Yugoslavia's Digital Twin – When a country's internet domain outlives the nation
thedial.world
thedial.world
...
> With the deletion of .yu, historians and researchers lost access to websites that contained important historical records. Gone are firsthand accounts of the NATO bombing and the Kosovo War; the mailing lists that scientists used to update their colleagues on the progress of the conflict; nostalgic forums and playful virtual nation experiments.
Don't worry, these sites probably moved to some other location - after all a website only exists while the owner has a stake in it (and is paying for that dns record + hosting/traffic)
So much more would already be lost without the Wayback Machine.
It's what happens when a place that was supposed to be free and decentralized has become the exact opposite [0]
[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
This is where you lost me. Wayback machine is a centralized repository.
A decentralized system would not have prevented data loss any better without burdening peers with shit they rightfully don't want to host. Nobody wants the cost of hosting anything but their own, and only their own, content.
The only way you're getting anyone to host things from the past is for there to be an incentive. The only incentive possible is a centralized repository.
One of those destroyed net neutrality and most online free speech, the other is a charity trying to be the last memorial of it.
> The only way you're getting anyone to host things from the past is for there to be an incentive. The only incentive possible is a centralized repository.
What about the incentive of keeping a somewhat thrustworthy and complete digital historical record? Is that worth nothing outside of its sheer monetization potential?
Try doing that outside of the FAANG dominance and you have some work cut out for you because they've spent the last decades either buying up any prospective "competition" or straight up marginalizing it into irrelevance.
Which is, to state it again, the antithesis to what the web was supposed to be, it started as a scientific venture [0], it inspired a whole new way of looking at the world and our minds in it [1].
Profit incentives came only later, they were not inherint to this space, they invaded it and took it over.
Yes, I'm romanitizing a lot of idealism here, but I think it's important to remember that era and mindset of the early web.
It's important to remind people that the current web was neither the goal nor has it still much to do with the web of the old, a place of counter-culture, not of corporate mainstream pushing overwhelming government messages while keeping more tabs on you than even the Stasi could ever dream about.
If not satire: especially in the early internet, sites were university hosted. It was not uncommon for a site to live at, for instance, http://galadriel.mathdept.universityname.tld
The web server could either be a forgotten SUN pizzabox in a closet somewhere, or the new-fangled http 1.1 thing where you could have several domains on the same server! Crazy, I know!
It was not uncommon for these early relics to just chug along unatteneded for years after anyone even know what they were for, and no one cared much either.
If a DNS record disappeared, the server may still have been running for years, but effectively nobody would have known how to access it.
If satire: perfect score.
Often it's easier to just migrate that directory to the new web server if there's nothing insecure in there, lest you generate a call from some faculty member to the Chair's office that ends up landing in your inbox
Ah, that explains it.
When I try to explain what actually happened during that war to younger generations, I find it hard to impossible to find backing documentation to prove my point. As paranoid as I am, I usually attribute this to "history rewriting", and although that is probably part of it, i didn't realise a lot of information was actually lost.
Then NATO came with the idea of bombing but they were afraid to fly too low so apart from bombing the military they also bombed civilians. Many people in Serbia remember this and Putin loves to remind everybody of that. When you dig into it you only discover ugly things.
Too many times I found that an event that was in the news few years ago and suddenly is relevant today has been scrubbed.
(For instance a certain doctor hosting a conference sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, then few years later same doctor, now promoted, blocks prescriptions of certain drug that would otherwise cause said pharmaceutical to lose money, at the expense of patients - no longer can find evidence of the event online).
Honestly seems a bit intentionally nuclear.
Instead, they have to keep the temporarily assigned .xk which the UN confirmed can never be a permanent ccTLD.
What is going to happen to all .xk sites once the UN finally gets around to publishing the bulletin on Kosovo's country code?
Jon Postel, RFC 1591 (Domain Name System Structure and Delegation)
If they wanted to deal with this case, they had the .su domain of the Soviet Union, which still exists.
While the article is wrong about the amount of time, it is correct that .yu outlived Yugoslavia by several years; the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was replaced in 2003 with the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, which itself was dissolved in 2006; the .yu domain was eliminated in 2010.
> If they wanted to deal with this case, they had the .su domain of the Soviet Union, which still exists.
