This paper deals with the breakup of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The breakup is portrayed as a clash of several different nationalisms. It starts from systemic errors that Yugoslav self-management socialism contained. Those errors created discomfort among Yugoslav peoples and encouraged them to look for an alternative. Nationalism is the ideology that aspires to create and preserve nation states, and during crises, it appears as an alternative to existing social order. Yugoslav peoples felt that they were withhold, and they chose nationalism as the solution to their problems. Their nationalisms were triggered by different motives and aspired toward achieving different goals. The clash of those nationalisms caused the breakup of Yugoslavia. The paper tells the example of South Africa, a country in which, after the abolition of apartheid, a violent breakup was expected, but it did not happen. The South African example, which shows that an ethnic conflict can be avoided, even when it is considered certain, is compared with Yugoslav example, in order to see which forces, that could have prevented the conflict and the breakup of the Yugoslav state, were missing from Yugoslav society.