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Armed conflict on the territory of the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001 claimed over 200,000 lives, gave rise to atrocities unseen in Europe since the Second World War, and left behind a terrible legacy of physical ruin and psychological devastation. Unfolding against the background of the end of cold war bipolarity, the new Balkan wars sounded a discordant counterpoint to efforts to construct a more harmonious European order, were a major embarrassment for the international institutions deemed responsible for conflict management, and became a preoccupation for the powers concerned with restoring regional stability. After more than a decade of intermittent hostilities the conflict has been contained, but only as a result of significant external interventions and the establishment of a series of de facto international protectorates, patrolled by UN, NATO, and EU sponsored peacekeepers with open-ended mandates.
In the 1990s, amid political upheaval and civil war, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia dissolved into five successor states. The subsequent independence of Montenegro and Kosovo brought the total number to seven. Balkan scholar and diplomat to the region Mieczyslaw P. Boduszynski examines four of those states—Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—and traces their divergent paths toward democracy and Euro-Atlantic integration over the past two decades. Boduszynski argues that regime change in the Yugoslav successor states was powerfully shaped by both internal and external forces: the economic conditions on the eve of independence and transition and the incentives offered by the European Union and other Western actors to encourage economic and political liberalization. He shows how these factors contributed to differing formulations of democracy in each state. The author engages with the vexing problems of creating and sustaining democracy when circumstances are not entirely supportive of the effort. He employs innovative concepts to measure the quality of and prospects for democracy in the Balkan region, arguing that procedural indicators of democratization do not adequately describe the stability of liberalism in post-communist states. This unique perspective on developments in the region provides relevant lessons for regime change in the larger post-communist world. Scholars, practitioners, and policymakers will find the book to be a compelling contribution to the study of comparative politics, democratization, and European integration.
Mitja Velikonja has written a comprehensive survey that examines how religion has interacted with other aspects of Bosnia-Herzegovina's history. Velikonja sees the former Ottoman borderland as a distinct cultural and religious entity where three major faiths -- Islam, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy -- managed to coexist in relative peace. It is only during the past century that competing nationalisms have led to persecution, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder. Emphasizing the importance of religion to nationalism as a symbol of collective identity that strengthens national identity, Velikonja notes that religious groups have a tendency to become isolated from one another. He believes Bosnia-Herzegovina was unique in its sarlikost, or diversity, because while religion defined ethnic communities there and kept them separate, it did not create a culture of intolerance. Rather than suppressing one another, the region's ethno-religious groups learned to cooperate and mediate their differences -- useful behavior in an area that served as buffer between East and West for most of its history. Velikonja believes that Bosnians went beyond tolerance to embrace synthetic, eclectic religious norms, with each religious group often borrowing customs and rituals from its rivals. Rather than the extreme orthodoxy evident elsewhere in Europe, Bosnia became the home of heterodoxy. Sadly, nationalism changed all that, and the area became the scene of systematic persecution, forced conversion, and mass slaughter. Velikonja considers the misfortunes suffered by the Bosnians during the 1990s as largely the result of actions by their neighbors and local militants and inaction by the international community.But he also sees the tragedy that unfolded as the result of the exploitation of ethno-religious differences and myths by Serbian chauvinists and Croatian nationalists. Despite the tragedy that overwhelmed Bosnia-Herzegovina
A numerically small Jewish community helped their ethnically embattled neighbors in a neutral, humanitarian way to survive the longest modern siege, Sarajevo, in the early 1990s.
"Croatia is today popularly known as a beautiful country, with an excellent soccer team, but the rest of its long history is still not well known outside scholarly circles. It is less known for example that Croatia started as an ancient kingdom established in the 7th century. It lost its independence in the 11th century and had a troubled history until the first democratic elections in 1990 and independence in 1991. Since the Great Schism in the 11th century, Croatia has been the easternmost country of the Catholic West facing the Orthodox East. Attacked by the Ottoman Turks in the 15th century, it has been called ever since Antemurale Christianitatis (The Bulwark of Christianity). Croatia went through difficult times during the two World Wars and in the inter-war and the post-war periods until it won its independence and later gained membership to the European Union in 2013. This book reveals important information about its history, the struggles it endured to gain independence, the key problems of post-communist social and economic transition, and prospects for the future, summarized at the end as an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, as well as its external threats and opportunities. The book is divided into two parts, "Croatian History Timeline" and "Past in Present and Future", because the Croatian past informs its present and future in a profound way. There are few sources in English that present so many until-now unknown aspects of this European country as does this book. It may be said that it is the first reliable and objective guide to give essential understanding of the Republic of Croatia published so far in the English language"--
This book re-constructs the evolution of the border conflict between Croatia and Slovenia. The aim is to reveal the processes at work, the historical and contemporary circumstances, and the strategies and motives of the actors involved. The book highlights the roles of the European Union and of judicial third parties in the management of the conflict. Further, it considers the precedent-setting value of the Slovenian-Croatian conflict, the attempts at its resolution, and what they mean for the ongoing and prospective EU enlargement in South East Europe. Internal documents and interviews are at the heart of this process-tracing analysis, which discusses the third-party roles of the European Commission and the EU Council Presidency in 2008/2009 as a mediator-facilitator in the drafting stages of the arbitration agreement, and the judicial work of the arbitration tribunal and the EU Court of Justice. Lastly, the book offers policy recommendations on how to strengthen dispute resolution and solve current bilateral issues in the EU accession process.
Socialist Yugoslavia was a country suspended between civilizations, political systems, and Cold War blocs. It produced a remarkable body of modern architecture. This book explores the historical 'in-betweenness' of Yugoslav modernism and captures its visual richness and complexity through Wolfgang Thaler's new photographs --publisher.
Examines the processes of social change that characterize the reformation of the nation. This study constructs a methodological framework for the analysis of the morphogenesis through the exploration of the basic assumptions of Social Realist Theory. These assumptions of the developed framework are tested on the case of Croatia.