Serbia

The territory of present-day Serbia has been inhabited since prehistory, with the Lepenski Vir and Vinca cultures of the central Balkans providing some of the earliest evidence of settled life in Europe. By classical antiquity the region was home to Illyrian, Thracian, and Celtic populations, and from the first century BCE it was gradually absorbed into the Roman Empire, which organised the territory into provinces such as Moesia and Pannonia. Several Roman emperors, including Constantine the Great, were born in the area. After the empire's division the lands fell within the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, sphere. South Slavic tribes settled the region in the sixth and seventh centuries, and over subsequent centuries gradually consolidated under local princes who accepted Christianity in the Byzantine rite during the ninth century.

A medieval Serbian state emerged in the twelfth century under the Nemanjic dynasty, founded by Stefan Nemanja around 1166. His son was canonised as Saint Sava and established an autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church in 1219. The realm reached its zenith under Stefan Dusan, who was crowned emperor in 1346 and codified an extensive legal system. After his death the state fragmented, and Serbian forces were decisively weakened at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Over the following decades the Ottoman Empire absorbed the Serbian lands, and Ottoman rule persisted, with intervals of Habsburg control in the north, for roughly four centuries.

The First Serbian Uprising of 1804, led by Karadjordje, and the Second Uprising of 1815 under Milos Obrenovic produced an autonomous principality. Full international recognition of Serbian independence came at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, and the country was proclaimed a kingdom in 1882. The rivalry between the Karadjordjevic and Obrenovic dynasties shaped nineteenth-century politics. After the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Serbia expanded southward, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 triggered the First World War, in which Serbia suffered catastrophic losses.

In 1918 Serbia joined the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. Occupied and dismembered during the Second World War, the country was reconstituted in 1945 as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito, with Serbia as one of six federal republics and including the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo. After Tito's death in 1980, economic strain and rising nationalism, intensified under Slobodan Milosevic from 1987, contributed to the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, with wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and later Kosovo. NATO conducted an air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999, and Kosovo was placed under United Nations administration.

Milosevic was removed from power in October 2000 following mass protests, and the federation was restructured as Serbia and Montenegro in 2003. Montenegro's independence in 2006 left Serbia as a sovereign successor state, and Kosovo declared independence in 2008, a status Serbia does not recognise although many states do. Serbia formally applied for European Union membership in 2009 and opened accession negotiations in 2014, while maintaining a policy of military neutrality outside NATO.

Serbia today is a parliamentary republic with a directly elected president, a unicameral National Assembly, and a government headed by a prime minister, operating under the constitution adopted in 2006.