Im not from Europe. Can someone explain what are the Balkans exactly and why there’s “beef” between them?
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Answer: the Balkans are the peninsula in southeast europe. The area has a lot of mountainous terrain, and has experienced overlays of many different types of people throughout history. So there are many pockets of different types of cultures.
Part of the reason there is so much conflict today, is that the area has always been a sort of crossroads. There were the Illyrians in Roman times, Slavs in the 8th and 9th centuries, Magyars came in to Hungary, and then Ottomans during the time of their empire.
The split between Eastern and Western Roman empires went right through roughly the Croatia/Bosnia/Serbia area. Which meant that to the east they were Eastern Orthodox, and to the West they were Catholic. To this day Croats are Catholic and Serbs are Eastern Orthodox. When the Ottomans attempted to come into Europe, they left pockets of Muslim peoples, primarily now in Bosnia and Kosovo. Then there were periods with the Austrio-Hungarian and Venetian Empires, and Greece.
As others have mentioned, there’s been a lot of recent history as well, but effectively the bones of conflict are simply very different groups of people, living in very close proximity to each other, with long histories of conflict.
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