At the beginning of the nineteenth century almost all the land stretching from the south-eastern Alps to the Black Sea, bounded by the rivers Drava and Danube in the north and by the Adriatic and Aegean in the south, was inhabited by people speaking Slav dialects. These merged into each other as one travelled from north-west to south- east. During the first half of the century, as the result of pioneering work by native scholars, three distinct literary languages were formed-Slovene, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian. Intermediate dialects continued to be spoken, such as the kajkavski variant in central Croatia, the shopski dialect in the border districts between Serbia and Bulgaria, and a number of dialects in Macedonia.
These Slav-speaking people were divided between three religions. Those of the north-west, and of the Adriatic coastal strip, were mainly Catholics. Those of the lower Danube, Morava, Vardar and Maritsa valleys and of the lands between them were mainly Orthodox. In the central region of Bosnia, and on the southern slopes of the Rhodope Mountains, were many Muslims of Slav speech.
The peoples still had dim memories of past historical greatness. The triune kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia had not been forgotten, nor the kingdoms of Serbia, Bosnia and Bulgaria. In 1800 not much was left of them. Part of Croatia had remained under Habsburg rule even at the height of Turkish power; more had been reconquered at the end of the seventeenth century; and the southern frontiers of the Monarchy had been settled with Serbs who had fled from Turkish rule and had received land in return for military service. These 'military frontiersmen' formed a distinct political unit in the Habsburg Monarchy. Dalmatia had been separated from Croatia in 1420 and became part of the lands of the Venetian republic: it remained Venetian until the republic was dissolved in 1797. After this it passed first to French and then to Austrian rule, but was kept separate from Croatia. In the mountains behind the south-eastern comer of the Adriatic was the principality of Montenegro, whose Orthodox Slav people had never been conquered by the Turks. The rest of the region, from Bosnia to the Black Sea and from Belgrade to the Aegean, still belonged to the Ottoman empire.
It is easy to exaggerate or to underrate the collective consciousness of these peoples in 1800. The historic names of Croat and Serb were widely used. The name Slovene was also coming into wide use among the people of the Alpine north-west comer of the region, who had never possessed a firmly organised state of their own, but were certainly aware of the difference in language and culture between themselves and their German or Italian-speaking neighbours. In the mountainous central regions and in Serbia, life was largely based on the patriarchal extended family (zadruga) which has been rightly represented as the core of Serbian national culture in the centuries of Turkish rule. Another important influence were the popular epics (narodne pesme), preserved orally, largely concerned with the heroic days of the Ottoman conquest of the old kingdoms. In the eighteenth century southern Hungary, where the exiled Serbian Orthodox Metropolitanate was established in Sremski Karlovci, was a centre of education for Serbs. In Croatia and in the Slovene Alps opportunities for school were rather better. A few learned South Slavs made their appearance. One was Jernej Kopitar, a Slovene living in Vienna, a most erudite librarian and linguist. Another was an Orthodox priest, Dositej Obradovic, who travelled widely in Europe, was deeply influenced by the Enlightenment, and published works in his language. Still more important was the Herzegovinian Serb, Vuk Karadzic, who published five volumes of popular epics from 1841 onwards, and did more than any other single person to create a modern Serbo-Croatian language, based on his own Herzegovinian dialect, but broadly accepted in the following years by both Croats and Serbs as their own.
