Serbia

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Lore

Serbia (Srbija), officially the Serbian Republic (Republika srpska), is a democratic republic in Southeast Europe ostensibly within the Austro-Hungarian economic and political sphere of influence, but secretly controlled by a bellicose, ultra-nationalist deep state called the Konspiracija, very similar to the Black Hand that once dominated the Kingdom of Serbia in the years prior to the Weltkrieg and eventually lit the spark for the most devastating conflict in human history by assassinating Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Defeated by the Central Powers, Serbia was reduced to an Austro-Hungarian satellite via the 1919 Treaty of Wartholz until a 1925 revolution instituted democratic reforms, including the abolition of the monarchy. Serbia remains in a free trade zone with Austria-Hungary and its army limited by treaty to just four divisions, but secret rearmament has already started.

Serbia is bordered by Austria-Hungary on the other side of the Danube to the north as well as to the west via Montenegro, Bulgaria on the other side of the Morava to the east and to the south via Kosovo and by Albania to the south-west.

History[]

The Rise of Serbia[]

After centuries of direct Ottoman rule and decades as an Ottoman client state, the Principality of Serbia was finally recognized as a sovereign state at the Congress of Berlin in 1878; shortly after, the Kingdom of Serbia was proclaimed. Ruled by the House of Obrenović at the time, the small Balkan country generally pursued a pro-Austrian foreign policy, reflected most prominently in the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885. However, especially Russophile factions in Serbia as well as pan-Serbian ultra-nationalists, who dreamed of an expansion into Austrian-controlled South Slavic territories to the northwest, were not pleased about that. In June 1903, King Alexander I as well as his wife and close associates were killed in a bloody palace revolution by several military officers, which led to the extinction of the Obrenović dynasty.

In secret, the incident had been planned and organised by the so-called "Black Hand", a nationalist military society which advocated for the unification of ethnic Serb territories. Now, with the Obrenovićs out of the way, the National Assembly invited the exiled Prince Peter Karađorđević to ascend to the throne. Peter was the son of Prince Alexander of Serbia, who had ruled the Principality between 1842 and 1858 and who was known for his pro-Russian tendencies; the Black Hand hoped that with Peter at the helm, they could make their pan-Serbian ambitions finally reality.

Prior to the Weltkrieg, the Kingdom of Serbia's constitutional monarchy held the trust of its inhabitants, to the point where the period had even been called “Serbia’s golden age”. King Petar I followed the will of the parliament, the National Assembly, and civilian governments dominated by the moderate liberal People’s Radical Party helped to establish a free, democratic system. Paired with Serbia's glorious victory in the Balkan Wars of 1912/13, everything was seemingly going well. But behind the scenes, King Peter and the House of Karađorđević were still at the mercy of the Black Hand, which had expanded its influence deep into the military structures of the country. Its leader, Dragutin Dimitrijević “Apis”, basically controlled the government as a deep state - the Black Hand turned Serbia’s foreign policy towards the reclamation of all South Slavic territories, inevitably causing tensions with Austria-Hungary.

On 24 June 1914, the elderly King Peter relinquished most of his royal powers to his son Crown Prince Alexander, an opponent of the Black Hand. Though a Serbian nationalist, he saw Dimitrijević’s status as “kingmaker” as a severe threat to the monarchy's position within the country - after all, the events of 1903 could potentially repeat at any given time should the Black Hand not be satisfied with the Karađorđevićs' ruling policy anymore. Around the same time, only four days later, the Bosnian Black Hand agent Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Crown Prince of Austria Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand during a visit in Sarajevo, triggering the July Crisis; the Dual Monarchy sent Serbia an ultimatum designed to be rejected, and when Serbia refused to unequivocally accept it, Austria-Hungary declared war and therefore caused the most devastating armed conflict in human history.

