When the West Woke Up: How Yugoslavia Fell Apart

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1:32David McWilliams: To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. And this is, if you were listening last week, part two of our examination of Yugoslavia, the former Yugoslavia, the Balkans, the war. And the reason we're doing it this week is this is the 30th anniversary of the massacre of Muslims in Srebrenica, which led to a about turn in Washington. and Washington came in explicitly on the side of the non-Serbs, particularly the Croats. So this comes, Srebrenica comes after years of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

2:26So this is the kind of final straw. And then within weeks of the Srebrenica massacre, where the Serb armies look as if they are dominant, everything changes. The Serbs are on the run. The Croats counterattack in Dalmatia. They occupy Kraina, which is a Serb-controlled area of Croatia. And the Croat army move into Bosnia. And as a result of that, the Americans bring the warring factions to the table. And it ends up in the Dayton Accord, which signals the end of the Yugoslav war. But as we're going to talk about, it is not the end of the hatreds, the enmities, the legacy, the revenge, all that stuff, which really hasn't gone away in this part of the world.

3:18And again, again, John, this is a lesson for Israelis in Gaza. You know, you inflict carnage, death, desolation, destruction upon people. They don't forget it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just don't forget it. It becomes part of their DNA.

3:34David McWilliams: Of course it does. Of course it does. Because your brother's been killed. Your son's been killed. Your family's been killed. So, and again, the reason we're doing it is, and we don't want to be too extreme on this, but what happened in Yugoslavia can happen anywhere. That's the point. With the wrong leaders, with the wrong impulses, with no strategic thinking, with no big picture thinking, once you go down the idea that we are better than you, that we are superior to you, that we are the victims and you are the oppressors. and that playlist is a European fascist playlist that we know exists because Europeans have been through it.

4:16And again, although the European Union may well be fragile, may well be impossible to deal with, may well be a large bureaucracy, all those things that the Americans like Jamie Dimon throw legitimate shade on the European Union, It still is far better than the alternative for Europeans, which is what played out in Yugoslavia and what characterized European relations from 1870 until 1945, which was ethnic conflict, racial conflict, aggression, war. no sense of the rule of law, no sense of accepting international boundaries and borders, and basically the rule of the strongman. And if you want to go down that road, just make sure you know that that road is paved with violence, ethnic tensions, death, and destruction.

5:20David McWilliams: That's the way it all ends. So that's the big point, John, I would say, about looking at Yugoslavia. Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting because, you know, that part of the world, it's a huge part of Europe. Yes, you know, it was a part that not many Europeans were very familiar with. You're absolutely right. I was telling you just off air that I did a radio documentary with a friend of mine called Deirdre Mulroney back in, I think it was 2015 or so, for RTE Lyric FM called Journey to You, as in why you and i followed this travelogue book that was written back in the 1930s by this lady rebecca west called black lamb and gray falcon yeah so the documentary itself is about this photojournalist who is yugoslavian grew up in yugoslavia and was a teenager when the the war broke out her name is dragona uracic and she follows in the footsteps of rebecca west talking about you know the culture the history but also what it was like for her and her family as the war broke out and the confusion and the terror that they felt yeah but one of the most interesting things of the documentary that i found out was that as the war broke out all the journalists in the world that were covering the war had very little understanding of yugoslavia likewise the American army and the generals.

6:48So there was huge demand for this 1930s book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, because they use it as their kind of go-to guide to explain 1990s Yugoslavia and its topography and geography and all that kind of stuff, which I think was really bizarre. Well, I mean, again, that gets right to the point, which is that the Balkans is the road through which all Europeans came.

7:16David McWilliams: If you think about it, right? All Europeans come from Anatolia, right? All of us come from Anatolia. And we all came this way. We all came this way, which is why it's such a fascinating place, which is why I believe, for example, genetically people are very, very mixed here, all that sort of stuff. Two things going on in the Balkans. One is that book, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, is a classic. So it's a travelogue, Rebecca West. It's a massive tome of a book as well. So she understood the language. She understood the culture. That's the first thing. The second thing, if you want, dear listener, to get a sense of this region, and if you're into reading summer reads, there's a great book called The Bridge Over the Drina, which won the Nobel Prize for a Yugoslav writer called Ivo Antrich.

