I have already mentioned that the entities that broke out of the disintegrating Yugoslavia were not nations. They were something less than that. Yet, the people in those states were infused with nationalism for their little states.

Many outsiders assume that all Balkan peoples are inevitably nationalistic, but that is not true.  Many of them lamented the loss of the old Yugoslavia with its federal state where all ethnic differences were suppressed in favor of the unity of brotherhood. Many of them liked Coca Cola Communism.

Too many people around the world thought that the collapse of Communist states would bring a “new world order.”  Remember that quaint expression of George H.W. Bush?  What a foolish expectation!  What we got was a new world disorder. Most of us, around the world,  believed that the fall of communism would lead inevitably to a new order of nation states, hopefully free and democratic, when they were released from what Ignatieff called the “senile grip of Soviets.” Naively people assumed that self-determination meant peace and freedom.  Instead, in Yugoslavia at least, it meant savagery and nation destroying.  As Michael Ignatieff said,

“We assumed that national self-determination had to mean freedom and that nationalism meant nation building.  As usual, we were wrong.  We hoped for order.  We got pandemonium. In the name of nationalism, dozens of viable nation-states have been shattered beyond repair.  In the name of state building, we have returned large portions of Europe to the pre-political chaos prior to the emergence of the modern state.

 

Large portions of the former Yugoslavia are now ruled by figures that have not been seen in Europe since late medieval times; the warlords.  They appear wherever nation states disintegrate: in Lebanon, Somalia, northern India, Armenia, Georgia, Ossetia Cambodia, and the former Yugoslavia. With their car phones, faxes, and exquisite personal weaponry, they look postmodern, but the reality is pure medieval…”

 

Of course, since Michael Ignatieff wrote that in 1994 the same thing has happened in many other places around the world and is threatening again to happen in many more. Even countries we long thought of as solemn and steady have shown uncomfortable wobbliness.

We seem headed for dangerous times. No that’s wrong; we are in dangerous times.