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The Balkans in the Cold War Edited by Svetozar Rajak, Kostantina E. Botsiou, Eirini Karamouzi, Evanthis Hatzivassiliou. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 372 p, ISBN 978-1-137-43901-7
The Balkans is one of the more intriguing regions where the fault lines of the Cold War system met during the second half of the twentieth century. As the region is split directly between two competing military and ideological alliances, one would not expect it to differ much 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 defied outright, as NATO at one point became de facto obliged to militarily defend a country that was born as an example of orthodox Marxist-Stalinist socialism.
To summarize the main message of the volume, the Cold War was not always what it seems to us today. It was riddled with contradictions, as alliances that were considered to be based on rigorous ideological cohesion were not as cemented in ideology as they seemed to be, and alliances built on practical political interests proved to be more stable. The Balkans is the perfect area for the authors to demonstrate this. When discussing the Balkans and what shaped it during the Cold War, they argue it was both the outside force of the "systemic element of the Cold War itself" and the inside force of inherent regional realities and pressures. For the study of...