ABSTRACT
The upheavals in what were once Yugoslavia and the threat of more in the Balkan peninsula have raised the question of Turkish reaction—not so much whether Turkey will react, but in what form. The stability that prevailed since the end of World War II in the Balkans has been shattered. Turkey's neutrality during World War II enabled it to escape the devastation and dislocation the other Balkan nations suffered. But it found itself on the front line of the incipient Cold War, with Stalin pressing demands for territorial concessions, for a revision of the 1936 Montreux Convention regulating navigation through the Straits, and even for a naval base on the Bosporus. The Ottoman Empire at its height had given the Balkans certain stability; this, though, began to be disrupted at the end of the seventeenth century by the encroachments of the Hapsburg Empire.
