William W. Hagen

Kosovo has reinforced the Balkans' image as a cauldron of ethnic hatred. Many commentators argue that the region has always been wracked by ancient hatreds, while others maintain that today's strains are artificially created by cynical postcommunist demagogues looking to legitimate their rule. Neither school has it right. Balkan ethnic strains are neither as ancient as time nor as recent as the rise to power of Slobodan Milosevic; rather, they are about as old as the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. To a historian, today's Balkan crises are rooted in, above all, a crippling dependence on the ideology of expansionist nationalism.