‘Ethnic cleansing’ in peacetime? Yugoslav/Serb colonization projects in Vojvodina in the twentieth century

This article deals with post-war population movements affecting Yugoslav Vojvodina in the period between 1918 and 1996, with a strong focus on the first half of the twentieth century. It is argued that many Yugoslav/Serbian political and military leaders considered the aftermaths of wars and wars in the neighbourhood respectively a convenient window of opportunity for ‘adjusting’ the ethnic structure in specific regions according to their visions and ideals. Such an ethnic ‘cleansing’ combined with social engineering occurred in Vojvodina in the years from 1919 to 1922, from 1944 to 1947 and again during the Yugoslav wars of secession in the 1990s. With each of these colonization projects, this ‘most European region of Serbia’ (Aleksandar Popov, Director of the Centre for Regionalism, Novi Sad) became more Serbian on the one hand and less multicultural on the other.