1. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
2. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1995, p. 3.
3. Nedim Gürsel, Retour dans les Balkans: Récit, Ottignies: Quarnum, 1997, p. 70. Gürsel puts it this way: “De toute façon, bien que tous soient contraints de vivre ensemble, les Macédoniens détestent les Bulgares, les Bulgares les Turcs, les Turcs les Albanais, les Albanais les Serbes, les Serbes les Bosniaques, les Bosniaques les Croates, les Croates les Valaques, les Valaques les Tziganes et les Tziganes les détestent tous. Dans un sens, on peut dire que c’est le destin des Balkans.”
4. Orientalism refers to an imputed, but false opposition between East and West, used to assert the uniqueness and superiority of Western civilization. The concept is developed by Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
5. Misha Glenny The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804-1999, New York: Viking, 2000, p. 2, asserts that the Serbian uprising of 1804 “marked the beginning of modern history in the Balkan peninsula.” Glenny portrays national discord and endemic violence as a consequence of external manipulation.
6. See Elena Zamfirescu, “The ‘Flight From the Balkans’,” Südosteuropa, Nos. 1-2, 1995, pp. 51-62.
7. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 11.
8. Ferdinand Shevill, The History of the Balkan Peninsula: From the Earliest Times
to the Present Day, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922, p. 13.
9. Shatterbelt is a term of art in geopolitical analysis used to refer to a politically fragmented and ethnically divided zone that serves as a field of competition between neighboring powers. See Philip Kelly, “Escalation of Regional Conflict: Testing the Shatterbelt Concept,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1986, pp. 161-180.
10. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age
of Philip II, 2 vols., New York: Harper & Row, 1972, Vol. I, pp. 103-167.
Rights Publications, 1993, provides a guide to Balkan national communities.
12. Challenges to this assertion by the 19th century Austrian historian Jakob Fallmerayer, whose work sought to deny an organic link between the modern Greeks and their classical predecessors, have been a source of continuing resentment. See Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 2; and Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, Byzanz und das
Abendland: Ausgewälte Schriften, Vienna: W. Andermann, 1943.
13. The reason for the conversion of Balkan Christian communities to Islam remains a subject of debate. Desire to maintain social status by adopting the faith of the conqueror, resistance to the repression of the local Bogomil tradition (a Manichaean religious movement denounced as heresy by the established church), the conversion of child-levy (devşirme) military recruits and slaves promised freedom, and imposed conversion at the behest of Muslim landlords have all been cited. It should also be noted that there were conversions in all directions, not just from Christian to Muslim. See John V. A. Fine Jr., The Bosnian Church, A New
Interpretation: A Study of the Bosnian Church and its Place in State and Society from the 13th to the 15th Centuries, New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.
14. The most important of the Balkan Slavic Muslim communities, the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina (referred to as Muslimani in Titoist Yugoslavia), officially adopted the name Bosniac (Bošnjak) in 1993. A regional variant of the Serbo- Croat language (including numerous Turkish loan words) was also designated as the Bosnian (Bosanski) language. See Senahid Halilović, Bosanski jezik, Sarajevo: Biblioteka Ključanin, 1991. Bosnian Muslim nationalist movements, hoping to buttress their case for an independent national identity, had urged these changes for several decades, but they did not win significant popular support until the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. Francine Friedman, The Bosnian Muslims: Denial of
a Nation, Boulder: Westview Press, 1996, p. 192.
15. The size of Roma communities in the region is difficult to determine, due in part to resistance within the community to census gathering. An approximate breakdown would be 800,000 in Bulgaria, 800,000 in Hungary, 60,000 in Macedonia, 2 million in Romania (according to some estimates as many as 3.5 million), 60,000 in Albania, 7000 each in Slovenia and Montenegro, 18,000 in Croatia, and 500,000 in Serbia. See André Liebich, “Minorities in Eastern Europe: Obstacles to a Reliable Count,” RFE/RE Research Report, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 20, 1992. Portraits of the situation of the Roma in the contemporary Balkans appear in Zoltan Barany, “Living on the Edge: The East European Roma in Postcommunist Politics and Society,” Slavic Review, No. 2, Summer 1994; Zoltan Barany, “Orphans of Transition: Gypsies in Eastern Europe,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 9, No. 3, July 1998, pp. 142-155; and David M. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe
and Russia, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
of civilizations,” and cites Christopher Dawson’s observation that “the great religions are the foundation on which the great civilizations rest.” Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 47.
17. See the essay “Ex-Yougoslavie: une fausse guerre de religion,” in Paul Garde, Fin de Siècle dans les Balkans 1992-2000: Analyses et chroniques, Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 2001, pp. 17-33.
