We often talk dismissively about "The Balkans", which we tend to see as a region of instability and violence, contrasting sharply with the peaceful remainder of our Continent. But the reality is that in the post-Cold War period instability and violence have been confined to one corner of the Balkans: Yugoslavia and, to a much lesser degree, its small Adriatic neighbour, Albania.
For, since the fall of the Iron Curtain a decade ago, the other countries of the Balkans, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, have been entirely peaceful and, as public opinion has shifted backwards and forwards, their governments have changed democratically.
Indeed, given the disturbed history of the whole of eastern, central and south-eastern Europe up to and throughout the first half of the present century, and given also the extraordinarily complex mix of peoples throughout much of this region, what is most striking - I would even say astonishing - about the past decade has been the moderation, restraint and good sense with which all but two of the countries in this half of Europe have managed their relations with each other and also most of the time with minorities in their territories.
As they look westwards towards our half of the Continent, most of those countries could, perhaps, be forgiven for comparing their domestic situation favourably with that of countries such as the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain, where throughout most of the past 30 years people's lives have been persistently disturbed by terrorism.
This achievement of peace, order and democracy in most of the eastern part of the continent, together with the fact that by the end of this decade this region has secured an overall economic growth rate twice that of western Europe, is all the more remarkable when one reflects upon the potential for conflict that for historical reasons existed between, and also in some cases within, those countries as they emerged from Soviet domination.
Quite apart from the scars left by German and Russian conquest and partitioning in 1939, Poland in the early part of this century had boundary conflicts with Lithuania (the capital of which, Vilnius, it had forcibly incorporated in its territory) and with Ukraine, whose western part had also been brought under Polish rule after the first World War.
Yet post-Cold War Poland has not merely refrained from any kind of irredentist claims on these lost territories but in recent years, under the auspices of the Partnership for Peace, has been carrying out joint military exercises with those two neighbours, and with Germany. Such joint exercises with our nearest neighbour are something that we in this country have yet even to imagine, never mind plan and undertake.
For its part Hungary, savagely diminished in size by the victorious Allies in 1919, and with almost one-third of its native Hungarian population cut off as substantial minorities in neighbouring Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, has during this decade established good relations with its neighbours. Once again this has been greatly helped by military co-operation, effected through common participation in the Partnership for Peace.
And, further south, in the heart of the much-maligned Balkans, Bulgaria, with similar claims to lost territories in Greece, Macedonia and Yugoslavia, as well as a history of past conflicts with its former colonial power, Turkey, has similarly abandoned territorial pretensions which three times in the past 115 years it had pressed successfully, if in each case very temporarily. Bulgaria now has good relations with all four of those neighbours.
None of this outbreak of good sense and moderation could reasonably have been predicted 10 years ago, when the Soviet grip on those strongly nationalist peoples ended so suddenly and dramatically. On the contrary, there then seemed every likelihood that old quarrels would soon break out again between many of these states, setting neighbour against neighbour.
Nevertheless today, just because one internally divided and unstable state, Yugoslavia (the peoples of which had been almost haphazardly thrown together by the chaotic events of the couple of weeks immediately following the ending of the first World War), dissolved into conflict and anarchy at the outset of this decade, an impression has been created in ill-informed western Europe of widespread instability throughout south-eastern Europe; an area described by what has become a pejorative rather than just a geographic term: "The Balkans".
The country that has suffered most, and most unfairly, from this widespread mental confusion has undoubtedly been Bulgaria, where I spent most of the past week. Since 1989 post-Cold War Bulgaria has had its share of changes of government, including, from 1994 to 1997, a return to power by the heirs of the old communist party, which severely set back economic progress.
But through these democratic changes of government Bulgaria has evolved into an internally stable and externally pacific state, which under its present energetic government has been making good progress towards economic recovery, achieving a 3 per cent growth rate last year. Until the NATO/Yugoslav war broke out, this growth had been projected to accelerate significantly: the OECD had forecast a 6 per cent growth rate for the current year.
All this has now been put in jeopardy by the way in which this war has effectively isolated Bulgaria from the rest of Europe. For Bulgaria has depended for its access to western Europe upon road, rail and river transport through Yugoslavia, all of which are now blocked as a result of the war.
Having reorientated 60 per cent of its trade from Russia (to which it now ships only 6 per cent of its exports) to western Europe, this blockage is a disaster for a country the economy of which is only just starting to recover from the longterm effects of half-a-century of Soviet domination and communist rule, and from the mistakes of 1994-97.
The situation would be much less serious if plans to replace an inadequate ferry by a new bridge across the Danube at the northwest corner of Bulgaria had been implemented. This would have offered an alternative route to Hungary and thus western Europe, bypassing Yugoslavia.
Unhappily, Romania has for many years stalled this project, apparently because it prefers to channel road as well as rail traffic across a bridge at Giurgiu, 150 miles downstream. This diversion, where truck-drivers are vulnerable to demands for bribes along the additional Romanian section of the highway, adds almost 250 miles to the road journey from Bulgaria's capital, Sofia.
BULGARIA'S external earnings could now also be hit by a loss of tourist traffic to the Black Sea coast and to ski resorts in the mountains, as a result of ill-informed holiday-makers failing to realise that Bulgaria is as peaceful as Yugoslavia is violent.
We in Ireland know all about this phenomenon: in the single year 1972, because of violence in Northern Ireland, the number of tourists coming to this State plummeted by two-fifths, and it took us a full five years to recover the ground then lost.
Despite the current low level of Bulgarian GNP per head (the purchasing power of which is barely one-fifth of our present level), the country's economy has a hidden strength in its educational system, in particular in the mathematical sciences.
This gives it an important high-tech capacity, and already firms like IBM and the Irish consultancy company Paragon, are drawing on these skills on the spot, employing Bulgarian computer programmers in their own country. For much software activity is capable of being undertaken anywhere in the world, and Bulgaria is now starting to compete with India in this respect, which will help to stem the inevitable brain drain from which it has started to suffer.
The scale of software activity in Ireland (last year software exports by some 750 firms here are estimated to have been worth well over £5 billion), together with our remarkable economic growth in recent years, have attracted the interest of the Bulgarian authorities, who are visibly keen to draw on our experience as a successful small member-state of the EU.
In Bulgaria as everywhere else there are mixed feelings about NATO's Yugoslav policy, but no sympathy at all with Milosevic who, in addition to the destruction he has wrought in his own country, has throughout the past decade inflicted considerable indirect economic damage on Bulgaria's economy.
During the past week the Bulgarian government has been uncertain what to do about Kosovan refugees. It has feared that acceptance of any significant number of displaced Kosovan Albanians could destabilise Bulgaria's vulnerable economy, although Thursday's EU foreign ministers' adoption of a long-term stability pact for the Balkans, supported by an initial €250 million fund, should ease those concerns.
Failure to help with this human tragedy so close to their own frontiers, while convoys of Turkish trucks can be seen speeding along their highways bringing aid to refugees in Macedonia, might damage the country's standing in the eyes of the EU, to membership of which they aspire.