Yugoslavia

1. Introduction

Founded on 1 December 1918 as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Yugoslavia united for the first time the bulk of the South Slav lands of the disintegrating Habsburg Empire with the previously independent kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. Those who inspired the foundation of the new state, which in 1941 covered an area of 247,542 sq. km. (95,550 sq. mi.) with an estimated population of 15.97 million, believed it must have a common national identity as well as a common government; but their doctrine of Yugoslav ‘national oneness’ served in practice to abet the assertion by the country's largest people, the Orthodox Serbs, and their dynasty, the Karadjordjevićes, of dominion over the rest. Far from fostering ‘national oneness’, Serbian centralism stimulated feelings of national separateness. Whether under ineffectual parliamentary rule between 1918 and 1929 or royal dictatorship thereafter, the country was riven by national and constitutional dissension. The Catholic Croats, the second most numerous nation, were least reconciled to their subordinate status in a unitary state, but the other Yugoslav peoples, including the Serbs, and the many national minorities also had fundamental grievances.

Yugoslavia declared itself neutral in September 1939, but that did not spare it from Axis and Allied pressure or from an intensification of its domestic quarrels. The two were interrelated. The Serbs, recalling their comradeship in arms with France and the UK on the Salonika Front in 1915–18, were both overwhelmingly pro-Allied in sentiment and inclined to feel that no war could be fought successfully without them. Serb domination of the Yugoslav officer corps, and the anglophilia of the Regent Prince Paul (1893–1976), reinforced the government's portrayal of its neutrality to the Allies as a temporary expedient, necessitated by the country's strategic vulnerability and economic subordination to the Axis, as well as by the faint heartedness of the non-Serbs.

The leaders of the other Yugoslav peoples were both more impressed by Axis power than were the Serbs and less keen to fight for a state and regime which they did not really regard as theirs. The Slovenes, for whom no alternative was on offer, were expected to remain loyal. But radical Croat nationalists had not been satisfied with the belated granting of home rule in August 1939; and even the mainstream Croatian Peasant Party, despite entering government, remained susceptible to Italian blandishments concerning statehood. The Macedonian Slavs (classed as Serbs in the inter-war years) tended to look to Bulgaria as a possible liberator. The Slav Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina (claimed by both Serbs and Croats as co-nationals) were another doubtful element, while some Montenegrins (also defined as Serbs) hankered after a restored independence under Italian patronage. Finally, the large Albanian, German, and Hungarian national minorities constituted potential fifth columnists if and when their putative motherlands should beckon.

2. Domestic life and economy

By 1940 the German Reich possessed both a stranglehold on Yugoslavia's foreign trade and an enhanced share of the ownership of its important mines of non-ferrous metals. The dependency of an underdeveloped economy on the export of its peasant proprietors' agricultural surpluses gave Germany political influence as well as economic control. Prince Paul's government felt obliged not only to meet Germany's ever-increasing demands for foodstuffs and raw materials, but also to make the occasional anti-Semitic gesture. Meanwhile, the progressive absorption of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria into the Axis camp (Albania was already there) meant that Yugoslavia was virtually surrounded by hostile states with claims on its territory. The UK was in no position either to contest Germany's economic domination or to outbid the Axis in making offers to Yugoslavia's neighbours. Nor could London make good the country's deficiencies in armaments and aircraft. Prince Paul sought to find a counterweight in the Soviet Union, but Stalin was unwilling to push his rivalry with Hitler in the Balkans to the point of jeopardizing the Nazi–Soviet Pact.

Before the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia in April 1941 the Germans had developed elaborate schemes for the economic exploitation of Yugoslavia, as for south-eastern Europe generally. In the event, however, they sought merely to maintain their hold over those mines (of copper, chrome, lead, zinc, and bauxite), rich lowland agricultural areas, and lines of rail, road, and river communication which were deemed essential to their war effort. Even where a facility fell within the zone of occupation of one of their allies, as in the case of the bauxite mines near Mostar, the Germans demanded and got control over the installation and its output.

The ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or NDH) which was set up by the Germans after their occupation of the country, was also compelled to supply Germany with such of its products as the Germans required, and to pay the costs of the German and Italian occupation forces. In the rump of Serbia, the value of the minerals and foodstuffs taken by the Germans was simply offset against the huge occupation costs imposed on the Belgrade government. This was not necessarily disadvantageous to peasant farmers in areas of food surplus. They tended to prosper as forcible requisitioning was abandoned in favour of bulk purchases. The residents of cities and towns might also prosper financially, but they were also vulnerable to being rounded up for execution in reprisals or deportation to Germany. Several hundred thousand Yugoslavs were sent to work in the Reich: some as prisoners-of-war (all Serbs), some as volunteers, and some as forcible deportees. The Germans also employed forced labour in some of the mines under their control.

The Italians, in contrast, discovered that their share of the Yugoslav spoils was an economic liability, and even had to be fed from Italy. The Bulgarians and Hungarians concentrated on integrating their portions by expelling post-1918 Serb colonists and imposing their own teachers and administrators. In Macedonia this provoked native resentment, both on account of the high costs to be paid and the absence of the expected opportunities for advancement by the local intelligentsia.

3. Government

(a) Pre-occupation

After King Alexander (1888–1934) was assassinated, Prince Paul ruled on behalf of the young King Peter II (1923–70). Paul moderated but did not dismantle his late cousin's dictatorship. The prospect of war had moved the Prince Regent to grant home rule to Croatia. Yet his failure, simultaneously, either to restore democracy or to devolve powers to the other national-historical units ensured that Yugoslavia entered the wartime period as disunited as ever.

The Italians' failure to subdue the Greeks following Mussolini's invasion in October 1940 (see Balkan campaign) compelled Hitler to come to the Duce's rescue. This meant, in turn, that Yugoslavia had to be enrolled in the Axis. The Germans did not need Yugoslav help or the use of Yugoslav territory to attack Greece, but they did require a guarantee of access via Bulgaria and the isolation of the British. From November Hitler began bludgeoning Prince Paul to sign the Tripartite Pact.

The prince, hoping for deliverance by the outbreak of Nazi–Soviet hostilities, played for time, failing to appreciate that it was running out. He wavered until early March 1941 when, after submitting to a harangue from Hitler at Berchtesgaden, he concluded that the only alternative to signing the pact was state suicide.

Yugoslav ministers journeyed to Vienna to sign the Tripartite Pact on 25 March 1941. It committed Yugoslavia to little more than acquiescence in Germany's conquest of Greece; the various let-out clauses and the bribe of a post-war acquisition of Salonika remained secret. Demonstrations against the Axis erupted in Serbia and Slovenia. Conspirators drawn from the army, air force, and Serbian nationalist groups seized power in Belgrade in the early hours of 27 March, abolishing the regency, and proclaiming King Peter to have come of age. Serbs took to the streets to celebrate the recovery of their honour and the prospect of a just war alongside the UK and Greece. Communists among them shouted instead for an alliance with Moscow. From London Churchill hailed the Yugoslavs' recovery of their ‘soul’. Croats sulked at home over such folly and expected the worst.

An all-party government was established under the presidency of the conspirators' nominal leader, General Dušan Simović. It seemed an impressive embodiment of Yugoslav unity, but its cohesion was illusory. The makers of the coup had acted to expunge the dishonour which partnership with the Axis would do to Serbian traditions: the politicians whom they summoned to share power had other concerns. The representatives of those Serb parties which had been in opposition since 1929 were as hostile to the iniquities of Prince Paul's domestic policy as they were to his appeasement of the Axis. They resented, in particular, the manner in which Croatia had won autonomy. On the other hand, Vladko Maček, leader of the Croatian Peasant Party and vice-premier of Paul's ousted government, made his participation in the new cabinet conditional upon its reaffirmation of both Croatian home rule and Yugoslavia's adherence to the Tripartite Pact. This was agreed as the enormity of the country's peril sank in.

Hitler was enraged by the insult dealt to him by the coup. Within a few hours he had issued Directive No. 25, decreeing Yugoslavia's obliteration and assigning secondary roles in its conquest to Italy and Hungary. The invasion, on 6 April 1941, took place simultaneously with the German attack on Greece (see Balkan campaign).

The Luftwaffe inaugurated the Axis offensive with punishing raids on Belgrade (killing some 5,000 people in the supposedly ‘open city’) and the main military airfields. These set the king, government, and High Command in flight, disrupted communications, and destroyed from the outset any possibility of a concerted defence. German forces in Bulgaria struck deep into Macedonia, cutting off by 8 April the Yugoslavs' line of retreat towards Greece and nullifying the premise of their strategic plan. The Wehrmacht then turned its attention to Belgrade (which fell on 13 April) and the north and west of the country. As German troops entered Zagreb on 10 April the Ustaša—Croat Fascists led by Ante Pavelić—were permitted to declare the independence of Croatia, Maček having spurned German offers that he do so. Italy and Hungary invaded on 11 April to claim their shares of the spoils. (Bulgaria was not obliged to fight for its share.) In total, the Axis invaders employed 52 divisions, 24 of which were German, and their casualties were negligible. The Germans, for example, lost only 151 dead.

Although the Yugoslavs offered occasional local resistance, and some effort was made to attack the Italians across the Albanian frontier, their rout was complete. It took the Germans longer to locate men competent to sign an instrument of surrender than it did to create the conditions of chaos that made Yugoslav capitulation inevitable. The king and most of his ministers fled by air to Greece on 14 and 15 April. Simović left behind instructions to seek an armistice (blaming the Croats' defection for the need), but it was, in effect, an unconditional surrender which was signed in Belgrade on 17 April.

(b) Government under occupation

Hitler had sketched out the lineaments of the country's occupation and partition on 12 April. This was now put into effect (see Map 111). The aim of the new regime was to secure for Germany what it required in the area (principally, control over the main lines of communication and certain economic assets) while rewarding (and making use of) the Reich's allies and those Yugoslav peoples thought by Hitler to be amenable to his purposes. It was also designed to give expression to Nazi racial doctrines (e.g. Germanization for northern Slovenia, now incorporated into the Reich; ‘Aryan’ status for the Croats and Slav Muslims of an independent Croatia which included Bosnia and Herzegovina; self-government for the German minority in Banat) and to eradicate the very idea of a South Slav state. This meant that the Serbs, as the Yugoslav Staatsvolk and authors of the insult of 27 March, were singled out for condign punishment. Hitler did not originally intend that the rump of Serbia should have even a spurious statehood. The establishment during the summer of a Quisling regime under General Milan Nedić came in response to a predictable outbreak of Serbian rebellion.

The rebellion happened, above all, because of the Ustašas' initiation in May 1941 of a campaign of terror and genocide against greater Croatia's nearly two million Serbs. (The far smaller numbers of Jews, gypsies, and communists were, of course, also targeted for destruction.) The Ustašas' aim was to produce an ethnically and ideologically ‘pure’ Croatia by expelling to Serbia, converting to Roman Catholicism, and murdering its ‘oriental’ minorities in roughly equal proportions.

