The breaking up of a region or country into smaller, often hostile or incompatible states or groups.
From the Balkans + suffix '-ization' (the process of becoming). Coined to describe the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire and later applied to any similar political breakup.
This term was created to describe one of history's most dramatic dissolving acts—when the Ottoman Empire fragmented into many new nations in the early 1900s, it happened so visibly that Europeans gave the process its own word!
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