ABSTRACT
The dilemmas of Yugoslav statehood The creation of Yugoslavia in 1918, in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and the First World War, marked the final victory in a century-long struggle by the South Slavs to create a 'Southslavia' (the literal meaning of Yugoslavia) in the Balkans, following on the collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. But while the other newly-independent states of Eastern Europe could all claim the status of nation-state, in the sense that each contained a single, dominant national and linguistic group, Yugoslavia was from the start a multi-national state, more of a microcosm of the ramshackle empires it succeeded than any tribute to the Wilson Doctrine. It did have a large measure of linguistic unity with around 70 per cent of the population speaking some form of Serbo-Croat as their first language (Hoffman and Neal 1962: 29), but Croatia, with its Habsburg past and Roman Catholic religion, was as self-consciously different from Serbia (Orthodox and still smarting from the memory of the Ottoman yoke) as is the Protestant, French-speaking part of Switzerland from France. The Serbo-Croat-speaking Muslims of Bosnia and Hercegovina and the people of Montenegro - Serbo-Croat-speaking and Serbian Orthodox in religion, but with a long history of independent statehood - further complicated the picture. Outside the Serbo-Croatspeaking heart of the new state lay a periphery populated by Slovenes and Macedonians - Slav nations, but with distinctive national languages - and substantial minorities of Albanians, Hungarians and, at that time, also Germans. The biggest single ethnic group - the Serbs - accounted for about 40 per cent of the total population of some 12 million people.
