A Macedonian salad or a powder-keg just about to explode: the Balkans have invoked many images of irrational brutality and perpetual instability in Europe. Yugoslavia's slow but irrevocable disintegration, which dominated the entire post-Cold War decade, only appears to confirm the worst fears about a region torn apart by old historical and territorial disputes, laced with economic and social decay. Explaining why this is so is the task which Misha Glenny set himself.
In broad terms he has succeeded, although, as always with the Balkans, answering one question simply raises a few more.
Stripped of its sophistries, the story he has to tell is brutally simple. The creation of the nation-state as the only viable and desirable political unit was largely a western idea which, when exported further East, created havoc in the Balkans. Straddling the meeting point of three multinational empires and residing on Europe's strategic waterways, the people of the Balkans could never be neatly separated into homogenous national entities.
An emasculated Turkey still contained large Kurdish and Christian minorities; Greece and Bulgaria incorporated Muslims; Yugoslavia was from the beginning a hotch potch of nationalities, and no less than a third of Romania's population at the end of the first World War did not belong to the majority nation.
All Balkan states, however, remained determined to fit realities into fiction by regarding themselves as unitary nation-states. And the result was a particularly dangerous combination of conflicts, as mutually exclusive territorial demands clashed with historical claims and ideologies. In an area where frontiers changed frequently and historical justifications depended on one's starting point, every one of these nationalist claims entailed, by definition, an injury to another nation.
The picture is complicated even further by the tendency of every Balkan nation to change arguments according to circumstances. In 1990, Serbs justified their control over the Kosovo region - overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Albanians - as a historical necessity: Kosovo was the cradle of Serbian nationhood. Yet the same leaders went on justifying the annexation of further territory which never belonged to Serbia proper on the principle of defending ethnic Serbs throughout the Balkans. Moderation and consistency were never great Balkan virtues. The Balkan experience had two further effects. First, it created an obsession with history, a discipline which was regarded as an instrument of politics, to be practised by government officials. Every historic episode is reinterpreted or falsified according to the prevailing official need.
Tito, the ruler of modern Yugoslavia, created a Macedonian nation, an entity whose very existence was denied by neighbouring Bulgarians and Greeks. Greece, in turn, denies the existence of a Slav minority inside the country, Turkey claimed for decades that it had no Kurds, while Bulgaria used to re-label its Turkish minority "Bulgarians of Muslim faith". The second effect of the Balkan experience is a singular obsession with national unity. This, again, is the result of history: Balkan states are the result of the failure of multi-national empires. It thus remains pointless to suggest that these states should create autonomous regions for their ethnic minorities; their own national movements started last century with such demands, only to lead to the break-up of empires. In the Balkans, decentralisation of government control is equated with weakness, and autonomous regions are regarded as the first step towards national disintegration. The past is the present and the present belongs to the past: this was the Balkan dilemma.
Misha Glenny is a journalist turned academic, and he has managed to blend some of the traits of both professions. Like a journalist, he is undaunted by the monumental task he undertook, and finds nothing wrong in jumping back and forth, from the grand analysis to the colourful personal anecdote. Nevertheless, he does make use of the available academic scholarship, much of which is not ordinarily available to a Western audience. A few of his assertions are certainly debatable and his grasp of some arcane historic points is not always sure. Glenny's apparent belief in the centrality of Yugoslavia for the Balkans is certainly not shared by other of the region's states.
BUT his book is still compelling reading, and the story is well told. The communist regimes in the Balkans ultimately harnessed nationalism in order to legitimise their rule. Throughout the region, fuelling old nationalist disputes became a mechanism for deflecting public attention from economic difficulties, a vehicle for mass mobilisation. Thus, xenophobia reached new heights under the communists' rule.
Furthermore, communist policies of "social engineering" created new ethnic difficulties. Established in overwhelmingly agrarian countries but claiming to represent an almost non-existent working class, the communists embarked on a policy of rapid industrialisation which resulted in massive social dislocation. The entire structure of the village community was destroyed, and uprooted peasants were forced into massive industrial concerns and bleak housing estates, usually at the edge of towns. Members of this first-generation, working-class peasant-class remain insecure: having renounced their peasant origins, they have yet to establish an urban existence and ethos. It is this factor which accounted for the relative lack of an organised opposition in Bulgaria or Romania, and matters were not helped by the existence of an Orthodox Church with a long tradition of subservience to state authority. A deliberate policy of ethnic engineering completed the disaster. The Romanians settled in Transylvania swell the ranks of virulently anti-Hungarian organisations. And Serbia's neo-fascist leader, Vojislav Seselj, has found many adherents among the Serbian immigrant workers in Croatia.
The mixture of nationalism and crude collectivist ideas easily survived the communists' collapse and continues to be employed. The anti-Communist revolutions of the last decade were incomplete, for the masses which poured on to the streets in Bucharest, Sofia or Belgrade may have known what they opposed, but had no idea of what they were promoting. Thus, while youngsters spoke passionately of "democracy" and "market economy", their former communist leaders changed their parties' names and continued more or less as before.
A political stalemate prevails. Governments are not strong enough to crush their opposition, but other political parties are still too weak to assume power. A mass of unqualified industrial workers, a lumpen proletariat in the true Marxist sense, holds the key to the political future of these countries. Their alarm at the prospect of unemployment - a necessary feature of any meaningful reform - has already been harnessed. These were the workers which in June 1990 beat up Romanian opposition supporters at President Ion Iliescu's behest; their counterparts in Serbia are the backbone of President Slobodan Milosevic's rule. Market economy is often confused with pure black market speculation and a political career is universally regarded as a fast track to personal enrichment. The impression Glenny gives is that political life in the Balkans still does not amount to a confrontation between different ideas.
Instead, it is a struggle between individuals who regard themselves as national saviours. In the absence of any point of reference or venues for dialogue, everything is disputed, from the constitution and parliamentary powers to the rights of minorities and economic reform. And every dispute threatens to erupt into open violence.
Yet the image of gloom which Glenny presents, of the people of the Balkans who remain "prisoners of history", may be too harsh. The reality is that, with the exception of Yugoslavia, the other nations of the area are determined to break free from their vicious circles. And the prospect of European Union integration is now being offered to the Balkans for the first time in two centuries. Glenny's book should be required reading for all those wishing to know what has gone wrong in the region. Yet history does not need to repeat itself, even in the Balkans.
Jonathan Eyal is an author and Director of Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London