to unify the region failed until after World War I, when the impetus to come together increased for economic and security reasons. Yet, the nation that emerged was always tenuous because the union did not satisfy the needs of all the groups equally. Tensions seethed beneath the surface for the period of independent rule, and they continued under the domination by the Communists, who were able to keep the groups together only by the threat of force and by imposition of all structure and regulation from above. The problem today is that the tensions that were kept in check during the Communist era have now boiled over and have brought the different ethnic groups to war with one another.
It is our intention to stop the conflict in Bosnia, but it is the immediate purpose to assure that the international community take a proper role in this first test of its resolve in the post-Cold War era. An examination of the nature of the conflict and its importance to the international community will lead to a recommendation for the way the international community should view the war, address the problem, and develop a way to end the fighting.
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. They were subjugated by various non-Slav powers occupying the area over the next twelve hundred years, and this fostered even greater variations among them in religion, language, culture, and political development. 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. Nyrop (1981) notes:
Centuries of foreign rule, however, did not prevent the development of a strong...