The first major political event in the modem history of the South Slavs was the revolt of the Serbs under Kara Djordje in 1804. This was essentially a movement of discontented peasants, directed against the lawlessness of local Turkish potentates and usurpers, and not designed to overthrow Ottoman rule as such. The rebels freed a substantial region south of Belgrade, between the Drina and Morava rivers, the so-called 'land of forests' (Sumadija). Their success was facilitated by the fact that from 1806 onwards the Turks were at war with Russia in the Danubian principalities: although not much direct Russian aid reached the Serbs, the Turks were too occupied elsewhere by the main Russian army to make a major effort to reconquer Serbia. This changed in 1813, when Russia had made peace with Turkey; all Europe was convulsed by the last stages of the war against Napoleon, and the sultan had the chance to punish his rebellious subjects. It now became a direct fight against the Turks as such, and a national struggle for Serbian freedom, inevitably aggravated and embittered by the explosion of the latent hatred between Christians and Muslims. Serbia was crushed in 1813, but in 1817 a new leader, Milos Obrenovic, a more cunning politician and an abler diplomat than Kara Djordje, achieved a limited success; and as a result of the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-29 and of great power diplomacy an independent Serbian state was established, owing only nominal allegiance to Ottoman suzerainty.
Further west, five years (1809-14) of annexation of Slovene and Croatian lands to Napoleon's French empire as the province of 'Illyria' left their mark on at least an educated minority. The study of Slav dialects and grammar, the influence of Herder's ideas about language in general and about the Slavs in particular, and the appearance of romantic Panslavism, especially among the Czechs, had effects also in the South Slav lands of the Habsburg Monarchy. The outstanding figure was the Croatian writer Ljudevit Gaj, who became the leader of an 'Illyrian movement'. In his periodical Danica he argued that there was a single Illyrian people, of Slav speech, stretching from the Alps to Varna. Though this was only talk, and there was no question of any action to create a great Illyrian state, it was objectionable to the authorities in Hungary, with which Croatia was united under Habsburg rule. Metternich in 1843 formally forbade use of the name Illyria. The idea of South Slav nationality and unity survived however.
In 1848 both Croats and Serbs found their national aspirations rejected by the makers of the Hungarian Revolution, 18 and in consequence supported the Habsburg government against the Hungarians. While the fighting went on in Hungary, the rulers of Serbia, beyond the Danube and Sava rivers at Belgrade, remained prudently inactive, not daring to antagonise both Austria and Russia. However, they were interested in the liberation of their kinsmen under Turkish, and eventually also under Habsburg, rule. The chief minister of Prince Alexander Karadjordjevic, Ilija Garasanin, prepared in 1843 a far-reaching project (nachertanie) for South Slav unity.
The Habsburgs showed no gratitude to Croats or Serbs. Under the restored absolutism, the South Slavs had the advantages of fairly good government and some material and cultural progress, but no concessions were made to their national aspirations. In 1867 the Habsburgs, having made the Compromise with Hungary, left the Croats to make the best terms they could with the Hungarians on their own. All they got was a limited regional autonomy, with a provincial Diet and the use of Croatian as the language of administration. Dalmatia remained under the rule of Vienna: thus the former triune kingdom continued to be divided. There were also Croats in Istria, a separate province, in which Italians formed nearly half the population and were both culturally and politically dominant. The Slovenes were divided between four provinces-Istria, Gorizia, Carinthia and Carniola (only in the last of which they formed an overwhelming majority), and in the city of Trieste.
In Dalmatia under Austrian rule the Croatian majority succeeded over the years in winning control of public life from the Italian minority which had long been favoured by Vienna. Dalmatia however was an exceedingly poor country, and very little was done from Vienna to develop its resources or protect the economic interests of its people. Croats in both provinces agitated unsuccessfully for the union of Dalmatia with Croatia. In both Dalmatia and Croatia there were also large Serbian minorities. Here as elsewhere, the normal distinction between Serb and Croat was religious. Both spoke the same language (differences of dialect were a matter of regional not of religious division), but Orthodox were Serbs and used the Cyrillic alphabet, while Catholics were Croats and used the Latin alphabet. However, in southern Dalmatia there was also a rather small number of Catholics who considered themselves to be Serbs.
