Gavrilo Princip kills Duke Franz Ferdinand - 5 July 1991

How many in the class have heard of Gavrilo Princip?

I put this question to a chance acquaintance in the strange, the sudden heat of Wimbledon on Thursday and the answer which came smartly back was worthy of a man who keeps up with the ever-changing hierarchy or perhaps I should say, seeding of the international players, wasn't he my knowledgeable friend suggested at one time a partner of Prpic? Spelled P-r-p-i-c. It was an intelligent response, Prpic, would have had to be about 80 years older, but the point is that Princip looks like principal with the A L missing, Princip was surely the same nationality as the attractive Prpic. And what nationality would that be? Yugoslav is that correct? No, well yes, it would have been if there'd ever been such a thing as a Yugoslav in Princip's day.

To keep you on tenterhooks no longer, let me straighten out what appears to be a simple case of mistaken identity but is actually at tangled web of places, nationalities and forgotten countries. Gavrilo Princip then, quite simply was a Serbian nationalist who on 28 June the 28 1914 assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary and destroyed the empire. So maybe G Prpic, rated 67th highest or lowest tennis player in the world, male, is, was or would have been a Serbian, too. He is however a Yugoslav and it shows what we've come to in even scanning the headlines these days. That for the first time in about 50 years, you have to know who's doing what to whom when you read that Slovenia is up in arms, and the Croats want to be independent, and how about the Serbs? Who are they all? Asked a bright young college student friend of mine, "and where have they been hiding all this time?" A shock to me but a delightful one, I had the feeling, rare these days that I could actually be of some use to the latest generation of students who are such an alien race to me in everything from manners to music, from clothes to philosophy, from taste to values.

I'm not blaming anybody for having forgotten vital facts and movements in European history. It would be amazing if the average top student anywhere in Western Europe could tell you off hand, who are the people, the peoples who came to make up what in the 1920s, '30s, became known as Yugoslavia. But don't think that those cool, cool newsreaders telling ignorant us every evening about the shifts and turns of the wars, and what's happening in Split and Skopje, I never heard of the places before they were bundled out there and had time to stand in a t-shirt and pants before a tank or a smoking mountain and say, "This is Tim Slessor reporting from Zagreb".

Can you ever remember a time when you had the feeling, either that you never learned any geography whatsoever, or that you've somehow landed on the wrong planet. Well here it is, in rough, stark simplicity, here is the way it was before the birth, the creation of something called Yugoslavia and don't be alarmed at the early dates, we shall skip centuries without catching a breath.

Since 1389, Serbia was a vassal state of Turkey, now there's an ancient and once all powerful nation. Five hundred years later, in 1878 to be exact, Serbia became an independent kingdom and after a rash of nasty wars, which we used to shake our heads over nonchalantly as, the Balkans again. Serbia expanded its borders by annexing Macedonia and the old Serbia, don't press me on what that was. We're now in the glorious summer of 1914 when was heard the pistol of Gavrilo Princip. And pray where was that heard? A friend of mine, a sports commentator the other day, promptly identified it as the place where the winter Olympics were held. That's right, I said, it was also the place where one shot of a maniac killed an emperor and started the First World War. "No kidding' he said.

So, Princip shot the Archduke of Austro-Hungary. The Great War as it was called slaughtered on for four murderous years and when it was over, in 1919 a poor country boy from Wales one David Lloyd George simply announced that the Austro-Hungarian empire was no more. So a new kingdom was formed, the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which is, so disturbs us now. And that was formed from – please, class get this down – from the former provinces of Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Slovenia, Vojvodina and the independent state of Montenegro. Some years later the whole conglomerate was blessedly for us re-named Yugoslavia.

