Ante Trumbić

Ante Trumbić (May 17, 1864 - November 17, 1938) was an important Croatian politician in the early 20th century. He was one of the key politicians in the creation of a Yugoslav state.

Trumbić was born in Split in the Austro-Hungarian crownland of Dalmatia and studied law at Zagreb, Vienna and Graz (with doctorate in 1890). He practised as a lawyer, and then, from 1905 as the city mayor of Split. Trumbić was in favor of moderate reforms in Austro-Hungarian Slavic provinces, which included the unification of Dalmatia with Croatia-Slavonia. At the same time separatist and pan-Slavist movements were troubling politics in Serbia.

After the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Trumbić fled to Italy and was the prime mover of the Yugoslav Committee which operated from London. Its purpose was to convince the Serbian government of Nikola Pašić that a union between Croats, Slovenes and Serbs (from the West Balkan) and the already established Kingdom of Serbia would best serve the interests of the South Slavs. These discussions led to the Corfu Declaration which were signed in the summer of 1917. Crown Prince Aleksandar, acting as regent for the claimant King Peter I of Serbia, endorsed the Yugoslav concept.

In 1918 he became foreign minister in the first government of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. At the Versailles conference after World War I, Trumbić had to represent Yugoslav concerns in the face of Italian territorial ambitions in Dalmatia (temporarily settled in 1920, but raised again with Benito Mussolini). Trumbić resigned as Foreign Minister in 1920, as Serbian influence clearly showed little interest for the affairs which concerned the Croatian nation. The policy in the kingdom was supposed to have represented all minority interests among South Slavic peoples. Trumbić was elected to the Constituent Assembly and, in the final vote, voted against the constitution.

In 1929, hoping to bring an end to the ongoing bickering between the Serbian and the Croatian representatives within the kingdom, King Alexander of Yugoslavia for the first time since the creation of the state, pulled rank and banned all political parties, and removed the individual nationalities "Serb" and "Croat" from the bigger picture. He renamed the land "Yugoslavia", and abrogated the constitution to establish a royal dictatorship. Trumbić was by now in retirement in Zagreb. King Alexander's division of Croatia-Slavonia and Dalmatia into banovinas countered all previous reforms Trumbić had sought.

Trumbić later regretted the end of Austria-HungaryFact|date=August 2008, as the South Slav state he had helped to create proved incapable of his intended reforms.

External links

* [http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/trumbic.htm FirstWorldWar.com biography of Ante Trumbić]
* [http://www.geocities.com/veldes1/trumbic.html Leadership in Austria-Hungary during WWI]