Demographic displacement, not ideology, was Yugoslavia’s key conflict trigger.

Evidence

The complicated processes that led to intercivilizational wars in the former Yugoslavia had many causes and many starting points. Probably the single most important factor leading to these conflicts, however, was the demographic shift that took place in Kosovo. Kosovo was an autonomous province within the Serbian republic with the de facto powers of the six Yugoslav republics except the right to secede. In 1961 its population was 67 percent Albanian Muslim and 24 percent Orthodox Serb. The Albanian birth rate, however, was the highest in Europe, and Kosovo became the most densely populated area of Yugoslavia. By the 1980s close to 50 percent of the Albanians were less than twenty years old. Facing those numbers, Serbs emigrated from Kosovo in pursuit of economic opportunities in Belgrade and elsewhere. As a result, in 1991 Kosovo was 90 percent Muslim and 10 percent Serb. Serbs, nonetheless, viewed Kosovo as their “holy land” or “Jerusalem,” the site, among other things, of the great battle on June 28, 1389, when they were defeated by the Ottoman Turks and, as a result, suffered Ottoman rule for almost five centuries. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 723

Categorization

• XREF: The Kosovo demographic inversion mirrors contemporary debates about demographic change driving political conflict.