Participants: Lucija Balikić (Central European University, Vienna/Budapest), Olga Manojlović Pintar (Institute for Recent History of Serbia), Dragan Bakić (Institute of Balkan Studies, SASA) and Stefan Gužvica (Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory).

Moderator: Petar Žarković (Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory)

The book shows the importance of the role of British and French intellectuals in the process of creating the first Yugoslavia. The author dispels the established myth that the state community of South Slavs was created solely as a product of the outcome of the First World War and the will of local political elites.

“The title topic was chosen with the aim of presenting to the general public an important, and at the same time often omitted in historiography, aspect of the creation of the first common state of the South Slavs, namely the role of the great (and ultimately victorious) powers of Great Britain and France in that process. In particular, the main issue that this book deals with is not necessarily the one that refers to the official positions and decisions of the governments, but precisely the one that focuses on government advisers, experts and intellectuals who contributed to the creation of a certain public image of the characteristics, situation and needs of the South Slavs, in the public of Great Britain and France and their ruling circles. (…) The goal of this book is not to present only one side of the story, but to portray as objectively as possible the nature of the entire dialogue between all relevant intellectuals (British, French, German, Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian, liberal, conservative, socialist, nationalist, regionalist, cosmopolitan, etc. ) and their governments, thus proving that integral Yugoslavism was the most widely accepted program in the entire period around the Great War, but also that the opinions seriously differed in the matter of the concrete shaping of the future, somewhat unexpected, state.” (From the Preface)

Lucija Balikić is a PhD student and lecturer at the Central European University in Vienna and Budapest. She researches the intellectual history of the Sokol movement of interwar Yugoslavia. She studied at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb and at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

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