War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges

[Thumpalumpacus]

Regarding your original question about Yugoslavia's dissolution and subsequent wars, it's my understanding that at its base was a nexus of ethnic and religious tensions, as opposed to national identities.

I do think that upstart nations can gain a sense of national identity through warfighting. I don't know enough about the current conditions in the Balkans to say that that is the case there, though.

Really what I'm wondering is what it has to do with the Balkans being a post communist society.  As I said, the author makes a substantial thread of the conflict in his book, and never mentions the classless society.  I guess this has something to do with the fact that the classless society was effectively a failure.  I wondered while I was reading it if the racial and religious conflict was somehow connected to an attempt to re-establish some kind of structure to the society in that part of the world, in the wake of said failure of communism.

I don't doubt that. Nations are like any other grouping of people in that they need an organizing precept, I think. The nations and leaders which arose from the dissolution of Yugoslavia had to have an anchor for the cohesive sensibilities of people. People want to belong to something, usually, and nations have a vested interested in garnering buy-in from subject populations: the failure to attain that buy-in is often fatal to polyglomerate countries (see Iraq and Syria, as well as Yugoslavia, once the cementing authority was destroyed, weakened, or died, respectively.)

Tito's death removed the obstacle to latent religious and ethnic tensions, and after a decade or so of nervous tension, the country flew apart. I don't know much about the social systems in place there, so I'm afraid I can't help you much with an analysis of socialism's failure to garner buy-in. But I do take note that with few exceptions, socialist/communist countries historically have eventually run into a wall which limits public support, either because a charismatic leader is taken offstage, a security-state apparatus takes on too much power, or standard-of-living issues arise. It seems to me that the first issue was certainly in play with Tito's death. I'm not terribly informed about the facts on the other two possibilities vis Yugoslavia, so I leave this post where it is and hope that I've contributed something to the discussion.