You sound like you’re from Belgrade and have never been to Kosova or Bosnia or even to the countryside. Would you prefer to say “western Balkans” or do you presume to also speak for Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc.

I would engage with your sources rather than once again retreat into claims of irreducible essence of identity that can never be understood by outsiders. If the Balkans has a curse, it’s that dishonest rhetoric being peddled by corrupt westernizers and corrupt nationalists.

If the GP had gone to Kosovo or (as the common English shorthand for “Bosnia and Herzegovina”) Bosnia, do you think that would change anything? In my experience, northern Kosovo and Republika Srpska are the very hotbeds of banging on about Serb identity and national character in the region, more than Beograd.

Vojvodina is a good escape from all that. Obviously the ethnic Hungarian population there doesn’t care about “Kosovo is Serbia” stuff, but even a lot of the Serb population feel those disputes are far away.

>In my experience, northern Kosovo and Republika Srpska are the very hotbeds of banging on about Serb identity and national character in the region, more than Beograd.

Most definitely! Not coincidentally, they also are dirt poor, ruled by the biggest crooks, and generally have limited opportunities for educational or economic mobility. The alliance that drove Serbia to war was between the resentful and opportunistic minority in the capital and the resentful and ignorant in the periphery.

Vojvodina is a great example of what the real tragedy is for Serbia. The Serbs were not united and their legitimate concerns about the future of Serb minorities was abducted by brutal people who cared about their own power only, effectively dooming not only those Serbs over the republic borders but also tainting the entire nation with their crimes.

Some of the most politically sophisticated people now are the men who started as country bumpkins taken in by Milosevic, served in the JNA or ancillary serb forces, and saw that it was all bullshit. Incompetence, drunkenness, and horrifying crimes against civilians for purposes of simple theft. They saw that the best of Serbia was against what they were doing and they were serving amoral people of low character, limited intelligence, who would shoot not only the enemy but anyone who got in the way of their ransacking. Yet now that they're in this dead end and the bridges have all been burned, how to go forward?

When I go elsewhere, I like to transmit these stories to people who (understandably) would not feel comfortable going to where those stories are told. At times there is a spark of recognition and solidarity in the shared problems, a willingness to reconcile if it comes first with full accounting and sincere apology that will never come from the political class.

And on the way back to serbian areas, I pass on the stories of not just random destruction but personal betrayal. How when the serbian paramilitaries came into a majority albanian village, they had kill lists provided for them by a local with names and addresses: the mayor, doctors, journalists, and anyone whose prominence had bred resentment. How after that, it makes simple tolerance of the western liberal type impossible, even basic trust impossible for a generation.

It certainly makes it hard for them to even pretend to care about Serbian families who experienced similar or historical Serbian architecture, because while everyone committed ethnic crimes, they did not all do so first or on the same scale.

And yet, all the refugee children of any ethnicity or religion who have become adults have much in common with each other: the feeling of being driven out of their home, hated for who they are, betrayed by neighbors they had grown up with, beset by economic uncertainty, and being continuously used in the most cynical way by politicians who make no real effort to provision their country for the future.

It should go without saying that neither "The West" in the form of the EU/Nato/KFor nor Russia have any interest in acting as honest brokers for untangling the complexity. If the conflict is reignited in earnest by local intragisence, everyone involved will likely become a tool of foreign powers who see the people there as little more than disposable proxies in a larger conflict.

I benefit from not just being an outsider but from being sincere in my sympathy for everyone. There is nothing more disrespectful than to tell someone in pain that their pain is not real, or that they deserved it because of what their government did, or that it's so proportionally insignificant compared to someone else's that they shouldn't even express it.

Telling people to shut up and get over it is (as is common among emigres and westerners) is so incredibly destructive. Refusing to listen is greatest gift to those who want to radicalize and dehumanize, it gives them an endless source of legitimacy as "the only one that cares" no matter what lies they tell.

The modern wave of Albanian-Serb hostility goes back to the early 1980s, a time when the breakup of Yugoslavia was not yet on the horizon and so there was no fear of an oppressive Albanian ethnostate. Rather, the Serb rhetoric was driven by a claim that Albanians were squatters on historic Serb land.

An independent Kosovo would have become a state chiefly for the Albanian ethnicity simply due to demographics, but it need not have become completely hostile to Serbs and Bosniaks, if the Serbs had acted more wisely. The Republic of Albania itself contains a number of Greek, South Slavic-speaking, and Aromanian villages. And had the Serbs acted more wisely, Kosovo undoubtedly would have been partitioned at Mitrovica.

