"Contemporary analysis of Serbia's foreign policy in the middle of the nineteenth century has remained in a deep shadow of the "Načertanije", a document conceived in 1844 in Belgrade, as a result of collaboration between Serbia's interior minister Ilija Garašanin and F.A. Zach, the representative of the Polish political emigration from Paris, led by Prince A. Czartoryski, in the capital of the autonomous Principality of Serbia. Prince Czartoryski, author of Councils for Serbia's foreign policy in 1843, considered Serbia, the sole semi-independent state among Slavs in South-Eastern Europe, a nucleus of a wider, Serbia-led South Slav state that might endorse an anti-Russian and anti-Austrian policy as a support for his wider plans regarding the restoration of independent Poland. The over-ambitious pan-Slav probject of F. Zach (Serbia's Slavic Policy) was eventually modified by Garašanin to a more realistic and attainable plan, in accordance with Serbia's modest demographic and military potential, limited international experience and still humble administrative capacities. Planning the unification of the predominantly Serb-inhabited lands under Ottoman rule was appropriately adapted to the geopolitical realities of 1844. The foreign policy of Serbia under Garašanin, during the rule of the pro-Austrian Prince Alexander Karadjordjević and Garašanin's premiership under Russophile Prince Michael Obrenović, was balancing between various political options that were dominating Europe and the Balkans between the 1848 Revolution and the Crimean War and the first Balkan Alliance. Garašanin was continuously prudent and bold in pursuing realistic political ambitions regarding large-scale anti-Ottoman activities, by building a network of confidents and agents throughout Turkey-in-Europe that was to forment a joint insurrection against the Ottoman rule. During its last phase, Garašanin's foreign policy gradually evolved into the direction of closer Yugoslav and Balkan cooperation"--Back cover.

This edited book analyzes Kosovo’s foreign policy and bilateral relations with the United States and several European countries. After the 1999 liberation from Serbia, Kosovo built close relations with various countries that supported it in the process of reconstruction, economic stabilization, institution-building, and state-building. From 1999 to 2008, many of these states were politically and operationally engaged in Kosovo under the leadership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). Since its independence in 2008, the Republic of Kosovo has adopted a foreign policy in accordance with its values and strategic interests, a foreign policy that aims to strengthen Kosovo’s security and foster its socio-economic prosperity in collaboration with primarily Western countries. In this volume, each chapter is dedicated to Kosovo’s bilateral relations with a selected state with which it has established diplomatic relations. The book shows that Kosovo has been able to develop and achieve strong bilateral relations with major allies and partners. It argues that Kosovo’s foreign policy aims to develop, maintain, and enhance the position of the young state on the international stage. The volume bridges various methodological and disciplinary approaches in order to present Kosovo’s foreign policy objectives and the trajectory of its relations with some of its most important international partners. This book will be of interest to students of Balkan politics, state-building, foreign policy, and International Relations.

Who are the Serbs? Branded by some as Europe's new Nazis, they are seen by others—and by themselves—as the innocent victims of nationalist aggression and of an implacably hostile world media. In this challenging new book, Timothy Judah, who covered the war years in former Yugoslavia for the London Times and the Economist, argues that neither is true. Exploring the Serbian nation from the great epics of its past to the battlefields of Bosnia and the backstreets of Kosovo, he sets the fate of the Serbs within the story of their past. This wide-ranging, scholarly, and highly readable account opens with the windswept fortresses of medieval kings and a battle lost more than six centuries ago that still profoundly influences the Serbs. Judah describes the idea of "Serbdom" that sustained them during centuries of Ottoman rule, the days of glory during the First World War, and the genocide against them during the Second. He examines the tenuous ethnic balance fashioned by Tito and its unraveling after his death. And he reveals how Slobodan Milosevic, later to become president, used a version of history to drive his people to nationalist euphoria. Judah details the way Milosevic prepared for war and provides gripping eyewitness accounts of wartime horrors: the burning villages and "ethnic cleansing," the ignominy of the siege of Sarajevo, and the columns of bedraggled Serb refugees, cynically manipulated and then abandoned once the dream of a Greater Serbia was lost. This first in-depth account of life behind Serbian lines is not an apologia but a scrupulous explanation of how the people of a modernizing European state could become among the most reviled of the century. Rejecting the stereotypical image of a bloodthirsty nation, Judah makes the Serbs comprehensible by placing them within the context of their history and their hopes.

This is a meticulously researched history of the rule of the Axis powers in occupied Yugoslavia, along with the role of the other groups that collaborated with them—notably the extremist Croatian nationalist organization known as the Ustashas.

This book develops a novel way of thinking about crises in world politics. By building on ontological security theory, this work conceptualises critical situations as radical disjunctions that challenge the ability of collective agents to ‘go on’. These ontological crises bring into the realm of discursive consciousness four fundamental questions related to existence, finitude, relations and autobiography. In times of crisis, collective agents such as states are particularly attached to their ontic spaces, or spatial extensions of the self that cause collective identities to appear more firm and continuous. These theoretical arguments are illustrated in a case study looking at Serbia’s anxiety over the secession of Kosovo. The author argues that Serbia’s seemingly irrational and self-harming policy vis-à-vis Kosovo can be understood as a form of ontological self-help. It is a rational pursuit of biographical continuity and a healthy sense of self in the face of an ontological crisis triggered by the secession of a province that has been constructed as the ontic space of the Serbian nation since the late 19th century.