How We Made the Balkans (Page 2)

Unlike vast quantities of books on the Balkans, Glenny's audacious theme is that a good deal of the mess there has been generated by interventions of the great powers--or the "international community," as we say nowadays. The Balkans, he writes, were "not the powderkeg, as is so often believed; the metaphor is inaccurate. They were merely the powder trail that the great powers themselves had laid."

Before the 1990s, there had been three major great-power interventions in the Balkans in the past two centuries. The first was at the 1878 Congress of Berlin, where the cutting and pasting of territories by imperial cartographers--whose only immutable principle was the advancement of great-power interests--created lasting wounds. The second began with Austria-Hungary's assault on Serbia in the summer of 1914 and ended with the great population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. The third began with unprovoked attacks by Italy and Germany on the Balkans in World War II and ended with the installment of Communist governments in all countries of the region except Greece. These three interventions were so destructive, Glenny argues, that they guaranteed the Balkans' relative economic backwardness.

The violence that these interventions encouraged--often inflicted by one Balkan people on another--insured the continuation of profound civil and nationalist strife. In the West, however, these events are rarely regarded as the result of external intervention. On the contrary, the Balkan countries are seen as culprits who force the reluctant outside powers into their unfathomable conflicts. This imagined Balkans--a world where people are motivated not by rational consideration but by a mysterious congenital bloodthirstiness--is always invoked when the great powers seek to deny their responsibility for the economic and political difficulties that the region has suffered as a consequence of external interference.

It is against this background that Glenny invites us to judge the NATO attack on Serbia and its aftermath. Should the West fail to address the effects of the air war and the preceding decades of miscalculation and indifference, then there is little to distinguish NATO's intervention from those of its great-power predecessors. Who can claim a moral or political victory if the sole achievement is the expulsion of Milosevic's Serbia from Kosovo?

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