Chapter Eight: The Concordat (July 14th, 1937 to December 2nd, 1937)
Loose Ends: Yugoslavia’s Slovenes and the Macedonians
The rupture between Father Anton Korošec and Prime Minister Stojadinović inspired some more independently-minded Slovene organizations to split from the hitherto-dominant Slovene People’s Party.
The longer that he kept his followers outside of the Yugoslav Radical Union, the more that Father Anton Korošec worried about the influence of Slovenes in the kingdom, and his own power, eroding. His negotiations with Stojadinović were hindered by the addition of some Croatian support to the government coalition and challenges to Korošec’s party by rival Slovene political movements which agitated for a more aggressive visions for Slovenia which variously included independence, war with Italy over the Istrian peninsula, or both. To rein in these radical nationalists, Stojadinović and Korošec hastily brought the Slovene People’s Party back into the fold with the promises of a ministerial post for the priest and a greater degree of autonomy for the local Slovene government in the cultural and economic spheres. Offers of partnerships with local industrialists to improve local infrastructure and expand their operations into the rest of the country also sweetened the pot. A key point of compromise in the agreement was the stipulation that the degree of self-rule granted the Slovenes was based on the geographical Drava banovina rather than their status as an ethnic group distinct from other Yugoslav subjects.
The Macedonian terrorist organization IMRO had long been the second-greatest threat to Yugoslavia’s internal stability. With the crippling of the Ustaše, Belgrade’s attention turned to the Bulgarian-backed separatists.
With the Croatians more or less reconciled to the state and the Slovenes returning to the fold of the Yugoslav Radical Union, Prince Paul and Prime Minister Stojadinović now turned their attentions to the kingdom’s Macedonian population. The region of Macedonia had passed from the rule of the dying Ottoman Empire to the Balkan states of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece following a number of wars in the years leading up to the Great War. Despite efforts to reconcile the Macedonians to their status within Serbia and later Yugoslavia, a sense of Macedonian identity began to emerge which sought to unite all Macedonian territories and people into one state. The concept was promoted by the Communist International and the Bulgarian government, both of whom were instrumental in supporting the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, or IMRO. While never reaching the level of notoriety that the Ustaše achieved, the IMRO still posed a threat to the unity and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia, especially as Bulgaria, like Hungary, began to cast about for a great power patron to champion Sofia’s territorial claims.
In the years immediately following the failed Zveno coup in 1934 which temporarily brought a pro-Yugoslavia and pro-French government to power in Sofia, Belgrade had practiced a defensive and reactionary posture with regards to agitation among the kingdom’s Macedonian population, leading to the border between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria becoming one of the most fortified in the region. As with the early campaigns against the Ustaše in Croatia, the Royal Yugoslav Army would conduct raids and sweep the countryside for hideouts and caches of weapons following attacks launched by the IMRO, but these moves failed to tear out the terrorist group by the root, and the heavy-handed response alienated a sizable percentage of the local population.
In the light of the success against the Croat terrorists that Belgrade’s new approach had accomplished, many in Macedonia; terrorists, soldiers, and civilians alike; prepared themselves for a similar effort at disrupting the IMRO while appealing to the local citizenry. Macedonia’s more rural character and closer proximity to foreign support made it a more challenging prospect than Croatia, and it was predicted that such a campaign would take much longer, be much more costly in terms of lives and funds, and be less successful at winning the population over to the vision of Yugoslavism promoted by the evolved Radical Union.
After being liberated from the Ottoman Empire, Macedonia was divided between Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Macedonian nationalists sought to unify their countrymen in one state, with the IMRO serving as the most prominent and deadly example.
