nations’ of Ireland, or the
Belgians and Dutch. And Croats and Serbs, of course, seemed a text-book
instance of a race divided by religious allegiance. But in the South
American states, Catholic like their former colonists, or the US, with its
diverse Christian traditions, religion was no more a marker of nationality
than language. Separate identities were explained with reference to broader
historical tradition, borne of long cohabitation in a well-defined territory.
In fact it was clear to theorists that no national consciousness could
exist without such accumulated tradition. ‘A nation’, wrote Sidney
Herbert, ‘must have a history’.1 And of course only artificially did theorists
separate religion or language from this secular tradition. All combined to
form what another writer called that ‘common civilisation which gives
[men] a sense of unity […] quite apart from the bond of the state’.2 (In
fact modern writers have argued that the symbols and rituals of national
mythology assume the overtones and emotional resonance of worship,
becoming in effect a ‘civil religion’).3
We have seen that race and language were attributed an objective
solidity since superseded by the idea of the nation as an ‘imagined
community’.4 The dominant metaphor was not, as now, the ‘construction’
76 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

of history in the service of national cohesion, but rather a nation’s

‘awakening’ to its latent inheritance.5 But despite lacking a sophisticated
theory of constructed identities, many British theorists – more inclined
than Americans to raise the voluntary element of ‘will’ over purely
‘objective’ criteria – rhapsodised the formative power of history and
tradition. Invoking the revered authority of Mazzini, Mill and Renan, they
emphasised origin traditions, past glories and sufferings, and the general
accumulation of habit and experience: the ‘possession in common of a
rich legacy of memories’.6 This ‘voice of the anterior humanity’ (Mazzini’s
phrase) remained, for one British disciple, ‘the strongest of all forces that
mould men into nations’.7 Another, Ramsay Muir, concurred, in language
whose romantic exuberance was typical (particularly during the war):

Historical achievements, agonies heroically endured, these are

the sublime food by which the spirit of nationhood is
nourished. From these are born the sacred and memorable
traditions that make the soul of nations […].8

Of course none could deny the importance of a nation’s history and

culture any more than that of its language. But for that influential school
which stressed the formative role of race, and saw in language the
expression of this genetic make-up, historical tradition was treated
similarly. Political institutions, literary culture, religious persuasion, military
aptitude: all flowed ineluctably from the innate racial character. Traditions,
as a later writer observed, seemed to express the true soul of a people.9
The ‘persisting and pervasive individuality of race’, wrote E.G. Murphy, ‘is
the ground and basis of [a man’s] essential culture’.10
This was an argument as hard to disprove as to prove. While British
theorists reacted against the premise of this racialist argument – the notion
of a racial purity which could meaningfully be measured or analysed –
unthinking assumptions based upon it remained widespread.11 Even for
those who were sceptical of racial analysis, belief in a ‘national character’
produced by environment and history remained strong. In a circular
argument, national tradition was seen as both the passive expression of
this character and as its decisive formative influence.12
Within the broad category of national tradition, theorists highlighted
elements of recurrent importance. One such was the sense of homeland
borne of long occupation of a defined space (or at least the idea of such a
territory).13 Another was the sustained existence of institutions regarded
(however anachronistically) as national: a tradition of state administration,
whether ongoing or the object of revivalist aspiration. Of course Britain
herself showed that unified administration need not forge a unified
nationality. But political sovereignty, aligned with the ethno-linguistic raw
materials, could foster national identity among a wider population – by
 TRADITION 77

education, improved communications, external conflict, and so on. The

memory, furthermore, of an historical state associated with a particular
nationality was a powerful spur to modern national ideology which could
romanticise that past, mourn its demise and invoke its resurrection.
As with belief in racial unity, some noted that the veracity of
traditions mattered less than their mythic potency: their enshrinement in a
nation’s legends, songs and literature, and in the rituals and paraphernalia
(flags, anthems and other iconography) of its ‘civil religion’.14 A
constructed past, however illusory, could legitimate a state’s existence, or
fuel a yearning for the territory and prestige of a former age. The ‘soul and
conscience of a nation’, wrote Zimmern, lay not in space and population
but in ‘a sense of great things experienced in the past, and greater lying
ahead in the future’.15

All of which is particularly pertinent in the case of the South Slavs because
of their obvious lack of shared tradition. ‘History’, R.G.D. Laffan later
admitted, ‘gave no hint of Yugoslav nationality’.16 This was illustrated at
the moment of unification by the varieties of administration and
infrastructure requiring amalgamation: according to estimates, three
banking systems, four currencies, five incompatible railway networks, six
customs areas and seven governmental regions (each with distinct laws,
taxation and forms of representation).17 Most strikingly, for over half a
millennium the Yugoslav region had been divided between the two great
empires of south-east Europe, Habsburg and Ottoman, with their
divergent political and cultural traditions – and both in themselves diverse,
as was evident within their respective South Slav territories.
A British wartime memorandum talked of settling boundaries by
‘historically established lines of allegiance and nationality’ as if this was a
single criterion.18 No contradiction, seemingly, was expected between
nationality as defined by recorded history and ethno-linguistic evidence.
The Paris Conference would find, of course, that such correspondence
could not be assumed. And historians have come to see the South Slavs as
a case in point: their ‘distinctly separate histories’ meaning the very term
‘Yugoslav’ was a ‘subterfuge’.19 ‘In 1918’, accepted wisdom runs, ‘the
Yugoslav peoples shared no common political philosophy and experience
out of which they could construct a new political community’.20
And yet (as we have seen) a strong and widespread sense developed
in Britain, especially during the latter half of the war, that ‘Yugoslavia’ was
being forged by an irresistible historical necessity.21 To understand this
teleological view, we must look at how the various South Slav histories
and cultures were represented in Britain in the early 20th century. How did
it affect belief in a Yugoslav ‘nationality’ in 1918 that the sub-groups
owned such divergent histories? In what ways did the cultural factors
which united them seem to render the prospective state a viable
78 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

proposition? And how far was British understanding of the multifarious

strands of Yugoslav history and culture either reliably informed or unduly
influenced by events shaping the region in the present?
It is perhaps not surprising to find a picture emerge similar to that
relating to religious differences: a shift in emphasis during the war from
cultural diversity to elements of a shared heritage; a change, too, in the
interpretation of South Slav history – answering the needs of wartime
propaganda but pervading also the work of influential British scholars.

A National Territory: the Geography of the South Slav lands

For many British theorists geography had played a crucial role in shaping
patterns of national allegiance. Not only was a sense of homeland central
to national consciousness, but this homeland’s features had shaped the
nation’s history and thus moulded its consciousness in the first place.
Cases were cited in which geography had caused the bifurcation of closely-
related peoples: the mountains dividing Portugal and Spain or the
impenetrable forest between Finland and Russia; and conversely, in which
it had promoted, or facilitated, the sympathy underpinning nationality.22
It was widely argued furthermore, following Montesquieu, that
environment more profoundly shaped a nation’s character and culture. On
such factors as climate and rainfall, Sidney Herbert noted, depend a
people’s ‘forms of government, their family life, their intellectual culture,
even their religion and morality’; it was obvious ‘how powerful an
influence making for consciousness of kind is common submission to a
particular geographical environment’.23 Even within a broadly unified
region, local environments created differences of outlook and identity.
The Balkans seemed a case in point: there, J.A.R. Marriott observed,
‘nature points imperiously to a congeries of relatively small states’.24
In the narrower South Slav region British writers presented a similar
picture, with geography accounting for the lack of shared political history.
Lines of penetration, noted Marion Newbigin, led through the region
rather than to its separate parts, with few cross-connections.25 The
difficult nature of the country, Neville Forbes argued, had militated
against fusion. Mountains had had an ‘immense influence’ on the region’s
history, as had river courses which failed to connect the Adriatic coast
with its interior. The effect of geography on early Serb and Croat history
was, he observed, ‘to emphasise the ethnographical difference between the
two peoples, which originally was infinitesimal’.26 The character of the
country, A.H.E. Taylor agreed, ‘mountainous and split up into a number
of comparatively small valleys, and mountain-surrounded basins’
prohibited national unity and ‘fostered a sturdy love of independence and
 TRADITION 79

a vigorous local life’.27 Indeed the historical independence of Yugoslav

regions was often attributed to geography: that of Montenegro, for
instance, its mountains a haven against the Turks; or of Dalmatia, its
mountain backdrop and Mediterranean climate distancing it politically and
culturally from its hinterland, a watershed sending the rivers of Bosnia
north and east, towards the Danube and the Black Sea.28
This divisive impact of topography was much stressed by wartime
advocates of unification, who found in it a neutral explanation for the
historical absence of that political unity they now espoused: one which
circumvented the argument that South Slavs, or Slavs in general, were
innately fissiparous and incapable of large-scale organisation.29 Geography,
Robert Seton-Watson suggested, had ‘acted on [Serbs and Croats] as a
centrifugal force and shaped their fate into varying channels’.30
Too great an emphasis on this theme, however, risked undermining
their case, a problem confronted in three ways. The first was to stress that
the Yugoslav lands comprised a single, contiguous mass: ‘a solid block of
[…] territory’, a ‘compact geographical […] unit’ (which, though true, was
no more proof of unity than in the case of Spain and Portugal).31 The
second, even less persuasive, was simple contradiction. Having cited
geography as a centrifugal force in the South Slav lands, Seton-Watson
wrote elsewhere that these lands formed a ‘natural geographical unit’, split
into ‘purely artificial fragments’.32 Leon Dominian argued both that
geographical diversity had hampered national unity, and that geography,
like ethnography, pointed ‘irrefutably to Yugoslav national unity’.33 In
such cases geographical arguments seem rather to have served a
preconceived position than to have informed it.
Thirdly, and most plausibly, it was argued that technological
progress had brought down the barriers of the past: that in the South Slav
region geography had lost its formative power. Before man could tunnel
through mountains, dry up marshes and render rivers navigable, Harold
Temperley observed, ‘the unity of the Yugo-Slav race was an impracticable
dream’. The map showed, he argued, that ‘the geographical unity of these
lands has only become possible within recent years’.34 Only in the last
thirty years, Neville Forbes concurred, with improved communications
and education, had all Serbs ‘become fully conscious of their essential
identity and racial unity’.35 This claim applied more convincingly, however,
to the potential for the future than to the meagre existing infrastructure.36
While, then, geography was often cited to explain the Yugoslavs’
divided history, it rarely seemed an obstacle in itself to enthusiasts for the
unification project. Insofar as it had fostered past political divisions,
however, it had clearly encouraged the development of distinct historical
and cultural identities existing within the Yugoslav region. It is these we
must now consider.
80 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

In his History of Serbia Temperley admitted that, despite talk of a

common future, to write a unified history of the South Slavs would be
‘like threading a labyrinth’. The only course, he suggested, was to focus on
one sub-group and to treat other sub-groups as they entered this frame.
Significantly, he chose Serbia and Montenegro, judging this ‘the most
important’ element in the South Slav story. ‘These lands’, he argued, ‘are
the core of that rugged stock which has preserved or achieved freedom,
[…] a hope and a beacon to the Slavs enslaved under other rulers or
imprisoned in other lands’.37 Serbs of Serbia and Montenegro, he implied,
had forged their own Slavic history, more relevant to Yugoslavia than that
of kindred peoples obliged to live under foreign rule.
It seems obvious now that to consider the Habsburg Yugoslavs only
as they impacted upon Serbian history, as lost sheep rejoining the national
fold, is no adequate methodology for treating the South Slavs as a whole.
We need to consider separately British attitudes towards the history and
culture of each of the significant sub-groups, before assessing their impact
on the broader picture of Yugoslav nationality in Britain at the time of
unification. Given that Temperley’s focus was predominant in Britain,
however, we can turn first to the history of the Serbs.

‘Guardian of the Gate’: Serbian history and culture in British eyes

The Medieval Serbian State

Theorists have often emphasised the importance to a strong national

identity of myths of a ‘golden age’: a period of perceived greatness for a
state regarded (however anachronistically) as national in the modern ethno-
linguistic sense. For the Serbs this halcyon epoch began with Stefan
Nemanja, whose state emerged in the late 12th century from within the
Byzantine Empire, and reached its apogee under his descendant Dušan
seventy years later. ‘Tsar Dušan’ exploited a Byzantine civil war to conquer
widely to the south and east, and at Skopje in 1346 was crowned ‘Emperor
of the Serbs and Greeks’.38 The state’s collapse after Dušan’s death in
1355, followed by the destruction of Serbian independence during the
century after the battle of Kosovo in 1389, rendered more poignant in
retrospect the short-lived glories of this great Serbian Empire, ensuring its
veneration by subsequent nationalist mythology.
Early 20th century British writers were struck by the immediacy for
the Serbs of what seemed a distant medieval past. One of ‘their most
remarkable characteristics’ seemed ‘the reality of even the most ancient
Serbian history to the minds of the people’.39 ‘Every true Serb’, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica noted, ‘lives as much in the past as in the present’,
 TRADITION 81

memories of past greatness fuelling the desire ‘for a reunion of the whole
race, in another Serbian Empire, like that overthrown by the Turks in
1389’.40 Such ‘grand ideas’, William Miller observed, ‘every Serb imbibes
with his mother’s milk and cherishes dearly’.41 The ‘glorious epoch’ of
Dušan was ‘more than a historical memory: it is a political programme’;
his conquests were ‘the title-deeds of their race to lands that had long
since ceased to be theirs […]’.42
This obsession with a bygone epoch in the service of modern
nationalism seemed to many in Britain a peculiarly (and pejoratively)
‘Balkan’ characteristic, and a source of the region’s notorious instability.
(Little attention was given, as we have seen, to the recent origins of
rivalries which were represented as age-old and irremediable). ‘There is no
quarter of the world’, A.H.E. Taylor suggested, ‘where contending parties
hark back to “rights” derived from so long distant a past, which not
infrequently represent a possession quite ephemeral in character’.43
In pre-war Britain there was little sympathy for this fixation with
medieval greatness. Miller was contemptuous of Belgrade’s ‘chauvinist
politicians’ captivated by the ‘barren and impracticable glories of the great
Serbian idea’.44 And attitudes towards the culture and politics of this
‘brief-lived empire’ were condescending if not overtly negative. H.N.
Brailsford was dismissive: the Empire’s literary culture, he argued, was
purely imitative, amounting largely to translations from Greek
ecclesiastics, while its architecture was either derivative of Byzantium or
built by imported Italian artists. ‘Their civilisation’, he concluded, ‘was
second-hand’.45 As for Dušan himself, the great king-emperor of Serbian
history was commonly referred to in Britain as ‘the strangler’ (an incorrect
derivation of his name from the Serbian verb ‘to smother’).46
As we have seen, however, Serbia’s image in Britain improved
markedly during the war in response to her spirited resistance, and views
of Serbian history and culture shifted accordingly. What had seemed a
backward fixation with ancient history looked instead like an independent
people’s defence of national traditions against overwhelming odds. The
Austrian assault on Serbia evoked parallels with the Ottoman advance five
centuries previously. Dušan’s state, like King Peter’s, became a haven of
democracy and egalitarianism confronting the might of a militaristic
autocracy. Modern Serb history, Temperley argued, was unintelligible
without reference to her ‘splendid and tragic past’: her laws and
institutions showing great promise, her culture perhaps too freedom-
loving and democratic for her own good.47 Medieval Serbs, wrote Taylor,
were no savages or copyists, and Dušan himself was no semi-barbarous
monarch, his famous legal code superior even to western equivalents:

The general position of the mass of the people was certainly

superior to that occupied by the similar classes in central and
82 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

western Europe […]. There was no feudal oppression, nor

feudal justice, or rather injustice […] and the French peasant of
the eighteenth century would probably have very willingly
changed places with his Serb brother of the fourteenth.48

Dušan’s Serbia, W.E.D. Allen agreed, was as advanced as the France of St.
Louis.49 Dušan himself was now hailed as an enlightened lawgiver and
statesman.50 The rise and prosperity of medieval Serbia, F.S. Copeland
proclaimed, was ‘the fairest page of Southern Slav history’. The Serbs,
R.G.D. Laffan recalled, ‘were a great people six hundred years ago’ and
deserved again to ‘take their place among the mighty nations of the
earth’.51 ‘Dušan’s empire’, hymned another, ‘may yet be built up again and
unite all the Southern Slavs […] under one sceptre’.52
What is surprising is that, for all the obvious imperatives of wartime
propaganda, British observers widely accepted the Serb picture of Dušan’s
state as national in the modern sense. Stretching southeast of modern
Serbia and incorporating regions of Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece and
Albania, it certainly had not united all the Southern Slavs. As Dušan’s
adopted title made clear, he intended neither that it should do so, nor that
it should exclude ethnic varieties. Rather, in his deliberate use of Byzantine
ritual he sought to maintain the imperial tradition.53 It was anachronistic,
therefore, for Neville Forbes to regret that Dušan’s boundaries were ‘from
the point of view of nationality […] far from ideal’.54 But few pointed out
that this was an imperial not a national state, or indeed that its duration
was short-lived even by the unsettled standards of the medieval Balkans.55

The Battle of Kosovo

Similar tendencies emerge in British presentation of the seminal event of

Serbian mythology, the 1389 battle on Kosovo Polje – the Field of
Blackbirds – at which the Serbian Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović fell. We
have noted the role of myths as bonding agents of modern nationality,
their potency unaffected (or enhanced) by the historical distortions
involved. If ‘golden age’ myths were often cited, and clearly applied to the
Serbian case, more strongly emphasised were those relating to great
national suffering or disaster. (They reinforced each other, of course: the
antediluvian years acquiring a roseate glow in the light of subsequent
misfortune). The memory of suffering and martyrdom, Bernard Joseph
noted, proved often more poignant than that of great achievement.56
And Serbia, of course, was much cited as a nation reinforced by
memories of defeat and adversity. Presaging her similar predicament
during World War I, Serbian accounts of Kosovo and the subsequent
Turkish occupation were accepted uncritically in Britain. A view was
 TRADITION 83

willingly propagated of the battle as a climactic confrontation between the

Ottoman Empire and an independent Serb race, causing the suppression
of a great Serbian state and the subjection of its people to centuries of arid
tyranny; a confrontation, moreover, not only between Serb and Turk but
also (a century after the final crusade) between Christendom and the
‘infidel’: the final attempt to exclude Islam from the Balkans.
Thus, while Temperley rightly noted that Serbs had fought in the
Sultan’s army as well as Lazar’s, helping to deal ‘the final blow to the
Serbian Empire’, most in Britain eschewed such nitpicking in favour of
the manichaean nationalist vision.57 At Kosovo, wrote Forbes, ‘Serbian
armies from all the Serb lands […] joined together in defence of their
country for the last time’.58 The Serbs, then as later, had stood bravely as
‘guardians of the gate’ between Constantinople and the Christian West.59
In the eyes of the South Slavs, claimed Nikolai Velimirović (the Serbian
bishop revered by Seton-Watson and others), Orthodoxy and Catholicism
were always fellow Christian confessions, united against Islam.60
But as historians have noted, to present this medieval battle as a
struggle between Serb and Turk, or a confessional clash between Christian
and Muslim, was wholly anachronistic. Such accounts conceived the Serbs
in a way in which they could not have understood themselves, and skewed
the sociology of a period in which such confrontations occurred between
‘alliances of feudal aristocrats of no clear ethnic or religious loyalty’
employing mixed contingents of mercenaries and vassals.61 Claims for the
Serbs as defenders of Christendom were sheer romanticism (as later
alliances with Turks against Hungarians made clear).62
Equally accepted was the Serbian view of the battle as a cataclysmic
defeat, ending at a stroke a period of political and cultural greatness.
Kosovo was ‘the great disaster’.63 It wrought ‘the utter destruction of
[Serbian] national existence’.64 In 1916, with Serbia again conquered,
publicists seized upon Kosovo Day as a symbol of resilience in defeat and
of the irrepressible national ‘soul’ which would rise again.65 The desperate
Serbian retreat through Albania in the winter of 1915-16 chimed with the
legends’ theme of honourable death (the ‘heavenly kingdom’) preferred to
earthly slavery.66 Such myths of suffering endured and final redemption
appealed to Christian writers, by their obvious parallels with Christian
doctrine. G.K. Chesterton hailed a nation with ‘that particular spirit which
remembers a defeat rather than a victory’ and insisted that ‘Kosovo of the
Serbians towers in history as the most tragic of such instances of memory’:

It was under the sign by which Constantine conquered that

Lazar fell in a failure that has been as fruitful as a martyrdom
[…]. There is but one religion which can only decorate even its
triumphs with an emblem of defeat. There is only one army
84 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

which carries the image of its own captain, not enthroned or

riding, but captured and impaled.67

Commemoration of Kosovo Day 1916 fired fresh enthusiasm for Serbia

in Britain, France and America.68 In Britain a rush of publications, by
Serbian and British authors, recorded Kosovo traditions and songs. The
historical reality – that the battle was one of a series (and not the most
important) by which the Ottomans conquered the Balkans, that it was in
the short term not a decisive defeat, and that Dušan’s Serbian Empire had
disintegrated three decades earlier – rarely intruded.69
Romanticism had entrenched the idea that in a nation’s folk
literature and music lay its ‘soul’. Karadžić’s publication of Serb popular
epics had impressed Europe’s literati, who vaguely imagined the Slav to be
as innately poetical as he was politically incapable. While all the races of
European Turkey liked ballads, Sir Charles Eliot noted, only the Serbs had
elevated them into a national epic: ‘the emotional and poetic, if somewhat
undisciplined, character of the Slav finds adequate expression in the less
formal styles of composition’.70 And during the war this restrained
enthusiasm swelled, seizing even otherwise judicious authors. ‘So long as
the songs of Kosovo are sung’, Temperley hymned, ‘and a Serbian exists
in any land to sing them, so long there will always be a Serbia’.71 (Bizarrely,
one writer even suggested Serbia’s borders could be defined by the spread
of the epic ballad).72 If the Orthodox Church had helped preserve national
bonds, it was these songs – the ‘National Muse’ – which had ‘kept alive
the spirit of nationality during those centuries of living death under the
Crescent’.73 For centuries after the defeat at Kosovo, the Balkan Review
enthused, while Serbia groaned under the heel of Turkish tyranny, ‘only
these heroic songs kept alive the soul of the country whose child was that
Tsar Lazar who chose a heavenly rather than an earthly kingdom’.74
One significant side-effect of this romanticisation of Serb history
was that British writers were happy, as a rule, to consider the Kosovo
region a Serbian heartland, though it had been reclaimed by Serbia as
recently as 1912 and was populated largely by Albanians.75 Since Kosovo
was accepted as Serbian sacred ground – one of the great ‘shrines of
nationality’ – it was assumed to be rightfully Serbian.76 For Arnold
Toynbee it was ‘Serbian irredenta’; for L.F. Waring it lay ‘in the heart of
Serbia’; and for H.N. Brailsford it had been ‘real Serbian country’. Though
Brailsford was surprised to discover a Muslim majority in the area, he
attributed this emotively to ‘emigration, massacre and forced conversion’.
Serbian soil, he implied, had been unjustly encroached upon:

Year by year the Albanian hillmen encroach upon the plain, and
year by year the Serbian peasants disappear before them.
 TRADITION 85

Hunger, want, and disease are the natural accompaniments of

this daily oppression.77

The Ottoman Occupation

Russian expansion made 19th century British policy firmly Turcophile and
Slavophobe. The assumption that all the South Slavs were inferior and
semi-barbarous was, as Maria Todorova has argued, ‘a stumbling block for
any solution of the problem of Turkey and her European provinces’.
British upper classes more easily identified with Muslim governors than
with their Christian subjects.78 By World War I, however, the
controversies over Turkish rule in Bulgaria, along with the diplomatic
revolution of the alliance with Russia, had wrought a dramatic reversal.
While British sympathy for Constantinople returned briefly with the
Young Turks in 1908, and while Balkan politicians and writers continued
to detect ingrained Turcophilia as it suited them, such an attitude is hard
to find in early 20th century British writing on Ottoman rule in Europe.79
Western scholars, Bernard Lewis has noted, have tended to be
‘influenced by the national historiographical legends of the liberated
former subject peoples of the [Ottoman] Empire’, to generalise ‘the
admitted failings of Ottoman government in its last phases into an
indictment of Ottoman civilisation as a whole’, and so to ascribe the
shortcomings of the successor states to imperial misrule.80 Nowhere is this
analysis more clearly true than in the case of British attitudes to Serbian
history. As sympathy for the Serbs burgeoned during the war, the
Ottoman period was characterised as one of oppression and stagnation:
‘dreary centuries’; ‘hideous tyranny’; ‘five hundred years of misery,
bloodshed and decay’. Europe as a whole must atone, urged J. Holland
Rose, for the ‘immeasurable wrongs committed since the Ottoman hordes
overwhelmed Serbia at Kosovo in 1389’. Overrun by ‘Mohammedan
hordes’, wrote Laffan, the Serbs sank for four hundred years into a deep
sleep: ‘the gross darkness of Turkish rule covered the land’; the Turk had
been ‘a parasite living on the industry of Slav or Greek peasants’.81 This
latter image was a recurring one. The root of Balkan instability, Marriott
argued, was ‘the presence, embedded in the living flesh of Europe, of an
alien substance […] the Ottoman Turk’. Though dominion in Europe
rarely aligned with ethnicity during the Ottoman period, ‘the Turk’ was
portrayed as an intruder in a manner quite distinct from, say, Austrian rule
in Poland or Ukraine, or Dušan’s rule over his Balkan Empire (which, for
all its Byzantine ritualism, had depended ultimately on conquest).82
W.E.D. Allen’s account was typical:
86 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

For five hundred years an army of occupation has held South-

Eastern Europe […]. A few years, even a few months, of
enemy occupation has a disastrous effect. Yet for five hundred
years the South-East of Europe has suffered this. When the
‘Turkish Night’ overshadowed the Balkan lands, all trade, all
art, all literature, all education, all social progress ceased.83

And it was this allegedly obliterative effect of the Ottoman occupation

which explained and justified, for many British observers, the Serb
obsession with medieval history. ‘Under the Turk’, noted one writer, ‘there
was no history’; Kosovo, therefore, ‘does not seem to the Serbs as though
it were a distant day’.84 Serbs and other Balkan races, Miller agreed, had
‘stepped straight out of the middle ages, after the long night of Turkish
rule, into the full blaze of modern civilisation’.85
Only rarely was this simplistic picture moderated by the sense that
Ottoman rule had once represented ‘not only military might, but also
wealth, status and civility’.86 Temperley was one of very few to question
the Serb nationalist caricature. Until at least the late 16th century, he
suggested, Turkish rule seemed less oppressive than that of a Latin
conqueror might have been; the lot of Serbian peasants under Hungarian
rule was probably improved by Turkish conquest in 1526. ‘As a race’, he
argued, the Ottomans had been ‘superior in morality to those whom they
conquered’, Sultans and peasants alike ‘men of simple faith, earnest ideals,
and heroic bravery’.87 Even he, however, made concessions to the
stereotype, bemoaning ‘the terrible effect which Kosovo produced on the
Serbs’, and stating baldly, in contradiction to his subsequent analysis, that
the Ottomans ‘were alien barbarians, with a lesser civilisation’.88

Independent Serbia 1812-1914

Leopold von Ranke wrote in his history of Serbia that the character of
Kara Djordje, leader of the first Serbian revolt against Ottoman rule,
recalled the heroes of the Serbian national songs.89 But British observers
were unimpressed by the parallel, not inspired by modern Serbia’s early
independence as they were by the medieval legends: ‘so remote’, Forbes
remarked, ‘that it cannot thrill us’.90 (Equally, perhaps, not remote enough
to permit the romanticisation embraced in the case of the Kosovo myths).
Certainly the Serb cause never provoked in Britain the emotional response
that the Greek struggle famously did.91
In fact little in 19th century Serbian history enthused pre-war
Britons, who portrayed the independent Serbs as a typically turbulent
‘Balkan’ people. While increased contempt for Turkish rule did elicit
sympathy for their difficult history, long confinement in an oppressive and
 TRADITION 87

stultified culture seemed to have moulded their own society and

government. They were not to blame, but they had ‘been brought up in a
bad school’.92 National consciousness, one writer observed, constituted
‘the only basis of European culture’ in the Balkans, centuries of subjection
to ‘Asiatic Byzantinism’ having stunted the ethical and economic elements
of civilisation.93 Serbia had seemed ‘the most volcanic of the Balkan lands’,
‘the least scrupulous and the least civilised’ of the 1913 Balkan allies, ‘not
exactly a credit to civilisation’.94 ‘One cannot say’, Brailsford observed,
‘that her political extinction would be a serious loss to Europe’.95 Only a
‘benevolent autocracy’, Miller thought, was suited ‘to an Oriental people,
lately emancipated from centuries of Turkish misrule’.96
The same pejorative assumptions dominate Robert Seton-Watson’s
pre-war writing. He cautioned strongly against the pan-Serb solution
advocated by ‘the Chauvinists of the Serbian Kingdom’. No one who had
visited Belgrade and Zagreb, he suggested, could suppose such a course
attractive to Croats or educated Serbs in Austria-Hungary: ‘the corruption
of public life in Serbia, the stagnation caused by embittered party factions
[…] and the interests of European peace combine to render such a
solution highly undesirable’. The pan-Serb idea would mean ‘the triumph
of Eastern over Western culture, and would be a fatal blow to progress
and modern development throughout the Balkans’.97
These aspersions now seem a little undeserved. Though portrayed as
backward in comparison with the Habsburg lands, Serbia possessed a
more democratic parliamentary system than Dalmatia or Croatia-Slavonia,
where the franchise remained highly restricted.98 Since the early 1880s
Serbia could claim a period of genuine parliamentary politics, with
established representative institutions, and parties defined by socio-
economic ideology rather than (as in Croatia or Slovenia) a nationalistic
stance.99 The constitution of 1888-9 had expanded the power of the
Skupština, abolished appointed members, assured secret ballots and
broadened civic freedoms.100
While pre-war British works often alluded to Serbian ‘democracy’,
and to the egalitarian social structure resulting from Ottoman
displacement of the indigenous ruling class, one must be sensitive to the
tone of these remarks. It is easy now to miss the semantic ambivalence in
terms such as ‘democratic’ and ‘egalitarian’ at a time before Britain had
adopted a universal franchise, and when most Britons accepted without
question the role of class differentiation in a stable modern society.
‘Democracy’ seemed a threat to Britain’s ‘cherished hierarchies of class’.101
Phrases like ‘peasant democracy’ highlighted the perceived primitivism of
Balkan societies lacking a refined class system. ‘Progress’, a ubiquitous
buzz-word, was equated less with democracy or constitutional rights than
with economic and administrative advancement. Miller’s condemnation of
the ‘folly’ of bestowing full representative government ‘upon an Eastern
88 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

nation before it has had any chance of obtaining a training in public

affairs’ was typical. The ‘unlimited’ or ‘absolute’ democracy of the Balkans
was a phenomenon to be deplored not applauded.102
In Britain such attitudes were vindicated and reinforced by the event
which did most to define assumptions about Serbia in the early 20th
century. The murder in 1903 of King Alexander Obrenović and his wife
sent ‘a thrill of horror throughout Europe’.103 The British representative
was withdrawn in protest for three years.104 Rather than an isolated crime,
it seemed ‘symptomatic of the depravity of the governing classes’.105
‘Christianity and humanity’, wrote one (not unsympathetic) observer, ‘are
at a shockingly low ebb in a country where such horrible deeds of savagery
can not only be perpetuated by the few, but also be praised and glorified
by the many’.106 For most Britons this was the only known event of recent
Serbian history and it naturally fortified preconceptions about the
Balkans.107 (‘There is little to choose in bloody-mindedness’, Brailsford
lamented, ‘between any of the Balkan races – they are all what centuries of
Asiatic rule have made them’).108 As one British soldier recalled:

When the war began most of us thought of the Serbs only as

Balkan barbarians […]. That horrible murder of Alexander […]
and his Queen, Draga, was practically all we knew of Serbian
history, and it stuck in our gizzards […].109

But while pre-war writing took a firmly hostile line on this ‘deplorable
event’, the war years again saw a significant shift.110 The incident, it was
now widely claimed, had been misinterpreted. ‘To an outside world
ignorant of Serbia’s great past’, wrote J.A.R. Marriott, ‘the impression was
inevitably conveyed that Serbia of the present consisted of half-civilised
swineherds’. ‘How false that impression was’, he concluded, ‘it has
required a political martyrdom to prove to the world’.111

In unison wartime writers presented the regicide as a regrettable but

necessary evil. The full facts, it was claimed, went far to palliate a crime
whose gory details had been ‘much exaggerated’.112 A tendency to mourn
the rule of the last Obrenović was displaced by a view of Alexander and
Draga as symbols of the indolence and corruption which had hampered
progress in Serbia.113 Alexander’s pro-Austrian leaning, little resented in
Britain before 1914, became much condemned as Austro-Serbian relations
were caricatured as ‘a prolonged struggle between the forces of autocracy
and democracy, oppression and freedom’.114 The ‘steady, enlightened rule
of King Peter, and the wise statesmanship of M.Pašić’ with hindsight
mitigated the sanguinary end to Alexander’s ‘troubled, autocratic,
irresponsible reign’.115 Noel and Charles Buxton’s assessment was typical:
 TRADITION 89

Though the manner of that regicide cannot be excused, yet it is

idle to ignore the fact that the extirpation of the dynasty was
but the symbol of a great national revolt against the policy of
subjection to Austria for which that dynasty stood […]. The
regicide policy was brutal, but it was a desperate struggle for
life, and the nation breathed freely when it was done.116

The great change in British attitudes towards the Serbs was remarked by
the American writer H.A. Gibbons. ‘What a miracle’, he exclaimed in
1914, ‘has been wrought in the decade since “an immoral race of
blackguards, with no sense of national honour”, has become “that brave
and noble little race, spirited defenders of the liberties of Europe”’.117
And as the general outlook towards the Serbs shifted, so did
pejorative attitudes towards Serbian society. In its primitive peasant
culture were discovered rare virtues. ‘The Serbs in their broken forest
country’, wrote one author, ‘have retained in their character many more of
the mystic qualities of an earlier civilisation’; a population of pig-dealers
were also ‘nearly all poets’.118 That ‘democracy’ which had seemed a mixed
blessing at best was heralded by wartime propaganda as a contrast to the
autocratic regimentation of Austro-German culture. Such despotism was
‘not to the taste of the democratic Serbs’, who, as before in their history,
were bravely ‘holding the gate of freedom of life, of freedom of thought,
against the sinister forces of moral enslavement’.119 Left-leaning writers
like George Trevelyan, opposed to the iniquities, as they saw them, of the
British class system, found in the egalitarianism of Serbian society
something to admire rather than patronise. In Serbia, he observed in 1915,
‘there is none of that division of class from class, such as you find in
western countries, nor any of that unwillingness to cooperate that is found
among the farmers of other countries’.120 The Serbians, agreed W.F.
Bailey, ‘are, and have ever struggled to be, a free people [who] desire not
the peace brought by the drill sergeant of “civilisation” – that tramples on
all individualism and national freedom – that grinds the souls of the
people and destroys their liberties in the name of progress’.121 They were:

the most democratic of nations […]. The cult of democracy has

penetrated every phase of national life. These descendants of
the men who led the Balkan races in the struggle for freedom
enjoy perfect social, political and legal equality. Their
constitution is of the most liberal, and religious tolerance has
developed to a marked extent.122

If this constitution related to the pre-war Serbian state, furthermore, one

can also detect a shift in British conceptions of the Serbian nation.
Observers had long recognised the aspiration to include all Serbs in a
90 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

‘Greater Serbia’ (and scorned this as primitive chauvinism). The project

was assumed to embrace the lands to the south-east secured during the
Balkan Wars, along with Bosnia-Hercegovina, southern Dalmatia and
Vojvodina. It was rightly viewed, in other words, as a Serb rather than a
Yugoslav project.123 But in wartime works little distinction was made
between this Great Serbian idea which had dominated 19th century Serb
thought and the Yugoslav one which had a heritage in the west but lacked
deep roots in Serbia. Not only was Yugoslavism presented as a natural
extrapolation of Serbianism, but the former was superimposed upon the
latter, rendering 19th century Serbian ideology Yugoslav in intent, and
removing any historical distinction between the two. ‘Of the Southern-
Slav movement’, Marriott wrote in 1917, ‘Serbia was, throughout the
nineteenth century, the most conspicuous and powerful champion’,
preparing herself ‘for the great part which she believed herself to be
destined to play as the liberator of the Southern Slavs, who were still
under the heel of Habsburg and Turk, and as the centre of that Greater
Serbia, the Yugo-Slav Empire, which is still in the future’.124

Serbia during World War I

The cause of these changing attitudes was a war in which, during the
winter of 1914-15, Serbia fought with more courage and success than
many Britons had anticipated. But the precipitating crisis, of course, had
done little for Serbia’s stock, the shot that began the conflict fired by a
Serb nationalist amid allegations of Belgrade’s complicity. Sarajevo initially
seemed another blot on the reputation of Serbia and the Balkans: ‘to hell
with Serbia’ a typical expression.125 And in Government circles sympathy
for Serbia played little part in the desire to avoid a large-scale
conflagration: on the contrary, there was strong sympathy for Austria over
the assassination.126 ‘If [Austria] could make war on Serbia and at the
same time satisfy Russia’, Sir Edward Grey told the Austrian ambassador,
‘well and good; but, if not, the consequences would be incalculable’.127
A hostile witness like Edith Durham could not forget South Slav
responsibility for the war.128 But for most Britons Austria’s full-scale
invasion, and her failure to crush Serbia by the first winter, caused an
upsurge of enthusiasm which effaced prior hostility. There was no
evidence, it was stressed, to prove Serbian complicity in Franz Ferdinand’s
murder.129 Any such assertion was ‘unworthy of consideration’.130 The
‘splendid pluck’ with which Serbia faced the ‘Austrian Goliath’ evoked
romanticised memories of resistance to the medieval Ottomans.131 The
Serbian stand, wrote W.F. Bailey in 1916, ‘had in it all the features of the
ancient wars of Freedom’.132 The idea soon took hold, furthermore, that
the root cause of the war was Germany’s imperialist ambition in south-
 TRADITION 91

east Europe and beyond. Sarajevo, in other words, was a mere pretext
(perhaps even deliberately engineered) for a long-planned assault on
Serbia, whose suppression constituted ‘a corner-stone of the foundation
of German domination’.133 For Seton-Watson, the reason why Serbia was
attacked was ‘not far to seek’:

Just as in earlier centuries Serbia lay on the route of the Turkish

conquerors moving westward, so today she blocks the route of
the German conquerors moving eastward. She is the holder of
the gate that leads to Constantinople and Salonica, the last
obstacle towards the achievement of that programme which
Germany has so long considered secretly, and is now openly
and boastingly proclaiming […] – the programme of Berlin to
Bagdad […]. The events of 1912, 1913, and above all of the
past fifteen months have for ever exploded the false and
superficial estimation of Serbia with which the news service of
Vienna and Budapest had so skilfully inoculated our press
[…].134

Serbia was now implausibly ‘the shining tower of the East, anxious only to
dwell in peace’, who had been ‘used as a stalking-horse for vast ambitions
bent on war’.135 A ‘martial inclination’ forced upon her by centuries
‘pressed between Turk and Teuton’ had ‘never shown itself in aggressive
action’.136 And in this context her success first in resisting the Austrian
invasion, and later in the re-invasion through Macedonia, wholly reversed
old pejorative attitudes. The Serbian soldier, recently dismissed as ‘a
slouching, ill-favoured lout’, now had ‘no superior in Europe’.137 He
combined ‘the heart of a child with the strength and technical skill of a
man’.138 ‘He loathes fighting’, wrote one representative observer, ‘but
loves – with the enthusiasm of a poetic nature – his family, his home, his
bit of land, and his country’.139 This unruly Balkan country had become
‘our brave ally, gallant Serbia’, producing ‘prodigies of valour’ equal to
anything in the war.140
Nor was it only successes which were turned to propaganda
advantage in Britain. As we have seen, Serbia’s fall in the winter of 1915-
16, and the surviving army’s dreadful winter march through the mountains
of Montenegro and Albania to avoid surrender, seemed a modern-day
expression of the Kosovo spirit.141 British soldiers and relief-workers
serving alongside the embattled and disease-wracked Serb troops wrote
popular accounts acclaiming their stoicism and bravery. The second
Serbian campaign had been, one soldier affirmed, ‘tragically glorious for
the armies of King Peter’.142 The Serbs were a great people six hundred
years ago, Laffan enthused, but ‘never have they been more glorious than
in their present humiliation, exile and disruption’.143
92 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Many of these writers, impressed by the Serbs’ martial qualities,

proceeded to elaborate upon the wider qualities of the Serbian nation.
‘Nothing in all history is more wonderful’, wrote Mabel St. Clair Stobart,
‘than the way in which the Serbian people have, during centuries,
struggled, then suffered passively […], then struggled again for […] the
ideal of race freedom’. In religious imagery recurrent in the writings of
relief workers, many of whom served with Christian organisations, she
hailed that ideal of freedom which had been Serbia’s ‘pillar of cloud by
day, and of fire by night, pointing to the Promised Land’.144 In similarly
ecstatic language, Alice and Claude Askew compared the tears of Serbia to
‘the bloody sweat that fell at Gethsemane’. This little nation had:

never been more glorious than in her moment of earthly defeat.

In the sight of the unwise she seemed to die; but she has laid
hold of life immortal, for the spirit of Serbia is unconquerable,
the soul of Serbia is uncowed.145

A leader in the Daily Mirror declared:

Serbia is ruined. Serbia, as at Kossovo, is defeated. But that

omen is now as then it proved to be – favourable, eternal, as
the omen of recurrent Spring after bleak Winter. Serbia will rise
again as she once rose from her magnificent dust.146

The Habsburg South Slav lands: one ‘culture-nation’?

The Croatian State Tradition

Croats, in contrast to Slovaks or Ukrainians, were considered one of the

Habsburg realm’s ‘historic’ nationalities: they could claim a distinctively
national political history, while their ruling classes maintained, locally at
least, a position of authority.147 Unlike the Serbs under Ottoman rule, they
had retained a layered social structure, presided over by an aristocracy
which conceptualised its privileges in terms of ancient constitutional right.
The medieval Croatian state had not, it was argued, been conquered as
Serbia was by the Ottomans; rather, in 1102, it had accepted dynastic ties
with Hungary while remaining politically distinct, Hungarian rulers being
separately crowned king of ‘Croatia and Dalmatia’. Croat identity was held
to have survived not just in the cultural field (like the Serb), but in an
unbroken political tradition from the days of King Zvonimir.148
British attitudes to this Croatian political heritage are harder to
analyse than attitudes to Serbia since the Croats received markedly less
 TRADITION 93

attention than the Serbs in Britain (as also in France) before 1918.149
Inevitably, an independent state secured more coverage than an Austro-
Hungarian minority. And Croat national traditions lacked propaganda
potential for wartime British writers. As a result reactions tended to be
more complex and ambivalent.
On the one hand Croatia’s hierarchical society meant that, despite its
majority peasant base, it avoided the negative connotations attached to
Serbian ‘peasant democracy’. Zagreb, with its long history and variegated
social fabric, had a culture which seemed ‘greatly superior to that of
Belgrade’.150 Centuries of association with Central Europe was assumed to
have left a lasting imprint: (‘latin and teutonic influences’, Temperley
observed, ‘penetrated deep into [Croatia’s] fibres’), a view which generally
conveyed positive implications of culture and stability.151 The
condescension of educated Croats towards a primitive and ‘oriental’
Serbian society was viewed sympathetically before the war. And many
post-war analysts would likewise identify with Croat attachment to
regional traditions and institutions in the face of a centralising Belgrade.152
Inevitably, however, the war which so changed British attitudes
towards Austria had an impact also on attitudes towards the Croats, whose
assumed teutonic influences and (many still argued) loyalties had grave
negative implications. While early supporters of the Yugoslav Committee
enthusiastically accepted Croat allegiance to the Allied cause, and to the
kindred Serbs, a strain of opinion in Britain remained suspicious of
Slovenes and Croats as reactionary loyalists to Catholic Vienna. During
the 19th and early 20th centuries, furthermore, a strain of admiration for
the Magyar aristocracy as representatives of a tradition of constitutional
liberalism (uncritically identified as the analogue of British
Gladstonianism) caused Croats to be cast as lackeys of absolutism for their
role in suppressing the Hungarian revolution of 1848-49, and in Austrian
attempts to frustrate Italian independence. (Mazzini, like Kossuth, was a
revered figurehead for British liberals). ‘It was the Croats’, Lloyd George
later recalled, ‘who had been used by the Habsburgs to crush and keep
down Italian liberty’.153 The enthusiasm with which Croats waged Vienna’s
war against their southern enemy after 1914 confirmed to some in Britain
that their dynastic allegiance remained pre-eminent.154
But while the Croats never fully shared in the prestige acquired by
the Serbs for their martial endeavours and stoicism during the war, and
(retrospectively) for their long liberation struggle against Ottoman rule, by
1918 the propaganda campaign of The Serbian Society and its affiliates had
succeeded in establishing the idea of Croat attachment to the Yugoslav
cause. For obvious reasons, however, the narrower traditions of the Croat
nation were less widely propagated in wartime Britain, according neither
with the pro-Italian view of the Croats as Habsburg loyalists, nor the
Yugoslavist conviction of a unified South Slav culture. Nevertheless,
94 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

among the few who contemplated it, the idea propagated by Croat
nationalists of the ‘triune’ state of Croatia-Slavonia-Dalmatia had an
appeal which might be thought surprising given both its tenuous historical
basis, and its incompatibility with the Yugoslav idea.155 (Medieval Croatia
was never, like the medieval Serbian Empire, anachronistically elided with
the cause of modern Yugoslavia).
In October 1914 Seton-Watson proposed that the monarch of a
united Yugoslavia ‘be crowned not only as King of Serbia, but with the
Crown of Zvonimir, as King of the Triune Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia-
Dalmatia, thus reviving the historic traditions dating from the tenth
century and never abandoned or forgotten’.156 The following year
Toynbee noted that, in any move towards South Slav unity, the first
impulse of Croats would be restoration of this 11th century triune
kingdom, and that entrance into a wider Yugoslavia would depend upon
large autonomy for this entity within a federative structure.157 Steed and
Seton-Watson’s manifesto for the Yugoslav Committee described this
triune kingdom as a genuine constitutional reality.158
On the other hand suspicion did exist of the historicist
constitutionalism which dominated Croatian political theory. Before the
war, while a few independent observers like Seton-Watson backed the
‘trialist’ programme espoused by Frankists and Starčevists (by which a
revived triune Croatia would be elevated to equal status with Austria and
Hungary), officials tended to consider this aspiration unrealistic and
inflammatory.159 As Robin Okey has noted, ‘a proud empire like 19th
century Britain was more likely to sympathise with the Dualist
establishment than with a Russian-tinged Slav nationalism’. British
reportage generally accepted those stereotypes imposed by the Hungarian
authorities, with the Croatian Party of Right represented as the Croatian
‘Jacobins’ and Starčević himself the ‘Croatian Parnell’.160 No Magyar could
be expected to tolerate a scheme which ‘would […] deprive Hungary of
the dependent kingdoms of Slavonia and Croatia, which have been hers
for 800 years’.161 Frankists and Starčevists seemed simply ‘chauvinist and
anti-Hungarian’.162
These groups were in fact little studied before the war, partly
because Britain had no representative in Zagreb and the Budapest
consulate provided only a sketch of Croatian politics, and partly because
they were represented as extremists out of tune with mainstream opinion.
Their intolerance towards the Croatian Serbs, considered by Seton-
Watson chief among the ‘grave faults’ which vitiated the Frankist-
Starčevist position, was also cited by officials.163 (If the ‘Pure Right’ party
hated the Hungarians, Esmé Howard noted, it seemed ‘to hate the Serbs
still more’).164 Ante Starčević himself, like Vuk Karadžić or Juraj
Strossmayer, was one of the few individuals associated with the 19th
century growth of South Slavic national consciousness with whom British
 TRADITION 95

commentators were familiar. But while Karadžić was hailed for his
linguistic scholarship, and Strossmayer for his urbane and progressive
Yugoslavism, Starčević was known (reasonably enough) for a vehement
Croat nationalism and a fixation with Croat state tradition which seemed
outmoded. With the rise of the Serbo-Croat Coalition suggesting a
significant new atmosphere in Yugoslav politics, this trait marked
Starčevists and Frankists as reactionaries, in spite of their radical aims for
the Monarchy. ‘They represent’, Howard noted, ‘the old Croatian as
opposed to the new Pan-Serbian idea’, associated with both a conservative
social agenda and a strong support for the Catholic Church.165
And during the war Britons increasingly enthusiastic about Yugoslav
unity became less sympathetic towards those whose zeal for Croatian state
tradition was accompanied by hostility to union with Serbia and
inflexibility over the rights of Croatian Serbs. To those keen to redraw
boundaries on an empirical, ethno-linguistic basis, talk of ancient
hereditary right and constitutional tradition seemed backward and ‘short-
sighted’.166 Seton-Watson scorned those whose ‘juggling with high-
sounding constitutional phrases’ masked a chauvinistic pan-Croat
agenda.167 And at a time when Serbs, Croats and Slovenes seemed only
branches of a Yugoslav nation, this emphasis on Croatia, however framed,
was not nationalism but narrow provincialism. The fact that an ideology
which emphasised constitutionalism and legitimism tended to uphold the
sovereignty of the Habsburg Emperor, furthermore, made it distasteful to
British observers during the war in a way it had not been previously. A
Croatian nobility which had seemed to represent history, culture and
societal sophistication came to seem not only selfish and reactionary but
even traitorous to their national cause and that of the Entente.168

Provincial Identities within the Habsburg Monarchy

i. Dalmatia, Croatia-Slavonia and the Austro-Hungarian Divide

It had often been emphasised that the western and eastern halves of the
new state were heirs to divergent cultural legacies. One effect of this was
to homogenise the Austro-Hungarian South Slavs in British eyes,
differences seeming inconsequential beside the fundamental Habsburg-
Ottoman divide. It is true that British use of provincial labels like
Dalmatian or Slavonian seemed acknowledgement of distinct identities.
This practice was widespread before the war and remained common up
until 1918. But this was largely due to ignorance of Austria’s ethnic
composition. Little thought was given to regional variations of history and
outlook, particularly in the context of Yugoslav union.
96 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

The most obvious regional division affecting Habsburg South Slavs

in 1918 was that which since 1867 had demarcated Austrian and
Hungarian spheres.169 Historians have considered significant the different
experiences of, say, Croats of Croatia and Croats of Dalmatia.170 In
Dalmatia distinct patterns of landholding, combined with the mercantile
culture which supported an urban middle-class, produced differences in
social structure most noticeable at the level where national ideology
originated and exerted most influence.171 Budapest’s inclination to forge a
unified Magyar state by undermining internal autonomies – while Vienna
was more decentralist – is significant: it was Croatian Croats, used to
equating their interests with legalistic obstruction of central government,
who were the least enthusiastic Yugoslavs and the most hostile to Serbian
centralism.172 The culture which developed in early 20th century Dalmatia,
by contrast, was characterised by a strong civic identity and an ethno-
linguistic Yugoslav nationalism rather than ‘state right’ historicism.173
To a limited extent British writers did note provincial differences.
There were, it was conceded, ‘latin influences’ in Dalmatia. Dalmatian
Croats, Seton-Watson observed vaguely, were ‘more complex’: ‘in them
the subtleness and aloofness of the Italian mind is grafted onto nature that
is at once childish and reckless, full of poetry and the sea […]’.174 The
mode of life of the Dalmatian Slavs, another writer noted, was ‘entirely
different from that of the Slavs of the interior’.175 And anti-Austrian
feeling was strong in Dalmatia, Forbes observed, in a way that (by
implication) it was not in Croatia, due to Vienna’s neglect of the former’s
economic interests.176 But little of significance to the Yugoslav movement
was attributed to such differences (that anti-Austrian feeling in Dalmatia
might, for instance, have fostered Yugoslav sentiment of untypical
fervour). The division of South Slavs between Austrian and Hungarian
spheres seemed simply an example of that machination which had sought,
in vain, to undermine their unity.177 It was suggested that this created
problems for Vienna and Budapest, but not that it did so for the
Yugoslavs themselves.178 Even the Slovenes, with their distinct heritage,
were bracketed culturally and temperamentally with the Croats, though the
Austrian-ruled duchies of Carniola, Styria and Carinthia were markedly
different environments to semi-autonomous, Budapest-ruled Croatia.179
In over-stressing the unifying features of South Slavic experience
British students reacted against the ignorance in pre-war Britain of the
genuine bonds and geographical spread of ‘Yugoslav’ culture. Regarding
Dalmatia, for instance, they confronted a popular misconception that the
familiar Italian toponymy (Spalato and Fiume rather than Split and Rijeka)
indicated a population of Italianate origin and culture. The controversy
over the 1915 Treaty of London also produced an over-emphasis on the
Slavic heritage of Adriatic towns like Dubrovnik which had absorbed
significant Italian influence.180
 TRADITION 97

That doubt centred more on the Yugoslav feeling of the Dalmatians

than the Croats in fact assisted the case for unification. Seton-Watson’s
response to an inaccurate intelligence report suggesting ‘Croats’ had little
in common with ‘Dalmatians’ is revealing. On the contrary, he wrote: ‘it is
notorious that the most ardent advocates of South Slav unity are just the
Croats of Dalmatia’.181 The fact that Dalmatian Croats were more
enthusiastic Yugoslavs than Croatians was presented, in other words, not
as a point of difference but as a confirmation of unity. Nor was
significance drawn, as a result, from the over-representation of Dalmatians
on that Yugoslav Committee which so influenced western opinion, and
whose claim to represent all Habsburg South Slavs was readily accepted.

ii. The ‘Prečani’ Serbs

If Croats and Slovenes were often elided in British analysis, this was
primarily in opposition to the Serbs, whose eastern culture was contrasted
with that of Austria. (‘The Croats and Slovenes have a Western, and the
Serbs an Eastern mentality’, Miller observed: ‘the result of their respective
histories’).182 But in this formula many Serbs, who had for generations
been under Habsburg rule, were misrepresented. For while the assumption
was that Croats and Slovenes were Habsburg in background while Serbs
were Ottoman, in reality the Serbs were divided between the empires.183
Despite this common simplification, British students were aware, of
course, of the many Orthodox Serbs in Austria-Hungary. The Ottoman
invasion, Taylor noted, had split Serb history into two streams: that of
independent Serbia, now emerged from its long occupation, and that of
those who had fled the Turkish advance into Hungary.184 Others marked
the intellectual role played by more advanced Serbs in Vojvodina. ‘It is no
exaggeration’, wrote Temperley, ‘to say that the Serbians of Serbia were
saved from despair by the Serbians of Montenegro and from ignorance by
the Serbs of South Hungary’.185
But in assessments of Serb attitudes, observers accorded little
significance to differences of background among the various groups. In
their national ideology, and their attitudes towards unification, they were
taken to be homogeneous. The mindset of Habsburg Serbs was, it was
assumed, conditioned by the same national mythology which had shaped
the historical sense and present outlook of their brethren in Serbia. The
Serbs had emerged from occupation, one anonymous diplomat observed:

[…] the most Slav of Slavs, and all the more Slavonic for
having been a Turk, an Austrian or a Hungarian, according to
the vicissitudes of the time. It would seem as though the deeper
the submergence and the more sweeping the inundation the
98 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

more does anything atrophied or alien get purged out of the

national character, leaving only the […] essential elements.186

Education in the Monarchy, Laffan noted, was organised on a church

basis, allowing Serb traditions to survive outside Serbia (as they had in
Ottoman Serbia) through the Orthodox Church and the folk culture
which transmitted an idealised Serb history.187 Constant intercourse
between Hungarian and Ottoman Serbs had, Temperley argued,
reinforced the idea of a single Serb nation.188 And this nation, it was
sometimes observed, was prioritised by nationalists over the interests of
the pre-war state.189 In fact, then, the British stereotype of Serbs as
‘eastern’ was not simply a careless generalisation, but argued a shared
culture which transcended the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier. Nevertheless,
by comparison with modern convention, British analysis undersold
regional differentiation among the pre-war Serb population which, despite
allegiance to Serbia and an almost universal Orthodox faith, was
characterised by marked variations of outlook:

The descendants of the soldier settlers of Austria’s Military

Border differed from the middle-class Serbs of Zagreb, the
landowning and professional Serbs of Voivodina and the
educated Serbs of Dalmatian towns; the Serbian bourgeoisie of
Bosnia from the tied peasants of the Muslim-owned estates; the
Montenegrins from the Ottoman Serbs of Macedonia and the
long-suffering Serbian minority in Kosovo; and all of these
from the Serbs of the kingdom of Serbia […].190

The suspicion with which Serbians regarded a seemingly alien central

European civilisation extended, it has been observed, to the Serbs of the
Monarchy, who were pejoratively labelled ‘Swabians’ (though it had been
the influence of European ideas, channelled by Hungarian Serbs, which
sparked Serbia’s national revival from the late 18th century).191
And significant for the early post-war period were the contrasting
attitudes among Serbs towards the structure of the unified state. The
distinct outlook of prečani Serbs, John Allcock has argued, was reflected
in the opposition between Radicals and Democrats: the latter (dominated
by Svetozar Pribićević, a Serb from the old Croatian military frontier)
espousing a doctrinaire centralism which reflected the fear of Serbs
detached from the national body of isolation in an autonomous Croatia.192
 TRADITION 99

iii. The Slovenes

We have noted before that the Slovenes, least numerous of the Yugoslav
peoples, were little noticed by pre-war British writers, and when they were,
were dismissed as a genuine nationality or as part of a putative South
Slavic unit. Given the plausible Slovene claim to a distinct linguistic
tradition, often considered a hallmark of nationality (albeit the claim was
not always credited), this may seem surprising. The theme of history and
tradition, however, is here particularly important. The crucial point, Seton-
Watson observed in 1911 (justifying excluding the Slovenes from the
‘southern slav question’) was that they had ‘no distinct history’.193
Slovene publicists in wartime Britain tried to shift this negative
perception. They traced modern Slovene consciousness not only to a
distinct linguistic culture but also to a medieval polity (the early 7th century
Carantanian principality) portrayed as a prototype Slovene ‘nation-state’:

The Slovenes were the first among the Yugoslavs to create an

independent State system. The heart of the Slovene state was
Carinthia, and to this day the oldest Slovene traditions are
preserved in this province.194

They recounted a long Slovene history of resistance to Germanic

expansionism (a theme of obvious propaganda potential at the time). ‘The
history of the Slovenes’, wrote Ivan Žolger, ‘is from beginning to end one
continuous struggle against the Germanic element’; ‘for over a thousand
years the Slovenes have arrested German expansion towards the South’.195
At the same time, the Slovenes were portrayed as the final outpost
of the west, frontiersmen of European culture on the border with an
uncivilised east (a self-image shared, of course, by Croats, Serbs and other
Christian peoples of south-east Europe). Slovenes more than any Slav
nationality except the Czechs, Vošnjak argued, were imbued with western
civilisation. Among Yugoslavs they alone could act as bridge between west
and east (another recurrent metaphor). Their inclusion in ‘Yugoslavia’ was
thus not just desirable but essential if it was to ‘enter completely into the
world of Western culture and […] discard the last remnants of Oriental
manner and Byzantine traditions’.196
But while the mythology of Serb resistance struck a chord in Britain,
this similar caricature of Slovene history failed to stick. Not only had the
Slovenes barely entered British consciousness, but they had not played the
wartime role which in the Serb case vividly coloured their national
traditions. British writers, far from regarding Slovenes as a ‘bulwark
against Germany’, considered them to have been for centuries – right up
to 1914 – decidedly Germanophil in their inclinations. They had, Toynbee
wrote, ‘been well treated by their German masters’ and had ‘no
100 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

independent tradition or civilisation of their own’. Ljubljana had ‘a

thoroughly German character’, and the wider province of Carniola would
likely choose to remain with the Germans ‘with whom politics have knit
the district for five centuries’.197
It was perhaps significant, given the elision of ‘Great Serbia’ and
‘Yugoslavia’ in British discourse, that the Slovene lands – unlike other
Habsburg South Slav regions – were unclaimed even by extreme Serb
nationalists.198 But with increasing British enthusiasm for a Yugoslav state
during the war, a more positive attitude did develop towards the inclusion
of Slovene populations. They seemed, Toynbee admitted, to have been
‘roused to active consciousness’ by that ‘wave of national enthusiasm’
triggered by Serbia’s victories over Turkey and Bulgaria; they might now
conceivably, for the first time, ‘take an initiative of [their] own’.199 Known
for their loyalty to the Emperor, Taylor wrote, Slovenes had come only
now to value their kinship with Serbs and Croats and to proclaim a
Yugoslav ‘solidarity and unity’.200 Yugoslav sentiment in Slovenia before
1914 had been ‘present but not conspicuous’, Laffan wrote, but had since
developed rapidly.201 Before the war, Whitehall agreed, clerical influences
and dynastic loyalty had prevailed, the Slovenes ‘quite satisfied to remain
Austrian subjects’. But having realised Austria was a German tool, they
were now ‘firm in their demand for independence’ and as committed to
Slavonic unity as their neighbours.202 (For all that Slovenes might claim an
advanced ‘European’ culture, however, they were considered a ‘long-
conquered and rather backward race’).203
If anything historians have tended to be more sceptical of Slovene
national consciousness. Natural barriers, and administrative fragmentation
under Austrian rule, had fostered a ‘mosaic-type pattern of small
entities’.204 The geological variety of Slovene lands, from mountains to
karst, prevented a consistent identification with landscape as happened in
Montenegro.205 Though economic development had begun to extend
horizons, the familiarity of region remained attractive, as the 1920
Carinthian plebiscite showed. (Integration in ‘Slovenia’, of course, was
scarcely less an unknown than ‘Yugoslavia’). Even for educated Slovenes,
higher education was in German until 1919, and key centres of Slovene
cultural life – Trieste, Vienna – would be severed by Yugoslav borders.206
And though Britons often lumped Croats and Slovenes together as
South Slavs of Central European heritage, historians have little credited
the publicists’ vision of two peoples living as brothers ‘from time
immemorial’.207 The fact that Slovenes lived in Austria rather than
Hungary had created a barrier to political cooperation.208 And even when
this came down, Slovenes resented a Croat tendency to treat them as
protégés not equals.209 As we shall see, furthermore, British observers
certainly overestimated the social penetration of the Yugoslav ideal.
 TRADITION 101

Varieties of the Yugoslav ex-Ottoman lands

i. The Montenegrins

If the Slovenes had an ethnic identity but no history, the Montenegrin case
seemed the opposite. Racially and linguistically they were assumed to be
pure Serbs. But their separate existence since the 15th century had wrought
a strong regional identity. If Serbian history, moreover, told of brave
resistance but ultimate subjection, Montenegro claimed a tradition of
unbroken independence earning it honorary precedence in the Greater
Serb and Yugoslav movements. ‘No South Slavonic community’, wrote
Toynbee, ‘cherishes so glorious a tradition as she’.210
In Britain, one pre-war writer observed, Montenegro had been
practically unknown before the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8.211 Ignorance
remained widespread. (‘I suppose’, Forbes was asked, ‘the natives are
black?’).212 But since that time the Montenegrin heritage had appealed to
liberals who railed at Ottoman obsolescence, an enthusiasm disseminated
in the speeches and writings of figures like Gladstone and Tennyson.
Numerous British writers cited Tennyson’s poetic tribute to those:

[…] Warriors beating back the swarm

Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,
Great Tsernagora! Never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and broke the storm,
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.213

In this ‘primitive race […] little affected by modern civilisation’ were

discovered those primary virtues of courage, stoicism and honour often
romantically attributed to such peoples.214 Harry de Windt had never met
a better fellow than the Montenegrin: ‘he has been called the “Afghan of
Europe”, and if the latter be as brave as a lion, generous in his dealings,
and the soul of honour, the simile is correct’.215 The Montenegrin claim,
widely accepted in Britain, to descent from Serbian nobles who had
escaped from the Turks, added to their romantic appeal.
And in the person of King Nicholas was found an exotic and
appealing figurehead for a country unsullied by modern life – a personal
ruler in the medieval fashion, who had ruled ‘wisely and well for over fifty
years’, and had led his troops into battle.216 ‘Amid the prosaic dullness of
the modern world’, Laffan enthused, ‘King Nicholas has been a striking
figure of romance’.217 His image in pre-war Britain was very positive. Since
1880, noted the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, the country had advanced in
prosperity under his ‘autocratic but enlightened rule’, the progress of
102 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

education in particular ‘very remarkable’.218 This, as we will see, was in

striking contrast to the contempt he aroused among officials after 1915.219
It is true that primitive virtues seemed offset by concomitant defects
(indolence, vanity, male chauvinism). The blood-feud, associated with
Dinaric highland culture, seemed to illustrate the primitivism and endemic
turbulence of Balkan society (though sociologists now stress its stabilising
function in regions of weak state power).220 But during the war the
Montenegrin’s martial reputation ensured a good British press even as
officials privately bemoaned his Government’s equivocal conduct. The
tradition of unbroken resistance to the Turks fed hopes of a similar stand
against Austro-German expansion. ‘Perched on inhospitable crags of
mountains round Cetinje and ruled by their bishops’, wrote Laffan, ‘a
remnant of the people hurled defiance at the Muslim’.221 From the walls of
the Black Mountain, wrote Temperley, ‘wave after wave of Turkish
onslaught rolled sullenly back’.222 Britons recalled that Montenegro had
‘for centuries alone upheld the banner of Christianity in the Balkan
peninsula’ against ‘the unspeakable Turk’.223 Only the British official in
Cetinje anticipated historians in suggesting that Montenegrin
independence under its prince-bishops was somewhat mythical.224
In fact the Foreign Office, in spite of popular romanticisation,
assumed before the war that Montenegro was not a viable entity, and that
amalgamation with Serbia was a matter of time.225 Before the success of
Yugoslav propaganda after 1914 Serbian nationalism was, with reason,
viewed as a pan-Orthodox ideology targeting Serb irredenta in
Montenegro, Bosnia and Macedonia. The ‘acid character’ of relations
between the courts of Petrović and Karadjordjević (each contemplating
Greater Serbia under its own aegis) was not considered to reflect popular
feeling.226 For all their proud independence Montenegrins, officials
persuaded themselves, did recognise advantage in a wider union.227
But before 1913, of course, the two Serb states had not shared a
frontier. And Austria-Hungary’s rigid opposition to union looked set to
continue frustrating Greater Serb aspiration.228 Only after the unexpected
victories of 1912 had yielded a common boundary did a brisk if staggered
union seem possible in spite of Austrian antipathy. Little store was put by
Nicholas’ desire to make his state viable by expansion into Albanian-
populated territory. His country, it was noted, could barely administer the
territories it had recently acquired. Reports of anarchy and mass
emigration seemed ‘not encouraging as to the future of Montenegro’.229

ii. Bosnia-Hercegovina

The complex history and traditions of the contiguous provinces of Bosnia

and Hercegovina defied any such black-and-white mythology as was
 TRADITION 103

accepted in Britain in the cases of Serbia and Montenegro. Parts of the

region had belonged, at different times, to medieval Croatian and Serbian
states, while it boasted significant periods as an independent kingdom (if
under varying degrees of Hungarian suzerainty).230 From 1580, with
sections of neighbouring provinces, it existed as a distinct Ottoman eyalet
(province), and maintained this status for the rest of the Ottoman
period.231 For early 20th century observers, however, its position in relation
to the Habsburg-Ottoman division was ambiguous, since from 1878 it was
under Austrian rule (before being annexed in 1908). While the largest part
of its population was Orthodox and so assumed to be Serb, furthermore,
this group lived alongside substantial Catholic and Muslim communities,
while the land belonged overwhelmingly to the Muslim element.
Sometimes medieval Bosnia’s distinctive church, with its allegedly
‘Bogomil’ theology, was held to indicate a tendency towards regional
independence, as was the autonomy enjoyed to varying degrees by the
district’s Ottoman governors.232 But the notion of a genuine Bosnian
identity was dismissed in Britain, particularly during the war, as Austrian
propaganda.233 Typically, as we have seen, the region was associated with
Serbia, whose claims were most audible, and its population was considered
purely Serb in spite of its confessional variegation.
Nor was this simply a question of race. Muslim historical traditions,
it was claimed, were ‘purely Serb and told of the glories of the ancient
Serb Empire’.234 Even for those few pre-war observers who still linked the
identity of Muslims rather with Turkey than their Christian neighbours,
their ‘Serb’ race and language meant they could be expected, with Turkey’s
retreat, to develop a Serbian consciousness. And in general the Muslim
presence served to fortify British visitors’ impression that the region was,
in terms of tradition, on the eastern (Serbian) side of that fundamental
boundary separating Europe from the Orient which was assumed to have
shaped both customs and psychology.
This left the Catholics who looked to Zagreb, and who supported
the Emperor, a distinct minority. There was no sympathy for the Croat
aspiration to include Bosnia in a revived triune kingdom, ‘a scheme of
aggrandisement going beyond their constitutional claims’.235 And in fact
even the Croats in Bosnia were assumed to bear the Ottoman stamp. ‘In
Bosnia’, Seton-Watson noted, ‘Turkish influence has introduced among
Serb and Croat alike something of the fatalist element’. 236 The region, an
official report argued, was ‘by blood, by language and by historical connection
[…] purely Serbian’.237
Insofar as Austrian rule of the province was concerned, it will be
recalled that the war promoted a significant shift in attitude: fulsome
praise for the progress achieved in a backward and divided province was
displaced by the view that divisions had been consciously instigated.238
Before 1914 Bosnian Serbs and Croats were assumed to be profoundly
104 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

divided, not only by religion but also by the national traditions of the
matrix-states with which they felt aligned. Bosnian Serbs in particular were
observed to feel a strong cultural affinity with Serbians and Montenegrins.
Back in 1875 (before Austria had had any chance to foster division)
Arthur Evans had noted that Serb national songs:

[make] the Bosnian Serb […] forget the narrower traditions of

his half alien kingdom in these more glorious legends, which
override the cant of geographers and diplomatists, and make
him see a brother in the Serb of the Black Mountain or Old
Serbia, or the free Principality.239

Later pre-war writers, well disposed to Austrian rule, lamented these

‘feelings of kindred nationality’ among Bosnia’s Orthodox (‘stimulated by
Serbian and Montenegrin journals’), and the internecine strife which
seemed sure to follow a Habsburg withdrawal.240 Diplomats assumed a
bitter communal rivalry. A combined protest by Sarajevan Serbs and
Croats against Hungary’s autocratic rule in Croatia had only emphasised,
the British consul noted in 1912, their divergent ambitions for Bosnia’s
future, and shown ‘how effervescent [the Southern Slavs] are and how
hopelessly divided by their religions’. (The United Muslim League, he
added, were guided by an ‘instinctive antagonism to the Serbs’).241
During the war, however, assumptions of hostility between the
communities in Bosnia dwindled as the Yugoslav propaganda campaign
caught on. What was emphasised instead, in relation to the Yugoslavs as a
whole rather than just Bosnia-Hercegovina, was the attachment of all
groups to a shared culture. ‘In their songs, dances, folk-lore and customs’,
noted one typical British wartime account, ‘[…] the [Serbs and Croats]
show their race unity’.242 The claim of publicists like Bogumil Vošnjak that
in their ‘racial, intellectual and mental life’ the three Yugoslav peoples were
fundamentally one made a remarkably quick impact. ‘Within a very short
time’, Vošnjak himself noted in 1917, ‘the idea that Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes form one “culture-nation” has gained general acceptance’.243
We have noted before the impact made, for instance, by the sculptor
Meštrović, whose interest in Serb mythology seemed proof that Croats
and Slovenes shared Serb oral culture, and a veneration for the old Serbian
Empire.244 (‘Meštrović the Dalmatian shepherd boy’, Seton-Watson wrote
to Herbert Fisher, ‘is the living proof that Kosovo means as much to the
Croat peasants as to the Serbs of Central Serbia’).245 Enthusiasm for
Yugoslav unitarism was greater, as we have seen, in the sculptor’s native
Dalmatia than in Croatia-Slavonia. But it happened that his work made a
profound impression upon Western Europe, and was interpreted as –
what it purported to be – the expression of a broader cultural unity than
had hitherto been appreciated.246
 TRADITION 105

In his War Office report Temperley remarked that Zagreb’s displays

of Serbian colours, singing of Serbian songs and cheers for King Peter
seemed a ‘sure indication of the pace and direction travelled by Croats and
Slovenes since the war began’.247 A little later he noted, more sweepingly,
the ‘great importance’ of the fact that ‘the peasants of Croatia have the
same songs, feelings, manners and customs as the Serbs’.248 It was not
considered that such manifestations might, as in the past, have expressed
hostility towards Vienna or Budapest as much as empathy with Belgrade.