18. Thus the Nobel Prize winning novelist Ivo Andrić, born of Croatian parents, baptized a Roman Catholic, and raised and educated in Bosnia, could claim Serbian nationality as an adult. The Bosnian novelist Meša Selimović, author of the great Yugoslav novel Death and the Dervish, raised a Bosnian Muslim but a professed communist and atheist, also asserted Serbian nationality in his later years.
19. Bulent Gokay, “Oil, War and Geopolitics from Kosovo to Afghanistan,”
Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, Vol. 4, No. 1, May 2002, pp. 5-14.
20. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 59. Todorova suggests that the series of stereotypes she designates as balkanism is more than just a “subspecies” of Orientalism because of the region’s close but ambivalent relationship with both East and West. “Unlike Orientalism, which is a discourse about an imputed opposition, balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity.” (Ibid., p. 17).
21. Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History, New York: The Modern Library, 2000, p. 62.
22. Jean-Arnault Dérens, Balkans: la Crise, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2000, p. 12.
23. Herodotus describes the episode in a somewhat more scientific light: “Persian historians put the responsibility for the quarrel on the Phoenicians. These people came originally from the coasts of the Indian Ocean . . . in Argos they displayed their wares . . . the king’s daughter Io and some others were caught and bundled aboard the ships . . . Later on some Greeks . . . probably Cretans—put into the Phoenician port of Tyre and carried off the king’s daughter Europa, thus giving them tit for tat . . . Some forty of fifty years afterward Paris, the son of Priam, was inspired by these stories to steal a wife for himself out of Greece . . . And that was how he came to carry off Helen.” Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969, pp. 13-14.
24. Michael Grant, The Rise of the Greeks, London: Phoenix Books, 2001.
25. In his classic account, Arnold Toynbee equates Hellenism with the entire Greek civilization of the classical age and beyond. He defines it as “a civilization
which came into existence towards the end of the second millennium B.C. and preserved its identity from then onwards until the seventh century of the Christian era.” Arnold J. Toynbee, Hellenism: The History of a Civilization, New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 3.
26. For a discussion of Constantinople’s role in the northern frontier regions see Paul Stephenson, Byzantium’s Balkan Frontier: A Political Study of the Northern
Balkans, 900-1204, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
27. John Julius Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium, New York: Knopf, 1997, p. 101.
28. Steven Runciman, Byzantine Civilization, New York: Meridian Books, 1956, p. 240. Runciman’s evocation of the city’s fall to the Ottomans, said to be destined to transform it into “the seat of brutal force, of ignorance, of magnificent tastefulness,” sheds unfortunate light on the cultural bias that informs this conclusion. Ibid.
29. John V. A. Fine, Jr., The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the
Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
1983, pp. 94-158. Fine’s work is the best introduction to the period.
30. George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1957, p. 283.
31. The misgivings that the arrival of the Crusaders provoked among the Byzantine hierarchy are described in Anna Comnena’s Alexiad, perhaps the greatest surviving monument of Byzantine literature. See The Alexiad of Anna
Comnena, trans. E. R. A. Sewter, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969, books ten and
eleven,
32. John V. Fine Jr., The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late
Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1987.
33. Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History, New York: New York University Press, 1998, pp. 58-80, gives a good account of the battle and its place in historical memory.
34. See Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire, London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1938; and Fuat Köprülü, Les Origines de l’Empire Ottoman, Paris: E. de Boccard, 1935.
35. One of the best biographies of Mehmed remains Franz Babinger, Mehmed
36. Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453-1924, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995, offers a portrait of the city as imperial capital.
37. Maria Todorova, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” in L. Carl Brown, ed., The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, pp. 45-77; and Peter Sugar, Southeastern Europe Under
Ottoman Rule, 1354-1804, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.
38. Ivo Andrić, The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia Under the Influence of
Turkish Rule, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990, p. 38. This is the text of
Andrić’s doctoral dissertation, written in 1924 for the University of Graz.
39. Dorothea Gräfin Razumovsky, Der Balkan: Geschichte und Politik seit
Alexander der Grossen, Munich: Piper, 1999, p. 203. Razumovsky goes on to note
with “astonishment” that this achievement has been no more respected than Marshall Tito’s comparable accomplishment in promoting peace and unity several centuries later.
40. Peter Gunst, “Agrarian Systems of Central and Eastern Europe,” in Daniel Chirot, ed., The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from
the Middle Ages Until the Early Twentieth Century, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989, pp. 53-91.
41. George Schöpflin, “The Political Traditions of Eastern Europe,” Daedalus, Vol. 119, No. 1, Winter 1990. pp. 55-90.
42. The theme of cultural differentiation is developed at length in Michael W. Weithmann, Balkan-Chronik: 2000 Jahre zwischen Orient und Okzident, Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1995.
