yugoslavias implosion

The Serbian national program faced competition from the
national agendas of other peoples, for the Balkans have been home
to many different peoples for centuries, and in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, many of them began trying to build modern
states of their own. Because most dreamed of large national
states, their dreams clashed and ended in bloody wars and prolonged
periods of oppression. When, during the Second Balkan War in 1913,
the Kingdom of Serbia and the Kingdom of Montenegro annexed
the bulk of the present-day territory of Kosovo and Macedonia, the
goals of the Načertanije came closer to realization. But this tripling
of the size of the Kingdom of Serbia’s territory was accomplished at
the expense of its Albanian population. Under the Serbian military
Kosovo turned into an oppressed and heavily exploited king’s feudal
estate.
Post–World War I
On December 1, 1918, the first Yugoslavia was created from the
ashes and rubble of World War I. From its inception, the new state—
officially called “the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes” until
1929, but from its birth known colloquially as the “Kingdom of Yugoslavia”
or, more simply, as “Yugoslavia”—represented the framework
for the realization of the Serbian national program. But the
Yugoslav state embodied common south Slav aspirations as well as
disparate national interests, leading to a fundamental paradox: On
the one hand, the Serbs wanted it to be a unitary but not equitable
state—they wanted Yugoslavia to fulfill Serbian aspirations. On
the other hand, the Croats and Slovenes wanted Yugoslavia to be an
unambiguous federal system. Even as the new state was being built,
the proponents of centralism and federalism clashed, their conflict
raising the national issue as the key to the survival of the Yugoslav
state.
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