'What Europe can be quite proud of is how not only war was avoided during the last decades but also that war was made less likely over the decades.'
Whaaaaaaatt??? Does sound any bell to you the names Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia...?
Whaaaaaaatt??? Does sound any bell to you the names Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia...?
The other countries getting involved was to stop worse from happening.
From what I know about that war it was basically something that was bound to happen the moment Tito kicked the bucket. He was - like Saddam Hussain in many ways - the person that kept the spring-loaded component parts in an iron grip which some mistook for stability. Once the counter force was gone the various parts flew apart and started a war to try to gain the upper hand.
In Yugoslavia you could say that there never really was stability, only a temporary lack of opportunity to continue the fight.
I agree with your larger point, though. The breakup of Yugoslavia was unfortunate - and inevitable - but it's kind of the exception that proves the rule. 1914, after all, was the last time a war was started in Yugoslavia, and it took down the rest of Europe and spread beyond the continent. This time, it was relatively self-contained, and the pieces of Yugoslavia are joining the Union, one by one. (After all, Yugoslavia was always a political fiction - Tito needed a platform big enough to fend off the Soviet Union, and by God if Slovenia didn't like it they could go suck an egg.)
Belgium may be next - and nobody's going to get killed over it. I just can't stress enough what incredible progress that really is.
That's my impression from reading up on Srebrenica and a bunch of other places, it is very well possible that that is just an 'after the fact' impression, and since it happened the way it did we'll never know what would have happened had there been no intervention.
I know people on two sides in that story (Serbian and Croatian), and there is enough confusion even now that it's probably best they didn't meet. One thing this war did for me though was to open my eyes once and for all to the amount of propaganda in supposedly unbiased media.
I don't mean to gloss over that the balkans war was a terrible tragedy and was dreadful, but in the end I think they're going to come out better than they were before.
I don’t think anyone would have expected that.
I wanted to write “(except for the Balkans)” but ultimately didn’t and probably should have. Just two things: When I say “Europe” I was pretty much talking about western Europe plus a bit of eastern Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, …), also the situation on the Balkans is nowadays unlikely to cause a European or worldwide war (you know, like 100 years ago).