The Croat Peasant Party (Hrvatska seljačka stranka, HSS) was arguably the most important Croatian political party in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Emerging as a relatively minor party in the late Habsburg era (1904–18), it was transformed after 1918 into the only serious political party, in fact a mass movement, in the Croat lands and the second-largest party in Yugoslavia. Most of its political gains were made under the leadership of the charismatic Stjepan Radić, who was assassinated in 1928.Footnote 1 He was replaced by Vladko Maček (1879–1964), for years one of Radić's closest aides and confidants.Footnote 2 Under Maček's leadership the HSS entered the most difficult period of its history: it was forced to contend with the royal dictatorship (1929–34) of King Aleksandar Karadjordjević, the Great Depression, growing nationality tensions, an increasingly volatile political climate in which the extremes of the right and left, represented in Croatia by the Ustaša and Communist parties respectively, contended for power and, finally, the painful experiences of war and occupation which overlapped with and culminated in communist revolution.
The Ustaša party of Ante Pavelić emerged during the royal dictatorship as the most radical nationalist group in Croatia, committed to a programme of Croatian independence. Its core membership was drawn from the Croat Party of Right (1918–29), whose social base was the Croat petite bourgeoisie and nationalist intelligentsia. Like the HSS, the Croat Party of Right was from the beginning opposed to the new Yugoslav state. These two parties emerged as the leading opponents of state centralism in the Croat lands, albeit with quite distinct constituencies. Given its relatively narrow social base, the Croat Party of Right was soon marginalised politically; it never polled more than 2 per cent of the popular vote in Croatia. The HSS's political strength was rooted in Croatia's socially dominant countryside. In 1921–2 these two parties and the Croat Union – the party of Croatia's nascent middle class and liberal intelligentsia – joined a common front against Belgrade, known as the Croat Bloc, but this alliance proved to be short-lived. After 1922 the HSS and Croat Party of Right charted quite different paths.
This would change only temporarily following Stjepan Radić's death in August 1928. All the Croat political parties rallied to the Croatian national cause. The HSS was joined by Pavelić's Croat Party of Right and the Croat Union. This Croatian front was also supported by Svetozar Pribićević's Independent Democrats, whose main support base was Croatia's Serb population. The united front remained cohesive into the first year of the royal dictatorship but slowly began to unravel as the HSS and Pavelić's nascent Ustaša party began mapping distinct political trajectories.
This article will examine the contentious relationship between Maček and the HSS on the one hand and Pavelić's Ustaša groupFootnote 3 on the other, in the critically important years between 1929 and 1941. This troubled relationship stemmed from fundamentally dissimilar conceptions of Croatdom, and hence of the national question in Yugoslavia. In particular, the article will examine the Ustaša policy towards Maček in this period. It will also try to assess Maček's legacy and his place in Croatia's twentieth-century political history.
The context
After January 1929 the dictatorial regime of King Aleksandar Karadjordjević systematically worked to indoctrinate the populace into an abandonment of their old ‘tribal’ identities in favour of a new Yugoslav national identity.Footnote 4 The ideology of integral Yugoslavism was now promoted with new vigour by the authorities. A reorganisation of the local administration abolished the old system of thirty-three departments (oblasti) in favour of nine large provinces (banovine), which took the names of geographical features rather than historic and cultural entities.Footnote 5 The borders of the new banovine cut across historic prewar frontiers of provinces such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Montenegro. The governors of these provinces were appointed by royal decree and directly responsible to the king. In October 1929 the state's name was officially changed to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. On 3 September 1931 the King issued his octroyed constitution. Although it guaranteed personal liberties it simultaneously forbade most forms of political activity. The executive was given extensive powers, as was the king; elections to the National Parliament were no longer by secret ballot and half the members of the Senate were nominated by the king. The state apparatus, army and judiciary remained firmly in Serb hands and the new government party, the Yugoslav National Party (Jugoslovenska narodna stranka, JNS), was a predominantly Serb affair. In the same period (1931–4), many moderate non-Serb leaders spent time in prison and were otherwise harassed by the authorities; Maček would spend nearly six months in detention in 1931 and the better part of 1933–4 in prison for his alleged anti-state activities.Footnote 6
