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Hello, you're very welcome to Longreads, a Jacobin podcast where we look in depth at political topics and thinkers.

My name is Daniel Finn, and the features editor here at Jacobin, and I'll be presenting the show.

The breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s resulted in a brutal civil war.

The conflict ended in experiments in multinational coexistence across the Western Balkans.

But the tragic end of Yugoslavia shouldn't define the way that we think about its history.

The Yugoslav nationalities played an outsized role in the struggle against Nazi Germany.

During the Cold War, the government helped organize the non-aligned movement and tried to develop its own form of socialism.

Our guest today for a conversation about Yugoslav history is Catherine Samary.

She's an historian of the Balkans and the author of several books, including Yugoslavia dismembered.

This is the first part of a two-part interview. You can hear the second part in our next episode.

What was the nature of the interwar Yugoslav state that took shape after the First World War under the rule of the Serbian monarchy?

First, in 1918, what was called, not Yugoslavia at that time, but what was called the Kingdom of Serbs, Crats and Slovenes,

was established under the rule of the Karajorjevic dynasty, Serbian dynasty.

And that expressed the aspiration of different Slavic people to regroup on the base of the collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Ungarian empire.

And expressed also the idea that an alliance of those different people could help them to resist the German domination, which expressed itself in the war.

But this rapidly was transformed because of the consolidation of the domination of the Serbian national power,

with dictatorial dimensions rapidly, and the Kingdom transformed itself into what was renamed a Yugoslav that was the first time that the term Yugoslav was used.

...