Yugoslavia is the complex product of a complex history. The nation's confusing and conflicting mosaic of peoples, languages, religions, and cultures took shape during centuries of turmoil after the collapse of the Roman Empire. By the early nineteenth century, two great empires, the Austrian and the Ottoman, governed all the modern-day Yugoslav lands except Montenegro. As the century progressed, nationalist feelings awoke in the region's various peoples, the Turkish grip began to weaken, and Serbia won its freedom.
During World War II, communist-led Partisans waged a victorious guerrilla fight against foreign occupiers, Croatian fascists, and supporters of the prewar government. This led to the rebirth of Yugoslavia as a socialist federation under communist rule on November 29, 1945. Under Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslav communists were faithful to orthodox Stalinism until a 1948 split with Moscow. At that time, a Soviet-bloc economic blockade compelled the Yugoslavs to devise an economic system based on Socialist self-management. To this system the Yugoslavs added a nonaligned foreign policy and an idiosyncratic, one-party political system. This system maintained a semblance of unity during most of Tito's four decades of unquestioned rule. Soon after his death in 1980, long-standing differences again separated the communist parties of the nation's republics and provinces. Economic turmoil and the reemergence of an old conflict between the Serbs and the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo exacerbated these differences, fueled a resurgence of nationalism, and paralyzed the nation's political decisionmaking mechanism.
Yugoslavia History
