With remarkably little international fanfare, Berlin on Monday again became the capital of Germany, as the eyes of an appalled world are fixed on the conflict between Slav and Muslim. So too they were 120 years ago, when the city called its first and last peace congress. In the spring of 1876, just as in the spring of 1999, news had reached western Europe of fearsome massacres in the region, triggering war between the Ottoman Empire and its ancient foes Serbia and Russia.
That war is remembered within the English language by one word: jingoism. Appalled by the possibility of the Russians capturing Constantinople, the British prepared to fight; as the music hall song declared, "We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do,/ We've got the men, we've got the ships, we've got the money too . . . The Russians shall not have Constantinople."
Foreign fleets
So followed the Congress of Berlin to resolve what is unresolved even yet: the Balkans. Today foreign fleets stand off the Bosphorus as they did some 120 years ago. So many of the background ingredients which made the congress imperative then are present today - simmering pan-Slavism in an unstable Russia, Serb loathing of Muslims, and much emotionalism in the West.
But more than anything else the crisis then asked the question that the crisis today also asks: What is Europe? "The problem is neither German nor Russian, but European," the Russian chancellor Gorchakov had written to Bismarck. (Like Boris Yeltsin, Gorchakov was made prematurely senile through his addiction to vodka; unlike Yeltsin, even in senility, he disdained the pan-Slavic bayings of the mob.)
Bismarck scribbled in the note's margin: "Qui parle Europe a tort, notion geographique", which means roughly, fiddlesticks. More sagely he was to write: "I have always found the word `Europe' on the lips of those statesmen who want something from a foreign power which they would never venture to ask for in their own name."
To Bismarck at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Europe was a fiction, a notion, a piety, which was incapable of imposing its will on anything. That was how it was; that is how it is. And the greatest military power in Europe had towards the conflicts in the south-east corner of the continent an attitude comparable to that which drives the policy of the greatest military power in the world today, the US. In Bismarck's words, for Germany the Balkans were "not worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier."
Wrong. A war begun in the Balkans 36 years after the Congress of Berlin took the healthy bones of 40 millions - not all of them Pomeranian grenadiers - and that was merely the prelude for even worse. The Balkans, by the wars they have triggered since the Congress, have truly made this the Balkans century. They remind us that we live in the shadow of a historical legacy which sometimes recedes from our consciousness, but is ever present in our affairs.
Illusory unity
Who would have thought 10 years ago, when all the talk was of the end of history, that by conclusion of the century Berlin would again be the capital of Germany while, simultaneously, German aircraft would be in action against Serbia, and with far more than the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier at stake? Yet the apparent unity of NATO is illusory: NATO forces operate within the military shape defined by America's political will, not Europe's.
New forces and old ones are emerging throughout the region, and the very countries which delegates discussed in Berlin 121 years ago - Macedonia, Bosnia, Turkey, Serbia (which Bismarck always referred to as a land of sheep stealers) are back on the agenda. With the hundreds of thousands of Kosovars trecking to safety, leaving behind them their burning villages and their loved ones, slaughtered in their homes or dead from exhaustion on the roadside, is it possible for the countries which make up the European Union to resolve to create and arm the military institutions which ensure that as Europeans we prevent this happening on our doorsteps again?
Verbal piety
Or is Europe, as Bismarck scribbled, just a notion geographique ? Is it a verbal piety conjured up as an excuse for not doing something oneself? "This is not our concern; it is Europe's." Yet such a Europe - a union which takes responsibility for its defence, and for the formulation and implementation of policy according to its own interests, and quite independently of the US - does not exist. What does exist is a bizarre confederation of states which can spend fortunes on regulating cheeses and counting olive trees by satellite but which cannot defend a single mile of their common border without assistance from another continent; and as for defending the hunted pilgrims of Kosovo . . .
Vast lessons should be learnt from the holocaust of Kosovo; but then they should have been learnt already, and they weren't. And maybe they can't be learnt. Maybe it is impossible for Denmark to agree a defence policy with Greece, Ireland with Germany. In which case, the Balkans will truly have defeated us and we must become an American protectorate for all time; and maybe that is what is truly meant by the end of history - in reality, the end of Europe.