History of Yugoslavia - travelworldtickets.com

Podcast transcript

From 1929 to 1992, several governments ruled the Balkans, all using the name “Yugoslavia”.

Yugoslavia is a country that was born out of dreams, born out of war, and ultimately ended because of war.

Although the country of Yugoslavia no longer exists, its influence can still be felt in the countries that once threatened it.

Learn more about Yugoslavia, its rise and fall in this issue of Everything Everywhere Daily.

In a previous episode, I gave an overview of the Balkans and introduced many of the countries in the region.

In this episode, I want to focus on a country that played an important role in the history of the region in the 20th century: Yugoslavia.

The story of Yugoslavia actually begins with the migration of Slavs about 1500 years ago.

Around the middle of the 6th and early 7th centuries, a people group known as the Slavs began migrating from their homelands in present-day Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine.

There are many reasons for the Slavic migration, including climate change after the end of the Roman Optimum, population pressure, and taking advantage of changes in European populations after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

The Slavs migrated in all directions. The Eastern Slavs migrated into what is today Russia.

Western Slavs settled in what is today western Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.

However, associated with this event is a group of Slavs who moved south and settled in the Balkan Mountains and in present-day Bulgaria.

The word “Yugoslavia” means “land of the South Slavs” in several Yugoslav languages.

Although there are Yugoslavs in Bulgaria, the word Yugoslavia has always referred only to the Slavs living in the Balkan Mountains.

The Slavs in the region eventually became linguistically isolated from the Slavic groups further north, as Hungary and Romania were located between the two Slavic regions.

These South Slavs eventually began to separate linguistically from the Slavs to the north and developed their own South Slavic language family.

Here I will skip over a thousand years of history that includes the Byzantine and Ottoman conquests and the religious influence of Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

Importantly, these Yugoslav groups had much in common but developed distinct national identities based on language and religion.

By the 19th century, the northern part of the region, including modern-day Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia, came under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

During this period, a pan-Southern Slavic movement known as the Illyrian Movement arose.

The Illyrian movement was named after the former Roman province of Illyria. At the time, people believed that the South Slavs were descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Illyria. They used the word Illyrian to describe all South Slavs.

The Illyrian Movement was a cultural and political movement launched in the Croatian region under Habsburg rule in the first half of the 19th century, aimed at promoting the unity and identity of the South Slavs and cultivating national consciousness.

It reached its peak in the 1830s and 1840s.

Despite its noble aims, the movement was primarily a Croatian movement, aimed at strengthening Croatian national identity.

The movement’s leaders did not particularly want independence; they simply wanted a degree of autonomy under Austro-Hungarian rule.

The movement never really achieved any of its political goals, and eventually broke up in 1845 over differences over poetry (believe it or not).

Although the movement failed, it began to get people thinking about Pan-Slavic unification, and in 1848, amid revolutions across Europe, a plan was developed to create a Yugoslav federation.

The federation was a union of Yugoslavs, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Although the federation was led by a king, each tribe had equal status in the government.

The plan was not put into practice, but it was happening. In 1867, the last Ottoman troops left Serbia. In 1872, the major European powers convened the Berlin Conference to decide the fate of the Balkans. In 1882, Serbia became independent.

Now, we must fast forward again, this time several decades later, to World War I.

The war did not go well for Austria-Hungary, which had fought alongside Germany. In 1918, as the war was coming to an end, the empire disintegrated.

In the Balkans, the Provisional National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs was formed, composed of representatives of each group. On October 29, they announced the creation of a new state called the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, and just two days later they formally sought to merge with Serbia and Montenegro.

Things moved very quickly, and on December 1, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was proclaimed in Belgrade.

The dream of the 19th century Yugoslavs had finally come true. There were some problems with the new borders with Austria and Italy, but in practical terms Yugoslavia had been born… even if they didn’t use that name yet.

The original idea was to create a federation in which each member state would have considerable autonomy, a system similar to the Swiss federal system.

but it is not the truth.

In 1921, a new constitution was adopted that greatly centralized power, taking it away from the electoral districts and concentrating it in the hands of the Serbs. This led many of the original supporters of the merger to revolt against the government.

Finally, on January 6, 1929, King Alexander I announced the establishment of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, abolished the constitution and established his own dictatorship.

Alexander was assassinated while traveling in Marseille, France, in 1934. It was the first time the assassination had been filmed; if you’ve never seen it, it’s pretty dramatic.

