The Balkans in the Cold War

by Svetozar Rajak (Editor), Konstantina E. Botsiou (Editor), Eirini Karamouzi (Editor)

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.

Genres: History

400 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 2017

Reviews

[Tomáš Madleňák · Rating 4 out of 5]

Balkans is one of the more intriguing regions where the fault lines of the Cold War system met during the second half of the 20th century. Being split directly between two competing military and ideological alliances, one would not expect it to be much different from other places where NATO and Warsaw pact forces looked at each other across the border lines. However, the Balkans was different. Being entangled in its own system of difficult and complex religious, ideological and nationalistic diversity, it defied some of the main assumptions of the Cold War and even created a situation where ideological differences were outright defied, as NATO at one point became de facto obligated to defend militarily a country that was born as an example of orthodox Marxist-Stalinist socialism.
To summarise the main message of the volume, Cold War was not always as it seems to us today. It was riddled with contradictions as alliances that were considered to be based of rigorous ideological cohesion were not as cemented in ideology as they seemed and alliances built on practical political interests proved to be more stable. The Balkans is for the authors a perfect area where to demonstrate this. When asked about the Balkans itself and what actually shaped it during the Cold War, this volume argues it was both the outside force of “systemic element of the Cold War itself” and the inside force of inherent regional realities and pressures. For the study of the Cold War itself it is however extremely important for a number of reasons.
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