War and Change in the Balkans: Nationalism, Conflict and Cooperation by Brad K. Blitz (review)

Abstract

164 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 2OO9 is a somewhat conservative one. Almost two decades after the collapse of Communism, it seems surprising that the freeing up of research conditions should not have resulted in greater consideration of theday-to-day functioning of regime and society during 'normal' times.Of the pieces in the collection only Williams's critical consideration of 'normalization' touches on such themes. Second, beyond the familiar pairing of Hungary and Poland in Johanna Granville's chapter on 1956 and Nigel Swain's discussion of their 'negotiated revolutions' in 1989, there is little effective comparison. The editors' introduction offers a fairly standard four-fold typology of forms of resistance to Communist rule: armed struggle, popular protest, intellectual dissent and within-system effortsat reform. But their argument that, beyond this, national diversity precludes further effortsat generalization is not fully convincing. Some phenomena highlighted, such as, for example, the role of working class protest in puncturing regime stability in cases as diverse as the GDR, Romania and Poland, clearly invite comparative discussion. Similarly, Tony Kemp-Welch's conclusion ? a solid but somewhat out-of-place reflection on the relative importance of Soviet and Western policy towards Communist Eastern Europe ? also misses the opportunity for a more searching cross-national perspective. Finally, as the foreword by former Czech ambassador to the UK (and historian) Pavel Seifter notes, inmuch of contemporary Central and Eastern Europe memories of Communism are the subject of intense political and cultural conflict.Despite the passing of lustration legislation inPoland and the Czech Republic during the 1990s, right-wing governments in both countries have sought to implement deeper de-Communization and a fuller opening up of the past as revealed in Communist-era archives. Sadly, Seifter's comment aside, the reader gains little sense of the contemporary resonance of the crises and conflicts analysed in the collection. Similarly, despite briefmention of the fall ofMilosevic in 2000, there is littlebroader perspective on the experience of East European Communism and its collapse and how we might read it in an era of 'coloured revolutions' against the remnants of nomenklatura power elsewhere in the post-Communist world. Despite such limitations, the uniformly high quality of contributions and consistent blend of sophistication, concision and claritymake Revolution and Resistance inEastern Europe far superior tomany similar publications, and a collection which can be enthusiastically recommended both to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as the usual readership of scholars and specialists. UCL SSEES Sean Hanley Blitz, Brad K. (ed.).War and Change in the Balkans: Nationalism, Conflictand Coop eration. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2006. xii + 290 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?17.99: $29.99 (paperback). War and Change in the Balkans pursues the rather fundamental objective of taking the reader through a wide range of dilemmas encountered by both REVIEWS 165 the region and itspeoples during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The main tide efficiently represents the actual contents of the book, which consists of a series of contributions by a group of authors, gathered from a wide range of academic disciplines ranging from international politics to the social sciences, with a possibility of the contributions themselves being organized into a number of broad categories. The first category, 'The Fall', is comprised of contributions related to the processes of the disintegration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This section is represented by two articles with reference to the pre-war mech anisms of the Yugoslav state, centred on a well-structured insight into the weaknesses of Titoist Yugoslavia by George Schopflin. By focusing on the theme of a 'forced coexistence' and providing his own definition of ethnicity (p. 15), Schopflin places an emphasis on Serbian and Croatian identities in underlining the ethnic and cultural differences between the two, and in criticizing what he perceives to be an artificial nationhood, based on the linguistic similarities of the 'Serbo-Croat' language. The second chapter, written by Andrew Ross, portrays the dissolution ofYugoslavia from aMace donian perspective, whilst presenting a series of arguments on the nature of the Macedonian nation. The second section of the book, 'TheWar', discusses thewartime policies of the states of formerYugoslavia, whilst also concentrating on the develop...