But U.S. President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the proposal and the Allies agreed to accept Albania within its 1913 borders. In 1920 Albania was admitted to the League of Nations, winning international recognition as a sovereign nation for the first time.

In the meantime, the discovery of a secret agreement between Italy and the Allies pushed Croatian and Slovenian nationalists to seek an alliance with Serbian nationalists. In April 1915, the Allies had secretly signed the Treaty of London with Italy, promising coastal Istria and large areas of Slovenia and Dalmatia to Italy if it entered the war on the Allies’ side.

Croatian and Slovenian nationalists in exile, who had founded a “Yugoslav” (South Slav) Committee in London, found out about the agreement in 1917, and immediately approached the Serbian government in Corfu. The two agreed to form a joint defense front, and pledged themselves to working for a single democratic South Slav state under a constitutional monarchy (The Corfu Declaration).

In November 1918, representatives of the Yugoslav Committee, the National Council, and the Serbian political parties met in Geneva to issue a declaration of union under Serbia’s Karadjordjevic dynasty. The Montenegrins had rebelled against Austrian occupation two months earlier, and after the Geneva declaration a national assembly in the Montengrin capital, Podgorica, declared for union with Serbia. The Croatian national assembly had declared an end to the union with Hungary in October, and in December a delegation from the Croatian National Council invited the Serbian prince regent Alexander to proclaim the new union. On December 5, 1918, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formally announced.

Map Courtesy of the National Geographic Society Map B.6: The Kingdom Of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (click to enlarge)

After strenuous negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference and the League of Nations, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes comprised Slovenia, Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Serbian held territories in Macedonia, but Istria still went to Italy.

One of the Kingdom’s first acts was to enter into a defensive alliance with Romania and Czechoslovakia (the Little Entente), with French backing, to contain the dangers from Hungary and Bulgaria, both of which felt short ended by the Paris Peace Conference.

The new state, which was recognized in 1921, was under pressure from the start. Croats and Slovenes under Austria-Hungary had, like the Bosnians and Albanians under the Ottomans, hoped for autonomy within the empire, and wanted the Kingdom to be federal in structure. But the Serbian government was committed first and foremost to unifying the Serbian territories that were scattered between Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, far to the west in Croatia and to the east in Kosovo, as well as to consolidating its hold on the territories it had gained in 1913.

The exigencies of war had submerged these differences for a while, but now the first differences emerged. Elections in November 1920 produced a constituent assembly made up of fifteen separate political parties, most with specifically ethnic constituencies.

There was an immediate rift between the Serbs and the Croats over the constitution of the Kingdom. Serbia had long sought a strong state as the best defense against predatory neighbors, whereas Croats and Slovenes had long had to defend their nations from too strong a state. Serbia rejected Croat and Slovene proposals for federalism and the chief Croatian political party, the Croatian Peasant Party, withdrew from the assembly. Serbian and Muslim deputies were able push through a highly centralized constitution, which was promulgated on Serbia’s national day (Vidovdan), June 28, 1921.

Despite the support of Muslim deputies to the Vidovdan constitution, Bosnia had no formal status under it. But its former Ottoman sanjaks were transformed into six provinces, and so it retained a presence on the map of the Kingdom.

The first decade of the Kingdom’s existence was marked by deteriorating relations between Serbs and Montenegrins on the one side, and Croats and Slovenes on the other, and a general disaffection amongst non-Serb groups. In June 1928, when a Montenegrin deputy shot dead two Croatian deputies in the assembly and mortally wounded the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, it became clear that the standoff between Serbs and Croats over the Vidovdan constitution was undermining the Kingdom.

In January 1929, King Alexander dissolved the assembly and declared he would rule alone. In a belated gesture towards the South Slav ideal, the Kingdom was renamed Yugoslavia (“Land of the South Slavs”), and was reorganized into nine banovine (governorates) and the prefecture of Belgrade. Bosnia was divided between four banovine, and was wiped off the map.

Though there was initial support for these moves, it was soon eroded by the draconian methods used to implement them, including a ban on nationalist gymnastic societies, the torture of political opponents and interference with the press and the judiciary.

In 1934, an agent of the Croatian terrorist organization, the Ustasa, assassinated King Alexander, and his brother, Paul, took over as regent. Talks began between Serbian and Croatian leaders, and in August 1939, on the eve of World War II, the Serbian government agreed to create a partially self-governing Croatian banovina, that included portions of Bosnian territory. Before the agreement could be implemented, however, Germany and Italy invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941.

Hitler’s rise to power in Germany had caused alarm bells to ring in the Balkans, and in 1934 Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey and Romania signed an agreement for collective security (the Balkan Entente). But Germany already dominated Yugoslavia economically, through a discriminatory common market agreement, and when Austria was incorporated into the German Reich in March 1938, Germany shared a border with Yugoslavia, and the pressures on the latter spiraled out of control.

By 1939 Italy was able to march into Albania without resistance from any power, great or small, and the 1941 invasion of Yugoslavia fragmented the internally divided Kingdom beyond repair.

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