engleski

Post-Cold War Frozen Conflicts in South-East Europe: between Sustainable Solutions and a Threat to World Peace

Does a conflict in the Balkans have the potential to provide the spark to break world peace in a similar way the 1914 assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne was the spark that ignited World War I? While commenting on the mechanism of NATO’s functioning, US President Donald Trump suggested that there is a state in the South-East Europe which is capable of triggering a new world conflict. It is Montenegro, NATO’s newest member state, whose people are ‘very aggressive’ according to Trump. Independently of this judgement, most of the territory of the former Yugoslavia, whose constituent republic was Montenegro, as well as some neighbouring states such as Albania and Greece are undergoing - albeit to various degrees – latent or frozen conflicts. One of these conflicts is Bosnia-Herzegovina’s crisis of functioning, where the stability is reliant on the international community well two decades after the end of the armed conflict. There is also the unsettled issue of the relationship between Serbia and its former province of Kosovo with a predominantly Albanian population, which declared independence in 2008. Furthermore, there is the question of the relations between the ethnic majority and minority in Montenegro and Macedonia, as well as a long-standing dispute over the name of both the state and the nation of Macedonia. Are these phenomena to be defined as peacefully- resolvable conflicts or as threats to world peace? This paper accounts for the causes and the progress of these conflicts and analyses their consequences in a context of doctrines of realism and idealism in international relations. Namely, the consequences regard the mutual relations of the conflicted parties as well as the regional and global relations. The USA and Russia represent invariably key international actors in all of them, the Balkan region included.

post-cold war period ; frozen conflicts ; South-East Europe ; sustainable peace

nije evidentirano