Homo Yugoslavicus

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Homo Sovieticus (Latin for "Soviet Man") is a sarcastic and critical reference to an average conformist person in the Soviet Union also observed in other countries of the Eastern Bloc. The term was popularized by Soviet writer and sociologist Aleksandr Zinovyev, who wrote the book titled Homo Sovieticus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus

The New Soviet man or New Soviet person, as postulated by the ideologists of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was an archetype of a person with specific qualities that were said to be emerging as dominant among all citizens of the Soviet Union, irrespective of the country's cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity, creating a single Soviet people, Soviet nation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man

Could Yugoslavia have embarked on a program aimed at creating a new Yugoslav man? Perhaps the Yugoslav goverment could assimilate all the respective groups into one big group. The assimilation if total enough could potentially butterfly away the Yugoslav dissolution, and the wars that sprang from the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
 
Stalin engaged in population transfers and still the USSR ended up with a serious problem of nationalities.

The sad thing is that multi-cultural/religious/ethnic countries don't work that well and the differences end up producing constant friction if not worse.

In this case one of the groups would have to absorb the rest and impose its identity onto the rest of Yugoslavia, but none is large enough to do so.

Sorry, I don't see this happening to a larger extent than OTL under Tito.
 
This might need a POD going back to the creation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Perhaps Yugoslavia is made a more federal entity at the beginning. You could have Serbia simply annex the territories, establishing a Greater Serbia through ethnic cleansing and claiming that it’s Yugoslavia.
 
Some will point to the addition of a "Yugoslav" category in Yugoslav census data and the low numbers of people who identified as such as proof that the Titoist regime both tried to institute such a program and failed.

This analysis, in my mind, and the minds of numerous experts on Titoist Yugoslavia, misses the point. The goal of Tito's government was to create a political entity in which ethnic identity came a distant second to adherence to the Yugoslav state. Every ethnic group was supposed to feel like they were equal members of the Yugoslav state. The low numbers of people who identified as "Yugoslav" says very little about the success or failure of the Titoist project.

Given that the creation of a "Homo Yugoslavicus" was completely contrary to both Tito's ideas and his idea man Edvard Kardelj's, both of them would need to be killed off in order for such a policy to be seriously implemented. If it were implemented, it would likely take one of two forms, both of which would be disastrous to the country and suggest why such a program was never pursued in OTL. In my mind, a "New Yugoslav Man" would either have the overwhelming support of most Serbs and thereby alienate every other group, or have the support of most/all of the other groups in Yugoslavia and provoke intense resistance in Serbia proper.

As Sabrina Ramet points out, the primary cause for the collapse of Yugoslavia was intractable economic problems. Solve those and Yugoslavia is still around to this day.
 
Wait where are the Bosnians(Bosniak) on that map?

There in there as Muslim. Something that is more or less accurate - since the Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian languages have little differences religion became the defining characteristic to separate those ethnicity from one another.

Though a few more information on the map would be interesting. On what census is it based?

Some will point to the addition of a "Yugoslav" category in Yugoslav census data and the low numbers of people who identified as such as proof that the Titoist regime both tried to institute such a program and failed.

It's been a while since I read up on this topic. IIRC Yugoslav was used to a large extent by minorities that didn't quite fit in. Significantly Roma and Sinti that had a difficult standing as it was.
Now I'd assume this means little in terms of assimilation, it's still interesting that Yugoslav identity was proclaimed at the fringes of society instead of it's core.
 
Tito knew that trying to remove national identities would create more trouble than regime could handle. There was hope that gradualy the Yugoslav identity would be dominant one, aided by Serbo-Croat language and JNA service (it was no coincidence the conscripts served far away from home), but there would be no concetrated effort which could cause a nationalistic backlash.
 
Wait where are the Bosnians(Bosniak) on that map?
Possibly Muslims. Muslim was an official term in old Yugolslavia. It was an ethnic category, not religious. Even non-muslims could identify as Muslim, even if they were technically Roman-Catholic or Orthodox.
 
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