BANOVINAS – ADMINISTRATIVE UNITS OF KING ALEXANDER I KARAĐORĐEVIĆ AND HIS PERSONAL REGIME
BANOVINAS – ADMINISTRATIVE UNITS OF KING ALEXANDER I KARAĐORĐEVIĆ AND HIS PERSONAL REGIME

Summary/Abstract: One of the main consequences of the King Alexander I Karađorđević’s personal regime was an administrative rearrangement of the state that formed new administrative units called banovinas. Historiography to date has not shed much light on the circumstances under which the banovinas were formed. Studies show that this issue occupied much of the attention of the king and his court, and that the best experts were engaged. At the beginning of the dictatorship, banovinas and their bans were used as a means through which the proclaimed ideology of Yugoslavism would come into being in the form of a single Yugoslav nation. The starting point was to remove national and historical borders between Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which were regarded as the culprits behind divisions within the population. Presenting federalization as derived through banovinas as administrative units served to conceal their true function in the process of building a unified state. Following the death of King Alexander I Karađorđević, there was an abundance of support for the idea of banovinas as administrative units and as part of the foundation of the Yugoslav state. After only ten years, the borders of the banovinas, as defined by the September constitution, were changed due to the creation of the Banovina of Croatia. This act annulled all the principles of the 1929 administrative rearrangement. The further fate of the banovinas was determined by the Second World War, in which the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as a state disappeared. Based on an analysis of available archival material, periodicals, memoirs of contemporaries and historiographical publications, the intention of this study is to show how the banovinas, as new administrative units, were used to serve the king’s personal dictatorship. Opinions of the Banovinas as parts of the administrative system are mostly negative. However, in a broader context, they brought progress and prosperity to certain areas of the state.

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