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By Root 1490 0

imagined history over actual achievement—has been the shame of the West ever since. The promise of the future in Belgrade was traded for reconstructed memories of nineteenth-century Pan-Slavic dreams like those of Nikolai Danilevsky, who postulated an Orthodox Russian soul at odds with the Catholic West, firing the imagination not only of Russians but of Bulgars, Macedonians, and Serbs. Czarist Russia actually dispatched volunteers in 1877 to support the uprising of Serbs and Montenegrins against the Turks, and (to oversimplify) Serbia returned the favor in 1914 by dragging Russia into World War I in the cause of its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Serbia today justifies its ethnic outrages in the region by appeal to anti-Vatican and anti-German sentiments and sulks about being “betrayed” by Russia (though a group of Russian volunteers called the “Czar’s Wolves” were involved in the Serbia campaign in Bosnia).12

I will not, however, try to do justice to the tragic narrative of carnage that quickly has become Yugoslavia’s destiny. That story has been in the headlines nonstop for the last three or four years. A quick glance at the absurdist maps drawn by desperate would-be peacekeepers trying to stay out of the conflagration without completely surrendering to brute force will show just how far back poor Yugoslavia has fallen into a brutal and fractious if also largely imaginary past. It is hard to tell which smacks of greater cynicism: the spirit of self-delusion and appeasement with which spineless “concerned” outsiders draw their successive maps; or the hypocrisy and deceit with which the protagonists within toy with and ultimately reject them. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. For in the end, the cynicism of all negotiations in the region is an apt response to their sheer futility.

To give even Yugoslavia, let alone the dozens of emerging tribal fragments, their due here would require that I compile a Middle European encyclopedia of ethnicity and civil war that would surely run to dozens of volumes. There simply is no efficient way to do justice to the multiple Jihads that have sprung up within but against McWorld from a region that is within McWorld’s borders without being of McWorld. Let me offer just one case, an instance centered on a nation in the very middle of the middle in which, despite a strong nation-state, nearly every toxic attribute of disintegral Jihad is present or threatening: the Ukraine. This largest and most powerful of the ex-Soviet Union’s newly autonomous non-Russian nations, to many “the sick man of the region,”13 boasts nuclear weapons (supposedly to be dismantled), a fleet (supposedly to be bartered off to Russia in return for fuel and gas credits), and the status of a major power (in negotiation).14 The Dnieper River, on which the Ukrainian capital of Kiev lies, divides the country between an eastern region heavily populated with Russians (nearly n million or more than 20 percent of a total Ukrainian population of 52 million) and firmly attached to Russia, especially in the Crimea, which is over 60 percent Russian; and a western region with its “capital” at Lvov, where ethnic Ukrainians cherish their autonomy even as they confront ethnic rivals in Romania across the Dniester River to the west and in Hungary, Slovakia, and Belarus to the northwest. The Ukraine’s big power status conceals a civic fragility: for not only is it in conflict with most of its neighbors, but it is also deeply divided from within. A senior Western diplomat has warned: “If Ukraine ruptures the whole of Central Europe and the Black Sea region goes up with it.”15

Ukraine thus faces dual risks from Jihad: rupture from within and conflict with neighbors. Its first post-Soviet president was Leonid M. Kravchuk, an ideological Communist who, much like Milosevic in Yugoslavia, converted to lethal nationalism following independence, thereby arousing the suspicion and fear of the 11 million Russians living primarily in the east and on the Crimea peninsula in the Black Sea. Under his regime, inflation grew at as much as