title: The Balkans as Geopolitical Periphery of Eastern Europe – Past Implications for an Uncertain Future
abstract: In the post-Cold War period, the Balkan Peninsula experienced the issue of "Balkanization" -fragmentation of once compact multiethnic political space -similar to the one it had already experienced in the 19 th and early 20 th century. Both historical instances of Balkanization countered wider European integrative trends of the time. A historical comparison between the first and the second Balkanization finds the cause for this "repeating" of history in an extraordinary geopolitical position of t