Stjepan Radic: The Croat Peasant Party and the Politics of Mass Mobilization, 1904-1928

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom and The History of Fort St. Joseph, and the co-author of
Invisible and Inaudible in Washington: American

What was to become the 20th-century Balkan nation of Yugoslavia was a
consequence of World War I. In December 1918, Serbian King Peter I
became King of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which
also included Macedonians, Kosovars, Montenegrins, and Bosnian Muslims.
Political parties flourished along ethnic (Serb versus Croat) rather
than ideological (socialist versus conservative) lines. Stjepan Radic
became leader of the Croat nationalist party. Thoroughly fed up with his
rants, a Serb deputy shot him right on the floor of the national
parliament in 1928. Before he died, Radic reiterated that Croatia could
not remain part of the larger federation. The “martyrdom” of Radic
inspired those who planned the 1934 assassination of Peter I’s son (by
then King Alexander of Yugoslavia), the Ustashe Croats (Croatian
separatists who collaborated with Hitler during World War II), and the
nationalists who detached Croatia from Yugoslavia in 1991. Radic indeed
was a significant person, worthy of a serious biography. This appears to
be it.

Mark Biondich began this biography as a Ph.D. dissertation. He
discovered a total absence of any biography of Radic in any major
Western European language. Given the ferocity of the passion with which
Serbs and Croats—even those residing in Canada—attack each other,
there certainly is a need for a balanced, scholarly, rational account of
the life of Radic and his place in the history of Yugoslavia. Biondich
admires Radic. While Radic was, says Biondich, “a Croat nationalist
... his deeply rooted commitment to Christian ethnics and democratic
principles meant that Radic’s nationalism never degenerated into
chauvinism.” Biondich agrees that the same cannot be said of Radic’s
successors.

Many, including this reviewer, would regard “a good nationalist” as
an oxymoron. More admirable than those who seek ethnocentric
nation–states for their people are those who promote tolerant
societies in which disparate peoples can thrive. Might the former
Yugoslavia be a happier place today if a Laurier or a Trudeau as
prominent as Radic had participated actively in the Belgrade of the
1920s? Perhaps another historian can make a convincing argument that
King Alexander, who had a pan-Yugoslav perspective, was more admirable
than Radic. Historians, however, must deal with what happened rather
than what might have been; under the circumstances, Biondich has
provided a service.