iii. Macedonia and Kosovo

We have noted the complexities of Macedonian race and language which

left British observers flummoxed by rival claims. In general, while
Macedonians often seemed an intermediary group, there was greater
support for the Bulgarian case, particularly when securing Bulgaria became
an Allied interest. Though both had a claim to this ‘Naboth’s Vineyard’,
Miller suggested before the war, Serbia’s case was weaker ‘historically’.249
Some wartime publicists, enthused by Serbia’s medieval traditions, were
impressed by her historical case. ‘If historical arguments count for
anything’, wrote Laffan, ‘Serbia has the better claim’.250 Had not Dušan’s
realm encompassed the whole of Macedonia, its capital at Skopje? Was
not Prilep home to the legendary Serb hero Prince Marko?251 But to many
Serbian cession of Macedonia seemed the only hope for Balkan peace, and
her refusal the work of a reactionary minority. Seton-Watson and his allies,
for instance, blamed the Serbian Minister in London, whom they
considered a narrow chauvinist.252 They underestimated the sacred nature
of the 1913 gains in Macedonia to a wider political class.253
Foreign Office records of 1913-14 show awareness of the
substantial non-Serb population in Serbia’s new territories, and of the
problems it posed for Belgrade and the wider region. A campaign
undertaken to liberate co-nationals, Paget observed, had become one of
territorial aggrandisement. As the Serbian army moved into Kosovo and
the Sanjak, ‘a spirit of wholly uncompromising chauvinism swept through
the army and the country’.254 But Belgrade’s argument that the ‘various
nationalities’ could in time be ‘firmly welded together’ seemed plausible.
While it prompted one official to sneer that the new Serbia would be ‘a
jolly place to live in’, Sir Eyre Crowe was less judgemental: ‘theoretically’,
he minuted, ‘the Serbian position is not only sound, but corresponds with
what every other State has done in similar circumstances’.255 It was,
Crackanthorpe wrote two months later, too early to say that Serbia would
be unable in time ‘to assimilate her new population and raise the standard
of civilisation in Macedonia’. A contented population in Serbia proper
showed she could govern well under normal conditions.256
106 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

In fact British analysis of Serbian administration in Macedonia was

surprisingly divided. On the one hand, consular officials in Skopje and
Monastir repeatedly denounced the corruption, incompetence and heavy-
handedness of Serbian officials towards both the Muslim population,
many of whom had been rendered refugees, and that Orthodox peasantry
considered to be Bulgarian rather than Serb. An earlier prediction, wrote
Walter Peckham, that Bulgar peasants would be amenable to Government
‘Serbizing’ had assumed an administration superior to that of the Turks.
‘Unfortunately’, he added, ‘Serbian administration is infinitely worse’; after
experience of Serbia ‘even the Macedonian Serbs would prefer autonomy
to the certain evils of the present administration’.257
Discussing the Kosovo Albanians his colleague in Monastir,
meanwhile, found it ‘abundantly clear’ that Muslims under Serbian rule
could expect only ‘periodical massacre, certain exploitation, and final ruin
[…]’.258 Belgrade’s intention, he reported, seemed to be to compel
Muslims to abandon their villages, to expropriate their land, and to settle it
on Serbians returning from the USA. ‘The assignment of the whole of the
Metoya [Metohia] to Albania’, he wrote, ‘is the only policy which will
avoid infinite trouble in the future’.259 And nor was this ‘dread of
subjection’ limited to Albanians:

In Serbian Macedonia it is shared by the Muslim, Bulgar,

Grecoman, Vlach and Jewish subjects of a penniless State,
which, indifferent to the present and future sufferings of a new
colony and bent on satisfying its own immediate needs by a
barren system of calculated administrative robbery, is paralysing
agriculture, commerce, and education, and draining every
community of its means of existence to an extent unknown in
the blackest days of the Turkish regime.260

Accepting these reports at face value, some officials were shocked by this
‘gloomy picture of Serbian misrule’. ‘The conduct of the Serbians in their
new territories’, minuted one, ‘is really disgraceful’; only ‘the plainest
speaking at Belgrade’ could ‘save the Muslim population from being wiped
out’.261
But senior officials were unruffled, and doubted the atrocity claims.
‘Natives of these countries’, Crowe warned, ‘are notoriously unreliable
witnesses’.262 The Serbians, he noted, had administered their country fairly
well hitherto; and these territories had a chequered history: ‘Macedonia
has been the theatre of every kind of outrage committed by every
nationality there’. The same applied in Kosovo. ‘These frontier regions’,
he argued, ‘have been unsettled and the scene of tribal feuds from time
immemorial’.263 Trouble was inevitable, Arthur Nicolson concurred: ‘the
liquidation of the Turkish heritage, with the greedy claimants to it, cannot
 TRADITION 107

be carried through smoothly, rapidly or peacefully’.264 Officials on the

spot, Crowe agreed with Crackanthorpe, had become ‘carried away by
[their] feelings’; ‘the atmosphere of the Balkans’, he wrote loftily, ‘tends to
exaggeration even in the case of British vice-consuls’.265 A proposal to
condemn Serbian misgovernment publicly was firmly quashed.266
Of particular interest here is Whitehall’s attitude towards the
national identity of Muslim refugees. The only ‘satisfactory and lasting
solution’, Crackanthorpe advised, was ‘the emigration of these destitutes
to their own country’.267 Britain, Crowe insisted, was not the guardian of
Serbia’s Muslim subjects: ‘it is really for the Turkish government and not
for HMG to take up the matter of [these] oppressive measures’.268 Unlike
the Muslims of Bosnia, in other words, whose Yugoslav identity was
recognised in Britain (even if their ultimate allegiance was at times in
doubt), Muslims in Macedonia continued to be seen essentially as Turks,
for whose decent treatment in Serbia Constantinople should look out.
During the war discussion in Britain focused on a Yugoslav state,
and little was said about non-Serb minorities in Macedonia or Kosovo.
Amid the controversial union of Serbia with Montenegro, and of Serbia
with the Habsburg provinces, (and with Croats and Slovenes reluctant to
raise an issue unimportant to them), the fate of a recognised Serbian
region barely arose, and was certainly not treated as a ‘national problem’ in
its own right.269 (As Sir James Headlam Morley later noted, the minorities
treaties drawn up after the war did not apply to old Serbian territory: in
Macedonia ‘[the Serbs] would be allowed to do what they liked’).270

The Existence of Yugoslav Consciousness

We have noted the emphasis many British theorists of nationality, for all
their concern with ‘objective’ attributes such as race or language, placed
upon ‘will’. After all, if the latter could scarcely exist without the former,
peoples with similar racial and cultural characteristics had often lacked a
conscious shared identity. This was what Ramsay Muir meant when he
wrote that a nation must prove its right to existence ‘by a show of
unshakeable will’.271 And, crucially, it is this criterion by which the notion
of a single Yugoslav nation in 1918 has failed to convince many modern
historians. In the Yugoslav lands at the time of unification, Ivo Lederer
has suggested, ‘no such state of mind obtained’.272
In this respect, as in others, the years of the world war (and, to some
extent, the preceding Balkan Wars) saw a dramatic shift in British attitudes
towards South Slav unity. Even an enthusiast for Yugoslav amalgamation
like Seton-Watson had been reserved before the war about a union
embracing the independent states of Serbia and Montenegro. He (and
others like Steed) had emphasised not only the Habsburg Empire’s
108 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

geopolitical importance but also the real differences of psychology and

experience dividing the western Yugoslav population from their brethren
in the ex-Ottoman East.
Pre-war diplomats stressed divisions between Serb and Croat,
Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim, above any shared racial and cultural
inheritance. ‘Old jealousies between Serbs and Croats and Muslims’,
reported the consul in Sarajevo, were liable to ‘break out on the least
provocation’.273 To Esmé Howard in Budapest (his words reflecting a
Hungarian viewpoint) the ‘danger’ of pan-Slav co-operation in Croatia
remained a ‘bogey’; despite much talk of ‘national aspirations’ and the
‘South Slav idea’ there seemed ‘little or no probability of the South Slavs
making a united effort in any one given direction’.274 And even the
Dalmatian Slavs recognised, the vice-consul in Dubrovnik reported, ‘that
their past hopes [of an independent Slav kingdom] are futile’. ‘Their
aspirations are nebulous’, one official in London concluded.275
From early 1912 Yugoslav feeling did seem to be increasing. The
suspension of the Croatian constitution, Paget reported from Belgrade,
had excited fresh animosity against Austria and ‘revivified the idea of
Southern Slav Union and Solidarity’. ‘This South Slav movement’, Arthur
Nicolson minuted, ‘is not one that can be disregarded’.276 Among
Habsburg Yugoslavs Serbia’s victories in the Balkan Wars aroused obvious
enthusiasm. An Austrian, one official recalled, had insisted that Serbs and
Croats of the Monarchy hated each other too much to combine, let alone
with the Serbians. ‘He was wrong’, he observed, ‘for though they were
opposed for many years they have joined together and just at the time
when the success of independent Serbia has rendered her a far more
important nation than she was two years ago’.277 Seton-Watson recalled
the ‘indescribable wave of enthusiasm’ he had witnessed in Dalmatia at the
news of Serbia’s victories.278
Pre-war officials remained cautious, however. Serbs, de Salis
reported, had been ‘deeply stirred’ by the successes of their race. But while
these had at first enthused all elements of the Serbo-Croat Coalition, he
wrote, ‘the intolerance of the Orthodox in victory tended to alienate the
sympathies of the strong clerical element among the Catholic Croats,
inspired rather by anger against Austria or Hungary than by any real
affection for the Serbs on either side of the frontier’.279 It was impossible,
Cartwright agreed, to gauge disloyal sentiment among Austrian Slavs
during the first Balkan War:

It was undoubtedly greater than was admitted by official circles,

but was probably also exaggerated by Slav enthusiasts. The
difference of religion must always be a bar between the Slavs of
Austria and those of the Balkans […].280
 TRADITION 109

During the war (and particularly 1917-18), however, officials accepted

propagandist claims about the rapid growth of Yugoslav sentiment both in
Serbia and Austria-Hungary. Temperley noted ‘the pace and direction
travelled by Croats and Slovenes since the war began’. While pre-war
Yugoslav feeling had been ‘largely sentimental’ except in Dalmatia, Bosnia
and Serbia, circumstances had now ‘led Croatia and the Slovenes to forget
their particularist interests and to fling in their lot with the other Yugo-
Slavs’.281 The feeling was that, as a leader in Le Temps put it, sufferings
endured in common had set the seal on Yugoslav unity.282
And the same was even more true of independent writers in Britain,
for whom pan-Slav propaganda revealed ‘the intense national
consciousness of the South Slavonic race’.283 Its very recent emergence did
not seem, during the war at least, to cast any doubt upon its deep roots or
enduring nature. The fact that Czechs and Slovaks had ‘never shared a
common tradition’ was significant, Toynbee observed, given that they
gave ‘few indications at present of a common national consciousness’; but
the possibility of amalgamation remained: ‘the relation of the Croats to the
Serbs remained precisely parallel till as recently as 1912’.284 The seeming
contradiction (and wishful thinking) in the analysis of George MacAdam
was representative, if extreme. Having noted that a united Yugoslavia
would be ‘one of the most striking examples of the creation of a nation
founded upon racial kinship, whose boundaries are fixed by ethnic
limitation’, he went on to remark that there was in fact ‘no such thing as a
“Jugo-Slav”’, it being ‘simply a handy term of inclusion’ for peoples who
would identify themselves first as Serbs, Croats or Slovenes. Nevertheless,
he continued, the forces seen during the war – as at the conference at
Corfu – were ‘apparently making for the welding of the Jugo-Slavs into a
compact, strong nation’.285
Insofar as differences of culture and temperament did continue to
be noticed, moreover, they were seen as complementary rather than
problematic. Supilo’s argument that Yugoslavia could be the ‘harmonious
product of all our national strengths’ was echoed in British writing.286 ‘If
Serbia is the steel which struck thought into flame’, Temperley argued (in
a bizarrely tangled metaphor), ‘Croatia is the flint enclosing the spiritual
fire’.287 More prosaically, General Plunkett, the military attaché in
Belgrade, foresaw a fruitful division of labour: ‘the Serbians will provide
higher military training and organisation while the standard of living in
Serbia should be raised to the greater culture and learning of the Croats
and Slovenes […]’.288 Seton-Watson, his sons have argued, did not believe
in ‘a single, artificially stitched together “Yugoslav nation”’, but in ‘one
state with three nations’, which ‘must live together as equals as the English
and Scots lived together as equals in Great Britain’.289
Of course evidence of intellectual opinion available to British
observers did suggest enthusiasm for the Yugoslav ideal (though the four
110 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

official centres of Yugoslav activity commonly differed in their approach

to it, and it is now becoming clear that Yugoslav sentiment – before as
well as during the war – often coexisted with, rather than effacing, older
mindsets of Habsburg dynastic allegiance or Croatian ‘State right’).290
What is surprising, however, is how rarely its social permeation was
analysed, given that historians have seriously questioned the degree to
which the population at large identified with a broader Yugoslav nation.
‘Yugoslavism’, Dimitrije Djordjević has noted, had originated as a rational
intellectual creation rather than an inborn or emotional national feeling.291
The notion of ‘Jugoslaventsvo’, Ivo Lederer agrees, ‘was by no means
comparable to the emotional poignancy of Italianitá or Deutschtum’,
however effective the symbolisation of Serbia as the Piedmont of the
Southern Slavs.292 While the Yugoslav political ideal made strong progress
in Dalmatia and the Slovene lands during the war, Mark Cornwall has
similarly argued, the same sort of mass mobilisation did not occur in
Croatia: ‘Croatia […] was taken into the Yugoslav state by its intelligentsia,
but they had failed to carry the masses with them’.293
Contemporary British accounts made little distinction between elite
and mass opinion, or between that of zealous exiles and the populations
they claimed to represent. One war office report did caution that ‘large
sections of the masses are not educated enough to achieve national
aspirations or to produce social revolution’, describing such ignorance as
‘the firmest sheet-anchor of the existing regime’.294 But in official and
unofficial writing such caveats were few.295 It seems to have been assumed
that, as education improved, mass opinion would move towards that of
the elite. Politics, it was still presumed, was an elite preoccupation. Little
allowance was made for the fact that national movements were by
definition democratic (in their appeal to a wide constituency which
broadened the social basis of politics, if not in their solicitude for
individual rights); nor that, needing to appeal to a mass electorate, elite
opinion was as likely to be shaped by peasant allegiances as to shape them.
In a new era of mass suffrage the British assumption that nation-states
emerged in accordance with an inner historical necessity was an unhelpful
model for a Yugoslavia whose creation was, as John Allcock has noted,
negotiated pragmatically by cliques with little reference to popular opinion,
but which would be strongly influenced by this popular opinion in its
future constitutional direction.296

During the final months of the war, and the period which immediately
followed, the tensions first between the Serbian Government and the
Yugoslav Committee, then between the central Yugoslav Government and
the non-Serb provinces, forced a shift in British perceptions. Fears of
Serbian hegemonism produced a revived emphasis on differing traditions,
histories and identities in the various South Slav regions (and a
 TRADITION 111

correspondingly reduced emphasis on shared race and language as

sufficient national characteristics). This period, however, we will consider
in a subsequent chapter.
 Part II

The New State of Yugoslavia in British

Foreign Policy, 1914-1921
 Introduction
Having attempted a thematic study of the elements of Yugoslav
nationality as they were interpreted in Britain before and during World
War I, we must turn to the development of the Yugoslav question during
and immediately after the war. Since we will be dealing less with
background attitudes and preconceptions, and more with specific
responses to political and military events, it will be best to shift from a
thematic approach to one more carefully chronological. Since,
furthermore, the great majority of detailed information available in Britain
about the fluid and unstable Yugoslav situation between 1914 and 1921
took the form of confidential government reports, the focus must now
narrow. Thus, the ensuing chapters will constitute less an analysis of
British attitudes in general than a more conventional study of the
formulation and evolution of official British foreign policy.
The purpose of the preceding chapters, however, was to explore
such underlying presumptions as existed in Britain regarding Yugoslav
nationality questions – in Whitehall as much as among the general
population. It is important therefore that their conclusions are borne in
mind as we explore British policy development. It may naturally be
difficult, without direct evidence, to prove that the responses of a
particular official, or of a department in general, were shaped by the
common preconceptions we have explored. But assumptions which are
widespread and taken for granted are quite liable to remain unspoken – or
unwritten. This need not mean that they were not influential.
Crucially, moreover, the latter period of the war saw an important
shift in the relationship between foreign policy and public opinion in
Britain, which makes it more than mere presumption to think that many
of those attitudes we have analysed in preceding chapters did exert an
increasingly telling influence in policy-making circles.
Before 1914 there had been, as we have seen, little consistent
interest among even the more educated strata of society in matters of
international politics, particularly regarding regions such as the Balkans in
which Britain appeared to have little directly at stake. Senior officials –
who themselves paid little concerted attention to the internal affairs of
small Eastern European states, or to the national struggles of their kindred
populations within the multinational Empires – certainly had little reason
to heed the opinions of unofficial British observers. Minimal use was
made of independent academics, journalists or travellers who might have
provided insights into the history or politics of little-known peoples and
116 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

regions. There was, as Zara Steiner has observed, a clear distinction

between the professional diplomat and the amateur, the former
considering himself part of ‘a separate and privileged class entitled to
conduct their own affairs without outside interference’.1
By late 1915, however, there was much public disquiet at the ‘general
lassitude of Asquith’s administration’, its perceived mismanagement of the
war (and culpability for its outbreak).2 There was disquiet too at the
‘remoteness and aloofness’ – and deliberate secrecy – with which the
Foreign Office had conducted pre-war diplomacy.3 At the same time, the
British Government itself faced an increasingly urgent need for expertise
concerning the internal condition of the Habsburg Monarchy and other
regions of East-Central Europe, and was forced to look beyond the
cloistered confines of the diplomatic service. Suddenly, during 1917 and
1918, numerous individuals emerged, many of them academic historians,
who wrote in the public sphere – in books and articles in the press – and
who could at the same time influence directly the development of British
diplomacy. It was, as the MP and New Europe contributor A.F. Whyte
observed in Parliament in July 1918, a ‘remarkable circumstance’ (and one
that said much about the pre-war FO) that when the Foreign Secretary
sought to strengthen his Intelligence Department, he ‘found his most
useful assistance not in the ranks of the official professional Diplomatic
Service, but almost altogether in outside circles’.4 These developments will
be considered in the appropriate place. But it is worth briefly discussing
here some of the key individuals who illustrate this transition.
When in August 1914 Robert Seton-Watson, the leading British
expert on the minority Habsburg nationalities, offered his services to
Whitehall unsalaried for the duration of the war, he was declined.5 Though
he was close to certain officials – George Clerk in particular – in general
his relationship with the Foreign Office was distant, and in the aftermath
of the Treaty of London it declined into acrimony. During 1917, however,
this began to change. While his employment by the Intelligence Bureau of
the Department of Information (set up against Foreign Office wishes) did
not immediately dissipate the distrust he provoked in some quarters, it did
bring him within the ambit of Government. And while he declined to
work for the Foreign Office’s new Political Intelligence Department in the
spring of 1918, fearing (unduly as it turned out) that Sir William Tyrrell
would exert a stifling influence, his work under Northcliffe at the EPD,
and his continued writing and lobbying, secured him unsurpassed sway
within the former organisation. Arnold Toynbee, Lewis Namier, George
Trevelyan, Harold Nicolson, Alfred Zimmern, and Rex and Allen Leeper
were just some of the key members of PID openly indebted to Seton-
Watson for their ideas about the peace settlement in general, and about
the South Slavs in particular. (And like Seton-Watson, of course, many of
 PART II INTRODUCTION 117

them – not government officials by training or inclination – were active in

commentating on international affairs in public as well as in private).
As Austria-Hungary collapsed in the autumn of 1918, and at the
peace conference which followed the war, Whitehall turned directly to
Seton-Watson for insight into the present turmoil and future realignment
of this fragmented empire and of the wider Balkan region.6 As Robert
Evans has noted, in the immediate post-war period, with both Germany
and Russia prostrate, the ‘lands inbetween’ acquired an unprecedented
importance in their own right; it is therefore not surprising that 1919-20
marked the ‘moment of peak intensity’ for cooperation between the
Foreign Office and the growing band of freelance experts in the field.7
Seton-Watson’s own belief that he and his close allies had managed to
exert a decisive influence on government thinking was no mere hubris.8
Nor was Seton-Watson the only writer who both produced
influential publications for the general reader and helped shape foreign
policy behind the scenes. Another such was the historian Harold
Temperley, a long-term friend of Seton-Watson’s, who shared the latter’s
views on national self-determination and his enthusiasm for the South
Slavs in particular. Temperley’s knowledge of Serbia (recorded in his
respected History) saw him employed in June 1917 as head of MI2(e), a
new research organisation created by the Directorate of Military
Intelligence, and subsequently as a member of the British conference
delegation. In Serbia between mid-October 1918 and April 1919,
Temperley produced reports and minutes on the Yugoslav situation which
significantly shaped official attitudes, within and without the Foreign
Office.9 Meanwhile a fellow member of MI2(e), R.G.D. Laffan, was
another who influenced both popular and official attitudes to the
Yugoslavs. His populist work The Guardians of the Gate had, as we have
seen, a significant impact on British assumptions about Serbian history
and national mythology.10 And there were others too – men like Wickham
Steed, or Sir Arthur Evans – who, while not employed by the
Government in an official capacity, were nevertheless sufficiently well-
connected with those who were, to exert significant influence on official
attitudes towards the approaching peace settlement.11
In part, then, events themselves obliged the Foreign Office to
become more responsive to public opinion. High levels of dissatisfaction
with the manner in which the administration of Asquith and Grey had
managed the war effort prompted Lloyd George’s National Government
to pay more heed to the views of public campaigners and influential
sections of the media. But this process was not simply a response to
external pressures. Increasingly, towards the end of the war, it was driven
from within, as an urgent need for expertise which could not be met by
Foreign Office resources caused Whitehall to open its doors to
independent academics and writers prone to a more ideological, less
118 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

pragmatic outlook on diplomacy, and inclined both to respond to and to

attempt to shape public opinion in a manner disdained by more
conventional government hands.
This was not a transition wholly without tension or disquiet. The
PID was not, as E.H. Carr observed, unanimously welcomed by older
Foreign Office hands, for whom it contained too many eccentric
individuals unschooled in the subtle arts of diplomacy.12 Only slowly did it
earn the respect of traditional elements.13 And a division remained
between the career diplomats (a remarkable two-thirds of whom had been
to Eton), and the more heterogeneous and cosmopolitan group of
academics and journalists who dominated the new intelligence
organisations.14 A significant part of the motivation for the Foreign Office
to open its doors to such influential opinion-formers, and to bring the
think-tank bodies to which they contributed within its compass, was a
concern to arrest its increasing marginalisation under Lloyd George, and
‘to reassert its central position in foreign policy’.15 In this it was at least
temporarily and partially successful: in the period of its existence the
Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office came to constitute
‘the hub of the peace-planning machinery’, and on the settlement in
Eastern Europe in particular – an area of less immediate concern for the
Prime Minister and his entourage – many of those intellectuals associated
directly or indirectly with Seton-Watson’s New Europe group exerted a
strong influence on government thinking and policy.16
In the three remaining chapters we will follow in detail the evolution
of this British foreign policy thinking with regard to the wartime Yugoslav
question and the embryonic Yugoslav state up to 1921. There will be
times when the influence on official thinking of such common British
preconceptions about South Slav history and culture as we have hitherto
encountered will be suggested overtly by the written records. In such cases
it will be discussed directly. But there will be others in which it will be no
more than hinted; or perhaps merely a matter of conjecture. In general,
therefore, it is hoped that the discussions of preceding chapters will be
borne in mind and that – given what we know about the increased
sensitivity of official diplomacy to broader, informed opinion in Britain as
the war proceeded – they will enhance the detailed analysis that follows.
Let us now turn first, before we consider the evolution of British
attitudes to the Yugoslav question as a whole, to the thorny problem
posed by the fate of the independent state of Montenegro: a problem
whose particular difficulties cast light upon the manner in which the
present and future of all the Yugoslav peoples were understood in Britain.
 6

‘Montenegro – finis!’: Britain and the

Submergence of Independent
Montenegro, 1914-1921

On 6 November 1918, as their empire collapsed, Austrian troops

withdrew from Cetinje after nearly three years. Irregular Serbian bands
quickly appeared. And within days an assembly was convoked on the
authority of three men, the single Montenegrin among whom had not,
Count de Salis reported, held ‘any position […] which would entitle him
to take the lead in such circumstances’.1 Events, as an American
intelligence officer observed, were ‘railroaded through’.2 On 19
November, five days after they were decreed, elections were held by an
unfamiliar system. Five days after that the elected candidates assembled,
not in the traditional Skupština hall in Cetinje but in a store-house of the
Italian tobacco régie at Podgorica. Isolated communities were unaware an
election had occurred until after the results were announced.3
During the elections there had been much enthusiastic talk of
Yugoslavia. But few of the delegates, it was later claimed, had anticipated
incorporation into Serbia, as opposed to entry as a unit into a broad
federation. Nevertheless, on 26 November a resolution was passed
deposing the Petrović dynasty and declaring the union of Montenegro
with Serbia under Peter Karadjordjević. A five-man committee was
deputed to govern the region pending a permanent administration.4 By 1
December 1918, therefore, when a delegation of the Serb-Croat-Slovene
National Council arrived in Belgrade to authorise union between the
Austrian South Slav territories and Serbia, Montenegro had disappeared as
a sovereign state. Prince-Regent Alexander proclaimed ‘the unification of
Serbia with the lands of the independent State of Slovenes, Croats and
Serbs in a single Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, making no
reference to the formerly independent kingdom of Montenegro.5
None of this was yet recognised by the Powers, who faced a barrage
of protest from members and partisans of the exiled Montenegrin
120 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Government. But the Serbian regime insisted the amalgamation was the
will of the Montenegrin people and irreversible. British officials resented
this attempt to force their hand. ‘It is impossible’, Oliphant complained,
‘for His Majesty’s Government to admit the principle of the fait accompli’.6
But ultimately, while disapproval was expressed of the means, few saw
British interest in seeking to reverse the end.

The Paris delegates faced many issues as intractable and many of greater
moment. And within a few years Montenegro had largely disappeared as
an international issue. But for the few years that the problem simmered on
unresolved, it raised a disproportionate clamour in Britain. Arguably,
moreover, no problem of the post-war settlement better illustrates the
conflict of loyalties affecting British policy-makers, as – to paraphrase
Carlyle – formula and reality wrestled it out. The demise of an
independent state which had fought, however ineffectively, on the Allied
side presented awkward dilemmas. ‘Few of the smaller problems’, Harold
Nicolson later recalled, ‘caused us such heart-searching and left us with so
durable a sense of dissatisfaction’.7 At times officials could not mask their
frustration at the interminable complications and correspondence
produced by ‘this ridiculous question’.8 At others, in moments of
conscientious reflection, some confessed themselves ‘not at all at ease’
with their Government’s public position.9
Since no scholarly study of British attitudes to the demise of
Montenegro exists, it will pay to trace in detail the development of the
problem through British eyes. And while it may seem unbalanced to focus
on one of the smaller of those territorial units which merged in the
Yugoslav amalgam, and not to accord similar focus to the Slovenes, for
instance, the rationale is two-fold.
On the one hand, the case of Montenegro – a kingdom and
sovereign state – was unique. Not only had the Slovenes lacked autonomy
or administrative unity in Austria, but their individual identity was
acknowledged in the nomenclature of the new state. Any Montenegrin
claim to an independent regional or cultural identity was unrecognised.
For the two independent states absorbed in the new Yugoslavia fate could
hardly have been more contrasting. Serbia provided the dynasty and the
capital city, it dominated the military and the civil administration, while its
name endured both in diplomatic parlance and in European political
consciousness, which often regarded Yugoslavia as the ‘Great Serbia’ of
Belgrade’s imagination. Montenegro shared the fate of its monarch: a
period at the centre of a minor international controversy followed by a
lonely death, mourned only by its inhabitants and a few diehard
enthusiasts, unremembered even by Yugoslavia’s internal boundaries.
On the other hand, paradoxically, we can justify a focus on
Montenegro because of the similarities it did have with other Yugoslav
 MONTENEGRO 121

regions. The complications of this question from the perspective of

international law – a sovereign Montenegrin monarch and government,
recognised by the Allies, who refused to approve the Serb-orchestrated
unification – meant it received considerable attention in Allied capitals,
while Belgrade’s relations with other regions were overlooked as internal
matters. While British attitudes to other questions are sometimes unclear
from the diplomatic record, the fact that Montenegro’s position after the
war was, in Sir Eyre Crowe’s words, ‘very similar to that of almost any of
the outlying Yugo-Slav lands’, means we can hope from this problem to
inform our understanding of broader British attitudes to the new state.10

We have discussed British perceptions of Montenegro in the pre-war

period and need not revisit that curious amalgam of ignorance,
romanticisation and disdain. It is worth recalling, however, the official
assumption that union with Serbia was inevitable and desirable. On the
eve of war this process seemed underway. The minister to Serbia
suspected frontier talks in late 1913 had also produced agreement on a
customs union and common army, and rumours mounted of a plan for
full unification.11 It seemed, the British representative in Cetinje later
noted, that Montenegrin absorption by Serbia ‘might be an early result of
South Slav aspirations towards political unity’. A common frontier,
combined with the fact that Montenegro ‘[owed] to Serbia almost all her
territorial gains of the war’ seemed, another noted, to make this
‘inevitable’.12 And outside Whitehall Seton-Watson, for one, assumed
union had been ‘nearing completion’ at this time.13
The outbreak of war, of course, changed everything. On the one
hand, projects in the pipeline were put on hold. On the other, it became
plausible to contemplate radical changes in the Balkans that were
previously the province of dreamers. A pre-war trend towards Serb-
Montenegrin unification had become, as de Salis noted, ‘merged into the
wider questions which depend on the issue of the present war’.14
On 27 July Nicholas telegraphed to Alexander of Serbia an
assurance of full support, and the following day a general mobilisation was
ordered.15 Save a ‘desultory’ exchange between the Austrian fort in Kotor
and Montenegrin batteries on Mount Lovćen, however, no operations
were undertaken until mid-August, when a Serbian military mission
organised a combined defence. Montenegrin forces occupied the Serbian
army’s left flank as it struck into Bosnia to within twenty kilometres of
Sarajevo. But in mid-October the Montenegrins suffered severe losses and
retired hastily, exposing the Serbians and forcing them also to retreat.
Nicholas had to travel to Nikšić personally to placate his mutinous troops.
Despite Montenegrin involvement in Bosnia, Allied commanders
were dissatisfied from the outset. Appeals for information on the
movement of ships off Kotor were ‘systematically evaded’. French officers
122 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

on Lovćen reported an equivocal attitude among the Montenegrin

military.16 Early in the war there was ‘hesitation to take any decided action
against Austria’. Nor were further operations attempted after what later
seemed a ‘half-hearted’ advance. In May 1915 de Salis complained that
almost nothing had been done on the Bosnian frontier for six months,
while the Court openly absorbed itself in designs on Albanian territory.17
In fact, as early as August 1914 the Allies warned Cetinje not to jeopardise
the war against Austria by causing trouble in Albania. (Though, as officials
were aware, their high horse was diminished by the nugatory assistance
Britain had afforded her Balkan allies early in the war).18
During June 1915 Montenegrin troops crossed the Albanian frontier
on the pretext of securing supply routes, then descended into Scutari,
removing Albanian flags and declaring the population Montenegrin
subjects. Incredulous Allied representatives were told that the town’s
inhabitants had requested the occupation.19 The Powers warned against
further encroachment and on 29 July refused to recognise the annexation
(though it was only the stubborn resistance of Albanian tribesmen that
forced a truce).20 Anger at this flagrant pursuit of state interest was
compounded by intelligence reaching London of repeated contacts
between Montenegrin Headquarters at Budva and the Austrians at Scutari.
Over the subsequent months evidence mounted of a clandestine
understanding. It was inconceivable, de Salis argued, that action against
Albania would have occurred had fear existed of an Austrian offensive.21
During November and December Serbian and Montenegrin armies
fell back towards the old Montenegrin frontier, and early in January the
stronghold of Lovćen was surrendered. French officers reported Austrians
ascending the fortress without deploying in attack formation. By the end
of January Nicholas and his Court had left for Rome en route to the
French town of Neuilly, remaining nominally at war with Austria. The
new Montenegrin Prime Minister urged the Allies that endemic disorder,
caused by famine and disease, had compelled an honourable peace.22

The stock of the Petrović regime, however, had long since fallen in the
Allied capitals – none more so than London. Already by mid-1915
Nicholas’ self-interested equivocation had hardened attitudes. After a
series of warnings and broken promises the occupation of Scutari seemed
an intolerable betrayal. Montenegrin statements, de Salis complained, had
been ‘an unbroken series of falsehoods’.23 His report seemed in Whitehall
a ‘severe indictment of Montenegrin honesty’.24 Given her recent
behaviour, wrote one official, Britain should ‘give her services up’ and
‘regard her no longer as an ally’.25
Britain’s failure to provide military assistance gave her little clout.
She could revoke unilaterally only the transportation of reserves or
deliveries of food and medical supplies, as well as threatening to veto any
 MONTENEGRO 123

loan. But despite the public relations issues in cutting relief to a

beleaguered ally (especially one admired in Britain for a history of
embattled resistance), these were measures Whitehall thought would
become ‘imperative’.26 ‘We have to bring Montenegro to her senses’,
George Clerk argued, ‘and to do so must, “inter alia”, cut off supplies,
which increase want and sickness […]’.27
When Britain suggested this to her allies, however, all – to her
surprise – deprecated the proposal, forcing a reluctant retreat. But officials
remained determined to squeeze Montenegro as tightly as possible. Grey
set the tone: ‘we should’, he minuted, ‘do as little as possible for
Montenegro’.28 It was agreed with France and Russia that the ‘greatest
caution’ be exercised in advancing money.29 ‘Personally’, noted Sir Arthur
Nicolson, ‘I am not inclined to show any generosity to Montenegro’.30
But events – and the attitude of her Allies – again forced Britain’s
hand. As the Austro-German offensive in the late autumn pressed towards
southern Serbia and Montenegro, a last-ditch bid to shore up these states
seemed the only means of maintaining a foothold on the peninsula. ‘If we
are to continue to try to maintain some focus of resistance to the Central
Powers in the Balkans’, Lord Eustace Percy suggested, ‘we shall have to
adopt a much more forthcoming attitude towards Montenegro’.31 Its
Government might be hopeless, but the people were ‘still with us’. So
while de Salis continued to discourage a loan (and to stress that the French
Legation’s primary aim was to supplant Italian influence), officials in
London no longer felt able to demur.32
Guilt at the inadequacy of Western assistance at this critical time did
also soften Britain’s stance. Officials expressed exasperation with military
leaders blind to the political cost of neglecting an alliance. ‘Our military
authorities’, Percy noted with disgust, ‘consider Montenegro an entirely
negligible factor in the war and do not think it worth while moving a
finger to help her’.33 A Montenegrin statement justifying Cetinje’s attitude,
and bitterly protesting inadequate Allied supplies, caused officials briefly
to descend from the moral high-ground and to admit ‘the force of much
that [Radović] says’. De Salis was told to express understanding of
Montenegro’s position and to explain that, along with transport problems,
there had been a need to husband resources for more active theatres.
There was ‘no thought’, he was untruthfully to insist, ‘of stinting
Montenegro of what she needs’.34
Though military sources continued to report little serious fighting
between Montenegrins and Austrians, officials bowed to their Allies’ view
that the population should not be punished for government
misdemeanours.35 It was suspected, in any case, that cession of all supplies
would make a Montenegrin peace with Austria ‘almost certain’.36 Despite
uncertainty of Montenegro’s attitude, the department concluded,
continued supplies were ‘the only means of strengthening the hands of
124 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Serbian staff at Cetinje to resist [the] King’s desire to make peace’.37 From
‘the political point of view’, furthermore, it seemed ‘advisable […] to keep
in the field any Ally of His Majesty’s Government, however weak’.38 But
as we have seen, any dim hope proved short-lived and by 11 January
Lovćen, fabled bastion against the Turkish horde, had fallen without a
struggle. As news of this final conquest reached Whitehall, Lord Eustace
Percy’s summation was succinct: ‘Montenegro – finis!’.39

Whitehall gave only limited consideration before 1918 to the post-war

configuration of the Balkans. Officials were reluctant to assume even
hypothetically the total victory which would allow a dictated peace, and
preferred, where possible, to keep options open. As a result one cannot,
with certainty, pinpoint British thinking at the moment Nicholas left his
homeland for the final time. But it is tempting, nevertheless, in the light of
the available evidence and subsequent events, to read in Percy’s brief final
minute an acknowledgement not only of a military defeat but also of a
dissolution which even an Allied victory would not reverse.
It is true that in July 1915 Grey had promised that in the event of
victory Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia would have ‘for division between
themselves’ the territory west and south of the Drave-Danube line,
implying the three would be separate entities (though leaving the division
of territory tactfully unexplored).40 His further suggestion, however, that
with Croatian approval Britain would ‘guarantee to facilitate the union of
Serbia and Croatia’ may be taken to suggest – what was widely believed
though not publicly stated – that Montenegro was not viable outside such
a grouping. Her distinct traditions seemed unlikely to prevent a demand
for modernisation, which was to say broader amalgamation, among an
impoverished people. By undermining respect for a regime whose rights
were the primary obstacle to integration, the events of 1914-15
consolidated this official British view.41 And the personal nature of
Montenegrin government meant feeling against the king as an individual
affected attitudes towards his realm. In his influential report on the events
of 1915 de Salis posed the question directly: was it desirable for
Montenegro (or anyone) that Nicholas should reclaim his throne? ‘No
sound policy’, he concluded, ‘could involve reliance on him’. The
Montenegrin people:

[…] with their own history and traditions, might seem to merit
better than to become a distant province of an enlarged Serbia.
Yet their fate as such might be preferable to remaining a
separate State incapable of establishing a solvent
administration, under a dynasty dependent for its existence on
doles from foreign Governments and ever for sale to them.42
 MONTENEGRO 125

The memorandum drawn up with an eye to a future peace by Paget and

Tyrell in the autumn of 1916 strongly endorsed this view. Should
Montenegro be revived as an independent State or be absorbed into
Serbia? For his treacherous conduct since the outbreak of war Nicholas,
the authors observed, deserved ‘no consideration’ from the Allies; indeed
his restoration ‘should be so far as possible opposed’. Montenegro’s
resurrection under another king, it was half-heartedly admitted, should
‘presumably depend on the wishes of the Montenegrins themselves’. But:

It should be borne in mind that in any case such a State will

serve no useful purpose; it will in the future as in the past not
be self-supporting, and be dependent on the charity of the
Powers. Its absorption by Serbia is therefore on the whole
much to be desired.43

In general, this memorandum was in advance of what might be considered

a British policy position. Before late 1917 the priority remained to keep
options open. But in this regard what is telling, concerning British
thinking in 1915-16, is what was not said. In a parliamentary debate in
March 1916 the Government was asked whether Montenegro was
included in the promise made to Belgium and Serbia that their restored
sovereign independence was a specific Allied war aim. Lloyd George
parried with a genial fudge. ‘The interests of Montenegro’, he replied, ‘will
not be lost sight of by the Allies in the final settlement’. But in private
officials were more forthright. ‘Montenegro certainly does not’, one wrote,
‘deserve the same promises as have been made to Belgium and Serbia’.44
The implication of such reticence was confirmed privately a year
later. To a tabled inquiry whether Britain would allow Montenegro to
settle its own destiny, Harold Nicolson drafted an affirmative response,
but was overruled by Robert Cecil. Discussion of Montenegro’s future, he
argued, could not serve ‘any useful purpose at the present time’. ‘We may’,
he added, ‘want to hand her over to Serbia’.45
It would be too much to say that, for most of the war, this was a
settled policy; but it certainly seemed a possible, and also a desirable
outcome. And as such care was taken not, by careless promises, to
obstruct it. Reports suggesting Nicholas’ wartime equivocation had
undermined his domestic position were seized upon since they enabled
hostility to his regime to be portrayed as consonant with (or, better still,
motivated by) Montenegrin opinion. A letter from Edith Durham in June
1916 claiming ‘Old Nikola’ was ‘extremely unpopular’ in his homeland
only restated, Nicolson observed, ‘what we have already heard – namely
that the present Royal Family will never again be allowed to rule in
Montenegro’.46 And if his phraseology here suggested simply a passive
recognition of public feeling, different was his emphasis eight months later
126 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

when intelligence suggested Nicholas was still intriguing with Austria. ‘To
counter this’, he declared, ‘we should put all our money on the Crown
Prince of Serbia. In other words the Montenegrin dynasty must go – in
spite of Italy’.47
Officials were aware, however, that the Montenegrin court, and
perhaps also the general population, would resent being bumped into a
Greater Serbia on Belgrade’s terms. (One mid-1916 report of ill feeling
between Serbs and Montenegrins seemed, it was noted, to ‘[augur] very ill
for a future fusion between these two states’).48 They knew too that the
question would be awkward in terms of the presentation of British policy
and of its underlying principles. This may be why, for much of the war,
the matter was not confronted. By the autumn of 1917, however, with
evasion increasingly difficult, a clearer line was needed. In September
Nicolson minuted the department, expressing British policy assumptions
as they stood, and urging the need for greater clarity. The British
Government, he argued, should:

agree with their allies (or rather with France and Russia) as to
what policy should in future be adopted towards Montenegro.
There is a general idea that the Montenegrin Govt have
behaved badly, that the King and his family merit no sympathy,
and that the great majority of the Montenegrin people desire
union with Serbia. This end is clearly desirable for many
reasons […], but it is a policy which may awake criticism in this
country.49

This, then, was Britain’s vague position on the eve of the final year of the
war: the need for a more detailed, robust policy had been recognised, but
not met. 1918 would be the first of several difficult years for officials
assigned to the Montenegrin question.

Things were not helped by the publication in January of a high-profile

document from which it was found impossible to exclude reference to
Montenegro’s rights as an ally: a reply to President Wilson’s ‘peace note’
of 22 December which, in its scrupulous vacillation, intimated the
difficulty ahead. In paragraph VII it promised at once ‘the restoration of
Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro, with the compensations due to them’,
and the ‘reorganisation of Europe […] based at once on respect for
nationalities and on the right to full security and liberty of economic
development […]’.50 Here, in a few carefully-worded lines, was an uneasy
dual commitment both to the codes of the ‘old diplomacy’, with its
obligations to established Allied governments and treaties, and to a brave
new world of territorial rationalisation, with boundaries redrawn according
to ethnic allegiance, economic infrastructure, and the strategic prerogatives
 MONTENEGRO 127

of continental topography. A document so subtly balanced provided, over

the subsequent months, succour to rival groups, each finding in it what
suited them. Only thus could a statement reaffirming obligations to Allied
Governments, specifying the restoration of Serbia and Montenegro as
independent states (and repeatedly cited as such by Nicholas’ partisans) be
acclaimed in a New Europe editorial as a clarion call for ‘Southern Slav
unity’ and ‘nothing less than a landmark in the history of the world’.51
Up until Montenegro’s liberation early in November official
attitudes tended only to harden towards the exiled dynasty and its
entourage. Sir George Grahame, the sympathetic British representative
with Nicholas’ court, did highlight a Serbian campaign – with French
connivance – to undermine Montenegro’s status and promote her
absorption into Serbia.52 But in London this tough and possibly
underhand treatment of the Montenegrin Government did not seem
unmerited. The French, Sir William Tyrrell argued, had ‘every reason to
mistrust the Montenegrins’, the Serbians ‘still more reason to do so’; de
Salis had clearly described Montenegro’s ‘record of treachery’.53 Whatever
qualms might exist about French support for Belgrade, Nicolson
concurred, Nicholas could ‘scarcely believe’ that Britain ‘would move a
finger to preserve his dynasty’.54 He was, it was agreed, an ‘old ruffian’, ‘a
reactionary, selfish and disreputable old man’, who deserved (and
received) little sympathy.55
And while Grahame protested that the pro-Serbian Montenegrin
Committee for National Unification was an organ of Belgrade-inspired
propaganda, it was given much credence.56 It represented, Leeper argued,
‘the views of all Montenegrins except King Nicholas’ immediate
entourage’.57 Since mid-1917, in fact, the Intelligence Bureau of the new
Department of Information, in which Leeper and Seton-Watson worked
under John Buchan, had reported a sharp divide in Montenegrin opinion
between the Court and a ‘tiny clique’ of ‘reactionary’ politicians on the one
hand, and the majority of younger men on the other. The views of
Radović’s Committee, it claimed, would ‘find a ready welcome among
most progressive Montenegrins, who see Montenegro’s political and
economic future indissolubly bound up with the union of all the Yugoslav
lands’.58 Recent events showed beyond question, Leeper wrote in July
1917, that ‘practically the whole of intelligent and independent feeling in
Montenegro is solid for Yugoslav union, and that the King will be unable
to secure any real support among his subjects in defence of the
particularist interests which his dynasty represents’.59
Though there were occasional doubts, in general this view prevailed
in Whitehall during late 1917 and 1918. 60 Harold Nicolson, an ally of
Leeper’s who later confessed his intoxication with the Yugoslav idea,
influenced his senior colleagues. In August 1917 he hailed a declaration by
Radović as ‘important and authoritative’.61 Contrary to Grahame’s view,
128 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

he later minuted, the King and his Government ‘do not represent
Montenegro’.62 Most Montenegrins, he wrote (in a draft letter to Lord
Derby in Paris), desired a union with Serbia which ‘would be in strict
accord with the principle of nationality’.63 The despatched reply was more
cagily phrased. ‘Some sympathy’, it disingenuously began, ‘must naturally
be felt for an aged monarch reduced to exile’; but it was doubtful whether
the exiled Government was ‘in any real sense representative of
Montenegrin opinion or desirous of working in Montenegrin national
interests’; Radović’s committee should be examined ‘not only in the light
of previous history but with some prescience of inevitable future developments’:

As Your Lordship is aware, the whole tendency of the future of

Serbia is towards national union and it is our hope and
endeavour to secure the liberation from Austrian domination of
the Yugo-Slav races of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Croatia. A
glance at the map will show that if this union is eventually
secured the State of Montenegro will become little more than
an enclave within Serbian territory, and this fact, taken in
conjunction with the very real movement which exists in
Montenegro for complete fusion with Serbia renders it possible
that a separate Montenegrin Dynasty may not survive the
settlement at the Peace Conference.64

Clearly the inclination of British policy was to pre-empt the verdict of

Montenegrin democracy by backing that broader union which seemed an
‘inevitable future development’. A sympathetic telegram sent to Nicholas
by President Wilson, promising that the ‘integrity and rights of
Montenegro’ would be ‘secured and recognised’, caused concern among
officials who feared the phrase might be exploited ‘in an anti-Yugoslav
sense’.65 The following month, in a bid to prevent Nicholas sending a
consul to the US, Nicolson argued that Petrovićist propaganda was ‘anti-
national, anti-Yugo-Slav, and to that extent anti-entente’.66 Why, it was
asked, should a position hostile to Allied policy, certain to complicate the
peace negotiations, be popularised with Allied funds?
It is not hard to understand Whitehall’s motives over Montenegro in
1917-18: the appeal of a large Yugoslavia governed by the sort of
progressive, pro-British politician who represented the Yugoslav
Committee in Britain; the lack of sympathy for the feudal ruler of an
insolvent and expansionist minor Balkan state. But one detects in the files,
nevertheless, a semi-conscious suppression of that moral ambiguity which
would surface over the ensuing months. There was, for example, an
obvious flaw in the oft-repeated claim that most educated, progressive
opinion in Montenegro backed union with Serbia. The country’s
population, as officials well knew, was among the least educationally or
 MONTENEGRO 129

politically sophisticated in Europe.67 The majority of ‘educated’ opinion

could scarcely be said to equate with a democratic majority. It is indicative
of a wilful over-estimation of the spread of ‘progressive’ (liberal
nationalist) opinion at this stage that this obvious objection was
overlooked.68
Occasionally, it is true, uncertainty did emerge. The Montenegrin
question, Nicolson admitted in May 1918, would be one of the most
difficult of the Peace Conference. Little progress would be made without a
plebiscite which, in practice, would be ‘difficult, if not impossible, to
realise’.69 But for the most part officials like Leeper, less susceptible to
doubt, saw in the Corfu Agreement the dawn of a South Slav union and
the welcome demise of parochial factions like the Petrović court. The
protests flooding in from Neuilly were simply ‘very much out-of-date’.70

From early November 1918, however, the rapid sequence of events

following the Austrian evacuation compelled recognition of the question’s
complexity. For weeks Whitehall struggled to follow the situation: in mid-
December officials were still asking the War Office to send someone who
might ‘find out exactly what is happening in Montenegro’.71 Accusations
and counter-accusations pouring in from Neuilly, or from Radović and
Belgrade, were clearly partisan (though the fact that Radović was
increasingly viewed as such suggested a shift in attitude). Under such a
barrage officials tended to fall back on settled preconceptions; and in the
case of mutual recrimination among Balkan politicians – pots bawling at
kettles – credence was the order of the day. (‘I have no doubt’, Cecil had
declared, ‘that everything said by the Serbian about the Montenegrin and
vice versa is perfectly true’).72
Nevertheless, such was the contempt in which Nicholas’ Court was
now held, and such the credibility Radović had gained thereby, that
officials initially doubted reports of intimidation in Montenegro. It was
possible, one noted, that the Serbians had killed some of Nicholas’
officials who had colluded with the Austrians, but it was ‘difficult to see
why the Serbians should massacre the Montenegrins, whom they wish to
attract into the Yugo-Slav State’.73 ‘I have no doubt’, another wrote a few
weeks later, ‘that some of the complaints of King Nikita against the
Serbians are true but [the general tone was unchanged] I regard all his
complaints with some suspicion and he deserves little sympathy’.74
Early reports reaching London of the Podgorica assembly did not
question its conduct or validity; the measures passed chimed with the
accepted picture of Montenegrin opinion. Nicholas’ return, intelligence
continued to indicate, would be ‘very much against the wishes of the
people’.75 A War Office report in mid-December considered the matter
closed. Even ‘allowing for the King’s disadvantage in being virtually
interned in France’, it seemed ‘that the National Committee does
130 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

represent Montenegrin feeling and that the separate existence of

Montenegro has come to an end’.76
For months ‘all evidence’ had shown popular support for a
Yugoslav state, but little distinction was yet made in terms of how
Montenegro entered it.77 Nicholas’ claim that Montenegrins must choose
between a confederation (in which he would retain his throne and regional
autonomy) on the one hand, and a centralist pan-Serbia on the other was,
Leeper complained, a ‘deliberate falsehood’. What most Montenegrins (as
other Yugoslavs) wished was neither of these but union according to the
Pact of Corfu.78 Since Podgorica confirmed this, claims that the assembly
had been rigged could be dismissed; the émigrés, he scoffed, ‘had better
persuade the Montenegrin people of this!’79
Despite the assurance of Yugoslav enthusiasts like Leeper, however,
towards the end of 1918 a sense of unease did gradually develop about
Montenegro. Recurring reports of Serbian heavy-handedness, from a
variety of sources albeit questionable, suggested an element of truth.
Grahame accepted that the Podgorica assembly had been convened ‘under
pressure of [Serbian] bayonets’, and he in turn convinced some senior
officials.80 Lord Robert Cecil urged that an official complaint be lodged
with Belgrade. It was a question, he argued, not of whether Montenegro
be absorbed by Serbia but of the way the action had been effected;
Serbian conduct had been ‘thoroughly lawless and should not be passed
over’.81 On 31 December the head of the British Military Mission in
Albania telegraphed that while reports from Montenegro remained ‘too
unreliable to form any just conclusion’, there was ‘no doubt that many
people are swinging back towards their ancient Monarchy under the
pressure of Serbian occupation’.82 A report for the Peace Conference
cautioned that the Serbians seemed ‘to have exercised considerable
pressure in order to obtain support for the declaration of union with
Serbia’.83
With little reliable information from Montenegro itself, external
developments had an impact on British perception of the issue. Since late
1917 officials dealing with the Yugoslav question had become increasingly
uneasy about the tendencies of Serbian policy, and those of Pašić in
particular. The optimism prompted by Corfu – that he would, while
rejecting extreme federalism, accommodate decentralist desires – had
given way to a fear that his public assurances masked a centralistic and
chauvinistic agenda.84 Officials responded by emphasising the attachment
of Southern Slavs to their historical provinces. Claims for Montenegro’s
independent traditions and regional pride (especially when combined with
professed Yugoslav feeling) began to receive a more sympathetic hearing.
Persistent rumours of intimidation in Montenegro late in 1918, therefore,
were lent credence by doubts already developing about Pašić’s integrity.
 MONTENEGRO 131

For the first time officials began to ask not just whether Montenegro
would join the projected union, but also how, and on what terms.
Meanwhile the conduct of Britain’s European allies was also
muddying the waters. On the one hand Italy was busy, from positions in
Albania, promoting Montenegrin independence in a bid to undermine a
Yugoslav state. And on the other, growing evidence of collusion between
Belgrade and Paris suggested France was sponsoring a Greater Serbia for
her own ends (a suspicion wholly confirmed by recent French
scholarship).85 French refusal to warn Belgrade off Montenegro was,
Grahame argued, ‘one more proof’ that the French Foreign Ministry and
the Serbian Government were ‘absolutely hand-in-glove’.86 ‘Asking the
Quai d’Orsay about anything to do with Montenegro’, he complained, ‘is
just as if one asked Belgrade’.87 In a minute applauded by Lord Derby and
circulated to London, he explored the implications of French policy:

Probably the whole French influence will be used to make the

Yugo-Slavs […] come right in under Serbian rule with as little
federative regime as possible. People tell me that large financial
and banking interests and concessions are already involved, and
the French intend firstly, that Serbia shall be as big as possible,
and secondly, that she shall be under their aegis. This will mean
that they will favour the elimination of Montenegro in the
Serbian interest, and come up against Italy. France is going to
be the dominant power on the Continent with a ‘pléiade’ of
these new States in formation looking to her. […] The French
may do lip-service to the idea of a League of Nations and the
like, but they intend to profit to the utmost by the
extraordinarily favourable situation in which they now find
themselves in Europe.88

Whitehall recognised ‘very great truth’ in this view. ‘It bears out’, noted
Laurence Collier, ‘what we have heard from other sources about French
policy’.89 But if it raised doubts, it did not yet bring a decisive shift, if only
because cynicism existed on both sides: if French motives for backing
Belgrade were sordid, Collier observed, those of Italy in supporting
Nicholas were ‘if possible, even more sordid’.90 The case should be viewed
solely on its merits (which included, of course, an estimate of ‘our
interests’ in the matter).

That such questions should have emerged to test the foundations of

British policy at this time was inevitable given the unpredicted speed with
which the Central Powers had collapsed. Suddenly Britain faced demands
not only that Nicholas be allowed to return to his homeland, but also that
132 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Montenegro be admitted as an ally to the peace conference. Both

presented awkward dilemmas.
Officials felt they could hardly prevent Nicholas returning now the
armistice had removed the pretext of ‘war conditions’. ‘It is impossible’,
Oliphant exclaimed, ‘to keep him practically a prisoner!’. ‘Why should we
bother?’, asked Balfour: ‘it is the French who are keeping the old ruffian
from his country – let him fight it out with them’.91 Indeed (though
officials admitted it only obliquely) the King’s return to confront a Serbian
occupation had at least the advantage of forcing a resolution; and
intelligence suggested it would be in the sense desired.92 But the French
refused to take the risk.
The question of Montenegro at the conference was more intractable.
In mid-November Derby told Nicholas’ Prime Minister that Montenegro
had not ‘made out any case for […] being considered as a belligerent
Ally’.93 Whitehall agreed it had met none of the obligations attached to
such status. But its claim to a seat remained hard to deny; entry was
granted to many non-combatant states as well as to some, like Romania,
with a record as equivocal.94 By rights, Collier conceded, Montenegro
should be admitted to sessions discussing her affairs. But as ‘Montenegro’
meant Nicholas, there was ‘sure to be trouble if she is admitted’.95 But in
fact the question remained unresolved precisely because it could not be
decided whether Montenegro did mean Nicholas. Radović claimed that it
was his democratic provisional Government which should participate in
the conference. Evidently this question could not be resolved until the
Allies had decided how to respond to events on the ground.96
A memorandum drafted for the peace delegation provides, in its
measured tone and considered judgements, the clearest picture of British
thinking on Montenegro at the end of 1918. The premise was clear and
unchanged: it was in the ‘obvious political and economic interest of
Montenegro’ to be incorporated in any Yugoslav union. There seemed
‘little doubt’ this would be welcome to Montenegrins, and would thus
accord with ‘the doctrines of self-determination and nationality’ (those
hallowed principles too readily assumed to operate in unison). But
opposition from Nicholas’ camp was inevitable. On the one hand he
merited little from his ‘former’ Allies, his wartime conduct open to the
‘gravest suspicion’. (London still lacked firm evidence of duplicity). On the
other hand it seemed ‘scarcely equitable’ to suppress his dynasty without a
hearing. It would be advisable, therefore, to set up an impartial
commission to gauge Montenegrin wishes. ‘Presumably’ this would ‘decide
overwhelmingly in favour of the union of Montenegro with the new
Serbian State’; but Nicholas would be left with a ‘justifiable grievance’ if he
was prevented from making his case.97
This memorandum is noteworthy in several respects. Firstly,
Montenegrin independence still seemed politically and economically
 MONTENEGRO 133

unviable, and against the interests both of Montenegrins and of all with a
stake in the region’s stability. Secondly, despite reports that Serbian rule
might be reviving Nicholas’ popularity, Whitehall remained convinced that
few desired his return. A commission was mooted not because its verdict
seemed in doubt but because its evidence would undermine the ex-King’s
campaign. Thirdly, there remained a tendency in London to regard
Nicholas’ exile as condign punishment for his wartime conduct, by which
he seemed to have brought his misfortunes upon himself.
More significant, perhaps, is what the document did not contain: any
analysis of the manner in which Montenegro should amalgamate with the
other Yugoslav lands. Concerns that Pašić’s Great Serb vision was
incompatible with the Corfu Pact were dismissed: ‘the Greater Serbian
idea and Serbian local prejudices have in some cases died hard’, it was
noted, ‘but for practical purposes we may regard them as dead’. Only a
unitary state, rather than a federation, could serve the Yugoslav race. The
Montenegrin problem, in other words, was still analysed in terms of two
possibilities: complete absorption in a united Yugoslavia or (improbably)
continued independence under the Petrović dynasty.98
It is not surprising that no thought was yet given to Yugoslavia’s
internal constitutional structure. But it is striking that none was given to
the manner of Montenegro’s amalgamation as a Serbian province.99 The
rhetoric from Belgrade and from Radović’s regime implied Montenegrins
brought no distinct identity to Yugoslav union, but were simply Serbs
restored to their heartland. And yet Whitehall countered Petrovićist anger
by citing Montenegrin enthusiasm for a federation, repeating that it was ‘to
our interests, and to those of the Montenegrins themselves, to encourage
union with Yugoslavia’.100
If seeds of doubt had been sown, then, on the surface little had
changed. We should leave the Montenegrin appeal alone, Oliphant
advised: ‘I doubt […] whether this moment is opportune for starting any
fresh line of policy as regards Montenegro’. ‘I agree’, wrote Tyrrell.101

For British officials the first two months of 1919 were the most difficult
of the controversy’s duration – a period of painful awakening both to the
problem’s true complexity and to their inability to resolve it. And if it was
upsetting for those directly involved, it also resonated more widely, the
first major blow to the facile trust, pervading Whitehall as much of the
press, in the mantra of self-determination and national unification.
Looking back late in February Nicolson thought December 1918 the
critical moment of disillusion, with the ‘extremely painful’ realisation that
Podgorica had not been the free popular expression it had purported to
be.102 It was then, as we have seen, that doubts began to take root. But
Nicolson predates the crucial moment. Not before the new year did their
134 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

accumulated pressure split fissuring cracks in Britain’s hitherto complacent

policy towards Montenegro.
In the first days of January the situation reached its most alarming
stage. Opponents of unification stirred autonomist tribes to rebel and
besieged Cetinje and other towns, prompting brief but bloody
confrontations with the Serbian Army and Radovićist militias.103 Whitehall
now began to receive, for the first time, intelligence derived from British
sources. On 1 January a report that Serbian terrorism was provoking a
‘revolution’ had been treated with scepticism. (‘All our information’,
Collier minuted, ‘is to the contrary effect’).104 But on 3 January, after a
week-long mission of enquiry, Temperley reported major unrest in the
Njeguš region above Kotor (Nicholas’ heartland) as well as among the
Muslims of Podgorica, and even in more pro-Serbian Nikšić.105 Six days
later the Commodore of the British Adriatic Force talked of ‘revolution’
against the Radović party (though he rightly reported that serious
insurgency was now limited to the outskirts of Cetinje).106 And General
Phillips, head of the British mission to Albania – who sent a member of
his mission, Captain Brodie, to investigate – reported on 11 January that
his man had ‘walked straight into a revolution in Montenegro’, and that
while the rising seemed to have failed, participation had been widespread
and sporadic fighting continued. ‘I do not think’, he warned, ‘the trouble is
in any way over’.107 Trying to make sense of the ‘obscure’ situation in
Montenegro, officials talked of ‘civil war […] raging’ between the pro- and
anti-Radović camps.108
Initially Whitehall clung to short-term, remediable (and plausible)
causes: economic deprivation, Serbian insensitivity and foreign
machination. The British Commodore had blamed the rising on Italian
provocation (his source here Radović), and to ‘acute hunger and hatred of
Serbian troops’.109 Temperley too referred to Montenegrins’ ‘distress’, and
to their ‘fear and dislike of the Serbian soldiers’.110 ‘Lack of food and
possibly Italian intrigues’, wrote one official, ‘are doubtless responsible for
the present state of affairs’; supplies would be a priority for the Inter-
Allied Committee in Paris.111
The heavy-handed conduct of Serbian troops (no longer in doubt)
might be alleviated, it was still hoped, by a joint protest to Belgrade. But
Paris remained reluctant, claiming ‘every reason to believe that
Montenegrins are desirous of unity, and that this desire takes the character
of a fusion with Serbia’. Whitehall felt bound to accept their diluted text
which was despatched to Belgrade (Grahame lamenting London’s failure
to ‘break loose from French leadership in these matters’).112 But little hope
was held out for its impact. ‘However severe a protest was made’, Derby
complained, ‘the Serbs would know that the French at any rate do not
mean them to take it too seriously’.113 It would serve at least, officials
reasoned, to show before the conference that Britain (and France too, for
 MONTENEGRO 135

all that her actions suggested otherwise) did not accept Belgrade’s ‘fait
accompli’ over Montenegro.114
London’s reluctance to be bullied into accepting Serbia’s absorption
of Montenegro increased during January as it became clear that the
upheaval was about more than Italian intrigue, scarcity of resources or
Serbian misrule. There must, Temperley had stressed, be more to it:

Something must be allowed for the intense conservatism of the

people […]. The Montenegrin always fears for his freedom and
too great dependence on the Serbs may endanger this. All
Montenegrins say they are for Yugoslavia, but some seem to be
afraid of accepting the Kara George dynasty and are therefore
Republicans or pro-Nicholas […].115

Here, almost for the first time, the assumption was challenged that union
with Serbia under Radović and entry into a broader Yugoslavia amounted
to the same thing. ‘Montenegro, on the whole, wanted to join as a country
a Federal Yugo-Slav State’, Phillips wrote to Graham, ‘but not to be
absorbed into Serbia’.116 And though he referred to a ‘Royalist’ uprising,
most witnesses denied it was primarily any such thing. On the contrary,
the British naval commander reported: the rebels were strongly hostile to
Nicholas.117 They wished, Captain Brodie agreed, ‘to preserve their
independence and become federated with the Yugoslavs’; they demanded
a referendum; but there was ‘no movement on foot to bring back the
King’.118 When from Rome de Salis (no friend of Nicholas) assessed the
evidence, he concluded that ‘opposition to annexation by Serbia’ was too
widespread to be attributed ‘solely to King Nicholas and his clique’. ‘The
resistance’, he wrote, ‘is of a more serious character and the possibility of a
union with a Yugoslav state is likely to strengthen it’.119
Initially officials focused, with relief, on the apparent lack of support
for the king, and on favourable Montenegrin attitudes to the Yugoslav
project. Feeling against the return of the Petrović dynasty, Major-General
Thwaites observed, seemed universal, ‘if the desire for complete union
with Serbia is not perhaps so apparent’.120 This latter phraseology is
indicative, however, of the rather head-in-sand attitude still existing in
Whitehall towards Serbia’s absorption of Montenegro. A strong protest
was unnecessary, Graham implied, since there was ‘little doubt but that,
ultimately, Montenegro will be joined to Serbia in the new State’.121
As the weeks passed, however – ironically as open rebellion petered
out – officials accepted that Montenegrins felt betrayed by the Podgorica
proceedings: that, despite enthusiasm for Yugoslavia, many wanted an
elected government to negotiate entry on their own terms. While the
insurrection was not monarchical, the DMI noted on 22 January, it was ‘a
movement in favour of federation of Yugoslavs but not absorption in a
136 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

greater Serbia’.122 The November elections, it became accepted, had not

constituted a free expression. While Temperley had gently suggested that a
non-unanimous vote would have had more force, Brodie was more
forthright. The rebels considered the elections a farce, he reported; they
desired union with Yugoslavia but ‘objected to Serbian support of a
Government they considered illegally constituted’.123 Officials still felt that
most might settle down as part of Serbia. (‘We do not yet know what the
Montenegrins really want’, Nicolson minuted in late February).124 But they
rejected the French claim that Radović was opposed only by a small ancien
régime party. British sources, George Warner minuted, suggested there
were three parties in Montenegro: one supporting complete absorption in
Serbia, one favouring federation in Yugoslavia, and one faithful to the old
regime. The two latter seemed ‘stronger than the first and united by this
common dislike of the Serbians’.125
And if doubt remained about the parties’ relative strength,
Montenegrins, officials now felt sure, had been denied fair democratic
expression. It was desirable, wrote Sir Robert Graham, that Montenegro
should enter ‘the new Yugo-Slav State or Confederation of States’; but
‘the people ought to have a fair chance to express their wishes […]’.126
From Belgrade General Plunkett argued that since the ‘real interests of
Montenegro’ (and of Britain) lay in its amalgamation, ‘details’ of electoral
injustice were ‘unimportant’. But in London his reports now seemed
unduly Serbian-influenced. The issue, wrote one official, was ‘not so much
what is good for Montenegro as what she wants’.127 An American
intelligence officer’s report that most Montenegrins wished to enter a
Yugoslav state while maintaining ‘their separate entity and their state
autonomy’ was greeted as supporting ‘our point of view’.128

For the past year and a half, Sir George Grahame lamented on 3 February,
Europe had been treated to the ‘extraordinary spectacle […] of one allied
State being allowed to treat another smaller one as a boa constrictor treats
a guinea pig found in its cage’; and while the French had ‘actively
connived at this carnivorous proceeding’, Britain had ‘looked on
passively’.129 But for officials who – if they did not go quite so far – had
come to sympathise with Grahame’s impassioned view, the question, of
course, was what could be done? In theory the answer was obvious: a
small-scale Allied occupation, to replace Serbians and Italians with troops
from Britain, America or (less ideally) France, able to organise a fair
referendum. But in practice difficulties abounded. As early as 1 January
Collier had noted that an international occupation without Italy was ‘no
doubt the best theoretical solution of the problem’, though Britain could
not carry the scheme against French and Serbian opposition.130 And in
general, during the first half of January, Whitehall accepted France’s view
that no occupation was necessary.131
 MONTENEGRO 137

The matter was complicated by the fact that two distinct issues were
involved. First was the imperative of ensuring public order, preventing the
region relapsing into anarchy or civil war. Second was the perceived duty
to allow Montenegrins to shape their own future. While it was unrest
which had prompted British unease about Podgorica, the two were not
necessarily related: order might indicate repression rather than
contentment, as Whitehall in fact believed to be the case. (The fact that
Montenegro was now calm, General Bridges reported, was ‘thanks to the
14th century methods adopted during the late elections’).132 On this point
Britain and France were at cross-purposes. Paris would contemplate an
occupation to secure order, but refused to undermine a stable situation by
pushing for a plebiscite. British officials came to feel that, whether or not
Serbia had secured control, long-term stability depended on the just
settlement only an occupation could secure. The Montenegrins should
have the chance to express their wishes freely, Graham observed, and ‘the
only hope of their getting it seems to be an American or British-American
occupation of the country’.133
Under pressure from Wilson (who sympathised with the
Montenegrins) France agreed to send General Franchet D’Esperey to
investigate and to back an intervention should he recommend one.134 But
while this proposal was welcomed in Whitehall (‘so surprisingly good’,
Graham enthused, ‘that one instinctively considers whether it does not
contain some pitfall’) it should have been clear that for Paris the litmus
test was disorder, not the validity of Podgorica. Since his report suggested
the situation was more stable, Paris rejected an occupation, while in
London enthusiasm only increased. It seemed now ‘specially necessary’,
Hardinge noted, that Montenegro be occupied by Allied (not Italian or
Serbian) forces.135 It was clear, Warner agreed, ‘how urgent an impartial
allied occupation of Montenegro is’. But no doubt the French, he etched
sarcastically, would claim ‘that “all is for the best in the best of worlds” in
Montenegro’.136 With no agreement frustration mounted. Could an
occupation not be expedited, Hardinge asked: ‘while we wait the pitch is
being queered apparently with French connivance’.137
But the obstacles proved considerable. Despite Wilson’s sympathy,
American feeling was increasingly hostile to European commitments.138
The US reply forwarded by Derby declared an occupation ‘not at present
desirable’. Perhaps, it suggested, all forces occupying Montenegro could
be withdrawn, ‘leaving to the people of that country determination of their
own future’.139 But this was transparent fantasy. The idea, Warner wrote,
was ‘most unfortunate’:

It will be absolutely impossible to counteract undue pressure by

Serbian agents if there is no impartial Allied force in the
country to watch the situation. Even though the Serbian troops
138 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

were withdrawn Serbian comitadjis would be able to continue

the work of terrorisation.

The decision, Graham wrote, ‘simply means handing over Montenegro to

the Serbians’; without an allied occupation Montenegrins could never
express their real views. Lord Curzon agreed. Washington should be
pressed to reconsider. And if that failed, ‘a British and French occupation
or even one with the Italians would be better than nothing’: better at least
than leaving Montenegro ‘at the mercy of Serbian comitadjis’. Let us,
Curzon affirmed, ‘have the best allied occupation we can get’.140
But without US involvement any occupation was beyond British
power to implement. France remained obstructive. Italy, Paris pointed out,
would demand to join any Allied venture; Serbia would then refuse to
withdraw; and, as Britain knew, it was ‘the Serbians whom it is vital to
exclude’. The nationality of a non-American occupation, Warner
conceded, ‘bristles with difficulties’.141 With ‘so much friction in the Near
East between British and French officers’, Grahame cautioned, a Franco-
British occupation might be ‘the occasion of fresh trouble’.142 And while a
purely British presence might have been pressed on all parties, it seemed
doubtful her army could contribute to a joint operation, let alone tackle
the job single-handed. (On 12 February officials learnt that due to
commitments in Italy and elsewhere the Chief of the Imperial General
Staff opposed sending any British troops to Montenegro).143 The only,
unpromising course, it seemed, was to press America to reconsider. If they
refused, there seemed ‘little hope for the Montenegrins’. A French
occupation would be pro-Serbian; a Franco-Italian one impossibly
fractious. By the end of February any occupation seemed unlikely. If so,
Britain could only try to persuade Serbian troops to leave. But, Warner
lamented, ‘very few, if any, will go’.144
Under pressure in press and Parliament, the Foreign Office sought
an alternative resolution.145 The suggestion had previously been made of a
commission to investigate Montenegrin opinion and report to the
Conference. De Salis had seemed an excellent candidate. He might go to
Montenegro, Grahame had suggested, ‘with a mandate […] to establish
tranquillity so that elections may be held’.146 But such a mission plainly
required substantial military back-up, and once this was ruled out, the
appealing notion of an Allied Commissioner acting as temporary governor
had also to be dismissed.
In ruling out military commitment, however, Wilson had hinted he
might support an Anglo-American ‘Commission of Investigation’. For
officials confronting the need ‘to eat our words’ and accept the US
proposal for a general evacuation, this was a straw to be clutched. A
simple withdrawal, Graham still insisted, would leave Montenegrins to be
‘coerced by Serbian comitadjis’. But perhaps, he mused unconvincingly,
 MONTENEGRO 139

General Phillips’ dismissal of a commission without troops had been too

pessimistic. It would at least beat abandoning Montenegro to ‘conditions
of Serbian coercion or civil war which must render any real self-
determination impossible’.147 With occupation ruled out this seemed ‘the
only hope for Montenegro’.148 Wilson approved the plan and a young
colonel, Sherman Miles, was appointed to accompany de Salis. The pair
met in Scutari and on 3 May arrived together in Cetinje.

