When war broke out in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, European commentators quickly reverted to old stereotypes of Balkan barbarism to explain the conflict. While Balkan experts such as Susan L. Woodward have argued that current problems in the region stemmed in part from post-Cold War realignments, popular constructions in the media preferred the more romantic notion of the perpetual Balkan powder keg. Yet this phenomenon of racist stereotyping cannot simply be attributed to the media's need for simplification, but is also to be found in political and intellectual discourses. The historian Mark Mazower has underlined the way in which western elites deliberately distanced the “West” from the atrocities in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. By describing the killing in Yugoslavia as “primeval and unmodern,” they succeeded in keeping “the desired distance from it” and from any parallels that might be made with xenophobia and nationalism in the heart of “civilized” western Europe. In a similar vein, the cultural critic Michael Ignatieff has observed the hypocrisy of intellectuals like himself, who rushed to Sarajevo to defend multiethnicity in that city, but were not prepared to challenge racism in their own countries. For, as Ignatieff has pointed out, intervention was as much about western European self-images as it was a defense of Bosnia: “we intervened to save ourselves. We wanted to show that Europe ‘meant’ something, stood for toleration within a peaceable and civilised civil society.”