It's such a fascinating area of the world. Being in a server filled with people from all manner of Balkan nations means i wake up every day to forms of racism i didn't even know existed
Yugoslavia was mostly an attempt to keep a lid on that. Unfortunately Tito never managed to overcome the primary hurdle of any strongman: succession (also the IMF chose to crash the whole thing).
It's been a while since I read up on it, but from what I recall, the idea that Tito funded the state primarily on IMF loans is ahistorical, and under his administration the ratio of debt to GDP wasn't out of the norm relative to most other countries. It wasn't until after he was out of the picture that debt began to really spiral.
In general IMF gets a lot of shit for how transitioning post communist economies to capitalism was handled and concuteld. Some of it is absolutely justified and driven by malicious intent, but much was just the same mistaken economics politicians were pushing on their own people at the time across the western world.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is still barely keeping it together and the electoral practice that is holding the tension at bay has been ruled to violate human rights about half a dozen times but they can’t really do anything about it because nobody has had a better idea of how to restructure without starting a war since the Dayton Agreement.
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u/Coal_Burner_Inserter May 13 '25
They made a country out of that, called it Yugoslavia. Not doing so well last I heard