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I also speak Serbo-Croatian and travelled the Balkans extensively. I think to call it just a subculture is a bit harsh. There's definitely a significant chunk o

I also speak Serbo-Croatian and travelled the Balkans extensively. I think to call it just a subculture is a bit harsh. There's definitely a significant chunk of the population that does miss Yugoslavia and bratstvo i jedinstvo. In my experience, the sentiment is actually strongest in Bosnia, which makes sense, as it is the most mixed of the successor states and also the one that suffered the most from petty nationalism. Personally, I also think that Yugoslavia was a good idea that was killed by right wing gangsters. We're all much more similar than we're different and we should focus on that instead of on what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. If Munich and Berlin can be in the same country, why can't Zagreb and Belgrade? We speak the same language (even tho some don't want to admit it - I usually use "po našu" when referring to the language, meaning "in our language", thus avoiding the nationalist names and pettiness), eat mostly the same foods, have similar mentalities etc. I agree with you on the ethnic Albanians though - they never made sense in Yugoslavia, the state of the South Slavs. Kosovo should be part of Albania and the Serbs need to shut up about it already.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Interesting that your experience says Bosnia is the most yugonostalgic. The most batshit crazy Greater Serbia talk I hear, even to the point where Yugoslavia is viewed as an anti-Serb mistake, is always among older men in villages in the Republika Srpska. They outdo their peers over in Serbia, and they might even be ahead of their coethnics in northern Kosovo. In the Federation, Muslims often express happiness at being independent, they just wish their independent state didn’t have such a dysfunctional system. I have seldom interacted with Croatians in the Federation, though. My own experience has found that ethnic Macedonians are the most yugonostalgic, which might be understandable since 1) they had linguistic autonomy outside the acrimonious quarrel over "Serbo-Croatian", and 2) they avoided the wars. But all this is anecdotal and I can see how others might have very divergent experiences.
- emptyfile 3y ago
  [dead]
- malermeister 3y ago
  I definitely meant the Federation and not Srpska. I haven't dared to show up in Srpska, as I also understand it to be a hotbed of nationalist extremism. I encountered a lot of Yugonostalgia especially amongst the more secular muslims of Bosnia. Hell, I went to a museum that had a photo op for "Your picture with comrade Tito"! https://imgur.com/a/7cMCgjH https://imgur.com/a/7cMCgjH
  - medo-bear 3y ago
    > I definitely meant the Federation and not Srpska. I haven't dared to show up in Srpska, as I also understand it to be a hotbed of nationalist extremism. Relax nothing will happen to you.
- asta123 3y ago
  "Yugoslavia is viewed as anti-Serb mistake" It is fascinating that nationalist Serbs and nationalist Croats think that Yugoslavia was a mistake and benefited the other side?? Someone must be wrong I guess.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Well, neither could win over the other side while the pesky Yugoslavia kept them from each other's throats. So they are both right, in a sad way.
  - malermeister 3y ago
    Both are wrong, or right, depending on your viewpoint. Yugoslavia forced equality, when they wanted supremacy.
- wheelerof4te 3y ago
  "In the Federation, Muslims often express happiness at being independent, they just wish their independent state didn’t have such a dysfunctional system" Muslims want their own Greater Bosnia, and Republika Srpska to be only a bad memory. Hence, the patriotism of Serbs in Bosnia is naturally stronger, to counter a threat to the existance of their "entity".
  - jakupovic 3y ago
    >>Bosnians (Muslims) want their own Greater Bosnia, and Republika Srpska to be only a bad memory. This is true that Ethnic Bosnians want their own state. Also, it's racist to call Bosnians Muslims instead of Bosnians. Please correct yourself.
