Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the situation made Rather Bad when Serbia started to use force to keep Bosnia a part of the Republic which created a snowball effect as other ethnic groups decided it was time to leave?
If so, couldn't the Serb leadership have adopted a more conciliatory position with limited autonomy?
What happened was that the various political heads of the federation's states - of which the Serbian President, Milosevic, is the most famous - gathered localized power around themselves. At first this wasn't based on separatism or exclusivism, but simply the only way to gain any sort of continuing power under the rotating presidency model. From here it becomes quite complicated. I will simplify it as best as I can.
Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of the Serbian state, was a hard-line communist, arguably moreso than Tito himself had been. He originally supported the idea of regional autonomy, which has historically been the communistic norm; see the variety of ethnic autonomous states in the USSR and China for examples. This meant that Milosevic supported the existence of an autonomous Kosovo within Serbia. The problem was that one of Milosevic's political opponents - it was never quite clear who, since this was all happening behind closed doors in Serbia - cleverly used the Albanian minority in Kosovo as a scapegoat to further his own political ends in the hope of taking Milosevic's place. Kosovar autonomy had never been popular amongst the average Serbian, for whom nationalism was more important than abstract ideas of the communist revolution. Milosevic, a consummate politician, saw which way the wind was blowing and performed an about-face, abolishing the regional autonomy of Kosovo. This won him a huge amount of popularity amongst Serbs, just as the one-party system was collapsing, making him an obvious choice for Serbians to vote for in the upcoming elections in other federal republics, especially Croatia and Bosnia. Montenegro was already solidly Serbian in outlook and followed Milosevic all the way.
Milosevic, realising he was onto a winning idea, similarly abolished the autonomy of Vojvodina, the ethnic-Magyar autonomous republic north of Belgrade in Serbia. Then Milosevic began to make loud noises about the ethnic Serbs in neighbouring constituent republics, notably Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovia. IN response to the obvious threat of a Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia, Croatia elected a rabidly nationalist President, Franjo Tudman.
Slovenia, seeing the writing on the wall - and noticing that all the Yugoslavian troops due to begin the next year's deployment on Slovenian soil were suspiciously Serbian and Montenegrin - withdrew from the Yugoslav republic. For six days it appeared as if Milosevic might use the military to retain Slovenia, but then Tudman, who had been relying on Slovenia to help him balance Milosevic's power, also withdrew from Yugoslavia. This saved Slovenia, since Croatia stood between it an Serbia. Slovenia also had a population that was 97% ethnically Slovenian, so it was spared any ethnic difficulties. Croatia was not.
Now finding themselves part of an independent Croatia just days after it appeared they would become the dominant-ethnic group in all of Yugoslavia, some Serbian nationalists in Croatia rioted. Tudman, either believing this was a Serbian plot to give Milosevic a
casus belli to intervene in Croatia, or, more likely, simply because he was a genocidal xenophobic scumbag on par with Hitler, began ethnically cleansing all the Serbs on Croatian soil. Tudman, incidentally, invented the term "ethnic cleansing" in a speech about ridding Croatia of "Serbian vermin."
Milosevic was left with no option but to respond by invading Croatia; even if the mass-rape, murder and deportation of Serbs hadn't disgusted him personally, it would have ben political suicide for him to not respond to ethnic Serbian appeals to the Serbian government for assistance. He invaded Croatia, and simultaneously began his own cleansing of the Croat minority in Serbia.
This is when the Bosnian War started. Bosnia, even moreso than any other Yugoslavian republic, was an ethnic hodgepog. It was roughly one-third Serbian, one-third Croatian and one-third Muslim. The Bosnian government knew it was likely to become a bloody battleground in any Serb-Croat conflict, and therefore similarly withdrew from Yugoslavia and declared its neutrality in the Serbia-Croatia war. But the Serbian and Croatian minorities in Bosnia had already started fighting each other, and the Serbian and Croatian governments immediately invaded to defend their own ethnic groups in Bosnia. Both sides immediately started killing the Bosnian Muslims, which neither side liked. The Muslims also inhabited the most strategically and economically important areas of the country, and as such both sides wanted that territory, if not permanently, then at least for the duration of the current conflict.
Milosevic now realised that he couldn't possibly hold on to all of Yugoslavia, but understood that he might be able to create a "Greater Serbia" out of its ashes. He let Macedonia, which had very few Serbs and was no threat to him, secede from Yugoslavia without a fight, cut a deal with the Kosovo Liberation Army so as to be able to pull troops out of Kosovo - the KLA wanted to increase its own strength while Serbia was worn down by Croatia and what was left of the Bosnian government - and concentrated as much of his forces as possible on Bosnia. He already controlled the Serbian parts of Croatia, but Bosnia was an easier target, and if he was able to take it over he'd be able to flank the Croatians fighting in Croatia itself.
This led to the US and NATO interventions against Serbia in Bosnia. As it was, Milosevic eventually allowed himself to be bought off with the promise of regional autonomy for the Serbs in Bosnia. This gave them 49% of the country. While the Dayton Accords made a partition of Bosnia illegal and unconstitutional, Milosevic still hoped to annex the Serbian part at a later date. He also cut a similar deal regarding the Serbs in Croatia, though he was far less successful there. Again, he hoped to seize power there at a later date.
I guess my question is broader and it doesn't have to be 1980. I was thinking post-WWII, though.
Can someone fill me in what happened during the war? My understanding is simply Yugoslav Communist partisans (presumably not exclusively Communist) fighting against Nazis. I assume it's vastly more complicated than that?
Oh, incredibly complicated. The
ustache were a collaborationist group of Croatian ultra-nationalists who massacred Serbs with such intensity that even the SS were disgusted, stepping in to stop them on at least one occasion. The Italians were only able to control a small portion of Serbia and Macedonia, as well as the coastline. The Germans took control of Serbia, succeeding in wiping out the entire Jewish population of that country, a feat even they didn't manage anywhere else in Europe, due in no small part to enthusiastic Croatian assistance. The Serbian resistance was mostly royalist, as inno stated, and did not mesh well with the other major resistance movement, Tito's communists.
Tito himself was Croatian, but not a nationalist. He seems to have been of the old school of thought which believed that all of the "South Slavs" should be under the control of one state. As such, he attempted to dominate the Albanian communist resistance as well, which led directly to Enver Hoxha taking control of that movement (Hoxha was vehemently anti-Yugoslavian, and succeeded in ousting the pro-Yugoslavian wing of the movement by intrigues with the British and Greeks). Tito pan-Slavic ideals won him the allegiance of the non-Communist resistance movements which feared a return to Serbian domination post-war, enabling him to eliminate the Cetniks before the Red Army arrived in Yugoslavia. For the most part, Yugoslavia was liberated without the assistance of Red Army or British troops, since the Germans and Italians evacuated it in order to concentrate their forces in Hungary and Italy. As such, Tito's primary enemy was the
ustache which were hated by all but ultra-nationalist Croats. When he massacred the
ustache in February 1945, Tito effectively became the only mote of power in all of Yugoslavia.
- so I was kind of hoping that an alternative outcome for Yugoslavia could be realistic. 
