Balkans in the Cold War

Positioned on the fault line between two competing Cold War ideological and military alliances, and entangled in ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, the Balkan region offers a particularly interesting case for the study of the global Cold War system. This book explores the origins, unfolding and impact of the Cold War on the Balkans on the one hand, and the importance of regional realities and pressures on the other.  Fifteen contributors from history, international relations, and political science address a series of complex issues rarely covered in one volume, namely the Balkans and the creation of the Cold War order; Military alliances and the Balkans; uneasy relations with the Superpowers; Balkan dilemmas in the 1970s and 1980s and the ‘significant other’ – the EEC; and identity, culture and ideology. The book’s particular contribution to the scholarship of the Cold War is that it draws on extensive multi-archival research of both regional and American, ex-Soviet and Western European archives.

Svetozar Rajak is Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK, the Academic Director of LSE IDEAS Centre and a member of the editorial board of the Cold War History journal. He is author of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the Early Cold War: Reconciliation, Comradeship, Confrontation, 1953-1957 (2010).

Evanthis Hatzivassiliou is Professor of Post-war History at the University of Athens, Greece. He chairs the Academic Committee of the Foundation of the Greek Parliament for Parliamentarism and Democracy. He is the author of Greece and the Cold War: Frontline State, 1952-1967 (2006); and NATO and Western Perceptions of the Soviet Bloc: Alliance Analysis and Reporting, 1951-1969 (2014).

Eirini Karamouzi is Lecturer of Contemporary History at the University of Sheffield, UK, and co-director of the Cultures of the Cold War network. She is the author of Greece, the EEC and the Cold War, 1974-1979: The Second Enlargement (2014).

Konstantina E. Botsiou is Associate Professor in Modern History and International Politics at the University of the Peloponnese in Greece. She is the author of Griechenlands Weg nach Europa: von der Truman-Doktrin bis zur Assoziierung mit der Europäischen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft, 1947-1961 (1999) and the 3-volume Konstantinos Karamanlis in the Twentieth Century (2007), co-edited with C. Svolopoulos and E. Hatzivassiliou.