I remember life being deceptively ordinary in the period leading to Yugoslavia’s collapse. I went to high school, hung out with friends, and took pride in growing my cassette collection.

My father deeply believed in the state motto “brotherhood and unity” and raised us as Yugoslavs. One afternoon, walking home from school with two friends, one casually used the word Balija, a slur for Bosnian Muslims. As it was the first time I heard it, I asked what it meant. He looked at me, confused, and said, “What, you don’t know we call you that?”

A year later, thousands of those called “balija” were killed, tortured, imprisoned in concentration camps, or expelled from my hometown, Prijedor. Yugoslavia’s disintegration began in June 1991 with a ten-day war in Slovenia. Bosnia-Herzegovina followed Slovenia and Croatia in declaring independence in March 1992. The war in Bosnia started in April 1992, and by May, there were three concentration camps in Prijedor. For those who remember, what followed was the bloodiest war on European soil since WWII. Interestingly, since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Western media seems to have forgotten that.

As Yugoslavia disintegrated in a storm of nationalism and genocide, Western leaders watched with a mix of glee, condescension, and horror. Glee at the fall of a socialist federation, condescension toward the “barbaric” Slavs, and horror at the scale of violence on European soil.

How did a state built on the motto of “brotherhood and unity” fracture so violently? For many outsiders, the conflict appeared “too complicated”. They attributed the political violence to a process of balkanisation. The term had been first used in the early twentieth century to describe the political breakup of the Balkans, and is nowadays used derogatorily for the fragmentation of any region or system into smaller, hostile parts.  

After the war, “cold peace” ensued, and the so-called International Community lectured us on Western Values as inseparable from capitalism. The West, we were told, was a bastion of liberal democracy, immune to such regressions seen in the Balkans.

Three decades later, that smug assumption has collapsed. From Buenos Aires to Washington, the political style once dismissed as a Balkan aberration has become a dominant force. Hard-right mainstreaming of conspiracies, corruption, xenophobia, gangsterism, war, and the casual acceptance of genocide as a political tool are an international norm.

Politics as spectacle

From 1989, Slobodan Milošević didn’t merely ride a wave of Serbian nationalism — he engineered it. His regime weaponised historical grievance, rehabilitated fascist collaborators, and fused cultural spectacle with political propaganda.

He presented himself internationally as an embattled strongman resisting Western imperialism, convincing many in the global left of his victimhood. At home, he championed Serbian nationalism, cracked down on the media, revived NAZI collaborators, and oversaw the plunder of Yugoslav state resources. In short, he was an opportunist who employed contradictory ideologies as required.

The revival of historical myths morphed from revisionism into psychological warfare. It resurrected dormant fascist narratives of “blood and soil”, casting Serbia as a besieged nation surrounded by enemies that it needs to “cleanse” from its territories. But it also portrayed Serbs as heavenly people, with the nationalist motto, “where one Serb lives, there’s Serbia”.

During the war in Bosnia, Milosevic’s Serbia became a gangster state that fused political power, violence, the criminal underworld, and the nationalist spectacle.

That assault on primal emotions and collective psychology led to the dehumanisation of the ‘other’ to such levels that genocide became an inevitable solution to the “Muslim problem”.

Even today, despite the relentless detoxification by many human rights activists and artists over the two decades, the rot still taints the social and political arena. For example, Milorad Dodik, a former president of RS (“Republika Srpska”, one of the two ethnic “entities” solidified by the Dayton peace accord), in many ways Milosevic’s ideological heir, still issues secessionist threats and regularly denies genocide.

Developing overt ties with Russia’s Putin, Serbia’s Vucic, and Israel’s Netanyahu, he opposes international institutions and judicial bodies as illegitimate or rigged against Serbs, and actively challenges the peace accord. Taking notice of the rise of islamophobia and fascism in the West, he began casting himself as the defender of Christian Europe and professing admiration for all things Trump. This, while war criminal Ratko Mladić gets a state funeral in a neighbouring Serbia.

From the Balkans to Mar-a-Lago

Trump himself rose to power by stoking grievances and fear. His rallies became akin to what the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called “carnivalesque spectacles”, full of identity affirmation and woke‑bashing. His inner circle, like Milosevic’s, erased the lines between politics, business, and criminality. Trump’s embrace of conspiracy theories and disdain for democratic institutions, admiration of strongmen like Netanyahu and Putin, echoes Milosevic’s praise of the idea that strength was the path to stability, not consensus.