The situation with the .su domain is discussed at length in the article and its continued existence and use is contrasted with the treatment of .yu.
A country that claimed that name existed. It wasn't widely recognised as being the successor state of the country of that name and was not considered entitled to its domain name.
Just because you claim your country has a certain name doesn't mean it does, if the rest of the international community doesn't recognise it.
> There's a country called Yugoslavia consisting of parts of another previous Yugoslavia, and they're supposed to cancel the .yu domain and issue it a new domain called .foo?
If the country calling itself Yugoslavia was recognised as the sucessor state of the prior country called Yugoslavia, then it would inherit the .yu domain. If that succession is not recognised, then it doesn't get to keep that domain and needs a new one (and even if the name is similar or the same, since it's a different country it can't have the domain which belonged to the old country). Seems reasonable to me.
"The following 32 teams, shown with final pre-tournament rankings,[11] qualified for the final tournament."
" ... Romania (22) Scotland (41) Spain (15) FR Yugoslavia (8) "
So obviously "international community" is a very vague term. If we were talking about anything material, like who owns an embassy building in e.g. London I'd see your point, but insisting that Yugoslavia not use a .yu domain because it was assigned to another Yugoslavia that received the name three years before it dissolved sounds like not solving problems but having an axe to grind.
Even on that very line you've got another entity that's not an ISO country and does not have its own ccTLD, so clearly having a FIFA World Cup team is not quite the same thing as being a sovereign state.
> So obviously "international community" is a very vague term.
International recognition for a country is a spectrum rather than a binary, sure.
> If we were talking about anything material, like who owns an embassy building in e.g. London I'd see your point, but insisting that Yugoslavia not use a .yu domain because it was assigned to another Yugoslavia that received the name three years before it dissolved sounds like not solving problems but having an axe to grind.
A top-level domain is valuable and culturally important in the same way as an embassy building. If you want to argue that states that refused to recognise "FR Yugoslavia" as the successor state of Yugoslavia and allow it to hold the UN seat, government property, etc. were petty and vindictive - well, maybe they were, politics is often petty and vindictive (although I would note that what was finally agreed in 2004 was that Yugoslavia had divided into five equal successors, none of which had a special claim on its embassy buildings, domain names or anything else).
Deferring to the politically recognised succession seems like the best way to insulate administration of the Internet from dealing with those disputes directly. Maintaining a separate/parallel system for listing countries and their names/abbreviations, as FIFA does, does not seem like it would be a productive use of the internet community's resources, nor would it be likely to make the disputes that would inevitably arise any less petty or vindictive.
A top-level domain might be of cultural importance, but it's a big stretch this was the case for Yugoslavia in 1992 when the internet barely existed and the .yu domain existed for three years (according to the article). So in reality it's a nothing burger, unless you have an axe to grind.
Given that it was embroiled in a dispute over the succession of Yugoslavia for the entire time that it was calling itself "FR Yugoslavia", and that dispute was resolved shortly after the country changed its name, no, it's not at all obvious that it was accepted.
> The question of it being a succession state is not really relevant for the name.
The question of it being a successor state is what's relevant for the domain name though. Just because you have the same name as a previous state doesn't mean you're entitled to that previous state's domain name, just like with the UN seat.
> it's a big stretch this was the case for Yugoslavia in 1992 when the internet barely existed and the .yu domain existed for three years (according to the article).
Who inherits the petty cash tin in the embassy in London is obviously a much smaller question than who inherits the building. But it still all has to be negotiated.
> So in reality it's a nothing burger, unless you have an axe to grind.
That goes both ways though - if "FR Yugoslavia"'s position is that it's a nothingburger then they can't complain about having to switch to a different domain name - and if they wanted to keep using the domain name they had been and it would be a pain to migrate, well, so did the people in Ljubljana. Ideally they would've come to a negotiated agreement to either continue to share the domain, or make a smooth transition - but like with anything else, if you can't reach an agreement on how to split it then you don't get to just take it.
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?
According to the article they kept running the domain and using it for email for two years until Postel transferred it to Belgrade. (The article phrases it as though that email use was less important or less serious than the unspecified "work" that the group in Belgrade wanted to use it for, but that smells like a slanted narrative to me)
http://www.london.mfa.gov.rs/ambassador.php
So it is rationale/fair for the states to inherit what they originally had paid for.
