Dr Dejan Djokic publishes a new book
“Pasic and Trumbic! … Seldom have two antagonists been forced to become partners so quickly.”
Nikola Pasic and Ante Trumbic: The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by Dejan Djokic is published by Haus Publishing (www.hauspublishing.com) in the Makers of the Modern World series on Sunday 23rd May 2010, the 95th anniversary of Italy declaring war against Austria-Hungary.
Price UK £12.99 hb (ISBN 978-1-905791-78-1) 227pp
This volume is one of 32 in the series Makers of the Modern World, which describe the personalities, events and circumstances surrounding the countries that were remade after the Paris Peace Treaties. Each examines the standpoint of key players from a different country around the table. Nikola Pasic and Ante Trumbic were present at the Paris Peace Conferences representing a country once-removed from the main issues but at the same time a rival for territory with one of the Big Four – Italy. At the same time they were seeking endorsement for their newly created state of Yugoslavia. They both believed that small states would be weaker than a united Yugoslavia in the turbulent times to come. Yugoslavism was based on the premise that Croats and Serbs were ethnically one nation.
The new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) faced many obstacles at the Paris Peace Conferences of 1919–20, not least among them the different perspectives and conflicting strategies used by its two main delegates to the Conference: Pasic and Trumbic. Pašic, a wartime Prime Minister of Serbia, was the embodiment of pre-Yugoslav Serbia and was mainly concerned with Serbian territorial demands against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Trumbic, a Dalmatian Croat and a representative of pro-Yugoslav Croatia, wished to prevent Italy from gaining Dalmatia and Istria. Pasic’s sense of Realpolitik often clashed with Trumbic’s idealism, mirroring the conflict between traditional diplomacy and Wilsonian principles among the Big Four.
However, Pasic and Trumbic were brought together by one ideal: unification and international recognition of Yugoslavia. They were often pitted against their allies, as much as against their enemies. Pašic was to call the 1915 Treaty of London, “the source of our greatest problems at the Peace conference”. It had promised the Dalmatian coast to Italy in return for its joining the war on the side of the Allies and made Italy Yugoslavia’s main rival at the Conference. A similar wartime arrangement placed Romania, another former ally, in the anti Yugoslav camp. Although the young state was not recognized in the early months of the Conference, its delegation was tolerated. Prime Ministers Clemenceau and Lloyd George and President Wilson were generally sympathetic to Yugoslav self-determination, but had to deal with Italian opposition. Clemenceau is reported to have said, “My God, my God! Italy or Yugoslavia? The blonde or the brunette?” Another problem emerged when the Yugoslavs (like other East-Central European states) initially refused to sign the individual Paris Treaties which included the minorities' clause.
Yugoslavia, often erroneously described as a “Versailles creation”, shared the tragic destiny of the post- Versailles order, destroyed by the Second World War. It re-emerged as a federation at the end of the war.
Dejan Djokic is Senior Lecturer in History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Balkans, Goldsmiths, University of London. He previously taught at University College London, Birkbeck, University of London and University of Nottingham, and has held research fellowships at Columbia University, New York and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC. His publications include New Perspectives on Yugoslavia: Key Issues and Controversies (2010, co-editor), Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia (2007) and Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992 (2003, editor).