8:05And The Bridge Over the Drina is a book about a small town in Bosnia called Novigrad, so a new town. Yeah. And the Drina is a river in Bosnia. And the reason this book is fantastic is it actually gives you the patchwork of the ethnicities that lived in eastern Bosnia up until the war. So it has Serbs, it has Muslims. Andridge himself was a Croat.

8:35David McWilliams: It has Sephardic Jews that spoke Spanish, Ladino here. Oh, yes. Yeah. A massive tribe. So basically what happened is when the Jews were kicked out of Spain, the Ottomans accepted the lion's share of Jewish refugees. And they followed the Ottoman armies up into what is now Yugoslavia. So the Jewish community here in Bosnia, Serbia, is incredibly old. and they spoke a language called Ladino, which was Spanish. Right, okay. Which they brought from Spain with them. So you have Jews, you have Muslims, you have Catholics, you have Orthodox Christians, all in this book, The Bridge Over the Drina. And the book is about a bridge that was constructed by the Ottomans in the 16th century all the way up to the Second World War.

9:31David McWilliams: A fascinating book. Incredible, yeah. So fascinating. And again, won the Nobel Prize. Yeah. Evo Andrich, Google it, all good. Yeah, and by the way, that documentary is on RTE Player, and it's called Journey to You from 2015. Well, I'm going to go for a long walk now, John, and not that I would be sick of hearing your voice. I will listen to your musical, your sonic effects. Your sonic effects. Yeah. So we are in 1991, the beginning of the war, unambiguously prosecuted by Serbia. Yeah. We left off there at Vukovar, the assault on Vukovar. So Vukovar, eastern Croatia, you get the assault on Vukovar.

10:18The Serb army attack a mixed town.

10:23David McWilliams: So the interesting thing is that most of these areas were mixed. People married, people intermarried. You know, because they lived in a socialist country, people all went to the same school, all that sort of stuff. Now, this becomes absolutely horrific when we go to Bosnia. But let's just, for the moment, we're in eastern Croatia, around a town called Vukovar. Most of the Croatian migrants to Ireland come from this area, by the way. Oh, okay. They use the Ryanair flight from Osijek, a flight I've been on, which is basically, and again, geography-wise, this is the Danube Delta. It's very, very fertile.

11:00David McWilliams: It's very agricultural. It has been part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire for a long, long time. Remember I said there was a part of Serbia called Vojvodina, which is a Hungarian minority? It's also known as the more tolerant part of the region. So the Serbs smashed that in the Serb army. They then go on to Slovenia and they try to snuff out the Slovene nationalists, but they give up after about two weeks because they realize there aren't enough Serbs there for their claim of Greater Serbia to be in any way legitimate. So they say, you know what, Slovenia, off you go. Slovenia, a very Alpine republic, by far the most successful economic part of this country.

11:41David McWilliams: When you go there, it feels like you're in Austria. It's very, very Austrian or Swiss in the way in which the Slovenes organize themselves. They are profoundly different from the rest of former Yugoslavia, although their language is distinct from Serbo-Croat. But if you speak Serbo-Croatia or if you understand Croatian or Serbian, you can pretty much get the drift of what the Slovenes are saying. But a distinct culture, they are blessed in the fact that don't have that many Serbs there. So Belgrade realizes, look, this isn't worth the fight. Croatia, on the other hand, is the jewel in the crown because Croatia has the coast, because Croatia is the only ethnic population of 4 million, which is a ballast to the Serbs of 10 million.

12:30There's a sense that Croatia has huge, huge tourist income coming in.

12:37David McWilliams: It's close to Italy. It's sophisticated. The Serbs want it. And the Croats put up the mother and father of fights, of defenses. So all through 1991, 1992, Croatia is bombarded by the Serbs. The Serbs never get as far as Zagreb. The Yugoslav army, I think, is stuck at a place called Karlovac, which is where a great beer called Karlovacco comes from, John. That's okay. Very important, yeah. Very important, very important. Karlovac in the center. Down here in Dalmatia, the Yugoslav navy turn on Sibenik, the town which is very close to me. All the while, the Serbs in Krajina, which is this part of Croatia, which has a large Serb population, declare their own independent republic.

13:30But how come there's so many Serbs in this part of Croatia? They, now this is a fascinating thing, they were imported by the Austrian-Hungarians as a bulwark against the Ottomans because they were regarded as the best fighters in the region. So in a sense, they have a garrison mentality.

