Is There Any Hope for the Balkans?

Abstract

So much has been said and written about the Balkans or, more specifically, the collapse of the Yugoslav Federation and the post-Yugoslav states. Since the early 1990s, academics, journalists, and policy experts have tried to figure out what went wrong and whom to blame, and to identify lessons learned so they could propose recommendations, the purpose of which is to help the region make progress and hopefully come closer to the rest of Europe, if admittedly not capable of catching up with it fully. But, figuring out what the region itself really wants has been extremely difficult. Back in 2013, while completing a volume on the post-Yugoslav space, I observed that