The Bosnian War happened because a nation is a very hard thing to define.
In this video, our third in our five part series, I intend to show you how.
Gavrilo Princip believed in Yugoslavia.
He believed in the unity of his people.
It's just he wasn't exactly sure who those people were, what form of nation it should take.
But he certainly believed in their unity.
As he died in prison, he was quoted as saying 'I don't care who rules it, I just want there to be a Yugoslavia'.
Like so many Slavs before him, Gavrilo defined himself in the reflection of the other.
His people were anyone but the imperialists.
He wasn’t Ottoman and he wasn’t Austro-Hungarian.
He was a Slav.
And had he lived long enough to see the changes he inspired in the world,
he might have called himself an Orthodox Bosnian Serb.
But Gavrilo was not destined for a long life.
Here in the tolerant capital of Sarajevo, he murdered an archduke when he was nineteen years old.
Just a kid.
An idealist.
And like most idealists, from the outside his goals seemed noble.
He wanted self-governance.
A homeland for his people.
He wanted Bosnia to take part in the great ethnic uprisings
that had been working their way across the planet.
To shed the yoke of colonialism and join the modern era.
And he would get his wish.
As he died in that dark Austrian prison, the flames he’d ignited
would burn the world he knew to the ground.
The fire of revolution ripped through the continent.
That one small domino that he’d knocked over would go on to start
the bloodiest war humanity had ever seen.
That one dead archduke would be followed to the grave by tens of millions of soldiers and civilians.
It would lead to a resetting of the world order that would create an even more devastating war
just a single generation later.
The true outcome of ethnic nationalism.
But out of the ashes rose Yugoslavia.
Gavrilo would get his wish.
Not everyone would be so lucky, though.
One person who would never get his wish was Ante Trumbic.
He was one of the many men who was actually going to have to put in practice
what Gavrilo's ideology had started.
The thing about being an assassin is that you get to die a hero.
You don’t actually have to stick around and figure out what Yugoslavia actually means.
Trumbic tried to form some political glue that could bind together this fledgling state.
And while he may have been a nationalist Croat at heart, he was facing down the barrel of
both Italian and Austrian conquest.
And in the shadow of the other, he was willing to unite.
He believed that so long as they created the right organization, a unified Yugoslavia
would be the best possible solution for his people.
A United States of the Balkans.
A fresh start to a troubled land.
Intellectuals and political leaders from across the region sat down with the Serbian kingdom,
looking for a path to integration.
Any way to come together.
Italy had entered the war on the promise of exiting with Slovenian and Croatian land,
and the best way to stop them from that was to present a unified front.
They would create an entity that could compete with the great powers of Europe.
A federation so strong that they could never be colonized again.
All it had to do was keep from destroying itself in the meantime.
To strike a balance between the multitude of self-defined ethnicities.
And unite.
And from their side, the Croats had some demands.
While they were happy to live as equals if they were treated equally,
they had no interest in signing up to be second class citizens of a new Serb empire.
Their Yugoslavia would require the political agreement of all South Slavic people,
not just the most dominant.
It would give power to weakened ethnic states and allow for a truly federated state.
It would provide balance to a system weighted against the small, and form a framework
for the creation of a new pan-Slavic identity.
A utopian ideal for all their citizens to rally behind.
And of course, problems arose almost immediately.
The ideals of intelligentsia are rarely well met by reality.
But when the enemies were at their gates, the Yugoslavs had shown they could find ways to work together.
The gang that had killed Franz Ferdinand after all contained Bosnian Serbs, Muslims and Croats.
And together, they’d aimed to be an example of that united identity they’d always seen
in the reflection of their enemies.
With all their enemies dead, they had to start to ask themselves what comes next.
If the basis of their federation was an ethnic identity, then what stopped them
from further breaking down into sub-identities?
Nationalism doesn’t end with everybody united.
It ends with them divided.
With the lowest common denominator of identity.
If Serbia couldn't treat the other ethnicities within this federation as equal then
what stopped them from dominating the government?
What stopped them from taking an essentially multi-ethnic democracy on paper and turning it
into a single-ethnicity dictatorship in practice?
