By Jared O. Bell
In 2017, I visited the House of Flowers in Belgrade, Serbia, the mausoleum that holds the remains of Yugoslavia’s once-indomitable leader, Josip Broz Tito, and his wife, Jovanka. The site feels less like a tomb and more like a time machine. Inside, the relics of Tito’s rule transport you to a moment when Yugoslavia stood proudly at the helm of the Non-Aligned Movement, commanding respect as a bridge between East and West.
As an eager student of modern Balkan history, I wanted to see the traces of what Yugoslavia once was and to understand the Yugonostalgia I often encountered among people from across the former republics. For many, Tito’s era still represents a lost vision of unity, stability, and dignity, a time when a small federation of nations could punch far above its geopolitical weight.
It is easy to see why Tito was so beloved, even as an autocrat. He presided over one of the most ethnically diverse republics on Earth—a federation composed of six republics (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia) and two autonomous provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina)—held together by both charisma and compromise. Yet walking through that museum, you can sense the fragility beneath the grandeur, the quiet fault lines of resentment, fear, and rivalry waiting to split open.
The breakup of Yugoslavia after Tito’s death in 1980 was a slow and painful process, ignited by deep political divisions, corruption, weakened institutions, and a lack of collective vision. What emerged from that unraveling, immortalized by the term Balkanization, has been studied endlessly by diplomats, historians, and conflict scholars. The wars that followed were horrific, leaving scars that still shape the region’s politics, memory, and identity.
The real lessons of Yugoslavia’s collapse lie not only in the atrocities that ended the federation but in the divisions that made disintegration possible. Many claimed the breakup was inevitable, the product of “ancient ethnic hatreds.” Yet others, myself included, see something far more modern: a democracy undone not by its differences, but by its inability to manage them.
In recent months, as I have watched the headlines unfold, the United States has begun to resemble pre-war Yugoslavia, a society fraying under the weight of its own divisions. Political violence, assassination attempts, and a relentless stream of incendiary rhetoric have replaced reasoned discourse with rage. It is often said that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps that is true. Or perhaps, as Mark Twain suggested, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes, and today America’s rhyme is an unsettling one. We need not look all the way to the Balkans to see the danger signs. Our own Civil Rights Era revealed how fragile the union can become when justice and consensus fall out of step. Yet this moment feels different, not like the 1960s struggle for equality, but like the 1980s Balkans, when civic trust eroded, institutions faltered, and fear replaced faith in democracy itself.
Some may argue that this comparison is unfair, that the United States, with its entrenched democratic heritage and strong institutions, cannot be likened to Yugoslavia, which for much of its history existed as an appendage to larger empires or as a monarchy without deep democratic traditions. America’s institutions are presumed older and stronger. Yet for me, the history rhymes clearly. The melody may differ, but the rhythm, the corrosion of trust, the normalization of hatred, and the substitution of identity for citizenship, feels hauntingly familiar.
In the final years before Yugoslavia’s collapse, its leaders learned that division was easier to manage than democracy. Ethnic and regional identities became political weapons. No one understood this better than Slobodan Milošević, who rose to power in Serbia by exploiting nationalist resentment. In 1989, he delivered a fiery speech at Gazimestan in reference to the Battle of Kosovo that had taken place 600 years earlier, invoking centuries-old grievances with the words, “No one will beat you again.” It was political theater masquerading as patriotism, and it worked. State-controlled media amplified his message, portraying Croats, Bosniaks, and Albanians as existential threats. Compromise was branded betrayal, unity weakness. What began as rhetoric turned into policy, and what began as suspicion turned into violence.
America’s version of this story is unfolding in real time. As inequality widens and social mobility collapses, populists again sell resentment as relief. Immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, racial minorities, and even teachers become the targets of orchestrated fury. Conspiracy replaces policy, grievance replaces governance. When despair becomes a political resource, the powerful have every incentive to keep people divided and afraid.
The rising tide of political violence in America has become impossible to ignore. On June 14, 2025, Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman of the Minnesota House of Representatives and her husband, Mark Hortman, were fatally shot in their home in what federal prosecutors described as a targeted attack. Authorities later charged Vance Boelter with the murders and the related shooting of Minnesota Senator John Hoffman and his wife, later admitting that he killed Hortman because of her political views. Just weeks later, right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk was gunned down by Tyler Robinson in what investigators described as a politically motivated killing.
That a respected public servant and a prominent media figure, people on opposite ends of the political spectrum, could both be assassinated within three months should have jolted the nation into collective outrage and mourning. Instead, each tragedy was devoured by the 24-hour news cycle, filtered through partisan lenses, and weaponized to deepen the very divides that fueled the violence in the first place. What should have united Americans in shared condemnation of political bloodshed instead became another front in a culture war, leaving the nation more fractured, fearful, and numb.
This moment carries an unsettling historical rhyme. In the twilight years of Yugoslavia, political violence became both a symptom and a strategy of collapse. Reformers, journalists, and dissidents who challenged nationalist extremism were harassed, exiled, or killed. The assassinations of figures like Croatian reformer Ante Paradžik in 1991, journalist Slavko Ćuruvija in 1999, and Serbian opposition leader Ivan Stambolić in 2000 were not random acts; they were milestones in a nation’s moral decay. Each death eroded faith in institutions, normalized vengeance as politics, and convinced citizens that the rule of law no longer applied. The line between rhetoric and bloodshed vanished, and once it did, the center could not hold.
America now stands perilously close to that same precipice. The killings of Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk, though worlds apart ideologically, share a deeper, more dangerous resonance: the idea that violence has become a legitimate language of politics. When assassination becomes another form of argument, democracy itself begins to die. And yet, instead of mourning together, we fracture further, weaponizing grief, assigning blame, and feeding the same culture of fear that fuels the next act of violence.
While we are not yet at the point of Sarajevo in 1992, the warning signs are impossible to ignore. Like Yugoslavia before it, the United States risks mistaking polarization for principle and vengeance for justice. History’s warning is clear: once a nation accepts violence as discourse, collapse is no longer a question of if, but when. We have to shed the illusion of American exceptionalism, because that very myth blinds us to our own fragility. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the most vicious acts of violence were not carried out by distant enemies but by neighbors, classmates, and former friends. The war revealed how ordinary people can become participants in extraordinary cruelty when fear and ideology replace empathy. The same is true today: those drawn to anger over political differences are our neighbors too. We may not be firing weapons, but we are loading the rhetoric, with social media as our battlefield, drawing us further and further apart.
If we cannot relearn how to see one another as citizens instead of combatants, the echoes of Sarajevo may yet become our own, and as most Bosnians will tell you, it is a hell of a reality to relive again and again.
Jared O. Bell, syndicated with PeaceVoice, is a former U.S. diplomat and scholar of human rights and transitional justice, dedicated to advancing global equity and systemic reform.
