Kingdom of Serbia and Montenegro

The Kingdom of Serbia and Montenegro is a federal monarchy in the central Balkans, made up of three units, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo, with about 7.5 million people. Its capital, Belgrade, stands where the Sava meets the Danube, and the far bank of the Sava, Zemun, belongs to Austria-Hungary. The kingdom runs south from the two rivers through the orchard country of Šumadija and the Morava valley to the mountains of Kosovo, and west to the karst of Montenegro and a short coast on the Adriatic at Bar and Ulcinj.

One sovereign holds two crowns. Aleksandar II, of the House of Obrenović, has been King of Serbia since 1974 and King of Montenegro by the same accession, the two crowns having been joined by statute in 1968 after his marriage to the last heiress of Montenegro’s own dynasty. Kosovo became the third federal unit under the Ohrid Settlement of 1995. Each unit has a premier and an assembly; above them sit a National Assembly of 250 members elected in single-member districts, a Senate of thirty in which each unit has ten seats, and a Prime Minister, Vesna Ilić, since 2027. The King keeps a working veto, and uses it.

The state grew out of two risings against Ottoman rule, in 1804 and 1815, became autonomous in 1830 and independent at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, and has been a kingdom since 1882. The Obrenović dynasty, which made the second rising, has held the throne since then with one interruption in the middle of the nineteenth century. It survived an officers’ conspiracy in June 1903, when a coup against King Alexander I failed at the palace gate, and the conspirators’ society staged three further coups between the wars without ever again touching the throne. The kingdom took Kosovo, part of the Sandžak and Macedonia in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, kept an armed neutrality through the whole of the First Great War, and at the peace of 1919 gave up Macedonia under German pressure in return for loans that bound it into Mitteleuropa. The South Slav question that was expected to make Belgrade the centre of a larger state was answered instead by Vienna, with the creation of the Kingdom of Illyria inside Austria-Hungary in 1920. Serbia stayed out of the Second Great War until 1943 and then sent a volunteer legion to France.

Its gravest modern episode is the Kosovo War of 1992 to 1995, which began with a mutiny of the Priština garrison against a promised referendum, was waged by the army over the head of its own ministry in Kosovo and the Sandžak, and killed more than ten thousand people. A force under the authority of the League of Nations ended it, the Ohrid Settlement reconstituted the state, and a League tribunal at The Hague convicted the Prime Minister of the day and the generals who had led the mutiny. The referendum the officers mutinied to prevent is due in Kosovo in April 2029.

The kingdom joined the European Concert in 2027, where it is the second poorest member and the quietest seat. It has never belonged to the Atlantic Treaty Organization. Emigration, mostly to Germany, is high; the King, born in 1947, is frail, and the question of a regency for his grandson and heir, born in 2011, is openly discussed.

Name

The state is the Kingdom of Serbia and Montenegro, in Serbian Kraljevina Srbija i Crna Gora (Краљевина Србија и Црна Гора), a style it has carried since the statute of 1968 that joined the two crowns. Before 1968 the Kingdom of Serbia and the Kingdom of Montenegro were separate states with separate kings, and the federal name records the union of two monarchies rather than the absorption of one by the other, which is the reading Montenegrins insist on and the one the statute’s drafting supports.

Serbia is the land of the Serbs; the name is attested from the medieval kingdom of the Nemanjić dynasty and was revived by the risings of the nineteenth century. Montenegro is the Venetian rendering of Crna Gora, the Black Mountain, after the dark forested slopes of Mount Lovćen above the old capital, Cetinje; the Venetian form became the international one long before the principality had any dealings with the world beyond the Adriatic.

Kosovo takes its name from Kosovo Polje, the Field of Blackbirds, the plain where the battle of 1389 was fought. In Serbian administrative use the unit was long called Kosovo and Metohija, the second name referring to the western valley of church estates around Peć; in Albanian it is Kosova. The Ohrid Settlement gives the unit the single name Kosovo in both languages.

In ordinary use abroad the whole state is called Serbia, and its people Serbs, which Montenegrins and Kosovo’s Albanians correct as a matter of course and which the federal government’s own protocol office avoids.

Geography

The kingdom occupies the central Balkan peninsula from the Danube in the north to the Adriatic in the south-west and the Šar mountains in the south. It is landlocked except for the Montenegrin coast, and its frontiers touch Austria-Hungary along the Sava and the Danube and in the west, the United Principalities of Romania along the Danube gorge, the Byzantine Federation to the east and south-east, and Macedonia and Albania to the south.

Šumadija and the Morava valley

The heart of Serbia proper is Šumadija, the wooded country south of Belgrade: low rounded hills, oak and beech woods, small farms and, above all, plum orchards, which supply the fruit for the national brandy and give the region its look in spring. The risings of 1804 and 1815 began here, and the old Obrenović capital, Kragujevac, is its principal town.

East and south of Šumadija runs the Morava, the river system that is the country’s main corridor. The Great Morava flows north to the Danube; its two branches, the West and South Morava, reach back into the mountains. The road and the railway from central Europe to the Aegean and to Constantinople follow the valley through Niš, the second city of Serbia proper, and most of the country’s farmland, towns and industry lie within a day’s walk of the river.

The Danube and the border city

Belgrade stands on a ridge above the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, with the fortress at its point. Across the Sava lies Zemun, which has been Habsburg for most of the last three centuries and became part of the Kingdom of Illyria in 1920. The capital of the kingdom is therefore a border city, built facing a foreign town across a river a few hundred yards wide. Bridges, a ferry and, since the Concert’s arrangements began, an open crossing join the two, and a great many Belgraders cross every day to work, shop and visit relatives.

Downstream the Danube forms the frontier with Romania for more than two hundred kilometres and passes through the gorge at the Iron Gates, where the river cuts through the Carpathian and Balkan ranges. The dam built jointly with Romania at the gorge is the largest structure either country owns. North of the Danube and the Sava the Banat, Bačka and Srem, with Novi Sad, belong to Illyria, and Serbia has no part of the Pannonian plain.

The mountains and Kosovo

South and west of the Morava the country rises into the mountains that cover most of its area: the Dinaric ranges in the west, with the high pastures of Zlatibor and Tara; Kopaonik, the highest massif of Serbia proper and its skiing country; and in the far south the Šar mountains on the Macedonian frontier.

Kosovo is a high basin enclosed by these ranges. Its eastern plain, Kosovo Polje, holds Priština; its western valley, Metohija, holds Peć, Dečani and Prizren below the Albanian Alps. The basin has the richest lignite in the kingdom and a large, young and mainly Albanian population. The great medieval monasteries of the Serbian church stand in the western valley, among Albanian villages.

Montenegro and the coast

Montenegro is limestone: a high, dry, broken karst of grey rock and thin soil, cut by deep canyons, with the massif of Durmitor in the north and Lovćen above Cetinje in the south-west. Podgorica, the unit capital, stands on the plain at the head of Lake Skadar, which is shared with Albania.

The kingdom’s coast is short. Bar is the port and the terminus of the railway from Belgrade; Ulcinj to the south has the long sand beach at the Bojana mouth and an old Albanian and Turkish town. The Bay of Kotor, with Kotor, Herceg Novi and the Venetian towns around it, lies just north-west and belongs to Illyria, so that the finest anchorage on the eastern Adriatic is visible from the summit of Lovćen and is not Montenegrin.

Climate

The north and centre are continental: hot summers, cold winters, and in Belgrade the košava, a hard, dry south-easterly wind down the Danube that blows for days at a time in the cold months. The mountains carry heavy snow, which closes some Montenegrin and Kosovar passes in winter. The coast is Mediterranean, with dry summers and wet mild winters, and Podgorica is among the hottest towns in Europe in July.

History

Medieval Serbia and the Ottoman centuries

The Serbs settled the central Balkans in the early middle ages. Under the Nemanjić dynasty, from the late twelfth century, Serbia became a kingdom; Saint Sava, a son of the dynasty’s founder, obtained an autocephalous church for it in 1219, and under Stefan Dušan, crowned emperor in 1346, it held most of the peninsula south of the Danube. The empire broke up after his death. The battle on Kosovo Polje on 28 June 1389, Vidovdan, in which Prince Lazar was killed and the Ottoman sultan Murad was assassinated, did not end Serbian independence at a stroke, but it became the defining memory of its loss, and the epic songs that grew around it shaped the national idea for five centuries. The last Serbian fortress, Smederevo on the Danube, fell in 1459.

