Week 24

 

I usually try to keep these self-consistent; this time though I would advise those interested in a “brief” review on how the principle of nationalities affected the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with special attention to the Italo-Yugoslav relations, to check the first part in week 20, because I had to split it into two halves.

Also, I am fairly more confident on getting the Italian side right: if you believe I have missed something or have corrections or suggestions of any kind; please let me know. Source recommendations on the various nations between the two World Wars are also welcome, as those can be rather elusive and a few times divisive as well.

And I use often the Italian version of names and locations – that is not always the preferred denomination but it saves time.

 

If the talks among the allies and the Serb and Croat exiles had initially moved along the road that went from Venice to Paris to London, the official Serbian Government – that was to became an obvious point of reference for those patriots who had left the Austrian lands – had a privileged relation with the Russians. Thus, for the time being, the road to Russia went through Serbia. Therefore soon after gaining a few generic “declarations of friendship” towards their cause, the Croat independentist Frano Supilo took the route to Nis, seat of the Serbian Government, where he met, as “plenipotentiary of the whole Serb-Croat exiles”, with Prime Minister Pasic and Russian Ambassador E. Trubeckoj. Here he suggested the idea that the unification of all the Slavic peoples should be presented, not just as a spoil of war for Serbia, bus as an opportune and ultimately desirable eventuality; with Serbia taking the role of Piedmont in an unification process – and like Piedmont had done with France, argued the Russians, Serbia would have to compensate its neighbors, Romania and Bulgaria, that in the intentions of the Russian Foreign Ministry Sazonov were both going to join the Entente.

The Russian tentative approval offered Supilo a chance for a series of meetings in St. Petersburg (February to March 1915), where he had to be received though as an envoy of the Serbian government, with diplomatic letters from Pasic. In the meantime though, talks over the Italian intervention were in their final stages, with the Italian intervention a key piece in the strategy of opening new fronts against the central powers, that had begun with the Salonika expedition. The Italian demands – that would be sanctioned with the signature of the Treaty of London on Aprli 26^th 1915 – involved a good portion of the Dalmatian coast with some of the border lands occupied by Slovene and Croat majorities. Lands those of course, that Supilo and the members of the Committee alike would have wanted to keep united in that Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes which was already the ultimate goal of the Croat patriot's political action.

The Russians, interested in securing a part of the coast line for the expanded Serbian Kingdom, attempted to reason that the Italians would have gained more by leaving those lands to the Serbs and instead securing some trade agreements that would have put the more advanced Italian industry in a prominent position in the Adriatic region. The nature of these agreements though would have been problematic on both sides and for similar reasons: on one hand, in order to bring Italy into the War, it was necessary for both the Italian interventionists and the Entente powers to show that the war was going to bring larger gains than those the Austrians may have been willing to give in exchange for Italian neutrality. For the Slavs under Austrian sovereignty, it was necessary to prove that going against the Empire, favoring the Austrian defeat and possibly seceding to the Serbian Kingdom was going to result in larger autonomy than what could have been achievable within the Empire – or even perhaps within a victorious Empire.

Very few of the men involved thought at the time of an actual unavoidable dissolution of the Austrian Empire: rather of an alternative: either autonomy of the Slavs within the Empire, with their own Kingdom (in the much desired “trialistic” reform – that would have been “tetralistic” if extended to the Crown of Bohemia) or joining the Serbian State by seceding from the Austrians (as the Italian regions of the north had done fifty years before, without that resulting in the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire). The Croats and Slovenes within the Empire could not expect to garner support for a program that accepted “losing” half of their lands to the Italians and half of their lands to the Serbians; it would have been better then to envision a Croat and Slovene Kingdom within the Empire.

At the same time for a good chunk of the Italian political world (Prime Minister Antonio Salandra in primis) the Great War was still a matter of internal politics: a “short war”, barely more testing than the Libyan War of three years before, that would have sanctioned the end of the Giolitti era, laid to rest the experiments of openings towards the socialists and the popular forces and cleared the lad for a new era of mass-conservatism under the leadership of Salandra himself.

Those forces – so different and acting under so different motivations – could not be expected to meet halfway and in fact had, for the time being, no intention nor reason to do so.

For this reasons, as soon as Supilo was able to transmit news of the imminent agreement between Russia and Italy on the issue, the Yugoslav exiles and Trumbic first among them – who were and would remain for most of their activity in the western countries – reacted immediately, and, one must say, not with a sound measure of political realism. If you take this map of the nationalities as reference, you will recognize broadly the borders of the “ethnic Yugoslavia” created after the war. But in addition to those, the demands put forward in their memorandum of May 1915 included: the entire coast up to Gorizia (I.e to the Italian border as it was), with Trieste and Fiume, the southern parts of Carinthia and Styria, Backa (an Hungarian province) and Banate (claimed by Romania). This other map should be more or less accurate to the one included with the memorandum (I can't find the original one).

Granting those sort of concessions to the Serbians would have gone not only against the Italian demands but also turned Romania away from the Entente and strengthened the ties between Austria and Hungary, that some of the allies hoped could be broken with offerings of separate peaces for the two Kingdoms. That was more or less the point of view exposed by Italian Foreign Ministry Sidney Sonnino in August 1915, when the allies had made inquiries whether the Italians would approve of the annexation of Croatia^1 to Serbia in exchange for Serbian concessions on the Bulgarian side to keep Bulgaria out of the war. And in fact the Hungarian Kingdom (and Prime Minister Tisza first and foremost) appeared to share some of Sonnino's concerns that the Hungarians had to fend off both the Slavic aspiration to expansion and the German aspirations to hegemony over their future economical backyard of Mitteleuropa. A separate peace might have actually benefited Hungary – argued various internal observers – that seemed destined to gain little from either a German victory or a defeat.

For these reasons Sonnino eventually accepted (end of August 1915) to promise the Serbs the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the southern portion of Dalmatia; but keeping out of the agreement Croatia and the city of Fiume^2 . Pasic could not accept these terms, that would have compromised his position with the Croats, echoing the Committee's claim to the whole Yugoslav region, including Croatia, Fiume and Slovenia.

Supilo, acting of his own initiative, argued with British Foreign Ministry E. Grey that the Yugoslav Nation could not offer itself to Serbia one piece at the time, but only as a whole, in a complete process of liberation. Grey offered his agreement on a formula that proclaimed “the freedom to choose their own destiny” for the Yugoslav nationalities (except for Slovenia); but this formula, that would have met with a likely Italian hostility for the aforementioned reasons, was refused in principle by Pasic; who wasn't yet open to an agreement of equals but wanted first to secure his “minimum plan” for expansion of the Serbian nation.