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48-528: Yugoslavia effectively went through two iterations of internal administrative borders. In the Vidovdan Constitution of 28 June 1921, drawn up in large parts by Nikola Pašić and Svetozar Pribićević , 33 administrative districts were established in what was then called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes . These were designed in a very deliberate way to maximize the political power and representation of

96-470: A Banovina of Slovenia , the threat posed by neighboring Italy and Germany and the rapidly expanding Second World War soon took precedence. Vidovdan Constitution The Vidovdan Constitution was the first constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes . It was approved by the Constitutional Assembly on 28 June 1921 despite the opposition boycotting the vote. The Constitution

144-689: A " Great Serbia " rather than a union of South Slavs. From the Croatian viewpoint, the Croatian Question was less focussed on the appeasement of Yugoslavia as a greater whole, but on the separation of Croatia from any sort of influence from Belgrade. Stjepan Radić became the early face of the Croatian separatist movement. He oscillated between favoring outright independence or a confederate model of government with three constitutionally recognized peoples (Slovenes, Croats, Serbs) that were to form independent and sovereign nation states before then voluntarily joining

192-522: A defender of Croatian national interests. The positive opinion towards the agreement among Croats did however turn increasingly sour as the agreement's implementation stalled and economic hardship arose in relationship with the onset of the Second World War. The Serbian reaction was one of outrage: 800,000 ethnic Serbs, about 20% of the Banovina's population, were now subjects of a Croatian parliament, and

240-591: A federal system and wished to emulate the Croatian autonomy rights for the Serbs. The Bosniak Muslims were particularly embittered, as they previously already had to deal with the division between four different banovinas, in all of which they were minorities. Now, two of these banovinas were merged into a national unit, which the Bosniaks had been denied, along with the very recognition as a national subculture in Yugoslavia, which

288-608: A group of communists. The viability of the constitution dominated the 1923 parliamentary elections . The Croatian Peasant Party did not accept the legitimacy of the constitution. After the 1925 elections , entry into the government was offered to the party by Nikola Pašić . The Croatian Peasant Party accepted and recognized the constitution. Leader Stjepan Radić was released from prison, along with other party officials. Littoral Banovina The Littoral Banovina or Littoral Banate ( Croatian : Primorska banovina ; Serbian : Приморска бановина / Primorska banovina ),

336-434: A loose union. Other contradictions in his political beliefs included those on the role of organized religion, urbanization and communism. His view of Croatia's borders, be it within or without Yugoslavia, expanded far beyond the modern-day Croatian nation state and included most of contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina as well. In Radić's view the local Bosniaks were not a separate ethnic group and were in truth an extension of

384-520: A new one, which had the meaning of a hidden constitutional referendum . The Council of Ministers was accountable to both the King and the National Assembly (Orleans parliamentarism) and the ministers did not have to be MPs. There was also the criminal and civil liability of the ministers, with a special State Court . The Council of Ministers had the right to legislate, to issue regulations for

432-792: A speech insulting to Queen Maria . Radić had even enlisted his party in the Krestintern in the Soviet Union in 1924, although King Alexander had openly supported the Russian Whites against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War . Radić's open flirt with communism, which was deeply despised in the Serbian political establishment, even partially brought about the downfall of the Davidović administration,

480-490: Is named after the feast of St. Vitus ( Vidovdan ), a Serbian Orthodox holiday. The Constitution required a simple majority to pass. Out of 419 representatives, 223 voted for, 35 voted against and 161 abstained. The Constitution was in effect until King Alexander proclaimed his 6 January Dictatorship on that date in 1929. The process of adopting the Vidovdan Constitution revealed major political conflicts in

528-519: The Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) had been excluded. This had made it easy for Pašić's People's Radical Party (NRS) and Pribićević's Democratic Party (DS), both political parties that were most popular among ethnic Serbs, to fulfill their agenda. Ultimately, the Vidovdan Constitution institutionalized Serbian hegemony in the new state, and its revision became a key goal for high-ranking opposition voices like HRSS leader Stjepan Radić . Radić

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576-711: The Government of National Agreement . The first and only Ban was Ivan Šubašić , a veteran of the First World War who was selected by the regent as a Serbs' Croat in the hopes of appeasing the Serbian public opinion about the deal with the Croatians, although the gesture had little effect on the negative Serbian reaction to the agreement. For the HSS part of the Peasant-Democrat Coalition, the agreement meant that, just like

