By looking through the prism of the West's involvement in the breakup of Yugoslavia, this book presents a new examination of the end of the Cold War in Europe. Incorporating declassified documents ...from the CIA, the administration of George H.W. Bush, and the British Foreign Office; evidence generated by The Hague Tribunal; and more than forty personal interviews with former diplomats and policy makers, Glaurdić exposes how the realist policies of the Western powers failed to prop up Yugoslavia's continuing existence as intended, and instead encouraged the Yugoslav Army and the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević to pursue violent means.
The book also sheds light on the dramatic clash of opinions within the Western alliance regarding how to respond to the crisis. Glaurdić traces the origins of this clash in the Western powers' different preferences regarding the roles of Germany, Eastern Europe, and foreign and security policy in the future of European integration. With subtlety and acute insight,The Hour of Europeprovides a fresh understanding of events that continue to influence the shape of the post-Cold War Balkans and the whole of Europe.
This book is about the process of Americanization of Yugoslav culture and everyday life during the sixties. After having fallen out of the Eastern bloc, Tito turned to American backing. In political ...spheres distance was carefully guarded, yet in the realms of culture and consumption the Yugoslav regime was definitely much more receptive. For Titoist Yugoslavia this tactic turned out to be rewarding. It stabilised the regime internally and gave it an image of openness in foreign policy. The book addresses the link between cultural diplomacy, culture, consumer society and politics. The main argument is that both culture and everyday life modelled on the American way were a major source of legitimacy for the Yugoslav Communist Party, and a powerful weapon for both USA and Yugoslavia in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds. Vučetić explores how the Party used American culture in order to promote its own values and how life in this socialist and capitalist hybrid system looked like for ordinary people, living in a country with communist ideology wrapped in capitalist form. The book offers a careful reevaluation of the limits of appropriating the American dream. The analysis raises doubts toward both the uncritical celebration of Yugoslavia’s openness and the exaggerated picture of its authoritarianism.
Drawing on visual materials (film, art, graffiti, street-art, public advertisement, memorials), the essays of this collection offer detailed views on the cultural and political dynamics that preceded ...and emerged in the wake of the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s.
In 1992 Yugoslavia finally succumbed to civil war, collapsing under the pressure of its inherent ethnic tensions. Existing accounts of Yugoslavia's dissolution, however, pay little regard to the ...troubled relationship between the Yugoslav Federation and the European Community (EC) prior to the crisis in the early 1990s, and the instability this created. Here, Branislav Radeljic offers an empirical analysis of the EC's relations with Yugoslavia from the late sixties, when Yugoslavia was under the presidency of Josep Broz Tito, through to the collapse of the Yugoslav federation in 1992, after the rise of Slobodan Milosevi? and the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars. Radeljic explores the economic, political and social elements of these discords, and also places emphasis on the role of Slovenes, Croats and other diasporas - focusing on their capacity to affect policy-making at a Europe-wide level. Radeljic argues convincingly that a lack of direction and inadequate political mechanisms within the EC enabled these non-state actors to take centre-stage, and shows how EC paralysis precipitated a bloody conflict in the Balkan region.
Yugoslavia was unique among the communist countries of the Cold War era in its openness to mixing cultural elements from both socialism and capitalism. Unlike their counterparts in the nations of the ...Soviet Bloc, ordinary Yugoslavs enjoyed access to a wide range of consumer goods and services, from clothes and appliances to travel agencies and discotheques. From the mid-1950s onward the political climate in Yugoslavia permitted, and later at times encouraged, a consumerist lifestyle of shopping, spending, acquiring, and enjoying that engaged the public on a day-to-day basis through modern advertising and sales techniques. InBought and Sold, Patrick Hyder Patterson reveals the extent to which socialist Yugoslavia embraced a consumer culture usually associated with capitalism and explores the role of consumerism in the federation's collapse into civil war in 1991.
Patterson argues, became a land where the symbolic, cultural value of consumer goods was a primary factor in individual and group identity. He shows how a new, aggressive business establishment promoted consumerist tendencies that ordinary citizens eagerly adopted, while the Communist leadership alternately encouraged and constrained the consumer orientation. Abundance translated into civic contentment and seemed to prove that the regime could provide goods and services equal to those of the capitalist West, but many Yugoslavs, both inside and outside the circles of official power, worried about the contradiction between the population's embrace of consumption and the dictates of Marxist ideology. The result was a heated public debate over creeping consumerist values, with the new way of life finding fierce critics and, surprisingly for a communist country, many passionate and vocal defenders.
