This essays investigates the reasons of the general underestimation of the dynamics that led to the Yugoslav dismemberment. In particular, the chapter claims that the underestimation is due to a variety of reasons: (a) the role of anti-communist feelings which were addressed not only towards the Soviet Union and its Camp, but also towards the non-aligned Yugoslavia, as Brzezinski explicitly stated in Uppsala in 1978 during the World Congress of Sociologists . In particular, these feelings reinforced the Western predisposition to support secessionist nationalisms when they appeared to be functional to the weakening and then the eradication of communism; (b) a widespread Western belief that the violence that erupted in Yugoslavia was an evident manifestation of an uninterrupted, mediaeval “Balkan” brutality, unrelated to the “European democratic traditions”; (c) alternatively, that the violence was generated by opposite nationalisms, whose mutual hatred had been nurtured for centuries; (d) the Western conviction that an international non-aligned position in Europe (Yugoslavia, in effect, promoted and led the Non-Aligned Movement) was unsustainable as soon as the socialist statehood experience started vanishing in the late 1980s.
By contrast, regardless of the ideology of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the predominant role of the League of Communists, the Yugoslav federalism deserves a special consideration since the way its institutions worked offers critical insights about the experimented mechanisms of representation and decision-making in multinational societies.