scholarly journals The 1905 parliamentary crisis in Serbia

Balcanica ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Dimitrije Djordjevic

This paper examines the 1905 May crisis in Serbia that emerged from the conflict between the parliament and Cabinet. It places this particular crisis in the context of development of parliamentarianism in Serbia in the period from the 1903 coup to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This process reflected the application of parliamentary system of government, as it was replicated from the British and French examples, to the circumstances prevailing in Serbia during the challenging period of building a democratic government after the autocracy under the Obrenovic dynasty. The case of the May 1905 crisis demonstrated that parliamentary democracy in Serbia was making progress despite the legacy of the ?old regime? and the lack of tradition to build on. Hence the crisis remained strictly within parliamentary bounds.

Balcanica ◽  
2006 ◽  
pp. 143-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dusan Batakovic

Given that the issue of the functioning of parliamentary democracy in Serbia 1903-1914 has not been thoroughly explored, an attempt is made to define the capacities of Serbia?s parliamentary system confronted with military interferences in political processes. The paper looks at the conflict between the democratic forces, led by the Prime Minister Nikola Pasic and his Radicals, and a group of conspirators within the army, which in 1911 formed a clandestine society "Unification or Death" (Black Hand), led by D. Dimitrijevic Apis. Political influence of the army significantly increased with the dynastic change effected in 1903. In a predominantly rural society (almost 90 percent of the population) the army took up the function of the middle class and its mission to expedite the process of national liberation. Due to unconstitutional and non-parliamentary actions of military circles the period may be described as one of fragile but functional democracy. Seeking to suppress the army's praetorian aspirations, Pasic and the Radicals took various measures to force it into its constitutional role. Sharpened during the First World War, the conflict led in 1917 to a show trial known as the Salonica Trial. The leaders of the Black Hand were sentenced to death and executed. Similar trials stood by military conspiracies in other European countries during the Great War show that democracy is always threatened in times of extreme crisis such as war. In that sense, Pasic may have deemed the extreme measures against the Black Hand necessary for the preservation of the democratic system established in 1903.


1974 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. Holton

The myth or reality of widespread social unrest in Britain in the period immediately before the First World War has attracted increasing attention among historians in recent years. Debate has centred upon two main themes, namely the character and impact of contemporary labour unrest, and the situation and prospects of the Liberal Party. Was British labour fundamentally disaffected from existing forms of industrial relations and from Parliamentary democracy? Was the pre-1914 Liberal Party already in decline and unable to withstand the advance of the Labour Party? Several recent writers have returned sceptical or largely negative conclusions to questions of this kind. In so doing they have sought to dispel a popularly held notion of incipient social breakdown and imminent social change, proposed amongst others by Dangerfield in The Strange Death of Liberal England.


2000 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
R. Soloviy

In the history of religious organizations of Western Ukraine in the 20-30th years of the XX century. The activity of such an early protestant denominational formation as the Ukrainian Evangelical-Reformed Church occupies a prominent position. Among UCRC researchers there are several approaches to the preconditions for the birth of the Ukrainian Calvinistic movement in Western Ukraine. In particular, O. Dombrovsky, studying the historical preconditions for the formation of the UREC in Western Ukraine, expressed the view that the formation of the Calvinist cell should be considered in the broad context of the Ukrainian national revival of the 19th and 20th centuries, a new assessment of the religious factor in public life proposed by the Ukrainian radical activists ( M. Drahomanov, I. Franko, M. Pavlik), and significant socio-political, national-cultural and spiritual shifts caused by the events of the First World War. Other researchers of Ukrainian Calvinism, who based their analysis on the confessional-polemical approach (I.Vlasovsky, M.Stepanovich), interpreted Protestantism in Ukraine as a product of Western cultural and religious influences, alien to Ukrainian spirituality and culture.


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