[wonders]

I don’t mean to pick on you, but I hear this all the time. Please name all the wars between Serbs and Croats prior to WWII.

[hellbender]

Those South Slavs were preoccupied with dealing with the common enemy, the Turks, for centuries. Are you implying that Serbs and Croats were completely in love with each other prior to WW 2? If there was not some underlying hatred, why was there so much genocidal violence in that war? And even if there was not such violence before, I bet there was deep dislike, as there is between Flemings and Walloons in Belgium, or Protestants and Catholics in much of Europe for many centuries. Almost anything cultural or racial which can be used to distinguish groups of people leads to friction and even violence.

I was told by a Hungarian-American that the recent ethnic violence in Yugoslavia was stirred up by Marxist dictators, which tends to support your position. However, Yugoslavia, like Czechoslovakia and Belgium, was an artificial country with no prior history of unification. All those countries were created by "great powers" in the wake of wars which destroyed the empires which once controlled them.