ommunists, 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 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 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 different Slav-speaking national groups underwent different historical experiences, and while at various points in their history they have been conscious of common interests, at other times they have emphasized their differences. It has usually ben a common external danger that brought them together, and in periods when the external danger is absent, their historically rooted cultural differences take hold. The Yugoslav movement developed during the nineteenth century with two main strands. The first affected the lands north of the Sava-Danube line and Dalmatia, territories that were attached to the Habsburg monarchy. The Croats and Slovenes in these areas...