Less predictable was the dissatisfaction and rivalry which soon came to prevail among both Hitler's allies (who wanted more than they had got) and the Yugoslav beneficiaries of his largesse (who gradually found reasons to repent of their initial enthusiasm for the ‘new order’). The super-nationalistic pretensions of the NDH had in any case been crippled at the outset by its enforced cession of much of Dalmatia to Italy and by the designation of an Italian prince as Croatia's future king. The subsequent revelations of Ustaša barbarism against Croatia's Serbs and of the nullity of NDH ‘independence’ completed its delegitimation. The oppressive Bulgarian regime in Macedonia eventually disabused people there also of their inclination to regard Sofia as a deliverer. Hitler's ‘new order’ (see Germany, 4) was, in fact, to prove a principal cause of both the resistance struggle and the accompanying civil wars, as well as of the Axis powers' inability to extirpate the former while making use of the latter.

(c) Government-in-exile

King Peter and his ministers arrived in London in June 1941 to find themselves regarded as heroes. Their army's performance in April may have been lamentable, but that did not appear to have diminished Allied admiration for their March defiance of Hitler. The fragmentary reports of ongoing resistance which filtered out of their homeland in July and August and, by September, of the self-proclaimed leadership of it by Colonel Draža ( Dragoljub) Mihailović, the foremost of the Serb royalist officers who called themselves Četniks, enhanced their sense of being no mere collection of impotent exiles. They set about promoting Mihailović's cause (and their own) among the Allies and made him a general. They also nourished hopes of using the thousand or so of their servicemen who had joined the British evacuation from Greece to Egypt as the nucleus of an army to be raised among Yugoslav emigrants in the Americas. With forces fighting both at home and in the Near East, they were confident of translating Allied pledges to restore Yugoslavia into reality.

It was not long, however, before divisions appeared in their ranks. These reflected both the unresolved national and constitutional questions which they had brought with them into exile and the weaknesses inherent in their detached and dependent existence. King Peter, the fount of their legitimacy, was immature, impressionable, and wilful. His premier, General Simović, was inept and inconsistent, and soon alienated both cabinet colleagues and the king. News of the Ustašas' massacres of Serbs in the NDH destroyed all trust between Serb and Croat ministers, and of both in their premier, who bungled his handling of this explosive issue. King Peter, meanwhile, had fallen under the influence of junior officers who resented Simović's effort to monopolize credit for the 27 March coup, criticized his conduct of the April war, and accused him of failing to mobilize adequate aid for Mihailović. Despite British reservations, the king dismissed Simović in December and entrusted his government to a distinguished but elderly Serb academic, Slobodan Jovanović. In an effort to undo any consequent damage, the king and Jovanović promoted Mihailović again and made him their war minister. By this action the Yugoslav exiles entrusted their fate to a movement about which they knew little and over which they could exercise even less control.

The dangers of such a policy would not become apparent until August 1942, when the Soviets began to attack Mihailović for collaborating with the Italians and, even worse, at the end of the year, when the British began to reassess their exclusive commitment to him. In the first half of 1942, however, it was mutinies among the Yugoslav forces in Egypt which did most to undermine the government's prestige. The displaced war minister, the senior officers, and the majority of their men refused to accept the new government's replacement commander. British GHQ, regarding the mutineers as the true authors of the March putsch and the first officer sent out from London as incompetent, refused, in turn, to help the government impose its will. Only the nomination of another commander and Rommel's June eruption into Egypt put an end to this farce.

The inability of the Yugoslav exiles either to manage their own affairs or to assert their relevance to their compatriots at home by any means other than cleaving to Mihailović led their British hosts to treat them with ever-diminishing respect. Their own efforts to lessen their dependency on the British by strengthening ties with the Americans, Soviets, and de Gaulle's Free French were unsuccessful. Personal, party, and national dissension among them and the large Yugoslav-American community led to cabinet crises and, in the summer of 1943, to two changes of government. These, however, had more to do with King Peter's determination to defy his ministers' opposition to a wartime marriage than with increasing British reservations about Mihailović. When, by August, the king contrived to provide himself with a non-party government under Bozidar Purić which was prepared to sanction his marriage, the British had come to see him not only as the sole element among the émigrés worthy of their support, but also as the only one likely to repay it.

As the British moved towards abandoning the inactive Mihailović in favour of the more warlike communist partisan leader, Tito, it was the king's legitimacy, pliability, and assumed popularity with the Serbs that appeared to offer the only chance of reconciling the UK's short-term military requirements with long-term political interests. Having decided in December 1943 to break with Mihailović, Churchill laboured to persuade Tito to work with the king. By doing so, he argued, Tito might acquire international recognition, the material assets of the exile government, and the support of royalist Serbs. He worked simultaneously to compel Peter to dismiss the Purić government (and, with it, Mihailović) and to name a premier willing to deal with Tito. By May 1944 he had succeeded. Ivan Subasić, the former ban (governor) of Croatia, formed a one-man government charged with effecting a merger between the monarchy and the revolution, and in June he signed an agreement with Tito's Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation (AVNOJ) which envisaged the eventual formation of a united Royal-AVNOJ government.

(d) Post-occupation government

Although Tito could by 1944 expect to take control in most of the country when the Germans withdrew, the Četniks still dominated Serbia. It was with this in mind that he appealed to Stalin in July 1944 to divert the Red Army from its course into Central Europe and to help hasten the conquest of Serbia. Stalin graciously complied; and the Četnik movement, its morale sapped by three years of equivocation over its role, disintegrated under the triple blows of a Partisan–Soviet attack, western Allied abandonment, and King Peter's endorsement of the Partisans. Belgrade was liberated on 20 October. The Red Army then decamped for Hungary, leaving the Partisans (now fighting as a regular army) to finish the job as the Germans and their Yugoslav auxiliaries slowly fell back to the north and west. An internationally recognized coalition government, with Tito as premier and Subasić as foreign minister, had been formed under communist domination in March 1945, but complete liberation did not come until the German surrender in May 1945.

Over the next few months the communists consolidated their power, took revenge on those of their enemies who had failed to escape to Italy or Austria, and began to remake their country in the image of the only other authentically revolutionary Marxist-Leninist state—the USSR.

4. Armed forces

(a) Army

The Yugoslav Army's war establishment was 1.2 million, with a further half-million in the reserves. At the end of March 1941, when both a ‘general activation’ (not mobilization) and a new war plan were promulgated, the army's strength stood at 700,000. At least half of its 110 light tanks were obsolescent. Despite relatively lavish expenditure on defence in recent years, this was an army which still moved at the pace of a bullock cart and was led by men whose conceptions had advanced little since 1918. The army's only possible advantage over the Wehrmacht lay in the use it might make of its rugged native terrain, but that was vitiated by demoralization, disaffection, and paralysis in the face of German might. At less than half-strength and with its dispositions in flux on account of the new war plan, the Yugoslav Army was no match for its enemies in April 1941. A Yugoslav infantry battalion composed largely of ex-Italian prisoners-of-war of Slovene nationality was later formed in Egypt.

(b) Navy

The Yugoslav Navy had an old German training cruiser, four modern destroyers—a fifth was under construction—four submarines, sixteen old torpedo boats, and a number of miscellaneous craft including a seaplane tender. None was lost to enemy action but the cruiser seaplane tender, and three of the destroyers were captured. The fourth destroyer was scuttled by its crew. A submarine, two torpedo boats, and eleven seaplanes of the Yugoslav Fleet Air Arm escaped to Alexandria where they were used for local patrol duties. Later, a number of small British warships were manned with Yugoslav crews based on Malta. Their return, along with vessels seized by the Italians in 1941, was sought by Tito in 1944.

(c) Air Force

With a total of 419 aircraft the airforce comprised one fighter and one bomber air brigade, each with two wings; two mixed air brigades, each with one wing of fighters and one of bombers; and a bomber air brigade of two wings. There were also seven squadrons of obsolete army aviation aircraft. The aircraft were of mixed British, French, and German types, some modern, some not. The fighter air brigade which protected Belgrade was equipped mostly with Hurricanes and Me109s, and these inflicted some losses on the Germans when the Luftwaffe raided the capital on 6 April 1941. Altogether, 49 Yugoslav aircraft were lost in the air and 85 on the ground before the armistice. About 50 escaped to Greece, some of which eventually reached Egypt. The bulk of the several hundred air force personnel who reached Egypt mutinied against the Jovanović government-in-exile early in 1942. The mutineers were eventually enrolled in the RAF Volunteer Reserve. Most returned to the Yugoslav colours in 1944 when the UK began to train fighter squadrons for Tito.

5. Resistance and civil war

Resistance to the Axis was to be expected in lands where the traditions of fighting alien rule were still living parts of most people's national identities. Fragments of the army and gendarmerie, who adopted the traditional Serbian name of Četniks (from četa, regiment), had taken to the hills as the magnitude of their defeat became obvious in April 1941. There they regrouped, awaited developments, and rallied gradually to the command of Mihailović. The communists, or Partisans as they came to call themselves, were also organizing themselves under their party secretary since 1937, Josip Brož Tito, though they too were few in number. Unlike the Serb loyalists, they were awaiting the revolutionary situation they trusted Soviet entry into the war would unleash. Both movements sought to take control and advantage of the spontaneous and inchoate Serb risings which the Ustaša pogroms were provoking in the Independent Croatian State, or NDH. Not wanting to be left out, and encouraged by the Soviet Union's entry into the war and the communists' consequent call to arms—as well as by the Germans' earlier transfer of front-line troops to the east—the Serbs of Montenegro and the rump of Serbia rose in rebellion in July and August. Such unity as these various local uprisings possessed was not destined to endure, as their would-be leaders, the communists and the Serb officers, were fighting for different ends. These, in turn, implied different strategies.

Mihailović's movement sought Yugoslavia's restoration as a Serb-dominated monarchy. Its appeal to non-Serbs was thus small. But in the summer of 1941, the popular demand was for resistance; and Mihailović and his commanders went along with it so as to maintain their claim to both wartime and post-war leadership. By the autumn, however, the mass reprisals against Serb civilians (on a ratio of 100 executions for every German soldier killed) which had become Hitler's answer to revolt confirmed Mihailović in his original belief that the uprisings were premature and that the communists were no better than criminals for seeking to provoke and prosecute them. In this assessment lay the seeds of the Četniks' collaboration with the Axis and a long civil war; although in November the Germans rejected Mihailović's offer to fight the communists in return for arms.

The communists, on the other hand, were fighting for a revolutionary transfer of power. Although this, their ultimate objective, was more or less effectively camouflaged after the spring of 1942, from the start they sought to appeal both individually and collectively to all the Yugoslav peoples. Militarily, they differed from the Četniks by emphasizing unremitting war on the Axis and its Yugoslav helpmates: at first in order to lend assistance to the embattled ‘first country of socialism’, but later because to do otherwise was to serve the enemy and to betray one's own people. They denounced Mihailović, the various Croat and Slovene leaders, and parties who refused to concede their right to command the resistance as collaborators. Most of these anti-communist potential resisters fell into the trap, becoming what the communists alleged they were.

