By declaring themselves a separatists group in the Republic of Serbia, the Serbian.

             government had reason to put down their uprising, but its situation went too far as political tensions between the two provoked into uncontrolled violence. The Serbian"s fervent nationalism coupled with the Albanian separatists movement towards an independently governed Kosovo, aligned with the Albanian government, made for a.

             reactionary environment that ultimately led to conflict in 1996 and continuing into much.

             of 1998.

             The realist stance on the Kosovo situation is that conflict of different peoples within an existing state is inevitable because, "nationalism is a scavenger that feeds upon the pre-existing sense of natiohood in and effort to destroy heterogeneity by squeezing diverse ethnic groups into the nation, by trying to surpress the cutlture of minority groups, or by driving the them out of the country." The Serbian government justifies their actions on the basis of this stance, claiming that "injuries inflicted by another group are.

             remembered mythically as though the past were the present." A view which NATO sees as a threat to the other ethnic minorties of the Balkans, but since the Balkan states with the exception of Greece are not members of NATO, one questions the authority that NATO has in trying to protect the collective security of Europe, when its mission clearly states "the military authorities of the sending State shall have the right to exercise within the receiving State all criminal and disciplinary jurisdiction conferred on them by the law of the sending State over all persons subject to the military law of that State." .

             The problem that arises from this situation is directly associated within NATO"s nature of collective security, as well as that of the European Union. Seeing that the Balkan states have always proved to be an unstable political, economic, and social.