624-510: The Sabor , to look after its own affairs. Furthermore, he had scored five government posts for himself and his colleagues. However, the agreement's stipulations were provisional. The planned revisions did however never happen, as the Second World War brought about the end of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The new Banovina of Croatia comprised about a third of the entire country's territory. The Croats were now

672-465: The Bosniaks and be to their detriment. After the proclamation of the 6 January Dictatorship by Alexander I , the Vidovdan Constitution was overturned. Half a year later, it was replaced with the 1931 Yugoslav Constitution (also known as September Constitution ), and the country officially became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia . In the September Constitution, the 33 administrative districts of

720-537: The Constitution. He also had the right to declare war and conclude peace . He also possessed extensive powers regarding the appointment of judges and the dissolution of the assembly. In addition, he had the classic powers of the head of state . The National Assembly was a unicameral representative body . According to the Vidovdan Constitution, citizens had political rights - voting rights , association rights, assembly and collusion . Voting rights were limited by

768-570: The Croat Maček's accession to the office of vice premier was perceived as even more of an insult. Furthermore, the fact of the very existence of a Croatian banovina led to political calls for just the same arrangement for Serbia. Slobodan Jovanović of the Serbian Cultural Club put forth a proposal that would have included Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia into a banovina of Serb countries . This proposal reached planning stages in mid-1940, but

816-609: The Croat nation, which had 'de-balkanized' them. Radić used the term 'Balkans' in a derogatory fashion, as he believed that Croatia was not a part of the Balkans. This Croatian view on Bosnia's status, which went back to thinkers like Ljudevit Gaj , was juxtaposed by Serbian nationalist beliefs going back to Vuk Karadžić , which included the Bosniaks as a natural part of the Serbian nation. As such, any sort of territorial settlement between Serbs and Croats would likely happen without representation of

864-516: The Croatian regionalists. Through intermediaries in the HSS, Cvetković met Maček in Zagreb for preliminary talks. Cvetković and Maček could profit off each other: Cvetković could gain some much need legitimacy with the Croat people and thus the United Opposition, whereas Maček could fulfill his regionalist agenda to increase Croatian autonomy. Negotiations lasted from April to August 1939, and produced

912-508: The Croats in a joint skepticism of central Serb authority, but now the Croats evidently had struck a deal with the Serbs that awarded them special treatment, including a separate national parliament that Slovenia did not have. Although the Drava banovina was somewhat close to an exclusively Slovene district, it had none of the special autonomies granted to the Banovina of Croatia. While there were calls for

960-406: The Croats, at last, had their own autonomous government and an ethnically defined territorial entity to call their own. However, both the fascist Ustasha and the Croatian communists were unhappy that the settlement had stayed short of outright independence. The positive opinion was further helped by the fact that the agreement was given legitimacy by its sponsors, especially Maček, who was popular as

1008-506: The HRSS had done with the Vidovdan Constitution , the party now effectively operated from within the September Constitution and had started cooperating with the constitutional system it had previously rejected. However, Maček had come as close as he could to complete Croatian autonomy without outright independence: Croatia now had a ban between itself and the king, and it had its own parliament in Zagreb,

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1056-575: The HSS broke ranks with the Radicals in early April 1926. After Radić's death in 1928, the party came under the leadership of Vladko Maček on 13 August 1928, who turned it further in favor of bourgeois political circles and intellectualism, away from the rural peasant agrarianism originally envisioned by Radić. He had been offered the possibility of leading the Yugoslav government as prime minister in July 1932, after

1104-664: The King had dismissed Petar Živković and Vojislav Marinković in short succession, but Maček declined. During the Royal Dictatorship, he formed potent political alliances in the opposition. First, the HSS joined with the Democratic Party to form a Democratic Peasant Union , then allied with other forces like the Slovene People's Party and Yugoslav Muslim Organization to become a complete 'United Opposition'. These alliances managed to score good electoral results in spite of

1152-520: The Serbs, but rather with the Croatian side of the deal, as the Croatians had through their cooperation with the authoritarian government legitimized both the authoritarian system in general and the 1931 Constitution in particular. Both liberals and conservatives in Serbia did, however, lay at least some of the blame at the feet of Prime Minister Cvetković, who was soon even less popular in Serbia than his authoritarian predecessor Stojadinović had been. In general,

