Almost 20 years after political bonds were severed by war, day-to-day links between companies, professions and individuals are quietly being restored

AT A recent summit of the cold-war relic called the Non-Aligned Movement, Serbia’s president, Boris Tadic (above left), remarked that companies from former Yugoslav republics should join forces to bid on construction projects or specialised military-equipment contracts. His Croatian counterpart, Stipe Mesic (right), responded approvingly. Companies from “our countries”, he said, were too small to compete in other markets by themselves.

On the face of it, these comments were both obvious and inconsequential. The firms are indeed small by global standards. Yet the use of the term “our countries” by the leader of one ex-Yugoslav republic to refer to everyone in the group, enemies as well as friends, points to a bigger change. From Slovenia to the Macedonian border with Greece, most people in the region still have a lot in common, even if they do not talk about it much. Every day the bonds between them, snapped in the 1990s, are being quietly restored. Yugoslavia is long gone; in its place a Yugosphere is emerging. ...

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