I really cannot believe my eyes the stuff I am reading here......
It seems , from your description, that we, people from Balkans , are some
sort of brigands and neandertales, perhaps worthy of some good circus show
in the US?
I am deeply aware of anti serbism fashion, but two things suprise me with
your attitude:
1. that  on list which is gathering progressives from different part of the
world, man can find racists
2. that you are speaking about Balkans as some pitt in the ground, inhabited
by caveman and wildman.
If you didnt notice, my mails here are oftenly directed to one more address
: ex-yu-a list, list which is gathering progressives - anarchists, left
libertarians, leftists- from ex Yugoslavia; it numbers a lot of people; we
are all trying to connect ourselves and organize to fight our domestic
regimes in order to bring more political freedom in our countries while
promoting noble idea of internationalism.
Some of my best friends are, therefore, Slovenians, Croats, Macedonians.
Depicting us as some kind of caveman is not just an indicator of your own
lack of knowledge, civilized behaviour and decency, but also an insult for
all of us from Balkans who are trying, very hard, to fight against our
domestic oligarchs and against western imperialism.
I suggest reading this text  am sending, hoping that you might learn
something from it. Perhaps your imperial ego and monumental ignorance, as
well as your deep rooted racist prejudices will soften.
Comradely,
                                   Andrej
                           Belgrade Libertarian Group
                               BLG/IWA/IWW


Only in the Balkans - www.dissidence.org
by Misha Glenny*

Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination by Vesna
Goldsworthy.
Yale, 254 pp., £19.95, 21 May 1998, 0 300 07312 7

Imagining the Balkans by Maria Todorova.
Oxford, 270 pp., £35 and £17.99, 26 June 1997, 0 19 508750 X

'Kosovo,' the Prime Minister tells us, 'is on the doorstep of Europe.' The
province, we learn, is situated near countries like Greece and Italy with
which British people are very familiar from their holidays. This is why we
cannot stand idly by and watch the Serbs perpetrating atrocities on Albanian
civilians. Why exactly, though? Because it might interfere with our package
holiday arrangements? Or because it is on the doorstep of Europe? What is
the doorstep of Europe and why is Kosovo outside the house?

It can hardly be barred for geographical reasons. Greece lies further south;
Poland and Finland further east; the Adriatic is a stone's throw away.
Perhaps, Tony Blair calls it a 'doorstep' because Albanians are
predominantly Muslim. The Government repeatedly refers to Serb atrocities
which, George Robertson teaches us, Europe has not seen the like of 'since
the Middle Ages'. Isuppose if you overlook the period 1914-45, he does have
a point. Maybe it is this barbarism that excludes Kosovo from Europe?

In fact, Kosovo, like anywhere else in the Balkans, is neither inside nor
outside. The rest of Europe considers its status to be malleable:one moment
the British press will describe it as an impenetrable nether region of
ancient hatreds; the next it will be home to swinging multi-cultural
Sarajevo at the heart of Europe.

In one sense, the Prime Minister is right: Kosovo is on the doorstep. Europe
will never allow it in. The West's determination to keep most of the
Albanian refugees in miserable conditions in Albania and Macedonia suggests
that they do not want Kosovo's blood to stain the carpet in the living-room.
Far better, as Emma Bonino, the EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid,
suggested, to accommodate these refugees in the region - in Bulgaria, for
example, or Romania. These countries already suffer chronic infrastructural
problems and social unrest, caused in part, as Ms Bonino is doubtless aware,
by the West's refusal to compensate them for the punishing losses they have
incurred in abiding by UN sanctions on Yugoslavia. So why not exacerbate
their economic problems still further by funnelling refugees across
Macedonia for Sofia and Bucharest to deal with? The West never properly
appreciated how useful the Cold War was: for half a century, it was able to
forget the Balkans. They were in that part of Europe for which it thankfully
bore no responsibility.

In the mid-Eighties, when we still lived in that stable bipolar world, two
American friends of mine were hiking in a remote part of Montenegro. As they
surveyed the beauty of the mountains around them, a smiling shepherd boy,
ten years old at most, approached in an evident state of excitement and keen
to talk. Taking out an imaginary machine-gun, he sprayed make-believe
bullets in a semi-circle and delivered a message that echoed around the
Dinaric peaks: 'Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh - Blake! Krystle! All
dead!'