So the lands of the dismembered Yugoslav state became not only the scene of Europe's greatest resistance struggle, but also one of its bloodiest civil wars. Partisans and Četniks fought the occupiers, their servants, and each other in order to win anti-Axis leadership and the right to organize the post-war state. The several regimes and movements involved in collaboration fought the resisters and occasionally each other under the benevolent or worried gaze of their rival Axis patrons. For example, the Serb anti-communist militias organized by the Italians in their zones of occupation (and which also proclaimed their allegiance to Mihailović) not only participated in Axis offensives against the Partisans, but also fought Croatian forces (Ustaša and regulars) armed and directed by the Germans. General Nedić, the Serb Quisling, pressed the Germans to detach eastern Bosnia from the Ustaša state and to re-assign it to Serbia. Meanwhile, in German-occupied eastern Bosnia itself, the local Četniks forged anti-communist alliances with the very elements they had come into existence to oppose—the Ustaša. Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims massacred each other in the name of religion. Brother fought brother in the name of politics. Most of the 1.2 million Yugoslavs who died in the Second World War perished at the hands of other Yugoslavs.

Mihailović's movement was in the ascendant during 1942. By partially ‘legalizing’ itself with the Nedić regime, it had managed to escape destruction in the German offensive which chased the Partisans out of Serbia at the end of 1941. Its natural appeal to Serbs as a reincarnation of 19th-century insurgencies against the Turks was buttressed by the legitimacy accorded to it by King Peter's government and by the propaganda backing it received from the Allies. Outside narrow Serbia, in Montenegro, Herzegovina, and inland Dalmatia, Mihailović's sub-commanders joined with the Italians in waging war on the communists and/or in keeping the Ustašas at bay. By such means they expected both to preserve themselves and to eliminate their rivals against the day when the Italians, quitting the war, should bequeath their arms, equipment, and control of the coast. The British, unable themselves at this stage to supply the Četniks, did not oppose these arrangements.

The Partisans, however, were recovering from their set backs of late 1941 and early 1942. Their ‘long march’ from south-east to north-west Bosnia in the summer of 1942 translated them from an area in which they had worn out their welcome to one sympathetic to their now less revolutionary demeanour. When they convoked the first meeting of their all-national front, the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation (AVNOJ), in Bihać in November they gave it a moderate and patriotic guise. In the first half of 1943 they survived—just—two great Axis offensives, while inflicting crippling defeats on the Četniks outside Serbia in the process. They also extricated themselves from negotiations with the Germans for an anti-Četnik modus vivendi without being found out by the British, who had chosen this moment (April) to send their first missions to them. By the end of 1943 they claimed to have more than 200,000 men and women under arms. More importantly, from the Allied point of view, they were credited with holding down some 35 Axis divisions which might otherwise have been available for service on the Italian or Eastern Fronts.

Mark Wheeler

Bibliography

Clissold, S. , Whirlwind: An Account of Marshal Tito's Rise to Power (London, 1949).
Deakin, F. W. D. , The Embattled Mountain (London, 1971).
Djilas, M. , Wartime (London, 1977).
Roberts, R. , Tito, Mihailović and the Allies, 1941–1945 (2nd edn., Durham, 1987).
Tomasevich, J. , War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: The Chetniks (Stanford, Calif., 1975).
—— ‘Yugoslavia During the Second World War’, in W. S. Vucinich (ed.), Contemporary Yugoslavia: Twenty Years of Socialist Experiment (Berkeley, Calif., 1969).
Mark Wheeler , ‘Pariahs to Partisans to Power: The Communist Party of Yugoslavia’, in T. Judt (ed.), Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe, 1939–1948 (London, 1989).

YUGOSLAVIA

Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Federativna Republika Jugoslavijá

COUNTRY OVERVIEW

LOCATION AND SIZE.

Although the country is recognized by others, the United States does not officially recognize the federation consisting of Serbia and Montenegro as Yugoslavia; it calls the country "Serbia and Montenegro."

Located in southeastern Europe, bounded on the north by Hungary, on the northeast by Romania, on the southeast by Bulgaria, on the south by Albania and Macedonia, on the southwest by the Adriatic Sea, and on the west by Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, Yugoslavia has an area of 102,350 square kilometers (39,518 square miles). Serbia, including the province of Kosovo, accounts for 88,412 square kilometers (34,136 square miles) while Montenegro accounts for 13,938 square kilometers (5,382 square miles), 199 kilometers (124 miles) of which is coastline. The total area is slightly smaller than Kentucky (Serbia is slightly larger than Maine, Montenegro is slightly smaller than Connecticut). The capital, Belgrade, is situated on the Danube and Sava rivers in north-central Serbia. Until the early 1990s, Yugoslavia incorporated the republics of Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The territory has yet to resolve all the territorial disputes between the former Yugoslav republics.

POPULATION.

The population was estimated to be 10,662,087 (Serbia—9,981,929; Montenegro—680,158) in July 2000. By 2001, the World Factbook estimated that the population had grown to 10,677,290. The numbers are not exact, however, because of the dislocations caused by the devastating Yugoslav wars and the ethnic cleansing (killing carried out on ethnic minorities by a majority group) that had raged from 1991 to 1999. In 1998, the population was estimated at 11,206,039, including a significant number of Serb refugees from Croatia and Bosnia. In 1999, a mass exodus of ethnic Albanians from the Serbian province of Kosovo into adjacent Albania and Macedonia occurred; most have since returned. The population growth rate in Serbia is positive, with a birth rate of 12.2 and a death rate of 11.08 per 1,000 population (estimated in 2000). In Montenegro, emigration caused a decline in the population, although in 2000 the estimated birth rate stood at 14.9 and the death rate at 7.9 per 1,000.

The ethnic composition before the recent wars included Serbs, 62.6 percent; Albanians, 16.5 percent; Montenegrins (close to Serbs), 5 percent; Hungarians, 3.3 percent; Muslims (or Bosniaks), 3 percent; along with Roma (Gypsies), Bulgarians, Croats, and other groups. Religions include Orthodox Christian (65 percent), Muslim (19 percent), Roman Catholic (4 percent), Protestant (1 percent), and others (11 percent). The population in Montenegro, and to some extent in Serbia, is young, with 22.05 percent below the age of 14 and 11.79 percent older than 65; in Serbia, 19.95 percent are below the age of 14 and 14.83 percent are older than 65. In 1997, 58 percent of the population lived in urban areas.

OVERVIEW OF ECONOMY

The Yugoslav economy is severely damaged due to more than 10 years of internal fighting and fighting among some republics that were formerly part of the federation. Prior to 1991, Serbia and Montenegro were 2 of 7 constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). The disintegration of the federation in 1991-1992 and the secession (withdrawal from an organization in order to gain independence) of 4 republics, including the most prosperous ones, Slovenia and Croatia, were an economic disaster for the newly formed FRY (Serbia and Montenegro).

The republics struggled for control of the area and some, especially Serbia, mounted genocidal attacks on neighboring Kosovo. The conflicts led to market disruption, and international sanctions . Corrupt economic policies led to devastation, high inflation , and the reversal of market reforms that had started in the 1980s. Industry was almost ruined, production was cut by more than 50 percent, the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in 2000 was half of the 1989 level, and unemployment was up by 50 percent. Liquidity, large trade and fiscal deficits, and politically based economic inefficiencies threaten economic stability.

Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic led much of the area's troubles. The international community enforced strict sanctions against the area to try to stop the fighting and, finally, in 1999, NATO began a bombing campaign to end the internal fighting.

The international community welcomed the ouster of Milosevic in October 2000, and radical institutional and economic reforms were expected in 2001. The European Union (EU) opened up its market to imports of Yugoslav industrial and agricultural goods, and sanctions were lifted as the West accepted that the only way to stabilize the country was to help reintegrate it with the rest of Europe. Before the new government turns to reforms, however, companies and institutions must first be made operational. The almost continuous conflicts in the area have destroyed much of the country's infrastructure .

POLITICS, GOVERNMENT, AND TAXATION

Slavic republics had been separated for much of history by larger national powers, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th century. After World War II, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina were united. But the federation of these republics was far from easy. Although mostly Slavic republics, the populations in the republics were a blend of people with strong, differing cultural affinities that did not match territorial boundaries. By the 1990s, tensions between the republics led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The break was not clean, however, because people within the republics struggled to redraw the territorial boundaries along cultural lines. Ethnic Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, wished to join with Serbia. War between many of the republics led to severe political and economic disruption in the area.

In 1992, Serbia and Montenegro adopted a new constitution that set up a parliamentary government with a bicameral (2 house) legislature. Despite the new government, President Milosevic headed a dictatorial regime from 1987 to 2000. Milosevic's regime is responsible for much of the devastation caused by years of war from 1991 to 1999.

Following the presidential elections in September 2000, a popular uprising toppled Milosevic. The new president, Vojislav Kostunica, pledged a return to democracy and the rule of law. He promised to begin much needed reforms and to seek full reintegration into Europe. Furthermore, he secured Yugoslavia's return to the United Nations (UN) and admission to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Parliamentary elections in December 2000 brought to power the Democratic Coalition of Serbia (DOS), a reformist union of 18 parties and a trade union, led by Zoran Djindjic of the Democratic party, with 64 percent of the vote. Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia that ruled along with the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party and the Yugoslav United Left garnered only 14 percent of the vote.

Recovery is expected to be long and painstaking. The DOS favors swift change, but Kostunica holds that it would jeopardize stability before a new legal framework is instituted. But the squabbles between the former Yugoslav republics are far from over. The UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), established after the 1999 war, is now the authority in what was the former Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, and Albanian separatists are wreaking havoc in south Serbia, adjacent to Kosovo. Montenegro, which boycotted federal elections, continues its push toward independence. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro and Croatia, and Serbia and Montenegro and Macedonia have yet to resolve respective territorial issues.

The government's role in the economy is significant, as state enterprises owned more than 80 percent of the capital, and the private sector accounted for only 37 percent of GDP in 1996. Federal and republic governments have retained many formal and informal levers of authority over the economy, export and import licenses, credit, and jobs. The Montenegrin government has been more reform-oriented, and its law establishes tax exemptions, tax relief, and other privileges for foreign business activity.

INFRASTRUCTURE, POWER, AND COMMUNICATIONS

Serbia enjoys a central location in the Balkans, but the loss of markets and economic sanctions and NATO's (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) bombardment in 1999 devastated the transportation and communications sector; billions of dollars are needed for repair and modernization.

In 1997, the road network included 50,414 kilometers (31,326 miles) of roads (55 percent paved), with 380 kilometers (237 miles) of expressways, and 171 kilometers (106 miles) of semi-expressways. There were 4,031 kilometers (2,505 miles) of railroad tracks. Harbors on Montenegro's coast and at Belgrade serve as shipping centers, and plans to clear debris from the Danube left

by the bombing campaign will make trade along the river active again. The national airline, JAT, operates out of international airports in Belgrade and Podgorica, but under the 1992-1995 embargo , flights to Yugoslavia were banned, and the bombing of 1999 caused damage to civilian airports.

