Was a nationalist crisis in Yugoslavia inevitable at the end of the Cold War?
I don’t know if it was inevitable. But in the 1960s I had conversations here with visiting Yugoslav intellectuals, and they were in absolute terror and panic at the thought of what would happen in Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. So they knew. They realized the nationalist hatreds. When I visited Yugoslavia after Tito’s death, in the early 1980s, I noticed already enormous tensions between nationalities. There was a saying then: It’s easier to trade with China than with a neighboring republic. So nationalist hatreds were already very strong. I then saw that immediately after the Yugoslavs liberated themselves from Marxism they embraced nationalism. This proves the strength of nationalism. It emerges after political crises — and in this case, after the opening of the void previously filled by Marxism. Do you think the NATO bombing is a just military intervention? The whole affair has been going on for 10 years now. What the Serbs were doing in Bosnia — ethnic cleansing and other atrocit
