The creation of Yugoslavia as part of the reordering of Europe after the first world war made a great deal of sense. In geopolitical terms, it helped accomplish the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, removing Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Hercegovina and Vojvodina from Austrian or Hungarian control. At the same time, the creation of a Land of the South Slavs, or Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija, from jug, south, plus slavija, of Slavs) met the demands of at least some of the dominant political figures among the South Slavic peoples, particularly the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. These peoples and the Mecedonians speak closely related languages or dialects of the same languages or dialects of the same language. Serbian and Croatian are as closely related and mutually intelligible as British English and American English, while the relationships of Slovenian and Macedonian to Serbo-Croatian are about the equivalent of those of Dutch and Schweizerdeutsch, respectively, to German. The fact that Croats and Slovenes are mainly Catholic while Serbs and Macedonians are mainly Orthodox Christians did not seem to differentiate these peoples overwhelmingly. In terms of criteria of language/dialect, religion, traditional economic structures and other cultural features, there were and are probably fewer differences between Serbs and Croats than between Bavarians and Prussians. The existence of a sizable population of Serbo-Croatian speaking Muslims in Bosnia and Hercegovina was an additional complication, but many of those Muslims who identified themselves as Turks had left Bosnia for Turkey at the end of the war, and most of those remaining identified themselves as Serbs or Croats, albeit of Muslim confession. The large Albanian population of Macedonia and Kosovo was another potential problem, but was ignored under the Serbian urge to recover Kosovo, the site of the Serbs' legendary defeat by the Turks in 1389.
As an empirical matter, the South Slav peoples were so closely...