Milan Stojadinović (; ; 4 August 1888 – 24 October 1961) was a Serbian and Yugoslav politician and economist who was the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia from 1935 to 1939. He also was Foreign Minister from 1935 to 1939 and as Finance Minister three times (1922–1924, 1924–1926, 1934–1935).
Early life
Milan Stojadinović was born on 4 August 1888 in the Serbian town of Čačak. His father, Mihailo, was a municipal judge who relocated to Belgrade in 1904. It was here that the young Stojadinović finished his secondary education and became a sympathizer of the Serbian Social Democratic Party (SSDP). Later, he came to believe that the liberation of ethnic Serbs who lived in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires was more important than bridging the gap between the upper and lower classes, and followed in his father's footsteps by joining the People's Radical Party (NRS) of Nikola Pašić.
In the summer of 1906, Stojadinović was sent to Austria to learn German as a reward for successfully completing secondary school. While there, he fell under the influence of South Slavic youth movements and became a supporter of Yugoslav unity. He later returned to Serbia and began his studies at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law, specializing in economics and finance. He spent three years studying abroad, staying in Munich and Potsdam during the 1910–11 school year, Paris between 1911 and 1912, and London between 1912 and 1913. Stojadinović's stay in Germany had a profound effect on his economic views and led him to write a doctoral dissertation on the country's budget. He was greatly influenced by the German historical school of economics, which argued that economic policies should be developed according to the specific economic and cultural conditions prevalent in a society rather than being based on a universal model.
Economist
Stojadinović's competence as an economist became evident during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 and during World War I, when he began working in the Serbian Ministry of Finance. Following the Serbian Army's retreat through Albania during the winter of 1915, he withdrew with the Serbian government-in-exile to the Greek island of Corfu. He stayed there between 1916 and 1918 and distinguished himself as a financial expert by helping to stabilize the Serbian dinar.
Stojadinović met his future wife Augusta – a woman of mixed Greek-German heritage – during his stay in Corfu. The two settled in Belgrade following the war. Stojadinović was appointed assistant manager of a local branch of the English Commercial Bank in 1919, but resigned as director-general of the State Accounts Board of the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes because of disagreements with the government of Prime Minister Ljubomir Davidović and his Democratic Party. He lectured economics at the University of Belgrade from 1920 to 1921, but quickly gave up on academia.
Finance Minister
Stojadinović became the Minister of Finance in 1922, aged only 34. He began writing for the Belgrade daily Politika and the English-language weekly The Economist. Following the proclamation of a royal dictatorship by King Alexander I in 1929, he sided with a faction of the NRS that opposed the royal dictatorship. The Radical Party broke into two in 1929, with the largest faction supporting King Alexander's dictatorship and Stojadinović joining the opposition faction headed by the party's Main Committee.
Despite being suspected of opposition to the monarchy, he was once again appointed to the position of Finance Minister in the government of Bogoljub Jevtić, who became prime minister following Alexander's assassination in Marseille in October 1934. By this point, Stojadinović was the vice-president of the Belgrade Stock Exchange, chairman of a river navigation company, and the director of a British-owned broadcasting station and a British-owned shipbuilding company. Despite clear evidence, presented by Yugoslavia, that Italy and Hungary were behind the assassination of King Alexander, the League of Nations failed to take action against either of those countries, convincing Stojadinović that the League was useless.
Prime minister
In 1935, he became the leader of the Serbian Radical Party, which with some other parties formed a coalition Jugoslovenska Radikalna Zajednica (Yugoslav Radical Union, JRZ) and won the elections. The JRZ was made of the Serb Radicals, the Slovene People's Party led by Father Anton Korošec and the Yugoslav Muslim Organization led by Mehmed Spaho, which Stojadinović called a "three-legged chair" that was missing a "fourth leg", namely the support of the Croats. Stojadinović wrote in his memoirs: "I called our party the three-legged chair, on which it was possible to sit when necessary, although a chair with four legs is far more stable". On 24 June 1935 he was elected prime minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. He survived an assassination attempt by Damjan Arnautović, a school teacher, in 1935. The Regent for the boy king Peter II, the Prince Regent Paul, appointed Stojadinović Prime Minister partly because he was regarded as a financial expert who could deal with the effects of the Great Depression, and partly because Stojadinović was believed capable of making a deal with Croat politicians to resolve whether Yugoslavia was to be a federation or a unitary state. One of Stojadinović's first acts was to loosen censorship on the press and to free 10,000 political prisoners. Through the JRZ Stojadinović had a submissive skupshtina (parliament), but the JRZ never became the mass movement that Stojadinović had envisioned.
