Elusive Compromise

DEJAN DJOKIC is Lecturer in Serbian and Croatian Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the editor of Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918-1992 (Hurst, 2002).

'Fascinating and compelling. ... an extremely important addition to the historiographyof Yugoslavia.' -Prof. V.P. Gagnon, author, The Myth of Ethnic War:Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s'Logical as the idea of a unified South Slav state seemed in the late nineteenthcentury, since such a state failed twice in the next century, catastrophicallythe second time, it is now easy to assume that the hope was flawedfrom the beginning and that the problem is in Serbian-Croatian relations.Key scholars have posited that failure was in the DNA of the first Yugoslavia- born of the First World War, destroyed by the Second - but Djoki argues that interwar Yugoslavia was not doomed by conflicting Croatian and Serbian national ideologies. Failure came rather from the inability of politiciansto compromise over the centralization of state power. Hence, the statefailed because of political decisions taken or not taken in the flush of events, not because of primordial forces. Djoki does not ultimately prove the counterfactual that the Yugoslav idea could have been saved, but he gives it plausibility.' -Foreign Affairs