Weltkrieg[]

Serbia's armed forces performed valiantly, successfully stalling the Austro-Hungarian advance into the country in 1914, turning the tide of the front around in battles at the Cer and Drina rivers, and evicting them from Serbian soil entirely. In October 1915 however, German reinforcements under August von Mackensen and Bulgaria's entry into the Central Powers allowed Austro-Hungarians to finally break through and shatter the Serbian army. Convinced by Field Marshal Radomir Putnik that holding out against the Central Powers on Serbian soil was impossible, Crown Prince Alexander ordered a mass retreat to the Allied-occupied territories in neutral Greece. From November to January, over 150,000 Serbs marched through the Albanian and Montenegrin mountains to the Adriatic, where they embarked on allied ships and formed a Serbian formation that would eventually serve at the Macedonian Front. All of Serbia was put under Central Powers occupation and divided between Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian zones. This occupation was gruesome and bloody, marked by war crimes, pillaging, famine, epidemics and a vast loss of life on Serbian soil.

While the Bulgarians tried to ethnically cleanse large swathes of their occupied territories in an effort to integrate it into their vision of "Greater Bulgaria" later on, leading to brutal war crimes such as the Surdulica massacre and the mass executions following the Toplica uprising, the Austro-Hungarian military occupation was directionless. The Empire's military and political leadership was divided on Serbia's fate, and this lack of common understanding meant that Austrian occupation policy lacked clear goals and was basically haphazard. Three views of the future of Serbia arose at the beginning of the war:

The Imperial and Royal Armed Forces, most notably Chief of the General Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, pursued imperialist ambitions – they viewed Serbia as a threat to Imperial integrity and believed that it needed to be occupied for years after the war, or even permanently. At the minimum, Austria-Hungary needed to take control of the Morava-Vardar valley and the Mačva and eliminate any potential influence which Serbia held over its co-nationals in the Empire.
The Hungarians, led by Prime Minister István Tisza, vehemently refused the annexation of any Slavic-speaking territories into the Austro-Hungarian Empire and instead envisioned only the annexation of a small northwestern part of Serbia, the Šabac-Belgrade bridgehead over the Danube, into the Kingdom of Hungary.
The Foreign Ministry in Vienna subscribed to a freer handed approach to Serbia and maintained that its fate should not be prejudged, owing to the ever-changing circumstances of the war, and did not dismiss the possibility of a rump independent Serbia tied to the Empire via economic and trade agreements. This view was supported by the German high command, which also wanted to see Serbia remain nominally independent after the war in an effort to guarantee peace and stability on the Balkans.

The German Empire, whom Austria-Hungary was becoming increasingly reliant upon during the war, envisioned a stabilized Balkan system which would be able to pressure Romania and block Allied plans in Southeastern Europe. They stood in favor of a separate peace with Serbia (which caused a fallout between Germany and Austria-Hungary in the fall of 1915), according to which Serbia would surrender Macedonia to Bulgaria, but annex Montenegro and thus gain an outlet to the sea. The Foreign Ministry in Vienna was somewhat sympathetic to the idea, but, as Foreign Minister, Count Burián, stated, “was against half-measures that would harm the Monarchy’s prestige”. Such a solution was opposed by the Austrian military and the Hungarians.

1916 saw the beginning of internal conflict within the Imperial and Royal Military Administration in Serbia over the course of the occupation. Ignoring Hungarian and civilian government objections, the k.u.k. administration implemented policies clearly designed to keep Serbia permanently under military administration, such as denationalization measures and changes to the education system. The military systematically sabotaged the efforts of the appointed civilian administrators, who were mostly Hungarian. Feldmarschalleutnant Johan Ulrich Graf von Salis-Seewis was the most vehement in these annexationist tendencies, thus ended up in direct conflict with Tisza and Burián and was ultimately sacked in July 1916. After his removal, the powers of the civilian authority over the Austrian occupation zone increased.

Collaboration with the Austrian authorities was small, yet present. The center of these activities was the Belgrade Committee, a Serbian local administration which was responsible for the distribution of relief in Belgrade and its surroundings and included several high-ranking politicians from the pre-war period. They were led by Vojislav Veljković, former Finance Minister of Serbia and the leader of the Belgrade municipality for the duration of the war – as early as 1915, he had reached out to the Austrian occupation authorities to attempt a dialogue between them and the remaining Serbian political leaders. Another important figure was Živojin Perić, professor and former member of the Progressive Party who split off to found the anti-Russian and pro-Austrian Serbian Conservative Party in 1914. The Belgrade Committee was tolerated by the Austrian authorities, which got the Kingdom of Hungary to accuse the k.u.k. administration of not just annexationist tendencies, but also preparations for a some sort of restored Serbian state. However, the absolute majority of the local population still utterly despised Austrian occupation, even though the Austrians were quite lenient in comparison to the brutal Bulgarians right on the other side of the Morava.