43. See the collection by Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey, eds., Rude
and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers,
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968; and especially the colorful account by the Protestant radical Adam Olearius in Samuel H. Baron, ed., The Travels of
Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967.
44. Norman Daniel, Islam, Europe and Empire, Edinburgh: The University Press, 1966; and Franco Cardini, Europa e Islam: Storia di un malintesa, Rome: Editori Laterza, 1999.
45. Sacherwell Sitwell, Romanian Journey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 63.
46. Razumovsky, Der Balkan, p. 204. Figures are cited from the 1910 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
47. M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774-1923: A Study in International
Relations, London: Macmillan, 1966.
48. L. S. Stavrianos, The Balkans 1815-1914, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963, pp. 16-19.
49. See Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
50. The doctrine of the Third Rome was coined in the reign of Ivan III (1462- 1515). It argued that after the fall of Rome and Constantinople, Moscow inherited the mantle of the true Christian faith.
51. Bismarck cited from Weithmann, Balkan-Chronik, p. 297.
52. K. E. Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali
Pasha’s Greece, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
53. Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans: Vol. I: Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 61. The classic
study of the primitive rebel phenomenon is Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits, 2nd ed., Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985.
54. L. S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453, New York: New York University Press, 2000, pp. 215-229.
55. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983.
56. See Wayne S. Vucinovich and Thomas A. Emmert, eds., Kosovo: Legacy
of a Medieval Battle, Minneapolis: Minnesota Mediterranean and East European
Monographs, 1991.
57. R. W. Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy, New York: Howard Fertig, 1969.
58. The best survey of Russian engagement in the Balkans during the 19th century is Barbara Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
59. The terms of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, which did not permit the passage of Russian warships into the Mediterranean, were not satisfactory to St. Petersburg, and became a source of constant revisionist demands. See E. I. Druzhinina, Kiuchuk Kainardzhiiskii mir 1774 goda: Ego podgotovka i zakliuchenie, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1955, p. 334.
60. I. S. Dostian, Rossiia i balkanskii vopros: Iz istorii russko-balkanskikh
politicheskikh sviazei v pervoi treti XIX v., Moscow: Nauka, 1972, pp. 36-42. Peter the
Great had called upon Balkan Christians to rise against the Porte as early as 1711, but this was a rhetorical gesture that was not attached to any kind of substantial policy.
61. Cited in Frank Fadner, Seventy Years of Pan-Slavism in Russia: Karamzin to
Danilevskii, 1800-1870, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1962, p.
30.
62. Article VIII of the treaty of Bucharest pledged the Porte to grant a general amnesty to Serbian rebels and limited internal autonomy. It required the Serbs to destroy fortresses constructed during the rebellion, accept the re-establishment of Ottoman military garrisons in place in 1804, and pay an annual tribute. The treaty was negotiated between St. Petersburg and the Porte, without the Serbian side being consulted. Georges Castellan, Histoire des Balkans (xive-xxe siècle), Paris: Fayard, 1991, p. 252.
63. On these events, see E. P. Kudriavtseva, Rossiia i obrazovanie avtomnogo
Serbskogo gosudarstva (1812-1833 gg.), Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN,
1992. Serbia was finally able to seize control of the six districts that it claimed from the Ottomans in the summer of 1833, thanks to the presence of Russian troops in Moldavia and a Russian naval squadron in the Straits. As a result, Serbia’s territory was expanded by one-third.
64. William C. Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia 1600-1914, New York: Free Press, 1992, p. 222.
65. John Shelton Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean War, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975.
66. Garašanin was the author of the 1844 Načertanije (Guideline) that argued for the creation of a greater Serbia under Russian sponsorship. P. N. Helm, “The Origins of Modern Pan-Serbism: The 1844 Načertanije of Ilija Garašanin: An Analysis and Translation,” East European Quarterly, No. 2, 1975: pp. 158-169; Wolf Dietrich Behschnitt, Nationalismus bei Serben und Kroaten 1830-1914: Analyse und
Typologie der nationalen Ideologie, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1980, pp. 54-65; and Vaša
Čubrilović, Istorija političke misli Srbiji XIX veka, 2nd ed., Belgrade: Narodna knjiga, 1982, pp. 165-193. The text is often referenced as an inspiration for the conflicts of the 1990s.
67. Anderson, The Eastern Question, p. 203. On the role of public pressure for war in Russia, see David MacKenzie, The Serbs and Russian Pan-Slavism 1875-1878, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967, pp. 73-77.
pp. 113-168.
69. See the excellent accounts in Bruce W. Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets: The
Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992,
pp. 51-86; and A. A. Kersnovskii, Istoriia russkoi armii, 4 vols., Moscow: Golos, 1993, Vol. 3, pp. 202-247.
