yugoslavias implosion

38
ChApter 1
that Serbs and Croats could not live together, that a break was inevitable,
and that Serbia should concentrate on building Greater
Serbia. 9
Serbia believed that it deserved a vanguard role in the 1934 Balkan
Entente, the collective defense arrangement designed to discourage
the territorial claims of various European countries. With the
assassination of King Aleksandar that October, the Yugoslav dictatorship
ended and the problem of restructuring the state surged to
the forefront, threatening the very existence of Yugoslavia. The Serbian
claims on Yugoslavia were neither economically nor culturally
founded. Arising from a predominantly agrarian economy, Serbia’s
political culture could not assimilate the much more developed western
parts of the country. The state restructuring problem revolved
around the issue of Croatian sovereignty, which had become acute.
The 1939 Cvetković-Maček agreement between Yugoslav prime minister
Dragiša Cvetković and Croat politician Vladko Maček establishing
the Banovina (province) of Croatia was a concession to growing
Croat discontent, an effort to mollify the pro-autonomy movement
in Croatia lest it grow into a separatist movement. The agreement
immediately agitated the Serbs, who countered with demands that a
Serbian banovina be set up on ethnic Serbian territories.
At the forefront of the criticism of the Croatian banovina was
the Serbian Cultural Club, which viewed the agreement as an
anti-Serbian deal that “left the Serbs in the Banovina of Croatia
in such a frame of mind that they no longer feel at home there.” 10
The club postulated that because “the Serbs were the chief architects
of Yugoslavia,” the state “needs them more than ever before.”
Such statements exemplified the attitude of Serbs toward the state:
9 In 1927, the brochure “Amputation” was circulated by Serbian nationalists,
drawing a line of demarcation between Greater Serbia and Croatia running from
Virovitica to the Adriatic sea by way of Grbišno Polje, Sisak, Karlovac and the River
Kupa, and leaving the Croats a stretch of the littoral from Bakar to Rijeka .
10 Srpski glas, No . 16, February 29, 1940 .