After Franz Ferdinand...

When President Wilson took to his Fourteen Points after WWI, he simply decided to take the crayon and redraw the map. It was good in theory to apply nation-states, but when in an ethnic mélange say, New York City, the lines aren’t so easily drawn. The differences among South Slavs are in dialect, names and religion*. Accordingly, Croat Catholics, Croat-Serbs of whom are Orthodox, and Bosnian Muslims known as Bosniaks.

This posed to be a little more problematic than what meets the eye. Quite literally, there are hardly any distinguishing features of South Slavs. One could assume raven hair and sharp features as Serbian, and Aryan features as Slovenian, but intermarriages and chromosome conjugations keep you guessing.

Archduke Ferdinand, not one in the same as the celeb-boy band

For the sake of cohesion, these internal differences were continually subsumed. Suffice to say, the area including the reclaimed territories lost to the former Austro-Hungarian were redrawn and renamed to “the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.”

Croatians didn’t take to the imposing Serbian rule so delicately. Their anointment was Catholic Serbs. Then you had, Alpine Serbs, Slovene Serbs, etc. to denote that all Yugoslavs descended from Serbia. To add to that profile, the language was Serbian.

Some thirty years later, it took a Croatian terrorist this time, to kill the king and end this attempt at unification. Five years later, WWII began.

Then, the differences were attacked...

*It should be added another major difference is the script. I prepared to be lost here, but not lost with a map. Serbs write in Cyrillic, the Russian font. The rest of the Balkan region writes in, Latin as I do.