David Binder

Greece, Turkey, and NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has some strange partners, in terms of history. The oddest couple of all may be Greece and Turkey. The two neighbors fought four wars in the space of a quarter century (1897 to 1922) and are still mutually suspicious. But they have followed parallel courses within the alliance—joining some group actions while remaining aloof to others. Meanwhile, the alliance has over the past two decades changed its posture from defense to offense and from a focus on the European continent to perceived enemies in North Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Now it is a heavily armed organization in almost desperate search of an antagonist. That is not what Greece or Turkey signed up for when they joined NATO in 1952.

A Balkan Balance Sheet

In 1995, at the insistence of President Bill Clinton, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization displaced the United Nations as the supreme international arbiter and protagonist in the ruin of Yugoslavia. There, ethnic cleansings, the crime of choice of the 1990s, had already swept millions of Croats, Serbs, and Muslims out of their homes. Now, two wars later, the United States is participating in the international equivalent of annual charity drives: a “donors conference” for Kosovo recovery, held in Brussels on 28 July 1999, where the Clinton administration committed

A Tribute to Nikolaos A. Stavrou 1935–2011

500 million of the total

The Time of Epithets

2 billion in pledges, and a Balkans Stability Pact summit in Sarajevo on 30 July featuring the president. In the words of Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel Berger, the latter meeting was to promote “democracy, prosperity and security across the region,”1 with the Europeans footing most of the costs. Since 1995, American-led NATO forces have partially fostered and literally watched over, with manned and unmanned reconnaissance craft, three ethnic cleansings:

Vlachs, A Peaceful Balkan People

Nikolaos A. Stavrou, the founder of Mediterranean Quarterly and editor since 1990, passed away on 29 December 2011. He is survived by his wife, Katarina, and two brothers and two sisters and their families. Funeral services took place in Bethesda, Maryland, on 2 January 2012. The family of Professor Stavrou and the staff of Mediterranean Quarterly have received many expressions of loss on the death of a friend and colleague. Among the tributes are the following.

The Yugoslav Earthquake

When and how did the characterization nationalist become an epithet that indicates abuse or contempt? The most obvious advent of the new usage may be found in the journalism and academic writing about the civil wars (1991–95) that doomed the existence of Yugoslavia. Employing nationalist as a negative quantity was made even more explicit by attaching intensifying prefixes such as “ultra” or “extreme.” Searches of newspaper and other archives show that nationalist as a denunciatory epithet has continued in the media to the present day, especially as applied to Serbian politicians. It has also begun to infect the discourse among the political parties in Serbia.

The Euro-Atlantic Brand

In our time millions on all continents have abandoned their homes and homelands in search of physical safety and respect for human dignity. As in the past, movements of people have social, economic, and elemental survival reasons. Vlachs, too, have migrated, and fl ed. But this unique people of the Balkans have also demonstrated over many centuries how to hold on to their identity and contribute to national cultures in a region repeatedly swept by savage confl icts through the ages. They have many names: Rumani, Arumani, Vlach, Koutsovlachos (Greek), Choban (Albanian), Tsintsar or Vlasi (Slavic), Karagouni (Turkish), and more. They inhabit at least seven southeastern European countries: Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Serbia-Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia. Yet those Vlachs of the Balkans not fully assimilated by their host nations have one thing in common—they speak a language apparently deriving from the Latin spoken by the Roman conquerors who arrived in the region more than two thousand years ago. Other ancestral traits are that many Vlachs practiced herding of sheep, while others were urbanized merchants. According to a (non-Vlach) specialist, “In a word, the Vlachs are the perfect Balkan citizens, able to preserve their culture without resorting to war or politics, violence, or dishonesty.”1 The Roman Empire gradually expanded in what is now called the Balkan Peninsula from 146 BC, with the fi rst colonies around Preveza in the Epirus region of Greece, to about 550 AD. Vlachs are sometimes assumed

Has "Greater" Vanished from the Balkan Vocabulary? Fragmentation and Cohesion in Southeastern Europe

Literally and figuratively, the Balkans is an earthquake zone. It has seismic fault lines along the Adriatic littoral as well as in the interior, including the Vardar Valley, scene of the catastrophic 1963 Skopje earthquake and some fifty quakes recorded before that. Indeed, the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on the Balkan Peninsula’s structure and relief takes note of the region’s numerous faults. There are, in addition, historic fault lines crossing the Balkans, including that dividing the Christians loyal to Catholic Rome from those adhering to the Orthodox faith rooted in the Byzantine Empire and another between the former Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Those divisions, promoted over centuries by far-off princes and prelates, aided in fostering ethnic rivalries, internecine feuds, and wars. Then there are the Balkan political earthquakes. The Yugoslav presidential elections of 24 September 2000 can be regarded as a massive political tremor, affecting not only Serbia itself, the largest and most strategically located unit of the former Yugoslavia, but the whole Balkan neighborhood. Not only did the victory of Vojislav Kostunica shatter the autocratic regime erected by Slobodan Milosevic over the previous thirteen years, but it also had an immediate and powerful impact on two regions nearest and dearest to Serbia: Kosovo and Montenegro. The effect in Kosovo, jointly administered and controlled by North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops under its Kosovo Force (KFOR) and the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo, has been to set back if not to quash the commonly shared plans of the often warring factions of the Albanian majority to create an independent Kosovo state. In Montenegro the