Could Yugoslavia Be Saved?

Wouldn't a surviving Yugoslavia need a PoD during and/or after the First World War?

Even then, it would not work.

While Panslavism was a popular idea leading up to the Great War and afterward, no one could get it to work. It only came to be in 1918 because everyone was fearful of being cut by the surrounding powers. (Italy.) Same again in 1945.

Yugoslavia was never what it was supposed to, and it was everything everyone feared. (A Serbian dominated state.)
 
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If I were an alien space bat this would be one of my pet projects. Corruption aside, Yugoslavia was a tidy little multi-ethnic state and the modern world would be a better place if it had survived liberalisation. Tito doing a better job at succesion planning might have been enough to get it over the hump and another generation without conflict would have (hopefully) permanently weakened the nationalist sentiments. Imagine how many hours of my life I’d have back if I didn’t have to queue at the Slovene-Croat border!
 
It is interesting to note that since the rise of Milosevic in 1987 there has been a lot of confrontations with demonstrations, soccer fans, and later even groups arming themselves. But it took until March 1991 at Plitvice to get a casualty. People were reluctant to use violence and it took conscious provoking to push peiple into violence.

All this goes for the relatiinship between Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia. Bosnia and Macedonia OTL preferred not to secede. And Croatia and Slovenia iz was also a gliding scale. No Milosevic, and an Europe which would treat seccesionists like Catalonia now, only negotiatibg with a democratizing central government, the prospect of EU aid and menbership by 2000 as a carrot, and an earlier Berlusconi government shouting: we have a treaty with Yugoslavia, not with Croatia and Slovenia, so we want Istria back, could be enough for a different outcome.

The Kosovo problem was much more difficult to solve, it was already violent since 1981, and the Albanians were under Serbian control.
 
An interesting method around the problems of Albanians is to have Albania within Yugoslavia. Then you can have ethnic states (perhaps even semi borderless) within the nation. The Albanians in Kosovo follow one law while the Serbians follow another, while they all follow Yugoslav laws. What's there to complain about then?

With Bulgaria in too as part of a communist Balkan bloc it might require a name change.
 
Yugoslavia, in it’s historical form, cannot survive in the long term. Preventing Milocevic from getting into power prolongs it’s life into the late 1990s, but after that things start to unravel. Yugoslavia could survive in a different form by giving up Slovenia and Croatia, and exchanging Serbian Kraijna for Croat Herzig-Bosnia. This still means Bosnian nationalism is a thing, and it must be surpressed to keep the country stable.
 
Trying to ignore Catalonia was only possible because modern Spain is a democracy, even though its conservatives trolled Cwtalan separatism into existence. The same could not be said of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, where you had a Slovenia and a Croatia that seemed to be trying to Westernize but a Serbia that was being deeply illiberal. Supporting Slovenian and Croatian independence was defensible; Yugoslavia certainly was offering nothing better.
 
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