The Black Box is as well a metaphor: in aeronautics it gives proof of the very last moments of a crashed plane. However, similarily to the above case, the wars and social "crashes" of the 90s in former Yugoslavia, have left an "empty" and truly "black" box to the Western observers leaving them without a clue what had really happend in those very years.

Ethnic boundary-making, anachronisms of tradition and modernism,economic transformations and political miscalculations of the last years have only increased the opacity of the image of the Balkans. Additionally, Western attempts to shed light in regard to the understanding of the region have proven short-sighted so far.