Meanwhile, Allied commanders had ordered all forces to withdraw from

Montenegro. On 6 April General Bridges reported, to no one’s surprise,
that the order had been ignored.149 The Serbians, considering Montenegro
‘national territory solemnly reunited to Serbia’, alleged that ‘grave internal
troubles’ would follow their withdrawal. Among officials long adamant
that a full Serbian and Italian withdrawal was vital for Montenegrin self-
determination, however, the prospect of de Salis’ mission – an active
measure after months of wrangling – had wrought a sudden change of
attitude. Weary cynicism was replaced by sanguine expectation. Though
this refusal would not help de Salis’ task, Warner minuted, ‘in view of the
approaching commission the question is less important than it was’.150
But disillusion soon returned. De Salis’ primary mission was to
gauge Montenegrin opinion: to ascertain the circumstances of the
November election and the Podgorica decision to unite with Serbia, and
to estimate ‘the true wishes of the population as regards the future status
of Montenegro’. Did they wish: ‘1) absorption in the new Yugo-Slav State,
2) union on a federal basis, 3) complete and separate independence’. In the
case of 2) or 3), did they desire the return of the King?151 Before reaching
Cetinje, however, de Salis complained to London that Miles’ remit was at
odds with his own. Miles was to inquire into alleged atrocities in the
Gusinje region (during conflicts with local Albanians), but had ‘no
instructions whatever’ to investigate the elections or the true wishes of the
people.152 And the situation, he added, made it in any case hard to fulfill
what was asked. The Provisional Government had been disbanded, its
powers passed to a Serbian delegate, while Montenegrin provincial
prefects had also been replaced by Serbians. Bar Italian and Montenegrin
troops at Antivari and Vir, the country was under a military occupation
which had ‘got a tight hold on it’. Its opponents were in prison:

In these circumstances Colonel Miles considers it would be

very difficult to make enquiries from people with regard to
their wishes especially as we cannot guarantee support to those
who oppose the present regime. I agree with him.153

For Whitehall this was dispiriting. For Miles to be told only to investigate
atrocities, Howard-Smith lamented, was ‘useless’, and de Salis’ doubts
140 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

about assessing public opinion ‘a pity’; they should try to overcome these
obstacles. Balfour sent reassurance. It was never his intention, he wrote,
that enquiry should be limited to atrocities: they had been sent to ascertain
majority Montenegrin wishes ‘in regard to union with Yugo-Slavia’. The
impression remained, he observed, that ‘Montenegrins as a whole do
desire such union’, and that the separatist movement was engineered by
Nicholas’ circle. He made clear what he wanted to hear: ‘you will of course
realise that in general British interests it will be to our advantage if
Montenegro enters the Yugo-Slavia Federation in some form or other’.154
For all the clamour from Neuilly, however, this ‘some form or other’
was precisely the issue. On 9 May Britain had followed the US (and
Norway, Switzerland and Greece) by recognising the Serb-Croat-Slovene
State. While the Quai d’Orsay claimed America had thereby recognised
Montenegro’s union with Serbia, Whitehall denied this.155 Though it was
assumed that the new state must encompass Montenegro, it no longer
seemed as it had after Podgorica, ‘quite natural that Montenegro should be
represented in the same way as other Yugo-Slav States – ie, by the Serbian
representatives’. Though de Salis was not expected to report widespread
separatism, he was to indicate the nature of the union desired: information
which, Harmsworth told the Commons, the Conference could act upon.156
Other than as a salve to British conscience, however, the mission
was of little interest to a Conference preoccupied with external frontiers.
(At the Conference, one American delegate had remarked in April, ‘slowly
but irrevocably’ the Montenegrin problem had ‘faded from the picture’).157
In the satisfaction resulting from belated action, an awkward question was
suppressed: how, if de Salis reported strong opposition to the Serbian
annexation, could the Powers respond? The opinion much rehearsed in
January and February – that only an occupation could rectify Serbian
abuses – seems to have been temporarily quashed. Only occasionally did
this feeling of impotence resurface. (‘The fact is’, Graham lamented, ‘that
the commission comes too late, as the Serbians have effectively laid hands
on the country’).158
Before much feedback from de Salis, Whitehall received the report
of Colonel Miles, ordered to wrap up his enquiry quickly. Though no
Balkan specialist Miles said much to confirm British suspicions: the
November election had likely been influenced (‘as politics have always
been in Montenegro’) by military power; since then Belgrade had executed
a ‘quiet coup d’état’, substituting Serbian for Montenegrin officials and
securing real power for the Serbian Army. As a result it was quiet, only a
few Royalists opposing the regime ‘in a feeble manner’. But concerning
Whitehall’s declared priority – Montenegrin public opinion – Miles’
verdict was unwelcome:
 MONTENEGRO 141

It would be absolutely impossible to ascertain the real wishes of

the Montenegrins, except under a British or American
occupation of the country. Even then a plebiscite would have
to be taken under conditions which would permit the people to
understand very clearly what they might expect from union
with Serbia, union with Yugoslavia, or from independence, and
under what guarantees. […].159

To restore Montenegro to independence would certainly be a mistake,

Miles argued. The country was geographically unsuited and Nicholas’
Government (to which no alternative existed) was discredited. Since an
Allied-imposed referendum was ‘practically inadmissible’, Montenegro’s
inclusion in Yugoslavia should be recognised under guarantees of local
autonomy. Her political rights should be ‘equal to those of the Serbs,
Croats, and Slovenes’. Even then it was ‘practically certain’ that the
Serbians would use repression for political control in Montenegro (though
ultimately such tactics would backfire against this ‘warlike, mountainous
people’). Nevertheless, to abandon Montenegro wholly to Serbian control,
‘would be a political crime’.
Pending his final report, de Salis sent similar impressions. He found
(as expected) that most Montenegrins supported a Yugoslav union; but to
direct incorporation into Serbia, apparently by force, there was ‘a good
deal of opposition’. The leaders of this, however, were ‘imprisoned or in
flight’. And since Serbian and Italian troops showed no sign of leaving,
‘free expression of opinion cannot […] be expected’.160 A month later de
Salis amplified these judgements. Opposition leaders were ‘categorically in
favour’ of Yugoslavia, but desired to enter it ‘as free Montenegrins in
accordance with [the] desires of their country and not as subjects of
Belgrade’. Their claim that this was the majority wish, he observed,
‘[might] well be the case’. But a genuinely representative Montenegrin
Government could ‘only be secured through a freely elected assembly’,
impossible while the country was controlled by ‘Serbian officials from
Belgrade, supported by Serbian troops’, and while ‘Montenegrin leaders
who oppose this regime are kept in prison as rebels’.161
As an acknowledged expert on Montenegro (and one clearly not
partial towards Nicholas) de Salis wielded strong influence in Whitehall,
especially since his views were corroborated by other sources. General
Phillips, for instance, thought Montenegrins now resented the Serbian
occupation more than they did Nicholas. The tendency, he reported, was
for Royalists to ally with supporters of a federal Yugoslavia. In the unlikely
event that Serbian troops obeyed orders and left a ballot might back the
King if this meant freedom from ‘the Serbian Yoke’. But if Montenegrins
thought they could remain a country under its own name and
Government, without the King, as an integral part of Yugoslavia, ‘there
142 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

would be a large majority for Federation’. Serbian methods of carrot and

stick – large-scale bribery and arrest – had ensured, however, that there
were ‘no leaders of any consequence’ to direct and coordinate the people.
In effect, he lamented, Montenegro ‘may be described as part of Serbia’.162
Although Young did report from Belgrade that the SCS
Government was investing substantial aid in Montenegro (information
seized on by Leeper), most in Whitehall accepted the verdict of their men
on the spot. Faced with this criticism of Serbian conduct, optimism that
Yugoslav union heralded a progressive dawn in South-East Europe
leached steadily away. The Serbs, Howard-Smith complained, were being
‘typically “Balkan” in their treatment of Montenegro’.163 Britain, officials
insisted, could not accept Belgrade’s assertion that the union of
Montenegro with Serbia ‘and thereby its incorporation in the Kingdom of
the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’ was a ‘fait accompli’. The ‘cardinal point’,
Howard-Smith observed, was that Serbs and Italians ‘must both be cleared
out’.164 But such musings were now invested with little real hope.
In September de Salis’ formal report confirmed his previous
judgements. The Serbians, he wrote, had ‘a tight hold on the country and
intended to maintain it’. The Government, ‘purely one of military force’,
was ruling by ‘a regular system of terrorism’.165 Both elections and
assembly had been conducted ‘under the bayonet of the Serbian forces’,
behind whom lay ‘bands of lawless komitadjis’. Discontent remained
obvious. There was ‘good ground for thinking’ that the whole country
between Nikšić and Cetinje, the heart of ‘Old Montenegro’, backed the
rebels. The area was not in contact with Italian troops so could ‘scarcely
be affected by Italian influence’. One could not be sure: in a country
becoming ‘a second Macedonia’, free expression was impossible. But the
Powers had recognised the exiled Government since 1916 and could not
in good faith now ignore it. Certainly the Podgorica decisions – ‘illegal and
irregular’ – furnished no basis for doing so. Only a free election could
show which Government, if either, represented most Montenegrins.
Exploring the attitudes underlying Serbian policy, de Salis noted that
Radović, endorsed by Belgrade, had denied that Nicholas’ personal failings
justified the union. Even had he been beyond reproach, it was claimed, the
Serb people would have required it.166 For Belgrade the amalgamation was
simply a reunion, the end of an artificial Montenegrin independence caused
by the Turkish conquest of medieval Serbia. There was no place in this
programme for Montenegrin federation with Croats or Slovenes, ‘only for
incorporation into a revival of the ancient Serb Empire’ which had yet to
regulate its relations with the other South Slavs.
This picture of Belgrade’s attitude had been put to Whitehall by
Petrovićist publicists but not by a trusted official. Its ramifications, as de
Salis stressed, extended beyond the fate of Montenegro. The ‘Greatest
Serbia’ policy might prove ‘a fatal obstacle’ to that free Yugoslav state for
 MONTENEGRO 143

which there was support in Montenegro and elsewhere. While the Powers
might consider unification based on Serbian force the easiest means of
averting trouble in the short-term, in the long-term this was dangerous.
The ‘declared or sullen opposition’ of annexed populations might ‘render
such a settlement far from durable and open the door to the very intrigues
from outside which it is thought so desirable to eliminate’.
Officials in London were already convinced of the injustices
committed by Radović’s regime. (There seemed little doubt, one had
noted in August, that the Serbs were ‘behaving badly to the
Montenegrins’, and that this would have a ‘most unfortunate’ effect on
British public opinion).167 De Salis’ report confirmed this view. It
represented ‘a damning case’ – ‘a severe but doubtless fully deserved
indictment of the Serbs’.168 The difficult question, however, remained
unanswered: how were Britain and her Allies to respond to this
‘deplorable situation’ in Montenegro?169

Decision-making was hampered during 1919 by the fact that senior

officials and Government ministers were in Paris for long periods. Those
left behind to read reports from trouble-spots could telegraph advice, but
felt detached from debates thrashed out (or left to stagnate) in the
corridors and ante-rooms of the French capital. In the case of
Montenegro the perspectives from London and from Paris clearly
diverged during the summer.
For one thing, officials in London were influenced by greater
proximity to press and parliamentary opinion. Since Serbia’s occupation of
Montenegro a small but vociferous lobby had denounced Belgrade and
lamented the predicament of King Nicholas.170 In the Commons the
Government was harried for not safeguarding the right of Montenegrins
‘to determine for themselves whether or not they shall be included in [the
SCS] Kingdom’, and for not being open about its policy.171
Particular difficulty was created by the de Salis report, eagerly
anticipated by unofficial lobbyists as by the Government. With questions
long parried on the grounds of insufficient or unreliable information, this
was expected at last to produce a clearly articulated policy. Its arrival,
Howard-Smith commented, heralded ‘many awkward questions’ in
Parliament, and the Government had ‘practically promised’ to publish it.
A letter to Crowe in Paris pressed for prompt action on Montenegro:

I anticipate that highly inconvenient questions will be asked

when Parliament reassembles after the Recess, and it will be
very difficult to reply satisfactorily to those questions unless
some settlement of this vexed question is in sight. There is
apparently considerable feeling in this country at the delay in
settling this matter.172
144 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Crowe should know, Hardinge commented, that it would be ‘almost

impossible’ to prevent publication of the report, and that questions were
inevitable; he should be asked whether Montenegro was soon to be
addressed by the Supreme Council. Publication would provoke ‘a fierce
controversy’, Curzon warned, but the report was ‘able and impartial’ and
this course seemed ‘very desirable’.173
Crowe’s responses, however, indicate the disagreement between
Whitehall and the Peace Delegation over both the de Salis report and
Britain’s whole approach to Montenegro. While officials in London,
pressured by lobbyists and with time to reflect, viewed the problem as sui
generis and requiring immediate, separate attention, Crowe (a great
influence on Balfour and the delegation) denied any distinction. The
Council, he noted, while yet to reach a formal decision, had always
assumed the question would be ‘impossible to separate from that of the
rest of Yugo-Slavia’. The present regime was ‘irregular and unsatisfactory’;
but in this respect, he argued, Montenegro was ‘no isolated phenomenon
in South-Eastern Europe’. Many regions were suffering during ‘the
prolonged state of belligerency and unrest’ pending a final settlement. The
Montenegrin situation, moreover, was ‘an integral part and natural
consequence of the present state of the Yugo-Slav question’. Ethnically,
geographically and economically tied in with Yugoslavia, it was embroiled
in the ‘great and prolonged political controversy which at last, during the
past month, has come to a head throughout the Yugo-Slav Kingdom’. Its
position resembled ‘that of almost any of the outlying Yugo-Slav lands’.174
Resolution of Yugoslavia’s difficulties depended, Crowe argued, on
the defeat by the ‘more honest and intelligent’ Yugoslavs, working for a
constitution based on the ideals of the Pact of Corfu, of that ‘reactionary
current’ embodied by Pašić and Protić. It was imperative that elections be
held soon for an assembly to define the state’s structure. There was no
doubt, he stressed, that this would secure for Montenegrins, and others
who desired it, ‘a very large measure of provincial autonomy’. But (and for
Conference delegates this was the nub) such elections must await the
finalisation of the state’s borders. Resolution of the Montenegrin question,
in other words, like that of the Yugoslav constitution, required a
resolution of the Adriatic dispute. After this there was ‘no doubt’ that
political pressure would ‘sweep away the obstructions artificially made by
the Old Guard of Serbian politicians’.175
In London, as in Paris, Crowe commanded respect. His concerns
about publishing de Salis’ report at a delicate stage of the Adriatic talks
were reluctantly heeded.176 ‘The Montenegrin question’, Hardinge minuted
gloomily, ‘must still continue to hang fire’.177 But with the failure to release
the report meeting the anticipated hostile response, Whitehall’s patience
could not last. Was it denied, Ronald McNeill demanded in Parliament,
 MONTENEGRO 145

that this report gave a ‘most appalling description of the proceedings of

the Serbians in oppressing the Montenegrins?’. In the face of transparent
evasion by official spokesmen, even the former Under-Secretary of State
Robert Cecil was moved to demand a résumé of the facts. ‘It is really
becoming little more than a scandal’, he asserted, ‘the lack of information
we have on foreign affairs’.178
At the same time the complicating issue of financial assistance to the
Petrović court re-emerged. Since France, at the beginning of 1919, had
again terminated its share of the subsidy, the Treasury had been paying it
alone. In November it decided that, due to financial constraints and
Montenegro’s abolition, the subsidy should be ceased, a decision bitterly
resented by Nicholas’ Government, and censored by Sir George Grahame:

It is not in any way the fault of this unhappy Government that

their principal Allies delay a consideration of what is to be done
with regard to their country. None of the Allies have
recognised the validity of the seizure of the country by Serbia,
and Monsieur Plamenatz’s Govt is therefore still the legal
Government of Montenegro […]. In these circumstances the
Allies are morally bound to assist the Montenegro Government
financially until a settlement is arrived at, and while they are
kept here as powerless exiles owing to the forcible occupation
of the country by Serbia.179

Officials in London sympathised. ‘I agree entirely […]’, Frederick Adam

(of the Southern Department) noted, ‘and share his feeling of shame at the
treatment which the Treasury have forced us to accord to the legal
Government of Montenegro’.180 (A long way, this, from the general
contempt for Nicholas twelve months previously). To stop payments
before a settlement would give the impression Britain had ‘prejudged the
Montenegrin case in favour of Serbia’.181 Officials pressed in vain for a
reconsideration.182 ‘It is a deplorable decision’, wrote Adam in January, but
‘nothing can be done’.183
Increasingly uncomfortable, Whitehall no longer accepted Crowe’s
call to await the outcome of the Adriatic question. Curzon telegraphed
Crowe to urge again that Montenegro be placed on the Supreme Council
agenda at the ‘earliest convenience’.184 Pace Crowe, Howard-Smith argued,
‘the Montenegrin question must be treated separately’; the Allies must
‘stand up to the Serbs as they have done to the Romanians’.185 Nicholas’
suggestion of an assembly organised by Anglo-American occupation,
whose outcome he would accept, seemed ‘eminently just’ and ‘the right
way to reach a settlement’. But since occupation was impossible and the
Serbians obstinate, all hope lay with the Supreme Council; it was ‘high
time’, wrote Hardinge, that the latter took action.186 While the pro-
146 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Montenegrin lobbyists in Britain were not many, Adam noted, their case
was ‘exceptionally strong’. Britain was ‘committed to not letting the
Montenegrin nation lose its chance of free and peaceful development’.
Lord Curzon accepted, he wrote, that the question was part of the Adriatic
settlement, but thought Britain obliged to ensure Montenegrins entered
Yugoslavia ‘only on an equality with the Serbs, Slovenes and Croats’. The
Council must promptly ensure that they ‘not be absorbed as a province of
the Serbian Kingdom’.187
But what were the Council to do? Adam’s attempt to answer this
revealed the misapprehensions prevalent in Whitehall in late 1919. It was
surely not too late, he argued, for the Powers to secure Montenegro
recognition as a separate unit in a Yugoslav Federation. Failure to
acknowledge Montenegrin nationalism might mean ‘that a martyr has been
made of such poor stuff as King Nicholas’. Crowe should secure the same
status for Montenegro as accorded to Croatia and Slovenia.188
Officials, however, were misled by the ideals of Corfu and the state’s
tripartite nomenclature. As Crowe quickly pointed out, the difficulty lay
‘precisely in the fact that no such status is at present definitely accorded to
any portion’ of the SCS kingdom. In any case, he added, the Supreme
Council had no authority to impose such a decision, and nor could the
Yugoslavs themselves while their frontiers were uncertain. But he
remained strikingly sanguine. ‘There is not’, he wrote, ‘the slightest danger
that, in such an assembly, the wishes of Montenegro would be disregarded
or not be fully respected’. Curzon’s view that Montenegro desired to join
Yugoslavia as a discrete unit was shared, he felt, ‘by the great majority of
responsible Yugo-Slav politicians and public men’. Apart from ‘a small
reactionary clique of politicians’, he wrote, ‘I doubt if any Yugo-Slav
would deny this necessity’.189
Officials in London continued to waver, but were swayed by
Crowe’s arguments, and by his assurance that France and America agreed.
‘It is impossible to know what to think’, Howard-Smith lamented; but the
US position did seem to be that Montenegro join Yugoslavia.190
Parliamentary questions over British policy towards Serbia’s ‘fait accompli’
continued to be ducked. ‘The future of Montenegro’, Bonar Law told the
Commons on 28 April 1920, ‘can only be settled on its merits by
agreement between the Allies’.191 Only once the Adriatic dispute had been
resolved, he said, could steps be taken ‘for determining the status of
Montenegro as part of the Serb-Croat-Slovene Kingdom’.192 A
memorandum for Curzon now assimilated Crowe’s view completely:

The exact status of Montenegro within the Serbo-Croat-

Slovene State can only be determined by a Constituent
Assembly in which Montenegro as well as all the other Yugo-
Slav territories will be represented. The Constituent Assembly
 MONTENEGRO 147

cannot be elected until it is decided what territories are to be

included in the Serbo-Croat-Slovene State. This depends on the
general Adriatic settlement, which is still under negotiation.193

This was the position officials had been obliged to accept. But unease
remained. For while it was not admitted, Crowe’s argument was specious.
Since most Montenegrins favoured a broader union, he reasoned, their
inclusion in the SCS State could be assumed, and that union’s
constitutional structure was an internal matter not one for the Powers. But
this ignored the fact that Montenegro, whatever its people’s wishes, had
not by any process recognised by Britain or the US dissolved itself in a
Yugoslav State. Serbia had united with the ex-Habsburg territories to form
an entity which had been internationally recognised. But Montenegro’s
inclusion hung on its previous incorporation as a province of Serbia. Since
Britain had refused to recognise this process, it must still consider
Montenegro an independent State, and the exiles at Neuilly its legitimate
representatives. As Nicolson admitted, Montenegro was in the SCS State
de facto, but ‘not yet legally’.194
It was Nicolson, in fact, who most clearly expressed the discomfort
palpable in the Foreign Office records. ‘We are’, he exclaimed, faced with
drafting another parliamentary reply, ‘in a quite impossible position as
regards these questions on Montenegro’. With no official representative in
the country, with news derived either from Belgrade or Alex Devine (both
sources biased ‘to say the least’), ‘we are perfectly unable to answer these
questions either honestly or accurately’.195 A week later he confessed
himself ‘not at all at ease about all this Montenegrin business’. ‘We are’, he
lamented, ‘being manoeuvred onto weak ground owing to the fact that we
do not, and perhaps cannot, say what we think’.196 Though the issue here
was alleged Serbian brutality, one senses a deeper unease about British
policy (a supposition amply confirmed by his memoir of the period).197 In
a long minute in mid-August he set out the assumptions, and the wilful
blindness to legal nicety, which had characterised the British position,
before hinting euphemistically at its unstable foundations:

Hitherto we have only been able to proceed by deduction on

the following principles: a) the whole history of the present
generation in Montenegro, not excluding King Nicolas himself,
has been the story of a constant struggle to secure union with
Serbia […]; b) now that the Yugo-Slav ideal has been realised it
appears a priori impossible that any thinking Montenegrin
could contemplate remaining outside the union. Economic
considerations alone would seem to render this union
inevitable.
148 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

From this we deduced, and all the ‘authorities’ share in this

deduction, that the great mass of the Montenegrin people
desired union with Yugo-Slavia, and that the only problem was
that of the form which this union should take. This problem,
however, was not for us but for the Montenegrin people
themselves, acting through a Constituent Assembly to decide.

Since the armistice, however, three elements have arisen to

confuse the logic of this deduction, namely 1) the intrigue of
King Nicolas who wished to keep his throne, 2) the activities of
Italy who desired at all costs to prevent the union, and 3) the
futile behaviour of the Serb-Croat-Slovene Govt, who
endeavoured by every means to make Montenegro a mere off-
shoot of the Belgrade administration.198

The absorption of Montenegro by Serbia was admitted, therefore, not by a

recognised legal process (none, it was accepted, had taken place) but by
deduction on the grounds of historical and economic inevitability. Given
clear evidence that Montenegrins wished to enter the Yugoslav union,
Curzon wrote, ‘I wish to do nothing which may complicate or defer such
union’. The form would be decided by Constituent Assembly and it was
beholden to Britain simply to verify the fairness of the elections and to
ensure that, when the assembly met, Montenegrin opinion was adequately
represented.199
But even this limited prescription was not universally accepted. On
one side the conscientious Nicolson embraced a solution to the ethical
impasse. Belgrade must know, he wrote, that Montenegro’s union with
Yugoslavia would be recognised only if the elections were seen to
represent the popular will.200 Britain must then ensure the views of
Montenegrin representatives were not ‘summarily quashed in [the]
assembly’.201 Her guarantees, and Parliamentary interest, meant Britain
could not disinterest herself. But in Belgrade Sir Alban Young demurred.
Was it wise, he asked, to do anything which might disturb the status quo?
The Serbians were more sensitive about Montenegro than any other
question (as angry reactions to Britain’s refusal to recognise the union
showed).202 Did the Allies really intend, he asked, to shadow Montenegrins
in the assembly and to attempt to enforce their desires? Stability was the
priority, and Britain ‘should abstain from enquiring too closely into the
extent to which the democratic principles of free elections and self-
determination are applied in practice’.203 To interfere would be to meddle
‘in a kettle of very lively fish’, the danger that Montenegro (with Albania)
would form ‘fresh ingredients in the witches’ cauldron of seething
European politics’.204
 MONTENEGRO 149

Senior officials sympathised. Basing everything on these elections,

Hardinge minuted, could produce ‘stormy possibilities’. Supposing
Montenegrins did want the King back? Better, he wrote, ‘to let well alone
and turn a blind eye to the elections which in oriental countries are carried
on in a way quite unknown in the West, by official, police and military
pressure coupled with corruption of the most flagrant kind’.205 Crowe
agreed, declaring himself ‘much impressed’ by Young’s arguments.206
Unfortunately, Curzon pointed out, parliamentary declarations meant
Britain could not disinterest herself: ‘we have promised to get fair play for
Montenegro; and if she is stamped out by unfair elections we should be
held guilty of a breach of faith’.207 But the observer, Young was assured,
would gauge the election ‘not on Western standards but on standards
usually current in Balkan countries’. The Government must be able to
defend its handling of the question in Parliament without jeopardising
Montenegro’s inclusion in Yugoslavia. Britain was bound, Curzon noted
cynically, to secure ‘at least the appearance even if not the reality of legality
and free choice’.208
On 10 November, therefore, Parliament was told that Britain’s
attitude would depend on the electoral result, and on satisfaction that it
reflected popular wishes.209 Thus, in essence, Whitehall had accepted
Belgrade’s position that Montenegrins must define their relationship with
their fellow Yugoslavs not by negotiating entry as a state unit (a position
of obvious strength), but by participating in an internal consultation
process in which, as a small minority, they could have little leverage. What
may seem legalistic quibbles, in other words, were of marked significance.
Crowe’s argument, however, should be considered from a broader
ethical as well as legal perspective. It was the case, for instance, that the
Slovenes – a population with an identity arguably stronger than the
Montenegrins – might be in the same position: a minority in an assembly
unable, other than by fortuitous political bartering, to dictate the terms of
their participation in the union. The fact that the Slovenes had owned no
independent state was of juridical significance, but surely did not affect
their position from the point of view of the principles of nationality and
self-determination?
Even on this ground, however, the British position was not credible.
It was true, as Crowe observed, that no people was guaranteed autonomy
in the new state. But whereas the separate sub-national identities of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes had been repeatedly acknowledged, recognised
(against the wishes of unitarists) in the nomenclature of the state, for
Montenegrins there was no such assurance. On the contrary, Serbia had
repeatedly claimed them as Serbs, dismissed their identity as a superficial
provincial allegiance, and treated the union of Serbia and Montenegro as
an internal matter in which Croats and Slovenes had no right to
interfere.210
150 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

In Britain it was of course accepted that Montenegrins were, by

linguistic, religious and even voluntarist criteria, essentially Serbs. But it
was also accepted, partly due to the post-war resistance, that they had
developed a distinct heritage and psychology, entitling them to separate
and equal status among the Yugoslav peoples. As would become clear,
Crowe’s assurance that this would be granted was entirely baseless.

Two further reports were compiled by British officials who visited

Montenegro: the first by Harold Temperley, after a visit in the late autumn
of 1920, the second by Roland Bryce who (after Temperley withdrew in
ill-health) fulfilled Britain’s promise to monitor the elections of 28
November. On the basis of these Britain felt able at last, with relief,
formally to accept Montenegro’s absorption into Yugoslavia.
In basic content Temperley’s report differed little from that of de
Salis.211 He distinguished the same three categories of opinion: Petrović
loyalists, pro-Serbs and pro-Yugoslav autonomists. He confirmed, as
expected, that the first was the weakest: even heartland regions were
tranquil, with much less evident support for Nicholas than earlier in the
year. International relief and credits from the SCS Government had
apparently convinced this ‘primitive people’ they needed the Yugoslav
state. Regarding the second two categories, Temperley (like previous
observers) was unsure. The pro-Serbs – supporters of direct incorporation
into Serbia – were strong, he thought, particularly among the intelligentsia,
but their precise strength was hard to gauge.212 ‘Autonomists’, meanwhile,
was a generic term for a range of dissidents. Some wanted a republic,
some a federal solution, some a limited form of regional autonomy. But
all, Temperley stressed, agreed on the ‘main point’: inclusion in the
Yugoslav State.
But as this summary suggests, while the evidence Temperley
presented largely echoed de Salis, his emphasis, and his tone, were
different. While for de Salis the ‘main point’ was resentment of the
Serbian occupation, for Temperley it was pro-Yugoslavism (which, given
that Whitehall already assumed this tendency, was hardly the point
requiring investigation). While de Salis had denounced the Belgrade-
imposed administration, Temperley was more sympathetic. It had spent,
he noted, substantial resources to win Montenegrins round, and faced
‘very great’ difficulties. Furthermore, local discontent was inevitable
whatever government was established. Montenegrins had no
understanding or experience of efficient government, their traditions
‘bound up with those of lawless and untrained valour’. It was difficult to
accommodate them to ‘the idea of discipline and control’.
Added (by implication, exaggerated) importance had been lent to the
autonomist opposition, he suggested, by the country’s martial tradition:
‘opinion in Montenegro has always been armed before it was articulate’.
 MONTENEGRO 151

Reversing the concerns of de Salis and most previous British observers

that Serbian troops and irregulars were suppressing legitimate opposition,
Temperley feared that in some districts armed autonomists might
intimidate other factions.
While the report soothed Whitehall’s conscience over the manner of
Montenegro’s integration with Serbia, in terms of the presentation of
British policy it resolved nothing. Since recognition had been stated to
depend on the conduct and outcome of the Constituent Assembly
elections, only a study of this process could provide closure. But the
feeling that a resolution was now within reach was heightened by the
development upon which the elections themselves, and progress over
Montenegro, had long seemed to depend: the November 1920 Rapallo
treaty resolving the Adriatic dispute. Particularly promising was the fact
that, in return for what seemed in Britain an unduly favourable deal in
Dalmatia, Italy agreed to cease support for Montenegrin separatism.213
All now depended on the elections. Within two days of the poll
Bryce sent preliminary impressions. ‘The actual voting’, he wrote, ‘was
perfectly free and secret and there was an entire absence of gendarmes or
any visible pressure’. Bar one incident the poll had been peaceful.214 (In
Britain this was seized upon, and Parliamentary statements lauded this
enlightened conduct).215 The result soon filtered through: four of ten
Montenegrin seats won by Communists, two by Republicans, one by the
Democrats, one by the Radicals and one each by two small local parties.
But what mattered for British purposes was the interpretation of this result.
In the absence of a separatist list, what was the meaning of Communist
success in a region with no urban bourgeoisie? How important were the
abstention rates? To decode from the voting Montenegrin attitudes to the
union would, Bryce cabled, take time.
Meanwhile officials speculated. ‘Communists’, Temperley noted,
probably meant republicans or left-wing autonomists rather than
bolsheviks. At any rate they were unlikely to be pro-Nicholas.216 But
Young was less sure. Nicholas’ partisans, he suggested, doubtless had
voted for the Communists who were thought to have rallied the
discontented of all hues.217 While the result had not alarmed Belgrade
(where it seemed ‘the humorous feature of the elections’) the possibility
that Communist voters desired an independent Montenegro, possibly in
the shape of a Soviet republic, seemed ‘a dangerous speculation’.218
Whitehall inclined also to view the vote as anti-Serbian if not pro-
Nicholas. Communists had ‘rallied in many districts those elements which
are dissatisfied with Serbian administrative methods’.219 But a final verdict,
all agreed, must await Bryce’s report.
On 16 December Bryce submitted his analysis. His approval of the
electoral conduct remained unreserved. In an area with high illiteracy, the
secrecy and voting method (coloured balls) seemed ‘unimpeachable’.
152 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Police and military were withdrawn and there was ‘no evidence of
interference or pressure’ by any Government authority. Given
communication difficulties and political lethargy in mountainous regions
abstentions were ‘satisfactorily low’.220 (67.31% of registered voters –
themselves 17% of the population – had voted, he reported).221
Concerning the party lists, and patterns of voting, Bryce’s analysis gave
Whitehall exactly what it hoped to hear, his desire to please evident in
conclusions questionable or over-emphatic even on the basis of his own
testimony.
Chief among the difficulties of interpretation from a British
perspective was that, as Bryce reported, the question of union with Serbia
‘was not specifically raised as an election issue’. With moderate and
extremist opponents failing to unite, none of the seven Montenegrin lists
had opposed the union. But in any case the moderates, Bryce claimed,
were the great majority. While unhappy about Montenegro’s ‘unfair and
unnecessarily harsh treatment’ in the past two years, they were willing to
work for a Yugoslav Constitution granting Montenegrin equality. Within
the ‘numerically insignificant’ ranks of the ‘extremists’, meanwhile, Bryce
distinguished four groups: Nicholas’ circle, those who had suffered
persecution under Radović, those who blamed the regime for their present
ills, and those who rued the loss of an accessible sovereign for one distant
and impersonal. The opinions of the first two, he argued, were ‘largely
vitiated by the invariable intrusion of the personal element’ (his
implication, bizarrely, being that oppression was invalid grounds for
opposition). The latter two groups included ‘only the older generation of
less enlightened peasants’.
For most Montenegrins, Bryce concluded, there was one question:
communist or bourgeois? Over a third of voters – 37.99% – gave the first
answer, comfortably more than for any other party (the Democrats came
next with 27.8%), and the highest communist vote in Yugoslavia. Bryce
ascribed this success to intense Communist propaganda, an emphasis on
historic Montenegrin ties with Russia, the popularity of the leader
Tomašević, and inadequate understanding of communist ideology. But
partially plausible as these explanations were, his dismissive conclusion
that the Communist vote was proportionately ‘very little higher than in
Serbia proper and in Macedonia’ was quite wrong.222
The possibility Bryce seemed anxious to avoid was that, in
Montenegro as in Macedonia, voting for a violently anti-establishment
party represented an inarticulate protest against Belgrade. It is true, as he
noted, that the KPJ was centralist and rejected ‘bourgeois’ historical
identities, an unlikely vector – to an educated observer – for Montenegrin
autonomist sentiment. But among a politically unsophisticated electorate
the party targeted a general sense of deprivation and exploitation. Most
subsequent historians have related Communist success in Montenegro
 MONTENEGRO 153

directly to feelings of national disaffection. Without national political

movements, Aleksa Djilas has noted, Montenegrins and Macedonians saw
Communists as their defenders, in spite of their centralism and unitarism,
because they opposed hegemonic Serbian nationalism and advocated
fundamental change:

[…] from the beginning the party was perceived, in matters

relating to the national question, as the defender of the
oppressed. As a radical opponent of the status quo, it was for
many a ‘protest party’ for all kinds of dissatisfactions, including
national discontents.223

The paradoxical but readily comprehensible idea that support for a

centralist party could represent a regional protest against Serbian
hegemonism was also absent from Bryce’s brief analysis of the Radical and
Democrat parties. Rightly he generalised that while Radicals espoused
limited administrative decentralisation to protect historic identities,
Democrats urged rigid centralisation to eradicate them. The fact,
therefore, that the latter had fared much better in Montenegro (27.8% to
13.41%) seemed to Bryce a rejection of federalism or local autonomy, and
helped justify the amalgamation of 1918.
This was a misleading impression, however. We will discuss the
major parties later, but, contrary to Bryce’s implication, the Radicals’
proclaimed respect for historical and cultural differences entailed no
recognition of separate Montenegrin identity; and the unitaristic centralism
of the Democrats was, like that of the Communists, in part a reaction
against Great Serbianism. (Democrat success in Macedonia, Kosovo and
Sandžak similarly indicated wariness in the southern borderlands towards
this ideology).224
This lack of sophistication in Bryce’s analysis (for which, as a non-
specialist, he can scarcely be blamed) manifested itself in his conclusions,
which were wholly sanguine and reassuring. The elections, he declared,
had been ‘very satisfactory’:

No trace can be found of party or body of opinion in

Montenegro which is against the abstract idea of union with
Serbia in Yugo-Slavia. On the subject of the de facto union
existent, opinion is unequally divided into – (a) a very small
minority, who, basing their opinion on their experience of the
past two years, assume that the projected Constitution will not
give them equal rights with their brother Serbs […] (b) a very
large majority who support the de facto union with varying
degrees of enthusiasm.
154 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Provided, he affirmed, that the Constitution turned out to be a general

one for all Yugoslavs, the minority’s case would disappear and ‘the last
obstacle to the co-operation of the whole Montenegrin people in support
of the union of their country with Serbia in Yugo-Slavia would thus be
removed’. In London the report was, of course, warmly welcomed:

It definitely establishes [Adam enthused] the fact that the great

majority of the Montenegrins desire to join a Yugo-Slav state
and have freely expressed their desire in a fair and well-
conducted election […]. HM Government have therefore
secured the first object of their policy, as declared in both
Houses of Parliament, viz. that the Montenegrin people should
achieve the form of government that they desire by a free vote
in the elections for the Yugo-Slav Constituent Assembly.

No one, Nicolson agreed, could read the report without conviction of its
sincerity and truth, and ‘some slight irritation’ that Devine’s propaganda
had rendered Bryce’s mission necessary.225 (A few months previously he
had declared the evidence of oppression in Montenegro ‘overwhelming’
and had been foremost in demanding such a mission).226 ‘The result’,
Curzon minuted with satisfaction, ‘is a complete justification of our policy
in insisting on having a representative in Montenegro during the elections’
which ought to silence (though it probably wouldn’t) the government’s
domestic critics.227

By the time the Constituent Assembly finally got down to drafting a

constitutional document in late January 1921 the publication in Britain of
the Temperley and Bryce reports, emphasising Montenegrins’ pro-
Yugoslav inclinations, had significantly cooled the controversy.228 British
attention, both in and out of Whitehall, had tailed away rapidly. While
Devine continued to denounce Serbian hegemonism and British
connivance, he struggled to find an outlet in the mainstream press.
Previously, of course, officials had argued that justice for
Montenegro would depend on monitoring not only the election but also
the subsequent fate of Montenegrin deputies. This second element,
however, was quickly and quietly discarded. Faced with persistent pressure
from (Serbian) Yugoslav diplomats to recognise Montenegro’s absorption,
Whitehall initially stalled, resolving to await the outcome of the Assembly,
but soon wearied. If Montenegrin deputies had taken the oath to King and
State, Nicolson asked in February, could Britain not follow France and
America, withdraw exequaturs from the exiled Montenegrin Government,
and end this ‘tiresome question’?229 The oath, Temperley agreed, proved
the ‘desire for union in the Yugoslav state’; Britain need only cancel the
 MONTENEGRO 155

consular appointments.230 This it promptly did, ending its involvement in

the controversy. Only Italy declined to follow suit.
That this was not, however, the principled closure that Whitehall
claimed, but rather a somewhat shifty retreat, is suggested by a continued
misrepresentation of the Assembly’s function. In Parliament the
Government was asked whether an invitation to send delegates to an
assembly in another country marked the fulfillment of British pledges to
secure Montenegrin self-determination. This, Nicolson reacted, confused
the issue ‘in a foolish and […] unscrupulous manner’. In the Commons
Harmsworth responded that the assembly would indicate ‘whether the
dispersed elements of the Yugo-Slav race desire union, and, if so, on what
terms they wish this union to be secured’.231 It should now, Nicolson
argued, be left to the Montenegrin delegates to demand independence if
they desired it.232
Whitehall felt sure they did not desire independence. But it assumed
Montenegro expected (and was right to expect) significant autonomy.
Since it also assumed most deputies would wish to satisfy this desire, the
question of how ten among over four hundred could secure their claim
need not arise.233 Officials continued, with seemingly wilful complacency,
to portray Montenegrin delegates in Belgrade as negotiating terms of entry
to the union. (Britain had no doubt, Crowe assured the French, that the
assembly would work out a federal scheme ‘under which Montenegro would
become part of the new State’).234 They continued, in justifying British policy,
to distinguish only between full independence and entry into a federal
union. Britain had not changed its attitude, Lloyd George told Parliament;
it was a question of Montenegrin wishes: ‘if they are really desirous of
entering into a great Slavonic Confederation, there is no reason why we
should force independence upon them’.235
To regard this misconception as culpably complacent, if not as a
deliberate misrepresentation, is only to amplify the view of Sir Alban
Young, who had often stressed that Montenegro’s union with Serbia, and
so with Yugoslavia, was deemed to have occurred at the end of 1918 and
to be entirely non-negotiable. The Constituent Assembly, he repeatedly
pointed out, was not an instrument for the negotiation of conditions of
entry. Reading with shock Harmsworth’s parliamentary statement, he
wrote:

I do not know what M.Vesnić and his colleagues will think of

His Majesty’s Representative in Belgrade, from whom they will
presume this information was obtained when they read this
answer. I thought I had been untiring in my efforts to explain
in my reports that, in the eyes of the Government, the
conveners of the Assembly, the latter had neither of the
attributes assigned to it by Mr Harmsworth. The union was
156 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

decided on by the pact of Corfu and confirmed by the

declaration of the 1st December 1918, and the preceding
resolutions of the Croatian National Assembly.236

But even such warnings from their minister in Yugoslavia did little to
undermine Whitehall’s assurance. His comments, Adam suggested, need
not ‘be taken too seriously’. The Assembly should secure ‘the successful
negotiation of a federal Constitution’.237

Within months it had become obvious that a federal constitution was not,
after all, a likely outcome. On 1 April Temperley noted that Belgrade had
carried its scheme of dividing the State on non-historic lines (deliberately
breaking up units with a distinct historical identity).238 Nicolson,
commenting later in the year on the law dividing the country into districts,
noted that Montenegro had been split into two, and that its very name,
‘Crna-gora’, was being suppressed. ‘This can only’, he lamented, ‘lead to
trouble in the future’.239 As reports of disorder in parts of Montenegro
continued to reach London during 1921 officials relapsed into gloomy
resignation. ‘It is all hopeless’, Nicolson minuted.240
And yet the sympathy once strong in Whitehall for the plight of
Montenegrin nationalism had by now largely dissipated. The 1920 election
had demonstrated Yugoslav sentiment in Montenegro, and the bitterness
left by the prior, forced union with Serbia was ignored. Ongoing
disturbances (unlike those in Croatia) were willingly dismissed as what
Belgrade claimed them to be: the acts of brigands and desperadoes,
showing that ‘the Serbs have some justification for the strong hand in
Montenegro’.241
During late 1921 and into 1922, amid mounting reports of Serbian
arrogance over the Croatian question, Whitehall’s limited information
about Montenegro was supplied almost wholly by Belgrade.242 One
military official (for whom Montenegro remained ‘somewhat uncivilised’)
happily credited his Serbian source: ‘any feeling that exists today in
Montenegro against the Serb regime is, I was told, confined to former
adherents of the late King Nicholas’ regime and is in a distinct minority
[which] in a few years […] would die away’.243 Officials explained
disturbances as a spread from Croatia of Radićist discontent, forgetting
that anti-Serbian unrest in Montenegro had arisen at least as early as in
Croatia, and that sufficient cause existed without external intrigue.244
As other questions arose, and as officials familiar with the original
dispute moved on, memories grew hazy. With unrest worsening during the
economic hardships of 1922, and the dispute over the Yugoslav-Albanian
border ongoing (Italy still refusing to recognise Montenegro’s inclusion in
Yugoslavia), an international crisis again threatened. One official
requested, for reference, an account of Montenegro’s absorption by
 MONTENEGRO 157

Serbia: ‘I know’, he wrote vaguely, ‘there was a popular vote by the

Montenegrins to that effect’.245 When a parliamentary question was tabled
in November asking whether the Government approved the ‘continued
occupation of Montenegro by Serbian troops’, private minutes were
similarly hazy about both the question and previous British policy.
Montenegrin sovereignty, Troutbeck asserted, was not abrogated by any
treaty or convention but by the Montenegrins themselves at the 1918
Podgorica assembly: ‘we on our part recognised the fact when the SCS
Kingdom and not Serbia signed the Treaty of Versailles’ – a complete
misrepresentation of the British position between 1919 and 1921.246 The
act of Podgorica had anyway been, Crowe noted, ‘fully condoned’ by the
free elections held for the Constituent Assembly, a statement arguable
regarding Nicholas’ deposition, but not regarding Montenegro’s
absorption by Serbia.247
The British view, in short, was that since the Constituent Assembly
would shape Yugoslavia’s constitution, it could be overlooked that
Podgorica had merged Montenegro directly into Serbia rather than only
into a broader union. To a degree, this is understandable. But attitudes on
this narrow issue were symptomatic of that general failure to appreciate
the depth of Serbian nationalist feeling towards Montenegro (as also
towards Bosnia, Macedonia, and parts of Croatia-Slavonia) which explains
the misreading of the Assembly. The wider question of the constitution
will occupy us in the next chapter. In the meantime, it has been hinted
that there was an element of wilfulness in British inconsistencies over
Montenegro. If so, what underlay any reluctance to confront the issue?
We have noted before the assumption that an independent,
insolvent Montenegro would be an unsustainable and destabilising
element in Balkan politics and that she must, therefore, enter the Yugoslav
union in whatever form it took. We have commented, likewise, on the
practical impossibility for British policy-makers, denied support from
major allies or their own War Office, of securing the military intervention
which alone might have enabled a free plebiscite. But fundamentally, it
must be emphasised, officials recognised an interest in good relations with
a Yugoslav state they conceived as a pro-British bulwark against German
imperialism. In the immediate post-war years, as the Adriatic controversy
ground on and tilted (despite British sympathy for the Yugoslavs) towards
Italy, Whitehall feared Belgrade might turn against its western patrons.
With reports of rising anti-Western feeling in Yugoslavia, there was a
reluctance to antagonise Belgrade unnecessarily.248 ‘We are always nagging
the SCS Government for one cause or another’, Nicolson commented,
‘and have never really helped them when they were in the right as in the
Adriatic Question’.249
While it was claimed, therefore, that attitudes towards Montenegro
were ‘entirely unconnected’ with considerations concerning Italian policy,
158 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

this is questionable.250 In fact, while Yugoslavs complained that the Allies’

anti-Yugoslav attitude over Dalmatia reflected an imperialist conspiracy
which underpinned a similarly anti-Yugoslav attitude over Montenegro,
the reverse was true. Guilt over the former, in which the Yugoslavs
seemed the innocent party, tempered the expression of indignation over
the latter issue in which they – the Serbians at least – seemed culpable.
Concerning Nicholas’ ‘eminently just’ last-ditch proposal one official
wrote: ‘I doubt whether the Serbs will accept and we cannot say anything
to them’.251
The discomfort which resulted from being pushed, for clear
pragmatic reasons, into a public stance which felt morally ambivalent,
particularly with hindsight, was expressed most overtly by Harold
Nicolson:

The story of the submergence, or as Lord Cushendun would

say, the suppression, of Montenegro, is not a very pleasant
story […]. [It] raised in my own mind a very serious conflict of
motives. I disliked and distrusted King Nikita, yet I felt he was
almost in the right. I had a passion for the Yugoslav State, and
yet I felt they had behaved badly about all those bayonets and
that Podgorica Assembly. I knew that it would be better in the
long run, for economic and political reasons, were Montenegro
in fact to be absorbed by Serbia, or, as we then preferred to
phrase it, ‘admitted into close union with the Serb, Croat and
Slovene State’. Yet I felt extremely uncertain whether such a
solution was in fact that desired by the Montenegrin population
themselves. Here was a case in which dynastic interests on the
one hand, were balanced against the union of a fine and
liberated people. It was awkward to reflect that the balance of
right inclined towards the dynasty, and the balance of wrong
towards the Serbian liberators. It was in connection with this
problem of Montenegro that my early faith in Self-
Determination as the remedy for all human ills became clouded
with doubts and reservations.252
 7

Britain and the Idea of Yugoslav

Unity, 1914-1918

Before discussing British analysis of the constitutional settlement in

Yugoslavia between 1918 and 1921, we must examine the process by
which the very notion of an independent South Slav state came to be
embraced by British policy-makers. In terms of European geopolitics this
was a revolutionary idea. Pre-war diplomats had noted closer political
relationships among the South Slavs. But these trends were of such recent
origin (at least in their latest manifestation), and faced such a monumental
obstacle in the Dual Monarchy, that the idea of ‘Yugoslavia’ seemed
hopelessly far-fetched. Before August 1914, Lord Eustace Percy observed
during the war, it had ‘entered into the minds of none but a dozen
students’.1 And yet in a short time it acquired – for an obscure foreign
question – considerable popular appeal, was sponsored by a coterie of
influential figures, and was ultimately welcomed (if largely after the fact)
by the British Government.

Britain and the Yugoslav idea 1914-1918

The war which broke out in August 1914 concerned, in its genesis,
Serbia’s future as an independent state. If it did not seem obvious to many
on the day Austrian armies crossed into Serbia, as it did to Seton-Watson,
that a Great Serbian state had at that moment become ‘inevitable’, it is not
surprising that the future of Serbia and her Habsburg kinsmen soon
became the subject of debate.2 Within four months Whitehall was having
its attention drawn, by both the embryonic Yugoslav Committee and the
Serbian Government, to aspirations towards South Slavic national
amalgamation.3 A memorandum submitted by Supilo to the British
Government in January 1915 stressed that Serb, Croat and Slovene were
160 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

‘three designations for a single ethnic unit’, and that the ‘palliative’ of Slav
autonomy under Habsburg rule could prove no lasting remedy.4 The
Serbian Government, Sir Charles des Graz reported from Belgrade in
April, harboured similar aspirations, and had sent emissaries to the Allied
capitals to propagate its view.5 In May a Yugoslav Committee manifesto
(co-authored by Seton-Watson) was delivered to Parliament and published
in the press. It stressed the unity and indivisibility of the Yugoslav nation,
‘alike by identity of language, by the unanswerable laws of geography and
by national consciousness’, and that nation’s determination to unite its
territories in a single independent state.6
Those who lobbied the British Government to approve the principle
of a united Yugoslav state, furthermore, were never so unrealistic as to
bank on the idealistic appeal of national liberation and unification.
Repeatedly they emphasised the role a large state might play in obstructing
Germany’s route to the Near East. ‘Serbia is not fighting only for Serbia’,
proclaimed Bishop Velimirović, ‘but at the same time for India and
Egypt’; the South Slavs were Britain’s ‘unique friend between Hamburg
and Baghdad’.7 To fail to create a South Slav state with its fullest ethnic
borders, Seton-Watson urged Whitehall early in 1915, was to ‘renounce
the creation of a really effective barrier to German expansion in the
Balkans and the Drang nach Osten’.8 Independent Serb or Croat states
would inevitably be sucked into the German orbit.9
Officials were certainly susceptible to such arguments. When one
referred in August 1915 to the ‘really large Serbia, which I am convinced it
is our interest to encourage’, he implied at least a significant encroachment
on Austrian territory.10 Prior to the war the Monarchy, for all its
weaknesses, had seemed a strategic necessity. (‘Great Britain has
everything to gain from a strong Austria-Hungary’, Eyre Crowe had
written in 1909, ‘on condition that [she] is not dominated by Germany and
does not oppress Italy’).11 But the war had cast German aspirations in a
more voracious light and gravely undermined faith in Habsburg
independence of Berlin. Ideally, many still felt, a strong Austria would act
both as a barrier to German ambition and as a counterpoise to Russia.12 A
federal Monarchy might, it was hoped, fulfil the role of bulwark between
Teuton and Slav. But some officials certainly agreed with Namier that
Austria must always be ‘the backbone of German imperialism in Europe’,
her continued existence ‘a definite victory for Germany’.13
Regarding a full, independent South Slav union, however, there was
no question of commitments at this stage. British representatives were
happy to make positive noises. Supilo recalled that both Grey and Asquith
had promised to back a settlement ‘according to the principle of
Nationality’.14 In July Lord Crewe, accepting an amended Yugoslav
Committee manifesto, promised the English people’s warm sympathy for
the principle of nationality and ‘goodwill’ towards Yugoslav aims ‘after the
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 161

victorious conclusion of the war’.15 But in private George Clerk

(sympathetic to the Yugoslav cause and Seton-Watson’s closest Foreign
Office ally) cautioned that ‘the time is not yet come for a detailed
consideration of these questions – we have still to beat Germany’.16
This caution proved misguided, however, as Whitehall was plunged
immediately into just such detailed consideration, not by ideological
sympathy for the Yugoslav cause or long-term strategic analysis, but by
the more pressing exigencies of the war. Already in early 1915 the
question of an expanded South Slav state was raised by the military
imperative to secure new allies in southern Europe. By that summer, with
the war going badly, this need was increasingly critical. The two countries
of most interest – Italy and Bulgaria – lay at opposite ends of Yugoslav
territory, and it was in both cases with parts of this territory that diplomats
hoped to induce allegiance to the Allied cause. The extent to which any
principle of ethnic integrity was subservient at this stage to military
necessity is shown by the fact that, while ‘nationality’ was disingenuously
invoked in one case, in the other it was consciously violated.
British attempts to tie Bulgaria into the anti-German alliance, or at
least to secure her neutrality, were ill-fated.17 But for some time it seemed
she might be tempted by Macedonian territories allotted to Serbia in 1913.
The national identity of the population concerned had, as we have seen,
been thought inchoate. Once it suited Britain to propose a transfer to
Bulgaria, however, the justice of the Bulgarian claim seemed more
apparent. A sententious memorandum by Lord Eustace Percy considered
Serbian concessions necessary to the reconstitution of a Balkan bloc, the
‘only worthy object of Balkan statesmanship’. And while hitherto the
Government had, with ‘patience and forbearance’, refrained from pressing
the point, a public newly alive to the cause of nationality expected no less:

The unanimous opinion of students in this country […] is one

favourable to the occupation of Macedonia by Bulgaria on the
ground of the national principle itself. There is in this country
no doubt whatever that the principle of nationalities assigns
these regions to Bulgaria, and that, without the cession of these
territories, no peace in the Balkans can be assured.18

Fortunately, the difficulty of asking an ally fighting for survival to cede

territory to a rival who had remained on the fence seemed softened by the
scope for compensation in the west. The fact that certain Habsburg lands
were claimed as rightful Serbian territory, and that there was sympathy in
Britain for the claim, meant this too could be ascribed to principle rather
than realpolitik. To British strategists, whose calculations underestimated
Serb passions over the recently-acquired territories in Macedonia, this was
an admirably holistic solution, promising long-term Balkan rapprochement
162 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

and a united front against the Central Powers in South-East Europe.19 The
British public believed, a Foreign Office memorandum argued, ‘that a
certain injustice was done to Bulgaria in the settlement of the Macedonian
question in 1913’, that Britain was partly culpable, that this failure should
be redressed, and that in return Serbia should receive ‘all, and far more
than all, that she dreamt of in 1912 on the Adriatic and in the Slav lands of
Austria-Hungary’. The satisfaction of Serbia in the west and of Bulgaria in
Macedonia formed ‘interdependent parts of one policy’.20
But despite the lofty justifications, this was plainly wartime
diplomacy as usual. The nub of the matter, as Grey expressed it, was that
for Bulgaria to be secured without alienating Serbia, Pašić must be given ‘a
definite guarantee of the territories which Serbia will receive as the result
of a victorious war’.21 Here, Clerk observed, lay both ‘Serbia’s real avenue
to progress and the justification for the cession to Bulgaria which can
alone secure us united Balkan support’.22 Allied victory, Grey promised in
May 1915, would ‘secure for Serbia at least the liberation of the whole of
Bosnia and Hercegovina and their union with Serbia, and wide access to
the Adriatic in Dalmatia’.23 The enlarged state envisaged by British policy
at this stage was not, therefore, ‘Yugoslavia’ – the political union of all
South Slavs – but simply an expanded Serbia. Bosnia, Hercegovina and
southern Dalmatia (a strip stretching north to the Neretva delta and
therefore incorporating Dubrovnik) were reckoned, as we have seen, Serb
territories. No form of popular consultation was suggested.
With regard to Croatia proper, Whitehall was more circumspect.
Officials were not opposed to the broader Yugoslav idea, and they were
anxious to persuade Serbia to make concessions in Macedonia. But they
were also acutely sensitive to the views of their allies. And while France
was rightly presumed to favour Serbian aggrandisement, it seemed
uncertain how Russia, or subsequently Italy, might react. The tendency in
pre-war Russia, particularly in ecclesiastical circles, to oppose an
association of their Orthodox brethren with the Catholic Croats, meant
that in London the Russian attitude seemed ‘all important’.24 In fact,
though, as the Russian position deteriorated during the summer of 1915,
St. Petersburg became desperate to secure Bulgarian assistance and was
happy to promise Croatia in return for Serbian sacrifices. But by then Italy
had entered the war and strongly opposed a Serbo-Croat union.25
When in August Pašić sought clarification of the territories offered,
discussions were held to agree an Allied response. As a result Serbia was
assured Bosnia, Srem, Baćska, part of southern Dalmatia (to be split with
Montenegro), and Slavonia if it was in Allied hands, while the fate of
Croatia was reserved. Essentially this was a British-brokered compromise
between the Italian desire to restrict Serbian aggrandisement (and to forge
a bond with Hungary), and the Russian position.26 British officials
certainly did not view Croatia as rightful Serbian territory like Bosnia or
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 163

southern Dalmatia. If justice was to be done to its distinct religious and

historical identity, some form of consultation would be required. Union
between Croatia and an enlarged Serbia would, Grey informed Niš in May,
‘naturally be a matter to be decided by the Croats themselves’ (though
subject to their approval, he later wrote, Britain could ‘guarantee to
facilitate the union’).27 Nevertheless, British solicitude for Croat self-
determination owed as much to Italian feelings as to those of Croats.28
That sympathy for South Slav nationalism was firmly subordinate to
military priorities was made amply clear by the terms of the Treaty of
London in April 1915. British strategists convinced their superiors that
Italian involvement would decisively affect the war. (It would be, Grey
affirmed, ‘the turning point’ which would ‘very greatly hasten a successful
conclusion’).29 On this basis the Cabinet agreed to promise Italy the
territory she demanded in Istria and Dalmatia, with its 1.3 million
Yugoslavs, and to press Russia to concur.30
It was inevitable, of course, that military imperatives seemed
paramount. (One should indeed avoid importing ‘the ethical standards of
tranquillity into the emotional atmosphere of danger’).31 At the same time
it is not clear that Whitehall’s discomfort at the Italian terms was as acute
as some officials subsequently liked to suggest.32 While the territory in
question was known to be ethnologically more Slavic than Italian, and
while it was regretted (for pragmatic reasons) that the Serbs should be
further antagonised, few yet regarded ‘nationality’ as a presiding
geopolitical principle. Clerk may in private have commented that Allied
ministers would deserve ‘to be hanged’ unless Italy decisively tilted the
balance of the war, but at his desk in Whitehall he brushed protests
aside.33 ‘We cannot’, he asserted, ‘strain the principle of nationalities to the
point of risking success in the war’.34 ‘We wish the war to be ended as far
as possible on the basis of nationalities’, he minuted, ‘[…] but we did not
set out on a Nationality Crusade’. ‘What we are doing’, wrote Grey, ‘is to
take the best means to ensure that the Slavs get all but a fraction of their
claims’, since without Italian cooperation ‘the Slavs might get less than
nothing’.35 Any national boundary would have its ‘ragged fringes’.36
Territories offered to Serbia were still conceived, in other words, as
reward for services to the Allied cause or as compensation for sacrifices
elsewhere, rather than as rightfully hers on ethnic grounds. Pašić should
appreciate, it was noted, that Serbian aspirations were now heeded to an
extent ‘far beyond anything that seemed possible a few months ago’;37 he
should recall the distance the British Government had travelled towards
acceptance of aspirations hardly considered before outside Serbia itself.38
A Yugoslav Committee memorandum seemed to Clerk ‘almost menacing
in its insistence on the Allied Powers creating a vast Yugo-Slav State’.39
Such a demand seemed not natural and principled but presumptuous and
unrealistic. A draft message to Serbia was couched in language wholly
164 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

conventional in its pragmatism: ‘the following territories are reserved for

Serbia in the event of a successful war […]’.40 And it was pointless,
officials noted, to pretend otherwise. Would the Allies, the elder Nicolson
asked rhetorically, continue fighting simply to uphold promises to
Serbia?41 ‘We all know perfectly well’, wrote Lord Eustace Percy, ‘that we
cannot and will not continue the war until Yugo-Slavia is constituted’.42
Whatever the vague encouragement given to pro-Yugoslav campaigners,
this, in essence, remained Britain’s position until the eve of the armistice.

1916 saw Yugoslavia largely disappear as an issue for official Britain, just
as it burgeoned in the popular consciousness. With Serbia conquered and
its government in exile, Bulgaria allied with the Central Powers, and Italy
making no impression on the southern front, the future disposition of the
South Slav territories seemed uncertain.43 When the subject was raised, as
when Alexander Karadjordjević visited London in April, the principal
concern was to avoid commitment. ‘It will be desirable’, warned Sir Arthur
Nicolson, ‘to be very cautious as to what is said to the Crown Prince in
respect to a Serbo-Croatian union’.44 (Of the various hints and assurances
made during the frantic diplomacy of 1915 none, as things had turned out,
was considered binding).45 There was scant official enthusiasm for the
propaganda campaign launched to mark Kosovo Day in 1916, and unease
at Lord Cromer’s appointment as President of the newly-formed Serbian
Society (for fear that apparent government sponsorship might upset Italy).
While Seton-Watson remained close to certain officials, his relations with
the Foreign Office were increasingly strained.46 The British Ambassador in
Italy criticised ‘certain people in England’ who saw themselves as ‘heaven-
born interpreters to other nations of what they ought to think’.47
Nevertheless, the failure of the 1916 offensive did foster for the first
time the possibility of a negotiated peace, and memoranda began to be
drawn up considering the key principles of a European settlement. The
most important of these, drawn up by Sir Ralph Paget and Sir William
Tyrell, assumed a total Allied victory, and advocated the destruction of
Austria-Hungary and South Slav unification. ‘We consider’, they wrote,
‘that Great Britain should in every way encourage and promote the union
of Serbia, Montenegro, and the Southern Slavs into one strong federation
of States with the view to its forming a barrier to any German advance
towards the East’.48 Such ideas, if they were the logical conclusion of
previous statements, were nevertheless much starker than most official
thinking at this stage. (For one thing, prior to Russia’s collapse the break-
up of Austria seemed likely only to enhance the former’s already
uncomfortable influence in Eastern Europe and the Near East).49
Early 1917 saw critical developments both for the conduct of the
war and for its political aftermath. On 10 January the Allied reply to
President Wilson’s conservative ‘peace note’ was published. While the
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 165

latter had been condemned in The New Europe for overlooking the modern
movement of nationality, this reply was greeted rapturously as a ‘charter of
emancipation’, a landmark in world affairs.50 Despite calling for the
restoration of Serbia and Montenegro to their pre-war independence (a
fact not lost, as we saw, on the exiled Petrović court), the call for ‘the
liberation of the Italians, as also of the Slavs, Roumanians and Czecho-
Slovaks from foreign domination’ was hailed as a commitment to
Yugoslav unity and independence. Three months later the Russian
revolution, combined with the prospect of US engagement, seemed to
favour a campaign based explicitly upon the principle of ‘self-
determination’ proclaimed by the Russian socialists. The implosion of one
imperial regime had shown, some argued, that an open commitment to
the oppressed nationalities of Austria-Hungary could destabilise that state
from within. The employment in May of Seton-Watson, alongside like-
minded colleagues like Lewis Namier and Rex and Allen Leeper, by the
Department of Information’s new ‘Intelligence Bureau’ (with a remit to
study internal conditions in foreign, particularly enemy, states) seemed to
promise a shift towards direct allegiance to the principle of nationality.51
But in fact the impact of these developments on British policy
towards the Yugoslav question was less significant in the short term than
Seton-Watson and others were led to hope, their optimism on this score
largely, as Victor Rothwell has observed, ‘wishful thinking’.52 The reply to
Wilson had been primarily a propaganda gesture directed at American
opinion; it was certainly not intended as a commitment to dismember
Austria-Hungary. In fact clandestine attempts had already begun – and
would continue for another fifteen months – to detach Austria-Hungary
from Germany by a separate peace, thus assuring the former’s survival.
While Seton-Watson considered that Allied commitments led ‘logically
and inevitably’ to the break-up of Austria-Hungary, officials thought
Britain bound only to ensure a measure of federal autonomy for the
subject nationalities.53 In July 1917 the War Cabinet decided that
discussion of specific war aims be postponed as long as possible.54 Most
of its senior members remained opposed to Habsburg dismemberment
even during the final months of the war.55
And while in retrospect none can doubt the impact of the Russian
Revolution on the geopolitical outcome of the war, its immediate effect
was not obviously favourable to the Yugoslav cause. For one thing, it gave
currency in Britain, particularly on the left, to the idea of an armistice
without annexations or recriminations and a return to the status quo ante, a
tendency which appalled those campaigning for an end to imperial
subjection in Europe.56 Their attempt to reclaim the moral high-ground by
hailing the principles of self-determination and democratic choice had not,
by the early summer of 1917, made a significant impact. Nor did Seton-
Watson believe that events in Russia would be repeated. While political
166 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

conditions in the Monarchy were increasingly tense, with the ‘leaven’ of

the Russian Revolution working among all classes and races, it would be,
he argued, ‘a grave mistake to suppose that there is any analogy between
the situation of Petrograd last March and that of Vienna or Budapest
today’. In Austria-Hungary there was ‘no real basis for a revolution’.57
Nor does it seem with hindsight that the employment by the
Intelligence Bureau of Seton-Watson and other New Europe contributors
marked an important policy shift. The Department of Information, of
which the Bureau was a subsidiary, had poor relations with senior Foreign
Office officials, who mistrusted its intentions, resented its direct access to
the Prime Minister, and feared the disruption these zealous individuals
might cause. Confidential information was deliberately withheld, not least
about the peace negotiations in progress with Austria-Hungary.58 Its
members, the Foreign Office insisted, should ‘confine themselves to facts
and refrain from recommendations and advice’.59
But while they might not have directly altered British policy towards
Austria, the events of early 1917 and the Russian Revolution in particular
did induce developments among the South Slavs – most notably the July
Corfu Agreement between the Serbian Government and the Yugoslav
Committee – which influenced British attitudes to the Yugoslav project.60
In accordance with their desire to keep options open regarding
Austria-Hungary, initial British reaction to the Corfu Declaration was
muted. (Indeed at the time the gathering had aroused suspicion: ‘what are
they conferring about?’, Cecil asked: ‘it sounds to me rather ominous’).61
An Intelligence Bureau memo written by Seton-Watson in mid-September
eulogised a pact which represented ‘the unanimous and considered view
of every serious party in Serbian politics’.62 But not until 28 November,
over four months after it was announced, was there any official reaction.
His Majesty’s Government had received the text of the Declaration, Lord
Robert Cecil announced blandly in Parliament, ‘with great interest and
sympathy’. It was not, he responded to questions, desirable to say more.63
There certainly was sympathy in many quarters for the ideals
expressed at Corfu. Memoranda prepared by the Political Intelligence
Department (which succeeded the disbanded Intelligence Bureau in March
1918) backed a redrawing of European boundaries with reference to
ethnicity. This was not, it was argued, a departure from traditional notions
of diplomacy (as was imagined both by romantic enthusiasts and their
conservative opponents); on the contrary, the ‘balance of power’ would
remain fundamental. But states based on conscious common nationality
would ‘be more durable, and afford a firmer support against aggression
than the older form of State, which was often a merely accidental
congeries of territories without any internal cohesion, necessary economic
unity, or clearly defined geographical frontiers’. In this respect, it was
argued, ‘our interests entirely coincide with the principle of nationality and
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 167

the doctrine of self-determination, though there must be very great

difficulties in applying it’.64 The Yugoslavs specifically had ‘incontestably’
shown ‘almost unanimous determination to construct a united
independent Yugoslavia’; if difficulties were presented by their diverse
traditions, they were ‘indisputably one race’.65 While the doctrine of self-
determination could not be applied universally, there was no problem in
this case; the Habsburg Yugoslavs wanted simply to join an existing state
with which they shared a racial and cultural affinity: ‘here […] there is no
question of anarchy, but simply of transference of authority’.66
As we have seen, however, this sympathy (always strongest among
Whitehall’s younger elements) did not preclude attempts to reach a peace
with Austria quite incompatible with the goals of Corfu. It was one such
effort which finally induced the Government to produce a statement of
war aims, delivered by Lloyd-George to a trade union audience on 5
January 1918. While this referred to Polish independence, it talked for the
other Habsburg nationalities only of ‘genuine self-government on true
democratic principles’.67 Three days later Wilson’s Fourteen Points
referred likewise only to ‘the freest possible opportunity of autonomous
development’ for the peoples of Austria-Hungary. An agitated Serbian
enquiry as to whether Britain supported a Yugoslav State was ducked.
Speaking personally, Cecil proffered, given a complete Allied victory he
would favour a Yugoslav State; but ‘how far any such object would be
attainable depended on the fortune of the war’.68 In private Lord Hardinge
rejected complete Yugoslav independence as, under present conditions,
‘an unrealisable programme’.69 Though ignorant of the negotiations taking
place, South Slav activists were acutely alive to Britain’s reluctance to
commit to their cause, and lamented her ‘lingering liking for Austria’.
Despite ‘much sympathy for the Yugoslav cause among Allied circles’,
wrote one campaigner, ‘that cursed Austria still enjoys the sympathy of the
official classes here […]’.70
On Steed’s advice Lord Northcliffe, heading the new Department of
Propaganda in Enemy Countries (EPD), urged clarification of Britain’s
attitude to Austria-Hungary. The Government was, he argued, perched
between two contradictory policies: seeking a separate peace which would
preserve the Monarchy, while simultaneously encouraging subject
nationalities in their quest for independence. On 5 March, with hope
declining for the first policy, the War Cabinet tentatively approved the
second. But no careless promises should be made, it cautioned: ‘we must
not promise them complete independence if the best we could get was
autonomy’.71 Later that month a final approach to Austria failed, and on
12 April the publication of the Sixtus letter ended all hopes of a separate
peace. When in May Lord Derby asked which horse Britain was riding,
Cecil replied that the policy of detaching Austria must finally be
abandoned and all support given to the oppressed nationalities.72
168 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

In private this was the moment at which the British Government

endorsed an independent Yugoslav State. A clear public statement,
however, was obstructed by Italy. On 3 June a declaration by the Allied
Supreme War Council calling explicitly for ‘a united and independent
Polish State’ expressed only an ‘earnest sympathy for the nationalistic
aspirations towards freedom of the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav peoples’.73
In Britain, a PID memo argued, there was ‘no idea of making any
difference of principle or of treatment between the Poles on the one hand,
and Czechs and Yugo-Slavs on the other’; the latter’s aspirations were ‘in
full accord with the fundamental principles for which the Entente is
fighting’.74 Nevertheless, while Balfour now privately admitted the break-
up of the Monarchy was the ‘best solution in the general interest’, Britain
never publicly matched the US statement on 28 June that all branches of
the Slav race should be completely freed from German and Magyar rule.75
By August it seemed certain, in any case, that internal pressures
would cause Austria-Hungary’s collapse.76 In the event, therefore, as the
PID admitted, Austria’s demise and the creation of a Yugoslav union
came upon the Entente before any conclusive decision had been made.77
Despite widespread sympathy for the Yugoslav project, Britain had
ultimately felt unable to commit: rather, as Seton-Watson expressed it,
‘like a bather who undresses but remains standing on the brink’.78 For all
that officials talked as if South-East Europe was theirs to shape, delegates
assembling for the Peace Conference were faced in the ex-Habsburg lands
with a fait accompli they were powerless to alter.79
The problem which quickly emerged for British officials was in what
manner to recognise those groups claiming authority over the Empire’s
South Slav lands. While in the case of the Czechoslovaks one
unchallenged body – the Czechoslovak National Council – claimed to act
as a provisional government, a bitter dispute had developed between the
Serbian Government and the Yugoslav Committee. While the former
asserted a right to represent all Yugoslavs, the latter held out firmly for
separate recognition. Already, therefore, by the time a Yugoslav state was
declared at the beginning of December 1918, Britain had to respond to an
internal crisis with serious ramifications for its future structure and
stability. But let us first retrace our steps, and look at the assumptions
already made in Britain about the constitutional shape of a Yugoslav state.

