I’ll always be grateful to the Balkans (my generic name for the various Hatfield and McCoy ethnic leaders of that eternally querulous region) for allowing me to write several news stories about a European war that contained the term “scorched earth tactics” – I never thought I’d get to use such a barbaric, WWII era term as a journalist in the late 20th century. It almost made up for the calls we’d get to the newsroom every night from one Balkan or another accusing us of “bias.”*
It was hard to root for any side beyond the ordinary people during that conflict, but back then the Serb leaders stood out for me as particularly nasty pieces of work. Mladic coud hand out all the chocolates he wanted, but that footage never made our shows – we all knew what a murdering scumbag he was.
[* The best were the angry Macedonians demanding we use the proper name for their country, of which there were at least two competing terms – we’d change it the next evening, and get calls from the other group the next. It was the closest I’ve been to being in the Monty Python JPF/PFJ skit]
It seems that it could be subtitled “The rise and fall of the idea of Yugoslavian identity” which is an interesting topic. But I’m not sure that it disproves the idea that a united Yugoslavia was an aberration, lasting from Versailles until the fall of European communism.
(edit) your comments and those of @deathisastar seem to reinforce the idea that a state containing both Serbs and others would be a non-starter.
As Simon Hoggart observed of Northern Ireland after years of reporting on it: What they want isn’t peace; it’s victory. And what the Serbs want is a Serb state. So they can start arguing, presumably, about who are really Serbs.
One problem is that there really isn’t an international community. Another is that most people cannot see the bigger picture (for a variety of reasons including having to work too hard just to get by).
Yugoslav identity was in competition with other more discrete nationalist identities, including Serb and Croat. My point was that these were all new identity formations, pretty much developed and shared by the elite, built in part on folkways and traditions of the Balkans. People prior to the modern age tend to identify local first, religiously second (in part because of the way the Ottoman empire was structured up to the mid-19th century - specifically around religious communities).
You’re ignoring the fact that during the Ottoman era, people of different religious and regional identities got along. The tensions are rather new and related to the rise of an elite of particular ethnic identities, which aren’t “naturally” occurring. Much of the historiography that highlights Ottoman era tensions are nationalist narratives, reading a modern identity formation into the past, for modern political reasons.
In my experience Italians still do, though it has moved on beyond towns to regions.
When I was at school I had a summer job with a rose grower. Many of the workers were Italians from Sicily, which is one reason why my Italian accent is so odd. Then somebody went to work there who came from Rome. Two years later he still had no other form of address than “roomani”.
You can also think of Yugoslavia as an attempt at Greater Serbia, hence its dissolution when the artificial glue melted. Tito was a Croat, so he tried to keep the Serbs in check.
I once attended a presentation by Tito’s granddaughter, Svetlana Broz, in Boston after the Bosnian War. She said that there was widespread denial in Serbia about war crimes. She was (is?) a physician, so she encountered lots of people, including the wives and mothers of former soldiers who would seek her medical opinion about the awful mental state of their men (it sounded like PTSD). When she tried to explain to them what they had done or show them pictures, they would categorically refuse to listen.
