Montenegro, a country of just 650,000, is unfamiliar to many Britons. Yet it’s an obvious choice for get-rich-quick and money-laundering schemes. I was once driven along the casino-studded Adriatic coastline by a former Montenegrin MP on his way to do penance at a monastery for his involvement in unspecified acts of immorality: he made no bones about describing his country, one of Europe’s poorest, as a “narco-state”. Since gaining independence from Serbia in 2006, the country has similarly been designated a “mafia state” and the “weak underbelly” of Europe, a loosely-policed entrepôt where luxury yachts ply the same coastline as smuggled cigarettes and shipments of cocaine stuffed in banana boxes.

The Balkans have long held a broader political fascination for the rising global Right. This relationship dates to the Nineties, when the region was wracked by what the radical Right perceived as civilizational clashes between Christians and Muslims. Today, a more populist Right is seeking to foster relationships across these sectarian divides, linking regional governments into a truly globalized network of crypto-fueled authoritarian strongmen.

Posh George himself moved to Montenegro after his release from US federal prison, having served eight months on major money-laundering charges. He was already the UKIP deputy treasurer after his arrest on his way back from attending the 2016 Republican National Convention alongside Farage, where the then-UKIP chief had spoken in support of Donald Trump. As we now know, Cottrell went on to funnel hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations and undeclared benefits to the man he calls “Daddy”.

Meanwhile, Posh George was also putting down roots on the Adriatic coast. As excellent investigative reporting has shown, Cottrell used his move to Montenegro to establish a network of companies and crypto projects registered in Tivat, a luxury holiday destination where super-yachts tower over terracotta houses along the Bay of Kotor. What’s more, Cottrell is only one of a number of Reform-linked figures to have links to Montenegro. According to the same investigation, Tivat hosts businesses belonging not only to Christopher Harborne — a crypto billionaire and source of a controversial £5 million ‘gift’ to Farage — but also several key figures in Farage’s former Brexit Party: Gawain Towler, Mehrtash A’zami, and Samee Bhatti.

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Though the issue is domestically contentious, successive Montenegrin administrations — both anti- and pro-EU — have sought to establish their country as a crypto haven, attracting figures such as the founder of leading crypto-currency Ethereum and the man behind a $40 billion ‘crypto crash’. Crypto also has a wide base of appeal throughout the Western Balkans, a region known for low trust in traditional finance, high bank fees, and endemic money-laundering. I’ve even met locals dreaming of establishing a crypto-fueled libertarian micro-nation in unclaimed ‘terra nullia’ left behind as the region was carved up following the collapse of Yugoslavia, an unrealized dream which speaks to the ideological linkage between crypto and the radical neo-Right.

There’s an obvious parallel to be drawn here with Trump’s relationship to Nayib Bukele, the El Salvadorian ruler who sought to turn the Central American country into a Bitcoin hub — while cracking down on domestic opposition and housing people deported from Trump’s US. It’s possible to imagine a similar relationship developing between pro-crypto Montenegrin premier Milojko Spajić and a future Farage-run Britain, with Montenegro perhaps offering to host deported asylum-seekers after the pattern of other Balkan countries seeking closer ties with their European partners. After all, Cottrell and his associates have been accused of illegally lending support to Spajić’s electoral campaign by providing political campaigning and strategy advice, an accusation he firmly denies.

Yet the British and global Right’s interest in the Balkans dates back beyond the crypto boom. With the collapse of the multi-ethnic Yugoslav federation, local strongmen colluded with foreign backers in both East and West to establish a fragmented mosaic of half-a-dozen ethnostates. These wars came to define the modern term “ethnic cleansing”, and culminated in the massacre of Muslim Bosniaks by ethnic Serbs at Srebrenica, Europe’s worst mass killing since the Second World War.

The Muslim Bosniak forces became a focal point for global Islamist networks, as thousands of mujahideen flocked to the fight and linked up with networks that would later bring militants from around the world to join other holy wars in Iraq and Syria. On the other side of the line, institutional and radical Right-wing figures back their Christian opponents across Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia, similarly establishing networks that would underpin a generation of hard-Right militancy. One good example is John Kennedy, a Tory-turned-Brexit Party candidate who developed close links with Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb politician convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. Kennedy became a familiar face on TV, enthusiastically lobbying against the Muslim cause and disseminating what Bosnia’s de facto governor Paddy Ashdown frankly termed “bullshit”.

Though the days of open warfare are over, the fringe Right continues to view the Balkans as a training-ground and ideological frontline between Christendom and the Muslim hordes beyond. Jim Dowson, Britain’s “most influential” far-Right activist, has been implicated in providing financial, practical and media support to anti-Muslim groups in Serbia, the region’s largest Christian nation and which retains close ties to its smaller Montenegrin cousin. While the far-Right uses Serbian nationalism as a vehicle for its fantasies of race war, the populist Right movement developed more substantial links with neighboring Hungary under Viktor Orbán, on the basis of similar narratives of civilizational struggle at the frontiers of Christian Europe.

Not that the situation is so simple as a binary split between evil, Christian, Right-nationalist countries on the one hand, and liberal, pro-Western Muslim nations on the other. Rather, the region remains a battleground, one where Putin’s Russia and the European Union compete for influence, as when Russian intelligence officers allegedly attempted to carry out a pro-Moscow coup in Montenegro back in 2016. Canny local politicians profit from this fragile peace, keeping inter-ethnic tensions alive while presenting themselves as the only figures tough enough to keep the region’s criminality, ethnic conflicts and illegal migration under control — a phenomenon known as “stabilitocracy”.

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These figures can style themselves as nationalists or socialists, and be pro- or anti-Western, or more often a complex combination of the two. Montenegro is a case in point. Spajić’s centrist Europe Now! Movement (PES) heads an exceptionally broad coalition encompassing both pro-European and pro-Russian parties, even as it seeks to push ahead long-stalled EU accession processes while retaining his country’s historically close ties with Serbia, long seen as the bête noire of Brussels liberalism. And it’s this very pro-European party which is allegedly being backed not just by Cottrell, but also a number of other figures with links to the Brexit Party, with figures like Towler and Chris Bruni-Lowe allegedly devising PES’s electoral slogan and offering other advice.

The same seemingly contradictory dynamics are at play throughout the region. For example, another political controversy is boiling in traditionally pro-Western Albania, where the government has greenlit a Trump and Jared Kushner-backed mega-development set to concrete over a nature reserve, sparking the country’s largest protest movement for decades. Yet Kushner’s Affinity Partners firm also backed an equally controversial development in the Serbian capital Belgrade: in that case, building a luxury hotel on a site memorializing Nato attacks on the city. Here, then, are two governments at ideological and political loggerheads — yet happy to establish relationships with the global Right. In both cases, too, the powers-that-be were met with fierce domestic opposition, with locals tired of being shunted aside to make room for the mega-rich global Right.

The migration factor is also telling here. Farage has clashed with Albanian premier Edi Rama over illegal migration from the impoverished, Muslim-majority country, with the latter accusing Farage of touting false statistics over Albanian criminals in the UK and bizarrely sharing an AI-generated image of the two men wrapped in their national flags and sipping wine on an Albanian beach. Yet Rama has also colluded with Giorgia Meloni to tout his country as a potential holding pen for migrants deported from Italy. Forget Farage: even Keir Starmer sought similar arrangements, hoping to outsource Britain’s deportation centers to Albania, Serbia or Kosovo. At any rate, regional ethnic and political divides don’t neatly map onto global divisions. Rather, self-serving politicians of all stripes are united in their pursuit of lucrative relationships with the rising global Right.

