This _modus vivendi_, accepted at the eleventh hour by Pashitch, might have lasted throughout the Peace Conference had it not been for the fear of Italian aggression, which prompted the Agram Government to beg for the assistance of the Serbian army to save Laibach and Fiume from Italian occupation. In taking over the territories assigned to them by the armistice of November 3, the Italian armies acted with a high hand, suppressing the Jugoslav national movement promptly and ruthlessly. Italian nationalism was being worked up to fever heat by the propaganda to make the Adriatic an Italian lake. The Dalmatian League at Rome declared that Dalmatia was to be Italian. D’Annunzio issued an impassioned appeal for Fiume, the words of which he soon afterward proved himself able to translate into actions.
The Agram National Council’s hand was forced. Instead of waiting to arrange on equal terms with the Belgrade Government the details of union, as the Declaration of Geneva had provided, the Council proclaimed, on November 23, the union of the territories under its control with the Kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. Three days later a national assembly at Podgoritza deposed King Nicholas and his dynasty and voted for the union of Montenegro with the new state. Prince Alexander, as regent, announced the birth of “free and united Jugoslavia” at Belgrade on December 1, 1918.
When the Jugoslavs appeared with a united delegation at the Peace Conference, Italy insisted that its members be acknowledged only as Serbians, acting in the name of the Belgrade Government. The union of the Jugoslav portions of the Hapsburg Empire with the Kingdom of Serbia had not been recognized by Italy, or by the other Entente Powers, for that matter;[14] and, as such an event was a thing of the future, to be decided by the Peace Conference, Italy declared that she would not consent to have decisions anticipated or prejudiced by acceptance of the union as a _fait accompli_. Throughout the Conference Italy maintained this uncompromising attitude.
It was after issuing from a conference in which the future of the Jugoslavs was the principal topic that Mr. Lloyd George said that the peace treaties threatened “to Balkanize Europe.” The full significance of this remark is grasped when we realize that the Jugoslav cause at Paris was not advanced by delegates who presented a solid front and followed a consistent policy in pressing their national claims. Pashitch and his colleagues from Belgrade, dismayed by Italian opposition at times and at others more interested in the Banat of Temesvár and Macedonia than in the Adriatic, held back from whole-hearted support of Croat and Slovene claims. In their attitude toward their “redeemed brethren” the Serbs displayed curiously mixed sentiments. If one were rash enough to attempt to express the Serbian feeling in one sentence, he might put it in this way, that the Serbs possessed, in relation to the Hapsburg Jugoslavs, a superior military complex and an inferior cultural complex.