It's obvious the name was accepted because nobody had an issue with the name. You state yourself the issue was whether or not it was a successor or not, and thi

It's obvious the name was accepted because nobody had an issue with the name. You state yourself the issue was whether or not it was a successor or not, and this is likely mostly an issue of claiming property (I am guessing). Seems fairly logical to me that the country called Yugoslavia would use a .yu domain. Yugoslavia did not complain about having to switch to a different name - they just continued using it. From Wikipedia: ".yu was the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) that was assigned to SFR Yugoslavia in 1989 and was mainly used by Serbia and Montenegro and its two successor states. After Montenegro and Serbia acquired separate .me and .rs domains in 2007, a transition period started, and the .yu domain finally expired in 2010.[1]" You can make a case it's somehow really culturally important, but nobody will buy that as it was mostly irrelevant then, thus it's only relevant if you have an axe to grind. From my point of view, people in Ljubljana had every right to continue using the .yu domain if they wanted to, and they could've maybe made a deal to manage the domain together. But it seems to me this collides with the desire to be independent, so my assumption is they were kind of happy to switch to their own tld. Or maybe you know this is not the case?