Serbs andCroats

Serbs and Croats were part of the Slavic migrations into the territory of the Roman empire at the beginning of the sixth century. They established early medieval polities that went through separate political and cultural developments. The Ottoman conquest in the fifteenth century caused large demographic shifts and movements of Vlach and Serbian populations into the traditional Croat territories. Catholicism and Orthodoxy became the main division line that influenced the Serb–Croat divisions in the nineteenth‐century national integration processes. The first Yugoslav state was created after the disintegration of the Austro‐Hungarian empire and was dominated by Serbian political elites. German and Italian occupation during World War II triggered ethnic conflicts, genocidal policies of the puppet regimes, and a new struggle for liberation. The communist Yugoslavia created after World War II disintegrated with the fall of communism. After the wars of “succession,” new independent Croatian and Serbian states emerged, ethnically more homogeneous than was ever the case in the past.