Customer Reviews

Explaining Yugoslavia

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Out of the now almost countless array of books published over the last decade and meant to `explain' what happened in Yugoslavia, John Allcock's "Explaining Yugoslavia" is among the best. In fact, readers need go no farther if they're looking for a one-volume analysis of the former Yugoslavia and some of the underlying reasons for the country's violent and bloody collapse. Allcock, a sociologist, analyzes historical, cultural, political, social/societal, economic and other factors and skillfully ties them together to provide a comprehensive picture of the peoples of the former Yugoslavia and reasonable answers to the question of why their common state fell apart. Allcock essentially sees the root cause for the failure of Yugoslavia in the country's economy, but this is hardly economic reductionism - he stresses the importance of the interplay of numerous other factors. If this book is not the definitive `explanation of Yugoslavia' (something that will likely never be achieved), it is a large and important step in that direction.

Allcock traces the present of the "former Yugoslavia" back to its distant roots - and does a great job. Organised around issues (eg. "economic modernisation", "the movement of population", "violence"), his genre of historical sociology offers remarkable insights.

Oxford historian Richard Crampton praised this book as "making many Balkan backstairs intrigues, including those of the last few years, more comprehensible" (New York Review of Books, January 11, 2001, p.18). Rightly so.