Abstract
The Policies Of The Communist Party Of Yugoslavia On The National Question (1918 - 1941)
In this article, the policies of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia on the national question between 1918-1941 will be examined. After the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia since 1929), which united the Southern Slavs under a single state in 1918, the most important political conflict in the country was between the pro-centralist Serbs and the pro-federal Croats. When the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was founded in Belgrade in April 1919, it accepted the idea that Serbs, Croats and Slovenes formed a single Yugoslav nation, and also set a goal of overthrowing the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. After 1934, the communist party accepted the existence of Slovene, Croat and Serbian nations separately and adopted a political program for the establishment of a federal Yugoslav state on the basis of equality of nations. The decisions of the Comintern played a major role in changing the party's view on the national question. In this study, the transition process from the view of the existence of a single Yugoslav nation, which was adopted by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia when it was first established, to the view of federalist Yugoslavia, which recognizes the existence of different nations, will be explained. It will be argued also that the transformation of this ideological-political attitude was decisive to the establishment of Second Yugoslavia (1945-1991) as a federal state by the communists.
Keywords
Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Nationalism, Centralism, Federalism, Balkans
