PARIS 1919 (21 page)

In Zagreb, the National Council started to panic. It had no forces of its own, and law and order were collapsing as peasants attacked the landlords and gangs of looters ransacked shops and businesses. Along the Adriatic, Italian troops were seizing the major ports. Demonstrators began to appear in the streets of Zagreb demanding union forthwith with Serbia. On November 25, the National Council hastily resolved to ask Serbia for a union. Crucial details, such as the constitution, were to be settled later. A Croat nationalist leader warned in vain against scuttling to Belgrade like “drunken geese in the fog.” Surely, many thought, the powers would protect them. An American military man reported from Slovenia in early 1919: “The government and the people emphasize their almost pathetic confidence in the United States as their champion in Paris. They constantly refer to President Wilson and his doctrines, and believe that their national claims and their national security, like those of other small states, can only be gained if these doctrines are accepted and carried out as the basis of the peace settlement.”
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On December 1, 1918, Prince Alexander of Serbia proclaimed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The name itself was a problem; non-Serbians generally preferred “Yugoslavia” because it implied a true union of equals. Serbians wanted a name that enshrined the central importance of Serbia. It was an uneasy marriage, among peoples who had been divided by years of history, religion, cultural influences and war. Were the claims of a common ethnicity and similar languages enough to make it last? Outsiders were dubious; as an American military observer wrote in the spring of 1919, “while the Government officials all take pains to protest (‘too well') that the Serbs and Croats are one people, it is absurd to say so. The social ‘Climate' is quite different. The Serbs are soldier-peasants; the Croats are passive intellectuals in tendency. The Public Prosecutor, from whom one would expect a certain robustness of mind, told me frankly that the Croats had given up struggling against their Magyar oppressors long ago, and had devoted themselves to the arts.” He noticed that the Serbian army was increasingly unpopular throughout Croat territories.
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Matters were not helped by the conviction of many Serbians that they had simply increased Serbian territory rather than founded a new country, and by their suspicion that the Croats and Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims had not tried very hard to liberate themselves from Habsburg rule. Although Serbs made up less than half of the population, they ran the new country. The Serbian army became the Yugoslav army; Croatian units from the old Austrian-Hungarian army were disbanded. In the bureaucracy and government, Serbs held almost all the important posts. Belgrade remained the capital and the kings of Serbia became kings of the new state. Alexander took an oath of allegiance to the constitution on June 28, 1921, the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, the most important day in Serb history.
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It was a beginning from which Yugoslavia never recovered.

At its very first meeting in Paris, the Supreme Council found itself dealing with the fallout from Yugoslavia's sudden appearance. Should Montenegro be treated as a separate country or not? The hasty vote to unite with Serbia and depose the royal family had produced an armed struggle between the Greens, who refused to recognize the union and who were largely monarchist, and the Whites, who did. (The colors, and the divisions, appeared again after the collapse of Tito's Yugoslavia in 1991.) Sonnino, speaking for the Italians, objected to separate representation on the grounds that Serbs and Montenegrins were virtually the same. Italy clearly did not want Serbia to have any more voice than it already had. (The Italians were quite content to see Montenegro swallowed up by Serbia, hoping that the mouthful would be particularly indigestible.) Lloyd George and Wilson were for hearing both sides. Wilson was particularly worried about Montenegro's rights to self-determination: “The action of Serbia had gone some way toward prejudicing his mind against Serbia. It was absolutely against all principle that the processes of self-government should be forced.” The difficulty, as the statesmen all agreed, was to find anyone, in the existing circumstances, who could speak for the Montenegrins. Should the Allies recognize the king? Balfour said mordantly, “We pay for him.” (Britain and France had subsidized Nicholas during the war and had not yet got around to withdrawing recognition from him.) Wilson objected that the king could speak only for himself and not for Montenegro.
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Much greater problems were waiting for the peacemakers, but there was something fascinating about Montenegro. The country, a spot on the map between Croatia and Albania so small that few people could find it, was absurd and heroic, remote and beautiful. According to Montenegrin legend, when God was creating the world he had its mountains in a sack which broke and rained them down in a crazy jumble on what became their homeland. The Montenegrins themselves matched their mountains. They were perhaps the tallest people in Europe, handsome, proud, brave and indolent, given to endless drinking of coffee and the rehashing of old victories and blood feuds. The intrepid traveler Edith Durham took against them when she inadvertently looked into the bag of one noble warrior to discover his booty of sixty human noses; from that point on she transferred her considerable loyalties to the Albanians.
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Their legends had it that Montenegrins were descended from the Serbs who had fled from the invading Turks in the fourteenth century, and it is true that they were Orthodox like the Serbs and spoke a version of Serbian. From their mountains they had fought the Turks to a standstill and so had remained an autonomous Christian island in the Turkish Muslim sea. Their rulers, until the middle of the nineteenth century, had been warrior bishops. The modern dynasty was established by the last bishop of the line in 1851, when he tired of being celibate and married. His nephew, Nicholas II, had been on the throne since the 1860s.