In another light, then, the Right’s vision for Britain might offer a distorted reflection of the long-term prospects for Montenegro and its fellow Balkan nations. Like Montenegro, Britain will remain practically reliant on trade and migration flows with Europe to survive, even as it engages in its own hostile tussles with Brussels. But elites in both countries, each in their way at the edge of Europe, will also seek new relationships with the crypto-funded, globalized Right. Tightly-patrolled borders will combine with unregulated investment opportunities, as luxury developments jostle for space with offshore migration detention centers. From the Adriatic to Clacton-on-Sea, an international coterie of flashy Right-wingers will grow richer by the day, without offering local populations any substantial return on their promises of an alternative European order.

To tell the tale of how a modern, multinational European country could slide from normalcy into the terrible vortex of civil war, the drama drew on the personal experience of BBC correspondents during the Balkan Wars of the Nineties. Broadcast in 2019, at the height of the Brexit crisis, when the atmosphere in the UK was indeed that of a cold civil war, the BBC dramatists succeeded in showing not only how little they understood Brexit but also how little their correspondents had learned about the collapse of Yugoslavia and the ensuing Balkan Wars.

The history of Yugoslavia still provides fodder for fictional accounts of a second British civil war because it offers a convenient moral fable. There is the dangerous allure of nationalism, the pernicious role of charismatic demagogues, and the collapse of multicultural harmony. It is the smug conceit of a liberal West that thought it had escaped history through globalisation and European integration across the Nineties. But now that the story of both Britain’s national decline and Yugoslavia’s collapse looks very different, what — if anything — can the 21st-century British public learn from the collapse of Yugoslavia?

Unsurprisingly, the standard fable bears little correspondence to the historic reality of Yugoslavia’s collapse. While the nationalist passions created during the war were real enough, they were modern rather than deeply historical and were weaponised by the hackish nationalist leaders. More scheming bureaucrat than inspired orator, Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević dredged up Serbia’s defeat in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje to reignite Serbian nationalism 600 years later. Seen as the point at which the Serbs martyred themselves before the invading Turks, that tale of rekindled historic grievance was clearly insufficient as an explanation of national collapse. If an independent Scotland ever did go to war against a Rump England, we can be confident that The New York Times would soon be carrying sombre stories about Edward Longshanks and Robert the Bruce, accompanied by chin-stroking editorials about ancient rivalries stretching back to the 1314 Battle of Bannockburn, adorned with quotes from Mel Gibson. But it would not serve as a useful explanation.

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The reality is always more prosaic. Yugoslav ethnic grievances were bound up with centrifugal political dynamics between core and periphery. In 1974, the Yugoslav communist leader Marshal Tito sought to dilute Serbia’s preponderance as the largest constituent republic of the Yugoslav federation by imposing devolved provincial administrations within Serbia itself. This inter-ethnic asymmetry would play out in the collapse of Yugoslavia across the Nineties, as the secession of the smaller republics of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were all afforded international recognition, while the secession of minority Serbs within Croatia and Bosnia was denied. To this day, the EU protectorate over Bosnia-Herzegovina expends much of its political energy in keeping Bosnia’s Serb population bound up in that rickety mini-federation, despite the Serbs’ hostility to the central state in Sarajevo.

Thus there is a lesson in Tito’s efforts at constitutional rebalancing. The attempt to boost peripheral smaller nations at the expense of the largest constituent nation risks precipitating a vicious cycle. The rights extended to smaller nations in order to placate and bind them more tightly to the central state can never be extended to the largest nation without disproportionately strengthening it, thereby risking the integrity of the central state. At the same time, the failure to extend the same rights equally across the constituent peoples of the state undermines the reciprocity and equality that is supposed to bind the state together.

We see this dynamic at play in the toing and froing over English representation in the union. Should we establish an English parliament? And what about the constitutional anomaly of the so-called West Lothian question, whereby Scottish and Welsh MPs have a right to legislate on English matters while English MPs do not with respect to Wales and Scotland? Devolution is indeed a nationalist cause, but, unlike in the narrative of First World Problems, not one of a “greater England”. It is the cause of Scottish and Welsh separatism, propped up by English metropolitan liberals who nurture Celtic separatism as a way of checking the despised voters of the English heartland outside of London.

In the Yugoslav situation, there was a critical catalyst which contributed to the process of decentralisation. According to Croatian political scientist Dejan Jović, the Yugoslav Communists’ political commitment to the Marxist “withering away of the state” propelled Yugoslav decentralisation further than mere administrative reforms. It was the Yugoslav federal state that bore the brunt of this forced degeneration, while leaving the constituent republics of the federation intact. Whatever the whining of former prime minister Liz Truss about socialist Britain, there is no Communist Party seeking to shrivel the British state. But there has been a parallel process of state shrivelling in Britain — which ironically was part of the very same neoliberal programme that Truss herself strove to revive.

The neoliberalism espoused by successive Tory leaders from Thatcher through to David Cameron’s tinpot version with the “big society” programme shares with Marxism a commitment to the vanishing state. The difference lies in the timing, function and ultimate end-state. Unlike the Marxian vision, in which under socialism the state is gradually absorbed by civil society itself, the neoliberal version seeks to defeat socialism by stripping back public power, especially state oversight of the national economy. This is done not by working-class revolution, but via state-led privatisation of state-owned industry, integration into the supranational EU, and the devolution of state authority to independent regulatory agencies such as an independent Bank of England or Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR). In the neoliberal vision, this shrunken state remains in place to enforce social order — and private property.

In practice, the neoliberals never succeeded in repressing state spending as a proportion of GDP. They did, however, succeed in gouging state capacity and stripping back public authority far beyond their original intent. We can see the results of the neoliberal effort to wither away the British state all around us: in the closure of national industries, dingy high streets with boarded-up shops, pot-holed roads, a crumbling public health service, the disgorging of convicts from prison, and police forces incapable of policing. Instead of a vigorous civil society emerging to supplant the central state, the neoliberal decimation of the state only weakened civil society further — look at how George Osborne’s programme of austerity cascaded state failure across the nation as a whole. Today, a central state still strives to divest itself of its sovereign power. As Rachel Reeves empowers the OBR, Keir Starmer’s localist agenda intends to drive devolution further, all while sidling up to the EU and Nato, the better to outsource Britain’s foreign and defence policies.

Despite enduring a parallel process of state degeneration, Britain enjoys a geopolitical advantage that Yugoslavia did not. As a Nonaligned power perched between East and West, Yugoslavia was left exposed to geopolitical realignment with the end of the Cold War in 1992, and in particular to the hubris of a newly reunified Germany. Chancellor Helmut Kohl decided he would signal Germany’s return as a great power by flouting US Secretary of State James Baker’s instruction that no one was to recognise any of the break-away Yugoslav republics. Germany’s recognition of Slovenian and Croatian independence in 1991 lit the kindling that would send Yugoslavia up in flames. In the end, Yugoslavia burned for nothing as Kohl’s bid for European leadership floundered. The US re-established hegemony over its European allies by leading the Nato bombing campaigns first against the Bosnian Serbs in the Nineties, and then Serbia itself in 1999. Today, Germany lets its own energy infrastructure be bombed.

Here Britain is fortunate. It was our withdrawal from the EU in 2020 that has allowed us to swerve the dystopian scenario of a future civil war. By enforcing the principle of loser’s consent on those who wanted to rejoin the EU, and by undercutting the appeal of Scottish separatism, our withdrawal from the EU preserved the authority of the central British state and, with it, British democracy. If we are to make good on this historic fortune, then we must reverse the process that led us here by an energetic programme of centralised nation-building that will necessarily involve strengthening the state. This does not mean strengthening the state’s already bloated bureaucracy, but rather boosting the state as an authoritative and representative public power. If we can do this, not only can we reap the political blessings of independence, but we might also be spared any more BBC fables about the former Yugoslavia.

