The brutal wars which broke up Yugoslavia in the 1990s are being recalled this week in Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo, where selected military leaders came under severe pressure to surrender to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Yesterday, Kosovo prime minister Ramush Haradinaj resigned and surrendered to the tribunal, a day after one of the leading Serb military commanders during the wars did so. Croatia's hopes of opening accession negotiations with the European Union next week are now highly uncertain, following the failure to hand over the most wanted war crimes suspect, Ante Gotovina.
In each case these governments are responding to a dynamic driven largely from Brussels, which holds out the medium or long term prospect of joining the EU. Their various programmes of political, economic and legal modernisation and reform are predicated on that objective, through what will be diverse stages of achieving them. However difficult it is to render up military leaders who became war heroes, this is the price of progress towards those goals through making peace and repairing war wounds.
Overall this is an immensely positive dynamic, obviously compared to the horrors of the Balkan wars, but also to the messy unpredictability which followed them for several years. In order to sustain it, pressure must be kept up on governments in the Western Balkans to fulfil their side of the large political bargain involved. They must confront unpopular legal and human rights obligations to maintain the gravitational pull towards eventual incorporation in an enlarged EU of up to 500 million people over the next generation.
This week EU ministers must decide whether to open talks with Croatia next week. It will be much more difficult for them to do so after the forthright criticisms of the Zagreb government's failure to hand over Mr Gotovina by the United Nations prosecutor, Ms Carla del Ponte. If it is to be credible, this pressure requires close co-ordination between the EU, the UN, NATO and the OSCE, all of which have important roles in stabilising and rebuilding these states and nations. Croatia had hoped to join the EU along with Romania and Bulgaria in 2007 if talks open next week. That calendar is now slipping and this crisis has raised hostile voices against EU accession among those who regard Mr Gotovina as a war hero.
Such crises are to be expected in such an intense transition from war to peaceful development. On this occasion the Serbians and Kosovans have responded more convincingly than the Croatians.