Introduction

What did the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia represent? Was he “radical evil” incarnate, as Susan Sontag (1999) has suggested, or just another Balkan strongman (Djilas 1993) trying to survive? Michael Ignatieff (1999, p. 75) suggested that he “developed a new style of post–Cold War authoritarian populism” just as he had “pioneered ethnic cleansing and the use of refugees as a weapon of war” (p. 74). Of course, Milosevic lost the war with NATO. And perhaps the most appropriate label given to him nowadays is the one originally given and officially sanctioned by Louise Arbour in her capacity as the chief prosecutor for the UN tribunal in the Hague: “War criminal.”

The Milosevic episode is a typical example of one of the central dilemmas since the fall of communism: the persistence of dictatorships, or at least of highly imperfect or “ugly” democracies and the problems caused by the interaction and conflict between these regimes and the democracies. The Cold War with communism may have disappeared, but other conflicts with dictatorships have taken its place. The most obvious examples in recent years have been the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, along with the other Middle East dictatorships and the continuing possibility of conflict with China. And there is also the never-ending standoff between Fidel Castro of Cuba and the United States.