The Third Reich and Yugoslavia: An Economy of Fear, 1933–1941 is a fresh look at interwar economic diplomacy between Germany and Yugoslavia. Drawing on some dozen archival and documentary collections, Perica Hadži-Jovančić details how Nazi Germany's increasing assertiveness, coupled with the Allies’ tepid support for Yugoslavia, created an atmosphere of fear among Belgrade's political leadership, a leadership that, in this account, doggedly resisted German domination.

Although the concept of “informal empire” has been used to describe Germany's approach to commodity-exporting countries in southern and eastern Europe, Hadži-Jovančić questions the concept's usefulness in Yugoslavia's case. Yes, Germany sought to control economic policies, especially through bilateral trade arrangements, which circumvented the use of scarce reserve currencies like the pound, the franc, and the dollar. However, Germany proved unable to “decisively influence” political, economic or, indeed, cultural life before Germany's 1940 invasion of France (192). Hadži-Jovančić also challenges the historiography that situates Yugoslavia within France's security sphere in eastern Europe. Instead, Yugoslavia was an “anti-revisionist” state: it opposed revisions to the Versailles Treaty, unlike Germany and Italy. While Yugoslavia's political leadership hardly merits rehabilitation, not least because of “autocratic and undemocratic internal policies,” its ruling elites eschewed “subordination to and cooperation with the Nazis” (7, 2).

The book is organized in nine, roughly chronological chapters. Following a brief introduction, Chapter 1 adeptly reviews Yugoslavia's place in German economic theories and decision-making, from Freidrich Naumann's influential 1913 Mitteleuropa to Rainer Schmidt's recent work. Chapter 2 outlines why both countries opposed Habsburg restoration, while Chapter 3 centers on the 1934 Trade Agreement between Germany and Yugoslavia (19–20). The Agreement exemplified the rise of Nazi Germany's trading block in eastern Europe. In Yugoslavia's case, Hadži-Jovančić insists, the Agreement primarily served Germany's economic interests, rather than Hitler's political ones, in part due to Hjalmar Schacht, Germany's economic minister and central banker.

The following two chapters outline Yugoslavia's place in Schacht's New Plan (1933–36) and Hermann Göring's Four Year Plan (1936–39). These chapters will interest historians of Germany while the next two will interest area specialists. Chapter 6 covers state-directed industrialization, which the author provocatively argues served as the “foundation of socialist Yugoslavia's industrialization” (126). Between 1935 and 1938, for instance, clearing arrangements financed conglomerates like Zenica's steelworks, to the benefit of both sides. Chapter 7 covers antisemitism, native fascism, and Yugoslavia's German minority; the fact that authorities banned a prominent fascist organization, Zbor, in October 1940 suggests “Yugoslavia's fear had limits” (148). The last two chapters describe the hectic period from the outbreak of World War II to Germany's 1941 invasion of Yugoslavia.

One of Hadži-Jovančić's contributions is to recreate the dialogue between Germany's and Yugoslavia's elites, whereas studies usually focus more on Berlin's side of the conversation. Another of his contributions is to illuminate Yugoslavia's policy responses to the Great Depression, which do not neatly fit into the supposedly predominant responses, namely social democracy in creditor nations like Britain, France, and the United States and autarky in debtor nations like Germany and the Soviet Union. He shows how a sizable portion of Yugoslavia's economic experts and business elites supported various autarkic measures, such as tariffs, quotas, and foreign currency controls, but relatively few expressed enthusiasm for joining Germany's economic sphere. Still, claims about commitments to “liberal capitalism” (3) in Yugoslavia's financial and business circles could have been explored further; after all, among European states, Yugoslavia stayed the shortest on the Gold Standard, the epitome of economic liberalism. The critical concept of fear also merited further explication. Was fear as particular to Yugoslavia as its combination of autarkic policies and free trade sentiments? Or alternatively, as might be inferred from a careful reading of the introduction's closing paragraph, was fear a general (universal?) feature of relations between smaller countries and powerful ones?

In all, Hadži-Jovančić's impressively researched monograph will certainly appeal to country specialists. What is more, given the significance of economic relations between so-called peripheral and core countries in Europe, An Economy of Fear represents a valuable case study for scholars interested in foreign economic policies of authoritarian regimes.