I visited Sarajevo in 2005. At that time, there seemed to me to be an air of optimism about the place - certainly in comparison with Serbia, where they really are totally demoralised.
I haven't visited any other parts of Bosnia, but as I understand it, the Muslim-Croat area remains heavily segregated, while the Serbs are still loyal to their fatherland and are watching what happens in Kosovo with keen interest.
> Serbia's role following the collapse of the Soviet Union seems to
> have been aimed at, far from setting into motion a genocidal program,
> the prevention of the succession of the Balkan constituent countries.
> Granting Serbia, or Serbs at any rate, committed many terrible
> crimes, it is understandable that they would want to keep Yugoslavia
> together.
They weren't trying to keep Yugoslavia together as such, but trying to hold onto the parts where Serbs were the majority. Hence Slovenia's relatively smooth departure - not enough Serbs there to make it matter to Serbian nationalists. (There were also some *Yugoslav* nationalists who genuinely did want the entire federal country to stay together, but once Milosevic took over they didn't last long.)
> Perhaps the "ethnic tensions" were entirely, or to a significant
> degree, manufactured ones to begin with (now, of course they are very
> real).
Most ex-Yugoslavs who were old enough to remember will tell you that there were ethnic tensions there, but no more than there are in any other country. That's between the Slavic constituents, anyway; the Serb-Albanian tensions in Kosovo seem to have been real and significant long before NATO ever poked its nose in.
On the question of Germany's role in the breakup of Yugoslavia, Germany (and Austria) recognised Croatian and Slovenian independence as soon as they were declared - against the advice of practically everyone in the diplomatic world - pretty much ending any hopes of getting Croatia into a negotiated settlement over the large Serb-majority areas within its borders. Peter's first post made reference to the consequences of this.