Yugoslavia & Ethnic Tensions

Yugoslavia remained a state until the end of the cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, at which time ethnic warfare broke out among the three main groups constituting that state--the Serbs, the Croats, and the Muslims. Yugoslavia was always an artificially-constituted state, held together over the past fifty years by the power of the Soviet Union and the Communist leaders of Yugoslavia and not by commonalities among the three ethnic groups. Beneath the surface, long-standing ethnic tensions festered and remained strong enough to break out as soon as the pressure of communist rule was removed. This report is an examination of the origins of Yugoslavia as a state, the ethnic tensions that existed at that time, and the nature of the state that emerged from World War I.

The peoples of Yugoslavia were linguistically and culturally differentiated after they 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, while

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Category: Foreign - Y