Serbian political elite from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Yugoslav Kingdom (1918-1941)

During the existence of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes/Yugoslavia (1918-1929), the Serbian political and intellectual elite from Bosnia and Herzegovina found themselves in a position to actively participate in the new state. However, only a few managed to successfully navigate the newly formed political landscape and benefit from it. Most of them believed that the Serbian national question had been definitively resolved in 1918. As a result, they were unprepared for the emergence of the ?Croatian question? in the Kingdom of SHS. Their political disorientation led them to passively accept the unstable parliamentary system of the new state, shaped by deepening interreligious and interethnic tensions. By 1929, in response to aggressive Croatian nationalism, which was encouraged and directed by the Roman Catholic clergy, they began to defend themselves not through Serbian nationalism but through Yugoslav nationalism. Sincerely embracing King Alexander?s policy of integral Yugoslavia, proclaimed in 1929, most of them only realized by the late 1930s that they had been politically deceived by the Croats. Their unrealistic faith in the Yugoslav state prevented them from forming an independent Serbian national program-until it was too late, on the eve of World War II.