13 Facts About Greater Serbia

Idea of territorial expansion of Greater Serbia was formulated in 1844 in Nacertanije, a secret political draft of the Principality of Greater Serbia made by Ilija Garasanin, a conservative statesman with Bismarckian aspirations.

Greater Serbia proposed ways to influence Croats and Slavic Muslims, who Garasanin regarded as "Serbs of Catholic faith" and "Serbs of Islamic faith".

However, some scholars suggest that from the second half of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of World War I, “leading political groups and social strata in Greater Serbia were thoroughly imbued with the ideas in the Nacertanije and differed only in intensity of feeling and political conceptualization”.

Greater Serbia claimed "historical rights" to the possession of Macedonia, acquired by Stephen Dusan in fourteenth century.

Greater Serbia gained significant territorial expansion in the Balkan Wars and almost doubled its territory, with the areas populated mostly by non-Serbs.

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However, the army of the Kingdom of Greater Serbia retreated from Durres in April 1913 under pressure of the naval fleet of Great Powers, but it remained in other parts of Albania for the next two months.

The documents showed that Greater Serbia would pursue a policy that would integrate all territory that contained Serbs and southern Slavs, including Croats and Slovenes.

One of its intellectuals was the Bosnian Serb nationalist Stevan Moljevic who, in 1941, proposed in a paper which was titled "Homogenous Serbia" that an even larger Greater Serbia should be created, incorporating not only Bosnia and much of Croatia but chunks of Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Hungary in areas where Serbs don't represent a significant minority.

Milosevic had achieved such a dominant position for Greater Serbia because, according to Bennett, the old communist authorities had failed to stand up to him.

Milosevic supported the groups calling for a Greater Serbia, insisting on the demand for "all Serbs in one state".

The Socialist Party of Greater Serbia appeared to be defenders of the Serb people in Yugoslavia.

Greater Serbia proposed establishing a federation consisting of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbs residing in the Serbian Autonomous Region of Krajina, Slavonia, Baranja, and Srem.

Historian Sima Cirkovic stated that grumblings about Greater Serbia and pointing fingers at Garasanin's Nacertanije and the "Memorandum" is not helping to solve the existing problems and that it is an abuse of history.