The Foreign Policies of Post-Yugoslav States is a rich anthology that looks at the convergence and divergence of the foreign policy of several states that emerged in the wake of the dissolution of Yugoslavia. It deserves to be read not only by academics and policymakers who focus on post-Yugoslav political developments but also by scholars who focus on comparative foreign policy and the politics of Europeanization. Why should you read it? After all, this is not a book about the foreign policies of the great powers. However, the successes and failures of these small states are fascinating in both theory and practice. These new states are small and nimble, sometimes having to navigate dangerous domestic and international territories, picking allies, and wielding identities in various directions to achieve different goals.

While the Europeanization literature in Eastern Europe focuses mostly on the role of the European Union on political and social changes in the region, this text focuses on the ways these states act as participants in foreign policy. As such, the volume is part of the welcome turn in the literature to local agency. On the one hand, there is a clear past for all of these new states—Yugoslavia—and a clear future to which they aspire—membership in the European Union. In the words of Soeren Keil and Bernhard Stahl, “all states were born in Yugoslavia and will spend adulthood in the EU” (p. 11). On the other hand, there is significant variation between the states that are already members of the EU, Slovenia and Croatia, and others that are stuck in various parts of the journey. In addition, European or NATO integrations are not the only goals of these states’ foreign policies. Most of these states aimed at international recognition and used foreign policy activities for rebuilding. Almost all of these countries share experiences of war, and most of them share experiences of economic sanctions in the 1990s; therefore, they had to deal with legacies of war and illegal smuggling.

While foreign policy is often analyzed separately from domestic policy, especially by realist theories that focus on unitary state actors, the contributors to this volume underline how foreign policy is intimately connected to domestic policy concerns and actors for these new and small states. In many ways, foreign policy has been an important tool of the multiple transformations in the region, from war to peace, from socialist self-management to free markets, from authoritarianism to democracy. The study of foreign policy is not simply descriptive; it is also theoretical. The contributors are very self-conscious in using foreign policy analysis and various international theories—realism, liberalism, and constructivism—to explain how the internal makeup of the states, their historical memories, and identities matter in explaining the goals, tools, and achievements of their foreign policy. As Katrin Boeckh writes in her chapter on Yugoslav foreign policy during the Cold War, Tito and the Yugoslav socialists wielded a complex multivectoral foreign policy that pragmatically appealed both to the capitalist West and the communist East. The Yugoslav policy of nonalignment ensured that Yugoslavia received significant foreign loans and credit that helped economic growth. Yugoslav citizens were also able to travel freely to both East and West, and many worked as guest workers that helped rebuild Western Europe. Therefore, the foreign policy achievements helped stabilize Tito’s authoritarian regime.

The role of identity in foreign policy formulation, long a concern of constructivist international relations theories, is used to explain various important developments in the text as well. The contributors point out both the instrumental use of identity to achieve foreign policy goals and the constitutive understanding of identity in foreign policy. Nationalist mobilizations in Serbia and Bosnia are understood in the instrumentalist framework, where self-interested leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic played the national card to rally the population. The contributors point out that membership in the European Union was sometimes motivated by shared values of democracy and free markets, as well as by the desire to join a more prosperous, more peaceful, and freer supranational institution. When it broke up with Yugoslavia, Slovenia emphasized its Central European identity in order to escape associating with the Balkan images of war and nationalism (pp. 53–54). Identities are not a given, and often contested among elites and mass publics. There are different implications from images of Croatia as a place only for ethic Croats or as a European country where the human rights of all its citizens are protected. While Franjo Tuđman favored the earlier vision, the Croat elites who led Croatia into the EU chose the second vision. Paradoxically, Kosovo Albanian leaders stressed the minority religion in Kosovo, Catholicism, and de-emphasize the Muslim majority religion in order to appeal to the American and European allies (p. 215).

Another contribution of the volume is that it unpacks the state as well, since it looks at how multiple actors within the state, both internal and external, matter significantly in decision making. Subnational units in a federation, such as Republica Srpska in Bosnia or the U.S. embassy in Kosovo, are important actors in the foreign policy decision making in Bosnia and Kosovo. The states also vary in the degree to which they are consolidated or contested, challenging the unitary state assumption in foreign policy analysis: Slovenia and Croatia have matured as consolidated states, Bosnia is contested from within, and Kosovo is contested from within and externally.

The contributors did a good job in answering the specific questions about the goals and conduct of foreign policy in a theoretical and comparative context. However, it would have been useful to see some comparative survey data of attitudes among the Western Balkan countries. In their chapters on Serbia and Montenegro, Mladen Madenov and Jelena Džankić make extensive use of Gallup Balkan Monitor survey data that has extensive information on the citizens’ views and attitudes in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. While the Gallup Balkan Monitor did not include Slovenia, it would have been useful to add the comparative data in the book on Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Croatia. Gëzim Krasniqi uses another survey commissioned by the European Union in Kosovo in his chapter.

Another critique is that the contributors focus mostly on the mobilizing role of national identity. Elites also used nationalist discourse to silence and demobilize liberal critics of new authoritarian leaders in Serbia and Croatia (se V. P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s, 2004).

In the conclusion, Amelia Hadfield hypothesizes that state consolidation and internal consensus on EU integration explain the divergence in the success of EU integration. In other words, no state, no EU integration. However, the contributors also indicate how post-Yugoslav state elites have used the prospect of EU integration to strengthen their states. The puzzles concerning how state and democratic consolidations relate to supranational integration have not been fully answered yet. The volume makes a strong contribution to the unpacking of such puzzles in a comparative context.