The boy bore news from distant Hollywood: the elders of the Carrington clan,
the central characters in Dynasty, had met a sticky end. The crime that
induced shock in audiences across the United States had not been perpetrated
by a crazed Vietnam vet. If it had, perhaps Americans could have made some
sense of the tragedy. But members and friends of Denver's richest family had
been gunned down by terrorists in the distant Balkans. The heinous act was
carried out (in a house of God!) as Blake and Alexis's long-lost daughter
was marrying the Crown Prince of Moldavia. Most of the cast were brought
back from the dead in the subsequent episode by the insatiable desire for
network ratings. All this happened just a hundred miles from Dracula's
castle. Only in the Balkans.

Although Vesna Goldsworthy does not investigate the Dynasty affair in
Inventing Ruritania, it is a rich example of what she calls the 'imperialism
of the imagination'. The television producer who had wanted to massacre the
cream of Colorado society was Camille Marchette. 'I'm responsible for
Moldavia,' she told America's TV Guide in 1986. 'I sat down one day and
said: "I'm only going to be on the show a year and I'm going to end it with
a shoot-out in Moldavia."' Did she know that Moldavia was a real place which
would gain its independence just five years after the wedding was filmed?
Did she dream up the name King Galen? Were the terrorists who imprisoned
Krystle and Alexis Communists? Nationalists? Romanian-speaking Serbs,
perhaps?

The answer is that it doesn't matter, provided you are writing about the
Balkans. In her 1925 novel, The Secret of Chimneys, Agatha Christie depicted
the London financier, Herman Isaacstein, in 'very correct English shooting
clothes which nevertheless sat strangely upon him. He had a fat yellow face
and black eyes, as impenetrable as those of a cobra. There was a generous
curve to the big nose and power in the square lines of the vast jaw.' Not
even an anti-semite like Christie would risk such a passage today. In the
same book, she introduces a 'Herzoslovakian' peasant, Boris Anchoukoff, with
'high Slavonic cheekbones, and dreamy fanatic eyes'. He is, we learn, 'a
human bloodhound from a race of brigands'. As Goldsworthy points out, the
cut-throat savage from the mountains is still with us:
That writing about the Balkans is a free-for-all, with no inhibitions about
political correctness, is shown in a recent editorial in the Evening
Standard which - following the news that Albania was to hold a referendum on
the restoration of the monarchy - suggested that 'Lord Archer or Mrs Camilla
Parker-Bowles could be persuaded to take on the Albanian job . . . And if
some bearded, wild-eyed, bomb-throwing Balkan anarchist brought their reign
to a premature end - well, that is a blow that we, like their subjects,
would have to bear with fortitude.'

The bomb-thrower's alter ego is the bumbling Ruritanian peasant who, having
stumbled on political power, is unsure how to wield it. Reporting on Michael
Portillo's visit as defence minister to Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and
Macedonia in 1996, Anne Applebaum (coincidentally, for the Evening Standard)
has a good old chuckle:
Up and down the red carpets he walks, Her Majesty's aircraft just behind
him, the Macedonian defence minister just beside him, the Macedonian
soldiers in front of him, looking very much like extras from a de luxe
production of the Nutcracker Suite . . . I would say he has a genuine talent
for Ruritanian diplomacy, or indeed any diplomacy. The Defence Secretary was
very good, for example, at answering long and garbled questions from
Bulgarian journalists, even when the translation was uncertain and the room
very hot. An ear splitting group of folk musicians didn't prevent him from
chattering away with his Romanian counterpart during a multi-course state
dinner in Bucharest. While in Macedonia, Mr Portillo oohed and aahed
convincingly while being shown a collection of bronze tools - the work of
Macedonian neolithic hunter-gatherers.

Why do so many Westerners shake their heads in laughter and despair at the
Balkans? Why are the region's inhabitants seen either as congenitally
irrational and bloodthirsty mobs, never happier than when they are slitting
the throats of their neighbours, or as incompetent clowns in fanciful
uniforms that mysteriously invoke a medieval past? It would be hard to find
academics or Balkan specialists who take the view that the collapse of
Yugoslavia was a product of ancient hatreds. But this belief is stubbornly
held by the Western media and Western policy-makers, including many who have
participated or are still participating in the crisis, and whose influence
helps to perpetuate the myths.

