I was going to say this is like movie/book x, but I can’t think of any work of fiction that even comes close.

Random Kosovo/Serbia stuff from the last few days.
First, an interesting Indian perspective on Kosovo:
[T]he truth is that the birth of Kosovo is also a profound testament of the failure of the nation state form in Europe to accommodate ethnic diversity. As Michael Mann, in an important article on the “Dark Side of Democracy” had noted, [...]

In James Gleick’s bestseller, Chaos: Making a New Science, one of the recurring phrases is “period three implies chaos.” Grossly simplified, once things start oscillating among three stable states, chaos is inevitable and ubiquitous. In politics, particularly German politics, three parties did not imply chaos, but rather orderly transitions with the hinge party making a [...]

So Armenia had a Presidential election last week. Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian — the establishment candidate — won in the first round, supposedly with 53% of the vote.
I’m not much of a prognosticator. I do it sometimes, but I’m not very good at it. Still, here it is: two weeks [...]

Well, okay — they just elected a Communist as their President.
And AKEL, Cyprus’ sort-of Communist Party, isn’t exactly a bunch of ragged proletarians. Excepting some fiery rhetoric, a tendency to wave red flags, and a proliferation of pictures of Che, it’s not too different from a standard European party of the left. AKEL [...]

So Milo Djukanovic is back as Montenegro’s Prime Minister again.
Djukanovic is a damn interesting character. When Yugoslavia broke up, most of the pieces were dominated by guys in their fifties and sixties — Milosevic, Izetbegovic, Tudjman. Hell, Gligorov of Macedonia was a WWII vet in his seventies.
Montenegro was the odd exception. [...]

So a mob attacked the US, Croatian, Turkish and Bosnian embassies in Belgrade today. The US embassy — evacuated in advance — was looted and partially burned. The other embassies also suffered varying degrees of damage.
This came at the same time as a government-sponsored mass demonstration against Kosovo’s declaration of independence. [...]

Karl Marx said that ideology is part of the social superstructure, merely a decorative overlay on the brutal truth of the economic base. Millian liberalism was really just an expression of the pounding steam engines, Jacquard looms and downtrodden apprentices of 1840s Manchester, just as absolutism had been built on the assumption that society would [...]

A developing story, of course, but the BBC is reporting that the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy recognizing or pledging to recognize the independence of Kosovo. Wikipedia is also quick off the mark with its entry on the now-official flag.
The EU has papered over its differences, with the common foreign and security policy consisting [...]

This doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of attention, but Kemal Kerencsiz was arrested last month.
Kemal Kerincsiz is a Turkish lawyer. He’s also the guy who tried to prosecute Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, and several other writers for “insulting Turkishness”. And he’s been arrested — along [...]