Svetozar Pribičević

Svetozar Pribićević (Serbian Cyrillic: Светозар Прибићевић, pronounced [pribǐːt͡ʃeʋit͡ɕ]; October 26, 1875 - September 15, 1936) was a Croatian Serb politician who was one the the main proponents of Yugoslavism and a federalized South Slavic state which would later turn out to be Yugoslavia. However, he later became a bitter opponent of the same policy and of the dictatorship of king Aleksandar Karađorđević.

Pribićević was born in Kostajnica, and as a youth he studied mathematics and physics in Zagreb and then briefly in Prague. Upon returning to Zagreb, he joined other young, politically active Croats and Serbs in producing the book Narodna misao (The National Idea, 1895) which argued that Croats and Serbs were one nation, and that they should work together in Croatian politics.

He took over leadership of the Serb People's Independent Party (Srpska narodna samostalna stranka) in 1903. In 1905, he and his party sponsored the Zadar Resolution, by which the Independents proposed to work with willing Croatian political parties (and signatories of the Rijeka Resolution) for a new, more assertive Croatian policy vis-à-vis the Hungarian and Austrian governments.

Between 1906 and 1918, he led the Croat-Serb Coalition, which was the political child of the two earlier resolutions. The Coalition dominated Croatian politics during that period. The power of the Coalition, and its Yugoslav state creation incentive, made it the target of attempts by Austrian and Hungarian authorities to destroy it. The treason trial of 1909 (in which a court in Zagreb tried 53 Serbs, including his brothers Valerijan and Adam, for treason) and the Friedjung trial (in which Pribićević and other members of the Coalition sued the Austrian historian Heinrich Friedjung for libel on the basis of several articles he wrote in the Reichspost) of the same year were the most obvious evidence of these campaigns.

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