Before 1999, the country was self-sufficient in electricity from coal and hydropower. The sector is dominated by the state-owned monopolies of Serbia and Montenegro. The bombing in 1999 destroyed or damaged 14 power stations and 2 major oil refineries.

In 1997, the purchase of a 49 percent share of the Serbian Telecommunications Company PTT by the Italian company Stet and Greece's OTE pumped nearly US$1 billion into the budget. War and sanctions delayed modernization, but this has led to fast mobile telephone growth. Access to the Internet was introduced in 1997, and there are about 100,000 registered users and 150,000 personal computers.

ECONOMIC SECTORS

The sanctions of the 1990s hurt the economic sectors of Yugoslavia, especially industry. Unable to reach export markets or to import needed materials, many companies had to cease operations. Formerly one of the chief sources of copper in Europe, Serbia's mining industry also suffered during the 1990s, and many factories in the manufacturing sector became idle. But as sanctions were lifted, the industrial sector soon started up again. By 1998, the contributions of industry to the GDP were as follows: manufacturing and mining accounted for 33.9 percent; construction, 5.6 percent; agriculture, forestry, and fishing, 19.9 percent; trade, tourism, and catering, 18.7 percent; crafts, 9.9 percent; and transport and communications, 12 percent. Agriculture was estimated to account for 20 percent of GDP, industry 50 percent, and services 30 percent by 1998. The government hoped to encourage exports in agricultural goods, food processing, textiles, furniture, pharmaceuticals, metallic ores, and to boost tourism, particularly in Montenegro, in order to earn foreign exchange.

AGRICULTURE

Chief agricultural products include corn, sugar beets, wheat, potatoes, grapes, plums, cattle, pigs, and sheep. Vojvodina, in northern Serbia, contains the most fertile land. Cooperative farms in Yugoslavia did not take root under the socialist regime, but the government of Milosevic exported wheat and corn heavily (contributing 25 percent of Serbia's hard currency ) and bartered grain for oil and gas from Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Ukraine. This practice exploited farmers by paying them below-market prices and limiting their access to the free market. Farmers had no alternatives but to sell to state mills as most did not have storage facilities and permits to trade. Police harassed them, and if caught selling outside state outlets, they were fined US$2,000. The drought in the summer of 2000 was considered the worst in 7 decades and food shortages threatened throughout the winter of 2000-2001, with the corn harvest about 50 percent lower compared to 1999. Sunflower seeds were also down by 60-70 percent, soya by 40-50 percent, and fodder crops by 40-50 percent. International humanitarian aid pledged by the European Union and other donors following Milosevic's removal in October 2000 may compensate for the shortages.

INDUSTRY

Unlike other former socialist countries with inappropriate concentration of heavy industry, Yugoslavia inherited a diversity of industries. Before the disintegration of the federation there were thriving metallurgy, chemicals, textiles, automobile, furniture, and food-processing sectors. Industrial output plunged by 70 percent over the 1990s. Although industry wasn't literally "wiped out," it became less commercial than in communist times. During the 1980s, the communist regime set up joint ventures with foreign companies. Then, during the wars, strategic firms were re- nationalized , most other companies remained in social ownership, and less than a third were private. By the end of 2000, there were indications that much of what had already been privatized by Milosevic might be re-nationalized.

Industry is considered about 50 percent over-staffed, and most firms are bankrupt. In 1996, overdue inter-company debt was nearly US$2 billion (roughly 30 percent of the sector's contribution to GDP). The biggest loss-makers were 30 large state and socially owned companies, responsible for more than 60 percent of all losses. The complex system of workers' ownership of companies, a legacy from the socialist past, confuses shareholder issues. Although Montenegro was affected by the same problems, its active privatization policy transferred all state-owned capital to government funds to attract foreign investment.

Among the industrial enterprises that have ties with foreign investors, but were bombed in 1999, were the Zastava factory in Kragujevac, maker of the Yugo automobiles, the Sloboda domestic appliances factory at Cacak, and the 14 Oktobar factory in Krusevac, the largest heavy machinery plant in the Balkans.

Copper, zinc, and lead mining were an important contributor to industry. The Trepca complex near Mitrovica in Kosovo was the main mining area. In 2000, it was taken over by the U.N. administration in Kosovo because of environmental and health hazards, provoking protest from Belgrade, which accused the U.N. of confiscating the mine. Negative environmental impact from mining in Serbia is considerable, but no serious measures were taken by the Milosevic regime to counter it. Additionally, rivers and soils throughout Serbia, and particularly in Kosovo, were heavily polluted by oil spills from destroyed refineries and radioactive, depleted uranium shell debris from the 1999 bombing campaign. Serious concerns arose in the Balkans and Western Europe about the health of the population and the international peace-keeping troops based in the region. Sizeable international assistance could help to improve the situation, but most likely only in a long-term scenario. Sustained recovery in Yugoslav industrial performance will require, apart from ending the isolation and instituting trade preferences, considerable foreign investment and new technologies to be brought into the country.

SERVICES

FINANCE.

Yugoslavia has about 100 small commercial banks with bad loans amounting to more than US$4 billion. Under-capitalization (insufficient funds) is rampant and, according to official data, the assets of the 10 largest banks in Yugoslavia now total about US$3.5 billion, or 60 percent of all bank assets. Some experts estimate that even this modest number is overstated by approximately 25 percent, because the banking system is not sound. Around 50 percent of assets are of low quality (dubious receivables), while another 40 percent are non-performing (frozen). Confidence in banks was destroyed after the sequestration (seizure) by the state of the population's hard currency savings of US$3.4 billion for its war efforts in 1991-92 and the collapse of a series of pyramid schemes in the early 1990s. The repayment of the savings to depositors in dinars started in 2000, but most preferred to wait for future payments in hard currency. Many banks did not have hard currency and offered gold coins instead. The commercial banks put the blame on the National Bank of Yugoslavia (NBY, the central bank) for its failure to provide funds for the reimbursement.

TOURISM.

Tourism is the most promising sector in Montenegro, given the short but beautiful stretch of Adriatic coastline, adjacent to Croatian Dalmatia, with numerous resorts and picturesque small towns. The sector was well developed before the wars, but is now in shambles. Some limited foreign investment, primarily from Slovenian companies, may be expected in the short run, but it will take longer to restore the one-time attractiveness of Montenegro for Western tourists. In Serbia, the importance of the sector was lower and is now negligible.

RETAIL.

This sector was well developed and a major portion of it was privatized before the wars, but it contracted with the economic collapse of the 1990s. By 2000, some small retail stores were reopened and some experts hoped the success of small shops, such as gas stations and other

retail stores, would support growth of medium and large retail companies.

INTERNATIONAL TRADE

International sanctions on Yugoslavia were implemented in 1991 with weapons embargoes. As the conflict in the area escalated, more sanctions were enforced and full trade was blocked from 1992 until 1994. Embargoes against weapons sales were again imposed between 1998 and 2001.

The sanctions had a dramatic effect on trade. Trade with the United States, for example, went from US$38.7 million worth of imports and US$5.9 million worth of exports in 1992 to US$1.7 million in exports and no imports in 1993. Trade with the United States improved as the sanctions were lifted in the late 1990s. In 1996, the United States exported US$46 million to Yugoslavia and imported US$8.2 million worth of goods. Yugoslavia's total trade in 1996 reached US$1.8 billion for exports and imports rose to US$4.1 billion. The trade numbers for 1999 were US$1.5 billion for exports and US$3.3 billion for imports.

The imbalance between exports and imports reflected the weakness of the economy and the export-oriented sectors. The lack of international recognition of the FRY made receiving loans, foreign investment, and trade credit difficult and, in turn, did nothing to help develop trade relations with other countries.

MONEY

Banking remains weak as many businesses owe large sums and show little inclination to pay them back to the banks, which are now largely insolvent. Over the first half of 2000, the 28 largest banks made a loss of US$190 million at the black market exchange rate , and most are unable to observe their own national banking regulations. Small banks were more cost-efficient and less vulnerable to political and business pressure. Some small steps

towards reform and consolidation of the fragmented sector were taken in 1997, when 16 small banks and 4 large ones—Beogradska Banka, Investbanka, Agrobanka and Beobanka—were consolidated. The 20 banks together controlled about 75 percent of the market, and in 2000, the Montenegrin government passed a bill seeking stringent safeguards in the banking system. Radical restructuring of the banking sector is more likely now as Yugoslavia is restoring its membership in international financial institutions.

Capital markets are underdeveloped. The Belgrade Stock Exchange was established in 1989 and the Podgorica Stock Exchange in 1996. Given the current state of privatization, trading in securities is very limited and both exchanges operate primarily in short-term (30 days or less) commercial paper (notes) issued by large Yugoslav corporations.

In November 2000, Montenegro made the German mark legal tender. All payments between the 2 republics will be conducted in marks. The dinar was tied to the German mark in 1995 (at a fixed rate of 3.3 dinars per mark). The street exchange rate in mid-2000 was at about 3.5 dinars per mark (5.7 dinars per US$1), but analysts believe the dinar was overvalued by 30-50 percent. The black market in foreign currencies was robust, and inflation lowered the real income of salaried workers.

POVERTY AND WEALTH

Before 1991, Serbs and Montenegrins enjoyed a comparatively prosperous life, and their access to information, travel, and work abroad was easier than in most Eastern European countries. As a socialist economy, old Yugoslavia was generally more egalitarian than Western European countries. During the 1990s, as the economy collapsed, the majority of Serbs grew desperately poor. Average salaries in Serbia hit the bottom at US$40 per month in 2000. Payments to employees on state payrolls—health workers, teachers, soldiers, police, and pensioners

—were months overdue. The 1999 bombing of major cities led to many casualties and devastation. Health, education, and welfare were also seriously jeopardized, and energy shortages plagued the people. Widespread indignation fueled the mass protests of 1996 and the popular uprising that finally toppled Milosevic in October 2000.

At the same time, many members of Milosevic's inner circle amassed—through nepotism, corruption, and smuggling—largely illegitimate fortunes that the new government will work to recover from foreign bank accounts. The dictator's notorious playboy son, Marko, was particularly resented, and as soon as his father was out of office, many assets of his self-styled business empire were looted and burned by angry crowds.

WORKING CONDITIONS

About a quarter of Serbs are officially unemployed, but the number rises to 50 percent if people in insolvent companies are included. Over-staffing and underpayment in most remaining firms mean that few workers have real jobs. The way to provide people with sustainable livelihoods is to revive the companies with capacity to provide new jobs. These companies must end their isolation and become able to export. Labor activism was instrumental in ousting Milosevic and could hardly be underestimated as an economic factor in a country with largely socialist traditions. Unions will influence economic decisions, as workers, having taken control of their companies from Milosevic's managers, are pushing for reversal of the privatization schemes that benefited Milosevic's cronies. Revisions of these privatization deals seem more likely than elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

By late 1999, about 2 million people were employed in the state sector, about a million and a half in industry and agriculture, and the rest in education, government, and services. Slightly more than 300,000 were employed in private sector trade and services, and 560,000 were independent farmers, while up to 1 million, including most Serb refugees from Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, engaged in subsistence agriculture and lived in deep poverty.

