9.5 Postwar Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Atrocities

Many Europeans hoped that the horrors of fascism and the growth of cooperation (9.10) would make nationalism fade. In the West, national loyalty became calmer, but regional groups who felt they were a separate nation inside a larger state kept demanding self-rule. Separatism is the push by such a group to break away and form its own state, or at least to win autonomy, the right to run its own affairs. In the communist East, governments suppressed open nationalism, but it survived and returned when communism collapsed.

• Northern Ireland, the Troubles (about 1968–1998): the province stayed part of the United Kingdom when the rest of Ireland gained independence in 1922. Mostly Protestant unionists wanted to remain British; mostly Catholic nationalists, who faced discrimination in jobs, housing and voting, wanted union with Ireland. Civil rights marches in 1968 led to violence, British troops arrived in 1969, and on Bloody Sunday (1972) British soldiers shot dead 13 civil rights marchers in Derry, with a 14th dying later. The Provisional IRA (Irish Republican Army) and loyalist paramilitary groups carried out bombings and killings that left about 3,500 people dead. The Good Friday Agreement (1998) created a power-sharing government and largely ended the violence.
• The Basque Country, Spain: Franco had banned the Basque language and culture. The separatist group ETA, founded in 1959, turned to bombings and assassinations and killed more than 800 people. Spain's democracy gave the Basque region broad autonomy in 1979, which reduced support for violence. ETA announced a permanent end to its armed campaign in 2011 and dissolved in 2018.
• Chechnya, Russia: this mostly Muslim region in the Caucasus declared independence as the Soviet Union collapsed. Russia fought two brutal wars there (1994–1996 and 1999–2009) that leveled the capital, Grozny, killed tens of thousands of civilians, and were followed by terrorist attacks inside Russia.
• Belgium: tension between Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north and French-speaking Walloons in the south was mostly peaceful but persistent. Belgium gradually turned itself into a federal state, formally completed in 1993, giving the language regions their own governments.

Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics, including Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, home to Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Albanians and others. Its communist leader Josip Broz Tito held it together until his death in 1980. In the late 1980s, as the economy failed and communism weakened, Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević rose by stirring up Serbian nationalism, and other republics feared Serbian domination.

Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in 1991, and war broke out in Croatia. In Bosnia (1992–1995), Bosnian Serb forces, backed by Serbia, fought Bosniaks and Croats. All sides committed crimes, but the largest share was by Bosnian Serb forces, who carried out ethnic cleansing, forcing out or killing people of another ethnic group to create an ethnically pure territory. They besieged the city of Sarajevo for nearly four years. In July 1995 at Srebrenica, a town the United Nations had declared a safe area, Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić murdered about 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. International courts later ruled that Srebrenica was genocide.

NATO air strikes in 1995 helped bring the sides to the Dayton Accords, which ended the Bosnian war. In 1998–1999 Serbian forces attacked Albanians in the province of Kosovo, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes, until NATO bombed Serbia and forced its troops out. Milošević was later tried for war crimes at an international tribunal in The Hague but died in 2006 before a verdict.

These conflicts show continuity with the 19th-century nationalism of Unit 7: the idea that each people should have its own state still had explosive power, especially in multi-ethnic regions. They also showed change. International courts now prosecuted war crimes and genocide, building on the Nuremberg trials (8.9), and Europe's new institutions, from NATO to the European Union, became involved in ending wars and rebuilding states.