Reading The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy in the context of the Kosovo war provides an unexpected perspective that enables one to understand that America may have just passed through a watershed experience.
One parallel can be found between the Boer War and Kosovo, with Kruger in the role of Milosevic. While not exact, questions of national prestige came into play in much the same way for Imperial Britian as they apparently have for post-Imperial America (and its NATO partners).
A central subplot in the multigenerational family romance is the rivalry between Val Dartie and young Jolly Forsyte which leads them to leave university careers and enlist in the Army to fight the Boers -- despite Jolly's initial sympathies with the Afrikaners standing up to England.
At first the conflict seems very far away and unimportant to the family. Older Forsytes reflect how British wars are fought by professional soldiers and do not concern ordinary middle-class folk. In a way, this has been the American attitude from Vietnam to Kosovo.
However, a series of victories over the British by the Boers caused young Jolly to differ from his elders. He feels he must stand with his country, even if he thinks it may be wrong.
But that is not the primary reason he enlists. The catalyst is the love of Val for his sister, a union Jolly opposes partly out of jealousy and partly out of disapproval of Dartie's family. His father was a wastrel and a gambler who abandoned his mother, running off to South America with a ballet dancer.
After a series of confrontations, including a fistfight, Jolly announces -- in front of Val and his sister -- that he has enlisted in the Army to fight in South Africa. Val, in order not to look like a coward, also enlists.
Tragically, Jolly catches enteric fever and dies in a South African hospital during the war. Val emerges from the conflict with only a leg wound, and marries Jolly's sister. He then emigrates to South Africa and raises horses.
The point of the novel is that the motivations for going to war are often quite different from the dramatic issues which concern statesmen. Rather, they are personal jealousies, power struggles, and romance. One subtext is that these forces combine to affect the course of nations. The irrational has an unacknowledged power over the lives of men.
The "foresight" of the Forsytes is not sufficient to cope with the emotional undercurrents that pull and tug this way and that on the souls of the family, the nation, and the world.
After the Boer war, everything changes for the family. Val does not return, the the values that had held the family together -- prudence, thrift, property -- are rejected by the young.
In this way, the Boer conflict prepares the way for what I certainly had thought, prior to reading Galsworthy's epic, was cynicism resulting from the horrendous experiences of World War I. But the seeds were already to be found in the South African campaign. The mass slaughter of a generation during the Great War is foretold (just as many say the Spanish Civil War presaged World War II)
Nihilism, is already undercutting all the Forsytes had believed in.
Ironically, perhaps, Val's leg wound keeps him out of the First World War. And the Forsytes seem to be less affected by that conflict than the smaller, yet highly significant Boer war.
So it is with Kosovo. Although it is still unclear what has happened, or what the final map will look like, one thing is clear. The old certainties did not hold. Things did not go as planned (though as Tolstoy points out in War and Peace, they never do in wartime).
The way people will look at governments, countries, nations, and so on will have changed. Conventional attitudes towards armies and international conflicts will likewise be different. Those who return home from the Kosovo theater will bring their experiences to bear on the American scene.
Like the Vietnam veterans who carried their experiences with them, they will slowly re-enter American society, and transform what seems solid, proper, and established.
Another "value shift" is in the works. What it will mean, we do not yet know. When we will recognize it, we cannot tell. But just as the Forsyte family adapted to changes in their environment after the Boer war, so Americans will find that the world after Kosovo will be a different one from before.
Alistair Cooke's Letter From America (BBC)