COUNTRY HISTORY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

600s. Slavs settle in parts of the present Serbian and Montenegrin lands, comprising portions of the ancient Roman province of Illyricum, then ruled by Byzantium, from which the Slavs accept Orthodox Christianity.

1168. King Stefan Nemanja establishes the first kingdom of Serbia.

1331-55. Under King Stefan Dusan, Serbia acquires new lands as the feudal economy develops and gives way to decentralization.

1389. Ottomans rout a Christian army including Serbs under King Lazar at Kosovo Polje.

1459. Serbia is violently conquered by the Ottoman Empire and remains under its rule for nearly 4 centuries, while Montenegro, the one-time Serbian province of Zeta, remains virtually independent.

1815. A revolt frees most of Serbia from Ottoman domination; a Serbian national revival thrives. Serb nationalists aim at uniting all South Slavs under the Serbian state.

1912-13. In the Balkan Wars, Serbia annexes extensive territories, including the Sandjak, Kosovo, and the present-day Republic of Macedonia.

1914. Austria-Hungary starts World War I, occupying Serbia by 1915. The Serbian army and government flee.

1918. The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1929) is proclaimed (it includes Montenegro).

1941. In World War II, Yugoslavia breaks up as Nazi Germany occupies Serbia. Serb nationalist Chetniks compete with Partisans led by Croatian communist Josip Broz Tito in resisting the Germans.

1945. Tito's communists proclaim the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. Serbia and Montenegro become constituent socialist republics. In 1946, the regions of Kosovo and Metohija and Vojvodina become autonomous provinces.

1945-80. Yugoslavia's socialist economy develops, and heavy industry is stressed, but since the late 1950s economic control is decentralized, and some private initiative is allowed.

1987. Dissatisfaction with the federation grows among constituent republics after Tito's death. Serbia, led by President Milosevic, tries to impose control over them and revokes the autonomy of Kosovo (the 90 percent ethnic Albanian province) and Vojvodina (where a sizeable ethnic Hungarian minority lives).

1991. Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia declare their independence, and Bosnia joins them in 1992. Serbia and Montenegro subsequently declare themselves the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which is not recognized by the international community. Its U.N. membership is suspended.

1991-95. The Milosevic regime plays an active role in the civil wars in Bosnia and Croatia and is severely criticized by the international community for military atrocities and the brutal oppression of domestic opposition and minorities.

1995. The Dayton peace accord puts an end to the war in Croatia and Bosnia.

1996. Mass demonstrations, led by the united democratic opposition against the Milosevic regime, begin.

1999. Mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, to counter the underground insurgent Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK), provokes an international response, including bombing and the stationing of NATO and Russian peacekeepers in Kosovo while Montenegro declares the German mark official currency.

2000. Milosevic is defeated in presidential elections and democrat Vojislav Kostunica takes over. Montenegro aspires for independence, and Albanian separatists strike in southern Serbia. Readmission to the U.N. is approved; membership in the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and in the IMF is expected. The Democratic Coalition of Serbia wins parliamentary elections in December, led by reformist Zoran Djindjic.

FUTURE TRENDS

Yugoslavia's economic problems will not disappear simply because it now has a democratically elected president. The new government faces the challenge of reconstruction, and the legacy of 10 years of war, sanctions, and corrupt officials' looting will take a considerable amount of time to reverse and will not occur without a substantial inflow of foreign capital. Trade relations can be normalized quickly and co-operation with the West can be energized with the swift resolution of pending political issues.

The government's tasks will include stabilization and economic reform, imposing law and order, and helping vulnerable sectors of society. They will be trying their best to attract foreign direct investment and to unfreeze the assets of the former Yugoslavia by reaching agreement with the other successor republics. The frozen private bank accounts in the names of Milosevic and his associates in Switzerland and elsewhere may be transferred back to the country, and immediate aid of US$172 million was pledged by the EU in late 2000 for medicine, heating, and food through the winter. The Stability Pact for South-eastern Europe, a regional development plan backed by the EU and the United States, the IMF, the World Bank, and regional banks will contribute to the reconstruction and reform process. The prosperity of Serbia and Montenegro will be crucial for establishing lasting peace in the Balkans.

DEPENDENCIES

Yugoslavia has no territories or colonies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Curtis, Glenn E. Yugoslavia: A Country Study. Library of Congress, 1992.

Economist Intelligence Unit. Country Profile: Yugoslavia. London: Economist Intelligence Unit, 2000.

Stokes, Gale. Three Eras of Political Change in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. World Factbook 2001. <http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html>. Accessed October 2001.

U.S. Department of State. FY 2000 Country Commercial Guide: Serbia and Montenegro. <http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/business/com_guides/index.html>. Accessed December 2000.

"U.S. Trade Balance with Yugoslavia." U.S. Census Bureau. <http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c4799.html>. Accessed October 2001.

—Valentin Hadjiyski

CAPITAL:

Belgrade.

MONETARY UNIT:

Yugoslav dinar. 1 New Dinar (YD) equals 100 pari (in Serbia). Montenegro made the German mark (DM equals 100 pfennige) legal currency alongside the YD in 1999.

CHIEF EXPORTS:

Manufactured goods, food (grain) and live animals, raw materials, and metals.

CHIEF IMPORTS:

Machinery and transport equipment, fuels and lubricants, manufactured goods, chemicals, food and live animals, and raw materials.

GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT:

US$24.2 billion (2000 est.).

BALANCE OF TRADE:

Exports: US$1.5 billion (1999 est.). Imports: US$3.3 billion (1999 est.).

Yugoslavia , Serbo-Croatian Jugoslavija, former country of SE Europe, in the Balkan Peninsula. Belgrade was the capital and by far the largest city. Yugoslavs (i.e., South Slavs) consisted of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Bosniaks (also known Bosnian Muslims). Closely related linguistically, these peoples are separated by historical and cultural factors that ultimately led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The country also included Albanian (mainly in Serbia's former Kosovo prov.) and Hungarian minorities (mainly in Serbia's Vojvodina prov.).

History

Yugoslavia came into existence as a result of World War I. In 1914 only Serbia (which included the present Republic of Macedonia ) and Montenegro were independent states; Croatia , Slovenia , and Bosnia and Herzegovina belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy . (The earlier histories of Yugoslavia's six component republics are treated in more detail in their respective articles.)

A Sketch of Yugoslav History before World War I

Slavs settled (6th-7th cent.) in the Balkans and were Christianized in the 9th cent. Slovenia was under Frankish (8th cent.), Bavarian (9th cent.), and Austrian (14th cent.) rule until 1918. A Croatian kingdom existed from the 10th to 11th cent., when it was conquered by Hungary, and Croatia was subsequently under Hungarian rule until the end of World War I. Bosnia was independent from the 12th to 15th cent., when it fell under Turkish rule. In the late 19th cent. it passed to Austria-Hungary, and its formal annexation (1908) was one of the irritants that led to World War I.

Macedonia was contested between the Byzantines, Bulgarians, and others until conquered by Serbia in 14th cent., and like Serbia it fell to the Turks (late 14th cent.). Serbia gained control over the region during the Balkan Wars . A Serbian kingdom emerged (13th cent.) and under Stephen Dušan (r. 1331-55) became the most powerful Balkan state. Defeat (1389) at Kosovo Field brought Serbia under Turkish domination from the 14th to 19th cent., with Serbia securely in Turkish hands by 1459.

At the time of the defeat at Kosovo Field what is now Montenegro was the virtually independent principality of Zeta in the Serbian empire. The mountainous principality continued to resist the Turks, but by 1499 most of it had been conquered; Venice held the port of Kotor, and the Montenegrin princes ruled their remnant stronghold from Cetinje. Montenegro's independence was recognized by the Ottoman Empire in 1799, and in 1829 the Turks granted the Serbs autonomy under a hereditary prince. Montenegro and Serbia were recognized as independent by the European powers at the Congress of Berlin (1878). Serbia was proclaimed a kingdom in 1882, and it emerged from the Balkan Wars (1912-13) as a major Balkan power.

A movement for unification of the South Slavs (see also Pan-Slavism ) was led by Serbia and was a major cause of World War I. When a Serbian nationalist assassinated (1914) Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Bosnia, Austria declared war on Serbia, thus precipitating World War I . Serbia and Montenegro were overrun by the Central Powers, but Serbian troops were evacuated to Allied-held Corfu, Greece, where representatives of the South Slavic peoples proclaimed (July, 1917) their proposed union under Serbian king Peter I . Montenegro's last monarch, Nicholas I , was deposed in 1918, and Montenegro was united with Serbia. In Dec., 1918, the "Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes" was formally proclaimed.

Founding to World War II

The Paris Peace Conference (see Neuilly, Treaty of ; Saint-Germain, Treaty of ; Trianon, Treaty of ) recognized the new state and enlarged its territory at the expense of Austria and Hungary with Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, and other territories. King Alexander , who had been regent from 1918 for his invalid father, ascended the throne on Peter I's death (1921). In order to protect itself against Hungarian and Bulgarian demands for treaty revisions, Yugoslavia entered (1920, 1921) into alliances with Czechoslovakia and Romania, the three states forming the Little Entente in close cooperation with France. With its western neighbor, Italy, relations were strained from the first over the Fiume question (see Rijeka ). Although this was settled in 1924 with Fiume given to Italy, Italian nationalists continued to entertain hopes of appropriating part or all of Dalmatia , which had been secretly promised to Italy in 1915 by the Allies in exchange for joining them in World War I. Yugoslav nationalists, on the other hand, claimed parts of Venezia Giulia on ethnic grounds, and relations remained tense.

Internal problems were still more acute. Late in 1920 the Serbian Pašić became premier and obtained enactment of the centralized constitution of 1921. The Croats, led by Radić , demanded autonomy. In 1928 Radić was shot and killed in parliament. After the Croats had set up (1928) a separate parliament at Zagreb, King Alexander in 1929 proclaimed a dictatorship, dissolved the parliament, and changed the name of the kingdom to Yugoslavia (sometimes spelled Jugoslavia). The royal dictatorship officially ended in 1931, but the new parliamentary constitution provided for an electoral procedure that insured victory for the government party. Troubles with Croatian and Macedonian nationalists culminated (1934) in Alexander's assassination at Marseilles, France. His son, Peter II , succeeded under the regency of Alexander's cousin, Prince Paul. The Croatian problem had been eagerly exploited by Hungary and Italy, which encouraged particularist movements against the Serbian centralists.

Prince Paul's gradual rapprochement with the Axis powers thus had the paradoxical effect of leading to the restoration (1939) of a more democratic government and the establishment of Croatian autonomy. In Mar., 1941, Yugoslavia adhered to the Axis Tripartite Pact. Two days later a bloodless military coup ousted the regent. The new government proclaimed a policy of neutrality, but in Apr., 1941, German troops, assisted by Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Italian forces, invaded Yugoslavia. Striking swiftly, the Germans joined with the Italians in Albania; a week later organized resistance was over. A Croatian puppet state was proclaimed under the leadership of Ante Pavelić, chief of the Ustachi (a fascist Croatian separatist organization; see Croatia ). Dalmatia, Montenegro, and Slovenia were divided among Italy, Hungary, and Germany; Serbian Macedonia was awarded to Bulgaria. Serbia was set up as a puppet state under German control. Atrocities were committed by the Axis occupation forces and by the Ustachi.