Expanded Serbia or new ‘Yugoslavia’? – The Shape of a United

South Slav State in British Thinking 1914-1918

We have noted the increasing tendency in wartime Britain to view the

Yugoslav groups as a single nation, to relegate religious and historical
differences beneath a fundamental racial-linguistic unity and apparent
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 169

Yugoslav consciousness. And we have seen that, while not official

government policy, the concept of a united Yugoslav State – distinct from
an enlarged Serbia – acquired late in the war a wide currency in Britain.
But to what extent, before December 1918, did British observers
contemplate the constitutional structure best adapted to a state with such
disparate provinces and traditions?
The Government considered an enlarged Serbia during 1915-16
predominantly in the context of compensations for Macedonia. Bosnia,
Southern Dalmatia and Slavonia were to be integrated in the pre-war
Serbian state. The Croats, however, were to approve any union with their
Serb brethren, a recognition of distinct identity which manifested itself
also in vague assumptions that the resulting union would be federal.
Whether a ‘Federation of Croatia’ followed the enlargement of Serbia,
Grey wrote to des Graz in May 1915, would be a matter for the Croats
themselves.80 His proposal that Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro should
have most of the intervening territory ‘for division among themselves’
implies a hazily-imagined tripartite federal or confederal arrangement
(though the awkward matter of internal frontiers was not broached).81 The
Paget-Tyrrell memo of autumn 1916, which boldly advocated the
dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, talked of a ‘future confederation
of Southern Slav States’.82
From early in the war Supilo highlighted the pitfalls awaiting a
unification process. Already in January 1915 he stressed that the Austro-
Hungarian South Slavs must see the war as one ‘not […] of conquest but
of redemption and liberation’. Serbia, he stated, must expect to come to
provinces like Bosnia or Dalmatia ‘not as a conqueror of new territories
but as a liberator of her own people’ who would immediately participate in
the country’s administration.83 In August he complained that the Allied
promise of Bosnia, Slavonia and half of Dalmatia (all with Croat
populations) directly to Serbia, while Croatia was left free to choose, might
jeopardise a stable union by creating Croat irredentism in Serbia, Serb
irredentism in Croatia, and a temptation for Catholic Croats to separate
from the Orthodox Serbs. Either all Croats should be assigned to Serbia
or all should have the option.84 Yugoslav national unity, he urged Pašić,
‘should not be divided and offered in pieces to Serbia as a basis for
compensations’ but should be viewed as a single ‘ethnic entity’.85 In
October Supilo again warned British officials that unless Serbia reformed,
‘instead of liberation, union and fusion of the Croats and Slovenes with
the Serbs, it would […] be a simple case of conquest and domination
inspired by Serb-Orthodox exclusivism’. In this case the Habsburg
Yugoslav regions might prefer a separate union around Croatia.86
A few in Britain were strongly influenced by Supilo. Seton-Watson
in particular agreed that unless the Yugoslav region was treated as one, an
amalgamation might prove divisive rather than unifying. Immediately he
170 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

urged that the problem be treated ‘on truly Southern Slav (as opposed to
merely Serbian) lines’; transferring Bosnia alone from Habsburg to Serbian
hands would settle nothing – Bosnia, Dalmatia, Croatia-Slavonia and the
Slovene lands were too entwined by geography and sentiment.87 Union
must come voluntarily from within, not by conquest from without. It
must preserve for the Habsburg South Slavs ‘their existing political
institutions and culture as a worthy contribution to the common South
Slav fund’. The natural solution would be a federal union, with a Croatian
Parliament in Zagreb parallel with that in Belgrade, and a central federal
Parliament, either based centrally in Sarajevo or rotating between the
various provincial centres.88 Like Supilo he stressed that no satisfactory
boundary could be drawn between a separate Croatia and an enlarged
Serbia; the two sisters, he warned Prince Regent Alexander, would be
enemies, each plagued by irredentism among their respective minorities.89
But as we have seen, the claim that South Slav union must be
complete if it was not to prove divisive was little heeded by officials
unwilling to commit to securing Yugoslavia, and in this context des Graz’s
assumption at the end of 1915 that the Serbian Constitution would simply
be extended to new territories may have been widely shared.90 Certainly,
beyond vague talk of a Croat-Serb ‘federation’, little thought was given to
the problems of forging a single state from the disparate Yugoslav groups.
Though he impressed officials he met, Supilo’s submissions went
unminuted. And while Grey did tentatively agree that, with Pašić’s
approval, Bosnia, Southern Dalmatia and Slavonia might – like Croatia –
choose their own fate, Pašić’s refusal caused little concern. The Balkan
discussions, wrote Sir Arthur Nicolson, were tangled enough; Supilo’s
scheme would make matters worse.91 Although by the autumn of 1915
Seton-Watson felt, rather optimistically, that an impact had been made
upon British thinking, Clerk reminded him that ‘the S[outhern] S[lav]
question is quite a new one, which has only just begun to force itself upon
the attention of public men’.92
In fact Whitehall largely ignored Supilo’s concerns until they were
forced on its attention prior to the peace conference. As we have seen,
between the defeat of Serbia and the first Russian Revolution, the
Yugoslav question, while increasingly prominent in the British media,
largely passed from official consideration. From his position in the
Intelligence Bureau Seton-Watson tried to return it to the agenda. In May
1917 he hailed the Russian Socialist principle of ‘self-determination’ as ‘the
method of deciding the future of the Yugoslav race (including the
Slovenes)’.93 His report on the Corfu agreement hailed its prescription for
Yugoslav unity. While Pašić had deprecated any extreme form of
federalism, he noted, he and others had ‘accepted as an axiom the need for
considerable local autonomies to meet the varying requirements of the
various provinces’. And if all agreed on the need for a strong central
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 171

parliament, the Serbians were clear that ‘if […] Croatia or other sections of
the Yugo-Slavs insisted on a federal solution they would be prepared to
accept this’. There was ‘to be a settlement by amicable agreement and
Serbia repudiated any idea of forcing her will upon the others’.94
But not before the foundation of the Political Intelligence
Department in March 1918 was there any official inclination to deliberate
the internal shape of a Yugoslav state, or that state’s position in a general
peace. As we have seen, Seton-Watson and others had supported Supilo’s
insistence on a federal (or at least decentralised) constitution which would
respect the region’s diverse traditions. Interestingly, however, the
memorandum on South-East Europe drawn up by Nicolson, Leeper and
Paget which discussed the issue of ‘incompletely conciliated rivalries’
based on geographical and historical factors took a different view. The
Pact of Corfu had represented, it argued, a consensus that to overcome
the ‘artificially created’ divisions of the past there should be emphasis on
‘the complete union of the race, not in any federal system, which would
allow the old rivalries to continue, but in one united State wherein all three
branches of the race should enjoy absolute equality’. The Greater Serbian
idea had ‘in some cases died hard’, but might now ‘for practical purposes’
be considered dead. It was ‘indisputable’ that a unitary state was ‘the only
possible solution’. On such a basis there was ‘no reason why […] the new
Yugoslav State should not work well’.95
Until at least October 1918 most British officials were insensitive to
Croat and Slovene concerns about their position in the embryonic state,
and to the tendencies in Serbian political circles which underlay these
concerns. One who was not, Horace Rumbold, reported from Berne in
May 1918 that Austrian Yugoslavs distrusted the Corfu Agreement as ‘a
mere trick of Pašić’. ‘All the opposition parties’, he wrote, ‘are utterly
opposed to Pašić’s centralising and imperialistic tendencies, which would
turn Yugoslavia into a second Macedonia’; they were ‘determined that
even the smallest provinces should have full autonomy, and be able to
develop freely’.96 Though in some respects confused, Rumbold saw
accurately the deep mistrust between the Serbian Government and the
Austrian Yugoslavs. His information, however, was dismissed in
Whitehall. The agreement, Allen Leeper insisted, had been ‘universally
welcomed among the Yugoslavs’ with only very insignificant exceptions.97
When in June Harold Temperley wrote an intelligence report on the
Yugoslav problem he recorded that the Pact of Corfu had ‘proclaimed the
Yugoslav programme beneath the aegis of Serbia’, a wording highly
insensitive to the insecurity of Habsburg South Slavs. Initially, he argued,
Croat and Serb interests were not quite the same: ‘the Serb conception of
Yugo-Slavia tended to be that of a greater Serbia and the Croat conception
was federalistic’.98 But during the war ‘national feeling’ (a phrase used
always at this stage to indicate Yugoslav feeling) had spread markedly. The
172 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Pact of Corfu and the demise of the ‘Russian-Orthodox bogey’ had given
the Croats and Slovenes a feeling of security. If the terms of the pact were
not ideal from their point of view (there being no mention of federation),
the securities given had substantially allayed the earlier suspicion of
Serbian intentions. This report significantly influenced official British
opinion. (In December it was reprinted and circulated with minor
amendments).99 Though it did, unlike the previous PID report,
acknowledge a Croatian desire for federalism, it attributed this to concerns
originating before the early summer of 1917, implying that a subsequent
growth of Yugoslav sentiment had removed the need for a federal
arrangement. A slogan published by Croatian and Slovene officers in
Russia (‘No Great Serbia, no Great Croatia, no Great Slovenia. Federated
Yugo-Slavia was and is our ideal’) Temperley described as ‘extreme’.100
The western Yugoslavs, Harold Nicolson minuted with similar
insensitivity, were in a different position to the Czechs and Poles since
they ‘will not form a distinct State, but will be assimilated to Serbia’. He
dismissed the Yugoslav Committee’s request for a distinct army formed
from Austrian Yugoslavs imprisoned in Italy, considering it – as Pašić did
– ‘only natural’ that these join the Serbian Army.101 Since ‘nationalist’
(Yugoslav) feeling was presumed to dominate in Croatia by this stage,
there was scant sympathy for the Committee’s wish to be recognised as a
provisional authority, with its own armed force, distinct from Belgrade.102
(In part, of course, the Committee had itself to blame for overstating to
the Allies in the past its common ground with the Serbian Government).
When Seton-Watson pointed out the changed attitude of Serbs from
Bosnia and Croatia towards Pašić (‘till lately [his] most ardent supporters
[…] now entirely disillusioned’), few were interested. It was, Lord
Hardinge observed dully, ‘difficult to follow the intricacies of Serbian
party politics’.103 Des Graz, meanwhile, presented the ‘growing opposition
to the personal ascendancy of Pašić’ simply as a split within Serbian
politics (‘the causes of which lie far back’), without relating it to the
broader Yugoslav picture.104
With the Yugoslav project still far from secured, even Seton-Watson
continued to stress, particularly in public, that Serbia’s problems were ones
of personality and party politics rather than fundamental disagreement
over national unification.105 Though he warned against any attempt by the
‘old guard’ to revert to a narrowly Serbian rather than Yugoslav ethos, he
did not suggest this process was actually underway. On the contrary, he
wrote, this ‘wretched party feud’ had happily not infected Serbian
enthusiasm for Yugoslav unity; the Declaration of Corfu still represented
‘the unanimous voice of every section of the Serbian nation’. ‘The
unhappy misunderstandings of the last year must not’, he argued, ‘be taken
as a sign of any slackening or uncertainty in the national ideal’.106
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 173

By early October, however, with the Empire collapsing and the Yugoslavs
dictating their destiny on the ground, it was no longer necessary to
exaggerate a unity of purpose. For the first time the antagonisms which
had been boiling under the surface became unavoidably apparent to
British officials. Ante Trumbić delivered to Whitehall a memorandum
expressly highlighting the divergence of views between the Committee and
Pašić’s Government. While careful to deny that this was a conflict with
Serbia as a whole, he attacked Pašić bitterly for refusing to back separate
recognition for the ex-Habsburg Yugoslavs as an Allied nation. He was,
Trumbić complained, animated by a spirit not of liberation but of
conquest; he assigned to Serbia a position of ‘Prussian primacy’ and would
hold the western Yugoslavs ‘in a position of subjection and humiliation’.
He failed to appreciate that provinces ‘in matters of civilisation and public
administration more advanced than Serbia’ would ‘not be willing to be
subjected to a Government which is not on the same plane’.107
At the same time Seton-Watson submitted a paper entitled ‘The
Policy of Mr Pašić and the Yugoslav Problem’.108 The Government must
realise, he urged, the motives behind Pašić’s policy and the extent to
which he had alienated not only Habsburg Yugoslavs but also political
circles in Serbia. Abandoning his insistence that Corfu had unanimous
support, he argued that Pašić had been forced into it by external events –
the Russian Revolution and growing American influence – and that,
despite paying lip-service to its principles, had never intended to honour
them.109 The ‘whole basis’ upon which Corfu rested, he insisted, was that
the Serbian Government and the Yugoslav Committee were ‘absolutely
equal contracting parties’. In opposing recognition for the Committee and
claiming Serbia alone represented the Yugoslav people, the Serbian
Government was ‘violating the whole spirit of the Agreement’. And this
was no mere question of form. ‘The issues at stake are fundamental’, he
insisted: ‘it is a struggle between the Pan-Serb solution, as represented by
Pašić and Protić and [the] Yugoslav idea, as accepted by the great body of
Serbian and Yugoslav intellectuals’.
In Whitehall these blunt memoranda evoked mixed feelings. It did
seem, Leeper observed, that Pašić had ‘practically disregarded all
Parliamentary methods’ in confronting his Serbian opponents. (Des Graz
had often said so from Corfu). But having been persuaded by Yugoslavs
and their British allies of the unity of feeling existing between Serbians and
their western brethren, there was a tendency – certainly a desire – to
regard these claims as overstated and alarmist. Pašić might at times have
behaved arbitrarily, Leeper admitted, but:

[…] the bogey that Trumbić raises of a Serbian annexation of

the Yugo-Slav countries of Austria-Hungary is purely fantastic.
Serbia is far too small and exhausted to carry through such an
174 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

annexation against the wishes of the population even in the

unimaginable eventuality of the Great Powers permitting such a
flagrant violation of the rights of peoples. There is no real
evidence that Mr Pašić contemplates any such absurd policy
[...]110

While for Seton-Watson recognition for the Committee as the

representative of a distinct Allied nation was simply the fulfillment of the
Corfu Agreement for which Britain had, albeit vaguely, vouched its
support, Whitehall was unsure. There was certainly sympathy for the
Yugoslav demand for ‘a fair share of the direction of the whole question’.
But Italian reservations could not be ignored. And if there was doubt over
Pašić’s democratic mandate and his support among the Serbian political
class, he was right to claim both a stronger mandate than Trumbić and
vastly greater governmental and diplomatic experience.111 The Committee,
Leeper agreed, had ‘at most only a theoretical, certainly not an actual
mandate from their fellow-countrymen’. Recognition might be accorded
only ‘to the point of view represented by the Committee collectively
[rather] than to the Committee in its personal aspect’.112
Concern for democratic legitimacy, however, was not the main
concern.113 More important was the feeling that, if ‘Yugoslavia’ was to be a
united state, its representatives must speak with ‘one voice not two’.114
Pašić, Cecil noted, considered himself the real head of the Yugo-Slav
movement.115 And while Seton-Watson urged that Serbian Government
and Yugoslav Committee be recognised as equal contracting parties, many
officials assumed that the former should occupy a position of precedence:
it was, Leeper observed, the ‘natural nucleus’ of a Yugoslav state. To allay
suspicions Pašić, he suggested, should form a national Government
incorporating members of the Serbian opposition and at least two
members of the Yugoslav Committee. On 9 October this proposal was
urged by Balfour upon both Trumbić and Pašić.116 But while a gesture
towards inclusiveness, this was scarcely the coming together of equals
which the Yugoslavs desired; and it suggested that, whatever sympathy
existed for the latter, officials did regard a national Government as
fundamentally a continuation of the Serbian.
Soon, however, Whitehall was compelled to rethink. As events on
the ground gathered pace (the Habsburg Yugoslavs, Leeper noted on 15
October, had ‘practically declared themselves an independent State’) it
became essential to secure inter-Yugoslav cooperation and progress
towards amalgamation.117 Officials began to lose patience with Pašić’s
claim that Serbia’s wartime sacrifices entitled her to represent all
Yugoslavs, and became sympathetic to Trumbić’s concerns. ‘The relatively
advanced Slavs of Croatia etc’, Robert Cecil declared, ‘will never consent
to be “bossed” by the bands of dishonest and murderous intriguers which
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 175

constitute the backbone of the Serbian Government’.118 Lord Acton’s

report of Serbian opposition to Pašić seemed to confirm Seton-Watson’s
view that the Prime Minister headed a narrow ‘clique’ out of tune with
opinion in Serbia as in western Yugoslavia.119 Pašić’s claim that Britain
should consider the Austrian Yugoslavs her allies simply because Serbia
was an ally was absurd, Leeper minuted:

Our reason for recognising [the Austrian Yugoslavs] as friends

and extending to them privileges as such is the evidence we
have from them direct, both by their formation of volunteer
forces to fight on the side of the Allies and by their ever-
increasing antagonistic attitude to the Austro-Hungarian Govt.
What Mr Pašić is aiming at, but has discreetly involved in
several pages of verbiage is that the Yugoslavs of Austria
should have no contact with us nor any claim on our
consideration except through the mediation and in reward for
the gallant behaviour of Serbia. This is, of course, a perfectly
impossible position.120

Initially support remained for Pašić’s vision of a unitary, centralised state.

The Corfu Pact was accepted as the basis for Yugoslav union, and while a
few, like Seton-Watson, emphasised that agreement’s implication of equal
status for Serbian Government and Yugoslav Committee, officials noticed
first its commitment to the creation of a unitary kingdom under the
Karadjordjević dynasty. Crewe House’s suggestion in mid-October that
Britain grant separate recognition was dangerous, Leeper argued. Not only
would this be ‘inacceptable [sic] to Mr Pašić’, but, more importantly, it
risked ‘reopening […] the whole question, settled by the Declaration of
Corfu, of the necessity of one united Yugoslav State’.121
By the end of October, however, with no sign of a broad-based
Government, attitudes towards recognition of the Austrian Yugoslavs
began to shift. Though Balfour remained anxious to unite the parties
before any formal recognition was granted, hope was diminishing. ‘I am
afraid’, Sir Robert Graham lamented, ‘that it is not possible to bring M.
Pašić to reason and that we shall finally have to recognise the
Committee’.122 When, three days later, Nicolson also urged that Britain
recognise the Committee ‘without further delay’, Graham proposed that
action be taken directly Balfour returned from Paris.123
There were signs too of a shift in attitude towards the structure of
the Yugoslav state. Lord Acton quoted the Serbian Minister in Switzerland
as stating that all question of federalisation had been dropped since a
federal system would be too cumbrous and would provoke friction
between the component states. This was precisely the argument of
Nicolson, Leeper and Paget’s PID memo, which had dismissed federalism
176 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

as likely to incubate old rivalries. Amid the recriminations of October

1918, however, the statement struck Nicolson as an example of that
‘extreme chauvinism’ which it was to be feared might permeate the
Serbian Government.124
A shared Franco-Italian interest in limiting the influence of the
Habsburg Yugoslavs made it very unlikely Britain would persuade her
European allies to join her in recognising the Committee.125 And in the
event no move towards recognition was made before an apparent
breakthrough persuaded the British Government (again) to await
developments. On 3 November came a message from the Serb-Croat-
Slovene National Council that it was ‘prepared to form a common State
with Serbia and Montenegro’ (‘the first formal declaration to the world’, it
was later noted, ‘of adhesion to that union which the Pact of Corfu had
proclaimed’).126 Then a South Slav conference in Geneva offered fresh
hope of ‘some definite Slav organism’ uniting Serbian Government and
Yugoslav Committee which Britain might recognise. When, despite
reports of Pašić’s obstinacy, an agreement was announced on 9 November
for a Cabinet with equal Serbian and Austrian Yugoslav representation, all
prayers seemed answered. In the meantime Serbia agreed to recognise the
Zagreb National Council as legitimate representative of the western
Yugoslavs. All economic frontiers were to be dissolved. ‘The new State
exists’, it was proclaimed.127 The new Government, Sir Arthur Evans
reported, would control all foreign affairs, internal security and
infrastructure, so that ‘as far as the outside world is concerned it […]
represents the complete fusion of Serbia and all the Yugo-Slav lands’.128
Again Britain faced pressure to respond. ‘The formation of this
supreme joint council’, Allen Leeper noted, ‘together with the
construction of a Serbian Coalition government, marks a most desirable
advance towards complete unity of action [which] raises in a still more
cogent form the question of recognition by the Powers’.129 But while a
united Yugoslavia was, as Seton-Watson affirmed, ‘an accomplished fact,
with which the Entente must reckon’, the agreed joint administration was
not, and uncertainty remained over a response.130 Some argued for
positive action. Since the National Council’s request for independent
recognition had now been publicly supported by the Serbian Government,
Leeper wrote, there seemed ‘no further reason against this recognition
being accorded, save, possibly, the attitude of the Italian Government’.131
But still Balfour was unwilling to commit. On the one hand the
question remained complicated both by the hostility of the Italians (whose
occupation of territories promised by the Treaty of London raised fears of
armed conflict with the South Slavs) and by disorder in the Yugoslav lands
which cast doubt on the National Council as an effective temporary
administration after the collapse of Austrian authority. On the other hand,
Pašić’s sincerity at Geneva already seemed questionable. He had, Sir Ralph
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 177

Paget reported on 21 November, raised doubts about the joint council

appointments, and it looked as though he ‘did not intend to run quite
straight’.132 (In fact, ten days earlier, on a hint from Pašić, Protić had
resigned from the coalition cabinet on behalf of his Radical colleagues,
rejecting this ‘expression of mistrust in Serbia’).133 A few days later Sir
Arthur Evans informed Derby that Pašić had ‘intrigued against [the
Geneva agreement] by every means in his power’. In his ‘oriental
evasions’, he noted with disgust, ‘he is just like a Pasha’.134
Nothing, consequently, was done before on 1 December 1918 a
delegation sent by the National Council to Belgrade declared loyalty to
Alexander, and received in turn the proclamation of a single unitary
kingdom. Pending a constitution for a common Government, Alexander
(representing his incapacitated father) had provisionally assumed executive
power, Evans reported on 4 December, ‘throughout what is now one
united Kingdom of Serbia and Yugoslavia’.135 This, wrote Laurence
Collier, profoundly altered the situation. Recognition of the National
Council of Zagreb had been withheld, but ‘to recognise this new State
would be a different matter […], and indeed, it is difficult to see how we
can avoid recognising it, as we recognise Serbia, which it has absorbed
[…]’.136 Nevertheless, ongoing political instability dissuaded Britain even
now from formal acknowledgement. (At Alexander’s behest Pašić resigned
as head of the first joint Ministry on 16 December and was replaced by
Protić).137 The Foreign Secretary, Graham minuted on Christmas Day,
wished to defer action until it was known what lay behind this resignation
and whether a durable united government was really in existence.
When, some three weeks later, uncertainty remained, it was decided
to dress procrastination up as policy. The Allied Governments had studied
the notification of the union of all Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the Foreign
Office instructed their representative in Belgrade, but ‘cannot recognise a
political transformation accomplished on the eve of the Peace Conference,
which alone can pronounce on the definite disposal of territory and on the
constitution of the new States, due regard being paid to the general
situation and the wishes of the populations concerned’.138 And indeed,
despite all evidence to the contrary, it was sometimes still implied that this
Conference, not the Yugoslavs themselves, would actuate South Slav
union. The Conference, Balfour wrote in late November, ‘will surely
desire to bring into being a single and united Yugo-Slav State’.139

Before turning to the post-war period, we should look further at British

expectations of a Yugoslav State at the moment of its creation. Since, as a
PID memo admitted, the Austrian collapse had occurred ‘before any
decision had been made upon the Yugo-Slav question’, little thought had
been given to the political difficulties and constitutional choices facing a
united Yugoslavia.140 But by December 1918, if not before, it seemed
178 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

obvious to Whitehall that Britain’s principal European Allies were

fostering opposite tendencies among the South Slavs. While Italy, hostile
to a Yugoslav state, sought to foment separatism among Croats and
Montenegrins, the French – regarding such a state as a potential ally in
southern Europe – pressed on Belgrade a firmly centralist agenda, arguing
that federalism would divide the country and weaken it internationally.141
Both, in other words, centrally-governed themselves, equated federalism
with weakness and centralism with stability and strength.
Unlike Italy or France, Britain, her officials maintained, viewed
southern Europe’s future impartially. Lacking territorial ambitions or
strong commercial interests she sought only the stability which would
avert another major war, hoping for the region’s new or enlarged states
simply that their foundation on the principles of nationality and self-
determination would ensure ‘a firmer support against aggression than the
older form of state’.142 Of course such ‘honest broker’ pretensions were
not wholly ingenuous. The settlement would provide, it was also
suggested, ‘an unprecedented opportunity for the legitimate extension of
British influence’. And the fact that the balance of power remained
‘fundamental’ to British diplomacy in Europe meant London could not
stand aloof from this jostling for position. Foreign Office files on
southern Europe reveal a marked suspicion of French intentions in the
Balkans, observers vaguely surmising ‘some sinister territorial, strategic or
economic motivation’.143 (‘We do not want the Balkans to come entirely
under French influence’, Lord Derby minuted in January 1919, ‘and the
French are leaving no stone unturned to increase their influence
throughout the peninsula’).144 Nevertheless, British self-interest was
enlightened in the sense that its primary aim – a Yugoslav state politically
stable, strategically significant and independent of excessive great power
influence (given that any such was unlikely to be British) – accorded with
that of the South Slavs themselves.
In terms of how this aim was best achieved, the winter of 1918-19
was a crucial transitional period in British attitudes. Despite the oft-
expressed concerns of Yugoslavs like Supilo, Trumbić and Hinković,
some British officials still conceived Yugoslavia as Great Serbia and, as
Pašić had hoped, saw Serbia as its natural administrative centre.
Recognition seemed unavoidable, Collier wrote on 21 December, since the
new state was ‘only an extension of Serbia, in the same way as the newly-
formed united Romanian State of Romania, Transylvania etc, is an
extension of the old kingdom of Romania’.145 Perhaps inevitably, Serbia’s
decades of independence bequeathed it a certain precedence. But it
required a blindness to the sensitivity of Austrian Yugoslavs to declare
that the National Council wished ‘to be embodied in one State under the
rule of Serbia’;146 likewise to report that the entire Yugoslav population
was ‘anxious […] to work efficiently and willingly under Serbian direction
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 179

and command’.147 Nor did Whitehall continue referring simply to the

‘Serbian Government’ only while recognition for the Serb-Croat-Slovene
State was impending. Throughout 1919, months after recognition, ‘Serbia’
and ‘Serbian’ were used as short-hand for the cumbersome new
nomenclature.148
Nevertheless, by the time Yugoslavia became a reality, concerns
were already developing in Britain over the Serbian regime’s intentions
towards the other South Slav territories. Increasing credence was given to
complaints by western Yugoslavs and their British allies that Pašić was a
chauvinist seeking to substitute the overlordship of Belgrade for that of
Vienna. Having long seemed in Britain Serbia’s unchallengeably pre-
eminent statesman, he began to seem out-of-touch with progressive
opinion both among Austrian Yugoslavs and in Serbia itself. Following
the likes of Steed and Seton-Watson (now exerting strong influence in
government circles), officials portrayed Pašić, Protić and their ‘reactionary
connections’ as a minority clique, shoring up their position by
unconstitutional machination.
When, in late November, an assembly in Novi Sad declared
unilaterally for direct union with Serbia (one of numerous such
declarations by Serb groups in Bosnia, southern Dalmatia, Srem and
elsewhere), Whitehall’s reaction was noteworthy. The word ‘annexation’,
Leeper noted, was ‘strongly to be deprecated’:

No Austrian Yugo-Slav will permit himself to be annexed to

Serbia; that is the root of the whole trouble between Pašić and
a few ‘Greater-Serbians’ on the one hand and the rest of the
Yugo-Slav race on the other.149

Two aspects of this analysis are worth highlighting for what they show
about British thinking at this stage. Firstly, there is the assumption we
have noted that most Yugoslavs, whether Serbian or Austrian in
background, opposed Pašić’s policy of securing a dominant position for
Serbia. This stemmed from a repeated emphasis by Seton-Watson and
others that the Yugoslav Committee worked with and shared the aims of
Pašić’s Serbian opposition, and it profoundly influenced assessments of
Yugoslav politics between 1918 and 1921.150 Crucially, however, it was
fundamentally mistaken, and skewed, as a consequence, all analysis which
took it as a premise. Serious divisions had developed among Serbian
politicians in Corfu; Pašić’s autocratic and at times unconstitutional rule
riled both his political opponents and those ‘progressive’ Serbian
intellectuals with whom Britons like Seton-Watson tended to
correspond.151 The anti-Radical opposition did cooperate with the
Yugoslav Committee while it tried to negotiate a favourable coalition
cabinet after the Salonica trials.152 But it was mistaken to infer that the two
180 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

groups opposed Pašić on similar grounds, or shared a vision for the State.
On the contrary: as Ivo Banac points out, while Serbian Opposition
leaders were happy to exploit the Committee’s clash with Pašić, they ‘in no
sense objected to Pašić’s idea of unification’.153
Secondly, it is noteworthy that Leeper characterised the primary
division among the Yugoslavs as one between the ‘Serbian’ (or at least an
older generation of ‘Greater Serbians’) on the one hand and the ‘Austrian
Yugo-Slav’ on the other. No suggestion was made of ‘national’ divisions
within the Austrian Yugoslav region, between Croats, Slovenes and Serbs.
In this respect Leeper’s analysis was representative of British assumptions
at the time, which emphasised the cultural fault-line between west and
east, Habsburg and Ottoman. The dishonest intriguers of the Serbian
Government, Cecil had noted, were opposed by ‘the relatively advanced
Slavs of Croatia etc’.154 Seton-Watson, the most influential expert on the
Yugoslav question, was at pains to stress not only that the Pašić
Government had little support inside Serbia, but also that it was
unanimously rejected by the Serbs of Austria-Hungary. None on the
Yugoslav Committee were more opposed to Serbian disrespect for the
spirit of the Corfu Declaration, he noted, than the Serb members from
Bosnia and Slavonia; the ex-Habsburg districts were unanimous in their
refusal to be treated as annexed territory.155
To a degree, this was not surprising. The dominant political conflict
was between Serbian Government on the one hand, and Yugoslav
Committee on the other. The latter’s membership, as befitted an organ
representing the South Slavs of Austria-Hungary, included representatives
from all three groups, as did the ‘Yugo-Slav’ delegation which met the
Serbians at Geneva. Having for so long argued the unity of the South Slav
‘nation’, and the kinship of Serbs and Croats in particular, the Committee
could scarcely present their differences with the Serbian Government as
being in any sense the conflicting aspirations of distinct Serb and Croat
nations. Instead Trumbić, for instance, emphasised the civilisational
division, which justified the concerns of those wary of Serbian domination
without questioning the essential, long-term unity of the Yugoslav race.
The western districts were, he urged, ‘in matters of civilisation and public
administration more advanced than Serbia and would not be willing to be
subjected to a Government which is not on the same plane’.156 To the
‘Serbians of Old Serbia’, Balfour noted, the (Austro-Hungarian) Yugoslavs
considered themselves ‘superior […] in education and culture’.157
We have discussed the sense of cultural and political superiority
which characterised the attitude of western Yugoslavs towards their
counterparts in Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. This was a genuine
phenomenon, not reducible simply to an opposition between Serb and
Croat (though it certainly flavoured that opposition). But to present the
jealousies of late 1918 simply, as Balfour did, as between Serbians on the
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 181

one hand, and their ‘kindred over the frontier’ on the other, was to
provide a misleading picture which hindered British understanding of the
situation developing in Yugoslavia.158 It was to listen to Trumbić’s claims
of Habsburg cultural superiority, but to ignore Pašić’s contrary argument:
that the Serbian Government’s right to speak for all Yugoslavs rested not
only on Serbia’s wartime sacrifices but also on the ‘unanimous wishes’ of
the Serb inhabitants of ‘Yugo-Slavonia’.159
The insistence of Trumbić and others that they spoke for all Austro-
Hungarian Yugoslavs blinded British observers to contrary evidence. In
the chaos which afflicted the collapsing Monarchy in the late autumn of
1918, the newly-established ‘National Council’, without significant forces
of its own, found its authority confined to the towns. In Serb regions
there was strong support for Pašić’s vision, with local councils urging the
establishment of a ‘monarchist, united, and centralist’ state, refusing to
recognise the Council’s authority, and proclaiming unilateral unifications
with Serbia.160 While reports of these events did reach Whitehall, their
implication of tension and disunity between prečani Serbs and their Croat
and Muslim neighbours was, as Leeper’s response indicates, overlooked.
Nor, crucially, was there an adequate understanding of the balance
of forces on the Council itself. In Britain its outlook tended to be equated
with that of the Yugoslav Committee (which, it had been agreed, would
represent it abroad). The Slovene President of the Council, Anton
Korošec, had, after all, publicly supported both the Committee’s position
and the Geneva agreement. (Any obstruction directed against the Joint
Ministry formed at Geneva would, he assured Seton-Watson, be seen in
Zagreb ‘as an affront for the Southern Slav idea’).161 But Korošec did not
represent the majority view of his Council. And Protić’s rejection of the
Geneva deal seems in fact to have been prompted by awareness of the
growing division between Council and Committee.
The Council had only with difficulty won the allegiance of the
Serbo-Croat Coalition, the leading political group among the Austrian
Yugoslavs during the decade prior to 1918. But, having entered the
Council, the Coalition quickly dominated it. Its leader, Svetozar Pribićević,
was nominated a vice-president and quickly became the Council’s leading
figure: effectively, as Ivo Banac puts it, ‘the power arbiter in Zagreb’.162
An Orthodox Serb from the old Croatian Military Frontier, he favoured a
centralistic unification.163 During the last quarter of 1918 he liaised
covertly with Belgrade, and it was he who, having rejected the Geneva
agreement, ‘forced the pace of liquidating the sovereignty of the National
Council’.164 But his crucial role in the unification, the rigid centralism
which inspired him, and his general influence at this stage, were missed by
British observers.
Perhaps more understandable was the lack of consideration – or at
least lack of respect – in Britain for those currents of opinion in ex-
182 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Habsburg Yugoslavia hostile to the unconditional declaration of union,

and to allegiance to the Karadjordjević dynasty in a unitary state.165 In late
1918 these seemed insignificant, or at least were difficult to disentangle
from such discontent as seemed inevitable in a collapsing empire after a
long war. If Dalmatia (the heartland of Pribićević’s HSK), and perhaps
Bosnia too, were recognised as the vanguard of the movement for unity, it
seemed only that they were ‘even more for unity than Croatia’, rather than
that Croatians harboured significant doubts.166 Those violent protests by
Croat soldiers in Zagreb’s Jelačić square on 5 December which resulted in
thirteen fatalities, and which seem now a sign of serious discontent at the
unconditional cession of sovereignty to Belgrade, were dismissed as the
work of ‘Bolsheviks and reactionaries’.167
No one, Temperley insisted, had dared seriously oppose the
declaration of unity under the Serbian dynasty. Serb troops in Croatia had
adopted a conciliatory attitude and seemed popular, and the National
Council, while inefficient, had served its purpose and secured wide
approval. If now the unstated exception to the first assertion – that of
Stjepan Radić who, alone on the Council, refused to support an
unconditional union – seems a noteworthy oversight, this is not to say
there was fault in the omission.168 As leader of the Croatian Peasant Party
Radić’s constituency remained, before 1920, almost wholly
disenfranchised, and his hold over the Croat masses had yet to become
manifest. His party, Temperley reported, was ‘not now very important’; it
did not ‘at present appear to constitute any very serious danger to national
unity’.169 (Though a slight, almost subliminal foreboding might be detected
in these qualifying phrases – ‘not now’, ‘not at present’ – and a War Office
report did note that the party had until recently been ‘anti-Serbian’, in
general the significance of any unrest was played well down).
Nor did the views of the other prominent personality on the Council
– Pribićević’s fellow vice-president Ante Pavelić – cause British observers
concern. His Starčevist Party of Right (SSP) was included by Temperley
among those strands constituting an ‘undercurrent of opposition’.
(Another prominent member of the SSP, Mate Drinković, was also on the
Council’s seven-man Executive Committee). And it was noticed that such
‘considerable support’ as it had enjoyed owed much to its being ‘Croatian
rather than Serbian in conception’.170 Strangely, however, the movement’s
ideological basis was characterised simply as republican, and its previous
anti-Karadjordjević rhetoric as deriving wholly from anti-dynastic
principle. The fact, therefore, that Pavelić had headed the delegation
offering the loyalty of Austrian South Slavs to Alexander, and that his
party had made a declaration of support for the dynasty, seemed to
assuage all concern.
But while Starčević himself had opposed the Habsburg Monarchy,
the SSP, after it split from the Frankist movement in 1908, happily
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 183

cooperated with the regime while it supported Croat interests.171 The

ideological basis of the SSP was less republicanism than simply a loyalty to
Croat State tradition. (As the party slogan ran: ‘neither with Austria nor
against it, neither with Hungary nor against it, neither with Serbia nor
against it, but only for Croatia’).172 Pavelić accepted the idea of a federal
Yugoslavia in 1918, but not the principle of Yugoslav ‘national oneness’ or
the unitarist implications of the address he himself delivered to Alexander
after a debate within the National Council. It should have been
inconceivable that he and his following would calmly acquiesce in the
centralist state scheme which Pašić and Pribićević were known to favour.
There were signs during late 1918 that Whitehall was no longer
assuming a Yugoslav state should be centralist in structure (though it
remained convinced of ‘the necessity of one united Yugoslav State’ as
opposed to a loose confederal arrangement), but its attitude was hard to
pin down.173 Officials called increasingly for a degree of federalism or local
autonomy to satisfy feelings of cultural difference, but there was little
thought about what these terms might mean in practice, or what they did
mean to Yugoslav politicians.
At times officials seem to have vaguely envisaged a continuation of
the bipolar Serbian/ Habsburg-Yugoslav division familiar from the
wartime opposition of Serbian Government and Yugoslav Committee.
Since British observers had often stressed the cultural division between
ex-Habsburg and ex-Ottoman, it could seem that the former as a group
required institutional protection in the new state. And such an
arrangement had seemed foreshadowed at Geneva, when a joint
Government was constituted consisting of three (subsequently nine)
members each from Serbia and the Habsburg provinces, implying a
recognised reality for the two distinct halves.174 The memorandum on the
unification drawn up in December 1918 suggested that, once Italian
pressure was removed, the ‘Yugo-Slavs of Austria-Hungary’ might well
demand autonomy; if they did so, and if Bulgaria joined, Yugoslavia
‘would then enjoy a constitution not unlike that of the US but under the
Serbian Royal House’.175 As we have seen, however, the Yugoslav regions
of Austria-Hungary, subject for centuries to different influences and
administrations, hardly constituted an historic entity. And though in the
past the possibility had been (implausibly) raised of a Yugoslav unit in a
trialist monarchy, the fact that Bosnia, southern Dalmatia and Slavonia
had previously been promised directly to Serbia was hard to reconcile with
the notion of a distinct ex-Habsburg unit.
But more often British analysts thought in terms of the continued
existence of, and limited autonomy for, the various historic provinces of
Yugoslavia. Prior to unification Seton-Watson had urged that a principle
be established of ‘complete equality between the various Kingdoms and
provinces’, with a constituent assembly in each formally approving the
184 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

wider union.176 In an interview with Pašić in October Steed stressed that

‘the Southern Slavs of Austria-Hungary were deeply attached to their
historical provinces’.177 Until the eve of the 1921 constitution it was, as we
shall see, Whitehall’s firm assumption that limited autonomy for the
existing provinces would be the presiding principle.
It should already have been clear, however, that these were both
implausible prescriptions for the Yugoslav state. Any notion of ‘complete
equality’ which reduced Serbia to the status of one among multiple units
was anathema to those for whom it was the core around which other
provinces had gathered. As we have seen, the British distinction between
Serbians and Austrian Yugoslavs was rejected not only by Pašić and his
Radical allies, but by most educated Serbs, for whom the Yugoslav whole
was most importantly divided into Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The British
failed to appreciate the relative unimportance of Yugoslav ideology in
Serbian political culture during the pre-war decades, and certainly missed
the extent to which it was the unification of all Serbs which remained
during the war the Serbian Government’s primary ambition. The
preservation of historical provinces which divided the Serbs of Bosnia,
Croatia-Slavonia and Dalmatia from each other and from Serbia (and left
them at times a vulnerable minority in their region) was out of the
question. Seton-Watson’s satisfaction that at Corfu Pašić had approved
‘considerable local autonomies to meet the various requirements of the
various provinces’ was thus misconceived. Pašić never contemplated, as
Seton-Watson did, autonomies for the existing historical regions.178
Nor, in reporting Pašić’s potential openness to a federal solution, did
Seton-Watson appreciate the caveats which vitiated that offer. For one
thing, the realisation of such a wish was made almost impossible by the
rejection of Trumbić’s request that the constitution be secured by a
parliamentary majority ‘qualified tribally’ (to ensure Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes an equal say rather than one weighted according to population), a
crucial decision which was overlooked in London. For another thing, a
‘federal’ Yugoslavia, Pašić made clear, would mean not a preservation of
historic boundaries but a three-way tribal division, in spite of the
intermixing of populations which practically, as both he and Trumbić
recognised, rendered such a scheme unviable. Furthermore, the criterion
for identification would be linguistic, a sign-post of South Slav identity
unknown to British observers, restricting the Croatian unit within borders
no Croat could accept.179
Perhaps most importantly, British observers failed to appreciate the
degree to which the unanimity proclaimed in December 1918 was the
artificial product of a particular external threat, and that when this
diminished a much more divided picture was likely to re-emerge. Lacking
forces of its own, and struggling either to maintain order in its heartlands
or to present a plausible deterrent to Italian adventurism, the National
 IDEA OF YUGOSLAV UNITY 185

Council had no option but to request the assistance of the Serbian

Army.180 The influential South Slavs of Dalmatia in particular, long at the
forefront of the Yugoslav movement, demanded immediate union with
Belgrade partly through fear for their independence. To be fair, British
analysts did at times recognise that Italy had acted, unwittingly, as ‘a
political solidifier’.181 But what was observed was too readily assumed to
be a profound and permanent shift, rather than a superficial and pragmatic
response to circumstances. The strained internal relationships within the
National Council – which indicated that Austro-Hungarian South Slavs,
and South Slavs in general, were not as unified in their objectives as they
seemed – were overlooked, just as, as we saw earlier, the atypical
circumstances of the war in general had been too little credited with the
marked rise in Yugoslav feeling that was widely and enthusiastically
noticed in Britain. The next chapter will show how British observers
responded to (and exhibited) the disillusionment which inevitably
followed during the first three years of peace, and how their assumptions
about the constitutional future of Yugoslavia shifted as a consequence.
 8

Britain and the First Yugoslav

Constitution, 1918-1921

By the time delegates convened in Paris in January 1919 the Habsburg

Empire had been effectively dead for two months, while its southern
borderlands had declared their unification with Serbia and Montenegro in
a single unitary state. Initially the Powers withheld formal recognition,
citing the prerogative of the Conference in such matters, and it was as the
representatives of Serbia that the combined Serb-Croat-Slovene delegation
was officially received. Nevertheless, Yugoslavia’s existence was
acknowledged and favourably perceived by Britain, France and the US,
and only Italian insistence that it remained a ‘theoretical hypothesis’
prevented a formal Allied acknowledgement (though Britain and France
were happy to be able to assess the new grouping’s stability before
committing themselves).1 Nevertheless, in February the US recognised
Yugoslavia unilaterally, and over the next few months Britain, France and
most other European states followed suit.2
Officials often talked as if the Conference would reshape the
European map, but in south-east Europe its work was the fine-tuning of
frontiers rather than their broad outline (along with minority-protection
and other matters). And since Yugoslavia had disputes involving six of its
seven national boundaries, delegates had plenty to occupy themselves.3 Of
all the new states, New Europe sympathised, ‘none is confronted with so
many delicate problems as Yugoslavia’.4 Nor was any frontier dispute
facing the Conference more intractable, or more potentially explosive,
than that between Yugoslavia and Italy over the Adriatic coast and the
port of Fiume.5
The frontier questions are well treated elsewhere. But it is important
to recognise the impact which these had on the development of the
embryonic state. For nearly two years the lack of established frontiers was
‘a circumstance that affected adversely every facet of its national life’.6
Italian hostility in the border regions, and attempts to subvert the
Yugoslav union politically, significantly affected the process of that union.
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 187

The Zagreb National Council, needing Serbian military support, could not
hold out for a conditional union with Belgrade. And uncertainty over the
state’s constitutional shape was prolonged since, as Whitehall accepted,
Constituent Assembly elections were impossible until the extent of
Yugoslav territory was known.
Nor can the Adriatic dispute’s impact on British attitudes be
ignored. Not only did it absorb much official time and patience, but it
affected the way Yugoslavs were perceived. The fact that most contact
with Yugoslav politicians occurred in the context of a dispute over which
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were broadly united gave an exaggerated
impression of Yugoslav unity, masking internal divisions. And while at
times this seemed merely another intractable squabble between
chauvinistic southern European nations (confirming entrenched
prejudices), in general Yugoslav conduct was favourably received.
Whitehall felt guilty about the ‘regrettable’ Treaty of London, sympathised
with the Yugoslav position, and was impressed by the forbearance of
Yugoslav politicians who, Sir Eyre Crowe wrote in September 1919, had
been ‘most exemplary in their attitude’.7
Our focus here, however, is on those internal questions for which
the international conference in Paris had little time and did not (except
insofar as they affected conference representation) count within its remit.
For two years, in the shadow of the conference, Yugoslav groups jostled
for position. How, in the period leading up to the constitution of June
1921 did British observers perceive the political state of the country,
relations between its various provinces and peoples, and its likely political
structure?

The apparently unanimous declaration by the Serb-Croat-Slovene

National Council of allegiance to a united South Slav state under the
Karadjordjević dynasty had been welcomed by British officials happy to
believe the exaggerated claims of Yugoslav consciousness made to them
by exiled publicists. Concern had grown during 1918, however, at the
obvious tension between the Serbian Government and the Yugoslav
Committee over the manner in which unification was conceived. The
obstinacy and subterfuge with which the Committee’s hopes of
recognition had been undermined, and the Geneva agreement reneged
upon, had set Whitehall against the superannuated Pašić in particular as a
relic from a chauvinistic past. And while at the time of his first Ministry in
December 1918 Protić had seemed ‘less obnoxious to the Yugoslavs’, his
hatred for Pribićević quickly earned him a reputation for equal if not
greater intransigence.8 Neither, it seemed, could promote the ‘progressive’
Yugoslav state which younger, idealistic officials hoped would encourage
stability in the region.9
188 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Thus the assumption common in Britain before the war of a

fundamental cultural divide between the East/Orthodox and
West/Catholic regions of South Slav population was replaced by the
demonisation of a few individuals. Officials influenced by the testimony of
wide popular commitment to the Yugoslav ideal largely ignored the pro-
Yugoslav camp’s obvious interest in masking internal differences before
the union had been secured. The attitudes of Pašić’s regime, rather than
representing general tendencies in Serbian politics, were portrayed as those
of an outmoded minority clinging to power. Even their underhand
manoeuvring could not in the long run, Whitehall felt sure, secure the old
Radicals against the tide of progressive Yugoslavism.
And in terms of the constitutional question – the political problem
of integrating populations with diverse cultures and identities – the
anticipated ascendancy of a ‘progressive’ generation strengthened
Whitehall’s early assumptions. Though little careful thought was given to
this question early in the war, it was always vaguely assumed that the
outcome would be a ‘federation’.10 Only thus, it seemed, could distinct
Croat, Slovene and Montenegrin identities be incorporated in a genuinely
Yugoslav union (as opposed to the expanded Serbia officials had initially
envisaged). And while after Corfu some in Whitehall concluded that
federalism might in fact ‘allow old rivalries to continue’, and that a
centralist state would best integrate a diverse population, the final months
of the war saw a strong reaction against a policy which in the hands of
Pašić and his allies seemed tainted by Serbian chauvinism.
The dominant view in London, shaped by an exaggerated faith in
Yugoslav Committee claims to represent the population at large, was that
not only were the great majority united behind a genuinely Yugoslav as
opposed to Great Serbian policy, but that there was also wide agreement
about how such a policy was best pursued: by means of significant
autonomies to protect the distinct pride and culture of historic regions.
This was a view which, in the face of much conflicting evidence, proved
curiously persistent in Whitehall during 1919 and 1920. In fact, studying
British analysis of the debates which took place in an atmosphere of
increasing rancour between 1918 and 1921, it is difficult to avoid the
conclusion that it was unsystematic and complacent, particularly in the
case of officials in London who seem at times barely to have read reports
intended to correct cherished misunderstandings.

Attitudes towards the Radicals changed little in Britain during 1919 and
1920. If anything they became more hostile, as the party’s leadership was
blamed for the tensions undermining fraternal Yugoslav feeling. As head
of the Yugoslav delegation, Pašić was in Paris for much of this period, but
Protić seemed a conduit for his mentor’s outmoded ideas. There was,
Crowe observed in October 1919, ‘a reactionary current […] impervious
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 189

to any new ideas’ trying ‘to retain the same close militarist and
bureaucratic control as they have in the past exercised to the detriment of
Serbia’.11 When Leeper urged in February 1920 that Yugoslavia discard the
‘bad old party traditions’ of Serbian politics, he had the Radicals in mind.12
No Government with Pašić in it would do much good, Temperley
insisted; it was essential ‘to get rid of the “old gang”’.13 Pašić represented,
Nicolson agreed, ‘all that is worst in the old Belgrade tradition’.14 And
though he was at times still fêted in the British popular press, and Lloyd
George for one retained a great respect for him, officials now paid scant
respect to the Radical tradition of constitutionalism and democracy in
independent Serbia. Protić in particular was uncredited for a loyalty to
these ideals certainly greater than that of prominent ‘Democrats’ (a party
label often as incongruous as that of the ‘Radicals’).15
At the same time officials continued to take heart from the
assumption that the Radical leadership was a small ‘clique’, without a
strong constituency, and at odds with the attitudes of the younger
generation. Certain political developments during 1919 consolidated this
view. The formation in April of the Democratic bloc left the Radicals a
‘decided minority’ in the Provisional National Assembly.16 Even in
Protić’s cabinet Radicals were significantly outnumbered: eleven of
seventeen members were Democrats. And by August his Government had
ceded to a purely Democratic ministry.
In other respects, however, cherished assumptions were challenged
during the spring of 1919. Perhaps most important of these was the fond
notion of a monolithic, anti-Radical progressive consensus. We have
noted already the British tendency to accept Yugoslav Committee
spokesmen as true representatives of Habsburg Yugoslav opinion, and,
mistakenly, to equate the agenda of the Serb-Croat-Slovene National
Council with that of the Committee. In the months following the
unification, and the dissolution of the Committee, members of the latter
most trusted and admired by Whitehall – Ante Trumbić in particular –
found themselves without a strong party base and unable to exert the
influence British officials had expected. Instead, significant political
influence was wielded by groups whose attitudes diverged from that
progressive ‘Yugoslav’ ethos which was assumed to prevail.
One important example during 1919 was Ante Pavelić’s Starčevist
Party of Right. At the end of 1918 officials had rationalised Pavelić’s
‘considerable support’ in Croatia with reference to his stated allegiance to
a united state under the Karadjordjević dynasty. Optimistically, they saw
him as a convert to the moderate movement for a decentralised
Yugoslavia. In April 1919 des Graz regretted that the Government now
contained no member of the ‘important’ Starčevist party.17 But, as we have
seen, Whitehall had long considered the Starčevist agenda (like that of the
Serbian Radicals) essentially chauvinist and reactionary, and they soon
190 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

resumed this opinion.18 The sense revived during 1919 that Starčevist and
Frankist ideology – ‘Croatian in conception’, and therefore divorced from
Yugoslav feeling – was regressive, extremist and rooted in ignorance. On a
visit to Srem Bryce reported that the views of leading locals were of an
‘extreme Croat complexion’, putting Croatia first and advocating a
Yugoslav federation embracing an autonomous Croatia linked with
Slavonia and Srem. Underpinning this attitude, he observed, was an
‘extreme ignorance about Belgrade and the old Kingdom of Serbia’, which
left Croats ‘groping in semi-darkness for a solution of the best future’, and
‘open to the promptings of those, like Hungarian officials, with ulterior
motives’.19 In a memorandum in July, after talking with Pavelić and others,
he condemned their agenda more forcefully, arguing that their policy was
underpinned by ‘an intense and deep-seated jealousy of the Serbians’, and
denying their fears of Serbian hegemony were shared by the average
Croatian. Their views, he wrote:

were in the main destructive rather than constructive, and […]

were to a great extent biased by party considerations and
jealousy of their opponents, especially of M.Pribićević […]. The
average man in Croatia […] appeared to have only one desire,
namely to be generous in his attitude towards those in
authority, and to assist them by every means in his power to
carry out successfully the difficult problems which naturally
confront a new State […]. This desire seems to be entirely
lacking in the counsels of the ‘Starčevist’ Party, whose main
object would appear to be to harry the Government as much as
possible and to subordinate the well-being of the State as a
whole to purely local feelings and prejudices.20

The principle conclusion drawn from this report in London indicates a

somewhat self-deluding attitude towards Yugoslav politics. At the time
that Pavelić’s declaration of loyalty had brought the Starčevists within the
pale, so far as British officials were concerned, the breadth of his support
in Croatia had been recognised. (His party’s adhesion to the dynasty was
clear proof, Temperley had observed, that the state had popular feeling on
its side).21 Once the party’s anti-Serbianism was re-emphasised, however,
it was consigned once more to the status of a hard-line minority. Bryce’s
report confirmed, PID minuted, ‘that the separatist movement in Croatia
is not very important’ (a conclusion which illustrates too the hazy
differentiation in Britain at this stage between ‘autonomists’ or ‘federalists’
and genuine separatists).22 The fact that Temperley, in a slightly earlier
report which highlighted the same Starčevist sins – ignorance of the Serbs,
‘personal bitterness’, lack of a constructive agenda – had presented their
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 191

vague desire for federation as in tune with Croat opinion, was

conveniently forgotten.23
But perhaps the most important development in Yugoslav politics
during the spring of 1919 was the emergence of the Democrats. While the
significance of this was plain to British officials, they again contrived to
overlook or to underestimate respects in which it undermined key
assumptions concerning the country’s likely constitutional path.
When the DS first coalesced at Sarajevo in February 1919 it
embraced only parties from the former Monarchy: the HSK (its leader
Svetozar Pribićević the driving influence), the anticlerical Slovene liberals
(themselves a fusion of Carniolan Progressive Party and Styrian People’s
Party), and a dozen smaller unitarist groups. Subsequently parties joined
from Serbia and Montenegro: Serbian opponents of Pašić like Ljuba
Davidović’s Independent Radicals, and Montenegrin pro-Yugoslavs. But it
is not surprising that British observers regarded the new party initially as a
representative product of the ex-Habsburg provinces. This, by and large,
is how it seemed in Belgrade.24 And the lack of any permanent official in
Croatia during 1919 left Britain reliant on its legation in the capital. (Des
Graz admitted that what he saw came ‘mainly from Serbians and may well
have a Serbian tinge’).25 Both Starčevist and Democrat parties, Bryce
reported in July, were now ‘seeking support in various provinces of the
SHS outside Croatia proper’. The latter, like the former, he implied, was
Croatian if not Croat in origin.26
Officials soon noted, with enthusiasm, the party’s success in
broadening its horizons. It had become, des Graz wrote from Belgrade,
the first genuinely nation-wide party, transcending the division between
old Balkan states and ex-Habsburg regions. The participation of ‘Young’
Radicals and other Serbian groups as well as ‘most if not all Montenegrin
representatives’ illustrated the ‘important fact’, he observed, that ‘this is a
new Democratic Party for the whole united kingdom and is not on a
provincial or regional basis’.27 Given the manner in which British analysts
viewed the Radicals, the creation of a political grouping embracing parties
from the breadth of the new state, from Slovenia to Montenegro, allayed
fears that Yugoslavia might struggle to establish a unified political system.
Parties seemed to be grouping themselves ‘on political and not national
[…] lines’.28 And the fact that the alliance’s anticipated bloc of 140-150
seats in the Provisional Assembly gave it ‘a clear majority and
preponderating influence’ – an ‘unwelcome surprise to the Old Radical
Party’ – was entirely welcome to British observers who deplored the
influence of Pašić and his associates.29
We have seen that the tendency in Whitehall during 1918 to regard
one-nation centralism, combined with a modernising socio-economic
agenda, as the progressive blueprint for the country’s future had
diminished as centralism became associated with the policies and outlook
192 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

of the Old Radicals. But the emergence of the Democrats, with their
vision of a centralised state working to overcome ‘tribal’ rivalries and the
instability and corruption associated with Balkan politics, revived this
sympathy somewhat. Agrarian reform, Temperley noted, constituted the
Democrats’ ‘trump card’: a ‘direct and bold appeal to the peasant in
Croatia, Slavonia and Bosnia’ which would demonstrate the benefits of
‘Serbian rule’. And this policy, he argued, involving the redistribution of
feudal estates to create a small-holder class, ‘only a centralised government
could effect’.30
And if British observers sympathised with Democratic ideals, they
also warmed to Pribićević, the party’s driving influence. Little known to
officials as leader of the HSK, as Interior Minister in Protić’s Government
he had become a manifestly important figure:

He has the reputation [Young reported] of being very able, and

is clearly a man of prompt action. His ability and personality
produced a strongly-favourable impression from the moment
of his arrival here before the proclamation of the union of the
Yugo-Slavs with the kingdom of Serbia […]. That impression
has remained and has increased, and he may therefore become
a very important factor in the internal politics of the united
kingdom.31

Though some Croats were known to distrust him and his centralist
ideology, his enemies were seen in Britain, particularly during 1919 and
early 1920, as sectarian, parochial and unrepresentative. And just as the
Democrats’ standing in Britain grew by default from the censure attached
to other Croatian parties seen to be clinging to vested interests, so it did
from British hostility to the Radical leadership’s narrow Serb nationalism.
With Protić’s reputation in Whitehall as a leader of the Serbian ‘old gang’,
reports of vitriolic clashes between himself and Pribićević redounded
distinctly to the latter’s credit.
But perhaps the most important single issue disposing officials
against the Serbian Radicals and, in consequence, in favour of the
Democrats, was that which (along with the Adriatic dispute) dominated
British interest in Yugoslavia during 1919: the fate of Montenegro.
Though we have examined this question already, it is of interest here for
the manner in which it affected broader assumptions about the course of
Yugoslav politics, and for the confusions in British thinking which
resulted.
Since the Democrats were not strongly linked with Serbia, their
reputation in Britain was little tainted during 1919 by Belgrade’s heavy-
handed policy in Montenegro and the Austrian provinces. As the year
drew on, and Montenegro came to seem less an exceptional case than an
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 193

archetype of ‘Old’ Serbian intentions towards the ‘new’ provinces,

Whitehall’s regard for the Democrats became increasingly contradictory.
While deploring the attempt to ‘coerce’ Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro
into a centralised state, and noting rightly that the Democrats considered
any autonomist programme ‘altogether inadmissible’, it continued
nevertheless to view Davidović’s ministry as the best hope for positive
development in Yugoslavia.32 When it fell in February 1920 Leeper
mourned a cabinet ‘representative of the best younger elements’.33
As a result British assumptions were left in a state of (largely
unacknowledged) confusion. While Radicals represented for British
observers all that was regrettable and outmoded in Yugoslav politics,
Democrats, with their agenda of land reform and the submersion of
‘tribal’ identities in a single nation, seemed progressive and broad-minded.
That such rhetoric should have appealed to idealistic Whitehall officials is
not hard to understand (and Democrats exploited this, lamenting to the
British ‘the old Balkan or Oriental traditions’ with which Radical leaders
were imbued, and insisting the latter were ‘in no way representative of the
Serbian people’).34 At the same time, awareness of the resentment towards
Belgrade in some regions led to wide agreement in Britain that rigid
centralism would ill serve a state comprising such disparate traditions and
identities, while a federal constitution (or one granting substantial local
autonomies) offered a path to harmonious national development.
But it was the ‘progressive’ Democrats who espoused a doctrinaire
centralism, while some ‘Old Radicals’ – Protić in particular – were willing to
recognise and uphold regional identities.35 (Pašić, it is true, was on the
party’s more centralist wing and so was happier to collude with the
Democrats in late 1920). And yet, until at least the spring of 1920, the
Democratic Party’s reputation in Britain was untainted, despite the fact
that the Davidović ministry had centralised zealously: extending Serbian
military law nation-wide, further undermining autonomy in Croatia, and
establishing in Slovenia a regional government with no seat for the
autonomist Slovene People’s Party.36 The fact that what seemed a
reactionary policy in the context of the Yugoslav national question was
advocated by many whose socio-economic agenda distanced them from
the old Serbian past was too little appreciated in Britain, and as a result the
likelihood of what seemed the progressive decentralist solution was
seriously misjudged.

In general British analysis of the constitutional options facing Yugoslavia,

and of political trends on the ground, was deficient. In part this was
because attention was monopolised by the Montenegrin and Adriatic
questions. In part also it was because certain officials – notably the British
minister in Yugoslavia Sir Alban Young – saw stability as the
overwhelming British priority in the region, and thought this better served
194 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

by an imposed settlement than one which tried to address the concerns of

every province and group. The Constituent Assembly, he wrote:

seems to me to contain potentialities of violent discord, and,

given the nature of the different peoples who will be
represented in it, I should think that the only safe method of
avoiding a lapse into anarchy will be for the responsible leaders
to force through a practically agreed scheme. I must once again
earnestly express my opinion that if we want peace in this
corner of Europe we should abstain from enquiring too closely
into the extent to which the democratic principles of free
elections and self-determination are applied in practice.37

This attitude is evident in the unsystematic fashion in which officials

analysed the constitutional options. So far as Yugoslav politicians were
concerned, there were essentially four alternatives. First was the rigid
centralism espoused by the Democrats, in which historic provincial
boundaries would make way for much smaller French-style departments,
and legislative and administrative power would be concentrated in the
capital. Second, at the other extreme, was a federal system, by which was
generally understood a tripartite ‘racial’ or ‘tribal’ federalism, with frontiers
redrawn to create discrete Serb, Croat and Slovene units, each with
substantial administrative and legislative independence. In between were
two varieties of autonomism: regional autonomy for the historic provinces
which had merged to create Yugoslavia – Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia,
Bosnia, Montenegro etc; and local autonomy for new sub-regions of
Yugoslavia, shaped according to economic and geographical criteria, with
a view to eroding ingrained provincial or ‘tribal’ allegiances.
In Britain, however, with most analysis relating to the Montenegrin
question, these alternatives and their ramifications were not methodically
identified or studied. (It is remarkable that in December 1919, a year after
Yugoslavia’s formation, Crowe should have had to point out to officials
who talked of granting Montenegrins the ‘same status accorded to Croatia
and Slovenia’ that no such special status had been accorded).38 There was,
of course, awareness that autonomist sentiment in regions with a strong
historical consciousness was increasingly at odds with a centralising
Government. But rather than the above four options, British observers
conceived only a simple dichotomy: centralism or decentralism. The
words ‘federative’ and ‘federal’, loosely used, were not distinguished from
the concepts of regional or local autonomy, nor was any significant
difference between these latter phrases identified. When Pašić and others
rejected ‘federalism’ – i.e. a tripartite ‘tribal’ division – on the grounds that
no border could separate intermingled Serb and Croat populations, this
was interpreted as the rejection by a narrow clique of the very idea of a
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 195

decentralist constitution.39 It was condemned despite respected Yugoslavs

like Trumbić having similarly dismissed such a disruptive scheme, and
though Whitehall had never contemplated the idea, equating decentralism
with limited independence for the traditional provinces of Yugoslavia.40
And despite the increasing pessimism we noted in minutes relating
to Montenegro, the assumption persisted that the Assembly would in due
course approve a federative settlement on the latter basis. Thus in May
1919 Balfour reminded de Salis that it would be in the British interest for
Montenegro to enter ‘the Yugo-Slav Federation’.41 And later in the year
Crowe thought the Assembly would ‘no doubt’ secure ‘a very large
measure of provincial autonomy’ for Montenegrins, Dalmatians, Bosnians,
Slovenes and the people of Croatia-Slavonia. Pressure in the Yugoslav
State would be strong enough, he argued, ‘to sweep away the obstructions
artificially made by the Old Guard of Serbian politicians’.42
But the British representation of Pašić and his allies as isolated
reactionaries who had only by subterfuge retained a position of influence
was misleading. Protić was able during 1919 to forge tactical alliances with
both the Croat National Union (HZ) and the Slovene People’s Party
(SLS), who had more to fear in the short-term from the centralising zeal
of Pribićević. As the ‘Parliamentary Union’ this bloc owned a majority in
the Provisional Assembly, disrupted the Democrat Government, and by
February 1920 – to Whitehall’s surprise and disgust – was in power.43
Of course, Radical attitudes towards the ‘historical rights’ of Serbs,
vis-à-vis Croats and Slovenes as well as non-Slav minorities, were extreme
and uncompromising. (In fact, as we have seen, the extent of territory and
population claimed by Serb ideologues was unappreciated by British
observers, who ignored the linguistic element of Serb nationalism). But
the vilification of old Radicals as a reactionary ‘clique’, instigated by the
Yugoslav Committee and their British associates, blinded Whitehall to the
prevalence of such attitudes. Demands like that of the Bosnian ‘Serbian
National Organisation’ for a Greater Serbia incorporating Bosnia,
Dalmatia, Lika, the Banat (and more) were treated as fringe extremism,
but in fact represented a common aspiration of the Serb political class.44

During early 1920 political relations in Yugoslavia became increasingly

tense and antagonistic as the question of Constituent Assembly elections,
and that of the future constitution, loomed larger. Leading politicians
talked of preparing a draft constitution in advance, for debate and
ratification. In a fraught atmosphere in which strikes and unrest plagued
the western provinces, in which ‘riotous scenes’ afflicted the provisional
assembly and party newspapers attacked opponents with increasing vitriol,
while the public became ‘disgusted with the intensity of the party feeling’
delaying electoral legislation, and in which the very adhesion of Croatia to
Yugoslavia seemed to British observers ‘daily less certain’, Young
196 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

confessed he would ‘not be surprised’ to see the military take power. The
political situation was similar, he wrote, to that in Greece in 1908 when
parties so ignored the interests of the country that the military stepped in:
‘a development along the same lines is not excluded’. Nor did he seem
averse to such a firm line. The military, he noted, was the most efficient
branch of the government.45 Officials whose perspective derived from
residence in Belgrade little empathised with the impetuous behaviour and
demands of the ‘more excitable Yugo-Slavs of the west’.46
In the aftermath of Davidović’s resignation, however, Young and
others did begin to appreciate the share of blame attributable to the
Democrats for the acute unrest. Whitehall officials still praised a
Government ‘sensible to the need for a united and progressive Yugoslav
state’ and keen to expunge Serbia’s ‘bad old party traditions’; and
bemoaned the new coalition of Radicals and autonomists as unlikely to
endure but capable of doing ‘infinite harm in the interval’.47 But on 2
March Young reported that the resignation of a party ‘in favour of the
centralisation of Government at Belgrade’ had prompted demonstrations
against the union in Croatia and Slovenia. At first unsure how to interpret
these (still without a consul in Zagreb), he soon linked discontent to the
policies of a party ‘all for centralisation and unity of Yugo-Slavia’.48
And what fully convinced him that doctrinaire Democrat policy had
been fomenting unrest (rather than simply old Radical prejudice) were that
month’s municipal elections. ‘Throughout the new provinces’, he
reported, ‘the Democrat Party was routed’.49 Communists had made
‘startling’ gains. (In Zagreb 25 of 40 National Club representatives made
way for 20 Communists, a trend repeated throughout Slovenia and
Croatia-Slavonia). And while Belgrade insisted that non-Yugoslav
minorities had voted Communist ‘to show their hatred for the Serb’,
Whitehall accepted the Croat claim that the results expressed simply
‘dissatisfaction with the present administration’. ‘There is no doubt of the
correctness of this view’, Temperley minuted, ‘and we need not look for
the [Belgrade] press explanation of German and Magyar intrigues’.50
Though it was Protić’s coalition in power at the time of the elections,
primary responsibility seemed to rest with those Democratic decrees
passed without mandate from the assembly between August 1919 and
February 1920.51
In the socio-economic sphere, no less than the political, Democratic
zeal seemed culpable. The enforced break-up of large estates (without
compensation for non-Yugoslav owners) had caused unrest and
disruption. The likely ‘serious shortage of harvest in Croatia’, Temperley
noted, was due directly to ‘the mismanagement of the Government and
the policy of Pribićević’.52 Democrat policy had bequeathed ‘an unpleasant
legacy’, Young admitted, while Protić’s line had been more moderate: ‘not
averse to establishing small holdings like those which make old Serbia a
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 197

peasant State’ but ‘more conservative as regards the vested rights of the
proprietors’.53
In general, the Democrat Party, hailed in Britain hitherto as a pan-
Yugoslav alliance of progressive elements, a break from the country’s ‘bad
old party traditions’, began to seem themselves a narrow-minded faction,
putting doctrine and party interest before that of the state. Having been
identified first with the Habsburg provinces in which the HSK had its
roots, then with Yugoslavia as a whole, they came instead after the
municipal election defeat to be associated with Serbia, and with a
centralisation drive predicated on Serb hegemonism rather than a genuine
belief in Yugoslav nationhood. They had become, in Young’s political
survey of the summer of 1920, simply one of the ‘old Serbian parties’.54

Obvious too, by the winter of 1919-20, was a shift in British perceptions

of the autonomist movements in Croatia, Slovenia and elsewhere. We
have seen that, while there had long been sympathy for Montenegrin
opposition to Belgrade rule, the Starčevist and Frankist movements most
clearly committed to retaining Croatian autonomy (and to some extent
also the autonomist Slovene People’s Party) were regarded as reactionary
and obstructionist, and were denied the respect accorded to individual
opponents of Pašić like Trumbić or Smodlaka. During 1920, however,
there was a marked rehabilitation of Croatian national feeling in Britain.
This owed much simply to growing disillusionment with the centralists in
Belgrade. But also important was the development of decentralist
associations in the interim parliament.
First came a loose alliance known as the National Club comprising,
as Ivo Banac notes, members from ‘fairly distinct political traditions’:
Starčevists of the SSP – Pavelić, Drinković and others – who headed the
Croat wing of Zagreb’s National Council, Croat dissidents from the HSK,
Starčevists from Istria, and independents (including former members of
the Yugoslav Committee). Then in May 1919 Pavelić and others
formulated a single programme before uniting, in July, in a new party: the
Croat Union (HZ).55 The tenor of its ideology during 1919-20 was
moderate, rejecting centralism and defending the integrity of ‘our ancient
provinces’, but embracing the ‘one nation’ idea and eschewing any notion
of tribal federalism. Its membership was predominantly urban-intellectual,
for which constituency they seemed ‘the only respectable Croat party’.56
While the logic of their autonomism and of their Croat identity (which did
attract a more aggressive Frankist element) gradually undermined their
loyalty to the one nation ideal, they were untainted in Britain by the
reactionary reputation of their constituent ‘Starčevist’ faction. An
unofficial association with Trumbić’s National Club lent the HZ the
respectability which adhered to a Yugoslav politician admired in Britain
above all others.57
198 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

So while a fervent unitarist like Leeper remained suspicious of Croat

‘particularists’, in general a more positive attitude emerged towards those
who would take ‘wise and generous account of the desires of the different
Yugo-Slav lands to retain their peculiar local institutions of self-
government in the form of a regularised provincial autonomy’.58 In mid-
1920 administrative devolution and legislative unity, the HZ’s official
position, seemed to Temperley ‘the proper ideals at present’.59 Britain
need not mind growing autonomism, Adam argued, provided it refrained
from ‘a definitely disruptive tendency’; its constitutional opposition would
‘serve as a useful curb on the militarist tendencies of the Serbs of Serbia in
the new Yugo-Slav State’.60 The HZ was welcomed as autonomism’s
moderate face.
By the spring of 1920, furthermore, this movement attracted British
observers in its opposition not only to the intransigence of Radicals and
Democrats, but also to a ‘Communist’ threat which loomed substantially
larger in the aftermath of the March municipal elections.

