sounds plausible, yeah. Looking at wiki on demographics of yugoslavia, croatia, serbia and bosnia is a bit interesting; 81', which appears the peak, has yugoslavian as the ethnicity of 5.4% of yugoslavia total, 7.9% of bosnia and herzegovina (and there it was even higher, 8.4% in 61' which isn't even remotely the case in the other 2 countries - serbia and croatia have fractions of a % in 61'), 4.1% of serbia, and interestingly 8.2% in croatia. Today ofc its essentially 0% in all of them.
So by the end of yugoslavia, got relatively substantial but still by far the majority always identified with some specific ethnicity.
Now I presumed most people revised their identification in 90' for political reasons/safety, but could be emigration as you say played a significant role too, especially in bosnia.
And yeah, a fair proportion would prob be offended by an imputation of yugoslavian identity today, because of the ethnically divided politics.
But I think further than that, a significant chunk of the people not too happy that yugoslavia failed and disintegrated (such as myself and I believe many left-leaning people around) still can't see much sense in identifying as being ethnically yugoslavian. Yugoslavia is no more; yugoslavian identity was a composite one in its rather recent origin; people knew specific ethnicities of their parents and choose to think of themselves as yugoslavian first, or interpreted having parents of different ethnicities as being that identity. As a political project - and it was that - it died just by the time it was getting any substantial traction, so seems rather pointless today.
I guess I naively see it as an umbrella identity for the other ones and it makes sense if your parents from different parts, or don't like the divison of the 90s (It pretty much means - south-slavic). But it has been heavily politicized like anything else in the Balkans. Also current political leaders in the region doing their share to smear Yugoslavian identity probably to justify the division in which this political elite prospers, rather than see a
return of some idea that will get people to look past their minor differences.
So by the end of yugoslavia, got relatively substantial but still by far the majority always identified with some specific ethnicity.
Now I presumed most people revised their identification in 90' for political reasons/safety, but could be emigration as you say played a significant role too, especially in bosnia.
And yeah, a fair proportion would prob be offended by an imputation of yugoslavian identity today, because of the ethnically divided politics.
But I think further than that, a significant chunk of the people not too happy that yugoslavia failed and disintegrated (such as myself and I believe many left-leaning people around) still can't see much sense in identifying as being ethnically yugoslavian. Yugoslavia is no more; yugoslavian identity was a composite one in its rather recent origin; people knew specific ethnicities of their parents and choose to think of themselves as yugoslavian first, or interpreted having parents of different ethnicities as being that identity. As a political project - and it was that - it died just by the time it was getting any substantial traction, so seems rather pointless today.