1200-547: The Sporazum. The agreement was finalized on 20 August 1939, and ratified on the 26th. The terms of the agreement were as follows: Политика ("Politics") (27 August 1939). sr:Споразум Цветковић—Мачек (1939)   (in Serbian). p. 3 – via Wikisource . Furthermore, although not formalized in the agreement, Maček joined the cabinet as Vice Premier. Four further cabinet positions were given to Maček's colleagues, forming

1248-518: The Vidovdan Constitution were replaced with nine banovinas. Each of these were named after a river, and in the case of the Littoral Banovina , after the coastline. They were outwardly designed to avoid connotations of historical, ethnic, regional or religious allegiance, but were in effect a continuation of the Serbian dominance within Yugoslavia: Serbs were the majority in six out of nine of

1296-416: The agreement put a renewed strain on Serb-Croat relations, which had overall improved during the united opposition of Croat and Serb liberals against the central government's authority. The major effect of the Banovina of Croatia's creation on the political views of most Serb policy makers was the end of the ideology of centralism (also called unitarism). By the end of the 1930s, most Serbian politicians favored

1344-646: The banovinas, Slovenes the majority in Drava , Croatians in Sava and Littoral. By comparison, the Kosovo Albanians and Macedonians were minorities under Serbian majorities in Zeta and Vardar , and the Bosniaks (often just called Muslims at the time) were split between four banovinas ( Vrbas , Zeta , Drina , Littoral), making a majority in none of them. In the decade following

1392-442: The establishment of the royal dictatorship, half a dozen prime ministers ( Živković 1929–1932, Marinković 1932, Srškić 1932–1934, Uzunović 1934, Jevtić 1934–1935, Stojadinović 1935–1939) rose and fell, first at the behest of King Alexander I, and then, after the king's assassination in 1934, at the wishes of Prince Paul , who served as regent for the underage King Peter II . Of these prime ministers, Milan Stojadinović had

1440-610: The ethnic Serb population, and an amendment to the Electoral Law in June 1922 even prescribed the use of pre- First World War population numbers, allowing Serbia to ignore its massive casualties during the war. Furthermore, the way that the constitution was passed by parliament had also caused some resentment, as the Croatian Republican Peasant Party (HRSS), Croatia's largest regionalist party, had refused to vote, whereas

1488-583: The faith of his cabinet. The regent replaced him with Dragiša Cvetković on 5 February. Cvetković would remain prime minister until the Yugoslav coup d'état in March 1941, immediately preceding the German Invasion of Yugoslavia . Cvetković was not particularly popular in his native Serbia, neither with government supporters nor with the opposition. As such, he sought to strike a deal with Vladko Maček , who had become

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1536-506: The first one which had not been led by the Radical Party. However, in the mid-1920s, he turned his ideology in prison, accepted both the monarchy and the constitution and started to work with his renamed Croatian Peasant Party (HSS, the 'Republican' part had been dropped from the name) from within the system. A brief alliance between Radić's HSS and Pašić's Radical Party, formed on 18 July 1925, led nowhere due to mutual and public contempt, and

1584-606: The implementation of the law and those with legal force in special cases. The courts were independent and organized as first instance, appellate and cassation courts (based in Zagreb ). Special administrative courts (State Council and Main Control) were also envisaged. A large number of socio-economic rights were prescribed, as well as a special Economic Council . The units of territorial-administrative division were districts, districts, districts and municipalities. The Croatian Republican Peasant Party adopted its Constitution of

1632-495: The leader of the Croatian regionalist movement following Radić's death. Stjepan Radić had initially boycotted the Yugoslav Assembly with his HRSS in the early 1920s and had been openly hostile to the institution of the Yugoslav monarchy and the very membership of Croatia within the Yugoslav state. He engaged in openly hostile rhetoric towards the Serbian elite, and had to go abroad in July 1923 after an arrest warrant because of

1680-600: The longest tenure between 1935 and 1939, primarily because of the global economic recovery from the Great Depression . However, he was ideologically a strong centralist and opposed to major concessions to the minority movements, particularly when it came to the Croatian Question. He also drew the personal ire of Prince Paul, a western-minded anglophile, by adopting imagery and rhetoric from Italian Fascism . Stojadinović's government fell in early February 1939, when he lost

1728-628: The neutral peasant republic of Croatia in Zagreb on 1 April 1921. The Croatian Union had proposed a confederation of the kingdom into six entities: On 30 June, an editorial in the People's Radical Party's journal Samouprava stated, "This year's Vidovdan restored an empire to us". On 21 July, the Minister of the Interior and member of the People's Radical Party Milorad Drašković was assassinated in Delnice by

