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Smiths began working with locally mined gold and silver, horses and chari­ ots became more common, and trade routes stretched to northern Europe and the Aegean. ), trade flourished between the developing city-states of Italy and Greece and the region’s first identifiable peoples: Illyrian-speaking tribes north of Lake Ohrid and west of the Vardar River (in presentday Macedonia), Thracian speakers in the area of modern Serbia, and the Veneti, who probably spoke an Italic tongue, in Istria and the Julian Alps (in present-day Slovenia and northwest Croatia).

Despite widely held contempt for com­ munism, however, opposition within Serbia remained fragmented and ineffectual until 1991. In the first multiparty elections in post­ war Serbia, Milosevic easily won reelection in December 1990. Be­ cause he controlled almost all the Serbian media, his campaign was able to ignore the chaotic Serbian economy. In October 1990, internal and external conditions caused Slovenia and Croatia to seek independence in some form. Accordingly, the two republics proposed that Yugoslavia be restructured as a loose confederation of states, each with national sovereignty and its own army and each conducting its own foreign policy.

The diametrical­ ly opposed political blueprints of the centralist republics (Serbia and Montenegro) and the autonomist republics (Slovenia and Croa­ tia, later joined by Macedonia and Bosnia and Hercegovina) meant that any attempt to redistribute power was very likely to be dead­ locked. While Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia occupied center stage in 1991, the other three republics—Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bos­ nia and Hercegovina—divided their attention between local eco­ nomic and social problems and the transformation crisis of the federation.