WEST European policy makers tend to greet the worst aspects of political life in the Balkans as the norm for the whole region. Until a few weeks ago, they were helping to sustain Serbia's ruler, Slobodan Milosevic, even though the wars he had initiated in Croatia and Bosnia, and the economic sanctions his aggressive behaviour invited, has ruined Serbia perhaps for a generation.
Similarly, Albania's president Berisha, was shored up by Britain and Italy until his regime evaporated owing to the collapse of pyramid savings schemes which the government had tacitly encouraged.
Both were seen as strong men who could keep turbulent citizens in line and contribute to peace in adjacent trouble spots. Berisha restrained Albania nationalism in Macedonia and Kosovo while Milosevic forced the Bosnian Serbs to accept the Dayton peace settlement.
EU states have backed local despots because there is great scepticism about the ability of their peoples to aspire to any better form of government. No doubt the remarkable television images from Albania of emptied jails, looted armouries and apparent mob rule have reinforced prejudices about a region whose very name Balkan has become a metaphor for strife and fragmentation.
But there have been plenty of hopeful developments from the Balkans in the last five months. If the news values of Europe's media had been different, there might have been altered perceptions about the chances of peaceful change in Europe's "powder keg". Governments with roots in the Communist era have been removed in Bulgaria and Romania and in Serbia time is running out for Milosevic. Ordinary citizens, facing impoverishment as the region's economy declines, abandoned their apathy about political change and swelled protests against corruption, mismanagement and fraudulent elections.
Except in Albania, where the prospect of penury unleashed mass anarchy, street protests were usually controlled and peaceful. These were not spasmodic bursts of rage of the kind which occur in repressive states after the lid on the political pressure cooker has been lifted. In Bulgaria and Serbia, the State did two things unusual for the Balkans: it made concessions to its political opponents without using violence and acknowledged that its authority had limits.
In Romania, the largest state in the region, a genuine contest for power, which many thought impossible in such a flawed democracy, saw the triumph of the reformist Democratic Convention in November's elections.
A peaceful transfer of power took place and a remarkable reconciliation has ensued with the large Hungarian minority who have been deprived of influence for many years. Plans are afoot to restore many of the educational and cultural rights denied to them since the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. The two states, Hungary and Romania, are also working on a regional security pact as their applications to join NATO are being reviewed in Brussels.
INTER-ETHNIC conflict has been noticeably absent from the 1996-7 unrest. Cornered elites were this time unable to disable their opponents by stirring up ethnic hatreds. Indeed, the manipulation of nationalism by exCommunists has been failing as a strategy for control for several years. It blew up in Milosevic's face when his attempt to create a Greater Serbia from the ruins of Yugoslavia finally culminated in a US-led intervention. In Romania, President Iliescu's incompetent handling of nationalism hastened his departure from office.
The gravity of the economic crisis has made appeals to historic ethnic grievances redundant. The dismal record of regimes which had promised social protection to workers and peasants while allowing state assets to be plundered by party hacks and their clients, became impossible to conceal from ordinary citizens, at least in the cities, despite tight control of the State media.
Radical economic reforms launched in Romania in January, and planned for Bulgaria after elections next month, are widely seen as the first genuine engagement with capitalism the Balkan has seen in the 1990s. Low key reactions to austerity measures suggest a willingness to endure further hardship if it leads to the dismantling of economic and political structures inherited from Communist times and a re-launch of national institutions along western lines. But patience will crumble if the reformists in charge do not offer tangible hope of better times. Real earnings have tumbled by as much as 60 per cent since 1989 and the incidence of diseases like tuberculosis, associated with endemic poverty, is startlingly high.
The depth of the economic decline in the Balkans and the way it has spread through society exceeds in magnitude the catastrophe that overtook the capitalist economies during the Great Depression there are very few examples of infant democracies withstanding unaided the economic and social hardships which are the norm for millions of people there.
The level of external support for reformist governments will help to decide their fate. Targeted assistance in the Balkans to help them to rebuild collapsing national infrastructures and reduce the pain of economic shock therapy will probably be more beneficial for European security than an emphasis on NATO enlargement or resurrecting the mirage of EU expansion towards the East.
The US is trying to get Balkan states to overcome their distrust of one another with its new SouthEast Europe co operation initiative. The EU emerged from similarly modest postwar initiatives as many of its cities lay in rubble and, by right, it should be west Europeans who are offering a helping hand to their Eastern cousins. Washington has filled the void because the Americans usually lack the disdain for the Balkans rife in our part of Europe. This negative mind set may well deter the EU from doing much to boost the reformist cause in the region. Currently, only France is willing to throw aside its Balkan complexes, President Chirac having become an active supporter of Romania's bid to join NATO.
The Balkans has suffered from West European failure to move towards a common foreign and security policy which, after all, is a core aim of the Maastricht treaty.
Individual states have instead pursued their own interests, Germany championing Croatia in 1991, but losing interest when human rights abuses tarnished the new state. Britain has followed a similar trajectory in Albania.
When a crisis in the region erupts that can, in part, be traced back to the short term or inconsistent behaviour of Western states, minimalist or zero response is usually all the EU can agree upon because its own institutional shortcomings prevent it dealing with emergencies such as in Albania.
Malcolm Rifkind, in his first policy speech on becoming Foreign Secretary in 1995, quoted with approval Palmerston's dictum that "the furtherance of British interests ought to be the sole object of a British Foreign Secretary".
Such a response led to the diplomatic carve up of the region between the Great Powers before 1918, creating unviable territories and rebellious minorities.
It is hardly surprising then that the track record of the European democracies towards the region over the last 100 years has fuelled defensive nationalism among local elites.
Today, liberalism, a desire for regional co operation, and a rejection of chauvinism shoots bursting through the rocky terrain off the Balkans, with Romania and Bulgaria leading the way and perhaps Serbia ready to follow. Even in prostrate Albania there are opportunities amidst the chaos to promote a new political elite which will make national reconstruction the priority rather than expropriating public property for private gain, which happened in the Berisha years.
It will be a tragic oversight if European powers fail to conquer their prejudices and put diplomatic and economic muscle behind reform in the Balkans. Well targeted assistance now could prevent explosions later from which Western Europe will not be able to shield itself.