Posted on 01/24/2014 7:34:22 AM PST by C19fan
Serbia’s government is commissioning a statue to honor Gavrilo Princip, the boy-assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Novosti, Serbia’s largest newspaper, revealed this week. To avoid any speculation about its intended symbolism, the statue will be erected atop the Belgrade Fortress on June 28, the 100th anniversary of Princip’s fateful gunshots, which, conventional wisdom holds, ushered in World War I. “Serbia and the Serbian people are thus righting a wrong committed against Princip, who has never before had a monument dedicated to him,” writes the pro-government paper.
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Problem was Franz Ferdinand was a progressive who wanted to reform the monarchy and liberalize the country. Princip killed the wrong guy
An odd person to build a monument to, but I can’t see any immediate ethical concerns.
The bridge near the assassination spot was named the Princip Bridge during the Communist era, but apparently they have gone back to the old name (the Latin Bridge).
I visited Sarajevo before the breakup of Yugoslavia, when the bridge was still named for Princip and they had shoe impressions in the sidewalk which were supposed to represent the place Princip stood when he fired the shots at the Archduke and his wife. I don't know if they are still in place.
Franz Ferdinand supposedly wanted to adopt the “Trialist” solution (make the South Slavs a third group on par with the Austrians and the Hungarians in the empire). Whether he would have really tried to implement that if he had come to power is uncertain. For Princip and people like him, that ran against what they wanted for Bosnia—they wanted to get rid of Austro-Hungarian rule altogether.
Exactly.
You would think that the Austrians would have made an exception in this case, but they didn't.
Nice quip. Of course, anyone under 50 would have no idea what you're talking about. And by the way, Amazon is selling a nice collection of Dean Martin roasts. I recommend it.
>> Serbia was an independent nation in 1914 and had been for many decades. Not all Serbs, however, lived within its boundaries. <<
Yes, what I meant was that Princip wanted to liberate the rest of the Serbs. Actually, he wanted to liberate all of the South Serbs (”Yugoslavs,” including Bosnians, Croats, Slovenes, Bulgars and Serbs), but I’m quite certain that my Slovene ancestors would have told him and his ilk to pound sand; Slovenes and Croats were Catholics, like the Austro-Hungarians and would have never voluntarily formed a union with the Serbs, which is why Milosevic killed so many hundreds and thousands of them.
>> Everything I’ve read about him indicates he was a Yugoslav nationalist. The attack was planned and carried out by a rogue faction within the Serbian government, for whom Princip worked. <<
He absolutely was a Yugoslav nationalist. Those two assertions are in no way contradictory. But where the Black Hand was Masonic, and Young Bosnia was strictly political, Princip was mostly animated by anti-Austrian hatred, which he associated with the Catholic Church.
Such absolutism!
I’m not saying the Austro-Hungarian emperor met all these standards, but hypothetically:
What if the unelected monarchs are beloved by a majority of the people they represent? What if they rule justly, and enable economic freedom and motility? Is a beloved monarch better than a despised elected government? We are a democracy; is our government beloved? Just? Free?
A people is entitled to choose their own leaders. If a people are prosperous, free and happy under an effective and just ruler, are they wrong to retain such a ruler?
Elections aren’t democracy. Elections are merely the means by which successors are chosen. The laws of a nation make for a democracy when the people retain power over their own lives and decisions. An elected ruler with no respect for law is far worse than a monarch with great respect for the laws he inherited. What major decision, in the last 100 years, has ever been made in America with the consent of the governed? The legalization of abortion? The destruction of the American family? The imposition of the welfare state? The prohibition of public Christianity? The explosion of the public debt?
My understanding is that the Croats and Slovenes were reasonably content under the Dual Monarchy, with Croatia being an autonomous region under Hungary.
Interesting to hear from you. For some unknown (to me) reason, most freepers with an interest in this area are very pro-Serbian and pro-Milosevich.
I’ve always thought the history of Croatia really interesting, especially the Croatian Military Frontier.
Very true. Franz Ferdinand was set against the annexation of Bosnia Herzogovina as being worthless as assets and nothing but trouble. Franz Joseph and his clique overruled him.
Croatia was divided--Dalmatia belonged to the Austrian half but much of inland Croatia was part of the Hungarian half of the empire. The Military Frontier had only recently been added to "civil" Croatia (1881 or something like that).
Modern ideas of national identity seem to have spread to that area only in the 19th century. Before that most people probably thought of their identity in religious terms (Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish) rather than ethnic terms. Later, both the Serbs and the Croats tried to claim that the Bosnian Muslims belonged to their group.