Nothing, that’s what.
And so, of course it happened.
The only thing that could stand in its way was violence.
And so, of course there was violence.
No matter how many different ways they aligned the ideology, the old schisms remained the same.
Croats and Slovenes were still Catholic.
They still pulled to the West.
Serbs were still Orthodox, and with the Russian Empire in full swing, they had a valuable patron in the East.
And with their hatred still fresh from the Ottoman era, neither of them was even remotely willing
to consider the Muslim Bosniaks of a people worthy of distinction.
From their point of view, they’d long since traded their Slav identities for those of the invader.
They were either Turks or heretical Serbs or something, but what they weren’t was
a unique people within the Yugoslav kingdom.
And when the time came, the Serb leadership intended to split the land that they lived on,
that they owned, that they farmed, with Croatia and take Muslim Bosnia as their own.
They were just never able calm the country down enough to make it happen.
But the Bosnians weren’t the only ones they were denying an identity.
The Serb leadership claimed that they were the ethnic foundation for both the Montenegrin and Macedonians.
And since they were both Orthodox, that put them in the Serb sphere of influence.
And if they wanted to prove otherwise, they’d have to do so like everyone else did.
With a gun.
So with the swing of the pendulum the Serbs had switched to the role of oppressor.
With the power back in their hands, they would begin repressing those who disagreed with them,
be it due to ethnicity, religion, or culture.
Just as was done to them under so many previous regimes.
For their part, the Serbs saw themselves as the natural leaders of the Yugoslav movement.
From their point of view, the Montenegrins, the Bosniaks, everyone,
they were simply just a version of them who hadn’t realized it yet.
They saw themselves somewhat like the Prussians of the Balkans, and their cultural backbone
would offer the pan-Slavs a way to unite that they'd never found before.
And just like all those colonizers and religious leaders before them, if anyone disagreed with that identity,
they'd kill them.
No matter how much resistance they came across, they always found a way to claim it was meant
to uphold a united Yugoslavia.
And as ridiculous as it might seem now, many truly believed that.
Because in their eyes, the stronger the Serbs, the stronger the nation.
In the eyes of many, it didn’t matter if the name on paper was Yugoslavia,
what they were starting to see was the return of Greater Serbia.
And ten years after they’d united, Trumbic was wishing he’d never agreed.
The people he’d brought together were now at each other’s throats.
And for the Croats, the writing was on the wall that they were going to have to fight
their way back out of the door he’d convinced them to enter just a few years before.
With each passing day, it only got worse.
In 1928, on the floor of parliament, a Serb deputy shot five members of an opposing Croatian party.
Two would die then and there, one of whom was their leader.
In turn, the Serbian king suspended the constitution and stripped all their ethnic groups of their political power.
He turned the state into a true dictatorship.
His last ditch effort to keep the people together.
Or perhaps put in another way, to stay in power.
As dissenting voices started to scream their demands, the government turned to imprisonment and murder.
Prominent activists and scholars were killed without recourse.
Political leaders were locked in cages.
The state undertook a massive campaign of repression, particularly against the ethnicities
that refuted the dominance of the Serbs.
Any who felt an identity beyond that which they were given, was punished.
And soon, Croats would be fighting again to be free.
Only this time, it would be against the very union that they’d helped to create.
This was no foreign invader for the Slavs to oppose, no Avar to unite against.
Now, they were fighting purely against themselves.
It wouldn’t be long before they committed suicide.
In 1934, sixteen years after Gavrilo shot that famed archduke,
a second assassination would rock the Balkans.
In Marseille, France, with help from the Croatian nationalists, a member of Macedonia’s
secret paramilitary murdered Yugoslavia’s king.
Although the state he led would limp forward for a few more years in his absence,
the writing was now on the wall.
And what’s more, it was written in blood.
It took two shots in Sarajevo to bring about the first Kingdom of Yugoslavia,
and two shots in France to destroy it.
It would be another world war and the mass slaughter of
three hundred thousand innocent Serbs before they’d try again.
But more on that next time.
This is Rare Earth.
And this is a world war one trench. Crazy!