For the western Balkans the transition from years of disintegration and war never seems to end.
While the Balkans did net the Germans a reliable source of oil, attempting to squeeze an invasion of the Balkans and Operation Barbarossa into the same summer was a gigantic mistake.
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In the Balkans, the EU offers the balm of membership to heal the trauma of the Yugoslav wars.
He also covered a succession of wars in the Balkans, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, numerous crises in Iraq.
Another reason for the gulf between the Balkans and the westward-moving rest of the old communist swathe is ethnicity.
Awful as the death toll has been in the Balkans in the 1990s, it has not reached even 120, 000.
There is a dangerous element of the Balkans in the mounting Malukus crisis.
In both the Balkans and the Arab world, many believe that American policy must be guided by some unspoken, strategic agenda.
At the very least, the devastation of much of the Balkans and the present prospect for a wider regional war might have been avoided.
From the Balkans to the Middle East to Eastern Europe, I have seen dark paths transform, through the will of the people, to bring about brighter futures.
My candidate for the job: Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who brought peace to the Balkans in the mid-1990s with the masterful Dayton accords that he oversaw and managed.
One day, several years off, a grand conference of interested parties may be able to redraw the map of the Balkans with the consent of its people.
With deployments in the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa, many European countries are close to the limit of what they can sustain in terms of overseas operations.
Very quickly, the crisis in the Balkans provided the alliance with a new and testing task and one that shows no sign of ending in the immediate future.
These limitations mean that pupils are not learning about military conflicts that have preceded the current attacks on Afghanistan, such as in the Balkans and the Gulf War.
Mr Erdogan's secular critics argue that his behaviour points to another troubling impulse: to lead an arc of Sunni Muslim countries spanning Africa, Asia, the Balkans and the Middle East.
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This calls for a Turkish zone of political, economic and cultural influence, primarily among neighbours (many of them former Ottoman dominions) in the Balkans, the south Caucasus and the Middle East.
As Turkey seeks to start negotiating with the European Union to join that club, while striving for greater influence in both the Balkans and the Caucasus, he may find himself sidelined.
The rise of English as a lingua franca will not necessarily do much to diminish arguments over national languages within or between countries, in places like the Balkans or the Baltic states.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has held his first meeting with foreign ministers from the six-nation Contact Group formed to tackle ongoing problems in the Balkans following the break-up of Yugoslavia.
Thanks to you and the service of our forces throughout the Balkans, the region is growing closer to the rest of Europe, but there is still a lot of work to do.
But they remained concentrated in their Cold War locations, from which they have had to be deployed to deal with crises elsewhere in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia and other locations.
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NATO's national armed forces were always able to operate together in theory, but when allies went to war in the Balkans in the 1990s, they found they couldn't talk to each other by radio.
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During a meeting with visiting Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, he noted that the forces of global jihad are making a concerted effort to penetrate the Balkans through the Albanian and Bosnian Muslim communities.
No single person has done as much to shape the history of the Balkans in the past dozen years, and no single person has as much to answer for in the court of historical judgment.
One group that will not be affected are the immigrant retailers mostly from the Balkans or the Indian subcontinent who work all the hours they can in tiny corner shops, well under the size limit for Sunday opening.
In fact, located as it is between the Balkans, the Middle East, and formerly Soviet Central Asia, Turkey must contend with neighbors who are virtually without exception antipathetic to the development of and proliferation of democratic freedoms.
When he collected his Nobel peace prize from Oslo in December 2009 he made a point of saying that he accepted the case for using force on humanitarian grounds, as Bill Clinton did in the Balkans in the 1990s.
Under fire for having spared Saddam Hussein's Iraq from bombing, and struggling to convince Congress of the need for further peace-keeping in the Balkans, the Clinton administration may reckon it increasingly awkward to be thought to condone Mr Milosevic.
But it would certainly make a nervous Europe stretch out a pleading hand to the United States, as this newly aggressive Russia poked its finger into the Baltic area, the Balkans and the explosive region where Europe meets Muslim south-west Asia.
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