King Aleksandar's Yugoslavist project began to unravel even before his assassination in October 1934 in Marseille by a Macedonian terrorist working for the Ustaša movement. His political experiment in dictatorship resulted in the construction of an elaborate police state and undermined the project of establishing a widely shared unitary Yugoslav identity, which was one of his stated objectives; its methods resulted in further alienation. There was a nearly universal shift to the political right among all the Yugoslav peoples, although this shift also reflected the spirit of the times in Europe. As such, the royal dictatorship undoubtedly contributed to an increase in inter-ethnic tensions.Footnote 7
After October 1934 a Regency Council was established, headed by Prince Pavle Karadjordjević, the late king's cousin. Much of Aleksandar's system, such as the 1931 constitution, was retained, although the reins of dictatorship were definitely loosened.Footnote 8 Prince Pavle combined a reactionary attitude toward parliamentary pluralism and socioeconomic reform with a desire to reach a political compromise with the HSS.Footnote 9 Despite elections in 1935 and 1938, attempts under Prime Minister Bogoljub Jevtić (1934–5) and then Milan Stojadinović (1935–9) to consolidate the political situation in the country failed. During this period, Maček headed the country's United Opposition, which brought together the HSS, the Croatian Serb Independent Democrats and the Serbian Democrats and Agrarians. A significant change came only in early 1939, when Dragiša Cvetković replaced Stojadinović as premier. In August 1939, Cvetković and Maček negotiated the Sporazum (Agreement), which created a semi-autonomous Croatian banovina (province).Footnote 10 This semi-autonomous Croatian unit included prewar Croatia-Slavonia (minus most of Syrmia), Dalmatia and those parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina with a Croat plurality, that is, western Herzegovina, parts of central Bosnia and Posavina. Croatia had its own elected Diet, the Sabor, and autonomy in most internal administrative matters; foreign policy, defence and taxation remained in the hands of Belgrade. In 1939 the HSS joined a coalition government – its first stint in government since 1925–7 – with Maček assuming the position of deputy prime minister of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
The Croat political right, Pavelić and Maček
When Pavelić fled Yugoslavia in early 1929, he initially portrayed himself as a representative of Croatia's united opposition that had been formed in the summer of 1928. This was more a fiction than anything else. In 1928–9 the HSS had sent its own emissaries, including August Košutić and Juraj Krnjević, abroad to act as its foreign representatives.Footnote 11 The HSS leadership evidently did not object to maintaining ties with Pavelić, despite their past differences. Indeed, in 1930 Krnjević, Košutić and Maček, who had gone to Czechoslovakia for medical treatment, met with Pavelić in Salzburg, where they discussed joint action. They apparently agreed, among other things, that Pavelić should act as a liaison with the Italians.Footnote 12
In the event, Pavelić had already established contacts with Fascist Italy and was unwilling to act as a mere liaison between Rome and the HSS. After all, he was the leader of the Croat Party of Right and, as such, the bearer of an ideology that was more radical, nationalist and anti-Serb than that of the HSS. Co-operation with the HSS had its advantages, but seemed unlikely to last. The HSS was willing to court European governments and public opinion, but it hoped to use European support to pressure Belgrade into a negotiated solution to the Croat question, as it had tried to do in the early 1920s. Pavelić, on the other hand, was committed to Croatian independence at any cost and hoped to exploit revisionist sentiment among Yugoslavia's neighbours. Dialogue with Belgrade was rejected as futile. Pavelić's first contact with Italian officials came in summer 1927, when he submitted a memorandum to the Italian foreign ministry on the Croat question.Footnote 13 Already at that point he envisaged Croatian statehood through Italian patronage. Although Pavelić maintained formal links to the HSS in 1929–30, he simultaneously charted his own course. It should be noted, however, that the Croat political right of the 1930s was a diverse lot and that Pavelić's Ustaša group was only one part. While Pavelić's group openly broke with Maček in 1935, the political right in general did so only in 1939.