sokols 3y ago
> I agree with you on the ethnic Albanians though - they never made sense in Yugoslavia, the state of the South Slavs. Kosovo should be part of Albania and the Serbs need to shut up about it already. That was the intention of the people gathered around Bujan Conference [0] during WWII. But their decision was replaced with another one later which was more "marxist". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bujan_Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bujan_Conference
- pacija 3y ago
  There are so many places all over Europe where majority of population is not of same ethnicity as the rest of the country. Italians in Istria, Croatia. Basque people in Navarra, Spain. Hungarians in southern Slovakia or Vojvodina, northern Serbia. In all of the places I've mentioned and been to, there's a great level of autonomy for those ethnical minorities. Bilingual street signs, schools in native languages, churches etc. This is what Kosovo had in Yugoslavia, and this is what Kosovo should have in Serbia, for ethnic Albanians.
Keyframe 3y ago
apropos language, yes they are definitely mutually intelligible.. but there are some grammatical and definitely a lot of lexicographical differences to consider them to an extent separate. This is quite evident by if you watch younger generations trying to understand the other language, since they weren't exposed to it all as we older generations did. Even I have to look up a lot of words when I'm exposed to foreign media.
- malermeister 3y ago
  I also speak German and I can promise you that the differences of German even within countries (Southern vs Northern Germany, Eastern vs Western Austria), are much more significant than the differences between various forms of Serbo-Croatian. Sure, there's different dialects. But most languages that are old enough have those.
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    It depends, I also speak German so I know what you're saying. It's a spectrum where narrower band is between Croatia and Serbia and Bosnia (although lexicopgrahical difference is quite there!) and a wider band between let's say Slovenia and Macedonia. Not talking about dialect, just grammar and especially lexicon - since dialects within ye olde republics is also quite something (zagorski, dalmatinski, šumandinski..). Good thing you've mentioned german though, since they have Hochdeutsch. We had it as well "srpsko-hrvatski ili hrvatsko-srpski" (actual full name not to offend anyone lol), but that died after Yugoslavia and ever since divergence grew even moreso.
    - malermeister 3y ago
      I think the most correct way to put it is that srpsohrvatski or whatever you want to call it is a pluricentric language with a few mutually intelligible standards the same way German is. Austrian High German is different from German High German is different from Swiss High German. For example, Austrians refer to bread rolls as "Semmeln", while Germans call them "Brötchen". Austrians tend to avoid the Preterite in spoken language, while Germans use it pretty frequently etc etc. "Ich holte mir eine Tüte Brötchen" vs "Ich habe mir ein Sackerl Semmeln geholt", for a practical example. And yet we consider it the same language.
vasac 3y ago
> There's definitely a significant chunk of the population that does miss Yugoslavia and bratstvo i jedinstvo. In my experience, the sentiment is actually strongest in Bosnia, which makes sense, as it is the most mixed of the successor states and also the one that suffered the most from petty nationalism. I'm from Bosnia, and while there are people who pay lip service to the idea that they miss Yugoslavia, in 95% of cases, these same people didn't vote for political parties that wanted to preserve Yugoslavia. Instead, they voted for nationalistic parties. Now that they've been disappointed by those nationalistic dreams (as it turns out, politicians/criminals don't actually care who they are robbing), they say they miss Yugoslavia. However, they still vote for the same political parties that advocated for independence. > I agree with you on the ethnic Albanians though - they never made sense in Yugoslavia, the state of the South Slavs. Kosovo should be part of Albania and the Serbs need to shut up about it already. Kosovo was part of Serbia before Yugoslavia came into existence, and it will be again. Last time, it took us a few hundred years to return; this time, it will happen much faster.