Despite having one of the world’s highest per-capita rates of gun ownership, Serbia had never witnessed a mass shooting until last month, when a 13-year-old boy killed nine fellow students and a security guard at his elementary school in Belgrade. It was the deadliest school shooting in Europe in 15 years – and it was followed by another spree, just one day later and a few miles away, when a 21-year-old man armed with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire as he drove through three villages south of Belgrade, killing eight.

Although a number of American gun-control activists have praised the seemingly swift response by President Aleksander Vučić, the shootings have prompted the largest protests seen in Serbia since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000. While Vučić hastily announced stricter measures, his authoritarian government’s deployment of 1,200 police officers to schools — as well as its threat to bring back the death penalty — were seen by many locals as both insufficient and heavy-handed. A Serbian minister’s claim the school shooting was caused by the spread of “Western values” further infuriated protestors, who accused him of instrumentalising the tragedy in line with a pro-Putin agenda.

In this way, the present crisis illustrates the failures of the authoritarian Vučić government — and, by extension, also of Western intervention in the region. But it also shows the grim success of a particularly American brand of individualistic, sexist rage.

Certainly, the immediate response by both the government and opposition has been a world away from the endless debate in America, which had seen nearly 200 mass shootings in 2023 by the time of the Belgrade massacre. But as Biljana Djordjevic, an opposition MP in a green coalition, tells me, the crisis occasioned by her country’s dual massacres is “bigger than these two tragedies” alone, and represents a potential “moment for this country to change”. Mass demonstrations at the shootings have prompted demands for resignations at the top of government and reforms of the government-controlled media ecosystem. The largest protests since Vučić came to power bespeak a deeper anger with his highly centralised rule, corrupt and inadequate service provision, and lack of democratic norms.

In Belgrade, few doubt that the powerful interests focused around Vučić are trying to prevent any such change from taking place. Last weekend, the president brought his supporters onto the city’s rain-swept streets. Memes on Serbian social media mocked the buses shuttling Right-wing nationalists into the capital, and the provision of free drinks and snacks as an inducement to attendees. (Vučić-branded cereal bars were freely available, with packets of Smoki, the delicious and insanely popular corn puffs, handed out only on request.)

While addressing a rain-drenched crowd, Vučić resigned the leadership of his dominant Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). He made it clear he will remain president while launching a new, centralised political force with which he intends to cleanse Serbia of what he called “severe diseases”. Prominent among those “diseases” will be the “vultures” and “hyenas” the president has condemned as attempting to politicise the shootings.

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Demonstrators parroted government lines – that this was a “gathering”, not a protest; that the event had nothing to do with the recent shootings; and nor was it a rearguard action following the ongoing anti-government protests, which brought tens of thousands of people to the same streets. “This is not related to the shooting,” insisted Ilya, 32, one of a group of muscular, shaven-headed men lined up in front of the stage where Vučić was set to speak. “We just want to show we support our president. If he calls us, we will come.” 

In practice, the “gathering” was a show of force, bringing together pro-government hooligans, war veterans, state employees, Serb nationalists from Serb regions of neighbouring countries, and pensioners in pursuit of free nibbles. The event coincided with a flare-up of violence in Kosovo, provoked this time by ethnically Albanian authorities in the breakaway region, thus providing Vučić with a convenient foil for his calls for national unity. Scores of Serb protesters and Nato soldiers were subsequently injured in clashes. 

It is clear that many Serbians are angered by what they view as the government’s self-serving response to the shootings. A uniquely diverse range of opposition parties — centre-Right, liberal and Leftist — plus various political movements have backed the ongoing anti-government demonstrations. “I’m in favour of a complete ban on weapons,” said Biljana Stojkovic, co-chair of Leftist party Zajedno (Together), “but the presence of policemen in schools can only increase fear and abnormality.” Djordevic notes that the Belgrade shooter came from wealth and the second gunman’s father was an army General, meaning that both could still have access to guns, regardless of official controls.

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In a clear contrast with the pro-government “gathering”, the angry protesters huddling under umbrellas were immediately and volubly political, linking the shootings to what they call a “culture of violence” and impunity emanating from the government. “Why are we here? After 10 years of dictatorial rule, repression, closed media and brainwashing, why do you have to ask?” Slobodan, 52, tells me. Like other demonstrators, he is quick to demand Vučić’s removal, liberalisation and a concomitant pivot towards Europe, away from what Slobodan calls “Eastern despotism”. (Serbia has been on the waiting list to join the EU since 2009, a major stumbling block to its membership being its refusal to recognise Kosovo’s declaration of independence.) 

Indeed, Western policy plays a crucial rhetorical and geopolitical role in shaping Serbia’s ongoing domestic debate. In Serbia, criticisms of state policy are typically articulated through appeals for a pivot towards the West, which are in turn rebutted and echoed in reverse by the government’s supporters. “The issue is the immediate reaction, the claim the system has not failed,” says Djordjevic, arguing that the minister who blamed “Western values” mere hours after the massacre intended to distract attention from government failings. She highlights the second shooting, conducted by the general’s son sporting neo-Nazi insignia, as instead demonstrating the role of nationalist, Right-wing ideology in facilitating the ‘culture of violence’ blamed for the killings. “Blaming ‘Western values’ is a way to promote Putin’s values in Serbia, as a contrast to democracy,” Stojkovic adds. 

Ever since the collapse of Tito’s “third way” socialism path between the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States, the Serbian Left has struggled to articulate alternatives to Russian-sponsored revanchism without looking to Europe for inspiration and support, with predictably limited results. Actual European accession, and subsequent investment, remains essentially off the table. As such, the liberal opposition’s courting of Europe has resulted in few positive steps toward the democratisation protesters believe could prevent more shooting tragedies. “We just have to wait for the EU to help us to move forward. Right now we are stuck in a vacuum,” says Stojkovic.

Meanwhile, there are other US “values” that may underpin the Belgrade massacre. As a prescient analysis published just two weeks before the school shooting suggests, ultra-misogynistic ideas promoted by “manosphere” influencers such as Andrew Tate — who chose the Balkan nation of Romania as a hideout prior to his arrest on rape and human trafficking charges — have found an enthusiastic audience among young Serbian men. NGO-led efforts to promote gender equality have struggled to make significant inroads, with feminism and LGBT rights characterised as “Western”, therefore liberalising, therefore destructive influences.

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It’s striking that eight of the nine fellow pupils killed by the school shooter were girls. Though Djordevic cautions it is too early to ascribe definitive motivations to the shooter, the hallmarks of a US-style school shooting motivated by a particular confection of entitlement, resentment and “incel” ideology are readily apparent. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the poisonous notion that young men have a “right to sex” with whichever girl they please constantly recurs as a motivation behind recent US school shootings. (On a US-based “incel” forum, the shooting was rapidly praised by both US and Serbian posters.)

As in America, the idea that young people’s hardships are the fault of a political culture that denies them opportunities for conquest has proven considerably more compelling than the liberal rights order with which the misogynistic ideologues are in constant, self-perpetuating battle. Neither Tate nor Vučić offers any real solution to the genuine challenges faced by the new generations over which they hold sway. But in their own way, each is able to harness and profit from their followers’ misplaced anger. And in both cases, the Left has long struggled to come up with a compelling, organised alternative to their opponents’ strident battle-cries. 

