Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

The Agram National Council’s hand was forced. Instead of waiting to arrange on equal terms with the Belgrade Government the details of union, as the Declaration of Geneva had provided, the Council proclaimed, on November 23, the union of the territories under its control with the Kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. Three days later a national assembly at Podgoritza deposed King Nicholas and his dynasty and voted for the union of Montenegro with the new state. Prince Alexander, as regent, announced the birth of “free and united Jugoslavia” at Belgrade on December 1, 1918.

When the Jugoslavs appeared with a united delegation at the Peace Conference, Italy insisted that its members be acknowledged only as Serbians, acting in the name of the Belgrade Government. The union of the Jugoslav portions of the Hapsburg Empire with the Kingdom of Serbia had not been recognized by Italy, or by the other Entente Powers, for that matter;[14] and, as such an event was a thing of the future, to be decided by the Peace Conference, Italy declared that she would not consent to have decisions anticipated or prejudiced by acceptance of the union as a fait accompli. Throughout the Conference Italy maintained this uncompromising attitude.

It was after issuing from a conference in which the future of the Jugoslavs was the principal topic that Mr. Lloyd George said that the peace treaties threatened “to Balkanize Europe.” The full significance of this remark is grasped when we realize that the Jugoslav cause at Paris was not advanced by delegates who presented a solid front and followed a consistent policy in pressing their national claims. Pashitch and his colleagues from Belgrade, dismayed by Italian opposition at times and at others more interested in the Banat of Temesvár and Macedonia than in the Adriatic, held back from whole-hearted support of Croat and Slovene claims. In their attitude toward their “redeemed brethren” the Serbs displayed curiously mixed sentiments. If one were rash enough to attempt to express the Serbian feeling in one sentence, he might put it in this way, that the Serbs possessed, in relation to the Hapsburg Jugoslavs, a superior military complex and an inferior cultural complex.

But to be fair to the Serbs one must remember their recent military achievements and the martyrdom of the World War. They had put the Serbian race in a position of commanding the respect of the world and of being listened to at Paris because of their exploits and their sufferings. Then, too, they had fought for the Entente Powers while the rest of the Jugoslavs had fought for the Central Empires. It meant a great deal to them to renounce the historic name of their country and the flag under which they had fought, and to lose their identity in a new “Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.” The change of the red-blue-white flag to a blue-white-red flag was even more of a renunciation. On the practical side of the question, Premier Pashitch had to think of two other considerations: Serbia, bled white, risked a new war with Italy in championing the Croat side of the Fiume question and the Slovene side of the Istrian question; and the Serbians, with a hundred years of independent existence behind them, risked being submerged in the new state with its Occidental and more highly educated Croato-Slovene majority. What leader, under these circumstances, would not have paused to weigh the alternatives of Greater Serbia and Jugoslavia? The dilemma was all the more distressing because Pashitch realized that at the best he would have to sacrifice half a million Slovenes to Italy and would thereby incur their enmity for himself and for the Belgrade Government as well!

In the midst of currents and counter-currents of sentiment and sound diplomatic common sense, the Jugoslavs whirled through the mad year of 1919, avoiding a decision as to the precise form the new state should take. Until the treaties with Austria and Hungary were signed, the Jugoslavs concentrated upon the problems demanding attention at Paris, which were (1) resisting the pretensions of Italy in Dalmatia and at the head of the Adriatic; (2) getting as much territory as possible from Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria; and (3) trying to prevent the award of the Banat of Temesvár to Rumania.

Two problems of minor importance came up: (1) the repudiation by influential Montenegrins of the union voted by the Podgoritza assembly; and (2) fixing a frontier with the Albanians.

The Banat question with Rumania was compromised by a Solomonic division of the disputed territory. As we have seen elsewhere, Jugoslav ambitions in regard to Albania were thwarted by the Albanians themselves, whose success in defending their independence was followed by the intervention of the League of Nations. The Montenegrin revolt was suppressed. Serbian claims at the expense of Bulgaria were allowed in the Treaty of Neuilly. The Treaty of Trianon gave the new state generous frontiers at the expense of Hungary. The Treaty of St.-Germain provided for a plebiscite in the Klagenfurt district of Carinthia, which resulted in a victory for the Austrians. But the Paris Conference left to direct negotiations between Italy and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes the fixing of the frontier with Italy.

For eighteen months it looked as if war would break out between Italians and Jugoslavs. But the latter were not sufficiently united to make possible an uncompromising attitude toward the Italians. In violation of President Wilson’s ninth point in the famous Fourteen, the Jugoslavs finally agreed to sacrifice a large portion of the Slovenes, to renounce their claim to Fiume, and to agree to the incorporation of the Zara district and some of the Dalmatian islands in Italy. This compromise, called the Treaty of Rapallo, was signed on November 28, 1920. Like other compromise frontiers in the general settlement after the World War, the Rapallo arrangement created an irredentist problem more complicated and dangerous than the one it was supposed to solve. Italy was confirmed in the possession of Istria and secured a frontier in the hinterland of Trieste and the Isonzo Valley more advantageous than the frontier of the 1915 secret Treaty of London. Fiume was made a free state “in perpetuo.” Zara and its hinterland became an Italian enclave in Dalmatia. The islands of Cherso and Lussin, with “minor islands and rocks” off the Istrian Peninsula, went to Italy. Former Austro-Hungarian subjects were allowed to opt for Italian nationality, without the obligation to transfer their domicile outside Jugoslav territory. Reciprocity for Jugoslavs residing within the new limits of the Kingdom of Italy was denied.

A glance at the map will show how great a blow to the prosperity of the Slovenes and the Croats was the creation of the Free State of Fiume. The loss of Trieste was serious enough to the Slovenes; that of Fiume cut them off entirely from the sea; while Fiume, where the Julian and Dinaric Alps meet, is the logical outlet for Croatia, Hungary, and Slavonia. Italy justified her seizure of Fiume (the fiction of a free state is transparent) on the ground that the majority of the port’s inhabitants were Italians. If the suburb of Susak be counted as part of the city, even this claim was debatable. But the fact that Danzig’s population was over 90 per cent pure German did not weigh at Versailles against the decision to detach Danzig from Germany to make it an outlet for Poland. Memel was similarly taken from German to be later awarded to Lithuania. Here we see the application of two weights and two measures, in the case of Fiume against a state created by the Peace Conference itself! The moral of most of the decisions made since 1918 is that the supreme argument in international relations is the possession of force. Taken as a whole, the map of Europe, as redrawn since 1918, has been more influenced by the possession of superior force by its beneficiaries than any of the territorial readjustments of the nineteenth century.

Advantageous as it was, there was a loud outcry in Italy against the Treaty of Rapallo, and it has not yet been fully put into force. As I write these lines the Jugoslavs are vainly endeavoring in a conference at Abbazia to secure loyal fulfilment of Italian promises and to make conditions tolerable for the foreign trade of Jugoslavia.