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ABOUT US

     Our Foundation was established in 1994 as a non-partisan research institute devoted to studying the Balkan Peninsula in all its aspects. The Foundation's extensive research, publications, and numerous conferences all over the world are designed to correct the current trend of public commentary, which tends, systematically, not to understand events but to construct a propagandistic version of Balkan rivalries, designed to facilitate the involvement of outside powers. The Foundation provides a forum and a platform for specialists and commentators who wish to reassert their independence against the neo-imperialist trend that has been strongly present in the mass media treatment of the Balkans over the past decade.

     The Foundation is named after a great Western poet who gave his life in the fight to free Balkan peoples from Mohammedan rule. This reflects its belief in the essential unity of our civilization, of which the Orthodox nations of Southeast Europe are an inseparable and essential ingredient.

     Our Foundation's primary brief is Southeast Europe, and its objective is to assert the essential unity of the "Latin" West and "Greek" East; but the problem of the Balkans under the "New World Order" is inseparable from the quandary of America under the bipartisan regime inside the Beltway, or that of Europe "united" under Bonn and Brussels. Can any meaningful unity of nations sharing European heritage be restored? To what extent, how, and why has the modern, secular, "post-Christian" West inherited the antipathy of West to the carriers of the Byzantine tradition? How do those two traditions converge, and how do they diverge, amidst the continuing onslaught of New World Order secularism?

     The purpose of our Foundation is to consider whether such old historical animosities, fanned by new political ambitions, can be countered by the upholders of traditional values. It seeks to monitor the role of the West along the old fault lines of Eastern and Western Christendom in the former Yugoslavia. Such issues are not merely political. They are as much "cultural" as theological, and they have been political all along. It is on the way we deal with them today that the future of our civilization will depend.

     Accordingly, our Foundation seeks to counter prejudice and ignorance about an area of the Old Continent which need never be the "powder keg of Europe." Though the Balkans, however delineated, contain many states and even more nations, they have one thing in common: for most of history they have not been masters of their own fate, but objects of policy by dominant outside powers. Though sometimes depicted as generating wider conflicts, the peoples of the Balkans in most cases had these conflicts foisted upon them by powerful outsiders. The way in which the Realpolitik practiced by outside powers blew up in their faces time after time is a leitmotif of Balkan history.

     Even if all history-as a philosopher argued-is in some measure contemporary history, it need not be dominated by the obsessions of the day. The work of The Lord Byron Foundation is based on the belief that the cause of tolerance in a troubled region can never be advanced by misrepresentation or by the sentimental lapse of seriousness which judges one patriotism as admirable and condemns another as inadmissible. Our work, therefore, is not only about the Balkans; it is not only about Western policy in that region either. It is not only about the problem of globalist hubris, nor is it only about the decline of Western civilization. It is about all of the above. Each problem in the equation is inseparable from the rest.