>>>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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That's the most concise and coherent explanation of that time and place I've heard. Thanks for that. I knew there was more than brute force going on ( Tito seems to have been a remarkable personality )

>>Britain seems to have left behind as much as it took.
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>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.
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The Opium Wars were not Britain's finest hour. But also remember that in the first half of the 19th century you had the greatest cultural clash the world had ever seen - the gap between nations was almost unimaginable by today's standards. Switzerland and Somalia today would have more in common than Britain and Afghanistan in 1832. There was no playbook or historical precedent for dealing with the differences in cultures and progress. I don't think it is particularly instructive to judge the decisions made then in a 20th or 21st century context. Remember that one of the primary missions of the British navy in the 19th century ( at least post-Trafalgar ) was the suppression of the slave trade - which had always been quite acceptable in Africa and continued to be in Arab lands until - oh, about 5 minutes before you ask a western educated diplomat from Saudi Arabia or Sudan.

As to where the cultures involved would have got to on their own ... Arab civilization collapsed of its own internal ossification before it got any help from Europeans ( rememeber, Napoleon pretty much walked into Egypt, the Ottomans had already replaced Arab culture and were in the process of themselves decaying ) , the Chinese had been going downhill since the arrival of the Manchu - who only succeeded because of the decay of the Ming - and the Indian Rajahs were more interested in making war on each other than the Moguls. Europeans didn't invent colonialization or conquest. We just invented feeling guilty about it <s>

>> The areas that were colonized were generally vulnerable because indigenous rulers were not doing a particularly good job
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>So... let's say Canada has the right to colonize the US for the same reason :).

<s> No, societies are only colonized by more dynamic cultures. I think we're safe <g>

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>>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.
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>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.

Drawing borders was another weak spot - but only became a weak spot after the colonial period. And where a legacy of an educated upper and middle class and a code of laws survived ( India, the US, Canada ) amazing things were achieved that were a credit to the mother country. I think it is very very very safe to say that without the Raj India would not today be a united and democratic country and you would be getting tech support and customer service calls in a completely different way.


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

In a perfect world created from scratch, no. But as a believer in evolution over 'intelligent design' I think history unfolds in a complex and often haphazard fashion. I am encouraged and inspired by the parts that work and seldom surprised by those that don't <bg>