An alternative solution was put forward by Milan Stojadinović at a meeting of ministers and generals. The success of the Ustaše campaign after years of ineffectiveness had chastened the commanders of the Royal Yugoslav Army, but the prime minister’s latest scheme seemed even more radical. In response to a facetious suggestion to hand over Macedonia and its troublesome population to Bulgaria outright, Stojadinović proposed approaching local Macedonian leaders who were known to have ties to the IMRO and arranging a meeting between the government and the separatists. The military was horrified that the prime minister would even consider working with one of the organizations responsible for the brazen assassination of King Alexander, but their anger gave way to something else as Stojadinović elaborated over their loud and repeated objections. The IMRO sought to unify all Macedonians within one state, but why should that be solely to the benefit of Bulgaria? A properly conducted approach, he argued, could harness the IMRO and turn it from a threat into an ally of Yugoslav interests in the Balkans.
Again, the military privately fumed, but ultimately a majority of them went along with the other government ministers and Prince Paul and approved of Stojadinović’s ambitious scheme, although not without deep reservations. To that end, Macedonians were granted a degree of concessions falling somewhere between the outright wooing of the kingdom’s Croat population and the implicit support which her Slovene subjects received. Efforts to turn the Macedonians into Serbs were curtailed, only to be replaced with Yugoslavist indoctrination which, pervasive as it was, did not attempt to strip Macedonians of their self-image but to instead complement it with a greater sense of belonging to the South Slav nation.
Military Developments
The General Staff appointed former Chief of the General Staff Ljubomir Marić to evaluate the kingdom’s military and to serve as the architect of Yugoslavia’s updated military doctrines on the strength of his 1928 work Fundamentals of Strategy
, his Serb ethnicity, and his personal popularity. Part of Marić’s work included the development of hypothetical war plans against the kingdom’s neighbors.
In order to persuade the generals to support more of the Radical Union’s domestic agenda, Yugoslavia’s civilian leaders had to promise the army more support and a chance for it to heighten its already formidable prestige within the kingdom. To that end, Belgrade began planning for war.
It was not enough for the generals to equip their forces with the latest technologies, they also needed to understand how to utilize them. To this end, small-scale maneuvers were conducted using the small Yugoslav air force. The aim of these exercises was to incorporate air power into the offensive and defensive strategies which would be utilized in the event of war. Given the kingdom’s modest industrial base, the general staff decided against developing an air doctrine based on strategic bombing. Yugoslavia was simply not capable of the aircraft production necessary to produce wings of various types of bombers and their escorts. Furthermore, a truly independent air force, as opposed to one subservient to the Royal Yugoslav Army, would be another competitor for prestige and power.
Supplied generously with resources in order to provide work and secure the loyalty of the military, the air arm of the Yugoslav army, under the leadership of General Dušan Simović, was able to cobble together a rudimentary scheme for operating in wartime. Such tactics could not be fully tested and evaluated, however, before the outbreak of war.
The smaller size of countries in the Balkans, and the uncertainty of public support in the event of hostilities, made the General Staff reject the idea of a long war which would necessitate a bombing campaign to break the enemy willpower. Instead, the generals counted on Yugoslavia’s larger and better-trained army and sizable industry when compared to many of its neighbors to break through enemy lines and rapidly gain enough territory to bring an end to the war. To aid in this plan, planes and pilots were molded to serve in support roles for the army first and foremost, including winning air superiority and softening up entrenched enemy positions.
Such plans were almost entirely developed with an eye towards conflict with one of the other Balkan countries, such as Hungary. In the event of war with a great power, Yugoslavia’s generals were still pessimistic regarding the kingdom’s chances, short of assistance from a larger ally. Such diplomacy was still the provision of Stojadinović, and this dependence was a constant irritant for his opponents in the military.
The Concordat and Its Discontents
The pacification of Croatia was informally commemorated with the expansion of the already impressive University of Zagreb, one of the three flagship universities of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Education had long been neglected during the years of turmoil and financial insolvency, but expanding access to schooling, some would say indoctrination, was a key tenant of the new Yugoslav Radical Union’s program.
