Yet More Unrest From the Country That Gave Us World War I : Yugoslavia: The country is sliding into chaos, and has an unhappy habit of pulling the rest of the world along. Europe is already choosing up sides.

Bosnia-Hercegovina, one of the six republics of exploding Yugoslavia, is the kind of place most Americans hope that they will never have to know much about. It’s poor, remote, hard to pronounce and strategic--the kind of place where old quarrels smolder and wars sometimes break out.

On the banks of the tiny Miljacko River in the quaint Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, there are two footprints set in concrete, marking the spot where a hot-headed young Serb assassinated a Hapsburg archduke and started World War I. This is one of the many differences between greater Los Angeles and the Balkans: We have the Boulevard of Stars, they have the Boulevard of Assassins.

Unfortunately, Bosnia, Sarajevo and hot-headed Serbs are back in the news. The Serbian leadership, trying to build a “greater Serbia” in the wreckage of Yugoslavia, wants to partition Bosnia-Hercegovina; the two-thirds of Bosnians who aren’t ethnic Serbs think this is a terrible idea, and the war in Croatia is threatening to spread south.

Civil war in Bosnia will almost inevitably lead to violence in two of Yugoslavia’s other trouble spots--and could well lead to armed intervention by neighbors like Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Hungary, all of which have old claims to parts of Yugoslavia. With Macedonia, Yugoslavia’s poorest and southernmost republic, recently voting for independence, the prospects for chaos have grown.

Western diplomats shake their heads in exasperation and pity. European newspapers are filled with tut-tutting over these new and dangerous signs of the old Balkan talent for blood feuds. But far worse is the way the trouble in Yugoslavia is revealing that the rest of Europe is still caught in the old, tragic approaches.

The new Europe of 1992, based on the European Community and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was supposed to end the bickering and scheming that divided Europe’s nations in the past. That hope is beginning to look frayed; the troubles in the Balkans reveal that all Europe’s major countries are up to their old tricks.

Poor and remote as the Balkans have been, other European countries have been meddling there since the Ottoman Empire began to weaken 250 years ago. The great rivalry between Germans and Slavs for control of Central Europe was fought there. The Serbs, Slavic and belonging to the Eastern Orthodox Church, relied on their fellow Orthodox Slavs in Russia to oppose the Roman Catholic and German Hapsburgs. The French, ever eager to make trouble for the Germans, also sided with the Serbs.

One of the most deeply rooted proverbs in Balkan culture is the saying: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Croats, the Hungarians and the Slovenians, long enemies of the Serbs, traditionally sought backing from the Germans. In World War II, the Croats formed a Fascist pro-German independent state, and the pro-Nazi Hungarians annexed disputed Serbian territory on the border.

Now the Croats and Slovenians are again looking to the Germans for support and, for sentimental and practical reasons, they have been getting it. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl has repeatedly alarmed his European Community partners by his willingness to support the ambitions of the breakaway republics.

The Serbs think they know what is happening: The Germans are trying to set up a Fourth Reich to include Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia in a pro-German system of states that will control the Balkans. The Germans reply this is nonsense--but something like this will be the logical outcome of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The two German-speaking countries of Germany and Austria are, by far, the most important Western powers in this part of the world already. Slovenia and Croatia will be completely dependent on the German economy.

The old German alliance with the Hungarians is also revived. “I will never forget this,” said Kohl in an emotional meeting with Hungarian leaders as communism began to crumble in Eastern Europe. It was Hungary’s decision to allow East Germans to pass freely through Hungary to the West that made the collapse of the East German communists--and German reunion--inevitable.

Serbs fear a German-dominated bloc in the region will leave them second-class citizens. They are less developed and less Westernized in outlook than the Croats and Slovenians; Serbs see the formation of a German-centered system in the region as a recipe for continued Serbian backwardness and isolation.

Serbia has not, however, been isolated in the crisis. The dictatorial neo-communism of Serbia’s President Slobodan Milosevic--a kind of Serbian Ariel Sharon--has not made many friends, but the French are almost as worried about German power as the Serbs, and they have worked hard to keep Germany from following its inclination to recognize Croatian and Slovenian independence. The Russians, absorbed by their own problems, can do little, but have made clear their sympathies lie with the Serbs.

Suddenly, the old game of Balkan politics is back on the table. Europe’s great powers are scheming against one another and backing rival surrogates. Germany’s growing influence is giving its neighbors heartburn, even as nationalistic politicians in Germany have been arguing that the reunited country must have a “Germany first” foreign policy.

This is an ugly mess. At one level, the diplomats of Europe intrigue and scheme; at another, armed folk militias drive their neighbors from their ancestral villages. Repeated EC-sponsored cease-fires have collapsed; Europe’s much-vaunted systems of consultation and policy coordination do not seem to be working.

This is bad news, because the Balkans are not the only problem in millennial Europe. The boundaries separating Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, Germany and the Balkan states are just as fuzzy, and the hatreds run almost as deep, as they do in the Balkans. Josef Stalin took land from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany after the war and distributed it among western Soviet republics. As Stalin’s 1945 boundaries crumble in northeastern Europe, the strains on Europe will grow.

Instability in Eastern Europe is not just a local problem. That has been the lesson of Sarajevo in the 20th Century--and is as true today as ever. This instability is not just a European problem, either. The train of events that began with the assassination in Sarajevo dragged the United States into a world war three years later; we are far more wrapped up in European politics now than we were back then.

The wretched blood feuds in the Balkans still have the power to embroil the whole world in crisis. We ignore them at our peril. The possibility--probability--that upheaval in the Soviet Union will enlarge the crisis should make all realize that prospects for a stable European order are, for some years to come, very dim. The world is already weary of the headlines and war stories coming out of Eastern Europe, but we ain’t seen nothing yet. This crisis will be with us for a long, long time, and before Eastern Europe settles down, we will have learned how to find all kinds of tiny, unpronounceable places on the map.