“Other problems also bedeviled Wilson, including the vexing difficulty of determining who, exactly, deserved self-determination. Despite the precision of his maps, it was difficult to come up with clean new boundaries without stirring a hornet’s nest of ethnic rivalries.”
Other problems? It was the problem and its consequences are still with us. “…who, exactly, deserved self-determination…” was the wrong premise from the get-go. Ensuring states upheld democratic principles for all their ethnically mixed or multiple populations should have been the guiding issue, not coming up with “…clean [skin-crawl…not much of a leap from “clean” to ethnic cleansing] new boundaries…” “Self-determination” for all, or if not, then for who, sounds so impossibly naive today, only the leader of a nation-state like the U.S. could have possibly thought it was a working, guiding principle.
Seems like a miracle at this point that Yugoslavia held together for as long as it did.
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Comment: nikobakos@gmail.com
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 
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