Creation of Yugoslavia - Origins of The Idea

Origins of The Idea

The first idea of a state for all South Slavs emerged in the late 17th century, a product of visionary thinking of Croat writers and philosophers who believed that the only way for southern Slavs to regain lost freedom after centuries of occupation under the various empires would be to unite and free themselves from tyrannies and dictatorships.

In the 19th century, the Illyrian movement, as it came to be called, attracted many prominent Croatian intellectuals and politicians. It started gaining large momentum only at the end of the 19th century, mainly because of the Revolutions of 1848 and the policies against freedom movements of southern Slavs. However, ideas for a unified state did not mature from the conceptual to a practical state of planning, and few of those promoting such an entity had given any serious consideration to what form the new state should take.

As the Ottoman Empire grew weaker and Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece grew stronger after the Berlin Congress, there was new hope for sovereignty of the South Slavic peoples in Austria-Hungary, and the idea of a union between them gained momentum. Scholar Aurel Popovici proposed a reform called the "United States of Greater Austria" in 1906. Although his proposal was not acted upon by the Habsburg Emperor it was an inspiration for the peace conferences at the end of World War I.

Adam Czartoryski in the early 19th century was one of the conceivers of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav idea was forged by the Polish and other Western Slavic emigrants in the West who saw that a Russo-Austrian division of the Ottoman Empire must be prevented at all costs and a common state of all South Slavs forged. He enlisted Zach and sent him to Belgrade on that mission with a drafted plan the "Načertanije".

In Vienna on 31 May 1917, Anton Korošec read the May Declaration in which the Slovenian people requested that the Austro-Hungarian Empire change from a dual to a triple monarchy: Austria-Hungary should not be divided to only Austria and Hungary anymore, but to three parts: Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia would have consisted of separate Slovene, Croat and Serb entities from within the empire. The declaration was rejected.