Abstract
The Second Yugoslavia created in 1943, under the name of Democratic Federation of Yugoslavia, was a federal state consisting of six republics -Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia- and two autonomous provinces - Kosovo and Vojvodina. It became the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946 and was later renamed to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1963. This federation broke up in the early 1990s when Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence on June 25, 1991, followed by Macedonia in October and Bosnia Herzegovina in November. There are many grounds for this disintegration. It is impossible to reduce the complexity of socialist Yugoslav disintegration to some supposed pre-eminent factor. On the contrary, there were a multitude of causes like the economics of choices, institutional structures, religious cultures, elite dynamics, and deficiencies in systemic legitimacy that played a role in pushing the country toward violent break-up. Yugoslavia was a mosaic of ethnic groups, whose unity was undermined by the revolutionary statesman Marshal Tito's death, economic crisis, ethnic tensions, changing international context and the rise of nationalism in the 1980s.