It is not easy now to recapture the vague sense of menace exerted in

Britain (as also in France) by an ideology which had toppled one major
government, threatened to spread like the Spanish influenza germ through
central and eastern Europe, and yet was scarcely better understood. (Not
only had ‘soviets’ been declared in Germany, but the Bolshevik Béla Kun
had for a time taken control in Hungary on Yugoslavia’s northern
border).61 Assuming that communist ideology was likely to make its
strongest appeal to the industrial working-class, some officials – those in
Belgrade in particular – associated this threat with the more developed
Croat and Slovene provinces, and as a consequence regarded Serbia
favourably as the country’s stable core. The western countries might be
more advanced, observed des Graz, but Serbia ‘may be held to represent
the more stable element and fixity of purpose’:

With such continuous mention of Bolshevism in certain other

countries the subject has naturally come in to every one’s
thoughts but a purely agricultural land like Serbia, where each
man has a holding or part of one, is ground particularly
unsuitable for the propagation and adoption of Bolshevist
ideas.62

The hazy understanding of this phenomenon is indicated by the fact that

officials barely differentiated between two movements which were
ideologically and institutionally quite distinct: the Communist Party of
Yugoslavia (KPJ) and Stjepan Radić’s Croatian Peasant Party (HPSS).
Little attention was paid to the latter in Britain before 1920, nor
significance attributed to it by officials inclined to emphasise both the
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 199

shared culture of the Serb and Croat peasant and his lack of interest in
politics. (‘The general impression I have’, wrote Temperley in March 1919,
‘is that Radić […] hardly constitutes a serious danger’).63 And since Radić’s
political ideology was little examined, his traditional peasant socialism
tended to be labeled ‘communist’. Des Graz referred to Radić as the leader
of the ‘Communist Agrarian Party’, Temperley to the HPSS as ‘parochial
and local Bolshevik’.64
Thus although the ‘startling’ gains in the elections were
predominantly for the KPJ, it was in the context of Radić’s growing
prominence that the results were interpreted. Municipal communism was
new in Croatia, Temperley reported, but was ‘bound to be connected with
the old communist movement under Radić which was popular among the
peasantry before the war’.65 (Contact between the two groups was
frequent on market days, he noted rather unconvincingly). Young’s
reports of Radić’s release from prison after eleven months, and of the
prompt resumption of his ‘extremist campaign’, were not unnaturally
associated with word of increasing protests in Croatia and Slovenia ‘hostile
to the union with Yugoslavia’, and of the Communist electoral successes.66
Officials confronted by the worsening unrest in the western
provinces during the spring of 1920 were faced with one fundamental
question, and it was one which had important ramifications for the state’s
constitutional settlement. To what extent was the turmoil a reaction to
short-term economic dislocation which, after the upheaval of the war and
its aftermath, could be considered inevitable (even if it was unnecessarily
exacerbated), or rather a sign of real ethnic rivalries within the Yugoslav
‘nation’?
This does seem to have been a turning point. As we have seen, the
elections showed British officials both how alienated Croats and Slovenes
had become from the policies of Democrats as well as Radicals and, in
consequence, how ‘Serbian’ both principal parties seemed in outlook and
motivation. For the first time, moreover, unrest did seem more than a
symptom of transition. If communist success was merely an anti-
Government protest it would die down quickly, Temperley observed; but
‘I am […] inclined to think myself that there is more to it than this, and
that troublous times are ahead’.67
There still remained, however, a certain reluctance to view the
disturbances as, at root, the expression of national hostility between Croats
and Slovenes on the one hand, and Serbs on the other. Railway strikes in
April, followed by a wider national strike in Croatia, seemed, Adam
commented, a ‘Bolshevik action’ among Croats and Slovenes. His
suggestion that this was also in part ‘a political movement among Croats
and Slovenes against Serbs’ was crossed out.68 In a subsequent minute he
subtly shifted tack: the SCS authorities were faced, he observed, with ‘a
centrifugal political agitation among the Croats and Slovenes, combined
200 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

with a formidable strike movement’.69 He refrained, in other words, from

directly linking the two phenomena – that is to say, from concluding that
economic unrest was an expression of national animosity.70
When further more serious unrest broke out among the Croatian
peasantry in the autumn of 1920, sparked by a requirement to register
animals for military service, British analysis remained uncertain on this
point. A strong link was made with Radić’s party (as it has been by
historians). In Belgrade, Young noted, the risings were widely attributed to
the preaching of ‘the peasant agitator Radić’, and from Zagreb Maclean
reported that the district suffering the most serious disturbances was a
stronghold of the HPSS.71 A few officials – Leeper in particular –
continued to deny that this was a substantial movement against unitaristic
Yugoslavism, stressing short-term economic dislocation, and crediting the
claim that Radić had conspired with foreign agents. ‘It is easy’, he wrote,
‘to rouse peasants’ suspicions when their property is concerned and
probably Hungarian agents (if not Italians) lose no chance’.72
But in general there was now an increased acceptance that economic
problems both aggravated and were aggravated by widespread national
tensions. The upheavals were to be deplored, wrote Gordon Maclean (the
British consul in Zagreb), since they would ‘add to the friction between
Croat and Serb which certainly does not tend to diminish and which is the
factor most antagonistic to the peaceful and prosperous development of
the SHS kingdom’.73 And Young too admitted that the unrest was a
genuinely popular Croatian response to political and economic problems.
Belgrade newspapers ‘pretend’, he noted, that it was engineered by the
Italians.74 But in Croatia, alone in the SCS State, there was clearly ‘a body
of peasantry at once republican and violently anti-Serb’. Most alarming of
all: anti-Serb feeling in Croatia, he now pointed out, applied to all Serbs
‘whether of Croatia or Serbia-proper’. The old British assumption that the
primary cultural division was between ‘western’ Yugoslavs and ‘eastern’
Serbians was undermined as observers belatedly recognised a polarisation
on national rather than regional grounds.75
From this realisation followed another, whose potential
consequences were alarming. Now, very late in the day, it was recognised
that the ideological distance between the two leading Serb parties might
have been overstated. In the context of growing autonomist strength,
socio-economic questions such as agricultural reform were, it was now
recognised, of secondary importance beside a shared hostility to Croat,
Slovene and Montenegrin nationalism.76 The latter, Young suggested,
might lead them to forge a coalition, ‘thus ranging Croats and
Montenegrins and Slovenes against Serbs’. This, Temperley warned, was a
‘highly dangerous possibility’.77 Not only did it raise the prospect that
Yugoslav politics might remain violently polarised, but it threatened to
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 201

overturn cherished British assumptions about the balance of forces in

Yugoslavia, and so about the likely shape of the constitutional settlement.

Before looking at the Constituent Assembly elections, we should look

more closely at the effect the unrest of 1920 had on these British
expectations for the Yugoslav constitution. We have noted that analysis
during 1919 was constrained by an over-simplistic centralist-federalist
dichotomy. Amid the tensions of 1920 British officials in Yugoslavia did
belatedly begin to move beyond this, and to convey (though still
inconsistently) the more complex issues at stake in the framing of a
Yugoslav constitution. In June Young drew attention to the debate not
only over the autonomy provinces would enjoy, but also over these
provinces’ definition. A key question, he noted, likely to cause ‘acute
controversy’, would be whether they should be defined ‘to obliterate as far
as practicable the traces of a former existence as separate entities of the
different portions of the Kingdom, or whether the historical limits of the
various provinces should be preserved’.78 This was the first sign of
awareness among British analysts that the ‘large administrative
autonomies’ which even centralists like Pašić had happily promised
foreign diplomats need not entail the survival of Yugoslavia’s historic
provinces.
At the same time Temperley clearly distinguished federalism and
autonomism (while continuing to associate the former with devolution to
historic provinces rather than ‘racial’ units). On the basis of early
constitutional drafts, he noted, federalism seemed ‘unlikely’: no probable
Government could ‘admit such an extension of self-government to the
component parts’. (Even the few proposals preserving Croatia and
Slovenia marked, he noted with an eye to Whitehall’s first interest, ‘the
end of any federal or devolutionary scheme for Montenegro’).79
Administrative devolution and legislative unity were ‘the proper ideals’.80
William Strang, meanwhile, also tried to temper officials’ assumption that
Yugoslavia would be federative, and their association of centralism with a
narrow and reactionary clique. While the ‘forward movement’ in western
countries was towards devolution, he pointed out, in Yugoslavia
federalism was associated with a dislike of change – with the maintenance
of strong Croat, Serb and Slovene identities, and thus with a reluctance to
embrace the progressive ‘Yugoslav’ idea. 81
When Temperley analysed the various proposals, he brought a rare
experience of the political atmosphere in western as well as eastern
Yugoslavia, and (not coincidentally) an appreciation uniquely nuanced
among British officials. One could not, he noted, be ‘wholly conclusive’ as
to the future form of the Yugoslav state. But all existing drafts (including
those of Protić and Trumbić) agreed:
202 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

[…] either in substituting geographic or economic units for

historic ones, or in adopting measures which lead to the same
result, ie the advantage of Serbia. Even M.Protić’s draft does
this, for Croatia and Slovenia, which are politically, at any rate,
states nearly equal to Serbia proper, become two out of nine
provinces, and will, as provinces, therefore carry little weight,
even though they may obtain much administrative
independence. This in one form or another is indispensable.
You will never get an assembly at Belgrade interested in the
fishermen of Dalmatia or the miners in Slovenia.82

Here, then, was a clear indication of the obstacles facing those who would
preserve the historic provinces, and a wake-up call to those in Whitehall
who assumed a settlement would be on this basis. It is also interesting to
note, in the analysis of one who had spent time in Croatia, a concern for
the upholding of Croat and Slovene interests against those of the
dominant Serbs, and a consequent subtle shift towards the view that
Yugoslavia’s structure should reflect its tripartite national division by
according equality of political influence to Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia.
(Though there is no indication of how these ‘states’ might be defined if
old provincial boundaries, inadequate as ethnic boundaries, were
abolished; and the implication of administrative independence for
Dalmatia might suggest he had still in mind the historic region of Croatia-
Slavonia rather than a broader ethnic Croatia).
Later, on the eve of the elections, Young, Strang and Temperley
continued to stress that the situation was complex and hard to predict.
Certainly the autonomist movement had ‘gained greatly of late’, with
visible support in Slovenia and Bosnia as well as Croatia and Montenegro
(in Bosnia a US colleague, Young reported, considered autonomism ‘very
marked’).83 ‘Administrative autonomy in the provinces’, they suggested,
seemed likely to be ‘the real election cry’ outside Serbia.84 His implication
was that ‘the provinces’ might, if they had their way, be retained in historic
form. Having said that, of the two major parties, he and Young continued
to stress, one – the Democrats – favoured centralisation, while Radical
‘decentralisation’ involved the abolition of historical boundaries.
Overall what is clear, reading the reports sent to London during
1920, is that there was both an awareness of worsening intra-Yugoslav
relations, and a growing appreciation of the complexity of the
constitutional problem. While usage of terms like ‘autonomy’ and
‘federalism’ remained loose, due to an ongoing failure to pin down the
various alternatives, the inadequacy of the primitive dichotomy of
‘centralism’/ ‘decentralism’ (or ‘centralism’/ ‘federalism’) was recognised.
When we turn to the attitudes of Whitehall officials who read these
reports, however, the picture is different. So ingrained was the expectation
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 203

of a ‘South Slav federation’ that advice that a federal arrangement was in

fact unlikely made astonishingly little impression. Instead, politicians and
officials continued to refer unthinkingly to a Yugoslav ‘Federation’. (No
doubt the talk of increasing autonomist sentiment, and of Radical support
for ‘local autonomies’, did not discourage this misapprehension). In
September 1920 Leeper proclaimed it an axiom of the Balkan settlement
that Montenegro would take its place in a ‘Yugo-Slav federation’.85
Similarly, again in relation to Montenegro, Crowe assured the French
Ambassador that the British Government ‘had no doubt that the
[Constituent] Assembly would in due course work out a federal scheme’.86
Six days later, as the first election results reached London, Adam noted
that the forthcoming Bryce report would show whether Communist gains
in Montenegro indicated a desire ‘to be outside the Yugo-Slav Federation
or not’.87 The Prime Minister, meanwhile, talked in Parliament of
Montenegro’s decision to join this ‘Great Slavonic Confederation’.88
It is not surprising, given the clear guidance he had provided to the
contrary, that Young should have found this tendency exasperating. The
use of the word ‘federal’, he warned regarding Crowe’s comments to the
French Ambassador, was ill-advised: ‘if it were made public that His
Majesty’s Government thought that a federal construction of the Yugo-
Slav State was to be expected, I should incur the reproaches of the
Government here for having so misled you as to the tendencies of the
Coalition Government or any of the Governments which have been in
power since my arrival over a year ago’. There was, he impressed, ‘nothing
federal’ about the draft constitution it was intended to force through the
assembly: the Serbian element likely to have a majority which would
‘effectually prevent the discussion of any federal scheme’.89 A Serbian
stranglehold on the Assembly – entailing the collaboration of Radical,
Democrat and smaller groups – was not, it is true, a possibility much
discussed until the eve of the election. (At the time Young was writing,
moreover, the results were known, and the possibility that Radić’s party
might not participate increased the likelihood of Serb domination). But he
was right to insist that strong opposition to a federal settlement had been
reported by the embassy, and that London’s almost wilful inattention
placed him in an awkward position with Yugoslav politicians. Much good
his protests did: three days later, again regarding Montenegro (where
Serbian politicians had least intention of granting autonomy), Adam noted
that the question of separate diplomatic representation would lapse ‘if and
when the assembly work out a federal scheme’.90

British observers had few complaints about the conduct of the elections
of 28 November. In fact they had little to say on the subject. In his
substantial report of 3 December Young restricted himself to noting that,
aside from small incidents in Montenegro and Bosnia, they had taken
204 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

place ‘in perfect calm’.91 His silence on the electoral system recalls his
previous stated intention not to enquire too closely into the election’s
democratic credentials.92 When he had forwarded the electoral law in late
September, Nicolson had greeted it warmly. On paper, he wrote, the
programme seemed ‘perfectly just and reasonable’ and the distribution of
seats ‘quite fair’.93 Detailed analysis in Whitehall limited itself to two
questions – Montenegro and the position of non-South Slav minorities –
towards which Britain was felt to have an obligation. These seem to have
been foremost in British minds and to have taken precedence over other,
broader (and arguably more significant) questions of Yugoslav politics.94
The results did not, in any case, lead officials to suspect Serbian
foul-play, seeming to demonstrate that shift of power previously noted
towards the autonomists of the ‘new provinces’. ‘My despatches will have
shown’, Young wrote, ‘that during the last few months there had been
growing evidence that the people of Yugoslavia were not going to range
themselves unthinkingly under the Old Serbian Party divisions as had been
once expected’. The fact that in an assembly of 419 members Pašić’s
Radical Party would control only 95 seats, and Davidović’s Democrats
only 93, showed, he argued, ‘that the old leaders will have lost their
domination in Yugo-Slav politics’.95 Young made clear, Temperley
observed, the ‘decisive defeat of the Democrats as a nation-wide party’,
and the emergence of other groups in their place.
The most noteworthy and surprising demonstration of this swing
for British observers was the success of Radić’s HRSS: ‘the sensation of
the election’, Young called it.96 Of 93 seats in Croatia-Slavonia (the only
province in which it presented a list) the party won 50. Seemingly
overnight Radić was transformed from minor irritant to significant player.
He had, Young observed, ‘suddenly acquired a political importance which
may turn his head’. The moderate Croat Union, meanwhile, which had
seemed the principal force in Croatia, slumped to a showing of only four
seats – an illustration of ‘the immense chasm between the intellectuals and
the peasant masses’.97 Furthermore, success for autonomist groups in
other non-Serbian regions – in particular for the JMO in Bosnia – seemed
to confirm this picture of Serbian centralists losing their grip on the
political situation.98
In general, Young noted, it was ‘the fashion’ to consider the results
‘satisfactory from the point of view of the unity of Yugo-Slavia’. But to a
British official for whom such unity was the primary concern, this
optimism was unconvincing. The only clearly defined political party from
the new provinces, Young wrote, was Radić with his fifty Croatian peasant
republicans. And despite British observers’ sympathy for decentralism as
the right way to amalgamate Yugoslavia’s disparate regions, this
‘demagogue’ was still viewed with strong suspicion. While the prospect of
ministerial office and significant influence might undermine his prior
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 205

intention to remain in Zagreb, it remained uncertain whether he would

prove ‘an amenable opportunist or a fanatic adhering to his convictions’.99
More fundamentally, the evidence of Croatian feeling caused Young
to question the strength of that Yugoslav solidarity accepted so uncritically
in Britain in 1918. Noting the ‘perhaps well-founded’ anxiety in Belgrade
at a possible return of the Habsburg dynasty, Young marked the
‘undeveloped racial self-consciousness’ of Croatian peasants: an open
admission that ‘Yugoslav’ identity had yet to penetrate beneath the
educated classes. (‘More than one person casually met who knows the old
Austrian provinces’, he reported, ‘says that a plebiscite among the peasants
would give an overwhelming majority to the ex-Emperor Karl’).
And similar uncertainty concerned the electoral success of the
Communists, whose fifty-eight seats left them Yugoslavia’s third largest
party. Again, Young reported, Belgrade’s reaction had been sanguine. In
fact, given their recent municipal election successes, the dominant
emotion had been relief that they had not won more. But his own
reactions were mixed. On the one hand, so far as the union was
concerned, it was assumed that whatever else the Communists might be
they would be ‘good Unionists and even centralists’.100 On the other hand,
it was doubted that those voting communist had genuine communistic
convictions, or any real grasp of the KPJ’s ideological platform, beyond an
awareness of its anti-establishment stance. The party’s success therefore
seemed further testimony to a reaction against Serbian-style centralism,
showing ‘discontent with the Government and anti-Serbian feelings’.
In London, however, officials were more optimistic. The results
were assumed to mark a further swing away from doctrinaire centralism,
and to guarantee the decentralist constitution now unanimously backed in
Whitehall. ‘Local devolution of power in one form or another’, Temperley
minuted confidently, ‘is inevitable’.101 And the assumption remained that
this would entail a federalism based upon Yugoslavia’s historic provinces.
Young warned that the Assembly was not, contrary to recurrent
misconception, a chance for distinct provinces to discuss the terms of
unification; this phase was ‘already accomplished’. But such cautions need
not, Adam minuted, be taken too seriously: ‘the Constituent Assembly
seems to be satisfactorily launched; and the attitude of M.Protić,
representing the Radical party, should ensure the successful negotiation of
a federal Constitution’.102 Though the SCS Government were thought to
have a constitution ready to submit to the assembly, they would probably
be forced to modify it ‘in the direction of establishing 5 or 6 provinces
with executive autonomy in local affairs’.103 Even concerning Radić there
was little alarm. ‘Probably […]’, Temperley wrote, ‘his Communism, like
that of Montenegro, will not be incompatible with Yugoslav unity’ (the
same highly misleading confounding of the ideologies of the KPJ and the
HPSS which we noted earlier).
206 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

In the immediate aftermath of the election it was Radić who remained the
centre of attention. A party meeting he called in Zagreb for the 8
December was the subject of concerned speculation. It was feared in
Belgrade, Young reported, that he would declare an independent Croat
peasant republic and (refusing to recognise any political proceedings since
the original declaration of such a republic on 29 October 1918) claim its
right to negotiate entry into a Yugoslav union on its own terms. Since
Belgrade refused to countenance such a claim, any such Croat
manifestation was likely, Young wrote, to be suppressed by force, and the
situation overall seemed ‘very grave’. Though the Radićists were not a
large majority, he observed, the boast of a union of hearts would be vain if
a constitution had to be forced upon them.104 In fact, he noted, feeling
was growing in Belgrade that if the Croats persisted in making trouble it
would be better to revert to the idea of an Orthodox Greater Serbia, and
to leave a (truncated) Croatia and Slovenia to fend for themselves.105
News that at this meeting Radić had indeed declared a republic (in
the presence, Young reported, of some 20,000 people) alarmed Whitehall
and in part undermined its complacency regarding the constitutional
settlement.106 On the one hand there was some sympathy, among officials
wary of Serbian hegemonism, for Radić’s demand (supported by the Croat
Union) that the three ‘nations’ be equally represented in the Assembly
rather than in proportion to their populations. This confirmed the view,
Adam minuted, that ‘only by a slow process of federation under the King
of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes can the Yugo-Slav races achieve
unity’.107 On the other hand, Radić’s tactics and temperament were the
subject of strong criticism. Trumbić had always hoped, Nicolson
remarked, that the Croats might be the decisive factor in the Assembly,
but Radić was ‘scarcely the man to exercise any useful influence’.108 He
was a ‘man of ill-balanced judgement’, Adam agreed, a ‘fire-brand’ who
was ‘not likely to succeed in constructing any stable form of government
in Croatia’.109 Since early life he had shown, Maclean reported, that
‘intransigentism which has characterised the whole of his political career’:

Although highly intellectual, he lacks stability of character to

such a degree that many of those who know him well frankly
describe him as mad […]. His gift of flowery oratory and what
might be called personal magnetism give him an enormous
influence over his peasant followers, and renders him a grave
potential danger to the young State.110

Radić’s political agenda (as opposed to his personal character) had, Adam
thought, three fundamental aspects: it was ‘a) republican as against the
king of the SCS State; b) peasant as against the artisans; and c) Croat as
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 207

against the Serbs’. Of these, he suspected, ‘only the last is permanent and
genuine’. The republicanism was probably in fact ‘another expression of
the same tendency’, and would, he implied, be appeased by ‘some form of
autonomy to a diet or Council for Croatia’. This common view that
Croatian republicanism was rooted less in a philosophical ideal than in the
perception of this monarchy as a specifically Serbian institution was
justified: Radić had, after all, supported the Habsburgs until 1918.111 (We
may recall Temperley’s earlier conclusion that a republic’s attraction for
Croats was precisely that it was ‘Croatian rather than Serbian in
conception’).112
On the general question of republicanism versus monarchy
Whitehall did not exhibit strong views. Its priority was for the system
which would be supported and would therefore promote stability. No
doubt, however, there was an unstated assumption that constitutional
monarchy was most conducive to such stability. Certainly the Corfu
agreement that Yugoslavia be unified under the Karadjordjević dynasty
was welcomed. And once this unification had taken place, with apparent
majority approval, there was no sympathy for ideologues who would
depose the dynasty and declare a republic. The Prince Regent was widely
admired in Britain and, at least until early 1921, applauded for a Yugoslav
sentiment which distanced him from Serbian chauvinism. When, late in
1920, Young reported the Assembly’s early problems over the oath of
allegiance for incumbent candidates, officials were little interested. Britain,
Adam observed, could ‘regard these early difficulties of the SCS
Government […] with equanimity’, a view scarcely suggestive of sympathy
for republican aspiration in Yugoslavia.113
Radić’s own brand of republicanism was, however, characteristically
idiosyncratic. He claimed not to oppose Alexander as King of Serbia, but
only his sovereignty (consecrated by no formal process he recognised)
over all the Yugoslavs. His 8 December declaration was of a narrow
Croatian republic, which he seems to have imagined joining a broader
Yugoslav federation on its own terms. Interpreted literally, this quixotic
agenda inspired little sympathy in Britain. For one thing, the parallel with
Britain’s own increasingly inflammatory Irish national question was
becoming too close to ignore. (Radić wanted, Young reported, to
negotiate the union of Croatia with Yugoslavia ‘on the basis of equality,
just as Mr de Valera appears to desire in the case of Ireland and her
relations with the British Empire’;114 his party, Adam remarked, combined
‘much of the spirit of the earlier Sinn Fein movement with a taste for
“oaths” and “covenants” that Ulster might envy’).115 In this context,
Whitehall had no intention of promoting interference in such ‘internal’
matters, whether by independent powers or by the embryonic League of
Nations. The SCS Government, Adam observed, ‘cannot admit a republic
in Croatia any more than we can in Ireland’; ‘HMG should keep out of
208 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

this controversy with the SCS Government, which like the Irish
controversy, is an internal question’.116
In general Radić’s vision of a peasant republic within a broader
federation seemed so impractical and unlikely that British analysts
hesitated to take it seriously. ‘If he can successfully entwine a Croatian
Peasant Republic into a united Yugoslav Monarchy’, Young remarked, ‘he
will accomplish a feat which we should no doubt like to emulate at
home’.117 For all his inconsistency and impulsiveness there was, Temperley
suggested, little reason to suppose Radić’s party genuinely wished to
separate from Yugoslavia: ‘the “Republic” is very probably a “beau geste”
to insure definite autonomy on a federal basis’.118 For Radić, an admirer of
the American model, the same writer argued the following spring, ‘a
monarch stands for unity and a republic for federalism’.119
In their sanguine moments, some officials continued to regard the
stand-off between Radić and the centralists merely as a temporary obstacle
before the necessity for a decentralist constitution was recognised. ‘When
Radić has proved futile and Vesnić tried repression’, wrote Adam, ‘wiser
and more moderate counsels’ would obtain a hearing; then it was to be
hoped that the country would turn to Trumbić.120 In general, however,
British analysis became increasingly pessimistic during December 1920
and January 1921. Importantly, it was recognised that Radić’s republicans
were by no means the only group opposed to Belgrade’s vision. (Just as
Whitehall was preoccupied with Montenegrin autonomists before the
election, so in its immediate aftermath Radić tended to monopolise British
analysis of the anti-centralist opposition). If Radić might prove as
formidable an obstacle to union as the Petrović dynasty, Adam
commented, the Slovenes could ‘hardly be counted on as enthusiastic
supporters of Serbian policy’.121 By the end of the month Young was
reporting strikes in Bosnia and Slovenia, as well as a general strike in
Croatia.122 Two weeks later he noted that some in Belgrade considered
Korošec and his Slovene Clericals a greater danger to the state than Radić,
while the Muslims of the JMO, who had effectively put themselves up for
auction, seemed to be favouring ‘the Croat and Slovene point of view’.123
The rivalry between Orthodox Serbs and other communities in Bosnia, his
consul in Sarajevo confirmed, was ‘increasing in bitterness’.124
In this increasingly tense atmosphere, British observers began to fear
not only long-term instability but even dangerous confrontations in the
short-term. On New Year’s Eve Young referred gloomily to the forecast
by the Moscow Congress of Communists that civil war would break out in
Yugoslavia by the end of the forthcoming year, and that this unstable
conglomeration of races (a view of the supposed Yugoslav family now
becoming general in British policy-making circles) was ripe for
revolution.125 The situation, Adam wrote, was serious: it was ‘all-
important’ for the state to preserve internal order, but intelligence
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 209

continued to suggest external intrigue intended to aggravate tensions – in

Macedonia, where Communist strength seemed testimony to Bulgarian
propaganda, as well as in Croatia by Habsburg and d’Annunzist agents.126
In the circumstances, Young commented ruefully, ‘the prospect of a stable
Government being established which can accomplish peaceful work seems
remote’:

I cannot foretell what will be evolved from all these conflicting

elements; the Yugo-Slavs aligning themselves against the Old
Serbs. Perhaps the latter by their strength of character, and in
virtue of their strong right arm, will impose their will, but no
one wishes to be dominated by the Serbs. Perhaps the younger
Serbs will break away and find some solution which will
combine centralisation with emancipation from the Serbia of
Balkan traditions.127

Certainly the incumbent Government’s response to this delicate situation

seemed rashly provocative to British observers. ‘The Serbians’, Young
lamented, ‘seem to be convinced that difficulties are best overcome by
forceful methods […]’.128 They had ‘immense self-confidence in their
ability to impose their point of view’.129 It was ‘curious’, he wrote, that
though Serbs as well as foreigners recognised the incapacity of the Serbian
civilian administration, ‘no Serb seems to think this a reason for
approaching the question of the structure of the Union on any other basis
than that of Serb predominance’.130 Belgrade’s plan of ‘forcing [a ready-
made constitution] down the throats of Croats, Slovenes and
Montenegrins alike’ (a basic strategy Young had previously commended in
the interest of stability) now seemed ill-advised. ‘Only by militarism’,
Adam argued, could such a policy be maintained.131 And Young rued
Pašić’s refusal to consider the autonomist programmes of Korošec and
the JMO. (If nothing was to change, Pašić asked, for what did Serbia
fight? In any case, he claimed, the draft constitution provided regional
autonomies to satisfy the interests and needs of all Yugoslavs).132
In Britain, however, officials were beginning to appreciate the gulf
which separated Pašić’s conception of ‘regional autonomies’ from that of
the western Yugoslavs (and their own), as well as the implications of a
settlement imposed by a Serb majority on other national groups. By early
December it was known that the Council of Ministers composing the draft
constitution had decreed that provincial divisions be independent of ‘any
historical or nationalist or even topographical distinction’ (only Korošec
on the committee had dissented, demanding Slovenia constitute a
province).133 The published constitution, Adam noted on 14 December,
provided for 35 artificial prefectures on the French model:
210 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

By taking no account of racial differences it cuts at the root of

any federal system, and is no doubt intended to do so by its
Serbian authors. The Government apparently will not be
willing, if they can maintain a majority in the Assembly, that
any federal scheme should be discussed. If they maintain this
attitude they will not only play into the hands of their
Hungarian and Italian rivals for the favour of M.Radić, but will
probably bring into opposition the whole body of Croats,
Montenegrins and Slovenes.134

Nevertheless, as we have seen, even at the end of December officials in

London still assumed federalist pressure would prevail, in spite of Young’s
warnings that such optimism was misplaced. And it is interesting to note
here an ongoing confusion about the form of a ‘federal’ settlement. A
federal system, Adam suggested, was one which did heed ‘racial’
differences, a criterion which – for all the wartime talk of a single
Yugoslav race – was now clearly assumed to distinguish Serb, Croat and
Slovene, and even Montenegrin (though the latter had always been
regarded in Britain as of pure Serb stock).135 But as Adam made clear in
the same minute, the constitution he (like most British officials) envisaged
was based upon historic provinces. Trumbić, he wrote, was ‘probably well
aware of the futility of parcelling out four or five ancient provinces, each
strong in racial prejudice and racial pride, into arbitrary administrative
divisions’. He was ‘no longer a member of the Government which
conceives this folly to be the surest means of cementing the Yugo-Slav
union’. Yugoslavia, he insisted, would have ‘to work out its constitution
on a federal basis, reserving to the central government the general
functions of legislature, while devolving on Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia,
Dalmatia, Old Serbia and Montenegro the duties of executive provincial
administration’.136
We have discussed before this common British over-simplification
which equated autonomy for the ‘ancient provinces’ with ‘racial’
federalism. To be fair, devolution to the historic provinces was, by and
large, the demand of non-Serb autonomists, albeit in slightly varied forms.
The Croat Union, for instance, suggested a six-way provincial division:
Serbia with Old Serbia and Macedonia; Croatia with Slavonia, Dalmatia
and Medjomurje; Bosnia; Montenegro; Slovenia; and Vojvodina. The
Slovene Clerical scheme varied only in attaching Dalmatia to Bosnia rather
than Croatia. The Muslim Club proposed an eight-fold division: Serbia;
Old Serbia with Macedonia; Bosnia; Croatia, Slavonia and Medjomurje;
Montenegro and Cattaro; Dalmatia; Syrmia and Vojvodina; and
Slovenia.137 Taken together these seemed to British observers to constitute
a broad non-Serb consensus for provincial federalism: the only
enlightened model for Yugoslavia, and a stark contrast to the Serb
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 211

chauvinism which would focus the power of a centralised state in

Belgrade.
The truth which this black-and-white picture contained, however,
blinded Whitehall to its defects. For one thing, a glance at these various
autonomist schemes should have shown them to be each as self-serving as
those of Pašić or Protić were accused of being. The Croat Union proposal
secured the long-held Croat ambition of reuniting the provinces of the
triune kingdom. By instating Montenegro, Bosnia and even Vojvodina as
distinct regions, moreover, it denied to the nationalists of Belgrade an
expanded Serbia, and ensured the balance of power tilted towards Zagreb.
The single difference in the Slovene scheme was significant: in not uniting
the three majority Croat provinces it reflected a desire to limit the power
of Croatian politicians resented by Slovenes for an arrogant and
condescending manner towards their north-western neighbours. The
Muslim scheme, meanwhile, no less plainly advanced Muslim interests. A
province comprised of Old Serbia (Kosovo) and Macedonia, along with
an autonomous Bosnia, ensured that Muslim populations could exert
considerable influence in the provinces which they inhabited. To Muslim
parties both the Croat and particularly the Slovene scheme (which by
merging Bosnia with Dalmatia diluted Muslim clout in this heartland
province) were not minor variants but were fundamentally unacceptable.
In the context of a Yugoslav political scene, furthermore, in which
each national group sought to secure its own interests, it should scarcely
have been surprising that the Serbs inclined to do likewise. Nor, given that
this was the case, should it have been surprising that autonomist schemes
retaining historical boundaries did not commend themselves to Serb
interests. All of the above proposals left significant Serb populations
stranded as potentially powerless minorities in provinces dominated by
rival groups. In an atmosphere of increasing mutual suspicion (fostered,
admittedly, by the insensitivity of Serb-majority governments) it was not
unnatural for Serbian politicians to fear their Orthodox brethren in
Croatia, southern Dalmatia or Bosnia might be left at the mercy of
regional governments deaf to their concerns.138 This was why Pašić
insisted that the only form of federalism his party would contemplate was
a ‘racial’ one in which a new and greatly enlarged Serb unit was carved out
at the expense of separate and much diminished Croat and Slovene
counterparts.
British analysts, however, did not ask for instance how Bosnia, an
undeniably historic province, could be considered ‘strong in racial
prejudice and racial pride’, with its impossibly intermingled Serb, Croat
and Muslim population; nor how Serbs in Croatia were to be reconciled to
inhabiting an autonomous province conceived explicitly as an ethnic
Croatia; nor how Yugoslav Macedonia was to be integrated – as Adam at
least seems to have imagined – into the province of ‘Old Serbia’ (by which
212 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

it was conquered only during 1912-13) in the light of the hostility to

Belgrade in that troubled region. (‘Southern Serbia’, the British consul in
Skopje warned in February, was ‘a Serbian colony rather than an integral
part of the Serbian Kingdom’, and as such could not ‘with any hope of
success be subjected to a form of administration framed for a
homogeneous population, such as that of France’).139 By failing even to
acknowledge these fundamental problems for any scheme based upon
autonomy for the historic regions Whitehall overestimated the strength
and cogency of the decentralist cause.
Unfortunately a lack of media and popular interest in the Yugoslav
constitutional question meant that – unlike, say, in the case of Montenegro
– officials were not subjected to external scrutiny and interrogation.
Young himself remarked this lack of interest, and the reduced pressure on
British officials which resulted (though it naturally seemed to him an
advantage rather than otherwise). At the end of January 1921, a moment
‘of decisive import for the tranquillity and prosperity of the new-born
Southern Slav state’, it seemed to him ‘remarkable, and perhaps a cause for
thankfulness, how little attention is being paid in the English or other
Western press to the interesting situation now arising at Belgrade out of
the hesitation of the more cultured races to lock themselves in the iron
embrace of the untutored but forceful Serb’.140 (A couple of months
previously, in the last issue of New Europe, Seton-Watson had rather
lamented this ‘renewed indifference of the general public to foreign
affairs’).141

By late January 1921, however, Whitehall’s complacency concerning the

outcome of the assembly had finally given way. The continued refusal of
Radić’s party to participate left the Radical-Democrat bloc little difficulty
maintaining the majority needed to secure its centralist vision. (On 31
January the deputies present elected a Constitutional Commission to
examine the draft constitution on which a majority belonged to the NRS-
DS coalition. Had Radić come to Belgrade, Young lamented, his five seats
would have removed this government majority).142
The persistent talk of local autonomies by leading Radicals (Protić in
particular) had gradually undermined officials’ earlier view of the Radical
agenda as centralist and Great Serbian, and reinforced the presumption of
a decentralist outcome. But this rhetoric, it was belatedly recognised, was
largely phoney. As Temperley noted in a detailed report early in March,
Protić’s December 1918 assurance that under State control existing
autonomous institutions would be retained (an equivocal statement which
Temperley rightly, if only with hindsight, considered ‘vague’) appeared
‘not to have been carried out in any really intelligible sense’. The Croatian
Diet had been abolished, and though the Ban had been granted the status
of a Cabinet Minister, he seemed more the servant of Belgrade than a
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 213

spokesman for Croatia. Elsewhere, government was effectively conducted

by presidents of districts who were ‘dependent on the Minister of the
Interior at Belgrade, and consequently […] liable to be changed according
to the party squabbles of the capital’.
Meanwhile in some regions – Montenegro, Bosnia, or Vojvodina –
the Serb military commander, or the chief of police (‘usually a Serb’), was
‘more powerful or more important than the actual civilian governors’. The
result, Temperley rightly sensed, was extreme centralisation of executive
authority, even if this owed as much to administrative inexperience as
political ideology. ‘The meddling interference and delays caused by
reference of minute details to Belgrade’ had produced, he noted, ‘endless
irritation without any corresponding advantage’. And while Radicals had
seemed ready to conciliate Croats and Bosnian Muslims in late 1919, their
proposals ‘received little practical application’ when they came to power.
Protić’s draft constitution, ‘intended to be forced on the Constituent
Assembly en bloc’, seemed to offer administrative devolution, but was in
reality ‘a species of disguised or camouflaged centralisation’.143
This element of subterfuge was now remarked in the rhetoric of
Belgrade, where ‘unitarism’, Young noted, had become ‘a blessed word
[…] more attractive than centralisation’, but which (he implied) amounted
in Radical usage to the same thing.144 And this was a deception to which
non-Serb groups were becoming wise. (‘M.Pašić, like an old spider, is still
alluring the Yugo-Slav flies to come into his parlour’, Young observed
wryly, ‘but their coyness seems to be increasing’).145 That the
Government’s approach in early 1921 was ‘Great Serbian’ and so by
definition not unitaristic (in the sense of believing in or aspiring to an
undifferentiated Yugoslav identity) seemed evident from the preliminary
debate over state nomenclature. During the ‘considerable discussion’
which the issue provoked Radicals, Young reported, insisted upon the
unwieldy form ‘Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, a determination whose
underlying chauvinism he readily detected:

I have frequently in private conversation protested humorously

against the embarrassment caused to the Chanceries by the
awkwardness of this cumbrous title, which lends itself to no
adjectival variations, but I have found the Radical politicians
most seriously insistent. They say their Serb constituents would
never accept for their country a name which contained no
allusion to the Serbs. They have also in their minds that, if
‘Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’ is awkward in common parlance,
the tendency will be to drop the ‘Croats and Slovenes’ and the
word ‘Serbs’ will in time gradually be used to designate the
whole country.146
214 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

While officials preferred (and often used) the form ‘Yugoslavia’, and were
contemptuous of the bigotry which sought to brand all Yugoslavs as
Serbs, they had themselves clearly abandoned the ‘unitarist’ notion that
Yugoslavs shared a monolithic national identity. ‘The one real attempt to
fuse the different races into one Yugo-Slav nation’, Temperley wrote, ‘was
made by the Democrats under Pribićević’. But, he noted with hindsight,
‘no one really believed’ that their attempts to advance this goal by radical
social and economic reforms could have succceeded against ‘so many
vested interests’.147 By early 1921 British officials effectively agreed with
the view of a Communist deputy reported by Young:

The country is now further from unity than it was two years
ago. The policy adopted during that period was fatal. It was an
arbitrary centralist ordering of our State on the supposition that
national unity and a centralist organisation are one and the
same thing.148

Few in Britain yet followed this deputy to his conclusion that ‘the Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes are not spiritually ready for union in one State’. In
fact, Temperley affirmed, ‘the desire for some kind of unity is apparent in
many directions, and even Radić is for it […]’. Nevertheless, real concerns
were now surfacing about what the future might hold if the struggle
between obstinate Serb centralism and increasingly vociferous non-Serb
autonomism continued on its current course. ‘Old Serbians’, Young
reported, seemed still ‘convinced that the Opposition has no dangerous
character, and that after the fanciful schemes of the dissidents are
sufficiently honoured the Centralist Constitution will force itself on the
country’. But, he warned, ‘it looks to me as though the Opposition is
gaining strength’, an opinion, Temperley thought, confirmed by other
evidence and representing ‘a serious prospect for the future’.149
Temperley’s conclusion in his March report displayed clearly this new
pessimism:

At the present moment the Radical-Democrats appear to have

the power to drive through their programme, which is really a
disguised centralisation. If they do they will be strenuously
resisted by strong parties in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, also
by Radić and the Communists, though for different reasons.
The Union is therefore in measurable danger because the
arbitrary methods of the Government have already awakened
universal suspicion outside the ranks of their own supporters,
and further persistence in this course can only increase the
separatising tendencies of the Federalists and the revolutionary
violence of the Communists.150
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 215

At the end of March Temperley recorded that the scheme of dividing the
state on non-historic lines had passed the constitutional committee:
Bosnia would be divided into at least three provinces, Croatia-Slavonia
into four, Macedonia into two, with Slovenia alone perhaps forming a
single province. ‘All historic divisions’, he commented, ‘are […] quite
clearly obliterated’.151 This was a ‘very far-reaching change’ which was
‘calculated to produce great discontent’.152 The reformed state structure,
along with the proposed aggressive measures against major landowners in
Croatia and Vojvodina, amounted to a ‘considerable revolution’ showing
‘marks of great violence and arbitrariness’. There was, Temperley
concluded (displaying again the British tendency to demonise an individual
rather than a wider body of opinion), ‘an unmistakable taint of oriental
intrigue, corruption and despotic method of which all are probably due
directly to M.Pašić’.
Nevertheless, with changes to the ministry and Radić’s abstention
giving the government an effective two-thirds majority, the constitution’s
passage seemed ‘assured’.153 In fact over the subsequent weeks British
observers suspected the centralisers were ‘gaining ground slightly’, while
those for historical frontiers like Korošec and Drinković became
increasingly ‘cornered’.154 On 12 May, amid reports of growing Radićist
agitation, a large majority in the Assembly passed the constitution. It was,
Temperley lamented, ‘really an epoch-making decision’, certain to increase
autonomist opposition.155 On 28 June (Vidovdan) 1921 the constitution
was finally ratified, fundamentally unchanged.156 Of 285 deputies in
attendance, 223 voted in favour, 35 against. 161 deputies had either
walked out or abstained. As Alexander left the formal ceremony in the
temporary Assembly building, a bomb was thrown at him by a
Communist agitator, an unsuccessful attack which boded ill for the future
stability of the state.157
Reaction from British observers was glum. The situation in Zagreb,
Maclean reported, was ‘far from satisfactory’. The constitution was
causing ‘deep discontent’. Services to mark Vidovdan had been ‘tinged
with gloom’.158 The provinces from which a majority of deputies had
backed the constitution, Strang observed, were Serbia, Montenegro,
Vojvodina and Bosnia: the first two purely Serb, the third largely Serb, the
last result owing to the vote of Muslims who ‘were paid their price’.159 Of
27 Croatian deputies who had voted in favour, two thirds were Serbs. In
general, he suggested, those who had voted against the constitution had
seen some good in it, those who had abstained none:

In the face of this it is impossible to argue that the Constitution

has not been imposed on the country by the Serb majority, and
the fact that the real opposition abstained from the vote as a
216 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

protest is a measure of the extent to which their claims have

been disregarded […], and of the determination of the Serbs to
destroy everything, whether good or bad, that savours of the
bureaucratic, autocratic, aristocratic spirit of Austria-Hungary,
and to put in its place the simplicity and democracy of which
they are so proud, and the easy-going inefficiency which to
them is the mark of a free spirit.160

Perhaps no single quotation so succinctly captures official British attitudes

towards the Serbs in the aftermath of the war, as a poised ambivalence
(fruit of the country’s martial gallantry) tilted decisively back towards the
wry denigration which had characterised pre-war assumptions. What a
damning weight of condescension and faint praise lies in those two final
clauses!
In London officials echoed this reaction. The Times’ pessimistic
analysis, one noted, would displease the SCS Government but put the
situation ‘admirably’. The desired compromise between centralists and
decentralists had not materialised. Pašić was ‘the foster-parent’ of a
constitution which was ‘a triumph for centralisation’, owing more to ‘the
clever wire-pulling of a politician than to any considerations of
statesmanship’. The last-hour deal with the Muslims was ‘typical of the
taint of intrigue and corruption that unhappily pervades the whole
construction of the Constitution’. Though the final vote seemed decisive,
the key to appreciating the situation lay in ‘the ominous balance of […]
abstentions’. This victory for rigid centralisation was ‘in the opinion of
many the one event liable to throw the three peoples into discord and to
prevent them from settling down in unison’. And with even future
Radical-Democrat cooperation uncertain, the state seemed ‘doomed to
political instability’.161
In his detailed annual report for 1921 Young provided a more
detailed analysis of voting patterns, and clearly highlighted the
constitution’s polarising effect. While a majority in Serbia, Bosnia and
Vojvodina had been in favour, 70% of deputies from Croatia-Slavonia had
abstained, 60% from Slovenia and 55% from Dalmatia. Meanwhile,
considering deputies’ religious background rather than provenance, it
transpired that 75% of those who voted for the Constitution were Serb-
Orthodox, while 70% of abstentions were by Catholics. 80% of Catholic
deputies had abstained.162
He also scrutinised for the first time the constitution’s precise
definition of the relationship between local authorities and central
government. This was an issue, he noted, which since unification had
‘never ceased to be the subject of the most acrid discussion’. And it was
one whose resolution emphasised the settlement’s rigid centralism. At the
head of each region was to be a ‘Lord Lieutenant’ (načelnik) appointed by
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 217

the crown, and though local elective bodies were to be instituted, with
limited decision-making authority, this official might refuse to promulgate
any decree deemed to conflict with state policy. ‘The object of the whole
system of local administration’, Young observed, ‘is to grant as large a
measure of autonomy as possible to local authorities while at the same
time striking a blow at provincial particularism […] which is looked on as
a danger to the existence of the young State’. If the common people could
be trusted, the same could not be said of the governing classes of Zagreb,
Sarajevo, Split or Ljubljana. These centres would therefore be reduced to
‘provincial towns with no authority beyond their own particular small
region or (in the case of Zagreb) beyond the limits of the city itself’. The
‘millenary if somewhat mythical’ triune Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and
Dalmatia, as well as the ‘Banovina’ of Croatia, would receive ‘their final
death blow’ and would in time ‘find themselves administered by half-a-
dozen nominees of the Ministry of Interior in Belgrade’.163

The Outlook for Yugoslavia

In November 1921, as the Assembly – now an official Legislative

Chamber – turned to the law delimiting the State into twenty-six
administrative districts, Nicolson rued a centralising policy which could
‘only lead to trouble in the future’. The sooner the constitution was
remade under a man like Trumbić (or even, he admitted, Protić) the
better.164 Pašić seemed, he wrote, to be governing Yugoslavia on the same
lines and (‘what is worse’) with the same staff as he ran Serbia: ‘in the end
the Slovenes, the Croats, and the Dalmatians will stand it no longer, but
[…] the harm will have been done’.165 Further instability late in the year –
the Government’s resignation, victory for Radić and the Croat bloc in the
December municipal elections, Radić’s demand for recognition within the
state of a ‘separate Croatian people, and a separate Croat state’ – was
lamented as ‘the inevitable result of M.Pašić’s policy’.166 Only a report on
the military offered any hope. The army, it suggested, was gradually losing
the commanding position and political influence it enjoyed in old Serbia.
If this ‘backbone of old-Serbian hegemony’, was losing political influence,
then ‘debalkanisation of the SCS State’, Nicolson dared suggest, ‘is nearer
than we had hoped’.167
This oscillation between profound pessimism and unguarded
optimism was more typical of Whitehall’s idealistic junior officials than it
was of Young, who was less squeamish about the use of government
power in the interests of stability and more consistent in his mild,
somewhat resigned pessimism. His 1921 report was less negative than
much British analysis in the constitution’s aftermath, no doubt because he
had not shared the lofty hopes of younger colleagues. He noted the
218 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

‘gigantic internal problem’ facing a kingdom with component parts on

such ‘differing planes of civilisation’. But to understand this was implicitly,
at least in part, to forgive the failings of the government confronted by it.
Clearly there was now no sympathy for Pribićević’s ostrich-headed
unrealism, which was seen to endanger the country’s very existence. (Since
the population were all Yugoslavs, Young quoted him with disbelief, ‘the
Croatian question does not exist’ and anyone denying this was ‘an enemy
of the State’). Nevertheless, the need for legal standardisation, with twelve
systems said to be in force, was ‘obvious’, and in some areas ‘fair headway’
had been made. And ‘not all Democrats’, Young added, were as rigid as
Pribićević; even members of his own group had shown concern at the
effects of an over-zealous centralism. Meanwhile the Radical party was, he
thought, ‘ready to swing if it sees profit in it’. This, allied to the fact that
Trumbić and some Slovenes were trying to moderate the extreme
autonomists, suggested, Young wrote, that future elections might
empower a coalition open to constitutional reform. (Though quite how
the Radicals, fiercely protective of Serb interests, were likely to approve
any revision acceptable to Croat sensibilities is unclear in this too-sanguine
analysis).
But the big question, Young was clear, was the mercurial Radić – a
man whose ‘high educational achievements’ failed to disguise a ‘somewhat
unbalanced and idealistic mind’; who, while advocating a strict policy of
non-violence, nevertheless ‘sets no curb […] on his tongue’. For all the
increased sympathy for Croatian autonomism in Whitehall during 1920-
21, Radić remained far too quixotic and temperamental a figure-head to
appeal to cautious British diplomats: a ‘dreamer’ whose ‘ideally Christian’
tenets included ‘no taxation’ and ‘no army’. He was, Young considered, ‘as
much a thorn in the flesh of the Belgrade authorities as Gandhi in that of
the Viceroy of India’ and whether to deal with him by violence or
indulgence was a problem ‘much exercising the Serb-Croat-Slovene
Government’.168 The comparison here (a recurrent one) displayed
sympathy with the central authorities, and he praised their ‘wise patience’
in allowing Radić his say ‘in spite of his provocative language’.169 It was, he
noted, ‘difficult to say whether his influence is growing’. His success in the
recent municipal elections showed an increasing urban influence. And
some said his doctrines were spreading to Bosnia and Dalmatia, even
perhaps among Serb peasants in Croatia. (He had himself recently warned
that this Croatian ‘poison’ was ‘working down through Bosnia and
Hercegovina to Montenegro’). On the other hand the Government had
pointed out that even in Radićist strongholds ‘recruits come up well and
taxes are readily paid’.
Much of the unrest among the Croatian peasantry could certainly be
attributed, Young felt, to the arrogant and disrespectful manner of Serbian
military administration. The Serbian Army ‘from the beginning treated
 FIRST YUGOSLAV CONSTITUTION 219

Croatia (unlike Slovenia) as occupied enemy territory, indulged in flogging

(which even the Hungarians never did), introduced martial law, overrode
the civil power, punished infringements of regulations which had never
been promulgated, and worked in Cyrillic script, […] so that in time the
Serbs appeared merely to have taken the place of the hated Magyar’. But
such ‘overbearing’ conduct, he implied, was tactless and ad hoc rather than
part of a centrally-orchestrated campaign. Violent incidents had been, he
noted, ‘a good deal less’ in 1921 than in 1920. It was not surprising that
such army brutality as persisted, combined with the penalties suffered by
Croat peasants as a result of tax and exchange-rate reform (which may
indeed have been skewed to favour the Serbian population), had lured
Croats towards Radić’s Edenic vision of a republic without army or tax-
collectors. But, Young implied, these were in large part the inevitable
teething problems of a newly-amalgamated state which might be expected
to diminish.170
If this reassured officials, however, there soon followed Young’s
account of an interview with Trumbić which emphasised the latter’s utter
disillusionment with a regime of ‘mere force’. Serbian misrule had,
Trumbić argued, turned Radić’s ‘harmless faddist band’ into ‘an
association of the Croat people suffering from a sense of real injury’. In
part Young sympathised. Serbians who classed Trumbić as an enemy of
state unity meant, he observed wryly, that he was ‘an enemy to that unity
under Serbian hegemony’. His charges of inefficiency, corruption and
disregard of legal procedure and popular rights, Young noted, ‘I never
meet anybody inclined to dispute’. But he questioned autonomist tactics.
Surely, he wrote, the new provinces ‘had […] the remedy within their own
hands’: by political participation Slovene, Muslim and Croat deputies
would comprise at least ‘a very important minority which, by its superior
culture, could doubtless impose to a great extent its views on the
governing class’. ‘An oppressed people’, he continued, ‘could only hope to
gain sympathy abroad if they could show that constitutional methods were
denied them’ (an argument which calls to mind once again British
preoccupation with the Irish question).171
In London Trumbić’s high standing gave this communication a
considerable (and depressing) impact. Nicolson was particularly maudlin:

This represents by far the most important and authoritative

criticism of the Pašić system which we have as yet received.
M.Trumbić is a man of high character, great learning, and
courageous, if somewhat dour, patriotism […]. He is a serious
and slow-thinking man; he would not have made these
statements […] unless he was firmly convinced of their reality
and importance. We can take it therefore that the selfish and
blind policy of M.Pašić will lead to a disintegration of the
220 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Yugo-Slav Union. The Croatian question will become acute: the

Muslim elements in Bosnia will join the movement: the
Slovenes, who have been so badly treated by Belgrade will
further embitter the issue; and the Montenegrin question,
which we had hoped was settled, will revive with renewed
intensity. From all this it will he Hungary and Italy who will
reap the advantage.

‘The outlook’, he added in comically-understated conclusion, ‘is not

hopeful’.172 Meanwhile in another minute written on the same day he
continued his diatribe against the aged Yugoslav premier:

Mr Pašić is a danger to Europe. Old, obstinate, venerable and

ingratiating he combines all the futilities of a Balkan politician
with the appearance and prestige of an elder statesman. The
only hope for Yugo-Slavia is that he should disappear.173

This was, to be sure, a letting-off of steam which may not fairly represent
the day-to-day mood of British officials dealing with Yugoslavia. And
Nicolson was certainly one of those younger, idealistic officials whose
great optimism for the post-war settlement paved the way for moments of
corresponding disillusionment. (‘I wonder’, mused the older guard in the
shape of Lord Curzon, ‘if things are quite so bad’).174 But there is no
doubt, nevertheless, that by the spring of 1922 most British observers
were profoundly disappointed with the constitutional path Yugoslavia had
taken since its formation in 1918 and regarded a significant revision in the
direction of regional autonomy as indispensable to the country’s future as
a united entity.
 Conclusion

The period of this study was claimed in the introduction as an

important, formative one for British attitudes towards the Yugoslav
peoples. It is certainly true that preconceptions about this region then
became established which have proved tenacious in subsequent British
discourse, as any brief perusal of the literature on Britain’s involvement in
and attitudes towards the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s will make clear.1 But
it will also have become apparent – indeed this has constituted one of the
monograph’s recurring themes – that attitudes towards the Yugoslavs as a
whole, or towards one or more of their component elements, were
capable on occasion of changing with great rapidity in response to
contemporary events and perceived British interests.
During the war in particular, the altered shape of European
geopolitics produced fundamental shifts in Britain not only towards south-
east Europe’s present and future, but also towards its past. Arnold
Toynbee summoned each nation’s ancestors – its ‘host of unseen
witnesses’ – to testify to the world about the living generation and its
future.2 What he did not perhaps appreciate was the degree to which the
interrogation and interpretation of these ancestral voices would be shaped,
and subsequently reshaped, in accordance with particular contemporary
circumstances. No doubt this mutability in the interpretation of South
Slav history was assisted by the fact that the region was, in general, little
known before 1914. It might be harder now for scholars to accept
uncritically the sort of national myths which were often embraced during
the First World War. But it would be implausible to suppose that the
changes we have charted were the result simply of an influx of new
information. For one thing, the altered circumstances of the immediate
post-war period quickly brought, as we have seen, a revived emphasis on
historical divisions, and a return to other pejorative stereotypes which had
dominated the pre-war discourse.
Rather than viewing our period as one in which a single monovalent
paradigm was established, therefore, it perhaps makes more sense to think
of it as having provided and consolidated a set of alternative resources.
Some (such as the view of the Balkans in general as turbulent, primitive
222 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

and unstable) obviously predated the 20th century, but were further
entrenched during that century’s first quarter. Others were first established
– or at least first became widespread – during the World War I era, though
they were quickly provided with a long historical pedigree, dating back to
that 14th century resistance against the Turks which proved such a rich
source of precedent and analogy. Subsequent generations of British
observers of the Yugoslavs have been able to draw upon these alternative
stock images in a manner dictated substantially by contemporary
contingency. Thus the Serbs have become brave, patriotic, democratic,
egalitarian and anglophile in one prefabricated image, primitive,
chauvinistic, ‘oriental’ in another; the Croats cultured, westernised and
Yugoslav, or narrowly nationalistic, clericalist, and pro-Austrian; the
Montenegrins brave, independent and instinctively poetic, or backward,
violent and pro-Russian. And so on. At later moments of crisis – during
the military coup of 1941 and the subsequent German invasion, for
instance, or the 1948 expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform –
British commentators resorted freely to these stereotypes, shaped earlier in
the century, selecting and employing them as they buttressed attitudes to
contemporary events.3
If the distant and recent past of constituent Yugoslav peoples was in
important respects reinterpreted in Britain during the war, perhaps the
most significant conclusion of the monograph’s early chapters concerns
the manner in which the pre-unification relations of the Yugoslavs as a
whole were re-assessed in the light of the apparent contemporary strength
of the Yugoslav movement. Historians looking back on the creation of
Yugoslavia in 1918 have often considered it a ‘major historical surprise’ –
a development which could not be said to be obviously foreshadowed by
the previous histories of the various Yugoslav peoples, but which was
brought about by the highly unusual circumstances of the war.4 It is
pointed out that 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.5 Even the most
optimistic of such enthusiasts, it is now assumed, would have admitted
that in 1918 no single Yugoslav nation yet existed to live in the new state.6
In Britain, however, the possibility that the apparent strength of pro-
Yugoslav feeling – or the apparent precedence of Yugoslav feeling over
other, narrower identities – might be the result of unusual short-term
factors, and might therefore not prove enduring once the war was over
and some sort of stability had returned, was barely considered. The
emerging new state was not allowed to be a ‘historical surprise’. Instead,
the past was reinterpreted to allow it (the state) to appear the natural result
of profound long-term trends, even if – as was widely acknowledged –
these trends had accelerated significantly during the 20th century. The
 CONCLUSION 223

failure of the Yugoslavs to coalesce earlier than 1918 became ascribed not,
as before, to acute internal divisions, but rather to the cynical
manipulation of external imperialist powers – and the failure in Britain to
appreciate the strength of pre-war Yugoslav sentiment and aspiration to
the deliberate campaigns of misinformation orchestrated by these powers.
After the war, as we have seen, British observers were rapidly
disillusioned of their belief in a single, existing Yugoslav nationality, as
older traditions such as those centred on Croatian ‘State Right’ and ‘Great
Serbia’ demonstrated a continued vitality, and new growths – Radić’s
republican movement in particular – grounded themselves upon sub-
Yugoslav identities. In the space of the thirty months which separated the
initial formation of the state and the ratification of its first constitution,
the image of Yugoslavia in Britain shifted fundamentally, from being that
of a new national state among the several which succeeded to the lands of
the old, multinational Habsburg Monarchy, to being that of another
multinational conglomeration (albeit one with strong linguistic and cultural
ties) which suffered the same acute difficulties in managing its antagonistic
national elements as had the Empire which preceded it. Under Serb
dominance Yugoslavia came, as Austria-Hungary before it, to seem
effectively a ‘prison of the peoples’.
And just as most pre-war British analysts had assumed that some
sort of federalisation of the Habsburg realm was ultimately the only way in
which that power would overcome its internal ethno-linguistic tensions, so
in the case of post-war Yugoslavia did they quickly conclude that a federal
solution – or at least one that incorporated substantial regional
autonomies – offered the only route to future stability. But as was also the
case with the Monarchy before the war, observers failed to confront the
difficult questions: for in post-war Yugoslavia, as in the Monarchy,
‘historic’ provinces and the boundaries of ethnic population were by no
means coterminous, and any system of autonomy based (as Britons
generally assumed) on the former raised intractable difficulties, particularly
for a Serb population reduced to minority-status in several of the principal
provincial units.
Broadly speaking, in fact, it may be said that while those British
analysts enthusiastic about Yugoslav union during the war tended to judge
the country’s post-war problems as being more simple in origin than was
in fact the case, those more pessimistic inclined to the opposite extreme.
Thus while the former, as we have frequently seen, sought to pin all the
blame on supposedly isolated individuals or groups, an interpretation
premised at times upon a misreading of broader opinion, the latter saw in
Yugoslavia’s teething problems the expression of rivalries so ancient and
complex as to defy either analysis or remedy. Increasingly, the
deteriorating situation during 1920-21 seemed to corroborate the second
view. For many of those in wartime Britain who had hoped, and believed,
224 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

that the new state’s western elements would ‘raise up’ the ‘oriental’ Serbs
to the level of central Europe, it began to seem that the reverse had
occurred. Instead of a stable, pro-western bulwark across the old Austrian-
Ottoman frontier, Britain was faced with the fact that ‘all Austria-
Hungary’ might now be considered part of ‘the Balkans’, a region defined
less by geographical extent than by moral climate – one in which it could
be assumed, as Harold Temperley predicted gloomily, that ‘atrocities will
take place in dark corners’.7 The scene was set for a century in which the
phrase ‘national question’ would seem to many western observers the
central fact of Eastern Europe – as timeless and irremediable in its final
quarter as it had been in its first.
 Notes

Introduction
1 This point was made by Lloyd-George in his Memoirs of the Peace Conference (New
Haven, 1939), ii, 588-9. The question of the Habsburg Empire, R.G.D.Laffan
noted in the official peace conference history, was ‘decided by its own disruption’:
‘The Liberation of the New Nationalities: The Yugo-Slavs’, in H.W.V.Temperley
(ed.), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, 6 vols. (London, 1920-4), iv, 204. ‘The
most solemn peace conference imaginable’, one participant agreed, ‘could not put
[Austria-Hungary] together again’: C.Seymour, ‘The End of an Empire: Remnants
of Austria-Hungary’, in E.M.House and C.Seymour (eds.), What Really Happened at
Paris: The Story of the Peace Conference, 1918-1919 (London, 1921), pp.87-8.
2 Quoted in Laffan, ‘The Liberation of the New Nationalities’, p.183.
3 H.Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary during the First World War (London,
1962), pp.1,3.
4 W.Miller, Travel and Politics in the Near East (London, 1898), p.xiii. Another who
penetrated the realms of ‘savage Europe’ agreed that most Englishmen were more
familiar with the geography of ‘darkest Africa’: H.de Windt, Through Savage Europe
(London, 1907), p.15.
5 N.Forbes, The Southern Slavs (Oxford, 1914-15), p.3.
6 K.Calder, Britain and the Origins of the New Europe 1914-1918 (Cambridge, 1976),
p.214. A.H.E.Taylor complained during the war that the British public’s traditional
attitude towards Balkan problems had been ‘one of indifference tempered with
annoyance at certain small nations whose affairs are continually threatening to set
other people by the ears’, while that of the Foreign Office, ‘if not actuated always
by indifference, though indifference has largely been present, has constantly been
based upon a misapprehension of the problems at issue’ (The Future of the Southern
Slavs (London, 1917), p.8).
7 Markedly less information flowed back to London even from Vienna, Robin
Okey has pointed out, than from regions of imperial concern – two extant
volumes of general correspondence from the Vienna Embassy for 1911, the same
number as for Abyssinia and Haiti/San Domingo, contrast with 19 for Morocco
and 22 for Persia: R.Okey, ‘British Impressions of the Serbo-Croat speaking lands
of the Habsburg Monarchy – Reports to the Foreign Office 1867-1908’, in
R.Evans, D.Kováč and E.Ivaničková (eds), Great Britain and Central Europe 1867-
1914 (Bratislava, 2002), p.62.
8 Quoted in H.Seton-Watson and C.Seton-Watson, Making of a New Europe
(London, 1981), p.322.
9 H.Seton-Watson and C.Seton-Watson (eds.), R.W.Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs:

Correspondence 1906-1941, 2 vols. (London; Zagreb, 1976), i, 265-7 (henceforward

Seton-Watson, Correspondence).
10 Quoted in Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.227. No doubt a similar
sentiment prevails among idealistic internationalists of our own age. Vernon
Bartlett recalled a spoof bulletin circulated to British officials in Paris declaring that
226 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

serious trouble had broken out in Dalmatia between the Yugos and the Slavs:
‘every one concerned initialled the news without a murmur’! (Behind the Scenes at the
Paris Peace Conference (London, 1920), p.146).
11 The future Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion estimated that perhaps a hundred

people in interwar England, in and out of Parliament, interested themselves in

Palestine. There is little reason to think Yugoslavia had a broader market (T.Segev,
One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (London, 2000),
p.398).
12 See his Great Britain and Austria-Hungary.
13 A number of works deal well with this subject. See, for instance, Harry Hanak,

‘The Government, the Foreign Office and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1918’, Slavonic

and East European Review, XLVIII, no 108 (1969); W.Fest, The Habsburg Monarchy
and British Policy 1914-1918 (London, 1978), pp.88-115, 241-4; and Seton-Watson
and Seton-Watson, Making of a New Europe (an excellent survey which, perhaps
inevitably, gives a slightly exaggerated impression of Robert Seton-Watson’s
influence on British policy-making).
14 The idea itself was not new, of course: the sense both of a shared South Slav

heritage as well as of a broader Slavic affinity had a long history as well as a

grounding in an objective linguistic kinship. In their early modern roots Yugoslav
and pan-Slav ideas were the province of a tiny intellectual elite, but by the 19th
century had become more widely disseminated, particularly in Austria-Hungary,
where they found expression in the ‘Illyrian’ movement of the 1830s and 1840s.
See I.Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca and
London, 1984), pp.70-115. My debt to this excellent work will be apparent. See
also D.Djordjević, ‘The Idea of Yugoslav Unity in the Nineteenth Century’, in
D.Djordjević (ed.), The Creation of Yugoslavia 1914-1918 (Santa Barbara, Calif.,
1980), pp.1-14; W.Vucinich, ‘Croatian Illyrism: Its Background and Genesis’, in
S.B.Winters and J.Held (eds.), Intellectual and Social Developments in the Habsburg
Empire from Maria Theresa to World War I (Boulder, 1975), pp.55-114.
15 This point is made by D.Rusinow: ‘The Yugoslav Idea before Yugoslavia’, in

D.Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea 1918-1992 (London, 2003),

pp.4-5, 11.
16 Journalists might perhaps be considered a discrete fifth group. In practice,
however, the majority of analytical journalism drawn upon in this study was
written by individuals who may fairly be considered within the first two categories.
Such journalistic coverage of the South Slav region as contained more than a
skeletal outline of events was scanty during the pre-war period, and when wartime
developments created a rapid escalation of interest among the British public, the
demand for information and first-hand accounts was met, often as not, by
individuals who were not professional reporters but who had otherwise acquired
personal experience or knowledge of the area. Of the many column inches written
about the Serbs in particular during World War I, a substantial portion was written
by individuals who had served in Serbia in a military or civilian capacity, had an
active connection with the Serbian relief fund or other charitable organisations, or
had an academic interest in the Yugoslav region.
17 De Windt, working as a correspondent for the Westminster Gazette, admitted
undertaking his journey with the haziest of preconceptions – of Cetinje as a
 NOTES 227

mountain stronghold ‘swarming with armed men and bristling with fortifications’,
and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) as a ‘squalid Eastern place’ (Through Savage Europe, pp.15,
42, 70).
18 P.E.Henderson, A British Officer in the Balkans: The Account of a Journey through

Dalmatia, Montenegro, Turkey in Austria, Magyarland, Bosnia and Hercegovina (London,

1909), p.15. For other pre-war travel accounts, see, for instance, M.Holbach, Bosnia
and Herzegovina: Some Wayside Wanderings (London, 1910), or F.K.Hutchinson,
Motoring in the Balkans: Along the Highways of Dalmatia, Montenegro, the Herzegovina and
Bosnia (London, 1910). Of the prospect of visiting Dalmatia, the latter wrote:
‘Dalmatia! What strange magic in the name! How remote and Asiatic it sounded!
What visions of mountain fastnesses and landlocked harbours, of curious buildings
and primitive peoples, danced before my excited fancy!’ (p.17).
19 Omer Hadžiselimović (ed.), At the Gates of the East: British Travel Writers on Bosnia

and Herzegovina from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (New York, 2001), p.471.
20 Miller, Travels and Politics, pp.xv-xvi.
21 B.Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (London,

2000), pp.99-105.
22 Representative examples of this genre include G.Gordon-Smith, Through the

Serbian Campaign: the great retreat of the Serbian Army (London, 1916) and Douglas
Walshe, With the Serbs in Macedonia (London, 1920).
23 For the best brief survey of this relief work, and its impact upon British public

opinion, see Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, pp.64-80. First-hand

accounts may be found in M.A.St.Clair Stobart, The Flaming Sword in Serbia and
Elsewhere (London; New York; Toronto, 1916), C.Matthews, Experiences of a Woman
Doctor in Serbia (London, 1916), C. and A.Askew, The Stricken Land: Serbia as We
Saw It (London, 1916), and E.P.Stebbing, At the Serbian Front in Macedonia (London,
1917). Gordon-Smith, Through the Serbian Campaign (pp.239-92) also contains a
detailed account of the relief effort.
24 Mabel St.Clair Stobart was a prominent suffragette. Elsie Inglis and other
initiators of the Scottish Women’s Hospital for Foreign Service were members of
the Scottish Federation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies
(Hanak, Britain and Austria-Hungary, p.66).
25 Ibid., pp.70-1.
26 Of the names listed above, Brailsford and Durham were the only notable
exceptions in this respect. One might also include Charles and Noel Buxton. The
latter was supportive of the Serbian Relief Fund – indeed, he became a Vice-
President. But in his Contemporary Review article ‘The Future of Austria’ (Jan 1918),
he argued against the break-up of the Empire. Seton-Watson’s article in the same
journal, ‘Austria-Hungary and the Federal Solution’ (March 1918), was intended as
a direct rejoinder (Correspondence, i, 312-3).
27 See Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, ch.6 for a discussion of those
currents of opinion in Britain opposed to the dismemberment of the Habsburg
realm.
28 R.J.W. Evans, Great Britain and East-Central Europe, 1908-48: A Study in Perceptions
(London, 2002), p.12.
29 Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.89.
228 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

30 Such people found a congenial home within organisations like the Union of
Democratic Control, and wrote for journals like the Cambridge Magazine. See
Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, ch.6.
31 As Hanak points out, Brailsford’s lack of familiarity with the politics of the
Monarchy did not prevent him penning numerous articles on the subject, or
hamper his reputation in left-wing circles as an expert (ibid., p.144). Before the war
in particular, Britons with a strong interest in the Balkans tended to be pro-
Bulgarian in their outlook, and therefore unsympathetic to Serbia over the
Macedonian issue.
32 Toynbee – pupil of Alfred Zimmern – admitted his great debt to Seton-Watson

in this respect (Nationality and the War, p.ix); James (Viscount) Bryce had been a
founder member of the Balkan Committee in 1903, and a champion of the
oppressed Ottoman Armenians, before becoming Ambassador to Washington
between 1907 and 1913. J.H.Rose had made his name as a biographer of Napoleon
and Pitt the Younger.
33 Zimmern’s paternal family were German Jews, and Namier’s parents were

Polonised Jews, though both men were brought up as Christians. (Norman Rose,
Lewis Namier and Zionism (Oxford, 1980). See the article on Zimmern in
H.C.G.Matthew and B.Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford, 2004)). Other writers on nationality, like Sidney Herbert and Bernard
Joseph, displayed strong Zionist sympathies.
34 Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, pp.66-7.
35 In his obituary of Seton-Watson R.R.Betts observed that his Scottish feeling

‘perhaps made him the more sympathetic to the rights and sentiments of small
nations’ (quoted in L.Péter, ‘R.W.Seton-Watson’s Changing Views on the National
Question of the Habsburg Monarchy and the European Balance of Power’, Slavonic
and East European Review, Vol.82, no.3 (July 2004), 656). In a pre-war speech in
Split Seton-Watson told his audience that it was easier for the citizen of a small
country like Scotland to sympathise with Dalmatia, and that he wished Dalmatia
the same fate as Scotland (Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.79). The
empathy afforded by his Scottish nationality was a theme that arose frequently in
his correspondence with Croats in particular: see, for example, Correspondence, i,
240, 269, 289.
36 Zara Steiner, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898-1914 (Cambridge, 1969),
passim. Technically, it may be noted, the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service
remained distinct, but informal interchange increasingly took place at the higher
levels of the two services (R.A.Jones, The British Diplomatic Service, 1815-1914
(Gerrards Cross, 1983), p.196).
37 Roberta M.Warman, The Foreign Office 1916-1918: A Study of Its Role and Functions

(New York; London, 1986), p.59.

38 One exception was the Magyarophile C.N.Knatchbull-Hugueson, whose history

of Hungary was the best available in early 20th century Britain (The Political
Development of the Hungarian Nation (London, 1908)).
39 Okey, ‘British Impressions’, pp.63-4.
40 See below pp.106-7.
 NOTES 229

41
These points (and the increasing challenge to Foreign Office control of foreign
policy formulation from other government organisations during the war) are
further discussed below. See pp.115-18.

Chapter One
1 R.Schlesinger, Federalism in Eastern and Central Europe (London, 1945), p.217.
2 On Herder, see I.Berlin, Vico and Herder (London, 1976).
3 E.Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing concepts of race in Britain and the
United States between the world wars (Cambridge, 1992), p.23. See also, for example,
H.J.Fleure, ‘The Racial History of the British People’, Geographical Review, March
1918.
4 E.T. Buckle, History of Civilisation in England (3rd ed; London, 1861), i, 36-7. T.H.

Huxley, ‘On the Methods and Results of Ethnology’, Fortnightly Review, Vol I
(1865), 257-77. For J.S.Mill, see footnote 7 below.
5 R.R.Marett, Anthropology (London, 1912), p.92; S.Herbert, Nationality and its
Problems (London, 1920), p.10.
6 Herbert, Nationality and its Problems, pp.7-13. It was, J.Oakesmith remarked,

‘difficult to refrain from impatient words in face of those who hold the racial
theory of nationality’ (Race and Nationality (London, 1919), p.38. For similar views
see J.M.Robertson, The Germans (London, 1916), pp.3-18; W.B. Pillsbury, The
Psychology of Nationality and Internationalism (New York; London, 1919), pp.11-17.
7 Mill quoted in Robertson, The Germans, pp.109-10.
8 A.H.Keane, Man, Past and Present (Cambridge, 1899), p.532.
9 Lord Bryce, Race Sentiment as a Factor in History (London, 1915), p.5.
10 A.Zimmern, Nationality and Government (London, 1918), p.84.
11 Lord Acton, ‘Mr Buckle’s Philosophy of History’, Historical Essays and Studies
(London, 1907), p.341.
12 Quoted in Oakesmith, Race and Nationality, p.40.
13 C.A.Macartney, National States and National Minorities (London, 1934), p.132.
14 R.W. Seton-Watson, ‘Pan-Slavism’, Contemporary Review, Oct 1916, 420.
15 R.W. Seton-Watson, Roumania and the Great War (London, 1915), pp.7-8; quoted
in Oakesmith, Race and Nationality, pp.42-6. Seton-Watson seemed happy to accept,
despite a millennium of uncharted, large-scale population movements through the
region, that the modern Romanian was the pure descendant of Trajan’s Roman
colonists (many of whom were of non-Roman origin in the first place).
16 Oakesmith, Race and Nationality, p.2. For the largely unchallenged view of race as

a natural biological category, divisible into observable hierarchies, until well into
the interwar period, see Barkan, Retreat of Scientific Racism, pp.2-3 and passim, and
J.Barzun, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (London, 1938), chs. I, IX, X, XI.
17 Joseph, Nationality, p.40.
18 It was not long since races had been regarded in pre-Darwinian terms as
products of divergent biblical descent, Noah’s sons progenitors of eponyomous
‘Semitic’, ‘Hamitic’ and ‘Japhetic’ races. Such vague presumptions tended, as ever,
to outlive the ‘science’ on which they were based (Robertson, The Germans, ch.1).
230 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

19 And race is still, of course, considered a valid social, as opposed to a strictly

scientific, category.
20 J.Holland Rose, ‘The National Idea’, Contemporary Review, March 1916, 336.
21 Oakesmith, Race and Nationality, pp.20-1; G.Le Bon, The Psychology of Peoples

(London, 1899), p.19.

