Serbia (Cinco De Mayo)

Serbia, officially the Republic of Serbia, is a southeastern European nation located geographically in the Balkans and bordered by Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania. Serbia is a Parliamentary republic with an empowered legislature and a weak Presidency.

Serbia suffered severe economic, military and territorial losses in both World Wars, culminating with the Treaty of Subotica in 1944 forcing it to divest Kosovo and much of upper Macedonia to Albania and withdraw Serbian troops from Bosnia. In 1947, the leftist nationalist Serbian National Movement (SNP) seized power in a coup, toppling the royalty and violently murdering much of the upper crust. Serbia would then form a union with Montenegro in the 1950 plebiscite and absorbed a third of the Banat Republic in 1952, and then engaged in a long war with Croatia and Bosnia over the status of Serbian peoples in both nations, which ended with the Treaty of Mostar in 1966 that restored the Danube as the border between Croatia and Serbia, allowed the peaceful transfer of Croatian Serbs to Serbia, and the territorial integrity of Bosnia after numerous proposals from both sides to annex it outright or split it.

Serbia would remain wracked by political and economic instability until a military coup in 1977 toppled the SNP dictatorship and then open elections were held in 1981 for the Presidency and 1984 for the Parliament after the military dissolved their right-nationalist party in turn after mass protests. As Serbia was loosely aligned with Britain during the Cold War, it is regarded as the first British Bloc country to break off and Westernize, and the fall of its pro-British government nearly sparked a crisis during the tense early 1980s.