Serbia: A Modern History
Marko Attila Hoare
Hurst, £65

THERE are certain cliches that are wise to avoid when reviewing a book, but then along comes a work that tempts you down that well-trodden path. The cliche in question is “exhaustive,” an epithet which Marko Hoare’s meticulous, groundbreaking and erudite Serbia: A Modern History thoroughly deserves. 

An exhaustive book would normally demand an exhaustive review, but there is so much to say about the work that general remarks allied to a concentration on a couple of well-known periods might serve the reader better.

For many readers, their knowledge of Serbia may well be limited to its role in the Great War and, of course, the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992 and the wars that began in 1991. Along with that, there is likely to be an awareness of the somewhat pejorative word, “Balkanisation.”

However, Hoare does not cover the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, limiting himself to the period 1804-1941. 

Why? 

Two reasons: firstly, the period from 1941 on requires its own history, due to its length, but also because this “second modern Serbia” was fundamentally different, “a state reconstituted by new forces with new rules”; and secondly, because 1804-1941 is the temporal framework of the first modern Serbia, beginning with the First Serbian Uprising and ending with its fall following the Nazi invasion.

The reasons why a relatively small country in central Europe found itself twice occupied by foreign powers in the 20th century is an important thread throughout. Hoare acknowledges the importance of “internal forces” while wanting to build a counterargument to the common view that some sort of inherent Serbian nationalism and expansionism are key to these two invasions and the country’s history more generally. He instead prioritises internal battles between rival leaders and, indeed, visions of what it means to be Serbian.

As an example of this approach, let’s look at the 1910s, in which the Balkan wars paved the way for the July Crisis of 1914 and the outbreak of WW1 the following month. Hoare describes how 1911 onwards saw the Radicals in power, with unchecked expansionism leading to a decade of warfare.

Enthusiasm for this was instilled at a young age. Schoolchildren were encouraged to read patriotic and violent poems, and sports clubs were another “incubator of popular nationalism.” This was pushed by Russia as part of its pan-Slavic and “Austrophobic” worldview. 

The problem that Serbia had, however, was that the territory it won during the first Balkan war, in which Bulgaria, Montenegro, Greece and Serbia fought the Ottoman Empire, wasn’t actually full of Serbs, instead being “Macedonian, Albanian and Muslim Bosniak.” This presented a difficulty, especially at a time in history when “pseudo-scientific ‘proofs’ of ethnic kinship” were all the rage in nationalist circles. 

Moreover, as the Balkan alliance started to fracture prior to the Second Balkan war, internal forces, specifically the militarist Black Hand, a rival to the Radicals, resisted arbitration and instead argued for an opportunistic war with Bulgaria. This resistance was not diplomatic: 17 of the Black Hand’s leaders told Nikola Pasic, Serbian prime minister and leader of the Radicals, that they would kill him if he accepted Russian arbitration. 

This is an example of Hoare’s argument that internal forces were the main driver of Serbian expansionism (even though in this case, the war wasn’t started by Serbia).

To move on to 1914, Hoare makes the point that “the plot to murder Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, fateful for world history, may have been embarked on deliberately to undermine Pasic’s foreign policy” — rarely can the internal affairs of a smallish nation have had such an effect on world history. As well as the matter of millions of deaths and the restructuring of Europe, the Irish War of Independence and the Russian Revolution were direct results, among other things, of the Great War.

To turn to the later of the two invasions very briefly, the period leading up to the fall of the Yugoslav kingdom in 1941 saw an increasingly large “conspiratorial network,” giving rise to the British-backed coup of that year in the wake of the kingdom signing the Tripartite Pact pledging cooperation with the Axis powers. The pro and anti-Axis forces were “an expression of the enduring power struggle … of the two wings of the Serbian elite.”

In this context, the pact didn’t cause the putsch, but was merely another power play by one wing, which was then used as a pretext by the other.

Hoare’s history is not a difficult read, though its length (588 pages) means that it is not for the fainthearted or casual reader wishing to have an overview of the country and region. Its length is a testament to the author’s scholarship, but also to the sheer complexity of the geopolitical picture of which Serbia forms a significant part.