by Marko Attila Hoare

Slobodan Milošević represented the last gasp of a discredited type of politics, but he was also the harbinger of a new one – not just in the former Communist East, but also in the West. His policies ensured that Communist dictatorship would not go peacefully to its grave in Yugoslavia, as it had in most of Eastern Europe, but would instead create a spectacular conflagration, claiming the lives of tens of thousands of innocent victims before burning itself out in total defeat. Yet despite this record, or perhaps in some sense because of it, Milošević’s cause became the cause of all those across Europe and the world – conservatives of the left and conservatives of the right – for whom the idea of progress under liberal capitalism was and remains anathema.