The revolution of 1848 demonstrated still further the friendly relations of these potential rivals as national unifiers. For the first time, the Croats and Serbs publicly fraternized and showed that the seemingly insurmountable barrier of religious difference tended to disappear in the struggle for national independence. In this sense the events of 1848—when the hand of the foreign master was for the while taken away—have given confident hope to those who believe that Jugo-Slav differences are soluble. Jela[c]i[c], Ban of Croatia, the idol of the Serbo-Croats, was proclaimed dictator and supported by the Croatian Diet at Zagreb (Agram) and the Serbian assembly at Karlovac (Karlowitz). The Serb Patriarch Raja[c]i[c] and the young and gifted Stratimirovi[c], provisional administrator of the Serb Vojvodina, attended the Croatian Diet and the High Mass where Bishop O[z]egovi[c] sang the Te Deum in Old Slavic. After Gaj, Raja[c]i[c], and Stratimirovi[c] had failed at Vienna and Pressburg to bend the dynasty or the defiant Kossuth, Jela[c]i[c] was empowered to defend the monarchy and bring back the historical rights of the Triune Kingdom and the Serb Vojvodina. The dynasty and the monarchy survived, but Jugo-Slav hopes and the promises they had received were unfulfilled or soon withdrawn, as for instance the Vojvodina in 1861. Absolutism reigned supreme from 1849 to 1860.
This disappointment led the Croats and Serbs to try cooperation with the Magyars, who under Deák and Eötvös appeared to be anxious to conciliate the non-Magyars in those uncertain years which began in 1859 and ended in dualism. Austria lacked a great statesman, and the Prusso-Austrian rivalry led the fearful and impatient Francis Joseph into the Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867. It was a work of haste and expediency and bound with it the fate of the dynasty. Thereafter, the German minority in Austria and the Magyar minority in Hungary were the decisive factors in the problems confronting the Jugo-Slavs. Dalmatia was handed over to Austria; Croatia, by a compromise, which it has never really accepted, to Hungary.
The Ausgleich between Austria and Hungary and Hungary and Croatia opened in 1868 a period which ended in 1905—it was a period, on the one hand of the greatest decay and decomposition in the political life of the Jugo-Slavs, and, on the other, of the greatest literary and intellectual unity as shaped by Bishop Strossmayer and Peter II and Nicholas of Montenegro.
Bishop Strossmayer and the Slovene, Croat, and Serb academies, matica, and learned societies, as well as men of literature, spoke, wrote, and pleaded for unity in this period, in vain. But they and the universities of Prague and Zagreb produced a younger generation which later took up the fight for national unity and which abandoned individual political foibles and looked over the boundaries of their provinces for inspiration.
Among the Slovenes, politics degenerated into the struggle for minor concessions from the court at Vienna in regard to the Slovene language and schools, while political parties multiplied freely through personal and social differences. The lines which bound them to their kinsmen in the south were weakest during this period.
The Croats found themselves no match for the astute Magyars who resorted to packed diets, gerrymandering, bribery, and forgery. The Compromise (Nagoda) of 1868 was as decisive as the murder of the farsighted Prince Michael of Serbia in that year. It will be remembered that, in spite of his many faults, he had made an agreement with Montenegro for the ultimate merging of their states and, after allying himself with Rumania, had carried out an agreement with the Bulgarian committee for the amalgamation of Bulgaria with Serbia, thus obtaining a commanding influence in the Balkans. With his death, Serbia fell into the hands of Milan and Alexander, whose weak and erratically despotic reigns ushered in an era in Serbian history from which she emerged in 1903, through the assassination and the extinction of the last of the Obrenovics, a country without a good name, a nation which, through no special fault of its own, had become degraded.
It was in the midst of this political decay that the Bosnians revolted in 1875 and that Serbia, Montenegro, Russia, and Rumania became involved in the Russo-Turkish war. Space forbids but the most hasty survey of the occupation and administration by Austria of Bosnia and the Herzegovina by virtue of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878.
Bismarck, Francis Joseph, and Andrassy were swayed by differing motives whose total result was that Austria was to become a Balkan power—the outpost of the German Drang nach Osten—and that it was worth while making a greater Serbia impossible, even at the cost of increasing the number of Slavs in the Habsburg monarchy, which, now reenforced by the Ausgleich, could stand the strain of advancing democracy and the necessity, therefore, of granting further rights to the Slavs.
The occupation of Bosnia led to the first real quarrels in modern times between Croat and Serb, for the former wanted Bosnia in Greater Croatia in order to have connection with Dalmatia; the latter wished it annexed to Greater Serbia, because it was Serbian. Magyar and German, further, quarreled as to the status of Bosnia and left it unsettled. But one thing was settled by the occupation in 1879 and the annexation in 1908. Neither Greater Croatia nor Greater Serbia were any longer truly possible as a final solution, only a Jugo-Slavia. The Greater Croatia received a mortal blow by the addition of Serbs up to more than one third of the number of Croats in Austria-Hungary, and Serbia faced the future either as a vassal or as a territory which must be annexed. From that time until the present the Habsburg monarchy, largely owing to the predominance of the Magyars in Croatia, adopted a policy of prevention—Jugo-Slav nationality was to be prevented. Viewed in that light the rule of Count Khuen-Hedérv[a]ry, Ban of Croatia from 1883 to 1903, in which time, according to Croats, he corrupted a whole generation, turned Serb against Croat, and played out the radical demands of the party of Star[c]evi[c] and Frank, is intelligible. The policy of Count Khuen, which was based on corruption and forgery, on press-muzzling and career-exploding, has since been imitated, and its imitation has been largely responsible for this war.
It was not until the Serbs and Croats formed their coalition in 1905 that the trial of strength had come. In Serbia, Peter Karageorgevitch ascended the throne and reversed the pro-Austrian policy of his predecessor. This it will be remembered was influenced until then by the Bulgarian policy of Russia and by Serbia's defeat at the hands of Bulgaria in 1885. The commercial treaty with Bulgaria in 1905, and the tariff war which Austria began immediately afterward, pointed out which way the wind was blowing.