The history of the evolution of the Jugo-Slavs from the sixteenth to the
twentieth century has been an effort to find the means of melting down
these differences until finally one--nationalism--accomplished the
purpose. Unity came first in the imagination and the mind, next in
literature and speech, and finally in political action. The four hundred
years beginning with the fifteenth and ending with the eighteenth
century will be remembered by the Jugo-Slavs as the age of humiliation.
Only Slavicized Ragusa and indomitable Montenegro kept alive the
imagination of the nation which was brought back to life by the
half-religious, half-national Slovene poets of the sixteenth century, by
the Ragusan epic poet [Gundulic], by the incessant demands of successive
diets of the ever-weakening Croatia in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and by the progressive and zealous Serbs of Hungary, who ever
since the fifteenth century in increasing numbers made their home there,
refugees from the oppression of the Turk, but who ever longed to push
out from the frontier and rebuild Serbia anew. [Krizanic], a Croat
Catholic Dalmatian priest, a firm believer in Jugo-Slav and Slavic unity
in general, appealed to the rising Russian empire to help save dying
Slavdom.
While the Turkish and the Venetian empires decayed, the Austrian and the
Russian gained courage. By the end of the seventeenth century the house
of Habsburg had won back all except the Banat and in the eighteenth
century aspired to divide the Balkan peninsula in halves with the
Russians. Along with this future foreign interference in the affairs
of the Balkans came the Germanizing and centralizing "reforms" of Maria
Theresa and Joseph II, whose result was to cripple still further the few
constitutional and historical rights which remained to the Jugo-Slavs.
But these "reforms" had nevertheless salutary effects upon the nation
of peasants. The enlightened despots, spurred on by the loss of
Silesia--which was at the same time a great loss in revenue as well as
prestige--sought to make good the loss by the economic betterment and
education of the peasantry. How else could an agrarian state increase
its revenue and supply able-bodied men for the numerous armies which
the overarmaments of Frederick II had brought upon central Europe?
[FN: Emphasis on this fundamental fact of Habsburg history in the
eighteenth century cannot be too strong. The writer of this paper
hopes soon to present archival proof of the far-reaching results of the
seizure of Silesia. The documents are to be found in the archives of the
_Hofkammer_ and _Ministerium des Innern_ in Vienna.] Centralization and
Germanization really helped to awaken the Slavs. Enlightened despotism
gave them the weapons of political struggle--education and economic
resources.
Of the Jugo-Slavs, the Serbs of Hungary were the first to achieve
national and cultural consciousness. In the absence of a native
nobility, but with unusual economic opportunities at their command, they
developed a wealthy middle class--a rare thing among Slavs before the
middle of the nineteenth century. This class came into contact with
nationalized western Europe and found that the bulwark against national
oppression was education for the masses. The nation must be educated and
must be economically sound in order to undertake the political struggle
against the Germans, the Magyars, and the Turks. That was the background
of Dositej Obradovi[c]'s literary labors as he raised spoken
Serbian ultimately to the literary language of the Jugo-Slavs and of
Karad[z]i[c]'s efforts which resulted in that wonderful collection of
Serbian national poems, and which clinched for all time the literary
supremacy of the _[S]to_ dialect. Serbian Hungary was the starting place
for Kara George's revolution which brought partial freedom in 1804 and
autonomy in 1830 and thus planted the germ of the modern Greater Serbia.
Napoleon's Illyria, created in 1809, joined for the first time Slovenes
and Croats in one political unit, and the excellent administration and
the schools left an undying memory of what might be if the Habsburgs
cared. Vodnik, the Slovene poet, sang of Illyria and her creator, but it
was the meteoric Croat, Ljudevit Gaj, in the thirties, who so eloquently
idealized it as he poured heated rhetoric into the camp of the
Magyars, who after the Diet of 1825 began their unfortunate policy
of Magyarization. Illyria, though short-lived, became the germ of the
Greater Croatia idea, which, with Greater Serbia, existed as the two,
not necessarily hostile, solutions of the Jugo-Slav problem down to the
Congress of Berlin. It was as yet a friendly rivalry with the possible
formation of two separate units. The occupation of Bosnia in 1878 led to
actual friction between them. On the other hand, the annexation of the
same province in 1908 had just the opposite effect, for from that time
the ultimate ideal was no longer Greater Croatia or Greater Serbia in
any selfish sense, but Jugo-slavia, because, to use a platitude, Bosnia
had scrambled the eggs. Evidence of the fairly amicable relations
between Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs at the time of Gaj is not lacking.
It was Gaj who reformed Croatian orthography on the basis of the
Serbian. Bleiweis and Vraz endeavored to do the same in Slovene.
