[In the following review, Borden asserts that Drakulic's focus on the individual in The Balkan Express is important to understanding the war in that region.]

A month into the shelling of Sarajevo, I interviewed a law professor at the university there. In retrospect it was a relatively hopeful period, before the worst atrocities occurred and the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina was divided. It seemed terribly urgent then to talk about measures the international community could undertake, and the professor had several important proposals. Speaking by telephone from a safe place beneath a staircase, however, he emphasized how inappropriate and even hypocritical it was to discuss “high politics” at such a time.

The remark confused me. If “high politics” meant what the world could do to halt the nightmare, I had to disagree, and I dutifully plodded on in search of big answers to the big questions. A year later, however, with Sarajevo still besieged and a hitherto unimaginable range of atrocities well known, I now understand. For international politics—indeed the whole official peace process itself—is conducted on a rarefied level, with little necessary connection to or even impact on the events on the ground. It is all too easy to debate the power politics of Washington, Whitehall and the warlords in the Balkans while having scant idea of the lives of the people we profess to be concerned about.

The best corrective to this trap is the writing of journalist Slavenka Drakulić, in The Balkan Express, a new collection of articles about the war. Through short but deeply felt essays on everything from house paint and high-heeled shoes to point-blank murder, Drakulić tells the story of the Balkan crisis as people are living it. This is firsthand war reporting without body counts or strategic analyses; in-depth political commentary without the statements of presidents or the opinions of self-appointed experts. Drakulić focuses on individual lives (often her own or those of her family), using the perversions that war forces onto everyday life to reveal the true complexity of the crisis and the enormity of the task of reconciliation.

Drakulić's central theme, as she explains in an excellent new introduction to last year's How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (her collection that includes several pieces originally published in The Nation), is the “special kind of loneliness which enters your soul in the middle of war.” This emptiness breeds fear, and this fear brings the defensive mechanism of categorizing people into “us” and “the other.” That dehumanizing step, in essence the identity politics of nationalism, is the real horror—after which, Drakulić explains, many cruelties become inevitable. It is then only a matter of degree from being rude to an old friend who has become a refugee to dropping a bomb into a basement where several of your enemies are cowering.

In the extraordinary title essay in Balkan Express, Drakulić describes a train ride from Vienna to Zagreb as a kind of nonstop journey into nightmare. Only a few years ago the trip would have been convivial, with passengers chatting in a friendly way, perhaps about their shopping, while passing through a broad space called Yugoslavia. Now the war is an inescapable “brand” on ex-Yugoslavs of all nationalities. In Vienna they feel uncomfortable. In the compartment on the train, all are terrified to speak, knowing the merest phrase will identify their “ethnic side.” “In that moment the madness we are traveling towards might become so alive among us that we wouldn't be able perhaps to hold it back,” she fears.

But suffering in welcome silence is not protection enough, as Drakulić comes across an article in the Belgrade daily Borba alleging a hideous war-time atrocity. “Report[ing] bestialities as the most ordinary facts,” she writes, “gruesome pictures are giving birth to a gruesome reality; a man who, as he reads a newspaper, forms in his mind a picture of the testicles being drawn up from the well will be prepared to do the same tomorrow, closing the circle of death.”

Contradicting the stereotype of hysterical Balkans intent on slaughtering one another, Drakulić describes hesitant killers, reluctant nationalists. One explanation is that she writes from Croatia during the defensive period; there is a notable lack of coverage of the treatment of Serb minorities in Croatia or of Croatian expansionism in Bosnia and, perhaps unavoidably, no writing about the situation for Serbs in Serbia. The pieces, with some very notable exceptions, are mainly about journalist colleagues, actors and other professionals; about herself, her mother and daughter; and about the looming presence of her late father, a former Partisan and army general.

But Drakulić's achievement is in describing the trickle-down effect of ethnic homogenization, showing how even the very liberal and highly educated elite cannot avoid the pull of nationalism. Sometimes the pressures are fairly obvious. In December, the leading Zagreb weekly Globus attacked Drakulić and four other writers as feminists, Marxists, Communists and, worst of all, Yugoslavs—in short, not adequately Croat. As Drakulić writes in a widely quoted piece:

The war is … reducing us to one dimension. … Before, I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character—and yes, my nationality, too—now I feel stripped of all that. I am nobody because I am not a person anymore. I am one of 4.5 million Croats. … The ideology of nationhood … has … been turned into something like an ill-fitting shirt. … You might not like [it]. … But … there is nothing else to wear. … And … perhaps it would be morally unjust to tear off the shirt of the suffering nation—with tens of thousands of people being shot, slaughtered and burned just because of their nationality. … Before this war started, there was perhaps a chance for Croats to be persons and citizens first, then afterwards Croats. … The last twelve months have taken away that possibility.

Drakulić does not try to provide the big answer; nor does she sound the by-now familiar (and well justified) alarms of a wider Balkan war. Instead she cautions that the deeper changes experienced by those in the region could infect the rest of Europe. “I don't know what the war is,” she concludes,

but I can see that it is everywhere. It is in a street flooded with blood … in Sarajevo. It is also in [our] not understanding it, in my unconscious cruelty towards [a refugee friend], … in the way it is growing within us and changing our emotions, our relations, our values. We are the war; we carry in us the possibility of the mortal illness that is slowly reducing us to what we never thought possible and I am afraid there is no one else to blame. We all make it possible, we allow it to happen.

War forces you to take sides, and if you don't oppose it, by design or default you are taking part in it.