Ante Trumbić
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Ante Trumbić (May 17, 1864 - November 17, 1938) was an important Croatian politician in the early 20th century. He was one of the key politicians in the creation of a Yugoslav state.
Trumbić was born in Split in the Austro-Hungarian crownland of Dalmatia and studied law at Zagreb, Vienna and Graz (with doctorate in 1890). He practised as a lawyer, and then, from 1905 as the city mayor of Split. Trumbić was in favor of moderate reforms in Austro-Hungarian Slavic provinces, which included the unification of Dalmatia with Croatia-Slavonia. At the same time separatist and pan-Slavist movements were troubling politics in Serbia.
After the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Trumbić fled to Italy and was the prime mover of the Yugoslav Committee which operated from London. Its purpose was to convince the Serbian government of Nikola Pašić that a union between Croats, Slovenes and Serbs (from the West Balkan) and the already established Kingdom of Serbia would best serve the interests of the South Slavs. These discussions led to the Corfu Declaration which were signed in the summer of 1917. Crown Prince Aleksandar, acting as regent for the claimant King Peter I of Serbia, endorsed the Yugoslav concept.
In 1918 he became foreign minister in the first government of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. At the Versailles conference after World War I, Trumbić had to represent Yugoslav concerns in the face of Italian territorial ambitions in Dalmatia (temporarily settled in 1920, but raised again with Benito Mussolini). Trumbić resigned as Foreign Minister in 1920, as Serbian domination became the policy in the kingdom that was to have represented all the minority interests among South Slavs. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly and, in the final vote, voted against the constitution.
By 1929, when King Alexander of Yugoslavia abrogated the constitution to establish a royal dictatorship, Trumbić was in retirement in Zagreb. King Alexander divided up Croatia-Slavonia and Dalmatia into banovinas, countering any reforms Trumbić had sought. Trumbić later regretted the end of Austria-Hungary, as the South Slav state he had helped to create proved incapable of his intended reforms.
