East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars by Joseph Rothschild

Author:Joseph Rothschild [Rothschild, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Europe, Political Ideologies, Political Science, History, General
ISBN: 9780295803647
Google: MqcpDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30257823
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 1974-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

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As these parties sought, in the early 1920s, to endow Yugoslavia with a viable political system—commencing with the drafting of a constitution—they exacerbated rather than assuaged the tensions and differences among their ethnic and social constituencies. After two years of government by an overwhelmingly Serb administration, “supervised” by an unrepresentative Provisional National Assembly (March, 1919-November, 1920) that had been mustered through cooptation on the basis of prewar election returns and from which Macedonian and Montenegran autonomists as well as the ethnic minorities has been excluded, elections to a Constituent Assembly were at last held on November 28, 1920. During these two years, Stjepan Radić, whose Croatian Peasant Party had been gerrymandered out of the Provisional National Assembly, had become deeply alienated and embittered. He had been twice imprisoned for lengthy terms at the instigation of the prečani Serb leader Svetozar Pribičević, who had been successively minister of the interior and of education in these early years, for his persistent agitation against the failure to safeguard Croatian state rights when Yugoslavia was founded in November-December, 1918. Pribičević, alarmed by the Communist conflagration of 1919 in neighboring Hungary and frightened by the burgeoning energies of Croatian nationalism, had pursued a severe administrative policy toward both movements (frequent arrests, confiscations, dismissals, etc.); in so doing he had poisoned Serbo-Croatian relations from the very outset of Yugoslavia’s existence. Moderates were undermined and extremists strengthened on both sides. In addition, the Croats were disturbed by what they considered to be the indifferent response of the Serb-dominated government to suspected Italian designs on Croatia’s Adriatic littoral. The Serbs, in turn, were outraged when the Croatian Peasant Party’s “republican pacifist” ideology expressed itself in subversive advice to Croatian soldiers to desert. The political atmosphere of the municipal elections on March 21, 1920, in Croatia and August 22 in Serbia and Macedonia, as well as of the long-awaited general elections to the Constituent Assembly on November 28 was charged.

Based on universal suffrage of all males over twenty-one, with the exception of military personnel on active duty as well as the Germans and Hungarians of the Vojvodina, and with constituencies apportioned by prewar census figures (thus somewhat favoring Serbia which had lost so much population during the war), the Constituent Assembly elections were comparatively free. Though in the preceding campaign the authorities had manifestly favored the Serbian Radicals and the Democrats, actual administrative pressure to skew the results was applied, if at all, only in Macedonia and Montenegro. Approximately 65 percent of those eligible voted, the turnout being highest in the former Habsburg areas and lowest in those most recently still Ottoman. Twenty-two parties competed, of which sixteen won seats.

The overall results, given in table 35, indicate that over half the elected deputies belonged to parties committed to unitarist constitutional theories (Radicals, Democrats, Agrarians), while less than a third were members of federalistic and regional parties (Croats, Slovene Populists, Muslims). To the two Marxist parties, with a sixth of the deputies, this constitutional issue was not a matter of principle.

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