Tito’s recognition of Muslims as a nation fuelled later Serb Islamophobia

Evidence

Eventually, in 1968, the Yugoslav Communist regime under Josip Broz Tito recognised the Muslims as a nation in their own right. The regime also granted extensive autonomy to the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo, formally part of Serbia but inhabited overwhelmingly by Muslim Albanians. Consequently, the Serb nationalist backlash against the Yugoslav federal order, which gathered momentum following Tito’s death in 1980 and found expression in Slobodan Milošević’s seizure of power in 1987, took an overtly Islamophobic form. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1072

Categorization

• XREF: A case study of the book’s running theme that state policies granting group recognition can trigger hostile nationalist backlash — resonant with the trajectory of antisemitic reactions to Jewish emancipation.