The relations between Croats and Serbs became a matter of great importance in the political life of Croatia. There were two main trends among the Croats. One may be called the Greater Croatian idea. Its chief exponent was Ante Stardevic. Essentially, he reinterpreted the Illyrian idea of Gaj. In his view there was one nation living between the Alps and the Black Sea, but its name was not Illyrian but Croatian. The Croatian nation should include those who, in the course of time, had become Orthodox or Muslims. The other names used by people living in this region were regional descriptions, not national names. It was possible to speak of those who lived in the region known as Serbia as 'Serbs', but it was wrong to speak of Serbs as a nation. Those who insisted on calling themselves a Serbian nation Stardevic viewed as enemies. Starcevic was a bitter enemy of both Austria and Hungary, though he was willing if necessary to accept a Habsburg as ruler. His aim was a great independent Croatian state, extending far into the existing lands of the Ottoman empire, possibly as far as the Black Sea. This state could at most be linked by personal dynastic union with Austria and Hungary: its institutions must be completely separate. Starcevic was a fanatical defender of the constitutional rights of the medieval Croatian State (hrvatsko drzavnopravo). He gave to his party the name of Party of Pure Right.
The alternative trend may be called the Yugoslav Idea. Its chief exponent was Ivan Juraj Strosmajer (1815-1905), for many years Catholic bishop of Djakovo. He recognised that Croats and Serbs were different, but believed that they were fraternal nations, belonging to a great South Slav (Yugoslav) community. He too wished to see a great free South Slav state, but he did not believe that it could be simply called Croatia or Serbia. The main task was to liberate South Slavs from Ottoman rule. Strosmajer's attitude to the Habsburg Monarchy was ambiguous. He had no love for Austrian rule, and still less for Hungarian, but he did not see any prospect of the break-up of the Monarchy, nor perhaps did he even desire this. His generation and the next had as their task to make the best they could of life within the framework of the Monarchy. This did not mean that they would not have liked a completely independent South Slav state, only that this did not arise as a serious possibility. The accusation sometimes made later against Strosmajer and his followers by extreme Serbian nationalists, that they were subservient to Austria, is irrelevant. Certainly Strosmajer did as much as anyone to promote the notion of solidarity between the South Slav peoples, not least by his use of the rich income of his diocese for education, including the foundation of the first academy of arts and sciences in a South Slav land. Established in Zagreb in 1867, it was significantly entitled 'Yugoslav Academy'.
The government of the small free state of Serbia was chiefly interested in liberating fellow-Serbs who lived both to the south and to the west of Serbia under Ottoman rule. Prince Michael Obrenovic had ambitious plans for a league of Balkan states and peoples to drive the Turks out of Europe, but he was assassinated in 1868 before this could be attempted. Whereas Prince Michael thought in terms of the extension of the Serbian state to include Serbs and perhaps Bulgarians, younger Serbs of radical outlook, above all the socialist Svetozar Markovic, opposed policies of state aggrandisement, bitterly criticised the Balkan type of bureaucratic absolutism which had grown up in Serbia, and aimed at an alliance of free and equal Balkan nations.
In 1875 there was a rebellion of Serbs in Herzegovina against Turkish rule, followed some months later by a rebellion in Bosnia. Both had been encouraged by revolutionary activities based on Serbia and Montenegro, and were also supported by the Serbs of southern Hungary. Serbia itself went to war with Turkey in 1876 and was defeated, and in 1877 Russia went to war. In the complex international diplomatic crisis of 1876-78 the Russian government sacrificed Serbian interests; and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the two Serbian lands most ardently desired by patriots in Serbia, were placed under Austrian administration while still nominally subject to Ottoman suzerainty. This decision created bitter hatred against Austria in Serbia. With the Monarchy, Strosmajer was greatly disappointed, and in Hungary those Serbs who had expressed support for the Serbian cause against Turkey were persecuted by the authorities in Budapest. Their outstanding leader, Svetozar Miletic, was imprisoned for some years. It must be admitted that the people of Bosnia gained from the change, for Austrian rule was more civilised than Ottoman, and some material progress was achieved in the next thirty years. The followers of Starcevic were not entirely displeased, for it seemed to bring nearer their long-term aim of a Greater Croatia, in which they insisted that Bosnia must be included, even though Serbs were twice as numerous in that province as Croats. The Bosnian Serbs remained fundamentally hostile to Austria, and in Serbia a growing number henceforth considered Austria to be Serbia's main enemy, more deadly than the traditional but declining enemy Turkey.
