144. Balkan Tour (9). Afterthoughts.

One thing about cool conversations on hot topics is that you find yourself quietly supplying the heat.  All Road Scholar guides speak, or start out speaking, coolly.  In Belgrade Djina coolly corrected my "Serbs" to "Yugoslavs" and went no further.  I walked back to the bus finishing off her speech on a soapbox:

Look, Americans, Bosnia was trying secede.  Can't you understand that?  You understand secession, don't you?  You fought a war to keep your South from seceding, didn't you?  That's leaving the Union.  Your blessed Union.  You had an idea of it, a vision, and you weren't going to let any provincials break it up, no matter how justified their grievances.  Well, we had a vision too.  It was called Yugoslavia and now it's called Greater Serbia.  That's a troublesome name, I know, but the vision is the same.  Surely you Americans, of all people, ought to understand why we had to fight to keep Yugoslavia from breaking up.

Think that way walking back to the bus and on the ride back to the hotel you might finish off with something like this:

Once upon a time a Big Power was a Very Little Power, occupying a small amount of land. It added to this land, piece by piece and people by people (making the people, at first by force and then by attraction, think of themselves as one people), until it acquired such power that everybody regarded it as a Great Power, and dealt with it with respect, and seldom looked down on its history.

Now, what I want to know, European nations, is this: which of you am I not describing?  Which of the ancient empires you admire?  Where's your Rome?  Where's your France?

In the early days of each of these, modern or ancient, you've got one among many, one city on seven hills, one island in the middle of a river.  Then you get war — that is, blood and cruelty and atrocities (have you looked closely at Caesar's war in Gaul?) — and you wind up with Greatness.

What's the difference between that and Serbia, in the Balkans now?  Only stage and success.  Serbia struggles in an early stage and it's a flop.  With you hanging over it it can't be anything else.

But, Europeans, my example doesn't have to be Serbia.  Let any of these five countries conquer the others, as you did your early neighbors, proclaim sovereignty over an equal area, field an equal number of divisions, with equally deadly weapons, and you will give it a place at the table, regardless of its crimes, which you know in your hearts are not different from yours.