...ll There's a story about Robespierre that has the preeminent rabble-rouser of the French Revolution leaping up from his chair as soon as he saw a ... ...h the Habsburgs: Bosnia to the latter in return for a free hand in Macedonia to the former. The wily Austro-Hungarians regarded the Serbs as canno... ...ainst the Russians and the Turks. In 1885, Bulgaria was at last united - north and formerly Turk-occupied south - under the Kremlin's pressure. The... ... - was the single most important agent of retardation and putrid stagnation in its colonies, a stifling influence of traumatic proportions, the cau... ...ssociation to a power hungry monstrosity. In 1912 Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece - former bitter foes - formed the Balkan League to confront an eve... ...0 "Getting history wrong is an essential part of being a nation." Ernest Renan, French historian "We spent the 1990's worrying about a Greater ... ... fundamentalists have more in common with Muslim militants than with East Coast or French intellectuals. Muslims have always been the West's most... ... was the failure that dissuaded them and others besides. The West lost its former colonies not when it lied egregiously, not when it pretended to ...