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Greater Serbia: A New Reality in the Balkans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Reneo Lukic
Reneo Lukic*
Affiliation:
Emory University
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Extract

“We Serbs must militarily defeat our enemies and conquer the territories we need.”

Vojislav Maksimovic, Member

Bosnian Serb Parliament

“I don't see what's wrong with Greater Serbia. There's nothing wrong with a greater Germany, or with Great Britain.”

Bosnian Serb Leader

Radovan Karadžić

The break-up of Yugoslavia has come about as a result of national, economic and political conflicts which by the end of 1987 had taken on unprecedented dimensions. At that point, latent political conflicts between various republics came into the open. More specifically, the conflict between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo had turned into a low-intensity war. Under Slobodan Miloševićs leadership in Serbia, the Serbo-Slovenian conflict over Kosovo deepened, forcing other republics and provinces to take sides. The Slovenian leadership opposed a military solution to the Serbo-Albanian conflict in Kosovo. By 1990 the Serbo-Slovenian conflict had spilled over into Croatia, completely polarizing the Yugoslav political elite into two distinct camps; one encompassed Slovenia and Croatia, the other Serbia and Montenegro, with Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina playing the role of unsuccessful mediators.

Type
I Eastern Europe Reconsidered
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 22 , Issue 1: Special Issue - Ethnopolitics in Poland , Spring 1994 , pp. 49 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe and ex-USSR 

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References

Note

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