22 Robertson, The Germans, p.12.
23 Oakesmith, Race and Nationality, p.39.
24 F.Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics: A Psychology and Sociology of National
Sentiment and Nationalism (London, 1944), p.68.
25 M.Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998), p.102.
26 F.Fellner, ‘George D. Herron and the Italian-Yugoslav rivalries during the final

stages of World War I 1917-1919’, in Djordjević (ed.), Creation of Yugoslavia, p.129.

27 The anthropologist Arthur Kroeber complained of this tendency in his textbook
Anthropology, cited in J.E.Terrel, ‘The Uncommon Sense of Race, Language, and
Culture’, in J.E.Terrell (ed.), Archaeology, Language and History (London; Westport,
Connecticut, 2001), p.27.
28 The respected journalist and historian William Miller, for instance, could at once

consider the South Slavs a single race ‘split up into three distinct religions’ and hail
the Dalmatians as ‘physically one of the finest races in the world’: Travel and Politics,
pp.xv-xvi; 19.
29 K.J.Calder, Britain and the Origins of the New Europe 1914-1918 (Cambridge, 1976),

p.214.
30 Forbes, Southern Slavs, pp.7-10; 14. (Neville Forbes was Reader – subsequently

Professor – in Russian and other Slavonic languages at Oxford; he travelled widely

and took a keen interest in the South Slavs). See also R.W.Seton-Watson, The
Southern Slav Question and the Hapsburg Monarchy (London, 1911), p.2 and J.Cvijić,
‘The Geographical Distribution of the Balkan Peoples’, The Geographical Review, Vol
V no 5 (May 1918), 345.
31 R.G.D.Laffan did admit the apparent racial and religious similarities of Bulgar
and Serb which had struck Britons before 1878, when it seemed ‘probable that the
Bulgars and Serbs would merge into one people’: The Guardians of the Gate: Historical
Lectures on the Serbs (Oxford, 1918), pp.42-3. (Laffan was an academic and army
chaplain who served alongside Serbian forces on the Macedonian front, and who
later became a Foreign Office specialist on Yugoslavia). For a post-war account
playing down Serb-Bulgar racial differences, and advocating their political union,
see H.Baerlein, The Birth of Yugoslavia (London, 1922), i, 24, 33-37.
32 On the Turkic origin of the Bulgar elite, and their subsequent Slavicisation, see

J.V.A.Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans (Michigan, 1983), pp.66-9; F.Fernández-

Armesto (ed.), The Times Guide to the Peoples of Europe (London, 1997), p229. It was
not then believed, as today, that Serbs and Croats were also non-Slavic tribes
which had ruled and become assimilated by a Slav substratum. See below p.21.
33 C.Mijatovich, preface to W.M.Petrovitch, Hero Tales and Legends of the Serbians
(London, 1914), pp.v-vi.
34 Forbes, The Southern Slavs, pp.8-11.
 NOTES 231

35 Sir C.Eliot, Turkey in Europe (London, 1908), pp.322, 333. During his time in the
diplomatic service Eliot had served in Belgrade, Sofia and Constantinople, as well
as travelling widely in Russia and Central Asia.
36 Seton-Watson, ‘Pan-Slavism’, p.420. On the pro-Bulgarian lobby in Britain
during the war, see Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary. It is true, as William
Miller pointed out, that Bulgarians assisted this racial redefinition, exaggerating to
their German, Turkish and Hungarian allies their non-Slavic (and, in the case of
the latter two, kindred) origins: Miller, ‘The Rise and Fall of the First Bulgarian
Empire 679-1018’, in The Cambridge Medieval History Volume IV: The Eastern Roman
Empire 717-1453 (Cambridge, 1923), p.230.
37 ‘The Inter-Allied Commission’s Report on Bulgarian Atrocities in Eastern
Macedonia’, The Balkan Review, Aug 1919, 79.
38 Miller, ‘Rise and Fall’, p.230.
39 Baerlein, Birth of Yugoslavia, i, 26-7.
40 M.B.Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia 1804-1918 (2 vols., New York;

London, 1976), ii, 635.

41 During the 1917 Corfu negotiations the Serbian Government only reluctantly

accepted the term ‘Yugoslav’ as a synonym for ‘Serb-Croat-Slovene’ to give an

impression of unity. ‘The very denomination “Yugoslav”’, Ivo Lederer has
commented, ‘represented in 1918 a subterfuge designed to deemphasise the points
of division between the component groups’ (‘Nationalism and the Yugoslavs’, in
P. Sugar, I. Lederer (eds.), Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle; London, 1969),
p.397). The Serbian Government rejected the name ‘Yugoslavia’, but not because
of the absent Bulgarians: Petrovich, History of Modern Serbia, ii, 646.
42 Stubborn, that is, on the part of the Yugoslavs themselves – particularly the
Serbs – who refused to forsake their primary identity. Of the new states ‘Czecho-
Slovakia’ and ‘Jugo-Slavia’, one British writer observed, ‘their composite names
prove their composite characters’ (quoted in Baerlein, Birth of Yugoslavia, i, 10).
43 In fact leading students of the Empire denied that it was moribund. ‘The
monarchy’, wrote Louis Eisenmann, ‘no longer rests on the power of the dynastic
tie alone, but also on their [the various nationalities’] conscious desire for union.
Herein lies its […] mighty new strength’ (‘Austria-Hungary’, in The Cambridge
Modern History, vol.XII, The Latest Age (Cambridge, 1910), p.212). See also R.W.
Seton-Watson, The Future of Austria-Hungary (London, 1907) and W.Steed, The
Habsburg Monarchy (London, 1913). Eisenmann, like Seton-Watson and Steed,
would revise his opinion during the war, and contribute to the journal New Europe.
44 Some, it is true, hoped that a Slavic unit in a federal Monarchy might encourage
Serbia for political and economic reasons to abandon its independence and seek
national unity under the Habsburg umbrella.
45 N.Buxton and C.Buxton, The War and the Balkans (London, 1915), pp.42-3.
46 Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, p.63.
47 Constituted in July 1916 by Seton-Watson, Steed, Annan Bryce, Elsie Inglis and

A.F.Whyte (Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, pp.175-6).

48 On the Committee’s activities and influence, see G.Stokes, ‘The Role of the

Yugoslav Committee in the Formation of Yugoslavia’ in Djordjević, Creation of

Yugoslavia, pp.51-71.
232 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

49 Balfour papers. Cited in Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p322.

50 FO 371/3138/202583. That this usage later seemed an inappropriate suggestion
of disunity is implied by Whitehall’s emendation of the Serbian Minister’s
proposed address to the Mansion House meeting. The first two words of the
phrase ‘Serbs and Yugoslavs’ were deleted (FO 371/3135/130170).
51 A memo by Seton-Watson in October 1918 provides one of many examples of
the confusing juxtaposition of different senses of the term, referring both to a
need to recognise ‘the Yugoslav Nation’ as a belligerent ally (meaning clearly the
Habsburg South Slavs in contrast to those in Serbia) and to the unification of
foreign policy of ‘all the Yugoslavs inside and outside Serbia’: Correspondence, i, 357.
52 For the sake of clarity subsequent use of ‘South Slav’ and ‘Yugoslav’ will refer
only to those groups included within the 1918 Yugoslav state, and to all of those
groups, unless the context implies otherwise.
53 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, p.2.
54 The latter two states did, since the Balkan Wars, contain substantial non-Slavic

minorities as well as the disputed Slavic population of Serbian Macedonia, but in

Britain the significance of these was little heeded outside the Foreign Office. See
below pp.84-5 and pp.105-7.
55 Djordjević, ‘Idea of Yugoslav Unity’, p.3.
56 W.Miller, The Balkans (London, 1896; 3rd edn 1923), p.512.
57 Though it is true that the use of ‘Croatian’ in this narrow, regional sense
continued for some time to coexist with the broader ethnic use.
58 Some of whom were, of course, Serbs. But the reference was clearly to all South
Slav groups (FO 371/3138/205290, 11 Dec 1918).
59 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, p.2.
60 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.250; Forbes, The Southern Slavs, pp.12, 17.
Taylor’s biographical details are obscure. His book, nevertheless, was highly
regarded and influential, and not without justification. One reviewer considered it
‘without exception the best on the subject in English’ (S.P.Duggan, Political Science
Quarterly, 33 (1918), 442); another – the American Yugoslav specialist Robert
Kerner – thought it ‘perhaps the […] best general statement of the Yugo-Slav
problem as a whole’ (Nation, 20 December 1917).
61 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, p.2.
62 Keane, Man, Past and Present, pp.548-9.
63 F.S.Copeland, ‘Who Are the Yugo-Slavs?’, The Balkan Review, Feb 1919, 32-3.
64 This gestation was accelerated by the increased exposure for the non-Russian

Slavs during World War I. Seton-Watson, Ronald Burrows and others promoted
the inauguration of the School of Slavonic Studies in October 1915 (Correspondence,
i, 205; Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, pp.153-4; R.W.Seton-Watson, ‘The
Origins of the School of Slavonic Studies’, The Slavonic and East European Review,
Vol XVII, no.50 (1939), 360-71).
65 Those few medieval scholars who, like J.B. Bury, did take a specialist interest in
this material tended to be Byzantinists for whom the South Slavs were a tangential
question.
 NOTES 233

66 R.W.Seton-Watson, ‘Pan-Slavism’, Contemporary Review, Oct 1916, 420. See also

his eulogistic obituary of Jagić, Slavonic Review, Vol II, no 5 (Dec 1923), 417-23.
67 Fine, Early Medieval Balkans, pp.49-59. This interpretation has since been

undermined by sources supporting the fundamentals of Constantine’s account.

68 M.Stanoyevich, ‘The Ethnography of the Yugo-Slavs’, Geographical Review, Vol 7,
no 2 (Feb 1919), 91-7.
69 Modern anthropology, Traian Stoianovich notes, questions the validity of even

these anthropological divisions, noting, for instance, significant diversity among

supposedly homogeneous ‘Dinaric’ populations: Balkan Worlds: The First and Last
Europe (New York; London, 1994), p.134.
70 See above p.14.
71 G.M. Trevelyan, for instance, thought the Serbians ‘temperamentally averse to

the German mind, its over-discipline, and its humourless precision’, and more akin
to ‘the mixed English temperament’: ‘Serbia Revisited’, Contemporary Review, March
1915, 274.
72 Petrovitch, Hero Tales, p.13. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn (London, 1911),

‘Serbia: Population, Government and Religion’.

73 H.J. Fleure, The Peoples of Europe (London, 1922), pp.80-2.
74 E.Durham, Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle (London, 1920), pp.12-13. (Though she

was writing two years after the war). One modern scholar considers that
Dalmatian Latin and Morlak elements were largely Slavicised by 1700 (Stoianovich,
Balkan Worlds, p.133). It is interesting that almost no contemporary works referred
to the migration of Orthodox Vlachs to the Ottoman frontier in modern Croatia
and western Bosnia, most of whom subsequently acquired Serb consciousness:
N.Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (London, 1994), pp.70-81.
75 Durham, Twenty Years, p.15. The ‘severe Serbizing’ of ‘wholly Albanian tribes’ in

Montenegro she argued further in a more scholarly study, Some Tribal Origins, Laws
and Customs of the Balkans (London, 1928), p.51. See also pp.29-30 below.
76 Ibid., p.141.
77 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.250.
78 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Serbia: early history’. The term ‘ethnic’ was
comparatively rare in this period, and here seems to relate purely to race. Today,
though misused in this sense, it connotes a self-conscious group identity
embracing (as relevant) history, culture, language or religion. See the helpful
discussion in C.Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European
Origins, (London, 1998), pp.214-17.
79 H.W.V.Temperley, History of Serbia (London, 1917), pp.1-2. Temperley had
begun his academic career as a student of 18th and 19th century British
constitutional history, but travelled extensively in Austria-Hungary and the Balkans
prior to 1914 and developed a profound sympathy for the ‘subject peoples’ of the
region, especially the Slovaks and the Serbs. Retiring from active military service
after contracting typhoid fever, he spent most of the war doing research and
intelligence work for the War Office (J.D.Fair, Harold Temperley: A Scholar and
Romantic in the Public Realm (London and Toronto, 1992)).
80 Particular satisfaction was taken in the story that the Bosnian Governor, von
Kállay, had felt obliged to ban his own book arguing the racial unity of Bosnian
234 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

groups. See, for example, H.A.Gibbons, The New Map of Europe 1911-1914
(London, 1914), p.143.
81 Southern Slav Question, pp.vii; 2 (emphasis added).
82 Correspondence, i, 222.
83 The New Europe, 28 Dec 1916; quoted in Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe,
p.192.
84 Correspondence, i, 310.
85 These two similar forms were often used interchangeably. A sensible usage,

however, followed here unless quoting from other sources, employs ‘Serbian’ to
mean a citizen of Serbia or pertaining to Serbia, and ‘Serb’ as a label of ethnic
identity. The forms ‘Croat’ and ‘Croatian’ operate similarly; likewise Slovenian/
Slovene (though there was no history of statehood in this case and the
geographical expression ‘Slovenia’ scarcely predates the 19th century). The English
vocabulary pertaining to other regions and identities – Montenegrin, Macedonian,
Bosnian etc – does not permit such differentiation, a consequence perhaps of the
purely regional (rather than ‘ethnic’) nature of these labels in British thinking.
86 Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, p.20; see also, for example, Gibbons, New Map,

p.149. Unless the context indicates otherwise, ‘Bosnia’ is used henceforward as

shorthand for ‘Bosnia-Hercegovina’.
87 L.Dominian, The Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe (London; New

York, 1917), p.182.

88 S.Wilkinson, ‘The Question of Servia’, in S.Wilkinson (ed.), August 1914: The
Coming of the War (London, 1914), p.11.
89 Forbes, The Southern Slavs, p.12.
90 D.H.Low, ‘The Kingdom of Serbia: Her People and Her History’, Scottish

Geographical Magazine, June 1915, 308-9. Low had worked as a lecturer at the
University of Belgrade, and was thus a pertinent example of the dominant
influence among British writers of a Serb perspective.
91 Gibbons, New Map, p.344.
92 FO 371/3137/190445 (forwarded by Lord Derby, 17 Nov 1918).
93 Lederer, ‘Nationalism and the Yugoslavs’, p.406.
94 Forbes, The Southern Slavs, p.24; Seton-Watson, The Emancipation of South-Eastern
Europe (London, 1923), pp.13-14 (Bosnian Muslims were of ‘the purest Serbian
blood’). Works published in Britain by respected Serb writers had routinely
claimed all Bosnians, regardless of religion, as Serbs. See, for example,
C.Mijatovich, Servia and the Servians (London, 1908), p2. It should be stressed that
we are here talking purely about underlying racial rather than political or national
identity.
95 J.Bryce, Essays and Addresses in Wartime (London, 1918), p.145.
96 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.251 (‘the “Croats” here are entirely Serb by

race’). By implication, for Taylor, there was some racial distinction between these
and the Catholics of Croatia and the Slovene lands. He referred also to the
‘Muslim Serbs of Bosnia’ (p.281).
97 Correspondence, i, 264. Italy exploited this semantic confusion over Habsburg
prisoners-of-war in Italy. Orlando, to British annoyance, interpreted the phrase
 NOTES 235

‘Yugo-Slav prisoners of Serbian race’ to apply only to Orthodox Serbs. See Hanak,
‘The Government, the Foreign Office and Austria-Hungary’, 195.
98 This is something of a simplification since the principles of Karadžić and

Starčević were not symmetrical and neither were true unitarists. The former
defined a Serb by linguistic criteria enabling him to identify most Croats as such
(language a corollary of race); the latter defined Croat identity in terms of the
historical ‘state right’ of the Croatian race. Only Croats and Bulgars, Starčević
claimed, were primary Yugoslav peoples, the ‘Serb’ a creation of 18th century pan-
Orthodox propaganda designed to split the Croats by religion. He was forced to
concede a Serb ‘genetic’ rather than ‘political’ identity, but his attempt to reconcile
this with pan-Croatianism makes the head swim. For a detailed treatment see
Banac, National Question, pp.70-115.
99 B.Vošnjak, A Bulwark Against Germany (London, 1917), pp.217-18.
100 The latter in particular enjoyed just renown for his work of linguistic
standardisation.
101 Banac, National Question, pp.98-102. For the development of the HSK see

N.J.Miller, Between Nation and State: Serbian Politics in Croatia before the First World War
(Pittsburgh, 1997), p.75 and ch.3 passim. See also Seton-Watson, Correspondence,
passim.
102 Seton-Watson, German, Slav and Magyar: A Study in the Origins of the Great War
(London, 1916), p.48.
103 W.Gordon, A Woman in the Balkans (London, 1918), p.38. One critic noted that:

‘in ordinary times the art of Meštrović might be too alien to England […], but in
these times of stress […] we can see and feel the message of his terrible images
and the deep pitifulness, too, that lies within them. His heroic art, indeed, is almost
the only art that does not seem alien to these mighty days’ (ibid.).
104 Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, p.74.
105 James Bryce was unusually circumspect in cautioning that exiled leaders
‘naturally tend to attribute their own ardent convictions to their fellow-
countrymen at home, many of whom may be but faintly interested in nationalistic
aspirations’: Essays and Addresses, pp.162-3, quoted in A.J.May, ‘R.W. Seton-Watson
and British Anti-Hapsburg Sentiment’, American Slavic and Eastern European Review,
XX, no 1, (1961), 43.
106 The formula ‘three-named people’ (troimeni narod) was adopted by Yugoslav
representatives in Corfu keenly aware of their interest in presenting an impression
of unity: Petrovich, History of Modern Serbia, ii, 645-6. See also the example in
L.Marcovitch, Serbia and Europe 1914-1920 (London, 1920), p.98.
107 Vošnjak, Bulwark, p.11.
108 I.Žolger, ‘Concerning the Slovenes’, The Balkan Review, July 1919, 442.
109 Temperley, History of Serbia, p.2. By the time he wrote an official report on the
Yugoslav problem in June 1918 he had, it should be said, shifted his priorities.
While the ‘Bosnians’ were out, replaced by ‘Serbs of Bosnia-Hercegovina’, the
Slovenes were now in (FO 371/3135/116831).
110 Minutes of EPD meeting, 27 May; quoted in Seton-Watsons, Making of a New
Europe, p.281.
111 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, pp.249-50.
236 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

112 FO 371/3133/48743 (7 March 1918).

113 Correspondence, i, 184. For an account of the genesis of Yugoslav feeling among
the Slovene intelligentsia largely confirming this picture, see C.Rogel, The Slovenes
and Yugoslavism, 1890-1914 (New York, 1977).
114 See the situation report on Austria-Hungary by the War Office, no 2, May
1918, in FO 371/3136/98080.
115 FO 371/3137/174611 (8 Nov 1918).
116 Baerlein, Birth of Yugoslavia, p.38.
117 Linguistic questions will be dealt with in the next chapter.
118 Mijatovich, Servia and the Servians, p.1. This 1908 account, it is true, was
uninfluenced by Slovene pro-Serb feeling during and after the Balkan Wars.
119 Forbes, The Southern Slavs, p.7.
120 Banac, National Question, pp.44-5.
121 Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, p.20.
122 Bryce, Essays and Addresses, pp.142-3. This statement is puzzling given that in

the same essay Bryce declared nationality not a factor simply of race (pp.128-9).
This sort of non-sequitur, however, was common in British writing on nationality.
123 A.Devine, Off the Map - The Suppression of Montenegro: the Tragedy of a Small Nation
(London, 1921), pp.vii-viii.
124 Private letter (21 March 1931), cited in N.Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History
(London, 1998), pp.358-9.
125 de Windt, Through Savage Europe, p.29. See also Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed.,

‘Montenegro: Population and Government’: ‘The physical type contrasts with that
of the northern Serbs: the features are more pronounced, the hair is darker, and
the stature is greater. The men are tall, […] muscular and wonderfully active’.
Curiously, Montenegrin men seemed a contrast to their animals: the former tall,
strong and primitive, their horses ‘diminutive, wiry and intelligent’!
126 ‘In the past’, Gladstone had remarked, ‘Montenegro was the beach on which

were thrown up the remnants of Balkan freedom’ (quoted in Gordon, Woman in the
Balkans, p.271).
127 Gordon, Woman in the Balkans, pp.271, 279.
128 Eliot, Turkey in Europe, pp.336-8, 347.
129 Durham, Twenty Years, p.16.
130 As Dragovan Šepić noted with reference to the Serbs and Habsburg Yugoslavs:

‘Macedonia was discussed in 1915 as a Serbo-Bulgarian problem; but after the

entry of Bulgaria into the war on the side of the Central Powers nobody raised the
Macedonian question; if and when it was mentioned it was not treated as a
separate problem’: ‘The Question of Yugoslav Union in 1918’, Journal of
Contemporary History, III, no 4 (1968), 35.
131 E.A.Freeman noted in 1877 that all Orthodox subjects of Turkey had until
recently been considered Greek in most European eyes, quoted in M.Mazower,
The Balkans (London, 2000), pp.2-3. See also M.Todorova, Imagining the Balkans
(New York; Oxford, 1997), p.98.
132 For a contemporary treatment of the Balkan Vlachs see A.J.B.Wace and
M.S.Thompson, The Nomads of the Balkans (London, 1914). Modern accounts
 NOTES 237

support the idea of a link between Romanian and Vlach populations, the product,
it is generally assumed, of a common Dacian ancestry. See T.J. Winnifrith, The
Vlachs: The History of a Balkan People (London, 1987); Fine, Early Medieval Balkans,
p.10. On the successful ‘Serbianising’ and ‘Albanianising’ of Vlachs in regions of
the future Yugoslavia and Albania see Malcolm, Bosnia, pp.202-5.
133 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.254; Eliot, Turkey in Europe, p.338;
134 Eliot, Turkey in Europe, pp.337-8.
135 ‘The Balkan Atrocities’, letter to The Nation, 6 Sept 1913, Vol XIII no. 23, 844-

5.
136 Miller, Travel and Politics, p.378.
137 A.Goff and H.A.Fawcett, Macedonia: A Plea for the Primitive (London, 1921),

p.xiv.
138 H.N.Brailsford, Macedonia (London, 1906), p.101. A staff member of the Nation
between 1907 and 1922, Brailsford travelled widely and earned a reputation as an
authority on Russia, Egypt and the Balkans, becoming an influential member of
the Balkan Committee. See F.M.Leventhal, The Last Dissenter: H.N.Brailsford and His
World (Oxford, 1985).
139 A.H.E.Taylor, ‘the Serbo-Bulgarian Situation’, in C.Price, Light on the Balkan
Darkness (London, 1915), p.100.
140 Eliot, Turkey in Europe, p.332.
141 Ibid, pp.337-8; Durham, Twenty Years, p.48.
142 Eliot, Turkey in Europe, pp.337-8. The ‘vilayet of Kossovo’ indicates the
Ottoman province of that name, extending considerably beyond the modern
region to include the Sanjak of Novi Pazar and part of north-west Macedonia: see
the map in Malcolm, Kosovo, p.xxii. The area comprehended by the classical label
‘Macedonia’ was not demarcated by any existing administrative borders in the early
20th century.
143 Brailsford, Macedonia, pp.274-5.
144
The Nation, ‘Great Britain and the Future of Turkey’, 17 May 1913, Vol XIII no
7; ‘No More War in the Balkans’, 31 May 1913, Vol XIII no 9.

Chapter Two
1 H.F.Pelham, The Reciprocal Influence on each other of National Character and National
Language (Oxford, 1870), p.7.
2 We will discuss shortly perceptions of the relationship between language and

‘nationality’.
3 T.H. Huxley, ‘On the Methods and Results of Ethnology’, Fortnightly Review, Vol I

(1865), 257-8. In his essay ‘Ethics and Evolution’ in Evolution and Ethics and Other
Essays (London, 1894), pp.1-45, he demonstrated why there could be no necessary
correlation.
4 Bryce, Essays and Addresses, pp.3-4. A.Lefèvre, Race and Language (London, 1894) is

an example of a work infused with the idea that language classification offers a
direct guide to civilisational success.
5 Robertson, The Germans, p.4. Bryce’s assurance was premature. Attempts to link

social characteristics with linguistic groups continue, if in more sophisticated, less

238 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

value-laden form. See, for instance, Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds, p.121 and the
cogent critique in Renfrew, Archaeology and Language, pp.15-19, 86-94.
6 R.Handler, cited in S.May, Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism and

the Politics of Language (London, 2001), p.58. The anthropological study of ethnicity
has gradually moved, Michael Herzfeld notes, ‘from the analysis of bounded
groups to a focus on constitutive process’, Anthropology Through the Looking Glass:
Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge, 1987), p.219 note.
7 Quoted in B.Anderson, Imagined Communities, (London; New York, 1983, 1991),

p.70.
8 We are dealing invariably, of course, with the ‘mother tongue’, whose role in

reflecting and shaping patterns of perception was considered vastly more

significant than any subsequent linguistic facility.
9 Quoted in May, Language and Minority Rights, p.57.
10 Barkan, Retreat of Scientific Racism, p.19.
11 F.Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York, 1911), p.127; ibid. (New York,

1938; 1965), p.19, cited in Terrel, ‘Uncommon Sense’, p.16.

12 Joseph, Nationality, pp.60-1. The Norman conquest of Britain seems only the

most obvious counter-example.

13 Zimmern, Nationality and Government, p.69.
14 Morant, Races of Central Europe, p.142.
15 Joseph, Nationality, p.54.
16 This point was made by the Greek philologist Ioannis Psykharis; see S.Skendi,

‘Language as a Factor of National Identity in the Balkans of the Nineteenth

Century’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol 119, no 2 (April 1975),
186.
17 See, for example, Lord Acton, ‘Nationality’, p.289ff; Zimmern, Nationality and

Government, pp.65-9.
18 Seton-Watson, German, Slav and Magyar, p.41.
19 H.A.Gibbons, The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1403 (Oxford, 1916),

p.196.
20 The term ‘national group’ was often used instead of ‘nation’ or ‘nationality’ to

suggest peoples with shared outward characteristics but no feeling of political

community.
21 A.Toynbee, The New Europe (London, 1915), p.56.
22 Herbert, Nationality and its Problems, p.49.
23 Pillsbury, Psychology, p.17. Pillsbury was American, but much read and respected

by British theorists.
24 How satisfied, it might have been asked, would independent Irish or Welsh

states have been with boundaries drawn purely with reference to linguistic data?
See Fleure, Peoples of Europe, pp.80-1.
25 Herder quoted approvingly in Joseph, Nationality, pp.67-8.
26 J.H. Rose, Nationality as a Factor in Modern History (London, 1916), p.13.
27 Oakesmith, Race and Nationality, pp.47-50.
28 Joseph, Nationality, pp.55-6.
29 Pelham, Reciprocal Influence, p.7.
30 Joseph, Nationality, pp.61, 67-8.
31 Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics, p.78.
 NOTES 239

32 Preface to Dominian, Frontiers, p.xvii.

33 Joseph, Nationality, p.61.
34 FO 371/44346/19436. FORD paper on the Austro-Yugoslav frontier.
35 Toynbee, The New Europe, p.56. See also his Nationality and the War (London,

1915), pp.14-15, and A.Cobban, National Self-Determination (Oxford, 1945), p.24.

Ultimately, adhering to the ‘psychological school’, Toynbee accepted only ‘the
ascertained wish of the living population actually concerned’. Consultations in
southern Carinthia and upper Silesia (and the striking case of the Lutheran
Masurians of Poland) supported this belief by violating the dictates of linguistic
identity. But the widespread use of plebiscites was a logistical impossibility, a
certain cause of unrest and presented problems of principle of its own.
36 Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics, p.96.
37 Djordjević, ‘Idea of Yugoslav Unity’, p.2.
38 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, p.339.
39 Seton-Watson, German, Slav and Magyar, pp.85-6.
40 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.82.
41 R.G.D.Laffan, Jugoslavia since 1918 (London, 1929), p.5.
42 Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, pp.20-1.
43 H.Vivian, Servia: The Poor Man’s Paradise (London, 1897), pp.29-30.
44 de Windt, Through Savage Europe, p.87.
45 Forbes, The Southern Slavs, pp.27-8.
46 M.Macmillan, Peacemakers (London, 2001; repr 2002), p.120.
47 Seton-Watson, ‘Vatroslav Jagić’ (obituary), Slavonic Review, Vol II, no 5 (Dec

1923), 419.
48 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, p.335.
49 Seton-Watson, The Spirit of the Serb (London, 1915), p.22.
50 H.A.Gibbons, Europe Since 1918 (New York; London, 1923), p.274.
51 Dominian, Frontiers, p.191.
52 C.Jelavich, ‘Milenko M.Vukičević: From Serbianism to Yugoslavism’, in

D.Deletant and H.Hanak (eds.), Historians as Nation Builders: Central and South East
Europe (Basingstoke, 1988), p.120.
53 Toynbee, Nationality and the War, p.168.
54 FO 371/4355/68. Paget headed the South Eastern Europe section, which

included Leeper and Nicolson.

55 A.Stead, ‘General Characteristics’, in A.Stead (ed.), Servia by the Servians (London,

1909), p.3.
56 Eliot, Turkey in Europe, p.335.
57 Ibid, p.338.
58 Vivian, Servia, pp.29-30.
59 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.82.
60 Forbes, The Southern Slavs, p.30.
61 Durham, Twenty Years, pp.13-14; Seton-Watson, Correspondence, i, 205.
62 There was also, in southeastern Serbia and Macedonia, a dialect known as Torlak

(Prizren-Timok), classified in the eastern South Slavic group. On this linguistic

background see R.Katičić, ‘The Making of Standard Serbo-Croat’, in R.Picchio and
H.Goldblatt (eds.), Aspects of the Slavic Language Question Vol I: Church Slavonic-South
240 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Slavic-West Slavic (New Haven, 1984), pp.261-95, and Banac, National Question,
pp.46-9, 77-81, 209, especially the map of dialectal distribution on p.48.
63 On the development of the Croat language question, see I.Banac, ‘Main Trends

in the Croat Language Question’, in Picchio and Goldblatt, Aspects of the Slavic
Language Question, pp.189-259; P.Herrity, ‘The Problematic Nature of the
Standardisation of the Serbo-Croatian Literary Language in the Second Half of the
Nineteenth Century’, in R.Bugarski and C.Hawkesworth (eds.), Language Planning in
Yugoslavia (Columbus, Ohio, 1992); W.Vucinich, ‘Croatian Illyrism’, passim; and
A.B.Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in
Yugoslavia (Stanford, 1998), pp.24-31.
64 Gibbons, New Map of Europe, pp.139-40; Seton-Watson, German, Slav and Magyar,

p.87.
65 This view did not, though, override the equation of Serbdom and Orthodoxy,

which remained strong. ‘Linguistic Serbianism’ was concerned only to undermine

the notion that a Catholic or Muslim from Bosnia, Croatia or elsewhere was
necessarily not a Serb. Cake was had and eaten. Karadžić’s linguistic grounding of
Serb identity was more successful among the Serb diaspora in Vojvodina, Vienna
and elsewhere than in Belgrade itself: J.B.Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia (London,
2000), p.327.
66 C.Jelavich, South Slav Nationalisms: Textbooks and Yugoslav Union before 1914

(Columbus, 1990), p.175 and ch.4, passim.

67 Jelavich, ‘Milenko M. Vukičević’, p.108.
68 See, for example, Forbes, The Southern Slavs, p.17.
69 See above pp.25-6.
70 Such thinking was not limited to a marginal intellectual clique. Karadžić’s

theories were embraced by the Serbian Radical Party. Linguistic Serbianism, Banac
argues, was accepted among a Radical intelligentsia whose least supremacist
elements, like Stojan Protić, took it for granted that štokavian was inherently
Serbian. Even formerly-kajkavian Croats who had recently adopted it were, by a
tortuous casuistical process, claimed as genuine Serbs (National Question, pp.156,
161). During the constitutional debates after 1917 Pašić told Croat federalists that
a Croatian federal unit would be defined on the assumption that only kajkavian
and čakavian speakers were Croats. An appreciation of these questions would thus
have greatly benefited British analysis.
71 To take one example, ‘flower’ is rendered in ekavian as ‘cvet’, in ijekavian as

‘cvijet’ and in ikavian as ‘cvit’. These differences are discussed in T.F.Magner,

Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian Language (Pennsylvania, 1991; revised edn
1998), pp.211-14.
72 A.Pavković, The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism in a Multinational State

(Basingstoke, 1996), pp.11-12.

73 Banac, National Question, p.210.
74 As well as structural and orthographic differences, alternative vocabularies were

maintained and developed as symbols of national identity. (Peter Herrity notes,

indeed, that lexicon proved the main distinction between the variants: ‘Problematic
Nature’, 173). Curiously, in Croatia, traditionally proud of its Western orientation,
neologisms have often been Slav calques or inventions, while Serbs have borrowed
directly, often from French.
 NOTES 241

75 M.Ekmečić, ‘The Struggle for Nation States and Modern Society, pp.295-6, 306-
7, in V.Dedijer et al (eds.), History of Yugoslavia (London; New York, 1974). If full
unity was ever realised, Bernard Joseph commented in 1929, it would be a
‘remarkable exemplification of the unifying power of language as a factor of
nationality’ (Nationality, p.60).
76 A.Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution 1919-1953

(Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, 1991), p.3.

77 A.D.Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations (Oxford; New York, 1986), p.27. Smith is

generally unpersuaded by language’s primary role in the creation of ‘ethnic’

identities.
78 G.Szépe, ‘Central and Eastern European Language Policies in Transition’, in

S.Wright and H.Kelly (eds.), Ethnicity in Eastern Europe: Questions of Migration,

Language Rights and Education (Clevedon; Philadelphia; Adelaide, 1994), p.44.
79 G.Schöpflin, ‘Yugoslavia: State Construction and State Failure’, in S.Bianchini

and G.Schöpflin (eds.), State Building in the Balkans: Dilemmas on the Eve of the 21st
Century (Ravenna, 1998), p.242.
80 Ibid.
81 H.Birnbaum, Language, Ethnicity and Nationalism: On the Linguistic Foundations of a

Unified Yugoslavia, in Djordjević (ed.), The Creation of Yugoslavia, p.162.

82 R.Auty, Language and Nationality in East-Central Europe 1750-1850 (unpublished

manuscript), pp.64-5.
83 Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics, p.96.
84 Katičić, ‘Making of Standard Serbo-Croat’, p.295.
85 E.Haugen, ‘Dialect, Language, Nation’, American Anthropologist, Vol 68, 4 (Aug

1966), 922. Logically, Haugen notes, ‘every dialect is a language, but not every
language is a dialect’ (ibid, 923).
86 R.Auty, History of the Serbo-Croat Language (unpublished lecture notes, 1973).

There are though, as Rado Lencek points out, symbolic sociolinguistic functions
attached to the possession of a literary ‘standard’: ‘The Modern Slovene Language
Question: An Essay in Sociolinguistic Interpretation’, in Picchio and Goldblatt,
Aspects of the Slavic Language Question, p.314.
87 May, Language and Minority Rights, pp.150-1. A language, it has been more pithily

put, is ‘a dialect with an army’.

88 On recent linguistic developments and controversies in the Serbo-Croat area see

R.Lučić (ed.), Lexical Norm and National Language: Lexicography and Language Policy in
South-Slavic Languages after 1989 (Munich, 2002).
89 A.Nečak Luk, ‘The Linguistic Aspect of Ethnic Conflict in Yugoslavia’, in

P.Akhavan and R.Howse (eds.), Yugoslavia: The Former and Future: Reflections by
Scholars from the Region (Geneva, 1995), p.119.
90 J.R.Lampe, Yugoslavia as History (Cambridge, 1996), p.299; Pavković,

Fragmentation, p.63. The protests were led by the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža,
no ethnic exclusivist.
91 Nečak Luk, ‘Linguistic Aspect’, pp.114-15. Official Communist policy after 1945

was federalist in national if not in economic terms, but had backed linguistic
unitarism rather than Serbian or Croatian philologists who seemed excessively
nationalistic in their commitment to regional peculiarities.
242 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

92 Lederer, ‘Nationalism and the Yugoslavs’, p.409. Tension caused by the political
exploitation of Croatian and Serbian language varieties Lederer dates to 1849 with
the subsiding of the Hungarian linguistic threat.
93 B.Anzulović, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (London, 1999), p.113.
94 Freud, cited in Stoianovitch, Balkan Worlds, p.301.
95 Haugen, ‘Dialect, Language, Nation’, 932.
96 This key distinction, Haugen notes, has been neglected in English-language

studies lacking the terminological resources provided in French, for example, by

the differentiation of ‘patois’ and ‘dialecte’ (ibid, 924).
97 Gibbons, New Map, pp.139-40.
98 Ekmečić, ‘Struggle for Nation States’, p.306.
99 See, for example, Bryce, Race Sentiment, pp.33-4. Race and language, he argued,

would suffer this fate together: ‘Everything points to a reduction of the number of
human stocks and languages. The weaker will disappear [...]’.
100 W.A.Morison, ‘The Serbo-Croat language’, pp.269-76, appendix to

H.D.Harrison, The Soul of Yugoslavia (London, 1941). Morison was lecturer in

Comparative Slavonic Philology at the School of Slavonic and East European
Studies.
101 Harrison, Soul of Yugoslavia, pp.36-7; H.M.Chadwick, The Nationalities of Europe

and the Growth of National Ideologies (Cambridge, 1945), p.23. The latter noted that
Serbo-Croat rivalry was probably the only European example of a national dispute
not bound up with language (p.2).
102 Miller, Travel and Politics, pp.xv-xvi.
103 Forbes, The Southern Slavs, p.30.
104 Seton-Watson, Spirit of the Serb, p.22.
105 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, pp.302-3.
106 See I.J.Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference: A Study in Frontier Making

(New Haven; London, 1963), pp.24-6; Stokes, ‘The Role of the Yugoslav
Committee’, pp.58-60.
107 Miller, The Balkans, pp.510-11.
108 Seton-Watson, Correspondence, i, 162-4.
109 FO 371/3135/116831. Namier minuted that he agreed with ‘every single point’

of this memorandum.
110 FO 371/4355/68.
111 Banac, National Question, pp.211-13.
112 Ibid, pp.79, 213.
113 H.Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the

Politics of Nationalism (London, 1977), p.134.

114 H.J. Fleure, The Treaty Settlement of Europe: Some Geographic and Ethnographic Aspects

(London, 1921), p.77. American Balkan specialist Archibald Coolidge, a strong

influence on both US and British conference delegations, was another who, with a
little hindsight, emphasised religious and alphabet divergence between Serb and
Croat: introduction to H.Fish Armstrong, The New Balkans (London; New York,
1926), pp.12-13.
115 J.A.Fishman, Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective (Clevedon;

Philadelphia, 1989), p.7: ‘The ever-present link between language and religion
(what would religion be without language?) not only sanctifies “our language” but
 NOTES 243

helps raise language into the pale of sanctity even in secular culture’. See also
J.A.Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1982), pp.203-4.
116 Katičić, ‘Making of Standard Serbo-Croat’, p.273; see also Malcolm, Bosnia,

pp.101-2.
117 This vile imposition by ‘Bohemian Hussites and Lutherans’ he referred to with

disgust as ‘stercora muscarum’ (fly droppings)! See R.Auty, ‘Orthographical

Innovations and Controversies among the Western and Southern Slavs during the
Slavonic National Revival’, Slavonic and East European Review, vol.xlvi, no.107
(1968), 328.
118 G.C.Arnakis, ‘The Role of Religion in the Development of Balkan

Nationalism’, in C.Jelavich and B.Jelavich (eds.), The Balkans in Transition: essays on

the development of Balkan life and politics since the 18th century (Berkeley; Los Angeles,
1963), p.119.
119 Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp.73-4.
120 R.Auty, ‘The Formation of the Slovene Literary Language against the

Background of the Slavonic National Revival’, The Slavonic and East European
Review, vol.xli, no.97 (June 1963), 393; R.L.Lencek, ‘Modern Slovene Language
Question’, pp.297-8.
121 Auty, ‘The Formation of the Slovene Literary Language’, p.395.
122 Banac, National Question, p.113.
123 V.S.Mamatey, The United States and East Central Europe 1914-1918 (New York;

London, 1957), pp.91-2.

124 Banac, National Question, p.49.
125 FO 371/44346/10006. FORD paper on Yugoslavia’s political structure, July

1944. ‘Such a language does not, in point of fact, exist’ (‘The Jugo-Slav
Constitution’, The Slavonic Review, III, no.7 (June 1924), 173-4).
126 Miller, Balkans, p.511.
127 Forbes, The Southern Slavs, p.12 and passim.
128 N.Buxton and T.P.Conwil-Evans, Oppressed Peoples and the League of Nations

(London; Toronto, 1922), pp.7-8; Gibbons, New Map, p.135. In a later work
Buxton similarly described both Croats and Slovenes as ‘identical in race and
language with the Serbs’: Travels and Reflections (London, 1929), p.115.
129 Seton-Watson, German, Slav and Magyar, pp.118-19. Privately, as we have seen,

he mooted a separate Slovene edition of New Europe, an indication of the

conscious simplification in his propagandistic writing.
130 Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, pp.131-2.
131 Vošnjak, Bulwark, pp.70, 216, 229.
132 Toynbee, Nationality and the War, pp.168, 248.
133 Joseph, Nationality, p.78; Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, p.20.

Chapter Three
1 Oakesmith, Race and Nationality, p.51.
2 Strictly, of course, ‘historical tradition’ was an overarching category incorporating

language, religion and other elements. In practice religion, like language, was
treated separately.
3 Joseph, Nationality, p.75.
4 Toynbee, Nationality and the War, p.14.
244 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

5 C.D.Burns, The Morality of Nations: An Essay (London, 1915), p.20.

6 Brailsford, Macedonia, pp.22, 61.
7 Miller, Travel and Politics, p.32.
8 Joseph, Nationality, p.76.
9 Ibid, p.71.
10 Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics, p.108.
11 Ibid, p.82.
12 Herbert, Nationality and its Problems, p.51.
13 Nationality and Government, p.73.
14 Seton-Watson, Correspondence, i, 237.
15 FO 371/4366/283 (Percy, 22 Aug 1918).
16 Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics, p.78.
17 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, p.2. To this, he stressed, there were

‘virtually no exceptions’. This Catholic-Orthodox division afflicted also, he noted,

the broader pan-Slav movement, for which antipathy between Catholic Poles and
Orthodox Russians had been a perennial obstacle (‘Pan-Slavism’, 426-7).
18 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p.98; L.Namier, Vanished Supremacies (London,

1958), p.168. See also p.236 note 131 above.

19 Seton-Watson’s early study, Absolutism in Croatia (London, 1912) was a

groundbreaking work on this theme; Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp.329-30.

20 Miller, Travel and Politics, p.32.
21 A.Fortescue, The Orthodox Eastern Church (London, 1907), p.281.
22 FO 371/599/7133 (Howard, 8 Feb 1909); FO 371/599/5137 (Cartwright, 1 Feb

1909).
23 FO 371/1575/7514 (15 Feb 1913).
24 Buxton, Travels and Reflections, pp.52-3.
25 Miller, Travel and Politics, pp.118-19; 128-9.
26 Temperley, History of Serbia, pp.111-12.
27 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, pp.124-5.
28 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, p.2.
29 A.Goff and H.A. Fawcett, Macedonia: A Plea for the Primitive (London, 1921),

p.xiv. (This refers, in fact, to the Orthodox-Muslim division in Macedonia).

30 Seton-Watson, Emancipation of South-Eastern Europe, p.7.
31 Adolf von Harnack, cited in Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics, p.113.
32 G.C.Arnakis, ‘The Role of Religion in the Development of Balkan Nationalism’,

in Jelavich and Jelavich, Balkans in Transition, p.117.

33 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p.101.
34 Fortescue, Orthodox Eastern Church, pp.280-2.
35 Marcovitch, Serbia and Europe, p.117.
36 FO 371/3135/116831 (report on ‘The Jugo-Slav Problem’, June 1918).
37 Brailsford, Macedonia, p.62.
38 Fortescue, Orthodox Eastern Church, pp.324-5. ‘If one were to grant all their

wishes’, he noted, ‘there would be no end to the disintegrating influence of

Orthodox jealousies, till each diocese became an autocephalous Church’.
39 Fleure, Peoples of Europe, pp.82-3.
40 Forbes, The Southern Slavs, p.26.
41 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Serbia’, p.168.
 NOTES 245

42 Seton-Watson, Spirit of the Serb, p.26.

43 Brailsford, Macedonia, p.68.
44 Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics, p.110. Herbert Vivian discusses the

mutual sympathies existing between Anglican and Serb Orthodox Church

hierarchies in The Servian Tragedy With Some Impressions of Macedonia (London, 1904),
pp.211-13.
45 FO 371/3025/217193.
46 W.J.Sparrow Simpson, ‘The English Church and the Orthodox East’, The Balkan

Review, Vol IV No 6, Jan 1921, 394.

47 Sir G.Young (‘A Diplomatist’), Nationalism and War in the Near East (Oxford,

1915), p.22. This respected work was produced under the aegis of the Carnegie
Commission, G.P.Gooch hailing it as a classic study (Contemporary Review, Nov
1915, 663-4).
48 Brailsford, Macedonia, pp.70-1.
49 J. and C.Gordon, Two Vagabonds in the Balkans (London, 1925), p.79; Sparrow

Simpson, ‘English Church’, 393. For a study of changing British attitudes to the
Balkans and the ‘East’, see Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. On the British sense of
Ottoman stasis, see R.Schiffer, Oriental Panorama: British Travellers in 19th Century
Turkey (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA, 1999), p.198 and passim.
50 Vivian, The Servian Tragedy, p.227.
51 Forbes, Southern Slavs, p.22; Forbes, ‘Serbia’, p.104, in N.Forbes, A.Toynbee et al

(eds.), The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey (Oxford,
1915). J.A.R. Marriott, The Eastern Question: An Historical Study in European Diplomacy
2nd edn (Oxford, 1918), p.315. The role of the revived Patriarchate of Peć between
1557 and 1766 seemed particularly important.
52 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Serbia’, p.176.
53 Cited in FO 371/1472/34881.
54 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, p.339. Seton-Watson, to be fair, was not

one of those persuaded by Serb nationalist propaganda to regard large groups of

Catholic South Slavs as ‘really’ Serbs.
55 Ivo Banac provides examples of these exceptions: National Question, p.58.
56 Ibid, p.221. The centralised structure faced internal dissent, especially from

Bosnia and Vojvodina: see R.Radić, ‘Religion in a Multinational State: the case of
Yugoslavia’, pp.196-7, in Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism.
57 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Montenegro’, p.125.
58 FO 371/3140/17406, (7 Jan 1918).
59 FO 371/827/10301 (Esmé Howard, 19 March 1910).
60 See below pp.94-5 and pp.189-90.
61 C.Jelavich, ‘The Croatian problem in the Habsburg Empire in the Nineteenth

Century’, Austrian Yearbook, III, Part 2 (1967), p.96. On the stimulus provided by
Hungarian nationalism in particular to the development of Croat identity, see
Vucinich, ‘Croatian Illyrism’, pp.68-73. Ivo Banac points out that Croat
nationalists had themselves not identified Croatdom with Catholicism (National
Question, p.108). It is true, however, that British observers in Bosnia did accord
much more emphasis to Serb-Croat confessional tensions.
62 FO 371/2862/137019 (July 1917).
63 FO 371/2862/239280 (Dec 1917).
246 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

64 See above p.28.

65 Banac, National Question, p.113.
66 Ibid. Since 1905 the clericalist party had been known as the Slovene People’s

Party. Carole Rogel’s claim that that during the two decades before World War I,
‘nearly all [Slovenes] came to focus on Southern Slav unity’, however, is scarcely
plausible.
67 Bosnia remained technically under Ottoman suzerainty until 1908 but was

effectively administered as a Habsburg territory from the Congress of Berlin in

1878.
68 Durham, Twenty Years, p.35.
69 William Miller, Travel and Politics, p.89.
70 R.M. Brashich, Land Reform and Ownership in Yugoslavia, 1919-1953 (New York,

1954), p.13.
71 Eliot, Turkey in Europe, p.344. ‘Beys’ (or ‘Begs’) were the Muslim landlords.
72 For a precise social breakdown of the provinces’ population by religion, see

Donia and Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (New York, 1994),
pp.76-9. Under Habsburg rule, which had not outlawed serfdom, some 6,000
Bosnian Muslim peasants had become enserfed by 1910.
73 R.J. Donia, Islam Under the Double Eagle: The Muslims of Bosnia and Hercegovina,

1979-1914 (New York, 1981), p.5. The early 20th century British view of the
Orthodox population as wholly peasant also overlooked a growing body of urban,
middle-class Serbs, critical to the province’s growing nationalist movement (ibid.,
p.4).
74 PID Memo on the formula of the ‘Self-Determination of Peoples’ and the

Muslim World, FO 371/4353/25 (10 Jan 1918).

75 Donia, Islam under the Double Eagle, pp.91-2. ‘Fanaticism’ was commonly noticed

in Muslim centres other than Sarajevo, notably Mostar (where the traditional forms
of dress seemed particularly sinister). As Donia notes, the quiescence of Sarajevan
Muslim leaders owed much to the fact that they were courted by the Habsburg
authorities in a manner not extended to their brethren elsewhere: ibid., pp.35-6.
76 Seton-Watson, Emancipation of South-East Europe, pp.13-14.
77 FO 371/4352/PC 25.
78 Ibid.
79 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p.109. David Cannadine (Ornamentalism

(London, 2001)) highlights the prevalence of a similar class-based empathy,

transcending racial and religious boundaries, between British and indigenous elites
in the Empire.
80 Eliot, Turkey in Europe, p.345.
81 W.Denton, The Christians in Turkey (London, 1863), p.1.
82 G.Gaillard, The Turks and Europe (London, 1921), pp.106-8.
83 FO 371/3508/59385 (Oman report, Oct 1918).
84 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.87.
85 FO 371/4356/172.
86 On the genesis of this organisation, see Malcolm, Bosnia, pp.163-4.
87 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, p.8.
88 Forbes, The Southern Slavs, p.31.
 NOTES 247

89 On the attitude of Bosnian Muslims to Serbs and Croats, and to the Yugoslav
idea, see Xavier Bougarel, ‘Bosnian Muslims and the Yugoslav Idea’, in Djokić
(ed.), Yugoslavism, pp.100-14.
90 See, for instance, Malcolm, Bosnia; R.J.Donia and J.V.A.Fine, Bosnia and

Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (New York, 1994). The latter work asserts that,
prior to 19th century nationalist agitations, ‘Bosnians [...] had not described
themselves as either Serbs or Croats’ (p.73).
91 Such a line of thinking might have developed from Stjepan Radić’s suggestion

that Yugoslavia only looked like one nation from the outside (cited in
E.J.Woodhouse and C.G.Woodhouse, Italy and the Jugoslavs (Boston, 1920), p.127).
92 FO 371/3136/98080 (May 1918).
93 See, for instance, his Religion and Nationality in Serbia.
94 Preface to Petrovitch, Hero Tales, p.v. (If written in 1917 instead of 1914 it seems

unlikely that it would have spoken of ‘nations’ rather than ‘nation’).

95 Preface to Velimirović, Religion and Nationality, p.3.
96 Seton-Watson, Spirit of the Serb, p.29.
97 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, pp.267, 303.
98 Price, Light on the Balkan Darkness, p.119 note.
99 FO 371/4355/68.
100 FO 371/3138/207115.
101 FO 371/3133/88314 (Rumbold, Berne, 10 May 1918).
102 FO 371/4358/21 (July 1918). See also The Jugo-Slav Movement: handbook no.14

(March 1919), pp.25-6. Historians have confirmed the strength of wartime

Yugoslavism among the Slovenes, while noting that it coexisted with genuine
loyalty to the Monarchy, and was motivated as much by the Italian nationalist
threat as by South Slav sentiment: M.Cornwall, ‘The Experience of Yugoslav
Agitation in Austria-Hungary, 1917-1918’, in H.Cecil and P.Liddle (eds.), Facing
Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London, 1996), pp.662-7.
103 FO 371/3508/59385 (15 Oct 1918).
104 FO 371/3138/213164 (15 Dec 1918).
105 FO 371/3135/116831.
106 See, for instance, the Amery report in FO 371/3136/177223.
107 FO 371/3138/204655.
108 FO 371/3135/116831.
109 Termperley, History of Serbia, p.3.
110 The Jugo-Slav Movement, p.5 (citing uncritically the Yugoslav proverb ‘a brother is

dear, whatever his faith’).

111 Ramet, ‘Religion and Nationalism’, pp.306-7.
112 See below pp.94-5 and pp.189-90.
113 F.M.D.Berry, Austria-Hungary and her Slav Subjects (London, 1918), p.35.
114 Price, Light on the Balkan Darkness, pp.11-12. Price was The Times’ correspondent

in Serbia during the early part of the war. See also Woodhouse and Woodhouse,
Italy and the Jugoslavs, p.131, citing T.R.Gjorgjević, ‘Religious Toleration among the
Southern Slavs’, New Europe, vol. X, p.61.
115 Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, pp.30-1.
116 ‘The Yougoslav Patriarch’, Balkan Review, Jan 1921, 413-14.
248 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

117 The phrase was Lloyd George’s. Cited in M.Beaven, Austrian Policy since 1867

(London; Edinburgh; New York, 1914), p.5.

118 Miller, Travel and Politics, pp.97,116-19. This tendency is noted in Andrew

Hammond, ‘The Uses of Balkanism: Representation and Power in British Travel

Writing, 1850-1914’, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol.82, No.3 (July 2004),
604-9.
119 Holbach, Bosnia and Herzegovina, pp.15-16. Holbach did, it should be said,

wonder if Western opinion had not ‘painted [the Turk] blacker than he deserved’.
120 de Windt, Through Savage Europe, p.81.
121 Vivian, Servia, pp.36-7. Benjámin von Kállay was Austro-Hungarian Finance

Minister from 1882 until 1903.

122 A.F.Pribram, Austria-Hungary and Great Britain 1908-1914 (London; New York;

Toronto, 1951), pp.98-9.

123 Murray Beaven, Austrian Policy since 1867 (London; New York, 1914), pp.8-9.

F.R.Bridge suggests, however, that in diplomatic circles disillusionment with

Austrian rule did grow after the annexation crisis: Great Britain and Austria-Hungary
1906-1914: A Diplomatic History (London, 1972), pp.38-9.
124 Sir H.Johnston, Commonsense in Foreign Policy (London, 1913), passim.
125 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, pp.86-7, 89.
126 Seton-Watson, German, Slav and Magyar, p.92.
127 Gibbons, New Map, p.140. See also, for instance, W.E.D. Allen, The Turks in

Europe (London, 1919), p.214, and Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, p.97.
128 Forbes, ‘Serbia’, p.135, 106.
129 Marriott, Eastern Question, p.345. Only now, Marriott noted late in the war, did

Britons perceive the division and strangulation of the Yugoslav race as the
necessary precursor to a German drive to the East (p.391).
130 Cornwall, ‘Experience of Yugoslav Agitation’, p.670.
131 F.S.Copeland, ‘Who are the Yugo-Slavs?’, p.40.
132 Berry, Austria-Hungary, pp.30, 35. Laffan even denied any economic benefits.

The region, he claimed, ‘was not allowed to develop’, its poverty so wretched that
peasants had to drag their own ploughs (Guardians of the Gate, pp.97-8).
133 Speech reported in The Times, ‘An End to Austrian Tyranny’, 26 July 1918.
134 Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, pp.30-1.
135 R.W.Seton-Watson, ‘Serbia’s Need and Britain’s Danger’, Contemporary Review,

Nov 1915, 579.

136 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.88.
137 See, for instance, the appendices in the War Office report on the ‘Yugo-Slav

problem’, FO 371/3138/207115.
138 See below p.96.
139 Cornwall, ‘Experience of Yugoslav Agitation’, pp.669-71.
140 See below chs. 7 and 8.
141 Quoted in J.Hanly, The National Ideal: A Practical Exposition of True Nationality

Appertaining to Ireland (London, 1932), pp.9-10.

142 FO 371/4366/559.
143 FO 371/4366/281 (1 Aug 1918).
 NOTES 249

Chapter Four
1 Herbert, Nationality and its Problems, p.33.
2 J.K.Bluntschli, quoted in Joseph, Nationality, p.22.
3 L.Fawcett, Religion, Ethnicity and Social Change (London, 2000), p.9.
4 The oft-cited phrase is Benedict Anderson’s.
5 P.Berger and T.Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (London, 1967)

exemplifies the modern constructivist approach. See also P.Jackson and J.Penrose,
Constructions of Race, Place and Nation (London, 1993).
6 E.Renan, quoted in Herbert, Nationality and its Problems, p.40.
7 J.Mazzini, quoted in Joseph, Nationality, pp.105-6.
8 J.R.Muir, Nationalism and Internationalism (London, 1916), p.43.
9 Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics, p.10.
10 The Basis of Ascendancy, pp.78-80, cited in Joseph, Nationality, pp.33-4.
11 Thus, for instance, the common perception that the Slavic race was innately

poetic, and politically fissiparous (a racial explanation for the circumstance that the
Slav peoples, Russians apart, had owned no independent state since the partition
of Poland). The Celtic blood of the Irish, English writers similarly claimed, made
them innately unfit to self-govern. For instances and criticism see J.M.Robertson,
The Saxon and the Celt (London, 1897).
12 Joseph argued that such tradition ‘moulds the national character and forms the
groundwork of the national sentiment’; and also that it was ‘the expression of the
soul or spirit of the nationality’ (Nationality, pp.103-5).
13 The Zionist cause, dear to many British theorists, was pertinent here.
14 On this theme see E.Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’ in
E.Hobsbawm and T.Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983),
pp.1-14.
15 A.Zimmern, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’, Foreign Affairs, June 1923, 121.
16 Laffan, Jugoslavia since 1918, p.5.
17 Banac, National Question, pp.222-3; Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, p.55;

J.R.Lampe, ‘Unifying the Yugoslav Economy, 1918-1921: Misery and Early

Misunderstandings’, in Djordjević (ed.), Creation of Yugoslavia, p.143.
18 Cited in E.Goldstein, Winning the Peace: British Diplomatic Strategy, Peace Planning,

and the Paris Peace Conference, 1916-1920 (Oxford, 1991), p.134.

19 Lederer, ‘Nationalism and the Yugoslavs’, p.397.
20 J.B.Hoptner, Yugoslavia in Crisis 1934-41 (New York, 1962), p.2.
21 Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference, pp.81-2.
22 Herbert, Nationality and its Problems, p.22.
23 Ibid, pp.24, 27-8.
24 Marriott, The Eastern Question, p.36.
25 M.Newbigin, ‘The Problem of the South Slavs’, The Scottish Geographical Magazine,

Jan 1919, 2-3.

26 Forbes, Southern Slavs, pp.19-20.
27 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, pp.32-3.
250 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

28 On Montenegro see, for instance, Eliot, Turkey in Europe, p.347. On Dalmatia,

see Dominian, Frontiers, p.186; T.H.Holdich, Boundaries in Europe and the Near East
(London, 1918), p.66; M.I.Newbigin, Geographical Aspects of Balkan Problems in their
Relation to the Great European War (London, 1915), pp.37,43.
29 ‘Unity has never been a feature of the Southern Slavs’, one influential pre-war

writer had observed, ‘except at rare intervals, under the sublime influence of some
great man, whose successors were unable to hold his heritage together’ (Miller,
Travel and Politics, pp.118-19).
30 Seton-Watson, German, Slav and Magyar, p.52.
31 Temperley, History of Serbia, p.2; Balkan Review, ‘Editor’s Causerie’, Aug 1920,
p.10.
32 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, pp.335-6.
33 Dominian, Frontiers, pp.186, 338.
34 Temperley, History of Serbia, p.2.
35 Forbes, ‘Serbia’, p.82.
36 In 1918 no rail links connected Serbia and the western Yugoslav lands. Arteries
in the west converged on the major Habsburg cities. (See V.Rogić, ‘The Changing
Urban Pattern in Yugoslavia’, in F.W.Carter (ed.), An Historical Geography of the
Balkans (London, 1977), p.414). 19th century Serbian communications had
improved very slowly, in part due to international rivalry over the transcontinental
routes through Belgrade. And in 1918 existing networks were often incompatible
and badly damaged (Lampe, ‘Unifying the Yugoslav Economy’, pp.144-5;
D.Turnock, Eastern Europe: an historical geography, 1815-1914 (London, 1989),
pp.147-62).
37 Temperley, History of Serbia, pp.1-2.
38 T.Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven;

London, 1997), pp.17-28.

39 J.Rives Childs, ‘Sight-Seeing in Serbia’, Balkan Review (September 1920), 134.
40 ‘Serbia: Population, Government and Religion’, p.166.
41 Miller, Travel and Politics, p.47.
42 Miller, ‘The Balkan States I: the Zenith of Bulgaria and Serbia 1186-1355’, in
J.R.Tanner, C.W.Previté-Orton and Z.N.Brooke (eds.), The Cambridge Medieval
History Vol IV: The Eastern Roman Empire 717-1453 (Cambridge, 1923), p.550.
43 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, pp.126-7.
44 Miller, Travel and Politics, pp.91, 378.
45 Brailsford, Macedonia, p.98.
46 The name derives from duša (soul/ spirit) rather than from dušiti. Taylor (Future

of the Southern Slavs, p.26) corrects this widespread tendency. Dušan’s bloody record
rendered the claim plausible, of course.
47 Temperley, History of Serbia, pp.viii, 87.
48 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, pp.46-51.
49 Allen, The Turks in Europe, p.2.
50 Miller, ‘The Balkan Peninsula for the Balkan Peoples’, Balkan Review, December
1920, 317.
51 Copeland, ‘Who are the Yugo-Slavs?’, p.37; Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, p.15.
 NOTES 251

52 M.Mügge, Serbian Folk Songs, Fairy Tales and Proverbs (London, 1917), p.19.
53 On the Serbian kings conscious aping of Byzantine ritual, see D.Milošević,
quoted in Judah, The Serbs, p.22.
54 Forbes, ‘Serbia’, p.95.
55 Temperley was one: History of Serbia, pp.91-2. And Edith Durham’s hostility to
Serbia (as well as her critical mind) made her resist such specious romanticism. In
truth, she wrote, Dušan’s Empire ‘was an incoherent mass of different and hostile
races, and it broke to pieces immediately on his death’ (Twenty Years, p.64).
56 Joseph, Nationality, p.106. See also Bryce, Essays and Addresses, p.129; Muir,
Nationalism and Internationalism, p.43; Pillsbury, Psychology, p.89.
57 Temperley, History of Serbia, p.92.
58 Forbes, ‘Serbia’, p.97.
59 This phrase, recurrent in British discourse, was used by Lloyd George, and by

Laffan as the title for his influential romanticised account of Serbian history.
(Lloyd George quoted in Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.225).
60 Velimirović, Religion and Nationality in Serbia, p.8.
61 Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp.315-18.
62 H.T.Norris, Islam in the Balkans: Religion and Society between Europe and the Arab

World (London, 1993), p.261. Ironically, Norris observes, contemporary Western

documents damned the Serbs as an ally of the infidel.
63 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.54.
64 Count de Salis, FO 371/2409/313 (annual report on Montenegro 1914).
65 Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, pp.174-5; Hanak, Great Britain and

Austria-Hungary, pp.75-7 and ch.4. The response to the ‘Kosovo day agitation’
Seton-Watson considered ‘extraordinarily satisfactory’ (Correspondence, i, 270).
66 On this retreat, see Fry, Destruction of Serbia, pp.91-104, 113-125.
67 G.K Chesterton, ‘The Thing Called a Nation’, in The Lay of Kossovo: Serbia’s Past

and Present (1389-1917) (London, 1917), pp.32-5. On the potency of themes of

fatalism and suffering in national mythologies, see G.Schöpflin, ‘The Functions of
Myth and a Taxonomy of Myths’, in G.Hosking and G.Schöpflin (eds.), Myths and
Nationhood (London, 1997), pp.29-30.
68 S.K.Pavlowitch, Serbia: The History Behind the Name (London, 2002), pp.97-8. ‘A
nation that can sing about its defeats and not lose heart’, Lloyd George observed
in 1917, drawing a parallel with his native Wales, ‘is immortal; and that is why
Serbia is immortal […]’ (quoted in Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.224).
69 Malcolm, Kosovo, ch.4.
70 Eliot, Turkey in Europe, pp.341-2.
71 Temperley, History of Serbia, p.viii. A romantic fascination with Serbian culture
coexisted always with Temperley’s more scholarly instincts; the diaries he kept of
his travels in the region at the end of the war were, as his biographer notes, instinct
with his love of South Slavic culture and national traditions (Fair, Harold Temperley,
pp.126-7).
72 Dominian, Frontiers, p.322: ‘the geographer, in search of Serbian boundaries,

tries in vain to discover a surer guide to delimitation. For Serbia extends as far as
her folk-songs are heard’.
252 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

73 Mügge, Serbian Folk Songs, p.17.

74 Balkan Review, July 1920, 471. Chadwick drew extensive parallels between the
Kosovo poems and the Iliad (The Heroic Age (Cambridge, 1912), p.309ff, while
admitting the former lacked the same rarified elevation.
75 1903 Austrian statistics for the Ottoman sançaks of Priština, Peć and Prizren
put the Orthodox Serbs at 25% of the population, Ottoman statistics of 1912 at
21% (Malcolm, Kosovo, p.230).
76 Zimmern, Nationality and Government, p.91 (‘Shrines of nationality’).
77 Toynbee, Nationality and the War, p.203; L.F.Waring, ‘Kosovo’, Slavonic Review,
Vol II no 4 (June 1923), 62; Brailsford, Macedonia, pp.100, 274-6. As historians
have pointed out, growth in the Muslim population in Kosovo and Macedonia
during the 19th century was largely due to expulsions by the independent Serbian
state from lands gained in 1877-8 (Malcolm, Kosovo, pp.228-30; J.McCarthy, Death
and Exile: the Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 (Princeton, NJ, 1995)).
78 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, pp.101-9.
79 Pribram, Austria-Hungary and Great Britain, p.97 (Young Turk revolution); Protić

reply to Seton-Watson, Correspondence, i, 331-3.

80 B.Lewis, ‘Some Reflections on the Decline of the Ottoman Empire’, in

C.M.Cipolla (ed.), The Economic Decline of Empires (London, 1970), p.215.

81 Forbes, Southern Slavs, p.26; Low, ‘The Kingdom of Serbia’, 309; Taylor, Future of

the Southern Slavs, p.44; Holland Rose, ‘The National Idea’, 337; Laffan, Guardians of
the Gate, pp.22, 26. For the British hostile Eastern armies were always ‘hordes’,
with that term’s intimations of barbarism and anarchy.
82 Marriott, Eastern Question, p.3. Of course the Habsburgs believed their rule,

unlike the Ottoman, originated in dynastic right. But Marriott claimed that the
Turk was ‘akin to the European family neither in creed, in race, in language, in
social customs, nor in political aptitudes and traditions’, which overlooked both
differences within this ‘European family’ and the fact that local Ottoman
governors were often natives of their region (Malcolm, Bosnia, p.46, note 10;
P.F.Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule (Seattle; London, 1977), p.58).
83 Allen, The Turks in Europe, pp.1-2.
84 Baerlein, Birth of Yugoslavia, i, p.49.
85 Miller, The Ottoman Empire 1801-1913 (Cambridge, 1913), p.503. Turkish rule, he
later wrote, ‘meant complete paralysis of national life’, with no form of progress:
‘The Balkan Peninsula for the Balkan Peoples’, pp.316-17. On the 19th century
view of the Ottoman legacy as an ‘alien imposition’ upon medieval Christendom,
see Maria Todorova, ‘The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans’, in L.Carl Brown (ed.),
Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York,
1996), pp.46-7.
86 Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, p.334.
87 Temperley, History of Serbia, pp.110-12, 120-2. See also G.Gaillard, The Turks and

Europe (London, 1921), translated from French.

88 Ibid, p.103.
89 L.von Ranke, The History of Servia and the Servian Revolution (London, 1853; tr.
A.Kerr), p.207.
 NOTES 253

90 Forbes, Southern Slavs, p.4.

91 Serbian history, unlike the Greek, Forbes suggested, ‘had not been sufficiently
brilliant to produce a Byron’ (Southern Slavs, p.5).
92 Zimmern, Nationality and Government, p.71.
93 Young, Nationalism and War in the Near East, p.31.
94 Miller, Balkans, p.496; Editorial, ‘Great Britain and the Future of Turkey’, The
Nation, 17 May 1913 (vol XIII, no 7); Brailsford, Macedonia, p.319.
95 Ibid.
96 Miller, Travel and Politics, pp.118-19.
97 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, pp.336-8; see also his letter of 17 Oct 1909,

Correspondence, i, 50-4. He later admitted this fear of an ‘oriental’ culture among the
Serbs had been ‘unduly coloured by the Viennese point of view’ (though he
continued to decry ‘old oriental tendencies’ in uncongenial individuals): Ibid., i, 20-
1, Appendix no 3; ii, 92-3.
98 Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp.262-3. Of course Serbian politics did also, as
Allcock points out, own a less salubrious militaristic undercurrent, represented by
organisations like the Black Hand.
99 G.Stokes, Politics as Development: the Emergence of Political Parties in Nineteenth Century

Serbia (Durham, 1990), passim.

100 Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, p.263; Petrovich, History of Modern Serbia, ii, 441-
3.
101 Todorova, Explaining the Balkans, p.110.
102 Miller, Travel and Politics, pp.118, 279.
103 Sir V.Chirol, Serbia and the Serbs (London, 1914), p.8.
104 On English reactions to the regicide, see W.S.Vucinich, Serbia Between East and
West 1903-1908 (Stanford; London, 1954), pp.105-12. Of course the fact that pre-
war British relations with Serbia ‘owing to the absence of any close point of
contact in their interests’ were ‘always more or less perfunctory’ (Ralph Paget, 6
June 1913, FO 371/1748/28340) made such a principled stand an uncomplicated
one for Britain.
105 Seton-Watson, Correspondence, i, 52 (17 Oct 1909).
106 E.J.Dillon, ‘Servia and the Rival Dynasties’, The Contemporary Review, 84, July-
Dec 1903, 143.
107 The same year’s Macedonian revolt served further to shore up such

assumptions.
108 Brailsford, Macedonia, p.xi.
109 D.Walshe, With the Serbs in Macedonia (London; New York, 1920), p.231. Chirol
doubtless had this in mind in observing that before the war it was ‘the worst pages
of [Serbia’s] history which chiefly clung to people’s memory’ (Serbia and the Serbs,
p.3). See also Rebecca West’s testimony to the murder’s impact in Black Lamb and
Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (London, 1942; Edinburgh, 1993), pp.10-
12. Further examples of outrage are given in Todorova, Explaining the Balkans,
p.118.
110 de Windt, Through Savage Europe, p.144.
111 Marriott, Eastern Question, p.314.
254 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

112 J.Berry, F.M.D.Berry, W.L.Blease et al, A Red Cross Unit in Serbia (London,

1916), pp.5-6.
113 For positive pre-war views of Alexander see, for example, de Windt, Through

Savage Europe, p.133; Vivian, The Servian Tragedy, passim.

