From 1929 to 1992, several governments ruled over the Balkans, all of whom used the name Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was a country that began with a dream, but was born out of war and ultimately ended in war. While the nation of Yugoslavia no longer exists, its legacy can still be felt in the countries that formerly compromised it. Learn more about Yugoslavia, its rise, and its fall on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. In a previous episode, I did an overview of the Balkans, where I went over many of the countries that make up the region. In this episode, I want to focus on the country that played an instrumental part in the region's history in the 20th century, Yugoslavia. The story of Yugoslavia actually starts about 1,500 years ago with the Slavic migration. Around the middle of the sixth century and in the early seventh century, an ethnic group known as the Slaves began to move from their homeland in what is today Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. The reason for the Slavic migration were many, including a change in climate from the end of the Roman climate optimum, population pressures, and taking advantage of changes in populations in Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

The Slaves migrated in all directions. The Eastern Slaves moved into what is today Russia. The Western Slaves settled in what is today Western Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. However, what is relevant for this episode is the group of Slaves that went south and settled into the Balkan Mountains and what is today Bulgaria. The word Yugoslavia simply means the land of the Southern Slaves in several Southern Slavic languages. And despite the existence of Southern Slaves in Bulgaria, the term Yugoslavia has always only referred to the Slaves who live in the Balkan Mountains. The Slavic people of this region eventually became linguistically cut off from their Slavic kin further north, with Hungary and Romania situated between the two major Slavic regions. These Southern Slaves eventually began to separate linguistically from the Slaves to the north and develop their own family of Southern Slavic languages. And now I'm going to skip about a thousand of history, which includes conquests by the byzantines and Ottomans and religious influences from Orthodox and Catholics. The important thing is that these Southern Slavic groups had much in common, but had developed separate ethnic identities based on language and religion. By the 19th century, the northern part of the region, including modern day Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia, were under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

A pan-sothern Slavic movement, known as the Illyrian movement, sprang up during this period. The Illyrian movement got its name from the former Roman province of Illyria. At the time, it was thought that the Southern Slaves descended from the ancient inhabitants of Illyria. They used the term Illyrian to describe all Southern Slavic peoples. The Illyrian movement was a cultural and political campaign in the first half of the 19th century, primarily in the Croatian regions under the Habsberg monarchy. It aimed to promote the unity and identity of Southern Slaves and foster a sense of national consciousness. It reached its peak in the 1830s and 1840s. Despite the lofty goals of the movement, it was mostly a Croatian movement that served to strengthen Croatian national identity. The movement's leaders didn't particularly want independent Since, they just wanted some autonomy under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The movement never really achieved any of its political goals during the life of its members, and eventually fell apart in 1845 due to differences in, believe it or not, poetry. Security. Despite the movement's failure, it started to get people to think about Pan-Slavic unity. In 1848, during the revolutions that took place that year all around Europe, a plan was put together for the creation of a South Slavic Federation.

The Federation would be exactly that, a union of what was called the three tribes of the Southern Slaves, the Serbs, the Croats, and the Slavines. Each would be equal in the government, although the Federation nation would have a single king at its head. Nothing was done with this plan, but things were happening. In 1867, the last of the Ottoman troops left Serbia. In 1872, the Congress of Berlin was formed by several major European powers to decide the fate of the Balkans. And in 1882, Serbia became its own kingdom. Now we have to fast forward once again, this time several decades to the First World War. The war did not go well for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which fought with the Germans as the central powers. In 1918, near the end of the war, the empire was dissolved. In its place in the Balkans, a provisional National Council of Slovians, Croats, and Serbs was established with representatives from the various groups. On October 29th, they declared a new state called the State of Slovines, Croats, and Serbs. And just two days later, they formally sought to merge with Serbia and Montenegro. Things moved very quickly, and on December first, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovians was declared in Belgrade.

The dream of the pan-sutherne Slavics from the 19th century had finally been achieved. There were some issues with the new borders with Austria and Italy, but for all practical purposes, Yugoslavia was born, even though they weren't using the name quite yet. The original idea was for a federation where each constituent country would have a significant amount of autonomy, a system that would be akin to Switzerland's federal system. However, that is not what happened. In 1921, a new constitution was approved, which greatly centralized power, removing power from the constituent regions and concentrating it in the hands of the Serbs. This caused many supporters of the initial merger to rebel against the government. The final nail in the Federation coffin came on January 6, 1929, when King Alexander I declared the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, abolished the Constitution, and established a dictatorship to be run by himself. In 1934, King Alexander was assassinated while on a trip to Marseille, France. It was the first time an assassination was caught on film, and if you've never seen it before, it's actually quite dramatic. This put the 11-year-old Peter II on the Yugoslov throne with his father's cousin, Prince Paul, serving as regent.