Under Ottoman rule the church was the one Serbian institution that survived. The Patriarchate of Peć, restored in 1557, kept a hierarchy, a calendar and a written language alive in the villages until it was abolished in 1766. Ottoman wars with the Habsburgs passed back and forth across the country; in 1690, after one of them, Patriarch Arsenije III led a great migration of Serbs north across the Danube and the Sava into Habsburg lands, where they settled the military frontier, the Srem and the Banat. That migration is the origin of the large Serbian population of the Monarchy, and of the quarrel that still divides Belgrade and Vienna. Belgrade itself was Habsburg from 1718 to 1739 and returned to the Sultan afterwards.

The risings, 1804 and 1815

At the end of the eighteenth century the Belgrade pashalik was taken over by the dahije, renegade janissaries who defied the Sultan and governed by terror. In January 1804 they killed many of the local Serbian notables, and on 15 February 1804, Sretenje, an assembly at Orašac in Šumadija chose Đorđe Petrović, a livestock dealer known as Karađorđe, Black George, to lead a rising. It began against the janissaries in the Sultan’s name and became, within two years, a war for independence. Karađorđe’s insurgents took Belgrade in 1806 and governed most of the pashalik for seven years with Russian help. When Russia made peace with the Ottomans in 1812 the rising was left alone, and in 1813 the Ottoman armies returned. Karađorđe fled to Austria.

The Second Rising began at Takovo in April 1815 under Miloš Obrenović, a district notable who had stayed in the country and made terms. Miloš fought where he had to and negotiated where he could, and by the end of the year had obtained a measure of Serbian self-government under Ottoman suzerainty.

In 1817 Karađorđe came back. Miloš had him murdered. He was killed in his sleep at Radovanje in July 1817 on Miloš’s orders, and his head was sent to the Ottoman pasha in Belgrade as a proof of loyalty. The murder founded the feud between the two houses that runs through the century: the dynasty that reigns in Belgrade is descended from the man who killed the leader of the first rising, and the national day it keeps is the anniversary of that leader’s rising.

The Obrenović principality and kingdom

Miloš ruled as an autocrat. The Sultan recognised him as hereditary prince in 1830, granting autonomy, and the first constitution, the Sretenje Constitution of 1835, was suspended within weeks because the great powers thought it too liberal. Miloš abdicated in 1839 under pressure from the notables, and his son Mihailo was deposed in 1842. The assembly then chose Karađorđe’s son, Alexander Karađorđević, who reigned as prince from 1842 to 1858, and whose deposition brought the old Miloš back for his last two years. It was the only interruption in the Obrenović succession and the last time a Karađorđević held the throne.

Mihailo III, restored in 1860, was the most capable of the line. He built an army, secured the withdrawal of the last Ottoman garrisons from Belgrade in 1867, and was assassinated in the Košutnjak park in June 1868. His cousin Milan, aged fourteen, succeeded under a regency. Serbia fought the Ottomans in 1876 and 1877 and was recognised as fully independent at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, gaining Niš and the country around it.

Milan made the decision that set the dynasty’s course. Russia had sponsored a large Bulgaria at the peace and had treated Serbian claims with indifference, and in 1881 Milan signed a secret convention with Austria-Hungary that placed Serbia’s foreign policy under Vienna’s guidance in return for Austrian support for the dynasty and for its elevation. Serbia was proclaimed a kingdom in 1882. The convention made the Obrenović a western-facing house, and their court remained so long after the treaty itself lapsed. A war against Bulgaria in 1885 went badly and was stopped by Austrian intervention. Milan’s private life and his quarrels with his queen, Natalija, made him unpopular, and he abdicated in 1889 in favour of his twelve-year-old son.

Alexander I and the night of June 1903

Alexander I came of age early by his own act: in 1893, at sixteen, he declared himself of age and dismissed his regents. He suspended the liberal constitution of 1888 and governed through ministries of his choosing, with his father returning for a time as commander of the army. The Radicals, founded in 1881 and by then the strongest party in the country, were alternately admitted to office and harried out of it.

In 1900 Alexander married Draga Mašin, a widow some years older than himself and a former lady-in-waiting to his mother. The marriage was opposed by his ministers, by his father, by the army and by most of political Belgrade; the cabinet resigned over it. The couple had no children, a pregnancy announced in 1901 proved false, and by 1902 a group of officers, led by a young captain of the general staff, Dragutin Dimitrijević, called Apis, had concluded that the dynasty would end with the King and that it would be better for the country if it ended sooner.

The plot was set for the night of 10 to 11 June 1903. It was betrayed in its last hours. The guard at the Old Palace was reinforced, the officers who came over the garden wall at about two in the morning found it awake and armed, and after a short exchange of fire in the grounds, in which two of the guard and three of the conspirators were killed, the rest were taken. The King and Queen were not reached. By morning the conspiracy’s officers in the city’s garrison had been arrested in their quarters.

The trials that followed were held in public and were the largest the kingdom had seen. Dimitrijević and the other leaders were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment rather than to death, a decision the King took against the advice of his ministers and which is generally regarded as the beginning of his reputation. Most were released under amnesties by 1910, and they came out of prison with a name for themselves: the June Officers, after the night that had failed.

Draga died of illness in 1905. The King did not remarry for eight years. In 1913 he married Princess Elisabeth of the United Principalities, born in 1894, of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen house of the Principalities, a marriage arranged with Vienna’s encouragement and Bucharest’s agreement, and the first of the dynasty’s ties to the Romanian throne. Their son, Milan, was born in 1914.

The years between the coup and the war were the most Austrophile in the kingdom’s history. When Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia in 1908, the court’s protest was formal and brief, and the outrage was left to the Assembly and the newspapers, where it was loud. It was the first time the division that later governed the kingdom’s foreign policy appeared openly: the court accommodating Vienna, the nation resenting it.

The Balkan Wars

In 1912 Serbia joined Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria in a league against the Ottoman Empire, whose authority in its remaining European provinces was collapsing. The court was reluctant and Vienna was cool; the Assembly, the army and the Radicals forced the issue, and the King gave way on the understanding, given to Vienna, that Serbia would not seek a port on the Adriatic.

The First Balkan War of 1912 and 1913 drove the Ottomans from almost all of Europe. Serbian armies won at Kumanovo and took Kosovo, Vardar Macedonia and the eastern part of the Sandžak of Novi Pazar, which was divided with Montenegro. The great powers created an independent Albania to keep Serbia from the sea, and Vienna held the King to his undertaking. In the Second Balkan War of 1913 Serbia and Greece defeated their former ally Bulgaria over the division of Macedonia, and the treaty signed at Bucharest in August 1913 confirmed Serbia’s gains.

The kingdom almost doubled in area. It also acquired, in Kosovo, a large Albanian population that had not wanted to be conquered and was not asked, and the policies with which it governed that population from 1913 onward are treated under Failings.

The neutrality, 1914 to 1918

The First Great War began in the summer of 1914 with the assassination of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha by a French gunman, and Serbia was not a party to its causes. It had every reason to stay out of it. Its army had fought two wars in two years, its treasury was exhausted, and its two great neighbours were on opposite sides: Russia, which the Assembly’s majority still regarded as the Slavs’ protector, with France and the Ottomans; and Austria-Hungary, which held the Serbs of the Banat, the Srem and Bosnia, with Germany and Britain.

The King chose armed neutrality, under an understanding with Vienna reached in the first weeks of the war. Serbia would keep its army mobilised on its own territory, would allow no belligerent passage, and would not be attacked; Austria-Hungary would treat its Serbian subjects without reprisal and leave the kingdom’s new provinces alone. Russia protested, and the Assembly came close to forcing a declaration of war in the autumn of 1914 and again in 1916, when Russian fortunes briefly revived. Both times the King held, the second time by threatening to dissolve the Assembly, and both times the army, which had no wish to fight Austria-Hungary across the Danube with its back to the Bulgarian frontier, supported him.

Montenegro, under King Nicholas, stayed neutral with Serbia.

Neutrality kept the country intact. It was not free. The army stayed mobilised for four years on borrowed money, the grain and livestock trade with the belligerents was profitable to some and ruinous to the treasury, and the kingdom came to the peace with heavy debts, no friends among the victors and no seat at the table.

Macedonia and Mitteleuropa, 1919

At the peace of 1919 the victors reordered the Balkans after the Ottoman collapse, and Serbia had nothing to bargain with. What it had was debt. The German answer to the instability of central and south-eastern Europe was Mitteleuropa, the system of loans, trade agreements and transport conventions that bound the smaller states of the region to the Empire, and Serbia’s terms for entry were set in Berlin.

The terms included Macedonia. Germany and its allies wanted an independent state in the Vardar valley, as a buffer between Serbia and the settlement being made to the south, and the kingdom’s creditors made its independence the condition of the loans that would refinance the war debt and rebuild the railways. The government accepted. Macedonia, which Serbia had held for six years, became independent in 1919 under League protection, and Serbia entered Mitteleuropa with its debts refinanced and its southern frontier drawn where it now runs. The loss is still taught in Serbian schools as the price of neutrality; the relationship with Macedonia itself has long since become a friendly one.