114 C.Price, Serbia’s Part in the War Vol I: The Rampart against Pan-Germanism
(London, 1918) p.3.
115 Gordon, Woman in the Balkans, p.69. By the assassination, claimed Price, Serbia

not only rid herself of the ‘mentally irresponsible’ Alexander, but also ‘checkmated’
Austria’s plans to secure control of the country (Serbia’s Part in the War, p.12).
116 The War and the Balkans, pp.46-7. See also the similar assessment by Forbes,

‘Serbia’, p.129.
117 Gibbons, New Map of Europe, pp.154-5. Both quotations were taken, he noted,

from the same British newspaper. (See E.Crankshaw, The Fall of the House of
Habsburg (London, 1963), pp.377-8). Paul Fussell suggests that the shift in British
usage from ‘Servia’ to ‘Serbia’ was itself indicative of a change in attitude – an end
to the old pejorative etymological association with ‘servant’ and ‘servile’ (The Great
War and Modern Memory (Oxford; New York, 1975;2000), p.175). But in fact this
change was requested by the Serbian embassy. M.T.Selesković noted in 1919 a
similar shift, prompted by the war, in German attitudes to the Serbs: ‘La Serbie
dans l’opinion Allemande Contemporaine’ (Doctoral thesis, University of Paris,
1919), pp.7-8 and passim.
118 Young, Nationalism and War, p.13. ‘Every Serbian peasant is a poet’, agreed
M.St.Clair Stobart (The Flaming Sword, p.28).
119 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.70; Admiral Troubridge, preface to Laffan,

Guardians of the Gate, p.2. See also Noel and Charles Buxton, The War and the
Balkans, p.46; Forbes, ‘Serbia’, p.120.
120 G.Trevelyan, ‘Serbia’s Fight for Freedom’, Nash’s & Pall Mall Magazine, June

1915, 392.
121 W.F.Bailey, The Slavs of the War Zone, (London, 1916), pp.252-3. This work is, in
general, a typically romanticised wartime account of the South Slavs, and the Serbs
in particular.
122 Price, Light on the Balkan Darkness, pp.11-12.
123 Even though the Yugoslav idea appealed to some Serbian intellectuals during

the war, it remained for older politicians a disposable addition to the Great Serbian
agenda. As Charles Jelavich points out, nearly all Serbs in responsible positions in
the post-war state had been educated before 1912 and ‘been indoctrinated in the
tradition of Serbianism and not Yugoslavism’ (‘From Serbianism to Yugoslavism’,
p.121). See also J.Udovički, ‘Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict and Self-Determination
in the Former Yugoslavia’ in B.Berberoglu (ed.), The National Question: Nationalism,
Ethnic Conflict, and Self-Determination in the 20th Century (Philadelphia, 1995), p.283.
On the lack of a clear idea of what Great Serbia represented, spatially, and the
shifting phases of preoccupation, see Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp.343-6. In
suggesting that the idea of Great Serbia was wholly abstract and divorced from
specific territorial associations, he seems to overstate this point.
124 Marriott, Eastern Question, pp.313-14.
125 Todorova pp.118-19; Pribram, Austria-Hungary and Great Britain, p.220.
 NOTES 255

126 Bridge, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, p.214.

127 Grey to Sir Maurice de Bunsen (British ambassador at Vienna), 27 July 1914,
printed in War 1914: Punishing the Serbs (London, 1915; 1999), pp.80-4. British
public opinion, Grey had written to Sir George Buchanan two days previously,
would not sanction going to war ‘over a Serbian quarrel’ (ibid, pp.53-4).
128 Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, pp.150-1.
129 Wilkinson, Question of Servia, p.12.
130 Low, ‘The Kingdom of Serbia’, 314.
131 Chirol, Serbia and the Serbs, p.18.
132 Bailey, Slavs of the War Zone, p.252. Already by October 1914 G.K.Chesterton
remarked that anyone reading the papers would become ‘bored with the cant
about Serbia’ (quoted in W.M.Klimon, ‘Chesterton, “Kossovo of the Serbians”,
and the Vocation of the Christian Nation’, The Chesterton Review (Feb1994), 42).
133 Dickinson Berry, Austria-Hungary, p.47.
134 Seton-Watson, ‘Serbia’s Need and Britain’s Danger’, Contemporary Review, Nov
1915, 576-9. See also his ‘The Pan-German Plan and its Antidote’, Contemporary
Review, (April 1916), 422-8. A cartoon in Harper’s Weekly illustrated the clearing of
Serbia’s responsibility for the war: T.D.Hadjich (ed.), The World’s War Cartoons: The
Balkans in Caricature (London, 1916), p.44. For a similar French argument that any
negative view of the Serbs had been cynical misinformation on the part of Vienna,
see P.de Lanux, La Yougoslavie: la France et les Serbes (Paris, 1916), p.234. For a
French work drawing the same parallel between Serbia’s supposed historic role as
‘rampart of Christianity against the Turks’ and her wartime obstruction of
Germany’s drive east, see Paul Labbé, L’Effort Serbe (Paris, 1916), p.4.
135 A. and C.Askew, ‘Kossovo Day Heroes’, in The Lay of Kossovo (London, 1917),

pp.29-31; Chirol, Serbia and the Serbs, p.3.

136 E.Christitch, ‘Letters from Serbia’, Contemporary Review, Jan 1915, 85.
137 de Windt, Through Savage Europe, p.143; Balkan Review, ‘Editor’s Causerie’, Aug
1920, 8. Amnesia quickly set in. The present war had proved, Noel and Charles
Buxton wrote, ‘more strikingly than ever the brilliant military quality of the Serbs’ (The
War and the Balkans, pp.45-6, my emphasis).
138 Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, pp.260.
139 M.A.St.Clair Stobart, ‘With the Serbian Army in Retreat’, Contemporary Review,

April 1916, 437.

140 Mügge, Serbian Folk Songs, Fairy Tales and Proverbs, p.6; Seton-Watsons, Making of
a New Europe, pp.178, 189, 311. But see Norman Stone on the Austrian army’s
inadequacy in 1914 (The Eastern Front (London, 1975), pp.71-2). Hew Strachan
notes the genuine improvement of the Serbian army during the early 20th century
(The First World War: A Call to Arms (Oxford, 2001), p.341). For accounts of
Austria’s failed assault, see ibid., pp.335-47, and C.E.J.Fryer, The Destruction of Serbia
in 1915 (Boulder; New York, 1997). A graphic first-hand account of Serbia’s
wartime sufferings, from typhus above all, is in J.Reed, The War in Eastern Europe
(London, 1916), pp.29-108.
141 T.A.Emmert, ‘Kosovo: Development and Impact of a National Ethic’, in

I.Banac et al (eds), Nation and Ideology: Essays in Honor of Wayne S.Vucinich (Boulder,
1981), pp.77-8. Emmert gives examples of similar American enthusiasm, as does
256 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Stevan Pavlowitch for France (Serbia: History Behind the Name, p.98). On the
pronounced enthusiasm in France for Serbia before and (particularly) during the
war, see M.Pavlović (ed.), Temoignages Français sur les Serbes et la Serbie 1912-1918
(Belgrade, 1988), pp.22-32.
142 Gordon-Smith, Through the Serbian Campaign, p.1.
143 Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, p.15. The near-universal acclaim in the British
media may be contrasted with the strongly hostile opinion of a British military
representative with the retreating Serbian army (FO 371/2603/263), though in
general the Foreign Office did consider the Serbs had fought a ‘heroic campaign’
(Oliphant, 371/1901/83097). For a recent account of the Serbian defeat see Fryer,
Destruction of Serbia.
144 St.Clair Stobart, The Flaming Sword, pp.203, 309-10. The enthusiasm of these

accounts cannot simply be explained with reference to the bond between

‘brothers-in-arms’. It is significant that the account of a medical relief worker who
served in Serbia forty years previously evinces none of the same romantic
attachment. ‘We could not admit’, wrote Emma Pearson and Louisa McLaughlin,
‘that the nation was far on the path of progress […]. The people were no better
than those of other lands’ (Service in Servia under the Red Cross (London, 1877),
pp.347-8).
145 C.and A.Askew, The Stricken Land, p.358.
146 Quoted in T.Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven; London, 2000),

pp.xvi-xvii.
147 Schlesinger, Federalism in Eastern and Central Europe, p.16.
148 Fine, Early Medieval Balkans, pp.284-8. Croats sometimes considered the 1102
union analagous to the 1867 ‘Ausgleich’. In some respects, as historians have
observed, this claim to state continuity was no less mythic than Serbian Kosovo
traditions. It was anachronistic to assume the judicial Croatian identity represented
in the feudal nobility’s claim to customary rights vis-à-vis the Hungarian crown
equated to the modern ethno-linguistic idea of a Croat. Nobles of the 15th or 16th
centuries claiming the traditional rights of a Croatian aristocracy may, ethnically,
have been German or Hungarian (see Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp.317-23).
149 On relative French ignorance of the Croats as opposed to the Serbs, see Kovač,

La France, la creation du royaume ‘yougoslave’ et la question croate, pp.110-12, which notes

Frano Supilo’s amazement at the widespread assumption that Dalmatia was Italian.
150 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, p.342. A.J.May has remarked of Seton-

Watson before the war that he had ‘a decided preference for the westernized
Croats under the Magyar yoke rather than for the Serbs’ (‘R.W. Seton-Watson and
British Anti-Hapsburg Sentiment’, American Slavic and East European Review,
Vol.XX, no.1 (1961), 46).
151 Temperley, History of Serbia, p.3.
152 See below ch.8.
153 Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference (New Haven, 1939), ii, 514; quoted

in M.Almond, Europe’s Backyard War: The War in the Balkans (London, 1994), p.72.
See also W.F.Lofthouse, ‘Serbia: A Study in Nationality’, The Holborn Review, April
1920, 148. On the pro-Hungarian strain in Britain, even during the war, see Hanak,
Britain and Austria-Hungary, pp.2-4, 161-3; Bridge, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary,
 NOTES 257

pp.36-7. Seton-Watson had himself been firmly Magyarophile. As his sons note,
‘the name of Kossuth, and the version of events of 1848 generally accepted in
Britain, caused the name of Hungary to be especially dear to British persons of
liberal outlook’, Correspondence, i, 13.
154 Hanak, Britain and Austria-Hungary, pp.195-7 gives examples.
155 On Dalmatia’s separate administrative history since the early 13th century
(continuously since the mid-15th), and also on the spatial inconstancy of regional
labels like ‘Croatia’ and ‘Slavonia’, see P.R.Magosci, Historical Atlas of East Central
Europe (Seattle; London, 1993), p.17 and passim.
156 Correspondence, i, 180-6 (letter to Foreign Office, 1 Oct 1914).
157 Toynbee, Nationality and the War, pp.213-15.
158 See extract in Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, pp.131-2.
159 Josip Frank was a lawyer who adapted Starčević’s programme to suit his

allegiance to the Habsburg dynasty, campaigning for a Croat unit within the
imperial framework. He died in 1911. (See Banac, National Question, pp.94-5).
160 Okey, ‘British Impressions’, p.66. What Okey terms the ‘Britishness of
coverage’ entailed in general a greater empathy with ‘moderation’ than with
‘extremism’ (ibid, p.75).
161 FO 371/825/904.
162 FO 371/1047/44966 (Grant Duff, Budapest, 7 Nov 1911). All other parties,

and public opinion, Max Müller observed, accepted the Croat-Hungarian

‘Ausgleich’ of 1868 (FO 371/1576/57517 (Budapest, 8 Dec 1913)). A similar
emphasis on the Party of Right as ‘the extreme Left’ and as ‘noisy and troublesome
agitators’ had been made by Sir Arthur Nicolson in his late 19th century reports
which were among very few to deal at any length with the Croatian situation
(Okey, ‘British Impressions’, pp.69-70).
163 Correspondence, i, 50-4 (17 Oct 1909).
164 FO 371/827/10301 (Budapest, 19 March 1910).
165 FO 371/599/7133 (Budapest, 8 Feb 1909). The Pure Right Party’s hatred of

Serbs, he noted elsewhere, was ‘less a matter of nationality than religion’ (FO
371/827/10301). In fact, as Banac points out, Croat ideologists had generally
resisted the equation of Catholicism and Croatdom, often claiming Bosnian
Muslims and the Orthodox of Croatia and Bosnia as Croats (National Question,
p.108).
166 Seton-Watson, Slav, German, Magyar, p.92.
167 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, p.339.
168 For further discussion of British attitudes to these Croatian groups, see below
pp.189-90.
169 While Croatia-Slavonia possessed a degree of autonomy under Hungary,
Vojvodina was ruled directly by Budapest; meanwhile Dalmatia and the part-
Slovene provinces of Carniola, Styria and Carinthia were under different forms of
Austrian administration, while Bosnia-Hercegovina was from 1878 ruled as an
‘independent’ crown land.
170 M.Gross, ‘Social Structure and National Movements Among the Yugoslav
Peoples on the Eve of the First World War’, Slavic Review, Dec 1977, 628-9;
Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp.27-8. Not before the rise of Radić in the early
258 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

1920s, Ivo Banac has noted, did the majority of Croats feel unified under a
common national leadership (National Question, pp.236-7).
171 Brashich, Land Reform and Ownership in Yugoslavia, p.17; Allcock, Explaining

Yugoslavia, p.331; Djordjević, ‘Idea of Yugoslav Unity’, pp.4-5.

172 Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.33; Djordjević, ‘Idea of Yugoslav

Unity’, p.10.
173 Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp.280, 326, 332.
174 Seton-Watson, Spirit of the Serb, p.17.
175 Newbigin, Geographical Aspects, p.62.
176 Forbes, Southern Slavs, p.30; Temperley, History of Serbia, p.4. As we have seen

British writers commonly regarded southern Dalmatia as natural ‘Serb’ territory.

177 Toynbee, Nationality and the War, p.173.
178 FO 371/2711/57457 (Count de Salis report on Montenegro for 1915).
179 Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp.254, 279.
180 In a pamphlet entitled The Balkans, Italy and the Adriatic (London, 1915), Seton-
Watson claimed Dubrovnik had been ‘a centre of Slavonic culture and aspirations
for many centuries’ (p.35), a claim rejected by de Salis (‘whatever the future may
give the Slavs, the past was not theirs’, FO 371/2711/57457).
181 FO 371/2862/210519 (19 Nov 1917).
182 Miller, Travel and Politics, pp.510-11.
183 Bosnian Serbs, under Habsburg rule only since 1878, are not considered here.

Roughly a third of Serbs lived outside the borders of 1913 Serbia (Allcock,
Explaining Yugoslavia, p.220).
184 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.59.
185 Temperley, History of Serbia, p.122; Lederer, ‘Nationalism and the Yugoslavs’,
p.408.
186 Young, Nationalism and War in the Near East, pp.17-18.
187 Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, pp.23-4.
188 Temperley, History of Serbia, pp.170-1.
189 FO 371/1472/34881; Lederer, ‘Nationalism and the Yugoslavs’, p.407.
190 Pavlowitch, History behind the Name, pp.113-14.
191 Djordjević, ‘Idea of Yugoslav Unity’, p.11; Banac, National Question, p.65.
192 Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, p.332. In general the voting patterns in 1920

support this assertion, though not all prečani Serbs preferred the Democrats. In
Vojvodina – whose Serb population outnumbered their Croat neighbours, felt less
isolated from Serbia, and wished to preserve their regional identity and economic
advantages – the Radicals prevailed (Banac, National Question, p.389 table 5.2). ‘In
order to assert itself’, Banac remarks, ‘the periphery often argues for an identity
that is more integrated than the identity of a metropolis’ (ibid., p.59).
193 Seton-Watson, Southern Slav Question, p.2.
194 Vošnjak, Bulwark, p.44.
195 Zholger, ‘Concerning the Slovenes’, pp.442, 445-6.
 NOTES 259

196 Vošnjak, Bulwark, p.258; what this meant, if not that the Slovenes were imbued
with the German influences these writers argued had for centuries been resisted, is
difficult to say.
197 A leading US official also argued in 1917 that Slovene bonds with Austria were
too old to disrupt (Mamatey, United States and East Central Europe, pp.91-2).
Toynbee’s judgement is striking given that Carniola was the only Slovene majority
province. As often in East-Central Europe, the Carniolan Germans dominated
economic life. Namier noted that though only 5% of the population, German
capitalists owned a quarter of the land, all the mines and most of the industry: FO
371/3135/116831 (24 June 1918).
198 Indeed, they were ignored in Serbian teaching of South Slav history as they
were in Britain: Jelavich, ‘From Serbianism to Yugoslavism’, p.120.
199 Toynbee, Nationality and the War, pp.248-58.
200 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, pp.249-50.
201 Laffan, ‘Liberation of the New Nationalities’, p.188.
202 FO 371/3135/116831; FO 371/3133/48743; FO 371/3508/59385.
203 FO 371/3508/59385 (C.Oman, 15 Oct 1918). Given that Slovenes boasted the
highest literacy rates of any Yugoslav group, this view seems rather unfair.
204 J.Velikonja, ‘The Quest for Slovene National Identity’, pp.251-5, in D.Hooson

(ed.), Geography and National Identity (Oxford, 1994). We have noted before the
dialectal variation which reflected this regionalism. Slovene emigrants usually
identified themselves by region (‘Carniolan’, ‘Carinthian’ etc) rather than as
Slovenes.
205 Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp.347-8. Strangely, Toynbee regarded the unity

of Slovenia as ‘primarily geographical rather than racial’ (Nationality and the War,
pp.257-8).
206 Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp.278-9.
207 Vošnjak, Bulwark, p.71.
208 L.Valiani, The End of Austria-Hungary (London, 1973), p.41. Only in 1911 did

the revived Croatian Party of Right agree to cooperate with the Slovene Catholic
Popular Party. The HSK consistently refused during the war to depart from the
dualist framework which entailed loyalty to Budapest and a refusal to cooperate
with Austrian Slovenes (see J.Pleterski, ‘The Southern Slav Question’, in
M.Cornwall (ed.), The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-national Experiment in
Early Twentieth-Century Europe, 2nd edn (Exeter, 2002), pp.141-5).
209 Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.139.
210 Toynbee, Nationality and the War, p.213. And Montenegrins anyway shared in
the lustre of Serb medieval history.
211 de Windt, Through Savage Europe, p.24.
212 Forbes, Southern Slavs, p.6.
213 E.M.Tappan (ed.), The World's Story: A History of the World in Story, Song and Art

(Boston, 1914), vol. VI: Russia, Austria-Hungary, The Balkan States, and Turkey, p.
420.
214 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Montenegro: Population and Government’.
215 de Windt, Through Savage Europe, pp.28-9.
260 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

216 Gordon, Woman in the Balkans, pp.284-6. Nicholas enjoyed some familiarity in
Britain for that success in forging dynastic links through his children which saw
him nicknamed ‘father-in-law of Europe’.
217 Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, p.46.
218 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Montenegro: History’; ‘Montenegro: Population and
Government’.
219 See ch.6 below.
220 Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp.388, 390.
221 Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, p.25.
222 Temperley, History of Serbia, p.105.
223 New Statesman, 12 April 1913: the journal’s first issue, here voicing majority

opinion rather than its own.

224 FO 371/2409/313. ‘As late as the Congress of Paris in 1856’, he added, ‘the
Turkish representative asserted without contradiction that the Porte regarded
Montenegro as part of the Ottoman Empire’. In the early 18th century
Montenegrins had rid themselves of Ottoman overlordship under their prelates
(who governed only a small district around Cetinje), but as recently as 1852-3 and
1861 Ottoman armies had compelled subordination to Constantinople. Not until
the 1878 Congress of Berlin was independence formally recognised by the
European Powers: Banac, National Question, p.44; Magosci, Historical Atlas, p.84.
225 For centuries St.Petersburg had kept it solvent; while British Near-Eastern
policy was governed by hostility towards Russia, Montenegro was denigrated as a
minor outpost of Tsardom.
226 Suspicion that Nicholas sought an understanding with Austria to protect his

regime from Serbian domination surfaced sporadically in the West. The Times, on 6
February 1912, suggested he had cast in his lot with Vienna. Whitehall understood
secret talks had stuck over access to the fortress of Lovćen (FO 371/2711/57457).
227 FO 371/1748/28340 (Paget report on Serbia for 1912, 6 June 1913).
228 Austria’s occupation of the Sanjak (technically still Ottoman) represented a
serious barrier to amalgamation.
229 FO 371/2041/24154 (2 Feb 1914). Ultimate union was often forecast in terms
of Nicholas’ life-expectancy, his issue considered incompetent to succeed. For
more on Montenegro, see below ch.6.
230 For the early history of the region, see Malcolm, Bosnia, chs.1 and 2.
231 Between 1463 and 1580 the ‘sandžak’ of Bosnia had formed part of the larger

eyalet of Rumelia, which covered most of the Balkans (Malcolm, Bosnia, p.50).
232 Forbes, Southern Slavs, p.24. Seton-Watson later noted strong traditions of local
autonomy among the Bosnian begs: The Role of Bosnia in International Politics (1875-
1914) (London, 1932), p.7.
233 Forbes, ‘Serbia’, p.135. During the war Austria was accused both of inventing

Bosnian identity and of fomenting division among Bosnia’s confessions. The

extent of Bosnian consciousness before the rise of Serbian and Croatian
nationalisms is unresolved. Some historians (Robert Donia and Noel Malcolm, for
example) have attempted to demonstrate such a consciousness; but see Allcock,
Explaining Yugoslavia, p.323 for a more sceptical view.
 NOTES 261

234 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.87. There was, as Malcolm notes, a strand

in pre-war Bosnian Muslim culture inclined to be pro-Serb. But its rapid

disappearance in the Yugoslav state suggests that it was no more than a superficial
political alliance. In practical terms, he concludes, they were already a separate
community: Bosnia, pp.163-6.
235 Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, p.89. To Serbs, it was noted (with apparent
sympathy), this claim seemed ‘an unprovoked attack upon their legitimate
aspirations’.
236 Seton-Watson, The Spirit of the Serb, p.17.
237 FO 371/3508/59385 (Oman, 15 Oct 1918). Emphasis added. (This was despite
noting Dušan’s failure to terminate medieval Bosnian independence).
238 See above pp.69-72. For historical treatments of Habsburg economic policies
in Bosnia, broadly positive about their motivation and outcome, see P.F.Sugar,
Industrialization in Bosnia-Hercegovina (Seattle, 1963), and M.Palairet, The Balkan
Economies c.1800-1914: Evolution without Development (Cambridge, 1997), pp.203-42.
As Sugar shows, the failure to create infrastructural links with other South Slav
territories resulted more from rivalry between Budapest and Vienna than from a
unified policy of ‘divide and rule’ in the Monarchy’s South Slav lands (p.219).
239 A.J.Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection, August
and September, 1875 (London, 1876), p.139. ‘Old Serbia’ here refers to Kosovo and
the Sanjak while ‘the free Principality’ was Serbia, technically under Ottoman
suzerainty until 1878.
240 Miller, Travel and Politics, pp.91, 118-19.
241 FO 371/1296/9024 (Freeman, Sarajevo, 26 Feb 1912).
242 Bailey, Slavs of the War Zone, pp.9-10.
243 Vošnjak, Bulwark, p.216.
244 See above p.27.
245 Correspondence, i, 277.
246 ‘In truth’, Banac notes, ‘there was no unitary Yugoslav culture’, only a brief

‘trend in the Croat artistic colony’, ‘a hopeless quest’, largely limited to Meštrović’s
evocation of Serbian myths (National Question, pp.203-7). With hindsight Meštrović
himself admitted that he had much overestimated the psychological readiness for
Yugoslav union (‘The Yugoslav Committee in London and the Declaration of
Corfu’, in A.F.Bonifačić and C.S.Mihanovich (eds.), The Croatian Nation (Chicago,
1955), pp.173-4).
247 FO 371/3135/116831.
248 FO 371/3508/59886 (Memo on Croatian politics, 31 March 1919).
249 Travel and Politics, p.377.
250 Laffan, Guardians of the Gate, p.64. Some who served in Macedonia were struck
by the syncretism of beliefs and customs. See, for example, Walshe, With the Serbs,
pp.186-7.
251 Banac, National Question, pp.308-9. See the map showing the extent of medieval

Serb and Bulgarian states in the 14th and 15th centuries in Magosci, Atlas, p.29.
252 Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.132-3. The Minister was Matija

Bošković.
262 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

253 Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference, p.248.

254 FO 371/1748/28340 (report for 1912).
255 FO 371/1748/53104 (Dayrell Crackanthorpe, 18 Nov 1913; Vansittart, 25
Nov; Crowe, 25 Nov).
256 FO 371/2099/4614 (28 Jan 1914).
257 FO 371/1748/57490 (Skopje, 14 Dec 1913).
258 FO 371/1748/53800 (Charles Greig, Monastir, 14 Nov 1913). See also his

letter in FO 371/2098/4617, dated 19 Jan 1914, for detailed charges against the
Serbian administration of systematic persecution of the Muslims, destruction of
minarets, seizure of local revenues and so on. For the Carnegie Commission’s
conclusion that a systematic policy of murder and expulsion had been applied by
the Serbs in Kosovo, see Malcolm, Kosovo, pp.253-6. For a report of Montenegrin
brutality towards Albanians in Kosovo, one of very few such to appear in the
British media, see Durham’s letter to The Nation (no 17), 26 July 1913.
259 FO 371/2099/16241 (4 April 1914). Metohia referred to the western half of
the district now known as Kosovo (which referred originally just to the eastern
half). See Malcolm, Kosovo, pp.3-4.
260 FO 371/1748/55169 (16 Nov 1913).
261 FO 371/1748/57490; 55163; 56441 (Vansittart, 23 Dec 1913; 10 Dec 1913; 16

Dec 1913).
262 FO 371/2098/20793 (11 May 1914); Paget recalled an alleged massacre in
August 1912 in which, initial reports claimed, 3,000 Serbs had been killed by the
Turks: ‘on closer enquiry this number fell to 300, then to 30, finally to only 1
individual’ (FO 371/1748/28340, 6 June 1913).
263 FO 371/1748/57489; 53800 (24 Dec 1913; 30 Nov 1913).
264 FO 371/2099/4614 (4 Feb 1914).
265 FO 371/1748/55482; 55169 (10 Dec 1913; 9 Dec 1913); Greig’s ‘sense of

proportion’, Lancelot Oliphant concurred, was ‘very faulty’: FO 371/2098/66980

(4 Nov 1914).
266 FO 371/2099/16239 (Crowe, 16 Apr 1914). Even Crowe suggested laying

reports before Parliament at one stage but Grey rejected the idea (FO
371/1748/56441). Representations were made to Belgrade, but with little
expectation.
267 FO 371/2098/2438 (14 Jan 1914).
268 FO 371/2098/11574; 25498 (18 March 1914; 11 June 1914). Arthur Nicolson

noted his agreement.

269 Šepić, ‘The Question of Yugoslav Union in 1918’, p.35.
270 J.Headlam Morley, A Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference 1919 (A.Headlam

Morley et al (eds.); London, 1972), p.136. In fact officials did later assume the
treaty applied in Macedonia, but they did not wish to foster unrest by enforcing it;
on the contrary, forced Serbianisation was assumed, in the long run, to be the best
solution to the region’s instability: see P.B.Finney, ‘“An Evil for All Concerned”:
Great Britain and Minority Protection after 1919’, Journal of Contemporary History, 30,
3 (July 1995), 535-40.
271 Quoted in Banac, National Question, p.185.
 NOTES 263

272 Lederer, ‘Nationalism and the Yugoslavs’, p.401.

273 FO 371/826/29123 (Freeman, 6 Aug 1910). A little later Fairfax Cartwright,
British ambassador in Vienna, predicted similar jealousies would re-emerge in the
Croatian Diet. And whatever the brotherly feelings of race, he insisted, there was
‘no doubt of the strong ties of loyalty and veneration which bind all parties and
races to the person of their august Sovereign’ (FO 371/1046/855 (annual report
for 1910)).
274 FO 371/827/13171 (Howard, 13 Apr 1910; Orde, 19 Apr 1910).
275 FO 371/1297/13711 (Vice-consulate report, 29 Dec 1911; Clerk minute

(undated)). This view is supported by modern accounts emphasising the ‘multi-

centred’ nature of the pre-war Yugoslav movement: Pleterski, ‘Southern Slav
Question’, p.133.
276 FO 371/1472/17911 (Paget, 24 Apr 1912; Nicolson, undated c.29 Apr).
277 FO 371/1576/57517 (Oliphant, 22 Dec 1913).
278 Correspondence, i, 183.
279 FO 371/2041/14874 (general report on Montenegro for 1913, 10 March 1914).
280 FO 371/1575/7514 (Annual report for 1912).
281 FO 371/3135/116831 (June 1918). See numerous similar examples in previous

chapters.
282 Reported by Lord Derby in FO 371/3137/183200 (3 Nov 1918).
283 W.E.D.Allen, The Turks in Europe, pp.214-15.
284 Toynbee, Nationality and the War, p.220. In three years between Kumanovo and
the fall of Serbia, the American Balkanist Robert Kerner commented in 1918,
‘religious differences, political rivalries, linguistic quibbles and the petty foibles of
centuries appeared to be forgotten [...]. The Yugo-Slav movement had ended in
the formation of a nation which is neither a doctrine, nor a dream but a reality’
(R.J.Kerner, The Jugo-Slav Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), pp.81-95.
285 G.MacAdam, ‘Jugo-Slavia: The New Great State of the Balkans’, World’s Work,

Dec 1918, 325-30.

286 Supilo quoted in Stokes, ‘The Role of the Yugoslav Committee’, p.57.
287 Temperley, History of Serbia, p.3.
288 FO 371/3507/16797 (25 Jan 1919).
289 Correspondence, ‘Introduction’, i, 36. Of his wartime writing this is dubious. His
manifesto for the Yugoslav Committee proclaimed the Yugoslavs ‘a single nation,
alike by identity of language, by the unanswerable laws of geography and by
national consciousness’. But he did, particularly before the war and near its end,
emphasise cultural differences, and express the hope that union would prove a
symbiotic ‘diversitas in diversitatae’, as in the case of the Scottish and the English
since 1707. It seems testimony to his optimism, as well as his heritage, that he
chose Scotland as an analogy rather than the less auspicious, but more compelling,
Irish case.
290 M.B.Petrovich, ‘Russia’s Role in the Creation of the Yugoslav State, 1914-
1918’, in Djordjević (ed.), Creation of Yugoslavia, p.73; M.Gross, ‘Croatian National-
Integrational Ideologies from the End of Illyrism to the Creation of Yugoslavia’,
Austrian History Yearbook, XV-XVI (1979-80), 4-5 and passim.
264 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

291 ‘Idea of Yugoslav Unity’, p.4.

292 Lederer, ‘Nationalism and the Yugoslavs’, p.398. The argument of Ivo Banac’s
National Question also denies that Yugoslavia had in 1918 any sound basis in
popular feeling. See also Šepić, ‘The Question of Yugoslav Union in 1918’, p.33.
Valiani (The End of Austria-Hungary, p.311 note 15) cites the experience of Baron
von Musulin who, on returning to his native Croatia in 1913, found Croat
intellectuals had become pro-Serbian while the mass of the peasantry remained
firmly loyal to the Empire.
293 ‘Experience of Yugoslav Agitation’, pp.669-70. See also Kovač, La France,

p.108.
294 FO 371/3136/98080 (report on situation in Austria-Hungary no 3, Aug 1918).
295 On the unlikely claims of widespread hostility to the Monarchy made by Slav
exiles, see R.J.W.Evans, ‘The Habsburg Monarchy and the Coming of War’, in
R.J.W.Evans and H.P.von Strandmann (eds.), The Coming of the First World War
(Oxford, 1988), pp.43-53. As Kosta St.Pavlowitch notes, far from the Yugoslav
insurrection feared by Vienna, the initial period of the war was characterised by
smooth mobilisation and political stability: ‘The First World War and the
Unification of Yugoslavia’, in Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism, pp.29-30.
296 Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp.211, 229. Italian publicists, by contrast, urged
repeatedly that Yugoslavism was narrowly confined to the intelligentsia and
middle-class (often, of course, for self-interested reasons): Lederer, Yugoslavia at the
Paris Peace Conference, p.72.

Introduction to Part II
1 Steiner, Foreign Office, p.212.
2 Goldstein, Winning the Peace, p.10.
3 Steiner, Foreign Office, p.211.
4 Quoted in Goldstein, Winning the Peace, p.65. The increasing role played during

the war and after by experts from outside the government service is considered in
Dimitri Kitsikis, Le Rôle des experts à la Conference de la Paix de 1919 (Otttawa, 1972).
5 Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.105.
6 Harold Nicolson, for one, recalled that he ‘never moved a yard’ in Paris without

consulting ‘experts of the authority of Dr Seton-Watson’ (Peacemaking, pp.125-6).

7 Robert Evans, Great Britain and Central Europe, 1908-1948: A Study in Perceptions

(London, 2002), p.6.

8 ‘Caviar to the general’ was the borrowed maxim he applied to the last issue of his

journal New Europe in October 1921 (Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe,

p.410). It is of course true, as Dimitri Kitsikis points out, that the final decision on
all questions that mattered remained with the Council of Four (Le Rôle des Experts,
p.209). But this does not dispute the real influence which such experts exerted on
British – and French and American – attitudes and policies.
9 Temperley himself noted in his diary that ‘the basis of the whole British Peace

Conference appears to have been the papers – prepared under my supervision – in

MI2E which supplied the groundwork of solid information to reach our delegates’,
a verdict with which his biographer does not take issue (Fair, Harold Temperley,
pp.125-32).
 NOTES 265

10 MI2(e) had close links with the Foreign Office’s PID – a fact not surprising, as
Erik Goldstein points out, given the number of Oxford and Cambridge historians
employed in these departments (Winning the Peace, p.53). Laffan went on to
collaborate with Temperley on the official history of the conference, and to
become the Foreign Office Research Department’s historical expert on the Balkan
region.
11 Steed’s close relationship with Lord Northcliffe, in particular, allowed him

access to Lloyd George and his immediate entourage. When Northcliffe was made
director of propaganda, A.J.A. Morris notes, ‘it was Steed who defined the policy
followed’ (DNB entry on Steed).
12 E.H. Carr, From Napoleon to Stalin and Other Essays (London, 1980), p.166.
13 Goldstein, Winning the Peace, p.86.
14 Evans, Great Britain and Central Europe, p.8. Some of those within the Foreign

Office who were closest to these newer elements – men like Sir Eyre Crowe and
Sir James Headlam-Morley – were, as Evans points out, often outsiders
themselves. Nine of the ten founder members of PID had Oxford connections,
but this belied their varied backgrounds. See Alan Sharp, ‘Some Relevant
Historians – the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, 1918-
1920’, The Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol 34 (1989), 360-1.
15 Sharp, ‘Some Relevant Historians’, 363.
16 Goldstein, Winning the Peace, p.4; Maisel, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, p.2.

The decline of Foreign Office influence under Lloyd George is well treated in
Warman, The Foreign Office 1916-1918, which discusses the exclusion of the Foreign
Secretary from membership of the War Cabinet, the increasing influence of both
Cabinet and Prime Ministerial Secretariats, and Lloyd George’s ‘lack of respect for
traditional institutions […] and […] preference for private rather than official
advice’ (p.23; pp.5-42). Warman stresses, however, the significant victory over
Lord Beaverbrook’s rival Ministry of Information represented by the effective
transfer of the Intelligence Bureau to the Foreign Office as the ‘new’ PID (ibid.,
pp.58-65). Individuals like Seton-Watson and Wickham Steed were, in any case,
never confined to exerting their influence through Foreign Office channels, but
were able to make contact directly with the Prime Minister and his closest personal
adviser, Philip Kerr. (In general, indeed, the division of the PID between Paris and
London meant that its influence was often exercised ‘through the activities of its
individual members rather than as a corporate whole’ (M.Dockrill and Z.Steiner,
‘The Foreign Office at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919’, International History
Review, 2, vol.1 (Jan 1980), 55-96)).

Chapter Six
1 FO 371/3580/124889 (21 Aug 1919). The others were Serbians, one an official
who had been coordinating Serbian propaganda in Montenegro. De Salis had been
sent in mid-1919 to investigate the situation on behalf of the British Government.
2 Reports of Major Furlong, cited by de Salis.
3 Of the 168 (subsequently 176) elected, only nineteen had sat in the old Skupština.

More than half the members of the previous (technically undissolved) skupština
were abroad and unable to participate.
266 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

4 Proceedings were irregular. One witness, considered impartial by de Salis,

reported: ‘There was no voting; the resolutions were declared to be carried by
unanimity. Anyone who attempted to object was howled down […]. All this was
under the shadow of the bayonet’.
5 Quoted in Petrovich, History of Modern Serbia, ii, 682.
6 FO 371/3579/204823 (on behalf of the Foreign Secretary, 26 June 1919).
7 H.Nicolson, Peacemaking (London, 1934), pp.148-9.
8 FO 371/3149/77441 (Leeper, 4 May 1918).
9 FO 371/3582/208009 (H.Nicolson, 30 June 1920).
10 FO 371/3581/142846 (16 Oct 1919).
11 FO 371/2099/11576 (Crackanthorpe, annual report on Serbia for 1913).
12 FO 371/2041/10053 (Akers-Douglas, Cetinje, 6 Feb 1914). Figaro on 1 July

1914 claimed full union was to have been announced on 28 June before events in
Sarajevo, but de Salis was sceptical (FO 371/2409/313).
13 Correspondence, i, 174 (22 July 1914). See H.Heilbronner, ‘The Merger Attempts of

Serbia and Montenegro, 1913-1914’, Journal of Central European Affairs, XVIII (July
1958), 111-33, and M.Cornwall, ‘Between Two Wars: King Nikola of Montenegro
and the Great Powers, August 1913-August 1914’, The South Slav Journal, 9, 1-2
(1986), 60-71. For a general survey of pre-war Montenegrin relations with Austria
see J.D.Treadway, The Falcon and the Eagle: Montenegro and Austria-Hungary, 1908-
1914 (West Lafayette, Indiana, 1983).
14 FO 371/2409/313 (annual report for 1914).
15 In simple numerical terms – of soldiers and armaments – Montenegro was of

course ‘of little value’ to her Serbian ally (D.Stevenson, 1914-1918: The History of the
First World War (London, 2004), p.72).
16 FO 371/2711/57457 (de Salis report for 1915).
17 FO 371/2254/57113 (8 May 1915).
18 Britain did deliver food aid in October 1914, planned to transport Montenegrin

reservists from Canada and the US, and sponsored relief work by British
organisations. In March 1915 a loan of up to £10 million was agreed by Britain,
France and Russia, but dropped two months later, with no sign of intent on the
Austrian front, and in the light of flagrant Montenegrin provocation in Albania.
19 FO 371/2262/108054 (de Salis to Grey, 18 July 1915).
20 FO 371/2262/86999 (Grey to des Graz, 28 June 1915). Grey denounced an

action ‘not merely rash, but essentially stupid’. It would be difficult, Radović was
told, for Britain to have any further confidence in his government’s assurances.
21 FO 371/2262/112939 (de Salis to Grey, 14 Aug 1915), reporting the view of the

Serbian Acting Chief of Staff with which he evidently sympathised.

22 While Whitehall was totally disillusioned with the Montenegrin Government,

continued support in the media was accompanied by the claim that Italy had failed
to counter the Austrian fleet: see Sir Arthur Evans’ letter, cited in Woodhouse and
Woodhouse, Italy and the Jugoslavs, pp.96-7. French reports of Montenegrin
capitulation may well have been deliberately overstated: Fryer (The Destruction of
Serbia, p.108) talks of ‘determined opposition’.
23 FO 371/2262/108054 (de Salis to Grey, 18 July 1915).
24 Ibid (Harold Nicolson, 7 Aug 1915; Oliphant, 7 Aug 1915).
 NOTES 267

25 FO 371/2245/87024; FO 371/2262/94459 (Oliphant, 1 July 1915; 14 July

1915).
26 FO 371/2262/89700 (Oliphant, 6 July 1915).
27 FO 371/2262/96947 (Clerk, 18 July 1915).
28 FO 371/2268/108972 (Grey, 10 Aug 1915).
29 FO 371/2262/112939 (Harold Nicolson, 10 Aug 1915).
30 FO 371/2272/145517 (8 Oct 1915).
31 FO 371/2268/180724 (Lord Eustace Percy, 30 Nov 1915).
32 FO 371/2268/182057 (de Salis to Grey, 30 Nov 1915; Clerk, 2 Dec 1915). De

Salis was probably right, one official noted, but Britain was not on sure enough
ground. The perfidy of the French Minister in Cetinje would become a recurring
refrain.
33 FO 371/2608/7401 (13 Jan 1916). The fact that Montenegro, along with Serbia,

was now facing a concerted assault temporarily undermined the conviction that
she had reached a clandestine agreement.
34 FO 371/2274/180595 (Grey to de Salis, 25 Dec 1915).
35 On lack of fighting see, for example, Taylor to War Office, 29 Dec 1915 (FO

371/2608/1403); the Serbian General assured the Allies that, while Nicholas’
Government favoured Austria, his army would resist the invasion (FO
371/2608/3812 (de Salis to Grey, 6 Jan 1916)).
36 FO 371/2608/1403 (de Bunsen to the Secretary to the Army Council, 11 Jan

1916).
37 Ibid (Grey to Rendell Rodd, 6 Jan 1916).
38 Ibid (de Bunsen, 11 Jan 1916).
39 FO 371/2608/5969 (Percy, 11 Jan 1916).
40 FO 371/2262/105071 (Grey to Rodd, 31 July 1915). See below pp.162,169.
41 In Whitehall Nicholas’ ‘unedifying role’ entirely displaced his positive pre-war

image. ‘No one’, Percy remarked after Lovćen had fallen, ‘will say a good word for
King Nicholas’ (FO 3712608/14973).
42 FO 371/3154/47217 (24 March 1916).
43 FO 371/2804/180510; quoted in Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, i,

15.
44 FO 371/2608/44744 (Hugh O’Beirne, undated). A similar enquiry from Sir

J.Roper Parkington, head of the Montenegrin Relief Fund, met the sublimely non-
committal response that Montenegro’s rehabilitation was a question ‘which will
always engage the earnest consideration of His Majesty’s Government’ (FO
371/2624/166490).
45 FO 371/2890/154799 (question tabled by Mr King, 17 July 1917).
46 FO 371/2608/122906 (Durham letter 14 June 1916; Nicolson, 26 June).
47 FO 371/2881/34053 (13 Feb 1917). This sentiment was initialled by Cecil and

Hardinge.
48 FO 371/2617/97227 (Report from Alex Devine, acting Commissioner for the

Montenegrin Red Cross, dated 5 May 1916; Harold Nicolson, 23 May 1916).
49 FO 371/2871/184331 (14 Sept 1917); Italy was excluded from the ‘allies’ in this

context because of its presumed emotional engagement with the Petrović dynasty,
related by marriage to the Italian royal family.
50 Quoted in Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.191.
268 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

51 Sir George Grahame reported that mention of Montenegrin restoration in a

Lloyd George speech on war-aims had been ‘greatly appreciated by the King and
Government’: FO 371/3579/13170 (19 Jan 1918). That the New Europe camp had
more reason to feel reassured, over Montenegro at least, is shown by a document
drawn up in February summarising British obligations. While note was made of
promises to Serbia, in terms of restitution, reparation and territorial compensation,
and of those to the Yugoslav Committee, Montenegro was passed over in silence
(FO 371/4357/10).
52 ‘Under cover of the general war’, he alleged, ‘an underground war [is] going on

between Montenegro and Serbia’, in which the latter held the advantage, and
which would ‘no doubt come to a head and be settled one way or the other when
the general war ends’ (FO 371/3579/13170 (19 Jan 1918)).
53 FO 371/3154/47217 (Tyrrell, 28 March 1918).
54 FO 371/3157/88970 (21 May 1918).
55 FO 371/3159/187666 (Balfour, Nov 1918); FO 371/3149/130733 (Nicolson, 2

Aug 1918).
56 FO 371/3149/77441 (Grahame to Oliphant, 19 Apr 1918). The Committee was

headed by Andrija Radović, a former prisoner of King Nicholas as well as briefly,

in 1916, his Prime Minister.
57 FO 371/3154/58211 (8 Apr 1918).
58 FO 371/2884/104400 (Dept of Info weekly report, 23 May 1917). The phrase

‘tiny clique’ was substituted for the first draft’s much weaker ‘certain number’,
describing the strength of the ‘reactionary’ element.
59 FO 371/2890/141823 (IB Report, 6 July 1917).
60 Lord Derby had wondered, late in 1917, how much could be reliably gleaned

from Radović’s statements beyond his bitter hostility to King Nicholas (FO
371/2871/219996 (19 Nov 1917)).
61 FO 371/2889/162723 (20 Aug 1917).
62 FO 371/3149/77441 (3 May 1918).
63 FO 371/3149/123820 (Derby to Grey, 13 July 1918; Nicolson, 23 July). Derby

had telegraphed sympathising with Montenegrin complaints against the French

(who had ceased paying their share of the Anglo-French grant to the Petrović
Government and were obstructing communication between Neuilly and Paris).
Nicolson’s draft did also claim that Britain would not want to commit ‘until such
time as the wishes of the Montenegrin people can be ascertained’. But it is hard to
believe in a desire to gauge Montenegrin opinion when this was so clearly
prejudged.
64 Ibid (FO to Derby, 30 July 1918, emphasis added). Nicolson’s draft had read

‘[…] renders it most unlikely, if not undesirable that a separate Montenegrin Dynasty
will survive the settlement’ (emphasis added).
65 FO 371/3158/126841 (enclosed by Grahame, 18 July 1918; Leeper, 24 July).
66 FO 371/3149/130733 (2 Aug 1918).
67 The Encyclopaedia Britannica had noted in 1911 that some 77% of the

Montenegrin population was illiterate (‘Montenegro: Population and

Government’). Most Montenegrins educated or ‘progressive’ in a Western sense
had been educated abroad, largely in the USA, where the majority had remained as
an influential émigré group.
 NOTES 269

68 Where, likewise, in the opposition between a reactionary ‘clique’ and the

majority of younger opinion, were most middle-aged and elderly Montenegrins
considered to stand?!
69 FO 371/3157/85253 (14 May 1918).
70 FO 3149/175679 (Leeper, 14 Nov 1918).
71 FO 371/3149/205017 (Laurence Collier, 13 Dec 1918). There was, it was

argued, a desperate need for impartial observers not just in Montenegro but across
the collapsing Austrian Empire (FO 371/3149/191504).
72 FO 371/3149/131553 (undated, 29 July-6 Aug 1918).
73 FO 371/3149/191504 (Collier, 20 Nov 1918).
74 FO 371/3149/205017 (Paget, 16 Dec 1918).
75 FO 371/3138/198773 (Capt.H.Edwards, Cattaro, to Commodore of British

Adriatic Force, 21 Nov 1918). Sir Arthur Evans, a trusted witness and campaigner
for South Slav union, reported on 4 December that the assembly had ‘solemnly’
deposed the King and confirmed Montenegrin union with Serbia. ‘All this’, he
assured Derby, ‘was inevitable and the démentis being put forward by the ex-King
have no value whatever. For some considerable time it was certain that the
Montenegrins would never allow either King Nikola or any of his family to set
foot in the country again’ (FO 371/3138/202583).
76 FO 371/4356/62549 (16 Dec 1918). The ‘national committee’ was Radović’s

provisional government.
77 FO 371/3137/163724 (Leeper, 5 Oct 1918).
78 FO 371/3149/197334 (3 Dec 1918).
79 FO 371/3149/201905 (Leeper, 12 Dec 1918).
80 FO 371/3149/200446 (Grahame, 4 Dec 1918).
81 FO 371/3149/212313; 212705 (undated, c.25 Dec 1918).
82 FO 371/3570/13815 (General Phillips). On a point of pedantry this ‘ancient

Monarchy’ was eight years old; only in 1910 had Nicholas elevated himself to the
position of King.
83 FO 371/4356/199 (report undated, probably late December).
84 This development will be examined fully in the following chapter.
85 See, for example, F.Grumel-Jacquignon, La Yougoslavie dans la stratégie française de

l’Entre-deux-Guerres (1918-1935) (Berlin etc, 1999), p.35 and J.Adler, L’Union forcée –
la Croatie et la creation de l’état yougoslave, 1918 (Geneva, 1997), p.156.
86 FO 371/3149/212705 (Grahame, 24 Dec 1918).
87 FO 371/3149/213092 (Grahame, 27 Dec 1918).
88 FO 371/3149/212705.
89 Ibid. (Oliphant, 28 Dec 1918; Collier, 28 Dec 1918). On the rapid re-emergence

of antagonism and suspicion between Britain and France after the armistice, see
D.R.Watson, ‘The Making of the Treaty of Versailles’, in N.Waites (ed.), Troubled
Neighbours: Franco-British Relations in the Twentieth Century (London, 1971).
90 FO 371/3149/212705 (28 Dec 1918).
91 FO 371/3159/187666 (Oliphant, 14 Nov 1918; Balfour, undated).
92 ‘There seems little doubt’, Collier noted on 24 December, ‘that if King Nicholas

did return, he would be deposed; but if he likes to expose himself to that

humiliation and if care is taken to keep him to his promise to go if the people wish
him to, it is difficult to see how we can, in justice, avoid accepting this proposal
270 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

and pressing it on the French Govt’ (FO 371/3159/210792). A report from

Cattaro said the Montenegrins there would shoot Nicholas at once (FO
371/3149/209980 (21 Dec 1918)). British officials, who had often mused wistfully
that the old king’s demise might resolve the Montenegrin problem, could scarcely
have felt alarmed at such a possibility. (Union on Nicholas’ death, Graham had
observed in July, would be ‘the best consummation’. ‘Yes’, agreed a colleague, ‘but
when will he die?’ (FO 371/3149/131553)).
93 FO 371/3137/190845 (Derby to Balfour, 16 Nov 1918).
94 Rather more so: while Montenegro had sued for peace under Serbian pressure,

Romania had not only capitulated but had also accepted as reward a province of
her Russian ally. She was granted two delegates at the Conference.
95 FO 371/3159/189336 (16 Nov 1918).
96 In fact Montenegro was allocated a seat but it remained empty, Nicholas and

Radović’s rival claims unresolved. The situation as regards Montenegrin

representation, Nicolson remarked, was ‘not a situation at all, but merely a haze’. It
was eventually dropped on the assumption that ‘as far as external questions are
concerned […] the Serbian Representatives […] may be trusted to defend
Montenegrin interests’: FO 371/3590/31514 (22 Feb 1919).
97 FO 371/4355/68. The document was drafted by Paget, Nicolson and Leeper

and printed as a cabinet paper on 13 Dec 1918 (CAB 29/2/P51).

98 FO 371/3137/190845 (16 Nov 1918). Nicholas’ confederal proposal, by which

both dynasties would be retained in a loose Yugoslav grouping, was,

understandably, dismissed as quite unfeasible.
99 ‘Montenegro’, an official statement conveyed to Whitehall in late December had

declared, ‘is reunited to Serbia under the Karadjordjević dynasty and, ipso facto, thus
enters the Kingdom of Serbians, Croatians and Slovenes’ (FO 371/3579/2884
(des Graz, 26 Dec 1918)).
100 FO 371/3149/212705 (Collier, 28 Dec 1918, emphasis added).
101 Ibid (28 Dec 1918).
102 FO 371/3590/31514 (22 Feb 1919).
103 Banac, National Question, pp 285-7. Autonomists became known as ‘Greens’,

Radovićists as ‘Whites’, after the colour of their candidate lists for the November
‘election’, a colour symbolism which endures to this day.
104 FO 371/3565/1057 (Rodd, Rome, 1 Jan 1919; Collier, 2 Jan).
105 FO 371/3580/16689.
106 FO 371/3579/5503 (9 Jan 1919).
107 FO 371/3570/13815 (Phillips to Gribbon, 11 Jan 1919).
108 FO 371/3579/5503 (George Warner, 10 Jan 1919).
109 FO 371/3579/5503.
110 FO 371/3580/16689.
111 FO 371/3579/5503 (Warner, 10 Jan 1919).
112 FO 371/3565/9622 (Grahame, 14 Jan 1919); FO 371/3565/3581 (Derby, 5 Jan

1919). The final communication is in FO 371/3578/4380. It stated simply that the

Allied Governments could not, prior to the peace conference, recognise such a
political transformation as Serb-Croat-Slovene unification.
113 FO 371/3565/6331 (Derby, 12 Jan 1919).
114 Ibid.
 NOTES 271

115 FO 371/3580/16689.
116 FO 371/3565/9622 (letter dated 25 Dec 1918, forwarded to London 14 Jan).
117 FO 371/3579/5503.
118 FO 371/3565/24822 (13 Jan 1919).
119 FO 371/3579/11210 (12 Jan 1919).
120 FO 371/3579/7957 (14 Jan 1919). Thwaites was the Director of Military

Intelligence (DMI).
121 FO 371/3565/6325. FO files were routinely headed ‘Reunion of Montenegro

with Serbia’, attaching a sense of inevitability to the process – an unconscious

acceptance of the Serbian nationalist presentation.
122 FO 371/3579/13215. The majority of the country, the French General Venel

had similarly reported, was for Yugoslavia but did not recognise annexation to
Serbia (FO 371/3579/13170).
123 FO 371/3580/16689 (Temperley); FO 371/3570/13815 (Brodie, 9 Jan 1919).

In one district, General Bridges reported on 1 February, about eighty men from
some four thousand had apparently voted, and there existed ‘real dissatisfaction’
about how the election’s conduct (FO 371/3580/26859).
124 FO 371/3590/31514 (22 Feb 1919).
125 FO 371/3580/17343 (Warner, 1 Feb 1919).
126 FO 371/3579/13170 (undated, c.24 Jan 1919).
127 FO 371/3580/35124 (Plunkett, Belgrade, 12 Feb 1919; Warner, 5 March 1919);

FO 371/3565/24822 (Plunkett, 2 Feb 1919). Plunkett suspected Temperley’s

advice was too concerned with ethnographical and historical factors; in our own
interest, he urged, ‘we should back the union for all we are worth’ (FO
371/3565/50990).
128 FO 371/3565/48066 (Warner, 27 March 1919).
129 FO 371/3580/21524.
130 FO 371/3149/213092.
131 FO 371/3579/3254 (Warner, 7 Jan 1919); on 9 January the French General

Franchet D’Esperey had cabled that the situation in Cetinje was not serious
enough to necessitate the despatch of troops.
132 FO 371/3580/26859 (1 Feb 1919).
133 FO 371/3579/13170.
134 On Wilson’s sympathy, see S.Bonsal, Suitors and Suppliants: The Little Nations at

Versailles (New York, 1946), pp.85-6 (based on diaries of Colonel Bonsal, a

member of the US conference delegation).
135 FO 371/3579/5503 (27 Jan 1919).
136 FO 371/3565/18001 (1 Feb 1919); FO 371/3565/22913 (2 Feb 1919).
137 FO 371/3565/14476 (31 Jan 1919).
138 ‘From what I hear from Americans in Paris’, Grahame warned, ‘the United

States Government are more and more chary of new commitments in Europe, as
public opinion in America has in no way been converted to the principle of active
intervention in European affairs’ (FO 371/3580/27399 (16 Feb 1919)).
139 FO 371/3579/16417 (forwarded 29 Jan). The French were quick to second this

proposal.
140 Ibid (Warner, 30 Jan 1919; Graham, 31 Jan; Curzon 31 Jan).
141 FO 371/3580/21558 (7 Feb).
272 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

142 FO 371/3580/27399 (16 Feb).

143 FO 371/3580/24283 (DMI, 12 Feb).
144 FO 371/3590/32139 (Warner, 27 Feb 1919).
145 Having already stated that Britain did not recognise the Podgorica decisions,

the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Cecil Harmsworth assured

Parliament on 13 February that the best method of gauging Montenegrins’ true
wishes was ‘engaging the attention of the Allied and Associated Powers’ (The Times,
29 Apr 1919).
146 FO 371/3580/21715 (6 Feb 1919).
147 FO 371/3580/33898 (4 March 1919). Quite how this course of action would

protect Montenegro from Serbian coercion was left unclear.

148 FO 371/3580/42885 (Warner, 19 March 1919).
149 FO 371/3580/55391.
150 FO 371/3580/64368 (de Graz, 23 Apr 1919; Warner, 26 Apr).
151 FO 371/3580/60289 (Warner, 18 Apr 1919).
152 FO 371/3580/71011 (de Salis, Scutari, 1 May 1919).
153 Ibid.
154 FO 371/3580/73717 (14 May 1919).
155 The Americans, Grahame asserted, had ‘recognised the new triple title of the

King of Serbia but that does not mean that they recognise the annexation of
Montenegro to Serbia’. The French Government had certainly gone too far,
Warner agreed (FO 371/3580/61893 (Grahame to Graham, 19 Apr 1919; Warner,
24 Apr)).
156 FO 371/3578/85372 (Hansard, 5 June 1919).
157 Bonsal, Suitors and Suppliants, p.93.
158 FO 371/3580/71011 (Howard-Smith, 10 May 1919; Graham, 10 May).
159 FO 371/3580/78065 (21 May 1919).
160 FO 371/3580/81372 (27 May 1919).
161 FO 371/3580/92881 (26 June 1919).
162 FO 371/3580/86030 (Phillips to DMI, 24 May 1919). The pejorative term

‘yoke’, commonly attached to the Ottoman regime, suggests rising contempt for
Serbian administration. The chief of the British Food Mission reported that
scarcity in Montenegro was being exacerbated by Serbian obstruction and by the
distribution of supplies on political lines. In Nikšić, he said, few supported the
Serbophil party while outspoken opponents were imprisoned in deplorable
conditions (FO 371/3571/101649 (20 June 1919)).
163 FO 371/3580/93328 (26 June 1919).
164 FO 371/3580/92881 (24 June 1919).
165 FO 371/3580/124889 (21 Aug 1919).
166 For instance in his pamphlet ‘the Question of Montenegro’, written for the

Paris conference. ‘Serb people’ of course included the Montenegrins.

167 FO 371/3580/111557 (Spicer, 4 Aug 1919).
168 FO 371/3580/124889 (Howard-Smith, 6 Sept 1919; Oliphant, 6 Sept).
169 FO 371/3581/131285 (Adam, 19 Sept 1919).
170 The schoolmaster Alex Devine was a persistent thorn in the Government’s

side. Though his views were initially received with some sympathy, his increasingly
pro-Nicholas propaganda soon grated, and he was dismissed in Whitehall as an
 NOTES 273

‘agent […] probably in the pay of King Nicholas’ (FO 371/3580/95252 (Balfour
to Curzon, 27 June 1919)). He regurgitated his views relentlessly, but they may be
found in his books Montenegro in History, Politics and War (London, 1918) and Off the
Map – the Suppression of Montenegro: the Tragedy of a Small Nation.
171 FO 371/3578/85372 (McNeill, Hansard, 5 June 1919).
172 FO 371/3581/131045 (Howard-Smith, 22 Sept 1919; FO to Crowe, 29 Sept).

The Peace Delegation must ‘take up this matter vigorously at once’ (ibid., 1 Oct
1919).
173 FO 371/3590/119478 (Minutes undated, 3 Oct or soon after).
174 FO 371/3581/142846 (16 Oct 1919).
175 Ibid. On the general constitutional question in Yugoslavia at this point see

below ch.8.
176 FO 371/3581/147825 (Adam, 29 Oct 1919). Although a draft was produced to

lay before Parliament, the report was not, in the end, presented.
177 FO 371/3581/142846 (20 Oct 1919).
178 FO 371/3581/151200 (Hansard, 10 Nov 1919).
179 FO 371/3576/150648 (8 Nov 1919).
180 Ibid (12 Nov 1919).
181 FO 371/3576/123170 (Victor Wellesley to Treasury, 5 Sept 1919).
182 Since the discontinuance of the subsidy was, Spicer argued, ‘undoubtedly

creating the impression in South Eastern Europe that His Majesty’s Govt have a
considered policy of prejudice against the former institutions of the Montenegrin
people, Lord Curzon is at a loss to understand the reluctance of Their Lordships
to re-consider their decision’ (FO 371/3576/171709 (19 Jan 1920)).
183 Ibid [171709]. On the strained relations between Foreign Office and Treasury

in this period, see Ephraim Maisel, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1919-1926
(Brighton, 1994), pp.14-17.
184 FO 371/3576/147429 (7 Nov 1919).
185 FO 371/3576/150648 (13 Nov 1919).
186 FO 371/3581/160278 (Howard-Smith, 10 Dec 1919); FO 371/3590/157197

(c.3 Dec 1919).

187 FO 371/3576/152107 (17 Nov 1919).
188 FO 371/3590/157197 (Adam, 3 Dec 1919; Hardinge, undated).
189 FO 371/3581/164456 (19 Dec 1919).
190 FO 371/3581/168350 (7 Jan 1920).
191 FO 371/3582/194950.
192 FO 371/3582/197235 (Hansard, 6 May 1920).
193 FO 371/3582/197235 (Adam, 6 May 1920). In July the Prime Minister insisted

that Montenegro could not be separated from a general Adriatic settlement (FO
371/4660/2132 (Hansard, 22 July 1920)).
194 FO 371/4703/4846 (27 Aug 1920). The point is illustrated by a seemingly

trivial debate the previous August over whether Whitehall should continue
forwarding mail to Nicholas as King of Montenegro. Pending the de Salis report,
Howard-Smith had concluded, it should ‘consider King Nikita as sovereign of
Montenegro, and thus should send the letters’. Since that report, far from
approving the Serbian occupation or the Podgorica assembly, had cast further
274 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

doubt on their legitimacy, it had hardly altered the situation (FO 371/3597/69664,
10 Aug 1919).
195 FO 371/3582/205949 (23 June 1920).
196 FO 371/3582/208009 (30 June 1920).
197 See Nicolson, Peacemaking, pp.148-52.
198 FO 371/4660/4115 (14 Aug 1920). Nicolson admitted having been greatly

influenced in Paris by the impressive personage of Sir Eyre Crowe, and the latter’s
influence is manifest here (Peacemaking, pp.210-11).
199 FO 371/4660/4115 (Curzon to Lord Gladstone, 17 Aug 1920). Gladstone had

assumed his forbear’s interest in Montenegro.

200 FO 371/4668/4789 (16 Aug 1920).
201 FO 371/4668/7029 (25 Sept 1920). Sir Alban Young, he noted, could provide

first-hand information.
202 FO 371/4695/1489 (16 July 1920).
203 FO 371/4668/7029 (18 Sept 1920).
204 FO 371/4669/9142 (16 Oct 1920); FO 371/4688/4785 (21 Aug 1920).
205 FO 371/4668/4789 (c.16 Aug 1920). As ex-viceroy of India Hardinge had had

ample chance to study the habits and predilections of the ‘oriental’!

206 FO 371/4668/7029 (25 Sept 1920).
207 FO 371/4668/4789 (7 Sept 1920).
208 FO 371/4668/7029 (Curzon to Young, 28 Sept 1920; Curzon internal minute,

26 Sept 1920).
209 FO 371/4661/11368 (Hansard, 10 Nov 1920).
210 D.Šepić, ‘Question of Yugoslav Union’, p.35. Croats and Slovenes, with no

desire to antagonise Belgrade over this issue, were happy to accept.

211 In fact he provided a preliminary report on 12 October and another on 24

November: FO 371/4669/9142; FO 371/4661/12217.

212 Unlike diehard Yugoslav enthusiasts like Leeper, Temperley did admit the

unrepresentative nature of ‘intellectual’ opinion: it was difficult, he noted,

especially for a foreigner, ‘to gauge the opinions of a people of conservative
instincts as distinguished from its intellectual leaders’.
213 Macmillan’s claim (Peacemakers, p.127) that Italy had been ‘quite content to see

Montenegro swallowed up by Serbia, hoping that the mouthful would be

particularly indigestible’ is misleading. Italian opposition to a seat for Montenegro
was based on the assumption that it would be filled by Radović, reinforcing the
Yugoslavs. Italy continued to support pro-Nicholas activists while there seemed
hope of undermining the Yugoslav state.
214 FO 371/4670/13829 (30 Nov 1920).
215 FO 371/4662/13982; 14090 (Hansard: Harmsworth, 14 Dec 1920; Lord

Sandhurst, 15 Dec).
216 FO 371/4669/12824 (Temperley, 3 Dec 1920). At least, he noted, the

Communist success confirmed Bryce’s belief in the freedom of the elections (FO
371/4662/12576, quoted by Adam, 30 Nov 1920).
217 FO 371/4662/13982 (10 Dec 1920).
218 FO 371/4670/13311 (3 Dec 1920); FO 371/4670/13890 (11 Dec 1920).
219 FO 371/4670/13815 (Adam, 14 Dec 1920).
220 FO 371/4670/14517 (report dated 16 Dec 1920).
 NOTES 275

221 While this level did compare well with other regions, Bryce failed to note that in
core areas of Old Montenegro, the heartland of Green insurgency, the rate was
much higher – 50.38% among the Cetinje tribe, 48.18% among the Ćeklići and
Bjelice. According to Banac, ‘in two out of three electoral districts of Old
Montenegro more than half of the eligible voters did not participate in the
balloting’ (National Question, pp.391, 287). Average voter abstention by region
ranged from 26.48% in Slovenia to 43.87% in Dalmatia. Banac’s statement that
‘electoral absenteeism in Montenegro was exceptionally high’ thus seems
unwarranted for Montenegro as a whole. Bryce’s attribution of many abstentions
to logistical difficulties, inability to appreciate subtle party differences, and a tribal
culture in which a family member spoke for the extended unit, seems plausible.
222 In Serbia proper the KPJ polled 15.49% of the vote, much less than half the

Montenegrin level. Even in the unsettled region of Macedonia the Communists

polled only 27.16%: see tables of voting figures, ibid., pp.388-9. This Macedonian
figure includes the neighbouring (and also unsettled) regions of Kosovo, Metohia
and Sandžak.
223 Djilas, The Contested Country, p.63. See also Banac, National Question, p.330.
224 Banac, National Question, p.391.
225 FO 371/4670/14517 (Adam, 24 Dec 1920; Nicolson, 24 Dec).
226 FO 371/4680/5243 (Nicolson, record of conversation with Trumbić, 2 Sept

1920).
227 FO 371/4670/14517 (26 Dec 1920).
228 Temperley report: HoC: Cmd 1123 1921 vol.xliii; Bryce report: HoC: Cmd

1124 1921 vol.xliii. The general proceedings of this Assembly, and British
observations thereof, are dealt with in ch.9.
229 FO 371/6200/3221 (14 Feb 1920).
230 FO 371/6200/3692 (22 Feb 1920).
231 FO 371/4662/13229 (6 Dec 1920).
232 FO 371/4670/13167 (7 Dec 1920).
233 Montenegro had been granted 10 deputies instead of the 14-15 to which her

pre-war population entitled her, Nicolson had noted, but as so small a proportion
of the whole this made ‘little real difference’ (FO 371/4668/7490, 30 Sept 1920).
The consequences of this insight for Montenegrin self-determination were not
developed.
234 FO 371/4669/12186 (conversation with M.Cambon, 24 Nov 1920). Emphasis

added.
235 FO 371/4662/12481 (Hansard, 25 Nov 1920; the term ‘confederation’ was

presumably used loosely here). It had, as officials had expressed it in August,

‘always been an axiom of the Balkan settlement that when this federation was once
achieved Montenegro would take her place with Croatia and the Slovenes within
the body of the Union’ (FO 371/4697/4545 (unsent letter to Grahame, c.20 Aug
1920)).
236 FO 371/4662/14502 (18 Dec 1920).
237 Ibid (24 Dec 1920). On misguided British assumptions about the nature of the

constitutional settlement, see below ch.8.

238 FO 371/6194/6414.
239 FO 371/6194/22132 (24 Nov 1921).
276 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

240 FO 371/6194/8448 (26 Apr 1921).

241 FO 371/6193/6413 (Temperley, 1 Apr 1921).
242 ‘We get very little from Belgrade about affairs in Montenegro’, one official

complained in December 1922 (FO 371/7681/16756).

243 FO 371/7682/5643 (11 Apr 1922).
244 Young talked of ‘a spread of the Radić poison’ (FO 371/7675/2481: 16 Feb

1922); see also the memorandum prepared for the Duke of York’s visit to
Yugoslavia (FO 371/7679/8016: June 1922).
245 FO 371/7681/10484 (Miles Lampson, 26 July 1922).
246 FO 371/7681/16356 (Hansard, 29 Nov 1922; Troutbeck minute, 28 Nov

1922). Ironically, the junior minister who told Parliament that Montenegro was an
integral part of the SCS Kingdom and that no opinion could be expressed as to the
disposition of troops within that State, was Ronald McNeill, who for several years
had denounced British policy on Montenegro, and admitted privately that his
views were unchanged.
247 Ibid.
248 See Young’s report of increasing anger at the sacrifice of Yugoslav interests to

Western ‘imperialistic designs’ (FO 371/4668/2980: 4 Aug 1920).

249 FO 371/4689/13542 (12 Dec 1920).
250 FO 371/4669/9420 (Curzon to Young, 29 Oct 1920).
251 FO 371/3581/160278 (Howard-Smith, 10 Dec 1919).
252 Peacemaking, pp.151-2.

Chapter Seven
1 FO 371/2261/83042 (24 June 1915).
2 Quoted in Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, pp.101-2. He specified

explicitly the inclusion of Croatia and Dalmatia as well as Bosnia.

3 On the Yugoslav Committee see G.Stokes, ‘The Role of the Yugoslav

Committee in the Formation of Yugoslavia’, in Djordjević (ed.), Creation of

Yugoslavia, pp.51-71.
4 FO 371/2241/4404. It was circulated to King and Cabinet: CAB 37/123.
5 FO 371/2257/48283 (22 April 1915).
6 FO 371/2258/76671 (12 May 1915). This state, the manifesto declared, would

bear the name ‘Yugoslavia’, ‘Serbia’ ceasing to exist as the name of a European
state.
7 Seton-Watson, Correspondence, i, 251 (29 Oct 1915). Many propagandistic works,

like Bogumil Vošnjak’s Bulwark against Germany, laboured this point.

8 Ibid., i, 213-14 (26 April 1915). Yugoslavia, the Serbian Society similarly

impressed on Lloyd George in June 1917, would be ‘the strongest barrier against
the Prusso-Austrian design of mastery over the Near and Middle East’ (ibid., 298-
300; see also ibid., 265).
9 Ibid., i, 239 (17 Sept 1915). Such arguments only increased as the war went on.

See Taylor, Future of the Southern Slavs, pp.56-7 and ch.10. By July 1918 Steed was
claiming that unless independent Polish, Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states were
created, ‘London, Paris, Milan and Rome would not be habitable a generation
hence’ (speech to the inauguration meeting of the Serbian (Yugo-Slav) National
War Aims Committee, The Times, 26 July 1918).
 NOTES 277

10 FO 371/2265/112839 (Drummond, 14 Aug 1915).

11 FO 371/599/14552 (19 April 1909).
12 Hanak, ‘The Government, The Foreign Office and Austria-Hungary’, 173-4;

May, ‘R.W.Seton-Watson’, 42.

13 FO 371/2862/97435 (11 May 1917). French thinking – astutely encouraged by

Pašić – was on precisely these lines: an independent or federal Croatia must fall
under German influence, and only a Yugoslav state firmly centralised in Belgrade
could serve as an effective bulwark. (Grumel-Jacquignon, La Yougoslavie, pp.40-1
and passim).
14 FO 371/2257/54094 (Letter counter-signed by Pašić and addressed to Jovan

Cvijić in Britain, 1 May 1915; the conversation with Grey took place on 11
January).
15 FO 371/2258/90173 (2 July 1915).
16 FO 371/2241/4404 (13 Jan 1915).
17 For a detailed treatment of this diplomacy, see K.Robbins, ‘British Diplomacy

and Bulgaria 1914-1915’, Slavonic and East European Review, 117 (Oct 1971), 560-85.
18 FO 371/2261/83042 (24 June 1915).
19 Alexander had told Seton-Watson he would cede Bosnia before Macedonia

(Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.113); similarly for a nationalist like

Bošković, Serbian Minister in London, the gains of 1912-13 were Serbia’s proudest
achievement, sacred, non-negotiable, and independent of her claims in the west
(ibid., p.132). French politicians were more informed about (as well as in sympathy
with) Serb nationalism on this point. See É.Haumant, La Formation de la Yougoslavie
(Paris, 1930), pp.683-4, which cites Clemenceau’s argument that offering
Macedonia to Bulgaria would be a betrayal of the Serbs.
20 FO 371/2268/116675 (Percy, Aug 1915).
21 FO 371/2263/105071 (Grey to Rodd, 31 July 1915).
22 FO 371/2241/4404 (13 Jan 1915).
23 FO 371/2257/53757.
24 FO 371/2241/4404 (Arthur Nicolson, 15 Jan 1915).
25 Seton-Watson suspected that Italian ‘efforts to emphasise the difference

between Serb and Croat’ had been responsible for ‘[impressing] on the mind of Sir
E[dward] G[rey] the fact that the Croats are an element in the situation which
deserves to be reckoned with’ (Correspondence, i, 225-6).
26 FO 371/2265/108843 (9 Aug 1915); FO 371/2265/112839 (Eric Drummond,

14 Aug 1915); FO 371/2265/112838 (15 Aug 1915).

27 FO 371/2257/53757 (undated); FO 371/2263/105071 (31 July 1915). In private

Britain and Russia promised Pašić not to object if Croatia desired union with
Serbia at the end of the war. Pašić had requested Slovene territories too, but these
were little considered by British analysts, who were reluctant to commit. While
Sazonov supported the request, Britain and France demurred (Seton-Watsons,
Making of a New Europe, p.139).
28 Sir Arthur Nicolson had advised against promising to facilitate Serbo-Croatian

unity as being unfair to Italy (FO 371/2265/112839 (recorded by Percy, 14 Aug

1915)). The idea that Slavonia’s future too be ‘subject to wishes of inhabitants’ was
dropped in view of the need to match Russian promises to Serbia (FO
371/2265/112838).
278 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

29 FO 371/2507/34053; 28275 (23 March 1915).

30 In fact Russia obliged Italy to drop its claim to Fiume and reduce its claims in
Dalmatia. It did so, however, on economic and strategic grounds. Her claim to the
Straits and Constantinople precluded any appeal to ethnicity.
31 Nicolson, Peacemaking, pp.137-8.
32 See, for example, ibid, pp.159-161. The terms were, Nicolson declared, ‘wholly

indefensible’.
33 ‘Deserve to be hanged’ comment reported by Steed, 29 April 1915 (cited in

Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.130 note 26).

34 FO 371/2376/37639 (31 March 1915).
35 FO 371/2241/41098 (9 Apr 1915). All aspirations could never be realised, Sir

Arthur Nicolson agreed.

36 Record by Seton-Watson of conversation with Grey, 4 May 1915 (Seton-

Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.130).

