Invitation to War

War in the Balkans stems not from mysterious and unresolvable ancient hatreds but from forces and events of recent times-nineteenth-century romanticism, the emergence of nation states and the breakup of empires. The idea of an ethnic nation, based on political imagination rather than the European reality of racial intermixture, is a permanent provocation to war. Yugoslavia's war is about political values, specifically separatism versus secular, nonethnic democracy. Without nato guarantees against forcible border changes and a Western willingness to intervene, ethnic conflict will dominate the course of events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union for years to come.