>>I guess we'll have to wait another 30 years or more to see which forces brought balkanization back to the Balkans in the nineties. Again, 90%+ of the people didn't want this; it was foreign forces who didn't want an example of a successful and viable socialist system in the middle of Europe, with open borders where anyone can come and see how it works (and millions of tourists did, over the years). Our shame is the ease with which they found the thugs who will do the dirty work of dismantling the country and turning it into six or seven colonies again.
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>I certainly defer to your experience in all matters Balkan. I think it is not necessarily a bad thing for someone to put a lid on endless hatred and blood feuds, hoping to break the cycle.

Ah, but it was not a lid. It was a massive propaganda action. It happened before my time, but it was still in all of the school curriculum, public discourse, it permeated the society. And it worked. I know of a case of an orthodox priest's daughter being married to a mullah's son, and that was quite normal. The happy fathers even drank together. Actually, I've had friends all over the country, and the feeling of federal identity was quite strong. The country was defined as a federation, and each of the nations had its identity recognized (though in case of Bosnia & Herzegovina, they had to invent a Muslim nation, to achieve symmetry), but at some point they had to officially recognize this federal identity. I think it was at the census of 1980 and 1990 when they had some percentage of people who declared themselves as Yugoslavs - not Serbs Croats or whatever - and there was as much as 10% of these in Bosnia.

What had to be kept under the lid was the nationalist forces within The Party itself, which usually took form of interstate bickering and accusations of attempts to gain a special status etc. There was an attempt in 1972 in Croatia - don't know what were they trying to achieve, but they were in The Party's top echelons, and they were swiftly removed from public life. Don't remember whether any of them got imprisoned, but they had to keep silent for the next 15 years.

And mind you, Tito died in 1980, but it took another six years for the system to start to crumble. It wasn't centralized at all; the self-managed enterprises had a lot of freedom and had to compete on the market. It was The Party that was centralized, and where the infighting began in 1986. And that was the time when the old cadre was retiring and being replaced with the younger, power hungry generation, which then didn't have a clue how to reform the system. Instead, they fought amongst themselves, and basically helped each other carve a parochy where they would be Caesars. That may or may have not been possible to prevent, I don't know, but all the aid they got went in the same direction as they did: towards the split. And I mean aid by foreign secret services.

>But I think the analogy holds as to the Ottoman colonization of the region leaving a community that was identified with former oppressors but was now a more vulnerable minority. ( as the Moguls in the India and the majority Hindu population. )

That analogy does hold. There are the muslims (former Muslims) in Bosnia and Kosovo & Metohia, about a third of Macedonia and some of Montenegro. I wrote about that elsewhere, so I don't feel like repeating.

>>With any amount of soul searching, I remain completely unable to find any sympathy for colonialism. It's just plundering and daylight robbery, call it what you want.
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>Well, I don't think most examples of it differ from your analysis, but of the lot, Britain seems to have left behind as much as it took.

Will we ever know how much it took? Just preventing a country's own development is more than enough. Then add the divide et impera, recruiting local forces to fight the locals, opium trading... while the colonial force may not have had direct profits from all of those, they surely inflicted damage on the country. So the balance can't be assessed purely from their gains and losses and whatever they built, but we also need to see what have they destroyed, plus the plunder by individuals - how many of cultural artifacts and other assets were simply taken or bought for a few pennies.

> The areas that were colonized were generally vulnerable because indigenous rulers were not doing a particularly good job

So... let's say Canada has the right to colonize the US for the same reason :).

>and in most cases were even less responsive to ( or in some case representative of ) the general population than the colonial administrations that co-opted or replaced them. And legacy of law, technology, education and language they left behind gave most former British colonies a decided edge in the post-colonial period.

That helped them in the situation in which they were pushed by colonization - by borders drawn by foreign forces, by having skipped a couple of centuries when they may have built those institutions themselves, and maybe would not even get into wars with their neighbors. How do we know whether they would need that military edge? I always suspect that wars between former colonies are influenced by former masters in some way.

>French, Belgian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and briefly German colonialism seemed to run on a slightly different model - and was certainly less constrained by 'do-gooders' in the home country. Napier in India and King Leopold in the Congo were quite different in both purpose and method. There were some heartbreakers, of course - Burma and Uganda come immediately to mind - but for the most part that was despite rather than because of British colonial influence.

The UK being a less bad colonial master doesn't make it a good one per se. There can't be one, IMO.