Serbia will not conclude a separate peace

The British chronology of the war records under 5 December 1914 that the Serbian government declared that Serbia would never make peace without the consent of its allies. We have been unable to find a separate statement from that day. On 5 December, that is 22 November by the Julian calendar then used in Serbia, the Prime Minister, Nikola Pašić, formed a new coalition government in Niš. Its programme, read out in parliament on 7 December, went down in history as the Niš Declaration. Most probably it is these events that lie behind the entry in the British chronology.

A government of unity

Since 1912 Serbia had been governed by a cabinet made up solely of members of Pašić’s Radical Party. In the autumn of 1914 the country was living through its hardest moments since the beginning of the war. The army was retreating into the interior, and on 2 December the Austro-Hungarians occupied Belgrade. In this situation Pašić decided to bring the opposition into the government. Alongside the Radicals, the new cabinet included Independent Radicals and Progressives. Pašić kept the posts of Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. The leader of the Independent Radicals, Ljubomir Davidović, became Minister of Education, and the Progressive Vojislav Marinković Minister of the Economy. The coalition lasted until 1917.

The new government was formed at a turning point at the front. Two days earlier the Serbian army had gone over to the counter-offensive on the Kolubara, and on 5 December its units recaptured the Suvobor ridge, which was key to the enemy’s defence.

The declaration of 7 December

On 7 December the government presented its programme to the National Assembly, the Skupština, sitting in Niš. The declaration began with the assurance that the cabinet was to embody the “unity of will, forces and aims” of the country until the end of the war. The government paid tribute to the fallen and thanked the army, which, it said, “has stood worthily beside the glorious, multi-million and old armies of the great nations, our allies, who together with us are waging the struggle for the cause of justice and freedom”.

The most important sentence concerned the aims of the war. The government declared that its only task was to secure a successful conclusion of the war, which “at the moment it began, became at the same time a struggle for the liberation and unification of all our unfree brothers, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes”. Further on we read: “In this struggle the Serbian people has no choice, for one does not choose between death and life.” The government announced that “loyal to its powerful and heroic allies, it will await the hour of victory with confidence in the future”. The declaration ended with the call: “Forward, with God’s help, against the enemy, to the struggle for freedom!”

The text of the declaration does not literally contain a pledge that Serbia would not make peace without the consent of its allies. It does, however, clearly announce a struggle to victory at the side of the Entente powers. The three Entente powers had already pledged to one another in September, in the Pact of London, that they would not conclude a separate peace.

The allies and Bulgaria

In those same days Serbia came under pressure from its allies. The Entente was trying to win Bulgaria over to its side, and on 5 December its representatives made démarches in Athens, Sofia and Bucharest. The price of Sofia’s goodwill was to be concessions in Macedonia, which Serbia had won in the Balkan Wars, and to this the government in Niš would not agree. Some historians believe that the announcement of the unification of the South Slavs was also a response to this pressure. Serbia was giving its allies to understand that its aim was the lands of the Habsburg monarchy, not new concessions to its neighbours.

Significance

The Niš Declaration was the first official proclamation of the programme of unifying the South Slavs as Serbia’s war aim. It did not speak of a “Greater Serbia”, but of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as three tribes of one nation. The Entente long refused to adopt this programme, because the Western powers did not then intend to break up Austria-Hungary. The Niš slogan was, however, repeated in 1917 by the Corfu Declaration, and in 1918 the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes came into being.