13:50David McWilliams: They have a military mentality. Around here, they're called Vlai. That's the nickname for them. The Vlai, which are people who live beyond the sea. And I know loads of them. Is that a derogatory term? I think it's probably a derogatory term, but they laugh at it. I mean, what you notice around here is that there's no PC. There's no woke. This is a woke free. Yugoslavia, former Yugoslavia, is a woke free zone. I mean, it is hilariously anti-woke. Yeah, Florida on steroids. They don't even describe themselves as anti-war. They just are, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It comes naturally to them. It's like walking into a Marlborough ad in 1971.

14:27David McWilliams: You know what I mean? Like it's really, it's got that vibe of it. So the Croats look as if they're about to be defeated. And Milosevic not only wants to take large parts of Croatia, but he also turns his eyes on Bosnia. Yeah. And this is where you get a microcosm of the three major religions, cultures, ethnicities. Can I just ask you quickly, was one of the driving forces in that the fact that Serbia is a landlocked country? So they needed access to the sea, to ports. Very much so. It's a landlocked country. It has an ability to be both victim and oppressor at the same time. so when you talk a lot to Serbs you know they will see themselves as victims but on the other hand they can be quite macho and they see themselves as the top dogs it's a bit like the Brexiteers you always notice remember the Brexiteers it was all victimization and what were better than everybody else yeah yeah it's like the Israelis as well a lot of people but I wouldn't you don't damn the Serbs there are many many culpabilities but in this war so for example I think the narrative is fair to say after the Second World War, the status of the Serbs associated with there being the majority of the partisans were Serbs, apart from the Dalmatians here, their status rose dramatically.

16:02The Croatian status fell because the Croats were associated with the Nazis. So that's the sort of story of Yugoslavia and that's going on, that's kind of percolating through the blood of the country in one way. After the Yugoslav war in between 91 and 95, the Serbs status and their brand and the perception of Serbia collapses because they look like they are fascists. They look like they are ethnic cleansers, which they are. And of course, the Croats are the plucky little defenders of themselves, the minority population, they're smaller. And at the end of war, right? But... What about the Bosnians?

16:45The Bosnians are in the worst position of all because they're sandwiched between the Croats and the Serbs, right? And the Serbs have a significant population in Bosnia of Serbs, of which Gavrilo Princip, the guy who started the First World War,

17:04David McWilliams: was one. Right. They occupy and turn their armies to Sarajevo. We remember the siege of Sarajevo. So they are indiscriminate. There are rape camps. They are deploying ethnic cleansing. They terrorize the Muslim population. The Muslim population are undefended. They have no army. And they are basically trying to fight back with whatever they have. 100 ,000 Bosnians are killed. 100 ,000 in ethnic conflict. Most of them are burned or shot by their neighbors. It's an extraordinary story. By their neighbors, yeah. By their neighbors, right? the Croats take what would be now called Herzegovina, which is an old Croatian part.

17:47David McWilliams: So you might have heard the town of Mostar. Yeah. Do you know where it's in the middle of Herzegovina? Medjugorje. Just to give you a little bit of symbolism there, John, right? Yeah. The Croats take that part. The Serbs basically acquire huge parts of Bosnia and kill the Muslims there. and Sarajevo is the city that holds out against them, against the Serbs, and holds out for, I think, three and a half years, which is quite phenomenal, right? And that's where you see the evilness of the Serb regime at its most stark because the Bosnian Muslims are largely defenseless. And again, this is where the legitimacy of the European human that was called into question.

18:38Yeah. So we see an ethnic cleansing on our own borders and we do nothing about it. Now, if you are Muslim, what you see is an ethnic cleansing of Islamic people and Christians doing nothing about it. And that is a narrative that has naturally become the dominant narrative in the Islamic world, the Muslim world towards Bosnia. And why are there so many Muslims in Bosnia? How did that become like a Muslim country in Europe? Interesting question. The Muslims in Bosnia converted under the Ottoman Empire. So the Muslims in Bosnia are local people who converted to Islam because the Ottoman Empire came in and said,

19:23David McWilliams: look, if you are Islamic, we will treat you a little bit differently. Whereas if you're a Christian, you are definitely not part of the gang. So the Muslims in Bosnia are local Serbs and Croats, in effect, that converted to Islam in order to live a reasonably peaceful life. So they were kind of top dogs in that region during the Ottoman Empire. Now, that's the interesting thing. That's the interesting thing. So they were. So that's another enmity that is bubbling up under the surface, right? that certainly before the communist takeover under Tito, the Muslims would have been the top dogs, the Serbs would have been the peasants.