MAGA embraced Confederate generals as freedom fighters, January 6 rioters as patriots, and presented “real America” as being under siege from immigrants and imaginary Marxists, while the existential threat of white genocide was only understood by them. As the tactic of “flooding the zone” worked at home, Trump has enacted the same saturation and attempted control of the narrative internationally, removing the thin veil of morality and respect for the rules-based order that Western countries traditionally claimed to uphold.

This veil fell with complicity in Israel’s war crimes and the repression of anti-genocide voices. Normalisation of genocide as a necessary act of territorial purification and expansion has set a dangerous precedent that is yet to be comprehended. The Australian terrorist who in 2019 murdered fifty-one Muslims at pray in Christchurch, with the names of Serbian generals written on his rifles, offers a glimpse.

The effectiveness of spectacle politics is there for all to see, but many of us are still in denial. Milošević’s tactics led to hyper ethno-nationalism and ultimately genocide. Trump’s actions have led to the normalisation of authoritarianism, the unravelling of the post‑WWII international rules‑based order, and “new crusades”. The spectacle worked. The myth is sold. And the public, caught between outrage and entertainment, struggles to tell the difference.

What if the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia was not a cautionary tale, but a preview? What if the West’s exceptionalism was always a myth, and its descent into oligarchal gangsterism and barbarism was not a fall from grace, but a delayed reckoning?

Imagining an alternative future

If Miloševic (and other Yugoslav nationalist leaders) could fracture a multiethnic federation built on “Brotherhood and Unity”, resisting Trumpist culture wars — a movement fuelled by division, nostalgia, and spectacle — requires more than moral outrage. It demands strategic, cultural, and psychological counterforce.

Once the public is dancing to the beat of the nationalist nostalgia myth, facts become irrelevant. War crimes and genocide disappear beneath stadium chants.

Since January, the US has attacked Venezuela, joined Israel’s war on Iran, threatened Cuba and numerous other countries, demonstrating Trump’s and Netanyahu’s, “watcha gonna do about it?” diplomacy. Combined with continued attacks on international institutions, threats to dismantle the International Criminal Court, support for anti-EU hard right parties, and the export of culture wars throughout the Anglosphere, it is becoming clearer that we are witnessing a shift towards the normalisation of right-wing authoritarianism. This oligarch-backed trend extends beyond the future of the Trump administration or the outcome of Western Asia wars.

No one can predict what comes next. But I can tell you this much, from the unfortunate privilege of having seen a few things in my life: once a crowd gets itself radicalised by the spectacle of ethno-nationalism, racism, woke-bashing, conspiracies and antique tales of blood and soil, the fever doesn’t break on its own. It takes a very long time for hatreds to quiet down and for people to start remembering how to think rationally again.

As a starting point, to resist, we must first recognise and admit what we are dealing with. We must name it, clearly, repeatedly, and without euphemism. We already have a generation growing up thinking fascism is just another political flavour. We must reweave the social fabric and rebuild solidarity. As the tradition of hakawati storytellers illustrates, people need stories, a narrative we can embrace and believe in. We must boldly chart a path out of the crises of inequality and capitalist wealth concentration, rather than merely expressing outrage at racist cruelty fuelled by social media owners or clinging to the centrist liberal status quo. This means supporting trade unions tackling low wages, and organising locally across differences, united by shared material goals such as housing, healthcare, and climate action. We can’t be risk-averse anymore. Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s, and it’s not going to work today.

We are already seeing communities in the US organising themselves against ICE raids and men in masks killing people on the streets. The limitations of a two-party system, and the incompetence of the opposition — a centrist party lobbied and corrupted with financial dependence on wealthy donors — have been laid bare. No one is coming to help; communities need to organise themselves. Or to borrow Lord David Owen’s (former British Foreign Secretary) infamous words from 1992 visit to Bosnia:

Don’t, don’t, don’t live under this dream that the West is going to come in and sort this problem out. Don’t dream dreams.

Balkanisation is no longer an overused metaphor, and is unfolding in the West in real time, driven by the same forces that once turned Yugoslav neighbours into enemies. Pretending things are normal is no longer an option. Because once you lift your head, you might find your neighbours being taken away by uniformed men, or even yourself marked as “undesirable”. What, you didn’t know they call you that?

Image: A map of the division of Balkan territories after the 1878 Treaty of Berlin (Wikimedia Commons, detail)