Balkan Powder Keg Essay

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THE BALKAN POWDER KEG

A number of countries in the beginning of the 20th century in the Balkan area were together restless, and this group was called the Balkan Powder Keg. The Balkan area refers to the southern eastern European countries. The Balkan Powder Keg refers to an easily ignitable barrel of gunpowder. The barrel or keg was the Balkan countries, and the easily ignitable material was the tension between these countries. The reasons for the countries having tension between them were nationalistic ideas and alliances pulling the countries in different directions. The Balkan Powder Keg ignited in 1914, remained glowing through WWI, stirred during WWII, and reignited during the 1992-1995 Bosnia-Herzegovina Genocide. This stirring nationalism …show more content…
This was later called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. By this time, Soviet Union did not have the Slavic nationalism as their foremost agenda, but communism.

As the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was created the international reaction to the strong nationalism during WWII was the creation of the United Nations in 1945. The issue of nationalism remained a problem in Europe after WWII. As nationalism and race had been key issues during the war, the UN issued the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. In the convention, national groups, as well as racial, religious and ethnical groups, are prevented from being officially proclaimed as inferior.

Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were able to keep their own nationalistic agenda since its creation and till 1990 when the country’s communistic rule had weakened and the various Slavic nations started a civil war in 1991. The decades of the Slavic groups not having been treated equally during the Yugoslav kingdom, enforced nationalistic feelings and wishes to separate from the kingdom. This civil war led to the Bosnia-Herzegovina Genocide of the years 1992 to 1995, where people were killed for having the wrong national
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