President Bush Welcomes Seven Nations to the NATO Alliance

Sorry for coming across too agressive there. I read the rest of your two posts, and you make a lot of very valuable, useful points - as you would, of course, being from Slovenia yourself. It was also very interesting to hear about your own experiences in '91 - one can just (or not, really) imagine.

You did a good job (I hope) of getting across the point about Yugoslavia being a federal state. Even if, under Tito in any case, all the different republics were under the ideological-political control of the one central party, the fact that the decentralised administrative structure meant each republic had its own institutions, its own governmental structures, manned mostly by people from its "own" ethnic group, obviously was very important. And in Tito's later years, from the sixties onwards, and especially after his death in the eighties, decentralisation continued ever further, with each republic's communist leadership starting ever more to make its own decisions and policy (thats how it fell apart, eventually, too). It made Yugoslavia's federal structure much more "real" than the merely nominally one of the Soviet Union.

I have one bone to pick still, though, and thats about how "All was good while Tito was alive". I understand that, in the light of the wars and economic misery of the nineties (even if Slovenia itself was spared most of that), the period of increasing prosperity, in what for a communist country was an increasingly liberal political climate, must have acquired a pleasant glow. But let's not forget that Tito started out as one of the most brutal dictators of Eastern Europe.

He deserves all the credit for building and leading a multiethnic partisan army that drove the fascists out - but after 1945, Tito's regime cracked down with some of the worst and most violent political persecution of Communist Eastern Europe at the time. (See Pavlowitch's Tito: Yugoslavias Great Dictator, for example.) It was only later that Yugoslavia acquired a name as by far the most liberal of communist countries. And if Tito's Communist Party had given alternative political identities or entities anything as much freedom as it gave the different ethnic-based state identities, the country might not have fallen apart quite so unambiguously and violently across ethnic lines.

Please don't laugh - i wont edit my previous post,
but John Wilkes argues _against_ us being Illyres. I confused the books - see there is still debate going on over this topic. I must ask the reference

(added a last line to the above ...)

thx for the reading tip, Relative!

hehheh - no, i wasnt laughing, i was smiling! <smiles>

thats cool, relative :wink:

nimh: perhaps you are right and Tito really was a dictator, though many will say not your typical dictator.

I am a poor reference in this matter, since my opinion is - and quite against my own will - influenced by the ideology of the regime long gone. I have been sufficiently brainwashed to always look on Yugoslavia and Tito as 'good old days'. I actually have all 16 volumes of Tito's collected works, in red leather (artificial) with golden letters, and haven't read a single book yet. The whole collection was given to me by my late grandfather, a communist figure, when I was 6 or 7 years old.

Whenever we discuss Yugoslavia with friends (Slovenians, Serbs, Croatians, Bosnians, Montenegros) that I came to know before or after Yugo-breakdown, friends that many of them fled to Slovenia, Czech republic, Austria, and all over the world to pursue their life as physicists, mathematicians, doctors, engineers, or otherwise positive members of our community, whenever we remember Yugoslavia we agree on one thing: as one of the singers of our generation puts it:
"Ako su to samo bile lazi, lazimo se bar jos malo" or in translation "If all that were only lies, let us lie for just a bit longer".

We had a wonderful youth, in a system that was remarkably safe and positive for all children of our generation. Now I know many Russian friends, and they didn't have such conditions, and I know some Romanian background and it's quite different.

Yugoslavia had political prisoners on Goli Otok 'Bare Island' : but which country didn't prosecute it's ideological enemies? Russians just killed them or expelled them to Siberia; the same happened in all dictatorships. Not here : we didn't fear the system and the few that were arrested and held in prison were mostly arrested back in 1940's or 1950's. The same as McCarthy's or anybody else's enemy.
Yugoslavia had a parliament; we had a so-called 'samouprava' or self-rule system, which meant a degree of independency on all scales of rule. We didn't have endless demagogic speeches so common in communist totalitarisms - we had american western instead. While we had a lot of partisan films, we also had comedy and social drama. Not many books or films were censored - not any more than in USA and certainly less than in USSR.
Tito enjoyed company of American film stars (Richard Burton et al), even the Queen of England.
For a Western author on this, see Richard West: Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia.


It was after 1986 that the system started to crumble visibly, but we had great opportunities even then as I was in high school, too. We could travel, we could go to foreign universities, we had vacations under the sun in Croatian islands, we went skiing in the winter. We were behind our Austrian neighbours, that's for sure, lacking shiny mercedes-benz cars, but our quality of life and freedom is grossly underestimated these days.

