Yugoslav war parties framed local enemies as confrontations between entire civilizations

Evidence

In the former Yugoslavia, Croats saw themselves as the gallant frontier guardians of the West against the onslaught of Orthodoxy and Islam. The Serbs defined their enemies not just as Bosnian Croats and Muslims but as “the Vatican” and as “Islamic fundamentalists” and “infamous Turks” who have been threatening Christianity for centuries. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 751

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the frontier-guardian identity from my ADDENDUM piece on Tamarisk trees/Osage-orange — no, actually connects to imperial frontier identities and to the idea that border regions weaponize civilizational identity. — connects to: Warfare in ethnically mixed Yugoslav regions took either conventional or genocidal forms. — Sandra Penic, Guy Elcheroth, and Dario Spini, When Is Collective Exposure to War…, 43
• ADDENDUM: The Croats as frontier guardians of the West parallels the ‘borderland identity’ theme — a good example for a follow-up on how edge regions define themselves against what lies beyond them.