Russia and the Former Yugoslavia

Abstract

In line with the overall theme of this volume, the central question for this chapter is: has Russia cooperated with or confronted Europe and the West over the ‘former Yugoslavia’?¹ This, in turn, has a wider contextual importance because, in a number of ways, the wars in that region represent a ‘mini-cosmos’ of European security both at present and in years to come. First of all, they constitute an important case of post-Cold War European security management – perhaps the most serious test of the so-called ‘European security architecture’ since the demise of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of Russia. These wars amount to a regrettable but nonetheless probably persistent threat to European stability; a threat premised not on nuclear exchanges or large-scale conventional warfare between states, but on ‘low level’, house-to-house ethnic cleansing, raping and pillaging. Secondly, issues surrounding the former Yugoslavia have generated a very heated political debate in Russia. The development of Russia’s role in the region is thus a particularly good prism through which to examine Russia’s new foreign policy and the formulation process behind it. Thirdly, a similar thing can be said about the West. In our part of the world, the debate about what to do in the former Yugoslavia has become a very important part of the wider debate about the future of the western Alliance – about means and modes of cooperating, about partners, dangers and dividing lines.²