Clouds of new storms are gathering over the Balkans, a social desert left behind by a decade of destructive wars, imperialist aggression, and social disintegration after the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes of so called "actually existing socialism". The Call for the 5th International Conference of the Balkan Socialist Centre "Christian Rakovsky" issued on May 2005 had insisted on the urgency and the reasons of this worsening situation: all the contradictions of the world crisis are again concentrated in this strategic region, exacerbated by three main factors a) the quagmire of American imperialism in occupied Iraq and the growing crisis in the entire Middle East, b) the new turmoil in the former Soviet space targeted to the Russian heartland and marked by the "orange" upturns sponsored by imperialism and, finally, c) the crisis in the European Union itself and its impact on the expectations both of rulers and ruled in the region. |