ABSTRACT
As the First World War came to an end, the ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’ was proclaimed in Belgrade on 1 December 1918.1 To ensure Serbian hegemony within the central-unitarist Yugoslav state, an expansionist Serbian policy of ‘national and state unity’, developed during the First World War, was inaugurated from the very beginning. Its function was to subordinate the non-Serbian people and historical provinces that in 1918-19 became a part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
