Yugoslavia formed

On December 1, 1918, in Belgrade, Prince Regent Alexander of Serbia accepted a delegation from the National Council in Zagreb and proclaimed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. For the first time the South Slavs of the Balkans and the former Habsburg south lived in one state, ruled by Alexander's father, King Peter I. The state covered about 12 million people of different faiths, alphabets and histories: Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims, Montenegrins, Macedonians and many minorities. In 1929 it was renamed Yugoslavia, meaning Land of the South Slavs.¹

The idea of South Slav unity had grown through the 1800s among intellectuals who wanted to resist Habsburg and Ottoman rule. The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 doubled the size of Serbia and made it the natural center of any union. World War I did the rest. Serbia was invaded in 1914, and exiled politicians from Austria-Hungary formed the Yugoslav Committee in London and agreed with Serbia's government on a joint state in the Corfu Declaration of 1917. When the Habsburg monarchy collapsed in October 1918, the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs of its former lands declared their own state in Zagreb, then rushed into union with Serbia, partly to avoid Italian claims on the Adriatic coast.³

The union was unequal from the start. Serbs dominated the army, the dynasty and the capital, and the 1921 constitution created a centralized state that many Croats rejected. In 1928 a Montenegrin deputy shot Croat leader Stjepan Radić in parliament, and in 1929 King Alexander suspended the constitution and ruled as dictator, renaming the country Yugoslavia. Alexander was assassinated in Marseille in 1934. The state survived until it was torn apart by World War II, revived under Tito after 1945, and finally dissolved in the wars of the 1990s.¹²