Illyria and the court, 1920

The question that most observers had expected Serbia to answer, the union of the South Slavs, was answered in 1920 by Vienna. Austria-Hungary’s imperial reforms of that year created the Kingdom of Illyria out of Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, Carniola, Bosnia and the South Slav districts of the Hungarian south, a crown within the Monarchy for Croats, Serbs, Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims together, with its capital at Zagreb. The Serbs of Bosnia, the Srem and the Banat, who had looked to Belgrade for a century, became subjects of a Habsburg crown that named Saint Sava among its patrons.

The court accepted Illyria at once. The King sent his congratulations to Vienna within the week, recognised the new crown before any other foreign sovereign, and let it be understood that the kingdom had no claim on the Monarchy’s territory. The decision followed directly from the convention of 1881, the understanding of 1914 and the loans of 1919, and it ended the possibility of a greater Serbia as an object of state policy.

The Assembly did not accept it. The Radicals moved a resolution of protest, the Assembly declared a day of mourning, and the claim on behalf of the Serbs across the rivers passed out of the hands of the state and into those of the parties, the press and the church, where it has remained. It is the origin of the division by which the kingdom’s relations with Austria-Hungary are still described: close at court, quarrelsome in the Assembly.

The June Officers and the coups, 1923 to 1932

The June Officers had come out of prison in 1910 into an army that needed them for two wars, and by the 1920s they held a large share of its senior commands. Their society was secret in form and well known in fact. It held that the army was the guardian of the nation against weak ministries and foreign interest, it opposed the settlement of 1919 and the acceptance of Illyria, and it never forgave the court for 1903.

It made three coups. In 1923 it removed a Radical ministry that had proposed to cut the army’s budget under Mitteleuropa terms; in 1926 it removed the government that had replaced it, after a dispute over promotions; and in 1932 it installed a government of its own choosing for eighteen months during the depression. Each time the officers occupied the ministries, the Assembly and the telegraph office, and each time they stopped at the palace. None of the three touched the King, and none tried to: after 1903 the society’s members regarded the throne as the one line they could not cross a second time and survive, and the King, for his part, received each new government without comment and kept the army’s loyalty in everything except the choice of ministers.

The coups governed the kingdom’s public life for a decade. The constitution was suspended twice. The press worked under censorship, by decree after each coup and by habit in between, and the censorship lasted until 1945. Parliamentary life continued in the intervals, the Radicals and the Progressives alternating in office, and the elections that were held were held honestly enough to return majorities the officers disliked, which is one reason the officers kept intervening.

The kingdom received a different kind of exile in these years. After the coup in Russia in 1922, the members of the House of Romanov of the cadet branches were expelled by the Russian Republic and scattered across Europe, and a number of them, the Konstantinovichi among them, settled in Belgrade, where the court received them and the government did not. The Russian church on the Tašmajdan slope dates from their settlement, and so does the kingdom’s coldness towards the Republic, which has not changed.

Alexander I died in 1934, after a reign of forty-five years, and was succeeded by Milan III, his son by Queen Elisabeth, aged twenty.

The Second Great War

When the Second Great War began in 1939, between France and the alliance of Germany, Britain, Austria-Hungary and the Realm, Serbia declared its neutrality again, and for four years kept it. France was distant, the kingdom was surrounded by allied or neutral states, and the court’s preference for staying out was shared, for once, by the Assembly and the officers.

Neutrality made Belgrade a place of passage. Refugees from fascist France and from the territories France held came east, many of them Jewish, and some thousands of them reached Belgrade by the Danube and the railway, usually on their way to the Monarchy and sometimes to stay. The government let them in, slowly and with papers demanded at every stage, and the city’s own Jewish community, which had lived in the Dorćol quarter since the Ottoman centuries, took them in. Belgrade’s Jews came through the war whole, and the community was larger at its end than at its beginning, which Belgrade remembers.

The neutrality ended under pressure. By 1943 Germany, through the Mitteleuropa machinery that held the kingdom’s debts, was pressing its members to contribute to the war, and Serbia’s terms of credit were made to depend on an answer. The government’s answer was a volunteer legion rather than a declaration of war: the Šumadija Legion, about 6,000 men, recruited for the duration, trained in Germany and sent to France in 1944, where it served in the allied advance and lost heavily in the autumn fighting. The kingdom’s formal state of war lasted from 1943 to 1945 and involved nothing else. The legion’s dead are commemorated at Kragujevac, and its veterans were the first Serbian soldiers in a century to come home from a war fought somewhere else.

Montenegro to 1945

Montenegro was a separate state until 1968, and its history before the union is its own.

Under the Petrović-Njegoš prince-bishops, of whom the poet Petar II Njegoš is the most famous, the mountain principality held out against the Ottomans for centuries without ever being wholly conquered, governed by its clans and its bishops from the monastery at Cetinje. Danilo secularised the principality in 1852, his successor Nicholas gained the coast at Bar and Ulcinj and international recognition at Berlin in 1878, and Nicholas proclaimed himself king in 1910. Montenegro fought beside Serbia in the Balkan Wars and took the western part of the Sandžak.

It stayed neutral in both great wars, as Serbia did, for the same reasons and with less margin: its army was small, its treasury was smaller, and its coast lay under the guns of the Monarchy’s fleet at Kotor. Nicholas, who had reigned since 1860, died on his throne in 1921. His son Danilo reigned until 1939 and died without children, and the crown passed to his nephew Michael. The small kingdom lived on emigrants’ remittances, sheep, tobacco and the port of Bar, and in 1945 it was, by most measures, the poorest state in Europe.

After the war, 1945 to 1968

The war ended for Serbia without a battle on its soil, a legion to bring home and a debt to Berlin that the legion had been sent to pay down. The first decision of the peace was about the army.

In 1946 the Assembly dissolved the June Officers by law. The society that had grown out of the failed plot of 1903 had made three coups in nine years, had kept the press under censorship until 1945 and had never once removed a king, and the statute treated it accordingly: as an institution to be closed rather than a conspiracy to be punished. Its members were retired on full pensions, its premises in Belgrade were taken for a military archive, and its papers were sealed for fifty years. No officer was tried. The settlement was criticised at the time as a pension scheme for mutineers, and it was defended in the same terms by the men who passed it, who said that a society of retired colonels drawing their pay from the state had no further reason to take it over. The coups ended with it. Nothing came close to another until 1992, and the purge became the standard example in Serbian political writing of a problem solved by paying it to stop.

The same year Milan III married Princess Tatiana of the Konstantinovichi, born in Belgrade in 1924 to a branch of the House of Romanov that had come to the city in the exile of 1922. The match was popular in Belgrade, where the Russian church and the Russian cemetery had been part of the city for a generation, and was received in silence by the Russian Republic, which had no relations with the exiles and wanted none with the court that sheltered them. Their son Aleksandar was born in 1947.

The postwar decades were spent inside Mitteleuropa, on German credit, German standards and German markets. Copper from Bor, plums and grain from the Morava valley and labour from the villages went north; machinery, railway stock and loans came south. The country grew steadily and stayed poor relative to its creditors, which was the pattern for every Balkan member of the arrangement and the source of the embarrassment with which Belgrade still uses the word.

Women received the vote in 1963. The Radicals and the Peasant Party had blocked every proposal since the 1920s, the Radicals on the ground that the village family voted as a family and the Peasant Party on the ground that it would lose the villages if it did not; the Progressives and the Social Democrats carried the reform together in the Assembly elected in 1962, and the King signed it within the week. Serbia was among the last states in Europe to enfranchise women, and the delay is recorded without excuse.

From 1964 to 1972 Serbia and the United Principalities of Romania built the dam on the Danube at the gorge, the largest work either country has undertaken. It was designed as a joint enterprise from the first survey, financed by both treasuries and a Mitteleuropa loan, and divided its power equally. It drowned the island town of Ada Kaleh, whose Turkish inhabitants were resettled downstream with compensation they still describe as insufficient, and it remains the plainest monument to the one friendship in the region that neither party has ever had to explain.

In Kosovo the decades after the war continued what the decades before it had begun. The province was governed from Belgrade through the police, Albanian schooling was refused and the colonist settlements of the interwar years were extended. It was quiet in the sense that the police meant, and the quiet is the background to everything that happened there afterwards.

The union of the crowns, 1968

Montenegro had remained a separate kingdom under the Petrović-Njegoš through both wars, neutral in each, poor, proud and dependent on Serbian loans for its budget and Serbian ports of entry for most of its trade. Its last king had a daughter and no son, and the Montenegrin succession did not pass through women.

