Today, Montenegro marks twenty years since the restoration of its independence.
It is an important anniversary. But perhaps for that very reason, this is also the right moment to place several uncomfortable facts back into their proper political and historical context—without mythology, propaganda, or retrospective rewriting of history.
Montenegro was not created in 2006. It is one of the oldest internationally recognized states in the Balkans.
At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Montenegro was recognized as a sovereign state among the first modern Balkan nations to receive full international legitimacy. The independence restored in 2006 was therefore not the creation of a new country, but the continuation of a European state that had been interrupted in its sovereignty.
Moreover, the modern international affirmation of Montenegrin independence did not begin in 2006. Nor did it begin in the late 1990s. It began in Washington, DC, in 1994.
