When the Croat delegates
of the Peasant Party withdrew from the fragmented Constituent
Assembly in 1920 - Serbia and the Moslem members voted for the
Vidovdan Constitution (June 1921) which was modelled on the pre-war
Serbian one.
While a minority with limited popular appeal, the Ustashe did not
materialize ex nihilo. They were the logical and inescapable
conclusion of a long and convoluted historical process. They were
both its culmination and its mutation. And once formed, they were
never exorcised by the Croats, as the Germans exorcised their Nazi
demon. In this, again, the Croats, chose the path of unrepentant
Austria.
Croat fascism was not an isolated phenomenon. Fascism (and, less so,
Nazism) were viable ideological alternatives in the 1930s and 1940s.
Variants of fascist ideology sprang all over the world, from Iraq
and Egypt to Norway and Britain. Even the Jews in Palestine had
their own fascists (the Stern group). And while Croat fascism (such
as it was, "tainted" by Catholic religiosity and pagan nationalism)
lasted four tumultuous years - it persisted for a quarter of a
century in Romania ("infected" by Orthodox clericalism and peasant
lores). While both branches of fascism - the Croat and the Romanian
- shared a virulent type of anti-Semitism and the constipated
morality of the ascetic and the fanatic - Codreanu's was more
ambitious, aiming at a wholesale reform of Romanian life and a re-
definition of Romanianism.
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