An added problem is the simple-mindedness, abrasiveness and sheer historical ignorance of America, the current superpower. A nation of soundbites and black or white stereotypes, it is ill-suited to deal with the nuanced, multilayered and interactive mayhem that is the Balkan. A mentality of western movies - good guys, bad guys, shoot'em up - is hardly conducive to a Balkan resolution. The intricate and drawn out process required taxes American impatience and bullying tendencies to their explosive limits. In the camp of the good guys, the Anglo-Saxons place Romania, Greece, Montenegro and Slovenia (with Macedonia, Croatia, Albania and Bulgaria wandering in and out). Serbia is the epitome of evil. Milosevic is Hitler. Such uni-dimensional thinking sends a frisson of rubicund belligerence down American spines. It tends to ignore reality, though. Montenegro is playing the liberal card deftly, no doubt - but it is also a haven of smuggling and worse. Slovenia is the civilized facade that it so tediously presents to the world - but it also happened to have harboured one of the vilest fascist movements, comparable to the Ustasha - the Domobranci. It shares with Croatia the narcissistic grandiose fantasy that it is not a part of the Balkan - but rather an outpost of Europe - and the disdain for its impoverished neighbours that comes with it. In this sense, it is more "Balkanian" than many of them. Greece is now an economically stable and mildly democratic country - but it used to be a dictatorship and it still is a banana republic in more than one respect. The Albanians - ferociously suppressed by the Serbs and (justly) succoured by the West - are industrious and shrewd people. But - fervent protestations to the contrary aside - they do seem to be intent on dismantling and recombining both Yugoslavia (Serbia) and Macedonia, perhaps at a terrible cost to all involved. Together with the Turks, the Serbs and the Bulgarians, the Albanians are the undisputed crime lords of the Balkan (and beyond - witness their incarceration rates in Switzerland). This is the Balkan - a florilegium of contradictions within contraventions, the mawkish and the jaded, the charitable and the deleterious, the feckless and the bumptious, evanescent and exotic, a mystery wrapped in an enigma. In this article, I will attempt to study two axes of friction: Islam versus Christianity and fascism and nationalism versus liberalism. It is hard to do justice to these topics in the Procrustean bed of weekly columns - I, therefore, beg the forgiveness of scholars and the understanding of frustrated readers. A First Encounter