PARIS 1919 (18 page)

Besides the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, Bulgarians and Macedonians, the Balkan peoples also included the Greeks (who preferred to think of themselves as a Mediterranean race) and, depending on your definition, Rumanians (who preferred to talk about their Roman ancestry), as well as a host of minorities left behind by the tides of the past. The Jewish merchants of Sarajevo, the Italian colonies on the Dalmatian coast, the descendants of German settlers in the north, and the Turks in the south— these were also part of the Balkan reality.

At the heart of the region was Serbia. In Nicola Pa
i
's childhood it was a simple place. Railways and telegraphs had not yet linked the little principality, as it then was, with the wider world. Apart from Belgrade, the capital, which had only 20,000 inhabitants, its towns were large villages. Its people lived, much as they had always done, from farming and trading. Nicola Pa
i
was one of the handful in his generation who had traveled abroad, in his case to Zurich, for higher education. His little country had great dreams, which he came to share: of a greater Serbia, reaching east and west toward the Black Sea and the Adriatic, sitting astride the great land routes leading down from central Europe to the Aegean. With the spread of nationalism in the nineteenth century, Serb historians rummaged the past to bolster their claims and bring all Serbs into the fold. “We got the children,” a schoolmaster told a traveler in Macedonia when it was still under Ottoman rule. “We made them realize they were Serbs. We taught them their history.” All over the Balkans, teachers, artists and historians were at work, reviving memories, polishing national myths, spreading a new sort of consciousness.
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The trouble was that it was not only Serbs who were awakened. As Churchill observed, the Balkans produce more history than they can consume. Where the blind Serb musicians sang of the great fourteenth-century kingdom of Stephen Du
an, stretching from the Danube to the Aegean, the Bulgarians looked to the tenth century, when King Simeon's empire controlled much of the same land. And the Greeks had the grandest memories of all, going all the way back to classical times, when Greek influence spread east to Asia Minor and the Black Sea, and west to Italy and the Mediterranean. Even the brief possession of a piece of land centuries ago could be hauled out to justify a present claim. “We might as justly claim Calais,” the traveler pointed out to the nationalist schoolmaster. “Why don't you?” he replied. “You have a navy.”
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Nicola Pa
i
was a founding member of the Serbian National Radical Party, founded in 1880, which advocated the liberation and union of all Serbs, including those in Austria-Hungary. Like so many Serb nationalists, he cared little about the Croats or Slovenes; they were Roman Catholic and looked to the West, while the Serbs were Orthodox.
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If Croats and Slovenes were to join Serbia, they would do so on Serbian terms, under Serbian leadership.

One by one, in little wars, simple and straightforward as they now seemed from the perspective of 1919, the Balkan nations had freed themselves from the lethargic embrace of the Turks. By 1914, all that was left of the European part of the empire that had once menaced Vienna was a toe-hold in Thrace and the great capital of Constantinople (today's Istanbul). The new countries acquired the trappings of statehood: newspapers, railways, colleges, academies of arts and science, anthems, postage stamps, armies and kings, most of whom came from Germany.

In the turbulent world of Serbian politics, Nicola Pa
i
managed to survive, a triumph in itself. Death sentences, exile, plots, assassination attempts, car accidents: he outlasted them all. And he returned the favors to his enemies. The English writer Rebecca West airily dismissed rumors, probably true, that he had known about the plot to assassinate the archduke in Sarajevo: “Politicians of peasant origin, bred in the full Balkan tradition, such as the Serbian Prime Minister, Mr. Pashitch, could not feel the same embarrassment at being suspected of complicity in the murder of a national enemy that would have been felt by his English contemporaries, say Mr. Balfour or Mr. Asquith.”
¹⁰

In 1919, when the question of appointing a leader for the delegation going to Paris came up, Prince Alexander of Serbia, who was acting as regent for his senile old father, insisted on
Nikola Pa
i
, perhaps to keep him away from Belgrade. To his considerable annoyance,
Nikola Pa
i
found that he had to share power with a Croat, Ante Trumbi
, the new foreign minister. Serbs and Croats tended to irritate each other. As a Serbian official once complained to a British visitor, “for the Serbs everything is simple; for the Croats everything is complicated.” And Ante Trumbi
was very Croatian. Fluent in Italian, with a deep love of Italian culture, he came from the cosmopolitan Dalmatian coast. While
Nikola Pa
i
had been dreaming of destroying Austria-Hungary, Ante Trumbi
had sat in its parliaments. He had learned there to love precedents and quibbles and reasons why things could not be done. Although he spent much of his life working to create a Yugoslav state which would include Serbia, he regarded the Serbs as barbarians, deeply scarred by their long years under Ottoman rule. “You are not going to compare, I hope,” he told a French writer, “the Croats, the Slovenes, the Dalmatians whom centuries of artistic, moral and intellectual communion with Austria, Italy and Hungary have made pure occidentals, with these half-civilised Serbs, the Balkan hybrids of Slavs and Turks.”
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