An equally important result of the 1878 settlement was the creation of an independent Bulgarian state. Already for some decades past, the literary language and the national identity of the Bulgarians had greatly developed. It was definitely no longer possible to consider them part of the same nation as the Croats and Serbs, as Gaj had considered them at the time of the Illyrian movement of the 1830s, though it was still possible to include them in the notion of a Yugoslav community of fraternal nations. Unfortunately the trend of the last decades of the century was not towards fraternity. The separate Serbian and Bulgarian states became centres of rival interests. The masters of the two state machines wished to expand, and inevitably clashed with each other. This trend was reinforced by the fact that, under the 1878 Congress of Berlin settlement, Serbia was designed to be a vassal of Austria and Bulgaria of Russia. This division of spheres of interest, which agreed with the conventional wisdom of which Bismarck was the outstanding exponent, did not work. Austria had antagonised the Serbs by seizing Bosnia, while the Russians made themselves disliked in liberated Bulgaria by their arrogant behaviour. Consequently each small state looked to the rival of its official protector-Serbia to Russia and Bulgaria to Austria. Thus Austro-Russian rivalry was not appeased but exacerbated by the Berlin settlement.
The main object of rivalry between Serbia and Bulgaria was Macedonia, lying to the south of Serbia and to the west of Bulgaria. This was assigned to Bulgaria by the original draft Russian peace treaty with Turkey at San Stefano in March 1878, but as a result of British and Austrian pressure had been restored to Turkey by the Berlin treaty. The people of Macedonia were of five languages and of both Orthodox and Muslim religion, but the largest single group spoke Slav dialects which were closer to Bulgarian than to Serbian. Among them were two political trends: one favoured simple annexation to Bulgaria, the other aimed at an independent Macedonian state, and argued that the Macedonian Slavs were a separate South Slav nation, distinct from both Bulgarians and Serbs. At first the Serbian government was not much interested in Macedonia, though it certainly wished to push Serbia's frontiers further to the south and south-west. However, after Bosnia had been denied to Serbia, the idea of compensation on a larger scale in the south seemed more attractive. During the last decades of the century armed bands, supported by the governments of the neighbouring states, fought each other and the Turks, making Macedonia a byword for plunder, murder and anarchy. There were Greek bands, Serbian bands and Bulgarian bands, Turkish regular and irregular troops, Albanian bands and bands of Macedonian autonomists, some of whom sometimes combined with each other but more often carried on a struggle of all against all. In 1903 there was a large-scale rising of Macedonian Slavs against the Turks, followed by reprisals and the establishment of an international gendarmerie of the European powers.
In Croatia from 1883 to 1903 Count Khuen-Hedervary maintained a political balance which satisfied the Hungarian government. He played off Serbs against Croats, fixed election results (on a very restricted franchise) by corruption and intimidation, and could always find a sufficient number of subservient persons to ensure a majority in the Diet. However, in 1903 long repressed discontent burst out in a series of street demonstrations and minor violence, and Khuen-Hedervary was removed. In the same year a number of Croatian and Serbian members of the several regional assemblies signed Resolutions in Fiume (Rijeka) and Zara (Zadar) in favour of the reunion of Dalmatia with Croatia and of cooperation between Croats and Serbs. A Croat-Serbian coalition was formed from some of the existing parties, which offered its cooperation to the Hungarian Opposition, then engaged in a bitter struggle with the Vienna government for control of Hungary's army and finances. This cooperation was a failure, for soon after the Hungarian Opposition came to power, it broke its promises to the Croats. In Croatia the normal working of legitimate institutions virtually came to an end between 1908 and 1913. Only one small faction of the successors of Starcevic were willing to cooperate with Vienna against both Hungarians and Serbs, in the hope of obtaining a Greater Croatia, including Bosnia, with the consent of the Vienna government.