Both Goldsworthy and Maria Todorova, a Bulgarian historian who now teaches
at the University of Florida, seek to explain the peculiar form of literary
and ideological imperialism visited on the Balkans. While consciously
drawing on Edward Said's Orientalism for inspiration, Todorova makes clear
distinctions between Said's consideration of the Middle East and her own of
what used to be called the Near East. Both authors draw on a third academic,
Milica Bakic-Hayden, to describe the process of imagining the Balkans as one
of 'nesting orientalisms'. On the one hand, the region is seen as
'irreparably oriental' because it spent nearly five centuries as part of the
Ottoman Empire. On the other, it is indisputably part of Europe. The
dichotomy is summed up by two further, now defunct names for the Balkans:
Turkey-in-Europe and Ottoman Europe. Its inhabitants were in the main white
and Christian, but in important contrast to the Middle East, the region was
never colonised by Western powers, which allowed it to become the repository
of any manner of fantastic imaginings.

Goldsworthy explores this history of Western perceptions and prejudices by
tracing the development of Balkan images in English literature from Byron
through The Prisoner of Zenda, Dracula, Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy and
beyond. It is thoroughly enjoyable to read and peppered with hilarious or
hair-raising quotations from some of Britain's most admired authors. A
literary critic, Goldsworthy very occasionally commits the sort of error she
ascribes to her subjects. She says, for example, that the Black Hand, the
group of Serbian military conspirators, carried out the murder of King
Aleksandar and Queen Draga in 1903 in Belgrade, her home town, but the Black
Hand was not constituted until 1909. These minor errors, however, do not
detract from her argument.

One of the most densely creative passages in the book deals with the crucial
Balkan metaphor of Dracula. 'I read that every known superstition in the
world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the
centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool,' notes Jonathan Harker,
Stoker's rational Victorian explorer, as he sets off for Transylvania.
Dracula's world represents everything that is anathema to the Victorians -
passion, sex, unrestrained violence. And yet, Goldsworthy explains, Harker
is astonished to find that Dracula's library resembles nothing so much as
the reference section of a club library in Pall Mall. It contains a London
directory, the 'Red' and 'Blue' books, Whitaker's Almanack, the Army and
Navy Lists, and even, as Harker notes with some pleasure, the Law List.
'Preparing to visit England, Dracula studies these books in detail.' The
Count intends to invade England by stealth and subvert it with his passion
and darkness. Stoker unwittingly reveals an English paranoia that is still
very much with us. The threatening conflation of 'sameness' and 'difference'
(typical of many Western literary representations of the Balkans),
Goldsworthy continues, 'ultimately means that Dracula must not simply be
killed but completely destroyed by the united representatives of the West -
an Englishman, a Dutchman and an American . . . Their mission to restore
order in the Balkans represents a (subconscious?) fictional expression of
the attempts in the late 19th and 20th centuries by the Western powers to
impose peace on the peninsula.' If Dracula were to wreak havoc again today,
the West would no doubt send in an observer mission without the right to
bear garlic, silver crosses or stakes and mallets.

Stoker's Gothic novel, published in the 1890s, demonstrates an important
development in representations of the peninsula. In the period beginning
with the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and ending with the protracted
negotiations that led to the various treaties of Paris after the First World
War, the adjective 'Balkan' ceased to be a vague geographical concept and
was transformed (for the 20th century at least) into one of the most
consistently pejorative epithets in Western political discourse. Of the many
revelations in Maria Todorova's outstanding book, this history of
denigration is the most important.

The Great Eastern Crisis of 1875, which marked the beginning of the end of
the Ottoman Empire, was laid to rest in 1878 by the Congress of Berlin. This
is when the modern history of the Balkans, and, incidentally, many of the
practices which are erroneously assumed to be the product of ancient Balkan
enmities, properly began. The decisions of the Congress, under the
chairmanship of Bismarck, marked a profound shift in the attitude of the
Great Powers to the ailing Ottoman Empire. After all previous crises in the
East, the Powers had collaborated to preserve the Empire and encourage
internal reform, but at Berlin they agreed it was beyond salvation and
instead began to dismember it. The outcome of every Balkan crisis since
then, including the Dayton Accords, has been dictated by the Great Powers.