37 FO 371/2257/53757 (draft telegram Grey to des Graz, May 1915).
38 FO 371/2261/83042 (Percy, 24 June 1915).
39 FO 371/2258/90173 (27 June 1915).
40 FO 371/2265/109491 (10 Aug 1915).
41 FO 371/2266/122256 (31 Aug 1915).
42 FO 371/2281/200194 (29 Dec 1915). Grey signified his approval.
43 Even for a tireless campaigner like Seton-Watson, 1916 saw a marked decline in

correspondence on the subject. His collected correspondence contains less than

half the number of items for 1916 than for 1915.
44 FO 371/2615/58989 (30 March 1916).
45 Since the condition attached to the guarantee to Serbia of Austro-Hungarian

territories (cession to Bulgaria of the ‘uncontested zone’) was unfulfilled, it was

deemed ‘not contractually valid’, though it should be borne in mind, a later memo
on British obligations noted, along with Grey’s verbal assurance in May 1915 that
Allied victory would secure for Serbia Bosnia, wide access to the Adriatic ‘to say
nothing of what Montenegro and Croatia would have’ (FO 371/4358/10 (Feb
1918)). While Grey had told Supilo post-war Croatia should decide her own fate,
this too was considered non-binding.
46 In New Europe he excoriated Grey, urging a more professional approach and

clear war aims. When Balfour took over the Foreign Office, Seton-Watson
advocated dismembering Austria-Hungary, urging the Government to deny it had
‘some dark purpose’ of preserving it (‘The Failure of Sir Edward Grey’ (1916);
‘Wanted – A Foreign Policy’ (1917), reproduced in R.Seton-Watson, Europe in the
Melting Pot (London, 1919), pp.86-120 and 121-36). Seton-Watson’s highly critical
view of the performance of Grey and the Foreign Office at this stage was echoed
more privately by his friend Harold Temperley, working for the War Office’s
Military Intelligence Department. Jibes at the Foreign Office’s general ignorance of
Balkan affairs were ‘a constant theme in his diaries’ (Fair, Harold Temperley, p.119).
47 Rodd, quoted in Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.181. The problem, he

later lamented, was that Italians wrongly assumed Seton-Watson, and Steed with
his position at The Times, strongly influenced British policy (FO 371/2627/231670,
10 Nov 1916).
48 FO 371/2804/180510.
 NOTES 279

49 Hanak, ‘The Government, the Foreign Office and Austria-Hungary’, pp.168-70,

174; the Paget-Tyrell memo, it is pointed out in C.A.Macartney and A.W.Palmer,
Independent Eastern Europe: A History (New York, 1966), p.64, was not even
discussed in Cabinet until the following year. And other memoranda, such as that
by the Chief of the Imperial Staff, General Robertson, were much more
conservative (Goldstein, Winning the Peace, pp.10-12).
50 Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.191.
51 On the impact of the Russian Revolution, see A.J.Mayer, Political Origins of the

New Diplomacy 1917-1918 (New Haven, 1959), p.163ff. The collapse of Russian
power, some argued, ended the ‘balance of power’ argument for Austria’s
existence: ‘so far from restoring a balance against Germany, an Austrian federation
under German leadership would merely increase the difficulties caused by the
collapse of Russia’ (FO 371/3136/177223, Nicolson and Namier minute, 7 Nov
1918).
52 V.Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914-1918 (Oxford, 1971),

p.119.
53 Seton-Watson, ‘Special Memorandum on the Question of a Separate Peace with

Austria’, Correspondence, i, 292-4. Cecil and Balfour denied that the Allied reply
pledged Britain to the form liberation of the subject nationalities would take
(Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.222 ). Eric Drummond’s February 1917
memo had acknowledged Paget and Tyrrell’s formula as ideally desirable, but
proposed instead a federal Monarchy with Czech and Yugoslav units as well as
German and Hungarian. It was keenly endorsed by Hardinge and Cecil (Rothwell,
British War Aims, p.81).
54 FO 371/2890/140532 (16 July 1917).
55 G.Bátonyi, Britain and Central Europe, 1918-1933 (Oxford, 1999), p.11.
56 Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, pp.143, 248-50.
57 Memo on general situation in Austria, 23 June 1917, quoted in Seton-Watsons,

Making of a New Europe, pp.211-12.

58 Though many Foreign Office officials were also kept largely in the dark about

this.
59 Quoted in Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, p.211.
60 Since 1915 Pašić had been wary of the Yugoslav Committee and of enhancing

its independent status. But with the collapse of his Russian ally, American
intervention, and pressure from domestic opponents, he felt compelled to propose
a conference to discuss common aims. (Trumbić, in turn, was motivated to regain
the initiative after the ‘May declaration’ had suggested that Habsburg South Slavs,
contrary to Committee claims, could speak for themselves). The Corfu Agreement
was announced on 20 July, declaring that a united state would be known as ‘the
Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, and would guarantee equality to the
three faiths, two alphabets and three ‘national designations’. The state structure
was reserved for decision by a Constituent Assembly.
61 FO 371/2889/119339 (c.16 June 1917). Rodd reported Italian scepticism at

Trumbić’s claim to speak for all Croatians and Slovenes (FO 371/2889/165368
(13 Aug 1917)).
280 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

62 FO 371/2889/180815 (15 Sept 1917). He thus downplayed the change of

Serbian Government during the negotiations as a result of the Salonica
controversy (see p.284 note 152 below).
63 FO 371/2889/235396.
64 FO 371/4353/55.
65 FO 371/4355/68: Paget, Leeper, Nicolson, ‘South Eastern Europe and the

Balkans’. We have seen how factors of race and language seemed, during the war,
to outweigh those of history and tradition: see above chs.1 and 2.
66 FO 371/4354/64. Leeper and Zimmern, ‘The Principle of Self-Determination

and its application to the Baltic Provinces’.

67 Rothwell, British War Aims, pp.145-53. Rothwell calls this speech, ‘the most

important single British statement on war aims in the Great War’. The break-up of
Austria-Hungary, Lloyd George had affirmed, was ‘no part of our war aims’
(M.Cornwall, ‘Disintegration and Defeat: The Austro-Hungarian Revolution’, in
Cornwall (ed.), The Last Years of Austria-Hungary, p.177; D.Stevenson, The First
World War and International Politics (Oxford, 1988), p.193).
68 FO 371/3149/6573 (9 Jan 1918).
69 FO 371/3149/16711 (28 Jan 1918); FO 371/3149/16712 (28 Jan 1918). If it

was an unrealisable aim, Seton-Watson responded, officials should realise that the
alternative was the absorption of Serbia in Central Europe. She could no longer
stand alone; ‘in one form or other unity must come’ (15 Feb 1918).
70 FO 371/4362/60 (Monitored by the Uncommon Language Dept, 12 May 1918;

18 March 1918).
71 Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, pp.259-60. For a first-hand account of

this debate, and of the propaganda war in general, see Sir C.Stuart, Secrets of Crewe
House: The Story of a Famous Campaign (London etc, 1920), pp.20-49. See also
M.Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: the Battle for Hearts and Minds
(Basingstoke; London, 2000), pp.174-85.
72 FO 371/3135/89828 (FO to Derby, 21 May 1918). Hardinge likewise wrote to

Rumbold: ‘I fear all our attempts to detach Austria have come to nought […]. We
now face the prospect of fighting it out, while doing all we can to encourage the
subject races to revolt’ (Hardinge papers, cited in Seton-Watsons, Making of a New
Europe, p.288 fn 16).
73 CAB 28/4, IC 66. Sonnino, Balfour told Steed and Northcliffe, had rejected his

original draft ‘which would […] have satisfied the strongest advocate of Yugo-Slav
aspirations’ (FO 800/329 (8 June 1918)).
74 FO 371/4358/212 (July).
75 CAB 23/42, IWC 30. Stevenson, First World War and International Politics, p.220.
76 Seton-Watson’s New Europe articles, such as ‘Twilight in Austria’ on 8 August,

reflected this view.

77 FO 371/4356/159 (18 Dec 1918).
78 EPD memo for an Inter-Allied Propaganda Conference, Aug 1918:

Correspondence, i, 329-31.
79 Historians have often pointed this out, but the notion of Yugoslavia as a

Versailles creation endures. Even Margaret Macmillan suggests misleadingly that

‘Yugoslavia and Nauru both owed their existence as independent states to the
 NOTES 281

Paris Peace Conference’ (Peacemakers, p.3; her account on pp.119-20 is more

accurate).
80 FO 371/2257/53757 (draft telegram to Niš, May 1915).
81 FO 371/2263/105071 (31 July 1915). It is noteworthy that the Slovene lands

were excluded from consideration at this stage.

82 FO 371/2804/180510. It spoke also of a ‘federation’ of States: the terms

‘federation’/ ‘confederation’ were used loosely.

83 FO 371/2241/4404 (Supilo, ‘Memorandum Respecting the Southern Slavs’, 7

Jan 1915; Clerk, 13 Jan 1915).

84 FO 371/2258/123158 (Clerk, 30 Aug 1915).
85 Ibid.
86 FO 371/2241/147119.
87 Seton-Watson to Foreign Office, 1 Oct 1914, Correspondence, i, 180-6. His

insistence now that the Slovenes ‘must share the fate of their Croat and Serb
kinsmen’ is noteworthy.
88 Ibid. The local diets of Dalmatia, Istria and Carniola would likely merge, he

noted, in a Parliament at Zagreb, while Montenegro, Cattaro and probably Bosnia

would merge in the Serb Parliament at Belgrade.
89 Correspondence, i, 237-40 (17 Sept 1915).
90 FO 371/2252/13146 (30 Dec 1915).
91 FO 371/2258/125871 (6 Sept 1915).
92 Correspondence, i, 233-4 (22 Aug 1915).
93 FO 371/2884/95788 (9 May 1917). This might be managed, he suggested, by

discussions in the existing Diets of Croatia, Dalmatia, Istria and elsewhere, which
could then be confirmed by referenda.
94 FO 371/2889/180815 (15 Sept 1917). For the sharp disputes over ‘basic

concepts’ which did in fact take place before and during the Corfu negotiations,
see Meštrović, ‘The Yugoslav Committee in London’ pp.174, 186-91.
95 FO 371/4355/68. Hardinge applauded this ‘excellent memo’. On the idea that

Yugoslav differences were ‘artificially created’, see above p.71.

96 FO 371/3133/88314 (Berne, 10 May 1918).
97 Ibid (22 May 1918). Rumbold referred erroneously to a Corfu Declaration

distinct from the Corfu Agreement.

98 FO 371/3135/116831. Croatian feeling, he noted, was ‘specially anxious to

prevent the political extinction of Agram [Zagreb]’; unlike the Slovenes Croatians
had some autonomy to lose.
99 FO 371/3138/207115.
100 It is possible that by ‘federated Yugoslavia’ he and others understood at this

stage a loose (what we would term ‘confederal’) arrangement – the voluntary

cession by states of circumscribed functions to a central body; and that Corfu
seemed a compromise, with Serbian nationalists and Croatian (con)federalists
agreeing to respect local traditions and autonomies within a unitary state.
101 FO 371/3135/111985 (25 June 1918). ‘I do not fully see why they wish for a

“national” army’, he wrote.

102 Those like the Frankists who rejected union with Serbia were considered, as the

Yugoslav Committee claimed, ‘an insignificant and pitiful clique’ (FO

282 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

371/3135/107968: a communication from the Committee, dated 15 June 1918,

hailed by Leeper as excellent and quite accurate).
103 FO 371/3140/108493 (19 June 1918).
104 FO 371/3154/126161 (6 July 1918).
105 See his famous article ‘Serbia’s Choice’ of late August 1918 (Correspondence, i,

385-91).
106 ‘Serbia’s Choice’. Seton-Watson’s criticisms of Pašić’s regime were, in any case,

questioned by des Graz, who sympathised with Protić’s rebuttal (FO

371/3154/158256, 3 Sept 1918).
107 FO 371/3137/169690 (Oct 1918). Since Supilo’s death in the summer of 1917

Trumbić was unrivalled as the leading international figure among the Austrian
Yugoslavs.
108 Correspondence, i, 350-5.
109 Pašić admitted to Seton-Watson’s friend and ally Wickham Steed that the Corfu

declaration had been issued merely to make an impression on European public

opinion (Steed, Through Thirty Years, II, 236).
110 FO 371/3154/169142 (c.4 Oct 1918).
111 Since April, Seton-Watson observed, the Serbian Opposition had withdrawn

from parliament, removing the Government’s quorum. Serbia had ‘been under an
unconstitutional regime ever since’ (‘The Policy of Mr Pašić’).
112 FO 371/3154/169142.
113 As Yugoslavs knew, Britain had recognised the unelected Czechoslovak

National Council. Given the importance of this body’s control of a national army,
officials were slow to appreciate why the Yugoslav Committee wanted a Yugoslav
army (memo on Czechoslovak sovereignty in FO 371/3135/132422).
114 FO 371/3137/169690 (Leeper, 8 Oct 1918).
115 FO 371/3137/154848 (9 Sept 1918).
116 FO 371/3154/169142; FO 371/3137/171759. If necessary, Leeper wrote,

‘friendly pressure’ should be applied to secure this outcome. The positions in the
Serbian Cabinet Yugoslavs should hold were not specified.
117 FO 371/3137/171114. On the Austrian collapse and the creation of

Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states, see L.M. Namier, ‘The Downfall of the
Habsburg Monarchy’, in Temperley (ed.), History of the Peace Conference, iv, 89-119.
118 FO 371/3137/172539 (c.18 Oct 1918).
119 FO 371/3154/179908 (19 Oct 1918).
120 FO 371/3149/171789 (16 Oct 1918).
121 FO 371/3137/171114 (15 Oct 1918). In the Morning Post Pašić had dismissed

any sort of federalism. It was impossible, he argued, to draw frontiers between

branches of the nation ‘inextricably intermingled’. Politically, furthermore, a
unitary kingdom would provide the strongest guarantee against foreign intrigue. At
the time this position provoked no adverse comment in Whitehall (FO
371/3137/174278).
122 FO 371/3137/179472 (29 Oct 1918).
123 FO 371/3137/176378 (Nicolson, Graham, 2 Nov 1918).
124 FO 371/3138/182475 (Acton, 2 Nov 1918; Nicolson, 4 Nov); PID Memo, see

p.171 above.
 NOTES 283

125 Kovač, La France, pp.148, 151. The Italians assumed a Serb-dominated state
would be more flexible regarding the disputed territories in Istria and Dalmatia
than one in which the Habsburg Yugoslavs exerted a strong influence. A
Yugoslavia dominated by a strong Serbia, and a strong Pašić, was the consistent
French objective (see ibid. and Grumel-Jacquignon, La Yougoslavie, pp.24-7) – an
attitude which led to growing anti-French feeling in Croatia (Grumel-Jacquignon,
La Yougoslavie, p.42). The French Foreign Minister, Stephen Pichon, was –
according to Raymond Poincaré (himself greatly interested in the Yugoslavs) – the
principal agent of French politics in relation to the Yugoslav question. Pichon was
a firm supporter of Pašić and was (so the French Senator Ernest Pezet alleged):
‘totalement ignorant des questions yougoslaves et, plus généralement,
danubiennes’ (see Kovač, La France, pp.186-91).
126 FO 371/4356/12 (War Office Memorandum on the Unification of the

Yugoslavs, 16 Dec 1918).

127 Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, pp.319-20.
128 FO 371/3137/190445 (forwarded by Derby, 17 Nov 1918).
129 FO 371/3137/189073 (19 Nov 1918).
130 FO 371/4354/52 (‘Memorandum Respecting Austria-Hungary: Legal Factors

Replacing the Dual Monarchy’, 25 Nov 1918; printed for the British Peace
Conference delegation, 13 Dec).
131 FO 371/3137/190285 (25 Nov 1918).
132 FO 371/3137/193384.
133 Banac, National Question, pp.134-5.
134 FO 371/3137/196814 (25 Nov 1918). Meštrović recalled Pašić’s admission that

he had found himself completely isolated in Geneva, but had never intended to
adhere to the agreement (quoted in Kovač, La France, p.191).
135 FO 371/3138/202583.
136 FO 371/3138/206375 (21 Dec 1918).
137 FO 371/3578/1709; 1819; 2882 (des Graz reports, 21, 22 Dec 1918).
138 FO 371/3578/4380 (13 Jan 1919).
139 FO 371/3137/195820 (Balfour to Rodd, 23 Nov 1918).
140 FO 371/4356/159 (Memo on the Relations between the Yugo-Slavs and the

Entente, 18 Dec 1918).

141 Kovač, La France, p.201. G.Krivokapić, ‘Politique Intérieure de Royaume des

Serbes, Croates et Slovenes vue par les Français à l’Époque de sa constitution en

1918-1921’, in L.Aleksić-Pejković (ed.), Rapports Franco-Yougoslaves (Belgrade, 1990),
255-6.
142 PID Memo, FO 371/4353/55.
143 D.Dutton, ‘The Balkan Campaign and French War Aims in the Great War’, The

English Historical Review, 370 (Jan 1979), 97-8.

144 FO 371/3586/6784 (14 Jan 1919).
145 FO 371/3138/206375. This was the argument Pašić had long pressed in order

to deny the Yugoslav Committee independent recognition. The correct analogy, he

argued, was not the Czecho-Slovaks or the Poles, neither of whom had
‘Piedmonts’ – free states outside the Monarchy to represent their interests. Serbia
had rather ‘the same position among our allies as Italy [he might have said
Romania], which, in the unification of its brothers, represents its countrymen from
284 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Austria’ (quoted in Banac, National Question, p.132). In reality neither Italy nor
Romania provided a plausible parallel. In purely quantitive terms, Serbia was not a
majority matrix state: Serbia’s population was some four million, while twice that
number of South Slavs lived in the former Habsburg lands. Moreover, there was a
qualitative difference. While the Romanians of Transylvania and the Italians of
Tyrol and Gradisca had developed cultures and traditions distinct in some respects
from those of their fellow nationals, they could not (and did not) claim the
separate identity and heritage possessed by Croats and Slovenes.
146 FO 371/3138/213162 (DMI, 28 Dec 1918).
147 FO 371/3507/16797 (Plunkett, Belgrade, 25 Jan 1919).
148 This, of course, was precisely what Serbian Radicals hoped in rejecting the

name ‘Yugoslavia’. While increasingly insensitive to the state’s internal situation,

‘Serbia’ seemed adequate in an international context.
149 FO 371/3160/200994 (7 Dec 1918).
150 See, for example, Seton-Watson, ‘The Policy of Dr Pašić and the Yugoslav

Problem’, Correspondence, i, 352.

151 The geographer Jovan Cvijić, for instance, who applauded Seton-Watson’s

criticism of Pašić in ‘Serbia’s Choice’ (Correspondence, i, 347-8); for similar support

from Pašić’s political enemies, see the letters from Milorad Drašković, Milutin
Stanojević and Ljubomir Stojanović, ibid., 336-45.
152 In June 1917 the trial by tribunal and execution of Serbian officers accused of

plotting to assassinate Prince Regent Alexander provoked a political crisis as

Independent Radical and Progressive leaders withdrew from Pašić’s coalition,
accusing him – apparently with justification – of rigging the trial in pursuit of his
own objectives (see D.Mackenzie, The ‘Black Hand’ on Trial: Salonica, 1917 (Boulder,
1995)).
153 National Question, p.133. Dragoslav Janković, the authority on Serbian wartime

policy, described the Serbian Opposition as the Committee’s ‘least reliable ally’;
having backed Trumbić six months earlier, it assured Alexander that Serbians
could administer ‘our several times larger Serb-Croat-Slovene Kingdom’ (cited in
ibid.).
154 FO 371/3137/172539 (c.18 Oct 1918, emphasis added).
155 ‘The Policy of Dr Pašić and the Yugoslav Problem’.
156 FO 371/3137/169690 (Oct 1918).
157 FO 371/3137/171759 (9 Oct 1918).
158 FO 371/3137/195820 (23 Nov 1918).
159 FO 371/3137/171759 (Balfour, 9 Oct 1918). It was also to disregard an earlier

insight by Sir Valentine Chirol. Serbs, he had observed, drew a ‘marked distinction
between the Kingdom of Serbia and the Serb “nation” of which it considers itself
the trustee’, always giving precedence to the interests of the latter (FO
371/2262/128346).
160 Banac, National Question, pp.130-1.
161 Correspondence, i, 364.
162 Stokes, ‘The Role of the Yugoslav Committee’, pp.64-5; Banac, National

Question, p.135. Pribićević’s group had assumed leadership of the HSK after
Supilo’s departure in 1910.
163 At least, that is, until his famous U-turn of 1925.
 NOTES 285

164 Banac, National Question, pp.170-3. He later frankly boasted as much.

165 The only condition attached to the declaration of loyalty accepted by Alexander
was that the (ex-Habsburg) Yugoslavs were guaranteed representation in the joint
Government.
166 FO 371/3138/213164 (Temperley, 15 Dec 1918).
167 FO 371/3507/3222 (Temperley, 15 Dec 1918). Belief in this implausible

alliance testifies, perhaps, to the vague sense of menace which Bolshevism exerted
over Europe in the aftermath of the war and of events in Russia.
168 ‘We Croats’, Radić had told the National Council’s Central Committee, ‘do not

want any state organisation except a confederated federal republic’ (M.Biondich,

Stjepan Radić, the Croat Peasant Party, and the Politics of Mass Mobilisation, 1904-1928
(Toronto, 2000), pp.138-9).
169 FO 371/3507/3222; FO 371/3138/213164. See below pp.198-9.
170 FO 371/3138/213164.
171 The remaining Frankist movement was acknowledged in Britain to be pro-

Habsburg and anti-Serbian, but was accorded no significance during 1917-18.

172 Quoted in Banac, National Question, p.99.
173 FO 371/3137/171114 (Leeper, 15 Oct 1918). The feeling existed, if rarely

voiced explicitly, that while Britain was entitled to ratify the Yugoslav project, and
set the state frontiers, constitutional questions were for the Yugoslavs themselves.
Seton-Watson protested with justice, but in vain, that financial support for Pašić’s
Government already constituted an intervention in internal politics, and one which
angered opposition groups (‘The Policy of Mr Pašić and the Yugoslav Problem’,
Correspondence, i, 350-5).
174 The same was true of the declaration of union guaranteeing Austro-Hungarian

Yugoslavs representation in the national Government.

175 FO 371/4356/172. ‘Confederal’ and ‘confederation’ were often used loosely as

synonyms for ‘federal’ and ‘federation’.

176 ‘The Policy of Mr Pašić and the Yugoslav Problem’.
177 FO 371/3154/171702 (8 Oct 1918).
178 FO 371/2889/180815.
179 Banac, National Question, p.124.
180 On the widespread unrest in Croatia in late 1918, see Biondich, Stjepan Radić,

pp.145-8, and I.Banac, ‘“Emperor Karl has become a Comitadji”: The Croatian
Disturbances in the Autumn of 1918’, Slavonic and East European Review, 70, no.2
(1992), 284-305.
181 FO 371/4356/172 (‘The Unification of the Yugo-Slavs’), p.5. See also Laffan,

‘Liberation of the New Nationalities’, p.201. Alexander himself had told the British
Minister in Belgrade that Italian action had hastened and consolidated the union
(FO 371/3138/205290 (des Graz, 11 December 1918)).

Chapter Eight
1 Ivo Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference (New Haven; London, 1963),
pp.64, 119; Andrej Mitrović, ‘The Yugoslav Question, the First World War and the
Peace Conference, 1914-1920’ in Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism, pp.54-5.
2 Recognition was effectively accorded by the Allied and Associated Powers on 1

May 1919 when credentials were exchanged with the German delegation in the
286 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

name of the SCS State. Britain and France made their recognition public on 2 and
6 June respectively. On 28 June the Versailles Treaty (also signed by Italy of
course) contained a full acknowledgement (Laffan, ‘Liberation of the New
Nationalities’, p.207).
3 Greece was the exception, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria and

Italy the rule.

4 Quoted in Lederer, Yugoslavia, p.96, the standard work for the Conference’s

treatment of Yugoslavia. For a contemporary British account of the Adriatic

problem, see Woodhouse and Woodhouse, Italy and the Jugoslavs.
5 Harold Nicolson recalled ‘the corrosive influence of that problem upon the

moral and diplomatic basis of the Conference of Paris’ (Peacemaking, p.158). Italian
‘Fiume’ was preferred in Britain to Slavic ‘Rijeka’.
6 Lederer, Yugoslavia, p.ix.
7 ‘Regrettable’: Balfour to President Wilson (Lederer, Yugoslavia, p.39). Crowe, FO

371/3510/136009 (30 Sept 1919). British favour was little help: in November 1920
the Rapallo treaty granted Italy all the London treaty had promised plus Fiume
(which was declared independent and lived an artificial existence as such until
occupied by Italian troops in March 1922 and annexed by Mussolini in January
1924). Overall, however, Yugoslavia didn’t fare badly. Some 720,000 Yugoslavs
were left outside, but the state’s 12 million inhabitants included nearly 2 million
non-Slavs (Macartney, National States, pp.518-42).
8 FO 371/3154/211722 (‘less obnoxious’, Collier, 27 Dec 1918); FO

371/3579/198962.
9 Semantically, the label ‘Old Radicals’ (distinguishing them from ‘Independent

Radicals’ among the Serbian opposition) distanced them from those liberal
attitudes associated with the younger generation. (On the use of such epithets, see
T.Stoianovich, ‘The Social Foundations of Balkan Politics, 1750-1941’, in Jelavich
and Jelavich, Balkans in Transition, p.318).
10 See above pp.94-5.
11 FO 371/3581/142846 (16 Oct 1919).
12 FO 371/3579/180059 (21 Feb 1920).
13 FO 371/3579/185929 (27 March 1920).
14 FO 371/4670/14076 (10 Dec 1920).
15 On the genuine radicalism of Pašić’s early career, see A.N.Dragnich, Serbia,

Nikola Pašić and Yugoslavia (New Brunswick, N.J., 1974), pp.11-60. In his Memoirs of
the Peace Conference (pp.525-6) Lloyd George recalled Pašić with veneration as a
unifying force among the Yugoslavs. Protić’s hostility to the DS’s centralism and
autocratic tendencies would lead, by August 1920, to his resignation and a period
of principled opposition. When Nicolson lamented in September that the
Government was ‘under the influence of the Crown Prince and the “Greater
Serbia” party’, he meant the Old Radicals, associating them not only with
chauvinism towards non-Serbs but also with the Regent’s autocratic instincts (FO
371/4688/5243 (2 Sept 1920)). In fact in his ideals, and his willingness to impose
them dictatorially, Alexander was closer to Pribićević.
16 FO 371/3578/63208 (des Graz, 17 April 1919). This Assembly had been

convened the previous month.

 NOTES 287

17 FO 371/3578/60126 (7 April 1919). The party’s one representative had resigned

over references in the Regent’s inaugural speech to the future internal
development of the state.
18 See above pp.118-9.
19 FO 371/3594/43979 (Feb 1919).
20 FO 371/3509/103989 (9 July 1919).
21 FO 371/3507/3222 (15 Dec 1918).
22 Ibid. A dismissive reference to ‘this separatist movement […] which the Italians

are running for all they are worth’ implied foreign intrigue rather than native
sentiment underlay Croatian nationalism (FO 371/3508/43950).
23 FO 371/3508/59886 (31 March 1919). On the similar blindness of Yugoslavist

liberals to the strength of the Croatian state right movement on the eve of war, see
Pleterski, ‘The Southern Slav Question’, pp.131-2; on Rightist ideology’s greater
social penetration, and more decisive influence on pre-war Croatian national
integration, than that of Yugoslavism, see Gross, ‘Croatian National-Integrational
Ideologies’, pp.5-6.
24 Having initially promised the DS would not operate in Serbia, Pribićević seemed

in Belgrade to represent ‘Croat’ opinion, considered thereby as firmly unitarist and

centralist (Banac, National Question, pp.172-4).
25 FO 371/3578/31098 (15 Feb 1919). He admitted also his ‘very slight

acquaintance with the pre-war politics in Croatia’.

26 FO 371/3509/103989 (11 July 1919). Temperley (the sole British official with

post-war experience in Zagreb), was alone in inclining immediately to identify the

grouping rather with Serbia. Their agrarian reformism had, he noted, ‘a definite
chance of winning [the Croatian peasants] and turning them away from Croat
separations and Radić towards Serbia and the new Democratic party’ (FO
371/3508/59886 (31 March 1919)).
27 FO 371/3578/63208 (17 April 1919).
28 FO 371/3578/43988 (des Graz, 14 Mar 1919).
29 FO 371/3578/63208.
30 FO 371/3508/59886.
31 FO 371/3578/63208. It was Pribićević, Alex Dragnich remarks, who set ‘the

tone and style’ of day-to-day administration during the state’s first year (The First
Yugoslavia: Search for a Viable Political System (Stanford, 1983), p.15).
32 FO 371/3511/149375, 155966; FO 371/3578/140518, 143033 (Times article, 20

Oct 1919).
33 FO 371/3579/180059 (21 Feb 1920).
34 FO 371/3579/198962 (Hope Vere, interview with an unnamed Democrat, 10

May 1920).
35 It was fairly noted that conflicting forces in Montenegro resembled those

elsewhere. But it was overlooked that for many Serbians Montenegro was a special
case, not analagous to those of Croatia or Slovenia. Montenegrins had not been
guaranteed equality at Corfu because they were considered not a separate people
but merely Serbs isolated from the national body. See above pp.149-50.
36 Banac, National Question, pp.383-4. The party had also secured the appointment

of Pribićević’s protégé Ivan Palaček as Croatian ban (ibid., 218-19). With

Alexander’s authority to dissolve the Assembly and call elections if denied
288 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Parliamentary support, the Democrats were able to force measures past bitter
opposition.
37 FO 371/4668/7029 (18 Sept 1920).
38 FO 371/3581/164456 (19/12/1919). An agreement for Croatia alone to have

special commissioners to oversee certain areas of policy had been brokered by the
Radicals, but it was clear, Athelstan Johnson reported, that they would remain
firmly subordinate to Belgrade and that there was ‘no question of the creation of
an autonomous state’ (FO 371/3578/145509 (18 Oct 1919)). It is unlikely that it
was this status that was referred to.
39 The fact that some of these politicians may indeed have rejected such an idea is

not, here, quite the point.

40 As we have seen, many British observers at this stage attached more significance

to ‘ancient provinces’ like Dalmatia or Croatia-Slavonia than to what we now call

‘ethnic’ identities. Though terms like ‘autonomy’ and ‘federalism’ were often used
interchangeably in Britain, we should be clear about the distinction. ‘Federalism’
denoted a division of legislative authority between a central parliament and
subsidiary regional parliaments, the nature of the division to be defined by
constitution and unalterable except by amendment. ‘Autonomy’ indicated a system
of local administrative independence in which legislative authority remained with
the central parliament. ‘Devolution’ (though the term was less frequently used)
referred to an intermediary position, by which legislative authority in certain
limited spheres was voluntarily transferred from central to regional parliament,
subject to recall without constitutional amendment. These points are discussed in
an article by the Serbian jurist and historian Slobodan Jovanović, enclosed in FO
371/6194/9607.
41 FO 371/3580/73717 (14 May 1919).
42 FO 371/3581/142846 (16 Oct 1919).
43 ‘The outlook’, Leeper lamented, ‘is not promising’ (FO 371/3579/180059).
44 FO 371/4668/2436 (Francis Jones, Sarajevo, 7 June 1920).
45 FO 371/3579/189400;184539 (Young, 2 March 1920; 26 March 1920); FO

371/3603/145102 (‘daily less certain’, Bridge, 20 Sept 1919).

46 FO 371/4687/2431 (Young, 23 July 1920).
47 FO 371/3579/180059.
48 FO 371/3579/184539; FO 371/3579/189400 (26 March 1920).
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid. (Leeper, 1 April 1920; Temperley, 13 April). By contrast Joseph de

Fontenay, the French Minister in Belgrade, remained strictly loyal to the Belgrade
line, treating all unrest in the non-Serb provinces – and Radić’s electoral success –
as expressions of separatism and pro-German intrigue. Would Paris, he simply
asked, dream of supporting Irish agitation against Britain? See Kovač, La France,
pp.223-4. (A few French officials – and many French soldiers on the ground in
Croatia – did hold, it should be noted, a different and often more nuanced view).
51 Strictly, Davidović headed two ministries during this period. The first fell after a

month but a second was quickly formed. Protić’s return had seen moves to relax
the centralistic trend, in fulfillment of promises to autonomist groups in his
coalition (Banac, National Question, p.384).
52 FO 371/3607/198110 (26 May 1920).
 NOTES 289

53 FO 371/3579/198115 (1 May 1920). Elsewhere he reported the indignation of

Bosnian Muslim landlords, ‘whose political influence was dangerous and who were
threatening to cause a Mussulman rising if their lands were confiscated in favour
of their Christian tenants’ (FO 371/3604/206758, 20 June 1920).
54 FO 371/4668/307 (25 June 1920).
55 Banac, National Question, pp.352-3.
56 Ibid, pp.354-7.
57 There was, Leeper observed, ‘no one else of his calibre and knowledge’ (FO

371/3579/180059).
58 FO 371/3579/180059 (Leeper, 21 Feb 1920); FO 371/3581/142846 (Crowe, 16

Oct 1919).
59 FO 371/4668/307 (7 July 1920).
60 FO 371/4669/11466 (20 Nov 1920).
61 On British attitudes to Kun, see Bátonyi, Britain and Central Europe, pp.88-100.
62 FO 371/3578/31098 (15 Feb 1919). The idea of Serbia as an anti-communist

heartland would become particularly important in British thinking during World

War II, with the rise of Tito’s partisan movement. In France too Serbia was
regarded as a crucial bastion against the Bolshevik threat. The influential General
Franchet d’Ésperey urged that every Serb (or Romanian) soldier armed would save
a French soldier, while the French Minister in Belgrade echoed the need for a
barrier against Russian influence (Grumel-Jacquignon, La Yougoslavie, pp.41-4).
63 FO 371/3508/59886 (Temperley, 31 March 1919). Some historians have echoed

this view (Lederer, Yugoslavia, p.93). But Banac notes the HPSS assembly in Zagreb
in February 1919, attended by 6,000 activists, and the petition to Paris demanding
a Croat constituent assembly which raised 115,167 signatures in 6 weeks. ‘Official
estimates of the effects of Radić’s republicanism in the Croat countryside’, he
writes, ‘had assumed alarming proportions in the spring of 1919’; ‘Proposed
agrarian reforms [pace Temperley] interested the peasantry far less than the
promises of Radić’s movement’ (National Question, pp.239-43). See also, in
particular, Biondich, Stjepan Radić, which stresses strongly the alienation of the
Croatian peasant majority from traditional, bourgeois politics and the – at least
potential – strength of Radić’s support (p.144 and passim).
64 FO 371/3578/53298 (des Graz, 30 March 1919); FO 371/3507/3222

(Temperley, 15 Dec 1918). A little later Temperley admitted that the label
‘Bolshevik’ was inaccurate for a party that was ‘older and more exclusive than that’
(FO 371/3138/213164). For communists, as Mark Biondich points out, Radić’s
peasantism was thoroughly bourgeois and reactionary, offering no solutions to
Croatia’s or Yugoslavia’s social ills (Stjepan Radić, p.157).
65 Radić’s pre-war popularity had not before been acknowledged. Seton-Watson

had corresponded with Radić, sympathised with his ‘trialist’ aspiration, and drawn
attention to his persecution, but Whitehall had shown scant interest in a group
making little electoral impression (despite the fact that its primary constituency,
90% of the population, was unenfranchised, meaning full democracy must increase
his influence).
66 FO 371/3579/184539; FO 371/3579/189400 (26 March 1920). Radić had been

rearrested (on 22 March) and held until the amnesty of 28 November, so his direct
part in subsequent unrest was not great.
290 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

67 FO 371/3607/198110 (26 May 1920).

68 FO 371/3607/194689 (29 April 1920). Whether by his own pen or another is
unclear.
69 FO 371/3607/194759 (29 April 1920).
70 This hesitancy contrasted with an Austrian police report received by Whitehall

which noted that while Slovene communism had been largely confined to
industrial centres, in Croatia the movement was ‘purely national’ (FO
371/4658/38, 28 May 1920).
71 FO 371/4689/6254 (13 Sept 1920); FO 371/4689/7510 (14 Sept 1920). See also

Banac, National Question, p.248ff.

72 FO 371/4689/7510 (29 Sept 1920).
73 Ibid.
74 FO 371/4689/6254.
75 A similar conclusion followed from the recognition of the DS, by provenance

not specifically Serbian, as a Serb party. Thus Adam characterised the forthcoming
electoral battle as ‘between older Serb parties and “autonomists” of the new
provinces’ FO 371/4669/11466 (20 Nov 1920).
76 The vitriolic rivalry which had seemed to indicate a fundamental divergence of

principles was largely personal. Though Democrats, unlike Radicals, believed in a

Yugoslav nation, Radicals could reconcile this with a Greater Serbian inclination.
In their view, after all, Yugoslavs were largely uniform: the great majority were
Serbs and the remainder, by a process of linguistic and cultural assimilation, could
become so. (The sophistry required to argue at once that Catholics were racial
Serbs without knowing it, and that Croats or Slovenes could become Serbs by an
acculturative process, proving no barrier).
77 FO 371/4669/11466 (20 Nov 1920).
78 FO 371/4668/307 (25 June 1920).
79 ‘Slovenia’, of course, was not a historic province at all, though British officials

often treated it as if it were; but the amalgamation of Slovene-inhabited regions

within the Conference-defined borders of Yugoslavia did not present the obstacles
which any ‘Croat’ or ‘Serb’ amalgamation would have done.
80 FO 371/4668/307 (7 July 1920).
81 Ibid. This, of course, was Belgrade’s perspective, but given the balance of power

no less important for that. In general it was insufficiently appreciated in Britain

that the experiences of French history, and more recently of Italian, had strongly
equated centralism with the liberal, ‘progressive’ tide in modern history. Radović
had written to Harmsworth that, while some Yugoslavs espoused federalism for
the SCS State, others wanted the state ordered ‘after the pattern of Italy or France
because those countries likewise evolved from several small states’ (FO
371/3580/111497, 27 July 1919).
82 FO 371/4668/307 (7 July 1920).
83 FO 371/4669/10883 (Young, 5 Nov 1920; Temperley, 15 Nov 1920; Strang

notes undated).
84 FO 371/4669/11466 (Temperley, 20 Nov 1920). Though he admitted to feeling

unsure about Vojvodina and Bosnia which were, he wrote, ‘always mysterious’.
85 FO 371/4697/4545 (18 Sept 1920).
86 FO 371/4669/12186 (24 Nov 1920).
 NOTES 291

87 FO 371/4662/12576 (30 Nov 1920).

88 FO 371/4662/12481 (25 Nov 1920).
89 FO 371/4670/13669 (7 Dec 1920).
90 FO 371/4670/13412
91 FO 371/4670/13311. Save a brief earlier mention of censorship in Croatia (on

Communist papers primarily) officials were also uncritical of the preceding

campaign (FO 371/3607/198110, Maclean 21 April 1920).
92 FO 371/4668/7029 (18 Sept 1920).
93 FO 371/4668/7490 (Young 25 Sept 1920; Nicolson 30 Sept).
94 Thus Nicolson, for instance, noted Montenegro’s population had been

underestimated, while J.J.McMalkin’s detailed analysis was concerned principally

with non-Yugoslavs: ibid. But British officials were over-sanguine. The ratio of
deputies to voters varied by region in a manner favouring the centralist parties; and
contrary to the state’s treaty obligations, Germans, Magyars and Jews were
excluded (Banac, National Question, pp.387-91).
95 FO 371/4670/13311 (subsequent quotes from this source unless stated). This

illustrates too, of course, the shift in the way Democrats were viewed in Britain
which we noted above.
96 Soon after the election, on 8 December, Radić changed the party’s name to

Croat Republican Peasant Party (HRSS). The party was alone in securing an overall
majority in a particular region.
97 Biondich, Stjepan Radić, p.140. Young’s ‘scarcely half a dozen’ therefore

undersold the extent of the collapse. In association with the Croat Husbandmen,
who won 7 seats in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the ‘National Club’ amassed only 11
seats.
98 Muslims, Young reported, had ‘a strong representation’ of nearly 30 members.

The correct figures were 24 for the JMO and 8 for the Cemiyet in Kosovo,
Metohia, Sandžak and Macedonia. The Slovene People’s Party (SLS) was deemed
to have suffered a ‘reverse’, and its leaders were unhappy. But it won 37% of the
Slovene vote, and with its Bosnian Catholic ally, the Croat People’s Party,
controlled 27 seats.
99 His declared intention to abstain called to mind again the Irish comparison: ‘like

the Sinn Feiners’, Young observed (FO 371/4670/13311 (3 Dec 1920)).

100 Initially the KPJ supported the idea of Yugoslav ‘national oneness’ and

favoured a firmly centralistic structure, though it later supported disruptive internal

nationalisms likely to foster revolution (Djilas, The Contested Country, chs.2 and 3).
101 FO 371/4670/13311 (9 Dec 1920). Such an outcome, Adam concurred, was

‘both in our interest and that of the Serbs themselves’ (ibid).

102 FO 371/4662/13229 (24 Dec 1920).
103 FO 371/4670/13587 (11 Dec 1920).
104 FO 371/4670/13669 (7 Dec 1920). The Government must remember, Young

warned, that comments regarding Montenegro ‘may be misapplied by Croatians’ to

their ‘more or less analogous case’ (FO 371/4670/13424;13669).
105 FO 371/4670/13587;13888 (Young, 10 Dec 1920; 11 Dec 1920).
106 Historians give a much higher figure: Banac (National Question, p.393) claims

100,000, Dragnich (The First Yugoslavia, p.21), 80,000.

107 FO 371/4670/13888 (16 Dec 1920).
292 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

108 FO 371/4670/13815 (15 Dec 1920).

109 FO 371/4670/13815;14953 (14 Dec 1920; 29 Dec 1920).
110 FO 371/4670/14953 (19 Dec 1920).
111 Banac, National Question, pp.104-5. And only now did the party incorporate the

word ‘Republican’.
112 FO 371/3138/213164 (15 Dec 1918). As Mark Biondich illustrates,

‘republicanism’ appealed to the Croat peasantry at the end of the war as entailing
liberation from all forms of fiscal and social restraint: overbearing landlords, taxes,
conscription, requisitioning, usury, and so on. It was not simply, or even chiefly, a
matter of a crowned head of state (Stjepan Radić, pp.150-1 and passim).
113 FO 371/4670/14954 (30 Dec 1920). Communists, National Club, Republicans,

JMO and Social Democrats all initially rejected the standing orders as illegal, while
Radić’s party, which also rejected the pledge, refused to attend at all. By canny
bargaining, however, the centralist bloc secured majority acquiescence. (The JMO,
for one, was considered reliably monarchist by inclination, and malleable once its
fears over land reform were assuaged). In fact this question was more significant
than Whitehall allowed since it raised the fundamental question of the Assembly’s
sovereignty. The ‘difficulties’ included also the election as Assembly president of
Ivan Ribar, a prominent Democrat, by ‘only 243 out of 419 deputies’, a result ‘not
satisfactory from the Serb point of view’. In fact Ribar’s support was narrower
even than Adam allowed: 192 votes from the 243 representatives in attendance, a figure
well under half the total membership (Banac, National Question, p.395).
114 FO 371/6193/1414 (14 Jan 1921).
115 FO 371/4670/13888 (16 Dec 1920). The use of the term ‘Black-Yellows’ in

Serbia to describe inhabitants of the new provinces who hankered after Austrian
rule (a black eagle on yellow ground being the Habsburg symbol) was, Young
remarked a little later, ‘ominously like Black and Tans’ (18 Feb 1921: FO
371/6193/3773).
116 FO 371/4670/13888. The connection between the Croatian cause and that of

the Irish was not one that escaped the Croats: see Young (18 Feb 1921, FO
371/6193/3773).
117 FO 371/4670/13311 (3 Dec 1920).
118 FO 371/4670/13424 (10 Dec 1920). Radić’s Republican movement, Adam

agreed, was ‘probably an immature expression of a trend in Croatia in a federal

direction’ (FO 371/4670/13815).
119 FO 371/6193/4669 (7 March 1921).
120 FO 371/4670/13815 (14 Dec 1920).
121 Ibid.
122 FO 371/6193/374 (31 Dec 1920); FO 371/6193/25 (Adam, 3 Jan 1921).
123 FO 371/6193/1414 (14 Jan 1921). The JMO’s principal concern was reckoned

to be to prevent major agrarian reform in Bosnia. But Francis Jones reported

nevertheless instances of oppression of Croats and Muslims by Serb officials in
that province, and the growing feeling that Croats and Slovenes must be
guaranteed an equal say with Serbs in the constitutional question: ibid. (7 Jan 1920;
12 Jan 1920).
124 FO 371/6193/2340 (22 Jan 1921).
 NOTES 293

125 FO 371/6193/374. The discovery of a Communist conspiracy, and consequent

far-reaching restrictions imposed on Communists, credited this picture of
clandestine Comintern machination.
126 FO 371/6193/2 (1 Jan 1921).
127 FO 371/6193/1414 (14 Jan 1921).
128 FO 371/6193/25 (31 Dec 1920).
129 FO 371/6193/2340 (29 Jan 1921)
130 Ibid.
131 FO 371/4670/13815 (14 Dec 1920).
132 FO 371/6193/1414.
133 FO 371/4670/13311 (Young, 3 Dec 1920).
134 FO 371/4670/13815.
135 As we saw in chapter 1, use of the ‘race’ concept was often vague. Nevertheless,

talk of ‘racial’ differences within the Yugoslav group is clearly indicative of the rapid
shift in attitudes towards Yugoslav nationality.
136 Ibid. He misrepresented Trumbić’s attitude: his constitutional proposal broke

up these ‘ancient provinces’. As a Dalmatian, Trumbić began more enthusiastic

about Yugoslav unitarism than most Croatians, and recognised a need to erode
provincial identities. In any case, Adam’s praise for Trumbić as ‘the only Yugoslav
statesman whose views are broad and moderate’ makes his faith in an ultimate
broad and moderate settlement puzzling.
137 FO 371/6193/3773 (Young, 18 Feb 1921).
138 Though the Orthodox were numerically the largest community in Bosnia, they

did not constitute an absolute majority, and were vulnerable to a Croat-Muslim

political alliance.
139 FO 371/6193/4351 (Stonehewer-Bird, 16 Feb 1921).
140 FO 371/6193/2340 (29 Jan 1921).
141 Seton-Watsons, Making of a New Europe, pp.410-11. Similarly in November 1919

he had complained of a ‘conspiracy of silence and considerable indifference and

ignorance’ in relation to the Fiume dispute (ibid., p.383). One can understand his
frustration, but a period of introversion after a drawn-out international conflict
seems natural and not (on Occam’s principle) requiring conspiratorial explanation.
(Part of the problem, he suggested more plausibly, was the lack of Yugoslav
representation in Britain before January 1920: ibid., p.390 footnote 82).
142 FO 371/6193/2828 (2 Feb 1921). The KPJ, another troublesome opposition

group, was weakened by strong measures to ban Communist agitation. (Vesnić’s

cabinet resigned on 23 December. On 1 January a new Democrat-Radical coalition
cabinet was confirmed. Headed by Pašić, it was free of the commitments to
autonomist partners which had hampered Protić and Vesnić: Banac, National
Question, p.396).
143 FO 371/6193/4669 (7 March 1921).
144 FO 371/6193/3773 (18 Feb 1921).
145 FO 371/6193/2340 (29 Jan 1921).
146 FO 371/6193/4846 (4 March 1921). Temperley agreed, attributing the decision

to Pašić: ‘a reactionary of the “Greater Serbia” school’ (9 March 1921).

147 FO 371/6193/4669. Some British officials certainly had done. Temperley later

remarked a statement by Trumbić to the effect that while Serbs and Croats were
294 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

racially similar, their divergent mentalities resulted from a distinct history. These
remarks, Temperley commented, ‘explain much’ (6 May 1921, FO
371/6194/9143).
148 FO 371/6193/3773. This line was untypical of the KPJ, which tended towards

centralism and unitarism, while protesting indifference to the ‘national question’ in

its quest for radical socio-economic change. But as a conglomeration of old leftist
groups it remained prone to inconsistencies.
149 FO 371/6193/4351 (Young, 18 Feb 1921; Temperley, 24 Feb 1921).
150 FO 371/6193/4669.
151 FO 371/6194/6414 (31 March 1921).
152 FO 371/6194/7548 (16 April 1921). An article limited the administrative areas

to a population of 700,000, Young reported, ‘finally dissipating the hopes of the

Slovenians and Croatians for the preservation of the identity of their countries’ (31
March 1921, FO 371/6194/6967). The Croat Parliamentary Union, Temperley
noted, had denounced the constitution, claiming it would make Yugoslavia a
police-state, and vowing permanent opposition.
153 FO 371/6194/7548.
154 FO 371/6194/8560 (Temperley, 27 April 1921).
155 FO 371/6194/10175 (20 May 1921). Young reported the view of one

‘enlightened’ Bosnian Croat that Radić’s influence was spreading, among Muslims
in Bosnia as well as Catholics.
156 The Government did agree at the last minute to increase the regional

population limit to 800,000, and to grant the JMO a compromise which looked
likely to secure Bosnia’s basic outline within the Yugoslav regional map.
157 A month later, on 2 August, Communist gunmen again tried in vain to

assassinate Alexander, instead killing former minister Milorad Drašković. The KPJ
was formally banned, known Communist leaders arrested, and the party forced
underground. (Alexander was crowned king on 16 August).
158 FO 371/6194/14658 (29 June 1921).
159 That the Bosnian Muslim community at large, far from sharing the Radical

vision, was ‘bitterly disillusioned’ at events since the liberation, was suggested by
British observers shortly afterwards. Strang recorded the view of ‘an Englishman
who has lived and travelled much in Bosnia’ that, whereas eighteen months earlier
the Muslims were proud of their place in the new State, they could no longer be
considered ‘an element [making] for unity and consolidation’ and had ‘regrets for
the days of the Austrian regime’ (8 Sept 1921, FO 371/6194/17935).
160 FO 371/6194/14658.
161 The Times, 20 July 1921. Enclosed with emphases in FO 371/6194/14606.

Protić’s rift with Pašić and the Radical majority (who had combined with his
enemy Pribićević), and his demand for constitutional revision, added to the feeling
of instability; as did the fact that both Serb parties had internal troubles: Vojvodina
Radicals, for instance, rejecting Pribićević as Interior Minister (Strang 29 Sept
1921, FO 371/6194/19039).
162 FO 371/7686/5308 (annual report for 1921).
163 Agnes Headlam-Morley later concurred that Yugoslavia’s was a ‘completely

centralised administrative system’ (The New Democratic Constitutions of Europe

(London, 1929), p.59). With the help of hindsight she observed that federalism
 NOTES 295

had ‘from the first seemed doomed to rejection’ (p.68). Interestingly, given the
British view that considered decentralism progressive politics, her comparative
study of new constitutions in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Finland, the
Baltic States and the SCS Kingdom observed the ‘general tendency’ to strengthen
the unity of the state ‘even at the risk of arousing violent opposition amongst
certain sections of the people’ (p.88). See also the analysis in Banac, National
Question, pp.398-9, and that (based on the work of Serb jurist Slobodan Jovanović),
in ‘The Jugo-Slav Constitution’, Slavonic Review, III, no.7 (June 1924), 166-78.
164 FO 371/6194/22132 (24 Nov 1921).
165 FO 371/6195/22500 (30 Nov 1921). Young’s observation in December that a

centralised state facilitated representations concerning British interests in the non-

Serb provinces was, Nicolson annotated, ‘a very narrow point of view’ (Young, 13
Dec 1921; Nicolson undated; FO 371/6195/23650).
166 FO 371/6195/24027 (Nicolson, 21 Dec 1921).
167 FO 371/7674/81 (Report on Politics in the SCS Army by military attaché

James Blair, 26 Dec 1921; Nicolson, 4 Jan 1922).

168 FO 371/7684/2476 (15 Feb 1922).
169 FO 371/7686/5308. Given that Radić had been imprisoned from March 1919

to February 1920, and from March 1920 to the amnesty of 28 November 1920, in
the first case without trial and in spite of his immunity as member of the Croatian
Sabor, this view might seem puzzling; but he had campaigned relatively freely
during 1921.
170 This view was, however, at odds with his verdict in a February report that ‘the

schism between the Croats and the Serbs appears to be widening’ (FO
371/7684/2476). On Serb-Croat relations within the military, see Mile Bjelajac,
‘The Military and Yugoslav Unity’ in Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism, pp.208-21 (though
his attempt to refute Istvàn Deàk’s claim of anti-Croat discrimination in the
Yugoslav army is unconvincing).
171 FO 371/7684/3588 (7 March 1922). Trumbić admitted, he reported, that

Radić’s abstention had been ‘from some points of view a mistake’, though it was
the illegal exaction of the oath that had held them aloof.
172 FO 371/7684/3688 (16 March 1922).
173 FO 371/7685/3689 (16 March 1922). Unfortunately, a colleague responded, he

was ‘precisely the sort of character that does not disappear’.

174 FO 371/7684/3688.

Conclusion
1 See, for example, B.Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia
(London, 2002), pp.12-13, 241-3 (Simms notes the ‘neuralgic associations’ the
words ‘Sarajevo’ and ‘Bosnia’ have had for diplomats and statesmen since 1914);
Almond, Europe’s Backyard War, p.xvii
2 See above p.75.
3 I have discussed some of these British attitudes to the newly established Tito

regime in 1945 in an article ‘Britain and the Yugoslav General Election of

November 1945’, in A.Hammond (ed.), The Balkans and the West: Constructing the
European Other, 1945-2003 (Aldershot, 2004), 1-15.
296 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

4 J.Allcock, ‘Aspects of the Development of Capitalism in Yugoslavia: The Role of

the State in the Formation of a “Satellite” Economy’, in Carter (ed.), Historical
Geography, p.547.
5 See L.Trgovčević, ‘South Slav Intellectuals and the Creation of Yugoslavia’ in

Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism, pp.224-9. She points out that Stojan Novaković’s 1911
essay ‘After One Hundred Years: Belgrade, 15 May 2011’ predicted a united
Yugoslav state a century hence.
6 See A.B.Wachtel, ‘Ivan Meštrović, Ivo Andrić and the Synthetic Yugoslav

Culture of the Interwar Period’, in ibid., p.238.

7 FO 371/3578/133811 (Temperley, 24 Sept 1919).
 Bibliography

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FO 371/825-8 Austria-Hungary, 1910
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FO 371/1575-6 Austria-Hungary, 1913
FO 371/1898-1900 Austria-Hungary, 1914
FO 371/2241 Austria-Hungary, 1915
FO 371/2602 Austria-Hungary/ Balkans, 1916
FO 371/2862 Austria-Hungary, 1917
FO 371/3133-9 Austria-Hungary, 1918
FO 371/3507-11 Austria-Hungary, 1919
FO 371/4625-6 Austria, 1920

FO 371/1219 Serbia, 1911

FO 371/1472 Serbia, 1912
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FO 371/3025 Serbia, 1917

FO 371/1151 Montenegro, 1911

FO 371/1398 Montenegro, 1912
FO 371/2041 Montenegro, 1914
FO 371/2409 Montenegro, 1915
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 Index
Acton, first Baron 14 281,287,288
Acton, second Baron 173 Ben-Gurion, David 226
Adam, Frederick Edward 143- Betts, R.R. 228
44, 152, 154, 196, 197-8, 201, Biondich, Mark 289,291
203, 204-5, 206-8, Bonar Law, Andrew 73,144
209,290,291,292,293 Bošković, Mateja 277
Albania/ Albanians 9,22,23,30, Bosnia-Hercegovina 20,26,65-
32-3,49,54,82,83,84,91,102, 6,70,102-5,108,119,160,167,
106,120,128,129,132,146 168,177,178,180,181,190,200,
Allcock, John 54-55,98,110,253, 201,206,208,209,211,212,213,
254 214,216,218,245,246,257,260,
Allen, W.E.D. 82,85-6 276,277,278,281,290,291,293,
America See United States 294,295
Askew, Alice 92 Brailsford, H.N. 7,8,9,31,33,53,
Askew, Claude 92 57,81,84,87,88,227,228,237
Asquith, Herbert 114,115,158 Bryce, James 9,14,26,30,34,228,
Austria-Hungary 10,55,60-1,70- 235,236,237,242
1,93,100,102,108,115, Bryce, Roland 148,149-52
158,162,163,164,165,173,178, (report on Montenegro),188,
181,182,214,221,222,225,226, 201,274,275
228,278,279,280,292 Buchan, John 125
Auty, Robert 44,50 Bulgaria 9,16-18,31-2,53,82,85,
100,105,159-60 (British
Baerlein, H. 18 attempts to woo),181,207,230,
Bailey, W.F. 89,90-1 231,236,277
Balfour, Arthur 19,28,72,130, Bulgarian (language) 40,50,51
138,142,166,173,174,175, Burrows, Ronald 40,232
178-9,193,278,279,280 Bury, J.B. 232
Balkan Committee 228,237 Buxton, Charles 8,18,88-9,227,
Banac, Ivo 43,50,178,179,195, 255
240,245,257,258,261,263, Buxton, Noel 9,18,50,55,88-9,
274-5,289 227,243,255
Bartlett, Vernon 225-6
Bauer, Otto 13 Cannadine, David 246
Beaven, Murray 70-1 Carnegie, W.H. 57
Belgrade 3,20,32,43,46,48,50,59, Carr, E.H. 116
81,87,90,93,104,105,106,108, Cartwright, Fairfax 55,108,262
109,117,158,168,175,187,188, Cecil, Robert 123,127,128,143,
189,194,195,198,200,204,210, 164,165,172-3,178,279
322 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Cetinje 102,117,132,137,140, Cvijić, Jovan 284

226,271
Chadwick, H.M. 242,251 Dalmatia 20,72,73,79,87,95-7,
Chesterton, G.K. 83-4,255 104,108,149,155-6,160,161,
Chirol, Valentine 284 167,168,177,180,181,183,
Clemenceau, Georges 277 184-5 (Adriatic Dispute),191,
Clerk, George 114,121,159,160, 200,208,209,214,216,225-6,
161,168 227,228,256,257,258,275,276,
Collier, Laurence 129,130,132, 277,281,282,287
134,175,176,269 Davidović, Ljuba 189,191,194,
Communism 149-51,194,196- 202,288
7,203,207,212,213,241,274, Deàk, Istvàn 295
275,284,289,291,293 De Salis, Count John 108,117,
Coolidge, Archibald 242 119,120,122,133,136,138,139,
Copeland, F.S. 72,82 140-2 (final report on
Corfu Agreement 47,56,68,73, Montenegro),148,193,258,
127,128,131,142,154,164,165, 265,266
168,169-70,171,172,173,174, De Windt, Harry 6,39,70,101,
177,178,182,186,205,231,235, 226-7
279,281,282,287 Delisle Burns, C. 53
Cornwall, Mark 110,247 Democratic Party See DS
Crackanthorpe, D.M. 105,106 Department of Propaganda in
Crewe, Lord 158-9 Enemy Countries See EPD
Croat-Serb Coalition See HSK Derby, Earl of 3,19,126,129,130,
Croat Union See HZ 132,135,165,175,176,268,269
Croatia 20,25, 92-7 (history), Devine, Alexander 145,152,272
154,160,161,167,168,178,180, Disraeli, Benjamin 57
182,187,188,189,190,191,192, Djilas, Aleksa 151
193-4 (unrest in),197-8,199, Djordjević, Dimitrije 110
200,202,204,205,206,207,208, Dominion, Leon 25,40,79
212,213,214,215,216-17,256, Donia, Robert 246,247,260
276,277,278,281,285,287,288 Dragnich, Alex 287
Croatian People’s Peasant Party Drašković, Milorad 294
(also Croatian Republican Drinković, Mate 180,195,213
Peasant Party) See HPSS/ DS (Democratic Party) 151,187,
HRSS 189-91,192,194,195,197,200,
Cromer, Earl of 162 202,210,212,216,286,287,290
Crowe, Sir Eyre 105,106-7,119, Drummond, Eric 279
141-2,143,144-45,147,148, Dubrovnik 41,42,97,108,162,
153,155,158,185,192,193,201, 227,258
262,265,274 Durham, Edith 7,9,23,30,40,
Curzon, Marquess of Kedleston 62,72,90,123,227,233,251
136,142,143,144,146,147,152, Dušan, Stefan 80-2,84,261
218,273 Eisenmann, Louis 231
 INDEX 323

Ekmečić, Milorad 43 Grahame, Sir George 125,128,

Elliott, Sir Charles 7,17,30,31,32, 129,134,136,143,267,271,272
40,57,63-4,84,231 Grant, Madison 37
Encyclopaedia Britannica 22,23- Graz, Sir Charles des 158,167,
24,57,59,80,101-2,268 168,170,171,187,189,196,197,
EPD 165 281
Evans, Sir Arthur 7,19,25,104, Grey, Sir Edward 90,115,121,
115,174,175,269 122,158,160,161,168,255,262,
Evans, Robert 8,115,265 266,277,278

Fine, J.V.A. 247 Hanak, Harry 3,7,27,228

Fisher, Herbert 104 Hardinge, 1st Baron of
Fiume (Rijeka) 286,293 Penshurst 135,142,143,147,
Fleure, H.J. 22,49 165,170,274,279,280,281
Fontenay, Joseph de 288 Harmsworth, Cecil 153,271
Forbes, Neville 2,17,20,24,25,29, Haugen, Ernest 241,242
39,40,47,50,57,65,78,79,82,83, Headlam Morley, Agnes 294
86,96,101,230,252 Headlam Morley, Sir James 107,
Fortescue, Adrian 56-57,244 265
France (attitudes) 129,130,132, Henderson, P.E. 6
134,135,136,138,144,160,174, Herbert, Sidney 9,36,54,75,78,
176,184,255,256,264,266,267, 228
268,271,272,277,282,288,289 Herrity, Peter 240
Franchet d’Esperey, Louis 135, Herron, George D. 15
271,289 Hertz, Frederick 38
Frank, Josip 257 Herzfield, Michael 238
Frankists 60,94,95,183,189,197, Hinković, Hinko 27,176
281,285 Hobsbawm, Eric 35
Freeman, E.A. 236 Holland Rose, John 9,15,85
Fussell, Paul 254 Howard, Esmé 94-5,108
Howard-Smith, C. 137-8,140,
Gaj, Ljudevit 38,41 141,143,144,273
Garvin, J.L. 3 HPSS/ HRSS 180,196,198,202,
Geneva Agreement 174,175,178, 289,291
179,181,185,283 HSK (Serbo-Croat Coalition)
Germany 69,70,91,99-100,117, 27,95,180,189,190,195,259,
157,160,161,165,198,277 284
Gibbons, H.A. 25,36,40,50,71, Huxley, T.H. 34,237
89 HZ (Croat Union) 193,195,196,
Gladstone, William 57,62,236, 202,208,209
274
Gooch, G.P. 245 Illyrian Movement 41,42,69,226
Graham, Sir Robert 133,134, Inglis, Elsie 7,227
135,136,138,173,175,269 Intelligence Bureau 163,164,168
324 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Irish Question 73-4,205-6,288, Laffan, R.G.D. 30,39,51,69,72,

291,292 77,82,85,91,97-8,100,101,102,
Italy (attitudes) 153,154,160,161, 105,115,225,230,248,251,264
166,174,176,183,184-5,234, Le Bon, Gustave 15
267,274,277,279,282,283,285, Lederer, Ivo 45,107,110,231,241
286 Leeper, Allen 29,40,114,125,127,
128,130,163,169,171-2,173-4,
Jagić, Vatroslav 21,39,232 177,178,179,187,191,196,198,
Janković, Dragoslav 284 201,239,274,282,288
Jelavich, Charles 42,254 Leeper, Rex 114,163
JMO (Yugoslav Muslim Lencek, Rado 241
Organisation) 65,202,206,207, Lewis, Bernard 85
291,292 Ljubljana 3,28,99,215
Johnson, Athelstan 287 Lloyd George, David 14,24,39,
Johnston, Sir Harry 71 64,73,93,115,116,123,153,165,
Jones, Francis 292 187,201,225,247,251,264,265,
Joseph, Bernard 14,35,37,51,82, 267,273,276,280,286
228,240-1,249 London, Treaty of 96-7,114,161,
Jovanović, Slobodan 288,294 174,185,286
Low, D.H. 25,234
Karadžić, Vuk 26-27,29,38,41- Lupis-Vukić, Ivo 27
43,84,94-5,235,240
Karadjordjević, Alexander 20, MacAdam, George 109
51,117,119,162,168,175,180, Macedonia 9,10, 16-17,22,25,27,
181,205,213,277,284,285,286, 31-33,43,48,55,57,59,62,82,91,
287,294 98,102,105-7,150,151,155,159,
Karadjordjević, Peter 88,105,117 167,169,178,207,208,209-10,
Keane, A.H. 21 213,232,236,237,239,261,262,
Kerner, Robert 232,263 275,277,291
Kerr, Philip 265 Maclean, Gordon Thompson
Khuen-Héderváry, Count 198,204,213
Károlyi 71 MacMillan, Margaret 280
Knatchbull-Hugueson, C.N. 228 Malcolm, Noel 260
Kopitar, Jerney 49,50 Marriott, J.A. 7,71,78,85,88,90,
Korošec, Anton 179,206,207, 248,252
213 May, Stephen 44-45
Kosovo 10,30,33,59,84,105- Mazzini, Giuseppe 76
7,151,209,237,261,262,275, McNeill, Ronald 142-3,276
291 Meštrović, Ivan 27,104,235,261,
Kosovo, Battle of 80,82-4,92, 283
104,162 Mijatovic, Chedo 17,29,67
Krleža, Miroslav 241 Miles, Sherman 137,138-9
Kroeber, Arthur 230 Mill, John Stuart 13-14
Kun, Béla 196,288 Miller, William 2,6,7,48,50,53,
 INDEX 325

55,62,64,70,80-1,86,87,97,105, 287,290,294
230,231,249-50,252
Montenegro 20,23,29-31,59, Oakesmith, J. 229
101-2,117-56,160,162,163, Obrenović, Alexander 88
167,174,178,184,189,190-1, Okey, Robin 10,94,225,257
193,199,200,201,202,203,208, Oliphant, Lancelot 118,130,131,
209,210,211,213,216,218,236, 262
260,266,267,270,271,272,275, Oman, Charles 68
278,281,287,290,291
Morison, W.A. 242 Paget, Lady 7
Muir, Ramsay 76,107 Paget, Sir Ralph 40,105,108,123,
Muslims 10,26,33,42,43,45,49, 162,167,169,173-4,175,239,
54,55,59,62-6,71,83,84,85,98, 262,279
102-7,132,179,206,208,209, Palaček, Ivan 287
211,213,214,217,218,234,246, Pašić, Nikolai 47,56,73,88,128,
252,261-2,288,291,292,294 131,142,160,161,167,168,169,
Mussolini, Benito 286 170,171-2,173,174,175,176,
177,178,179,181,182,185,
Namier, Lewis 9,114,158,163, 186-7,189,191,192,193,195,
228,242,259 199,207,209,213,214,215,
National Club 195,291 217-18,240,277,279,281,282,
National Council (Zagreb) 174, 283,284,285,286,293,294
175,176,179 (relations with Pavelić, Ante 180-1,187,188,195
Yugoslav Committee),180, Peckham, Walter 106
181,182-3,185,187,195 Percy, Lord Eustace 121,122,
New Europe magazine 48,116, 157,159,162,267
125,163,164,184,210,231,267, Petrović, Nicholas 101,102,119,
278 120,122,123-8,130-1,133,140,
Newbigin, Marion 78 141,143,144,146,148,155,156,
Nicolson, Sir Arthur 106-7,108, 259,260,267,268,269,270,273
121,162,168,257,262,277,278 Pichon, Stephen 282
Nicolson, Harold 40,60,114,118, PID (Political Intelligence
123,124,125-6,127,131,134, Department) 114,116,164,
145-6,152,153,154,155,169, 166,169,175,188,265
170,1734,187,202,204,215, Pillsbury, W.B. 36,238
217-18,239,264,268,270,274, Poincaré, Raymond 282
275,278,285,286,290,295 Political Intelligence
Norris, H.T. 251 Department See PID
Northcliffe, Lord 28,114,165, Pribićević, Svetozar 97,179,180,
264-5,280 181,185,188,189,190,193,194,
Novaković, Stojan 295 212,216,284,286,287,294
NRS (Radical Party) 151,186-7, Price, Crawfurd 67,69,247,254
189,190,191,193,194,197,200, Protić, Stjepan 142,171,175,177,
202,203,210,211,216,240,258, 179,185,186-7,190,191,193
326 THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Protić, Stjepan (cont.) 194,199- Seton-Watson, Robert 3,7,8,9,

200,203,209,210,211,215,240, 14,17,19,21,24,26,27,28,31,38
281,286,288,293,294 39,40,47,48,51,54,55-7,59,61,
Putney, Albert 50 65,67,70,71,72,73,79,87,91,94,
95,96,99,103,104,105,107,108,
Radić, Stjepan 180,196-7,198, 109,114,115,119,125,157,158,
201,202-6,208,210,212,213, 162,163-4,166,167,170,171,
215,216,217,221,247,257,276, 172,173,174,177,178,179,
284,287,288,291,292,294,295 181-2,210,226,228,229,232,
Radical Party See NRS 244,245,251,253,256,258,263,
Radović, Andrija 125,126,127, 264,265,277,278,280,281,282,
130,131,132,134,140,150,266, 284,285,289
268,270,274,290 Slavonia 23,25,40,41,42,48,73,
Ramet, Pedro 69 94,95,160,167,168,178,181,
Ranke, Leopold von 86 190,208,215,277
Rapallo, Treaty of 149,286 Slovene People’s Party See SLS
Renan, Ernest 36,76 Slovenia 27-29,61,96,98,100,
Ribar, Ivan 292 118,147,168,189,191,192,194,
Robertson, J.M. 34 197 (unrest in),199,200,206,
Rodd, Rendell 162,279 207,208,212,213,214,217,258,
Rogel, Carole 246 259,275,277,280,287,289,290
Rose, J.H. 36,228 SLS (Slovene People’s Party)
Rothwell, Victor 163,280 191,193,195,291
Rumbold, Horace 169,280,281 Smith, Anthony 241
Russia 14,48,55,56,57,60,68,70, Smodlaka, Josip 27,195
73,78,85,90,94,115,158,160, Sonnino, Sidney 280
162,277,279 Spicer, George 273
Russian Revolution 163-4,168, SSP (Starčevist Party of Right)
171,279 94,180-1,187-9,195,257,259
Starčević, Ante 26-27,29,69,94,
Sandžak 59,151,260,261,275,291 235
School of Slavonic Studies 232 Starčevist Party of Right See
Šepić, Dragovan 236 SSP
Serbia 18,20,24-6 (designation Stead, Alfred 40
of), 80-92 (history), 97-8 Steed, Wickham 3,7,8,24,27,28,
(regional variations),184,196 70,94,107-8,115,165,177,182,
(resistance to communism), 264-5,276,278,280,282
200,207,213,214,215,231,232, Steiner, Zara 10,114
275,280,282,283,287,289 Stobart, Mabel St.Clair 7,91-2,
Serbian Relief Fund 227 227
Serbian Society 18,24,93,276 Stoianovich, Traian 233
Serbo-Croat (designation) 20 Strang, William 199,200,213-14
Serbo-Croat Coalition See HSK Strossmayer, Juraj 41,69,94
Seton-Watson, Hugh 49,109
 INDEX 327

Supilo, Frano 1,27,109,157- 99,104,276

8,167,168,169,176,256,278,
281,284 Waring, L.F. 84
Warman, Roberta 10,265
Taylor, A.H.E. 7,20,23,32,39,40, Warner, George 134,135-6,137,
47,48,49,65,73,78,81,97,100, 272
225,232,250,260 Whyte, A.F. 114
Temperley, Harold 7,17,24,28, Wilson, Woodrow 124,126,135,
48,55,56,68-9,79-81,83,84,86, 136,137,162,163,165
93,97-8,102,104,109,115,132,
133,134,148-9,152-3,154,169- Young, Sir Alban 140,146,147,
70,180,187,188,190,194,196, 153-4,190,191-2,193-4,195,
197,198-200,202,203,205,206, 197,198,199,200,201,202-3,
210-11,212-13,222,233,235, 204,205,206,207,208,210,
251,264,271,274,278,287,289, 211,212,214-17,274,276,291,
293,294 292,293,294
Tennyson, Alfred Lord 101 Young, Sir G. 58,245
Tito, Josip Broz 289,295 Yugoslav (designation) 16-19,
Todorova, Maria 55,64,85 231,232
Toynbee, Arnold 9,36,37,40,51, Yugoslav Committee 19,47,93-
63,84,94,99,100,101,109,114, 4,157,158,161,166,170,171,
219,228,239,258,259 172,173,174,177,178,179,181,
Trevelyan, G.M. 7,89,114,233 185,186,187,193,195,231,276,
Trumbić, Ante 171,172,176,178, 279,281,282,283
179,182,187,193,195,204,206, Yugoslav Muslim Association
208,215,216,217,279,281,284, See JMO
293,295
Tyrrell, Sir William 114,123,125, Zagreb 3,25,41,43,46,50,55,67,
131,162,167,279 87,93,94,98,103,104,168,179,
180,194,198,203,204,214,215,
Union of Democratic Control 281,287,289
228 Zimmern, Alfred 9,14,35,54,77,
United States (attitudes) 135, 114,228
136,144,166,184,264,271 Žolger, Ivan 28,99

Velimirović, Nikolai 67,83,158

Versailles, Treaty of 1,53-4,
157,280,285
Vesnić, Milenko 206,293
Vivian, Herbert 39,40,70,245
Vlachs 22,30,31,106,233,236-7
Vojvodina 23,43,90,97,208,209,
211,213,214,245,257,258,290
Vošnjak, Bogumil 26,28,42,51,