Serbian nationalism
[3] Croatian nationalists opposed the centralized state and demanded decentralization and an autonomous Croatia within Yugoslavia, which was accepted by the Yugoslav government in the Cvetković–Maček Agreement of 1939.
[1] Karadžić created a linguistic definition of the Serbs that included all speakers of the Štokavian dialect regardless of their religious affiliation or geographical origin.
[3] In the aftermath King Alexander discarded the Vidovdan Constitution, proclaimed a royal dictatorship, and officially renamed the country Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
[3] In the aftermath of World War II and the seizure of power by the Yugoslav Partisans, Josip Broz Tito's communist Yugoslavia was established.
[3] After the ousting of Ranković, Serbian nationalist intellectuals increasingly began viewing Yugoslavia as a detrimental experience for the Serb nation.
[8] Serbian intellectuals began breaking a number of taboos—for example, Branko Petranović identified Mihailović, the Chetnik rival of Tito during World War II as being an important "anti-fascist".
[8] Dobrica Ćosić joined other Serb political writers in writing the highly controversial Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts of 1986.
[9] The Memorandum claimed to promote solutions to restore Yugoslav unity, but it focused on fiercely condemning Titoist Yugoslavia of having economically subjugated Serbia to Croatia and Slovenia and accused ethnic Albanians of committing genocide against Serbs in Kosovo.
Slobodan Milošević, at the time a Serbian communist official, did not speak publicly about the issue, but in a meeting with members of the secret police he formally endorsed the official government denouncement of the Memorandum, stating: The appearance of the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences represents nothing else but the darkest nationalism.
[14] In August 1988, meetings by supporters of the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution were held in many locations in Serbia and Montenegro, with increasingly violent nature, with calls being heard such as "Give us arms!
[15] In the same month, Milošević began efforts designed to destabilize the governments in Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina to allow him to install his followers in those republics.
[19] In the media started to be popularized Serbian Church, and the idea that the Orthodoxy was "the spiritual basis for and most essential component of the national identity [of Serbs]".
[20] In that regard, were re-published Nikodim Milaš's Pravoslavna Dalmacija (1901) and Radoslav Grujić's Pravoslavna Srpska Crkva (1921), pseudoscientific works claiming many historical innacuracies about the history of Croatia and Croats, as well the history of Serbs and Serb Orthodoxy, which were used as historical arguments for the war in Croatia and Bosnia.
[23] Serbia's specific endorsement of a Chamber of Citizens and a Chamber of Associated Labour faced opposition from the republics of Croatia and Slovenia as they saw the proposals as increasing Serbia's power and federal state control over the economy, which was the opposite of their intention to decrease federal state control over the economy.
[24] Croatia and Slovenia denounced the actions by Milošević and began to demand that Yugoslavia be made a full multi-party confederal state.
[26] Plans by Milošević to carve out territory from Croatia to the local Serbs had begun by June 1990, according to the diary of Serbian official Borisav Jović.
