When 55.5 percent of the citizens of Montenegro voted on 21 May 2006 to sever the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro and make their republic a fully sovereign country in its own right, they set the capstone on a political shift that has been noteworthy for its peaceful and orderly conduct in a region which has seen a great deal of chaos and bloodshed since the breakup of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.