Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [81]
Nicholas did what little he could. He tried to give Colonel House one of his most magnificent orders; he wrote to Wilson; he issued optimistic memoranda claiming part of Bosnia for Montenegro. He did not get any response: there were, after all, more pressing issues than the fate of a country of 200,000 people. Fresh votes were held, under Serbian supervision, which seemed to show that Montenegrins wanted to be part of Yugoslavia. At the end of 1920, France withdrew its support for Nicholas; in the spring of 1921, Britain did likewise. Nicholas died, still in exile, in the spring of 1921. His grandson, an architect in France, has said that he has no interest in reclaiming the throne. Montenegro remains, as it has done since 1918, an uneasy part of Yugoslavia.
When the Yugoslav delegation finally got its chance to speak to the Supreme Council in February 1919, it brought a set of demands that had been put together with as much haste as the nation itself, and with as much wrangling. In an attempt to satisfy everyone, six out of the country’s seven borders were open for discussion. Only the border with Greece, in the former Ottoman territory of Macedonia, was left alone. In the west, Slovenes insisted on Klagenfurt, on the north side of the southern spur of the Alps, as security against what was left of Austria. Otherwise they would be satisfied with the old boundaries between Austria-Hungary and Italy. Pašić, as usual, played his own game. His main interest, and that of the other Serbs, was to push eastward into Bulgaria and north of the Danube, taking a swath of Hungarian territory. Among other things, this would protect their capital, Belgrade, which had been in a uniquely exposed position, separated from a hostile Austria-Hungary by the width of a river. The Serbians had chosen it despite this drawback because it lay at the intersection of the Danube as it swept down from the north and the Sava River, which flowed from the west, at one of the most important strategic points in southern Europe. From the north and the west traders, pilgrims or armies had to pass by Belgrade if they wanted to go on to Greece and the great port at Salonika, or eastward through Bulgaria and on to Constantinople. The city had been besieged, defended, taken, sacked and fought over by Romans, Huns, Crusaders, Turks, Austrians and of course the Serbians themselves.24
On the afternoon of February 18, Milenko Vesnić, a Serb, started by apologizing that he did not yet have a full memorandum to lay before the powers. There were “certain difficulties,” he murmured. Vesnić, easily the best speaker in the delegation, was smooth, affable and well traveled. His rich, attractive wife was friendly with the new Mrs. Wilson. Putting up a map, he laid out the basis for Yugoslav claims: reward for virtue (Serbia was a loyal ally, and the South Slavs within Austria-Hungary had done their best to disrupt the enemy war effort), self-determination, security. Slovene and Croat colleagues followed to explain away the contentious claims: to the largely Italian town of Trieste, the Hungarian provinces of the Backa and the Baranya north of the traditional boundaries of Croatia, the Rumanian-speaking parts of the Banat and the German-speaking areas around Klagenfurt. They denied that they were asking for non-Slav areas: the old censuses were unreliable, and in any case the Austrians and the Hungarians had deliberately suppressed Slavic schools and culture. Why, a man had been arrested in the old empire for asking for a railway ticket in Slovene. Even Yugoslavia’s supporters were troubled. “Have they lost all sense of proportion and good sense?” asked a friend of Seton-Watson.25
Yugoslavia