Even before it collapsed into civil war, ethnic cleansing, and dissolution, Yugoslavia was an archetypical example of a troubled multinational mosaic, a state without a single national base or even a majority. Its stability and very existence were challenged repeatedly by the tension between the pressures for overarching political cohesion and the defense of separate national identities and aspirations.In a brilliant analysis of this complex and sensitive national question, Ivo Banac provides a comprehensive introduction to Yugoslav political history. His book is a genetic study of the ideas, circumstances, and events that shaped the pattern of relations among the nationalities of Yugoslavia. It traces and analyzes the history and characteristics of South Slavic national ideologies, connects these trends with Yugoslavia's flawed unification in 1918, and ends with the fatal adoption of the centralist system in 1921. Banac focuses on the first two and a half years in the history of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, because in his view this was the period that set the pattern for subsequent development of the national question. The issues that divided the South Slavs, and that still divide them today, took on definite form during that time, he maintains. Banac provides extensive treatment of all of Yugoslavia's nationalities; his sections on the Montenegrins, Albanians, Macedonians, and Bosnian Muslims are unique in the literature. In this unbiased account, all of the principals and groups assume a tragic fascination.When published in 1984, The National Question in Yugoslavia was the first complete introduction to the cultural history of the South Slavic peoples and to the politics of Yugoslavia, and it remains a major contribution to the scholarship on modern European nationalism and the stability of multinational states.

Released for the first time in the English language, and marking the centennial of Albania's independence, Serbs and Albanians delivers an at once refreshing and comprehensive insight into the cultural composition of Southeast Europe. A wider audience can now appreciate the work of Milan ufflay, a controversial figure of his time whose assassination was denounced by leading intellectuals, Albert Einstein and Heinrich Mann. With a measured and often poetic voice, ufflay takes us on a journey through the Middle Ages as it unfolded on a land where opposing cultures were distilled and interwoven, dynasts and whole cities upturned and reborn.

In 1948 in a series of moves that culminated in the famous Cominform Resolution, Stalin struck at the Communist Party in Yugoslavia, provoking the first split in the Communist state system. With this long-awaited book, Ivo Banac becomes the first scholar to assess the domestic consequences of Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform, and his findings will radically revise some of our most basic assumptions about Tito's revolution. Banac's subject is the nature and fate of those elements in the Yugoslav Communist party who were said to have sided with Moscow against their own country's leadership. He demonstrates that the so-called Cominformists represented as much as twenty-percent of the party membership and had widely divergent aims. He then reconstructs the history of the labrynthine factional struggles that preceded and accompanied the 1948 split and shows that, as always, the national question played the dominant role in Yugoslav politics. After identifying the members of the opposition and mapping its course, Banac recounts the harsh repression of the movement. He provides massive documentation of startling irony: the conflict with Stalin played the same part in the shaping of Yugoslavia's political system as the collectivization and purges of the 1930's did in the history of Soviet communism.

Georgi Dimitrov (1882-1949) was a high-ranking Bulgarian and Soviet official, one of the most prominent leaders of the international Communist movement and a trusted member of Stalin's inner circle. Accused by the Nazis of setting the Reichstag fire in 1933, he successfully defended himself at the Leipzig Trial and thereby became an international symbol of resistance to Nazism. Stalin appointed him head of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1935, and he held this position until the Comintern's dissolution in 1943. After the end of the Second World War, Dimitrov returned to Bulgaria and became its first Communist premier. During the years between 1933 and his death in 1949, Dimitrov kept a diary that described his tumultuous career and revealed much about the inner working of the international Communist organizations, the opinions and actions of the Soviet leadership, and the Soviet Union's role in shaping the postwar Eastern Europe. This important document, edited and introduced by renowned historian Ivo Banac, is now available for the first time in English. It is an essential source for information about international Communism, Stalin and Soviet policy, and the origins of the Cold War.

"Combining legal expertise with the scrupulous analysis of a mass of evidence, Cigar and Williams were the first to make a compelling case for the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic as a war criminal. I believe this work is one of the most important public ions to have appeared in the aftermath of the Bosnian war. It lays down a challenge to the international community that must not go unanswered."
--Noel Malcolm, author of "Bosnia: A Short History"

The trial of Slobodan Milosevic represents a singular moment in modern history. For the first time a former head of state must answer charges before an International Tribunal for the commission of war crimes.

Taking as its starting point the existing canon of international law and conventions governing actions during war, Indictment at the Hague, represents the most detailed examination of the conduct of the Serbian authorities and the individual responsibility of senior members of its leadership for war crimes.

Citing the precedent of the Nuremberg trials, Cigar and Williams carefully link conscious decisions and specific deeds undertaken by the Milosevic regime that violated the protections guaranteed to civilian populations in war. The volume reproduces a collection of key documents from the Hague Tribunal, U.N. Commissions, and Human Rights Organizations which appear in print together for the first time. Indictment at the Hague is essential for all those concerned with the difficult task of sustaining the Geneva and Hague Conventions, and those who wish to understand how in the era of "never again" the crimes of war continue to challenge the instruments of international law.