Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [76]
The trouble was that it was not only Serbs who were awakened. As Churchill observed, the Balkans produce more history than they can consume. Where the blind Serb musicians sang of the great fourteenth-century kingdom of Stephen Dušan, stretching from the Danube to the Aegean, the Bulgarians looked to the tenth century, when King Simeon’s empire controlled much of the same land. And the Greeks had the grandest memories of all, going all the way back to classical times, when Greek influence spread east to Asia Minor and the Black Sea, and west to Italy and the Mediterranean. Even the brief possession of a piece of land centuries ago could be hauled out to justify a present claim. “We might as justly claim Calais,” the traveler pointed out to the nationalist schoolmaster. “Why don’t you?” he replied. “You have a navy.”8
Pašić was a founding member of the Serbian National Radical Party, founded in 1880, which advocated the liberation and union of all Serbs, including those in Austria-Hungary. Like so many Serb nationalists, he cared little about the Croats or Slovenes; they were Roman Catholic and looked to the West, while the Serbs were Orthodox.9 If Croats and Slovenes were to join Serbia, they would do so on Serbian terms, under Serbian leadership.
One by one, in little wars, simple and straightforward as they now seemed from the perspective of 1919, the Balkan nations had freed themselves from the lethargic embrace of the Turks. By 1914, all that was left of the European part of the empire that had once menaced Vienna was a toe-hold in Thrace and the great capital of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul). The new countries acquired the trappings of statehood: newspapers, railways, colleges, academies of arts and science, anthems, postage stamps, armies and kings, most of whom came from Germany.
In the turbulent world of Serbian politics, Pašić managed to survive, a triumph in itself. Death sentences, exile, plots, assassination attempts, car accidents: he outlasted them all. And he returned the favors to his enemies. The English writer Rebecca West airily dismissed rumors, probably true, that he had known about the plot to assassinate the archduke in Sarajevo: “Politicians of peasant origin, bred in the full Balkan tradition, such as the Serbian Prime Minister, Mr. Pashitch, could not feel the same embarrassment at being suspected of complicity in the murder of a national enemy that would have been felt by his English contemporaries, say Mr. Balfour or Mr. Asquith.” 10
In 1919, when the question of appointing a leader for the delegation going to Paris came up, Prince Alexander of Serbia, who was acting as regent for his senile old father, insisted on Pašić, perhaps to keep him away from Belgrade. To his considerable annoyance, Pašić found that he had to share power with a Croat, Ante Trumbić, the new foreign minister. Serbs and Croats tended to irritate each other. As a Serbian official once complained to a British visitor, “for the Serbs everything is simple; for the Croats everything is complicated.” And Trumbić was very Croatian. Fluent in Italian, with a deep love of Italian culture, he came from the cosmopolitan Dalmatian coast. While Pašić had been dreaming of destroying Austria-Hungary, Trumbić had sat in its parliaments. He had learned there to love precedents and quibbles and reasons why things could not be done. Although he spent much of his life working to create a Yugoslav state which would include Serbia, he regarded the Serbs as barbarians, deeply scarred by their long years under Ottoman rule. “You are not going to compare, I hope,” he told a French writer, “the Croats, the Slovenes, the Dalmatians