Despite the nation-state’s current, constantly maligned status, it seems to work in the context for which it was created, producing stability in Europe. In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy wrote, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” Yugoslavia has long since disintegrated and left in its wake enough ethnic discontent to cause two wars, a genocide, and set the stage for another genocide, save for a NATO bombing campaign. So I ask again, of what use was the rule? Many of our speakers in Sarajevo and Belgrade were openly nostalgic for the Yugoslav way of life, the quality of education, housing, workers’ rights, and the fond memories of vacations by the seashore. Undoubtedly, these brought loyalty. Yet who paid for these vacations? It wasn’t the Yugoslavs.
Another relevant quote on this subject comes from James Carville: “It’s the economy, stupid.” By the early 1980s, Yugoslavia’s increasingly debt-fueled and overleveraged economy was collapsing under the weight of roughly $20–21 billion in foreign debt, equivalent to approximately $70–75 billion in 2025 dollars, as soaring interest rates, IMF austerity measures, inflation, and unemployment pushed the federation into a prolonged economic crisis that helped destabilize the state in the decade before its breakup. Yet that debt was far from insurmountable; every major polity in Europe today, save perhaps Switzerland, has risen from the ashes of many a financial implosion. Perhaps it is unfair to posthumously diagnose Yugoslavia and place it alongside the multi-ethnic graveyard of European states, ranging from the Soviet Union and Russian Empire to Austria-Hungary, the Kalmar Union, or the German Empire with its Jewish, Polish, and French minorities. Yet each time these great composite states hit dire straits, the nationalities bolted for the front door and took the state with them. When France was defeated in 1871 and 1940, the nation returned to the world stage with a more unified sense of purpose; the only disagreements were related to the direction, not the existence, of the country. This could not have been farther from the truth in Yugoslavia, however, and thus, when the question of diagnosing the failures of that state and imagining the future emerged, I found my ideas to be quite different from those of our lecturers in Sarajevo.
As we enjoyed our cigarettes after lunch, I had more time to litigate my ideas and determined that our main disagreement stemmed from the tension between utopian and grounded paths to reform. Danjella was aghast when I professed my support for the French methods of implementing social democracy with Gaullist principles, decrying their inability to provide for immigrants. I countered by noting that France has one of the most comprehensive welfare systems in the world, despite its flaws, and should be commended for it. I came to this conclusion by looking around the world to see which countries have been able to maintain flourishing democracies while having wealthy populations and relatively low Gini coefficients, representing low inequality. While no country is perfect, and France is far from anyone’s concept of utopia, it exists today. Ivana saw the failures of France and asked how I could ever wish for people to be oppressed in the same way that those who live in France are, and while I agree, who is to say that any new system introduced through a new world order, devoid of popular support or slow and careful implementation, could ever succeed when the annals of history have shown the poor quality of life under revolutionary regimes? In the same vein, the rampant criticism of the European Union for supposedly holding Bosnia as a resource colony and taking its people, while simultaneously glorifying the Yugoslav state, which maintained Bosnian backwardness and eventual failure, resulting in the very emigration being criticized, feels entirely without merit.
Thus, I left our trip more sure of the values of pragmatism and incrementalism than of any sweeping changes. The Yugoslav Wars showed the fragility of states held together through pan-nationalism imposed from above. Hannah Arendt argued in The Human Condition that “the public realm, in other words, was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were.” The tragedy of Yugoslavia was that this shared political reality was never able to withstand the collapse of communist rule, nationalist mobilization, and economic hardship. The breakdown of the state reverted politics to nationality, grievance, and fear rather than enabling people to appear before one another primarily as citizens. Karl Popper’s defense of gradual reform offers a better lesson. As he wrote in The Poverty of Historicism, “The piecemeal engineer knows, like Socrates, how little he knows. He knows that we can learn only from our mistakes.” This constitutes an excellent defense of pragmatism in that slowly changing countries with popular support through democratic institutions, so that the state can best serve the people while maintaining peace, is a noble objective. The nation-state and the European Union should be defended on these terms.