Dr Dimitris Livanios is Georgakis Research Fellow in Modern Greek Studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge, where he teaches modern Greek history. He read History and Archaeology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and graduated in 1988 with a First Class degree. He also holds an MA in Modern History (First Class) from the same university. In 1996 he obtained a D.Phil. in Modern History from the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College).

His research interests lie in the history of Greece and the Balkans from the 18th to the 20th century. In particular, his research and publications are concerned with the Macedonian Question, British foreign policy towards the Balkans, and various aspects of the emergence of nationalism in the Balkans. He has lectured on Balkan nationalism at Oxford, Cambridge, the LSE, King’s College London and Birmingham. He is a member of the editorial board of ΚΑΜΠΟΣ Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek, Books Editor of the Anglo-Hellenic Review, and Reviews Editor of the Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies. He is currently researching the development of Greek historical imagination (1770s-1950s), and preparing a study on the role of violence in Balkan history in the 19th and 20th centuries.

An attempt to offer some account of the main phases of the Macedonian question in the 19th and 20th centuries and to take a fresh look at what is new and not so new in each one of them.

Vassilis Fouskas was born in 1963 in Petra, Lesvos, and studied International Relations, Economy and European Politics at the Universities of Athens (Kapodestrian and Panteios), Perugia and London. His studies were supported by the State Scholarships Foundation of Greece and his publications include “Populism And Modernisation; The Exhaustion Of The Third Hellenic Republic”, 1974-1994, Athens: Ideokinissi, 1995) and “Italy, Europe, The Left”, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). He is currently working on “Greece, Europe and the Balkans; Greece’s Foreign and Economic Policies in the 20th Century”, a title contracted to be published by Macmillan (American publisher: St. Martin’s Press).

Vassilis is the founder and chairperson of the Association for the Study of Southern Europe and the Balkans and the editor of the Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans. He taught European History, Politics and Economics in various Universities in the UK and abroad. He is currently a Research Fellow in European Studies at Kingston University and the Convenor of the British Academy - sponsored international conference “The Balkans: The Politics Of Fragmentation, War And Reconstruction” (11 and 12 May, Kingston University).

This presentation explores the political strategy of Greece in the 1990s and attempts an assessment of it in the context of the country’s EU and NATO memberships. The way in which Greece’s political class dealt with the Macedonian issue in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia, Turkey’s and Greece’s role in the overall geo-political context of the Balkans, as well as NATO’s and EU’s strategies towards the region will be the focus of the presentation. In the same vein, an attempt will be made to examine the significance of the recent rapprochement between Greece and Turkey.