"By the mid-1990s, the original ideological synthesis of communism and nationalism seems to have faded and was replaced by a Serbian nationalism couched in such extreme terms that it barred the participation of other peoples in the exclusive Serbian state that Milosevic and his supporters attempted to construct. Genocide was most likely not Milosevic's original intent, certainly not in 1987 when he began to make his bid for power. As in the other cases discussed in this book, the genocide, in this instance of Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, emerged at moments of extreme crisis, which were largely self-generated by the Milosevic forces and their counterparts in Slovenia and Croatia. But the genocide also developed because of a set of deeper historical factors, notably, the potency of the ideology of nationalism, the continued commitment to communism on the part of important segments of the Serbian elite, and the typical— certainly by the 1990s—communist reliance on a powerful state to engineer the transformation of society."