Following the resignation of the fierce and controversial Serb Bogoljub Kujundžić, the Slovene leader Father Anton Korošec returned to the government to fill the vacated Minister of Education post. In a speech commemorating the expansion of the University of Belgrade, Korošec spoke primarily on the role that education could and should play in uniting the groups of Yugoslavia into a true nation. He lamented the fact that half of the kingdom’s subjects were illiterate, but pointed to the great duty and ability of the three Yugoslav universities of Belgrade, Llubjana, and Zagreb to rectify the lack of education in the country. These parts of the minister’s speech were well-received, as were his other educational proposals, but all were overshadowed by his brief announcement of the resumption of concordat negotiations between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Catholic Church.
His holiness, Pope Pius XII, was present at the negotiation of the 1914 Concordat between the Vatican and Serbia in his role as assistant-secretary of state, and participated in the initial stages of the renegotiation of the concordat with Yugoslavia shortly before his elevation to the papacy.
Relations between the Kingdom of Serbia and the Vatican had been cordial enough before the outbreak of the Great War, with a concordat being signed between the two a mere four days before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The 1914 Concordat was a fairly innocuous agreement regarding the rights and responsibilities of the Catholic Church and the Serbian government, and it proved entirely workable with the small population of Catholics inside of the kingdom. The war’s conclusion, however, saw Serbia transform into Yugoslavia, with a large population of devout Croat and Slovene Catholics. The tensions between groups frequently blurred matters of ethnicity and religion, and the predominant place given to the Serbian Orthodox Church in Yugoslavia hindered efforts to integrate the kingdom’s Catholic subjects. Some Catholic figures estimated that 200,000 of the kingdom’s Catholic subjects converted to Serbian Orthodoxy since unification for reasons of political and economic advancement. Until the 1930’s efforts to update the concordat to account for the vastly increased number of Catholics floundered against objections by the Orthodox Church and the Serb interests which held most of the kingdom’s political and military power. It was only with the evolution of the Yugoslav Radical Union’s ideology, and the need for greater Croat and Slovene support for the government following the successful neutralization of the Ustaše, which gave Stojadinović the political cover to update the agreement with the Vatican.
The young and passionate Archbishop of Zagreb, Aloysius Stepinac, was an ardent advocate for the Catholics in the kingdom. He reserved his support for Yugoslavia “with the condition that the state acts towards the Catholic Church as it does to all just denominations and that it guarantees them freedom.”
The new agreement expanded the rights and privileges of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia, granting it equal status with the Serbian Orthodox Church in most matters, although special recognition was afforded Orthodoxy as one of the sources of strength and inspiration which freed Serbia from Ottoman servitude and led to the creation of the unified Yugoslav kingdom. The tax-exempt status of the Catholic Church was reaffirmed, and provisions were set aside for funding churches and religious education in Slovenia and Croatia, although the amount was still less than that set aside in the state budget for similar upkeep and expansion of Orthodox institutions.
Despite its measured character, the concordat signed between Belgrade and the Vatican was met with fury by the country’s devout Orthodox population and by Serb chauvinists. Both groups saw the updated agreement as a threat to the predominant place of Serbs and the Serbian Orthodox Church in Yugoslavia. Despite the concordat stipulating that Archbishops in Yugoslavia must swear loyalty to the crown and not conspire against the state, members of the Serb Cultural Club held that the new concordat threatened the independence of the monarchy, and was the latest in a series of moves where Belgrade was advantaging every other group in the kingdom at the expense of the Serbs. Past support for Croatian groups, including the Ustaše, by some Catholic priests in the country were cited as proof of the concordat’s sinister nature, and rumors spread furiously among discontents about hidden provisions in the renewed concordat, including that Prince Paul had converted to Catholicism in secret as part of a plan to subvert the country and King Peter.
