Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903–1945

by John Paul Newman

The Yugoslav state of the interwar period was a child of the Great European War. Its borders were superimposed onto a topography of conflict and killing, for it housed many war veterans who had served or fought in opposing armies (those of the Central Powers and the Entente) during the war. These veterans had been adversaries but after 1918 became fellow subjects of a single state, yet in many cases they carried into peace the divisions of the war years. John Paul Newman tells their story, showing how the South Slav state was unable to escape out of the shadow cast by the First World War. Newman reveals how the deep fracture left by war cut across the fragile states of 'New Europe' in the interwar period, worsening their many political and social problems, and bringing the region into a new conflict at the end of the interwar period.

Genres: Nonfiction

297 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 25, 2015

Reviews

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Those people who find the story of Yugoslavian conflict confusing will likely not find much relief here, as the goal of the author is to provide a deep dive into the intra-ethnic political conflicts of the so-called "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes." The easiest way to summarize this book is to note that very few of the inhabitants of the new polity were interested in the "Yugoslavian" idea. Most Serbs aspired to the recreation of the medieval Serbian empire, with the Serbian people finally being their own masters. Practically speaking this meant raw annexation of Macedonia and Montenegro on one hand, and the expropriation of the lands of the Muslim landlords of Bosnia and the German settlers of the Banat on the other.

This is as compared to the Croatian people who wanted to retain the autonomy they enjoyed under the Austro-Hungarian system, and were largely done with kings. Unless they were Croatian officers of the old Habsburg state who had no use for nationalism in the first place, and who now found themselves a barely tolerated and largely reviled clique in the new order.

As for the Slovenes, they might have been the one group who had some interest in the Yugoslavian idea, but only as a buttress against annexation by Italy.

All these attitudes would have been hard to transcend with the best aspirations in the world. But when even Serbian aspirations could not be satisfied, as witnessed by the new state's inability to offer land to its soldiers and succor to its wounded veterans, this only led to further protest and politicized violence by the nominal beneficiaries of the victory. A glorious origin myth will only take you so far without practical performance.

Again, I got a great deal out of this monograph, which has a higher aim of placing the Yugoslavian example into the wider experience of post-1918 political violence in the successor states to the fallen dynastic empires, but it is admittedly not the first book you want to read on the subject.