Wells
I've been rereading H. G. Wells's Joan and Peter, a novel about education (primarily). In one of the later chapters, just weeks before the start of the Great War, Joan asks her guardian, Oswald, why he's poring over a map, and he answers,
"“Because there are various people called Croats and Slovenes and Serbs and they are beginning to think they are one people and ought to behave as one people, and some of them are independent and some are under the Austrians and some are under the Italians.”
This is very much the kind of thinking that Woodrow Wilson relied on when he advocated the assembly of "Yugoslavia" out of a bunch of fragmentary nationalities, which he believed to be all one nation. And it worked out really badly, because the Croats hate the Serbs and the Serbs hate the Croats and everybody hates the Bosnians . . . On grounds partly of old religious conflicts and partly of years and years of their doing each other dirt. Of course this is a speech from one of Wells's characters, but I'm afraid I suspect that Oswald shares his creator's blindness on this point.
"“Because there are various people called Croats and Slovenes and Serbs and they are beginning to think they are one people and ought to behave as one people, and some of them are independent and some are under the Austrians and some are under the Italians.”
This is very much the kind of thinking that Woodrow Wilson relied on when he advocated the assembly of "Yugoslavia" out of a bunch of fragmentary nationalities, which he believed to be all one nation. And it worked out really badly, because the Croats hate the Serbs and the Serbs hate the Croats and everybody hates the Bosnians . . . On grounds partly of old religious conflicts and partly of years and years of their doing each other dirt. Of course this is a speech from one of Wells's characters, but I'm afraid I suspect that Oswald shares his creator's blindness on this point.