It was 2:30 p.m., Skopje time. The date was September 11. The place was the office of the Macedonian president. Most of the people in our generation will remember in detail what they were doing at the moment when they learned of “it.” It is a subtle irony that I learned how vulnerable our world is while talking to the Macedonian president. For a decade, Macedonia was something between a state and a modus vivendi. For a decade Skopje was the capital of fragility, and it was in Skopje that I saw the World Trade Center collapsing after the attack of the terrorists.

One of the numerous manifestations of the trauma of September 11 is the feeling that others are misunderstanding or misinterpreting the meaning of the event. It is this obsessive feeling that others are not getting it that contributes to the profound sense of insecurity.

What changed on September 11 is fundamentally our basic intuition about the world we live in. When the suicide bombers destroyed the World Trade Center we all saw how the twin towers collapsed. What was not seen on CNN was the collapse of a third structure-an invisible tower, where the dominant paradigm of the last decade has been sheltered. What collapsed on September 11 was the Hollywood version of liberalism that was crowned as the post-Cold War paradigm. The Hollywood version of liberalism was marked by the deception of victory. The decade of best-selling wars and win-win solutions is over.

On the night of September 11, a movie theatre in Skopje was still showing the best-selling movie Air Force One. Harrison Ford, playing the president, was confronted with a choice between saving his family, captured by terrorists, and saving his country. The plot is as ancient as Antigone. The difference is that the president decided to choose both. He saved his country, and he saved his family-this has been the theme for more than a decade. Like the zero-casualty wars and other sweets of the postwar period, all Hollywood illusions of the last decade collapsed on September 11.

In the world after September 11, liberals and conservatives face completely different challenges. Liberals should understand that America was attacked for what it is, and conservatives should accept that America is hated also for what it has done, or for what it decided not to do.

In the way the 1930s are unintelligible if we fail to understand the logic of anti-Semitism, in like manner, the next decade will be unintelligible if we do not study the sources and twists of the present anti-Americanisms. Anti-Americanisms-in the plural-and not an ideologically comfortable anti-Americanism-singular-should be at the center of our attention. In the case of the Balkans, radical Islam and religious difference do not explain the rise of anti-Americanism. Muslims in Sarajevo and Kosovo are among America’s best friends. It is the frustration of transition, along with America’s policies in the region, and the growing gap between elites and the public that can give us an idea of who hates America in the Balkans, for what reasons, and with what consequences. September 11 is a fundamental challenge to the liberal paradigm because it will redraw borders between safety and civil rights. Majorities now have an opportunity to speak of how insecure they feel.

September 11 can also redraw real borders in the Balkans. The decade of the proliferation of weak and failed states had seemed to be over. The Balkans are now off the radar, and when they come back I suspect that the project of creating multiethnic societies will not be the driving force. After September 11, the obsession is not democracy; the obsession is governability. The current debate on the future of post-Taliban Afghanistan best illustrates the post-postcolonial dilemma the liberal paradigm is facing today. Is it possible to intervene without being colonial; or, put a different way, is it possible to be colonial without being hated?