"Though they imitated Stalin in slavish ways and built socialism before Moscow demanded it, Yugoslavia’s Communists became the first to break with the USSR in 1948. They did so because Stalin demanded complete subordination of their national interests to those of his country. In a public speech, Josip Broz Tito reflected on his sudden heresy as a Marxist-Leninist: One can love the motherland of socialism, he said, but not love one’s own country less. He did not mean Croatia or Serbia, Slovenia or Montenegro: Communist Yugoslavia was a second attempt to revive Ljudevit Gaj’s old program, this time as national liberation for all peoples in Yugoslavia. Tito’s Partisan movement had begun as a miniature Habsburg empire during the war, protecting Serbs, Jews, and others from fascist genocide, in the name of brotherhood and unity, a formula that succeeded until Tito’s death in 1980. If it had joined the newest version of the Habsburg Empire—the European Union (EU)—Yugoslavia might have survived. But fighting broke out in Croatia in 1991 before the EU had opened toward the east. Today Eastern Europe’s leaders gain political capital by claiming that the EU, despite its generous funding of national infrastructures, education, and agriculture, somehow threatens their countries’ existence. In June 2018, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán said that at stake in the election of an anti-EU candidate in Slovenia was the “survival of the Slovenian nation.”"