Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War

"This book is a study of the consequences of the Great War, on the people who fought it and on the states to which they returned once the fighting was over. It is addressed primarily to interwar Yugoslavia and to the 'New Europe' created at the end of the conflict; but it is also concerned with Europe as a whole. The end of the First World War and the Paris settlements established a brief and unprecedented moment of apparent unity in Europe. For the first time ever, Eastern and Western Europe resembled each other, beginning a short-lived era of nation-states governed by liberal political institutions. In successor-states such as Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, and Yugoslavia, Western European democracies such as Great Britain and France provided a model for emulation, not an imposed and patronizing tutelage--as in the mandatory countries of the Middle East--but an aspirational example to which the subjects and citizens of these new states could arrive on their own terms and in their own fashion"-- "The Yugoslav state of the interwar period was a child of the Great European War. Its borders were superimposed onto a topography of conflict and killing, for it housed many war veterans who had served or fought in opposing armies (those of the Central Powers and the Entente) during the war. These veterans had been adversaries but after 1918 became fellow subjects of a single state, yet in many cases they carried into peace the divisions of the war years. John Paul Newman tells their story, showing how the South Slav state was unable to escape out of the shadow cast by the First World War. Newman reveals how the deep fracture left by war cut across the fragile states of 'New Europe' in the interwar period, worsening their many political and social problems and bringing the region into a new conflict at the end of the interwar period"--