See, that's a nice idea... and it did work... for a while... without religion and nationalists in the mix... once you mix those 2, guess what happens...
The moral of the story is, it is doable... but you'd have to either get rid of the 2 things mentioned above, or historically you'd have to be a clean slate, which is pretty easy for the continents discovered in the last 5 centuries or so.
They probably meant North Macedonia. Macedonia changed it's name since there is also Macedonia in Greece which is presumably the southern part of Macedonia. There's a lot of places like that in Europe. Usually remnants of old kingdoms. Tyrol is a region encompassing part of Northern Italy and Western Austria for example. Bohemia is another example which historically was a lot bigger than the region of Czech nowadays.
I am a bit bothered by how the modern borders of Croatia seem like they are designed just to prevent Bosnia and Hercegovina from having a coast. I get that you can have a thin country, but they are really pushing it. Give them one beach!
croatia was already funny shaped when it was in personal union with the kingdom of hungary. that's the upper half of modern croatia. most of the lower thin bit was dalmatia, which was also historically inhabited by croats and unified with (a newly independent) croatia immediately after ww1.
so while yeah, it looks like the west meddled to deny serbia access to the sea, i dunno how true that is. the region really was mostly croats and some italians, i think...
i could much more easily believe that montenegro was the result of such meddling
To be honest, things went wrong because the person who knew how to keep the piece died, so... nationalists rose to power (they didn't rebrand communism though, so most got onboard the loony train thinking this is about communism and who is against it), and that was about all that was needed in a powder keg like the Balkans... a lot of war time profiteering as well, some people got very rich during those days... blood money, sure, but it didn't seem to bother them. Some of them are still in power, or their children.
Bottom line, none of them are communists, period. They're thieves and killers.
Because it sounds conceptually nice to good people, but selfish people know that without proper transparency and checks, it's very easy to consolidate power with it.
So the bad people get the support of good people and then exploit that flaw to do what they want instead of what is good.
The reason why it worked perfectly here, in the Balkans, was that Tito never actually lied to the people (OK, that's an understatement, lol 😂, but in general, he did have the people's best interests in mind)... so, everyone just thought that their leaders are actually being honest with them and that the other guy is at fault 🤷... it was easy to be honest... it was only after they were tried it became apparent that the only thing their leaders had in mind was money and power, nothing more... but, by then, it was too late... lives were lost, people's lives were shattered... it was really sad to be honest... when everyone realized that they fought a war for nothing...
It WAS as close to communism (actually socialism... though yes, the party was called a communist party and all that, but in reality, the name didn't really reflect the ideals of the party at the time, the name stuck for the sake of the Stallinists that were in quite large numbers and Tito and others were just trying to balance things out, since they needed some of those people to run the country and not turn their backs on them... some people were very cross with Tito when he turned his back on Stalin in the 50s, he didn't need to iritate them further by changing the name of the party) as you can possibly get at the time. No textbook representation of a social or economical system is 100% accurate to what the books say... just like democracy (which is basically anything but democracy at this point) is flawed everywhere.
The perfect system doesn't exist, but you can strive to make it better and serve the people, which is exactly what we DON'T have nowadays. Back then... to be honest, yes, it mostly served the people.