- jakupovic 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - vasac 3y ago
    I would be happy if you could settle on one version of history and maintain it for at least a century. It seems that historical narratives keep changing with each era. One version was disseminated during the Ottoman occupation, another under Austrian rule, then another during the First and Second Yugoslavia, and now, it appears we have a new version after the war. I hope this is the final one. Have you figured out whether you are Bosniaks or Bosnians? Are Serbs in Bosnia just Serbs, or has the Serbian Orthodox Church classified them differently? By the way, regarding Bosnian kings, here's[0] the first Bosnian king, Stephen Tvrtko I, who claimed to be the heir of Serbia's Nemanjić dynasty. According to the same Wikipedia article: > In early 1377, Tvrtko successfully plotted with the Travunians to take over Trebinje, Konavli, and Dračevica, marking his final conquests of the Serbian lands. So, it appears that Serbs lived in that area long before Bosnia had its first king (and we're still living there - I'm from Trebinje). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tvrtko_I_of_Bosnia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tvrtko_I_of_Bosnia
actionfromafar 3y ago
From what I have heard a Kosovo-Albania union has a sort of cheery superficial support among Albanians, completely unbacked by any serious desire or ambition, on either side. How would power be shared in such a constellation? It's not self-evident.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Especially in southern Albania, where the population is Orthodox Christian, and in a country where any religious observance significantly faded under socialism, there’s some wariness about political union because Kosovars are viewed as extreme Muslims. (Both Serbs and Republic-of-Albanians tend to be oblivious to the Roman Catholic Kosovar Albanians about Gjakovë, though granted they are a tiny minority.) I have repeatedly heard people in Korçë or Pogradec give the standard Albanian platitude that all Albanians everywhere are brothers, only for them to disparage Kosovars in nearly the same breath.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    This matches what I have heard too. And I just remembered, Kosovar tourists in Albania are wary of violent crime, like muggings under gun threat. They see Albania as less safe than Kosovo in general.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      I would be surprised if those fears among Kosovars were still common now years after the motorway was built and throngs of Kosovars come to Albania every summer and see it firsthand. Certainly I personally have never heard such concerns in the last decade.
allendoerfer 3y ago
> If Munich and Berlin can be in the same country, why can't Zagreb and Belgrade? Munich is more similar to Vienna than it is to Berlin. And yet Munich and Vienna should definitely not be in the same country, because people who argue like this, also tend to argue that Kaliningrad under its former name was pretty similar to Berlin after all.
medo-bear 3y ago
> I agree with you on the ethnic Albanians though - they never made sense in Yugoslavia, the state of the South Slavs. Kosovo should be part of Albania and the Serbs need to shut up about it already. Many countries have an ethnic component as part of their official country name, eg. France and Germany. Yugoslavia recognised nationalities as constituent. Five nationalies were seen as constituent: Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Slovenians, and Macedonians. However citizenship was not restricted to these. Bosnia and Herzegovina inherrited this system of constituent nationalities as part of the Dayton Peace Agreement, and as a qonsequence has one of the most wild government structures in the world

