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Tito vécut les purges staliniennes principalement en dehors de l'Union soviétique, ce qui lui permit de survivre, mais aussi d'en profiter pour devenir le principal dirigeant du parti. Les séjours à Moscou, en 1938 et 1939 furent des rudes épreuves pour lui, mais par un savant mélange d'opportunisme politique et de l'égoïsme personnel il sut se distancier de tous ses collègues qui ont péri dans les purges écartant ainsi les soupçons qui pesaient sur lui aussi. Le fait qu'il réussit à deux reprises de retourner de Moscou indemne en tant qu'au moins messager, sinon, comme il se représentait lui-même, comme mandataire de Komintern, lui permit de s'établir définitivement au sommet de la hiérarchie communiste en Yougoslavie dont il avait commencé le renouveau dès 1936.

L'arrivée du général Franchet d'Espèrey à Salonique, en tant que commandant des troupes alliées sur le front d'Orient, en juin 1918 a créé les conditions pour que les armées alliées, menées par les divisions serbes et françaises, réussissent à percer la ligne du front le 15 septembre et obligent la Bulgarie à signer l'armistice le 29 septembre. La victoire alliée à Salonique fut à l'origine de la décision de l'État-Major allemand d'exiger la fin des hostilités vu que l'écroulement du front dans les Balkans avait rendu vains tous les efforts pour gagner la guerre. Or, le gouvernement de Georges Clemenceau se refusa d'exploiter les fruits de la victoire au-delà de ses retombés sur les affaires balkaniques. L'armistice avec l'Empire Ottoman et la libération de la Serbie furent ses objectifs principaux. La rentrée de la Roumanie dans la guerre fut, en revanche, l'objectif d'une portée plus grande, car à travers elle fut prévue de rétablir les contacts avec les forces anti-bolchéviques en Russie.

The conflict between France and Italy in the Balkans in fact was an attempt at reorganizing the Balkans and Central Europe following the disappearance of the Habsburg and Romanoff. The two Latin powers now had a unique opportunity to dictate a rearrangement of the Balkans, but their positions were diametrically opposed. Italy sought to establish domination in the Adriatic and the Balkans, whereas France sought to reorganize the region with the view to precluding Germany from recovering its former influence. At the same time, after Wilson's political defeat in the Senate in 1919 Italian guarantees of the French-German border became vitally important to France. A compromise between Paris and Rome turned out to be unfeasible for several reasons. Expansionism of both the last liberal governments and Mussolini met with resolute opposition from Belgrade. Moreover, Paris was convinced that Italian domination not only would not bring stability to the Balkans, but on the contrary, that it would shatter the region's Little Entente-based inner cohesion and facilitate Germany's comeback. Thus most of diplomatic initiatives coming from Paris and Rome were mutually neutralized while German economic influence in the region irresistibly grew from the early 1930s. The agreement Mussolini-Laval reconciled the two Latin powers but it was now in the new circumstances created by the rise of Nazi Germany as a dominant force in Central Europe and the Balkans.

The French government and statesmen had never considered the creation of a unified South-Slav state as an objective of the Great War. Officially acquainted with the project through the Niš Declaration in December 1914 they remained silent on the issue, as it involved both the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy and, following the Treaty of London in May 1915, an open conflict with Italy. In neither case, then, did French diplomacy deem it useful to trigger such a shift in the balance of power in Europe just to grant the wishes of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Naturally, in the spring of 1918 the dismantlement of Austria-Hungary was envisaged, but with the view to weakening the adversary camp, while the destiny of the Yugoslav provinces remained undecided. Moreover, war imperatives required extreme caution in relation to Italian intransigency. The Italian veto weighed heavily on French politics, to the extent that even the actual realization of the Yugoslav project, proclamation of a unified state on 1 December 1918 in Belgrade, took place without a consent or implicit support on the part of the French government.

The initial phase of the First World War in the Balkans 1914-1915 was a natural continuation of the conflicts opened during the Balkan Wars, but national fervor now encompassed all of the Balkans, from Rijeka and Ljubljana to Athens, Sofia and Bucharest, because the role of the Dual Monarchy had changed from that of an arbiter to that of a participant in the conflict. With the demise of the Ottoman Empire, the further survival of the Habsburg Monarchy was challenged by the Serbian government's Yugoslav project, creating conditions for implementing the nationality principle in all of the Balkans. It seemed that, in support of the alliances that were being created in the Balkans and in Europe as a whole, the time had come for the final fulfillment of the national aspirations of the Balkan peoples. The outcome of this third Balkan war no longer depended solely on the balance of power inside the Balkans, but also on the overall course of the war. After the initial victories in 1914, Serbia suffered a defeat in 1915 and her armies were forced to retreat southward to Albania and Greece, but her Yugoslav project was the foundation of her future policies and the basis for materializing the concept of a common South-Slavic state.