The bloody break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the region's wider struggles with a post-Communist transition suggest continuing Balkan burdens for the peoples and states of Southeastern Europe. Ethnic conflict, disputed borders, forced migration and foreign intervention had already scarred the countries from Romania south to Greece during the decades surrounding the two world wars. John Lampe disputes this pejoratively Balkan background. He traces the region's traumatic twentieth century through wars and postwar transitions that adopted or confronted European ideologies, institutions and interventions.