Introduction

The political configuration of the Balkans attained by the end of the Greek civil war in 1949 was to last for forty years; it was the longest period in the modern history of the peninsula without war or any change of frontier on the mainland. The absence of military conflict and territorial change did not mean a lack of division. Greece's continuing status as a pro-western state separated it from the rest of the region; in the socialist camp Yugoslavia had already become a pariah and by the end of the 1960s each Balkan socialist state had assumed an individual position within the socialist community.