The story of how the first Yugoslav state, the kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, was created in 1918 through a unification of the formerly Austro-Hungarian lands of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Vojvodina with the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro is a deeply interesting case of state building. As one of the states formed after World War I, reflecting the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination, the kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes had its internal challenges, among them the relations and balance of power between the Serb, Croat, Slovene, and other nations. Yet, within this complex history, the role of the legacy of World War I itself, the very event that created the conditions for establishing the kingdom, has not received sufficient scholarly attention. John Paul Newman's great book, Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War, makes an excellent contribution to our understanding of that role.

Throughout the book, Newman points out how thoroughly difficult and divisive was the legacy left by the Great War to the interwar Yugoslav kingdom. The war losses in themselves were terrible: An estimated 750,000 or about one-fourth of Serbia's population perished (38). Newman's first three chapters discuss the Serbian war experience, Serbian veterans, and the “cult of victory.” Newman shows how the militarist influence that had been outspoken in the prewar Serbian kingdom remained strong in Serbian politics in the new Yugoslav state as well. The real and symbolic importance of Serbia's military elite was increased also by the need to build the new state's military forces around the structures and traditions of the Serbian army, and by the strong alliance between the Serbian military and the Serbian royal house, an alliance that was only strengthened in the war, when Crown Prince Alexander himself had commanded the army. Moreover, the kingdom's cult of commemorating the war dead on the Allied—and thus Serbian—side and the culture of victory, in which Alexander himself was deeply involved, was inevitably strongly biased toward the Serbian war experience. Thus, it could hardly avoid alienating the many thousands of war veterans from the former Austro-Hungarian regions who had fought in the empire's armies.

The divisions caused by the different war experiences are a main issue in the second section of Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War. Newman points to two general patterns of reaction among Austro-Hungarian veterans: One was the peasant conscripts’ rejection of war, which was “channelled into a pacifist and anti-militarist programme that undermined the very tenets of liberation and unification and therefore the principles on which the Yugoslav culture of victory rested” (115). This could develop into Bolshevism or peasant republicanism. The other pattern was the authoritarian radicalization of formerly Austro-Hungarian officers and veterans, who had remained loyal to the empire throughout the war. Indeed, according to Newman, the Ustasha, the infamous Croatian fascist movement that governed Croatia and Bosnia during World War II, “was the product of the Croatian ‘culture of defeat,’ nursed by former officers of the Austro-Hungarian army and their allies” (183). Yet Serbian veterans were also lured by fascism (227–28).

One of Newman's valuable contributions is his insistence on situating the case of Yugoslavia within a wider East European and European context more generally. While the legacy of the Great War had its specific characteristics and complexities in the newly created and rather fragmented kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Newman carefully points out that many of these or comparable problems were shared by other Central and East European states in the interwar period. Among these problems are the states’ structural weaknesses, the failure of national institutions, and the antidemocratic tendencies among war veterans throughout Europe. In Yugoslavia, argues Newman, many veterans “welcomed the imposition of royal dictatorship in 1929; certainly none of them mourned the passing of the parliamentary system” (13). Newman looks at these problems from various perspectives: politically, culturally, and socially. He discusses the roles of the king, of the veterans’ associations, and of the individual alienated veterans, both pacifists and radicalized members of fascist groups, all based on solid research.

It testifies to the complexity of Newman's topic that the memory of World War I in the Yugoslav region is highly divided after the fall of the federal state. This certainly became obvious in connection to the ambiguous and contested commemoration of the centenary of the outbreak of the war in Sarajevo.