1776-614: The new Cvetković-Maček cabinet was a member of the Yugoslav Muslim Organization, further increasing the impression that the Croatians had struck a deal with the Serbians to partition Bosnia to the detriment of the Bosniaks. For the Slovenes, the matter was less one of a possible imminent national destruction like in the case of Bosnia, but more one of equality between the three peoples. The Slovenes had usually stood side by side with

1824-571: The new state. Although there were earlier plans to adopt a Constitution (see the Guidelines , the Corfu Declaration , the Geneva Agreement ), the Constitution was eventually adopted by a narrow majority and overriding on a national basis. The SCS Kingdom is designated as a constitutional , parliamentary and hereditary monarchy , whose language is Serbo-Croatian-Slovenian. A unitary system

1872-592: The only ethnic group within Yugoslavia with their own dedicated political entity within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but the population also contained 20% Serbs and 4% Bosniaks. Most of the stipulations of the treaty remained unfulfilled, as the outbreak of Second World War in the very week of the agreement's ratification and the eventual involvement of Yugoslavia after the German Invasion of April 1941 prevented its political realization. The Croatian reaction within Yugoslavia was, at least initially, generally positive, as

1920-524: The openly biased political system that the September Constitution of 1931 had established. The United Opposition list managed to secure 45% of the vote in December 1938, further undermining the authority of Prime Minister Stojadinović. Stojadinović was then replaced with Cvetković in February 1939. Cvetković had been appointed prime minister because of the necessity that Regent Paul saw in immediately appeasing with

1968-480: The relatively high age bracket and were not enjoyed by women. For women, the Constitution provided for the passage of legislation that would address the issue of their suffrage, but it was not enacted throughout the life of the kingdom. Each member of the assembly had the right of legislative initiative , parliamentary question , interpellation . In the event of a change of Constitution, the Assembly dissolved and elected

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2016-484: The unwilling Croatian partner became the local version of the Croatian Question among the Serbian elite. Even 'amputation', i.e. Croatian independence to the benefit of the whole system, was considered on multiple occasions. Usually, the Serbian vision of amputation included the annexation of regions that were ethnically mixed between Croats and Serbs by Serbia, rather than Croatia. This would have effectively created

2064-523: Was a province ( banovina ) of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia between 1929 and 1939. This province consisted of much of the Croatian region of Dalmatia and parts of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina and was named for its coastal ( maritime ) location. The capital city of the Littoral Banovina was Split . According to the 1931 Constitution of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, In 1939, the Littoral Banovina

2112-507: Was established (the theory of the tribe people). The proclaimed principles of separation of powers were deformed by later provisions, but in principle parliamentarianism existed. Legislative power was shared by the King and the National Assembly . The king had a wide range of powers - legislative initiative , sanction , promulgation of laws as well as initiative and consent to change

2160-522: Was from its founding primarily designed around Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Not only did parts of the Bosniak population (4% of the Banovina of Croatia's overall population) now live under Croatian rule, but the drafts for a Serb banovina by the likes of Jovanović and the Serbian Cultural Club threatened to undermine the cultural and political autonomy of the remaining Bosniaks as well. Only one member of

2208-677: Was merged with the Sava Banovina and parts of neighboring provinces to create the Banovina of Croatia . In 1941, the World War II Axis Powers occupied the former area of the Littoral Banovina. Coastal areas from Split to Zadar were annexed by Fascist Italy with the remainder becoming a part of the Independent State of Croatia . Following World War II, the region was divided between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina within

2256-477: Was never realized due to the increasing pressure placed on the country by the Second World War. Both the Orthodox clergy and the officer class of the Yugoslav armed forces were outspoken in their opposition to the agreement. Even in liberal Serbian circles, where the 1931 Constitution was unpopular, the agreement was rejected. But among Serbian liberals, the main outrage did not lay with a Serbian government that betrayed

2304-399: Was shot by Serb deputy Puniša Račić in parliament in 1928, and died two months later. He became a martyr for the anti-Vidovdan cause, and the little remaining Croat faith in the constitution shattered. The HRSS started once again boycotting parliament, and the Vidovdan Constitution became untenable. Starting as early as 1922, the issue of the value and preferred method of appeasement towards

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