Canada's Future: Yugoslavia

I've been reading Brian Hall's book, The Impossible Country, about the last days of Yugoslavia.

the former Yugoslavia

It's a remarkable book about a remarkable place and Hall's perspective is thoughtful, balanced and personal.

I've learned three key points. The first  is that Yugoslavia was constructed on two dividing lines; the first between the Eastern and Western Roman Empire. This made the north and west (Croatia), Roman Catholic while the south and east (Serbia) became Eastern Orthodox.

The second divide was after the Turkish conquest and retreat in which the line between the liberated north and the occupied south also ran through the country. This created a fortified border and a siege mentality on both sides.

And finally there was the mass conversion to Islam of the followers of Bogomilism, a Christian fundamentalist group, in Bosnia in the 15th Century. As you can imagine, their practice of Islam was hardly the typical model, making them unique in the Muslim world.

So what was created by war and history was a remarkably balanced split (my pun) along religious, ethnic and cultural lines. No one group was quite strong enough to dominate the other and each one bridled when the other tried to do so. This led to horrific atrocities before, during and after every major war.

Which brings us to Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia which tried to impose a Communist, multicultural, federal state on top of the roiling ethnic mix left after WWII. Instead of racial divides, it tried to create working class unity using the typical socialist model and a leadership cult reminiscent of Hitler and Stalin. One feature of this was an annual youth relay, modeled on the Olympic torch run, in which batons were carried around the country each year and presented to Tito at the finish line.

Here's my first point. None of this social engineering worked! It failed. The state collapsed.

Despite intensive efforts from 1943 to 1992 the artificial superstructure of national unity and socialist solidarity fell away like the skin from a snake. What was left were the original racial, religious and ethnic divisions which quickly produced another civil war and more horrible atrocities.

What's the lesson? The lesson Yugoslavia teaches us is that you can't impose with social engineering a 'solution' to racial, religious and ethnic divides. Canada is trying to do this and it won't work. It won't work here because it didn't work there. Blood is thicker than government platitudes.

The second lesson is that it is folly to alter the existing racial, religious and ethnic balance in a country. And it's particularly bad if the alteration is three-way and almost equal. Lebanon is another country where there is a three-way split and it too descends regularly into sectarian violence. So too is Iraq.

And finally, because Bosnia was a microcosm of Yugoslavia itself, three-way racial, religious and ethnic tensions can break out in much smaller arenas than the national one. You can have civil war on a street-by-street basis if you create divisions that reach critical mass.

And so we come to Canada.

Canada is currently importing a quarter million legal immigrants a year, mostly from countries that are racially, religiously and ethnically different from the native population. In Toronto, the number of immigrants now outnumbers the native-born population, much the same as the Muslims outnumbered the Serbs and Croats in Bosnia. And, of course, we have the ethnically and linguistically distinct jurisdiction of Quebec which has the typical response to newcomers of rejecting their culture, religion and social norms. 

Supporters of mass immigration from the third world say, 'hey, what's the problem? Everyone is enjoying Toronto's multi-cultural mix, and the restaurants are great!' That's exactly—exactly—what they used to say about Sarajevo.

The restaurants are great right up till the first bombing, the first shooting and the first bodies in the street.Then, somehow, things aren't so great.

Am I predicting the same outcome for Canada as occurred in Yugoslavia? Yes. Not necessarily next year, or even the next Century, but sometime in the future. Yugoslavia's destiny took five hundred years to settle and when the fighting stopped they settled it through separation.

That has a lesson for us too.

More
Mark Steyn opined on this subject two years ago. He makes the same point:

I can’t understand why any society would lightly volunteer to become semi-Muslim — which is what in effect Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, et al have done. And, once you’ve done so, like Derb says, what’s the answer?

Indeed.

More II
And speaking of  Bosnia, January 1st was the first day residents of Bosnia could travel to the rest of the EU without a visa. Gates of Vienna adds up what this means for Europe.

What it means for Canada is extremely predictable.

Related
(January 9) I've now written an additional observation of Hall's book called Brian Hall, A Curious Omission.