Twentieth-century Southeastern Europe endured three, separate decades of international and civil war, and was marred in forced migration and wrenching systematic changes. This book is the result of a ...year-long project by the Open Society Institute to examine and reappraise this tumultuous century.A cohort of young scholars with backgrounds in history, anthropology, political science, and comparative literature were brought together for this undertaking. The studies invite attention to fascism, socialism, and liberalism as well as nationalism and Communism. While most chapters deal with war and confrontation, they focus rather on the remembrance of such conflicts in shaping today's ideology and national identity.
Building Market Institutions in South Eastern Europe—a study of impediments to investment and private sector development in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the former Yugoslav ...Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, and Serbia and Montenegro—yields fundamentally new insights for improving the region’s business environment, economic development, and prospects for growth. It focuses on four core topics: Business competition and economic barriers to entry and exit Access to regulated utilities and services Corporate ownership, transparency of business accounts, and access to finance Mechanisms for commercial dispute resolutionEach topic is empirically investigated across all eight South Eastern European countries through the systematic use of data from multiple sources: Official data from each country in the region Results from two annual rounds of quantitative, firm-level surveys covering 1,600 firms Results from 40 originally developed enterprise-level business case studiesThe result is an innovative analysis of cross-country comparisons and the development of key policy challenges from a regional perspective. Building Market Institutions in South Eastern Europe, a collaborative effort between the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, offers important practical insights for all policymakers and observers concerned with the future of South Eastern Europe. It makes concrete recommendations for reforms that would ease the constraints on domestic and foreign investment, an essential step in sustaining growth and reducing poverty in the region.
With the need to handle persisting problems and conflicts from the past while coping with new economic and political structures, Southeast Europe proves to be a challenging yet fruitful testing ...ground for establishing a long-term process of social and economic integration. This volume provides a theoretical and comparative overview which examines the prospects for spatial cohesion in this region.
The world wars, genocides and extremist ideologies of the 20th century are remembered very differently across Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, resulting sometimes in fierce memory disputes. ...This book investigates the complexity and contention of the layers of memory of the troubled 20th century in the region. Written by an international group of scholars from a diversity of disciplines, the chapters approach memory disputes in methodologically innovative ways, studying representations and negotiations of disputed pasts in different media, including monuments, museum exhibitions, individual and political discourse and electronic social media. Analyzing memory disputes in various local, national and transnational contexts, the chapters demonstrate the political power and social impact of painful and disputed memories. The book brings new insights into current memory disputes in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. It contributes to the understanding of processes of memory transmission and negotiation across borders and cultures in Europe, emphasizing the interconnectedness of memory with emotions, mediation and politics.
Religion as a Conversation Starter is the first comprehensive analysis of the present state of interreligious dialogue for peacebuilding in Southeast Europe. It is based on empirically grounded and ...policy-oriented research, carried out throughout the Balkans. The study maps recent interreligious relations in this part of the world, throwing light on both the achievements and challenges of interreligious dialogue for peacebuilding in particular, and offering a set of up-to-date policy recommendations, whilst contributing to a greater understanding of the local particularities and how they relate to broader trends transnationally. Interreligious dialogue has been a central tool in the continuous international efforts to promote peaceful living together in multicultural and multireligious societies. This fascinating monograph explores the place of interreligious dialogue as a primary method in conflict resolution and peacebuilding, and will be of interest to scholars of religious and peace studies, as well as those who advocate and carry out organized interventions in religion-related spheres.
This volume brings together a diverse group of scholars from North
America and Europe to explore the history and memory of Germany's
fateful push for power in the Balkans during the era of the two
...world wars and the long postwar period. Each chapter focuses on one
or more of four interrelated themes: war, empire, (forced)
migration, and memory. The first section, "War and Empire in the
Balkans," explores Germany's quest for empire in Southeast Europe
during the first half of the century, a goal that was pursued by
economic and military means. The book's second section,
"Aftershocks and Memories of War," focuses on entangled
German-Balkan histories that were shaped by, or a direct legacy of,
Germany's exceptionally destructive push for power in Southeast
Europe during World War II. German-Balkan Entangled Histories
in the Twentieth Century expands and enriches the neglected
topic of Germany's continued entanglements with the Balkans in the
era of the world wars, the Cold War, and today.
