Yugoslavia

• 1. Introduction

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  Yugoslavia was a country that held together, for seven decades, peoples who had spent centuries under the rule of rival empires. Its name meant simply "Land of the South Slavs." It was born from the wreckage of World War I, collapsed in the fires of World War II, rebuilt itself under a single strongman, and then, after his death, tore itself apart in wars that shocked Europe. The story raises urgent questions. How does a country invent itself from scratch? What does it take to hold together people divided by religion, language, and centuries of grievance? And what happens when the glue finally gives way? Those questions drove events from 1918 through the 1990s, and the answers are still being argued over today.

• 2. A Kingdom Built on Ruins

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  On the 13th of July 1922, at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris, Yugoslavia gained its first formal international recognition. That moment came nearly four years after the kingdom's actual creation, which followed the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918. The new state called itself the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and was commonly described at the time as a "Versailles state" - a creature of the post-war peace settlement. It brought together the old Kingdom of Serbia, the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, and territories acquired through the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, which formally transferred northern lands from Hungary.

  Peter I was the country's first sovereign, though power passed quickly to his son Alexander I upon Peter's death in 1921. Alexander faced a political landscape that was genuinely dangerous. On the 20th of June 1928, Serb deputy Punisa Racic opened fire inside the National Assembly itself, killing two members of the Croatian Peasant Party on the spot and fatally wounding party leader Stjepan Radic, who died weeks later. That act of violence inside parliament crystallised the crisis. On the 6th of January 1929, Alexander dissolved the constitution, banned political parties based on national identity, assumed executive power, and renamed the country Yugoslavia. He abolished the historic regions and drew new provincial borders named after rivers, hoping a fresh map might dissolve the old loyalties.

  Alexander's attempt to centralise power put him on a collision course with three of Europe's rising forces: Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Soviet Union. None of them favoured his vision for the Balkans. In 1934, during an official visit to France, he was shot dead in Marseille by Vlado Chernozemski, a marksman from Ivan Mihailov's Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, acting with the cooperation of the Ustaše, a Croatian fascist organisation. His eleven-year-old son Peter II inherited the throne, with Alexander's cousin Prince Paul governing as regent.

• 3. Occupied and Divided

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  At 5:12 a.m. on the 6th of April 1941, German, Italian, and Hungarian forces crossed Yugoslavia's borders simultaneously. The Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade and other major cities. On the 17th of April, Yugoslavia's representatives signed an armistice in Belgrade, ending eleven days of resistance. More than 300,000 Yugoslav officers and soldiers became prisoners of war.

  The Axis powers dismembered the country. The Independent State of Croatia was established as a Nazi satellite, governed by the Ustaše. German troops held Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as parts of Serbia and Slovenia. Bulgaria, Hungary, and Italy divided up the rest. What followed was among the worst violence the region had ever seen. Between 1941 and 1945, the Croatian Ustaše regime murdered around 300,000 Serbs along with at least 30,000 Jews and Roma. Hundreds of thousands more Serbs were expelled, and an estimated 200,000-300,000 were forced to convert to Catholicism.

  Two resistance movements arose in response, and they despised each other almost as much as they despised the occupiers. The royalist Chetniks, led by Draza Mihajlovic, initially held Allied support, but over time they focused less on fighting the Axis and more on fighting the communist-led Partisans. By the war's end, the Chetnik movement had become a collaborationist force, dependent on Axis supplies. The Chetniks also persecuted and killed Muslims and Croats, with an estimated 50,000-68,000 victims, of whom 41,000 were civilians.

  The Partisans, led by Josip Broz Tito, built what became the largest guerrilla resistance army in all of occupied Western and Central Europe. Their most notable victories over the occupying forces came at the battles of Neretva and Sutjeska. At the Tehran Conference in late 1943, the Allies formally recognised the Partisans as the legitimate Yugoslav resistance. On the 25th of November 1943, in Jajce, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Anti-Fascist Council reconvened and established the framework for a post-war federal state. The date was later celebrated as Republic Day. Official Yugoslav estimates put the country's wartime dead at 1,704,000; subsequent research by historians Vladimir Zerjavic and Bogoljub Kocovic, working in the 1980s, put the actual figure closer to 1 million.

• 4. Tito's Yugoslavia

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  On the 11th of November 1945, parliamentary elections were held in which only the Communist-led People's Front appeared on the ballot. It secured all 354 seats in the newly formed Constituent Assembly. On the 29th of November, the Assembly abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. Tito, who had commanded 800,000 men by the war's end, was now in full control.