The anti-HSS rhetoric of the Ustaše intensified during the break of 1935, following the HSS decision to participate and in fact lead the United Opposition in the state-wide elections.Footnote 14 Its criticism was predicated on a belief that, by heading the opposition, Maček was willing to accept a reformed Yugoslavia instead of working for its destruction. If Yugoslavism had been compromised and discredited since 1918 – a position that was shared by both the Ustaše and the HSS – first through the imposition of a centralist constitution (1921), then a failed democratic experiment (1921–8) and royal dictatorship (1929–34), then how, the Ustaše wondered, was any political agreement with Belgrade possible?Footnote 15
Maček's courtship of the Serbian opposition was denounced because Serbian parties were characterized without exception as being united in the desire to preserve Yugoslavia and to perpetuate Croatia's subordinate status within it.Footnote 16 In the Ustaša worldview, all Serbs shared complicity in the exploitation of Croatia and the Croat people.Footnote 17 For example, on 9 May 1939 a group of Croat nationalist students, whose sympathies lay with Pavelić, organized a meeting at the University of Zagreb to protest the HSS's decision to negotiate a settlement of the Croat question with Belgrade. One of the participants later wrote: ‘We ‘Croat nationalists’ are fighting against Serbs as a whole, against the Serb nation and its representatives, who all oppose the realisation of our national ideals’.Footnote 18
An Ustaša leaflet that was apparently disseminated in Croatia in January 1939 called attention to the point that the HSS had failed to achieve any substantial political results in the twenty years of the Kingdom's existence. But in those same twenty years Germany had been reborn from defeat to a major European power, and a handful of Irish nationalists had achieved Ireland's independence: not through ‘decrepit’ pacifism and negotiation, but by ‘a policy of resistance and blood’. The HSS leadership was seemingly dumb in the face of these facts. Instead of appealing to European leaders in Munich in 1938, it continued to work with the Serbian opposition ‘to save Serbdom and the borders of our prison, Yugoslavia’. The path to national freedom lay ‘in the spiritual and ideological unity of the leader and the nation itself, a clearly developed program and the immediate and resolute use of all legal and illegal means for the accomplishment of national freedom’.Footnote 19
To the extent that Belgrade was interested in a compromise with Croats, this was seen as a sign of Serb weakness. Belgrade feared war and having to arm Croats for defensive purposes; it turned to the idea of a compromise. But any agreement with Belgrade, one Ustaša activist insisted, would only help Serbs and mean that Croats would ‘die for the maintenance of our national prison’. Once the threat of war subsided, Belgrade would simply revert to the status quo.Footnote 20 A February 1939 Ustaša leaflet asked Croats what they had achieved by repeatedly casting their ballots for the HSS over the last twenty years. The HSS had not achieved any tangible results, but was simply continuing a feeble policy of pacifism and negotiation with Serb political leaders. Maček's neutrality during the Spanish Civil War, which was fully in line with the policy pursued by the Western democracies, was also attacked, for it reflected his passivity and ineffectiveness as a leader.Footnote 21 The only way to achieve Croatian freedom was to abandon pacifism and for Croat leaders to spread ‘among the people a revolutionary thought and disposition’.Footnote 22
Once the negotiations between Maček and the Yugoslav premier, Dragiša Cvetković, had been launched in 1939, the Ustaše denounced as tantamount to treason Maček's decision to negotiate a compromise.Footnote 23 The Ustaša press claimed that any ‘agreement’ between Maček and Belgrade would be artificial. The simplest solution would be to hold a referendum, they insisted, and to respect the people's decision.Footnote 24
The Maček–Cvetković negotiations prompted concerns within Serb nationalist circles but also among Croatian Serb leaders that the unity of Serbs would be jeopardised, and their rights in Croatia would be imperilled. Ustaša writers noted these concerns in their propaganda, for two related reasons: (i) on the one hand, in order to denounce Maček and the HSS; and (ii) on the other, to argue that all Serbs were unvaryingly opposed to the realisation of even the most basic Croat national rights within Yugoslavia. One Ustaša editorialist, noting these Serb concerns, remarked sarcastically that
we ‘Croat nationalists’ are not taking up the defence of either the HSS or its leadership, but gentlemen prečani Serbs ‘a reference to Serbs outside Serbia, i.e., Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina’, be entirely at ease. The Agreement that the HSS is preparing – if it is born alive! – will give you much greater guarantees for your survival. . . than anything or anyone else. Even the most virulent centralist cannot today complain to the HSS leadership about its work.
