A South Slavic state that lasted from 1918 to 1992
Yugoslavia—“land of the South Slavs”—united Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and neighbours into one country after the First World War, then reinvented itself as a socialist federation after the Second. Six republics and two Serbian provinces shared the flag until economic crisis and nationalism tore the project apart in the early 1990s.
The first Yugoslavia appeared in 1918 as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, joining the Serbian kingdom to the short-lived South Slavic state that had formed from Habsburg lands. Ambassadors in Paris recognised it on 13 July 1922; King Alexander I restyled it the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929. Political violence climaxed when deputy Puniša Račić shot Croatian Peasant Party members in the Assembly on 20 June 1928, killing two immediately and leader Stjepan Radić weeks later. On 6 January 1929 Alexander suspended the constitution, outlawed national parties, and carved the map into river-named banovinas meant to smother regionalism.
Axis armies overran the kingdom in April 1941. Communist-led Partisans answered with Democratic Federal Yugoslavia and secured Allied blessing at Tehran in November 1943; exiled King Peter II recognised the Anti-Fascist Council in 1944. The socialist federation that followed joined Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia, while Kosovo and Vojvodina sat as autonomous provinces inside Serbia—partners the 1974 constitution raised nearly to republican rank.
Alexander did not survive his centralising project. In 1934 a gunman from the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, acting with the Croatian fascist Ustaše, killed him in Marseille, leaving eleven-year-old Peter II under a regency headed by Prince Paul. When Paul put his name to the Tripartite Pact at Vienna on 25 March 1941, officers toppled him two days later, and Hitler ordered the assault that began on 6 April. Resistance lasted eleven days and more than 300,000 Yugoslav soldiers were captured.
Occupation carved the country apart. The Ustaše-run Independent State of Croatia murdered around 300,000 Serbs and at least 30,000 Jews and Roma. Tito's Partisans became the biggest guerrilla force anywhere in occupied Western and Central Europe, eclipsing the royalist Chetniks, and their council meeting at Jajce in November 1943 set out the postwar federation. After the breakup, Serbia and Montenegro kept a rump Federal Republic, renamed in 2003 and dissolved in 2006.
Source: Yugoslavia
