Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia A state created on 1 December 1918 as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. It emerged from the Corfu Pact of 1917, and was a heterogeneous country consisting of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro. Its religious and ethnic diversity was expressed in two mutually contrasting ideas about the nature of the new state. Slovenia and Croatia had joined the union with Serbia largely for defensive reasons, to protect their territories against Austrian or Italian revisionist (irredentist) pretensions. They demanded a federal state, which would leave each component with extensive autonomy. By contrast, Serbia was a relatively homogeneous country which had gained increasing self-confidence since independence in 1878, so that it was interested mainly in increasing its power over other territories in a ‘Greater Serbia’.

This latter conception won the day, when a centralized constitution was adopted by a narrow parliamentary majority in 1921. In protest, the Croatian People's Peasants' Party (CPPP) as well as other groups made parliament extremely unstable. After the assassination of the CPPP leader, Stjepan Radić, in 1928, King Alexander I dissolved Parliament and created a royal dictatorship, changing the country's name to Yugoslavia (‘Land of Southern Slavs’). His rule strengthened Serbian predominance even further, which motivated the growth of a number of terrorist movements, the most important of which became the Ustase movement, which carried out Alexander's assassination in 1934.

Despite an agreement on Croatian autonomy negotiated by the Prime Minister, Cvetković, in 1939, emotions against Serbia remained strong. After the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, the Ustase movement was eager to create a Fascist puppet regime as the Independent State of Croatia. Until 1945 its brutal government was responsible for the expulsion or killings of some 600,000 Serbs. In retaliation, once Tito's partisan rebels had established their dominance over the Chetniks, they vented their wrath on the Croatians, slaughtering many Ustase Fascists, as well as innocent Croatians, in return.

With bitterness and hatred between the country's fifteen nationalities at an all-time high, another attempt at unification could only be made by Tito's iron will. He created the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia on 31 January 1946, comprising six republics, the autonomous province of Vojvodina, and the autonomous area of Kosov. Unfortunately, the differences between the various ethnicities which had intensified so much during the war were never properly addressed or publicly discussed, and were largely suppressed. As the only Eastern European country (apart from Albania) which had become Communist without Moscow's direct help, Tito enjoyed much freedom of manoeuvre owing to the absence of Soviet troops, and he used this to the full.

To Stalin's impotent anger, Tito accepted US aid in 1948, from which time Yugoslavia pursued an independent policy as a leading member of the non-aligned movement. This enabled Tito to play off US against Soviet support, a game at which he excelled. A new constitution for the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia was introduced in 1963. Growing nationalist aspirations, most notably the Croatian Spring (1967–72), which produced a Croatian cultural and linguistic revival and was ultimately suppressed by Tito, led to the promulgation of the 1974 constitution, which gave the constituent republics and autonomous provinces more powers. After Tito's death, the presidency was shared between the states in rotation. While it would be wrong to assume that Yugoslavia was already doomed, there were signs that all was not well in 1981, when street riots in Kosovo were brutally suppressed. Thereafter, its autonomy was severely curtailed and was completely abolished in 1989, following renewed violence.

The impending end of the Cold War led to widespread, increasingly open debate about the nature of the Yugoslav state and the viability of Communist single-party rule. In 1989 the Serbian Communist Party responded to this by ensuring Communist survival through the election of the nationalist Milošević as leader. Together with the Serbian incorporation of Kosovo, this threatened the other republics, where nationalist movements opposed to the Communists emerged. In some ways it was a repeat of the interwar problem, as the attempt by Serb nationalists to gain control of the Yugoslav state apparatus was met with increasing rejection of the Yugoslav state by its other constituent republics.

The formal breakup of Yugoslavia began with the secession of Slovenia in 1991. By 1992, all that remained within Yugoslavia was Serbia and Montenegro, which on 29 April 1992 formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The Serbian-dominated Yugoslav army supported the rebellious Serb communities in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. In 1995 Milošević agreed to the Dayton Agreement, in order to achieve a lifting of damaging international sanctions against his country, and to consolidate Serb gains made in the Bosnian Civil War. Meanwhile, the Albanian-dominated province of Kosovo began to demand a restoration and extension of its autonomy from 1992. These demands were repressed with increased brutality, which included, after 1996, targeted actions of ethnic cleansing carried out by Serbian army and police forces. In 1997 Milošević lost some political power, as his ex-Communist Socialist Party lost its absolute majority in the Serbian parliament owing to a shift to yet more extreme nationalist parties. Serbia ultimately refused to withdraw its forces from Kosovo, and on 23 March 1999 NATO planes, led by the US Air Force, began an extensive bombing campaign. In over 35,000 sorties, government offices were destroyed and much of Serbia's economic infrastructure annihilated. After 73 days, Milošević succumbed and withdrew his forces from Kosovo. He consequently moved to secure his own power within Yugoslavia by attempting to change the constitution in his favour, and by reducing the influence of an increasingly distant Montenegro within the Yugoslav Federation.

Against all expectations, the opposition managed to rally against the government on a nationalist platform led by Koštunica. Milošević was swept from power by popular demonstrations in 2002. The subsequent years were spent rearranging the Yugoslav Federation into an even looser alliance to accommodate Montenegro. Under Djindjić the Serb government attempted to establish the rule of law against Belgrade's criminal underworld and Milošević's still powerfull allies. In 2003, these assassinated Djindjić. In the absence of a charismatic successor, and owing to popular disillusionment with slow economic progress, the nationalist Serbian Radical Party won the elections of December 2003. This proved a great setback to efforts at reintegrating Serbia into the international community and establishing closer links with the EU.