  The 1946 constitution, modelled on the Soviet Union's, established six republics, one autonomous province, and one autonomous district within Serbia. The federal capital was Belgrade. What followed was a period of tight one-party rule, but with one decisive difference from the rest of the Eastern Bloc: Tito broke with Stalin in 1948. The break was decisive. All other Communist European countries had already rejected the Marshall Plan at Stalin's insistence. Tito had at first gone along. But in 1948 he broke with Moscow on other issues and made Yugoslavia an independent communist state. Yugoslavia then requested American aid. After internal debate, the United States began sending money on a small scale in 1949 and on a much larger scale from 1950 to 1953. That aid was separate from the Marshall Plan.

  Tito criticised both the Eastern Bloc and NATO, and in 1961 he co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement alongside India and other countries, which became Yugoslavia's formal international affiliation until the country dissolved. At home, power was consolidated without mercy. Slobodan Penezic Krcun, Tito's chief of secret police in Serbia, fell victim to a dubious traffic incident after complaining about Tito's politics. Minister of the Interior Aleksandar Rankovic lost all his titles following a major disagreement with Tito over state policy. On the 7th of April 1963, the country was renamed the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Tito was named President for life.

• 5. The 1974 Constitution and Its Consequences

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  Student protesters in Belgrade and other cities joined the worldwide protests of 1968. Tito initially responded by saying on television that "students are right" and conceding to some of their demands. In the years that followed, however, he had the leaders of those protests sacked from their university and party posts.

  The Croatian Spring of 1970 and 1971 was a more serious challenge. Students in Zagreb organised demonstrations demanding greater civil liberties and Croatian autonomy, and mass protests spread across Croatia. The regime jailed the leaders. But Tito was caught between pressures: Croatia and other republics wanted greater independence, while Serbs complained the country was already tilted against them. His answer was the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution, which gave the individual republics more rights and granted the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina within Serbia a status largely equal to the other republics. Albanian and Hungarian became nationally recognised minority languages. Serbo-Croatian as spoken in Bosnia and Montenegro was recast to reflect local speech rather than the standards of Zagreb and Belgrade.

  The constitution created a structural paradox that would prove fatal. Kosovo and Vojvodina held the same voting power in the Federal Presidency Council as the six republics, but unlike the republics they could not legally secede from Yugoslavia. Serbia found itself in a situation where its two autonomous provinces could form coalitions with other republics in the eight-member federal council and outvote Serbia proper. This constitutional tangle satisfied Croatia and Slovenia but infuriated Serbian officials, who viewed it as weakening Serbia's influence over a population that included roughly 2 million Serbs living outside Serbia's borders. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, meanwhile, saw the new arrangement as insufficient and demanded full republican status.

• 6. Economic Collapse and Rising Nationalism

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  From the 1950s to the early 1980s, Yugoslavia was among the fastest-growing economies in the world, approaching rates comparable to countries in East Asia undergoing rapid industrialisation. The Yugoslav system was distinctive: factories operated as worker cooperatives, and economic decision-making was less centralised than in other socialist states. Then came the oil price shock of the 1970s, and the model broke apart. Yugoslavia had borrowed vast amounts of Western capital to fund export-driven growth. When Western economies went into recession and demand for Yugoslav exports fell, a severe debt crisis followed.

  The numbers that emerged by the end of the decade were stark. In 1989, 248 firms were declared bankrupt or liquidated and 89,400 workers were laid off. In the first nine months of 1990 alone, following the adoption of an IMF austerity programme, another 889 enterprises with a combined workforce of 525,000 workers suffered the same fate. In less than two years, the layoff mechanism had cut more than 600,000 workers from an industrial workforce of roughly 2.7 million. An additional 500,000 workers went unpaid in early 1990 as enterprises tried to avoid bankruptcy. The largest concentrations of failures were in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Kosovo. Real wages were in free fall, social programmes collapsed, and a deep atmosphere of despair set in.

  After Tito died on the 4th of May 1980, Slobodan Milosevic began his rise through Serbian Communist ranks. He sought to recover pre-1974 Serbian sovereignty. Slovenia and Croatia denounced his proposals as an attempt to reimpose Serbian dominance. Through moves his supporters called the "anti-bureaucratic revolution", Milosevic reduced the autonomy of Vojvodina and Kosovo. In the eight-member Federal Presidency Council, Serbia could now count on at least four votes: Serbia proper, a then-loyal Montenegro, Vojvodina, and Kosovo. Ethnic Albanian miners in Kosovo responded with the 1989 Kosovo miners' strike, which escalated into an ethnic conflict. At around 80 percent of Kosovo's population in the 1980s, ethnic Albanians were the clear majority, but Serb emigration from the region accelerated as tensions rose.

