Of course, as is a custom, there's a person jumping onto an opportunity to involve politics into a non-political post mentioning Yugoslavia, and claims how it was all the Serbia / Croatia / Bosnia's fault...Thanks for keeping the tradition alive. /s
The reason why Balkans is such a shit-show for centuries is in the similar mentality of the people living here, embodied in the saying "God, please make my neighbor's cow die"; mentality, language and culture of Croatians, Bosnians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Slovenians is 90% the same.
There is a reason why Yugo-nostalgia is such a thing in this region, and a great great majority of regular folks did not have anything against any of their neighbors, were mixing like crazy, and in a lot of cases living their best lives then - until politics and power struggles of very few, pushed by the West as well, destroyed most of what was good. Of course SFRJ had a lot of traits of communist regimes, in forced culture and "unity" aspects that were bothering people to some extent (not unsimilar to how those exist even in modern Germany, for example), but that was definitely not the main reason for the failure of the federation.
In the manufactured scenario that lead to the breakup, Milosevic gained a disproportionate number of votes in the federation, through basically taking over the political top of other members - but a lot of people also note how it was Croatia that was disproportionately favored by Tito for decades before and it created the "unequal" sentiment - just to advance the point that finger-pointing is always a thing and not useful for the discussion. If we were any smarter and had less self-absorbed and everyone-else-is-to-blame mentality , we would have formed at least economic alliances between the former Yugoslav countries not long after the breakup - in the end, we're all pretty much the same idiots, and got played. (Also, to clarify, I'm Croatian).
The reason why Balkans is such a shit-show for centuries is in the similar mentality of the people living here, embodied in the saying "God, please make my neighbor's cow die"; mentality, language and culture of Croatians, Bosnians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Slovenians is 90% the same.
There is a reason why Yugo-nostalgia is such a thing in this region, and a great great majority of regular folks did not have anything against any of their neighbors, were mixing like crazy, and in a lot of cases living their best lives then - until politics and power struggles of very few, pushed by the West as well, destroyed most of what was good. Of course SFRJ had a lot of traits of communist regimes, in forced culture and "unity" aspects that were bothering people to some extent (not unsimilar to how those exist even in modern Germany, for example), but that was definitely not the main reason for the failure of the federation.
In the manufactured scenario that lead to the breakup, Milosevic gained a disproportionate number of votes in the federation, through basically taking over the political top of other members - but a lot of people also note how it was Croatia that was disproportionately favored by Tito for decades before and it created the "unequal" sentiment - just to advance the point that finger-pointing is always a thing and not useful for the discussion. If we were any smarter and had less self-absorbed and everyone-else-is-to-blame mentality , we would have formed at least economic alliances between the former Yugoslav countries not long after the breakup - in the end, we're all pretty much the same idiots, and got played. (Also, to clarify, I'm Croatian).