We in the West have rationalized our acquiescence in the Bosnia atrocities, telling ourselves that, however terrible, this bloodletting is localized. Too bad about Bosnia, we say; it's really terrible to see these people, day after day, at each other's throats. But ultimately, it's not our problem. We can believe this, however, only because we fail to recognize the nature of contagion in human affairs. Not all human conduct is equally contagious. Some years ago, an anthropologist investigated those behaviors that are most contagious among human beings. He was intrigued by how, when one person in a group yawns, those who see him have the impulse to yawn as well, and the way laughter is infectious. Also on his list were coughing and smiling. In this set of contagious behaviors, the anthropologist discerned a fascinating common thread: they all involved exposing the teeth. The countless eons of our species development, evidently, had made the baring of the teeth especially irresistible to emulate. It is as if the sight of another brandishing our most primitive weapons compels the rest of us to show that we have them too. Among the contagious behaviors of our kind, therefore, the specter of violence may lie particularly close to the heart. Common sense can always find practical and mundane explanations for our grotesque actions. Why did violence against foreigners escalate recently in some Western European democracies? It's the stress of economic recession, common sense has told us, and the burden of increased immigration. That's part of the picture of course. But it was not just coincidence, I would suggest, that it was precisely when it became clear that the great powers would do nothing to stop ethnic cleansing, mass murder and rape in the Balkans that skinheads started attacking foreigners in Western Europe. Like a gangrene of the spirit, the message spread from Yugoslavia that the most hideous of our impulses could be freely indulged. The Balkans are a special case, we have told ourselves. These people have been killing each other for centuries. But it is clear the Balkans are hardly unique in harboring such menacing ghosts. We have all been killing each other for centuries. And throughout the world there has been the temptation, whenever psychological and social boundaries have been disturbed, to mobilize a special "Us" to bludgeon a despised "Them." Common-sense also has ready explanations for the recent scary success of fascism in Russia: it is the failure of Yeltsin's economic reforms to deliver, the economic misery of the Russian people, that accounts for the recent dark turn in Russian politics. Everything seems inevitable in retrospect. But Yeltsin himself did not know that his gamble with the Parliament would trade the hardliner Hesbulatov for the monster Zhirinovsky. He, too, underestimated the less visible daemonic forces that have been unleashed into the European system. The costs of putting the beasts back in their cages in the Balkans would be too high, the leaders of our rich and mighty nations have decided, while the Serbians first bit off a piece of Croatia and then proceeded to gnaw on the bones of Bosnia. But now the contagion of growling nationalism --the kind that wields hatred and violence as the means of achieving group identity and dignity-- has infected what is still a great power armed with nuclear weapons. What a time to countenance this baring of the teeth, a time when the face of Europe was newly fresh for molding! It is already hard to recall the sense of hopeful possibilities that arose as the cold war ended and the peoples of Eastern Europe gained their freedom. By wringing our hands and turning our backs --that is, by doing nothing-- we let the figure of death, with his naked, grimacing teeth, stand triumphant over those newly-born hopes. At the very moment when the norms of just and peaceful relations might have been made more deeply entrenched, we have instead made our world once again safe for atrocity.

Andrew Bard Schmookler is the author of Sowings and Reapings: The Cycling of Good and Evil in the Human System. ??