From Sarajevo, 1914 to Southeastern Europe, 2014: Wars, Transitions and Controversies

In Balkans into Southeastern Europe, 1914-2014, A Century of War and Transition  (Palgrave, 2014), John Lampe revises and expands his 2006 volume to reconsider the region's full century since the assassination in Sarajevo and the Great War that followed.  Drawing on recent scholarship and addressing recent controversies, he traces the saga of Southeastern Europe from the explosive mixture of Balkan states and imperial borderlands before the First World War, through the trials that their successors faced during two world wars, the Cold War, and finally the wars of Yugoslavia's dissolution. His fresh look at the full century since 1914 connects these wartime decades to the postwar transitions that followed, finding their main features, for good or ill, distinctly European. Lampe argues that not only the destructive ethnic nationalism and authoritarian regimes of the 1990s, but also the more recent rise of political pluralism and liberal market reforms, both now challenged since the 2008 financial crisis, have their roots.