https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Mazower
Mark Mazower (/məˈzaʊ.ər/; born 20 February 1958) is a British historian. His expertise are Greece, the Balkans and, more generally, 20th-century Europe. He is currently Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University in New York City.
Mazower, Mark
Ira D. Wallach Professor of History
Interests and Research
Mark Mazower, Ira D. Wallach Professor of History, specializes in modern Greece, 20th-century Europe, and international history. His current interests include the history of Greek independence, and the historical evolution of the Greek islands in the very long run. He comments on international affairs for the Financial Times and reviews books for the Financial Times, the Nation, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and others. In 2016 he made a film Techniques of the Body, a meditation on the refugee crisis in the long run of Greek history, with director Constantine Giannaris and he is currently exploring the theme of the unburied dead with theater director Theodoros Terzopoulos. His most recent book is What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (Other Press, 2017), a family history. He is founding director of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, which opens at Reid Hall in Paris in fall 2018 with an inaugural fellowship class of sixteen faculty and creative artists.
Governing the World: The History of an Idea
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594203490
The story of global cooperation between nations and peoples is a tale of dreamers goading us to find common cause in remedying humanity’s worst problems. But international institutions have also provided a tool for the powers that be to advance their own interests and stamp their imprint on the world. Mark Mazower’s Governing the World tells the epic story of that inevitable and irresolvable tension—the unstable and often surprising alchemy between ideas and power.
From the beginning, the willingness of national leaders to cooperate has been spurred by crisis: the book opens in 1815, amid the rubble of the Napoleonic Empire, as the Concert of Europe was assembled with an avowed mission to prevent any single power from dominating the continent and to stamp out revolutionary agitation before it could lead to war. But if the Concert was a response to Napoleon, internationalism was a response to the Concert, and as courts and monarchs disintegrated they were replaced by revolutionaries and bureaucrats.
19th century internationalists included bomb-throwing anarchists and the secret policemen who fought them, Marxist revolutionaries and respectable free marketeers. But they all embraced nationalism, the age’s most powerful transformative political creed, and assumed that nationalism and internationalism would go hand in hand. The wars of the twentieth century saw the birth of institutions that enshrined many of those ideals in durable structures of authority, most notably the League of Nations in World War I and the United Nations after World War II.
Throughout this history, we see that international institutions are only as strong as the great powers of the moment allow them to be. The League was intended to prop up the British empire. With Washington taking over world leadership from Whitehall, the United Nations became a useful extension of American power. But as Mazower shows us, from the late 1960s on, America lost control over the dialogue and the rise of the independent Third World saw a marked shift away from the United Nations and toward more pliable tools such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. From the 1990s to 2007, Governing the World centers on a new regime of global coordination built upon economic rule-making by central bankers and finance ministers, a regime in which the interests of citizens and workers are trumped by the iron logic of markets.
Now, the era of Western dominance of international life is fast coming to an end and a new multi-centered global balance of forces is emerging. We are living in a time of extreme confusion about the purpose and durability of our international institutions. History is not prophecy, but Mark Mazower shows us why the current dialectic between ideals and power politics in the international arena is just another stage in an epic two-hundred-year story.
German-occupied Europe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-occupied_Europe
History of the Balkans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Balkans
Yugoslav Partisans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Partisans
The Yugoslav Partisans,[note 1][6] or the National Liberation Army,[note 2] officially the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia,[note 3][7] was the Communist-led resistance to the Axis powers (chiefly Germany) in occupied Yugoslavia during World War II.
It is considered to be Europe's most effective anti-Axis resistance movement during World War II, often compared to the Polish resistance movement, albeit the latter was a mostly non-communist autonomous movement.[8][9] The resistance was led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.[10] Its commander was Marshal Josip Broz Tito.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josip_Broz_Tito
Tito was the chief architect of the second Yugoslavia, a socialist federation that lasted from November 1943 until April 1992. Despite being one of the founders of Cominform, he became the first Cominform member to defy Soviet hegemony in 1948. He was the only leader in Joseph Stalin's time to leave Cominform and begin with his country's own socialist program, which contained elements of market socialism. Economists active in the former Yugoslavia, including Czech-born Jaroslav Vanek and Yugoslav-born Branko Horvat, promoted a model of market socialism that was dubbed the Illyrian model. Firms were socially owned by their employees and structured on workers' self-management; they competed in open and free markets.
Tito built a very powerful cult of personality around himself, which was maintained by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia after his death.
Tito managed to keep ethnic tensions under control by delegating as much power as possible to each republic. The 1974 Yugoslav Constitution defined SFR Yugoslavia as a "federal republic of equal nations and nationalities, freely united on the principle of brotherhood and unity in achieving specific and common interest." Each republic was also given the right to self-determination and secession if done through legal channels. Lastly, Kosovo and Vojvodina, the two constituent provinces of Serbia, received substantially increased autonomy, including de facto veto power in the Serbian parliament.
Ten years after his death, Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, and Yugoslavia descended into civil war.