In 1966 Crown Prince Aleksandar married Princess Ksenija, the last heiress of the house. The marriage was a love match by every account, including the bride’s, and it was also the instrument of a union that both courts had been discussing for a decade. In 1968 the last Petrović-Njegoš king laid down his crown in favour of the union, and the Kingdom of Serbia and Montenegro was constituted by a statute of the Assembly at Belgrade and a royal decree issued at Cetinje. Milan III became King of Serbia and of Montenegro. The Montenegrin crown was kept as a separate crown, held by the same sovereign, and Montenegro kept its own assembly and government under the federal arrangements described below.

The Montenegrin assembly was not asked to vote. The court at Cetinje held that a dynastic settlement was a matter for the dynasty; the government in Belgrade held that a vote might be lost and that the union was worth more than the vote. The decision was taken knowingly, and the federal kingdom has been governed ever since under a founding instrument that one of its two original peoples never approved. That Montenegro is content with the result has not made the method any better, and the failing is recorded below.

Aleksandar II and the long quiet, 1974 to 1991

Milan III died in 1974, after a reign that began in the year of his father’s death and spanned the coups, the neutrality, the legion, the purge, the suffrage and the union. Aleksandar II succeeded him.

The first decade of the new reign was the most prosperous the country had known. The railway from Belgrade to Bar opened in 1976, through the mountains of the Sandžak and down to the Montenegrin coast, the largest work of the union and the one that gave Serbia, for the first time in its history, its own way to the sea. Bar was joined to the interior, the coast at Bar and Ulcinj became a resort, and the King, who had grown up with a capital on a frontier and no coast at all, opened the line himself and rode it to the end.

Kosovo was the exception to the quiet, and had been since 1913. The province taken in the Balkan Wars was overwhelmingly Albanian, and the kingdom governed it as conquered ground. Colonists from Serbia and Montenegro were settled on Albanian land in two waves, between the wars and again after 1945, with grants, tax remissions and the protection of the gendarmerie. Albanians were pressed to leave for the Ottoman lands, by agreements with Constantinople in the 1930s and by administrative pressure for decades afterwards, and tens of thousands went. Albanian schooling was refused: the state ran no school in the language, licensed none, and allowed no university teaching in it at all. The province was policed rather than governed, its local offices held by Serbs, and its Albanian majority had the vote and no representation it recognised as its own.

By the late 1980s the demand among Kosovo’s Albanians had settled on one thing, a referendum on the province’s future, and the demand was supported, cautiously, by the Albanian deputies in the Assembly and by the Social Democrats. It was opposed by the Radicals, by most of the Serbs of the province and above all by the garrison at Priština, whose officers were very largely the sons of the colonist families. In 1991, when the parties failed to form a government after an election that left no majority, the Assembly accepted as Prime Minister Radomir Kostić, a non-party administrator recommended by the general staff, on the understanding that he would keep the province quiet while the parties settled their differences. He did not keep it quiet.

The Kosovo War, 1992 to 1995

The war began with a mutiny. In the spring of 1992, after Albanian deputies tabled a bill for a referendum and the Social Democrats announced that they would support its second reading, the officer corps of the Priština garrison mutinied against the government in Belgrade. They seized the garrison’s arms, closed the roads into the province and issued a declaration that Kosovo was Serbian land and would not be put to a vote.

Prince Mihailo, the King’s son and heir, born in 1968, was a serving officer in the garrison. On the night the mutiny was planned he was told what his fellow officers intended and asked to join them. He refused, and said he would report it. He was shot that night, in the garrison, by officers of his own regiment. The garrison announced the next morning that the Crown Prince had been killed by Albanian insurgents, and for more than a year that was the official account.

The army then made war in Kosovo and the Sandžak over the ministry’s head. The general staff, which had recommended Kostić, did not repudiate the mutiny; it absorbed it. Units from Niš and Kraljevo were sent into the province on orders the government had not given, and the operation that followed, presented as the restoration of order, was a campaign against the Albanian population of Kosovo and the Muslim population of the Sandžak: villages burned, men detained in camps, families driven across the borders into Albania, into Macedonia and north into the Bosnian districts of Austria-Hungary. The Roma of Kosovo were driven out with them, and lost more in proportion than any other community in the province.

Kostić covered it up. He told the Assembly that the army was restoring order after a mutiny of a few officers, that the mutineers were under arrest, that there were no camps and that the refugees were fleeing the insurgents. Each statement was false, and he knew it. He suppressed the army’s own casualty returns, withheld the reports of the provincial police, and put the Crown Prince’s death before the Assembly in the garrison’s version.

The King spoke in 1993. He had learned the truth of his son’s death from an officer who had been in the garrison that night and had deserted to tell him. On a sitting day in the autumn he came to the Assembly, which a king of Serbia had not addressed in person since the union, and spoke for less than five minutes.

The speech broke the ministry. Kostić lost the confidence of the Assembly within the week and resigned, and a coalition of the Progressives and the Social Democrats took office. It did not end the war. The new government could dismiss the Prime Minister but not the general staff, which ignored its orders as it had ignored his, and through 1994 the fighting continued in the hills of Drenica and the valleys of the Sandžak while the new ministry tried, and failed, to bring the army back under its command. In the winter of 1994 it asked the League of Nations for help.

In 1995 a League force entered Kosovo, drawn from the German Empire, Britain, the Realm, the Nordic states, Ireland and Romania, with the Atlantic Treaty Organization coordinating its operations. Air cover was flown by Britain and the Realm and struck only army positions in Kosovo; nothing in Serbia proper or in Montenegro was hit. The mutinous units withdrew or surrendered within weeks, the general staff accepted the League’s terms, and the fighting ended in the autumn of 1995 without the massacre on the largest scale that had been feared.

More than ten thousand people were killed, most of them Albanian civilians, and the figure is disputed at its edges by every party to it. Hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes. The Sandžak’s Bosniaks were driven out to Illyria’s Bosnia and further, many of them to the Realm, where St Louis took the largest community. The war is called the Kosovo War, although it was fought in the Sandžak as well, because that is where it began and what it was about.

The Ohrid Settlement and after, 1995 to 2011

The war was ended by the Ohrid Settlement, signed in the autumn of 1995 at Ohrid in Macedonia, a neutral country with good relations with every party and a lakeside town far enough from Belgrade and Priština for both delegations to accept. It had six principal terms:

• Kosovo became a third federal unit of the kingdom, beside Serbia and Montenegro, with its own assembly and government.
• Albanian became an official language in Kosovo.
• The patriarchate at Peć, the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and the province’s monasteries were guaranteed their property, their access and their protection.
• The Bosniaks of the Sandžak were given minority rights in schooling, language and local office, and a right of return.
• A referendum on Kosovo’s future was promised “after a generation”, a phrase both delegations could sign because neither had to say what it meant. The League later fixed it at thirty-four years, placing the vote in April 2029.
• A League commissioner was installed at Priština to supervise the settlement until the vote.

The trials followed. A League tribunal was established at The Hague for crimes committed in the war. Radomir Kostić was tried for his part in concealing them and sentenced to life imprisonment; he died in prison in 2004. Every one of the generals who led the mutiny was convicted. The officers who shot Prince Mihailo were identified at the tribunal, and two of them were among those convicted.

The Realm’s part in the trials is the source of its difficulty with Belgrade. Several of the tribunal’s principal witnesses were soldiers who had deserted their units to give evidence, and Belgrade sought their return to stand trial for desertion. The Realm resettled the protected witnesses in St Louis and Burlington and refused every extradition request, and successive Serbian governments, including governments that accepted the tribunal’s verdicts, have treated the refusals as an affront to Serbian courts. The Realm’s view is that it was protecting the evidence that convicted the men who started the war. Neither government has changed its position.

About half the Sandžak’s exiles came home in the decade after the settlement, most of them from Illyria’s Bosnia, some from St Louis. Kosovo was rebuilt with League money and German loans, and the colonist settlements, which had emptied in the war, were not resettled.

The death penalty was abolished in 2002, as a condition of a loan from the Mitteleuropa development bank. No sentence had been carried out since the 1960s, and the generals convicted at The Hague were beyond its reach in any case, but the abolition was resisted by the Radicals and passed without enthusiasm, and Serbia is one of the few states in Europe that abolished capital punishment because a bank asked it to.

Conscription ended in 2005. The army that replaced it is small and professional, and every officer swears an oath to the constitution and the civil government that was written after the war and is read aloud at every commissioning.

