The article presents the events in the early 20th century and reveals how the Slovenes gathered around the political association Edinost wrote about the development of the Croatian political movement, known as the ‘New Course’. This was a new political strategy which altered relations within the Croatian-Austrian-Hungarian triangle and simultaneously affected relations between the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. The primary political objective of the Croats within the New Course was the reintegration of Dalmatia into the Croatia-Slavonia unit, which was initially supposed to remain in the Hungarian half of the Habsburg Monarchy. In return for securing Italian support, the New Course bolstered the Italian ambitions in Istria, Trieste and Gorizia. The latter seemed to improve the otherwise troubled Croatian-Serbian relations, but impaired the former Croatian-Slovenian alliance. Coastal and especially Trieste Slovenes feared that the Croats and Serbs would sacrifice them in exchange for Italian support of a South Slav politicaladministrative unit within the Habsburg Monarchy. However, the author notes that Edinost was divided between sympathy for the Croatian-Serbian agreement and broader South Slavic reciprocity on one side, and frustration with that part of the strategy that left Trieste outside of the imagined Yugoslav unit on the other. An analysis of Edinost texts also shows that the New Course did not represent a fusion of the Croatian and Serbian concepts, since the Croatian-Serbian Coalition was rent by two opposing visions on the South Slav question, particularly with regard to fundamental geopolitical parameters.
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