Elusive Compromise

'Fascinating and compelling. ... an extremely important addition to the historiography of Yugoslavia.' -- Prof. V.P. Gagnon, author, The Myth of Ethnic War:Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s
'Dejan Djokic is to be commended for having produced an excellently researched and very well- written book. He has avoided nationalist cliches and a strongly partisan tone and presented the reader with new interpretations of original source material. As such, the book contrasts markedly with much of the writing about the former Yugoslavia since the 1990s.' -- European History Quarterly
'Logical as the idea of a unified South Slav state seemed in the late nineteenth century, since such a state failed twice in the next century, catastrophically the second time, it is now easy to assume that the hope was flawed from the beginning and that the problem is in Serbian-Croatian relations.Key scholars have posited that failure was in the DNA of the first Yugoslavia- born of the First World War, destroyed by the Second - but Djokic argues that interwar Yugoslavia was not doomed by conflicting Croatian and Serbian national ideologies. Failure came rather from the inability of politicians to compromise over the centralization of state power. Hence, the state failed because of political decisions taken or not taken in the flush of events, not because of primordial forces. Djokic does not ultimately prove the counterfactual that the Yugoslav idea could have been saved, but he gives it plausibility.' -- Foreign Affairs