The Kosovo Moment: The United States and the Post-Cold War Balkans 138 pages, pdf  Download Back

The Kosovo Moment: The United States and the Post-Cold War Balkans

Publisher: Visar Xhambazi

Volume: 138 pages, pdf

Description:

The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serb nationalist on the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1914 incited the first Word War, ending a century of peace and order. The unresolved legacies of World War I further deepened the crisis resulting in another catastrophe, World War II—one of the most destructive and inhumane periods in modern history. Five decades after the horrors of World War II, Europe was shaken again. The wars in Yugoslavia put the Balkans back on the map of Europe and awakened history’s dark memories, an earlier historical logic of territorial wars, ethnic homogenization and nationalism.

The collapse of communism in the fall of 1989 produced the Wind of Change in Europe. The collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) absorbed most of the world’s attention. The West identified Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary as the first states in Eastern Europe that could be integrated into its institutions, the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). On the whole, the Balkan region was not regarded as important from a political and economic standpoint. During the 1980s, Yugoslavia was a crisis in the making, but when it exploded it became a priority.