I have always found the sounds of simultaneous interpretation – the unavoidable drawing-out of words, the characteristic humming of interpreters – to be deeply unsettling. In the western Balkans, they are well known to all 1990s kids, who grew up watching the televised trials of various military and political leaders of our newly formed republics before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). It was usually referred to as the Hague Tribunal, not just to shorten an unwieldy phrase, but also to avoid mentioning “Yugoslavia”, a former federative country from which seven new ones emerged. Each nascent nation felt that its potential had been thwarted, and the interests of its ethnically defined people had been hampered, in the old state. I was born in Split in Croatia in 1996, and some of my earliest memories are of snippets from the court proceedings in which the defendants – the only voices not accompanied by the interpreters’ droning hum – were tried for crimes against humanity.

Before the age of 10, I was already familiar with the Croatian terms for such phrases as “command responsibility”, “excessive bombardment”, and “joint criminal enterprise”. Seared in my mind is also a bland, grey, official-looking modernist building with a vast reflective pool in front of it – this building housed the ICTY. Set up by the United Nations three years before I was born, the ICTY was finally dissolved in 2017, three years after I became a legal adult. It was designed to prosecute the sundry crimes perpetrated during the bloody breakup of socialist Yugoslavia through vicious nationalistic wars in the 1990s. Above all, I remember the prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, a tan woman with white hair in a power bob. For me, she was the West personified. Only after I started writing this piece did I check her nationality, and she turned out to be – fittingly, I felt – Swiss. In 2006, she starred in a documentary called Carla’s List, which I watched with my parents. It followed her as she twisted the arms of uncooperative local governments while trying to track down three major war criminals who were still at large – Ratko Mladić, Radovan Karadžić and Ante Gotovina.

The first two were Bosnian Serbs responsible for the Srebrenica genocide and the siege of Sarajevo, and were accused of a laundry list of war crimes (murder, civilian terror campaigns and hostage-taking, including of UN peacekeepers) and crimes against humanity (persecution, extermination, murder, deportation). Everyone around me agreed that they deserved to be hunted down and hounded. When Karadžić was finally caught in 2008, my local newspaper, Slobodna Dalmacija, revealed that, at the time of Carla’s List, he had been vacationing in Čiovo, an island near my hometown, where I first learned how to swim.

The third man on her list, however, was a high-ranking Croatian general in charge of Operation Storm, which ended the war in Croatia in 1995 with a decisive victory over the rebel Croatian Serb forces. It also led to the death of hundreds of Croatian Serb civilians, and the flight of hundreds of thousands more from their ancestral homes to Serbia. One could hold this up as a textbook case of ethnic cleansing; instead, we only heard the talk of the strategic and military genius of the operation supposedly being taught at West Point. But the overwhelming majority of Croatians were adamant that he wasn’t guilty, and when he was arrested in Tenerife in 2005, 40,000 people gathered in Split to protest. I didn’t attend those demonstrations. What I do remember was the footage of the nice restaurant in Tenerife where Gotovina, in a white dress shirt, was arrested; obviously, he hadn’t been roughing it.

But everyone from my life, even if they weren’t at the protests, supported the jingoistic sentiment espoused there. One issue of Slobodna Dalmacija included a bonus pullout: a poster of Gotovina with the tagline “Hero, not criminal!” That poster went up on the door of my bedroom, between Digimon stickers and glow-in-the-dark dolphins. It wasn’t lost on me that the great hero had the same first name as me, the Croat variant of Anthony, most common in the region of Dalmatia, from which both of us hail.¹

In 2011, Gotovina was found guilty of crimes against humanity. But then, the next year, an appeals panel overturned his convictions, and he was released. I was in high school at the time, and the mood was one of general jubilation. They cancelled our classes on that day in November so we could leave and join the rest of the country in celebration. While nearly all my classmates basked in this moment of vindication and glory, I was thoroughly disgusted with it. What made me shift, in a space of a few years, from the default chauvinism of my youth to a fervent antinationalism?

There were many factors, but one particularly grisly and personal discovery involved Lora – a military naval base in Split, which also has a large venue for performing arts. We watched plays there during primary school, and I even took to the stage once myself at a poetry recital competition. But it turned out that, during the war, Lora was also a prison camp for Serbian residents of Split and POWs. More than 1,000 people were detained there, many were tortured, and several dozen were killed. Allegedly, some civilians had even paid to come and torture the prisoners.