Cooperation with the Vienna government was still the prevalent attitude among the Slovenes. For them the essential aim was union of all the lands of Slovene population and protection of their language and culture against German and Italian. They did not share the hostility of Starcevic's disciples towards the Serbs, but it was clearly essential for them to cooperate with the Croats, the only neighbouring people which did not threaten Slovene national interests. The Slovene People's Party, the largest group, led by Catholic priests and strongly influenced by the Church, still had confidence in the Monarchy, believing the dynasty to stand for a policy above nationalism, German or other. The Slovene Liberals were more sceptical about the Monarchy and more inclined to a Yugoslav ideal which would embrace the Serbs as well.
For their part the Serbs of the Monarchy were divided between the Yugoslav and the Greater Serb ideas. The latter was simply that all lands of Serbian population should be annexed to Serbia. This view was predominant among the Bosnian Serbs. The Serbs of southern Hungary and of Croatia and Dalmatia were divided. Very few positively wished the Monarchy to survive, but had to make their plans on the assumption that it would. The Yugoslav trend put fraternity and cooperation with the Croats as their first priority, whereas the Greater Serbs simply pursued whatever tactics were recommended by the Belgrade government.
The formal annexation of Bosnia to the Habsburg Monarchy in 1908 turned the attention of the Serbian government once more to the south. With encouragement from the Russian government, it sought alliances with Bulgaria and Greece. These were made in 1912, and in the autumn of that year war was declared on Turkey. In this war the Serbian army had brilliant successes, and these aroused enormous enthusiasm among all the South Slav subjects of the Habsburg Monarchy, especially among the educated younger generation, including students and schoolchildren. In this generation the idea now became widespread of a single 'nation of three names' (troimeni narod)-Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. Their aim was a single state to include them all. This could only be achieved by incorporating Serbia in the Monarchy or by destroying the Monarchy. The first was morally impossible in view of Serbia's heroic record and of Austria's sinister political methods and persistent hostility; therefore the second was the only possibility. This attitude was of course still a minority trend, but it was gaining ground among the most active and intelligent of the Monarchy's South Slav subjects.
The victories of the Balkan allies against the Turks were followed by inability to agree on the spoils. The Austrian government's refusal to permit Serbia access to the Adriatic, let alone to yield Bosnia, made gains in Macedonia seem still more important to the Serbian government, whose troops were in control of most of that province when the fighting with the Turks stopped. But to the Bulgarians Macedonia was their most sacred aim, and the Serb-Bulgarian treaty of 1912 had promised most of it to them. The result was the Second Balkan War of June 1913, in which the Bulgarian army attacked the Serbs and Greeks and was repulsed, and in which Bulgaria was also invaded by Romanians and Turks. The greatest part of Macedonia was thus annexed by Serbia, whose authorities simply denied not only that the Macedonian Slavs were Bulgarians, but even that they had any peculiar character of their own: they were simply declared to be 'South Serbs', and woe betide them if they denied it.
The First World War was triggered off by the murder of the heir to the Austrian throne by a Bosnian Serb, and it ended with the creation of a Yugoslav state. During the war the Croatian and Slovene, and even the Serbian, soldiers of the Austrian army fought bravely for the Monarchy, mainly because they objected to Italian designs on their homelands, but the desire to unite all three peoples, whether inside or outside the Monarchy, did not diminish. When the Austrian parliament was recalled in 1917, the South Slav leaders demanded unity of the South Slavs and independent institutions, while proclaiming their loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty-in individual cases from real conviction, but more usually from obvious prudence in wartime.