20:05And of course, that's one of the reasons that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand happened in 1914. So that's what's happening. We know the war. Listeners can Google what happened. There's a great BBC series called The Death of Yugoslavia, worth a very, very interesting BBC TV series, documentary series. It was a particularly horrific war, wasn't it? I just remember it was on every night. It's a bit like what's going on in Gaza now and Ukraine, that you almost become immune to the horror of it. And you really have to kind of pay attention and stay tuned in. And we didn't.

20:45David McWilliams: We didn't. We didn't. And again, interestingly, interestingly, it was the Americans who stopped it. So what brought them in? What was the... So let's go back a little bit, right? So we have three major powers. Our power blocks have always been involved in the politics of Yugoslavia. The Russians, the Ottomans, and the, in parentheses, loosely, the West. And the West is split between the Germanic group and the French and British Atlantic group. So the French, British and Russians have historically got an alliance to hem in the Germans. Okay, that's the first thing. That means the French and British usually are on the Russian side in pre-First World War politics.

21:36Unusual given that Russia is actually an absolute monarchy.

21:41David McWilliams: And the French are talking about liberty, equality and fraternity. but they put all the Republican stuff aside and they get into battle with the Russians because they're afraid of Germany. So the Serbs are very useful to the French, British and Russians as people who can annoy the Germans. When the conflict in Yugoslavia breaks out, those historical diplomatic links re-emerge. The French and British do nothing because they're actually on the Serb side. Right. But we were all watching what was going on. So how could that stand? Yeah, but I'm talking about the foreign office and the Elysee. Their DNA is pro-Serbian.

22:21Yeah. The DNA of the Germans and the Austrians is pro-Croatian. Yeah. And the Italians are sitting on the sidelines,

22:31David McWilliams: but also know that they are on the front line of immigration from Yugoslavia. So if the war happens, millions of Yugoslavs emigrate. Millions, not hundreds of thousands, millions. Germany, Austria, Italy. And you would get out. It's like, what are you going to do? You get out, right? Absolutely. That's the first thing. In the event, the Americans are the only honest brokers. And the Americans, and this is weird when you think about the Americans subsequently, under Clinton, take a moral stance on the war. And the Americans are also the only ones that have the firepower, the air power. And it's they that signal, okay, we've had enough of this.

23:11This is crazy. So it shows the European Union at its worst, which is that old historical diplomatic allegiances were seen as more important than coming in and helping the Muslims. And of course, since then, the Muslims have naturally sided with Saudi Arabia and with Islam and with Turkey because they are feeling the only people who could have helped them were their religious brethren. And amazingly, Islam in Bosnia, before the war, most Bosnian Muslims were Muslims in name only. You never saw hajibs, etc. Now if you go down to Sarajevo, you see imams, mosques, etc. It's become much more religious.

23:57But we're getting ahead of ourselves. So the Americans come in, they arm the Croats, they say to the Croats, you go. And on the 5th of August, the Croats go. They beat the Serbs. They turn the tables. They get into Bosnia. The Serbs are on the retreat. Milosevic at this stage is running a mafia state. And I'll tell you about that in a second. In Serbia, he's losing everything.

24:21David McWilliams: And what he's trying to do is desperately stay in power to avoid going to The Hague. He does a deal with the Croats. They redraw the boundaries. The Serbs are pushed back into Serbia. Parts of Croatia the Serbs occupied goes back to the Croats. The Croats win the war unambiguously. That may or may not have been a good thing for them. And I'll talk about that in a second, right? But the Bosnians are the ones who pay the price. So there's no foreign troops ever in Serbian soil. So the Serbs are never, they're never defeated. They just are pushed back to their borders. Bosnia is carved up between the integrated Republic of Bosnia, which is now Muslim and some Serbs and some Croats, but very few, but it's mainly Muslim.

25:10And a thing called the Republika Srpska, which is the Serb Republic around a place called Banyaluca, which is a Serb Republic, right? Bosnia is a failed state. It has been a failed state. It cannot progress simply because the ethnic conflict is still simmering there. It's an amazing place to visit, but the Bosnians are the biggest diaspora of Yugoslavia.

