National Council votes for union with Serbia

On 23 November 1918 the Central Committee of the National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs met in the Sabor building in Zagreb to decide on union with Serbia. The British chronology of the war records under this date that the Council voted for union with Serbia and for the creation of a common state with Serbia and Montenegro. The deliberations lasted two days, and the resolution was adopted on 24 November, the date given by Croatian and Serbian accounts.

The Council was acting under enormous pressure. The State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, proclaimed at the end of October, had neither Allied recognition nor an effective army. Bands of deserters, the so-called Green Cadres, roamed the countryside, and peasants attacked manor houses and shops. Italian troops were occupying Istria, part of Dalmatia and Fiume, and were approaching Ljubljana from the west. The agreement reached at the Geneva conference, which provided for a confederation on equal terms, had been rejected by the Serbian government. On 22 November the Serbian liaison officer in Zagreb, Lieutenant-Colonel Dušan Simović, reported an alleged plot by the former Austro-Hungarian general Anton Lipošćak to overthrow the Council. The charges proved false, and the general was acquitted in January 1919, but the Council’s vice-president, Svetozar Pribićević, used the affair as an argument for immediate unification. The Committee also received an ultimatum from the provincial government of Dalmatia. Its representatives, Ivo Krstelj and Josip Smodlaka, announced that if the Council did not decide on union within five days, Dalmatia would join Serbia on its own. The National Council in Sarajevo took a similar position, and on 24 November an assembly in Ruma announced the separation of Syrmia from Croatia.

The leader of the Croatian People’s Peasant Party, Stjepan Radić, spoke out against the haste. He argued that unification on such terms was against the will of the majority of Croats and warned the members of the Council: “Ne srljajte kao guske u maglu!”, that is, “Don’t rush like geese into the fog!” He proposed a confederation with three regents, the King of Serbia, the Ban of Croatia and the president of the Slovene National Council, and with autonomous governments for Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dalmatia and Vojvodina. The majority regarded this as extreme separatism.

On 24 November the Council resolved to proclaim the unification of the State of SCS with the Kingdom of Serbia and the Kingdom of Montenegro into a single state and elected a 28-member delegation to go to Belgrade. It gave the delegation written instructions. Until a constitution was adopted, royal power was to be exercised provisionally by the Serbian regent, Alexander. The constitution was to be adopted by a constituent assembly with a qualified two-thirds majority. Foreign affairs, the army, finance, railways and shipping, and the post were to belong to the common government, while the existing offices and courts in the individual lands were to remain in place. Only Radić and Dragutin Hrvoj voted against.

The delegation left Zagreb on 27 November, after Pribićević’s supporters had excluded Radić from the Central Committee. In Belgrade, persuaded by Pribićević and under pressure from the Italian advances on the coast, it set the instructions aside. On 1 December 1918 the Council’s vice-president, Ante Pavelić, read an address to the regent without any conditions, and Alexander proclaimed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The question of the constitutional system, left unresolved in Zagreb, burdened the new state throughout the interwar period.