Ethnic tensions continued to rise during the 1930s. Attempts to devolve some power were made, but few people were satisfied. Prince Paul aligned Yugoslavia with Italy and Germany, and formerly signed the tripartite pact with the Axis powers on March 25, 1941. And just two days later, Prince Peter was overthrown in a coup d'État led by pro-British factions in the military, and King Paul II was formerly put on the throne at the age of 17. This didn't sit well with the Germans, and despite the goodwill of the British, there was nothing the British could do if Yugoslavia was attacked. On April sixth, just 10 days after the coup, Yugoslavia was invaded by Germany, along with forces from Bulgaria, Hungary, and Italy. All the border and countries annexed small pieces of Yugoslavia, and the Germans established a puppet government. There was resistance to German rule and the puppet governments. Most notable were the Communist partisans led by Josef Broze Tito and the Royal Chetniks. Tito's forces eventually took the upper hand, and by 1943, he had established control over most of the country. On November 29, 1943, Tito announced the creation of democratic federal Yugoslavia. This new state was primarily designed to organize resistance efforts against the Germans and the Italians.

After Germany had surrendered in 1945, in November, Tito declared the Socialist Federal Republic Republic of Yugoslavia with himself as Prime Minister. The new country initially aligned itself closely with the Soviet Union. The Stovets established Communist governments across Eastern Europe that they could control, and Joseph Stalin assumed that Yugoslavia would follow in their footsteps. Tito, however, didn't want to be a puppet of Stalin. He began pursuing policies that were more independent of Stalin. Yugoslavia was more decentralized, and factory workers were more able to vote for changes in workplace. But perhaps most importantly, Stalin and Tito were simply alpha personalities who wanted to have their own way. The disagreements between Tito and Stalin soon came to a head. In June 1948, the Soviet Union through the Common Form Information Bureau, formerly expelled Yugoslavia, citing Nationalist elements in the Yugoslov Communist Party and accusing Tito of betraying Communist principles. Stalin, not wanting to see other Eastern Bloc countries follow in Tito's footsteps, ostracize Yugoslavia and cut off trade with it. And this forced Tito's hand, resulting in his creation of trade alliances with Western countries. Tito became a leading figure in the non-alignment movement, which sought to establish an independent path for countries not aligned with either the Western or Eastern blocks during the Cold War.

During the entire Cold War, Tito's Yugoslavia was a Communist country, but they weren't like other countries controlled by the Soviets. Westerners could freely visit Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavi and were able to travel outside of Yugoslavia as well. Yugoslavia, however, was ultimately held together by Tito personally. His iron grip on power in Yugoslavia kept the lid on ethnic tensions. However, in 1980, Tito died. The death of Tito allowed many of the pressures that had built up inside the country since the establishment of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to start to leak out. Ethnonationalist leaders began to emerge, such as Slobidan Milosevic in Serbia, who became the President of Serbia in 1989. With the collapse of the Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, it was only a matter of time before Yugoslavia followed suit. In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, and Macedia did a few months later. In 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina followed suit. The result was several wars in what was now the former Yugoslav Republic. The war in Slovenia was short and did little damage. It lasted only 10 days. In Maced, there was no real war at all. However, in Croatia and Bosnia, there were major cases of ethnic cleansing in mass murders.

The Srebrenica Massacre took place in July 1995, with over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys killed by Bosnian Serb forces. The topic of the Yugoslavian Wars will be addressed in more detail in a future episode. Nato eventually got involved, and the Daten Accords were signed, effectively ending the Bosnian Wars in 1995 by establishing Bosnia and Herzegovina as a single state with two entities. However, in 1998, another war broke out in Kosovo, which was part of Serbia that had a majority ethnic Albanian population. This again got NATO peacekeepers involved. In 2000, Slobidan Milošević was removed from power, and in 2003, the Federal Republic Yugoslavia was reconstituted as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro. However, even that didn't last very long, as in 2006, Montenegro declared itself independent and split from Serbia. Finally, in 2008, Kosovo announced its independence from Serbia. However, unlike other parts of Yugoslavia that became independent, Kosovo has never been universally recognized as independent by much of the world. As of the recording of this episode, only 104 of 193 countries in the United Nations recognize the independence of Kosovo. Just 54 %. The dream of a country for all Southern Slaves in the 19th century was one of the few political dreams that actually ended up becoming true.

However, it never materialized as the dreamers dreamt it. Yugoslavia became centralized, not federalized, and the constituent states were pushed aside for more centralization. This ethnic resentment eventually boiled over in the 1990s in one of the worst displays of bloodshed of that decade. Today, the nations of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Mastodonia, and Kosovo are all the legacy of that idea that was Yugoslavia. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benjie Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.