Serbia

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SERBIA.

By the first months of 1914 the Kingdom of Serbia seemed the most successful of the independent states that had emerged across southeastern Europe during the nineteenth century. Its modernized army, mobilizing 350,000 men from a population of 2.9 million, won victories in both Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, first against the Ottoman Empire and then against neighboring Bulgaria. The region's one native monarch, King Peter Karadjordjevi? (1844–1921), ruled under constitutional restraints and a parliament elected by near universal male suffrage. The tariff war of 1906–1911 with Austria-Hungary had secured economic independence from Serbia's huge northern neighbor. Family holdings predominated among a peasantry accounting for more than 80 percent of the population. The cultural and intellectual life of Belgrade displayed the growing European ambiance of the region's other capital cities but enjoyed the advantage of greater press freedom.

The next ninety years were not kind to that apparent promise. Two world wars and the wars of Yugoslavia's dissolution in the 1990s are partly responsible. So, however, is political conflict within Serbia's changing borders and a problematic relation with the much larger territory, a large number of Serbs included, that became Yugoslavia after 1918 and again after 1945. Already by 1914, the First Balkan War had added Kosovo, the much-remembered site of the medieval Serbian state's defeat by Ottoman forces in 1389, and Vardar Macedonia to the territory of "inner Serbia." Total population swelled to 4.4 million but reduced the 90 percent Serb and Serbian Orthodox proportion before 1912 to less than 70 percent. The ethnic and religious majority in Kosovo had long since become Albanian and Muslim, in the Vardar region Slav Macedonian and Bulgarian Orthodox.

In July 1914 Austria-Hungary seized on the assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to its throne by a Bosnian Serb to declare war on Serbia. In World War I Serbia's suffering began with the costly repulse of two Austro-Hungarian offensives. There followed a deadly typhus epidemic; and a German-led offensive that forced its army, government, and accompanying civilians to retreat across Kosovo and Albania to the island of Corfu by the winter of 1915–1916. The death toll to that point alone approached half a million. Hard Austrian and harder Bulgarian occupations divided Serbia's 1914 territory until 1918. Then a Serbian army reconstituted with French-led forces on the Salonika Front broke through Bulgarian lines in October 1918 and quickly retook the lost territory.

Pressed by advancing Italian troops and the internal disorder of a disintegrating Austro-Hungarian army, a National Council of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs hastily assembled in Zagreb and accepted Serbia's terms for the founding of the first Yugoslav or South Slav state on 1 December 1918. In return, Serbian troops stemmed the Italian advance and restored order in formerly Habsburg Croatia-Slavonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yet it was not until 1921 that a constituent assembly, minus most Croat votes, could establish the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes on unitarist terms under a Serbian King, Alexander Karadjordjevi? (1888–1934). Its thirty-three district administrations were made responsible to Belgrade's central ministries. They were subdivided so that the two million Serbs outside of Serbia, where only 2.6 million survived the war, would have local majorities in some of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, the Vojvodina, and Macedonia, and all of Kosovo. The two latter territories were now called South Serbia and placed under semi-martial law well into the 1920s.

Several disadvantages stood in the way of the Serbian dominance of this first Yugoslav state, as assumed by its detractors and anticipated by prewar political leaders such as Nikola Pasi? (1845–1926). Long head of the previously dominant Radical Party, Pasi? could remain prime minister again until 1926, but only through a series of unstable coalition governments. Serbia's political spectrum had divided into five parties, while single parties represented not only the Slovenes, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims but also increasingly the Serbs from outside of Serbia. Other disadvantages were the greater war damage suffered by Serbian industry, the failure of its banking sector to attract much of the private capital now concentrating in Zagreb, and the retreat of the European capital market from the state loans so helpful to prewar Serbia. Culturally, some effort to make Belgrade the center of a single, new Yugoslav identity briefly attracted intellectuals and artists from other ethnic areas but failed to survive the 1920s. Projects to create a single educational system would not even get started until the 1930s.

By then, King Alexander had abolished both the parliament and the established political parties, while redividing the renamed Kingdom of Yugoslavia into only eight banovine (provinces). Their borders favored Serbs but not Serbia. From 1929 to 1931 his royal dictatorship was a reality, enforced by new powers for the Interior Ministry in Belgrade. His closest army advisors fought the pressures rising for relaxation from 1931 to 1934 but could not prevail after the king's assassination in 1934 at the hands of radical Croatian and Macedonian nationalists. A new prime minister, Milan Stojadinovi? (1888–1961), revived the economy, first through favorable trade arrangements with Nazi Germany and then with rearmament favoring Serbian industry. But he could not come to terms with either the Serbian Orthodox Church or the Croatian Peasant Party. By 1939 his successors had agreed to larger and largely Croatianbanovina that prompted rising Serbian demands for one of their own, including most of Bosnia.

