Creation of Yugoslavia

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The creation of Yugoslavia occurred in 1918, after the dissolution of Austria-Hungary at the end of the First World War. The country was created as a state of the South Slavs through unification of the Kingdom of Serbia and South Slavic parts of Austria-Hungary. The process was driven by two different motives. Most Croat and Slovene political parties saw the unification as the means of protection of political autonomy and preservation of cultural distinctiveness, first threatened by Hungarian and Austrian hegemony, then by Italian expansionism. Most Serb political parties saw the unification as a method of bringing all Serbs into a single state or territorial expansion of Serbia under a different name. During the first eleven years of its existence, the country was formally called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. During the war, while fighting Austria-Hungary, Serbia declared the unification of South Slavs one of its war objectives and negotiated the Corfu Declaration on the...

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