Whether Serbia’s nascent protest movement will indeed prove able to “institutionalise the change people feel in their hearts”, as Djordevic’s claims, remains to be seen. What is certain is that Serbia, like the United States, is in need of political proposals and cultural role-models reaching beyond current polarities. And in both nations, the criticism of a liberal order which has failed to follow through on promises of a better world for the new generation should not preclude the critique of those who prey on young men’s worst impulses.

Rather, President Aleksandar Vučić is treading a necessarily complicated line in a vain attempt to appease both Brussels and Moscow, knowing he must soon alienate either his nationalist voter base or the great powers who have him over a barrel. Among Serbs, polling shows that opposition to sanctions on Russia is considerably more likely to be derived from memories of the devastating sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia in the Nineties (44%), as opposed to a vaguer sense that Russia is the country’s “great friend” (24%). A “noisy minority” (21%) do take an unambiguously pro-Russian stance, but the majority of Serbians still back a policy of non-alignment. It may seem clear to many observers that Serbs have an “irrational” and “distorted” relationship with Putin’s pariah state: but to understand why, we must look West as well as East.

The idea that Serbs are mindlessly pro-Putin is immediately complicated by the presence in Belgrade of around 200,000 exiles fleeing Putin’s Russia — doubtless contributing to Vučić’s recent designation of his capital as a modern-day Casablanca, swarming with foreign intelligence assets. Peter Nikitin, the head of anti-war campaign group the Russian Democratic Society, categorises the Russian expat community into three groups: “former activists and political refugees; those who were never active before the war but got so shocked they felt the need to get active; and apolitical, relocated IT people who want to pretend nothing happened”. This third group is the most visible. One local Telegram channel aimed at Russian expats brims with legal advice, job offers, and tips for treating gastritis (with brandy), offering the chance to “chat about life and migration to Serbia — politics prohibited”. Despite such disclaimers, even the relocated digital nomads’ presence here is necessarily political, testing how deep local support for Putin runs.

One set of Russian young professionals frequents Pub 53, a hole-in-the-wall spot owned by another Russian exile. Here, I meet Ana, a software engineer who emphasises the greater freedom of speech and quality of life available here compared to their native Moscow. “No-one can arrest me for my words,” she says. “I’m gay — you see how my friends are — and I’m just here to live my life. There are lots of liberal Russians here, like me.” As these friends arrive, they toast one another with B52 shots mixed with local rakija brandy. The general openness to people like Ana is partly economically motivated, helping to counteract the steady drain of Serbian young professionals into the EU.

Such stories are not universal. Many less educated men of military age grabbed their bags and left overnight for fear of conscription, and now live in hostels or on friends’ couches while they hunt for work. Each morning, a line of young Russian men can be found waiting below a sternly moustachioed statue of Vuk Karadžić, the father of modern Serbia, hoping to be offered cash-in-hand day labour. “The situation is shit,” says Luka, who used to work in a car factory before fleeing the draft. “Many people are going home because there is no work here, only cleaning toilets or deliveries.” But overall, anti-Putin expats have found a home here. While locals complain about (if they do not profit from) soaring rental prices or supermarket-queue etiquette, actual attacks on anti-Putin activists remain rare. “There is a nationalist minority who call us traitors,” says Peter, referring to a recent assault on one activist. “But even if they think we’re weirdos because we’re against Putin, most people are welcoming.”

Anastasija, a Russian psychotherapist and teacher participating in a protest in Belgrade against Russian war crimes, agrees: “Young people here support Ukraine, but many older people support Russia. We’d like to change this, because people don’t have access to information.” Over a year on from the Russian invasion, turn-out at the demonstration is limited — but an opposing, pro-war protest nearby is even more sparsely attended. There, an Orthodox priest fulminates into a microphone, surrounded by a gaggle of protesters brandishing conspiratorial posters: “Serbia will be freed of the servants of the Antichrist”; “Covid genocide”; “Vučić — Will you break the curse of Nato betrayal?” Neither the well-meant humanitarian appeal nor the apocalyptic rant captures the general public mood, with most bystanders hurrying past.

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Other concerns are more pressing. Prominent Serbian activist Aida Ćorović, recently arrested for pelting a mural of local hero and convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic with eggs, is coruscating towards her compatriots’ nationalism and “selective memory” over their treatment in the Nineties: “One drug, in the form of the Kosovo myth, was replaced by another drug — that Putin will save us from the ‘hateful’ West.” But she makes no bones about the fact that “the main problem is economic. We are number one in Europe for deaths from cancer, people look for food in garbage containers and fight over meat in Lidl, and yet our citizens believe Vučić’s statements that we live in a ‘golden age’.”

Serbian MP Nebojša Zelenović is the co-leader of Serbia’s green-Left Moramo coalition, which stood alone in backing sanctions on Russia during last year’s general elections. Speaking in the apartment where Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić wrote his magnum opus The Bridge on the Drina while under house arrest during the Second World War, he explains that locals are exhausted by lack of service provision, corrupt politicians with fraudulent degrees, scant employment opportunities, and continual brain drain to the West. “There is a strong atmosphere that everybody must be for Russia, and for Putin. At the same time, people don’t believe there is any hope for EU accession. There is no goal, we are going nowhere, and this situation could last for decades.” Serbia’s EU accession has been moving slowly, if at all, since 2009. To Zelenović, the EU is missing an opportunity to use Russia’s increasing alienation to draw Serbia into the fold.

Rather, the EU is using Russia’s increasing isolation to push Serbia into both joining the sanctions programme and make concessions over Kosovo. In downtown Belgrade, a group of men stand around a stall operated by the conservative, nationalist People’s Party, demanding a referendum over the “agreement on the path to normalisation” Vučić this year agreed with Kosovo. As its less-than-enthusiastic name suggests, detail of the agreement remains vague, and practical steps forward a still-distant possibility. Serbia typically counts on Russia to prevent greater international recognition of majority-Albanian, partially-recognized Kosovo. But the EU is now pushing Serbia to agree to Kosovo’s potential accession to the UN, EU and Nato, while offering more protection for Kosovo’s Serb minority in return. Damir Hadžiabdić, who supports the People’s Party campaign against the putative deal, echoes Zelenović’s complaints from the Right: “They don’t give us anything. Just a story of EU accession — but it’s been 15 years with no result.”

Vučić is in a bind. Nominally pro-European, he relies on a nationalist base still smarting from Nato’s 1999 bombing of Serbia, who will turn against him if he is seen to cave to Western pressure. “People in Vučić’s own party don’t support [the deal], but they are scared to admit it,” Hadžiabdić says. “They think the international pressure from the West is huge.” There is a general public belief that only Russia (and China’s) vetoes on the UN Security Council have prevented Kosovo from gaining further recognition, as MP Aleksandar Jerkovic, of Right-wing parliamentary coalition “No Going Back — Serbia Is Behind”, observes: “If you start from the wrong, but widely accepted, point of view that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, you get a simple answer as to why Russia has so much support.” Putin’s popularity in local polls now outstrips Vučić himself.

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The EU has generally seemed satisfied with more cosmetic signs of “reform” (including a failed attempt to hold Euro Pride in Belgrade), while Serbia’s leaders have continued to foster more significant personal and national ties with other powers (Russia’s Gazprom controls Serbia’s only gas import company; in 2021, China saved 10,000 mining jobs). Under Vučić’s premiership, public support for EU accession has dwindled from almost 60% to under a third, showing the failure of the EU’s own investment to create similar political traction, and offering Vučić a convenient excuse for stalled accession talks. EU investment in Serbia actually well outstrips investment from the East, but as Jerkovic explains, a favourable media climate has allowed Moscow to paint themselves as the country’s saviours, while ordinary Serbian people do not see the profits from European investment.

