Quotes About Balkans

There are some common problems in the Balkans in the settlement of which Bulgaria should also participate.

Bosnia is known as the powder keg of Yugoslavia, which itself is known as the powder keg of the Balkans, which in turn is reputed to be the powder keg of Europe. I would like to lengthen the list a bit by noting that Slobodan Milosevic was the powder keg of Bosnia. He is also one of the most extraordinary men you could hope to meet in your lifetime, a Halley's Comet of dictators, appearing once or twice a century. p. 199

We are not only talking about waves of refugees coming to Greece, to Italy, and elsewhere. Destabilizing the Balkans means Lebanonization, and that means destabilizing all of Europe.

Croatia and Serbia will always seek to advance the interests of their ethnic compatriots in Bosnia, at the expense of each other and of the Bosnian Muslims, no matter who is in charge, democrat or autocrat. But

We are a people who deny publicly that we are even partially in the Balkans, but we admit our Balkan identity privately, among ourselves.

War is a war. Everywhere is hard and bloody, but the Balkans in it bring their coloring and passion. Someone happened to be on the right side. But, madam, be without worry: it is not so far a day when both sides will become the same and when it will not be known which side of the story is right.

The Balkans arent worth the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier.

Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for "mixed salad" (macedoine), defines the principle illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that is borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion.

In the Middle East today there are too many people consumed by political dreams and too few interested in practical plans. That is why, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's line about the Balkans, the region produces more history than it consumes.

Greece is the only country in the Balkans that does not have territorial designs on its neighbors and wants to live in peace with them.

much of Bulgaria, Albania, the Republic of North Macedonia, and all the European part of Turkey.

and broke through the undefended Balkans to devastate all of mainland Greece north of the Peloponnese.

As my doubts about whether to move to the Balkans lingered, I devised a test for myself that I have used many times since. The test, as I put it then, was as follows: If I end up not making it as a journalist, will something else I learn in the process make it worth trying? I would come to call this the in trying for Y, the most I accomplish is X test, or the X test.

I love the combination of the words 'spies' and 'Balkans.' It's like meat and potatoes.

SOME DAMNED FOOLISH THING in the Balkans," Bismarck had predicted, would ignite the next war. The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914, satisfied his condition.

Remember all those references to Macedonia as the oasis of peace in the Balkans. You only really appreciate it when you have lost it.

Let's make a deal with the Serbs. Neither history nor emotion in the Balkans will permit multinationalism. We have to give up on the illusion of the last eight years... Dayton isn't working. Nobody - except diplomats and petty officials - believes in a sovereign Bosnia and the Dayton accords.

May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It's like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith - where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO's stomping on the Balkans while India and Pakistan threaten one another with nukes. Dead From the Waist Down on MTV. The humidity's making me horny and mad. I miss Robin. In his new book, Ken Wilbur calls it skin hunger. I feel like I'm building up a charge. Monsoon's on its way.

A similar semianarchy burst out in parts of Central Asia and the Balkans in the 1990s, when the communist federations that had ruled them for decades suddenly unraveled. One Bosnian Croat explained why ethnic violence erupted only after the breakup of Yugoslavia: "We lived in peace and harmony because every hundred meters we had a policeman to make sure we loved each other very much."33

The people of the Balkans are like a dysfunctional family. We may fight and argue, but in the end we are family.

That there could be death camps and a siege and civilians slaughtered by the thousands and thrown into mass graves on European soil fifty years after the end of the Second World War gave the war in Bosnia and the Serb campaign of killing in Kosovo their special, anachronistic interest. But one of the main ways of understanding the war crimes committed in southeastern Europe in the 1990s has been to say that the Balkans, after all, were never really part of Europe.

The End of History and the Last Man in 1992,3 I have regularly been asked whether event X didn't invalidate my thesis. X could be a coup in Peru, war in the Balkans, the September 11 attacks, the global financial crisis, or, most recently, Donald Trump's election and the wave of populist nationalism described above.

Well, let's assume the world is linear. If we required a certain amount of troops per 25,000 population in the Balkans, if the world is not radically different, something of the same extent is going to be needed in Iraq.

We should remember what Bismarck said in 1888: "If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans." Balkan