70. B. H. Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, 1870-1880, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1937, p. 571.
71. Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey—A Modern History, London: Taurus, 1993, p. 85. 72. Duncan M. Perry, The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Liberation Movements
1893-1903, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988.
73. Charles Jelavich, Tsarist Russia and Balkan Nationalism: Russian Influence
in the Internal Affairs of Bulgaria and Serbia, 1879-1886, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1958.
74. Pašić was strongly influenced by Russian Panslav thinking, particularly Nikolai I. Danilevskii’s Russia and Europe. For a contemporary evaluation see “Srbi i Rusi,” Vreme, February 28, 1994, pp. 34-38.
75. The Russian and Austrian foreign ministers Izvolskii and Alios Baron von Lexa Aehrenthal met in Buchlau in 1907 and agreed informally to a compensation agreement in which Austria would be permitted to absorb Bosnia in exchange for an agreement granting Russia free access to the Straits. In the end Austria cashed in on Bosnia, but gave no ground on the Straits.
76. Andrew Rossos, Russia and the Balkans: Inter-Balkan Rivalries and Russian
Foreign Policy 1908-1914, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976, p. 27.
77. Ernst Christian Helmreich, The Diplomacy of the Balkan Wars, 1912-1913, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938; and Katrin Boekh, Von den
Balkankriegen zum Ersten Welt Krieg: Kleinstaaten Politik und etnische Selbstbestimmung auf dem Balkan, Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1996.
78. The original Carnegie Endowment report documenting atrocities perpetrated during the Balkan Wars was reprinted, as a form of tragic commentary, during the new Balkan war of the 1990s. The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie
Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment Book,
1993.
79. Sir Charles Eliot, Turkey in Europe, London: Frank Cass & Co., 1965, p. 3. The original edition dates from 1900.
80. Mazower, The Balkans, p. 88.
81. Leon Trotsky, The Balkan Wars 1912-13, New York: Monad Press, 1980, p. 314.
82. Glenny, The Balkans, p. 304. See Vladimir Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo, London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967, for an engaging account of the plot.
83. Cited in Pierre Miquel, La grande guerre, Allear: Marabout, 1988, p. 139. 84. Alan Palmer, The Gardeners of Salonika, London: Deutsh, 1965, provides a colorful account.
85. Iu. A. Pisarev, Tainy pervoi mirovoi voiny: Rossiia i Serbiia v 1914-1915 gg., Moscow: Nauka, 1990, pp. 147-153, 187-194.
86. Russia pushed these arguments in the face of strong opposition from its British and French allies. Iu. A. Pisarev, Serbiia na golgofe i politika velikikh derzhav
CHAPTER 2
THE BALKANS IN THE SHORT 20th CENTURY
The Cordon Sanitaire.
The southeastern European regional order that emerged from the First World War was highly unstable. All of the new nation states carved from the wreckage of empire by the Versailles peacemakers were required to deal with the challenges of weak institutions, economic backwardness, unassimilated minorities and ethnic tensions, and strategic exposure. The impact of the world depression was particularly severe in an area whose economies remained primarily agrarian. Political polarization and the rise of extremist movements, including communist parties on the left and nationalist parties on the right, was an inevitable consequence. In every country in the region the resultant tensions would eventually be resolved by some variant of royal or military dictatorship.
A brief phase of democratic governance in postwar Albania was brought to an end by the Gheg tribal chieftain Ahmed Zogu, who overthrew the parliamentary regime of Fan Noli in 1924 and was crowned King Zog I in 1928.1 In the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats,
and Slovenes, the mortal wounding, on the floor of the national parliament, of the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party Stjepan Radić by the Serb nationalist Puniša Račić in June 1928 prompted King Aleksandar to declare a royal dictatorship on January 6, 1929.2
Bulgaria experienced failed Agrarian and Communist insurrections during 1918 and 1923, and in 1935, following a short-lived military coup, King Boris III proclaimed personal rule.3 The Versailles Treaty
of Trianon nearly doubled Romania’s territory, but a troubled interwar experience led through the rise of the fascistic Iron Guard and its leader Cornelia Codreanu to the promulgation of a new authoritarian constitution by King Carol II in 1938.4 In 1936 General
Ioannis Metaxas dissolved the Greek parliament and established himself as dictator under the restored monarch of Giorgios II.5
Mustafa Kemal and his Republican People’s Party ruled Turkey as an authoritarian one party state up to Kemal’s death in 1938, when the presidency moved to his hand picked successor İsmet İnönü.6
consequences of interwar development—failed democratization, sharp social differentiation, ethnic tension, and an authoritarian