Road to Peace[]

In March 1917, newly crowned Emperor Karl dismissed Hötzendorf from his position as Chief of the General Staff, contributing to the Austro-Hungarian military's inability to dictate an occupation policy in Serbia. The same year, István Tisza was removed from his position as Prime Minister of Hungary and replaced with the reformist Móric Esterházy, also defanging Hungary's ability to lobby on Serbian policy. By late 1918, the Weltkrieg had turned in favor of the Central Powers; the French and British had been put under severe pressure at the Western Front and were not in any position anymore to stage large-scale offensives in Macedonia. The Serbian government in exile's hope of triumphantly returning to Belgrade one day began to look more and more of futile. Simultaneously however, the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Serbia was turning untenable as well, as three years of economic exploitation, mass suffering and constant conflict were taking a toll. Both sides felt increasing pressure to sign a separate peace - via the Belgrade Committee, the Foreign Ministry of the Empire entered negotiations with the Serbian government in exile during summer.

The sentiments in the Austrian leadership and general population towards Serbia had changed since 1914 and its “Punish Serbia!” phase. Those who wanted to see the so-called “barbarians” burn and their country dismantled never vanished, but four years of war had taken its toll, the occupation of Serbia was extremely expensive and news of the crimes taking place would eventually slip to Vienna one way or another. What’s more, Austria was running short on its list of options for what to do with the rest of Serbia: Those who wanted to erase the Karađorđevićs from history and tear down their statues and monuments in the Austrian occupation zone couldn’t provide an alternative which the Austrian leadership could universally agree on. Austrian diplomats had been in talks with Prince Mirko of Montenegro for quite some time in an effort to put the House of Petrović-Njegoš on the Serbian throne, but Mirko had died in early 1918 and his son Michael was too young to effectively rule the country; he surely would have ended up as a puppet of Serbian far-right circles, eventually. The Germans on the other hand still had little issue with keeping the Karađorđevićs in power, as long as it meant a stable and secure Balkans which was outside the reach of the Entente – ultimately, the Austrians would begrudgingly have to agree to the solution as well.

The German proposal, which already had been worked out under Reichskanzler Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg and his foreign minister Gottlieb von Jagow in 1915/16, planned the unification of the Serbian territories west of the Morava, the Kingdom of Montenegro and the lawless Albanian state into a "New Kingdom of Serbia" - the dynasty which should rule it was left unspecified. Albania was eventually excluded from the plan on Austrian pressure who preferred the establishment of an closely Austrian-aligned Albanian protectorate. Vardar Macedonia and the Serbian lands east of the Morava would be ceded to Bulgaria. The Serbian exiles were not easy to convince, but Crown Prince Alexander, initially hesitant, would become the leading force of the separate peace talks. He feared that, should the Serbians in Corfu refuse a peace with Austria, the Austrians would take a page from German initiatives in Eastern Europe and simply place a Habsburg on the Serbian throne. That would not only be the end of the Karađorđević dynasty in Serbia, but the end of an independent Serbia as well. If they declined, he believed Vienna would brush off the dust from their promises of giving Šabac-Belgrade to Hungary, establish greater Montenegrin & Albanians kingdoms, and leave Serbia as a tiny rump state without the Sandžak and Kosovo, forever unable to reclaim its lost territories.

Many other Serbian exiles, however, most importantly King Peter, still hoped that the Entente would prevail. In the end, the King chose to not grant his signature to “a treaty which will destroy Serbia’s dignity” and abdicated instead, passing the crown to his son, now Alexander II of Serbia. On 29 September 1918, he and Prime Minister Nikola Pašić signed an armistice with the Central Powers which put an end to hostilities between the two factions and restored Serbian civilian administration in the Austrian occupation zone. Almost immediately after a somber return to the ruined, bombed Belgrade, Aleksandar II dismissed Pašić, for his personal distaste for the elderly politician had grown too far, especially due to the latter's reluctance to conclude peace. To many Serbs, especially those opposed to the armistice, this solidified the image of Alexander II as an usurper autocrat, who eliminated both his father and his Prime Minister in order to sell Serbia off to the Austrians - after all, in the critical last months of 1918 and first half of 1919, Austrian troops remained in Serbia – on one hand, they established order and prevented unrest, but on the other, they painted the King and his government as Austrian collaborators.

