Serbia

Serbia, officially the Republic of Serbia, is a landlocked country in Southeastern and Central Europe, in the Balkans, bordered by Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, with about 6.5 million inhabitants excluding Kosovo and Belgrade as its capital and largest city. Continuously inhabited since the Paleolithic age, the territory faced Slavic migration in the sixth century, and the Serbian Kingdom won recognition from the Holy See and Constantinople in 1217, reaching its territorial height in 1346 as the Serbian Empire before the Ottoman Empire annexed the whole of modern Serbia by the mid-sixteenth century. The Serbian Revolution of the early nineteenth century established the region's first constitutional monarchy, and in 1918, after the First World War, the Kingdom of Serbia united with Vojvodina and joined other South Slavic nations to found Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia existed under various political forms until the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s; during that breakup Serbia formed a union with Montenegro, which was peacefully dissolved in 2006, restoring Serbia's sovereignty. It operates today as a unitary parliamentary constitutional republic, an upper-middle income economy providing universal health care and free primary and secondary education, and it has negotiated European Union accession since 2014 while formally adhering to a policy of military neutrality.