The Myth of Ethnic War

Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s

Bibliographic Data

ID6317537
AuthorsSpyros Economide (0000-0002-9526-3772, London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume3
Issue4
Pages945-946
Publication date2005-12-01
Open AccessYes
TypeREVIEW
Review ofThe Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s, V P Gagnon, 2013
VenuePerspectives on Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1537-5927 • E-ISSN: 1541-0986
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1537592705850492
OpenAlexW2169928559
LanguageEN

The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. By V. P. Gagnon, Jr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 217p. $35.00 Publications focusing on Yugoslavia's collapse and the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo abound. One of the key category errors committed in much of this work—and especially in the mountains of journalistic output throughout the 1990s—has been to classify Yugoslavia's wars merely as wars of rival ethnicities and nationalisms, if not ancient hatreds. Conventional wisdom has it that Yugoslavia's wars in the 1990s were typical “Balkan” wars emanating from primordial nationalisms, heavily laden with historical baggage and rich in potent myth and symbols. The easiest way to explain Yugoslavia's violent disintegration in the late twentieth century was to relapse into cliché-ridden accounts of base, primeval ethnic rivalries that hitherto had been contained by a combination of the restraints imposed by Tito's brand of communism and the exigencies of a polarized Cold War international system in which Yugoslavia inhabited a very particular space

Ancient history · Communism · Economic history · Ethnic group · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Classics · History · Law

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