Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
V.P. (Chip) Gagnon, Jr. (2004, 2010) has provided a useful corrective to what he has called the “Myth of Ethnic War,” the notion that what was Yugoslavia was torn apart by primeval communal hatreds. He is not alone in this. Maria Todorova's variation on Edward Said's “Orientalism” take on the same question, and edited volumes put together by Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić and by Raymond Detrez and Pieter Plas have also attacked the problem posed when public intellectuals and politicians paint a crude caricature of Balkan history. The readers of this journal no doubt have their own favorites when it comes to the sport of bashing this particular myth.