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, Vojislav Šešelj , in late 1980s]] Greater Serbia (Serbian: '''''Велика Србија/Velika Srbija''''') is a term applied to certain radical currents within Serbian Nationalism . It has two forms. The first is the aim of uniting all Serbs in one state and this in its radical form is interpreted as including areas where Serbs are merely a significant minority. Though "greater" implies expansion, the term has often been applied, since 1918 , to movements or individuals who wish to create a rump Yugoslavia in which Serbs would dominate. The second form is a plan to unite South Slavs by simple expansion of Serbia so that other nominally equal partners are in fact forced to adapt to a Serbian law and practices. By extension, after the establishment of Yugoslavia, Greater Serbianism has been applied to attempts to impose Serbian domination of Yugoslavia. It can be seen as having originated in the 19th Century with the Serbia n government official Ilija Garašanin in his work "Načertanije" ( 1844 ) and aimed at uniting the Serbian people which at the time was separated among foreign Austria-Hungary and Ottoman empires. The work describes the lands on the Balkans , then inhabited mostly or partially by Serbs but ruled by the empires, and included Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Vojvodina, as well as parts of Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. Garašanin's plan proposes methods of spreading Serbian influence in these countries, mainly by propaganda efforts and by network of pro-Serbian agitators- in order to achieve optimal situation for Serbian national interests when the Ottoman empire finally collapses. Essentially, this plan (not made public until 1897) can be interpreted as a blueprint for Serbian national unification, with 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. Garašanin’s work does not mention violent or terrorist activities as the means of expanding the boundaries of Serbdom. Later developments have altered Garašanin's "Načertanije" in two significant matters: the originally propagandist blueprint which was concerned principally with the crumbling Turkish empire became a geopolitical instruction for Serbian expansion into the lands that had, generally, never been a part of Serbia. The imagined borders of such Serbia were including most of today's , terrorist activity. ORIGIN OF THE TERM In English Language , however, the concept is referred to as "Greater Serbia", suggesting that it is an Expansionistic goal. The term appears in a derogatory manner in a pamphlet 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. However, the situation has changed in time, as can be seen in writings of Serbian intellectual from Bosnia And Herzegovina Jefto Dedijer at the end of the 19th century. He envisaged Serbia and Montenegro , the two neighboring Slavic states with ethnic kin in Austro-Hungarian territories, as a sort of nucleus for creating a great Serbian state (more spacious than Yugoslavia), that would, in his opinion, unite all Serbs- although the majority of the populace in the preyed-upon areas were not Serbs at all. Up to this point, the situation remained within the realms of academic discussion. More sinister was the terrorist program that lied in the heart of the Serbian secret society Black Hand , headed by Serbian colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević Apis. This organization was responsible for numerous atrocities following the Balkans wars in 1913 . And in all probability, the assassination of Habsburg Arch-duke Franz Ferdinand , the event that sparked the First World War . The Greater Serbia concept, this time under the guise of Yugoslav ideology, was expressed in the Niš declaration by Serbian premier Nikola Pašić in 1914 , as well as in Serbia's regent Aleksandar's statement in {Link without Title} ]. Both documents envisage unification of Serbs, but with the clear intention of incorporating Croatian, Slovene and Bosnian lands as a sort of a military booty. This approach, which in practice meant interchangeability of the terms "Serbian" and "Yugoslav", was rooted in the Serbian perception of their relation to neighboring nations, nourished by pre-eminent Serbian intellectuals at the turn of the century, among them Jovan Cvijić, Aleksandar Belić and Ljubomir Stojanović. This term was later adopted following the creation of Yugoslavia by the Comintern and Russian Communist Party . Although the new Yugoslav kingdom was formed in 1918 , the Communist Party only began to oppose its legitimacy by 1924 when the official stance changed from support to opposition. The rhetoric of the Communist Party in Yugoslavia, under directions from Moscow , began to include mentions of ethno-class warfare, the ''bourgeois oppressors'' became the ''Serb-bourgeois oppressors of the working class''. CONCEPT The "Greater Serbian" concept was an offshoot of the onward, this concept has had a significant influence on Serbian politics — with a few significant exceptions. For instance, 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 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 and Dalmatia , as well as Bosnia And Herzegovina , including areas inhabited by Catholics who had not possessed traces of Serbian national consciousness, were ethnically Serbian- Vuk Karadžić is considered by some to be the progenitor of the Greater Serbia program. More precisely, Karadžić was the shaper of modern secular Sebian national consciousness, with the goal of incorporating all indigenous štokavian speakers (Eastern Othodox, Catholic, Muslim) into one, modern Serbian nation. It should be noted that this linguistic definition of nation would have excluded not only Kosovo but also southern Serbia where the Torlak dialect is spoken. However, this project was both ill-conceived and doomed from the outset:
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 . Note that Croatian nationalists claim something very similar, except involving Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy. Such views have been used to claim ownership of lands inhabited by other peoples (sometimes subsequently, sometimes not), much to the dismay of those inhabitants. The Habsburg Empire, which included large numbers of Slavic people, supported certain unification efforts among the Slavs (cf. the Vienna Literary Agreement ), but soon came to oppose Pan-Slavism as a detrimental factor to its own unity. The Serbs formed '' Matica Srpska '' ("National Matrix") as far back as 1826 , had their own clergy in the Serb Orthodox Church , and their own states as the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro emerged. Although these institutions were supported and paid for by Austrian government, the government in Vienna became suspicious when these institutions turned into political propaganda machinery aiming at secession and Serbian expansion into their territory. 