The “Dictatorship” in Yugoslavia

Malbone W. Graham

American Political Science Review, 1929, vol. 23, issue 2, 449-459

Abstract: The coup d'état, so-called, which, on January 6, 1929, brought into being a new form of government and established a new type of constitutional régime in the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, marked the end of exactly a decade of experimentation with the traditional principles of parliamentary government. That this “critical period” had not been an unqualified success is admitted by statesmen, diplomats, and politicians alike; that it was abruptly ended by the personal intervention of King Alexander and the supercession of the Vidov-dan constitution is equally a matter of fact. From Zagreb to Belgrade the passing of the political order which had obtained in the triune kingdom since 1918 has brought general rejoicing; outside the country, however, the queries have been raised: Is the change indicative of the future fate of all democracies, and have not the doctrines of fascism, of military dictatorship, of camarilla government, simply been transplanted to the Yugoslav capital from Rome and Madrid respectively?The situation is not to be understood merely by drawing hasty conclusions as to the prospective demise of democratic or parliamentary government everywhere, nor is it possible to speak, with any scientific accuracy, of the new régime in the Serb-Croat-Slovene state as a Balkan adaptation of the Italian and Iberian dictatorships. The occurrence of this constitutional change in the life of the Yugoslav people has its own distinctive raison d'être and does not flow from mere facile imitation of dictatorial practices in other countries.

Date: 1929
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:23:y:1929:i:02:p:449-459_11

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().