After hostilities ceased in Europe in August 1919, peace negotiations between the Allies and Central Powers began, and in October 1919, the Treaty of Wartholz, signed in the Habsburg imperial villa of Wartholz, affirmed the territorial changes made during the Weltkrieg and established Serbia’s relationship with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, and Germany. Montenegro was integrated into Serbia, and its native Petrović-Njegoš dynasty was exiled and forced to abandon their claims to the kingdom’s throne, for the time at least. Serbia was required to sign a treaty of free trade and commerce with Vienna, reduce the size of its army to a maximum of 4 divisions, or 35 thousand men, and allow tariff-less transit through the Morava River. It also renounced all claims on territories held by the Empire and Bulgaria. Germany originally envisioned Serbia, like Austria-Hungary, as a core member of their hypothetical Mitteleuropa bloc, but when German-Austrian relations soured after the war, these plans were dropped.

Towards Revolution[]

Serbia had suffered more than any other state during the Weltkrieg. Its economy had been subjugated to the occupying powers and completely looted, its population had dwindled and its political structure had been uprooted from the ground up. The nation was in crisis. Many sympathized with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and, later on, the Syndicalist Revolution in France, and sought to repeat it back home. Inspired by the French and Italians, Serbian workers organized into the Central Workers’ Trade Union (Centralno radničko sindikalno vijeće) and the Socialist Workers’ Party (Socijalistička radnička partija), whose revolutionary rhetoric resonated across the impoverished and famished Serbian population.

Advised by the Austrian foreign ministry, Alexander II appointed the leader of the Belgrade Committee, Vojislav Veljković, as Prime Minister of Serbia. Though the liberal 1903 Constitution was restored, the country remained in emergency, and the authoritarian monarch used the chance to expand his powers further. In late 1919, he promulgated the Obznana (lit. “announcement”) in response to anti-police violence during a miners strike in Montenegro & large-scale demonstrations in Belgrade, which banned the Socialist Workers’ Party and pushed it to the opposition. Elections were delayed, a state of emergency declared, and a power base built up in preparation to keep the country under the King’s will. Additionally, Veljković formed the State Party of Serbian Democrats, or the Democratic Party (Državnotvorna stranka demokrata Srba) as the main pro-Austrian and pro-Alexander lobby in the country. It was composed of the People’s Party of Veljković, the Serbian Conservative Party of Živojin Perić, and several Independent Radicals such as Vasilije Antonić, Mihailo Popović, and Milivoje Spasojević. Suppression of voters, crackdowns on vocal opposition, and rule by decree soon became daily occurrences.

Originally, elections were planned to be held in 1920 in order to finalize Serbia’s transition from a war-torn state into a restored nation, but it soon became clear that the Serbian people were not buying the legitimacy of the new regime. The Radical Party, led by former Prime Minister Nikola Pašić, was stronger than ever and campaigned on resisting the growing authoritarian regime; in case of an election, they were likely to gain a majority, even with extensive electoral fraud. Even worse, they were not the only party that openly campaigned against authoritarianism. Throughout and after the war, the pre-war Independent Radicals had split, and the majority of them consolidated around the Republican Democratic Party (later Serbian Republican Party), led by Ljubomir Stojanović. Though the Prime Minister was reluctant to commit to drastic action, Alexander II overruled him and released a second Obznana in April of 1920, ten days before the elections, with which he delayed elections by a yet another year, prorogued parliament, and suspended the Constitution. The elections in 1921 were no longer free or fair, marked by open ballot voting and thus public pressure to support the Democratic Party over any of their political rivals.

In total, Alexander's Royal Dictatorship lasted for five years, which were marked by progress and yet also decay. Vojislav Veljković, a skilled economist, introduced monetary reform by establishing a new National Bank, harmonized the impact of merging the Serbian and Montenegrin economies, and oversaw the reconstruction of the country. However, the political atmosphere remained tense. Though the Serbian people were thoroughly sick of war or any conflict with their neighbour to the north, Alexander’s pro-Austrian attitude sickened them even more, which, combined with the end of the democracy his father once fostered, turned him into one of the most hated men in the country.

