Greater Serbia



The term Greater Serbia or Great Serbia (Велика Србија, Velika Srbija) applies to the Serbian nationalist and irredentist ideology directed towards the creation of a Serbian land which would incorporate all regions of traditional significance to the Serbian nation, and regions outside of Serbia that are populated mostly by Serbs. This movement's main ideology is to unite all Serbs (or all historically ruled or Serb populated lands) into one state, claiming, depending on the version, different areas of many surrounding countries.

The Greater Serbian ideology including claims to territories of modern day Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia. In some historical forms, Greater Serbian aspirations also included territories of Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Its inspiration comes from the memory and existence of the relatively large and powerful Serbian Empire that existed in 14th century south-eastern Europe prior to the Ottoman invasion.

Historical perspective
Following the growing nationalistic tendency in Europe from the 18th century onwards, such as the Unification of Italy, Serbia - after first gaining its principality within the Ottoman Empire in 1817 - experienced a popular desire for full unification with the Serbs of the remaining territories, mainly those living in neighbouring entities.



The idea of territorial expansion of Serbia originally formulated 1844 in Načertanije, a secret political program of the Principality of Serbia, according to which the new Serbian state could include the neighboring areas of Montenegro, Northern Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the early 20th century, all political parties of the Kingdom of Serbia (except for the Social Democratic Party) planning to create a Balkan Federation, generally accepted the idea of uniting all Serbs into one only Serbian state. From the creation of the Principality until the First World War, the territory of Serbia was constantly expanding.



After the end of the Balkan Wars, the Kingdom of Serbia achieved the expansion towards the south, but there was a mixed reaction to the events, for the reason that the promises of lands gaining access to the Adriatic Sea were not fulfilled. Instead, Serbia received the territories of Vardar Macedonia that was intended to become part of the Kingdom of Bulgaria and the Serbian Army had to leave those coastal territories that would become part of the newly formed Kingdom of Albania. This event, together with the Austro-Hungarian Annexation of Bosnia, frustrated the majority of Serbian politicians, since there was still a large number of Serbs remaining out of the Kingdom.

The Serbian victory in the First World War was supposed to serve as compensation to this situation and there was an open debate between the followers of the Greater Serbia doctrine, that defended the incorporation of the parts of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire where Serbs lived to Serbia, opposed by the ones that supported an idea of uniting not only all the Serbian lands, but also to include other South Slav nations into a new country. Among other reasons, but also because of the fear of the creation of a bigger and stronger Orthodox Serbia, that could eventually became a Russian allied, the decision of making an ethnically mixed South Slav state, where other nationalities would balance the Serb hegemony, was made.

The Serbian Royal family of Karađorđević was set to rule this new state, called Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, that would be renamed to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. Initially, the apologists of the Greater Serbia doctrine felt satisfied, since the main goal of uniting all Serbian-inhabited lands under the rule of a Serbian Monarchic dynasty was mostly achieved. During the inter-war period, the majority of Serbian politicians defended a strong centralised country, while their opponents demanded major autonomy for the regions. This tension grew to a point that led to the creation of opposing nationalistic organisations that culminated in the assassination of the King Alexander I in 1934.

When the German invasion of Yugoslavia happened in 1941, these tensions grew to become one of the most brutal civil wars that occurred in World War II. The Royal Government soon capitulated, and the resistance was mainly made by the Četniks, who defended the restoration of the Monarchy, and the Partisans, who supported the creation of a communist Yugoslav state. The Serbs were divided into these two factions, that fought not only Nazi Germany and all the other neighbour Axis allied countries which also invaded different territories of Yugoslavia — the Italians, Hungarians and Bulgarians — but also each other. Beside this, other Yugoslav non-Serb nationalists took advantage of the situation and allied themselves with the Axis countries, regarding this moment as their historical opportunity of fulfilling their own irredentist aspirations, the Independent State of Croatia being by far the most brutal one.

After the war, victorious Partisan leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito became the head of state of Yugoslavia until his death in 1980. During this period the country was divided in six republics. In 1976, within the Socialist Republic of Serbia two autonomous provinces, SAP Kosovo and SAP Vojvodina, were created. During this period, most of the Greater Serbian ideology followers were incarcerated as accused of betrayall, or exiled. Within the rest of the Serbian population, the vast majority became strong supporters of this new Non-Aligned Yugoslavia.

During the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, Serbia stood accused of attempting to create the entity of a Greater Serbia through Belgrade's direct involvement with the unrecognised Serbian entities functioning in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia.