Speaking of inheritance, did the newly created states of Croatia and Slovenia in 1918 inherit their share of Austro-Hungarian debt when they left that union, or did they enter a union with Serbia debt free?
Much like in a divorce, if it's something that has clearly stayed separate the whole time then perhaps, but if it's something the combined state has shared and maintained then probably not.
And see the (North) Macedonia drama for a clear example of a country's name being controversial.
ISO 3166 is just a base proposition, the.uk (United Kingdom) is a bad example because the ISO 3166 code is GB (Great Britain).
A good watch to understand the above
As an example - the [International vehicle registration code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_vehicle_registra...) recently changed from GB to UK.
Just keep any tld forever.
So what about .tw?
Delayed it for months. Still felt incredibly bad when I finally did do it.
Google nowadays can't even find links from 10 years ago, let alone not show me stupid ads that have nothing to do with the search terms. The social internet ruined accreditability and transparency of where the information comes from.
We need to fix this. Otherwise the people in power will be the people that control misinformation (which, globally speaking, is AIMS, Team Jorge, and Russia right now).
A lot of people going abroad in the 1990s, or as gastarbeiter before that, were coming from Bosnia, the Sanjak, or Kosovo and they understandably are loath to identify with a state they saw as dominated by the Serbs, who committed atrocities against them. For Albanian speakers, Yugoslavia was a Slav-dominated project in general. As for Croatia, significant opposition to Yugoslavia began already by the early 1970s and it only got worse after the 1991 war.
The languages spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro (this order is by population size) are one and the same language. It is a southern slavic language, which is what the term yugoslav means. That it is not used is solely due to political correctness. God forbid that slavs should think they are one and the same, instead of constantly being at war with one another
> For Albanian speakers, Yugoslavia was a Slav-dominated project
Albanians were actually a small minority in Yugolslavia as a whole. The country was 90+% slavic. On the other hand Albanians, as an ethnic group, had unprecedented political autonomy (Kosovo) and language rights in Yugoslavia. Im certain they had more freedom and a better life than in Enver Hoxha's Albania. Also if it was not for socialist Yugoslavia, Kosovo would have just been, and hence remained, a region in a centrally governed Serbia.
As regards opposotion to Yugoslavia, it is actually more correct to say that Yugoslavia was opposed by nationalists of all ethnic groups it contained, including the Serbs, Croats, Muslims (as Bosniaks called themselves during those times and some period after), Slovenians, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, and of course Albanians. Even though people mainly know about Greater Serbia, each of these groups wanted (wants?) a Greater <insert your nat. here>, including the Albanians
It lasted for merely 15 years, from 1974 till 1989 when Milosevic and his clique brutally removed it. This autonomy was always a thorn in the eye of the serbian establishment and they never stopped their efforts to undermine it, which they succeeded in 1989.
Please, try to promote Texas independance from USA and see how that goes.
Kosovo War happened later, not during the above mentioned period.
Then, West became involved and Clinton wanted something to distract from his little raping scandal at home. So, they decided to bomb a country fighting foreign-backed terrorists on its soil.
(greetings from Quebec, which rebelled a few times, and isn't immune to populist politicians, but nonetheless somewhat stable. I think investing into education also helps a lot, which is the opposite of what Texas is doing)
>In Quebec, 25.5% of people aged 25 to 64 had a bachelor's degree or higher in 2016
> In 2012, 26% (4.1M out of 15.8M) of adult Texans had a bachelor's degree or higher; in 2021, that percentage increased to 32% (5.9M out of 18.6M)
(As an aside, even a Texas Governor would probably not have said something close to the famous statement Parizeau made regarding "le vote ethnique" after the 1995 referendum ;). But as long as you are Quebecois, I guess the government is doing fine here I agree )
I also think education can help people understand topics such as majority/minority rights, rights/history of first nations, systemic racism, etc. many of which the current provincial government still denies (not immune to populist). Despite all that, and despite this province's completely train-wreck succession of governments since the 80s, what is taught now in schools is still better than in the 80s. That might be of an empirical feeling. My high school still had priests raping kids until the mid-90s and racism was rampant. I have a teen in a public high school, what they learn now is pretty neat. All thanks to teachers, of course, and not to governments.