Funnily enough, my path to learning this was through the same Slobodna Dalmacija that my father would bring home from work. I had become an avid reader of columns penned by Boris Dežulović and Viktor Ivančić, and searching for more of their work led me to Feral Tribune, the satirical political magazine they created with Predrag Lucić, probably the greatest Yugoslav poet of the 1990s. The Tribune began in 1984 as a supplement of Slobodna, before becoming independent in 1993 due to political pressure. Known for its irreverent humour and lampooning of nationalists on all sides, as well as serious investigative journalism, the Tribune was a beacon of light in the bleak 90s. Sadly, I never held the magazine in my hands; it stopped publishing in 2008, when I was 12. Its Lora investigation had been published in 1992, and I read it, as with everything I was able to find from the magazine, through its haphazardly digitised online traces. The fact that they wrote about the criminal abuses at the base – which everyone in Split was knew, but no one else dared report – left a deep impression on me.

Their photomontage covers – hand-crafted as collages in the era before Photoshop – are justifiably famous: Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman in bed together, Franjo Tuđman as a bespectacled killer shark; an image of buttocks imprinted with lipstick captioned “All the successes of Croatian diplomacy”. Besides biting satire, their investigative journalism helped uncover multiple war crimes, such as the killing of the Zec family, murders and torture at the Pakračka Poljana prison camp, and the murder of civilians during Operation Medak Pocket and Operation Storm. All these revelations made me realise that even if the majority of people around me wouldn’t actually commit atrocities, most people would excuse them, and many would actively cheer them on.

It was impossible to forget that such horrors were part of my nation’s supposedly heroic origins. But I came to feel that this ethnic cleansing was not an aberration, or historical contingency; it couldn’t have been otherwise, because the principle behind Croatia’s independence was fundamentally flawed.

Post-Yugoslav Croatia has emphasised its Mitteleuropean and Mediterranean heritage, while denying that it is part of any entity called “the Balkans”. Modern Croatia still prides itself on its designation of “antemurale christianitatis”, given to it by Pope Leo X in 1519 for serving as “the bulwark of Christendom”. This literal Western wall – “ante”meaning “in front of” and murale meaning “the walls” – was later expanded, in the public imagination, to signify a broader defence against the Orthodox church as well as the originally intended Muslims. These mental ramparts ran through our speech. While the Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin variants of our language make liberal use of Turkish, Greek and other loanwords, has made a concerted push for linguistic purism.

Today, most Croats believe the false and politically motivated claim that Croatian is different from Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin – even though the standard versions of the latter three languages are more mutually intelligible than the regional variants and dialects of Croatian. For the longest time, I myself was on the lookout for any “Serbisms” that might slip my tongue.

If we had to work this hard to distinguish ourselves from our neighbours – fragmenting our already-small language in the process – I started to wonder if there ever really had been a good cultural reason to break away from Yugoslavia. It emerged in the early 20th century as an alternative to the crushing influence of Austria-Hungary, Italy and the Ottoman Empire. Its four largest countries, both in population and size – Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia – share a language. (Kosovo, Macedonia and Slovenia are different.) What separated all of them, at first tolerably, and then bitterly, was religion.

Yugoslavia 1.0, created after the First World War, was a parliamentary monarchy that had little in common with the socialist state that was its successor. This federal republic, established after the Second World War, had much to recommend it: rapid modernisation in service of the broadest swathes of people; its key role in the Non-Aligned Movement, skirting both Nato and the Eastern Bloc; its valiant, if insufficient, attempts at self-management in the workplace; even the world-class modernist sculptures commemorating the Partisan resistance. But unlike its successor states, it attempted to transcend ethnic divisions rather than entrench them – to build a multiethnic federation in which Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and others could coexist as equals.

That’s what led me to identify as Yugoslav. While my refusal to call myself a Croat isn’t completely unusual for a very small subsection of leftists, it would be met with virulent disapproval outside of those circles. Even people with a soft spot for Yugoslavia invariably conclude that it wouldn’t have disintegrated if it was any good, thereby allowing history to be not just the teacher, but also the judge, jury and executioner – as if only bad things perish with the passage of time.

