Nationalism and Ethnic-religious Radicalism and the Nato”s Specific Place in the Balkan Politics Final Report 1. Balkans in a Short Historic Review

Balkans has a long and abundant in events history .The age-long development of the Balkans, the almost permanent invasions, wars and conflicts have earned it a reputation of one of the fieriest European regions. For the purposes of political description of the relations there such terms as "a powder magazine", a dim region of "a clash of religions and civilizations" are used, but behind all these terms a permanent concept is hidden -the concept of a place that brings only problems to Europe. The reasons for such a characteristic of the Balkans are numerous. I can count some of them as the historic, geographic, ethnic-demographic, political and many other less important reasons. But if I have to arrange and to grade them in some way, without any doubt I have to put on the first place the geographic or expressed in other words -the geo-political position of this clearly differentiated European region. The European continent is unique in a global sense. It looks more like a huge appendage-peninsular of Asia, than an independent continent like Africa, the two Americas and Australia. Moreover, Europe has relatively not a big purely continental area, which is surrounded by some big and numerous little peninsulas. It is enough to count the big ones only the Balkan, the Apennine, the Iberian, the Scandinavian peninsulas, so that to get an idea about the percentage of the peninsular