ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: 1983
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

U dobrom stanju, sa posvetom autora


The First Yugoslavia: Search for a Viable Political System
Alex N. Dragnich
Hardcover

Hoover Press, 1983 - Yugoslavia - 182 pages

In the aftermath of World War I, a long- cherished dream of South Slav nationalists came into being. The independent kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro joined with three former territories of the Austro-Hungarian empire — Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Slovenia — to form the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, under the Serbian royal house. The hasty agreement uniting these areas assumed that a common language and a common history of foreign domination would allow the new state to overcome differences in religion, customs, and political systems.

It soon became apparent that the second largest ethnic group — the Croats — preferred independence, or at most a confederation that would leave them in control of their own affairs. The Serbs believed that their successful tradition of parliamentary rule under a constitutional monarch offered the proper model for the new state. When Croatia’s representatives boycotted the Constituent Assembly writing the constitution for the country, the Serbian proposal for a unitary system was adopted, setting in motion nearly two decades of political turmoil as the Croats, mainly through passive resistance, attempted to win a political system more favorable to their perceived interests.

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Alex N. Dragnich (Ferry County, Washington, 22 February 1912 – Bowie, Maryland, 10 August 2009) was a distinguished Serbian-American political scientist, and author of several works on the Balkans.

Born on 22 February 1912, he was the son of Serbian immigrants from Montenegro, who had a homestead in Ferry County in the State of Washington. In his youth, he attended elementary and high school there and worked on his parents` farm during the Great Depression. Upon graduation from high school, he enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1934 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1938. He then went on to obtain his master`s degree in 1940. For the next two years, he did graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley where he obtained his doctorate in 1942 but wartime service delayed his Ph.D. until 1945.

During the Second World War Dragnich served as a foreign affairs analyst for the Department of Justice and the Office of Strategic Services. From 1947 to 1950 he joined the U.S. Foreign Service and served as Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade. It was during his service in communist Yugoslavia that Dragnich first found out about the Tito-Stalin split of 1948.

In 1950 he became was a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where he spend more than a quarter century before taking his retirement. He carried out various studies on the Balkans, including critical works on characters and personages such as Josip Broz Tito and Nikola Pašić.

prva jugoslavija, istorija