Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and the end of the West’s civilizational fantasy.

Lars Møller | October 29, 2026

From Wikimedia Commons: WWI battlefield at night (F. J. Mears, unknown date)

The West has long cherished a consoling fiction: that history’s bloodier chapters closed with the twentieth century’s great catastrophes, leaving behind a socially matured civilization capable of resolving conflict through markets, dialogue, and the redistribution of resources. This conviction—equal parts progressive teleology and liberal complacency—treated human nature as an infinitely malleable artifact rather than a fixed and flawed constant.

The wars of the former Yugoslavia and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have exposed the fiction with brutal clarity. What remains is the necessity of “forced realism”—an unsparing recognition that envy, hatred, tribal loyalty, and the will to dominate endure unchanged, and that any polity ignoring them courts catastrophe.

The outbreak of the Yugoslav wars in the early 1990s arrived as an almost metaphysical affront. The Cold War had ended; the ideological struggle that had structured European politics for decades had dissolved. In the prevailing Western imagination, war itself had become anachronistic, a relic of primitive passions that enlightened institutions and rising prosperity had supposedly outgrown.

Yet within months, the successor states of Yugoslavia descended into campaigns of ethnic slaughter whose methods and intensity recalled WWII. Serbian nationalist forces, in particular, orchestrated systematic ethnic cleansing, the establishment of detention camps at sites such as Omarska, Keraterm, and Trnopolje, and the calculated use of rape as an instrument of terror. The siege of Sarajevo subjected a European capital to years of artillery and sniper fire.

Most starkly, in July 1995, Bosnian Serb units under Ratko Mladić executed more than eight thousand Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica—an act later adjudicated as “genocide” by both the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice. Cultural monuments—mosques, churches, libraries—were........

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