The international scientific conference “Thinking Balkan Borderlands: Violence, Conflicts, Cooperation was held in Devin and Koper between 26 and 28 June 2014. The main goal was to discuss the selected case studies on border areas of Western Balkans from different perspectives (political, social, cultural and economic) divided in three temporal frameworks: from the Balkan Wars to World War II (1912–1939); from World War II to the Breakup of Yugoslavia (1939–1991); from the Breakup of Yugoslavia to the present days. At the conference, 19 historians from Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Austria, Russia and the USA presented their latest research into Balkan border regions. The most important result of the Conference has been an outstanding debate on the questions of the borderlands conflicts between the states in Central and Southeastern Europe, which are despite the ongoing European integration processes still under the influence of historical traumas, incomprehension and conflicts. The excursion on the remnants of the Isonzo Front in Slovenia and Italy with an aim to present sites of memory in the former Austrian-Italian and present Slovenian-Italian border was also carried out.
B.01 Organiser of a scientific meeting
COBISS.SI-ID: 1536562884In the paper Egon Pelikan discusses the key ideal, ideological, and political shifts, which escalated into events in the former Yugoslavia. In a kind of circular manner the concepts dealing with so-called national question are intertwined with the founding concepts (at the time of the early formation of national identities in the Balkans in the 19th century), military actions (during the Balkan Wars and the First World War), the concepts of the first Yugoslav state (at the end of the First World War), socialist variants of resolving national question in Tito’s Yugoslavia (in the framework of the relationship between the national and the class, centralism and autonomy), and finally the tragic breakup of the State at the end of the 20th century. Important roles in these developments were played by international and domestic factors and actors, entering into the context and exiting from it.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 1536566724In the paper Mateja Režek discusses the internal territorial division of federal Yugoslavia. Borders between Yugoslav republics were never regulated by law and formally approved at the highest state level, and the archives of the top-level federal bodies contain no documents that might serve as the basis for the originally drawn internal borders. Due to a lack of historical sources, the principles and methods of drawing republican borders can only be deducted from the context of time in which the demarcation was done. The author notes that the absence of the debate regarding internal territorial division of Yugoslavia and related legal acts were due to the fear of new authorities of rekindling inter-national tensions and to the Party’s attitude towards federalism and the national question.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 1536563140