By Roger Cohen

The journalist is a stranger who moves in the opposite direction from the crowd, toward danger, leaving the settled majority perplexed. Why, they ask, are you going over the lines? Why do you choose such a lonely existence? In search of a fair understanding, you say, and they shake their heads. There is nothing to understand, they insist, just write the truth!

But truths are many and that is the problem. Memory is treacherous, as distinct from history as emotion from form. Every war is fought over memory. Violent nationalism is revived memory manipulated as revealed truth.

Conflict is incubated in the contested “truths” the past bequeaths. Questions swirl: Who came first to the land, who planted the millennial olive trees, who killed whom first, whether the church predates the mosque, and what of the synagogue that may precede them both?

Identities are assembled piece by piece. Each drop of blood shed, each shrapnel scar on a wall, is annotated in the Book of Unforgiving. In the Balkans and the Middle East the events of a thousand years past can seem as vivid as yesterday’s. The enemy imperatives of Serb and Kosovar, of Arab and Jew, can demand that memory, like the fuse for a bomb, be shaped for maximum explosive effect. Truces last no longer than a cheap umbrella in a storm.

I first came face to face with the power of myth to generate war in the Balkans, at Kosovo Polje, or “The Field of Blackbirds,” where the Serbs were routed by the Ottoman Turks in 1389. The battle has since become the lodestone of Serbian nationalism, a defeat transformed into a symbol of Serbian heroism and selfless sacrifice.

Here, a quarter-century ago, as the Cold War order in Europe cracked, the Serbian nationalist leader, Slobodan Milosevic, declared: “For six centuries now, the heroism of Kosovo has inspired our creativity, fed our pride, and not allowed us to forget that once we were an army great, brave and proud, one of the few that in defeat stayed undefeated. Six centuries later, today, we are again in battles and facing battles. They are not armed, although such battles cannot be excluded yet.”

The rest is now history: a decade of war; the dismemberment of Yugoslavia; the ethnic cleansing of wide swathes of Bosnia as its Muslims (often called “Turks” by the marauding Serbs) were processed through Serb concentration camps; more than 100,000 dead; Sarajevo and Srebrenica; the NATO intervention in Kosovo; and the contentious emergence of several newly independent European states, the last of them Kosovo in 2008. For Serbia, the adrenaline of nationalist frenzy turned into the slow drip of loss, none more painful than Kosovo, whose overwhelming majority is Albanian but whose landscape is dotted with sites sacred to Serbs.

So, after all this, I had to rub my eyes at the Munich Security Conference, where the most extraordinary sight was that of Ivica Dacic, the Serbian prime minister, and Hashim Thaci, the prime minister of Kosovo, sitting together on the same stage, all smiles, talking about how they had reconciled and how, in the words of Thaci, “the greatest single difficulty was to liberate ourselves from the past.”

Israelis and Palestinians, take note.Between the two Balkan leaders sat Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign policy chief and the world’s most underrated diplomat. Her appointment in 2009 and the creation of the European External Action Service were much derided. But her successful mediation of Serb-Kosovar talks that began in 2011 and her contribution to securing an interim nuclear deal with Iran constitute major achievements. In the Balkans the “pull factor” of the European Union — its magnetic attraction to nations craving stability and freedom — has again been demonstrated. Serbia and Kosovo had to sort out their differences to stand a chance of getting in, and so they have. The maligned European Union is still a peacemaking machine.

Normalization was not easy. Dacic was born in Kosovo. His people’s feelings about the cradle of their civilization are passionate. He put the issue bluntly: Serbia believes Kosovo is part of Serbia. Kosovo does not. Kosovo is 90 percent Albanian. The Serbian economy has languished. “Who can be in favor of such policies? It is up to us to decide if we move forward or stick to the past.”

Serbs and Kosovars have decided. They found an agreed degree of autonomy for the tens of thousands of Serbs in northern Kosovo. They opened for trade. They held free elections. They circumvented outstanding differences. They put themselves on the road to the European Union.

Above all they set aside the potent symbolism of The Field of Blackbirds in favor of progress, discarded myth to discover commerce, and reasoned their way out of the prison of passionate certainties and revealed “truth.” /nytimes.com/