At the start of this decade the incoming Yugoslav president, Stipe Mesic, took a train from Zagreb, his home town, to the capital, Belgrade.
Since the death of Tito, Yugoslavia's presidency had rotated, once a year, between the country's six nationalities. Now it was Mesic's turn. And with riots in Kosovo and tension everywhere else, Mesic had decided on drastic action. On the train journey he perfected a plan in which the country's splintering republics would adopt a confederal constitution - a loosening of the ties, before they broke. But he was too late.
"I got to Belgrade and found that nothing worked. The parliament was blocked, the presidency was blocked, the administration had stopped working. Nothing functioned," he said. Mesic found himself powerless, forced to take a back seat. Yugoslavia as a state had already ceased to exist. Communism had been under attack ever since Tito's death, and the vehicle of opposition had become nationalism. This was sometimes benign. As late as 1990 Bosnia's Croats, Muslims and Serbs appeared together on the same election rally in Sarajevo, their flags hanging together - united against the communist regime.
Nationalism took the place of communism in the blinking of an eye. Take the day, in 1987, when a senior communist official, Slobodan Milosevic, arrived in Kosovo to pacify Serbs angry at the growing assertiveness of the ethnic Albanians. In an afternoon he changed from communism to nationalism, and within weeks had dragged the Serb part of the communist apparatus with him.
In 1990 tanks were sent into Kosovo to battle against protesting ethnic Albanians. In 1991 Slovenia and Croatia broke away from Yugoslavia, provoking war and a United Nations peace force.
The year after that, Bosnia and Macedonia followed after voting for independence in referendums - one with no fighting, the other with a war that cost at least 100,000 lives. And finally the wheel turned full circle, and Kosovans, this time armed guerrillas, triggered a war ended only by NATO intervention.
Now the year ends with Montenegro, the only republic still with Serbia in Yugoslavia, threatening to break away. (Belgrade has reacted angrily to the Montenegrin move to recognise the deutschmark alongside the Yugoslav currency).
Yugoslavia's wars are heavy with irony. Until the fall of the Iron Curtain, the country was a step ahead of other communist nations: it had a higher standard of living, it had broken with Moscow and its citizens were free to travel and run businesses.
Yet, just as the Eastern bloc opened its doors to democracy, the Yugoslav state tore itself apart, dampening the hopes of those who trusted that the Fall of the Wall would bring peace to all Europe.
These wars have dragged the West in ever deeper. United Nations troops arrived in Croatia in 1991 and in Bosnia in 1992. In 1994 NATO launched air strikes, and launched more, together with artillery bombardments, in 1995. This year NATO fought its first and only war. With the alliance now running two separate policing operations for different parts of former Yugoslavia - Bosnia and Kosovo - Western leaders are as keen as the historians to understand how these wars have come about.
The mystery is all the deeper because, with the exception of skirmishes in the former Soviet republic of Moldova in 1992, the Iron Curtain nations in Europe have avoided inter-ethnic wars. While the Czechs and Slovaks managed a Velvet Divorce, Bosnia's Serbs added the term "ethnic cleansing" to the world's lexicon.
As perplexing is how the hardline nationalists who were at the helm when these wars broke out remain in charge today. The Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic won two terms as Serb president; then, when the constitution prevented a third, he switched and was elected President of the rump Yugoslavia.
Croatia's President Franjo Tudjman, who led his country to independence in 1991, won his third term in 1997 elections. Bosnia's Alija Izetbegovic triumphed in 1996 and again in 1998.
All three men are accused of presiding over massive corruption in which their ruling party has shared out state assets. Serbia is in ruins, technically bankrupt. Izetbegovic's government is accused of spiriting away $1 billion of the $5 billion showered on his country by the West. Tudjman is accused of allowing party cronies to get cut-price deals in recent privatisations.
These have been wars with no winners. Serbia and Montenegro are in the worst shape, but Bosnia's economy has failed to restart despite a drip feed from the West, and Croatia and Macedonia are tottering. Only tiny Slovenia in the extreme north has escaped the mess, and is likely to be a front-runner for admission to the EU and NATO.
Stipe Mesic, now a member of a six-strong opposition coalition hoping to unseat Tudjman's Croatian government in Christmas's elections, says nationalism has been used by extremists of all sides.
"Tudjman needs Milosevic and Milosevic needs Tudjman. They are mirror images of each other," he says. But he supports Croatia's independence. "The original Yugoslav constitution allowed for this. It had to happen, but it could have been managed differently."
Inter-ethnic war continues in Kosovo, for more or less the same reasons it persists in Russia. If there is a lesson in all this, it is surely that violent revolution can create more problems than it solves - a lesson that the history of the rest of this century should already have rammed home. A second lesson has been that, despite the end of the Cold War, there has been no new world order. Neither the UN nor anyone else has managed to become the world's policeman.
However, the UN has had more success in becoming the world's judge. After a difficult start, the UN's war crimes court is now accepted fact. It has spread from investigating former Yugoslavia to Rwanda and, probably, East Timor. And it has indicted a serving head of state - Slobodan Milosevic - committing the world to an uncertain, but probably irreversible march towards a system of transnational law.