Apparently, with the fall of a single man, Europe became one vast democracy from the Black Sea to the Skaggerak, and from the Straits of Hercules to the Archangel Bight. Peace and plenty lie before us . . .
Never mind for a moment the thousands of Serbs forced out of Kosovo, their homes burnt and their shrines desecrated; or the quarter-of-a-million Serbs expelled from their ancestral homelands of Krajina, in an operation planned by the US military; or that two entire regions of former Yugoslavia are governed and administered by overpaid foreign paladins; or that the new Yugoslav president is a vehement Serb nationalist. Never mind any of this: the important truth for the headlines that a good democrat has triumphed over a bad dictator. Hallelujah!
Elected to power
As usual, the headlines and the politicians are wrong. To be sure, President Milosevic was truly one of the great abominations of post-war European history, but he was not a straightforwardly undemocratic one. He was, after all, elected into power. Though he debauched the internal structures of Yugoslavia, and fuelled the war in Bosnia and with Croatia, he was not classically a despot.
Political opponents in Yugoslavia did not vanish overnight, as happened in any classic dictatorship from Argentina to Iraq. He stood for election twice after he became president, confident he would win because his brand of nationalism spoke to something in the Serb people. They liked his toughness. They liked his sense of Serb pride. They liked his contempt for the flabby liberal opinion of the West. They liked his sense of history.
Have you ever been abroad, and found yourself in a bar deep in conversation with a person who knows nothing whatever about Northern Ireland, but has strong opinions about it? You know the sort: If only the British gave Catholics the vote, and permitted them to go to school and own property and work, and if the British disbanded the all-Protestant RUC and the Orange Order, and allowed a united Ireland, with Gerry Adams president, everyone would be happy. You put down your glass, you open your mouth: but where do you begin?
Outside commentators about former Yugoslavia tend to be rather like the bore in a bar in Sydney or the Bronx. And I'm trying not to be the bore in the bar, and I think I can succeed in this ambition, because I know just enough about the place to be confident that I know virtually nothing of it whatsoever. And also I know enough to perceive that the problems of the region did not begin with Slobodan Milosevic, and they will not end with his ejection from power; and nor are those problems solely the creation of Serb nationalism either.
Serb nationalist
The hero of the hour, Vojislav Kostunica, is a Serb nationalist who opposed the Dayton Accords which brought peace of a kind to Bosnia. His position on Kosovo was perhaps summarised by the posed photograph he had taken of himself in the province last year, an assault rifle in his hands. He is similarly against Montenegrin separatism and he has promised he will not surrender any Serbs to the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague.
This is the kind of stuff which makes him popular with Serbs. Kosovo has a place in Serbian hearts which has no equivalent in the Irish nationalist mind. The nearest Irish equivalent would be in Ulster: how would the unionist psyche cope with troops from Munster garrisoning Derry's walls and the Orange heartlands around Portadown? That might give some idea of the wound the loss of Kosovo constitutes to Serbness. As the Serb economy gradually recovers from sanctions, do you think that Serbia will abandon all its devotion to a province to which it owes its identity, its religion, its most vibrant myths?
Those who accept the theories of Francis Fukuyama are already claiming that the downfall of Milosevic is another step towards the predicted end-state of history, the outcome of which will be a worldwide culture of liberal capitalism. In the Fukuyama model, expounded in his book The End of History, democratic legitimacy strengthens the internal authority of government, but, alongside rising prosperity and regard for creature comforts, fatally limits its capacity for external aggression. War becomes obsolete.
True, democracies seldom go to war - India and Pakistan in 1966 being a rare example. But end-states have been achieved in history before. The architects of the Congress of Vienna achieved what they believed to be permanent peace. The British empire was seen as a divinely ordered condition which Churchill in 1940 could still speak of as lasting a thousand years. Few empire-builders believe in the ultimate futility of what they do.
Liberal capitalist
The imagination of an ideologist such as Fukuyama has difficulty comprehending mentalities which work to different co-ordinates, different priorities, different fevers. Just as the apologist for 19th-century imperialism could never foresee the independence of its subject peoples, the apologist for the liberal capitalist imperium cannot predict circumstances in which this promised end-state might become stale, effete, ineffective to those who live within it.
I have no idea how Fukuyama's end-state might perish; indeed, his new world order might outlast a centenarian born this morning. But the Fukuyama imperium will end, as all human endeavours end. Future historians might not be surprised to observe that it perished on the rocks which split Rome from Rome and divided Christianity, that same fatal shoal on which foundered the Hohenzollern, Romanov, Ottoman, British, and French empires, and where last weekend, the last, heretical vestige of the Soviet empire finally expired.