Banovina of Croatia

The Banovina of Croatia or Banate of Croatia (Бановина Хрватска) was an autonomous province (banovina) of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia between 1939 and 1941. It was formed by a merger of Sava and Littoral banovinas into a single autonomous entity, with small parts of the Drina, Zeta, Vrbas and Danube banovinas also included. Its capital was Zagreb and it included most of present-day Croatia along with portions of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. Its sole Ban during this period was Ivan Šubašić. In the Vidovdan Constitution of 1921, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had established 33 administrative districts, each headed by a government-appointed prefect. Both the Vidovdan Constitution in general and the administrative districts in particular were part of the design of Nikola Pašić and Svetozar Pribićević to maximize the power of the ethnic Serb population within the new state. The new constitution was passed in a political climate favorable to the Serbian centralists, as the Croatian regionalists chose to abstain from parliamentary duty, whereas the deputies of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia were excluded by a parliamentary vote. An amendment to the electoral law in June of 1922 further stacked the deck in favor of the Serbian population, when electoral constituencies were created based on pre-war census figures, allowing Serbia to ignore its massive military casualties sustained in the First World War. This only furthered the resentment felt by the proponents of a federate or confederate state towards the government, particularly the Croatian regionalists of the Croatian Republican Peasant Party (HRSS) around Stjepan Radić. Radić was shot in parliament by a Serbian delegate in 1928 and died two months later. This provoked the withdrawal of the HRSS from the assembly, forged an anti-Belgrade mindset in Croatia and ultimately led to the collapse of the constitutional system of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.