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Can We Learn from Yugoslavia?

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Liquid Nationalism and State Partitions in Europe, by BianchiniStefano, Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar, 2017, 360 pp., $158.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9781786436603.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2022

Susan L. Woodward
Susan L. Woodward*
Affiliation:
The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
*
Email: [email protected]
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Extract

Liquid Nationalism and State Partitions in Europe is Stefano Bianchini’s magnum opus, reflecting a lifetime of working on the issues of ethno-nationalism in Europe, from Southeast Europe through Central Europe and the former Soviet space to all of western Europe. It is more than a book; it is an entire seminar, ranging not only geographically but also historically, from the Enlightenment to the second decade of the 21st century. Simply a list of the gems I learned would usurp all the space I have been given for this essay and much more. I choose to focus on one small part, what I take to be the primary motivation behind this book, namely his anguish over the lessons for western Europe “not learned from the dismemberment of Yugoslavia” (the title of Chapter 10), a case he knows so well. That chapter then begins with a quotation from another specialist on Yugoslavia, Jacques Rupnik, in Le Monde in 2014, “the greatest obstacle to the Europeanization of the Balkans is the Balkanization of Europe” (185). Nor are Bianchini and Rupnik alone in this concern. Already in 2012, Ivan Krastev convened two parallel seminars at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna on what he called, “The Logics of Disintegration” – of the Soviet case (Part I) and the Habsburg and Yugoslav cases (Part II) and their lessons for the European Union.

Type
Book Symposium
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 51 , Issue 6 , November 2023 , pp. 1425 - 1430
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Nationalities

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