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For decades, we have come to accept that nationalism formed the basis of the modern history of the Balkans. In this bold and controversial study, Pavlos Hatzopoulos turns this assumption on its head. Through a ground-breaking examination of the non-nationalist ideologies in the Balkans during the interwar period, Hatzopoulos calls into question the supposedly inherent connection between the Balkans and nationalism and argues that nationalism does not form the sole ordering principle of the modern history of the Balkan region. Focusing on the ideologies of communism, liberal internationalism and agrarianism, Hatzopoulos examines how these interact with nationalist ideology. He demonstrates how non-nationalist theories challenge the nationalist view of the Balkans as the sum of several national spaces. He even questions the nationalist understanding of the very term 'the Balkans'. "The Balkans Beyond Nationalism and Identity" revisits contemporary debates on a region that is still a European crisis point and challenges the nation-centric understanding that permeates it. In proposing a description of 'the Balkans' as a contested political concept, the book argues for a completely fresh interpretation of the region's composition.
The history of the Balkans has been a distillation of the great and terrible themes of 20th century history-the rise of nationalism, communism, fascism, genocide, identity and war. Written by one of the leading historians of the region, this is a new interpretation of that history, focusing on the uses and legacies of nationalism in the Balkan region. In particular, Professor Veremis analyses the influence of the West-from the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise and collapse of Yugoslavia. Throughout the state-building process of Greece, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria and later, Albania, the West provided legal, administrative and political prototypes to areas bedevilled by competing irredentist claims. At a time when Slovenia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Croatia have become full members of the EU, yet some orphans of the Communist past are facing domestic difficulties, A Modern History of the Balkans seeks to provide an important historical context to the current problems of nationalism and identity in the Balkans.
Throughout history, the Balkans have been a crossroads, a zone of endless military, cultural and economic mixing and clashing between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Subject to violent shifts of borders, rulers and belief systems at the hands of the world's great empires--from the Byzantine to the Habsburg and Ottoman--the Balkans are often called Europe's tinderbox and a seething cauldron of ethnic and religious resentments. Much has been made of the Balkans' deeply rooted enmities. The recent destruction of the former Yugoslavia was widely ascribed to millennial hatreds frozen by the Cold War and unleashed with the fall of communism. In this brilliant account, acclaimed historian Mark Mazower argues that such a view is a dangerously unbalanced fantasy. A landmark reassessment, The Balkans rescues the region's history from the various ideological camps that have held it hostage for their own ends, not least the need to justify nonintervention. The heart of the book deals with events from the emergence of the nation-state onward. With searing eloquence, Mazower demonstrates that of all the gifts bequeathed to the region by modernity, the most dubious has been the ideological weapon of romantic nationalism that has been used again and again by the power hungry as an acid to dissolve the bonds of centuries of peaceful coexistence. The Balkans is a magnificent depiction of a vitally important region, its history and its prospects.
A newly revised and updated edition of an award-winning BBC correspondent's magisterial history of the Balkan region This unique and lively history of Balkan geopolitics since the early nineteenth century gives readers the essential historical background to more than one hundred years of events in this war-torn area. No other book covers the entire region, or offers such profound insights into the roots of Balkan violence, or explains so vividly the origins of modern Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. Now updated to include the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, the capture of all indicted war criminals from the Yugoslav wars, and each state's quest for legitimacy in the European Union, The Balkans explores the often catastrophic relationship between the Balkans and the Great Powers, raising some disturbing questions about Western intervention.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the borders hitherto separating Greek culture and society from its contiguous Balkan polities came down, and Greeks had to reorient themselves toward their immediate neighbors and redefine their place within Europe and the new, more fluid global order. Projecting the political foresight and mustering the modernization policies to succeed in such an undertaking turned out to be no small feat, especially as the regional conflicts that had lain dormant during the Cold War were revived. Synthesizing the cultural, political, and historical into a sophisticated, interdisciplinary analysis, this innovative study untangles the prolonged 'historical moment' in which Greece and Europe were effectively held hostage to events in the Balkans - just at the time when both hoped to serve as the region's welcoming hosts.
The present volume is the last in the Entangled Balkans series and marks the end of several years of research guided by the transnational, “entangled history” and histoire croisée approaches. The essays in this volume address theoretical and methodological issues of Balkan or Southeast European regional studies—not only questions of scholarly concepts, definitions, and approaches but also the extra-scholarly, ideological, political, and geopolitical motivations that underpin them. These issues are treated more systematically and by a presentation of their historical evolution in various national traditions and schools. Some of the essays deal with the articulation of certain forms of “Balkan heritage” in relation to the geographical spread and especially the cultural definition of the “Balkan area.” Concepts and definitions of the Balkans are thus complemented by (self-)representations that reflect on their cultural foundations.
This open access book focuses on the origins, consequences and aftermath of the 1995 and 1999 Western military interventions that led to the end of the most recent Balkan wars. Though challenging problems remain in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia, the conflict prevention and state-building efforts thereafter were partly successful as countries of the region are on separate tracks towards European Union membership. This study highlights lessons that can be applied to the Middle East and Ukraine, where similar conflicts are likewise challenging sovereignty and territorial integrity. It is an accessible treatment of what makes war and how to make peace ideal for all readers interested in how violent international conflicts can be managed, informed by the experience of a practitioner.
Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused such intensities of fierce admiration and reactionary fear as Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. His extraordinary life and extensive writings have left an indelible mark on the revolutionary consciousness. Yet there was once a danger that his life and influence would be relegated to the footnotes of history. Published over the course of ten years, beginning in 1954, Deutscher's magisterial three-volume biography turned back the tide of Stalin's propaganda, and has since been praised by everyone from Tony Blair to Graham Greene. In this definitive work, now reissued in a single volume, Trotsky's true stature emerges as the most heroic, and ultimately tragic, character of the Russian Revolution.