Garašanin's Načertanije


Roots of the Greater Serbian ideology are often traced back to Serbian minister Ilija Garašanin's Načertanije (1844). Načertanije was influenced by "Conseils sur la conduite a suivre par la Serbie", a document written by Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski in 1843 and the revised version by Polish ambassador to Serbia, Franjo Zach, "Zach's Plan". From the 1850s onward, this concept has had a significant influence on Serbian politics.

The work claimed lands that were inhabited by Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Hungarians and Croats as part of Greater Serbia. Garašanin's plan also includes methods of spreading Serbian influence in the claimed lands. He proposed ways to influence Croats and Slavic Muslims, who Garašanin regarded as "Serbs of Catholic faith" and "Serbs of Islamic faith". This plan was kept secret until 1967 and has been interpreted by some as a blueprint for Serbian national unification, with the primary concern of strengthening Serbia's position by inculcating Serbian and pro-Serbian national ideology in all surrounding peoples that are considered to be devoid of national consciousness.

Vuk Karadžić's pan-Serbism
The most notable Serbian linguist of the 19th century, Vuk Karadžić, was a follower of the view that all south Slavs that speak the štokavian dialect (in the central south Slavic language group) are Serbs who speak the Serbian language. As this definition implied that large areas of continental Croatia, Dalmatia,and Bosnia and Herzegovina, including areas inhabited by Roman Catholics - Vuk Karadžić is considered by some to be the progenitor of the Greater Serbia program. More precisely, Karadžić was the shaper of modern secular Serbian national consciousness, with the goal of incorporating all indigenous štokavian speakers (Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim) into one, modern Serbian nation. This linguistic definition of nation would have excluded parts of southern Serbia where the Torlak dialect is spoken.



This negative view is not shared by Andrew Baruch Wachtel (Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation) who sees him as a partisan of South Slav unity, albeit in a limited sense, in that his linguistic definition emphasized what united South Slavs rather than the religious differences that had earlier divided them. However, one might argue that such a definition is very partisan: Karadžić himself eloquently and explicitly professed that his aim was to unite all native štokavian speakers whom he identified as Serbs. Therefore, Vuk Karadžić's central linguistic-political aim was the growth of the realm of Serbdom according to his ethnic-linguistic ideas and not a unity of any sort between Serbian, Croatian or other nations. It has often been suggested that the Muslims of Bosnia are the descendants of Serbs who converted from Orthodox Christianity to Islam under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.

Early criticism
Serbian writers and politicians in Austria-Hungary Svetozar Miletić and Mihailo Polit-Desančić fiercely opposed the Greater Serbia ideology, as well as the premier Serbian socialist from Serbia proper, Svetozar Marković. They all envisioned some sort of "Balkan confederation" that would include Serbia, Bulgaria and sometimes Romania, plus Vojvodina, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, should the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolve.

The term Greater Serbia first appears in a derogatory manner in a book authored by a Serbian socialist Svetozar Marković in 1872. The title «Velika Srbija» (Greater Serbia) was meant to express the author's dismay at the prospect of expansion of the Serbian state without social and cultural reforms as well as possible ethnic confrontation with neighboring nations, from Croats to Bulgarians.

Balkan Wars
The idea of reclaiming historic Serbian territory has been put into action several times during the 19th and 20th centuries, notably in Serbia's southward expansion in the Balkan Wars. Serbia claimed "historical rights" to the possession of Macedonia, acquired by Stephen Dušan in fourteenth century.

Serbia gained significant territorial expansion in the Balkan Wars and almost doubled its territory, with the areas populated mostly by non-Serbs (Albanians, Bulgarians, Turks and others). The Kingdom of Serbia temporarily occupied most of the interior of Albania and Albania's Adriatic coast. A series of massacres of Albanians in the Balkan Wars were committed by the Serbian and Montenegrin Army. According to the Report of the International Commission on the Balkan Wars, Serbia consider annexed territories "as a dependency, a sort of conquered colony, which these conquerors might administer at their good pleasure". Newly acquired territories were subjected to military government, and were not included in Serbia's constitutional system. The opposition press demanded the rule of law for the population of the annexed territories and the extension of the constitution of the Kingdom of Serbia to these regions.

Black Hand
Extremist Greater Serbian nationalist groups included the secret society called the Black Hand, headed by Serbian colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević Apis, which took an active and militant stance on the issue of a Greater Serbian state. This organization is believed to have been responsible for numerous atrocities following the Balkan Wars in 1913. In 1914, Bosnian Serb Young Bosnia member Gavrilo Princip, an organisation which had nothing to do with Black Hand, was responsible the assassination of Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which set off an international crisis that led to the First World War.