The German invasion of April 1941 then intervened to dismember the first Yugoslavia and occupy Serbia. A military coup in Belgrade had just overthrown the Regent Paul's government for agreeing to join the Nazi's Tripartite Pact. The brutality of the Nazi occupation intensified as both the Yugoslav Communist Party under Tito (Josip Broz, 1892–1980) and remnants of the royal Yugoslav army under Dragoljub Mihajlovi? organized competing resistance movements. Kosovo became part of a Greater Albania under Italian occupation and a Kosovar Albanian administration that killed or expelled interwar Serb immigrants. War deaths there and in Serbia proper totaled 150,000, versus 300,000 Serbs killed elsewhere in Yugoslavia. Tito used his partisans' expulsion into Bosnia and Croatia to build multiethnic support for the Communist Yugoslavia that took power quickly in 1945. The Chetniks' limited collaboration, more with the Italians than the Germans, allowed the larger Communist forces to join the Soviet army in sweeping them aside in Serbia.

The new Communist federation made Serbia a constituent republic within its pre-1912 borders. Neighboring Vojvodina became a province and Kosovo a region, promising subordination to Serbia given their respective Serb plurality and minority. And so at first they were, particularly in Kosovo under the hard-line Interior Minister Alexander Rankovi? (1909–1982). After he was deposed in 1966 and Kosovar Albanians rioted the following year, the region's own affairs, education and police powers included, passed increasingly out of Serbia's hands.

For the 60 percent of Yugoslavia's Serbs inside Serbia, their republic received little advantage from containing the capital city and having Serbs disproportionately represented in the Communist parties of Bosnia and Croatia. In the 1945 elections Serbia's noncommunist parties were the only ones to seriously dispute the Communist accession to power, their population the only one to abstain significantly, some 30 percent. The smallholding peasantry and the Serbian Orthodox Church survived Communist pressures by the early 1950s, but with reduced numbers and less influence. By 1965, Serbian Communist liberals were at the forefront of a proposal to introduce market-oriented economic reforms, reduce political influence in enterprise management, and retreat from any Serb-centered view of Yugoslavia. Their dismissal by Tito in 1971 along with Communist liberals in Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia as well, opened the way in the Serbian party for younger apparachiks, more opportunist than hard-line. Slobodan Miloševi? (1941–2006) moved ahead on just that basis. His chance would come after Tito's death in 1980.

Serbia's economy and society were by then struggling, like the rest of Yugoslavia, with increasing inflation, enterprises under decentralized but still political management, and now subdivided workers' councils. There were added problems for Serbia, increasingly portrayed by Belgrade's freer media after Tito's death as the result of discrimination from other republics. Its payments to the lower-income republics and Kosovo seemed a greater burden than for Croatia and Slovenia, with incomes respectively two and three times Serbia's (and Yugoslavia's) average. Belgrade's infrastructure and amenities were increasingly neglected in a confederal framework where the other republics could agree that the city that was also Serbia's capital should not be favored. What had been the most open, European, and multiethnic cultural and educational center in Yugoslavia began turning in on itself during the 1980s. Serbian nationalism emerged in theater, literature, and finally in politics.

As inflation accelerated, Yugoslavia's post-Tito political stalemate also frustrated economic reform. Miloševi? used added anxiety about the declining Serb population in Kosovo to take control of the Serbian party. After the other communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989 he sought to save party control of all but Slovenia and western Croatia. He deployed a Serbianized Yugoslav army and paramilitary forces to challenge the secession of first Croatia in 1991 and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992. By 1996 the surviving Federal Republic of Yugoslavia consisted only of Serbia (10.6 million people including Vojvodina and Kosovo) and Montenegro. Blaming the immiseration of the Serbian economy and the social demoralization of Belgrade in particular on Western sanctions, Miloševi?'s criminalized regime survived even after the NATO bombing campaign of 1999 and his agreement to withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo. The bombing on top of the Serb refugee influx of the 1990s left the public with an enduring sense of victimization, rolling together all of Serbia's suffering in the wars of the twentieth century.

Within a year's time, however, Serbia's political culture rallied. Demonstrations spread from city to city, rejecting the falsification of votes in a hasty election that Miloševi? had called to maintain his position as president. He and his regime were forced to resign in October 2000. Since then, Serbia's return to its pre-1912 democratic promise has struggled to answer for the war crimes and criminality of the 1990s, to overcome the long legacy of the failed communist economy, and to avoid the crippling political divisions of the 1920s. For his courageous if compromised pursuit of that promise, Prime Minister Zoran Djindji? (1952–2003) was assassinated in 2003. But the struggle has continued.