This is the second chance (not counting communism). This is the time to redefine South Europe and the Balkans. This is the time to draw logical borders, which reflect not whims and eccentricities, paranoias and ignorance, condescension and malice - but demography and history, national aspirations and disparate cultures and narratives. Let each ethnic group live within safe and internationally guaranteed borders. Let them work in harmony across borders - rather than engage in conflicts within them. Let the Albanian lands go to Albania, the Serbian lands to the Serbs - as the Czech lands are to the Czech and Russian lands are to the Russian. Only then will peace prevail as it does in Western Europe and in Scandinavia today - the scenes of centuries of battles and bloodshed. (Article published May 31, 1999 in "The New Presence") Return Millenarian Thoughts about Kosovo "English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer." ("Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - A Journey through Yugoslavia" by Rebecca West - Penguin Books 1994 edition p.20) Rebecca West's book was first published in 1940. By that time, it was common wisdom that the Balkans is the place where the destiny of our world is determined or, at the very least, outlined. Had she lived today, she would have had no reason to revise this particular judgement of hers. The Kosovo "air campaign" exposed and brought to culmination a series of historical processes whose importance cannot be exaggerated. The Russian Revolution Forced to choose between nationalist delusions of imperial grandeur and modern capitalism and its attendant, individualism - Russia chose the latter. The ever-surprising Yeltsin completed the revolution he started in 1990 by deposing of the last vestiges of stagnation personified by Primakov. The remnants of the former nomenclature, the establishment figures, the fossils in the ideological swamp that communism has become - were given the penultimate slip. Russia was forced to peer into the abyss of its own corruption, nepotism, criminality, social and political disintegration and military impotence. It was forced to do so by the developments in the Kosovo crisis. It was made to elect between pan-Slavism and pan-capitalism. For a while, it seemed to have been choosing the former - leading to an inevitable and suicidal confrontation with the victorious civilization of the West. Then it recoiled and chose the IMF over the KGB, material goods over ideological fervour, the new myths of modernity over the old ones of blood-steeped patriotism.