ABSTRACT
After the end of the war in Croatia and the construction of the new, smaller Yugoslav federation the successor regimes, Bosnia and Hercegovina excluded until the end of 1995, attempted to create functioning independent states. The most important dynamic in the area remained, however, the clash between Serbian nationalists and other ethnic groups. This time the locus of the conflict was within the Serbian republic, in Kosovo. The renewal of tension there after the end of the Bosnian conflict was to precipitate full-scale military action, in the air, by NATO. The Kosovo crisis so influenced the destiny of Serbia and the surrounding states that its evolution must be described before the affairs of those other states are examined. But even after the crisis had been contained peace did not come to the Balkans and a decade after the breakup of the post-1945 Yugoslav federation the one state which had departed that federation without a shot being fired, Macedonia, was plagued by a new ethnic conflict which threatened once more to destabilize the region.
