In the 18th and 19th centuries states came and went. The United States emerged as independent, Poland disappeared. Independent polities flickered into partial existence during the Napoleonic Wars only to become memories of the past and aspirations for the future. Greece and Serbia came out of the Ottoman Empire, an independent Hungary blinked on and off, then half on again. Then came the 20th century that began in earnest at Sarajevo in 1914, marked by radical changes to the map of Europe and the world. More than 150 states emerged over the course of the century, out of the collapse of empires and under the banner of self-determination following the First World War, the waves of decolonisation that followed, and the implosion of socialist federations after 1989, most significantly of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
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