Abstract
Pašić’s thumbprint was clearly visible on the Vidovdan Constitution, which was closely modelled on the Serbian constitution of 1903. Although the Constituent Assembly from time to time canvassed the merits of the French and American systems of government, and of an ‘English-style Parliament’, the constitution created a form of representative democracy which resembled none of them. The title of the new state, ‘The Constitutional, Parliamentary and Hereditary Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, seemed to hint at the ‘Westminster’ model of government, but Pašić had no such thing in mind. His was an intensely patriarchal vision of a political order rooted in the ties of blood and kinship between rulers and ruled, in which the key terms were not ‘state and citizen’, but ‘people and king’. The Crown was to occupy a constitutional position above the strife and turmoil of party squabbles, and bring about consensus rule. Article 55 described the King as an ‘inviolable person’, but the cabinet stood ‘immediately under the King’ (Article 90), who appointed and dismissed ministers, and wielded a real power of veto over legislation. In effect, the constitution established the dual sovereignty of the Peoples’ Assembly and the Crown, yet the King could not be called to account for his political acts.1
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Notes
The observation is made by Culinovic, Jugoslavija Izmedju Dva Rata, vol. 1, pp. 356–7.
One of the major gaps in the history of the first Yugoslavia is an appreciation of the role of the army in politics; nor is there a modern study of King Aleksandar. But see Glenny, The Balkans, pp. 428–30, for a cameo portrait.
The reference to the rarity of beds as a household item is the opening sentence of chapter 19 in the study by Rudolf Bicanic, How the People Live. Imprisoned as a young man for his association with the Croatian Peasant Party in the early 1930s, Bicanic emerged from his experience fired up with enthusiasm for understanding the life of the peasantry at first hand. He paints a stark contrast between the isolation and backwardness of the ‘passive regions’, and the life of the ‘gentlemen’ (gospoda) in the cities.
This way of looking at Radic and his party was first suggested to me by Nicos Mouzelis, in Politics. His comparative study of semi-peripheral states in the course of modernization includes a sketch of Bulgaria’s peasant politics, and the parallels are striking. Mark Biondich’s Stjepan Radic tells the story in detail. Latinka Perovic considers the whole question of what she calls ‘The Flight from Modernization’ in the history of Yugoslavia, in Nebojsa Popov (ed.), Road to War.
Smiljana Djurovic, ‘Industrializacija Srbije’, in Latinka Perovic et al. (eds), Srbija, p. 136.
The commercial dominance of Zagreb is all the more remarkable because, in 1910, Croatia’s industrial base was hardly more developed than Serbia’s. Less than 1 per cent of enterprises employed more than 20 workers and 68 per cent were family craft concerns. See Goldstein, Croatia, p. 106. The ‘great leap forward’ after 1918 goes some way towards explaining Serb perceptions of Croatia as the Trojan horse of their former enemies.
Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp. 111–12. Tomasevich, Peasants, p. 471, also stresses very forcibly the traditionalism of the Yugoslav peasantry, rooted in the economic and social conditions in which peasant communities lived and worked — holdings larger than 10 hectares were rare, and most were less than 5 hectares in extent.
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© 2004 Leslie Benson
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Benson, L. (2004). The Brief Life of Constitutional Government. In: Yugoslavia: A Concise History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403997203_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403997203_3
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