Among immigrants to the US (who mostly came before 1921), a lot of them still answered "Austria" for the census question for place of birth rather than Yugoslavia even after Yugoslavia had come into existence.
The history of the Balkans from say 1850 to 1914 is really interesting. All these different groups were trying to gain the allegiance of what were often called “emerging nationalities.”
In actual fact these nationalities were in the process of being invented. Different groups claimed “historical right” to particular areas because they’d controlled a big chunk of land 600 or 800 years before for a decade or two. My personal favorite is the Serbs claiming they “owned” most of the Balkans because Stephen Dushan had an empire for 25 years or so back in the 1300s. Obviously these claims overlapped greatly.
In Macedonia, for example, Greeks claimed all Macedonians were Greeks because Alexander the Great was from Macedonia. In fact, I think they still do. To an unbiased observer, this is a really, really flimsy basis for such a claim.
Meanwhile, the Macedonians themselves were largely Orthodox Slavs. They spoke a language with various dialects that were close to Serbian on one end of the region and Bulgarian on the other.
So of course Serbs and Bulgarians both claimed all Macedonians were “really” members of their “nationality.”
This leaves out of the mess that people in the Balkans didn’t live in neat blocks by “nationality” as they (mostly) did in Western Europe. They lived in general in villages of various ethnicities scattered across the landscape. Which meant that when one “nation” acquired title to the area, the other ethnic groups imediately became intruders, in a land where they had lived just as long as their now “majority” neighbors.
What a mess!
The Italians and the Greeks could claim all of the Balkans based on the fact that the whole peninsula belonged to the Roman Empire, and at times in the Middle Ages to the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantines called themselves Romans, and the Greeks continued to call themselves Romans for the most part until the 19th century, I think, when part of Greece became an independent kingdom (under a non-Greek king).
The ancient Greeks considered the ancient Macedonians to be barbarians, but the modern Greeks claim that they were Greeks--and have prevented the Republic of Macedonia from using that name at the UN. Most of the Balkans became Slavic in the 6th or 7th century, apart from Greece and Albania, so the modern Macedonians have little to do with the ancient Macedonians. (Perhaps they inherited some DNA...language changes don't always mean that the earlier population is wiped out.)
The modern Macedonian language is very similar to Bulgarian--if the Russians had succeeded in creating a "Big Bulgaria" in 1878 that area would use Bulgarian as their official language. Instead it was later conquered by Serbia in the Balkan Wars and called "South Serbia." Between the wars it was illegal to use the local Macedonian language--people were supposed to use Serbian instead. The Tito government recognized the Macedonians as separate from the Serbs and created the Macedonian literary language (trying to make it as different from Bulgarian as they could). Serbian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian are all related but Macedonian and Bulgarian are closer--they have features in common which are lacking in Serbian (like attaching the article to the end of a noun).
The whole Yugoslav project was an example of intellectuals thinking they know what is best for the people.
Well it seems to me that it is your resentment for the Serbs that is forming your opinion, not facts. There was a huge pro-Yugoslavian movement in those times in the Balkans, including Slovenia and Croatia.
Resentment? It’s merely history for me. I have no more resentment for the Yugoslav movement than any other American has for King George. I just have enough living relatives to know from living witnesses what is historically absurd.
Which is not to say that there wouldn’t be any sympathies for the Yugoslav movement; it only makes sense that certain discontents with memories of the nationalist-socialist revolutions (where have we heard that term before?) of 1848 would seek alliances with foreign powers to topple the Empire. But understand them for what they were: radicals seeking foreign intervention, not patriots seeking liberty.
Hungarian Croatia was an imperfect democracy, not at all a dictatorship. Even imemdiately after the Austrian-Hungarian Ausgleich (Settlement) of 1868, the separatist People’s Party were out-voted 66-16; they clearly represented a small fraction of the public. And they were merely separatist; they had no interest in being dominated by their much larger neighbors to the East.
So why would people vote 3-1 (at the LOW point) to be subjected to an Empire? Was it that they saw themselves less as Slavs and more as Catholics, and their empire that of the Holy Roman Empire? Or did they resent Germanic-Hungarian domination, but feared Serbian domination far more? Either way, the notion that they wanted to be under the boot of the Serbs is purely ridiculous.
>> The whole Yugoslav project was an example of intellectuals thinking they know what is best for the people. <<
And of course, by “thinking they know what is best for the people,” you mean, “justifying their own lust for domination and control,” as is the case whenever intellectuals do so, right?
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