Nikola Stojanović (politician, born 1880)

Nikola Stojanović (3 January 1880 – 5 March 1964) was a lawyer and Bosnian Serb and Yugoslavian politician. As a student, he wrote the article Serbs and Croats, printed in the Serbian Literary Herald, applying Social Darwinism and claiming that Serbs as 'superior people' would eventually assimilate the Croats. In the text, Stojanović announced war to extermination of either Serbs or Croats and the text has been cited as the blueprint for ethnic cleansing by Croatian writers. Following a politically-motivated reprint of the article in Srbobran, the newspaper of the Serb Independent Party in Zagreb, it led to 1902 riots targeting Serb businesses and homes in the city, involving a crowd of about 20,000.

Stojanović became a member of the Serb National Organisation political party in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its representative in the Diet of Bosnia. He called for the end of the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina and annexation of the land by Serbia as a part of its access to the Adriatic Sea through Dalmatia. Serbian prime minister Nikola Pašić directed Stojanović to contact émigré Croatian politicians Ante Trumbić and Julije Gazzari to form a body which would promote unification of South Slavs through expansion of Serbia. The group was established as the Yugoslav Committee with Stojanović was one of its founding members. Trumbić and Stojanović came into conflict with Pašić. While the former disagreed with Pašić on the issue of federation or greater centralisation, while the latter might have objected to the proposed state being a monarchy. Stojanović opposed the Corfu Declaration on unification which affirmed that the union would be a monarchy ruled by the Karađorđević dynasty. Stojanović was a part of the Yugoslav Committee's delegation which negotiated and the signed short-lived Geneva Declaration defining the future common confederal state. Despite initiatives calling on the National Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina to proclaim direct unification with Serbia similarly to the Podgorica Assembly, the council remained passive on Stojanović's instructions. At the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920), Stojanović was a representative of the newly proclaimed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as an expert for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In the interwar period, Stojanović pursued the career of an attorney. Upon the establishment of the Serbian Cultural Club in Belgrade in 1937, Stojanović joined the organisation. He was a part of a group tasked with drafting the organisation's rules of procedure and formulating its objectives. The Serbian Cultural Club took the leading role in shaping of the Greater Serbian ideology in the period. It also shaped the political programme of the Chetniks led by Draža Mihailović. In the summer of 1941, Stojanović started working for Mihailović in his Belgrade office and formally joined the Central National Committee in August 1943. That year, Nazi German authorities arrested him and took him to occupied France where Stojanović remained until the end of the war. He returned to the Communist Yugoslavia after the war. He was tried and convicted for his political work.