Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia was a country in Central Europe and the Balkans that existed from 1918 to 1992. Its name means 'Land of the South Slavs'. It came into existence after World War I, under the name Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, when the Kingdom of Serbia joined with the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. It was the first union of South Slavic peoples as a sovereign state, after centuries of foreign rule under the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy.

The House of Karađorđević ruled the kingdom, which gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris. On 3 October 1929, it was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Alexander I ruled through an extended period of political crisis that led to the 6 January Dictatorship and, in 1934, to his assassination. Prince Paul headed the state as a prince regent until Alexander's son Peter II was declared of age, following the Yugoslav coup d'état in March 1941.

The kingdom was invaded and occupied by the Axis powers in April 1941, which marked the start of World War II in Yugoslavia. The Communist-led Partisan resistance proclaimed the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia and gained the backing of the Allies at the Tehran Conference. In November 1945, the Constituent Assembly proclaimed Yugoslavia a federal republic, ending monarchical rule. Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito ruled the country from 1944 until his death in 1980, first as prime minister and later as president. In 1963, the country was renamed for the final time, as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The country was made up of six republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Within Serbia were the two autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. After an economic and political crisis, and the rise of nationalism and ethnic conflicts following Tito's death, Yugoslavia broke up along its republics' borders during the Revolutions of 1989, which led to the Yugoslav Wars.

After the breakup, Montenegro and Serbia formed a smaller state, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which is covered in Serbia and Montenegro. This state dissolved in 2006, when Montenegro and Serbia each became independent countries. Kosovo has had an ongoing dispute over its declaration of independence in 2008.

Background

Main article: Creation of Yugoslavia

The idea of Yugoslavia, as one shared country for all South Slavic peoples, began in the late 1600s and became well known through the Illyrian Movement in the 1800s. The name joins two Slavic words: jug, meaning "south," and Slaveni or Sloveni, meaning "Slavs." Plans to form Yugoslavia moved forward quickly after the Corfu Declaration of 1917, an agreement between the Yugoslav Committee and the government of the Kingdom of Serbia.

Kingdom of Yugoslavia

Main article: Kingdom of Yugoslavia

See also: 6 January Dictatorship

The country was formed in 1918, right after World War I, as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. It came from a union of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs and the Kingdom of Serbia. At the time it was often called a "Versailles state." In 1929, King Alexander I renamed the country Yugoslavia. The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 formally gave northern territories from Hungary to Yugoslavia. In 1928, Serb deputy Puniša Račić shot at members of the Croatian Peasant Party in the National Assembly. Two deputies died, and the party's leader, Stjepan Radić, died a few weeks later. On 6 January 1929, Alexander removed the constitution, banned national political parties, and took power himself. He hoped this would reduce separatist feelings. He later imposed a new constitution and gave up his dictatorship in 1931. Alexander's policies also faced opposition from other countries, including Germany, where the Nazis had risen to power, and the Soviet Union, where Joseph Stalin had become absolute ruler.

In 1934, King Alexander was killed in Marseille during an official visit to France. His eleven-year-old son, Peter II, succeeded him, and a regency council was led by Prince Paul. In 1939, with support from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Croatian leader Vladko Maček helped create the Banovina of Croatia. In March 1941, Prince Paul signed the Tripartite Pact, but many military officers opposed this and carried out the Yugoslav coup d'état. Army General Dušan Simović took power, and King Peter, who was 17, was given full powers. Hitler then decided to attack Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941.

World War II

Main article: World War II in Yugoslavia

On 6 April 1941, German, Italian and Hungarian forces invaded Yugoslavia. The German Air Force (Luftwaffe) bombed Belgrade and other major cities. On 17 April, leaders from Yugoslavia's regions signed an armstice with Germany in Belgrade, ending eleven days of resistance. The Axis powers occupied the country and split it up. The Independent State of Croatia became a Nazi satellite state, ruled by the Ustaše militia. German troops occupied parts of Serbia and Slovenia, while Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy took other parts. From 1941 to 1945, the Croatian Ustaše regime persecuted and murdered around 300,000 Serbs, at least 30,000 Jews and Roma. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs were expelled, and another 200,000 to 300,000 were forced to convert to Catholicism.

