Abstract
The Balkans have a bad name: outside observers have long associated the region with interminable violence, an association which was reinforced during the break-up of socialist Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Many itinerant commentators explained the so-called ‘Wars of Yugoslav Succession’ in terms of ‘ancient hatreds’ that the socialist regime had put into deep freeze but which were now thawing out, more rancid than ever. Such notions were crude but prominent: the British prime minister John Major alluded to the ancient hatreds theory in parliament, and Bill Clinton was an enthusiastic reader of Robert D. Kaplan’s travelogue Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History, a book which depicts the Balkans as a region shackled to its Ottoman heritage, whose inhabitants have a macabre obsession with the past, and whose historical landscape is pockmarked with assassinations, internecine wars, genocide. Unsurprisingly, the straw men of Kaplan and his ilk have received short shrift in the scholarship. The work of Maria Todorova, Vesna Goldsworthy, and Milica Bakić-Hayden has traced the genealogies of such Balkan stereotypes as far back as the beginning of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, historians such as Mark Mazower, Robert J. Donia, and John V.A. Fine (to name but a few) have done much to debunk myths of perennial Balkan enmity and of Ottoman barbarity.
Mark Biondich’s book will take its rightful place alongside these works. Biondich has produced a meticulously researched work that integrates a large corpus of literature on the Balkan region with the cutting edge of scholarship on violence, nationalism, and war. Thus a solid empirical foundation underpins valid and insightful generalizations. Biondich’s key argument is that Balkan violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been animated by the introduction of integral nationalism, brought to the Balkans from western Europe by elite groups, and eventually transmitted to a popular level. This importation was bound to cause violence, since the Balkans was an ethnically heterogeneous region. It was the efforts of nationalizing and modernizing elites to create homogeneous polities on this mixed landscape that have caused much of the violence in the Balkans since 1878. Biondich seeks to reintegrate the region back into the narrative of modern European history. His response to the pathologization of the Balkans is not to whitewash violence from the region’s history, but rather to show that much of this violence was a European rather than a Balkan speciality. Furthermore, the worst instances of mass violence in the Balkans took place during the First World War and the Second World War, which is to say, during periods when violence was present throughout Europe.
The book’s first two chapters set the argument out. Chapter 1 outlines the state of affairs in the Ottoman Balkans before the advent of nationalism, and then traces the entry of this ideology into the region. Chapter 2 covers the high-water mark of integral nationalism in the Balkans, from the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 until the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Biondich shows just how transformative this period was in the Balkans itself, and just how destructive was the quest for homogeneous polities and the friction created by overlapping Balkan nationalisms. Yet while integral nationalism proved the most resilient and most successful means of elite and grass-roots political mobilization in this period, Biondich points also to the tradition of Balkan socialism, whose proponents offered a more inclusive and potentially less violent path to modernity. Chapter 3 shows how programmes of integral nationalism, triumphant in the interwar period but incapable of governing with popular support, calcified into authoritarianism and dictatorship as the next European conflict approached. And it was authoritarianism and dictatorship that emerged from the Second World War in the Balkans and which lasted, in most cases, until 1989. In chapter 4, Biondich shows how postwar Balkan regimes, in their appropriation of nationalist symbols and discourses, were the heirs of pre-war integral nationalists rather than of Balkan socialists, whose vision remained unrealized, in spite of communist rule everywhere in the Balkans except Greece. The post-1989 chapter is dominated by the demise of socialist Yugoslavia, which, Biondich points out, is the violent exception to the peace that has generally obtained in the Balkans since 1989. The author expresses optimism in his conclusion that the region, more integrated now than ever in its history, will also become more integrated with the rest of Europe in the coming years.
This is a major contribution both to the field of Balkan studies and to OUP’s excellent ‘Zones of Violence’ series. There is enough interpretation and information in this volume to recommend it to both specialists and students. It will enrich existing debates on violence and Balkan history in the modern period, and generate many new discussions. My own questions were: was Balkan socialism really so pacific in the period under question? The terrorism of Bulgarian and Yugoslav communists during the 1920s would suggest otherwise, and perhaps the (admittedly brief) alliance between the Yugoslav communists and the Croatian terrorist/paramilitary group the Ustashe in the 1930s is evidence not just of a pragmatic arrangement but also of a violent affinity? And how about the violent campaigns of nationalization and assimilation pursued by centralizing states in the Balkans (e.g. Romanian policies in Transylvania, and Yugoslav policies in Macedonia and Kosovo)? This was surely part of the same programme of integral nationalism that the author analyses in the preceding chapters, and just as important to this topic as the installation and maintenance of the interwar authoritarian regimes. This is a stimulating topic, which has been treated in a stimulating way in Biondich’s excellent book.