Texas and other states are now burning books (and I hope we don't get to that point). One could have a PhD in CS, but be a tech-bro ignorantly erring towards fascism. I don't call that education. I think how a society treats its minorities (whether cultural or things like accessibility) is the best measure of advancement. Quebec is no model on that either, but it's probably better than Texas. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/14/texas-most-b...
> rights/history of first nations, systemic racism
Not everyone is guilty of robbing aboriginals of their land, raping them, enslaving them and trading them as though they are commodities. This is mainly an Anglo Saxon thing.
Right on, brother.
But, don't expect these Anglo-Saxons to understand, they are mostly good only at pillaging other, more peaceful nations. After they destroy your country and rob it blind for -insert reason-, they start telling you how good their democracy is.
These people don't realize that, if not for military might of NATO, people would eat them alive at every corner of the globe.
Ironically the Albanian government in Kosovo now is persuing the same Milosevic-type policies, except against Serbs, by not granting them autonomy [0]. When it comes to nationalists, especially those in the Balkans, it really is same sh*t different flag.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Serb_Municipali...
They have lots of soul searching as well.
It's interesting how roles in Kosovo reversed. Albanians being persecuted by Serbian authorities in the 80' and 90' and Albanians taking up arms and we have Serbs today taking up arms after being persecuted by Albanian authorities. Somehow though when Albanians are doing it it's allright ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Please don't add to the hate. People there don't need this.
And since you were talking about Kosovo, one thing you often hear from Hungarians in Vojvodina is that they don’t give a shit about “Kosovo je Srbija” and they hate being associated with a country that keeps banging on about it.
https://www.index.hr/vijesti/clanak/obitelj-mlade-albanke-bi...
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.
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.
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
Relax nothing will happen to you.
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.
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".
This is true that Ethnic Bosnians want their own state. Also, it's racist to call Bosnians Muslims instead of Bosnians. Please correct yourself.
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".
This is what Kosovo had in Yugoslavia, and this is what Kosovo should have in Serbia, for ethnic Albanians.
Sure, there's different dialects. But most languages that are old enough have those.
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.
Source: Am Bavarian, we're officially nearly a fourth of Germany and the Austrians talk like we do ;)
More seriously, I couldn't tell you if anything about tenses is written (and differently) in Austrian school books, or if it's just the dialect creeping up.
What I can tell you that your example sounds kinda made up, although of course I know it's proper German.
Also, the M in BCMS is Montenegrin, the latest made-up language, not Macedonian (which is separate). Seems like not even the defenders of linguistic seperatism can keep up with the insanity ;-)
The Torlak dialect of Serbian is so transitional to Bulgarian/Macedonian that it could fairly be called a dialect of the latter. Even outside that dialect, it's not at all unusual to see Macedonians and Serbs in general converse, each person speaking his own language.
Similarly, the Croatian dialect spoken in the northwest of Croatia (which has become increasingly fashionable after independence) is transitional to Slovenian and there is greater mutual intelligibility than with standard Croatian.
Maybe, but it adds no argument to the issue of the same lang vs different langs. There's no clear purely linguistical distinction between dialect and language. As an old joke goes a language is a dialect with an army. In other words when it has a separate political status, and governed by a separate body - it's a language, no matter how similar it is to other languages. The reason is that a literary/official language is defined by rules, and as rules are defined by separate entities, existing differences will be preserved, and new will emerge, and multiply eventually.
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.
How would power be shared in such a constellation? It's not self-evident.
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.
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
But implying that Serbs committed atrocities against other people during peaceful times is simply not true. Once civil war started, atrocities were committed by all sides, not just Serbs. I have lost family members in war and I have friends who as kids had to escape from Sarajevo in early days of war to save their they lives (while their only crime was being born as Serbs).
Unfortunately, today everything is presented in simple black/white, good vs bad guys way without ever scratching under the surface.
My post reported the perceptions that non-Serbs often have about Serbs, and how this can hinder yugonostalgia. This is a separate issue from who committed what, and your trying to bring up that debate is not helpful to this discussion.
I was driven by an Albanian taxi driver abroad, who loves ethnonationalist Albanian politician Albin Kurti, but at the same time believed that Yugoslavia was amazing and that he wished that it never split.
I can use many examples like that that can hinder your NATO flavoured narrative.
It goes both ways.