First World War and creation of Yugoslavia


By 1914 the Greater Serbian concept was eventually replaced by the Yugoslav Pan-Slavic movement. The change in approach was meant as a means to gain support of other Slavs which neighboured Serbs who were also occupied by Austria-Hungary. The intention to create a south Slav or "Yugoslav" state was expressed in the Niš declaration by Serbian premier Nikola Pašić in 1914, as well as in Serbia's regent Aleksandar's statement in 1916. The documents showed that Serbia would pursue a policy that would integrate all territory that contained Serbs and southern Slavs, including Croatians, Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims.

In 1918, the Triple Entente (Britain, France, and Russia) defeated Germany and Austria-Hungary. Serbia, which was allied with the Entente, pressured the allies to give Serbia the territory it requested. After the First World War, Serbia achieved a maximalist nationalist aspirations with the incorporation of the south Slavic regions of Austria-Hungary and Montenegro, into a Serbian-dominated Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Allies agreed to give the lands of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina to Serbia. At this time Montenegro had already been annexed by Serbia.

Serbian and Yugoslav nationalists claimed that the peoples' had few differences and were only separated by religious divide imposed by occupiers. It was under this belief that Serbia believed the large annexations would be followed by assimilation. During the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the government of the Kingdom pursued a linguistic Serbisation policy towards the Macedonians in Macedonia, then called "Southern Serbia" (unofficially) or "Vardar Banovina" (officially). The dialects spoken in this region were referred to as dialects of Serbo-Croatian. Either way, those southern dialects were suppressed with regards education, military and other national activities, and their usage was punishable.

The concept of "Greater Serbia" was put in practice during the early 1920s, under the Yugoslav premiership of Nikola Pašić. Using tactics of police intimidation and vote rigging, he diminished the role of the oppositions (mainly those loyal to his Croatian rival, Stjepan Radić) to his government in parliament, creating an environment to centralization of power in the hands of the Serbs in general and Serbian politicians in particular.

Chetniks Greater Serbian project
During the Second World War, the largely Serbian royalist Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland headed by General Draža Mihailović attempted to define its vision of a postwar future. One of its intellectuals was the Bosnian Serb nationalist Stevan Moljević who, in 1941, proposed in a paper entitled "Homogeneous Serbia" that an even larger Greater Serbia should be created, incorporating not only Bosnia and much of Croatia but also chunks of Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Hungary in areas where Serbians don't represent even a significant minority. In the territories under their military control, chetniks applied policy of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Croats and Bosniaks.

It is alleged to have been a significant point of discussion at a Chetnik congress held in village Ba in central Serbia in January 1944; however, Moljević's ideas were never put into practice due to the Chetniks' defeat by Josip Broz Tito's Partisans (initially predominantly Serb movement which was multi-ethnic at the time of Chetniks' defeat) and it is difficult to assess how influential they were, due to the lack of records from the Ba congress. Nonetheless, Moljević's core idea—that Serbia is defined by the pattern of Serbian settlement, irrespective of existing national borders—was to remain an underlying theme of the Greater Serbian ideal. Also: Moljević's excursus into cartography has become a standard reference tool in modern Serbian nationalist repertory, ranging from a familiar image of Greater Serbia map frequently appearing in the mass media to the programme of the Serbian Radical Party.

SANU Memorandum


The modern elaboration of Serbs' grievances and allegation of inequality in Yugoslavia was to be developed in the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (1986), which was the single most important document to set into motion the pan-Serbian movement of the late 1980s which led to Slobodan Milošević's rise to power and the subsequent Yugoslav wars. The authors of the Memorandum included the most influential Serbian intellectuals, among them: Pavle Ivić, Antonije Isaković, Dušan Kanazir, Mihailo Marković, Miloš Macura, Dejan Medaković, Miroslav Pantić, Nikola Pantić, Ljubiša Rakić, Radovan Samardžić, Miomir Vukobratović, Vasilije Krestić, Ivan Maksimović, Kosta Mihailović, Stojan Čelić and Nikola Čobelić. Christopher Bennett, author of Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences, characterized the memorandum as "an elaborate, if crude, conspiracy theory." The memorandum alleged systematic discrimination against Serbs and Serbia culminating with the allegation that the Serbs of Kosovo and Metohija were being subjected to genocide. According to Bennett, despite most of these claims being obviously absurd, the memorandum was merely one of several similar polemics published at the time.

