Why West-splaining Yugoslavia Still Hurts

Indeed, history of SFR Yugoslavia is messy, complicated, and hard to grasp—especially for outsiders. And yet, once the bloody unraveling began, it became even harder to understand. The breakup of that beautiful country, my beloved homeland, stretched out for a few decades. The West was not a bystander in this story; it actively made things worse, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina it helped push events into a fratricidal war. Let’s be honest: maybe the federation could not have been saved, but the war could have been prevented.

Why am I writing this now? Because I get uneasy—sometimes angry—whenever I hear “West-splaining” about Yugoslavia. You know the tone: confident pronouncements from people who either have no real idea what they are talking about, who are biased, or who have long forgotten what they once knew. That kind of shallow expertise is everywhere, and it is damaging. Such expertise doesn’t help understanding today’s world either.

Of course, there have always been foreign analysts who truly understood Yugoslavia. They spent years if not decades in my region, learned the languages, and paid attention to internal and external complexities. Their work is brilliant. I think here of Johan Galtung, Susan Woodward, Håkan Wiberg, Jan Øberg… Their outside perspective was not a problem; in fact, it was invaluable. In moments even healing for many of us who lost loved country…

What still hurts is when I hear lazy generalizations from self-styled “experts” who never cared to go deeper. It’s insulting to those of us who lived through it. That is why I was glad to see a group of younger scholars launch an online project they fittingly called Yugosplaining. At least someone is pushing back against the clichés.