25:35David McWilliams: They're all over the place. Probably the best-known one is Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Oh, yes, of course, who went to Sweden. Sweden, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Swedes took in a hell of a lot, right? Then the Serbs are defeated. The Serbs then are defeated against the Croats, but bizarrely... Only because of the Americans. Only because of the Americans. And the Croats fought incredibly hard, and the Croats fought incredibly diligently. Just to keep Croatia out of Greater Serbia was quite an achievement. And the Americans came in on the Croatian side and the Germans were on the Croatian side and the Austrians were on the Croatian side.

26:11David McWilliams: And then the Brits and the French kind of decided, okay, we'll come in and be peacemakers. But fascinatingly, what you have then is a stalemate, like a lot of these wars. And then in 1998, the Serbs turned their attention to Kosovo. Right. And start a war there. Yeah. Like, you kind of feel like, have you had enough of this carry on? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seemed to be endless. All the 90s was just the Balkans, Balkans, Balkans. The Balkans, Balkans. And that's when, of course, yours truly ends up in there. Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask you about. So you were talking earlier about parts where were agriculturally really fertile and very productive.

26:50But economically, where is the kind of the powerhouse within these three regions of former Yugoslavia. And you went over there as well to kind of study emerging economies. Tell us about that. Tell us from an economics perspective what's going on there. Okay, so I end up in a bizarre meeting, John, in 1996. And I'm sitting down in an office in Biogradska Banca, which is Belgrade Bank in Serbia. Serbia at this stage is under sanction. It's impoverished.

27:28David McWilliams: It has had hyperinflation. In fact, the hyperinflation in Serbia during the war was the worst episode of hyperinflation ever recorded in the world, worse than the Weimar Republic. Really? Really? Worse than Zimbabwe and all those places? Worse, worse. The worst destruction of money ever is the episode of the Serb hyperinflation in the early 1990s during the war. Wow, that's some claim. massive migration of serbs huge brain drain serbs who can get out get out there's a massive migration of croats as well but there's also an inward migration of croats of diaspora croats come to fight with the croats croats from australia croats from canada all that sort of stuff so i'm sitting in a meeting and in walks a woman called burka vucic right and i don't know at the time but she is Slobodan Milosevic's money woman.

28:20She's the bag carrier. She's the woman that gets all the money. So imagine this is a mafia state. Yeah. So Milosevic and his family are mafioses and they run the place with Arkan and all these extraordinary nasty war criminals, right? Yeah.

28:39David McWilliams: And I'm in there representing a French bank. And of course the French are being so French that they're backing both sides. I don't realize this. Yeah. Right? That they're backing the Serbs and the Croats during the war just to see who wins. Typical French, okay? Yeah, yeah. And I'm like an innocent abroad. I'm like the economist, red hair. Hi, how are you? Yeah, really interesting. And this woman walks in and she has the bang of nastiness off her. Yeah. And I don't know this at the time, but you know where you meet people and you get a vibe from them? Sure. So Borkovic ends up being Slovolan Milosevic's private banker.

29:14and she is the one that gets all the money out through Biograd's gabanker to Cyprus. Okay, right.

29:21David McWilliams: Cyprus is where all the offshore, basically Milosevic looted the place. So I don't know this and I'm sitting there and I go back to Paris and I say, look, I've just met this woman. I don't go back, I just ring them up. And of course the French say, oh, don't worry, you know, she's an interesting player. And of course I have no rash, so it's going on, right? The worst thing is that night, I go to a club in Belgrade. Yeah. And I'm at the bar at the club and I'm with two mates of mine and we sit down in a place. So there's the club, there's the dance floor, there's the bar and there's sort of a seating area.

29:59David McWilliams: So I'm having a gargle. Yeah, yeah. This sounds very 1970s kind of Studio 54 or Annabelle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's real 1970s, right? But it's 1990s in Serbia after the war is over. Yeah. With all the mafios. so I I sit I'm sitting in the thing having a few gargles and this massive bouncer comes over to me big shaved head gold chains the whole thing like kind of stereotypical like a trope bouncer yeah yeah no neck no neck no neck and he walks in right and he says get out of the seat and I'm like kind of cocky he said how do you mean get out of the seat I've paid for my drink he said get out of the seat who are you talking to bud oh yeah yeah not one but Ollie is right okay and I'm this tiny little fucker right and he goes it is for Marco.