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

Interesting that your experience says Bosnia is the most yugonostalgic. The most batshit crazy Greater Serbia talk I hear, even to the point where Yugoslavia is viewed as an anti-Serb mistake, is always among older men in villages in the Republika Srpska. They outdo their peers over in Serbia, and they might even be ahead of their coethnics in northern Kosovo. In the Federation, Muslims often express happiness at being independent, they just wish their independent state didn’t have such a dysfunctional system. I have seldom interacted with Croatians in the Federation, though. My own experience has found that ethnic Macedonians are the most yugonostalgic, which might be understandable since 1) they had linguistic autonomy outside the acrimonious quarrel over "Serbo-Croatian", and 2) they avoided the wars. But all this is anecdotal and I can see how others might have very divergent experiences.

emptyfile 3y ago
[dead]
malermeister 3y ago
I definitely meant the Federation and not Srpska. I haven't dared to show up in Srpska, as I also understand it to be a hotbed of nationalist extremism. I encountered a lot of Yugonostalgia especially amongst the more secular muslims of Bosnia. Hell, I went to a museum that had a photo op for "Your picture with comrade Tito"! https://imgur.com/a/7cMCgjH https://imgur.com/a/7cMCgjH
- medo-bear 3y ago
  > I definitely meant the Federation and not Srpska. I haven't dared to show up in Srpska, as I also understand it to be a hotbed of nationalist extremism. Relax nothing will happen to you.
asta123 3y ago
"Yugoslavia is viewed as anti-Serb mistake" It is fascinating that nationalist Serbs and nationalist Croats think that Yugoslavia was a mistake and benefited the other side?? Someone must be wrong I guess.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Well, neither could win over the other side while the pesky Yugoslavia kept them from each other's throats. So they are both right, in a sad way.
- malermeister 3y ago
  Both are wrong, or right, depending on your viewpoint. Yugoslavia forced equality, when they wanted supremacy.
wheelerof4te 3y ago
"In the Federation, Muslims often express happiness at being independent, they just wish their independent state didn’t have such a dysfunctional system" Muslims want their own Greater Bosnia, and Republika Srpska to be only a bad memory. Hence, the patriotism of Serbs in Bosnia is naturally stronger, to counter a threat to the existance of their "entity".
- jakupovic 3y ago
  >>Bosnians (Muslims) want their own Greater Bosnia, and Republika Srpska to be only a bad memory. This is true that Ethnic Bosnians want their own state. Also, it's racist to call Bosnians Muslims instead of Bosnians. Please correct yourself.

sokols 3y ago

> I agree with you on the ethnic Albanians though - they never made sense in Yugoslavia, the state of the South Slavs. Kosovo should be part of Albania and the Serbs need to shut up about it already. That was the intention of the people gathered around Bujan Conference [0] during WWII. But their decision was replaced with another one later which was more "marxist". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bujan_Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bujan_Conference

pacija 3y ago
There are so many places all over Europe where majority of population is not of same ethnicity as the rest of the country. Italians in Istria, Croatia. Basque people in Navarra, Spain. Hungarians in southern Slovakia or Vojvodina, northern Serbia. In all of the places I've mentioned and been to, there's a great level of autonomy for those ethnical minorities. Bilingual street signs, schools in native languages, churches etc. This is what Kosovo had in Yugoslavia, and this is what Kosovo should have in Serbia, for ethnic Albanians.

Keyframe 3y ago

apropos language, yes they are definitely mutually intelligible.. but there are some grammatical and definitely a lot of lexicographical differences to consider them to an extent separate. This is quite evident by if you watch younger generations trying to understand the other language, since they weren't exposed to it all as we older generations did. Even I have to look up a lot of words when I'm exposed to foreign media.

malermeister 3y ago
I also speak German and I can promise you that the differences of German even within countries (Southern vs Northern Germany, Eastern vs Western Austria), are much more significant than the differences between various forms of Serbo-Croatian. Sure, there's different dialects. But most languages that are old enough have those.
- Keyframe 3y ago
  It depends, I also speak German so I know what you're saying. It's a spectrum where narrower band is between Croatia and Serbia and Bosnia (although lexicopgrahical difference is quite there!) and a wider band between let's say Slovenia and Macedonia. Not talking about dialect, just grammar and especially lexicon - since dialects within ye olde republics is also quite something (zagorski, dalmatinski, šumandinski..). Good thing you've mentioned german though, since they have Hochdeutsch. We had it as well "srpsko-hrvatski ili hrvatsko-srpski" (actual full name not to offend anyone lol), but that died after Yugoslavia and ever since divergence grew even moreso.
  - malermeister 3y ago
    I think the most correct way to put it is that srpsohrvatski or whatever you want to call it is a pluricentric language with a few mutually intelligible standards the same way German is. Austrian High German is different from German High German is different from Swiss High German. For example, Austrians refer to bread rolls as "Semmeln", while Germans call them "Brötchen". Austrians tend to avoid the Preterite in spoken language, while Germans use it pretty frequently etc etc. "Ich holte mir eine Tüte Brötchen" vs "Ich habe mir ein Sackerl Semmeln geholt", for a practical example. And yet we consider it the same language.

