This paper seeks to examine the outlook of the Serbian Minister in London,
Mateja Mata Boskovic, during the first half of the Great War on the South
Slav (Yugoslav) question - a unification of all the Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes in a single state, which was Serbia?s war aim. He found himself in
close contact with the members of the Yugoslav Committee, an organisation of
the irredentist Yugoslav ?migr?s from Austria-Hungary in which two Croat
politicians, Frano Supilo and Ante Trumbic, were leading figures. In stark
contrast to other Serbian diplomats, Boskovic was not enthusiastic about
Yugoslav unification. He suspected the Croat ?migr?s, especially Supilo, of
pursuing exclusive Croat interests under the ruse of the Yugoslav programme.
His dealings with them were made more difficult on account of the siding of
a group of British ?friends of Serbia?, the most prominent of which were
Robert William Seton-Watson and Henry Wickham Steed, with the Croat ?migr?s.
Though not opposed in principle to an integral Yugoslav unification,
Boskovic preferred staunch defence of Serbian Macedonia from Bulgarian
ambitions and the acquisition of Serb-populated provinces in southern
Hungary, while in the west he seems to have been content with the annexation
of Bosnia-Herzegovina, part of Slavonia and an outlet to the Adriatic Sea in
Dalmatia. Finally, the reception of and reaction to Boskovic?s reports on
the part of the Serbian Prime Minister, Nikola Pasic, clearly shows that the
latter was determined to persist in his Yugoslav policy, despite the Treaty
of London which assigned large parts of the Slovene and Croat lands to Italy
and made the creation of Yugoslavia an unlikely proposition. In other words,
Pasic did not vacillate between the ?small? and the ?large programme?,
between Yugoslavia and Greater Serbia, as it has been often alleged in
historiography and public discourse.
The Serbian minister in London, Mateja Boskovic, the Yugoslav committee, and Serbia’s Yugoslav policy in the Great War 1914-1916
