Yugoslavia was a nation under the Soviet sphere of influence, yet it was largely an artificial nation made up of entities that did not get along and that tried to divide up the region once the threat of Soviet force was removed. The current ethnic conflict in what was formerly Yugoslavia has roots that extend far back into history. The ethnic groups in the region have long been divided by cultural differences, religion, and language. Efforts to unify the region failed until after World War I, when the impetus to come together increased for economic and security reasons. Yet, the state that emerged was always tenuous because the union did not satisfy the needs of all the groups equally. The former Yugoslavia is perhaps the most unstable of all the former Soviet satellite states, and even though the direct attack on Kosovo was stopped by U.N. forces last spring, stability is unlikely in the foreseeable future.
The peoples of Yugoslavia were linguistically and culturally differentiated after they had migrated to the Balkan Peninsula in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. For nearly six centuries prior to the beginning of World War I, the Croats and Slovenes were subordinated to the Germanic and Roman Catholic Habsburg Empire, and the Eastern Orthodox Serbs, Macedonians, and Islamized Slavs were ruled by the Ottoman Empire for much of the period between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries:
Centuries of foreign rule, however, did not prevent the development of a strong sense of ethnic identity within each of the South Slav groups. Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, and Macedonians sought to maintain separate characters and identities. Serbia's successful struggle to regain independence in the early nineteenth century stimulated the other groups to strive for independence (Nyrop, 1981, 3).
The first step toward the beginning of the war in Bosnia could be foreseen before fighting actually began:
The level of...