All this shows, however, what a great many of us, especially those of us who spring or derive from a British background, it all shows that most other nations today are artificial creations in the sense that they've been made up from tribes that later gelled into nations that later were conquered or annexed and packaged into a large nation with some such artificial name as Yugoslavia, or come to that, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The break up, or break down in Yugoslavia is only the latest eruption of a movement that I believe in America could in some not too distant time threaten the unity of the United States. The movement is quite simply a new concern of people who once emigrated to a new land, a new pride in where they came from.

Now we've touched on this, I should guess many times, and will do so a little more feelingly in the next year or two because, in America anyway it's a quite new thing in the immigrant experience. To put it roughly but I believe truly, let me just say that in the first decade of this century, when more than 12 million Europeans, mostly eastern from all the once and future kingdoms and republics we've been trying and failing to pronounce, when that famous tidal wave of eastern and southern Europeans washed against the New York shoreline and were processed as the callous saying went, through Ellis Island, one American seeing ahead the kind of trouble that is now I believe brewing for us, Theodore Roosevelt spoke up.

He honoured the new immigrants for their national devotion to the old homeland but as president he spoke to all Americans when he said, let us have an end of hyphenated Americans, let us stop talking about German Americans and Polish Americans and Italian Americans. He often reminded listeners in many places that the motto on the seal of the United States, printed on currency and crests everywhere, is E Pluribus Unum, out of many one. And the thing that can make and keep us one, Roosevelt said, is the English language.

Those millions of early 20th-century immigrants listened to him, they learned the language, both the parents and the children. They couldn't vote until they became citizens and they couldn't become citizens until they had a smattering of English and a few crude but true ideas about American government. Today many states print their ballot forms in many languages, in California 37, I believe at the last count, including two forms of Eskimo. The Eskimo population of California must be all of 20, 200?

Today the reminder is dinned into us on all sides, by politicians, by new immigrants, by college and school teachers, by the blacks, who insist on being called Afro Americans, by crusaders hot for maintaining everywhere two languages instead of just the one, English. We're told over and over again that we live in a pluralist society and we must respect the plural cultures by giving equal weight to their history, their literature, their ways as we formerly gave and give to the culture, the laws, the language of old Europe. It sounds mighty rousing and civilising, but in this surge of pluralism could be the flood that swamps and separates us in some not distant future.

I'm saying that we hear so much about the many cultures and of course today more than ever, of the invading Hispanics from South and Central America, and the Asians pouring on to the West Coast. We hear everything about E Pluribus but very little about the Unum. In blunter words we have forgotten or choose indeed to defy Teddy Roosevelt's reminder that the most important thing about the history, the creation of this American nation is the fact that out of many it made one.

Even those of us, the many millions of people around the globe who've been fascinated or appalled or heartened by the break up of the Soviet empire, it was the Communists all along who were the last imperialists. Even we were I believe stunned by the civil war in Yugoslavia, by the dawning knowledge that Serbs, Slovenians, Croats have never surrendered their pride and their origins, or their hopes for the restoration of their own nations. So, will the day come soon when the world outside America will be appealed to, to respect and support the rebellion in Florida of those who want a separate Hispanic, that's Spanish-speaking, republic? Only in the past year or two the mayor of Miami was quote as saying "There is absolutely no need to learn to speak English".

Dade County, the largest and most prosperous county in Florida of which Miami is a bristling seething metropolis, has not simply an Hispanic side to it, its core is now Spanish, in banking, real estate, merchandising, retailing, entertainment, whatever. I remember last year being driven in San Francisco by a young taxi driver. He was a retired soldier, he had no complaints, getting along on his pension in his cab, but he and his wife had left Florida. She was a secretary and he said, a very well trained a very good one. But in Dade County where they lived, she could not get a job; her sin, she could not speak Spanish.

That thought takes me back to our tennis player Mr Prpic, I said quite glibly that yes, he's a tennis player a Yugoslav, I don't know him but he might well in the present atmosphere resent that title, he might like some of the people parading this week outside the United Nations in New York, protest quite angrily, I am no such thing. I am a Serb.

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