Cvetković–Maček Agreement
In the Vidovdan Constitution of 28 June 1921, drawn up in large parts by Nikola Pašić and Svetozar Pribićević, 33 administrative districts were established in what was then called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
[7] Ultimately, the Vidovdan Constitution institutionalized Serbian hegemony in the new state, and its revision became a key goal for high-ranking opposition voices like HRSS leader Stjepan Radić.
[14] His view of Croatia's borders, be it within or without Yugoslavia, expanded far beyond the modern-day Croatian nation state and included most of contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina as well.
Cvetković would remain prime minister until the Yugoslav coup d'état in March 1941, immediately preceding the German Invasion of Yugoslavia.
He engaged in openly hostile rhetoric towards the Serbian elite, and had to go abroad in July 1923 after an arrest warrant because of a speech insulting to Queen Maria.
[26] Radić's open flirt with communism, which was deeply despised in the Serbian political establishment, even partially brought about the downfall of the Davidović administration,[27] the first one which had not been led by the Radical Party.
However, in the mid-1920s, he turned his ideology in prison, accepted both the monarchy and the constitution and started to work with his renamed Croatian Peasant Party (HSS, the 'Republican' part had been dropped from the name) from within the system.
He had been offered the possibility of leading the Yugoslav government as prime minister in July 1932, after the King had dismissed Petar Živković and Vojislav Marinković in short succession, but Maček declined.
These alliances managed to score good electoral results in spite of the openly biased political system that the September Constitution of 1931 had established.
The United Opposition list managed to secure 45% of the vote in December 1938, further undermining the authority of Prime Minister Stojadinović.
[36] However, Maček had come as close as he could to complete Croatian autonomy without outright independence: Croatia now had a ban between itself and the king, and it had its own parliament in Zagreb, the Sabor, to look after its own affairs.
[34] Most of the stipulations of the treaty remained unfulfilled, as the outbreak of Second World War in the very week of the agreement's ratification and the eventual involvement of Yugoslavia after the German Invasion of April 1941 prevented its political realization.
[34] The Croatian reaction within Yugoslavia was, at least initially, generally positive, as the Croats, at last, had their own autonomous government and an ethnically defined territorial entity to call their own.
[34] The positive opinion was further helped by the fact that the agreement was given legitimacy by its sponsors, especially Maček, who was popular as a defender of Croatian national interests.
[34] The Serbian reaction was one of outrage: 800,000 ethnic Serbs, about 20% of the Banovina's population, were now subjects of a Croatian parliament, and the Croat Maček's accession to the office of vice premier was perceived as even more of an insult.
Slobodan Jovanović of the Serbian Cultural Club put forth a proposal that would have included Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia into a banovina of Serb countries.
[39] In general, the agreement put a renewed strain on Serb-Croat relations, which had overall improved during the united opposition of Croat and Serb liberals against the central government's authority.
[38] The major effect of the Banovina of Croatia's creation on the political views of most Serb policy makers was the end of the ideology of centralism (also called unitarism).
While there were calls for a Banovina of Slovenia, the threat posed by neighboring Italy and Germany and the rapidly expanding Second World War soon took precedence.