The current policy of the HSS ‘does not abandon the framework either of Yugoslavia or Yugoslavism, nor is it dangerous for Serbs’. What seemed peculiar was that some Serb leaders, in Croatia and elsewhere, were voicing opposition to the idea of Croatian autonomy within Yugoslavia. Some of these Serbs had followed the Independent Democratic Party,Footnote 25 which stood on the platform of narodno jedinstvo (national oneness), that is, that Serbs and Croats were ‘tribes’ of one and the same people. If Croats and Serbs were indeed ‘one’ as the proponents of narodno jedinstvo argued, logic dictated that they would remain such in any Croatia that remained part of Yugoslavia. In short, the Serb concerns reflected a supposedly typical Serb mentality: among themselves they were always Serbs, but when dealing with Croats they act as supposed Yugoslavs.Footnote 26
Ustaša polemicists emphasised this point repeatedly. One writer asked why so many Serbs of Yugoslavist unitarist persuasion were now suddenly concerned with the supposedly threatened rights of Croatian Serbs in an autonomous Croatia, while expressing absolutely no concern for ‘Yugoslavs’. Were not these unitarists themselves Yugoslavs, as the logic of narodno jedinstvo and their own past rhetoric dictated?Footnote 27 Yet another Ustaša writer, noting the growing Serb dissatisfaction with semi-autonomous Croatia's borders, wondered why Serb proponents of narodno jedinstvo should care at all if the Orthodox of Croatia were called Croats instead of Serbs, because
if we ‘Croats and Serbs’ are in their opinion one ‘jedno’, then it is entirely the same thing if the Orthodox in Croatia call themselves Serbs or Croats. But we know that this principle applies only in the opposite direction, for Croats, who may freely call themselves Serbs,. . . while Serbs can at most be – Great Serbs.Footnote 28
In actual fact, such rhetoric was meant first and foremost to denounce the HSS leadership for negotiating with the Serbs.
Another Ustaša writer observed that the Independent Democrats, the party of Croatia's Serbs and a close ally of the HSS, was led by people ‘of the same mentality and same views on the Croat question as the United Opposition in Serbia'. The HSS was condemned for co-operating with the Independent Democrats because of its opposition to Croat rights and commitment to Yugoslavia. By extension, this meant that the HSS was anti-national and committed to Yugoslavia.Footnote 29 Other writers asked whether the 600,000 Croatian Serbs and their political leaders had voted for Maček in 1935 and again in 1938 because they had been won over to his political programme, or because he had merely adopted theirs. Their answer was unequivocal: Maček was trying to reform and thus save Yugoslavia, and had the support of the Serb opposition to that end.Footnote 30
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Ustaše railed vehemently against the HSS after the conclusion of the 26 August 1939 Sporazum. Maček was predictably attacked as betraying Croatdom and saving Yugoslavia. The HSS had supposedly abandoned Croatian independence. An undated post-Sporazum Ustaša leaflet, entitled ‘Maček's Free Croatia – Dr Maček loves the White Eagle of the Karadjordjevićes more than the honour and freedom of the Croat nation,’ concluded that the Sporazum was a ‘capitulation’ because the HSS had renounced independence and Croatia's historic borders.Footnote 31 Maček's decision to ‘renounce’ Croatia's historic borders, and to partition Bosnia and Herzegovina, was deeply resented in nationalist circles and he was reviled for that reason. One writer observed that over 1 million ‘Croats’ (i.e., Bosnian Muslims) had been left outside the new autonomous Croatia; they had been abandoned by the HSS.Footnote 32 Moreover, autonomous Croatia had only a limited internal administrative autonomy, which was far less than what Croatia had possessed before 1918 in the Habsburg monarchy. As such, Maček's policy was not ‘an interpretation of the will of the Croat nation, but an attempt to save Yugoslavia at any cost’.Footnote 33
The Sporazum was a ‘capitulation’ and a treasonable act, a product of the growing European crisis, but it did nothing to alter the fundamental reality of Croatia's subordinate status within Great Serbian Yugoslavia.Footnote 34 In an attempt to discredit Maček's role in Croatian politics, the Ustaše characterised the Sporazum as a Pyrrhic victory; Maček was trying to save Yugoslavia as the only way of securing his own political position.Footnote 35 His leadership capabilities were also assailed. (A related point, concerning Maček directly, made quite frequently by the nationalist press in Croatia, was that Maček was of Slovene background and not even a ‘real’ Croat.) Although Croats had given him their support since 1928, they had achieved nothing. The HSS was merely trying jealously to guard the village from political penetration, the same village that was suffering economically and socially as a result.Footnote 36
In 1939 the other right-wing groups in Croatia, such as the Catholic clericalists, National Socialists and others, which had earlier not necessarily been directly aligned with Pavelić, also broke with the HSS. As Vjeran Pavlaković has observed in his work on the Spanish Civil War, several nationalist, right-wing papers in Croatia, for example, Mlada Hrvatska (Young Croatia), Smotra (Review), Nezavisnost (Independence), and Hrvatska straža (Croatian sentinel), had already started calling for independence between 1935 and 1938. Generally they still viewed Maček as the legitimate leader of the Croat national movement.Footnote 37
The Spanish Civil War proved to be as divisive an issue in Croatia as in Europe generally. The Croat political right often commented on fascist intervention in Spain, and how fascism in general could be applied in the Croatian case. For the political right, democracy and liberalism were no longer viable solutions to the Croat question. Yugoslavia's failed democratic experiment of the 1920s had already confirmed them in this view. Their criticism of liberal democracy became an assault on Maček's strategy. Maček's decision to sign on 8 October 1937 the ‘Bloc of National Agreement’, as his agreement with the Serbian United Opposition was known, indicated to right-wing nationalist groups in Croatia that the HSS was willing to work with Serbs within a Yugoslav state. The political right's criticism of Maček and the HSS grew apace, and in 1939, with the conclusion of the Sporazum, the rupture was complete. For those elements in Croatia who wanted outright independence, Pavelić appeared in 1939 to be the only solution.
