The breakup of the Soviet Union and the powerful symbolism of the coming down of the Berlin wall there was a sense that liberal democracy and free market ideas had won out as a universal and may be achieved peacefully, though for another socialist country Yugoslavia this was anything but the case (Bunce, 2011). The Yugoslavian republics had a violent past prior to WWII but found solidarity through the authoritarian leadership of Josip Tito after reclaiming the area from Nazi occupation. Compared to the Soviet Union its version of socialism was more true in that workers had greater autonomy. It could be argued Tito was more pragmatic than Stalin owing that they embraced a level of western ideas acin to the third way, and freedom of expression was tolerated with exception of criticism of the leader and the socialist ideology (Pupovac, 2016). The western ideas , ideas of individualism, capitalism and freedoms worked their way into Yugoslavia just as they had elsewhere, this could be evidenced by the youth and counterculture movements (Mocnik, 2016). A sense of nationalism grew and coupled with economic problems owing to the global capitalist system there was a power grab with nations wanting to be unburdened by others, paradoxically the desire for national independence became justification for violence against other nations and minorities within the nation 's …show more content…
Serbian leader Milosevic initially saw himself as achieving a position similar to that of Tito as ruler of Yugoslavia but with the clamour for national independence Milosevic switched to playing into this and protecting Serbia’s interest. Serbia ended up at war with one of its two provinces Kosovo which had a large Albanian population to which the Serbian army tried to remove with violent measures. The Serbian government to justify ethnic cleansing claimed that Albanians had been driven out Serbians , the truth was they had been leaving owing to their better education and Kosovo being economically poor (Kuljik, 2016). Eventually Nato became involved in an attempt to bring an end to the war through military action with the justification that it was necessary pacifier, some critics suggested that Nato was also not just in its levels of violence and hid behind humanitarian discourses (Buden, 2016). Again taking an Arendt perspective state violence turned the public against it, past conflicts also came to the surface when nationalism became the objective and violence went past simply the objectives of independence and became illegitimate . In this instance just as in the Algerian case violence ran the risk of leading to more violence and self