The passport, as Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country, allowed its holders to travel very widely, not just to the West. That, combined with Yugoslavia’s brief e

The passport, as Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country, allowed its holders to travel very widely, not just to the West. That, combined with Yugoslavia’s brief economic prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s, is why Yugoslavs were one of the European nationalities embarking on the Istanbul–Kathmandu trail, and in discovering Bali as a mass-tourist destination alongside Germans and Nordics. That everything went to shit around the time that Tito declined and died (though correlation is not necessarily causation), does much to explain the nostalgia that you will still occasionally meet. However, that nostalgia has been challenged in recent decades through the wars and their aftermath. Serbian, Croatian, and Kosovar nationalism regard, for different reasons, Tito’s pan-Yugoslav project as inimical to their respective national interests, and nationalist rhetoric has a firm grip on many sectors of local media.