There is a weird “institutionalized” mindset when it comes to oppression.
I’m not advocating they go back to it nor do I feel it was grand when they were a communist republic, but one can see in a region that is completely fragmented and unstable that they would yearn for any semblance of unity.
They think not of the consequences, just the romance of the ideal which is, in fact horrific.
I guess the dumbing down of millennials is a global crisis.
The article only cited the two parts that had the most to lose from the breakup.
The Serbs, that missed their pseudo empire, and the Bosnians, that missed the suppression of ethnic tensions.
Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo, and Montenegro (whom held on the longest), seem to be happy with the current situation.
So the take-away is that socialism wouldn’t be so bad - if it were not for the prisons?
Anyone who remembers that part of the world as an example of peace and inter-ethnic comity is on industrial-strength drugs.
Tito had many flaws but he was a Yugoslav first and foremost:
The Partisans, while a Communist-led movement, were deliberately structured as a pan-Yugoslav movement.
To a certain extent, it succeeded in maintaining the Yugoslav postwar state.
But too many republic leaders were more inclined to pursue their parochial interests than work together to preserve national unity.
Yugoslavia wasn’t conquered; it died at the hands of its quarreling peoples.