• 7. Breakup and War

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  In January 1990, the extraordinary 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia exposed the fault lines that would split the country. The Serbian delegation, led by Milosevic, pushed for "one person, one vote" - a system that would empower Yugoslavia's largest ethnic group. The Slovenian delegation, backed by Croats, insisted on devolving more power to the republics. When the Slovenians were outvoted, they walked out, and the Croatian delegation followed. The all-Yugoslav Communist party dissolved.

  Multi-party elections followed in each republic through 1990. Slovenia and Croatia held theirs in April and elected governments favoring independence: Lojze Peterle in Slovenia, Franjo Tudjman in Croatia. Serbia and Montenegro elected candidates who favored unity. On the 25th of June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence simultaneously. The following day, the Federal Executive Council ordered the army to retake the internationally recognised border crossings, starting the Ten-Day War in Slovenia. Most Yugoslav Army conscripts in Slovenia had been misled into thinking the federation was under attack by foreign forces; many did not wish to fight where they had served their conscription. Slovene territorial defence forces retook most positions within days. The Brioni Agreement imposed a three-month moratorium on independence.

  Croatia's path was bloodier. Ethnic Serbs in heavily Serb-populated regions of Croatia had already, in August 1990, begun blocking roads from the Dalmatian coast toward the interior, nearly a year before Croatian leadership formally moved toward independence. They proclaimed "Serb Autonomous Areas" that were later unified as the Republic of Serb Krajina. By the autumn of 1991, a full war was under way in Croatia, with the Yugoslav Army acting less as a neutral buffer and more as a supplier and protector of Serbian forces.

  In Bosnia, a Bosnian Serb referendum held on the 9th and the 10th of November 1991 backed remaining in Yugoslavia; the turnout was partial and the parliamentary government declared the referendum illegal. From the 29th of February to the 1st of March 1992, a European Community-backed independence referendum drew 99.7 percent in favour of independence, though turnout was only 63.4 percent after most Bosnian Serbs boycotted. Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence on the 5th of April 1992. War followed almost immediately and lasted more than three years. From 1993 to 2017, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia tried political and military leaders for war crimes and genocide committed in those conflicts. Kosovo's declaration of independence in February 2008 remains disputed to this day, with the Republic of Kosovo not a member of the United Nations, though recognised as sovereign by the United States and a number of European Union members.

• 8. Faith, Identity, and Memory

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  Yugoslavia was always a country of striking religious diversity. Islam, Roman Catholicism, Judaism, Protestantism, and various Eastern Orthodox faiths coexisted within its borders, composing over 40 religious affiliations in all. A census taken in 1921 and again in 1948 found that 99 percent of the population appeared to be deeply engaged with their religion. The post-war Communist government's programmes of modernisation and urbanisation drove that figure sharply downward. By 1964, just over 70 percent of the total population still identified as religious believers. The highest concentrations of religious identification were in Kosovo at 91 percent and Bosnia and Herzegovina at 83.8 percent. The lowest were in Slovenia at 65.4 percent, Serbia at 63.7 percent, and Croatia at 63.6 percent. Self-declared atheists were most common among those who identified as Yugoslavs by nationality at 45 percent, followed by Serbs at 42 percent.

  Those religious and ethnic differences did not simply cause the collapse: they were inflamed and exploited by political leaders during the economic crisis of the 1980s. The ruling Communist Party had promoted ethnic diversity and "brotherhood and unity" while organising the country as a federation. The Kingdom that preceded it had taken the opposite approach, suppressing autonomy and proclaiming that Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Slovenes were all merely tribes of a single Yugoslav nation - a policy widely interpreted as gradual Serbianisation.

  What remains is something called Yugo-nostalgia: a remembrance of the joint state and the sense of social security it once provided. There are still people from the former Yugoslavia who identify themselves as Yugoslavs when asked about ethnicity in demographic surveys of today's independent states. The three major languages spoken across the country were Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian. After the breakup, Serbo-Croatian lost its unified status and diverged into four standardised varieties - Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian - though linguists recognise them as one pluricentric language. The Succession Agreement signed in Vienna on the 29th of June 2001 divided all assets of the former state among five successor republics, drawing a legal line under a country that had existed for less than a century.