Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Twenty Years Later: Why this Special Issue?Twenty years ago, for the first time since 1945, Europe witnessed a war motivated by a desire to create ethnically homogenous territories .The wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo resulted in a high level of violence and in the worst crimes in Europe since the Second World War .More than 150,000 people were killed and 3,000,000 displaced .Vukovar, Sarajevo, and Srebrenica became symbols of violence and suffering.The wars in the former Yugoslavia confronted European societies with difficult questions that ranged from the European willingness to intervene militarily to stop the carnage to their own self-perceptions as democratic and peaceful societies .It is worth highlighting that these wars took place in sinister simultaneity with the deepening of the process of political integration within the European Union .As Edgar Morin noted, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was the dark side of this process of integration .Bearing this European dimension in mind, this issue focuses on the perceptions of the (post-)Yugoslav wars in Germany and France .Both countries were important players in the Yugoslav crisis, especially at the beginning of the wars in 1991 and 1992 .Although both claimed to promote a common European foreign policy, their policy decisions were often at odds, as the recognition debate vividly illustrates.Moreover, different reactions are visible at the societal level .The shock of the war could lead to action or to paralysis, to voice or to silence, as shown in this special issue by Wolfgang Höpken, Nadège Ragaru and Nenad Stefanov .In France, an intense debate on the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina developed almost immediately .In Germany, there was irritation and silence in the intellectual sphere until the end of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, or, more precisely, until confronted with the Srebrenica massacre .It is against this background that a retrospective on the French and German debates on the (post-)Yugoslav wars acquires its significance.The aim is not only to improve our understanding of the differences between the German and French positions, but also to revisit the wars in the former Yugoslavia Südosteuropa 61 (2013), H. 4, S. 471-477
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4302129314