The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (20 page)

The Balkans, or south-eastern Europe, may be defined as the states of Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and those which constituted the former Yugoslavia. Greece and European Turkey, though geographically part of the Balkans, are excluded because the former is a member of the EU and both are members of NATO.
Since the collapse of European communism in 1989–91 the Balkans have been more at the forefront of European and world affairs than at any time since the first world war. For this reason the evolution of Balkan politics has been determined as much by external as internal factors. The area has seen: the first preventative deployment of UN forces, along the Macedonian borders in 1992; the first use of UN peacekeepers in mainland Europe; the first shots fired in anger by NATO in 1994; and, tragically, both the highest casualties in any European conflict, the worst massacre (at Srebrenica in July 1995), and the greatest number of displaced persons in Europe since the second world war. It has witnessed the return, as prime minister, of an exiled king.
The centre of international attention was the collapse of the Yugoslav federation from which four new states, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Macedonia emerged. In April 1992 a new Yugoslav federation, consisting of Serbia and Montenegro, was formed. Of the four new states only Macedonia emerged without conflict. The secession of Slovenia in the summer of 1991 was relatively easy despite the initial intervention of the Yugoslav National Army, but Croatia's departure was much more bitterly disputed, not least because it, unlike Slovenia, contained large numbers of Serbs who did not wish to be included in a Croatian national state. Most bloody of all, however, was the fighting in Bosnia which lasted for over three years. It was not a war in the traditional sense of one side battling against another because the three main elements, Bosnian Muslim, Croat and Serb, shifted their alliances and all at one point or another fought the others. The United Nations forces originally deployed in Croatia extended their mission to Bosnia, initially to guarantee the flow of essential humanitarian supplies through Sarajevo airport. Later, as the fighting intensified, the UN passed to NATO the task of preventing further escalation of the conflict; this meant, primarily, disciplining the Serbs. In the summer of 1995 NATO bombing raids on Serbian communications systems, provoked by the shelling of a market place in Sarajevo, combined with the defeat of Serbian forces in Croatia at last hastened the move towards a settlement. A peace was agreed at Dayton, Ohio, in December 1995.
External force had been deployed only at the end of the Bosnian war. In 1999 it was used in the early stages of a new conflict, this time in Kosovo, a part of Serbia inhabited primarily by Albanians. Early in 1998 tensions had increased and a year later the Kosovo Liberation Army, backed by local Albanians, was in conflict with Serbian forces. The leaders of NATO feared a second Bosnia with large-scale massacres and therefore took military action against Yugoslavia. Bombing of that country began in March and continued until June. Thereafter Kosovo passed effectively into international control with elections to its assembly finally taking place in 2001.
Surprisingly, none of the states bordering the former Yugoslavia, many of which had historic claims on parts of it, intervened. This was in no small measure because the external factors, primarily the EU, the USA, and the international financial institutions, upon which the Balkan states depended for economic regeneration, have insisted that no borders may be changed by force. Political reconstruction, though at times difficult, was much easier than economic regeneration. It was a relatively simple process to dismantle the apparatus of communist party control and to enact constitutional guarantees of individual liberties, press freedom and political pluralism, and to dissolve the links between the former ruling party and social organisations such as the trade unions. By the end of 1995 all the states of south-eastern Europe had, at least in theory, multi-party systems with assemblies elected by universal suffrage. In all states, except Bosnia and Hercegovina, general elections have brought about a change of government, though in Serbia in October 2000 it required considerable popular pressure on the streets to persuade the incumbent Slobodan MiloÅsevic to relinquish power in Yugoslavia. There was also political violence in Romania in 1990 and 1991 when miners from the Jiu valley were brought to Bucharest to intimidate student protesters and the government. Changes of government also came about as a result of street pressure in Bulgaria in 1990 and 1997, and in Albania in 1997, though a third attempt by the Jiu miners to march on the Romanian capital was prevented in 1999.
