Abstract
Reviewed by: Samuel Foster, University of East Anglia, UK
More than a decade on from the Albanian majority’s second unilateral declaration of independence, international attention previously afforded to the partially recognized Republic of Kosovo appears to have somewhat receded. While its various provisions have yet to be formalized, the 2013 Brussels Agreement, brokered by the European Union, has gone some way to normalizing relations, short of full recognition, with the neighbouring Republic of Serbia. Nevertheless, institutional corruption, dismal economic conditions and ongoing international contestation surrounding its proclaimed statehood, are likely to overshadow Kosovo’s future development as much as the traumatic legacy of Serbian rule.
Given this less than satisfactory outlook scholars of south-east Europe might still be reminded of how far the Kosovo national project has progressed since the territory’s incorporation into the kingdom of Serbia following the First Balkan War of 1912 to 1913. Kosovo, a Documentary History seeks to contextualize Kosovo’s recent history by presenting readers with ‘a compilation of key documents from the first half of the twentieth century’ (vii). Edited by Bejtullah Destani, the founder and director of the London-based Centre for Albanian Studies and current Minister Counsellor for Kosovo’s embassy in Rome, and the late Robert Elsie, a leading expert in Albanian literature, folklore and history, this collection comprises 122 texts falling into two historical periods. Documents 1 to 70 (16–199) cover the tumultuous events of 1912 to mid-1914. These include British diplomatic observations on rising hostility towards the Ottoman Empire under the unitarist Young Turk movement, as well as Serbia’s subsequent invasion and annexation of Kosovo during the First Balkan War and its repercussions for the territory’s Albanians. The remaining documents subsequently focus on the unsuccessful attempts at bringing the political, economic and social repression within Kosovo to wider international attention by its exiled Albanian political elite. This covers developments from 1918 to October 1945, rather than stopping at outbreak of the Second World War as stated in the preface (vii).
In addition to the documents themselves, the collection is bookended by two maps (xxv–xxvi), an introduction by Elsie (1–13) and an extensive bibliography of secondary literature published from 1889 to 2015 (423–64). Given the current scholarly propensity to focus on, or direct analytical discussion towards, Kosovo’s recent past, the inclusion of this resource arguably represents the book’s most important feature through the sheer number of indexed titles.
Sadly, this practical value is undermined by several limiting factors. Of these, the most overt is the editors’ extremely narrow source base. Out of all 122 documents, only 35 appear to have not been sourced from the British National Archives’ Foreign Office section. While this might serve to cultivate readers’ awareness of how Kosovo had been received in an early-twentieth-century international context – affording a voice to historically underexposed local political actors – it ultimately serves to conflate notions of international law and civility with the opinions of Britain’s largely detached diplomatic establishment. Of this entire selection, the number of records produced without British mediation amounts to a mere 33. Those familiar with Destani and Elsie’s previous titles might draw parallels with The Balkan Wars: British Consular Reports from Macedonia in the Final Years of the Ottoman Empire (2014) in which they present a concise rationale for the chosen source base while acknowledging its historical limitations. Kosovo features no such justification; the contents of the book itself aren’t even mentioned in Elsie’s introduction.
This startling lack of editorial engagement is further evinced by how the collection is structured. Whereas previous offerings, especially from Destani, are often divided into sections – with introductions outlining the broader context – Kosovo is almost entirely devoid of any curatorship or efforts to provide some chronological balance. More than three-quarters of the listed documents were produced between 1912 and 1919 while the sporadic coverage of subsequent periods appears either miscellaneous – or worryingly selective. Kosovo’s occupation by the Central Powers from 1915 to 1918 and the Axis from 1941 to 1944 are almost untouched, despite, as Elsie blithely mentions, the violent repercussions for the territory’s, then considerably larger, Montenegrin and Serb minorities (4). Indeed, a seemingly one-sided eagerness to establish direct parallels with 1998 to 2008 exists to the detriment of its historical consistency. What Elsie states as being Kosovo’s ‘fixed and recognized borders’ (2) for example, were only drawn up in 1945. Prior to 1912, it existed as part of the far larger Ottoman vilayet of Kosovo that included much of modern-day Macedonia. Elsie’s assertions are even contradicted by several of the earlier documents detailing the impact of the Serbian invasion on the city of Skopje, the capital of modern-day Macedonia.
These pitfalls are unfortunately compounded by the editors’ exaggerated assertions of providing readers with ‘much information, largely unavailable up to now …’ (vii). Can the records of the United Kingdom’s largest and most internationally connected archive really be viewed as inaccessible? Do excerpts from Leon Trotsky’s Balkan War correspondence (102–7), the 1914 Report of the International Commission on the Balkan Wars (195–7) or Vaso Čubrilović’s political memorandum Iseljavanje Arnauta (337–56) qualify as fresh material when they have already been repeatedly cited, republished and circulated online since the 1990s? Excluding the convenience it offers those unfamiliar with modern Kosovo’s history, in the wake of Noel Malcolm’s Kosovo: A Short History (1999), Destani and Elsie’s implied promise of fresh perspectives appears twenty years out of step.