While Peter II established a government in exile in London, many Yugoslav troops continued to resist in their mountain strongholds. There were two main resistance groups: the chetniks under Mihajlović and an army under the Communist Tito . In 1943 civil war broke out between the two factions, of which the second was more uncompromising in its opposition to the Axis. Tito was supported by the USSR, and he won the support of Great Britain as well. King Peter was forced to transfer the military command from Mihajlović to Tito. By late Oct., 1944, the Germans had been driven from Yugoslavia. The Soviet army entered Belgrade. Tito's council of national liberation was merged (Nov., 1944) with the royal government. In Mar., 1945, Tito became premier. Lacking real power, the non-Communist members of the government resigned and were arrested. In Nov., 1945, national elections—from which the opposition abstained—resulted in victory for the government. The constituent assembly proclaimed a federal people's republic.

Tito and Communist Rule

The constitution of 1946 gave wide autonomy to the six newly created republics, but actual power remained in the hands of Tito and the Communist party. The Allied peace treaty (1947) with Italy awarded Yugoslavia the eastern part of Venezia Giulia and set up Trieste as a free territory; conflict with Italy over Trieste ended in a partition agreement (1954). Within Yugoslavia a vigorous program of socialization was inaugurated. Opposition was crushed or intimidated, and Mihajlović was executed. Close ties were maintained with the USSR and the Cominform until 1948, when a breach between the Yugoslav and Soviet Communist parties occurred and Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform.

The Tito government began to pursue an independent course in foreign relations. Economic and military assistance was received from the West. In 1954, Yugoslavia concluded a military defense pact (independent of NATO) with Greece and Turkey. More cordial relations with the USSR were resumed in 1955, but new rifts occurred because of Soviet intervention in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). Domestically Yugoslavia's "national communism" or "Titoism" included the abandonment of agricultural collectivization (1953) and the centralization of administrative and economic controls. Important economic power was given to workers' councils, and the republics were subdivided into communes. In 1966, Aleksander Ranković, the vice president and Tito's long-time associate, was purged for having maintained a network of secret agents and for opposing reform. Friction with the Roman Catholic Church ended with an accord with the Vatican in 1966.

Yugoslavs under Tito possessed greater freedom than the inhabitants of any other Eastern European country. Intellectual freedom was still restricted, however, as the jailings and harassment of Milovan Djilas and Mihaljo Mihaljov showed. In the early 1970s, agitation among the nationalities revived, particularly among the Croats, and controls over intellectual life were stiffened. The autonomy of the six republics and two autonomous provinces of Serbia slowly increased through the 1970s as the economy began to stagnate. With the death of Tito in 1980, an unwieldy collective leadership was established. The economic problems and ethnic divisions continued to deepen in the 1980s, and the foreign debt grew significantly.

The Disintegration of Yugoslavia

In 1987, Slobodan Milošević , a Serbian nationalist, became the Serbian Communist party leader. To the alarm of the other republics Milošević and his supporters revived the vision of a "Greater Serbia," which would consist of Serbia proper, Vojvodina, Kosovo, the Serb-populated parts of Croatia, large sections of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and possibly Macedonia. In early 1989, Serbia rescinded Kosovo's autonomy and sent in troops to suppress the protests of Kosovo's largely Albanian population. Slovenia and Croatia elected non-Communist governments in early 1990 and, threatening secession, demanded greater autonomy. Serbia and Montenegro were the only republics to retain Communist leadership; Milošević was elected president of Serbia in 1989.

After attempts by Serbia to impose its authority on the rest of the country, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence on June 25, 1991. Fighting immediately broke out as the federal army (controlled largely by Serbs) moved into Slovenia. A fragile peace was negotiated by a European Community (EC) delegation, but fighting soon resumed. By the end of July, 1991, however, all federal forces had left Slovenia, although fighting continued throughout the summer between Croatian forces and the federally backed Serbs from Serb areas of Croatia. In Sept., 1991, Macedonia declared its independence, and the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina voted for independence that October.

In Jan., 1992, with Serbs holding 30% of Croatia, a cease-fire was negotiated in that republic, and the United Nations sent in a peacekeeping force. In that same month the EC recognized Croatia and Slovenia as independent states, and in April the EC and the United States recognized Bosnia and Herzegovina's sovereignty. The Serbs, with about 30% of the population, seized 65% of the latter republic's territory and proclaimed the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Croats, with about 20% of the population, seized about half the remainder of the land and proclaimed the Croatian Community of Herceg-Bosna. The poorly armed Muslims, who comprised more than 40% of the population, held the rest of the republic's territory, including the capital. In a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" carried out mostly by the Serbs, thousands of Muslims were killed, and many more fled Bosnia or were placed in Serb detention camps.

In May, 1992, the United Nations imposed economic sanctions on Serbia and Montenegro and called for an immediate cease-fire in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Macedonia was widely recognized the following year (though Greece withheld recognition and imposed an embargo until after an agreement was reached with Macedonia in 1995). Although Serbia and Montenegro declared a new Yugoslavian federation, the EC announced in June, 1992, that the new government could not claim the international rights and duties of the former Yugoslavia, because those rights and obligations had devolved onto the different republics. This opinion was affirmed by the United Nations in Sept., 1992.

The United Nations also imposed a naval blockade on Yugoslavia, which along with the sanctions resulted in severe economic hardship, including hyperinflation for a time. After Serbia reduced its support for the Bosnian Serbs, the United Nations eased sanctions against Yugoslavia. In late 1995 Yugoslavia (in the person of President Milošević of Serbia) participated in the talks in Dayton, Ohio, that led to a peace accord among Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia (Yugoslavia). Milošević became president of all Yugoslavia in 1997.

Tensions increased in Kosovo in 1997 and 1998, as a period of nonviolent civil disobedience against Serbian rule gave way to the rise of a guerrilla army. In Mar., 1999, following mounting repression of ethnic Albanians and the breakdown of negotiations between separatists and the Serbs, NATO began bombing military targets throughout Yugoslavia, and thousands of ethnic Albanians were forcibly deported from Kosovo by Yugoslav troops. In June, Milošević agreed to withdraw from Kosovo, and NATO peacekeepers entered the region. Demonstrations in the latter half of 1999 against Milošević failed to force his resignation. Meanwhile, Montenegro sought increased autonomy within the federation and began making moves toward that goal.

In July, 2000, the national constitution was amended to permit the president to hold office for two terms and to institute direct presidential elections; the changes were designed to permit Milošević to remain in power beyond a single term and reduce Montenegrin influence in the federal government. When elections were held in September, however, Milošević was defeated by Vojislav Koštunica, who was supported by a coalition of 18 opposition parties (Democratic Opposition of Serbia; DOS). The election commission initially refused to certify Koštunica as the outright victor, but Milošević conceded after a general strike was called, demonstrators took over the federal parliament building, and Russia recognized Koštunica.

A coalition consisting of the DOS and Montenegrin Socialists formed a national government, and in early Serbian elections (Dec., 2000) the DOS won control of the Serbian parliament. Koštunica replaced several top military officers—a move designed in part to placate Montenegro—but he initially refused to hand Milošević over to the international war crimes court in the Hague. In early 2001 Milošević and some of his associates in the former government were arrested on various charges. The former president was turned over to the war crimes tribunal by the Serbian government in June, prompting the Montenegrin Socialists to resign from the federal coalition. Relations between Koštunica and Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjić became strained, with the former concerned more about preserving the federation with Montenegro and the latter about winning Western foreign aid and reforming the economy.

Serbia and Montenegro (2003-6)

By 2002 Montenegro's drive for greater autonomy had developed into a push for independence, and a referendum on the issue was planned. In Mar., 2002, however, Serbian and Montenegrin representatives, under pressure from the European Union and other nations opposed to immediate Montenegrin independence (fearing that it could lead to further disintegration and fighting), agreed on a restructured federal union, and a constitutional charter for a "state community" was adopted by the Serbian, Montenegrin, and federal parliaments by Feb., 2003. Following the federal parliament's approval of the charter, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was reconstituted as Serbia and Montenegro.

Most governmental power shifted to the two republics, as the union became a weak federal republic. Although the two republics shared a common foreign and defense policy, they had separate currencies and customs regulations, and after three years either republic could vote to leave the union. Svetozar Marović, of Montenegro, was elected president of the union in March, and was its only president.

Despite the increased autonomy accorded Montenegro, Montenegrin leaders generally avoided any moves that would be supportive of the union and continued to call for Montenegro's independence. In May, 2006, after three years had passed, Montenegrin voters approved independence in a referendum, and Montenegro declared its independence on June 3. The government of Serbia and Montenegro then dissolved itself and, on June 5, Serbia declared itself a sovereign state and the political heir to the union. Serbia's proclamation brought to an end the prolonged dissolution of Yugoslavia into the constituent republics that had been established by Tito following World War II.

Bibliography

For a personal account of Yugoslavia see R. West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941, repr. 1968). See also J. B. Hoptner, Yugoslavia in Crisis, 1934-1941 (1962); S. Clissold, ed., A Short History of Yugoslavia (1968); J. Alexander, Yugoslavia before the Roman Conquest (1972); W. R. Roberts, Tito, Mihailović and the Allies, 1941-1945 (1973); W. Zimmerman, Open Borders, Non-Alignment and the Political Evolution of Yugoslavia (1987); H. Lydall, Yugoslavia in Crisis (1989); M. Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (3d rev. ed. 1996); D. Owen, Balkan Odyssey (1996); L. Silber and A. Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (1996).

Yugoslav literature literature written in Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, and, especially after World War II, Macedonian languages. The Serbian and Croatian literary languages are similar and generally mutually intelligible, although the Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet while the Croats use the Roman. The Slovenian language uses the Roman alphabet and is closer to Slovak than to Serbo-Croatian. The Macedonian language uses the Cyrillic and is closely related to Bulgarian.

Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Ecclesiastical works in Old Church Slavonic were produced in the Middle Ages. Under Turkish and later Austrian domination a large body of orally transmitted folk poetry of great richness developed. The remarkable 16th-century flowering of learning and literature in the Adriatic trading city of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) was a reflection of the Italian Renaissance, spread by commercial contacts and by Slavic youths educated at Padua. It reached its apogee in Osman, the Croatian epic by Ivan Gundulić , and in the plays of Marin Držić (1508?-1567) and Junije Palmotić (1606-57).

The Eighteenth Century

Literature suffered a decline in the 18th cent., when Dubrovnik's political independence was crushed, and a general imitation of foreign writings took hold. However, the writing of history and biography was gaining prominence. Academies flourished, and the epic poems of the academician Ignat Dordić (1675-1737) were notable. The first national bard, Anora Kačić Miošić (1702-60), wrote his poems in ballad and folk style, while the moralist-philosopher Dositej Obradović (1742-1811) introduced fable writing into Yugoslav literature.

