Authors

Miloš Vojinović¹;  ¹ Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbia

Discussion

The First World War brought sweeping changes; among them was the disappearance of the Romanov, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires. The geopolitical upheaval of 1918, with its far-reaching consequences, has understandably drawn sustained scholarly attention. For more than a century, historians of the Habsburg Empire and its successor, Yugoslavia, have sought to understand the changes the war brought. Yet the focus of inquiry has been, above all, on those protagonists who ultimately emerged victorious at the end of 1918. Less attention, however, has been given to how the experience of the war—its human toll, economic crises, censorship, and other disruptions—shaped how the post-war order was imagined during the war. The analysis of plans formulated during the war, plans made by South Slavs as well as by numerous other ‘minorities’ inhabiting the territories that would eventually become part of Yugoslavia, illuminates competing visions of legitimacy, authority, and social reform, while also revealing the constraints and possibilities perceived by contemporaries. Reading the history of the First World War ‘backwards’ has often rendered the creation of Yugoslavia as unavoidable and the collapse of the Habsburg state as inevitable. Such a teleological perspective obscures the contingency and complexity of the First World War. The study of unrealized plans is not merely a counterfactual exercise; rather, it reveals how contemporaries identified key problems, formulated priorities, and envisioned mechanisms of change. In this sense, the proliferation of competing plans demonstrates not only the horizons of possibility as contemporaries perceived them, but also the factors underlying the Habsburg Empire’s declining ability to articulate a vision of political and social order. Several points merit attention. First, the power of Slavism, the belief that territorial unification among Slavs represented a desirable outcome of the war. Such plans did not focus solely on closer ties between Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, but also envisioned union with Bulgarians. Individuals even considered schemes for unification between South and West Slavs, or the creation of a broader Slavic federation. Secondly, the imagined transformations were not confined to political realignments. The appeal of Yugoslav projects was consistently tied to promises of sweeping social reforms. In this sense, visions of Yugoslav unification challenged the empire’s legitimacy on two fronts—by contesting both its dualist framework and its capacity to address pressing questions of social justice. The war also gave rise to numerous mutually exclusive expansionist national programs, making the interwar period fertile ground for revanchism and revisionism. Lastly, despite self-determination being the keyword of the era, the long history of Great Power meddling in Balkan affairs meant that plans were shaped in a way that attracted foreign sponsors and supporters.