A mentality of western movies - good guys, bad guys,
shoot'em up - is hardly conducive to a Balkan resolution. The
intricate and drawn out process required taxes American impatience
and bullying tendencies to their explosive limits.
In the camp of the good guys, the Anglo-Saxons place Romania,
Greece, Montenegro and Slovenia (with Macedonia, Croatia, Albania
and Bulgaria wandering in and out). Serbia is the epitome of evil.
Milosevic is Hitler. Such uni-dimensional thinking sends a frisson
of rubicund belligerence down American spines.
It tends to ignore reality, though. Montenegro is playing the
liberal card deftly, no doubt - but it is also a haven of smuggling
and worse. Slovenia is the civilized facade that it so tediously
presents to the world - but it also happened to have harboured one
of the vilest fascist movements, comparable to the Ustasha - the
Domobranci. It shares with Croatia the narcissistic grandiose
fantasy that it is not a part of the Balkan - but rather an outpost
of Europe - and the disdain for its impoverished neighbours that
comes with it.
In this sense, it is more "Balkanian" than many of them. Greece is
now an economically stable and mildly democratic country - but it
used to be a dictatorship and it still is a banana republic in more
than one respect.
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