"For as long as multinational communities have existed, their weak point has always been the relations between different nations"
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Milosevic is doing something sly here: he smuggles a political project into the language of neutral diagnosis. By calling interethnic relations the perennial "weak point" of multinational communities, he frames conflict as structural, almost natural - a built-in flaw - rather than as the product of leaders who inflame it. The line reads like a calm sociological observation, but its real utility is permission. If tension is inevitable, then exceptional measures start to sound like realism. If coexistence is inherently fragile, then the strongman becomes the necessary engineer.
The phrasing also widens his alibi. "For as long as" stretches backward into history, laundering the specificity of Yugoslavia's late-20th-century collapse into a timeless pattern. It's a classic maneuver of nationalist politics: turn a contingent crisis into fate, then present your own hard-edged response as merely acknowledging what everyone knows.
Context matters because Milosevic rose by weaponizing exactly the fault line he claims to lament. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the language of protecting one nation from another became the soundtrack to constitutional sabotage, propaganda, and war. Read that way, "relations between different nations" isn't a worry; it's the terrain on which power can be consolidated. The subtext is a threat disguised as a shrug: multiethnic states are precarious, so don't be surprised when someone - preferably him - decides to "stabilize" them by redrawing borders, rewriting rights, or redefining who counts as the community at all.
The phrasing also widens his alibi. "For as long as" stretches backward into history, laundering the specificity of Yugoslavia's late-20th-century collapse into a timeless pattern. It's a classic maneuver of nationalist politics: turn a contingent crisis into fate, then present your own hard-edged response as merely acknowledging what everyone knows.
Context matters because Milosevic rose by weaponizing exactly the fault line he claims to lament. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the language of protecting one nation from another became the soundtrack to constitutional sabotage, propaganda, and war. Read that way, "relations between different nations" isn't a worry; it's the terrain on which power can be consolidated. The subtext is a threat disguised as a shrug: multiethnic states are precarious, so don't be surprised when someone - preferably him - decides to "stabilize" them by redrawing borders, rewriting rights, or redefining who counts as the community at all.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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