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Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU) Memorandum, 1986
Dobrica Ćosić is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and is considered by many to be its most influential member. While Ćosić has been credited with writing the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which appeared in unfinished fashion in the Serbian public in 1986, he in fact was not responsible for its writing.
Ćosić's long life has meant a….
Infant Mortality: Eastern Europe: 1970-1989
One of the most important indicators of a societies transition to what economists often call “modern industrial society” is a decline in infant mortality rates. As you might imagine, declines in infant mortality rates are also very important to individual citizens, because it means that their children are much more likely to live to adulthood. This rate reflects the number of children who….
Letter from Muhamet Kapllani to Hans-Dietrich Genscher (Tirana, 18 June 1991)
In this 1991 letter, written in formal diplomatic language, the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Albania agrees to accept a mission to Albania from the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) (later the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe). As a precondition for this mission, the Albanian government had to accept the Helsinki Final Act, including important….
The Warsaw Pact
Following the final approval of the Paris Peace Treaties that ended World War II, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) planned to incorporate the new state of West Germany into their military alliance in the spring of 1955. From the Soviet perspective, this was another aggressive military maneuver. In response to NATO's German decision, the Soviet Union and its East European allies….
The Future of Eastern Europe
By the spring of 1990, the future of the individual countries in Eastern Europe was still open for debate. While Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary seemed to be transitioning toward Western-styled democracies, Romania and Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania were following a different course. The former had experienced violent uprisings, and in the latter the Communists seemed to be more….