30:45David McWilliams: I look him and say, who the fuck is Marco? Yeah, good question. Marco Milosevic's was Slobodan Milosevic's son and his gang, his crew. It was like going to the Black Forge and dissing Conor McGregor. Yeah. So this guy comes in, he's got peroxide hair. Yeah. And it's Marco Milosevic and his entourage of girls and heads and guns and I've never hightailed Elephant Club so quickly. I was Scarborough down the road. So you're in a mafia state, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I could just see you there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of all cock in the hoop. Getting all tough and then going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all talk.

31:28David McWilliams: Because these guys were murdering people, beating people up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's around then I began to decide, okay, this is a fascinating part of the world. I came down here on holidays a few times, as you know. I fell in love with Croatia, with the Dalmatian coast. I've come back ever since, all that sort of stuff. But the Serbs then prosecute a war against the Albanians in Kosovo. This precipitates the Americans bombing, and NATO bombing Belgrade. But all the while, there is still this extraordinary heist going on. And the final little bit of detail is one of the only assets that Milosevic owned and Serbia owned that was worth anything was Serbia Telecom.

32:21So at this stage, Milosevic mafiosos were trying to sell everything to anyone who would buy it.

32:28David McWilliams: Now, we know that in the late 90s, telecom industries were worth a fortune. Surprised Dennis O 'Brien didn't buy it. I'm surprised, Nelson Bryant, but I tell you that this goes back to the Brits, right? Douglas Hurd, former British Foreign Secretary, is made the key man of HSBC, HSBC, the British bank, in the bid for who got the license to buy Serbia Telecom, which was the jewel in the crown of Serbia, and was, the money was going directly into the back pocket of Milosevic, taken by Borkovucic to Cyprus, HSBC win the bit out of nowhere. Surprise, surprise. And I've always wondered, was there a connection between Hurd and Milosevic because they would have known each other because Douglas Hurd was instrumental in the partition of Bosnia.

33:22David McWilliams: It was an interesting thing. Wow. I was contemplating this as I was legging down the road with the bouncers running after me. So come here to me, Mike. Let's just bring it up to now. Now, what is the legacy of this horrific war and this nasty, nasty breakup of Yugoslavia? How has that affected Europe as a whole? And where do we go from here? But before you answer that, let's do a bit of this. Get the money out of Cyprus.

33:55So, Mike, we're talking about Yugoslavia, the breakup of Yugoslavia, the horrible war that happened in Cyprus. This message comes from Jackson. Taxes aren't something you can only think about once a year. With investments, planning for tax days year-round. Fortunately, Jackson offers tax-efficient products. Visit jackson.com for more information on how our products can make your tax bill a little bit less painful. Jackson is short for Jackson Financial Incorporated, Jackson National Life Insurance Company, Lansing, Michigan, and Jackson National Life Insurance Company of New York. Purchase New York.

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36:27So what is the legacy of the war and the breakup of Yugoslavia? What's the legacy, particularly for Europe as a whole? And where do we go from here?

36:39David McWilliams: Yeah, fascinating question. So that's 30 years ago, John. So we're going to be reasonably rapid. Okay, so what happens is Slovenia becomes a very, very modern European country very quickly. So much so that it is estimated that Slovene GDP per head would be higher than British GDP per head in the next five years. Really? Wow. Okay. So they have become very much part of the European Union. Yeah. And what's their main industry that's driving that? Well, the amazing thing about if you go to Slovenia, there are 200 ,000 registered companies in Slovenia. There's only 2 million people in Slovenia. So that's a company for every 10 people.

37:18David McWilliams: Yeah. So they are hyper, hyper, hyper productive. Yeah. They're very Austrian that way. When you go to Slovenia, by the way, Slovenia is one of the best kept secrets in Europe. It's an absolutely beautiful country. Beautiful. We've got Alpine mountain ranges, goes down to the sea, lush agriculture, really beautiful. Yeah, the Julian Alps. It's on my list. Yeah, it's really well worth it. It's very, very well worth it. Slovene's very industrious, very close to Austria and Switzerland. Obviously, they're multilingual people. They're from the Dolomites. The German expression for a translator in German is a dolmenscher, which means somebody from the Dolomites, because they are on the axis where Germany meets the Slavic languages meets the Romance languages of Italy.

