Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia by Dejan Djokić (review)

Abstract

566 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 2010 Although thisbook is about a single year in a single city, it is clear that the author isdealing with an enormous subject, and that it is impossible to cover all of the possible aspects. The Bolsheviks inPower is by and large concerned with the political history of theperiod; economic aspects receive less attention. Thus, for example, the establishment of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) ismentioned only fleetingly.Nevertheless, this isby far the best book on the revolutionary period inRussian history, and one which should be obligatory reading for every serious student of the subject. Department ofCentral andEast European Studies UniversityofGlasgow J. D. White Djokic, Dejan. Elusive Compromise:A History of InterwarYugoslavia. Hurst & Company, London, 2007. xvii + 311 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?20.00 (paperback). The conventional historiographical view of interwarYugoslavia, exemplified in Ivo Banac's seminal work TheNational Question inYugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1984), is of a state unified in haste at the end of the First World War and then fatally hobbled by a centralized political bureaucracy based in the (Yugoslav and Serbian) capital Belgrade. This system, enshrined in the 'Vidovdan Constitution' of 1921,was unresponsive to the state'smulti ethnic character and ultimately resented by a large part of its population. Central to this failure was the disharmony between Yugoslavia's two largest nationalities, the Serbs and the Croats. In Dejan Djokic's new history of the interwar kingdom, Elusive Compromise: A History ofInterwar Yugoslavia, the Serb/Croat nexus retains itsprimacy. How ever, whereas other analyses have emphasized the immovable structure of separate nationalities, already well developed amongst the South Slavs before the First World War, Djokic favours the historical agency of the state's political elite post-1918. The high politics of the interwarperiod are scrutinized to show that, rather than being doomed whilst still in its swaddling clothes, the failure of the South Slav state lay in the inability of its leaders to locate the 'elusive compromise' thatwould lead to a workable political framework acceptable to themajority of the population. Djokic confronts the existing historiographical emphasis on 'inter-ethnic conflict' (p. 1)with a thorough account of the interwar state's various parliamentary alliances, formations, and factions. The result is a detailed political history of interwarYugoslavia, told for the most part chronologically, although with significant thematic departures. The first two chapters, 'Death and Union' and 'The Volatile Twenties' focus on the end of the First World War, the circumstances of South Slav unification in 1918, and the firstdecade of theYugoslav state's political life.Chapters 3 and 4 analyse, frommultiple angles, the royal dictatorship (proclaimed on 6 January 1929 by King Alexander Karadjordjevic, it contin ued in a diluted form after the king's assassination in 1934).Djokic's argument is in full stride at this important historical juncture. Depicting first how various groups attempted to come to termswith the dictatorship (Chapter 3 REVIEWS 567 'Compromise with the Dictatorship?'), Djokic then charts the growing opposition movement to the king's suspension of democratic life (Chapter 4, 'The Serb-Croat Opposition'). In these chapters it ismade clear that the dictatorship cannot and should not be interpreted as an exclusively Serbian imposition, and that the anti-dictatorship opposition included both Serbian and Croatian components. In this way, Djokic dissolves homogeneous national blocks intomultilayered and ever-changing political formations, and it is in these formations, he contends, thatwe should seek for an explanation of the failure ofYugoslav integration. Chapter 5, 'The 1939Agreement', deals with the 'Cvetkovic-Macek Agreement' which allowed for the creation of the largely autonomous Croatian Banovina within Yugoslavia, and Chapter 6, 'The Aftermath', looks at how this concession led to counter claims throughout the country, especially in Serbia. There is a lot of information in this book. The devil is in the detail, and Djokic has a remarkable skill for narrating what is often a convoluted tale, and for discerning patterns and historical meaning inwhat may appear to be no more than a morass of political chicanery. A particularly nice touch is the repeated references to train journeys made by politicians of various party colour across the country, especially to and fromBelgrade and Zagreb...