ABSTRACT
Serbia’s international image until the mid-1990s was of a country beset by nationalist passions. It was excluded from studies of democratization because it was seen as “special case of unresolved ethnic and national conflict.”1 The Serbian government bore a large part of the responsibility for the unleashing of the Yugoslav civil wars and for the atrocities committed against members of other ethnic groups. Led by a Machiavellian nationalist, Slobodan Miloševi¼, many Serbs shared the belief that they were engaged in a life or death struggle against Muslim fanaticism (in Bosnia) and Croatian aggression (supported by the great powers of the Western Christian world). It was not surprising that when Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations appeared in 1996, Serbia was one of his chief examples of the growing importance of civilizational conflict, belying his earlier optimism about the global spread of democracy (this “clash of Samuel Huntingtons” is discussed in the next chapter).2
