“Planinsko hrvatstvo”: slovensko-pravaške teze i veze
From the time of Ivan Tavčar’s youthful greeting of Croatian state right ideas and his declaration of being an “alpine Croat” in the 1880s, Slovene politics was based on an emphasis of cooperation with Croatian ‘Rightists.’ Thanks to Tavčar this cooperation was first prevalent among the Slovene National Progressives, but after the turn of the century, the initiative shift ed to the Catholic nationalists. In 1898, at the well-known congress in Trsat, they accepted Croatian State Right as the basis for the constitutional unification of the South Slavs of the Habsburg Monarchy. At the outset the majority of Croatian Catholic nationalists remained sceptical toward “clericals” from Carniola, despite the comments made in Croatian lands by the rather popular Christian Socialist ideologue Janez Evangelist Krek about Slovene-Croat fidelity. But because the Slovene People’s Party under the leadership of Ivan Šusteršič indisputably developed into the strongest South Slavic political party in Cisleithania, in the eyes of the Croatian ‘Rightists’ it was also a welcome partner in the struggle to establish Trialism in the south of the Habsburg Monarchy. Slovene national Catholics emphasized the commonality in views between the Slovene Catholic camp and the constitutional programme of the Croatian Party of Right. In this regard, for example, they referred to the decision of the Croatian Sabor (Parliament) of 9 March 1712, in which the Croatian estates accepted the Croatian Pragmatic Sanction under the condition that Croatia would be ruled only by those daughters of the Habsburg dynasty who ruled Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola. On the eve of the First World War the Slovene Catholic nationalists with all their effort attempted to tie their party to the ‘Rightists’ in some sort of a Trialist power bloc, so much so that in their statements of party programme they tried to prove the compatibility of Starčević’s ideas with those of Christian democracy. The height of the building of the Slovene-Croat political alliance was undoubtedly the “First Croat-Slovene parliament,” which met on 20 October 1912 in Ljubljana. The assembly was certainly a shining manifestation of Slovene-Croat alliance in the struggle for Trialism, and Mile Starčević and Ivan Šusteršič were selected as co-presidents of the Croat-Slovene Party of Right. Its foundation was personally welcomed, as a sign of South Slavic loyalty to the dynasty, by none other than heir apparent Franz Ferdinand in his memorandum directed to the Emperor and King Franz Joseph. However, the Balkan Wars which broke out that autumn wrecked the optimism of the adherents of Croatian State Right in Ljubljana: Slovene political fate was increasingly becoming subject to the growing activity of Serbian diplomacy, and less so that of cooperation with the programme of the Party of Right.
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