SERBIAN POLITICAL ELITE FROM BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA AND THE YUGOSLAV KINGDOM (1918–1941)
SERBIAN POLITICAL ELITE FROM BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA AND THE YUGOSLAV KINGDOM (1918–1941)

Summary/Abstract: Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serbian political and intellectual elite, in the period of existence of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes / Yugoslavia (1918–1929), found itself in a position to politically act in the new state, but only few among them managed to find their way around the new state of affairs and gain political profit. Most of them believed that the Serbian national question was finally resolved in 1918, and so the opening of the “Croatian question” in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes caught them completely off guard, and their confusion and failure to navigate the new political circumstances led to their only fitting into the bleak parliamentarism of the newly founded state and poisoned interreligious and interethnic relations until 1929, and to their using Yugoslav rather than Serbian nationalism as a defense against the aggressive Croatian nationalism fueled and channeled by the Roman Catholic clergy. Having sincerely accepted the regime of integral Yugoslavism of King Alexander, which was proclaimed in 1929, the majority of them realized, only in the second half of the 1930s, that in the state they had sincerely created and defended they had actually been cheated by the Croats. Their unrealistic faith in the Yugoslav state paralyzed any action toward creating a Serb national program, until it was too late, on the eve of World War II.

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