Matters were not improved by the concordat's conclusion coming only a few months after the death of Patriarch Varnava I of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Matters may have been worse if Prime Minister Stojadinović had been attempting to negotiate the concordat or having parliament vote to ratify it when the patriarch died, but as it was minor protests still broke out among Orthodox priests in Belgrade as the Yugoslav parliament ratified the treaty over the fierce objections of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The protests and the resulting arrest of priests gravely alarmed Prince Paul, and to ease tensions, two private conferences were arranged; one between the new Patriarch Gavrilo V, Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, the president of the Roman Catholic Conference of Bishops of Yugoslavia, and Prince Paul, and the other between the regent, Father Korošec, and Dmitri Ljotić; to discuss the concordat and other issues of church and state.
The leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, Vladko Maček, was noticeably absent from the discussions. His anti-clerical positions, including going as far as to advocate for a Croatian church separate from the Vatican, had left Maček and his party flatfooted by the government’s successful conclusion of the concordat. Milan Stojadinović was also pointedly excluded from these discussions, but it did not stop his opponents in the military from imagining the prime minister’s fingerprints behind these moves and agitating accordingly.
The Tightening Snare
In addition to the underhanded unilateralism of Milan Stojadinović’s policies, the Romanian government also seemed to take inspiration from the Yugoslav prime minister’s ambition of tying Yugoslavia to as many powers as possible in order to preserve the country’s independence.
Riding high from the success of the Bled Agreement, both Hungary and Romania sought to pursue their respective strategies further. With tensions temporarily settled between the two countries, each could look to their relationships with other neighboring countries. For Bucharest, this meant extending feelers in every direction to grant Romania the maximum diplomatic flexibility. To this end, King Carol took the wildly unexpected step of recognizing and establishing diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union. Meetings were tentatively arranged in which to discuss minority rights in Bessarabia, the passage of Soviet forces through the country in the event of war, and the return of the Romanian Treasure which had been sent to Russia for safekeeping during the Great War. Few expected Joseph Stalin or King Carol to come to an agreement on any of these issues, but neither had they anticipated the sudden desire by Romania to placate its larger neighbor. A more natural development was the renewal of the 1921 Romanian-Polish alliance, as the easing of tensions between Romania and Hungary and the corresponding decline in Bucharest’s relationship with Prague eased the way to reinstating many of the military and diplomatic conventions between Romania and Poland which had been allowed to lapse.
The fracturing of the Little Entente with the Bled Agreement encouraged Budapest to new heights of brinkmanship and saber-rattling against the post-war settlement.
While Romania was mending relationships with other countries, the Hungarians were aggressively posturing against their neighbors. Fences may have been mended with Bucharest, but with the threat of a Polish-Romanian-Hungarian bloc to fall back upon, the Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy went about strengthening ties with Berlin and Rome by adding ministers to his cabinet who were known to be receptive to Fascism and to German and Italian grievances, although he also made sure to emphasize his government’s unique Hungarian character. This move was followed by another set of military exercises. The highlights were the incorporation of the nascent Royal Hungarian Air Force into operations, and demonstrations where the army stormed fortifications and conducted mock encirclements on open plains. The message was clear to Prague and Belgrade that, while the Hungarians may have set aside the issue of Transylvania for the time being, they still had designs on other lost territories in Slovakia and the Banat.
The war in Spain continued unabated, with the capital of Madrid suffering as it passed from control of the Nationalists to the Republicans and back again. The successive battles for the country’s premiere city were characterized by fierce house-to-house fighting, and even after the battle had ended, the survivors were subjected to conscription and reprisals by the winners.
The Spanish Civil War continued its bloody progress, though towards what conclusion outsiders could only guess. After losing the battle for control of the Atlantic coast of the country, Franco’s Nationalists had managed to surround a small number of Republican divisions in the northwest corner of Spain. It was a welcome prize after weeks of setbacks and recriminations, but still a much poorer one than what had been allowed to slip through the fingers of the Nationalist forces. The initial excitement over the war had worn off, and the once-impressive flood of foreign volunteers and material support into Spain had slowed to a trickle. Franco’s supporters in Germany and Italy were particularly unimpressed with the military failures of the Nationalists, and began tempering expectations that had been fanned by domestic propaganda claiming that Spain was the primary battleground in the war against Bolshevism. Besides, events elsewhere in Europe occupied their attention and promised potential returns richer than those to be found on the Iberian peninsula.