vasac 3y ago

> There's definitely a significant chunk of the population that does miss Yugoslavia and bratstvo i jedinstvo. In my experience, the sentiment is actually strongest in Bosnia, which makes sense, as it is the most mixed of the successor states and also the one that suffered the most from petty nationalism. I'm from Bosnia, and while there are people who pay lip service to the idea that they miss Yugoslavia, in 95% of cases, these same people didn't vote for political parties that wanted to preserve Yugoslavia. Instead, they voted for nationalistic parties. Now that they've been disappointed by those nationalistic dreams (as it turns out, politicians/criminals don't actually care who they are robbing), they say they miss Yugoslavia. However, they still vote for the same political parties that advocated for independence. > I agree with you on the ethnic Albanians though - they never made sense in Yugoslavia, the state of the South Slavs. Kosovo should be part of Albania and the Serbs need to shut up about it already. Kosovo was part of Serbia before Yugoslavia came into existence, and it will be again. Last time, it took us a few hundred years to return; this time, it will happen much faster.

jakupovic 3y ago
[flagged]
- vasac 3y ago
  I would be happy if you could settle on one version of history and maintain it for at least a century. It seems that historical narratives keep changing with each era. One version was disseminated during the Ottoman occupation, another under Austrian rule, then another during the First and Second Yugoslavia, and now, it appears we have a new version after the war. I hope this is the final one. Have you figured out whether you are Bosniaks or Bosnians? Are Serbs in Bosnia just Serbs, or has the Serbian Orthodox Church classified them differently? By the way, regarding Bosnian kings, here's[0] the first Bosnian king, Stephen Tvrtko I, who claimed to be the heir of Serbia's Nemanjić dynasty. According to the same Wikipedia article: > In early 1377, Tvrtko successfully plotted with the Travunians to take over Trebinje, Konavli, and Dračevica, marking his final conquests of the Serbian lands. So, it appears that Serbs lived in that area long before Bosnia had its first king (and we're still living there - I'm from Trebinje). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tvrtko_I_of_Bosnia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tvrtko_I_of_Bosnia

actionfromafar 3y ago

From what I have heard a Kosovo-Albania union has a sort of cheery superficial support among Albanians, completely unbacked by any serious desire or ambition, on either side. How would power be shared in such a constellation? It's not self-evident.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Especially in southern Albania, where the population is Orthodox Christian, and in a country where any religious observance significantly faded under socialism, there’s some wariness about political union because Kosovars are viewed as extreme Muslims. (Both Serbs and Republic-of-Albanians tend to be oblivious to the Roman Catholic Kosovar Albanians about Gjakovë, though granted they are a tiny minority.) I have repeatedly heard people in Korçë or Pogradec give the standard Albanian platitude that all Albanians everywhere are brothers, only for them to disparage Kosovars in nearly the same breath.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  This matches what I have heard too. And I just remembered, Kosovar tourists in Albania are wary of violent crime, like muggings under gun threat. They see Albania as less safe than Kosovo in general.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    I would be surprised if those fears among Kosovars were still common now years after the motorway was built and throngs of Kosovars come to Albania every summer and see it firsthand. Certainly I personally have never heard such concerns in the last decade.

allendoerfer 3y ago

> If Munich and Berlin can be in the same country, why can't Zagreb and Belgrade? Munich is more similar to Vienna than it is to Berlin. And yet Munich and Vienna should definitely not be in the same country, because people who argue like this, also tend to argue that Kaliningrad under its former name was pretty similar to Berlin after all.

medo-bear 3y ago

> I agree with you on the ethnic Albanians though - they never made sense in Yugoslavia, the state of the South Slavs. Kosovo should be part of Albania and the Serbs need to shut up about it already. Many countries have an ethnic component as part of their official country name, eg. France and Germany. Yugoslavia recognised nationalities as constituent. Five nationalies were seen as constituent: Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Slovenians, and Macedonians. However citizenship was not restricted to these. Bosnia and Herzegovina inherrited this system of constituent nationalities as part of the Dayton Peace Agreement, and as a qonsequence has one of the most wild government structures in the world