"The earth is what is not us"

Yugoslavia in Rebecca West's Black lamb and grey falcon

pp. 100-127

in: Richard Robinson, Narratives of the European border, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

It was constituted as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes a few days later on 1 December. But it was established without clear borders and with no clear constitutional order. Had the kingdom of Serbia merely absorbed the south Slav regions of the Habsburg Empire and the Kingdom of Montenegro? Or was the country a novel entity in which Croatia, Slovenia, Dalmatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Montenegro would assume equal constitutional weight with Serbia?2