Moreover, as Ćorović indicates, a “constellation” of financial ties still links Vučić’s Progressive Party to Russia: “The party, which was created by Slobodan Milošević with significant support from Moscow, still functions according to the same principles and finds crucial support in the Kremlin.” Vučić therefore faces a Catch-22. Move toward Europe, and face domestic discontent; reject the EU line, and face hard or soft intervention against his rule. “If we make a decision to become part of the West, Vučić will begin to fall,” says Zelenović. “He knows this, so he will buy time, and spend years waiting for [foreign] elections.” Jerkovic echoes this analysis, adding that Vučić’s “pragmatic strategy to buy himself time” will likely last “until the denouement of the Ukraine crisis”, aided and abetted by physical attacks on the media and opposition politicians.

Is there a way out of this impasse? Though wary of the negative impact still more waves of neoliberal restructuring would have on Serbia’s already heavily-privatised economy, progressive opposition figures are generally agreed that closer ties with Europe are necessary to drive reform — particularly on minority rights, the environment, and press freedom. But to Zelenović, Europe’s current approach is all stick, no carrot: “Our voters think the EU forgot us. So what’s the point? If politics just means fighting Vučić, it’s too risky. It would be different if there were hope.”

Jerkovic and Ćorović both condemn Brussels’s willingness to turn a blind eye to authoritarian excesses and non-democratic elections in exchange for security cooperation — resulting in so-called “stabilocracies” where non-democratic regimes are granted external legitimacy , along with the EU’s promotion of extractive mining methods and the brain drain into Europe. “It’s clear to every intelligent Serb that these are double standards. Since the beginning of Serbia’s so-called relationship with the EU, there has been only one topic — what can be taken from Serbia?”, Jerkovic says. As Ćorović puts it, this leaves ordinary people “between the hammer of a radical government and the anvil of European hypocrisy”.

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With varying degrees of weariness, and from across the political spectrum, all three observers want the EU to take a more proactive and equitable approach. (“I am sure that British readers are very familiar with… EU praxis,” Jerkovic adds wryly.) Zelenović’s proposals include: a joint EU-accession process for all six Western Balkan states; EU support in exchange for reforms, such as offering agricultural subsidies in return for judicial reform; and exploring the ways Serbia can proactively support the EU — for example by using its historic links with former Non-Aligned countries in the Third World to ease migration into Europe.

The Yugoslav leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement is a reminder that Serbia was not always at the mercy of the great powers. The eponymous Bridge in Andrić’s novel represents Yugoslavia’s unique, strategic location between East and West. And this was the role adopted by Yugoslav President Tito, negotiating between Moscow and Washington to establish his nation as a crucial interlocutor on the world stage, surviving not despite but because of its position between two power blocs. Negative pressure on a country with these historical memories can only go so far. If the West is serious about drawing Serbia out of Putin’s web, it would do well to listen to both Left and Right and offer concrete support for reforms. Absent such measures, it is little wonder its politicians and population will continue trying to steer a third way through troubled waters.

Kosovo then was a province in the south of Yugoslavia, a landlocked area slightly smaller than the Falkland Islands. It was officially part of Serbia — the largest of the Yugoslav republics — but was heavily disputed: 90% of the population were Albanian by ethnicity, Muslim by faith. And Kosovo had, for differing reasons, a revered place in the histories of both Serbia and Albania, integral to each’s sense of national identity. As George Orwell noted in 1945: “Yugoslav politics are very complicated and I make no pretence of being an expert on them.”

The Kosovars were a small minority in Yugoslavia, who had long faced discrimination, and long sought independence. That had seemed an implausible hope, but by the time the province came to Blair’s attention, things were looking very different. In the first half of the Nineties, Yugoslavia had been ripped apart, with Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia splitting to become independent countries, the latter two after wars of a bloodiness not seen in Europe since 1945. The Kosovars were still a minority, but — with Yugoslavia reduced from six constituent republics to just two, Serbia and Montenegro — they now made up a fifth of the country’s population. Not so small anymore.

In 1995, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began armed actions; by 1998, the insurgency had escalated into serious conflict. The Yugoslav military was attempting to suppress the KLA by terrorising the population: hundreds were killed, thousands raped, and hundreds of thousands displaced. This was the point at which the situation forced itself into the international spotlight, provoking a sense of horrified déjà vu: the earlier Yugoslav Wars had cost the lives of up to 150,000, and made the term “ethnic cleansing” common currency. Many in the West were, retrospectively in some instances, feeling ashamed that such destruction had been allowed to run rampant in Europe. Then, the United Nations had tried to contain the killing with an arms embargo and the deployment of some ineffective peacekeepers; mostly they had looked on sorrowfully. And now it was happening again.

“I saw it as essentially a moral issue,” wrote Blair in his memoirs. There was a humanitarian disaster unfolding, and — as in Ukraine today — the blame lay at the feet of one man: in this case the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević. Action was needed. By June 1998, Britain was talking with its Nato partners about the possibility of an air and land operation; it was another nine months before, in March 1999, Nato began bombing Yugoslavia. “We have learned from bitter experience not to appease dictators,” explained Blair, who largely drove the initiative. “We tried it 60 years ago.”

There was — again, as today — political consensus, with backing for the government’s actions from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, then led by William Hague and Paddy Ashdown respectively. Even Blair’s own party was mostly in support. A few on the Left pointed out that the lack of UN authorisation made the bombing entirely illegal, but a motion condemning Nato’s actions was signed by just six of the usual suspects, including Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Notably absent was Ken Livingstone, who joined Blair in comparing Milošević to Hitler. Robin Cook and Clare Short — who would both later resign from the cabinet over Iraq — were fully on board, the former as foreign secretary, the latter dutifully doing the media rounds to defend the government.

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Television news played its part in preparing the public for military action, with extensive coverage of the appalling suffering being endured by the Kosovars. In the press, the most notable cheerleaders were to be found at the Guardian. As early as April 1998, an editorial was calling for “intervention if only on humanitarian grounds” and for “the deployment of troops”. On the eve of the bombing, the leader column was headlined: “The sad need for force.” We have become familiar with that sense of sorrowful necessity in the last 12 months.

It was confidently predicted that 72 hours of bombing would be sufficient to force Milošević into retreat. That didn’t happen, and the days stretched out into weeks and months. Along the way, there was a series of Nato errors: the accidental strike on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; a cluster bomb aimed at an airfield that hit a market, killing more than 60 Serbian civilians; the deaths of 87 Kosovar refugees in a bomb attack on the village of Koriša. In the face of these blunders and the absence of a swift victory, Blair ramped up the moral rhetoric: “This is no longer just a military conflict. It is a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity.” To prove the point, Milošević was indicted for crimes against humanity by a UN tribunal.

But the public was losing faith. Although an early opinion poll showed two-thirds supporting the use of ground troops, the Labour Party’s own focus groups reported far less enthusiasm. At a time when public spending was still under tight control, people wanted to know, why was money being spent on waging war? Philip Gould, Blair’s much-trusted pollster, urged him to ignore the findings and carry on, but press secretary Alastair Campbell was furious with the electorate’s lack of gratitude: “It made you wonder why we bothered sometimes.”

In the event, it took 78 days before Milošević agreed an unconditional withdrawal of Serbian troops, and even then, it was Russian diplomacy and the threat of a Nato land invasion that proved decisive. There was a limit to what bombing alone could do (as Martin McGuinness of the IRA helpfully pointed out). Nonetheless, the operation had achieved its objective. Indeed, it went further. So damaged was Milošević’s standing among Serbs that the following year he lost the presidential election and was dragged from office. (He was subsequently extradited to The Hague to face charges of war crimes, dying before the trial could conclude.) Regime change had not been the war’s aim, but it was achieved.

