The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the Balkans Book

The state of Yugoslavia came into existence, in 1918, as a result of World War I and, in a series of wars starting in 1991, it was broken up into several new and smaller states. In the period before World War I a long series of bloody insurrections had already taken place before the new states of Serbia and Montenegro engaged in warfare with the declining Balkan power, the Ottoman Empire, and with another new state, Bulgaria. During World War II, resistance movements in the same region fought the Axis and their puppet regimes as well as each other. The victors presented all the wars they won as wars of national liberation: each war was, in their view, fought for the liberation of a particular national group or groups from oppressive and foreign rule. In order to mobilize members of their national groups to fight in the wars, national liberation ideologies had been contructed on a rich local tradition of historical myth and of national grievance. The book traces the origins of national liberation ideologies in former Yugoslavia and outlines the way these ideologies were used in the mobilization for war and in support of new political regimes and states in the region.Read More