POST-CONFLICT BELGRADE: COLD WAR HERITAGE AND THE GLOBAL CHALLENGE
POST-CONFLICT BELGRADE: COLD WAR HERITAGE AND THE GLOBAL CHALLENGE

Summary/Abstract: Of all European capitals, Belgrade has suffered the most repeated destructions, migrations, economic crises and identity crises. The history of modern Belgrade is a comparative chronicle of general, "big", official history, and "small", usually anonymous individual destinies. The urban and cultural development of Belgrade in the last two centuries was left to the elements, arbitrariness or incompetence of institutions. Sometimes the difference in essence was lost, in the attitude of the conquerors or "liberators" towards the city and its current state. The chronic weakness of the citizenry became a factor in the specificity of the transition, democratization, emancipation of the rule of law and market liberalization even in the transition period, after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. Precisely because of all the aforementioned historical disturbances and fractures, Belgrade is the only former satellite of the Soviet Union that was not able to define the relationship between its contemporary culture and institutions that would distance itself from the legacy of totalitarianism. That is why Belgrade's role in the process of European disintegration belonged precisely to the Cold War paradigm, although the other Yugoslavia in Cold War relations was basically neutral, or non-aligned.

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