In December 1914 the Serbian parliament passed a resolution in favour of liberating all its Serbian, Croatian and Slovene brothers. This was also the aim of exiled Slovenes, Croats and Serbs from Austria-Hungary who were active in Britain, France and Italy during the war. However, acute disagreements arose between them and the Serbian government, led by Nikola Pasic, when it became known that Italy had been promised Istria and Dalmatia in return for its entry into the war on the Western side. The exiles now had reason to fear that Croatia would be divided into three parts-some given to Italy, some (southern Dalmatia) to Serbia, and the rest left as a rump still united with Hungary. Pasic did not like this prospect, but he took the conventional diplomat's view: he would get as much as he could, and wait for a more favourable time to get the rest, by diplomacy or by war. For him, Bosnia and southern Hungary were the most important territories, while Macedonia had to be kept at any cost. Dalmatia and Croatia had in his eyes a much lower priority.
Later in the war a further conflict developed between Pasic and the exiles. Pasic was immensely proud of the Serbian state, and he saw the future South Slav state as an extension of Serbia. Pasic stood in the nineteenth century radical tradition which considered centralism to be progressive, and regarded far-reaching regional autonomies as reactionary and disruptive. Therefore he wanted a large centralised state, to be formed by an extension of the Serbian administrative apparatus, but inhabited by a single 'three-named nation'. On the other hand the exiles from the Monarchy, while admiring Serbia, felt that the Serbian state should cease to exist, to be replaced by an entirely new state, Yugoslavia. They also wished the new state to respect older historical and regional distinctions, and to preserve some of the older institutions. Pasic was obsessed with the example of Piedmont. The exiles argued that Piedmont had been swallowed up in Italy. Pasic knew that, on the contrary, Piedmont had dominated Italy after unity. Serbia in the new state, was, in his scheme, to be a mixture of Piedmont and Prussia.
In November 1918 Pasic had his way. He was able to exploit the fear both of Italian aggression and of revolutionary disorder in Central Europe, to force the political leaders of the South Slavs of the disintegrated Habsburg Monarchy to accept union with Serbia with no preliminary conditions. The new Serb-Croat-Slovene state was proclaimed on I December 1918. Less than three years later a centralist constitution was voted by the assembly, against the opposition of federalists, including the most powerful Croatian group, the Croatian Peasant Party. There followed seven years of political intrigue, in which all the main parties kept changing their tactics, but nothing was solved. In 1928 the Croatian Peasant Party leader Stepan Radic was shot in parliament, and later died of his wounds. In January 1929 King Alexander introduced a dictatorship. He professed to be acting on behalf of a single Yugoslav nation, transcending Serbian no less than Croatian nationalism. In practice the supporters of the dictatorship were almost exclusively Serbs (though many, perhaps most, Serbs detested it), and the Croats were against it almost to a man. The result was that it operated in fact as a dictatorship of the Greater Serbs over the rest. This was even more true in Macedonia than in Croatia: government was considerably more brutal, and Macedonians were forced to call themselves 'South Serbs', while supporters either of independent Macedonia or of union with Bulgaria were pitilessly repressed.
Attempts at Serb-Croat reconciliation in the late 1930s had some success, but fundamentally a majority of the population detested the regime and was at best lukewarm about the survival of the state. In 1941 the invasion by the Germans and their allies brought the collapse of Yugoslavia within a few days. On its ruins was created a Croatian state, headed by the Croatian fascist Ante Pavelic, while the Slovene lands were partitioned between Germany and Italy, and Macedonia was given to Bulgaria. Pavelic's state seemed for a time a victory for the Greater Croatian idea, for the dreams of Starcevic. Though Pavelic had to surrender most of Dalmatia to Italy, he was allowed to annex all Bosnia. However, the massacres by Pavelic's men of Serbs and Jews, the armed resistance of the survivors, and the successful national and civil war waged by the communists led by Tito, reduced the Croatian state to anarchy.