As well as beginning the often arbitrary carve-up of the Balkans which
ensured that ownership of large chunks of mouth-watering territory would be
disputed in the future, the fateful imperialist decisions made at Berlin
triggered 'the Great Game' in Central Asia, and, with more brutal honesty,
the 'Scramble for Africa'. The origins of conflict in Bosnia, Afghanistan
and Somalia can all be traced to decisions made at the 1878 Congress.

Todorova notes the complicated clash between the Ottomans' demographic
legacy in the Balkans and historic claims on territory made by the emerging
states:
Neither historic rights (based on the territorial zenith of the medieval
Balkan states) nor issues of self-determination were, in the final account,
instrumental in delineating frontiers. At the very most, these elements
shaped the controversial and incompatible Balkan irredentist programmes. The
size, shape, stages of growth, even the very existence of the different
Balkan states were almost exclusively regulated by great power
considerations following the rules of the balance-of-power game. As Bismarck
hastened to inform the Ottoman delegates at the Congress of Berlin in 1878:
'If you think the Congress has met for Turkey, disabuse yourselves.'

Although afforded full delegate status at the Congress, the Turkish
representatives were admitted only on the understanding that they were to
hand over territory to whoever the six other delegations indicated.

The new Balkan states were thus accepted into the great European hierarchy
at the invitation of the Great Powers. As the long list of conditions
attached to their recognition as independent states made clear, they were
expected to know their place and to accommodate the foreign policies of
those Great Powers that demonstrated an interest in the region. It was
assumed that the new states would mimic the ideology of their elders and, as
Todorova points out, 'it is doubtful whether in an atmosphere in which the
national was imposed as the hegemonic paradigm in Europe, as the gold
standard of "civilised" political organisation, the imperial or any other
alternative could be viable.' The uncertain élites of the Balkan states had
no choice but to imitate the European model of the nation-state with its
attendant nationalism. In the Balkans, politicians, diplomats, writers,
geographers, folklorists and historians fleshed out that nationalism,
especially during the crucial period from 1878 to 1914. But the backbone was
provided by the Army. All parts of the body politic gazed north to Germany
and westward to Italy for inspiration. The great military model which the
Serbs, Bulgarians, Turks and, to a lesser extent, the Greeks and Romanians
looked to was Prussia. Publications sponsored by the Serbian Army, popularly
thought to be hostile to all things German, devoted considerable praise to
Prussia's military traditions and modernising ability. Many Serbian officers
received their training in Germany, as did Bulgars and Turks. From the
specific examples of Italy and Germany, and from the behaviour of all the
Great Powers, the Balkan statebuilders learned the lesson that force
determines history. And force means a strong state, which in turn means
centralisation and a powerful army. These were not Balkan but Western
traditions.

Yet already, in the minds of Western policy-makers and public alike, the new
Balkan states were part of an unbroken pattern of wild, aggressive behaviour
stretching back centuries. The belief, described with typical brilliance by
Todorova, was that

Balkan atrocities . . . are the expected natural outcome of a warrior ethos,
deeply ingrained in the psyche of Balkan populations. Balkan violence thus
is more violent because it is archaic, born of clan societies, whose archaic
forms reveal the 'disharmonic clash between prehistory and the modern age'.
This argument seemingly takes into account environmental factors
(mountainous terrain), economy (sheep and horse-raising), social
arrangements (extended families, clans, tribes) to explain the creation of a
cultural pattern. Its flaw, however, is that once the cultural pattern is
created, it begins an autonomous life as an unchangeable structure and no
account is taken of the drastic changes that have occurred in the social
structure of the Balkans in the past century, although there are concerns
and pockets less influenced by these transformations. There is an additional
aspect to the comparisons of atrocities. The jump from medieval brigands to
contemporary armed hillsmen involves a comparison of medieval violence (of
which both are representative) with highly technological contemporary
warfare, in which backwardness is attributed not only to the weapons of
destruction but also the perpetrators.

