Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903-1945

"This book is a study of the consequences of the Great War, on the people who fought it and on the states to which they returned once the fighting was over. It is addressed primarily to interwar Yugoslavia and to the 'New Europe' created at the end of the conflict; but it is also concerned with Europe as a whole. The end of the First World War and the Paris settlements established a brief and unprecedented moment of apparent unity in Europe. For the first time ever, Eastern and Western Europe resembled each other, beginning a short-lived era of nation-states governed by liberal political institutions. In successor-states such as Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, and Yugoslavia, Western European democracies such as Great Britain and France provided a model for emulation, not an imposed and patronizing tutelage--as in the mandatory countries of the Middle East--but an aspirational example to which the subjects and citizens of these new states could arrive on their own terms and in their own fashion"--