FROM BOSNIA TO BAGHDAD - The Revenge of Geography - page 6

Hungary, the quality of the building materials suddenly worsened; officials ravaged my
luggage and made me pay a bribe for my typewriter; the toilet paper in the lavatory disap-
peared and lights went dim. True, the Balkans were deeply influenced by Central Europe,
but they were just as influenced by the equally proximate Middle East. The dusty steppe
with its bleak public spaces—imports both from Anatolia—were a feature of life in Kosovo
and Macedonia, where the cultured conviviality of Prague and Budapest was harder to find.
Thus, it was not altogether an accident, or completely the work of evil individuals, that vi-
olence broke out in the ethnic mélange of Yugoslavia rather than, say, in the uniethnic Cen-
tral European states of Hungary and Poland. History and geography also had something to
do with it.
Yet by holding up Central Europe as a moral and political cynosure, rather than as a geo-
graphical one, liberal intellectuals like Garton Ash—one of the most eloquent voices of the
decade—propounded a vision not only of Europe, but of the world that was inclusive rather
than discriminatory. In this view, not only should the Balkans not be consigned to under-
development and barbarism, but neither should any place: Africa, for example. The fall
of the Berlin Wall should affect not only Germany, but, rather, should unleash the dream
of Central Europe writ large across the globe. This humanist approach was the essence
of a cosmopolitanism that liberal internationalists and neoconservatives both subscribed to
in the 1990s. Recall that before he became known for his support of the Iraq War, Paul
Wolfowitz was a proponent of military intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, in effect, join-
ing hands with liberals like Garton Ash at the left-leaning New York Review of Topics . The
road to Baghdad had roots in the Balkan interventions of the 1990s, which were opposed
by realists and pragmatists, even as these military deployments in the former Yugoslavia
were to prove undeniably successful.
The yearning to save the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo cannot be divorced from the
yearning for the restoration of Central Europe, both as a real and poignantly imagined
place, that would demonstrate how, ultimately, it is morality and humanism that sanctify
beauty. (Though Garton Ash himself was skeptical of the effort to idealize Central Europe,
he did see the positive moral use to which such an idealization might be applied.)
The humanist writings of Isaiah Berlin captured the intellectual spirit of the 1990s. “ 'Ich
bin ein Berliner,' I used to say, meaning an Isaiah Berliner,” Garton Ash wrote in a haunt-
ing memoir of his time in East Germany. 5 Now that communism had been routed and
Marxist utopias exposed as false, Isaiah Berlin was the perfect antidote to the trendy mon-
istic theories that had ravished academic life for the previous four decades. Berlin, who
taught at Oxford and whose life was coeval with the twentieth century, had always de-
fended bourgeois pragmatism and “temporizing compromises” over political experiment-
ation. 6 He loathed geographical, cultural, and all other forms of determinism, refusing to
consign anyone and anybody to their fate. His views, articulated in articles and lectures