Introduction

Abstract

Yugoslavia was a twentieth-century phenomenon. Proclaimed in December 1918, its history as a sovereign state spanned some seventy-three years of the most troubled and violent in Europe’s history. Just as this period of turbulence in Europe could be said to have begun with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his consort in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, so too, the dawn of a new era of uncertainty and international instability coincided with the refocussing of world attention on the Bosnian capital, then engulfed in the violence which accompanied Yugoslavia’s dissolution in 1991–92. The symbolism of these events was not lost on observers: the ‘Sarajevo century’ and the ‘Short Twentieth Century’ became metaphors for a distinct historical epoch the boundaries of which seemed to be delineated by conflict in the Balkans.¹ After the West’s initial triumphalism occasioned by the collapse of the communist system in 1989, and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union itself just two years later, the discovery that the post-Cold War world could spawn political violence in Europe on such a scale, and so quickly, was deeply shocking. On 28 June 1992, François Mitterrand, the octogenarian President of France, made an unannounced visit to Sarajevo to draw attention to the seriousness of the Bosnian crisis. Eric Hobsbawm refers to this event in the opening paragraphs of his study of the twentieth century, observing that for those educated in European history, ‘the coincidence of date and place could only be a reminder of the catastrophic consequences of the political miscalculation by Europe’s major powers which followed the assassination in 1914’.²