38:06So they're very multilingual people, very industrious. They have done extremely well. Ljubljana, amazing capital city, a beautifully well-designed city, etc. Right? They have a small bit of coast in Piran, just south of Trieste. So they're grand. They were unscathed by the war, right? Croatia has had a series of very, very poor governments in the last 30 years. And every time a government gets into trouble, they push down on the nationalist accelerator. So what they do is they get hyper-nationalist and they basically, in a bizarre alliance of the Catholic Church and nationalist parties, not unlike Devil Air's Ireland, Croatia has kind of lost its way.

38:54And the most significant, so the standard of living has increased, but nearly 20 % of Croatians are living at risk of poverty. That was in 2022. But the most significant statistic for Croatia is the population has fallen dramatically since the 90s. They have lost 900 ,000 people in the last 30 years. Through emigration? Through emigration. Very low birth rate, very, very high level of emigration. So for example, more than 400 ,000 Croatians are estimated to have emigrated in the 2010s alone. Wow, yeah. In 2021, 42 ,000 Croats, that's 1 % of the population emigrated in one year. And it's estimated that about 40 ,000 Croats live in Ireland.

39:40David McWilliams: There's 28 ,000 registered Croats in Ireland. But it's thought that there's all sorts of other Croats who haven't bothered registering because they're part of the European Union. so net migration has been negative every year since the 1990s the croatian diaspora communities are huge in germany there's about 450 000 of them in austria in ireland north america and australia i'll give you one interesting they must be getting a lot of remittances from they are getting remittances yeah little little factoid a song a croatian rap song where the chorus was all about Ryanair went to number one in the charts here about three years ago.

40:20Okay. About Ryanair. Go on, sing it there, Matt. About Ryanair.

40:23David McWilliams: Because they all emigrate using Ryanair to Ireland, right? So Ireland has become the promised land for Croats, okay? It gives a few bars. But no, but actually, again, Google it. Listener, Google Croatian rap about Ryanair. It's a Croatian rap song. So that's the background noise in Croatia. Fascinatingly, last week in Croatia, John, the biggest concert ever in the world the biggest paid music concert ever in the world took place in zagreb last week and the musician was somebody you will never heard of a guy called thompson right you're right i've never unless it was the thompson twins that the guy called thompson exactly do you remember the thompson do you want to sing a few thompson twins go on go for it okay Right.

41:12David McWilliams: Thompson named after the Tommy gun. Oh, right. So, so this gives you a flavor. Now, so, so, so, sorry, it's the biggest paid gig ever? Ever. 500 ,000 people paid to go to see. Think about the Croatian population as, I think, 3.5 million now. Yeah. That means, that means nearly one in six Croatians went to this gig. Yeah. It's like going to the Pope. It's like going to the Pope. Exactly. And speaking of the Pope, the imagery was incredibly Catholic. And so for the opposition here and the left here in Croatia and for people all around the Balkans, they saw this as a remembrance or an homage to Croatian nationalism, etc.

42:01Yeah. From my friends here who I spoke to last night who went to the gig, they just thought it was a big celebration of Croatian love for themselves. and for the world. But what it shows is that there is still a substantial part of the Croatian society that is driven by, not so much driven by, but that is still looking back on the war as the great victory, right? Yeah. And the problem with doing that, and I do think this is a problem, is that if that is your high point, and since then nearly a million of you who have emigrated, what you can see is it's very easy to use the victory in the war as the finest moment.

42:49And it's very easy to actually push down on that accelerator if and when the population begins to get pissed off at the lack of opportunity, at high unemployment, at income inequalities, all that sort of stuff, right? So that's what's going on here. Serbia, on the other hand, John Serbia is now experiencing a revolution on the streets There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of young Serbs marching against the corruption of the Vucic government This guy has been president for the last 10 years What sparked that? Fascinating story What sparked that was the collapse of a roof in a train station in Novi Sad Novi Sad is the capital of Voivodina.

43:36Right? You might remember that. About six months ago or so. Exactly. About six months ago. Yeah. And of course, the reason the roof collapsed, it was all a dodgy deal. Yeah. A shoddy. So basically, it was a relation of the president. Yeah. Got the contract.

