"Yugoslavia resembled Czechoslovakia in that it was a miniature empire run by Serbs, and with considerably more brutality than the Czechs ran theirs. In parts of it there had been continuous fighting since 1912, and the frontiers were not settled (if that is the word) until 1926. The Orthodox Serbs ran the army and the administration, but the Catholic Croats and Slovenes, who had much higher cultural and economic standards, talked of their duty to 'Europeanize the Balkans' (i.e. the Serbs) and their fears that they themselves would be 'Balkanized.' R.W. Seton-Watson, who had been instrumental in creating the new country, was soon disillusioned by the way the Serbs ran it: 'The situation in Jugoslavia,' he wrote in 1921, 'reduces me to despair.... I have no confidence in the new constitution, with its absurd centralism.' The Serb officials were worse than the Habsburgs, he complained, and Serb opposition more savage than German. 'My own inclination,' he wrote in 1928, '... is to leave the Serbs and Croats to stew in their own juice! I think they are both mad and cannot see beyond the ends of their noses.' Indeed, MPs had just been blazing away at each other with pistols in parliament, the Croat Peasant Party leader, Stepan Radic, being killed in the process. The country was held together, if at all, not so much by the Serb political police as by the smouldering hatred of its Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Albanian neighbors, all of whom had grievances to settle."