Serbia: The Sardinia of the Balkans?

Mookie

Banned
Somewhat. Austria lost control of Lombardy and Venetia to Sardinia. True, Sardinia had help from France for one and Prussia for the other, but it's not to say Serbia could not have received similar aid from, let's just use Russia as an example. Could Russia have helped? Yes. Would they? That's another matter. If they did, then it might not be much more than forcing the Turks to cede Bosnia to Serbia.

It wouldnt be that simple. Turks gave Bosnia to Austrians and even though they were guaranteed freedom of confession they staged a revolt. There would be even larger if it was about anexation by Serbia, who was a state for Serbs only
 
Maybe with a PoD before 1800, 1810 at the very latest.
Although IMO the unification of Italy can't really be transplanted to the Balkans. There are much greater cultural and religious differences between the various people of the Balkans, so any kind of a pan-Balkan state would be hard to achieve and even harder to keep together for long. The concept of a "pan-Orthodox" state could work for the short term, but it would inspire the local Muslims to revolt in Albania, Bosnia, parts of Bulgaria etc. A "pan-Slavic" state not only has no common ground with the Albanians, it doesn't even have anything to do with Greeks either.


Off-topic:
I sure do. Tell me of one war-crime commited in WW2 by Bosniaks against Serbs.

For example, the massacre of around 1,000 Serbs in Srem by the "Handschar" Waffen-SS Division.
 

Mookie

Banned
Maybe with a PoD before 1800, 1810 at the very latest.
Although IMO the unification of Italy can't really be transplanted to the Balkans. There are much greater cultural and religious differences between the various people of the Balkans, so any kind of a pan-Balkan state would be hard to achieve and even harder to keep together for long. The concept of a "pan-Orthodox" state could work for the short term, but it would inspire the local Muslims to revolt in Albania, Bosnia, parts of Bulgaria etc. A "pan-Slavic" state not only has no common ground with the Albanians, it doesn't even have anything to do with Greeks either.


Off-topic:


For example, the massacre of around 1,000 Serbs in Srem by the "Handschar" Waffen-SS Division.

Pan-orthodox state would iritate Bosniaks and Albanians but would be OK with catholic Croats and Slovenes o_O?

Evidence of that is?
 
Have Nappy create a Kingdom/Confederation/Whatever of Illyria in the Balkans to create some sort of nationalist identity for the Balkan peoples?
 
Pan-orthodox state would iritate Bosniaks and Albanians but would be OK with catholic Croats and Slovenes o_O?

Yes, but Slovenes and most of the Croats were at that time under the jurisdiction of Austria, which would probably last a few years longer than the Ottoman Empire in this scenario.
Evidence of that is?

Page 4. My mistake, it actually lists 732 civilian victims in Srem.
 

Mookie

Banned
Yes, but Slovenes and most of the Croats were at that time under the jurisdiction of Austria, which would probably last a few years longer than the Ottoman Empire in this scenario.


Page 4. My mistake, it actually lists 732 civilian victims in Srem.


A Serbian source.
How can I send you a book here?

And you mean to create Yugoslavia earlier?
And still, even so, what do you expect to do with Croats and Slovenes in orthodox state? Kill them off?
 
Mookie it is clear that you have an axe to grind against the serbs and I can't blame you due to all the things that have happened. But for the past few years we have had a quite civil (as in far less confrontational) discussion between members from the ex-Yu. So I would kindly ask to ease down a bit.

Horrible things have been commited by peoples of the Balkans against their neighbours the Bosniaks just had a misfortune to be the latest front line "victim".

Just matching claims and counterclaims of who did what and slaughtered more will get discussions such as these nowhere.
 

Mookie

Banned
Mookie it is clear that you have an axe to grind against the serbs and I can't blame you due to all the things that have happened. But for the past few years we have had a quite civil (as in far less confrontational) discussion between members from the ex-Yu. So I would kindly ask to ease down a bit.

Horrible things have been commited by peoples of the Balkans against their neighbours the Bosniaks just had a misfortune to be the latest front line "victim".

Just matching claims and counterclaims of who did what and slaughtered more will get discussions such as these nowhere.

I am not grinding it. I simply made a statement that Yugoslavia wouldnt work due to dead. Then there is a claim thats fake.
I provide a source, its not good enough its Bosniak.
I provide a non-Bosniak source its not good,authors ideology is bad.
I provide a source from those who did it, not good enough lol.
I am not grinding an axe, I just dont want to step down for sake of global peace so to speak.
We did that before, didnt work I must say
 
A Serbian source.
How can I send you a book here?

Znaci.net - a Serbian source o_O

It's a comprehensive archive of WW2 documents. Among other things, it contains many documents and writings on Chetnik crimes as well, so accusations of a Serbian bias are very, very misplaced.
And you mean to create Yugoslavia earlier?
And still, even so, what do you expect to do with Croats and Slovenes in orthodox state? Kill them off?

And if Croats and Slovenes joined this Balkan republic or whatever, it would obviously have to become secular, or it wouldn't even have an excuse to annex Croatia and Slovenia.

I don't actually "mean" anything, I'm just speculating. As I said, I believe such an "unification" of the whole region is very unlikely.

Just matching claims and counterclaims of who did what and slaughtered more will get discussions such as these nowhere.

...a good point. I guess I share a small part of blame for derailing the thread as well.