Underground nationalist organizations, styled after the Black Hand, began to form, often advised by former Black Hand members themselves. The most famous and influential of these was known as Konspiracija (“Conspiracy”), a nationalist secret society which sought to overthrow the pro-Austrian monarchy just like in 1903 and establish a new Serbian State which would restore Greater Serbia finally once and for all. Though nationalist & mostly Republican, its was ideology highly veritable; its members even including Socialist and Syndicalist sympathizers, such as Dragiša Vasić, one of the members of its Central Committee. Underground resistance was met by harsh responses from the Royal Dictatorship - assassinations, kidnappings, raids against political opponents, all of which continued to inflame tensions.

In late 1925, the far left once again began to stir, organizing spontaneous strikes and protests in Belgrade in response to a sharp increase in bread prices, which soon escalated into a non-ideological mass protest overtaking the streets of the country. The ongoing British Revolution, already in its end stages at the time, served as one of its inspirations, but a simple demand for an end to the dictatorship was just as important in inspiring the people. At first, expecting the movement to quickly disperse, the government merely ordered the strikes to be suppressed, but the violence only made tensions worse. The situation eventually became untenable, large parts of the army began to mutiny, and the Konspiracija gradually expanded its influence among the military's highest spheres. On the evening of 3 December 1925, King Alexander, who had just returned from his winter residence in Rijeka Crnojevića to Belgrade on the pressure of Prime Minister Veljković due to the deteriorating situation in the capital, was shot dead in a cloak-and-dagger operation, presumably by his own royal guards who had ties to the Konspiracija.

In the chaotic aftermath, Prime Minister Veljković resigned and surrendered his position grudgingly to the opposition and their leader Ljubomir Stojanović, the chairman of the Republican Party of Serbia. Though the main Karađorđević line did not go extinct with the assassination, Alexander II's only son, Peter II, was merely two years old at the time and his claim to the throne was effectively ignored by the insurgents – the Serbian Republic was declared instead shortly after. The baby, who had remained with his mother Maria of Romania at Ljeskovac Castle in Rijeka Crnojevića, Montenegro, was successfully evacuated by military officers of the White Hand, however, who secretly brought him out of the country and sent him to Canada to his uncle Prince Paul, where he would be tutored for the next ten years of his life.

Republican Era[]

There were several reasons why the democratic revolution in Serbia did not spark immediate Austrian intervention. Prince Paul, the likely regent to the Serbian throne, was a firm supporter of the Entente and a far cry from Alexander’s pragmatism. The Republican government did not immediately denounce the Treaty of Wartholz and even upheld most of its tenets, especially free trade with the Empire. Finally, Austria had its own pressing issues at the time – strong anti-war sentiment, fiscal difficulties, sympathy towards the Serbian democratic movement, and ongoing internal restructuring in Cisleithania caused the idea of a potentially costly military intervention, during a time when the British Revolution was still ongoing and tensions in Italy were looming, to eventually be abandoned. After a brief diplomatic crisis, the relationship between Vienna and Belgrade was resolved and the Serbian Republic officially recognized.

Elections to the Constituent Assembly of the Republic were held in early 1926 and resulted in an absolute majority for a coalition between the Radical Party and the Republican Party, which, despite Radical sympathies towards a constitutional monarchy, ultimately accepted the new Republican system. The rest of the Convention was taken up by conservatives, Syndicalists, Communists, Social Democrats, and remaining Democrats who distanced themselves from the Royal Dictatorship. The Convention drafted a new constitution for the country, which established Serbia as a semi-presidential republic; delegated by the Republican Party, Jaša Prodanović was elected as the first President of Serbia in 1926. Prodanović’s term would see the stabilization of the state, democratization of the bureaucracy, and the establishment of far-reaching welfare reforms.

