%0 Journal Article
%T The Case of Kosovo: Separation vs. Integration Legacy, Identity, Nationalism
%A Bataković, Dušan T.
%J Studia Środkowoeuropejskie i Bałkanistyczne
%V 2017
%R 10.4467/2543733XSSB.17.027.8325
%N Tom XXVI
%P 105-123
%K Serbia, Kosovo, ethnic-strife, Albanians, Serbs, 1999 NATO intervention, international policy, ethnic discrimination, self-proclaimed independence
%@ 2451-4993
%D 2018
%U https://ejournals.eu/czasopismo/ssb/artykul/the-case-of-kosovo-separation-vs-integration-legacy-identity-nationalism
%X 
	The history of the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija in the 20th century was rather marked by the secessionist movement of Kosovo Albanians from Serbia and Yugoslavia than with integration as a way of solving old inter-ethnic conflicts between Serbs and Albaniаns. After the Second World War and the subsequent communist takeover, Yugoslavia was restored as a communist federation, and Serbia became one of its six federal units, with Kosovo and Metohija, a region with a mixed Serb and Albanian population, within its borders. Kosovo in the present boundaries first became a region (1946) and then an autonomous province (1963) within the Socialist Republic of Serbia one of the six constituent republics of federal Yugoslavia. The Kosovo status was upgraded by constitutional amendments (1968–1972) and finally by the 1974 Constitution which gave Kosovo Albanians the main say in the province’s political life, a decision approved by communist dictator Tito in order to pacify the growing Albanian nationalism, strongly supported by neighbouring Stalinist Albania of Enver Hoxha. This policy triggered a process of repeated discrimination of the Kosovo Serbs throughout the 1970s that in the early 1980s, escalated into large-scale Albanian nationalist demonstrations, after March 1981 onwards, demanding that Kosovo be given the right to secede, thus announcing the rapid disintegration of the Yugoslav communist federation. Separation instead of integration became an official policy of Kosovo Albanians.