But I find statements implying that, say, Bosniaks literally didn't commit a single war crime pretty inflammatory.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Sardinia Piedmont didnt exterminate those who didnt want to participate in Italy.
Serbia can never participate in such a role ever again. Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia would never accept such a thing. Albania even less.
Montenegro is leaping ahead of Serbia in everything since independence.
For Greece/Bulgaria I see apsolutely no reason to want to join such a creation.
Serbs did that with Kingdom of SHS and Jugoslavia (both comunist and royal) and it ended terribly, with opression in peacetime, sometimes extermination in peacetime as well, colonisation, and wartime open extermination.
I completely understand that you have justified antipathy toward some of the participants in the Yugoslavian Civil War. This Forum, however, is not the place to express them. It is not for Political Chat.

That is what Chat if for (even their you need to follow Board policies).
 
For a start, it's worth noting that nationalists in the Kingdom of Serbia were very keenly aware of the Sardinia-Piedmont analogy. The journal of the Black Hand, the group that assassinated Franz Ferdinand, was called Pijemont. The idea of uniting the South Slavs was key to Serbian political ideology, and Serbia viewed much of the Balkans as 'unredeemed Serbdom'.

I think the key problems, though, are language, religion and identity. For all the various troubles in the Italian peninsula, the Italians spoke very similar languages (the place where we draw a line between a 'dialect' and a 'language' is fairly arbitrary), almost all of them were Roman Catholic and the Roman Empire was strongly remembered as a great and praiseworthy nation. These shared factors served Italian unification well. None of them were present in Yugoslavia-to-be; there were religious differences (which can be used to rally separate identities around), there were considerably greater linguistic differences, and, perhaps most importantly, someone in the Balkans living under the rule of a foreign power (e.g. the Ottoman Empire) mostly didn't think of themselves as Yugoslavs, but as Croats, Slovenes et cetera; there was no strong shared memory of a united Yugoslav state that everyone could be proud of, despite Serbia's largely unsuccessful attempts to revive the idea of Stepan Dusan's empire.

The fact that Serbia committed various atrocities against other people in Yugoslavia-to-be is, I think, a result of the fact that the non-Serbs in Yugoslavia-to-be did not enthusiastically embrace the Serbian 'liberation', because they did not view themselves as of one people with the Serbs, for the reasons above. Had (e.g.) the Albanians considered themselves a Yugoslav people and enthusiastically welcomed the Serbian presence, I imagine they would have been treated much more kindly; as it is, the Serbians, awakening to nationalism, felt under threat in their quest to bring about 'greater Serbia' and 'unite Serbdom', and responded, accordingly, with great harshness.
 
Pan-orthodox state would iritate Bosniaks and Albanians but would be OK with catholic Croats and Slovenes o_O?

German States had Protestants and Catholics and managed to unite. I would think the language barrier might be a bigger, even if the sectarian difference between Catholic and Orthodox dates back well before the Reformation.
 
Plus Congress Poland, which was Catholic, was united with Russia. Heck, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had Ruthenian Orthodox subjects living within its territories.
 

Angel Heart

Banned
I think the main problem here would be how to integrate the Bulgarians. Serbs and Croats don't have a significant linguist barrier and by plaing the cards right one could have united all Serbo-Croatian speaking people into a new one during the Illyrian Movement. While the Slovenes could have theoretically been assimilated into the Serbo-Croatian corpus due to their small number, the Bulgarians however have approximately the same number as the Serbs.

One more thing: If you truly want to understand the nationalist mythos and the victim mentality of the locals and what created it in the first place you may want to read this:

http://potsdam.yorex.org/sites/potsdam.yorex.org/files/balkan_holocausts_book.pdf

Pretty much everything is explained, even this mysterious land reform.
 
I think the main problem here would be how to integrate the Bulgarians. Serbs and Croats don't have a significant linguist barrier and by plaing the cards right one could have united all Serbo-Croatian speaking people into a new one during the Illyrian Movement. While the Slovenes could have theoretically been assimilated into the Serbo-Croatian corpus due to their small number, the Bulgarians however have approximately the same number as the Serbs.

One more thing: If you truly want to understand the nationalist mythos and the victim mentality of the locals and what created it in the first place you may want to read this:

http://potsdam.yorex.org/sites/potsdam.yorex.org/files/balkan_holocausts_book.pdf

Pretty much everything is explained, even this mysterious land reform.

The problem with trying to integrate the Bulgarians is that they didn't want to lose their identity and they certainly didn't want to become the second in command to the Serbs. Add the animosity between the two nations (it began with the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885) and you have a situation where Bulgarians wouldn't want to form a unified state with the Serbs.
 
I think Serbia should annex these countries and retain them
-Bosnia, including the Bosnian Dalmatia
-Vardarska aka Macedonia
-Ragusa(as an autonomous city state)
-Montenegro
-Parts of Albania will be a bonus, but that parts of Albania are Catholic...or Muslim.
 
Not a fan of Serbia (or Sardinia for that matter). Better to have Austria-Hungary crush it. Maybe a preventative war in the wake of the Russian revolution of 1905.
 
Not a fan of Serbia (or Sardinia for that matter). Better to have Austria-Hungary crush it. Maybe a preventative war in the wake of the Russian revolution of 1905.

And let the Austrians deal with a huge revolt within its territories? That would be a sure way to speed up the Austro-Hungarian Empire's collapse.
 
The problem with nearly all of the Balkans in essence, is that they lagged behind the rest of Europe for at least a couple centuries in terms of national identity-building and these new ideas such as separation of church and state. That's what you get for being under the yoke of two traditionalist multinational superstates like Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.

When they finally caught up in the 19th century, they didn't really know what to make of this "enlightenment" thing and skipped from feudalism straight to nationalism. Naturally, this caused a very bloody and confused mess, to say the least. :(
 
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