After the end of the Cold War, two major events occurred in Europe, one was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the other was the collapse of Yugoslavia.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has long been considered a great power tragedy under the conspiracy of the United States, but at that time, except for the three Baltic countries that were forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union during World War II, most of the soviet union's main member countries did not want to separate.
It's just that Russia, in the case of the collapse of the finance minister, does not want other difficult brothers to eat big households.
The Soviet Union, as a great power that followed the system of Tsarist Russia, was essentially a colonial empire based on national oppression.
So its disintegration is sooner or later.
Yugoslavia, on the other hand, was quite different, and its disintegration was a process of division resulting from religious antagonisms and ethnic contradictions.
The Slavs who went south
Serbia's history dates back to the 6th century, when the Slavs in central Europe were in constant civil strife, often divided into small gangs and fighting.
The Slavs decided to disband on the spot, and the Slavs split into three branches.
One went east and became the East Slavs.
One went west and became the West Slavs.
One went south and became Yugoslavs.
At the beginning of the 7th century AD, the Slavs who went south slowly merged with the different local natives and generally formed:
Bulgarians living on the west coast of the Black Sea
Slovenes living in the Adriatic Sea
Croats living between the Delava River and the Adriatic Sea
Serbs living in the central Balkans between the Adriatic Sea and the Danube.
They were collectively known as the Yugoslavs.
From the end of the 7th century, the Yugoslavs, like the other two Slavic brothers, began to establish their own state.
For example, the Grand Duchy of Croatia established by the Croats, the Duchy of Carantania established by the Slovenes, and the Duklia State established by the Montenegrins.
The Serbs rose relatively late, and it was not until the beginning of the 13th century that they established feudal kingdoms in the Balkans.
In 1217, Grand Duke Stephen Nemanya II was crowned king and Serbia became a feudal kingdom.
In 1340, the Serbian throne was succeeded by Duchamp, who married the daughter of the Bulgarian king and formed an alliance to attack the Byzantine Empire, which was in civil strife, and once dominated the Balkans.
After Serbia's power reached its peak, Duchamp began to fantasize about building a powerful Serbian Empire, and he began to call himself "Emperor of Serbia and Greece, Bulgarians and Albanians".
Like Yugoslavia hundreds of years later, Serbia has been facing a dilemma:
The larger the territory and the greater the nation, the more difficult it is to maintain rule.
After Duchamp, Serbia quickly turned from prosperity to decline, beginning a long history of sadness.
Beginning in 1370, as the Ottoman Empire continued to expand into the Balkans, the Serbs and muslims collided head-on with the most bullish war machine in Muslim history, and the two sides won and lost each other, and the fight lasted for 19 years.
On June 28, 1389, the decisive battle broke out.
Archduke Lazar of Serbia led an army to fight the invading Turks on the Plains of Kosovo, killing both sides in a river of blood, killing Lazar and assassinating sultan Murad I of Turkey.
Eventually, the Kingdom of Serbia was defeated and began a period of 500 years of Turkish rule.
Since then, June 28 has become a day of special significance for Serbs, not only as a day of national shame for Serbia, but also with almost every major event in history related to Serbia.
For example, the "Sarajevo Incident", the trigger of the First World War, the provocative parade of the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Ferdinand, on this day greatly stimulated the Serbs, and the price of provocation was to be shot.
Beginning in 1459, Serbia became a province of the Ottoman Empire.
For the next 500 years, the Yugoslavs of the Balkans never really believed in Turkic rule due to differences in religious beliefs.
Divisions in unity
After entering the industrial age, Ottoman Turkey gradually weakened, and the Serbs finally achieved revolutionary success in 1830, and the Duchy of Serbia became independent, but the territory only had Belgrade.
When the kingdom was re-established in 1882, the Serbs re-established the Kingdom of Serbia and began a continuous territorial expansion.
From freedom from control to true independence to territorial expansion, the ambitions of the Serbs have swelled as a result of successive victories.
They claimed to have been influenced by the "unified southern Slavic" trend, but in fact wanted to use this as an excuse to expand their sphere of influence.
So the Serbs began plotting to provoke war.
In 1914, the Sarajevo Incident successfully provoked a war.
After the war, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed.
The Balkan peoples took the opportunity to break away from the control of the great powers, and for the first time the Southern Slavs achieved a collective liberation from foreign domination and oppression.
They established their own state, forming the Kingdom of Serb-Croat-Slovenes with Serbia as the center.
It was renamed Yugoslavia in 1929.
This was the First Yugoslavia, after World War II Tito ruled the Second Yugoslavia, and the Federation of Serbia and Montenegro after the civil war of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was once also called Yugoslavia, that is, the Third Yugoslavia.
