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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Technically you are right, but most of Europe sees that as the des-integration of Yugoslavia, which would make it a civil war rather than a war between nation states. And I think you meant to write Serbia instead of Yugoslavia.

The other countries getting involved was to stop worse from happening.

From what I know about that war it was basically something that was bound to happen the moment Tito kicked the bucket. He was - like Saddam Hussain in many ways - the person that kept the spring-loaded component parts in an iron grip which some mistook for stability. Once the counter force was gone the various parts flew apart and started a war to try to gain the upper hand.

In Yugoslavia you could say that there never really was stability, only a temporary lack of opportunity to continue the fight.

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Very true, except for the statement that other countries' involvement stopped worse from happening - the Yugoslav arms industry was nonexistent, and while they most definitely would have kept on killing one another with rocks, I think they would have been less efficient.

I agree with your larger point, though. The breakup of Yugoslavia was unfortunate - and inevitable - but it's kind of the exception that proves the rule. 1914, after all, was the last time a war was started in Yugoslavia, and it took down the rest of Europe and spread beyond the continent. This time, it was relatively self-contained, and the pieces of Yugoslavia are joining the Union, one by one. (After all, Yugoslavia was always a political fiction - Tito needed a platform big enough to fend off the Soviet Union, and by God if Slovenia didn't like it they could go suck an egg.)

Belgium may be next - and nobody's going to get killed over it. I just can't stress enough what incredible progress that really is.

> Very true, except for the statement that other countries' involvement stopped worse from happening

That's my impression from reading up on Srebrenica and a bunch of other places, it is very well possible that that is just an 'after the fact' impression, and since it happened the way it did we'll never know what would have happened had there been no intervention.

I know people on two sides in that story (Serbian and Croatian), and there is enough confusion even now that it's probably best they didn't meet. One thing this war did for me though was to open my eyes once and for all to the amount of propaganda in supposedly unbiased media.

Now that it has broken up though, it does seem more positive for most of the previous members. Slovenia in particular is flourishing, my father worked there for a couple of years as part of an EU consultancy program to help modernise their economy, and they're now (according to wikipedia) at a GDP pp of 91% of the EU average, equivalent to South Korea or New Zealand.

I don't mean to gloss over that the balkans war was a terrible tragedy and was dreadful, but in the end I think they're going to come out better than they were before.

Yeah, I just drove through Slovenia two months ago and was bowled over - my last time through had been in 1986; it's ... very, very different now.

It’s kind of astonishing, actually, that the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact went as peaceful as it did in Europe. No bloody revolutions, no wars. Not a shot fired in Eastern Germany, Poland or Russia (and so on). Except for, you guessed it, Yugoslavia and Romania.

I don’t think anyone would have expected that.

And in Romania (I'm in Bucharest at the moment, coincidentially) it was very limited compared to what Yugoslavia went through.

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