Domestic issues
The British historian Richard Crampton wrote that the basis of Stojadinović's power was "political jobbery" and corruption as the JRZ functioned more as a patronage machine of a type common to the Balkans rather than the fascistic mass movement that Stojadinović had intended. Interwar Yugoslavia was characterized by an etatist economic system with the state playing a large role in the economy. The Yugoslav state owned all or most of the railroads, docks, mines, steel mills, forests, mills, hospitals, banks, publishing houses, hotels, theatres and opera houses in the country, together with the state having monopolies over the manufacturing, distribution and sales of matches, salt, cigarette paper, tobacco and kerosene. As public-sector jobs were better paid than those in the private sector, and presented more opportunities for corruption, there was much competition for jobs in the public sector, especially in a country as poor as Yugoslavia, enabling any party in power to build support by handing out public-sector jobs in exchange for votes. Every government in interwar Yugoslavia used patronage to reward its supporters with public-sector jobs and punish its enemies by denying them the chance to work in the public sector. Stojadinović, like his predecessors, created a patronage machine as the basis of his power with JRZ members being rewarded with employment in the public sector. Moreover, the gradual improvement of the Yugoslav economy in the late 1930s, as it recovered from its 1932 nadir, won Stojadinović a further measure of popularity. Stojadinović believed that the solution to the Great Depression lay in closer economic links with Germany, which lacked many raw materials necessary for a modern industrial economy and whose population exceeded the capacity of German farmers to feed it. Yugoslav exports of both food and raw materials such as iron, bauxite, copper and manganese to Germany fueled Yugoslav economic growth after 1935 and placed Yugoslavia in the German economic sphere of influence.
The Prince regent had hoped that Stojadinović would make overtures to the Croats, but Stojadinović's unwillingness to discuss federalisation of Yugoslavia presented major difficulties to this end. As part of an attempt to reach out to the Croats, Stojadinović signed a concordat with the Vatican in 1935. Stojadinović hoped that the Concordat would incline the Catholic Church would use its influence with Croat voters in favor of the JRZ, but opposition from the Serbian Orthodox Church led Stojadinović to delay the Concordat's submission for ratification. In another concession to the Croats, Stojadinović allowed the erection of a statue of the assassinated Croat politician Stjepan Radić in Zagreb, and allowed Croats who had gone into exile under King Alexander to return, including the son-in-law of Radić who had once called for Croatian independence. Though in theory a supporter of economic liberalism, in practice Stojadinović favored an etatist economic policy, arguing that the state should intervene to end the Great Depression.
Diplomacy
Stojadinović recognized the military threats from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and surrounding countries as imminent. From the beginning of his prime-ministership, Stojadinović sought closer ties with Germany despite Yugoslavia's traditional friendship with France. In late 1935, Stojadinović appointed a well known Germanophile as the Yugoslav minister in Berlin to replace the former minister who had a more critical attitude towards the Reich. Even before the remilitarization of the Rhineland, Yugoslavia under Stojadinović was moving towards a pro-German foreign policy. In 1935, Yugoslavia observed the sanctions that the League of Nations imposed on Italy, which hurt the Yugoslav economy, and Stojadinović signed his first economic treaty with Germany at the same time. In February 1936, Stojadinović welcomed King Boris III of Bulgaria to Belgrade, marking the beginning of Yugoslav-Bulgarian rapprochement as Stojadinović wanted more friendly relations with Sofia to settle the "Macedonian Question" which poisoned Yugoslav-Bulgarian relations in the interwar period.
Yugoslavia had signed a treaty of alliance with France in 1927, when France still occupied the Rhineland, and during Franco-Yugoslav staff talks, it was promised that France would take the offensive into western Germany if Germany should start another war. As long as the Rhineland remained demilitarized, there was always the possibility of a French offensive into western Germany, which reassured Yugoslavia. Weinberg wrote that the demilitarized status of the Rhineland the treaty of Versailles had imposed was "...the single most important guarantee of peace in Europe," for, as long as the Rhineland was demilitarized, it was impossible for Germany to attack any of France's allies in Eastern Europe without exposing itself to the risk of a devastating French offensive into western Germany. The remilitarization of the Rhineland on 7 March 1936 enabled Germany to start building the West Wall along its border with France, ending any hope of a French offensive into western Germany. From the Yugoslav viewpoint, the remilitarization of the Rhineland and the construction of the West Wall meant that Germany could now launch offensives into eastern Europe without fear of France, which led Stojadinović to break with the traditional pro-French foreign policy of Yugoslavia and to seek an understanding with the Reich. On 15–20 June 1936, the chiefs of staff of the Little Entente (Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) met in Bucharest to discuss their plans now that the Rhineland was re-militarized. The gloomy conclusion of the Bucharest meeting was that France was not a factor in Eastern Europe, and henceforward there were only two great powers in Eastern Europe, namely the Soviet Union and Germany, and the victory of either in another war would mean the end of their independence. Stojadinović worked increasingly toward a goal of neutrality like that of Switzerland. Examples of his work to that end were the non-aggression treaty with Italy and Yugoslavia's extension of its treaty of friendship with France.