ABSTRACT
World War I dramatically changed the European landscape, particularly for the South Slavs, who finally gained their own state. The 1919–1920 Paris Peace Conference officially ended World War I and established the basis for European political relations during the interwar period. The Bosnian Muslims, whose sympathies had largely been with the losing side in World War I, found themselves part of a state ruled by one of the victors of that war. The Serbian Karadjordjevic royal family favored South Slav union, so with Allied encouragement and its heretofore principal friend, Russia, in revolutionary turmoil, in 1917 Serbia agreed to become part of a Yugoslav state. The new Yugoslavia, called the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes until 1929, was declared on 1 December 1918. From that time until January 1929, the kingdom was governed as a constitutional parliamentary monarchy, in which all South Slav peoples were constitutionally equal under the Serbian monarchy.
