Europe and its illusions

What a proud place Marshal Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia was! Founded by second World War partisans who drove the Nazis out of their country, the only east European nation that successfully withstood Soviet hegemony during the Cold War became the beacon of the non-aligned movement, the world capital of "Brotherhood and Unity". Or so the official myth had it.

In those days - and for the first decade following Tito's death - Yugoslavia was part of Europe. Timothy Garton Ash, Britain's pre-eminent scholar of eastern Europe, Oxford don and roving journalist all rolled into one, noticed how our language changed as Slobodan Milosevic's wars whittled the federation from six down to two republics, as Serbs lost the possibility of travelling freely abroad, as their per capita income shrank to what it had been in 1959. Western commentators no longer talked about Yugoslavia, but about Serbia. And it was no longer in Europe, but in the Balkans.

In the 1980s, Garton Ash rejected the Cold War belief that eastern Europe started at the Berlin Wall, successfully bringing the term "Central Europe" into common usage. Just as "Central Europe" came to have a positive connotation, he writes, the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia, "revived another previously dormant geopolitical notion, `the Balkans'."

In our collective, western memory, the Balkans were never a happy region. The very name was redolent of troublesome nationalists starting wars, greasy food and bad plumbing. It was a place one travelled through on trains at night, en route for sunnier vacation lands. Now NATO briefers refer to Yugoslavia as "Europe's backyard"; for which read the slaughtering ground outside the back door, the unspeakable place where throats are slashed and carcasses hung.

As indicated by its subtitle, Garton Ash's new book is an unwieldy amalgam of dissimilar articles about dissimilar places; he self-indulgently calls it "a kaleidoscope". At best it is great journalism - for example, his prison visit to the former East German leader Erich Honecker. At worst it is a turgid academic record of the intricacies of Polish and German politics several governments ago. Europe in the broadest sense provides a thread - not EU-rope and the rush to monetary union which Mr Garton Ash derides, but Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, as Gen de Gaulle defined it. Across this continent of 600 million people in 35 countries, the decade since 1989 has brought more change than any other since 1939-1949.

For much of Europe, those changes have been happy. Germany was peacefully reunited in 1990 - an extraordinary event which caught all of us by surprise. Those Central European countries that were "stolen from the West" at the 1945 Yalta Conference are now returning, with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic full members of NATO and prime candidates for EU membership. Never before in the history of the world, Garton Ash quotes the Polish professor Janusz Reykowski as saying, has a political system changed so completely without violence.

Yet former Yugoslavia - those bloody Balkans - is the curse on Europe's happy ending. The chronologies between Garton Ash's chapters read like good news/bad news gags, with the rest of Europe providing the treaties and great leaps forward, punctuated by the massacres and broken ceasefires of ex-Yugoslavia. So what has Europe learned from the decade? "That Europe at the end of the twentieth century is quite as capable of barbarism as it was in the Holocaust of mid-century," Garton Ash writes. "That, during the last decades of the Cold War, many in Europe succumbed to fairy-tale illusions about the obsolescence of the nation state and war being banished for ever from our continent. That Western Europe has gone on living quite happily while war returned almost every summer to the Balkans. And we have learned that . . . we can't manage the affairs of our own continent without calling in the United States."

The author rejects Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington's division of Europe into that of inherently democratic, western (Catholic or Protestant) Christianity versus dictatorshipprone eastern Orthodox Christian and Muslim countries. Yet even he distinguishes between three separate Europes - the present EU, the "second Europe" of aspiring EU members and the "third Europe" of Russia and Ukraine, Belarus and, perhaps - he predicted in a 1995 essay - Serbia. On April 12th, I attended the session of the Yugoslav parliament that voted to join the Russian-Belarus federation. Out of spite towards its NATO attackers, Serbia threw itself into the enfeebled arms of its Orthodox, Slavic brothers.

A quarter of History of the Present is about Yugoslavia, and it is, of course, the most interesting. The proofs went to print before NATO launched its war for Kosovo on March 24th, but the book flows inexorably into the present conflict, as if the author knew it was coming. The war is symbolised in the blood of two dead Serb policemen that Garton Ash saw staining the snow outside a ruined mosque in Kosovo last November. In a litany of ceasefire violations, the Kosovo Liberation Army murdered the policemen in retribution for the destruction of the village. After the assassination, the Serb police beat up the only local Albanians they could lay their hands on; all this despite the much-vaunted presence of an OSCE "verification mission".

Garton Ash recalls some of the truths that were quickly buried when the NATO war started: that throughout the 1980s, Serbs fled the province "often being forced out by discrimination and violence". The US committed a monumental error by dismissing the pleas of Ibrahim Rugova at the 1995 Dayton peace conference.

Through his commitment to a non-violent struggle for independence, the moderate Albanian leader had prevented Kosovo from exploding. But Washington was more interested in cutting a deal with Mr Milosevic over Bosnia, and the Kosovans learned that non-violence does not work. By allowing Bosnian Serbs and Croats to keep much of the land they had seized by force, Washington taught the Kosovans that force pays.

Lara Marlowe is France and North Africa correspondent of The Irish Times and is covering the conflict in the Balkans