Zones of Conflict Fouskas, Vassilis K
2003, 2003-02-20, 20030101
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The US has major interests in the Balkans, the Greater Middle East and the Eurasian zone, which determine its political and military strategies in the region. What are these interests, and what ...strategies are used to ensure that they are maintained? Examining the balance of power between the US, the EU and key EU states, Vassilis Fouskas offers a critique of US foreign policy and its underlying motivations. Fouskas argues that the major US objectives include control over gas and oil producing zones; safe transportation of energy to Western markets at stable prices; and the elimination, but not destruction, of America's Eurasian competitors. He asserts that US foreign policy is therefore driven by the desire to maintain a strategic partnership with key EU states, while preventing the emergence of an alternative coalition in Eurasia capable of challenging US supremacy. How does the US manage its interests in Eurasia and what are the particular strategies the EU has elaborated so far to deal with America's supremacy? Has US foreign policy undergone a dramatic U-turn after the end of the Cold War or, for that matter, after September 11th? What are the roles of Germany, France, Britain and Turkey, and how do EU-Cyprus relations affect the balance of power? This book tackles these questions and argues that the emergence of a social democratic administration in Eurasia is a feasible alternative to American unilateralism.
The article advocates for the imperative need to compile an interactive digital ethno-linguistic atlas of the Metohija region in Kosovo (Alb. Rrafshi i Dukagjinit, “Dukagjin Plain”). Over the course ...of two millennia, this area has been a unique arena for interaction among diverse ethnic and linguistic groups, including paleo-Balkan tribes, Romans, Albanians, Balkan Romance speakers, South Slavs, Rumelian and Anatolian Turks, as well as Roma (Romani, Ashkali, and “Egyptians”), among others. Remarkably, the languages and cultures of this region are still studied independently, often in isolation from one another. The formation of a comprehensive Russian scientific discourse on a range of Metohija ethnolinguistic issues is deemed a crucial task within Balkan studies. The term “ethno-linguistic,” in line with the overarching synthesizing and aggregating approach of Balkan linguistics, is proposed to be employed in both its accepted meanings in Russian academia ― ‘ethnolinguistic’ (e.g., ethnolinguistic groups of people) and ‘investigating language in relation to culture’ (e.g., Moscow Ethnolinguistic School).The article raises the question of the specificity of the linguistic, ethnolinguistic, and cultural-anthropological landscape of Metohija against the backdrop of the broader Balkan context. It queries whether, due to centuries of close contacts between its ethno-linguistic groups, a linguistic and cultural union has evolved on this territory. To address this issue, an areal study is proposed, investigating the linguistic, dialectal, and cultural- anthropological micro-differentiation of all languages and cultures within the region in relation to local ethnic and social processes, focusing on interethnic, social, interfaith, cultural, and linguistic interactions. The proposed atlas program includes ethnolinguistic and sociolinguistic inquiries, cove-ring ethnic self-identification, migrations, linguistic aspects of marital strategies, etc. Subsequently, it encompasses questions reflecting all levels of language structure across the known Metohija territorial varieties and social dialects. Additionally, it addresses questions of ethnolinguistics in the traditional sense within Russian scientific understanding.The atlas aims to provide insights into the reasons, processes, and mechanisms behind the formation of linguistic and cultural unions or the hindrance of such convergent processes in specific micro-areas of the Balkan Peninsula.
A hybrid between Salix triandra and S. xanthicola, occurring in the Rhodope Mountains in northeastern Greece, is described as a new nothospecies. It differs from S. triandra by having distinctly ...hairy young stems and more deeply serrate-dentate leaf margins, and from S. xanthicola by a smooth, unstructured (without conicoids) wax layer on the lower side of the leaves and the presence of subsessile glands on the petioles.
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The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth within the framework of traditional production function for the period of 1990–2012 in 9 ...Black Sea and Balkan countries. For this purpose, we use Pedroni (1999, 2004) panel cointegration, Pedroni (2000, 2001) co-integration estimate methods and Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012) heterogeneous panel causality estimation techniques. The study has concluded that there is a long term balance relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth and renewable energy consumption has a positive impact on economic growth. Heterogeneous panel causality analysis results support growth hypothesis in Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Russia and Ukraine; feedback hypothesis in Albania, Georgia and Romania; neutrality hypothesis in Turkey and according to the panel data set including all nine countries the results support feedback hypothesis. With the findings, it was concluded that there is a significant impact of renewable energy consumption on economic growth in Balkan and Black Sea Countries.
•Explores the impact of renewable energy on economic growth in Black Sea and Balkan countries.•Employs panel cointegration and heterogeneous causality analyses.•Finds significant effect of renewable energy consumption on economic growth.•Finds bidirectional causality between renewable energy consumption and economic growth for the whole panel.
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