So has its opponents on the pseudo-Left. For them, the bombing of Yugoslavia played out the last act of the dismemberment of Tito's Yugoslavia. It acted out the end of a promise, the collapse of a Utopia of multi-ethnic and authentic socialism into the confusion of an ethnic war. Even so sharp-sighted a political philosopher as Alain Badiou still maintains that all sides are equally guilty. There were ethnic cleansers on all sides, he says, among the Serbs, the Slovenes and the Bosnians.
Serbian nationalism is worthless.
It is more popular and it goes back further in time, it has more weapons at its disposal and in the past it doubtless had more opportunities to act out its criminal passions . . Certainly, Milosevic is a brutal nationalist, just as much as his colleagues in Croatia, Bosnia or Albania . . . It seems to me that this represents a leftist yearning for Yugoslavia lost. Threatened by Serbian nationalism, even Slovenian and Croatian nationalism preserved a respect for Titos Yugoslavia, in any case for its fundamental principle, that of the federation of equal constituent states with full sovereignty, including the right to secede. Because in no way was the difference between Milosevic and other national leaders only quantitative.