Constitutional Development to 1914
Constitutional Development to 1914

Author(s): Malbone W. Graham
Subject(s): Pre-WW I & WW I (1900 -1919), Between Berlin Congress and WW I
Published by: CEEOL Collections / Digital Reproductions
Keywords: Yugoslavia's origins; Yugoslavia as Kingdom;
Summary/Abstract: The military conquest and partition of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by Germany and its Axis partners in the spring of 1941 was a tragic event for the South Slavs. But in the long perspective of history it can be viewed as an far less enduring in the lives of these heroic peoples than the aftermath of the Battle of Kosovo. Although it marked a major dislocation, a hiatus in constitutional development, it was not the end of the juridical pattern created by the Yugoslav people. The fabric woven throughout fifteen hundred years of common historical experience was not so delicate that a break in the thread of its continuity, even the temporary discontinuance of portions of the design, could permanently destroy the intricately woven tapestry. This is a fitting time to analyze the constitutional evolution of the Yugoslavs. The patterns for collective behavior (which we call constitutions) are complex. Constitutionalism is principally of nineteenth-century origin. Except for a relatively small part of the English-speaking world, whose continuity in legal structure and institutions stretches back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the great political movement resulting from the convergence of the American and French revolutions was, par excellence, a nineteenth-century phenomenon. It reached its zenith in the second decade of the twentieth century.

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