This placed the eleven-year-old Peter II on the Yugoslav throne, with his father’s cousin Prince Paul acting as regent.

In the 1930s, racial tensions continued to rise. The government tried to decentralize some power, but few people were satisfied with it.

Prince Paul allied Yugoslavia with Italy and Germany, and on March 25, 1941, the Triple Alliance Pact was formally signed with the Axis Powers.

Just two days later, Peter the Great was overthrown in a coup led by the pro-British faction of the military, and King Paul II, who was only 17 years old, officially ascended the throne.

This did not sit well with the Germans, and despite the good intentions of the British, there was nothing they could do if Yugoslavia was attacked.

On April 6, just 10 days after the coup, Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy invaded Yugoslavia. Neighboring countries annexed small pieces of Yugoslav territory, and Germany established a puppet government in Yugoslavia.

At the time, the Soviet people were fiercely resisting German rule and the puppet government, most notably the communist partisans led by Josip Broz Tito and the royalist Chetniks.

Tito’s forces eventually prevailed, and by 1943 he controlled most of the country.

Tito announced the establishment of the Democratic Federation of Yugoslavia on November 29, 1943. The main purpose of this new state was to organize resistance against the Germans and Italians.

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The new nation initially had close ties to the Soviet Union, which had established communist governments across Eastern Europe, and Joseph Stalin believed Yugoslavia would follow suit.

However, Tito did not want to be Stalin’s puppet. He began to pursue policies more independent of Stalin.

Power was more decentralized in Yugoslavia, and factory workers were more able to vote to change their work rhythms.

Perhaps most importantly, both Stalin and Tito were strong men who only wanted to do things their own way.

The differences between Tito and Stalin soon came to a head.

In June 1948, the Soviet Union formally expelled Yugoslavia through the Communist Information Bureau on the grounds that there were “nationalist elements” within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and accused Tito of betraying communist principles.

Stalin did not want to see other Eastern European countries follow Tito’s footsteps, so he excluded Yugoslavia and cut off trade with Yugoslavia, forcing Tito to establish a trade alliance with Western countries.

Tito became a leading figure in the Non-Aligned Movement, which worked to forge an independent path for nations not aligned with either the Western or Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.

Throughout the Cold War, although Yugoslavia led by Tito was a communist country, it was not like other countries controlled by the Soviet Union. Westerners could travel freely to Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavs could also travel outside Yugoslavia.

However, Yugoslavia was eventually unified by Tito. His iron-fisted rule over Yugoslavia suppressed ethnic conflicts. However, in 1980, Tito died.

Tito’s death gradually released the pressure that had accumulated in the country since the establishment of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

Nationalist leaders began to emerge, such as Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic, who became president of Serbia in 1989.

With the collapse of the Eastern European communist bloc, it was only a matter of time before Yugoslavia fell.

In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence, followed a few months later by Macedonia, and in 1992 by Bosnia and Herzegovina.

As a result, several wars broke out in what is now the former Yugoslav republic. The Slovenian war was short and the losses were not great. The war lasted only ten days.

However, in Croatia and Bosnia, serious incidents of ethnic cleansing and massacres occurred, including the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, in which more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces.

We will discuss the topic of the Yugoslav Wars in more detail in future episodes.

NATO eventually stepped in and signed the Dayton Accords, establishing Bosnia and Herzegovina as a two-entity state, effectively ending the Bosnian War.

However, in 1998, war broke out again in Kosovo, a part of Serbia with a majority ethnic Albanian population, and NATO peacekeepers were once again involved.

In 2000, Slobodan Milosevic was ousted from power, and in 2003, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was reorganized into the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro.

However, this situation did not last long, and in 2006, Montenegro declared independence and split from Serbia.

Eventually, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. However, unlike the independence of other parts of Yugoslavia, Kosovo has never been universally recognized by most of the world.

As of the time of this episode, 104 of the 193 UN countries recognize Kosovo, accounting for 54%.

The 19th century dream of a single state for all Yugoslavs was one of the few political dreams that actually came true.

However, the dream did not come true. Yugoslavia was a centralized rather than a federal system, with the member states being pushed to the side of the central government.

This racial hatred finally reached a peak in the 1990s, triggering one of the worst bloodshed of the decade.

Today, countries such as Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo are all legacies of the Yugoslav idea.

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