When the Jugoslavs appeared with a united delegation at the Peace Conference, Italy insisted that its members be acknowledged only as Serbians, acting in the name of the Belgrade Government. The union of the Jugoslav portions of the Hapsburg Empire with the Kingdom of Serbia had not been recognized by Italy, or by the other Entente Powers, for that matter;[14] and, as such an event was a thing of the future, to be decided by the Peace Conference, Italy declared that she would not consent to have decisions anticipated or prejudiced by acceptance of the union as a _fait accompli_. Throughout the Conference Italy maintained this uncompromising attitude. It was after issuing from a conference in which the future of the Jugoslavs was the principal topic that Mr. Lloyd George said that the peace treaties threatened “to Balkanize Europe.” The full significance of this remark is grasped when we realize that the Jugoslav cause at Paris was not advanced by delegates who presented a solid front and followed a consistent policy in pressing their national claims. Pashitch and his colleagues from Belgrade, dismayed by Italian opposition at times and at others more interested in the Banat of Temesvár and Macedonia than in the Adriatic, held back from whole-hearted support of Croat and Slovene claims. In their attitude toward their “redeemed brethren” the Serbs displayed curiously mixed sentiments. If one were rash enough to attempt to express the Serbian feeling in one sentence, he might put it in this way, that the Serbs possessed, in relation to the Hapsburg Jugoslavs, a superior military complex and an inferior cultural complex.