Despite serious attempts at rectification, the federative system of Yugoslavia, as was nurtured by its first premier Josip Broz Tito in the post-second world war period, exploded by 1990-91. The tenacity of ethnicity and finely differentiated versions of south Slav nationalism, sharpened by frequent foreign imperial dominations of the region in the past, defeated Tito's design as well as international efforts to save Yugoslavia from Balkanisation. Instead of integrating the eight ethnic groups comprising Yugoslavia into a single nation, certain political and economic dynamics of the federal system tended to unintentionally reinforce ethnic nationalism within each federal unit, especially the larger and more assertive ones. The serbian domination of the state power structure, unwarranted by population size or economic strength, provoked the assertion of non-serbian ethnic identities. If the croats and the slovenes succeeded in achieving a state and an economy of their own within the parameters of a nation, the Bosnian Muslims and the Kosovo Albanians became victims of the serbian repression unleashed against them.