Ethnic cleansing occurred during the Bosnian War (1992–95) as large numbers of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Bosnian Croats were forced to flee their homes or were expelled by the Army of Republika Srpska and Serb paramilitaries.[6][7][8][9] Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs had also been forced to flee or were expelled by Bosnian Croat forces, though on a restricted scale and in lesser numbers. The UN Security Council Final Report (1994) states while Bosniaks also engaged in "grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law", they "have not engaged in "systematic ethnic cleansing"".[10] According to the report, "there is no factual basis for arguing that there is a 'moral equivalence' between the warring factions".[10]
As for concerns about Serb domination in Yugoslavia, it's important to consider that each political reform in Yugoslavia since the end of World War II had weakened the federal administration while strengthening the republic administrations. By the time the last constitution was established in 1974, each republic had its own president, government with various ministries, police, secret police, and some form of military forces (territorial defense). On the federal level, each of these institutions had become a mere shadow of what they were just 20 years earlier. To pass any decision at the federal level, a majority vote was required and Serbia had one vote just like everybody else (that will change once Milosevic got control over two autonomous provinces in Serbia but that happened only in 1989-1990).
In the case of Serbia proper, by 1974, two autonomous provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo, had gained so much autonomy that they had voting power on the federal level. These two regions of Serbia already possessed legislative autonomy, meaning they could pass laws for their own territories without consulting the rest of Serbia. Consequently, there was a central part of Serbia that found itself somewhat beholden to these two autonomous provinces.
Another aspect, often forgotten nowadays, is that after World War II, communism was the defining characteristic of the ruling class. They were Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, but above all, they were communists. Over time, this was gradually replaced by thinly veiled nationalism. It's not coincidental that many of the politicians who emerged as party leaders, and later as state leaders, after the collapse of communism were, at some point, members of the communist party.
This is true. Serbs did commit ethnic cleansing and atrocities across Bosnia and Croatia. Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_in_the_Bosnia....
Ethnic cleansing occurred during the Bosnian War (1992–95) as large numbers of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Bosnian Croats were forced to flee their homes or were expelled by the Army of Republika Srpska and Serb paramilitaries.[6][7][8][9] Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs had also been forced to flee or were expelled by Bosnian Croat forces, though on a restricted scale and in lesser numbers. The UN Security Council Final Report (1994) states while Bosniaks also engaged in "grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law", they "have not engaged in "systematic ethnic cleansing"".[10] According to the report, "there is no factual basis for arguing that there is a 'moral equivalence' between the warring factions".[10]
Interestingly, Croatian football hooligans still using this fact to insult Serbs in 2023.
Kosovo's Albanians committed war crimes against Serbs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_Liberation_Army#Massa...
Those are the facts, and I don't understand what's the point in denying it.
Serbs committed many bad acts against everyone involved and there is no moral equivalence.
No, not really. More like Italians from New York were never part of USA (they were). Albanians were a minority throughout ex-yu and always showed inclination towards the eagle state, never yu. But you already knew what I was talking about because you rightly said:
> Albanians were not a minority in Kosovo
which I guess is true (I don't know by heart stats) since it was always considered kind of alien culture to all of the others including Vojvodina; Never integrated, always closer to Albania. However this might be just my perspective from Croatia.
Please re-read my statement that you quoted. Italians from New York is completely different from Albanians from Albania. Albania is a country where the overwhelming majority is Albanian.
> Never integrated, always closer to Albania.
Whether the Albanian population in ex-Yu showed inclination towards Albania can be argued either way, but I don't see the Albanian population in Macedonia do the same thing (took up arms and fought at the risk of losing their lives for independence). Considering someone alien makes it much easier to segregate, ostracize, denigrate, punish and abuse them. Ask yourself whether the ex-Yu government would have been able to do the things they did to Kosovo if they have called them our brothers (or even called them citizens of Yugoslavia) or if they called them "those Kosovo aliens that don't want to integrate".
Given the American identity is much older than either of these 2 examples and there aren't even these underlying nations like in e. g. Yugoslavia, I'd expect this effect to be way stronger and persistent in America.
