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true of an intellectual cannot be less true of village people. The nationalist language games of the elite only appeared to give a voice to their fear and their pride. In reality, nationalism ended up imprisoning everyone in the Balkans in the fiction of “pure” ethnic identity. Those with multiple identities—for example, from mixed marriages—were forced to choose between inherited and adopted families, and thus between two fused elements of their own selves.
    Historically, nationalism and democracy have gone hand in hand. Nationalism, after all, is the doctrine that a people have a right to rule themselves, and that sovereignty reposes in them alone. The tragedy for the Balkans was that, when democracy at last became possible, the only language that existed to mobilize people into a shared social project was the rhetoric of ethnic difference. Any possibility of a civic, as opposed to ethnic, democracy had been strangled at birth by the Communist regime.
    Serbia’s Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević was the first Yugoslav politician to break the Titoist taboo on popular mobilization of ethnic consciousness. MiloÅ¡ević portrayed himself both as the defender of Yugoslavia against the secessionist ambitions of Croatia and Slovenia and as the avenger of the wrongs done to Serbia by that very Yugoslavia.
    MiloÅ¡ević’s program, first set out in the Serbian Academy of Arts and Science Memorandum of 1986 and consistently followed ever since, has been to build a Greater Serbia on the ruins of Tito’s Yugoslavia. If the other republics would notagree to a new Yugoslavia dominated by the Serbs, MiloÅ¡ević was prepared to incite the Serbian minorities in Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina to rise up and demand Serbian protection. These minorities served as MiloÅ¡ević’s Sudeten Germans—pretext and justification of his expansionary design.
    So much is obvious. More complicated is the relation between the MiloÅ¡ević project and Serbian opinion. It would make matters simpler if we could demonize the Serbs as incorrigibly nationalistic and assume that MiloÅ¡ević was merely responding to their ethnic paranoia. The reality is much more complicated. While there were extreme nationalist elements, like the Chetniks, still seething with resentment at Tito’s campaign against their wartime leader, Draža Mihajlović, the majority of urban Serbs in the early 1980s displayed little nationalistic paranoia, and even less interest in their distant rural brethren in Knin, Pale, Kosovo, or western Slavonia.
    What needs to be explained, therefore, is why most ordinary Serbs’ general indifference to the Serbian question turned into rabid anxiety that Serbs in the diaspora were about to be annihilated by genocidal Croatians and fundamentalist Muslims. MiloÅ¡ević certainly exploited “the Serbian question” to serve his demagogic ends. But the Serbian question was not of MiloÅ¡ević’s making. It arose inevitably out of the collapse of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Once the multi-ethnic state disintegrated, every national group outside its republic’s borders suddenly found itself an endangered national minority. As the largest such group, the Serbs felt particularly vulnerable to the rise of Croatian nationalism.
    While the Croats, like the Slovenes, professed to support the emergence of a loosely confederal Yugoslavia, in realityboth republics were set on the course of independence by the late 1980s. The drive toward national self-determination was fueled by economic resentment. As the bills came in for Yugoslavia’s expansion in the 1960s and 1970s and its foreign indebtedness increased, the two richest republics, Slovenia and Croatia, became resentful that their economic success was creamed off to pay for backward Bosnia and “Balkan” Serbia. Both Tito’s suppression of the Croatian spring of 1970 and MiloÅ¡eví c’s expansionist