Why are so many in the European Union eager to take credit for the pro-European turn in the recent Serbian elections when few in the Union are enthusiastic about enlargement, with the possible exception of Croatia? You dedicate an entire page to puzzling out the answer to this conundrum (“Balkan Exceptionalism,” May 17, 2008), but you manage not to mention either America or Russia. Not even once. If there is any reason at this juncture for Balkan exceptionalism, as you call it, it is the tension between these two powers over Serbia and Kosovo, both of which are squarely on the Union’s prospective soil. To wit, the results of the Serbian elections, no matter how precarious in view of the interminable internal wrangling between pro-western and pro-eastern forces, are a slap in Russia’s face. There, the conundrum mercifully resolved.