The Nineteenth Century: Nationalism and Romanticism

The southern Slavs experienced the general European nationalist upsurge in the late 18th and early 19th cent. In Slovenia this nationalism, which received much of its impetus from Germany, was weakened by a conflict between religious and secular writers. In Croatia the writers looked to Italy for inspiration; in Serbia, to Russia. South Slavic intellectuals responded with enthusiasm to the Pan-Slavism of the Slovak Jan Kollár .

Among the Croatians a cultural movement known as Illyrianism (named after the state established by Napoleon after the defeat of Austria at Wagram in 1809) acted as a stimulant to literature. Illyrianism was suffused with romanticism and nationalism; the latter theme expressed itself throughout the 19th cent. partly in terms of antagonism to Austro-Hungarian rule. An effort at a popular, integrated literature was inaugurated by three early romantic leaders—the Croat Ljudevit Gaj (1809-72), the Slovene Jernej Kopitar (1780-1844), and the Serb Vuk Stefanović Karadžić . They developed a literary language based on popular speech. Karadžić was also a great folklorist; his collections helped stimulate the romantic-nationalist movement.

Benefiting from these beginnings, by mid-century the Serbian lyric poet Branko Radičević (1824-53), the Slovene poet and political satirist Stanko Vraz (1810-51), and the Croatian Ivan Mažuranić (1814-90)—whose epic The Death of Smail-Aga (1846, tr. 1918) tells of Christian-Muslim conflict in Turkish-ruled Herzegovina—had made important contributions to the movement. More technically perfect were the poems of France Prešeren (1800-1849), a disciple of Byron, and Petar Preradović , who cultivated medieval traditions. Considered far superior was the prince-bishop Petar Petrović Njegoš (1813-51), whose verse drama The Mountain Wreath (1847, tr. 1930) earned him the designation of the Montenegrin Shakespeare. Later romanticism is represented by Djura Jaksić (1832-78), writer of heroic, nationalistic dramas and poems, and Jovan Jovanović-Zmaj (1833-1903), a lyrical poet.

The Late Nineteenth Century: Realism and Psychological Interest

The rise of realism in the latter part of the 19th cent. furthered the development of the novel by such writers as the Serbs Simo Matavulj (1852-1908) and Jakov Ignatović (1824-88), whose penetrating studies portrayed the varied social classes of his region. Also important were the Croatian Evgenij Kumičić (1850-1904); and the Slovenes Josip Stritar (1836-1925) and Josip Jurcić (1844-81), both of whom portrayed Slovene society.

Many novelists of the period also wrote poetry and drama. Outstanding for versatility and abundant production were the popular Croatian writer August Šenoa (1838-81), who revealed Croat social decay and criticized German influence, and the greatest of all Slovenian writers, Ivan Cankar (1876-1918). The late 19th cent. also saw a growing interest in the psychology of motives and morals—a trend chiefly inspired by the writings of the Russian novelists Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. The best known of the psychological novelists was the Croatian Ksaver Šandor Gjalski (1854-1935), who in a series of some 20 novels depicted the whole range of contemporary Croatian life.

In the drama, historical themes had predominated, as in the works of the Croatian Ivo Vojnović (1857-1929). In Croatia and in Slovenia dramatists broke with the cult of history and concerned themselves with psychology. Among these writers are the Croatians Milan Begović (1876-1948) and Josip Kosor and the Slovenian Anton Medved (1869-1911). Serbian drama, however, long remained primarily romantic in the manner of its founder Jovan Sterija-Popović (1806-56), although contemporary problems were treated in the comedies of Branislav Nusić (1864-1938), who was also a noted novelist, story writer, and essayist.

The Twentieth Century: A Variety of Literary Movements

During the first quarter of the 20th cent. the modernists sought to assimilate literary trends imported from France and Germany. Anton Aškerc (1856-1912) wrote historical poems of social revolt, while Vojislav Ilić (1862-94), Aleksa Santić (1868-1924), and Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević (1865-1908) were influenced by the Parnassians. The symbolists numbered not only the Serbs Jovan Dučić (1874-1943) and Milan Rakić (1876-1938), but also Oton Župančić (1878-1949), the greatest Slovene poet of this century, and Vladimir Nazor (1876-1949), Croatia's 20th-century literary giant. Outstanding critics were the Serbs Bogdan Popović (1863-1944) and Jovan Skerlić (1877-1914) and the Croatian Milan Marjanović (1879-1955).

During the 1930s socially conscious literature with local-color settings predominated. The Serbs Jovan Popović (1903-52) and Cedomir Minderović were among the more successful writers of this period. In Slovenia the epic novel flourished under such writers as Jus Kozak, Anton Ingolić, and Prezihov Voranc.

World War II produced a number of partisan poets, and war themes predominated in postwar writing. After 1944 when Macedonian was recognized as one of the official languages of Yugoslavia, writers sought to develop a literature based on Macedonia's rich folk heritage. Although the Communist regime imposed severe restrictions on writers, freedom from Soviet influence after 1949 and the cultural independence of several regions resulted in some innovation.

Among notable postwar writers have been Mladen Horvat; Marko Ristić; the Serbian poets Miloš Crnjanski and Rastko Petrović; the Macedonian poet Koca Racin; the Bosnian novelist and poet Ivo Andrić , who was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature; the Croatian poet and dramatist Miroslav Krleža; the Slovenian prose writer France Bek; the fabulist Miodrag Bulatović; the political writer Milovan Djilas ; and the Serbian novelist Borislav Pekic. With the breakup of the Yugoslav federation in the early 1990s and the collapse of the effort (begun in 1918) to form a unified South Slavic nation, the differences between the major South Slavic literatures are likely to widen. Indeed, nationalists now speak of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian languages and have undertaken to "purify" them.

Bibliography

See A. Barac, A History of Yugoslav Literature (tr. 1955); S. Lukić, Contemporary Yugoslav Literature (1968, tr. 1972); anthologies edited by M. Matejic and D. Milivojevic (1978), T. Butler (1980), and C. Zlobec and H. Glusic (1980); E. Osers, tr., Contemporary Macedonian Poetry (1991).

YUGOSLAVIA (EX-)

Three men—Stjepan Betlheim, Hugo Klajn, and Nichola Sugar—born at the end of the nineteenth century are at the root of psychoanalysis in Yugoslavia. Having completed their medical studies and specialized in neuropsychiatry in Germany and Austria, their return to what was then the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes marked the beginning of the spread of psychoanalytic ideas in this region. They had to contend with the resistance of the psychiatric milieu and the polite interest of the intellectuals, except in Belgrade where they met with great success in artistic circles.

Because they were Jews, these pioneers naturally found themselves in the Resistance during World War II. The victory over fascism and Nazism conferred an authority on them that translated into the creation of psychoanalytically informed treatment centers.

Psychoanalytic thinking spread very rapidly in Sarajevo under the impetus of Dr. Aleksandar Markovic, and in Ljubljana where a psychologist, Leopold Bregant, and a psychiatrist, Milan Kobal, played an important role.

A new generation of Slovene psychoanalysts was being trained in the neighboring Italian city of Trieste. But it was mainly in Croatia and Serbia that the development was decisive. The war (1991-1995) put an end, for the moment, to scientific exchanges between Serb and Croatian analysts. However, both of these groups managed under difficult conditions to maintain vital contact with Western analysts, particularly in France and Italy.

Croatia

The history of psychoanalysis in Croatia is linked to the name of Stjepan Betlheim (1898-1970). He studied medicine in Graz and Vienna. After a first analysis with Paul Schilder, he completed his training with Sándor Radó, whom Abraham Arden Brill invited in 1932 to organize an institute of psychoanalysis in New York. Karen Horney in Berlin and Helene Deutsch in Vienna supervised Betlheim's first analyses. An "associate member" of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1928, he returned to Zagreb that same year. Until World War II he divided his time between a neuropsychiatric department and psychoanalysis in private practice. In 1948 his good reputation enabled him to introduce psychoanalysis in the medical faculty, and in 1953 to create a center for psychotherapeutic treatment in the framework of the neuropsychiatric clinic, thus offering the resources of psychoanalysis and its psychotherapeutic applications for individuals and groups. In 1952 he was elected a "direct member" of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In 1963 he published The Neuroses and Their Treatment, while simultaneously campaigning for the creation of an Association of Yugoslav Psychotherapists. The first steps in this direction were taken in 1964 at the Congress of Neuropsychiatrists at Ohrid, and the project bore fruit in Split in 1968.

In the period after World War II Stjepan Betlheim personally psychoanalyzed his first students: Duska Blazevic, Eugenie Cividini-Stranic, and Edouard Klain. At the same time he created the Mokrice seminar, which, from 1966 until 1991, was a meeting place for therapists from the different Republics constituting the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Professor Maja Beck-Dvorzak organized the psychoanalytic treatment of children and adolescents, followed by Professor S. Nikolic, who introduced the technique of the psychoanalytic psychodrama after a stay in Paris in Serge Lebovici's department, while undergoing personal analysis with Jean Gillibert (1976-1979). In Zagreb Duska Blazevic and Edouard Klain created a psychoanalytically oriented review, Psychoterapja. It is the responsibility of the remaining members of this group to establish regular relations with the IPA, the only body authorized to recognize its training courses.

Serbia

Two men contributed initially to opening Belgrade up to psychoanalysis. The first, Hugo Klajn (1894-1981), physician and psychiatrist, did his personal analysis in 1922 with Paul Schilder in Vienna. On his return to Belgrade his public lectures and translation of a considerable part of Freud's work met with an immediate success. He devoted himself mainly to theatre. As director of the Yugoslav dramatic theatre and Studio 122, his directing enriched the cultural domain. In 1955 he published War Neuroses in Yugoslavs.

Nikola Sugar (1897-1945) was the second of these founding fathers. He was analyzed in Berlin between 1922 and 1925 by Felix Boehm, then in Vienna between 1925 and 1927 by Paul Schilder. An associate member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society from 1925 to 1933, he was a full member from 1935 to 1938. When he returned to the city of Subotica (Vojvodina), he also became a member of Budapest Psychoanalytic Society. In 1938 he founded the first psychoanalytic association in Belgrade. Without having any formal character, it comprised nine members: six physicians, psychiatrists, and neurologists, and three philosophy professors. Meetings were held in the Belgrade Arts Faculty and were soon forbidden under the regency of Prince Paul, who was close to Italy, Bulgaria, and Nazi Germany. Sugar was deported and died.

