Reign of the Second King Aleksandar

Abstract For all the emphasis of historians on the national question as the reason for interwar Yugoslavia’s instability, it is remarkable how little it changed the nature of the political struggle in Serbia. King Petar turned out to represent not the start of constitutional monarchy but a mere interlude arising from the temporary destruction of royal authority in 1903. Serbia’s immersion in Yugoslavia shifted the balance of power in the state back toward the crown, giving it a much larger range of parties to play off against each other and much more plausible internal enemies against which to mobilize the Serbian population, while socio-economic change weakened the once mighty Radical party. The establishment of King Aleksandar’s dictatorship marked the culmination of the authoritarian, elitist policies pursued by Serbian monarchs since the Obrenović era. His much greater use of violence than previous Serbian monarchs reflected the difference between dominating a small, ethnically homogeneous state and dominating a large multinational one with many unwilling subjects. Nevertheless, Aleksandar’s was still a personal regime like Mihailo’s and the first Aleksandar’s, so his murder in 1934 meant not just a change of ruler but a change of regime.