Would war surprise us today?

The documentary Izgubljeni Dream Team (The Lost Dream Team, 2025) by the director Jure Pavlović tells a story that seems scarcely believable from today’s perspective: in the middle of a championship, a basketball team was left without the state it was representing in the competition. In 1991, the Yugoslav team won a gold medal in Rome for a country that had already ceased to exist, as Slovenia and Croatia declared independence during the tournament.

Thirty years later, the former Yugoslav basketball stars recall one after another that, in that distant year of 1991, they considered themselves Yugoslavs and, above all, basketball players. They recount how astonished they were by the dissolution of the state at the very moment their entire focus was on the upcoming Olympic Games in Barcelona, where they were set to face the American Dream Team. Toni Kukoč, Dino Rađa, Vlade Divac, Žarko Paspalj and the other great players of what was probably the finest generation in the history of Yugoslav basketball were not alone in their surprise, although, watching the recording of Milošević’s speech at Gazimestan in 1989 in the film, we find it hard to understand.

Similarly, in Mila Turajlić’s documentary Druga strana svega (The Other Side of Everything, 2017), the filmmaker’s mother Srbijanka Turajlić—a renowned Serbian intellectual and tireless advocate for the democratisation of Yugoslav society—recalls her astonishment when, in the early 1990s, she witnessed huge crowds in the streets of Belgrade, waving Serbian flags and holding up images of Slobodan Milošević. “Who are these people?” Srbijanka wondered at the time. Thirty years later, she admitted that she had been totally unaware of their existence. It was only at that moment that she realised, in shock, that she and her fellow fighters for democracy had been incredibly isolated, a tiny, almost invisible minority in their own country.

Now that we know all too well how the dissolution of Yugoslavia came about, it is difficult to comprehend the surprise of the Yugoslav people at the secession of Slovenia and Croatia, although we can at least understand their astonishment at the bloody conflict that ensued. Even that conflict, however, seems almost inevitable from today’s perspective, as it appears that the road to tragedy in the Balkans had been carefully paved.

Today, as we read the openly chauvinist headlines in Yugoslav newspapers from that time and listen to the inflammatory speeches of Yugoslav politicians from the late 1980s, it is much easier to believe those who, soon after Tito’s death, predicted that Yugoslavia was doomed to dissolution than those who were surprised by its demise.

And yet, no matter how loudly and unequivocally history announces its arrival, it still manages to surprise people time and again. World War II took people by surprise, too, even though some were already fleeing from Hitler in the early 1930s. And there are still some – now in 2025 – who have not yet grasped that Nazism is deadly.

The most convincing explanation for this phenomenon is that most people are predisposed to believe in a happy ending, despite knowing full well that every human story ends in unhappiness. However bleak the outlook, we manage to push the thought aside, just as we banish the thought of our own death from our everyday lives.

So, would we be surprised if the Balkans were to end up in flames once more tomorrow, just as our parents were in 1991? Would we be astonished, as they were, to see crowds glorifying nationalist leaders and their war rhetoric? Would we be surprised if a new round of fighting over native soil erupted in the Balkans tomorrow?

Or would we, later, once it was all long in the past, claim that we had anticipated it, or even knew it was going to happen? That it was inevitable?

A few days ago, the Serbian President stated that there would be war. Others won’t tell you this, but I will, he said in his familiar manner of fake sincerity. So that you’re not surprised, he might as well have added. Admittedly, he did not explain what war he meant, but he did talk about arms and of how stockpiling weapons inevitably leads to armed conflict. Perhaps he had Europe in mind. Perhaps the Balkans. Or perhaps Serbia itself, of which the media these days are quick to report “is on the brink of civil war”.

Over the past few years, there have been countless similarly gentle reminders that we should not be surprised later. Serbia is not only threatened by civil war, but is also losing Kosovo, and the Republic of Srpska has been left without its long-standing leader. And we know very well what might happen when beasts are wounded. Bosnia and Herzegovina has descended into utter despair, yet Bosnian students, who arguably have more reason to protest than their Serbian peers, are studying in Slovenia and Germany. The calm in Montenegro and North Macedonia seems peaceful only to those of us who, distracted by the loud noise of the neighbouring countries, cannot see that far.

Then there is Croatia, which is admittedly a member of the European Union but has an increasingly Balkan mindset. At Thompson’s concert this summer, the authorities openly identified with the crowd who were ‘ready for the homeland’, and this identification reverberated far and wide. Threats directed at the organisers of festivals in Benkovac and Šibenik, as well as the graffiti threatening the writer Miljenko Jergović in Zagreb, are merely individual echoes of the crowd at the Zagreb Hippodrome, who received the message that the ‘state is ours’.

And on top of all this, if it need be said, the vicinity of the Balkan region is also Balkanic in the worst sense of the word. Hungary is drawing maps of a Greater Hungary and Italy is being led by a neo-fascist government. But before our thoughts set out down the well-trodden path of modern populism and Trumpism, before we get lost in the side streets of social media and the world of fake news, let us return to the matter of surprise.

Let us ask ourselves: Is the Serbian President’s talk of war truly surprising?

Or we could frame the question differently. Today, nobody in Serbia is shouting ‘The state is ours!’—because those shouting the loudest are the people who finally realised a year ago that Serbia is not their state. And they are shouting because they feel that the state has been taken away from them.

Would we be surprised if an armed conflict erupted tomorrow between the rich owners of the state and their blinded supporters, and the dispossessed masses?

Would we be surprised if, amidst this social chaos, the Serbs suddenly identified an external enemy?

As I have already mentioned, people are wired not to see and not to hear. Our brains subconsciously perceive the changes in our surroundings and warn us of potential danger, but our memory stores away the worst traumas in order to protect us from experiencing new ones. At the same time, however, we successfully deceive ourselves that everything will be all right and end well. We see the red flags; we see the countless similarities between our seemingly happy present and our utterly unhappy past. And yet, we see nothing.

While it may seem paradoxical, from today’s omniscient perspective, I find it hard to understand the surprise at the dissolution of a state that had been falling apart before everybody’s eyes for years. Yet I can more easily comprehend the blindness of my parents and many other Yugoslavs who failed to notice the fatal social changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s and thus anticipated nothing. Today, I realise that they simply believed in a happy ending.

And so do we.

Vučić, Dodik, Plenković, Izetbegović, Čović, Kurti, Orbán, Meloni, Fico, Babiš and Kickl all hold power in an area a few hundred kilometres away from us, in a region that is a crossroads of the competing interests and influences of the superpowers currently led by Erdoğan, Xi, Trump and Putin. And yet, we tell ourselves that everything will be just fine in the Balkans and that there will be no new war.

In fact, we would be very surprised if a war did eventually break out.

Translated by Lili Potpara

Language editing by Fiona Thompson

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The project On the Balcony of the Balkans, hosted on the AirBeletrina portal, seeks to foster intercultural dialogue and strengthen cooperation among artists, institutions, and countries of the former Yugoslavia. It is not rooted in nostalgia or focused on the past, but is instead centered on present realities and, above all, aimed at reflecting on the future, as it seeks to contribute to the most successful possible development of the region. It is carried out with the support of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia.