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Standing on the threshold of the twenty-first century, I'm forced by these texts to wonder if too many of us have been seduced into believing that the wild beast that has leaped upon us at various times and in various places throughout history, has been tamed in our more "civilized" world. Bosnia, resting in the cradle of Europe, shatters such arrogance.

"Bosnia," says Peter Maass, "makes you question basic assumptions about humanity." Just because your society seems stable, your relationships healthy, your politics amenable to the diversity of cultures within your community, doesn't mean it will always remain so. "There are so many seams along which a society can be torn apart by the manipulators. … The wild beast is out there, and the ground no longer feels so steady under my feet."

In 1984, if you had prophesied to nearly any Yugoslav living in Sarajevo that within eight years' time his friends, neighbors, and relatives would be locked in a bloody war among themselves, he would have thought you were drunk or deranged. At best he would have been amused, at worst insulted.

Nearly 40 years earlier, the Communist guerrilla leader, Tito, had re-established the Yugoslav federation, a fragile coalition that existed from 1918 to 1941 before being torn apart by World War II. The chaos of war opened the door for the manipulators of ethnic, religious, and nationalistic ideologies. Croatia, controlled by a brutal fascist militia known as the Ustashe, championed a vision for an independent "Greater Croatia." The Ustashe "cleansed" Croatia of Serbs by forcing them to convert to Roman Catholicism, leave, or be killed. Many Bosnian Muslims fought with the Ustashe against their ancient enemies, the Serbs. Though hated by Croat nationalists, the Muslims were useful to their cause: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," teaches a Slavic proverb.

In Serbia, Orthodoxy rather than Catholicism was the dominant religious tradition, and there too was a Muslim minority, the legacy of many centuries of Ottoman rule. "We hated [the Muslims] twice," say Serb nationalists. "First for being traitors—the converted Muslim is worse than the original Turk. And second, for fighting with the Ustashe." The Serbs formed their own militia, known as the Chetniks, and waged a violent pogrom against non-Serbs in their cause to establish a "Greater Serbia."

Eager to maintain the Yugoslav republic, Tito's army of Partisans, representing the major ethnic and religious groups of the former Yugoslavia, fought for a unified republic under Communist rule. At war's end, Tito executed Ustashe and Chetnik sympathizers alike.

Following the war, Tito's strong-arm policies galvanized the diverse loyalties of the Yugoslav peoples into a unique multicultural society—one that not only seemed to transcend the past but aspired to be a shrewd architect of the future. Though communist, Tito had, by the 1970s, negotiated Yugoslavia's independence from the Kremlin, positioning the republic strategically between the Soviet and Western powers. Yugoslavia became Eastern Europe's richest and freest nation. Calls for an independent Croatia or Serbia began to fade, along with memories of the hatred and violence that had erupted during the war.

In Bosnia, for example, many Slavic Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Jews, and Gypsies based their political identity not upon their ethnic, religious, or nationalistic affiliations, but upon the constitutionally assured tolerance of their diverse cultural heritage. Between 1981 and 1991, nearly 20 percent of all marriages in Bosnia-Herzegovina were between people of different cultural and national backgrounds. The older tribalisms were waning; people saw themselves simply as "Bosnians." And when the world descended upon Bosnia in the winter of 1984, it was enchanted by a host that seemed to exemplify the Olympic ideal of universal harmony. Bosnia in general, and its jewel, Sarajevo, in particular, became an international symbol of the virtues of pluralism.

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