From what I gathered, Yugoslavia's collapse IOTL came when communism as a force was dying out and that the USSR was dead by then and that if Yugoslavia collapsed earlier during the Cold War, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact would get involved. With a POD involving Tito dying in the 1970's and assuming that it could manage to stay afloat until Détente ends just like OTL in 1979, how can the collapse of Yugoslavia effect geopolitics in the 1980's compared to OTL's 1990's?
 
both sides would attempt to expand their spheres of influence at the other expense. The US would back the non-Serbs in order to move NATO's borders eastward while the Soviets would back the Serbs in order to move their spheres border westward and also to gain a warm water port in Montenegro.
 
both sides would attempt to expand their spheres of influence at the other expense. The US would back the non-Serbs in order to move NATO's borders eastward while the Soviets would back the Serbs in order to move their spheres border westward and also to gain a warm water port in Montenegro.
Could see Romania trying to benefit from the situation as well.
 
The US didn't mind Yugoslavia existing, it just wanted it to be capitalist. As in OTL, American diplomacy may favor Serbian attempts to take over as much territory as they can.
 
The question is, would the USSR really be capable of waging yet another proxy war far from its borders, now that it was dug knee-deep in Afghanistan? I personally think they would have stood by, not willing to heat up the conflict even further. They had lived without Yugoslavia before, it wouldn't have made much of a difference if they couldn't have it later.
 
If Tito had died earlier but the rest of the Cold War was the same, I do not know if there would have been much difference.

There was a strong degree of continuity between Yugoslavia and its issues in the late 1970s and the same in the early 1980s: the nature of Yugoslav federalism, the underlying issues of the Yugoslav economy, the future of Yugoslavia, all were issues before Tito's end. You might just have fifteen years of decline instead of 10.

The collapse of Communism, meanwhile, had much to do with the decline and collapse of Communism elsewhere in Europe. I very much doubt we would have seen various post-Communist ideologies emerge in Yugoslavia in the early 1980s, not with Communism apparently doing just fine in a perfectly intact Soviet bloc and European integration not yet advance enough to provide the Yugoslav northwest with an incentive for separation.
 
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