It is somewhat understandable; with all these wars behind us and our new contries and new economical systems we are tempted to 'leave behind the bad times'. But it isn't so easy. And I understand the desire to mark all Eastern Europe as 'ex-communist' and 'totalitarian' 'not to happen again' systems.

Life must go on, but a lot remains in the past, and if one cannot evaluate what was good and what was bad, who is he?

Then they would agree with my opinion. I'm glad they're independent. What is the official name Yugo is using in it's application to NATO?...Yugoslavia NR?

Ehem, there isn't a 'Yugoslavia' anymore (you are living in Yankee-land, btw?).


Slovenia just joined NATO.



In the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), there are 46 member countries: 20 NATO members plus 26 more. The latter include from former Yugoslavia: Croatia and (The former Yugoslav) Republic of Macedonia.
(The others are Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Kyrghyz Republic, Moldova, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Tadjikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.)

Tito (Josip Broz), in addition to his valiant leadership of Yugoslavian guerilla forces against the Nazis, is notable for exactly one other accomplishment -- his resistance to Stalin in keeping Yugoslavia only partly behind the Iron Curtain. Russian troops never dared to occupy the country the way they did in Hungary, Checkislovakia and Poland. Other than that, he is remembered in the West as a vicious and brutal dictator.

As to the question of whether Slovenes are Slavs or not, I think we're entering into a semantic difficulty here. Generally, a people are defined by the language they speak. If this were not so, we could say that the Prussians are not really Germans because they were originally a Baltic people, speaking a language akin to Latvian and Lithuanian before being taken over by German-speaking Teutonic Knights in the late 12th, early 13th Century. We could likewise say that the people of Normandy aren't French but Scandinavian. Nobody makes these claims because, contrary to Hitler's dicta, there is no such thing as a "pure" ethnic anything in Europe (or elswhere, come to that). That Slovenia was originally inhabited by Illirians is hardly to the point. That they have been speaking a slavic language for many centuries, is.

Thanks, Andrew: so I'm not French, although I was born in a town, which was the farest eastward point of the Frankish occupation :wink:

But, Walter, the Franks were a Germanic people. It's ironic that France is named France even though they speak a Romance language. Charlemagne did not spak French (as you well know)

:wink:

<smiles about the red-leather-bound works of Tito>

Thanks, Relative, for your post.




Oh, talking of Yugo-nostalgia, I should (perhaps) add that my father went there on some summer camp, as a young man, to help build the ... Highway of the Brotherhood of Peoples, or what was it called? <giggles>

Looking back now, he says, "well of course all the locals we met were always grumbling about the Communists rulers" ... but he also insists that this was not yer regular dictatorship. And your post, Relative, explains as good as any why so many former "Yugos" feel so as well ...

Tito was a brutal dictator, in the late 1940s and fifties ... but later decades, even if Yugoslavia was still a one-party state, were indeed a very different story, for all the reasons you mention.

I had a friend, who had left Bosnia just before the war broke out, who still insisted she was a "Yugoslav", nothing else ...

And somewhere on the web (cant find the link back!) there is a "virtual Yugoslavia" to become a citizen of, for all those exiles who feel their homecountry has disappeared from the map! :wink:

If you're asking what the official name of the "rump-Yugoslavia" of Serbia and Montenegro is, it's "Serbia and Montenegro". Seriously.

They just changed the name last year - up till February 2003, it still existed under the name of "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia". (So your continued use of that name, though mistaken, isn't half as ridiculous as Walter makes it out to be).

But, as Walter - elliptically - points out, it hasnt actually applied for NATO membership.

Did all the answers here help you, at all?

300 years ago, French language was only spoken in Paris area. I come from a french region (Alsace) where local language is still a german dialect.

. . . and we're not even going to talk about Languedoc.

Being Croat, I must say that nimh has some really good points and I am actually amazed by his knowledge about ex-yugoslavian territory and history, because it's a rarity - heck, sometimes we don't understand some things
I would like to comment Tito - I am not sure how to put it, especially since English is not my native language - I guess truth is somewhere in between - Tito was surely dictator and Yugoslavia was surely not democratic country (first of all only communist party was legal, and there were no elections) but it's still true that Tito was much much smarter and wiser then probably any dictator in world ever. Yugoslavia was by far most liberate, by far most rich, and by far most successfull communistic country of all times - that does not mean that it was liberate, rich and successfull generally of course. And Yugoslavia was not "only partially" behind iron curtain, it was not behind it at all - relations with USSR were pretty much the same as relations with USA.