The Memorandum's central theses are:
 * Yugoslavia is a Croatian-Slovene hegemony, in order to reduce the Serbs to a smaller representative group, or "power-sharing".
 * Serbs are, in Yugoslavia, oppressed as a nation. This oppression is especially brutal in Serbian Autonomous Province of Kossovo-Metochia, and in Croatia, where their status is "the worst ever as far as recorded history goes".
 * Serbia is economically exploited, being subjected to the political-economical mechanisms that drain much of her wealth and redistribute it to Slovenia, Croatia and Kosovo-Metohija.
 * borders between Yugoslav republics are arbitrary, drawn by dominant Croatian and Slovene communists (motivated, supposedly, by anti-Serbian animus) and their Serbian political lapdogs.

The Memorandum's defenders claims go as follows: far from calling for a breakup of Yugoslavia on Greater Serbian lines claimed to be in favor of Yugoslavia. Its support for Yugoslavia was however conditional on fundamental changes to end what the Memorandum argued was the discrimination against Serbia which was inbuilt into the Yugoslav constitution. The chief of these changes was abolition of the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina. According to Norman Cigar, because the changes were unlikely to be accepted passively, the implementation of the Memorandum's program would only be possible by force.

Milošević's rise to power
With the rise to power of Milošević the Memorandum's discourse became mainstream in Serbia. According to Bennett, Milošević used a rigid control of the media to organize a propaganda campaign in which the Serbs were the victims and stressed the need to readjust Yugoslavia due to the alleged bias against Serbia. This was then followed by Milošević's anti-bureaucratic revolution in which the provincial governments of Vojvodina and Kosovo and the Republican government of Montenegro, were overthrown giving Milošević the dominating position of four votes out of eight in Yugoslavia's collective presidency. Milošević had achieved such a dominant position for Serbia because, according to Bennett, the old communist authorities had failed to stand up to him. During August 1988, supporters of the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution were reported to have shouted Greater Serbia themed chants of "Montenegro is Serbia!".

Croatia and Slovenia denounced the demands by Milošević for a more centralized system of government in Yugoslavia and they began to demand that Yugoslavia be made a full multi-party confederal state. Milošević claimed that he opposed a confederal system but also declared that should a confederal system be created, the external borders of Serbia would be an "open question", insinuating that his government would pursue creating a Greater Serbia if Yugoslavia was decentralized.

Major changes took place in Yugoslavia in 1990 when free elections brought opposition parties to power in Croatia and Slovenia. By this point several opposition parties in Serbia were openly calling for a Greater Serbia, rejecting the then existing boundaries of the Republics as the artificial creation of Tito's partisans. These included Šešelj's Serbian Radical Party, claiming that the recent changes had rectified most of the anti-Serb bias that the Memorandum had alleged. Milošević supported the groups calling for a Greater Serbia, insisting on the demand for "all Serbs in one state". The Socialist Party of Serbia appeared to be defenders of the Serb people in Yugoslavia. Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, who was also the leader of the Socialist Party of Serbia, repeatedly stated that all Serbs should enjoy the right to be included in Serbia. Opponents and critics of Milošević claimed that "Yugoslavia could be that one state but the threat was that, should Yugoslavia break up, then Serbia under Milošević would carve out a Greater Serbia".

In 1990, power had seeped away from the federal government to the republics and were deadlocked over the future of Yugoslavia with the Slovene and Croatian republics seeking a confederacy and Serbia a stronger federation. Gow states, "it was the behavior of Serbia that added to the Croatian and Slovene Republic's belief that no accommodation was possible with the Serbian Republic's leadership". The last straw was on 15 May 1991 when the outgoing Serb president of the collective presidency along with the Serb satellites on the presidency blocked the succession of the Croatian representative Stjepan Mesić as president. According to Gow, from this point on Yugoslavia de facto "ceased to function".

Yugoslav wars


During the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the concept of a Greater Serbia was widely seen outside of Serbia as the motivating force for the military campaigns undertaken to form and sustain Serbian states on the territories of the breakaway Yugoslav republics of Croatia (the Republic of Serbian Krajina) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (the Republika Srpska). From the Serb point of view, the objective of this policy was to assure Serbs' rights by ensuring that they could never be subjected to potentially hostile rule, particularly by their historic Croatian enemies (cf. Ustaše).