Ethnic differences which did much to destabilise and then ruin the old Yugoslav federation were always a factor in Balkan politics. In general ethnic tensions have been contained. In Romania the main party of the Hungarian minority has twice been included in ruling coalitions and promises of more education in Hungarian have been given, if not always fulfilled. In Bulgaria the Turkish minority has had strong influence on the formation of some cabinets and a number of concessions have been made to the Turkish and Islamic communities. After some tension in the early 1990s Albania too has promised that it will improve conditions for its largest minority, the Greeks. Slovenia has few non-Slovenes amongst its population, and since the end of the Tudjman era in late 1999 the Croatian government has been much less strident in its nationalist rhetoric and policies. Macedonia has faced the most severe problems, with unrest amongst the Albanian minority (officially 23 per cent of the population) leading to intervention by the EU and NATO in 2001.A persistent and more difficult problem centres upon the Roma who are found in all Balkan states. Most Balkan governments have made efforts to improve the lot of the Roma but the latter still find many reasons for complaint.
Corruption and crime are also endemic. Both were much encouraged by the imposition of sanctions on Yugoslavia, the profits to be made from sanctions-busting being so great that few could resist the temptation. A related phenomenon was the burgeoning of pyramid selling schemes. In states where personal financing was little developed, state welfare benefits were minimal, and inflation raged the chance to make a great deal of money in a short space of time proved irresistible. In Albania the collapse of pyramid schemes early in 1997 unleashed such fury that national government broke down and order could be restored only with the help of an international force led by Italy.
The new political systems created in the Balkans after the fall of communism varied. In Romania, Croatia, and, initially, in Albania, the executive was more powerful than the legislative arm; in the other states the balance of power tended to favour the latter, though in most states there were still disputed areas between the president and the premier; control of the intelligence services was an issue particularly prone to dispute In Bosnia and Hercegovina a modern state in the generally accepted meaning of term could scarcely be said to exist. There remained in essence two entities, the Bosnian-Croat federation, and the Republika Srpska but real authority rested with the international community's High Representative, a post created after Dayton.
One of the most surprising features of the 1990s in the Balkans was that the military played so little part in domestic politics. Proportional representation, one variant or another of which was adopted in all states except Serbia and Macedonia, meant that coalition governments were the norm. The political parties which emerged in the Balkans were of four main types: the former ruling communist parties; anti-communist electoral alliances; resurrected parties; and new parties. The former communist parties changed their names and liberalized their structures. The strongest amongst them were those of Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania all which remained united and most of which continued the close association with nationalism established before 1989.
Cohesion and continuity amongst the anti-communist electoral alliances, were rare, though not unknown. Generally, these were lose associations which fell apart once their one unifying demand, the removal of the communists from office, had been achieved. The third group of parties, those resurrected from the past, played very little part in the evolution of the area since 1989. Most had little in the way of infrastructure or funds and their leadership, though venerated, was old and had been too long in exile to be in touch with contemporary affairs. In general newly formed parties were much more important than resurrected ones. But they too faced considerable difficulties. Communist rule had meant the elimination of former distinctions of class, status and wealth upon which old party divisions were frequently based, and there had not been time for market forces to create or recreate the social bases for bourgeois parties. Some new parties were founded on issues such as the environment and most countries soon had their Green party or its equivalent. Parties representing ethnic majorities and minorities appeared in all states.
RC 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Secret voting; a vote conducted by this method. Voting by dropping a pebble (
psephos
—hence
psephology
) into an urn was an invention of ancient Greek democrats, resurrected in the eighteenth century. Though J. S.
Mill
argued that voting in public encouraged more responsible behaviour, most regimes decided that intimidation and corruption necessitated secret voting, introduced in the United Kingdom in 1872.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

The branch of
game theory
dealing with non-
zero-sum games
, in which both (all) parties have a common interest in bargaining for a solution which improves the outcome for at least some and worsens it for none. Bargaining models are much more sophisticated in economics than in politics, but have obvious applications in both.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search