The First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 are widely believed to
offer definitive proof of 'medieval' behaviour on the part of Balkan
warriors. But the Balkan nationalism and militarism expressed in these wars
were much more closely related to the practices and morality of Great Power
imperialism than to local traditions. The Balkan armies were largely funded
by Western loans, Western firms supplied them with weapons and other
technology, their officers were schooled and organised by Frenchmen,
Germans, Russians and Britons. The armies were staffed, and in the case of
Turkey commanded, by Westerners. Representatives of Krupp, Skoda,
Schneider-Creusot and Vickers participated in the wars as observers and
wrote reports on the effectiveness of their weaponry which were used to
advertise the superiority of their products over those of their competitors.

Anything anyone in the West knows about the Balkan Wars has been learned
from the report published in early 1914 by the Carnegie Endowment's
Commission of Inquiry into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars. It is
an important document and the Commission's members were serious and
well-intentioned. This is a passage from the introduction:
What finally succeeds in bringing armed peace into disrepute, is that today
the Great Powers are manifestly unwilling to make war. Each one of them,
Germany, England, France and the United States, to name a few, has
discovered the obvious truth that the richest country has the most to lose
by war, and each country wishes for peace above all things. This is so true
that these two Balkan wars have wrought us a new miracle, - we must not
forget it, - namely, the active and sincere agreement of the Great Powers
who, changing their tactics, have done everything to localise the
hostilities in the Balkans and have become the defenders of the peace that
they themselves threatened thirty-five years ago, at the time of the
Congress of Berlin.

Five months later, despite the Commission's belief in the inherent wisdom of
the Great Powers, imperialist rivalry reached its zenith, persuading the
club's senior members to divert their enormous economic and technological
resources into one vast industrial conglomerate of death.

The vast massacres of the First World War relegated the ruinous social and
economic impact of the Balkan Wars to the background. But those who
witnessed or participated in them were afforded a unique insight into what
the 20th century had in store. Several battles pitted forces larger than
Napoleon's mightiest army against one another. This despite Serbia, for
example, having a population of less than three million. The Bulgarians
mobilised 25 per cent of their male population, just under half a million
men. The fighting was characterised by trench warfare and merciless sieges;
and by pitiless artillery assaults on unprotected infantry and civilians.
All sides, except Montenegro and Romania, deployed aeroplanes against the
enemy, mainly for reconnaissance or dropping leaflets but also for the
occasional bombing raid. For the first time, technology enabled fighting to
last 24 hours a day, as huge searchlights illuminated enemy defences. This
was not Balkan warfare - this was Western warfare.

The violent capriciousness of the Balkans was used as an alibi by the Great
Powers for covering up their own role in various crimes and for pointing the
finger at countries who were acting as unwilling or unwitting proxies in a
broader Great Power struggle. 'The great crime of the Balkans,' Todorova
explains, indeed their original sin, were the shots fired by Gavrilo
Princip, which signalled the outbreak of World War One. While even after the
Macedonian rising of 1903, the British correspondent to the Graphic could
speak good-naturedly of the 'good old Balkans, where there's always
something going on', 1914 wiped out any ambivalence. The immensely popular
Inside Europe (1940) of John Gunther summarised feelings on this side of the
Atlantic: 'It is an intolerable affront to human and political nature that
these wretched and unhappy little countries in the Balkan peninsula can, and
do, have quarrels that cause world wars. Some hundred and fifty thousand
young Americans died because of an event in 1914 in a mud-caked primitive
village, Sarajevo. Loathsome and almost obscene snarls in Balkan politics,
hardly intelligible to a Western reader, are still vital to the peace of
Europe, and perhaps the world.'

It was precisely because of the inbetweenness, the mystery, the
incomprehensibility, the feeling that the area was 'the centre of some sort
of imaginative whirlpool', that Americans, Britons, French, Germans and
Russians succeeded in shifting much of the blame for the consequences of
their imperialist struggle in the Balkans onto a group of naive student
nationalists from the Bosnian countryside. The Balkans was never the
powder-keg but just one of a number of devices which might have acted as
detonator. The powder-keg was Europe itself.

When Yugoslavia collapsed in 1991, both Todorova and Goldsworthy must have
had a sense of déjà vu. The term 'Balkans' was barely used during the
Communist period. Four of the countries were subsumed into the phrase
'Eastern Europe' while Greece and Turkey were 'Nato's southern flank'.
Yugoslavia was hailed in both Moscow and Washington as a model of progress
and the Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu, the ugliest Stalinist in Eastern
Europe, was fêted and flattered in Washington, London and Tokyo - the
metaphors about Dracula flooded onto front pages in the West only after he
had been shot. Until then, he had been a welcome thorn in Moscow's side.

