yugoslavias implosion

36
ChApter 1
Serbian politicians were torn between the desire to see all the
scattered Serbs living in one state and the idea of Yugoslavism. People’s
Radical Party leader Nikola Pašić pushed for a unitary state that
would afford the Serbs political domination and looked upon federalism
as a state of disarray. His ambition for Serbia to become the
leading nation in Yugoslavia and the Balkans rested on the belief that
“Serbs have always had a flair for greatness and freedom.” 7 Serbian
politicians had always looked down on the other nations, especially
on the Croats, the chief opponents of the Serbian national agenda. In
1912, for instance, Nikola Stojanović (1880–1965), a lawyer, politician,
and newspaper publisher, displayed a curious mixture of arrogance
and belligerence:
The Croats … aren’t and can’t be a separate nation, and they’re
already on the way to becoming Serbs. By adopting the Serbian language
as a literary language, they have taken the most important step
towards unification. In addition, the amalgamation process goes on
outside the sphere of language. By reading Serb poems, any Serb poem,
by singing any Serb song, an atom of fresh Serb democratic culture
passes into their organism. … This struggle must be fought to extermination,
yours or ours. One side must succumb.” 8
The Serbs watched the creation of the first Yugoslavia with
mixed feelings because they suffered from two collective psychological
complexes simultaneously: a superiority complex, by which,
through a conjunction of historical circumstances, they touched
off World War I and came out of it, after suffering fearful losses, on
the side of the victorious powers, having “liberated” the Slovenian
and Croatian nations from Austro-Hungarian rule; and an inferiority
complex that led them to establish a Serbian nation-state on a
7 Nikola Pašić’s quotation taken from Latinka Perović, Ljudi,događaji, knjige (People, Occasions,
Books), (Beograd: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, 2000) p .129–32 .
8 Nikola Stojanović, „Do istrage naše ili vaše,“ [To the extermination of
either ours (Serbian) or yours (Croatian) Srbobran, August 1902 .