The present century

The succession was the first business of the new century. Prince Mihailo had died unmarried and without children, and the King’s surviving child was a daughter, Princess Natalija, born in 1972. The Obrenović succession had always passed through men. In 2011 the Assembly passed a succession law permitting descent through daughters, over the opposition of the Radicals, who argued that the dynasty was being changed by statute to suit one family’s circumstances, which was true. Prince Milan, the King’s grandson, was born in the summer of the same year. By the same law he carries the Obrenović name.

In 2027 the kingdom joined the European Concert at its foundation, one of its seventeen seats and, by common consent, the quietest. Its harvest labour in Germany moved on permits as before, and its old quarrel with Vienna over the Serbs of the Banat and the Bosnian districts moved into the Concert’s procedures.

The general election of spring 2027 gave the Progressives a narrow majority in the Assembly after a large swing from the Radicals. Vesna Ilić became Prime Minister. Because the Progressives lack a majority in the Senate, where each federal unit has ten seats, they govern in coalition with the Albanian Union, whose senators from Kosovo make the difference.

When the Russian monarchy was restored, on 25 October 2028, Belgrade sent a short message of congratulation. The King is a cousin of the new Emperor, Paul II, through his mother, and the message was signed by the King and drafted by the ministry, and said nothing that a message to any other state would not have said. Relations with Russia have been cold since 1922 and the message did not change them.

The King, born in 1947, is frail, and a regency has been openly discussed. Under the succession law Princess Natalija would act as regent if her father died before Prince Milan comes of age in the summer of 2029, which falls after Kosovo’s referendum, due in April 2029. The possibility that the vote will be held under a regency, with a sovereign of seventeen, is part of the arithmetic of the campaign.

The federation

The three units

The kingdom is a federation of three units: Serbia, Montenegro and, since the Ohrid Settlement, Kosovo. Each has its own premier and its own assembly, and each governs its own schools, police, local government, health administration and roads. The federal government in Belgrade holds foreign affairs, defence, the currency, the customs, the railways and the Danube, and the common budget that pays for them.

The arrangement grew in two stages and shows it. The federation of 1968 was written for two units, one of them twelve times the size of the other, and its provisions for Montenegro were drafted as guarantees to a small kingdom rather than as a model for anyone else. The settlement of 1995 added a third unit on the same pattern because the pattern existed, and Kosovo’s government therefore holds, with some modifications made at Ohrid, the powers that were designed in 1968 to reassure Cetinje.

Serbia, the largest unit by far, has its own premier and assembly at Belgrade alongside the federal ones. The duplication is constant and is criticised constantly: two assemblies sit in the same city, and much of what the Serbian unit does could be done by the federal government without anyone noticing. It exists because Montenegro and Kosovo would not accept a federation in which the largest unit was governed by the federal government and the smaller ones by themselves.

The Senate

The federal parliament has two chambers. The National Assembly of 250 members is elected from single-member districts across the kingdom and gives the government its majority. The Senate has thirty members, ten from each unit, elected in each unit for a fixed term, and must pass every federal law.

The equality of the Senate is the federation’s central guarantee and its central difficulty. Montenegro, with well under a tenth of the kingdom’s people, has as many senators as Serbia, and Kosovo, with about a quarter, has the same. A government with a large majority in the Assembly can therefore be stopped in the Senate by the smaller units together, and the present government governs in coalition with the Albanian Union for exactly that reason, although it does not need it in the Assembly. Serbian politicians of every party complain that the Senate overweights the smaller units, and none has proposed to change it, because changing it would require the consent of the units it overweights.

Montenegro

Montenegro is governed from Podgorica, which has been its capital since the 1940s, when the government moved down from the old royal town for the sake of the roads. Its premier is Andrija Vukotić, of the Montenegrin People’s Party.

The Ban of Montenegro, the King’s representative in the unit, sits at Cetinje, in the old royal palace, which is the only office of state still in the town. The Ban is appointed by the King on the advice of the Montenegrin premier, opens the Montenegrin assembly, gives the royal assent to its laws and represents the Montenegrin crown on the occasions when the King cannot. The office is ceremonial in practice and is valued in Montenegro precisely because it is: it means that the crown of the Petrović-Njegoš still has a residence in the place it was worn.

Montenegrin is recognised as a language of the federation, a recognition made at the request of the Montenegrin assembly and resisted by Serbian linguists, who regard it as a dialect with a flag. It is taught in Montenegro’s schools and used in its courts and assembly, and federal documents are issued in it on request.

Montenegro is content with the union. There is a small party that would leave, and it polls poorly; the coast and its revenues, the railway and the federal budget, and the presence of a Montenegrin queen on the throne have kept the arrangement popular in a unit that was never asked whether it wanted it. The contentment is real, and it does not alter how the union was made.

Kosovo before the vote

Kosovo is governed from Priština. Its premier is Arta Krasniqi, of the Albanian Union, which governs the unit and sits in the federal coalition. Albanian has been an official language in the unit since 1995, alongside Serbian.

Kosovo has no Ban. The Ohrid Settlement placed a League commissioner at Priština in the place where the King’s representative would otherwise sit, to supervise the settlement until the vote. The commissioner is an Irish diplomat, the fourth to hold the post, and the office will lapse when the referendum has been held and its result implemented.

The referendum is due in April 2029. Its question offers two choices: that Kosovo remain a federal unit of the kingdom, or that it become independent. The terms were agreed by the federal government, the Kosovo assembly and the League after two years of negotiation, and the result is to be binding on all three.

The campaign to stay leads. The Albanian Union, which governs Kosovo and sits in the federal government, supports staying, on the ground that thirty-four years of self-government inside the federation have given Kosovo more than independence would; the independence campaign is led by younger parties outside the coalition and by much of the diaspora. The polls have favoured staying for most of the campaign, by margins that have narrowed and widened without settling anything.

Kosovo’s Serbs have threatened a boycott, arguing that a vote in which they are a small minority cannot decide the fate of the province where their church was founded. The church has asked them to vote. The patriarchate at Peć is guaranteed by the Ohrid Settlement whatever the result, and the patriarch has said publicly that a boycott would leave the province’s Serbs without a voice in the outcome and the church without the votes of its own people. What would become of the guarantee in an independent Kosovo, beyond the terms of the settlement, has not been decided by anyone.

The Crown

The house

The sovereigns are of the House of Obrenović, descended from Miloš Obrenović, who led the Second Rising of 1815 and became the first prince of autonomous Serbia. It is the only Serbian dynasty to have held the throne since 1858, and the only one to have survived an attempt to remove it by force: the night of 10 to 11 June 1903, when the palace held, is the house’s founding modern date, and the dynasty has kept 11 June as a private day of thanksgiving ever since.

Since 2011 the succession passes through daughters where there are no sons, by a statute passed for the present King’s grandson. Prince Milan, born in 2011 to the King’s daughter, carries the Obrenović name by the same law, so that the house continues under its name through a female line. The Radicals opposed the law and have not repealed it.

The reigns

• Miloš, prince 1815 to 1839, and again 1858 to 1860.
• Milan, his elder son, for a few weeks in 1839.
• Mihailo, 1839 to 1842, and again 1860 to 1868, assassinated in 1868.
• Milan, prince from 1868 and king from 1882, abdicated in 1889.
• Alexander I, 1889 to 1934.
• Milan III, 1934 to 1974, King of Serbia and, from 1968, of Montenegro.
• Aleksandar II, since 1974.

The gap between Mihailo’s two reigns was filled by Prince Alexander Karađorđević, from 1842 to 1858, the only ruler of the other house after its founder.

The veto

The King has a real veto. Under the constitution he may refuse assent to any federal law, and a refused bill falls; it can be introduced again only in a new session. The power has never been surrendered by convention, as similar powers have been elsewhere, and Aleksandar II uses it constantly, on small bills: licensing regulations, the boundaries of municipalities, the opening dates of hunting seasons, the naming of streets. He has not used it on a budget, a treaty or anything a government has treated as a question of confidence.

Nobody minds. Governments of every party have accepted the refusals without complaint, the Assembly has generally reintroduced the bills in amended form, and the press reports a royal veto with the interest it gives to a rained-off football match. The practice is the most unusual feature of the Serbian constitution to foreign observers and the least remarked within it, and constitutional writers in Belgrade describe it as a power kept alive by being used for nothing that matters.

The royal family

Queen Ksenija, born a Petrović-Njegoš, is the last of the Montenegrin royal house and the King’s wife since 1966. She is more loved than the King, in both units, by every measure the newspapers have tried. Her patronage of the Montenegrin coast, the Bosniak returnees and the children’s hospitals of Belgrade is the most visible royal work in the kingdom, and since the King’s health declined she has carried most of his public duties.