The revolution of 1848 demonstrated still further the friendly relations
of these potential rivals as national unifiers. For the first time,
the Croats and Serbs publicly fraternized and showed that the seemingly
insurmountable barrier of religious difference tended to disappear in
the struggle for national independence. In this sense the events of
1848--when the hand of the foreign master was for the while taken
away--have given confident hope to those who believe that Jugo-Slav
differences are soluble. Jela[c]i[c], Ban of Croatia, the idol of the
Serbo-Croats, was proclaimed dictator and supported by the Croatian Diet
at Zagreb (Agram) and the Serbian assembly at Karlovac (Karlowitz). The
Serb Patriarch Raja[c]i[c] and the young and gifted Stratimirovi[c],
provisional administrator of the Serb Vojvodina, attended the Croatian
Diet and the High Mass where Bishop O[z]egovi[c] sang the Te Deum in Old
Slavic. After Gaj, Raja[c]i[c], and Stratimirovi[c] had failed at Vienna
and Pressburg to bend the dynasty or the defiant Kossuth, Jela[c]i[c]
was empowered to defend the monarchy and bring back the historical
rights of the Triune Kingdom and the Serb Vojvodina. The dynasty and
the monarchy survived, but Jugo-Slav hopes and the promises they
had received were unfulfilled or soon withdrawn, as for instance the
Vojvodina in 1861. Absolutism reigned supreme from 1849 to 1860.
This disappointment led the Croats and Serbs to try cooperation with the
Magyars, who under Deak and Eoetvoes appeared to be anxious to conciliate
the non-Magyars in those uncertain years which began in 1859 and ended
in dualism. Austria lacked a great statesman, and the Prusso-Austrian
rivalry led the fearful and impatient Francis Joseph into the Compromise
(Ausgleich) of 1867. It was a work of haste and expediency and bound
with it the fate of the dynasty. Thereafter, the German minority in
Austria and the Magyar minority in Hungary were the decisive factors
in the problems confronting the Jugo-Slavs. Dalmatia was handed over to
Austria; Croatia, by a compromise, which it has never really accepted,
to Hungary.
The Ausgleich between Austria and Hungary and Hungary and Croatia opened
in 1868 a period which ended in 1905--it was a period, on the one hand
of the greatest decay and decomposition in the political life of the
Jugo-Slavs, and, on the other, of the greatest literary and intellectual
unity as shaped by Bishop Strossmayer and Peter II and Nicholas of
Montenegro.
Bishop Strossmayer and the Slovene, Croat, and Serb academies, matica,
and learned societies, as well as men of literature, spoke, wrote, and
pleaded for unity in this period, in vain. But they and the universities
of Prague and Zagreb produced a younger generation which later took up
the fight for national unity and which abandoned individual political
foibles and looked over the boundaries of their provinces for
inspiration.
Among the Slovenes, politics degenerated into the struggle for minor
concessions from the court at Vienna in regard to the Slovene language
and schools, while political parties multiplied freely through personal
and social differences. The lines which bound them to their kinsmen in
the south were weakest during this period.
The Croats found themselves no match for the astute Magyars who resorted
to packed diets, gerrymandering, bribery, and forgery. The Compromise
(Nagoda) of 1868 was as decisive as the murder of the farsighted Prince
Michael of Serbia in that year. It will be remembered that, in spite
of his many faults, he had made an agreement with Montenegro for
the ultimate merging of their states and, after allying himself with
Rumania, had carried out an agreement with the Bulgarian committee for
the amalgamation of Bulgaria with Serbia, thus obtaining a commanding
influence in the Balkans. With his death, Serbia fell into the hands of
Milan and Alexander, whose weak and erratically despotic reigns ushered
in an era in Serbian history from which she emerged in 1903, through
the assassination and the extinction of the last of the Obrenovics, a
country without a good name, a nation which, through no special fault of
its own, had become degraded.
It was in the midst of this political decay that the Bosnians revolted
in 1875 and that Serbia, Montenegro, Russia, and Rumania became involved
in the Russo-Turkish war. Space forbids but the most hasty survey of the
occupation and administration by Austria of Bosnia and the Herzegovina
by virtue of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878.
Bismarck, Francis Joseph, and Andrassy were swayed by differing motives
whose total result was that Austria was to become a Balkan power--the
outpost of the German _Drang nach Osten_--and that it was worth while
making a greater Serbia impossible, even at the cost of increasing the
number of Slavs in the Habsburg monarchy, which, now reenforced by
the Ausgleich, could stand the strain of advancing democracy and the
necessity, therefore, of granting further rights to the Slavs.
