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Frano Supilo: The memorandum to Sir Edward Grey, 7 January, 1915
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FRANO SUPILO: THE MEMORANDUM TO SIR EDWARD GREY, 7 JANUARY, 1915 Title: The memorandum to Sir Edward Grey, 7 January, 1915 Originally published: Originally written in 1915 in Italian and translated into English by Henry Wickham Steed before being delivered to Edward Grey Language: English The excerpt used is from Dragovan Šepić, ed., Pisma i memorandumi Frana Supila (Belgrade: SANU, 1967), letter no. 18, pp. 40–44. About the author Frano Supilo [1870, Cavtat, near Dubrovnik – 1917, London]: journalist and politician. Born into a poor craftsman family, he started his political career in the ethnic Croatian party Stranka Prava (Party of Rights), acting as the editor of the local party newspaper Crvena Hrvatska (Red Croatia) (1890–1899). After he took over the editing of the main party journal Novi list (The new newspaper) in 1900, he joined the pro-Yugoslav fraction of the party and aimed to harmonize Croatian and Serbian politics in Croatia through the resolutions of Fiume and Zara that he drafted: Riječka (1903) and Zadarska rezolucija (1905). Together with Ante Trumbić, he established the movement of the ‘Politics of the New Course’ and founded the Hrvatsko-Srpska koalicija (Croato-Serb coalition) in 1906. After the legal persecution of Serb politicians in the Monarchy following the ‘Annexation Crisis’ of 1908 and 1909 (the so called ‘High-treason and Friedjung Processes’), he withdrew from the Coalition, unsatisfied with its compromising attitude towards the regime. He acted as the editor of Novi list until the outbreak of the First World War. In 1914 he fled to Italy with other prominent advocates of Yugoslavism, forming the ‘Yugoslav Committee’ with the purpose of lobbying in the Entente countries for south Slavic unification. He spent the war years moving between London, Paris, Rome and Petrograd , fervently advocating the Yugoslav project. Discontented with its conciliatory stance towards the Serbian government, he left the Committee in 1916, continuing his individual political action. Exhausted psychically and mentally, he died in a sanatorium in London in 1917. Supilo’s political work started to be canonized in socialist Yugoslavia, especially during times of debate in the late 1960s and early 1970s about the reconstitution of Yugoslavia. He was unreservedly canonized in the 1990s, when his political thought was reinterpreted to be exclusively Croatian, having a Yugoslav framework only due to historical circumstances. FRANO SUPILO: THE MEMORANDUM TO SIR EDWARD GREY, 7 JANUARY, 1915 251 Main works: Le procés de Friedjung-Reichspost et de la Coalition Croato-Serbe, Lettre de Frano Supilo (1910); Otvoreno pismo svojim izbornicima [Open letter to my voters] (1910); Politika u Hrvatskoj [Politics in Croatia] (1911). Context The emergence of German expansionist policies at the turn of the century, coupled by Hungarian political and economic expansion, led to a new shift in Croatian politics which had been dominated by the anti-dualist and the antiYugoslav project of Croatian political autonomy advocated by the Stranka Prava. A major faction of the party turned towards the centralist, proGerman politics of archduke Franz Ferdinand, while a minority endorsed the politics of Serbo-Croatian cooperation as the only way to achieve political emancipation. The latter group gathered Croat and Serbian political parties in Croatia under the banner of the HSK (Croat–Serb Coalition) in 1906. Inspired by the anti-dualist politics of the ‘Independence Party’ in Hungary (the so called ‘crisis of dualism’), and by the accession of the pro-Yugoslav Karađorđević dynasty to the Serbian throne following the downfall of the pro-Austrian Obrenovićs (1903), the two most prominent HSK members, Ante Trumbić and Frano Supilo, launched the ‘Politics of the New Course.’ This movement refuted the Austro-Slavist project advocated by Stjepan Radić, envisioning, instead, an alliance against Germany, which would bring together Croats, Hungarian anti-dualists, Dalmatian Italians and Serbia. It was also based on the Narodno jedinstvo principle of the ethnic sameness of Croats and Serbs, which would additionally support the emergence of an independent South Slavic state as the ultimate goal. However, the ‘Politics of a New Course’ soon collapsed due to the failure of Hungarian anti-dualist politics and the Italian unwillingness to participate in it. Moreover, the HSK started to cooperate with the Hungarian pro-dualist government in the 1910s after adopting the idea of Serbia’s primacy in the process of south Slavic unification . This was an idea propagated by the Croatian Serbs in opposition to Supilo’s notion of equal roles for the Croats and Serbs. Finally, Supilo’s politics met similar obstacles during the...