South Eastern Europe

Author: Centre for Co-operation with Non-members, Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, OECD Staff, Centre for Co-operation with Non-members, SourceOECD (Online service

Edition: illustrated

PublisherOECD Publishing, 2003

ISBN 9264100717, 9789264100718

380 pages

Education is one of the priorities identified in the Stability Pact adopted in 1999 to strengthen the economic and social development of countries in the south eastern Europe region. This is the first volume of an OECD thematic survey of national education systems in the region which seek to address policy issues and barriers to reform, as well as providing individual country overviews and a regional outlook. The countries covered in this volume are Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia and Kosovo. The evaluations are based on four main characteristics: availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability.

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Genocide After Emotion

Author: Stjepan Gabriel Meštrović

Edition: illustrated

Publisher: Routledge, 1996

ISBN 0415122945, 9780415122948

225 pages

The failure to adequately respond on the part of the major Western superpowers to the atrocities in the Balkans constitutes a major moral and political scandal. In Genocide After Emotion Mestrovic and the contributors thoroughly interrogate the war, its media coverage and response in the West. The result is alarming, both for the progress of the war and for the condition of our society today: the authors argue that the West is suffering from a 'postemotional' condition - we are beyond caring about anything anymore.

This book contains contributions from Philip J. Cohen, Norman Cigar, Slaven Letica, James J. Sadkovich, C.G. Schoenfeld, Thomas Cushman and Igor Primoratz.

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The Balkans since 1453

Author: Leften Stavros Stavrianos

Edition: 2, illustrated

Diterbitkan oleh C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2000

ISBN 1850655510, 9781850655510

970 pages

First published in 1958, The Balkans since 1453 is recognized as one of the most important critical accounts of Balkan history. In it, Stavrianos synthesizes fundamental information and describes the development of the Balkans, its people, and its nascent nation-states in a manner essential to a reasoned understanding both of Greek history, and the importance of the Balkans in European and world history.

As Greeks, we celebrate our heritage: the Golden Age of Athens and the Greek city states; Alexander the Great and his conquest of Persia and spread of Hellenism; Byzantium, which though Roman at its inception, was transmuted by a synthesis of Greek Orthodoxy and Hellenism; Greek Orthodoxy, the faith that sustained Hellenism through the Ottoman subjugation; the day, March 25 th , that commemorates the war of independence and creation of the first modern Greek state; and, OXI, Premier Metaxas’ response to Mussolini in 1940, when the Italians sought to occupy Greek territory. These, all, deserve celebration.

However an appreciation of Greek history can be much richer when it is considered in the context of the history of the Balkans, where late nineteenth and twentieth century conflicts followed two thousand years of migration and settlement by disparate peoples. The result was an eventual consolidation of ethnic groups and the formation of national states. All this transpired under Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman rule, strongly influenced by the Eastern Orthodox faith, and subject to pressures exerted by actions of the powerful states of Europe.

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Balkan idols: religion and nationalism in Yugoslav states

Author: Vjekoslav Perica

Edition: illustrated

Publisher: Oxford University Press US, 2002

ISBN 0195148568, 9780195148565

332 pages

Reporting from the heartland of Yugoslavia in the 1970s, Washington Post correspondent Dusko Doder described "a landscape of Gothic spires, Islamic mosques, and Byzantine domes." A quarter century later, this landscape lay in ruins. In addition to claiming tens of thousands of lives, the former Yugoslavia's four wars ravaged over a thousand religious buildings, many purposefully destroyed by Serbs, Albanians, and Croats alike, providing an apt architectural metaphor for the region's recent history.

Rarely has the human impulse toward monocausality--the need for a single explanation--been in greater evidence than in Western attempts to make sense of the country's bloody dissolution. From Robert Kaplan's controversial Balkan Ghosts, which identified entrenched ethnic hatreds as the driving force behind Yugoslavia's demise to NATO's dogged pursuit and arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, the quest for easy answers has frequently served to obscure the Balkans' complex history. Perhaps most surprisingly, no book has focused explicitly on the role religion has played in the conflicts that continue to torment southeastern Europe.

Based on a wide range of South Slav sources and previously unpublished, often confidential documents from communist state archives, as well as on the author's own on-the-ground experience, Balkan Idols explores the political role and influence of Serbian Orthodox, Croatian Catholic, and Yugoslav Muslim religious organizations over the course of the last century. Vjekoslav Perica emphatically rejects the notion that a "clash of civilizations" has played a central role in fomenting aggression. He finds no compelling evidence of an upsurge in religious fervor among the general population. Rather, he concludes, the primary religious players in the conflicts have been activist clergy. This activism, Perica argues, allowed the clergy to assume political power without the accountablity faced by democratically-elected officials.

What emerges from Perica's account is a deeply nuanced understanding of the history and troubled future of one of Europes most volatile regions.

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