The arrest of General Ratko Mladić, will be greeted with jubilation by the surviving victims of the Balkan wars of the 1990s in which he played so notorious and so grisly a part. His capture is a boost for Serbia's democratically elected government, which will now hope to advance its long-stymied quest for EU membership. It is also a fillip for international justice, in the battered form of the UN's international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

But most of all, the arrest of Mladić marks a symbolic end point to the long, shameful trail of failed politics, impotent diplomacy, and bloody ethnic warfare that engulfed the constituent parts of former Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the cold war. This horrific era revisited upon a shocked and disbelieving Europe the half-forgotten ghosts and spectres of its violent 20th-century history. And in ending that conflict, it fell, once again, and humiliatingly for the EU, to the United States to step into the ring and do what Europe could not do for itself.

The Bosnian Serb general's leading civilian partner, Radovan Karadžić, was captured in 2008 – an arrest that encouraged a sense of inevitability that the man mostly closely associated with the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys would eventually follow his co-defendant into custody.

All the same, Mladić proved remarkably hard to catch, a fact testifying to the fierce loyalties he inspired among the ultra-right military, paramilitary and political factions of the Milošević period. That Slobodan Milošević, chief architect of the nightmare dream of a "Greater Serbia", is dead and gone adds to the sense of an era coming to an end.

Mladić's victims, and those who advocate the supremacy of pan-national justice for those suspected of the most heinous crimes – genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes – will hope that, unlike his mentor Milošević, Mladić will live to face the final verdict of the court in The Hague.

Arguments that he should be tried in Serbia, certain to be heard in the coming days, will almost certainly be ignored by western powers. Yet, when he confirmed the arrest, the Serbian president, Boris Tadić, indicated the Belgrade government, at least, would not block his transfer to The Hague.

"On behalf of the Republic of Serbia I can announce the arrest of Ratko Mladić. The extradition process is under way," Tadić said. "This removes a heavy burden from Serbia and closes a page of our unfortunate history."

Serbian officials consistently dismissed suggestions that Mladić was hiding in Serbia itself. The US state department cables, disclosed by WikiLeaks, reported Serbian hints that Mladić was most probably under Moscow's protection and may have even been residing in Russia.

The fact that despite everything, Mladić was discovered on Serbian soil, the question of how he was finally cornered and captured, and why it took so long, will now be the subject of exhaustive inquiries once the initial excitement dies down.

Parallels are certain to be drawn with last month's tracking down of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, despite that country's government's similarly firm insistence that he was not hiding in its territory. And, as in case of the al-Qaida chief, the presumed existence of support networks, official and unofficial, that enabled Mladić to escape detection will come under highly critical scrutiny.

Who helped him? And on whose authority? And who turned a blind eye? More arrests may yet follow, especially if the general starts talking. One immediate theory circulating across the Balkans was that the time of Mladić's arrest was directly linked to the imminent report to the UN security council by the war prosecutor Serge Brammertz, who was expected to fiercely criticise Belgrade's failure to capture.

Whatever the eventual answers, and they may be long in coming, the arrest is likely to help advance Serbia's hopes of EU membership, as Tadić has been quick to affirm. This in turn will aid Serbia's acceptance as a modern nation state that has finally broken with its tormented past.

Despite continuing concerns about its level of co-operation with The Hague, the European commission gave Serbia the green light to open talks, and then sign, a "stabilisation and association" agreement in 2008, a move that opened the way for eventual full EU membership. But the Netherlands, whose UN soldiers were humiliated at the Srebrenica "safe haven", blocked further progress while Mladić was still at large.

Closer Serbian ties to Europe may have other important ramifications. One is that Belgrade's bitter resistance to Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence may in time be mitigated, allowing Kosovo in its turn to advance its own claims to consideration as an EU member.

A second is that Serbia may ineluctably move away from its historical ally Russia, a trend already in evidence in recent years, but one that is now likely to accelerate.

With Croatia moving towards EU membership, Slovenia already in, and Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Albania queuing up too, a settlement of the "Balkan Question" that so bedeviled 19th-century Europe (and sparked the first world war) may finally be in prospect.

It may seem absurd that such grand pan-European consequences could be contingent upon the fate of one man. But that has often been the way of Europe's history. Not until Napoleon was confined on St Helena, or Hitler died in his bunker, or Stalin died in his bed, did the wheels of history definitively and decisively turn. Mladić is not nearly in their league, either as an historical personality or as a wager of war. But it is not an exaggeration to say that his refusal to surrender blocked a whole nation's and an entire region's hopes of lasting peace, prosperity and redemption. It seems that obstacle has now been removed.