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Southeast European Politics Online

Volume VI, Number 1, July 2005

Explaining an Activist Military: Greece until 1975.
DIMITRIS TSAROUHAS

The paper aims at explaining the high degree of the military's involvement in Greek politics in the 20 century. It argues that focusing either on Huntington's "professionalization" thesis or the more sociological accounts of socio-economic development can hardly give an explanation for the Greek armed forces' military interventions in political life in general, and the 1967 coup in particular. In contrast to such explanations, I suggest an approach based on the Greek armed forces' "dual character" and the political environment of the post-war era. The army's tendency to intervene should be viewed primarily as a result of two major factors: a) the co-existence of two antithetical syndromes in the self-perception of the officer corps, and b) the army's identification with the monarchy and the political right after 1949 in the context of the Cold War.

Bulgaria's Demographic Crisis: Underlying Causes and Some Short-Term Implications. 
ROSSEN VASSILEV

This article explores the major reasons for the population implosion in Bulgaria, a Southeast European country that is said to be threatened with "demographic death." Bulgaria has the lowest total fertility rate (TFR) ever recorded for a European country in peacetime-just 1.09 births per woman per lifetime in 2003. It is also the country with the lowest TFR in the world. What is particularly worrying is that the national fertility level has dropped well below the replacement level, which is 2.1--2.2 children per woman per lifetime. If that catastrophic rate persists, each new generation of Bulgarians will be only about half the size of the preceding one. Because such a dramatic change in the demographic characteristics of a country cannot be without serious economic, social, and political consequences for its future, this article also explores some implications of Bulgaria's disastrous situation in the field of demographics.
Who Deserves Kosovo? An Argument from Social Contract Theory.
MATTHEW WOOD HERBERT1

Talks to determine the political status of Kosovo will probably begin this year. Serbia insists it will rule its southern province again, but 90% of Kosovo's inhabitants demand independence. Recent policy literature has focused on two themes-the legal grounds of each side's claim to Kosovo and the security risks of achieving final status. These approaches, however, plunge midstream into philosophical issues that must be traced to their roots in order to answer the question who deserves Kosovo? This paper argues that state's rights derive from the state's constitutive obligations, and that Serbia has alienated its right to rule Kosovo through willful, protracted failure to uphold its basic obligations there.
The Limits of Conditionality.
RIDVAN PESHKOPIA

In an article that appeared in a previous issue of this journal, Arolda Elbasani (2004) empirically tested the EU conditionality effect on Albania. The author argues that Albania's democratic institutions have been "used and abused" by domestic political actors in their struggle for power, and she concludes that "Albanian democratization could have a different trajectory without the presence of the EU pushing for and directing reforms."  Without necessarily opposing such a conclusion, I will argue that both the conditionality approach and Elbasani's article have shortcomings that preclude them from reaching such conclusions. Some of the shortcomings in the article are the product of the theoretical framework in which she places her argument; others are issues of a problematic research design. The major flaw in the conditionality approach is that this theoretical explanation can only fit in with one research program: the institutionalist one. Second, I think that a confusing research design in Elbasani's article leads to limited results. The following two sections discuss each point separately, while the third, concluding section, summarizes my argument.
BOOK REVIEWS  
 
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 580 pp., 17.99 GBP/ 24.99 USD, ISBN 0521538548 (paperback), 45GBP/ 70US$, ISBN 052183130X (hardcover).
Reviewed by EMILIAN KAVALSKI

Paulin Kola, The Search for Greater Albania. London: Hurst & Co., 2003. 416pp., 21 USD, ISBN 1-85065-596-0 (paperback).
Reviewed by MATHEW HERBERT

Peter Siani-Davies (ed.), International Interventions in the Balkans since 1995. Routledge. 2003. 224 pp., ISBN 0-415-29834-2 (hardcover).
Reviewed by HAMZA KARCIC

Miroslav Hadzic, The Yugoslav People's Agony. The Role of the Yugoslav People's Army. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. 293 pp.,49 GBP, ISBN 0-7546-1642-8 (hardcover).
Reviewed by FLORIAN BIEBER

EXCHANGE OF VIEWS:

The New Balkans: Disintegration and Reconstruction edited by George A. Kourvetaris, Victor Roudometof, Kleomenis Koutsoukis, and Andrew G. Kourvetaris
TINA MAVRIKOS-ADAMOU 
BILJANA RADONJIC
 



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Disclaimer: The author is employed by an American defense contractor as the senior political analyst, Kosovo Forces (KFOR), Multinational Brigade East, Camp Bondsteel Kosovo. The views expressed in this paper are the author's alone. They do not express the positions of his employer, the U.S. Government, the U.S. Army, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or KFOR.