ABSTRACT
The violent conflict that tore apart Yugoslavia in the 1990s is rightly viewed as a significant event in both post-Cold War European and global affairs. The disintegration of the multi-national federation and the ensuing bloodshed on the very borders of the fledgling European Union (EU) came as a stark reminder of the tremendous conflictual potential of ethnonationalism, in a region that had enjoyed half a century of relative calm. That fact alone put the Yugoslav war of succession, which for a variety of reasons gained currency as ‘the Balkan War’, at the centre of worldwide attention, despite the fact that several other conflicts of comparable or greater proportion were raging at the same time, such as the civil war in Algeria, the Rwandan genocide or the devastating violence in DRC. For nearly a decade, from 1991 all the way to the NATO intervention in Kosovo (April–June 1999), the former Yugoslavia topped the international agenda. It encapsulated issues and concerns with broader significance such as the true meaning of the right to self-determination, the place of human rights and humanitarian intervention in international society, the role of the UN and NATO in the post-Cold War world, and the future of US leadership in world affairs. Many of those questions, heavily coloured by the experience in the Balkans, lingered on well into the 2000s – even if international attention shifted away into the Middle East in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in the United States. It is not uncommon these days, for instance, to draw comparison between Bosnia and the war in Syria when international intervention is at issue.