As can be seen from the original name of the trilateral union, Yugoslavia had a deep internal split from the beginning.
Although the southern Slavic peoples are of the same origin, after hundreds of years of development, they have long been different, especially the difference in religious beliefs.
The Slovenian and Croatian regions are Catholic, while the Serbian and Bosnian regions are Orthodox.
The two sides are intolerant of fire and water, and can be united in the face of foreign invasion or have similar interests, and their interests are not at the same time.
This is like their brothers Poland and Russia, West Slavs in Poland are Catholic, East Slavs are Orthodox in Russia, fighting for thousands of years, and they will never leave a breath if they can beat each other to death.
This internal division was particularly pronounced during World War II.
After the start of World War II, Yugoslavia was partitioned, and pro-Nazi Croats carried out a brutal massacre of Serbs, which is said to have killed 600,000 people before and after.
Tito's partisans also carried out ruthless revenge on the pro-German Croats and Slovenes.
It's hard to tell whether the reason they're doing this is because of different positions or because of religious antagonism.
But what is clear is that "Yugoslavia" has ceased to exist in name only, and ethnic contradictions have directly drawn an insurmountable gap for Yugoslavs.
In 1945, with the Soviet Union entering Yugoslavia, Tito successfully restored the country with the help of Obayashi.
Yugoslavia at that time had an eight-character mantra:
One leader: Tito, president of the YUGO for life;
Two scripts: Latin alphabet and Greek alphabet;
Three religions: Orthodox, Catholic, And Islamic;
Four languages: Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Montenegrin;
Five major ethnic groups: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins;
Six autonomous republics: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina;
Seven neighbouring countries: Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania;
Eight autonomous regions: six autonomous Republics, autonomous provinces of Kosovo and autonomous provinces of Vojvodina.
This complex situation means that the country will fall apart if you are not careful.
Tito, with his strong personal charm (iron fist) and extraordinary talent (with a gun), twisted Yugoslavia back into a rope, but the rift between different peoples and different faiths was difficult to bridge.
In order to maintain the unity of the country and unite the peoples of all ethnic groups, Tito learned the lessons of the internal division of the first Yugoslavia and began to deliberately suppress "Greater Serbianism" and unite Croats and Slovenes at the expense of the Serbs.
Although Tito's hand has achieved a certain effect, it has left two major hidden dangers:
First, the Serbs felt that they had suffered a great loss, began to take revenge, and later found the field.
Second, in order to avoid the excessive territory of Serbia, the division of the autonomous republic was not divided according to the ethnic area. This led to the presence of Serb-populated areas in Croatia and the creation of an ethnically mixed republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which became a hidden powder keg.
But as long as Tito was there, the Yugoslav field remained calm before the storm with his iron fist.
Upheaval
In 1980, Tito, who had brought 35 years of calm to the Balkans, died.
Tito's death seems to be a signal, a signal of the outbreak of national contradictions.
The ethnic contradictions that he had long suppressed with an iron fist began to intensify rapidly.
In particular, after Milosevic, who had "Greater Serbianism", came to power, hostility between Serbs and other ethnic groups soared.
As soon as Milosevic came to power, he was anxious to find a place for the Serbs, removing the leaders of the two autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, and revoking the high degree of autonomy granted to Kosovo by the 1974 Constitution.
This has greatly stimulated the sense of crisis and the tendency to run away from other ethnic groups.
But Tito was gone, and Eastern Europe and the Big Brother of the Soviet Union were in town, and they couldn't mess up for a while.
The weather was unpredictable, and within a few years the Soviet Union was gone.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Yugoslav field was no longer in town.
When the Soviet Union was there, it was both a guard and a protector.
Without the Soviet Union, Europe and the United States must not tolerate the existence of a country in Europe with a different route, different beliefs, and a huge size of population than the West.
So be sure to dismember.
Eventually, under the impetus of the US-led European stick NATO, Yugoslav Serbs and other peoples fought four civil wars from 1991 to 1999.
The Serbs were defeated in all four battles.
In eight years and four wars, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina became independent.
After the independence of Croatia and Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro warmed up and together formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
But in 2006 Montenegro declared its independence.
epilogue
In the long course of history, peoples may be able to merge, but religion is only your life and death, and many large-scale wars in Europe are caused by religious conflicts.
Therefore, with regard to the division of Yugoslavia, the impetus of Europe and the United States is on the one hand, but the root cause is the conflict of religious beliefs in various countries and the long-term accumulation of national contradictions.
In this way, together with kosovo, which has always been controversial, the glorious Yugoslavia was divided into seven.
The former Balkan eagle is also like a folded wing, and it is difficult to make its voice in Europe.