In Yugoslavia, all political problems are intimately linked with nationalism'. Discuss

The first 200 words of this essay...

'In Yugoslavia, all political problems are intimately linked with nationalism'. Discuss

Yugoslavia has always been plagued by nationalist and religious divisions within its eventful history. Cultural divides in the area were evident for hundreds of years before the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, under the name of Yugoslavia in 1918. This centralization of the South Slavs was a strong national ideology of the Serbs, in contrast to the ideology of the Croats, who wanted a federal Yugoslavia. The Kingdom was destroyed after the Nazi invasion of 1941; a federal Yugoslavia emerged from the Second World War under the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and its Croatian leader Josip Broz Tito. Yugoslavia enjoyed relative stability during Tito's rule before the country began to fragment after his death. Ethnically different groups within the Balkans were at first centralized and later decentralized as regional differences promoted change. It is therefore essential that each of the eras of Yugoslav history be taken into account when assessing the relation of the nationalist and political problems that occurred in Yugoslavia.

Early divisions were cut between the ethnic groups living within the area that came to be known as