Daily Inspiration Quote by Stjepan Mesic

A clean little sentence that smuggles an entire war’s moral rot into a folksy image: Milosevic “grabs” Bosnia as if it’s a cake on a crowded table, and Croatia should “get a piece,” too. Mesic’s intent is accusatory, but it’s also diagnostic. He’s not describing a single policy disagreement; he’s naming the logic of opportunism that turned Bosnia into a prize to be divided once violence made division seem feasible.

The phrasing matters. “Driven by the idea” frames the target as ideologically compelled, not merely reacting to events. That’s crucial in the Yugoslav wars, where leaders often laundered expansionism through talk of defense, historic rights, or protection. Mesic strips away the alibis and reduces the motivation to its transactional core: if Serbia takes, Croatia must take, too. The subtext is a bleak mirror of nationalism as competitive consumption - not principle, not justice, not even coherent strategy, just fear of being the only one who didn’t cash in.

Context sharpens the blade. Mesic, a Croatian statesman who later positioned himself against hardline ethno-territorial politics, is pointing to the infamous “partition” imagination: that Bosnia’s sovereignty was negotiable, contingent on what the stronger neighbors could extract. The quote also reveals how the war’s cruelty wasn’t only in the killing; it was in the bureaucratic normalizing of theft. By casting aggression as a precedent others should emulate, it exposes the perverse peer pressure of ethnic statecraft: once one leader breaks the map, everyone else rushes to redraw it before the ink dries.