I think strictly speaking the absence of foreign troops does mean that it was not colonised, just as the presence of foreign troops may indicate that is has been colonised. That does not exclude the fact that Yugoslavia's development was indeed distorted by foreign ambitions (though you would have to note that the principle effect was that, like may African states, Y. was, in the Cold War, able to play off one superpower against the other to win a degree of political room to manoeuvre). If you mean Yugoslavia was a 'neo-colony', you participate in all the conceptual ambiguities of that neologism - that it blurs the distinction between direct occupation and indirect influence.
As to continuity, the continuity in the Balkans, is not really a continuity within the Balkans. Rather what is continuous is external to the region, the tendency of Great Powers to exercise their influence there.
Germany, and by dint of her all the imperialist nations, are driven to expunge the enduring shame of the defeat visited upon the German army by the Yugoslavs. Between them, first the nationalist Chetniks and then Tito's partisans did what no other East European nation could - pin down Germany's blitzkrieg. As long as Yugoslavia was (formally?) independent, the Germany's shame had a geographical expression. All other East European nations were created by the successive defeat of their national movements by Fascism and then Stalinism. Only Yugoslavia liberated itself.
As a consequence, Yugoslavia's national identity is founded upon the defeat of German Imperialism. Y's national institutions and history all fix the status of Germany as a Fascist nation, and legitimise armed revolt against her. And this is an affront to all of the Great Powers. In Sarajevo after the war Winston Churchill was horrified to find that the Yugoslavs (as then they were) had built a statue to Gavrilo Princip, assassin of the archduke Ferdinand, celebrating him as a national hero.
By participating in the occupation of Bosnia and Kosovo, Germany is expunging her national anxiety over her wartime occupation of Eastern Europe. Now history can be re-written with German troops as the saviours not the occupiers. And it can be re-written - monstrously - with the Yugoslavs being presented as the Nazis while the Germans are the democratic allies.
>there are certainly *worse* examples of a multinational state--
>which isn't to say that it was a good one. and the complexity of
>the interplay of forces makes an idea like 'serb dominance' a
>pretty blunt tool for analyzing what was going on. having said
>that, i pretty much agree with what you say. dominance, after
>all, can take pretty blunt forms.
I think this is an historical misunderstanding. What you miss out of the equation is that the partisans did indeed forge a Yugoslav national identity around the struggle against Germany. The 'South Slavs' gave content to their common nationality on the battle ground. Post-war Yugoslavia was no more a multi-national Empire than the USA is. Indeed, for most of the post-war period the important division in Yugoslav society was not ethnic, but political: between adherents of the right- wing partisans and the left.
Growing up in a small Yorkshire Town with a large émigré Yugoslav population, I can assure you that they were unconcerned with who was Serb or Croat when they met at the Yugoslav social club (a popular venue for 18th and 21st birthday celebrations). But the betrayal of the right- wing partisans exercised them greatly. Amongst leftwingers too, Yugoslav nationalism was popular. In Sarajevo in the seventies, the child's name 'Yugo' was popular.
Nor is it true to say that it was 'Serb-dominated'. On the contrary, Tito's gerry-mandering of the post-war Yugoslavia was designed to restrain the political influence of the largest single ethnic group. Many areas that were culturally Serb were divided off from the Serb republic and included in the neighbouring Bosnian, Croatian and Slovene republics. Serbs also constituted around 40 per cent in the autonomous region of Kosovo up until the seventies. This policy - designed to restrain Serb influence in Yugoslavia in favour of minorities - backfired with the separatist movements of the nineties, when Serb populations were caught behind enemy lines, as in Krajina, or most recently Mitrovice.
The greatest flaw in Tito's post-war settlement - and it was indeed disastrous - was that Tito substituted the political leadership of the movement for the masses. Distrusting ordinary Yugoslavs Tito erected a patchwork quilt of ethnically distributed sinecures and political positions to avoid the judgement of the Yugoslav people as a whole. This multicultural exoskeleton on the Yugoslav nation led to the disaggregation of the national sentiment that had been forged in the war, pitting different nationalities against each other in the struggle for spoils. Such divisions increased Tito's grip, but they led to the fragmentary tendencies that finally blew apart with the increased marketisation of Yugoslav society following Tito's death. -- Jim heartfield