Anali Pravnog fakulteta u Beogradu

Budimir Kosutic

The idea of revolution and a state of the serb people Summary

At the beginning of the XIX century, the idea of revolution, be it bourgeois or socialist, had a deep influence on the resurrection of the Serbian state, its duration and development. Naturally, the influence of these qualitatively different revolutionary ideas on the statehood of the Serbian people in different periods was not of the same intensity. Namely, the ideas leading to the achievement of the French Revolution in 1789 primarily exerted a powerful influence on the resurrection of the Serbian state, i.e, they awakened the national awareness of the Serbs as a single people, scattered in two empires - the Austrian and the Ottoman empires - as well as the need for their national liberation and unification. This specific national awareness, first of all, grew among the Serbian middle class in southern Hungary at the end of the XVIII century, under the influence of the French Encyclopaedists and the western Philosophy of Enlightenment, and then it spread among the Serbs in the Ottoman Empire. France and French revolutionary ideas played a constant and manifold role in building a Serbian state, at that time. First of all, the need to create a single national state, incorporating Serbs from the Ottoman and the Austrian empires, was rooted in the ideas on which the French bourgeois revolution was founded and accomplished. However, the French Revolution is also to be credited with opening the Yugoslav dimension of the Serbian question. Namely, in creating and spreading his Illyrian province, particularly from 1809 to 1814, Napoleon endeavoured to cultivate a national awareness among Serbs (in Dalmatia) that differed from the national awareness of the Serbian insurgeants in 4 Serbia. The creation of the Illyrian provinces, as the first administrative community of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes under a single name, and with one national language, was intended to serve this puipose. After the end of World War I, a common state of Southern Slavs was created, based on the ideas born in the French Revolution. This was to be a Yugoslav democratic nation-state, on the model that had come into being in England, France and the United States. From the aspect of international law, this joint state was an old slate (because it was a prolongation of Serbia,

* b )r - Budimir KoSutic, Professor of the Faculty of Law of the University of Belgrade.

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Будимир Кошутић, Идеја револуције и држава народа српског (стр, 325-345)