About this item
Highlights
- "The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the western world not only because of their ferocity and their geographic location, but also because of their timing.
- About the Author: V. P. Gagnon Jr. is Associate Professor of Politics at Ithaca College.
- 240 Pages
- History, Europe
Description
About the Book
V. P. Gagnon Jr. believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power.
Book Synopsis
"The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the western world not only because of their ferocity and their geographic location, but also because of their timing. This violence erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant, in a country that had only a few years earlier been seen as very well placed to join the west. In trying to account for this outburst, most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have resorted to the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality; in short, the Balkans as the antithesis of the modern west. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the wars in Yugoslavia is the extent to which the images purveyed in the western press and in much of the academic literature are so at odds with evidence from on the ground."--from The Myth of Ethnic WarV. P. Gagnon Jr. believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict.Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon's view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon's noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.
Review Quotes
Beautifully researched and written.... This is an excellent volume that makes an important and timely contribution to our understanding of the collapse of Yugoslavia.
-- "International Affairs"Gagnon presents an impressive and very original 'social constructivist' analysis of the recent wars in Bosnia and Croatia. In refuting approaches that assume deeply felt ethnic hatreds, the author contends that Yugoslav elites responded to the end of the Cold War by pursuing strategies that would ensure their hold on power and privilege.... This is a must-read for those who want a deeper understanding of the conflict processes in the former Yugoslavia.
-- "Choice"V. P. Gagnon challenges some widespread notions about the dangerous linkage between ethnicity and the upsurge of violence in the post-Cold War world, and he does it crisply and with plenty of carefully marshaled data.
-- "Foreign Affairs"About the Author
V. P. Gagnon Jr. is Associate Professor of Politics at Ithaca College.