Tension Between the Victors
The dust of the “War to End All Wars” had hardly settled when the victorious Entente powers turned against one another, disagreeing on the division of spoils, the drawing of boundaries, and the maintenance of peace.
Even in the darkest days of the Great War, the Franco-British partnership had endured. But what the war couldn’t accomplish, even with the Kaiser’s armies and propagandists and the withdrawal of Russia from the war into internal revolution and civil war, the outbreak of peace did. The alliance which had triumphed against the Central Powers, may have included Italy, the United States, Japan, and a host of smaller states, but by 1919 its heart was the relationship between France and Great Britain. As soon as peace negotiations had opened, however, it had been clear that London and Paris were drifting further and further apart. While the French had wanted to prevent a resurgence of German power and militarism, British statesmen had been more worried about France’s position as the predominant military power on the European continent. The rivalry between these two great empires may have been set aside in the face of the German threat, but hundreds of years of competition and hostility were not so easily put to rest.
In the 1920’s, France had attempted, on the whole, to pursue a policy wholly out of line with British financial and political interests in Germany’s rehabilitation. To that end, Paris had forged alliances with partners in Eastern and Central Europe: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. She had even attempted to split off the Rhineland from Germany through a plebiscite and propaganda campaign, and invaded the mineral-rich Ruhr Valley in order to collect Berlin’s delinquent reparation payments. These actions had not prevented Germany from growing more assertive and radical, nor did they preserve French security. Most alarming of all to Paris, such bold moves had tended to elicit sympathy across the English Channel for the defeated Germans. Accordingly, in the 1930’s France had emphasized the other trend in her foreign policy: clinging to London out of the belief that the combination of the two powers would be able to deter German ambitions, including through war if necessary.
This policy was limiting and frustrating for Paris, forced to play the junior partner to a historical rival who was largely ambivalent to French fears. It took a fractious period of debate and Pierre Laval’s cold-eyed assessment of his country’s situation to admit what he and many other Frenchmen had long known was true: Britain would not go to war to save France. Paris needed to take the lead in developing her own security.
After years of France molding her foreign policy to that of Great Britain, Pierre Laval’s government sought to revive French leadership and capabilities in Europe, both diplomatically and militarily.
Such a revelation came too late to preserve the original French military doctrine of using a demilitarized Rhineland as a springboard for an invasion of Germany, but a compromise was sought between the static mentality embodied by the Maginot Line and the offensive spirit that French army had embraced before the slaughter of the trenches. Laval was perfectly taciturn when describing the need for France to develop an army capable of offensive operations and a foreign policy which would defend herself, but careless translations and overeager subordinates lent these two developments the ominous monikers in the English-speaking world of an “army of aggression” and “France first”. While the Anglo-Saxon powers tut-tutted Paris, France’s one-time allies to the east could not help but doubt that this latest change in French policy and doctrine would last long enough to aid them.
While the sun never set on the British Empire, that meant that London could never sleep. Constant care had to be paid to a myriad of strategic considerations around the world, from the English Channel to the Suez Canal to the Straits of Malacca.
The divide between Britain and France had accelerated over the two countries’ differing views on which countries posed the greatest threat. For France, the German enemy against which she had fought again and again for over a hundred years was the clear and present danger, whereas Britain was more concerned with preserving a globe-spanning colonial empire from the jealous imperialist powers of Italy and Japan. To that end, London announced the government’s decision to reinforce colonial holdings in East Asia, namely Hong Kong and Singapore, by transferring vessels from the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet to an expanded and consolidated Far Eastern command. The announcement, by its very publicity, was intended to chastise both Japan and France, if only temporarily. After all, the Admiralty believed that a potential war between great powers was still a distant enough possibility that there would be plenty of time to reassign ships in light of whatever crises might arise.
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