After the fall of Communism, Goldsworthy observed how some preposterous
portrayals of the Balkans were dusted down and cited by journalists and
newspaper columnists who, lacking the time to research their subjects
thoroughly, are ever eager for readable - and quotable - accounts of life
and death in the Balkans. While the turmoil of the Nineties forged new
perceptions of individual Balkan nationalities, these frequently grew out of
the archetypal representations of the region which were first established in
the 19th century and then transmitted and transformed by successive
generations of writers. Stereotypes derived from popular literature remain
common currency in many discussions of the Balkans. While few political
commentators cite Rider Haggard in accounts of contemporary Africa, Hope's
Ruritania or Stoker's Transylvania - two of the most powerful products in
the history of entertainment in our era - are regularly invoked in
assessments of present-day Balkan crises.

The habit of patronising people in the Balkans is not restricted to any one
section of the West's intellectual hierarchy. Todorova quotes two Western
scholars explaining from a liberal perspective the significance of the rapes
perpetrated in the Bosnian and Croatian wars:

The rape is meant to collectively humiliate the enemy. What do the raped
women think of first? Of something different from Austrian, American or
English women. The latter would ask themselves: why me precisely? They would
receive support from their families, but they would think primarily in
individual terms. These women think first of their husbands, of the
children, of the parents, of the relatives - of shame. This is how the many
rapes can be explained. They are symbolic acts which are supposed to reach
the opponent in his political entirety.

As Todorova remarks, This categorical statement written by men about what
raped women think is not based on sociological surveys or interviews . . .
it does not differentiate between groups of women, based on education,
occupation and other criteria, it lumps together all Yugoslav women and
constructs them as a cultural species quite apart from the similarly
constructed group of Austrian, American or English, that is, Western women.
This is typical of the . . . irresponsibility with which overgeneralised
categories are used in academic discourse, despite all the evidence of the
dubious repercussions in extra-academic settings.

To help set the record straight here are a few lesser-known facts about the
Balkan peninsula that never make it into the newspapers. For those who would
defend the Balkans but don't know how, they will be useful for dropping into
conversations about how hopeless the situation there is. 1. The only country
allied to the Axis that refused to allow any of its Jewish citizens to be
deported to Nazi death camps was Bulgaria. 2. There were twice as many
Turkish casualties at Gallipoli as Allied ones (the Turks, lest we forget,
were defending their home territory). 3. The single most violent period in
Balkan history in terms of casualties sustained and the territorial extent
of the warfare was a direct consequence of Hitler's decision to occupy
Greece, a decision prompted by Mussolini's failed attempt to invade Greece
in 1940. The Nazi resolve in March 1941 to dismember Yugoslavia was
accompanied by the installation of a brutal Fascist administration in
Croatia that was entirely unrepresentative of the political aspirations of
the Croat people. Until Pavelic was installed in Croatia, there had been no
history of mass violence between Serbs and Croats. 4. The Stalinist
dictatorships that took root in Romania and Bulgaria were imposed by an
agreement reached by Stalin and Churchill. In exchange for handing over
these territories to Soviet influence, Churchill, and later Truman, were
given a free hand by Stalin to smash a Communist insurgency in Greece that
was on the verge of taking power with minimal foreign support. 5. Since
1989, the governments and people of Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania
and Greece have all resisted attempts by nationalists to destabilise the
local or regional polity. 6. The main victims of the sanctions imposed by
the UN on Serbia have been the surrounding states, a number of which are
attempting to steer their economies through the transition from Communism to
capitalism. Bulgaria, for example, has been losing an estimated $2 billion a
year. The impact on the economies of Western Europe and America has been
negligible. The UN refuses to give Bulgaria any compensation.

Until the agents of Western culture are able to see their prejudices about
the Balkans for what they are, the remarkable work of Goldsworthy, Todorova
and others like them will remain largely unused in the West. That would be a
tragedy.

* Misha Glenny, a former BBC correspondent in Vienna, is the author of The
Fall of Yugoslavia and The Rebirth of History. He is finishing a new book,
entitled The Balkans 1804-2000: Nationalism and the Great Powers.

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