Cold War In The Balkans

Positioned on the fault line between two competing Cold War ideological and military alliances, and entangled in ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, the Balkan region offers a particularly interesting case for the study of the global Cold War system. This book explores the origins, unfolding and impact of the Cold War on the Balkans on the one hand, and the importance of regional realities and pressures on the other. Fifteen contributors from history, international relations, and political science address a series of complex issues rarely covered in one volume, namely the Balkans and the creation of the Cold War order; Military alliances and the Balkans; uneasy relations with the Superpowers; Balkan dilemmas in the 1970s and 1980s and the ‘significant other’ – the EEC; and identity, culture and ideology. The book’s particular contribution to the scholarship of the Cold War is that it draws on extensive multi-archival research of both regional and American, ex-Soviet and Western European archives.

Analyses the crisis faced by the Balkan states at the end of the Cold War, the turbulent events that followed and Western policy towards the region.

Yugoslavia was well positioned at the end of the cold war to make a successful transition to a market economy and westernization. Yet two years later, the country had ceased to exist, and devastating local wars were being waged to create new states. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the start of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in March 1992, the country moved toward disintegration at astonishing speed. The collapse of Yugoslavia into nationalist regimes led not only to horrendous cruelty and destruction, but also to a crisis of Western security regimes. Coming at the height of euphoria over the end of the cold war and the promise of a "new world order," the conflict presented Western governments and the international community with an unwelcome and unexpected set of tasks. Their initial assessment that the conflict was of little strategic significance or national interest could not be sustained in light of its consequences. By 1994 the conflict had emerged as the most challenging threat to existing norms and institutions that Western leaders faced. And by the end of 1994, more than three years after the international community explicitly intervened to mediate the conflict, there had been no progress on any of the issues raised by the country's dissolution. In this book, Susan Woodward explains what happened to Yugoslavia and what can be learned from the response of outsiders to its crisis. She argues that focusing on ancient ethnic hatreds and military aggression was a way to avoid the problem and misunderstood nationalism in post-communist states. The real origin of the Yugoslav conflict, Woodward explains, is the disintegration of governmental authority and the breakdown of a political and civil order, a process that occurred over a prolonged period. The Yugoslav conflict is inseparable from international change and interdependence, and it is not confined to the Balkans but is part of a more widespread phenomenon of politic

As World War II drew to a close, the United States and the Soviet Union began to maneuver for position in postwar Europe, in the first exploratory moves of what would soon become a worldwide contest for power and prestige. In Bulgaria, Michael Boll finds a unique vantage point for study of the processes of international politics during these years of the emergence of the Cold War. Bulgaria, he writes, was to assume a significance for both the United States and the Soviet Union greater than that small nation's intrinsic importance to either Great Power. Bulgaria had joined the Axis—under pressure—during the war, though it alone among the Axis satellites had refused to declare war on the Soviet Union. Willing in 1943 to lend support to an American plan devised to bring about Bulgaria's surrender and its participation in the war against Germany, the Soviet by the fall of 1944 was to invade Bulgaria and form an alliance with the Bulgarian Communists, who offered dependable support in the Red Army's continuing war effort. When military objectives were replaced by the Soviet's political drive for consolidation of its newly won empire, the Bulgarian Communists remained indispensable allies and continued the determined campaign that culminated in 1947 in declaration of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. Boll refutes the frequent charge of American "nonpolicy" toward Eastern Europe in this period, concluding that the "loss" of Bulgaria was the result not of the lack of determined policy, but of a realistic assessment of American capabilities and strategic priorities. Cold War in the Balkans, drawing on important new Eastern European sources and newly declassified British and American archives, relates international diplomatic history to local political developments in a way that gives new depth to the study of Cold War origins.

What can outside powers do now to help heal the terrible wounds caused by Yugoslavia's wars? Why did the victors in the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War not act to stop the slaughter? The nature, scope, and meaning of the actions and inactions of outsiders is the subject of this book.

This book is aimed at presenting fresh views, interpretations, and reinterpretations of some already researched issues relating to the Yugoslav foreign policy and international relations up to year 1991. Yugoslavia positioned itself as a communist state that was not under the heel of the Soviet diplomacy and policy and as such was perceived by the West as an acceptable partner and useful tool in counteracting the Soviet influence.