Nationalism and the Balkan Powder Keg

After the progressive dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire over the nineteenth century, the Balkans became a mosaic of newly independent nation-states - Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Montenegro - with disputed borders and mutually incompatible territorial ambitions. Austria-Hungary's formal annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, which exploited the instability generated by the Young Turk Revolution, provoked a profound diplomatic crisis and lasting Serbian resentment by frustrating Serbian aspirations to a territory with a substantial Slav population. Clandestine Serbian nationalist organizations, chief among them the secret society known as the Black Hand, founded in 1911 by Serbian military officers, actively promoted national unification through methods that included political terrorism and sabotage against Austria-Hungary.