ABSTRACT
From the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949 until 1989, Southeastern Europe would enjoy a period of domestic and international peace behind the borders, unprecedented for the region in modern times. Cold War divisions helped to keep the peace. They had however become irrelevant in the last years before the collapse of the Communist regimes and the warfare and turmoil that followed from 1989 forward. Cold War economic aid from the United States advanced agricultural reform in Greece and allowed Yugoslavia to abandon collectivization in favor of the existing private smallholders. In addition to comparable economic problems, the Albanian, Greek, and Yugoslav regimes struggled with new political conditions by the 1980s. Albania’s economic isolation, after the break with China became final in 1978, prompted the Hoxha regime’s new pressure on the rural majority.
