Western Balkans: Does the Past Determine the Future? Pictures of South Slav Reality
The Balkan region is still deeply marked by the stereotypes created by the Western vision as well as by the past of a people in which long periods of peace have been the exception. 2014, which commemorates the centenary of Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Habsburg, the event that unleashed the First Word War, is an occasion to revise the view through which the West and the Balkan countries themselves have created the historical perspective of this region. In order to overcome these prejudices and stereotypes and economically redirect the region in the European context of economic crisis it is necessary to put an end to the savage neo-liberalism that currently characterises the Balkan countries, and which has created something that was almost non-existent in Tito’s Yugoslavia: enormous social inequalities.