Making Yugoslavs Nielsen, Christian Axboe
Making Yugoslavs,
2014, 20141015, 2014, 2014-10-15, 2014-11-05
eBook
Christian Axboe Nielsen uses extensive archival research to explain the failure of King Aleksandar's dictatorship's program of forced nationalization in the interwar era.
This book presents the findings of an international research initiative of over 160 leading historians, social scientists, and jurists that brings together in one volume key evidence presented by all ...sides in the recent Yugoslav conflicts. It represents a direct assault on the proprietary interpretations that nationalist politicians and media have impressed on mass culture in each of the entities of the former Yugoslavia.
Balkan Babel Ramet, Sabrina P.
2002, 20020101
eBook
The fourth edition of this critically acclaimed work includes a new preface, a new chapter, and a new epilogue, as well as revisions throughout the book. Sabrina Ramet, a veteran observer of the ...Yugoslav scene, traces the steady deterioration of Yugoslavia’s social and political fabric in the years since the war for Kosovo. Ramet paints a strikingly original picture of Yugoslavia’s demise and the emergence and politics of the Yugoslav successor states.
Nearly twenty years after it ceased to exist as a multinational federation, Yugoslavia still has the power to provoke controversy and debate. Bringing together contributions from twelve of the ...leading scholars of modern and contemporary South East Europe, this volume explores the history of Yugoslavia from creation to dissolution.
Drawing on the very latest historical research, this book explains how the country came about, how it evolved and why, eventually, it failed. From the start of the twentieth century, through the First World War, the interwar years and the Second World War, to the road to socialism under President Tito and the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s, this volume provides up to date analysis of the causes and consequences of a range of events that shaped the development of this remarkable state across its various iterations. The book concludes by examining post-conflict relations in the era of European integration.
Traversing ninety years of history, this volume presents a fascinating story of how a country that once served as the model for multiethnic states around the world has now become a byword for ethno-national fragmentation and conflict.
Contributors include Dejan Djokić, James Ker-Lindsay, Connie Robinson, Mark Cornwall, John Paul Newman, Tomislav Dulić, Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Dejan Jović, Nebojša Vladisavljević, Florian Bieber, Jasna Dragović-Soso and Eric Gordy.
Dejan Djokić is Senior Lecturer in History at Goldsmiths, University of London. His publications include Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia (2007) and Nikola Pašić and Ante Trumbić: The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (2010).
James Ker-Lindsay is Eurobank EFG Senior Research Fellow on the Politics of South East Europe at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also the author of Kosovo: The Path to Contested Statehood in the Balkans.
"...this is a crucial book which painstakingly restores half-forgotten acotrs to the historical stage. It is indispensable reading for scholars and students alike, as it redresses the balance of agency between elite and non-elite actors, while at the same time highlighting the multifaceted nature of the political issues with which Yugoslavia was faced in both of its incarnations." - Richard Mills, University of East Anglia in European History Quarterly
Introduction Dejan Djokić and James Ker-Lindsay 1. Yugoslavism in the Early Twentieth Century: The Politics of the Yugoslav Committee Connie Robinson 2. The Great War and the Yugoslav Grassroots: Popular Mobilisation in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914-18 Mark Cornwall 3. Forging a United Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes: The Legacy of the First World War and the ‘Invalid Question’ John Paul Newman 4. National Mobilisation in the 1930s: The Emergence of the ‘Serb Question’ in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia Dejan Djokić 5. Ethnic Violence in Occupied Yugoslavia: Mass Killing from Above and Below Tomislav Dulić 6. Yugoslavia in Exile: The London-based Wartime Government, 1941-45 Stevan K. Pavlowitch 7. Reassessing Socialist Yugoslavia, 1945-90: The Case of Croatia Dejan Jović 8. The Break-Up of Yugoslavia: The Role of Popular Politics Nebojša Vladisavljević 9. Popular Mobilisation in the 1990s: Nationalism, Democracy and the Slow Decline of the Milošević Regime Florian Bieber 10. The ‘Final’ Yugoslav Issue: The Evolution of International Thinking on Kosovo, 1998-2005 James Ker-Lindsay 11. Coming to Terms with the Past: Transitional Justice and Reconciliation in the Post-Yugoslav Lands Jasna Dragović-Soso and Eric Gordy
