ABSTRACT
Slobodan Miloševic’s manipulation of Serbian nationalism as a political tool during the late 1980s and early 1990s had a significant influence on the collapse of the ‘Second Yugoslavia’, and also on the horrendous warfare that followed in its wake. While studying law in Belgrade during the first part of the 1960s, Miloševic served as a secretary for ideological political work in the League of Communists’ Belgrade University Committee, and subsequently became president of that committee’s Ideological Commission. In 1982, after spending over a decade as a political manager in the economic sector, Miloševic followed Stambolic into the sharply factionalised and hardball world of Serbian politics. Stambolic, already a member of the communist establishment owing to his family ties, had actively joined the Serbian political elite near the end of Tito’s life. Throughout this period, Stambolic attempted to calm the atmosphere in Serbia and reassure communist leaders in the other Yugoslav republics.
