Review Articles: Milošević: malicious lunatic, faulty product, or baffling enigma?

Maybe one reason why analyses of the rise and rule of Slobodan Milošević so often turn out to be unsatisfying is that they are forced to combine a small subject, an undistinguished bureaucrat who developed into the contemporary face of mass murder, with a large question, the genesis and nature of evil. The question is big enough that efforts to examine it independently, whether from philosophical, theological, social–psychological or historical perspectives are always bound to appear tendentious or incomplete. And Milošević as a personality, however many questions his brief tenure as a global attention-getter raise, is an utterly inadequate vehicle to carry the weight of the question. Any treatment that is not simply a bad book is forced to choose between highlighting the characteristics of the vehicle in a mystifying way or diverting attention to the road the vehicle travels and losing the vehicle in the process. These twin impulses are demonstrated in two recent analyses of the Milošević phenomenon. Vidosav Stevanović, a prominent Serbian novelist and poet, seeks to match Milošević’s psychological craving for power with mythological and authoritarian impulses in Serbian culture. Lenard Cohen, a respected American political scientist, tries to situate Milošević in the context of regional and global political developments, moving toward an explanation that sees his power interacting with a socio-cultural environment and the calculations of other political figures, both of which showed an unnerving tendency to play into the Serbian caudillo’s hands. A comparative examination of the two books shows, if nothing else, the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two perspectives. While Cohen’s work is undoubtedly, from the point of view of evidence, methodology and quality of analysis, the better book of the two, it may be that Stevanović offers a level of insight into the meaning of Milošević that Cohen lacks. At the end there remain