Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia From the Death of Tito to the Fall of Milosevic

-Mark Thompson, author of A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia
"Balkan Babel has no peer in the literature about Yugoslavia's terminal crisis, dissolution and serial wars....Indispensable!"


-Nationalities Papers
"The product of meticulous research and fine writing... Worth reading. A fascinating look at Yugoslav society."


-Mark Almond, author of Religion, State, and Society
"An excellent introduction to the recent history of the South Slavs' descent into the inferno."


-Choice
"Highly recommended."


-Martin Peretz -The New Republic
"The best scholarship I have been able to find about Serbian Orthodoxy and Serbian nationalism."


Book Description
Yugoslavia's would-be system-builders failed three times over to build a workable system. The underlying problem was their failure to resolve the problem of legitimacy. In the 1980s, economic deterioration pushed people to despair and, under the pressure of Serbia's ambitious political establishment, the country broke up along ethnic fault lines. This volume, now in its fourth expanded edition, tells the story of socialist Yugoslavia's troubles and the challenges facing its successor states from May 1980 to 00/12. The fourth edition of this critically acclaimed work includes a new chapter, a new epilogue, and revisions throughout the book. Sabrina Ramet, a veteran observer of the Yugoslav scene, traces the steady deterioration of Yugoslavia's political and social fabric in the years since 1980, arguing that, while the federal system and multiethnic fabric laid down fault lines, the final crisis was sown in the failure to resolve the legitimacy question, triggered by economic deterioration, and pushed forward toward war by Serbian politicians bent on power-either within a centralized Yugoslavia or within an "ethnically cleansed" Greater Serbia. With her detailed knowledge of the area and extensive fieldwork, Ramet paints a strikingly original picture of Yugoslavia's demise and the emergence of the Yugoslav successor states.


About the Author
Sabrina P. Ramet is professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. She is the author of six other books, among them Whose Democracy? Nationalism, Religion, and the Doctrine of Collective Rights in Post-1989 Eastern Europe(1997) and Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia (1998). She has also edited a dozen books, mostly about Eastern Europe and Russia.


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The troubles that have plagued the Yugoslav area, particularly since 1991, says Ramet (political science, Norwegian U. of Science and Technology) arose because of illegitimate government, and were exasperated by economic deterioration and escalating polemics during the 1980s. No dates are noted for the previous editions. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)


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