As Milosovic's campaign of ethnic cleansing was just coming to light in the US, I was living in Germany.
I was a proud American and everywhere I went during those four years I was greeted with friendship and gratitude. Of course I occasionally ran into some knee-jerk anti-Americanism, but Bush, Sr.'s prosecution of his Iraq war (i.e., a noble objective, lots of allies, a clearly defined mission), was widely admired. Clinton was viewed as a sign that we were going to at least try to use our new-found status as the world's only superpower for good rather than evil. It was a good time to be an American living overseas.
Having landed in Germany with only English at my command, I had a daily 30 minute commute to my language classes and would give a lift to a fellow classmate, a young Albanian from Kosovo. He'd been a medical student, but the threat of ethnic cleansing had caused him to escape "through the woods at midnight", leaving his family behind to "protect our property".
Every day he would ask me, "Why won't Clinton help us?" When the US finally intervened he told me we'd saved his parents' lives. I started getting the cheek kisses after that.
It shouldn't surprise us that an American president -- the first to ever set foot in the country -- would be greeted enthusiastically:
The president was greeted by cheering crowds in one of the few European countries where his popularity is undiminished by the war in Iraq and other contentious issues.
The press, with it's notoriously short memory is trying to attribute the reception to Bush's position on including Albania in NATO and his statements about giving Kosovo independence (a position he seems to be trying to back out of), but I'm not buying it.
This is Bill Clinton's applause. Bush is pulling a Stephen Colbert, running across the stage with his arms raised, while the press scrambles to figure it out why it's happening.
They seem to have forgotten that it wasn't so long ago that this was the reception US Presidents got everywhere.