From the start, the resistance had two groups: the communist-led Yugoslav Partisans and the royalist Chetniks. The Partisans were led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito, and the Chetniks by Draža Mihajlović. The Partisans received Allied recognition at the Tehran conference (1943). The Partisans ran a guerrilla campaign that grew into the largest resistance army in occupied Western and Central Europe. The Chetniks focused more on fighting the Partisans, and they also persecuted and killed Muslims and Croats. The Partisans won famous battles at Neretva and Sutjeska. The Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia met in Bihać, in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1942, and met again in Jajce in 1943. The Partisans pushed the Axis out of Serbia in 1944 and the rest of Yugoslavia in 1945, with limited help from the Red Army. By May 1945, they had taken Trieste and parts of the Austrian provinces of Styria and Carinthia. In June 1944, a Tito-Šubašić Agreement tried to reunite the Partisans with supporters of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but Tito was in control. The official post-war estimate of victims is 1,704,000. Later research by historians Vladimir Žerjavić and Bogoljub Kočović found that about 1 million people had died.

Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia

Main article: Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia

On 11 November 1945, parliamentary elections were held. Only the Communist-led People's Front appeared on the ballot, and it won all 354 seats in the newly formed Constituent Assembly. On 29 November, the Constituent Assembly proclaimed the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, which ended monarchy. The elections had been called by a regency council that the King appointed on 2 March 1945, though historians disagree on whether this was an abdication. Marshal Tito was now in full control, and all opposition was eliminated. The 1946 Constitution of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, modelled after the Constitution of the Soviet Union, set up six republics, with Belgrade as the federal capital. It gave a strong central government under the Communist Party and recognized the many nationalities in the country.

Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Main article: Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

On 7 April 1963, the country changed its official name to Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Josip Broz Tito was named President for life. Each republic and province had its own constitution, parliament, and leaders. Tito was the most powerful person in the country, and officials who disagreed with him could lose their posts, as Aleksandar Ranković did. Cracks in the tightly governed system appeared when students in Belgrade and several other cities joined the worldwide protests of 1968. Tito later removed the protest leaders from their university and Communist Party posts. In 1970 and 1971, students in Zagreb led demonstrations for more freedoms and greater Croatian autonomy, during the Croatian Spring. The government stopped the protests and arrested the leaders.

A new 1974 Yugoslav Constitution gave more rights to the republics and to the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo. Serbia's influence in the country was reduced, which upset some Serbian officials. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo wanted their province to become a republic with the right to separate, which was not allowed. From the 1950s to the early 1980s, Yugoslavia's economy grew quickly. After the oil price shock of the 1970s, however, the country fell into economic crisis and large debts. By 1989 and 1990, many firms had closed and many workers had lost their jobs, creating a mood of despair among many people. This was a critical turning point in the events that followed.

Breakup

Main article: Breakup of Yugoslavia

Main article: Yugoslav Wars

After Tito's death in 1980, ethnic tensions grew in Yugoslavia. The Constitution of 1974 made it hard for the country to make decisions, and the different groups often disagreed. Albanians in Kosovo asked for their region to become a republic during the 1981 protests in Kosovo. In the late 1980s, Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević gained power, and Slovenia under Milan Kučan supported Albanian miners in the 1989 Kosovo miners' strike. At the January 1990 congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the Serbs and Slovenes disagreed about the future of the country, and the Slovene and Croatian delegations left. That year, Lojze Peterle led Slovenia's government and Franjo Tuđman led Croatia's, both aiming for more independence. Serbs living in Croatia rebelled, and their areas were later united into the Republic of Serb Krajina.

