Ante Trumbic
Ante Trumbić [ ˈaːntɛ ˈtruːmbitɕ ] (born May 17, 1864 in Split , Austrian Empire , † November 17, 1938 in Zagreb ) was a Croatian politician in Austria-Hungary , in the SHS state and in Yugoslavia . Until the outbreak of the First World War, he advocated the unification of the Croatian countries within the Danube Monarchy . In 1915, in exile in Paris, he founded the Yugoslav Committee , which sought to establish a common state of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. He was Foreign Minister in the first government of the SHS state. Since 1921 he was in the opposition. In the last years of his life, Trumbić was an avowed opponent of the royal dictatorship under Alexander I.
Life
Born in 1864 in the Dalmatian town of Split, Ante Trumbić attended grammar school in his hometown to study law in Zagreb, Vienna and Graz after graduating from high school. In 1890 he completed his studies in Graz with a doctorate. Since 1894 he had a law firm in Split.
Trumbić joined the Croatian Law Party in Dalmatia, which stood up for the national rights of Croats. In Dalmatia, politics at that time was still dominated by a narrow section of the Italian-speaking bourgeoisie, although Italians were only a small minority in the country. This was possible because a restrictive suffrage for the Dalmatian state parliament strongly favored the wealthy classes.
Trumbić was elected to the state parliament and in 1897 by the state parliament as one of the Dalmatian members of the Austrian Reichsrat . He campaigned in parliament for a comprehensive state and constitutional reform, through which the Slavic peoples of the Danube Monarchy should be put on an equal footing with the Germans and Hungarians. Most important to him was the demand for the unification of the Croatian countries of Dalmatia and Istria , which belonged to the Austrian half of the empire, with Croatia-Slavonia , which was subordinate to the Hungarian Crown of St. Stephen. Trumbić was initially against the detachment of the Croatian countries from the dual monarchy and their unification with Serbia. In 1905 Ante Trumbić became mayor of his hometown Split. In the same year he was one of the co-initiators of the Croatian-Serbian Coalition , an alliance of Croatian and Serbian parties active in Croatia-Slavonia and Dalmatia, which aimed at a political upgrading of the southern Slavs in the Danube Monarchy through tactical reference to the Hungarian national opposition.
When the Austrian heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand fell victim to an assassination attempt by Serbian terrorists in Sarajevo, which soon afterwards triggered the First World War, Trumbić went into exile in Italy. He had recognized that a better political position for the southern Slavs within Austria-Hungary was no longer possible because politicians and military men hostile to the Slavs now dominated the public discourse. In exile, he made contacts with Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian politicians who wanted to establish a common state for the southern Slavs after the war and the expected collapse of the Habsburg monarchy . In Italy he learned from Serbian diplomats that the Belgrade government saw the planned new state as an enlarged Serbia and that the Italians also supported this idea because they were mainly claiming Slovene and Croatian populated areas (Gorizia, Istria, Dalmatia) for themselves.
Trumbić therefore turned to Paris, where he founded the Yugoslav Committee (Jugoslovanski Odbor) with Frano Supilo , Ivan Meštrović , Nikola Stojanović, Dusan Vasiljević and other South Slav emigrants on May 1, 1915 . This association took its seat in London and tried to represent the territorial interests of the monarchical Slavs against the Entente powers. She also negotiated with the Serbs about the shape of the future common state. Since the enemy occupation of all of Serbia in late autumn 1915, the negotiating position of the Pašić government , which was now in Corfu, had been weakened. In July 1917, Trumbić and his colleagues were able to persuade them to adopt the Declaration of Corfu , which laid down some of the foundations for a common state.
After the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had been proclaimed on December 1, 1918 , Trumbić entered the government of the new state and became its first foreign minister. In this role he represented his country together with Nikola Pašić and others at the Paris Peace Conference. Within the South Slav delegation there were disagreements about the territorial demands to be made and, last but not least, about the related principles for a European peace order. Trumbić's colleague Josip Smodlaka later recalled that Pašić argued primarily with so-called historical rights of Serbia and also called for areas in which hardly any southern Slavs lived, but were less interested in the territorial conflict with Italy, which mainly affected Slovenes and Croats. Trumbić, on the other hand, oriented himself on the 14 points made by American President Woodrow Wilson and spoke out against violently drawn borders. In the end, the SHS state had to leave Istria, Gorizia and Zadar to the Italians, and in November 1920 Trumbić resigned from his ministerial office after the Rapallo Treaty was signed .
In the remaining years of his life, Trumbić was no longer in the first political row. But he was committed to the rights of the Croats in the increasingly Serbian-dominated SHS state. When King Alexander suspended the constitution in 1929 and established a dictatorial regime, Trumbić publicly condemned this and expressed his regret over the collapse of the Danube monarchy, in which the rights of nationalities were better protected than in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
In 1924 his hometown Split gave Trumbić honorary citizenship.
Fonts
- Programni govor Ante Trumbića ... izrečen u 1. sjednici obćinskoga vieća dne 13. veljače 1906 (The program address of the Mayor of Spalato on February 13, 1906 in the municipal council, 1906)
- To the British Nation and Parliament (On behalf of the Yugoslav Committee, 1917)
- Problemi hrvatsko-srpskih odnosa (Problems of Croatian-Serbian Relations)
- Iz mojih političkih uspomena. Suton Austro-Ugarske i Riječka rezolucija (From my political memories. Dusk in Austria-Hungary and the Fiume resolution, 1936)
- Izabrani politički spisi , selected and edited by Ivo Petrinović. Zagreb 1998.
literature
- Aleksandar Jakir: Dalmatia between the world wars. Agrarian and urban living environment and the failure of Yugoslav integration . (= Southeast European works; 104). Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56447-1
- Holm Sundhaussen: Trumbić, Ante . In: Biographical Lexicon on the History of Southeast Europe . Volume 4. Munich 1981, pp. 353-356
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Josip Smodlaka: Zapisi. Zagreb 1972, p. 93.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Trumbic, ante |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Croatian politician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 17, 1864 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Split , Dalmatia |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 17, 1938 |
| Place of death | Zagreb |