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 and an attempted westward expansion during the breakup of Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s . In addition, the Serbian domination of the pre- oppressors'' of the working class became the ''Serb-bourgeois oppressors''. Regarding the opposition from the right, the Kingdom aroused considerable nationalist resistance in Croatia, and the wartime Ustaše movement attempted to justify its virulently anti-Serbian stance with the claim that it aimed to "liberate Croatia from alien Serbian rule and establish a completely free and independent state over the whole of its national and historic territory." Such sentiments were commonplace in Croatia at the time, which the Ustaše who were a tiny and unrepresentative minority successfully took the advantage of the situation. During the Second World War , the largely Serbian royalist Chetnik movement headed by Draža Mihailović attempted to define its vision of a postwar future. One of its relatively few 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 and Hungary. It is alleged to have been a significant point of discussion at a Chetnik congress held in Serbia in January 1944 . However, Moljević's ideas were never put into practice due to the Chetniks' defeat by Tito 's Partisans and it is difficult to assess how influential they were, due to the lack of records from the 1944 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 program of the Serbian radical party- the single most powerful party in contemporary Serbia and Montenegro. ROLE IN THE FINAL DISSOLUTION OF YUGOSLAVIA The modern elaboration of Serbs' grievances and allegation of inequality in Yugoslavia was to be developed in the , 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 (Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse) 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 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:
All of the "Memorandum"'s verifiable claims have been refuted (for instance, the portions on the economy part by Croatian economist and academician Jakov Sirotković; the ideological-cultural portions by Croatian historian and polymath Miroslav Brandt), but to no avail, since the main arguments of the "Memorandum" were not intended to convince, but to inflame. This is especially visible since the authors have issued the "official" version after the collapse in wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1995. They claimed that the course of events "had corroborated" their contentions and did not question a single assumption they had made. 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. It's support for Yugoslavia was however conditional on fundamental changes to end what the Memorandum argued was the discrimination against Serbia which they alleged was inbuilt into Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav constitution as it existed. The chief of these changes was abolition of the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina two provinces which were almost equal to other republics yet were nominally part of the republic of Serbia. According to Norman Cigar (Genocide in Bosnia p24), because the changes were unlikely to be accepted passively, the implementation of the Memorandum's program would only be possible by force. With the rise to power of Slobodan 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 thesis that Serbs were the victims and the need for reajust Yugoslavia to redress the alleged bias against Serbia. This then was then followed by Milošević's anti-bureaucratic revolution in which the Regional governments of Vojvodina and Kosovo along with the Republican government of Montenegro, were overthrown which gave Milošević the dominating position of 4 votes out of 8 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. This changed first when the Slovenian communist leadership felt it had to respond to the concerns of the civil society opposition. Then in 1990 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 both Vuk Drašković 's SNO (Cigar p35) and Šešelj's Serbian Radical Party. Slobodan Milošević and his Socialist Party Of Serbia now however posed as defenders of Yugoslavia claiming that the recent changes had rectified most of the anti-Serb bias that the Memorandum had alleged. However, they together with the groups calling for a Greater Serbia insisted on the demand for "all Serbs in one state". For Milošević 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. (James Gow: ''Triumph of the Lack of Will'' p19). By now, in 1990 , power had seeped away from the federal government to the republics and the republics 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 15th of 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 (p20), from this point Yugoslavia de facto ceased to function. 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 teritorries 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 concept of a Greater Serbia has been widely criticised by other nationalities in the former Yugoslavia as well as by foreign observers. The two principal objections have been:
The fundamental problem of the policy has been that its definition of a Serbian national space - i.e. all lands where Serbs live - conflicts with other nationalities' conceptions of their national spaces. Many Serbs point out, however, that a converse argument can also apply: the independence movements in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo all took little regard of Serbs' desire to live in a unified state. Along these lines one could argue that the borders of current Serbia are questionable, too: since probably the vast majority of Albanians, Bosniaks or Hungarians (citizens of Serbia) want, naturally, to live in their respective national states, the dissolution of Serbia is the necessary logical consequence of following the argument to the conclusion. Proponents of the goal of Greater Serbia do not insist on an ethnically clean Serbia. Indeed, 35% of the population of Serbia is non-Serb. Rather, they assert that Greater Serbia could have Minorities , as well as that there still might remain Serb minorities in surrounding countries. Opponents of the goal claim that, in practice, the treatment of national minorities in the Serbian provinces during the 1980s and 1990s shows that the Greater Serbian goal equates to ethnic supremacism. In Kosovo , the conflict with the Albanians led to the Kosovo War . In Vojvodina , the radical nationalists (such as Vojislav Šešelj of the Serbian Radical Party ) used to terrorize the minority populations, but in general the situation did not lead to armed conflict. Serbia's military defeats in the Yugoslav wars, the exodus of Serbs from large areas of Croatia and Bosnia, and the indictment of Serbian leaders for War Crimes have greatly discredited the Greater Serbian ideal in Serbia as well as abroad. West ern countries claim that atrocities of the Yugoslav Wars have prompted them to take a much stronger stance against the Greater Serbian goal, most notably in Kosovo . However, the idea of a Greater Serbia remains influential in Serbian politics and is still seen by many Croatians, Bosnians and Albanians as a barrier to good relations between Serbs and other neighbouring peoples. SEE ALSO
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