The first time my grandma was supposed to return after the civil war she returned with her yogoslavian passport. They actually had a situation at the border where the border guards had to tell my grandma "I'm sorry madam, but this country no longer exists" :D
Some states that cause residents to have conversations like this:
Me: "I'm American. Freedom flavored." (don't make assumptions, anyone from North or South America is American) You: "Cool, which state?" Me: "A united state!" You: "What in the actual fuck? They're all united. What specific state do you reside in and/or originate from? (Smartass...)" Me: "Look... If you sweat all the small shit you're gonna die from a heart attack in your 50s." You: "Holy shit... So... Florida?" Me: "Worse." You: "Ah... Question retracted."
Sentiments that will be reinforced during a civil war when these groups keep trading violence and atrocities with each other, that creates a lot of bad blood and tends to make people identify in ways that differentiate them from "the enemy".
Not even Americans are immune to that, it's an issue latent to this day whenever state rights vs federal government comes up.
I've also heard the rumor that this is why the US and UK speak differently, and that the US is actually how Britain used to sound, but I've also seen people say it's BS.
Hm, more like "some", probably "very few", definitely not "a lot."
In my experience these people are from very mixed families, for example: has a Muslim mum, Slovak dad who was a Yugoslav communist bureaucrat, born in Belgrade, married to a Slovenian army man, lives in Vienna and is 75 years old.
Everyone else finds one branch of their ethnic composition to identify with.
From a European perspective, American means from the continent America, and not specifically from the US. To me a Brazilian is as much American as a US citizen.
I don't think this is true for most of Europe.
For at least three different EU countries that I lived in, America and American is used exclusively for "the US" and "person from the US". "Person from Mexico" and "person from Brazil" would be Mexican and Brazilian, not American.
And geographically, the continents are North America and South America, so North Americans and South Americans is used too, in that context. But I don't think I've ever heard Americans to refer to both North and South Americans as a group of people.
I get the argument against it, but this is how the language is used.
In all seriousness, North America.
Ethnic cleansing occurred during the Bosnian War (1992–95) as large numbers of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Bosnian Croats were forced to flee their homes or were expelled by the Army of Republika Srpska and Serb paramilitaries.[6][7][8][9] Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs had also been forced to flee or were expelled by Bosnian Croat forces, though on a restricted scale and in lesser numbers. The UN Security Council Final Report (1994) states while Bosniaks also engaged in "grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law", they "have not engaged in "systematic ethnic cleansing"".[10] According to the report, "there is no factual basis for arguing that there is a 'moral equivalence' between the warring factions".[10]
One only has to look at an article in different languages, clearly authored by different sets of people. For example, if you look up "Kosovo", the English version states "Kosovo ... is a country in Southeast Europe with partial diplomatic recognition" whereas the one in Serbian states (which I will translate):
"Република Косово је званични назив једнострано проглашене државе на територији Републике Србије, противно Уставу Србије.[5] Према Резолуцији 1244 Савета безбедности УН цела територија Косова и Метохије, правно гледано, налази се у саставу Србије док не буде постигнуто коначно решење"
translated as:
"Kosovo is a formal name for a one-sidedly declared country on the territory of Republic of Serbia, to the objection of Serbia. According to the resolution 1244 from the Security Council of the UN, the entire territory of Kosovo and Metohija, in terms of the law, belongs to Serbia until a final resolution is reached."
Wikipedia is essentially a he-said/she-said website on politically charged matters, and I really wish people would stop treating it as the source of truth.
I don't need Wikipedia to tell me anything about Bosnian War, but people here need sources. You coming in and saying Wikipedia is not a reliable source without citing anything makes you uninformed at best.
So, technically Bosniaks, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenians are South Slavs, or literally Yugo-Slavs.
And yet, invariably when you meet an American in some other country, and ask him where is he from, he will answer "I'm from California/New York/Alabama/Ohio".
Back when I lived in Europe and had a lot of contact with international people, I used to pull the leg when that happened. If an American introduced himself like that, I will introduce myself in a similar way: "I am from Campeche" ... let HIM try to guess what that meant haha.
Other cancelled country TLDs
- .zr TLD for Zaire - https://www.iana.org/reports/2001/zr-report-20jun01.html
- .cs TLD for Czechoslovakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cs
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.an
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.um
Did i fail to mention anyone?
... Interesting that they don't have a wiki page for deleted ccTLDs.
*twitch*
The .co.ck TLD is for serious business purposes, like crane rental companies, producers of integrated circuits, cloud storage providers, or maybe a lobby group for the carbon-based pigment industry.