Yugoslavia

The Balkan Peninsula has long been a crazy quilt of rival peoples, divided by customs, language and religion. The Ottoman Empire came to dominate the region after routing the Kingdom of Serbia at Kosovo in 1389. (During the 16th and 17th century the Turks also ruled Hungary, including Croatia to the west of Serbia.) But by the 19th century the Turkish hold was steadily weakening.

Between 1804 and 1813 Djordje Petrovic ("Black George") led a Serb rebellion against Ottoman rule, eventually leading to Serbian autonomy. During the 19th century control over the Principality of Serbia alternated between the Karadjordje and Obrenovic clans, supported respectively by the Russian and Austrian empires in a harbinger of future trouble. In 1878 the Congress of Berlin made Serbia a fully independent kingdom and put nearby Bosnia-Herzegovina under Austrian administration. (Austria would annex the province outright in 1908.) The last Obrenovic king was murdered in 1888 and the Serbian Crown came under permanent Karadjordje control. Many Serbians aspired to expand their landlocked kingdom to gain an outlet to the sea and absorb Serbs in Bosnia, Hungarian Vojvodina to the north, and Turkish Macedonia to the south.

In 1912 Serbia formed the Balkan League with Greece, Bulgaria to the southeast and Montenegro to the southwest and launched a war against the remaining Ottoman Empire, largely driving the Turks out of the Balkans. But Serbia and Bulgaria fought a second war in 1913 over Upper Macedonia to the south, in which Serbia prevailed. In 1914 in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo a Serb nationalist assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince, leading to an Austrian invasion and four years of devastating warfare. With Austrian forces annihilated by the end of 1918, Serbia absorbed Vojvodina and formed the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia (under the Serbian King, with its capital in Serbian Belgrade) with Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Austrian Slovenia. Yugoslavia proved to be an uneasy union of peoples, with Serb domination resented by the other nationalities.

In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded, Serbia was occupied and Croatia became a puppet state. By 1945, after another bloody war, communist forces under Josip Broz (a Croatian known by his code name Tito) had overcome both the fascists and Serbia's monarchist Chetniks under Draza Mihailovic. Yugoslavia became a communist state, but stayed independent enough to keep out of the pro-Moscow Warsaw Pact. After Tito's 1980 death, central control declined: the Presidency was rotated annually among the nation's six sub-republics, and policies diverged. (Croatia and Slovenia were more open to pro-market reforms than Serbia.)

Slobodan Milosevic came to dominate Serbia and exploited Serb nationalist feeling, ending Kosovo and Vojvodina's autonomous status in 1989 (the 600th anniversary of Serbia's Kosovo defeat). Non-communist parties were legalized in 1990, and the nation soon exploded. Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia seceded in 1991. In 1992 the secession of Bosnia-Herzegovina led to a three-year war marked by "ethnic cleansing" and ending in the republic's partition. Kosovo became independent in a 1999 conflict, with the help of American air power. The Montenegrese also ended their union with Serbia in 2006. Yugoslavia is history.

For background reading, you can try Leslie Benson's A Concise History of Yugoslavia.

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