43:52David McWilliams: This is a mafia state. It was Marco. Oh no, Marco's gone. Marco's gone. Marco's now a bouncer. so it was a relation of Vucic the present prime minister right and he got the deal basically Serbia is unbelievably corrupt yeah and again I come back to this idea it's a mafia state and the people are being bled dry by this oligarchy at the top they've had enough and of course they've had enough it's the kids it's university students have lost one year of college They don't go to college anymore. They protest every day. Wow. And of course, nobody in the West knows this. You're not seeing this on our news.

44:33You're not seeing this anywhere. So the biggest mass movement at the moment in Europe is a movement of Serbian students and young people against the corruption of the present regime, triggered by the fact that 15 people were killed when the roof of Novi Sad train station collapsed. and once they started digging, they realized that the entire thing was jerry-built on a contract that was basically,

45:00David McWilliams: let's say on the face of it, it was 2 million quid or let's say 10 million quid. I don't know the details, but let's say 10 million euros and in fact the job was done for a couple of hundred thousand. Corners were cut, terrible material was used and the thing collapsed on commuters. So what could be the outcome if this escalates? What could be the outcome of that and could that destabilize the region again? Well, the thing is that Serbia has actually economically recovered. There's a lot of direct foreign investment going to Serbia. Now, why is that? It is because the Serbs are very close to the Chinese and they're very close to the Russians.

45:38David McWilliams: So when Xi Jinping came to Europe last time, he visited Serbia and Hungary. He didn't visit Britain or France or Germany. And they built that high-speed rail between Novi Sad and Belgrade. Exactly. But of course, the Chinese built the rail, the Serbs built the infrastructure around it, and that's where the corruption was, okay? But of course, there's massive corruption going on. I'll give you again, 300 ,000 Serbs have left in the 90s alone, right? There are a million Serbian citizens abroad, a million Serbian citizens outside Serbia, and the diaspora is about two or three million who are people whose parents emigrated.

46:17Yes, yeah. But what could happen, John? is if the students succeed in bringing down the regime, it could be a fresh start for Serbia. Now, Serbia has been locked out of the European Union. Croatia's in the European Union. Croatia uses the Euro. Croatia's in NATO. So Croatia has been basically welcomed into the European family.

46:40David McWilliams: The Serbs have been excluded. Why? Because they are very close to the Russians. So there's loads of Russians in Belgrade. Yeah. You can get daily flights from Belgrade to Moscow. you get a huge amount of Russian immigrants have left Russia to Serbia. And then, of course, the Bosnians are very close now to the Turks and the Saudi Arabians. So what you see is the legacy of the war is that the places that were slightly Western, Catholic countries using the Western alphabet, the Croats and the Slovenes, are in the Western world now. The Bosnians and the Macedonians are very close to the Turks. In fact, about 200 ,000 or 300 ,000 Macedonians emigrate to Turkey because they're very close to them.

47:26And the Serbs are with the Chinese and the Russians. So the legacy is, in effect, John, the old colonial imperialist lines that were drawn 150 years ago are still there. Right. Which is kind of amazing. Yeah. The Ottomans. Yeah. i.e. the Turks now, the Russians, and the Western alliance are very much here and things haven't changed geostrategically one bit. The Russians will continue to support the Serbs because it gives the Russians a sort of a bridgehead into Europe. The Germans and Austrians continue to support the Croats and the European Union in general, but driven by Germans and Austrians.

48:13So the Slovenes and the Croats are kind of in our camp. And what it says to you is that without leaders who can go beyond nationalism, this is the key, who can actually put nationalism, ethnic difficulties and ethnic, let's say, red lines, without that, you get chaos, you get stagnation, you get emigration, and you get corruption. And so when I hear and when I see all of our resurgent nationalism in Ireland, in Britain, in France, Germany, Italy, the idea that we put ourselves first, and of course, flavored by the Trumpian MAGA nationalism, what I see is not a war like the Croatian-Serbian war or the Yugoslav war.

49:12But what I see is this gradual destruction of the international architecture that we put in after the Second World War. And I say, again, clumsy as it is, unimpressive as it might be, you can be critical of it, but the idea of free trade, free movement of goods, a certain amount of community of countries, this has to be better, John, than the alternative.

49:44David McWilliams: Europe knows what the alternative is. The Americans have never had a fascist government. They've no historical member of fascism. That's why I think they're hurtling down that way now. Yeah. Europeans have a memory of fascism. We have a memory of hyper-nationalism. Yugoslavia is the most recent example, and I think it's something we should avoid at all costs. We'll talk to you next week.

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