The real crunch will come if and when the new government moves to arrest Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military leader, who was more directly involved in many of the war’s most terrible massacres, in particular the murder of about 7000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. He is probably more closely guarded than Karadzic and is certainly more popular as a ‘war hero’. Apprehending Mladic will be a much more hazardous venture, and we should be correspondingly appreciative if and when it does take place.

One way or the other, a new geopolitics of the Balkans is now possible. The arrest marks a defeat for Moscow, which had long played the nationalist and anti-western card in Serbia, and which still maintains a strong grip over both the Serbian energy supply and the imagination of many Serbian Orthodox Pan-Slavists. It opens the way for membership of the European Union and, one hopes, ultimately of NATO as well. One of the last gaps in the creation of consolidated European democratic geopolitical space from Britain to the Bosphorus, from Scandinavia to Sicily, is in the process of closing.

Belgrade has seen such sharp transformations before, of course, and they did not always end happily. In March 1941 for example, the pro-Axis government in Belgrade was ejected by allied-leaning officers, who repudiated the pact with Hitler’s Germany. Winston Churchill famously remarked that ‘Yugoslavia has found its soul’. Shortly after, Hitler invaded, the Yugoslav capital was heavily bombed and the whole country fell under brutal occupation, accompanied by a lacerating civil war. No such Armageddon looms today, but there are still demons on the loose in Serbian political life, in the security apparatus, in intellectual circles, and in public opinion. Much of the population had still not quite come to terms with what was done in their name during the 1990s. Belgrade will therefore need help, rhetorical and practical, to make the last leap into Europe by arresting Ratko Mladic. Now is the time for Europe to reach out. Serbia has once more begun to find its soul, and we must make sure that it does not lose it again.