Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia was a multiethnic state with very diverse ethnicities. There are many nationalities, dialects, and ethnic religions. There were four official languages in Yugoslavia including Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian and Slovene. The three Universalizing religions including major religions in Yugoslavia were Roman Catholic in the north, Orthodox in the east, and Islam in the south along with small ethnic religions. As you can see with this much ethnic diversity, Yugoslavia was bound to break apart.

After the death of president Tito in the 1980's, rivalries among ethnicities resurfaced in Yugoslavia. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia in the 1990's and Montenegro in 2006 all broke apart from Yugoslavia to form independent nations believing that they had self-determination thus leaving Serbia on its own. There weren't many problems with the breaking apart into 6 republics between ethnic religions but when Yugoslavia's republics were transformed from local government units into 5 separate countries, ethnicities fought to redefine their boundaries. There were more ethnic groups that were not recognized as official nationalities and on top of that the ethnicities failed to redefine the boundaries of the 6 republics but also failed to match the territory occupied by the 5 major nationalities.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the population consists of 48% Bosnian Muslim, 37% Serb, and 14 percent Croat. The Bosnian Muslims weren't considered a nationality but rather an ethnicity. So rather than living in a multiethnic country with Muslim plurality, the Serb's and Croat's fought to regain control of the territory that they inhabited and to strengthen their case for breaking away from Yugoslavia, the Serbs and Croats ethnically cleansed the Bosnian Muslims gaining more territory for themselves to unite. Bosnia and Herzegovina was then split into three regions and each with Bosnian Croats, Muslims and Serbs. The