The Balkans In The Cold War

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.

At the end of the Cold War, the Balkan states of South East Europe were in crisis. They had emerged from two decades of hardline communism with their economies in disarray and authoritarian leaders poised to whip up nationalist feelings so as to cling on to power. The break up of Yugoslavia followed in 1991 along with prolonged instability in Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. The Balkans After The Cold War analyzes these turbulent events, which led to violence on a scale not seen in Europe for nearly 50 years and offers a detailed critique of Western policy towards the region. This volume follows on from the recently published Outcast Europe: The Balkans, 1789 - 1989 - from the Ottomans to Milosevic, also by Tom Gallagher.

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

Examining two centuries of Balkan politics, from the emergence of nationalism to the retreat of Communist power in 1989, this is the first book to systematically argue that many of the region's problems are external in origin. A decade of instability in the Balkan states of southeast Europe has given the region one of the worst images in world politics. The Balkans has become synonymous with chaos and extremism. Balkanization, meaning conflict arising from the fragmentation of political power, is a condition feared across the globe. This new text assesses the key issues of Balkan politics, showing how the development of exclusive nationalism has prevented the region’s human and material resources from being harnessed in a constructive way. It argues that the proximity of the Balkans to the great powers is the main reason for instability and decline. Britain, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France and finally the USA had conflicting ambitions and interests in the region. Russia had imperial designs before and after the 1917 Revolution. The Western powers sometimes tolerated these or encouraged undemocratic local forces to exercise control in order to block further Soviet expansion. Leading authority Tom Gallagher examines the origins of these Western prejudices towards the Balkans, tracing the damaging effects of policies based on Western lethargy and cynicism, and reassesses the negative image of the region, its citizens, their leadership skills and their potential to overcome crucial problems.

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.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s is often described as the starting-point of the EEC/EU involvement in Western Balkan politics, as if no political relations had developed between the EEC and Yugoslavia during the Cold War era. Instead, this book shows that the origin of EEC-Yugoslav relations must be placed in the crucial decade of the 1970s. Contrary to received opinion, this work demonstrates that relations between the EEC and Yugoslavia were grounded on a strong political rationale which was closely linked to the evolution of the Cold War in Europe and the Mediterranean. The main argument is that relations between the two parties were primarily influenced by the need to prevent the expansion of Soviet influence in the Balkans and to foster détente in Europe.