![]() ![]() We’re a much bigger and richer country, and our economy, for all its structural problems, is a lot less troubled than Yugoslavia’s was in the 1980s. So far, of course, America has avoided the fate of Yugoslavia. At this point, Trump’s manipulation of white nationalism seems every bit as cynically dishonest as Milošević’s Serbian patriot act. Chants of “Build the Wall” to preserve America’s current demographics have gone silent, while Trumpian populism turns out in practice to mean a cabinet packed with Goldman Sachs alumni and tax cuts for the rich. Now that’s he’s there, President Trump has failed to deliver on his grandiose promises to his base. By telling angry and alienated people just what they wanted to hear, Trump created a political movement overnight and mysteriously rode it right to the White House. Trump, who never had shown the slightest interest in the plight of the white working class while he built his flimflam empire of gauche condos and casinos, suddenly reinvented himself as their champion. You can understand the remarkable rise of Donald Trump in 2015-16 by simply exchanging “Serbian nationalism” for “white nationalism”: the parallels are eerie and disturbing. That he was eventually extradited to The Hague to face justice seems inadequate compared to the devastation which Slobodan Milošević left in his wake. As a result, Milošević improvised crisis after crisis and left behind a broken and impoverished Serbia, smaller and weaker than it was before the First World War.īy the time Serbs figured out they had been conned, it was too late the country was already wrecked, and Milošević managed to hold on until the fall of 2000, thanks to his control of the media and the police, enriching his family and his hangers-on every step of the way. Once he achieved power, Milošević really didn’t know what to do he was better at fiery rhetoric than reality. His plan to Make Serbia Great Again was nothing but a charade. He had never shown the slightest interest in nationalism, personally or politically, and seemed devoid of ethnic ressentiment himself, yet he realized that the issue was his ticket to power. Milosevic's rising starīy 1987, the Kosovo issue dominated Serbian politics, and out of nowhere Slobodan Milošević, a rising party boss, jumped on the nationalist bandwagon. Since much of Serbia’s history was tied up with Kosovo, this demographic decline was met with horror in Belgrade, where many Serbs portrayed it as an Albanian conspiracy to drive them out. This came to a head over Kosovo, an autonomous province of Serbia that between the 1950s and the 1980s went from being two-thirds Albanian and a quarter Serbian to 80 percent Albanian and barely 10 percent Serbian. Nevertheless, many average Serbs were angry by the mid-1980s, watching their economic security disappear as they faced demographic decline. ![]() They were by far Yugoslavia’s biggest ethnic group and by any accounting they dominated the country.ĭespite far-reaching Communist efforts at what we would term Affirmative Action (they called it the “ethnic key”), ensuring that minorities got proportional representation in jobs and sinecures, Serbs still held most of the big jobs in the Communist hierarchy and its institutions, and they dominated Yugoslavia’s military and security structures. It’s difficult to rationally see why Serbs felt aggrieved. ![]() Serbian nationalism, taboo for decades under Communism, emerged from under the ice in the mid-1980s with dangerous passion. ![]() Given such economic turmoil, political ferment burst forth, and in multiethnic Yugoslavia, that inevitably took on nationalist coloration. Yugoslavia was deeply in hock to foreign banks, its ailing economy having grown dependent on infusions of Western cash to keep running, and by the mid-1980s Tito’s Ponzi scheme was collapsing.Īs a result, unemployment spiked and average Yugoslavs, who had grown accustomed to near-Western levels of consumer comfort, saw it all evaporate before their eyes. After the death of the longtime Yugoslav party boss Marshal Tito in 1980, the country entered terminal decline. Milošević’s sudden, unexpected rise in the mid-1980s would be eerily replicated by Trump three decades later. Serbia in the late 1980s was a lot like the US is today ![]()
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