Princess Natalija, the King’s daughter, born in 1972, is a paediatrician at a Belgrade children’s hospital and has continued to practise since becoming the mother of the heir. She is married to Prince Nicolae, a cousin of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen house that reigns in the United Principalities and an architect by profession, whose practice in Belgrade designs schools. The marriage renewed a connection with the Principalities that began with Alexander I’s second queen, Elisabeth, in 1913.

Prince Milan, their son, born in 2011, is the heir, and is still at school in Belgrade.

Princess Tatiana of the Konstantinovichi, the King’s mother, died in 2011. Through her the King is a cousin of Paul II, whose restoration to the Russian throne on 25 October 2028 made Belgrade the only court in the Balkans with a Romanov in its own family tree. The kinship has not warmed relations with Russia, which have been cold since 1922, and the court has been careful not to suggest that it might.

The regency question

The King is frail, and the succession law provides that if he dies before Prince Milan comes of age, Princess Natalija acts as regent until her son turns eighteen, in the summer of 2029. The provision has never been used. Its timing has made it a political question: Kosovo’s referendum is due in April 2029, and a regency would place the vote, its result and its implementation in the hands of a regent and a sovereign of seventeen. The government has said that nothing in the referendum depends on the Crown. The Radicals have said that everything in the kingdom does. The question is unresolved, and depends on events no one can schedule.

Politics

The parties

Serbian politics is older than the kingdom’s present shape, and its parties were formed for a smaller country. Two of them date from the 1880s and still sit in the Assembly under their founding names.

The Radicals were founded in 1881, the year of the Secret Convention with Vienna, as the party of the peasant smallholder against the court, the officials and the Austrian connection. They spent the reigns of Milan and Alexander I in opposition or in uneasy office, and they have never lost the habit of treating the Crown as a party to be argued with. They are strongest in the Šumadija villages and the small towns of the south. They blocked women’s suffrage until 1963, alongside the Peasant Party, and they fought the succession law of 2011, which let the throne pass through a daughter, on the ground that it had been drafted for one family’s convenience and passed in one session. They are the natural home of the nation’s quarrel with Vienna and of the argument that the court gave away too much in 1920.

The Progressives are the Obrenović party, founded in the 1880s as the party of the court, the Austrian connection and the modernising official. They have been the party of government for most of the kingdom’s history, and the Crown’s closeness to Vienna and to the German Empire has always been, in practice, a Progressive policy. They are urban, commercial and bureaucratic, strongest in Belgrade and the north, and they accepted the Concert, the Mitteleuropa bank’s conditions and the Ohrid Settlement with less complaint than anyone else.

The Social Democrats grew out of the trade unions of Belgrade, Kragujevac and the Bor copper field and are the party of the industrial towns. The Peasant Party split from the Radicals between the wars and holds the poorer upland districts; it is socially conservative and economically cooperative. The Greens hold seats in Belgrade and Niš and campaign chiefly on the Danube, the copper smelters and the coal stations.

Two parties exist because the federation does. The Albanian Union was founded in Priština after the Ohrid Settlement and holds most of Kosovo’s seats in the Assembly and almost all of its ten seats in the Senate. The Montenegrin People’s Party sits in the Assembly at Podgorica and in the Senate, and argues for the unit’s privileges inside the union rather than against the union itself; Montenegro is content with the arrangement, and its largest party is the proof of it.

Elections to the National Assembly are held in 250 single-member districts, first past the post, which favours the large parties and the regions where each is dominant. The Senate has thirty members, ten for each federal unit, chosen by the unit’s own electorate, and it must pass every federal law.

The present government

The general election of spring 2027 produced a large swing to the Progressives, who won a narrow majority of the Assembly. Vesna Ilić became Prime Minister. A majority in the Assembly is not a majority in the Senate, where Kosovo’s ten senators decide most close votes, and the Progressives therefore govern in coalition with the Albanian Union, which holds two ministries and the chairmanship of the Senate’s committee on the federation.

The arrangement serves both parties and both are open about it. The Progressives need the Senate. The Albanian Union, whose leadership wants Kosovo to remain a federal unit, wants Kosovo inside the federal government during the campaign before the referendum due in April 2029, as evidence that the union can be governed from Priština as well as from Belgrade. The Radicals call it a government bought with a referendum; the independence campaign in Kosovo calls it the same thing in the opposite sense.

The units have their own governments. Andrija Vukotić is premier of Montenegro, at Podgorica. Arta Krasniqi is premier of Kosovo, at Priština. The premier of Serbia proper governs from Belgrade under the federal government’s eye, which is the least prestigious office in the country and the one most often held by a future Prime Minister.

The press

The press was censored from the first coup until 1945, by each government in turn and most heavily by the governments the June Officers installed. The old Belgrade dailies survived by printing what they were allowed and keeping their files of what they were not, and several of them published those files in the years after the war.

Since 1945 the press has been free in law. In practice it is small, poor and owned by people with other interests, and it is divided by alphabet as much as by politics: the oldest dailies print in Cyrillic, the commercial papers in Latin, and the Albanian press of Kosovo, legal since 1995, in Albanian. The public broadcaster carries programmes in Serbian, Montenegrin and Albanian, and its coverage of the Kosovo War, in which it reported what the ministry told it, is the subject of its own published inquiry. Its handling of the referendum campaign is the most closely watched thing it does.

Economy

Serbia and Montenegro is a poor country in a rich union. Its economy produces about A£112 billion a year, about A£15,000 a head, the second lowest in the European Concert, and its politics is largely an argument about how to close the gap without sending the whole of the next generation to Germany.

The land

Agriculture was the economy until the middle of the last century and remains its largest employer outside the towns. The Morava valley and the Šumadija hills grow maize, wheat and vegetables, and the hill country grows fruit, above all plums. The plum is the national crop and the national drink: most of it is distilled into rakija, in licensed distilleries and in a great many unlicensed household stills that the state taxes only in principle. Raspberries, grown on smallholdings in the west, are the most valuable export the countryside has.

The countryside is a country of smallholders, as it has been since the land was divided after the Ottoman departure. The plots are small, the farmers old and the young in Belgrade or Germany. The Peasant Party’s cooperatives run the mills and the cold stores of the upland districts, and the Concert’s agricultural money, since 2027, is the largest single transfer the villages have ever received.

Montenegro’s land is mountain pasture and stony karst, good for sheep, goats and the smoked ham of Njeguši, which carries a protected name in the Concert’s market and is exported in quantities that surprise anyone who has seen the village.

Copper and power

Copper at Bor, in the east, is the oldest heavy industry in the country. The mine was opened by foreign capital early in the last century and has been in Serbian hands since the 1940s; it is among the largest copper workings in Europe, and its smelter has made Bor the most polluted town in the kingdom. The Greens’ campaign against it, and the Social Democrats’ defence of the jobs it provides, are the oldest local argument in national politics.

The Danube dam at the gorge, built with Romania from 1964 to 1972, is the largest thing either country has built and supplies a large share of the kingdom’s electricity. Its upkeep is now part-funded by the Concert’s eastern agency. The rest of the power comes from lignite stations in the Kolubara basin, which the Concert’s climate rules will close and which nobody has yet agreed how to replace.

Kragujevac

Kragujevac was the first capital of the Obrenović principality and the site of its cannon foundry, opened in the 1850s, and it has been the arsenal of the country ever since. The arms works makes small arms and artillery ammunition, sells most of its output abroad under export rules set by the Concert, and was the industry the June Officers protected in every government they made.

The town also builds cars. A Serbian works has built them under licence from the Brunswick Motor Works since the 1950s, in a Mitteleuropa arrangement that gave Brunswick a cheap assembly plant and Serbia an industry; the licence, renewed in each decade, is the single largest private employment contract in the kingdom. The cars are sold in the Balkans and in the poorer half of the Concert, and their reputation is for being cheap, mended easily and kept for a very long time.

Work abroad and the harvests

The largest Serbian industry is work done elsewhere. Every year tens of thousands of Serbian and Montenegrin workers go to the harvests in the German Empire and Bavaria, on seasonal permits under the old bilateral agreements, because the Concert’s free movement of ordinary labour does not begin until 2030. Many more work in German factories and on German building sites on longer permits, and a great many have not come back.

Remittances keep whole districts of the south solvent. Emigration is high, mostly to Germany, and the free movement due in 2030 is feared rather than welcomed in Belgrade: every government since accession has said it will be the end of the countryside, and none has proposed anything that would stop it.

Modern growth

The fastest-growing part of the economy is software, concentrated in Belgrade and Niš, where the universities produce more engineers than the domestic economy can employ and foreign firms have come to employ them where they live. Wages in the sector are three times the national average, which makes it the one reason a Serbian graduate can earn a German salary without moving to Germany.