Conclusion: Maček's legacy
In 1939 the two currents of interwar Croat nationalism, represented by the HSS and the political right, parted company for good. The HSS, which had dominated Croatian politics since 1918, now reluctantly committed itself to the preservation of Yugoslavia at a time of looming crisis. The Croat political right, although ideologically diverse, was coalescing around Pavelić's fascist Ustaša movement and committed itself to independence at any cost. While the HSS alternated between recognising Yugoslavia and seeking Croatian independence, and had in the meantime recognised the existence of a Serb people in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Croat political right was unyielding on these issues. It wanted nothing short of independence, and the tradition of historic state right and its on-going fear of assimilation powerfully influenced its treatment of identity. The Ustaše denied the existence or distinct identity of a Serb people in historic Great Croatia, and therefore they denied the right of the Croatian and Bosnian Serbs to any special status in Great Croatia. Since they believed that there were hardly any ‘real’ Serbs in Great Croatia, these Serbs could not legitimately claim either a historical or natural right to Croat lands, or any special status to the detriment of the Croat population.Footnote 38 For the Ustaše, the Serbs of Great Croatia were only ‘colonists’Footnote 39 and, quite simply, ‘a tumour in a foreign body’.Footnote 40
Given these diametrically opposed viewpoints on the national question in Yugoslavia, it is no wonder that Pavelić's group fulminated with such vehemence against Maček. In their mind he was a traitor to the Croat cause and also to Radić's honourable legacy of struggle against Serb centralism. The Ustaše repeatedly invoked and utilised the memory of Radić, both in the 1930s and again during their wartime experiment in government. So too did the Croat (and Yugoslav) communists. Both vilified Maček; neither the radical Croat nationalists nor the Croat left had much sympathy for his cautious policy of dialogue with Belgrade. To the former he was a national traitor, to the latter a bourgeois reactionary in peasant garb. The Ustaše interned him in Jasenovac from October 1941 to March 1942 and then placed him under house arrest for the duration of the war. Maček's hurried flight from Croatia in May 1945 anticipated a much harsher fate at the hands of Tito's communists. History would regrettably show that, in an age dominated by ideological extremes, those forces in Yugoslavia committed to violent change would dominate the political stage and shape historical memory. In this respect Radić's violent demise in 1928 presaged by just over a decade an equally violent end for his movement.
Given the long shadow cast by Radić and Maček's marginalisation by extremists of the left and right it is hardly surprising that Maček remains ignored by much of twentieth-century Croatian political history. He never possessed the charisma of his predecessor and mentor, nor did he suffer Radić's martyr's death. These facts, combined with the painful reality that he ended his life in obscurity as an exile alongside so many other east central European political émigrés, contributed to his marginalisation as a historical figure. Maček and his peasantist political programme were simply overtaken by history. And with the so-called ‘rebirth of history’ in 1989, Maček never came to figure prominently as a figure of national remembrance.
But none of this should blind the historian to his significance as an interwar political figure, or the importance of the party he led. As Sabrina Ramet reminds us in her article, the HSS created or revived many associations in 1935–6. These included Economic Concord (Gospodarska sloga) and Peasant Concord (Seljačka sloga), which were designed to address socioeconomic and cultural problems, respectively, confronting the Croat peasantry. Especially important was the Croatian Peasant Defence (Hrvatska seljačka zaštita), a paramilitary formation created in 1936 to protect HSS supporters against several existing paramilitary formations, which had either a Yugoslavist or Serb nationalist orientation. In the Communist period, the Croatian Peasant Defence, like the HSS's other organizations, was summarily dismissed as a tool for suppressing communist influence in the countryside. As such, it was portrayed as an instrument of the HSS's allegedly bourgeois reactionary leadership. Sabrina Ramet's article places the Croatian Peasant Defence in an appropriate historical perspective and historiographical context.
