Creation of Yugoslavia
The South Slavic people of the Balkans are divided into numerous ethnic national groups. Before World War I, most of these were under the dominion of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. When these empires collapsed after World War I, the South Slavs created the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. Divided by ethnic tensions, the country was poor and unstable.
After World War I, the victors decided that what was needed in the western Balkans was a multinational state. Catholic Slovenia and Croatia, Orthodox Serbia and Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina...joined together in a nation whose unifying principle was discord. None of these countries was ethnically pure. Each was filled with enclaves of other nationalities and religions. And each was divided against itself. |