Two of Sugar's patients, Vladislav Klajn (1909-1984) and especially Vojin Matic (born 1911) were prolific in developing psychoanalytic activities. The IPA awarded an honorary diploma to Professor Vojin Matic at the San Francisco Congress in 1995. Vojin Matic was an assistant at the university neuropsychiatric clinic until 1952, before becoming a professor at the Arts Faculty until his retirement. In 1953 he founded the Medico-Psychopedagogical Center, the first of its kind in Yugoslavia. Ten years later the center was closed but continued to be active in the form of the Institute for Mental Health. In relation with the European Federation of Psychoanalysis, the Belgrade group organized the Seminar for Eastern Countries in 1990. The subject was "Transference and Counter-Transference." Protocols for psychoanalytic treatment were presented by S. Borovejki (Zagreb), V. Brzev (Belgrade), M. Cicek (Zagreb), I. Ivanovic and G. Marinkow (Belgrade). This seminar brought together more than eighty participants from Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, lCzechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia) and Western Europe (Germany, Spain, France, Great Britain, and Italy). Professors Nevenka Tadic, Ksenija Kondic-Belos, and Tamara Stajner-Popovic concentrated particularly on the development of psychoanalytic treatment for children and adolescents. The San Francisco Congress elected Stajner-Popovic and four of her colleagues direct members of the IPA. This election was the fruit of efforts by Hanna Groen-Prakken (of Holland) and John Kafka (of the United States) within the IPA. It opened the way for the constitution of a study group, then the formation of a provisional society, which could lead this group to recognition as a constituent society of the IPA.

Michel Vincent

Bibliography

Diatkine, Gilbert, Gibeault, Alain, Gibeault, Monique, and Vincent, Michel. (1993). La psychanalyse en Europe orientale. In La Psychanalyse et l'Europe de 1993, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Nikolic, S. (1987). La psychiatrie en Yougoslavie. Psychiatrie française, 6, 41-51.

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.

Yugoslavian Civil War

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The civil wars in Yugoslavia after 1991 involved the most severe violence in Europe since the Greek civil war (1946–1949), generating almost 70,000 battle-deaths and displacing many refugees. Many claimed that the cold war had contained nationalism in Europe, and that its end would unleash a wave of sectarian conflict. Paradoxically, this failed to materialize in most socialist states except for Yugoslavia, where the Soviet Union had only minimal direct influence, previously considered a relatively successful case of multi-ethnic political integration.

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was torn apart by demands for autonomy from the relatively more prosperous republics of Slovenia and Croatia and the increasing assertiveness of Serbia under Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006). Slovenia’s declaration of independence in June 1991 led to a minor violent confrontation with the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) but was quickly settled. Whereas independence was relatively uncontroversial for the ethnically homogenous Slovenia with undisputed borders, Croatia was much more contentious due to its large Serb population. The increasingly Serb-dominated JNA seized control over much of Croatia, and violent conflict escalated with the siege of Vukovar in August-November 1991. A January 1992 United Nations’ (UN) peace plan brought combat to an end but perpetuated Serb control over much of Croatia. Later that year violence erupted between Croats, Serbs, and the Muslim dominated central government in Bosnia, leading to a protracted war with many atrocities. An International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) was set up in 1993 to investigate allegations of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. Although fighting in Bosnia formally was carried out by autonomous militias, the Milošević and Franjo Tuđman governments of Serbia and Croatia are believed to have provided extensive support, and the ICT has brought charges against official representatives of both.

The inability of the UN to contain the conflict in Bosnia led NATO and the United States to take a more active role in 1994. The United States brokered a settlement agreement between the Bosnian Croats and the central government and provided military assistance to Croatia. In a military offensive in mid-1995, Croatia reconquered most of the Serb-held areas, and NATO bombardment forced the Serbs to sign the Dayton peace agreement in late 1995. The growing inability of Milošević to control events outside Serbia proper in turn promoted violence among the Albanian majority in the formerly autonomous Kosovo province. The main Albanian opposition leader Ibrahim Rugova (1944–2006) had advocated a strategy of nonviolent resistance, which had succeeded in keeping Kosovo quiet but brought few Serb concessions and did not prevent extensive repression.

Following an influx of arms during the chaos in Albania in 1997, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) turned to violent confrontation. Although the KLA was militarily much weaker than the JNA and the immediate Serb response was increased repression, the escalating violence, with a large outflow of refugees and allegations of atrocities, prompted NATO to start bombing Serbia in March 1999. Faced with prospects of a ground invasion, Milošević agreed to NATO demands in June, and a UN protectorate was established in Kosovo. Although Milošević had survived previous mass demonstrations calling for his resignation in 1991 and 1996, he was finally forced to leave in October 2000 after attempts to dispute an opposition electoral victory, and Serbia has not engaged in conflict with its neighbors since his ouster. The perceived success of the KLA inspired an Albanian armed uprising in Macedonia in 2001, but outside involvement prevented the conflict from escalating.

SEE ALSO Civil Wars; Croats; Genocide; Milosevic, Slobodan; Muslims; North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Serbs; Tito (Josip Broz); United Nations; War Crimes; Warsaw Pact; World War I

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bass, Gary J. 2000. Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bertsch, Gary K. 1971. Nation-Building in Yugoslavia: A Study of Political Integration and Attitudinal Consensus. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Kaplan, Robert D. 1993. Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History. New York: St. Martin’s.

Ramet, Sabrina P. 2002. Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the Fall of Milošević. 4th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Woodward, Susan L. 1995. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch

Yugoslavia A country (no longer recognized by most other countries) in south-east Europe. At the end of World War I it was formed as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, from the former Slavic provinces of AUSTRIA-HUNGARY (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina), together with Serbia and Montenegro, and with Macedonian lands ceded from Bulgaria. The monarch of Serbia, Peter I, was to rule the new kingdom and was succeeded by his son ALEXANDER I. At first the Serbian Premier Nikola Pasic (1921–26) held the rival nations together, but after his death political turmoil caused the new king to establish a royal dictatorship, renaming the country Yugoslavia (January 1929). Moves towards democracy ended with his assassination (1934). During World War II Yugoslavia was overrun by German forces (1941), aided by Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Italian armies. The king fled to London and dismemberment of the country followed, with thousands of Serbs being massacred and the puppet state of CROATIA established under Ante Pavelić. A guerrilla war began, waged by two groups, supporters of the Chetnik MIHAILOVICH and TITO's Communist partisans. In 1945 Tito, supported by the Soviet Union, proclaimed the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia consisting of the republics of BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA, CROATIA, MACEDONIA, MONTENEGRO, SERBIA, and SLOVENIA, and two autonomous Serbian provinces, KOSOVO and Vojvodina. Expelled by Stalin from the Soviet bloc in 1948, Yugoslavia became a leader of the non-aligned nations and the champion of ‘positive neutrality’. Improved relations with the West followed and, after Stalin's death, diplomatic and economic ties with the Soviet Union were renewed (1955).



On Tito's death in 1980 his presidency was replaced by an eight-man Collective State Presidency, with the office of President rotating annually. In 1989, multiparty systems were introduced in Croatia and Slovenia, and demands for independence soon followed. In 1990 a rebellion by Croatia's 12% Serb population was supported by Serbia, while in the same year Serbia, under its President, Slobodan Milosevic, brutally suppressed the 90% Albanian majority in the province of Kosovo. Croatia and Slovenia declared independence in 1991, provoking a full-scale military conflict with the Serb-led Yugoslav army. Atrocities were committed by both Croatian and Serb forces, creating large-scale refugee problems. The Belgrade leadership having failed to crush nationalism in Croatia and Slovenia, both states were recognized as independent in January 1991. Bosnia-Herzegovina was also recognized as independent but erupted into fierce civil war between ethnic Serbs (aided by the Belgrade government), Muslims, and Croats. By the end of 1992, after brutal and extensive ‘ethnic cleansing’, more than two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina was under Serb control. Sanctions were imposed on Serbia by the international community, and a UN force was sent to Bosnia to attempt to keep humanitarian relief lines open. After a long period of political indecision in the West, NATO forces finally launched air raids on Serb positions around Sarajevo in 1995. At the end of the year the presidents of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina accepted the US-brokered Dayton Accord, a peace plan for the region, and a ceasefire came into force. In Serbia, sanctions and general economic collapse left 40% of the population unemployed and the country suffering from hyper-inflation. The new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, proclaimed by the Belgrade government in 1992 and comprising Serbia and Montenegro, has so far received little international recognition. The independence of Macedonia was generally recognized in 1993, and in 1996 relations between Serbia-Montenegro and Macedonia were normalized. This may lead to international recognition of the new Yugoslav republic by the EU and other countries; Austria extended recognition in April 1996. However, in 1998 Serbian aggression against secessionists in Kosovo provoked widespread condemnation and resulted in a campaign of airstrikes by NATO in 1999. Yugoslavia effectively surrendered and withdrew its forces from Kosovo allowing an international peacekeeping force to enable the Albanian majority to return.

Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija) The previous name for what is now the state of Serbia and Montenegro when it was the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Savezna Republika Jugoslavija) in 1992–2003. In 1963–92 it was called the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia which consisted of the Republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Macedonia; the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–63) and Democratic Federal Yugoslavia (1945) with the monarchy being formally abolished in 1946; the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–45); and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Kraljevina Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca) (1918–29). The new country was created as a result of the Serbs siding with the victorious Allies in 1918, although the Croats and Slovenes had been on the losing side in the First World War as part of Austria‐Hungary. The kingdom also included the previously independent Kingdom of Montenegro, Vojvodina, Austrian Dalmatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina; Macedonia then was part of Serbia. The kingdom's borders were not settled until the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920. Yugoslavia means ‘Southern Slavs’ or the ‘(Land of the) South Slavs’ from jug ‘south’. In general, even in 1918, non‐Serbs preferred the name Yugoslavia because it suggested a union of equals, but as the most powerful element, the Serbs wanted a name that reflected their superiority.

Yu·go·slav / ˈyoōgōˌsläv; ˌyoōgōˈsläv; -gə-/ • n. a native or national of Yugoslavia or its former constituent republics, or a person of Yugoslav descent. • adj. of or relating to Yugoslavia, its former constituent republics, or its people.

Yugoslavia See Serbia and Montenegro

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Physical map

Websites

http://www.yuembusa.org

Yugoslav •Algarve, calve, carve, grave, Graves, halve, Slav, starve, suave, Zouave •Wroclaw •Jugoslav, Yugoslav •moshav • Gustave

Yugoslavia •astrantia • Bastia •Dei gratia, hamartia •poinsettia •in absentia, Parmentier •Izvestia •meteor, wheatear •Whittier • cottier • Ostia •consortia, courtier •protea • Yakutia • frontier • Althea •Anthea • Parthia •Pythia, stichomythia •Carinthia, Cynthia •forsythia • Scythia • clothier • salvia •Latvia • Yugoslavia • envier •Flavia, Moldavia, Moravia, Octavia, paviour (US pavior), Scandinavia, Xavier •Bolivia, Livia, Olivia, trivia •Sylvia • Guinevere • Elzevir •Monrovia, Segovia •Retrovir • effluvia • colloquia •Goodyear • yesteryear • brassiere •Abkhazia •Anastasia, aphasia, brazier, dysphasia, dysplasia, euthanasia, fantasia, Frazier, glazier, grazier, gymnasia, Malaysia •amnesia, anaesthesia (US anesthesia), analgesia, freesia, Indonesia, Silesia, synaesthesia •artemisia, Kirghizia, Tunisia •ambrosia, crozier, hosier, osier, symposia