YUGOSLAV CRISIS

Greymouth Evening Star, 5 December 1929, Page 10

YUGOSLAV CRISIS

KING ALEXANDER’S REFORMS. The political institutions of Yugoslavia are once, again in the meltingpot. It is just nine months since King Alexander carried out his dramatic “coup d’etat” and abolished the old constitution, under whose vicious Auspices the country was rapidly drifting into dissolution or civil war. Now he hus decreed a series of constitutional changes, so drastic and far-reaching that little will remajn of the country’s present political structure except its boundaries (writes Mr H. A. McClure Smith in the “Sydney Morning Herald”). The jealousies of the various constituent provinces, and especially the ever-growing antagonism between Serbia and Croatia, made the history of Yugoslavia under the old regime a long series of deadlocks and crises. But if the disease was grave the cure is being made equally drastic. For King Alexander has apparently decided that he can end these jealousies by the simple expedient of abolishing the present provinces as political units, and create ing artificial administrative areas in their place. Even the official title the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes —is to give place to that of the' Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the public use of these time-honoured and distinctive names is, in the future, severely punishable. Attempts to break with the past by such means are at least as old as the French. Revolution. But, at best, the solution is a violent one, and it may well be doubted if it will succeed, in Yugoslavia. The essential homogeneity of the people, which made so revolutionary a proceeding possible in France, is entirely absent from the newly-created triune kingdom. . And if an omelette cannot be made without breaking eggs, eggs .can nevertheless be broken without an omelette rising from the carnage.

The conflict ’ which raged with increasing ferocity ever since the creation of Yugoslavia is much more than a simple political quarrel between the Serbs and the Croats. In reality it is a struggle between the Serbs 1 - of the old Balkan kingdom -and the “pretchani” —those of the other side” of the Danube, that is to say the Yugoslavs of the ex-Hapsburg provinces. The clash is between two civilisations rather than two nationalities. The differences are not merely political, but are differences of culture and traditions, of laws and religion. This basic cleavage must be grasped by anyone who wishes to understand the real nature of the Yugoslav troubles. For 350 years the Serbs were a subject race under the absolute and tyrranical rule of the Turks. During that time they lost their aristocracy, their culture, and their whole connection with the .West. When at last they regained their independence in the middle of the 19th century, they had become a rude and purely peasant people with no traditions of government, and badly infected with the Oriental methods and corruption under which they had lived so long. King Alexander himself is the greatgrandson of an illiterate peasant, the leader of the first insurrection, who could not even write his name.

The Yugoslavs of the ex-Hapsburg provices have had a very different history. They belong entirely to the West. At the worst, their subjection was to a power at the very forefront of European culture, whose bureaucracy at least gave them the benefits of an enlightened legal system and an efficient economic life. The Croats, indeed, have always enjoyed self-govern-ment. The Croatian Constitution is many hundred of years old, and the Croats are intensely proud and jealous of the fact that their national identity and autonomy have been preserved untouched for over a thousand years. Only the wisest, leadership and the most restrained behaviour on both sides could have prevented so vital a cleavage from breeding discord in the new State. Both were lamentably lacking. The * Serbs, having shared in the Allied victory, looked upon themselves as conquerors, even in relation to their new compatriots; the ’’pretchani,” especially the Croats, despised the Serbs as uncultured and irresponsible. Thus antagonism began almost before the new State was born. In a fatal moment the Croats, under the uncompromising and erratic leadership of Raditch refused to attend the Constituent Assembly during its most critical sessions. And in consequence Pashitch, the Premier, and all-power-ful leader of the Pan-Serbs, was able to secure the adoption of the disastrous centralist constitution of 1921.

A CENTRALIST CONSTITUTION. That constitution destroyed any chance there might have been of achieving an agreement between the Serbs and the Croats, and it carried in it th© seeds of all that has since happened. It outraged Croat susceptibilities without being able to offer anything but chaos and mismanagement in return. For there was no machinery in the new State capable of running it on highly centralised lines. The organisation of Government offices and the methods of administration were primitive in the extreme, and there was no class educated in government from which a bureaucracy could be recruited. The resulting confusion enabled; Pashitch to dominate Yugoslavia in the narrow interests of Old Serbia, and to saddle the country with a regime of corruption and oppression worthy of the best Turkish traditions. The Serbs of the Old Kingdom were given a monopoly of all official posts, and party allegiance, not efficiency, was the sole test of fitness. No reforms were attempted. Even the differing judicial systems and methods of taxation which were in force in the various provinces before they were united were continued and exploited. Thus the Croats found that, while they had both lost their autonomy., and were excluded from the Central Government at Belgrade, they were being taxed three times as heavily as the Serbs. The inevitable climax came last year when the rising bitterness and antagonism between the Serbs and the Croats were finally sealed by the murder of Raditch and other Croat leaders in the Skupshtina—the Yugoslav Parliament—by a Montenegrin deputy and old associate of Pashitch. After that crime, probably nothing short of King Alexander’s “coup d’etat,” and the consequent abolition of the Constitution, could have saved the country from dissolution. ’ A POPULAR KING. At the time, the dictatorship was welcomed by the Croats and other “pretchani” as a release from th?

bondage of an intolerable system. King Alexander has always been popular with all sections of his subjects, and the Croats certainly hoped that he would restore them their autonomy and reconstruct his kingdom on federalist lines. But if his decision to proceed along more drastic and revolutionary lines is a crushing blow to them, they are themselves partly to blame for it. For the Croat leaders have systematically set their claims so high—since the Skupshtina murders they have demanded a dual monarchy on the lines of Austro-Hungary—as. to make it seem that compromise with them was impossible. Those who demand a whole loaf sometimes get none.

In attempting to regenerate his country by abolishing its internal national divisions, King Alexander has, perhaps, shown more courage than prudence, though in providing for decentralisation at the same time he has done something to gild the pill. In any case the outcome of his reforms will be closely watched. For Yugoslavia is pre-eminently the corner-stone of the post-war settlement in Central Europe. When the Treaties of Peace were being drawn up at Paris, a witty Frenchman remarked that the war, which was begun to Europeanise the Balkans, seemed likely to end in the balkanisation of Europe. The validity of this indictment will'depend on the success or failure of the Yugoslav, experiment. In Yugoslavia a major state has been created which, though it stretches into the heart of Europe, rests on a Balkan foundation. And the peace, prosperity, and progress of Central Europe will largely depend upon whether Yugoslavia can develop that internal unity without which an independent. state is a chronic danger to its neighbours, and whether it carries Balkan methods into Europe or European methods into, the Balkans,