ABSTRACT
From the mid-nineteenth century on, Zagreb functioned as the administrative centre for Croatia and Slavonia, but many among the city’s elite aspired to transform the city into a national capital. The difficulties in achieving this goal reflect the continued fragmentation of Croatian territories before 1918. The question of which entities were to look to Zagreb as their capital made possible a number of competing identities: Was Zagreb to be a provincial Habsburg capital in the Hungarian half of the monarchy? Was it to be the centre of the so-called Triune Kingdom that joined Croatia-Slavonia, which lay in the Hungarian half of the monarchy, with Dalmatia, which lay in the Austrian half? Or was it to be the centre of a larger south Slavic unit inside or outside the Habsburg Empire? These questions of identity remained to a large degree unresolved after 1918, when a united, south Slavic state emerged from the battlefields of World War I. The interwar Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia only after the imposition of a royal dictatorship in 1929) recognized the Croats as one of its constituent peoples, but Zagreb itself was bypassed as the new kingdom’s capital, which was instead located in Belgrade. Thus, Zagreb continued to struggle in the interwar period as an aspiring national capital on the periphery of a hegemonic state.