However, while Serbia maintained its democratic, ostensibly pro-Austrian facade throughout the late 20s and early 30s, most of the country's political affairs became more and more undermined by the ever-growing influence of the Konspiracija. Much like the Black Hand became a deep state in the Kingdom of Serbia from 1903 onwards, the Konspiracija grew into a powerful actor in deciding Serbian policy in the Republican Era – they thwarted any monarchist attempts to subvert the state and they kept the military loyal, but they wanted concessions in exchange. Their main goals were, and still are, the repudiation of the humiliating Treaty of Wartholz, the annulment of the devastating army restrictions imposed by the Central Powers, a military alliance with the enemies of both Austria and Bulgaria, and the eventual restoration of Greater Serbia: Due to their omnipresent influence in the army, they are responsible, among others, for the secret Serbian rearmament, in the form of things such as the establishment of civilian pilot schools to train a new generation of Serbian pilots and the formation of “hunting associations'' and “training clubs” in order to prepare a reserve of soldiers for the next war.

President Jaša Prodanović hoped to eventually eliminate the influence of the Konspiracija from the Serbian government, but his term expired before he could achieve this goal, and the deep state figured out his intentions. In the election of 1931, he was replaced by Dragomir (Dragiša) Vasić, a moderate socialist from the Republican Party and, secretly, a high ranking member of the Konspiracija. His term, while promising in its education, culture and welfare reforms, was also marked by a sharp growth of Serbian nationalism within the government, and increasing worries from Serbia’s neighbors that history will repeat anew. As 1935 ends, Serbia remains, nominally, a state under the Austrian sphere of influence, and its ambitions are shackled both by resistance at home and the Treaty of Wartholz abroad – but should the world shake once more, they will undoubtedly throw away those shackles and seize their destiny. However, the Konspiracija is still facing various challenges: While the government and the political upper class of the Serbia are receptive to irredentist goals, the populace is far less sympathetic – having suffered one of the worst occupations of the Weltkrieg, their greatest fear is the repeat of these horrors, and irredentism, expansionism, and militarism remain unpopular in the public sphere.

Politics[]

According to the new constitution of 1926, Serbia is a secular, semi-presidential republic whose unicameral legislature, the Skupština, elects a President, the head of state of the country, for a five year term, who has considerable power in appointing officials and directing domestic policy. He shares the executive role with the Prime Minister, who is appointed by the President with the assent of the Skupština and must maintain a majority in the legislature. The Constitution was designed to be strictly democratic, but nevertheless centralized in order to prevent what its designers perceived to be “extreme parliamentarianism”, which they believed caused the fall of the French and British states. Since 1931, President Dragomir Vasić leads a 'social liberal' government in an informal pact with the Konspiracija-supplanted military.

Title	Name	Party
President	Dragomir Vasić (born 2 September 1885)	Serbian Republican Party
Prime Minister	Milan Grol (born 12 September 1876)	Serbian Republican Party
Minister of Foreign Affairs	Mladen Žujović (born 5 June 1895)	Serbian Republican Party
Minister of Finance	Ilija Šumenković (born 26 July 1881)	Serbian Republican Party
Minister of the Interior	Kosta Kumanudi (born 22 November 1874)	Serbian Republican Party

Economy[]

Serbia has a fledgling economy and is mainly agricultural with most of the population consisting of peasants.

Industry[]

Almost all of Serbia's limited factories are located in the capital of Belgrade. In January of 1936, Serbia's industry consists of 4 civilian factories and 2 military factories.

Natural Resources[]

Serbia's only natural resource is steel, with them having 8 units of steel in the country.

Military[]

The Serbian Military is strong for such a small country. They, however, do not stand a chance against either their Austrian or Bulgarian enemies by themselves.

Army[]

The Serbian Army has been limited to 35,000 men due to the Treaty of Wartholz. however, the government has been secretly rearming, a process started just after the Weltkrieg.

Air Force[]

as of 1936, Serbia has no airforce to speak of.

Navy[]

Serbia does not have access to the sea as a coastal strip reaching from the Austrian port city of Kotor to the Albanian frontier city of Scutari was annexed by the Austrians as part of the Treaty of Wartholz in 1919; therefore, Serbia is not in possession of a navy.

Foreign Relations[]

Serbia has friendly relations with Russia, due to their common Slavic heretige, status as former members of the Entente and shared hatred towards Austria-Hungary. Serbia is also friendly towards Greece, Romania, and to a lesser degree the Ottoman Empire, due to common enemies.

Serbia has unfriendly relations with Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and to a lesser degree Germany. Serbia is in a free trade area with the former. Serbia claims territory lost to Bulgaria in the Treaty of Wartholz.