yugoslavias implosion

territory roughly coinciding with that of Yugoslavia but that fell far
short of their expectations.
The Croats, whose insistence on a federal arrangement for Yugoslavia
was ignored, continued to press for such a solution. Every
attempt by the Croats to organize Yugoslavia on a federal principle,
notably under the leadership of Stjepan Radić, met with resistance
from Belgrade. Hoping to curb nationalistic and separatist tendencies,
King Aleksandar Karađorđevć dissolved Yugoslavia’s National
Assembly, outlawed all political parties, and imposed a dictatorship
in January 1929, subsequently changing the name of the country
from the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes to the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia. From then on, government officials pursued a policy of
imposing an integral Yugoslavia across the territory of the Southern
Slavs to rub out the identity of the constituent peoples. The Yugoslav
unitary state emphasized the common ethnic characteristics of what
was supposedly one and the same nation with three different constituent
peoples. Yet the effort to create an integral nation proved futile.
While the Serbs strove toward national unity as the basis of state centralism,
the Croats and the Slovenes continued to champion national
pluralism as a prerequisite for federalism.
The centralist policy of the first Yugoslavia relied for the most
part on oppression and violence, with the regime branding all political
organizations and movements—federalists and republicans
alike—as “antistate” and outlawing them under the Law on the Protection
of the State. The unitary concept, unacceptable to Yugoslav
peoples other than Serbs, failed to ensure basic conditions for transforming
Yugoslavia into a democratic state. Because of the clash of
various national ideologies stemming from the different pasts of the
Yugoslav peoples and from the Serbs’ refusal to acknowledge them,
the Yugoslav state was unable to ensure respect for the fundamental
democratic principle on which it had been formed—the principle of
self-determination. Serbian leaders came increasingly to the opinion
37
ChApter 1