The war crimes charges against Milošević are based on the allegation that he sought the establishment of a "Greater Serbia". Prosecutors at the Hague argued that "the indictments were all part of a common scheme, strategy or plan on the part of the accused [Milošević] to create a 'Greater Serbia', a centralized Serbian state encompassing the Serb-populated areas of Croatia and Bosnia and all of Kosovo, and that this plan was to be achieved by forcibly removing non-Serbs from large geographical areas through the commission of the crimes charged in the indictments. Although the events in Kosovo were separated from those in Croatia and Bosnia by more than three years, they were no more than a continuation of that plan, and they could only be understood completely by reference to what had happened in Croatia and Bosnia."

The Hague Trial Chamber found that the strategic plan of the Bosnian Serb leadership consisted of "a plan to link Serb-populated areas in BiH together, to gain control over these areas and to create a separate Bosnian Serb state, from which most non-Serbs would be permanently removed". It also found that media in certain areas focused only on Serbian Democratic Party policy and reports from Belgrade became more prominent, including the presentation of extremist views and promotion of the concept of a Greater Serbia, just as in other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina the concept of a Greater Croatia was openly advocated.

The concept of a Greater Serbia has been widely criticised by other nations in the former Yugoslavia as well as by foreign observers. The two principal objections have been:

Vuk Draskovic, leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, called for the creation of a Greater Serbia which would include Serbia, Kosovo, Vojvodina, Macedonia and Montenegro, as well as regions within Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia with high concentrations of Serbs. Jovan Marjanovic of the Serbian Renewal Movement asked that "the Yugoslav Army must come into Croatia and occupy the line Benkovac–Karlovac–Pakrac–Baranja". About 160,000 Croats were expelled from territories Serbian forces sought to control.
 * Questionable historical justifications for claims to territory; for instance, during the Croatian War of Independence, Dubrovnik and other parts of Dalmatia were claimed as a historically Serbian territory — claims which were opposed by Croatian authorities, and by high-profile international governments.
 * The coercive nature of creating a Greater Serbian state against the will of other nations; before the wars, the peoples of Yugoslavia were highly intermingled and it was physically impossible to create ethnic states without taking in large numbers of other ethnic groups against their will. An answer to this was the widespread use of ethnic cleansing to ensure that mono-ethnic territories could be established without opposition from potentially disloyal minority groups. A converse argument is used against the upgrading the status of Croatia and of Bosnia and Herzegovina from republics to independent states—taking in large numbers of other ethnic groups against their will in the process.

Much of the fighting in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s was the result of an attempt to keep Serbs unified. Mihajlo Markovic, the Vice President of the Main Committee of Serbia's Socialist Party, rejected any solution that would make Serbs outside Serbia a minority. He proposed establishing a federation consisting of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbs residing in the Serbian Autonomous Region of Krajina, Slavonia, Baranja, and Srem.

Later developments


The military defeat of the Republic of Serbian Krajina, the creation of the Republika Srpska within a sovereign Bosnia, the UN Administration of Kosovo, the retreat of Serbs from their formerly controlled territories in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo and the indictment of some Serbian leaders for war crimes have greatly discredited the Greater Serbian ideal in Serbia as well as abroad. Western countries claim that atrocities of the Yugoslav Wars have prompted them to take a much stronger stance against the Greater Serbian goal.

Slobodan Milošević and many other Serb leaders were accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) of crimes against humanity including murder, forcible population transfer, deportation and "persecution on political, racial or religious grounds". Tribunal prosecutor's office has accused Milosevic of "the gravest violations of human rights in Europe since the Second World War and genocide." Milosevic died in prison before sentencing.

However, the idea of a Greater Serbia is still seen by many Croats, Bosniaks, and Albanians as a barrier to good relations and unity between Serbs and other neighbouring peoples.

In 2008, Aleksandar Vučić, a former member of the Serbian Radical Party, which advocated for a Greater Serbia, declared that the Greater Serbian project was unrealistic.

Current situation
Currently, there is a movement calling for the unification of Republika Srpska with Serbia. The Bosniaks and Croats see this as an act of breaking the Dayton Agreement, while Serbs see it as an example of self-determination.

Notes and references

 * Notes:


 * References:

Literature

 * Branimir Anzulovic: Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide, NYU Press, 1999.
 * Philip J. Cohen: Serbia's Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History (Eastern European Studies, No 2), Texas A & M University Press, Reprint Edition, February 1997.
 * Ivo Banac: The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics, Cornell University Press, Reprint edition, 1988.
 * Ivo Banac: The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics, Cornell University Press, Reprint edition, 1988.