Greater Serbia

[7] After the end of the Balkan Wars, the Kingdom of Serbia achieved the expansion towards the south,[8] but there was a mixed reaction to the events, for the reason that the promises of lands gaining access to the Adriatic Sea were not fulfilled.

Initially, the proponents of the Greater Serbia doctrine felt satisfied, since the main goal of uniting all Serbian-inhabited lands under the rule of a Serbian Monarchic dynasty was mostly achieved.

Resistance was initially made by the Chetniks, who defended the restoration of the Monarchy but would eventually collaborate with the Axis powers with the goal of forming a post-war Greater Serbia, and the Partisans, a multi-ethnic antifascist movement who waged a guerrilla campaign against occupying forces and supported the transformation of Yugoslavia into a socialist federal republic.

Beside this, other Yugoslav non-Serb nationalists took advantage of the situation and allied themselves with the Axis countries, regarding this moment as their historical opportunity of fulfilling their own irredentist aspirations.

[citation needed] The first person to formulate the modern idea of Pan-Serbism was Dositej Obradović (1739–1811), a writer and thinker who dedicated his writings to the "Slavoserbian people", which he described as "the inhabitants of Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Dalmatia, Croatia, Syrmium, Banat, and Bačka", and who he regarded as all his "Serbian brethren, regardless of their church and religion".

Other proponents of Pan-Serbism included historian Jovan Rajić and politician and lawyer Sava Tekelija, both of whom published works incorporating many of the aforementioned areas under a single umbrella name of "Serbian lands".

They all believed that rationalism would overcome the barriers of religion that separated the Slavs into Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Muslims, uniting the peoples as one nation.

"[12]The work claimed lands that were inhabited by Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Hungarians and Croats as part of Greater Serbia.

German historian Michael Weithmann considers that Karadžić expressed dangerous ideological and political idea in scientific shape i.e. that all southern Slavs are Serbs while Czech historian Jan Rychlik consider that Karadžić became a propagator of greater Serbian ideology and uttered a theory according to which all Yugoslav people speaking the shtokavian dialect are Serbs.

However, one might argue that such a definition is very partisan: Karadžić himself eloquently and explicitly professed that his aim was to unite all native Shtokavian speakers whom he identified as Serbs.

[24][25] The idea of reclaiming historic Serbian territory has been put into action several times during the 19th and 20th centuries, notably in Serbia's southward expansion in the Balkan Wars.

[26] According to the Report of the International Commission on the Balkan Wars, Serbia consider annexed territories "as a dependency, a sort of conquered colony, which these conquerors might administer at their good pleasure".

[31] However, the army of the Kingdom of Serbia retreated from Durrës in April 1913 under pressure of the naval fleet of Great Powers, but it remained in other parts of Albania for the next two months.

The intention to create a south Slav or "Yugoslav" state was expressed in the Niš declaration by Serbian prime minister Nikola Pašić in 1914, as well as in Serbia's regent Alexander's statement in 1916.

The documents showed that Serbia would pursue a policy that would integrate all territory that contained Serbs and southern Slavs (except Bulgarians), including Croats and Slovenes.

[citation needed] The Treaty of London (1915) of the allies would assign to Serbia the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Srem, Bačka, Slavonia (against Italian objections) and northern Albania (to be divided with Montenegro).

[citation needed] After the First World War, Serbia achieved a maximalist nationalist aspirations with the unification of the south Slavic regions of Austria-Hungary and Montenegro, into a Serbian-dominated Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

[37] During World War II, the Serbian royalist Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland which was headed by General Draža Mihailović attempted to define its vision of a postwar future.

[44]It was a point of discussion at a Chetnik congress which was held in the village of Ba in central Serbia in January 1944; however, Moljević's ideas were never put into practice due to the Chetniks' defeat by Josip Broz Tito's Partisans (initially a movement predominantly composed of Serbs which became more multi-ethnic by this time[45]) and it is difficult to assess how influential they were, due to the lack of records from the Ba congress.

Nonetheless, Moljević's core idea—that Serbia is defined by the pattern of Serb settlement, irrespective of existing national borders—was to remain an underlying theme of the Greater Serbian ideal.

Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (1986) was the single most important document to set into motion the pan-Serbian movement of the late 1980s which led to Slobodan Milošević's rise to power and the subsequent Yugoslav wars.

The authors of the Memorandum included the most influential Serbian intellectuals, among them: Dobrica Ćosić, Pavle Ivić, Antonije Isaković, Dušan Kanazir, Mihailo Marković, Miloš Macura, Dejan Medaković, Miroslav Pantić, Nikola Pantić, Ljubiša Rakić, Radovan Samardžić, Miomir Vukobratović, Vasilije Krestić, Ivan Maksimović, Kosta Mihailović, Stojan Čelić and Nikola Čobelić.

According to Bennett, Milošević used a rigid control of the media to organize a propaganda campaign in which the Serbs were the victims and stressed the need to readjust Yugoslavia due to the alleged bias against Serbia.

[55][56] A greater Serbian state was supported for irredentist as well as economical reasons, as it would give Serbia a large coastline, heavy industries, agricultural farmland, natural resources and all of the crude oil (mostly found in the Pannonian Plain, and particularly in the Socialist Republic of Croatia).

[57] In his speeches and books, Šešelj claimed that all of the population of these areas are in fact ethnic Serbs, of Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Muslim faith.

Prosecutors at the Hague argued that "the indictments were all part of a common scheme, strategy or plan on the part of the accused [Milošević] to create a 'Greater Serbia', a centralized Serbian state encompassing the Serb-populated areas of Croatia and Bosnia and all of Kosovo, and that this plan was to be achieved by forcibly removing non-Serbs from large geographical areas through the commission of the crimes charged in the indictments.

He proposed establishing a federation consisting of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbs residing in the Serbian Autonomous Region of Krajina, Slavonia, Baranja, and Srem.

[62]The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) accused Slobodan Milošević and other Serb leaders of committing crimes against humanity which included murder, forcible population transfer, deportation and "persecution on political, racial or religious grounds."

"[61] Serbian historian Sima Ćirković stated that grumblings about Greater Serbia and pointing fingers at Garašanin's Načertanije and the "Memorandum" is not helping to solve the existing problems and that it is an abuse of history.

[75] Prime minister of Serbia Miloš Vučević in December 2024 stated that one of the projects related to aforementioned General Serb Declaration is a construction of Trebinje airport in Eastern Herzegovina.