Abstract
Mark Biondich, The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011; xv + 384 pp., 5 maps, 8 tables; 9780199299058, £68.00 (hbk)
Subtitled ‘Revolution, War, & Political Violence since 1878’, Mark Biondich’s The Balkans is part of an OUP series that deals with ‘zones of violence’. It explicates the negative connotations ‘the Balkans’ have acquired in Western imagination – through their relatively late appearance in a border zone between declining dynastic empires. It follows the replacement of old religious identities by state-sponsored ‘national’ identities created by native elites, until the eventual triumph of the modern nation-state in our very own times. Biondich argues that this is only at first sight a phenomenon peculiar to the Balkans and ought to be seen as part of the general pattern of modern Europe. Since at least the turn of the nineteenth century, the Balkans were animated by such ‘European’ ideas – from liberal democracy to totalitarian ideologies. Occurring as it did in a region where different empires met, the development was generally attended by large-scale violence. However, it was also associated with wider European projects – liberalism, democracy, fascism and communism – and connected with crimes that afflicted the entire continent.
The role of the great powers runs through the book as a constant theme. They intervened to confer sovereignty, to delineate territory, to impose systems of government, and to enforce compliance with the norms of the ‘international community’. In their death throes Ottomans and Habsburgs resorted to violence. The worst excesses occurred during periods of international crisis, inspired and sustained by the Third Reich. Important segments of political society, while acknowledging the national principle as a basis for identity, nevertheless rejected its hegemony. Political violence might even have remained on the margins had the Second World War not reactivated and exacerbated it under Nazi rule. The author also reminds us that the transition from communism in the Balkans is under-researched. As a consequence of the wars of the Yugoslav succession, and in spite of all the literature devoted to them, ‘ethnic cleansing’ was again associated with the Balkans as a whole, whereas it affected only part of it, and perhaps even (the author believes) marked the final outcome of the development of nation-states in the peninsula. In a healthy reaction against the generalized theories of ‘genocide studies’, Biondich does not ‘essentialize’ Balkan violence. In broad terms, it is ‘Balkan’ only in the sense that nationalism appeared there later than in Western Europe. Whereas Western nation-states have come to be defined in political terms as groups within specific borders and owing allegiance to one political authority, their Eastern counterparts came to be defined by language rather than citizenship.
This is a useful monograph. It deals essentially with the development of modern nationalism in a ‘remoter’ part of Europe. Based on extensive knowledge, it offers students a sound interpretation and the possibility of wider reading on a part of our continent that is becoming less ‘remote’ by the day. Problems remain, but two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is cause for cautious optimism. The Balkans are now on the path that Western Europe took after 1945, when the defeat of the men of violence opened the way for the acceptance of a model based on civil society, representative government and liberal democracy. It is worth remembering here that only in the wake of the Kosovo intervention did the European Union belatedly elaborate a vision that included all the Balkans as part of the Union’s future. There is hope that its northwest-based core, as it offers its vision to the southeast, does not have too many second thoughts about its common project.