The story of Yugoslavia is a cautionary
tale and a warning for those who underestimate the strength of nationalism.
Yugoslavia was an artificial country, created after World War I
from Serbia, Montenegro, and much of Austria-Hungary. It was a
monarchy run by the same royal family that ruled Serbia before the
war. It was occupied by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during World
War II. Yugoslavia was liberated not by the Soviet Union, but by its
own partisan forces. Therefore, there were no Red Army troops in
Yugoslavia to force the country to become a satellite state of the Soviet Union
like the other countries of Eastern Europe.
Yugoslavia was held together by the unifying figure of Josip Broz
Tito. He was an ethnic Croat, not the largest ethnic group in the
country, but he was still respected by the various peoples of Yugoslavia for
his role in liberating Yugoslavia from German and Italian
occupation. While Yugoslavia was communist, Tito remained
independent of Joseph Stalin and led Yugoslavia his own way. Tito
was first allied with Stalin but broke with him in 1948. Yugoslavia
was an important figure in the non-aligned movement during the Cold
War. Tito promoted "Brotherhood and Unity" and suppressed
nationalism, sometimes by force.
Tito died in 1980. In the 1980s, the country's economy
declined, and nationalism began to rise. The country broke up in
1991 during the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The country had
been divided into six republics and two autonomous provinces. The
republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia all
seceded, leaving Serbia and Montenegro as the remnants of Yugoslavia.
Serbia was led by Slobodan Milošević. Milošević wanted to
create a Greater Serbia, where ethnic Serbs living outside Serbia would be
incorporated into their country. Specifically, he wanted the regions
of Bosnia and Croatia that were majority Serbian. Serbs in Croatia
didn't want to live under Croat rule, because during World War II, the Croats
allied with the Nazis and fascists and committed many atrocities against the
Serbs. They tried to secede from Croatia. Croatia
objected to this, to which Milošević responded that if Croatia could secede
from Yugoslavia, then Serbs living in Croatia could also secede.
Serbs in Bosnia also tried to secede and conquered much of the
country. The Muslims and Croats in Bosnia united to fight the
Serbs. After NATO bombed Serbian-controlled areas in Bosnia, they
agreed to negotiate. The Dayton Agreement was signed in 1995, which
led to the end of the war. Bosnia became a union of two entities,
the Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A
few years later, fighting broke out in Kosovo. Kosovo was majority
ethnic Albanian, but Serbia still claimed the province, because it was part of
the Kingdom of Serbia and the province of Serbia in Yugoslavia, and it had much
historical significance. It was the site of the defeat of Serbia by
the Ottoman Empire in 1389. NATO bombed Serbia, which led to the
country withdrawing troops from Kosovo. Gradually, peace returned to
the region. Montenegro became independent from Serbia in 2006, and
Kosovo declared independence in 2008, although Serbia, Russia, and many other
countries don't recognize it.
The trend since 1914 has been countries breaking up, not
uniting. Austria-Hungary broke up after World War I, its territory
becoming part of seven countries, some of which were new. After the
fall of communism, Yugoslavia broke up, as was detailed
previously. So did Czechoslovakia, which peacefully broke up into
the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. So did the Soviet Union
itself, which in 1991 broke up into 15 different countries based on the old
Soviet socialist republics. This caused ethnic problems, because
there were large minorities of Russians in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and
Kazakhstan. These problems flared up in 2014, with the unrest in
Ukraine and Russia's annexation of Crimea.
Ethnic conflict in multiethnic countries is not limited to
Europe. Most modern African countries were created by European
colonial powers and have no ethnic majority. This has led to ethnic
warfare, one example being the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 to 1970, where the
Igbo people tried to secede as the nation of Biafra but were
defeated. Most modern Middle Eastern countries were also
artificially created by European powers after World War I. This has
led to violence in Iraq among Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and
Kurds. This has also led to ethnic and religious tensions in other
countries such as Syria and Lebanon.
It certainly seems that diverse countries tend to be
unstable. That being said, what lies ahead for the most diverse
country in the world, the United States?
It is highly likely that the United States will break up sometime
in the near future. Since the 1960s, the United States has become
more racially heterogeneous and more politically polarized. The
right and left have grown increasingly farther apart and see each other not as
fellow Americans, but enemies. This polarization has accelerated
since the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016. Americans
used to mostly have the same religion, Christianity, and now they
don't. Many are irreligious or are members of other
religions. The immigration of large numbers of people from Latin
America and Asia since the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 has transformed the United
States. As a result of this mass immigration, white people are
projected to become a minority in the United States in 2042. No
other country has undergone such a rapid demographic transformation in such a
short period of time.
Many racial nationalists want a piece of the United States for
themselves. Some Mexican nationalists want the Southwest to become a
part of Mexico again or to become an independent country called
Aztlán. Some black nationalists want the Deep South to become an
independent all-black country, believing that black Americans have a different
identity from other Americans because they were enslaved and therefore deserve
their own country. Some white nationalists, especially in the
Alt-Right movement, want one part of the United States to become an
"ethnostate" where only white people live, the most common proposal being
the Pacific Northwest.
Some might argue that the number of people in the United States
who want to see the country break up are small in number, and therefore it is
unlikely to happen. This is true, but the number of things that
unite us as a country are becoming fewer, and the number of things that divide
us as a country are growing. This trend shows no signs of stopping
or slowing down.
A country without a common sense of nationhood won't
last. If the United States were racially diverse but politically
united, it could survive. If the United States were politically
divided but racially homogeneous, it could survive. But if the
United States is both racially diverse and politically divided, it will not
survive.
If this country does break apart, will it happen peacefully as in
Czechoslovakia, or violently as in Yugoslavia? Time will tell, but
if our Civil War is any indication, unfortunately, it will likely be more like
Yugoslavia. Let us hope this is not the case.