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Serbias have come and gone, and their boundaries have moved about. This text, rather than being a history, is an attempt to look at the historical forces, actors, ideas and periods which have moulded the entities that go by the name "Serbia". These are the mediaeval rulers and the church; the principality and the kingdom of modern times; the imperial rule of Ottomans and Habsburgs; the two world wars; the unification with other Slav populations and territories; the ideology of the three-named Yugoslav kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; that of the brotherhood-and-union of Yugoslav nations in the communist federation; and the disintegration of Yugoslavia and its aftermath. Following Serbia's emergence from the ruins of Tito's Yugoslavia and of Milosevic's regime, Stevan Pavlowitch strives to get away from both the "doomed-to-violence" and the "doomed-to-martyrdom" explanations favoured respectively by some Western and some Serbian interpreters. He seeks to pose questions rather than to provide answers, and to move forward from the past rather than to look back to idealized ages or read history backwards.
Yugoslavia appears to many observers a country riddled with ethnic divisions, financial problems and consequent instability - which the present inefficient leadership in Belgrade is unable to heal. Yet in spite of everything, including the vacuum that still remains following the death of Tito, the country survives as a single entity.
The history of the Second World War in Yugoslavia was for a long time the preserve of the Communist regime led by Marshal Tito. It was written by those who had battled hard to come out on top of the many-sided war fought across the territory of that Balkan state after the Axis Powers had destroyed it in 1941, just before Hitler's invasion of the USSR. It was an ideological and ethnic war under occupation by rival enemy powers and armies, between many insurgents, armed bands and militias, for the survival of one group, for the elimination of another, for belief in this or that ideology, for a return to an imagined past within the Nazi New Order, or for the reconstruction of a new Yugoslavia o...
The history of the Second World War in Yugoslavia was for a long time the preserve of the Communist regime led by Marshal Tito. It was written by those who had battled hard to come out on top of the many-sided war fought across the territory of that Balkan state after the Axis Powers had destroyed it in 1941, just before Hitler's invasion of the USSR. It was an ideological and ethnic war under occupation by rival enemy powers and armies, between many insurgents, armed bands and militias, for the survival of one group, for the elimination of another, for belief in this or that ideology, for a return to an imagined past within the Nazi New Order, or for the reconstruction of a new Yugoslavia o...
This new biography offers a straightforward, balanced approach to the man who reigned over Yugoslavia for thirty-five years. Stripping away the myths about Tito and his life, Stevan Pavlowitch places him within a larger historical perspective as a key twentieth-century European leader. Pavlowitch begins with an examination of the economic, social, and national factors that helped create Josip Broz Tito. He goes on to consider Tito's role as a national unifier after the chaos of the Second World War, demonstrating how Tito brought Yugoslavia together by offering something to each of his country's constituent ethnic communicates. While admitting that Tito remains something of a mystery because...
Encompassing the period from the Neolithic era to the troubled present, this book studies the peoples, societies and cultures of the area situated between the Adriatic Sea in the west and the Black Sea in the east, between the Alpine region and Danube basin in the north and the Aegean Sea in the south. This is not a conventional history of the Balkans. Drawing upon archaeology, anthropology, economics, psychology and linguistics as well as history, the author has attempted a "total history" that integrates as many as possible of the avenues and categories of the Balkan experience.
This historical essay explores Greece in the 1990s. It seeks to illuminate vital aspects of the Greek phenomenon using themes such as politics, institutions, society, ideology, foreign policy, geography and culture.
Against Massacre looks at the rise of humanitarian intervention in the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon to the First World War. Examining the concept from a historical perspective, Davide Rodogno explores the understudied cases of European interventions and noninterventions in the Ottoman Empire and brings a new view to this international practice for the contemporary era. While it is commonly believed that humanitarian interventions are a fairly recent development, Rodogno demonstrates that almost two centuries ago an international community, under the aegis of certain European powers, claimed a moral and political right to intervene in other states' affairs to save strangers f...
Heather Williams describes the political and military activities of the Special Operations Executive, especially its relationship with British policy-makers, the Foreign Office and the military high command during World War II in Yugoslavia.
This book focuses on the cultural processes by which the idea of a Yugoslav nation was developed and on the reasons that this idea ultimately failed to bind the South Slavs into a viable nation and state. The author argues that the collapse of multinational Yugoslavia and the establishment of separate uninational states did not result from the breakdown of the political or economic fabric of the Yugoslav state; rather, that breakdown itself sprang from the destruction of the concept of a Yugoslav nation. Had such a concept been retained, a collapse of political authority would have been followed by the eventual reconstitution of a Yugoslav state, as happened after World War II, rather than t...