The United States, Differentiation, and Balkan Cooperation during the Cold War

“As an international system the Cold War was riddled with contradictions” concedes Arne Westad. The Cold War divided the Balkan peninsula along ideological lines, but soon the region emerged as a location for converging strategic dilemmas. The enduring preoccupation of the Balkan states with national borders was thwarted by the awe-inspiring Cold War frontline that dissected it. Tito’s Yugoslavia opted for a policy of equidistance from the superpowers, which introduced ambivalence and prevented the establishment of neat division. The Cold War purportedly enabled Greece to escape the tyranny of its geography and become, politically and even culturally, non-Balkan. The dislocation was even greater for Turkey, displaced from both the Balkans and the Middle East. The Cold War did not impede the superpowers from testing each other’s resolve or from sowing discord in each other’s sphere of influence. The hunger for development in the Balkans offered the United States opportunity to “hone in” the instrument of “differentiation,” that was an integral feature of containment from 1949, and was bequeathed by each Cold War U.S. president to his successor. It aimed to exacerbate imperceptibly, any tensions in the Soviet bloc, by rewarding primarily through trade, Eastern European countries that manifested signs of independence from the U.S.S.R or made moves to internal liberalization.