Is it the hour of Europe again?

“IF ONE problem can be solved by the Europeans, it is the Yugoslav problem,” Luxembourg’s then-foreign minister, Jacques Poos, asserted in 1991.

The Soviet Union was formally, and largely peacefully, dissolved at the end of that year, but ethnic tensions in the Balkans were on the rise, and Poos was adamant that, since Yugoslavia was a European country, Europe, not the United States, should manage the growing crisis there.

“This is the hour of Europe,” he proudly declared. And yet, in the years that followed, Yugoslavia endured a bloody disintegration process, and Europe proved incapable of doing much about it.