ABSTRACT
By the last decade before the First World War, five independent states stood in place of the Ottoman regime whose Sultan had been the sovereign ruler of their considerable territory at the start of the nineteenth century. In 1912, Albania joined Greece, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Montenegro as the sixth post-Ottoman state. National armies supported the sovereignty of these states. Legislative assemblies elected by increased male suffrage and from established political parties contested for, or shared power with European-style monarchies and ministerial bureaucracies. In the Habsburg borderlands, similar domestic assemblies and parties were challenging governance under Austrian rule in Carniola, Dalmatia, the Vojvodina and the Bukovina, Hungarian rule in Croatia-Slavonia and Transylvania, or the joint administration in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
