The author compares political and historic traditions in Central Europe and in the Balkans in the beginning of the 20th century. Emphasizing a strong role of the monarch and the state, the political culture of the Habsburg monarchy had been the heritage from the period of baroque and the rule of Emperor Franz Joseph; this situation did not change until after 1867 when the parliamentary system started to restrain the monarch in a more pronounced manner. Regardless of the fact that in the period prior to the First World War there were marked differences in the degree of democratization between the eastern and the western parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in comparison to West Europe the development of political individualism and party pluralism was much slower in both. The second part of the article deals with the situation in the Balkans. In the 19th century, the newly-formed elites in Balkan Christian states started to adopt the model of political modernization and to follow the example of West European countries. The tendencies of these Balkan states were liberal on the one hand and nationalistic and populist on the other. In the case of Serbia, liberal tendencies and the fight for democratization were strongly hindered by the populist radical party and the court. In 1918, when Slovenes and Croatians joined the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, they brought with them a tradition of federalism and a profound distrust of a strong, centralized state government; Serbian politicians, on the other hand, advocated a centralized »national« state after the example of France. Rather than different degrees of political culture or democratization, the principal reasons for the disagreement between the three nations were different national, state, and political ideologies.