In Europe

were still running on time. But as the few students still left in Café Sax told me, the mood was one of ‘make believe’; they lived, as they put it themselves, ‘in the twilight zone’.
    Just imagine: for a cup of coffee that cost 15 dinars only last summer, you now paid 3,000 dinars. So then, what difference did it make? In 1990, a doctor's monthly salary had been around a thousand euros at today's rates. After three years of war, that same pile of dinars was worth no more than twenty-seven euros. One of Sarita's colleagues says: ‘As intellectuals here, we live as though we're in Berlin in 1933: are we going to leave, or will we stick around and see what happens? No one here talks about anything else.’
    I went with Sarita to visit her parents. After dinner the Serbian news came on, a programme that sometimes lasted for up to ninety minutes. Handy electronic maps showed the shifting front lines as though it were a weather report, the analyses made constant reference to blood, soil and the Serbian knights of the Middle Ages, the atrocities committed by the Croatians and Bosnians were exhibited in grim detail; those on the Serbian side remained unmentioned.
    Often enough, the propaganda did not even consist of lies, but of half-truths, which made it all the more convincing. ‘If you listen to RadioZagreb you hear exactly the same stories, but with the roles reversed,’ Sarita said. She provided a simultaneous translation of everything that was said, including her father's comments; before long, however, she lost her professional discipline and began peppering her translations with comments like ‘at least, that's what my father says,’ and ‘at least, that's what my father's generation thinks’ and ‘which is, of course, utter nonsense’. In the end, all attempts at translation ground to a halt, and father and daughter spent the next hour shouting at each other.
    In the 1990s, four wars broke out within what had once been Yugoslavia. The first was a brief armed conflict that arose when Slovenia declared its independence in 1991. The second was an all-out war in 1991–2, and had to do with Croatia's secession. The third and most complicated conflict was fought out in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992–6. And the fourth war, in Kosovo, broke out in 1998 after years of tension, and ended with NATO intervention in 1999.
    The Yugoslav wars formed a bitter finale to the twentieth century. They belonged to that century, and were in many ways a product of it: the collapse of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, the crude carving-up – ‘like a cake’ – of Central Europe and the Balkans in the conference rooms at Versailles and Trianon, the massacres of the Serb population by Croatian Nazis, and countless other unsettled accounts from the first half of the twentieth century. The regimes of Slobodan Miložsević, Franjo Tudjman and other nationalistic leaders reflected tendencies that had been seen for decades in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. They were anti-democratic and anti-liberal (the heritage of almost half a century of communism), they focused on ethnic purity (a legacy of National Socialism) and they were pronouncedly nationalistic and anti-Western (a leftover from the pan-Slavic movements that preceded the First World War).
    The unexpected dynamism of their nationalism, the vent they gave to the huge pressure on millions of humiliated farmers and town dwellers in an impoverished Eastern Europe was new, yet at the same time all too familiar. It was a primal force that leapt out of the darkness, like the monster everyone thinks is dead at the end of a scary movie. But this monster had not been defeated yet.
    NATO waited a long time before intervening, and clear rifts wereregularly seen between the United States and its European partners. That, too, was new. When the West finally took decisive action in 1999, the attack was of a strikingly technical nature: the operations took place at high altitudes and from great distances, with as few risks as possible for the Western soldiers involved. It was a war of bombardment, aimed particularly at Belgrade, Novi Sad and a small number of other cities. And so, for the West, the war in Kosovo, the final war of the century, served as a counterpoint to the First World War. The national governments in 1914 had willingly sacrificed hundreds of thousands of troops. In 1999, for NATO, that was unthinkable. The fighting was limited to the use of missiles and bombers. In