Home / Summaries / A Concise History of the World Since 1945 / ethnic-milosevic-serbs

An elusive new world order, 1991-2020 - Integration and fragmentation in wider Europe - Southeastern Europe and the NATO consensus

6 important questions on An elusive new world order, 1991-2020 - Integration and fragmentation in wider Europe - Southeastern Europe and the NATO consensus

What did Tito's regime do in the 1970s? What policy did they have?

Beginning in the 1970s, the regime of Marshal Josip Tito had liberalized its economic policies, allowing the development of small private-enterprise sectors and introducing profit-sharing schemes for workers in state-owned factories.
Trade links with the noncommunist world were strong, and the government ensured that Yugoslavia's multiethnic population, which included an Orthodox and Catholic majority in Serbia and Croatia, and a large Muslim population in Bosnia, lived and worked together in relative harmony.

What happened after Tito's death? Which leader arose?

After Tito's death in 1980 no one political figure emerged as a symbol of unity within the existing federal system, and with the fall of communism elsewhere in 1989 the call for national self-determination along ethnic lines accelerated.
In 1991 the leaders of Slovenia and Croatia declared independence for their respective republics. The ex-communist Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, immediately raised the banner of ethnic nationalism, demanding that all ethnic Serbs - irrespective of where they may have migrated over the previous 40 years under Tito's government - were in fact part of a greater Serbian state.

What does "ethnic cleansing" entail?

Not content with their territorial aggression, the Serbs instituted a policy of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia, terrorizing the Muslim inhabitants with the goal of expelling them from their homes.

What happened in the 1984 Winter Olympics?

The Bosnian capital of Sarajevo was bombed, reducing portions of the central city, host of the 1984 Winter Olympics, to rubble.
In the meantime the Croatian government began expelling ethnic Serbs from its sovereign territory, and joined the cynical assault on Bosnia in an effort to seize lands where ethnic Croats constituted a majority of the population.

What showed that there was politics of division in Europe?

The resurgence of ethnic nationalism in Southeastern Europe, with neighbor distrusting neighbor;
private armies pillaging and raping with impunity;
cities, towns, and villages destroyed;
and political leaders fueling the culture of hate

What happened with Milosevic?

Facing strong international sanctions and a crippled economy, Milosevic was voted out of power in 2000.
Arrested the following year and extradited to the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague in 2002, the Serbian leader was charged with crimes against humanity and genocide for his role in three wars that claimed the lives of more than 200000 people during the 1990s.

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

A Concise History of the World Since 1945 | 9781352010206 | W M Spellman

View summary