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Insofar as Kosovo is remembered, it’s seen as, to use Blair’s description, “a just war”. The comparisons between Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany were historically illiterate — and tone-deaf, given the history of the country in the Forties — but there was a clear aggressor, who everyone agreed had to be defeated. It was also, from a British perspective, a clean war. There were around 13,500 dead, most of them civilians, but Nato had no combat fatalities at all. And it was welcomed by those in whose name it was being fought. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, but it was notable that they blamed Milošević, not Nato. The Kosovars were overwhelmingly in favour of the military intervention, and Blair in particular was seen as a hero. When he visited the capital, Pristina, a few weeks after the cessation of hostilities, he was greeted by huge crowds, chanting his name, waving Union Jacks and presenting him with flowers. “Tonibler” and “Bler” became popular names for male children born in Kosovo that year (as with the Kosovan footballer Bler Thaçi).

“War is never civilised,” said Blair in his moment of triumph. “But war can be necessary to uphold civilisation.” It was the kind of paradox that appealed to him and was so integral to his oratory: the civilising war, the imposition of democracy. The victory, he believed, confirmed his “doctrine of international community” — which he outlined during the conflict: those with military power, he argued, had the right, indeed the duty, to intervene where possible against “a despotic, dictatorial regime”, even if there was no “immediate threat to our interests”.

It was the philosophy that later fed his fervour for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and of Iraq in 2003. There was the same talk of good and evil, of how we should never appease dictators; the same predictions of swift success. And in the case of Iraq, there was a similar failure — much more controversially this time — to get UN backing. But by now, Blair was, said Labour’s ex-deputy leader Roy Hattersley, in a “messianic mood”.

Neither of those ventures, of course, ended well. There was no repeat of the welcome in Pristina, and the unforeseen consequences were catastrophic. The destabilising of Iraq led to the emergence of Islamic State; Afghanistan reverted to Taliban control as soon as western troops departed. Nor was Nato’s later bombing of Libya in 2011 any more positive: Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown, but then another, longer and more costly, civil war broke out. All are, by any normal measure, failed states. The Foreign Office currently advises British citizens not to travel to Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya.

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It also advises against all but essential travel to northern Kosovo, and there’s a warning for the whole country: “Terrorists are likely to try to carry out attacks.” Media attention has long since moved on, but even with the continuing presence of KFOR — the Nato-led peacekeeping force, now much reduced in numbers — Kosovo is still not stable. Maybe that was inevitable. In public, this was “a battle between good and evil”. In private, Blair acknowledged that “the KLA were not much better than the Serbs”. The Nato victory was followed by Kosovan retaliation. There was an exodus of Serbs and Roma in a further wave of ethnic cleansing; churches were attacked, just as mosques had once been; and there have been frequent outbreaks of violence over the years: more than 200 KFOR personnel have lost their lives.

There have also been knock-on effects internationally. In 2004, Amnesty International published a report revealing how women were being trafficked into the province from Albania to work as prostitutes, meeting the demands of the 50,000 peacekeeping troops stationed there. And it wasn’t just adult women. “I was forced by the boss to serve international soldiers and police officers,” a 12-year-old Albanian girl told the researchers. Amnesty concluded that the UN and Nato forces were “not only failing to protect the human rights of the women and girls, but are in many cases themselves using them for sexual gratification and are even allegedly involved in trafficking itself”.

By the time the report was released, the sex industry created for KFOR had grown, becoming the centre of a network that sold woman and girls into prostitution in western Europe — 1,400 were being smuggled into Britain every year, it was estimated. When in 2005 ex-cabinet minister Harriet Harman analysed the successful prosecutions for people trafficking, she concluded that, “in nearly every case the culprit was Albanian or Kosovan, some of whom had been allowed in as refugees”.

The legacy of Kosovo was also seen in the transformation of Nato, now an organisation prepared to initiate war beyond the UN: a fact that ensures Kosovo still has traction in Russian propaganda. Answering western criticism of the invasion of Ukraine last year, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was quick to talk of Nato’s “illegal use of force” in 1999. And, in the context of Ukraine, it’s hard not to see Blair in Pristina as the model for Boris Johnson, or indeed Keir Starmer, in Kyiv. (How envious they must be to see all those Toniblers.) Adoring crowds and moral certainty are a seductive combination, particularly for a politician feeling a lack of honour in his own land.

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Ukraine, of course, is not Kosovo. In one sense, the argument today is even more clear-cut: Ukraine is an independent, sovereign nation, whereas Kosovo had no such status. (Indeed, it is still not recognised by all member states of Nato.) The Yugoslav claim that its forces were suppressing an internal terrorist threat carried some weight; the same is evidently not true of the invasion of Ukraine. The real difference, though, is the nature of the opponent. Blair’s interventionism depended, he said, on answering the question: “Are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake?” Nobody seriously thinks that Nato taking on Russia directly is either sensible or prudent.

Nonetheless, the rhetoric remains, despite all that has happened since Kosovo. The Ukraine War is seen in the moral terms advocated by Blair. Emotion is the order of the day, realpolitik is out of favour, and the political and media consensus is that this is again a fight between good and evil. The danger is of over-simplification. It is not hard to identify an evil, but good is a much less clearcut phenomenon. “War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress,” conceded Blair. More than that, it brings unintended consequences, which can amount to evils.

If Blair’s military adventuring had ended with Kosovo, foreign policy would be seen as a minor part of his legacy, rather than the dominant note that it now is. And the Kosovo War would be regarded as a qualified success, the negatives — including the lack of an exit strategy — outweighed by the positives. Few doubted that the cause was just, and most agreed that the violence and the death toll would have been worse had Nato not got involved. It might even be remembered for making the case for Blair’s doctrine of liberal intervention. There was an emergency, a clearly defined solution, and a task that was accomplished. There was also, however, the hazardous, illusory hope that the solution could be replicated in very different circumstances.

In the shadow of Bran Castle, once home to Vlad the Impaler, you might enjoy the irony of hearing this revisionist history lesson while surrounded by a whole gallery of vampire kitsch — kiosks with plastic fangs for sale; a Dracula face-in-a-hole board as diminutive and unthreatening as his descendants Count Chocula, of breakfast-cereal fame, or Sesame Street’s own Count von Count.

Listening to such lectures in the past, I would often find myself unable to suppress that exclamation, so completely taboo in our era of stay-in-your-lane deference: “Well, actually…” Because the truth is that tales of vampires existed in the Balkans long before Bram Stoker. Between the 15th and the 19th centuries, the figure of the vampire made the gradual transition from the proto-ethnography of the Balkans to the imaginations of Gothic littérateurs.

Most succinctly, we may say that the figure of the vampire emerges out of the confluence of three elements. The first is the real historical record of the actions of a certain Vlad Țepeș (1428/31—1476/77). The violent transgressions for which he became notorious were extreme — notably, impalement on rounded and greased spikes, carefully avoiding direct puncture of inner organs so as to prolong the victim’s misery. Woodcuts depicting his deeds were soon published in German books, and as these circulated the legends surrounding him grew beyond all human proportion.

The second element is the arrival of Germanophone Habsburg administrators in newly subordinated regions of Southeastern Europe, who had been influenced in their practices by the emerging culture of the Republic of Letters, which encouraged literate travellers in little-known places to note down and to report back to the metropole all rare or mysterious incidents. The third element, finally, are the ancient folk-cultural practices and beliefs that these humble clerks observed and documented.