The communists won the civil and national war of 1941-45 not only by their courage and military skill, and by the military supplies which they received from the British and Americans, but also because they were able to offer the people of Yugoslavia a better prospect than endless mutual massacre. They consistently preached unity of all Yugoslavs against the fascist conquerors, the enemies of all alike. At first their propaganda fell on deaf ears; but their own example, and the demonstration by their opponents of the horror and vanity of extreme nationalism, attracted to them growing numbers of recruits from all parts of the country.
After they had won, they introduced a constitution, closely modelled on that of the Soviet Union, in which there were to be six republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. It now became official doctrine that there was no Yugoslav nation but four nations -- Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Macedonians -- living together within one state, as well as several national minorities, of which the most important were Albanians and Hungarians. In practice the Yugoslav state was no more a federation than was the Soviet: at most there was some devolution of power, under the tight grasp of a highly centralised communist party. However, the new rulers made sincere and successful attempts to stop discrimination on grounds of nationality.
After the breach with the Soviet Union in 1948, the political system underwent a series of changes, both formal and informal. In the late 1960s not only the six republican governments but -the republican communist parties began to pursue divergent policies. National tensions reappeared, partly in the form of conflicts between the economically advanced and backward republics (the former objecting to the use of the product of their labour to finance the latter, and the latter protesting that the aid which they received was too little) and partly in the form of arguments about culture and language, especially between Croats and Serbs.
The Yugoslav communists hoped to end the old rivalry between Serbs and Bulgarians for Macedonia. They maintained that the Macedonians were a distinct nation, with a language and a history of their own. All attempts to impose Serbian domination on them were definitely abandoned. Press, literature and education in the new Macedonian literary language, derived from what had previously been no more than a spoken dialect, were very successfully promoted, and Macedonian became the accepted language of public business in the republic. Though the communist government of neighbouring Bulgaria was not convinced, the people of Macedonia themselves appeared to have accepted their new national identity; and Macedonian communist leaders spoke from time to time of the need to incorporate in the Macedonian republic the people of 'Aegean Macedonia' (described by the Greek authorities as 'Slavophone Hellenes') and of 'Pirin Macedonia' (whorn the Bulgarian government declared to be perfectly ordinary patriotic Bulgarians).
An interesting situation arose in Bosnia, where the Muslims increased more rapidly than the Serbs and Croats, and in the early 1970s were the most numerous of the three communities. What were they? They were certain that they were not Serbs or Croats, and official doctrine now denied (realistically) that there was a Yugoslav nation. They could hardly be called a Bosnian nation, because this would deprive the Serbs and Croats who lived in Bosnia of their Bosnian character. It therefore seemed difficult to resist the conclusion that they formed a Muslim nation. Speaking the same Serbo-Croatian language as their neighbours, but united by religion, historical and cultural tradition, they formed a compact community, as the people of Pakistan had never done. It seemed arguable that a million people in the centre of Yugoslavia were one of many nations of Muslim faith in the world, but the only 'Muslim nation'.
Another national problem of importance in Yugoslavia was the Albanians. Divided between a subordinate territory of the Serbian republic (known as the Kosovo-Metohija autonomous region) and the republic of Macedonia, they numbered about 1,200,000. This was a larger population than that of the whole Macedonian or Montenegrin republic; it was also over one-third of the total number of Albanians in the world, and was concentrated along the northern and eastern borders of the Albanian state. The claim either to form a seventh republic of Yugoslavia, or to be united with the Albanian state, was difficult to refute on grounds of principle. The rate of natural increases of these Albanians was about double that of the Serbs who lived among them.
Nationalism had not disappeared in Yugoslavia: on the contrary, its disruptive effects caused alarm, which led to a reassertion of authoritarian policies by the communist party in the early 1970s. Nevertheless, it remained true that the forces working for the strengthening of a single Yugoslav state, based on equality for its constituent nations, were stronger than they had ever been; and that the Yugoslavs were the only communists who had genuinely achieved progress towards solution of national conflicts within a multinational state, though they had begun their task in exceptionally difficult circumstances.