A comparison between the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the unification of Germany, in which the decisive phases occurred more or less at the same time, (1990 for Germany, 1991-1992 for Yugoslavia), offers an opportunity to assess the factors involved in the consensual unification of a political area. Unlike the German area, Yugoslavia only formed a political unit from 1918 to 1941 and again from 1945 to 1991. The divide between Catholics in the north-west and Orthodox Christians in the south-east, though limited in terms of dogma, worsened a political divide that had been entrenched by fifteen centuries of Ottoman rule in the Orthodox area, despite the desires of the elites, both intellectual (especially in the nineteenth century) and political (in the twentieth century) to develop a common sphere. Contrary to the case in Germany, where a common language (formalized by Martin Luther) and a common past neutralized both the Catholic/Protestant divide and the Communist period in East Germany, the lack of a common sphere of historical reference made the similarity between the Serbian and Croat languages politically invalid.