Obradović's Pan-Serbism The first person to formulate the modern idea of
Pan-Serbism was
Dositej Obradović (1739–1811), a writer and thinker who dedicated his writings to the "Slavoserbian people", which he described as "the inhabitants of Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Dalmatia, Croatia, Syrmium, Banat, and Bačka", and who he regarded as all his "Serbian brethren, regardless of their church and religion". Other proponents of Pan-Serbism included historian
Jovan Rajić and politician and lawyer
Sava Tekelija, both of whom published works incorporating many of the aforementioned areas under a single umbrella name of "Serbian lands". The concept of Pan-Serbism espoused by these three was not an imperialist one, based upon the notion of Serbian conquest, but a rationalist one. They all believed that
rationalism would overcome the barriers of religion that separated the Slavs into Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Muslims, uniting the peoples as one nation. The idea of a unification and homogenization by force was propounded by
Petar II Petrović-Njegoš (1813–1851).
Stratimirović's Serbia Rediviva and Tekelija's Illyria Stefan Stratimirović, the Serbian Metropolitan in
Sremski Karlovci from 1790 to 1836 and the head of the
Serbian Church in the
Habsburg monarchy, was one of the Serbs who fought for independence, and unification. His most significant and influential political work is the
Memorandum, written in June 1804. The core idea from the Memorandum stipulated that all Serbs should live in a single national state. This renewed Serbian national state (which may be called
Serbia rediviva) was based on the idea that all Serbs, both those from
Turkey (the
Ottoman Empire) and those from
Austria, should be united within it. Consequently, he proposed that the following territories of Austria inhabited by Serbs should be included which Stratimirović himself called the Slavonic-Serbian State (
Slavenoserbsko gosudarstvo): the
Bay of Kotor with the town of
Kotor, the parts of
Dalmatia and
Croatia east of the
Una River, the
Krka River, and the city of
Šibenik, the territory between the
Danube River, the
Sava River, and the
Vuka River and its surroundings, and the greater part of
Slavonia.
Serbia rediviva would also consist, according to his view, of the following historical-ethnic Serbian lands which at that time belonged to the Ottoman Empire: the
Belgrade Pashalik (from the Sava and Danube rivers in the north to the
West Morava River in the south, and from the
Drina River in the west to the
Timok River in the east);
Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Montenegro,
Kosovo and
Metohija, and the northwestern part of present-day
Bulgaria with the town of
Vidin, its surrounding area, and the
Lom River. He also mentioned the part of western
Wallachia between the Danube and
Jiu rivers, present-day southeastern Serbia with the towns of
Niš,
Leskovac,
Vranje, and
Bujanovac, and the northern part of present-day
Albania with the town of
Shkodra which should be considered part of the "ethnic space" of the Serbian people. Earlier, in June 1804, Habsburg Serb metropolitan
Stefan Stratimirović informed the Russian court of the same plan. Petar I's plan was to unite
Podgorica,
Spuž,
Žabljak, the
Bay of Kotor,
Bosnia,
Herzegovina,
Dubrovnik and
Dalmatia with Montenegro. -->
Garašanin's Načertanije Some authors claim that the roots of the Greater Serbian ideology can be traced back to Serbian minister
Ilija Garašanin's
Načertanije (1844).
Načertanije ("The Draft") 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
Czech ambassador to Serbia,
Franjo Zach, "''Zach's Plan''". However, Zach "envisaged a federal organization of the South Slav peoples. But where Zach had written 'South Slav', Garašanin substituted 'Serb" or 'Serbian'. This and other changes transformed Zach's cosmopolitan vision into a more narrowly focused Serbian nationalist manifesto". The work claimed lands that were inhabited by Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Bosniaks, Hungarians, Croats and Slovenes as part of Greater Serbia. Garašanin's plan also included 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". The document also emphasized the necessity of cooperation between the Balkan nations and it advocated that the Balkans should be governed by the nations from the Balkans. This plan was kept secret until 1906 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. Because
Načertanije was a secret document until 1906, it could not have affected national consciousness at the popular level. However, some scholars suggest that from the second half of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of World War I, "leading political groups and social strata in Serbia were thoroughly imbued with the ideas in the Nacertanije and differed only in intensity of feeling and political conceptualization". Political insecurity, more so than Yugoslavism or Serbian nationalism, appeared to be the prevailing reasoning behind the idea of expanding Serbian borders. The document is one of the most contested of nineteenth-century Serbian history, with rival interpretations. Some scholars argue that Garašanin was an inclusive Yugoslavist, while others maintain that he was an exclusive Serbian nationalist seeking a Greater Serbia.
Vuk Karadžić's Pan-Serbism , whose speakers
Vuk Karadžić considered
Serbs in the 19th century. The most notable Serbian linguist of the 19th century,
Vuk Karadžić, was a follower of the view that all South Slavs who speak the
Shtokavian dialect (of
Serbo-Croatian) were Serbs, speaking 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 Shtokavian speakers (Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim) into one, modern Serbian nation. Although there were many people (mostly the Croats), as Karadžić conceded, "who still find it difficult to call themselves Serbs", but "they will gradually become used to it". German historian Michael Weithmann considers that Karadžić expressed dangerous ideological and political idea in scientific shape i.e. that all southern Slavs are Serbs while Czech historian Jan Rychlik consider that Karadžić became a propagator of greater Serbian ideology and uttered a theory according to which all Yugoslav people speaking the shtokavian dialect are Serbs. This 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 Shtokavian 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 Serbs and the other nations. A clerical support to Greater Serbian ideology, and Karadžić's idea, was provided by
Nikodim Milaš in his writings of
Pravoslavna Dalmacija (1901).
Balkan Wars 1912–1913, according to the
Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (1914). 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).
Orthodox Christian metropolitan of Durrës Jakob gave a particularly warm welcome to the new authorities. Due to Jakob's intervention to the Serbian authorities several Albanian guerrilla units were saved and avoided execution. The army of the Kingdom of Serbia retreated from Durrës in April 1913 under pressure of the naval fleet of the
Great Powers, but it remained in other parts of Albania for the next two months.
Black Hand The secret military society called Unity or Death, popularly known as 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.
World War I and the creation of Yugoslavia ,
Syrmia,
Banat, Bačka and Baranja, and
Montenegro proclaimed its unification with the
Kingdom of Serbia and entered into Yugoslavia as part of Serbia (
Note: the map shown – Bačka, Banat, Baranja – represents a short time period, during military demarcation,
not the actual unified territory). By 1914 the Greater Serbian concept was eventually replaced by the Yugoslav
Pan-Slavic movement. After the
First World War, Serbia achieved a maximalist nationalist aspirations with the unification of the south Slavic regions of
Austria-Hungary and
Montenegro, into a Serb-dominated
Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The
Treaty of London (1915) of the allies would assign to Serbia the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Srem, Bačka, Slavonia (against Italian objections) and northern Albania (to be divided with Montenegro). 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.
World War II and Moljević's Homogenous Serbia ", 1941. During
World War II, the Serbian royalist
Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland which was 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 which was titled "
Homogenous 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 Serbs did not represent a significant minority. In the territories which were under their military control, the Chetniks waged
ethnic cleansing in a
genocidal campaign against ethnic
Croats and
Bosnian Muslims. It was a point of discussion at a Chetnik congress which was held in the village of
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 a movement predominantly composed of Serbs which became more multi-ethnic by this time) and it is difficult to assess how influential they were, due to the lack of records from the Ba congress. ==Role in the dissolution of Yugoslavia==