Quite by chance, today I learned about Leopold Kohr, a Twentieth Century scholar from Austria who argued that most problems in the world of his time had to do with bigness. That was the main cause of war. Big countries should be cut up into smaller ones, he claimed. According to him, though, ethnic borders should not matter. All that mattered was rational government of countries not big enough to cause any trouble to their neighbors. The map of Europe he had proposed was thus reminiscent of the United States, where straight lines, both horizontal and vertical, often serve as borders. Intrigued, I looked at the borders he had proposed for the Balkans. “Nah,” I almost shouted at once. “Straight lines would never do!” What is now Croatia would gobble up much of Slovenia and Bosnia, for instance, but it would jettison parts of Slavonia and Dalmatia. Unthinkable! And then I looked into Kohr’s life a bit more closely. Born in 1909, he died in 1994. Much of the drama in the Balkans happened after his death. But he should have known better. Much better. Coming from Austria, of all places, he should have been suspicious of straight lines from the very start.