Tourism has grown on the Montenegrin coast at Bar and Ulcinj, the only coast the federation has, since the Bay of Kotor is Illyrian; on the ski slopes of Kopaonik; in Belgrade, whose river rafts, moored bars and clubs on the Sava and the Danube, open until morning, have become the city’s reputation abroad; and at the monasteries of the south.

Infrastructure

The Orient line through Belgrade and Niš to Constantinople is the railway the country was built along, and it still carries most of the freight. The Belgrade to Bar line, finished in 1976 through some of the hardest country in Europe, gave the federation a railway to its own sea and is the most admired engineering work the kingdom has.

The roads are poor outside the motorway between Belgrade and Niš. The port of Bar handles the federation’s sea trade. Belgrade’s airport, the country’s only large one, is named for Nikola Tesla.

Society

Population

The kingdom has about 7.5 million people. Belgrade has about 1.5 million, and Niš, Kragujevac, Podgorica and Priština are the next cities, none of them a fifth its size.

Serbs are the large majority. Albanians, almost all of them in Kosovo, are the largest minority, and Montenegrins, who are counted separately at their own request since federal recognition of their language, the next. Bosniaks live in the Sandžak around Novi Pazar, a population that was driven out in large part during the Kosovo War and about half of which has come home. Roma live throughout the country and are the subject of the Failings below. Vlachs live along the Danube in the east, and there are small communities of Bulgarians, Romanians and Greeks.

The population is ageing and falling. The birth rate is low, the young emigrate, and the villages of the south and east are emptying faster than anywhere else in the Concert outside the Iberian interior.

Religion

The Serbian Orthodox Church is established, and its patriarch sits at Peć, in Kosovo, in the patriarchate that was the seat of the Serbian church in the Middle Ages and was restored there in the last century. Its position in a unit that may vote to leave the federation is protected by the Ohrid Settlement, which guarantees the patriarchate, its monasteries and the access of pilgrims, and says nothing about what follows if Kosovo leaves. The church has asked Kosovo’s Serbs to vote in the referendum rather than boycott it.

About 75 per cent of the population is Orthodox and about 20 per cent Muslim, nearly all of them Albanians in Kosovo and Bosniaks in the Sandžak. The Islamic Community has its own recognised hierarchy. There are Catholic Albanians in Kosovo and a small Catholic population elsewhere, and a Jewish community in Belgrade, described below.

Establishment carries money for the church, chaplains in the army, the Orthodox calendar as the calendar of the state’s holidays and the patriarch’s presence at the King’s oath. It does not carry a religious test for any office, and the Albanian Union’s ministers take their oath on whatever they choose.

Languages and alphabets

Serbian is the language of the federation. Since Vuk Karadžić’s reform of the nineteenth century it is written as it is spoken, and it is written in two alphabets: Cyrillic and Latin are equal in law, every federal instrument is published in both, and the choice between them in daily life is a matter of habit, age and politics. Government signage uses both; most newspapers choose one.

Montenegrin has been recognised federally, as a language of the union and not merely of the unit, since a long argument at Podgorica that the Montenegrin People’s Party won. Albanian has been an official language in Kosovo since 1995, by the Ohrid Settlement, after eighty years in which the state refused it schooling.

Education and health

The University of Belgrade, which dates its foundation to the High School of 1808, is the oldest and largest. There are universities at Niš, Kragujevac, Podgorica and Priština, the last teaching in Albanian and Serbian since 1995. Schools are free and compulsory to sixteen, the curriculum is set federally, and Kosovo and Montenegro teach their own languages and histories alongside it.

Health care is a national insurance scheme that covers everyone in law and works best in the towns. Doctors and nurses emigrate to Germany in numbers that empty the rural clinics, and the government’s attempts to oblige newly qualified doctors to serve in the south have been resisted by the profession and by the Concert’s rules on movement.

The Jews of Belgrade

Belgrade’s Jewish community is old, mostly Sephardic, and settled for centuries in the Dorćol quarter by the river. It survived the Second Great War whole. Serbia was neutral until 1943 and never in an enemy’s reach, and in the war years some thousands of refugees from fascist France came through Belgrade, many of them Jews, on their way to the Monarchy or staying.

The community grew with them. Belgrade remembers the refugees with pride and the record of their reception with less: they were admitted slowly, under rules that required papers many did not have, and some were sent on when they might have stayed. The community today is small, prosperous and old, with its synagogue, its schools and a museum of its own history that does not leave out the paperwork.

The diaspora

The largest Serbian diaspora is in the German Empire, where several hundred thousand people of Serbian and Montenegrin birth live and work.

In the Realm there are about 250,000 Serbian-Americans, the descendants of a migration that began in the nineteenth century: miners in Butte, Montana, steelworkers in Chicago and Pittsburgh, and the earlier settlers of California in the gold rush years, who kept churches and benevolent societies that still exist. There are also about 40,000 Bosniaks from the Sandžak, most of them in St Louis, Missouri, who came as refugees during the Kosovo War, and some of whom have since gone home.

Culture

Literature

The literature of the country begins with Dositej Obradović, the eighteenth-century monk who left the monastery for the Enlightenment and wrote in the language people spoke, and with Vuk Karadžić, who collected the oral epics, reformed the alphabet and wrote the dictionary, and whose reform is the reason the language is written as it sounds.

Njegoš, prince-bishop of Montenegro in the nineteenth century, is the national poet of both halves of the federation, and his long verse drama of Montenegro’s struggle against the Ottomans is read in every school and quoted by every politician, often against one another. He is buried on Mount Lovćen, in the small chapel he built for himself, which has never been replaced by a larger monument, a decision Cetinje defends against every proposal to improve on it.

Ivo Andrić, the novelist of Bosnia and of its bridges, was born in Bosnia, a subject of the Monarchy, wrote in Serbian and is claimed by Illyria too; both countries teach him, and the argument about him is conducted with more courtesy than most arguments between Belgrade and Zagreb. Miloš Crnjanski, the modernist poet and novelist of migration, is Serbian without dispute.

Art and building

Paja Jovanović painted the large historical canvases of the nation’s past that hang in its public buildings, and Nadežda Petrović, an expressionist of the first rank, painted the Serbian countryside in a way nobody had before her; she is on the 200-dinar note.

The buildings people know are the fortress at the confluence above Belgrade, looking across the rivers to Zemun and the Monarchy; the Old Palace of the Obrenović, where the coup of 1903 failed; the medieval monasteries of Studenica, Dečani and the Patriarchate at Peć, the last two in Kosovo; and the monastery at Cetinje, the old seat of Montenegro’s prince-bishops.

Music

Two musics divide the country and each has its partisans. The brass bands of the Morava valley are celebrated every summer at the festival at Guča, which draws hundreds of thousands of people to a village for a week of trumpets, roasting pigs and very little sleep. Turbo-folk, a loud electronic pop built on folk melodies, fills the clubs and the wedding halls and is argued over in the papers as a symptom of whatever the writer most dislikes about the country. Most people listen to both.

Science

Nikola Tesla is a Serbian national hero, though he was born in the Lika, a subject of the Monarchy, and spent his working life in the Realm. Belgrade’s airport is named for him, he is on the 100-dinar note, and his ashes are kept in a museum in Belgrade, which Illyria has asked, more than once, to share. The dispute with Illyria over which country he belongs to is standing, cheerful and unresolved.

Mihajlo Pupin, born in the Banat, went to King’s College in New York and became one of its most distinguished physicists, and he left money to the schools of his home village and to Serbian students. Milutin Milanković, who worked out the astronomical cycles of the ice ages, taught at Belgrade for most of his career.

Sport

Football is the national sport. Its great Belgrade rivalry is BSK against Jugoslavija, which began in 1913 and has been played ever since; the second club’s name, taken from the South Slav idea of its founders’ generation, has outlived the idea by a century.

Basketball is followed almost as closely and is where the country does best internationally. The water polo side is among the strongest in the world, volleyball is played to a high standard by men and women, and tennis has produced champions of world rank who are among the best-known Serbs abroad.

Food

The food is the food of the Balkans and the Ottoman inheritance: ćevapi, small grilled sausages of minced meat; kajmak, the soured cream eaten with almost everything; ajvar, a relish of roasted peppers made in every household each autumn; sarma, cabbage leaves stuffed with meat and rice; burek, layered pastry eaten for breakfast; and from Montenegro, Njeguši ham and cheese. The plum appears as brandy, as jam and as dumplings, and coffee is taken in the Turkish way.

Defence and foreign relations

Defence

The army is small and professional. Conscription ended in 2005, and every officer and soldier takes an oath to the constitution and the civil power, written in the knowledge of what the army did in 1903, in the coups between the wars and in 1992. The oath is read aloud at every passing-out, and the reading includes the date of the Priština mutiny.

