I am looking at the map of your solution in that other topic and I can tell you 100% that none of the ethnic groups involved would sign such a constitution unless held at a gun point.
I wouldn't go so far as that. And read through the thread. Someone posted me a link to a better map of Bosnia's ethnic makeup by district which is what I would have used had found it before drawing the map.
I also doubt the ethnic groups involved would have had a choice really if in 1984 all the republics involved agreed to it. As I noted in the thread, the entire idea is based off a compromise - more autonomy for the republics politically in exchange for local autonomy within the republics. At the time in 1984 for Bosnia and Croatia it would have looked like a good deal anyway - Serbs and Croats in Bosnia get autonomous provinces and Serbs in Croatia get autonomous provinces which are NOT like Kosovo and Vojvodina as they cannot veto republic legislation while they as republics get more autonomy, thus ensuring they don't feel threatened by any potential Serbian domination as a result of a one man, one vote system within the communist party.
Your first mistake in Croatia was that you based the border of the Krajina and Western Slavonia on winter 1991/1992 war front line rather than ethnic, geographic and economic factors.
Yeah, at the time of drawing the map I didn't have anything else on hand. It was meant to be a rough approximation in any event.
The second mistake is Bosnia proper as you call it. It would contain roughy 2/3 of all Croats living in BiH and roughly 1/4 of all Serbs prior to the 1992 war.
So what? Vojvodina had over 50% of it's population being Serb in 1974 when it gained substantial autonomy. There is nothing written down anywhere that says 100% of an ethnic group must be located in a designated area. The whole point of autonomous areas in a lot of cases is to give autonomy to a group where they can be found to be in a majority
locally. If Ireland were still a part of the United Kingdom now and was given autonomy the fact that there would be more Irishmen (and -women) living in the rest of the United Kingdom (perhaps as much as 60% of the Irish in the British Isles) rather than in the area that is now the Republic of Ireland doesn't make it a mistake for that area of Ireland to have been given autonomy under any circumstances.
If 1/3 of the Croats in Bosnia can be roughly found to be in a majority in a number of contiguous districts, why shouldn't those districts simply be given autonomy just because the other 2/3 of the Croats in Bosnia happened to be to found scattered across the rest of Bosnia and to be in the minority locally in the other places?
The solution to saving Yugoslavia is not segregation since that breeds only further divisions
I would have to disagree.
There are two solutions - complete centralization and the abolition of republics with a simple one man, one vote system OR providing complete autonomy.
What happened after 1974 seems to have been an incomplete autonomy process which moved Yugoslavia from a fairly stable (if not harmonious) model of six equally autonomous republics to an unstable (and definitely not harmonious) model of six supposedly equal autonomous republics as well as 2 autonomous provinces which (it seems) could veto the legislation of the republic they were located in. No matter how anyone wants to present it, the obvious
perception (note, I refer to the
perception, which may or may not have been what actually happened) is that this was all aimed at weaken one republic in particular (the autonomous republics were located in
only one republic and seemed capable of vetoing that republic's legislation). That was never going to be stable and was just begging for trouble. Remove that perception and it could go a long way to pulling the rug out from under nationalists in Serbia.
Also it isn't segregation if you base the autonomy on existing populations. Having autonomous provinces doesn't mean that Serbs wouldn't be allowed to live in say an autonomous provinces of Bosanska Posavina or that Croats and Macedonians wouldn't be allowed to live in Vojvodina.
The communists made a huge mistake in supressing nationalist feelings. To win the people of Yugoslavia to the idea of Yugoslavia is to support each group in their specific language, culture, customs and expresing of their national feelings
Which is exactly what autonomous areas allow for. With regards to language in particular, most autonomous areas in most countries are able to determine which language or languages they want to use in addition to the official, national language.
and then unite all of those different things under an idea of Yugoslavianism that would be similar to the idea Britishnes.
And in Britain there has been autonomy in Northern Ireland on and off since the 1920s and proposals for Scottish autonomy from 1913 (when a Scottish home rule bill was introduced). Also note that the very same Britain presided over an empire in which it gave more and more autonomy to its colonies as time went by. And today the UK has (mostly) allowed autonomy to the areas within the country that actually want it (Scotland, Northern Ireland, London (with it's assembly introduced as part of a plan for regional assemblies in England) and Wales). Some areas did not want it (North East England), but some areas have yet to be asked (North West England and Yorkshire & Humber).
The second Yugoslavia mostly failed in the eyes of its people because proclaiming you were a Croat, Serb, Montenegrin nationalist (which most people down here are) made you an enemy of the state since nationalism rather than lunacy of people in power was blamed for the horrors of WW II.
True. But denying autonomy to areas with local Croat, Serb and Bosniak majorities would be basically doing the same thing as how many Croat or Serb nationalists are going to agree with the idea of denying such local autonomy to their kinsfolk? I can't see how Yugoslavia can hold together on the idea of
not having autonomous provinces in Bosnia and Croatia when such an idea (denying local autonomy) would provide an excellent claimed grievance for various politicians campaigning on a nationalist platform.
If one takes a look on other areas of the world we can see examples where providing autonomy works and where conversely taking it away (or denying it) leads to trouble. So in Sudan the first civil war from 1955-1972 was fought because Sudan denied autonomy to the south. The second civil war from 1983 onward was a result of Sudan taking away the autonomy it had granted the south in 1972. Had Sudan not done this in 1983 there was a much greater possibility that South Sudan would still be a part of Sudan today (although an autonomous part). In Eritrea a rebel group attacked Ethiopian police and soldiers in 1961, but the 1962 decision to directly annex Ethiopia only gave those rebels more support and ensured that when the rebellion got into full swing that Ethiopia would have little chance of winning the population over to it's side. Likewise in Nicaragua the agreement to granting autonomy to the coastal areas helped to quell an uprising by its inhabitants (which was part of the wider Nicaraguan Civil War).