The occupation of Bosnia led to the first real quarrels in modern times
between Croat and Serb, for the former wanted Bosnia in Greater Croatia
in order to have connection with Dalmatia; the latter wished it annexed
to Greater Serbia, because it was Serbian. Magyar and German, further,
quarreled as to the status of Bosnia and left it unsettled. But one
thing was settled by the occupation in 1879 and the annexation in
1908. Neither Greater Croatia nor Greater Serbia were any longer truly
possible as a final solution, only a Jugo-Slavia. The Greater Croatia
received a mortal blow by the addition of Serbs up to more than one
third of the number of Croats in Austria-Hungary, and Serbia faced the
future either as a vassal or as a territory which must be annexed. From
that time until the present the Habsburg monarchy, largely owing to
the predominance of the Magyars in Croatia, adopted a policy of
prevention--Jugo-Slav nationality was to be prevented. Viewed in that
light the rule of Count Khuen-Hederv[a]ry, Ban of Croatia from 1883
to 1903, in which time, according to Croats, he corrupted a whole
generation, turned Serb against Croat, and played out the radical
demands of the party of Star[c]evi[c] and Frank, is intelligible. The
policy of Count Khuen, which was based on corruption and forgery, on
press-muzzling and career-exploding, has since been imitated, and its
imitation has been largely responsible for this war.
It was not until the Serbs and Croats formed their coalition in 1905
that the trial of strength had come. In Serbia, Peter Karageorgevitch
ascended the throne and reversed the pro-Austrian policy of his
predecessor. This it will be remembered was influenced until then by
the Bulgarian policy of Russia and by Serbia's defeat at the hands of
Bulgaria in 1885. The commercial treaty with Bulgaria in 1905, and the
tariff war which Austria began immediately afterward, pointed out which
way the wind was blowing.
An era big with decisive events arrived. The Jugo-Slavs had learned
that union meant victory, division foreign mastery. Petty politics
and religious fanaticism were forgotten, and Jugo-Slav nationality was
formed in the fierce fires of Austro-Magyar terrorism and forgery and in
the whirlwind reaped from the Balkan wars.
It was too late to talk of trialism unless it meant independence, and,
when it meant that, it did not mean Austrian trialism. The treason trial
by which Baron Rauch hoped to split the Serbo-Croat coalition, and
which was to furnish the cause of a war with Serbia on the annexation of
Bosnia in 1908, collapsed. It rested on forgeries concocted within the
walls of the Austro-Hungarian legation in Belgrade where Count Forgach
held forth. The annexation of Bosnia in 1908 completed the operation
begun in 1878 and called for the completion of the policy of prevention.
It was the forerunner of the press campaign in the first Balkan war,
the Prohaska affair, the attack by Bulgaria upon Serbia and Greece, the
rebuff to Masaryk and Pa[s]i[c], the murder of Francis Ferdinand, and
the Austro-Hungarian note to Serbia. The mysteries connected with the
forgeries and this chain of events will remain a fertile field for
detectives and psychologists and, after that, for historians. For us,
it is necessary to note that, as the hand of Pan-Germanism became more
evident, the Slovenes began to draw nearer to the Croats and the Serbs.
It remained only for the Serbs to electrify the Jugo-Slavs--"to
avenge Kossovo with Kumanovo"--in order to cement their loyalty to
the regenerated Serbs. Religious differences, political rivalries,
linguistic quibbles, and the petty foibles of centuries appeared to be
forgotten in the three short years which elapsed from Kumanovo to
the destruction of Serbia in 1915. The Greater Serbia idea had really
perished in 1915, as had the Greater Croatia idea in 1878. In their
place emerged Jugo-Slavia--the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and
Slovenes--implied by the South Slav Parliamentary Club in Austria in
their Declaration of May 30, 1917, and formulated by the Pact of Corfu
of July 7, 1917, which Pasie, premier of Serbia, and Trumbie, the head
of the London Jugo-Slav Committee, drew up. The evolution had been
completed. Nationalism had proved stronger than geography, stronger than
opposing religions, more cohesive than political and economic interests.
For this, the Jugo-Slavs have not only themselves and modern progress,
like railroad-building, to thank, but also the policy of the Habsburg
monarchy, the hopeful, though feeble, Note of the Allies to President
Wilson, the Russian Revolution, and the entry of the United States into
the war.
For the historian, it remains to examine the depth and the character of
the movement. He should neither lament that it succeeded, nor frown upon
it that it did not come long ago when his own nation achieved its unity.
That it is a reality is proved by the fact that the Central Powers
believed its destruction worth this catastrophic war. A nation of eleven
or twelve millions holds the path to the Adriatic and the Aegean and the
gateway to the Orient and world dominion. It can help to make impossible
the dream of mid-Europe or of Pan-Germany.
The Jugo-Slav movement has ended in the formation of a nation which is
neither a doctrine, nor a dream, but a reality.