Of particular importance in the revisionist lesson for foreigners in Transylvania is the task of clearing Dracula from any association with vampirism. “Dracula”, they explain, is simply the title, but not the name, of Vlad Țepeș, also known as Vlad III or Vlad the Impaler. He inherited it from his father, Vlad II, a member of the Order of the Dragon. In Romanian, dracul derives from the Latin draco, and simply means “the dragon”.

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It is not in fact in the castles, but in the villages of Romania that we typically hear rumours of the strigoi, which are in turn close cousins of the vrykolakas of Greece and the upior of the Slavic countries. These are, in all their regional variants, ghosts of the deceased, poltergeists who return to trouble the living. A common belief holds that one may prevent their apparition by sealing the coffin of the dead shut with extra nails, and by driving a stake through the chest of the corpse. Should one encounter a strigoi, some texts and traditions counsel the use of apotropaics such as garlic or holy water to ward them off. These folkloric characters thus share some, but not all, of the traits associated with the Stokerian vampire. There is as yet no strong association with bats, for example, or with hematophagy.

It is at least true, then, that Stoker’s rendition bumps the vampire up several social classes from where it had always resided in “authentic” folk culture, from the peasantry to the aristocracy. And it is the elevation of traditional village practices to a form of aristocratic decadence that enables Stoker to give his fiction a historical grounding, and to identify his own protagonist’s vampirism as part of an inheritance from none other than Vlad the Impaler:

“Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode [a military leader] crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land?”

In portraying Vlad as a hero in the war against the Turks, the Irish novelist is channelling a historiographical tendency more commonly seen in Russia and the Balkans than in Western Europe. In the Orthodox lands, while his cruelty is acknowledged, Vlad is mostly seen as a valiant defender against the Ottoman menace, and therefore as a bulwark of Christendom. In the German-speaking world, by contrast, his significance as a military leader pales in comparison with his inhuman and gratuitous cruelty. Beginning as early as the 1460s, broadsides circulated describing the delight Vlad took in roasting babies alive and forcing their mothers to eat them, in hearing the low moans of his impaled victims as musical accompaniment to his meals.

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Horrific tales of Vlad the Impaler were not the only source of vampire mythology. Non-fictional writing on strange incidents and curiosities stretches back to antiquity, but it is in the wake of the scientific revolution that a more systematic approach develops to the collection of eyewitness reports, largely inspired by the learned journal of the Royal Society of London, The Philosophical Transactions, founded in 1666.

The first extant treatise on vampirism is De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis [On the Chewing of the Dead in their Tombs], published in 1725, by the German Lutheran pastor and historian Michaël Ranfft. In his work, Ranfft helped to make vampires known throughout the German-speaking world by republishing a report from a minor administrator in the Serbian provinces of the Kingdom of Hungary, who described some peculiar events in the village of Kisolova following the death of a certain Petar Blagojević, of whom “it was stated that, within eight days [of his death], nine people, both old and young, died after enduring an illness of 24 hours”. It is reported that: “As they still lay alive on their death beds… the above-mentioned Plogojovitz [sic], who had died ten weeks prior, came to them in their sleep, lay down on top of them, and croaked that they must now give up their souls.”

The author of the report cited by Ranfft uses the word “vampire” in one of its earliest printed occurrences. He reports that “since among similar people (as are called Vampyri) there must be visible various signs, as that their bodies are undecayed, with skin, hair, beard, and nails growing”, the villagers resolved to open up the grave of Petar Blagojević and to see what they might discover there. Here is what they found:

“That, first of all, the body and its grave were not in the least touched by the usual smell of the dead. The body, other than the nose, which had somewhat fallen off, was very fresh; the hair and the beard, and also the nails, of which the older ones had fallen away, had grown on him; the old skin, which was somewhat white, had peeled away, and a new fresh skin had come forth underneath; the face, hands and feet, and the whole body were so composed that they could not have been more perfect during the course of his life. Not without surprise I glimpsed fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common expression, he had sucked from those he had killed.”

At issue in part was a puzzlement about some unexpected contingencies in the way bodies decompose. While they often rot quickly, depending on the circumstances of the air, the temperature, and the presence of microorganisms, bodies can also come to appear, under the right conditions, even more healthy than they had been just prior to death. Sometimes a corpse is found with blood streaming from the mouth, a natural consequence of the internal breakdown of the organs, which nonetheless can easily be mistaken for a vestige of recent feasting. They frequently become bloated, and in an era in which corpulence was still strongly associated with health, this temporary condition could easily appear as an improvement only to be explained on the assumption that the corpse had been ingesting food — food, that is, or blood.

The difficulty of determining the precise boundary between life and death is a subject that reappears throughout the 18th century — not just in reference to vampires, but in numerous medical treatises. The most interesting example of such work is undoubtedly the Danish-French physician Jacques-Bénigne Winslow’s 1742 Dissertation on the Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, and the Misuse of Burials, and Rushed Embalmings. Winslow cites several authorities to establish the view that “putrefaction is the only infallible sign of death”.

Winslow also peppers his treatise with macabre reports, many of which read like Gothic fiction. Thus we learn of a lady of Auxbourg, who, “falling into a Syncope, in Consequence of a Suffocation of the Matrix, was buried in a deep Vault, without being covered with Earth… Some Years after, however, one of the same Family happening to die, the Vault was open’d, and the Body of the young Lady found on the Stairs at its Entry, without any Fingers on the Right Hand.” Soon enough, documentary sources such as this were sublimated into fictional stories about the undead, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Premature Burial (1844) being a prime example.

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The early modern explosion of interest in Balkan “superstition” is, as we have begun to see, in no small measure an effect of the encounter between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, and in particular of the expansion of Habsburg rule into regions of the Balkans that had previously belonged to the Ottoman Empire. This encounter triggered a long — and indeed still ongoing — habit of representing Southeastern Europe as a land of benighted and backwards belief.

In his contribution to the 1776 Dictionnaire philosophique, none other than Voltaire, who never misses an opportunity to scoff at people who happen not to be French, takes up the example of vampires not only as a measure of the distance between Enlightened Europe and those other parts, but also between the rationality of the ancient Greeks and the irrationality of their degenerated modern descendants. “Who would believe that the fashion of vampires came from Greece? This is not the Greece of Alexander, of Aristotle, of Plato, of Epicurus, of Demosthenes, but rather Christian Greece, which is, unfortunately, schismatic.”

Voltaire is a defiant atheist, but his polemical anti-clericalism brings him close to some of the themes of anti-Papism familiar from Protestant lands. For many Protestant authors, the difference between Catholicism and worship of the forces of darkness is but another case of the narcissism of minor differences. Voltaire, writing in this same spirit, speaks mockingly of a young sceptic who had dared to question the truth of a number of reported miracles involving the Virgin Mary, and who finally was won over to all manner of Catholic articles of faith as a result of exposure to folk-beliefs about vampires. In his satirical account, it was best for the weak-minded to shelter themselves from stories of vampires, if only because these can all too easily serve as a gateway drug to the Roman religion.

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Among Catholic authors, by contrast, we generally see not mockery of folk-beliefs about vampires, but rather a subtle, almost mischievous, effort to occupy the ambiguous space between affirmation and scepticism. Indeed, a convention emerges in vampirological works over the course of the 18th century, whereby the author is generally presented as an intrepid and dedicated, but perhaps somewhat shadowy character. This doubt is in turn offset by an assurance that the author is a man of the cloth, an abbey or a clergyman who has immersed himself in the study of dark forces in order to better combat them for the sake of humanity’s salvation. Which side, a reader constantly wonders, is the author really on?