Fighting soon spread across the region, and this period is known as the Yugoslav Wars. In late March 1991, the Plitvice Lakes incident was one of the first sparks of open war in Croatia. On 25 June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence, which led to the Ten-Day War. A ceasefire was agreed in the Brioni Agreement, and the two republics were asked to pause their independence for three months under a moratorium. In September 1991, the Republic of Macedonia also declared independence, with Kiro Gligorov as its first president. On 27 November 1991, the United Nations Security Council adopted UN Security Council Resolution 721, which led to peacekeeping operations in Yugoslavia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a referendum in early 1992 showed strong support for independence, but most Bosnian Serbs boycotted it, and the war in Bosnia followed. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was formed on 27 April 1992, and the Dayton Agreement was signed on 14 December 1995 by the leaders of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia.

New states

As the Yugoslav Wars raged through Bosnia and Croatia, the republics of Serbia and Montenegro, which were relatively untouched by the war, formed a rump state called the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in 1992. The FRY wanted to be the only legal successor of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but the other former republics opposed this. The United Nations also denied its request to automatically continue the membership of the former state. In 2000, after the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević as president of the federation, the country gave up these claims, accepted the opinion of the Badinter Arbitration Committee about shared succession, and rejoined the UN on 2 November 2000. Milošević was put on trial for crimes committed during his ten-year rule in Serbia and the Yugoslav Wars. From 1992 to 2000, some countries, including the United States, called the FRY Serbia and Montenegro. In April 2001, the five successor states drafted an Agreement on Succession Issues of the Former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Under the agreement, signed in Vienna on 29 June 2001, all assets of the former Yugoslavia were divided among the five successor states:

In 2003, the FRY was officially renamed Serbia and Montenegro.

In June 2006, Montenegro became an independent nation after a May 2006 referendum, so Serbia and Montenegro no longer existed. Serbia then became the legal successor of Serbia and Montenegro, and Montenegro applied again for membership in international organisations. In February 2008, the Republic of Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. This led to an ongoing dispute over whether Kosovo is a legally recognised state. Kosovo is not a member of the United Nations, but a number of states, including the United States and various members of the European Union, have recognised it as a sovereign state.

Main article: Yugo-nostalgia

Remembrance of the time of the joint state and its positive attributes is called Yugo-nostalgia. Many aspects of Yugo-nostalgia refer to the socialist system and the sense of social security it provided. Some people from the former Yugoslavia still describe themselves as Yugoslavs, and this identity is commonly seen in population data about ethnicity in today's independent states.

Demographics

Main articles: Demographics of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Demographics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia was home to a very diverse population, with many nationalities and religions. Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, and Protestantism were all practiced in the country. After World War II, religion changed a great deal. A census in 1921 and another in 1948 found that 99% of people seemed deeply involved in their religion. As the government modernised the country and cities grew, the number of religious believers dropped sharply. Because religion and nationality were closely linked, the Communist government saw this as a threat to national unity. Yugoslavia became a de facto atheist state, unlike many other socialist states of the time. However, the Catholic Church stayed active in society, the Holy See normalized its relations with Yugoslavia by 1967, and the two worked together to stop the Vietnam War. The Serbian Orthodox Church also received favorable treatment, and Yugoslavia did not run anti-religious campaigns as widely as other countries in the Eastern Bloc. A survey in 1964 found that just over 70% of people still considered themselves religious believers, with the highest shares in Kosovo (91%) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (83.8%). Religious differences between Serbs, Macedonians, Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks, and Albanians, along with rising nationalism, helped lead to the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991.

The Kingdom of Yugoslavia tried to unite its peoples under one identity, claiming that Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Slovenes were all tribes of one nation of Yugoslavs (see Yugoslavism). Many Croats and other groups strongly disagreed, and this was seen as a gradual Serbianization of the non-Serb population. The Communist Party that ruled the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia opposed this approach. It promoted ethnic diversity and a shared Yugoslav identity under the idea of "brotherhood and unity", and organized the country as a federation. The three major languages were Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian. Serbo-Croatian, the only language taught across the whole country, remained the second language of many Slovenes and Macedonians, especially those born during Yugoslavia's time. After Yugoslavia broke up, Serbo-Croatian lost its single official standard and diverged into four standardized varieties of one pluricentric language: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian.^{[citation needed]}