Nicholas himself, as it happened, was in Paris, living on a dwindling pension from Britain while his daughters worked as dressmakers. Opinion was divided as to whether he was a cunning buffoon (Rebecca West's view) or a great warrior king (the opinion of Edith Durham, who spent a happy evening with him before the war swapping toasts). There was a whiff of the Middle Ages about King Nicholas: his insistence on leading his own troops into battle, on dispensing justice from his seat under an ancient tree, even the magnificent medals he awarded himself and his friends so copiously. His capital, Cetinje, was a large village, the Bank of Montenegro a small cottage, and the Grand Hotel a boardinghouse. The Biljarda, his old palace, was named after its much prized English billiard table, which had been hauled up the mountainside, and looked like an English country inn. His new palace was more like a German pension, with the royal children in folk costume doing their lessons with their Swiss tutor while the king sat on the front steps waiting for visitors. Franz Lehár used Montenegro as the model for Pontevedria in The Merry Widow.
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In fact, Nicholas was not quite the quaint figure he seemed. He had been educated, in France, among other places, and he had maneuvered with such success in the tangle of Balkan politics before the war that he had enlarged the size of his tiny state four times. He had also married his children well, two daughters to Russian royal dukes, one to the king of Italy and yet another to the king of Serbia. He had dreamed of Montenegro's absorbing Serbia; it was not meant to happen the other way round. He still hoped, in 1919, that he could regain the throne he had lost during the war.

Montenegro had been dragged into war when Austria invaded in 1916; Nicholas fled to Italy with what many on the Allied side thought was surprising alacrity. The suspicion that he had done a quiet deal with the Austrians followed him to Paris. The British Foreign Office regarded him as a treacherous ally, who probably was guilty as charged. It soon became clear in the discussion of Montenegro's representation that no one in Paris had any idea what the state of affairs on the ground was, and so it was decided to hold the question of Montenegro's representation open. It remained so until the Peace Conference ended.
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Nicholas did what little he could. He tried to give Colonel House one of his most magnificent orders; he wrote to Wilson; he issued optimistic memoranda claiming part of Bosnia for Montenegro. He did not get any response: there were, after all, more pressing issues than the fate of a country of 200,000 people. Fresh votes were held, under Serbian supervision, which seemed to show that Montenegrins wanted to be part of Yugoslavia. At the end of 1920, France withdrew its support for Nicholas; in the spring of 1921, Britain did likewise. Nicholas died, still in exile, in the spring of 1921. His grandson, an architect in France, has said that he has no interest in reclaiming the throne. Montenegro remains, as it has done since 1918, an uneasy part of Yugoslavia.

When the Yugoslav delegation finally got its chance to speak to the Supreme Council in February 1919, it brought a set of demands that had been put together with as much haste as the nation itself, and with as much wrangling. In an attempt to satisfy everyone, six out of the country's seven borders were open for discussion. Only the border with Greece, in the former Ottoman territory of Macedonia, was left alone. In the west, Slovenes insisted on Klagenfurt, on the north side of the southern spur of the Alps, as security against what was left of Austria. Otherwise they would be satisfied with the old boundaries between Austria-Hungary and Italy.
Nikola Pa
i
, as usual, played his own game. His main interest, and that of the other Serbs, was to push eastward into Bulgaria and north of the Danube, taking a swath of Hungarian territory. Among other things, this would protect their capital, Belgrade, which had been in a uniquely exposed position, separated from a hostile Austria-Hungary by the width of a river. The Serbians had chosen it despite this drawback because it lay at the intersection of the Danube as it swept down from the north and the Sava River, which flowed from the west, at one of the most important strategic points in southern Europe. From the north and the west traders, pilgrims or armies had to pass by Belgrade if they wanted to go on to Greece and the great port at Salonika, or eastward through Bulgaria and on to Constantinople. The city had been besieged, defended, taken, sacked and fought over by Romans, Huns, Crusaders, Turks, Austrians and of course the Serbians themselves.
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On the afternoon of February 18, Milenko Vesni
, a Serb, started by apologizing that he did not yet have a full memorandum to lay before the powers. There were “certain difficulties,” he murmured. Vesni
, easily the best speaker in the delegation, was smooth, affable and well traveled. His rich, attractive wife was friendly with the new Mrs. Wilson. Putting up a map, he laid out the basis for Yugoslav claims: reward for virtue (Serbia was a loyal ally, and the South Slavs within Austria-Hungary had done their best to disrupt the enemy war effort), self-determination, security. Slovene and Croat colleagues followed to explain away the contentious claims: to the largely Italian town of Trieste, the Hungarian provinces of the Backa and the Baranya north of the traditional boundaries of Croatia, the Rumanian-speaking parts of the Banat and the German-speaking areas around Klagenfurt. They denied that they were asking for non-Slav areas: the old censuses were unreliable, and in any case the Austrians and the Hungarians had deliberately suppressed Slavic schools and culture. Why, a man had been arrested in the old empire for asking for a railway ticket in Slovene. Even Yugoslavia's supporters were troubled. “Have they lost all sense of proportion and good sense?” asked a friend of Seton-Watson.
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