Whether writing as a science-oriented debunker, or as a pious fighter against the forces of darkness, or indeed as some mixture of these two, vampirologists always seem to be infected by their subject. Sceptics will see them as frivolous for wasting their intellectual energy on an old folk myth, and the pious will see them as rather too interested, for suspicious reasons, in the very thing they are supposed to be fighting against. It is hard to be taken seriously as a vampirologist.

And yet it still seems to me that vampires are due a certain measure of rehabilitation. The vampire, I think, is at least as “good to think with” as the “philosophical zombie” that has historically been preferred by analytic philosophers. Zombies give us all of the conceptual problems about mind and consciousness, but none of the feeling, and are thus perfect water-carriers for whatever it is the analytics are trying to do. To “think with vampires” is by contrast to think about feeling, mood, and the dimensions of human existence these disclose.

In its essence, a vampire is a being that knows it is dead, and feels infinite sadness about its plight. This is a paradoxical situation to be in, since death is supposed to be the cessation of all consciousness. But it is also fairly close to what we imagine when we try, per impossibile, to imagine death. We do so, mostly, by feeling our way into it, until we can bear no more and recoil. We do so by allowing what that feeling discloses to us to count for something. And also in our dreams, notably, we encounter dead people with surprising regularity. They walk and talk, and give us tidings, yet there’s something off about them, by which we understand that they are dead. An impossible condition — yet there they are.

Despite their distance in time and space, not to mention qualitative differences of magnitude and geopolitical significance, the conflicts in Ukraine and Bosnia nonetheless remain entangled. Fundamental questions that have surfaced over the past month — over European strategic autonomy, Germany’s status as a great power, multipolarity and the role of Nato expansion — all emerged with the war in Bosnia.

The German recognition of the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia in 1991 — in express defiance of the US secretary of state at the time, James Baker — spurred the collapse of the Yugoslav federation, leading to Bosnia’s bid for secession and its slide into civil war. At the time, German defiance of the US was taken to signal the revival of German power in the wake of the country’s reunification in 1990. Yet its fumbling for foreign policy independence was eventually ended by Washington, which reasserted its strategic domination on the continent with a Nato bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb forces that helped bring the war to an end in 1995. Followed by war in Kosovo in 1999, the wars of Yugoslav secession only ended in 2001 with a Nato deployment to end a conflict brewing in North Macedonia.

Although Western military intervention in another multi-national, multi-ethnic ex-communist federation spurred fears in the Kremlin that the West would reprise such adventures in the ex-Soviet Union during the Nineties, the collapse of the Russian state and the low price of oil meant that there was little Russia could do to stymie Nato expansion in the region. Russian weakness helped foster the mirage of a continent that had transcended great power rivalries, which would in turn smooth the path for Nato’s reckless policy expansion eastwards. Nonetheless, there were occasional portents of future conflict, such as when British Lieutenant-general Sir Mike Jackson refused the orders of his Nato commanding officer to fire on a Russian column attempting to seize Pristina airport in Kosovo.

The war in Bosnia and the brutality that defined it shattered the Long Peace that had prevailed in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a similarly shattering effect on a public that seems to have forgotten the wars in former Yugoslavia. Such collective amnesia — which also omits the bloody Greek Civil War that ended in 1949 — evinces a peculiar Eurocentrism, which treats European territory as if it were holy soil consecrated for perpetual peace by European blood, and as if Europe’s bloody history of internecine war makes war less rather than more likely.

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The Nato-led international intervention that brought the wars of Yugoslav secession to an end were seen as restoring the peace of Europe. In reality, however, the diplomatic, military and humanitarian tools developed in the Balkans would become instruments for extending war outside of Europe. All the elements of the international intervention in the Bosnian war would be globalised in subsequent decades across conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Arms embargoes, sanctions against “rogue regimes”, No-Fly Zones that escalated into bombing campaigns conducted alongside proxy forces and favoured ethnic militias, the deployments of large and militarised United Nations peacekeeping operations, the establishment of protectorates and international criminal courts — all these became the political and military instruments of a new global humanitarian order. Bosnia remains a de facto protectorate of the European Union to this day, hosting international forces and even sporting a blue and yellow flag expressly modelled on that of the EU.

The implications of humanitarian intervention in the Balkans were understood in Moscow even if not in Brussels or Washington. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly cited the precedent of Nato’s 1999 Kosovo War as a legal and political justification for his dismemberment of Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which was modelled on how Nato oversaw the detachment and independence of the former Serbian province in 2008. So we find ourselves in a situation where Russia claims to be retaliating against Nato encroachment in its sphere of influence in Ukraine, while in the Balkans it is Nato and the EU that decry Russian interference in stoking support for Serb secessionism in Bosnia.

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By Aris Roussinos

This geopolitical tangle of imperial hypocrisy shows that we are fully returned to a baleful era of great power spheres of influence, depriving smaller powers in Europe of the political space for their sovereignty and independence. The Balkans have been returned to their nineteenth century status, as what was formerly a single sovereign state has been reduced to a clutch of small, dependent states enmeshed in mutual hostility and rivalry as they jostle for great power patronage.

Given the war in Ukraine and renewed geopolitical rivalries in the Balkans, what are the prospects for Europe’s middle and smaller powers to emerge from tutelage? During the First World War, the British journalist H.H. Munro published The Purple of the Balkan Kings, a short story during the First Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, which had laid the ground for the Great War itself. The story recounts the discomfiture of his absurdly named protagonist Luitpold Wolkenstein, a “financier and diplomat on a small, obtrusive, self-important scale” who, while sitting in his favourite Viennese café, is astounded to read of the military victories of the Balkan League in rolling back the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Munro recounts how vital the subordination of the Balkan states was to Wolkenstein’s mental tranquility:

“His judgment had been one of unsparing contempt for small-scale efforts, of unquestioning respect for the big battalions and full purses. Over the whole scene of the Balkan territories and their troubled histories had loomed the commanding magic of the words ‘the Great Powers’…”

Filled with dread at the prospect that the Balkan states might redraw the map of Europe independently of the Great Powers, and that they might even roll their military victories over into a “project of fiscal unity, extending over the entire Balkan lands, and further of a constitutional union”, Munro has his “plump-bodied café oracle” retire from his café in a depressive mood.

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What we failed to learn from Syria

By Jacob Siegel

Today, latter-day Wolkensteins are firmly back in charge in Europe, not only in Vienna but also especially in Brussels, with their own equivalents in Moscow. Social media provides them with a hubbub that would easily outdo an early twentieth century Viennese café for its complacent febrility and bourgeois extremism. Thinking of the two Eastern European wars that now frame the rise and fall of the era of liberal hegemony — Bosnia and Ukraine respectively — will Europe’s smaller states ever be able to assert their independence against imperial domination?

There is a real risk that a peace settlement for Ukraine reproduces the problems that have plagued post-war Bosnia, which has been carved up into separate, ethnically homogenous statelets with no meaningful central government able to exert sovereignty over the territory as a whole. Ukraine would also carry the further risk of being torn between West and East, with the two halves of the country divided between Brussels and Moscow respectively.

Describing Russian war crimes as “genocide” risks overshadowing the political questions at the core of the conflict. If Ukraine is to safeguard the independence it is fighting for, it must not only repel the Russian invasion but also avoid becoming a Western protectorate, dependent on Nato arms and EU aid to survive. Neutrality offers Ukraine the best hope of preserving its sovereignty. In due course, a neutral Ukraine may even offer an example of how smaller and weaker European states may escape Balkanisation in the years to come.