That being said, I didn’t become Yugoslav through the idealisation of the past. After all, it was the federative constitution of the second, socialist, single-party Yugoslavia that made its states compete with each other, resulting in nationalisms that emerged at the top, solidified among the party elites, and then spread throughout the general population. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia’s non-nationalistic core was forged in the fires of the Second World War, in resistance to German and Italian occupying forces, as well as homebred nationalists like the Chetniks and Ante Pavelić’s Ustasha. But in the end, less than half a century later, it produced equivalent strains of nationalism among its own ranks.

Rather than nostalgia, my Yugoslav identity is rooted in a rejection of the culture I was born into, which somehow recast ethnonationalism as modern and progressive. That’s why, without ever having lived in a country called Yugoslavia – and having heard it endlessly disparaged throughout my formative years – it soon became, for me, the only acceptable national designation. Raised to be a Croat and a Catholic, I turned out to be, to the utter dismay of my loving parents, a Yugoslav, an atheist and a communist to boot.

Were I to confront those parents with something like Lora, they would immediately point to all the wanton crimes that had been committed against Croats. Appeals to commonsense morality don’t work – not for my parents, or really for anyone, I realised, because nationalism is essentially a release valve, a kind of socially sanctioned narcissism. That’s why people who are basically interpersonally decent can be effortlessly swept up in it, and how they can exalt their beloved homeland for doing things that they would never allow themselves to do in their dealings with others.

Of course, not all nationalisms are pernicious – one only needs to remember the anticolonial movements that freed much of the world from European domination. Often they are muddled and inadequate responses to a situation – all too familiar to anyone who has been colonised, or repeatedly invaded, like the Balkans – in which the great powers toy with you in games of conquest and suppress your language and culture. This is also the reason why I’m no fan of the European Union, of which Croatia became a member state in 2013. While I appreciate the effort to transcend borders and languages, the EU has never been purged of the colonial past of its core Western states. The effects of that can be seen daily: from its ignominious treatment of migrants and its spineless, kowtowing to the US, to its refusal to stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. So, Yugoslavian nationalism was closer to that of India or Egypt, two other states that helped found the Non-Aligned Movement, whereas Croatian nationalism is much more of a piece with other EU and NATO states (Croatia has been a NATO member since 2009).

This geostrategic positioning has hobbled both sides of Croatian political spectrum. Thanks to the Hague Tribunal, even this dogged US ally has harboured strong anti-Western sentiment. Our Catholic church-backed conservatives have been only too happy to denounce any emancipatory tendencies in the society, like LGBT advocacy, as American imports. The kneejerk, xenophobic, patriarchal anti-imperialism of the Balkans has often managed to be even more brutal than the Western status quo.

As for our liberals… the trouble was – as it often is – that they were not just social liberals, but economic ones, too. They supported the work of the Hague Tribunal and advocated reckoning with the bloody past, but also believed that gutting the social state and enacting IMF-style reforms would lead us to be more democratic and progressive like our Western betters – who were brazenly committing, in the illegal invasion of Iraq, the sort of war crimes for which only smaller nations like ours can get persecuted.

I’ve come to believe that the only things one can love about any place are the traditions and culture that typically thrive in cosmopolitan – or at least peaceable – contact with others, and which crumble in self-imposed autarchy. Any other sense of national identity is a disaster waiting to happen.

It is often on the periphery that new political realities first emerge. Sadly, that seems to have been the case with the dismal dissolution of Yugoslavia. What seemed, at the time, like the atavism of a particularly barbarous group of semi-Europeans now looks like a international bellwether. What I saw in Croatia is now becoming obvious even in the ostensibly liberal superpower that helped birth our young nation. So perhaps the experiences of people like me, coming from countries with a serious head start in political disillusionment, can help guide those in the spangled West who have now finally woken up to the furies of nationalism.

1. Remarkably, he wasn’t the most brutal Croatian Ante – that honour goes to Ante Pavelić, quisling dictator of the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist puppet state of 1941 to 1945. Pavelić oversaw a genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma people with a brutality that shocked even the Nazis. That our name did not go the way of Adolf postwar can be chalked up to Tito’s antifascist resistance of those same years, among whom there turned out to be a number of heroic Antes, most of them from Split, none of them well known today.