ABSTRACT

History’s judgment on Southeastern Europe in the 30 years since 1989 remains to be rendered. Readers nonetheless deserve some brief review in two final chapters. Since 1989, the new regimes and leaders across the region struggled initially with a transition to the single set of European standards to which most of them aspired. As the chapters assembled in this Handbook have demonstrated, these aspirations emerged not from a blank, premodern Balkan slate but from national identities and state-building with a modernizing momentum. They had advanced from imperial division to a set of nation-states on the European model in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Constraints continued from oversight by the Great Powers to the boundaries of the Cold War. The starts and stops since 1989, still unfolding, cannot be understood apart from the region’s own early modern and modern aspirations and constraints. Neither can they be understood without looking at the approaches of powerful players, especially the European Union and the United States, to Balkan politics after state-socialism.