Chauvinism doesn't come out of thin air, nor should leftists regard it as the cause of the wars in the region. One should look at the post-WW2 history of Yugoslavia, internal & external causes of economic problems before the wars, the West's recognition of the breakaway republics (whose boundaries were never meant to become the external borders of independent nation-states), the Western support of right-wing nationalists, and so forth. Both in the NYT Magazine article and Nathan's own post, _the Western imperialism disappears from the picture altogether_.
And what did Albanians in Kosovo get out of all this? Of course nothing like "self-determination," whose possibility only existed in befogged minds of some leftists who supported the war. Now they are colonial subjects of a Western protectorate, policed by the KLA gangsters who do not hesitate to kill and rob Albanians, in addition to Serbs, Gypsies, Montenegrins, etc. The West won't even pay enough to truly rebuild Kosovo, and with Serbia economically isolated, the region's economic recovery must wait for a long time. Meanwhile, we have a fine precedent established for future NATO interventions.
Yoshie