Serbia has never belonged to the Atlantic Treaty Organization. Its security has rested since 1919 on the German guarantee that came with Mitteleuropa, and since 2027 on membership of the Concert. The army’s tasks are territorial defence, disaster relief and contributions to League missions, the last a deliberate policy since 1995 of serving under the authority that once came into Kosovo.

Austria-Hungary and Illyria

The relationship with Austria-Hungary is close at court and quarrelsome in the Assembly, and both halves are true at once.

The Obrenović have looked to Vienna since the Secret Convention of 1881, and the court’s closeness to the Habsburgs has survived two wars, the making of Illyria and the Kosovo War. The King’s visits to Vienna are frequent and private, and the court accepted the Illyrian settlement of 1920 at once.

The nation did not. Its grievance about the Serbs of the Banat and of Bosnia, who live under the Illyrian crown, has been the subject of every Radical election campaign for a century and is now pursued through the procedures of the Concert, where Belgrade raises it at the Council and Vienna answers it by statute. In Vienna Serbia is called the monarchy’s most difficult neighbour, and the difficulty is the Assembly’s, not the court’s.

Illyria itself is the neighbour Serbs cross into daily. The border on the Sava, at Belgrade, is open, and tens of thousands commute between Belgrade and Zemun. Illyria’s Serbs look toward Belgrade without much urgency and vote in Illyrian elections. The two countries share Andrić, argue about Tesla and trade more with each other than either does with anyone but Germany.

Germany and Mitteleuropa

The German Empire is the largest trading partner, the largest lender and the destination of most emigrants, and the relationship is resented and needed in equal measure.

Serbia entered Mitteleuropa in 1919, when it gave up Macedonia under German pressure in return for loans, and it has been inside the German system of trade agreements, development finance and technical standards ever since. German pressure brought it into the Second Great War in 1943. A condition of the Mitteleuropa bank ended the death penalty in 2002. The word Mitteleuropa is used in Belgrade with embarrassment, and the money is used without it.

Serbia is outside the exchange-rate mechanism anchored on the mark and keeps the dinar, which floats and falls.

Romania

The United Principalities of Romania are the kingdom’s closest friend, and the friendship is old and dynastic as well as political. Alexander I’s second queen, Elisabeth, was a princess of the Principalities, and the King’s son-in-law, Prince Nicolae, is a Hohenzollern cousin of the same house. The two countries built the Danube dam at the gorge together and run it together, share an irritation at Hungarian policy, and vote together in the Concert more often than either votes with anyone else.

The Byzantine Federation, Albania and Macedonia

Relations with the Byzantine Federation to the south are friendly: Orthodox kinship with the Greek realm, a shared railway to Constantinople and no dispute of any substance.

Relations with Albania have been friendly since 1995, when Tirana accepted the Ohrid Settlement and its promise of a vote rather than pressing a claim, and the two governments have kept out of each other’s campaigns since. Macedonia, which Serbia held from 1913 to 1919 and gave up for German loans, is a friend; the settlement that ended the Kosovo War was signed at its lakeside town of Ohrid, and Macedonia’s role as host is remembered in Belgrade with gratitude.

Russia

Relations with the Russian Republic have been cold since 1922, when the Romanov exiles of the cadet branches came to Belgrade after Kolchak’s coup and the court received them. The King’s mother, Princess Tatiana, was born in that exile, and the King is a distant cousin of the restored dynasty. When the Romanovs were restored on 25 October 2028, Belgrade sent a short message of congratulation, and has said nothing since.

The Realm

Relations with the United Kingdom of America have been uneasy since the 1990s. The Realm flew the air cover over Kosovo in 1995 with Britain, took in the Sandžak refugees, resettled protected witnesses against the generals and the Prime Minister in St Louis and Burlington, and refused Belgrade’s extradition requests for them in the years after the war. Belgrade has never forgiven the last of these, though it is not now pressing them.

Trade is small: copper and software one way, aircraft and medicines the other. The Serbian-American community is old and loyal to both countries, and the Sandžak community in St Louis is loyal chiefly to the Realm.

The Concert

Serbia joined the European Concert in 2027, holds thirteen seats in its Parliament and is its quietest member. It receives cohesion money for the south and the Danube, waits for the free movement of labour in 2030 with mixed feelings, and uses the Concert’s procedures for its quarrel with Vienna, which is the most visible thing it does there.

In the League of Nations it is a member in good standing whose most important relationship with the League is the commissioner at Priština.

Failings

The Kosovo War. Between 1992 and 1995 the army of the kingdom made war on the Albanians of Kosovo and the Bosniaks of the Sandžak, killed more than ten thousand people, drove tens of thousands from their homes and drove the Roma of Kosovo out with them. The Prime Minister concealed it from the Assembly. The killing was ended by a League force and not by any institution of the kingdom. The Prime Minister and the generals were convicted at The Hague, and few below them were ever tried.

Kosovo from 1913 to 1990. The war did not begin the injury. From the conquest of 1913 the state settled colonists on Albanian land, encouraged and at times organised the departure of Albanians to the Ottoman lands, refused Albanian children schooling in their own language and governed the province by police. The officers who mutinied in 1992 were the sons of the colonists.

The coups and the June Officers. The officers who failed in 1903 were freed by 1910, formed a society, and between the wars made three coups, in 1923, 1926 and 1932, imposing governments the Assembly had not chosen and the King accepted. Their society was dissolved only in 1946, and its officers were pensioned off rather than tried. The army’s habit of acting over the heads of ministers was never broken by any law, and in 1992 it acted again.

The Roma. Roma live in unregistered settlements on the edges of every town, without title, water or the attention of the state, and their children are taught in segregated schools that the state denies are segregated. In the Kosovo War the Roma of Kosovo were driven out, and most have not come back.

Montenegro’s union. The crowns of Serbia and Montenegro were joined by marriage and the union was made by a statute of the Belgrade Assembly in 1968. Nobody asked Cetinje. No vote was held in Montenegro, then or since, and the union’s legitimacy rests on Montenegro’s evident contentment with it, which is real and is not the same thing as consent.

The press. From the first coup until 1945 the press was censored by every government, papers were closed and editors imprisoned, and the country’s political argument was conducted for a generation in rumour and in the coffee houses. The public broadcaster then repeated the ministry’s account of the Kosovo War without question.

Symbols

The flag is the Serbian red, blue and white tricolour within a red-and-gold border taken from the flag of Montenegro, adopted at the union of 1968. It carries no arms.

The arms are a crowned shield bearing the white double-headed eagle of Serbia and the lion of Montenegro, and since 1995 a third charge, six white stars on blue, for Kosovo, one star for each of the peoples the Ohrid Settlement named.

The motto is “God and the King”.

The anthem is “Bože pravde”, “God of Justice”, written in 1872 under the Obrenović and never replaced.

The national day is Sretenje, 15 February, the day of the First Rising in 1804 and of the first constitution in 1835.

Assessment

Serbia and Montenegro is a small, poor and settled kingdom whose modern history was decided twice by other people. In 1919 the German Empire took Macedonia from it in exchange for money; in 1920 Austria-Hungary answered the South Slav question by making a kingdom of Croatia, Bosnia and the South Slav lands, and the country that had expected to lead the South Slavs found itself a neighbour of their kingdom. Most of what followed, the Austrian connection, the Mitteleuropa loans, the coups and the long grievance in the Assembly, was a response to those two decisions.

Its record inside its own borders is worse than its record abroad. It held Kosovo for eighty years by colonisation and police, and when the Albanians asked for a vote its army made war on them, and the war was ended from outside. The Ohrid Settlement, the federation of three units and the referendum due in April 2029 are the product of that failure, and the kingdom has accepted them with a completeness that is to its credit and was not its own idea.

The Register’s judgement on the kingdom’s westward course is that it was made by the dynasty first, by the nation late and by the army never. The Obrenović chose Vienna in 1881 and kept the choice. The nation came to the Concert by way of a century of resentment of Mitteleuropa and arrived without enthusiasm in 2027. The army, which tried to overthrow a king in 1903, made three governments between the wars and made a war in 1992, accepted the civil oath only after it had been defeated.

The questions in front of the kingdom are short and none is answered. Kosovo may leave. The King is frail and the heir is not yet of age. And the free movement of 2030 may take the young of the south to Germany for good.

Chronology

See also

• Austria-Hungary
• United Principalities of Romania
• The Byzantine Federation
• The German Empire
• The Russian Republic
• The House of Romanov
• The European Concert
• The League of Nations
• The First Great War

Trivia

Categories

Nations of the World · Europe · Federations · Constitutional Monarchies · The Balkans