The latest claim sounds disingenous. I'm too painfully aware that no partitions of USSR were redone with regards of actual ethnic occupancy (especially when talking about Russians, that's Serbs in case of Yugoslavia).

So all the new states are extremely imperialistic and will not give up on any of "their" lands even if they did not have ethnic dominance there. So no, Kosovar Albanians will still demand Mitrovica.

However, it is actually outrageous that Serbs were made to give out their actual UN recognized lands, and they had full motivation to try and keep those, like Azeri did. And in fact it's not off the table yet. Let's suppose something bad happens to NATO, Serbs can try to Karabakh-2023 Kosovo.

> Vietnam won decisively

Northern, communist Vietnam won. It wasn't a war between a Vietnam and USA, but rather between a communist and pro-western regimes.

At no point did it exist as an independent entity with popular support, it was first created by the French and propped up by the US. It’s about as credible as saying the Soviet war in Afghanistan was between two competing regimes or that the liberation of France in WW2 was a conflict between pro-German and pro-American regimes.

Formally true, but not a meaningful distinction given the massive disparity in capabilities and supporters.

You are very articulate but you don't have a clue of what you are talking about, no matter how many books you have read. The southern vietnamese have a very distinct identity, and they haven't moved on at all, if they had a chance they would declare independence from the north in a split second.

Source: I have lived in Saigon for a decade, which beats hands down the many books I had read about the subject before that

I could say the same as an American southerner! The existence of distinct regional identity preexists the state and continues after reunification. The North dominates in their politics just as in ours and there’s resentment about it in both countries, but it does not follow that there is no national identity or that a regional dictatorship created and funded foreign powers which could not survive without their indefinite aid is true expression of regional identity.

First of all, apologies, the way I started my reply was too brusque.

Yes, at the end of the day it's all about who has the power. I just wanted to point out that present Vietnam is far from united and that you can't imagine how much resentment there is in Saigon towards the communist government in the north.

Saigon had a "good" war, barely saw any fighting, but the post-war was horrible, scarring southerners to this day, many people repeatedly tried to flee on dingies out of desperation from human (northern) caused starvation and scarcity, this in a land that had never experienced hunger (the Mekong Delta is extremely fertile and milked by the north). They haven't forgotten.

The world is full of hopeful irredentists, and whether they will ever succeed or not is not a matter of right, but might (maybe in the shape of a foreign power). It is just that in southern Vietnam most people are irredentists, which I suspect is not the case in the US south, isn't that right?

No apology needed, and I can believe it! I happen to have some personal contacts in Hue who are in middle but in the divide between northern and southern communists they were treated as part of the south. I know there's some real bitterness even among just the communists, in part because the Hanoi-driven war strategy led to the formations in the south taking incredibly heavy casualties which then further cemented their political subordination in the postwar era.

From what little I know, both the center of the country and the south, party and non-party alike, generally feel that the northern elite is clannish and doesn't allocate jobs and investment fairly, which is kind of a big deal for a country with such a large state sector.

In the American case most of the state of Mississippi did not celebrate the 4th of July until 1945 because they considered themselves to be occupied confederate territory for 81 years: https://www.visitvicksburg.com/blog/celebrating-independence...

I can well understand some feeling persisting a mere 65 years later.

That said, for American southern irredentists of past, present and future, they're stuck with the confederacy alone, which is inextricably connected to slavery even for people like Robert E. Lee who was personally but not politically opposed to slavery. That's simply a much harder thing to identify with morally and practically, especially when 30-40% of the population of the south are descended from freed slaves.

The Republic of Vietnam flag stands for the hundreds of thousands of ARVN soldiers and administration and their families, but it also stands for things like a catholic dictatorship attacking temples in a 90% buddhist country, rigged elections, coups, and being the junior partner of a foreign power that carried out a brutal and dehumanizing counter-insurgency.

Unlike the American south, the southern Vietnamese have a much older identity and much richer history to draw upon. So, I wonder if in time a prior symbol/flag/something from their distinct history will become more resonant for them in the future, which conveys the identity without the baggage.

For much of history (i.e. millennia) the north and the south of Vietnam have experienced different degrees of voluntary and involuntary separation. For hundreds and hundreds of years they existed as different countries and even tried to conquer each other. The vast majority of south Vietnamese people today have more sympathy for the US than for Hanoi.

Source: half my family is Vietnamese and I lived there for 3 years.