The Balkans
Thursday, May 11th, 2006 @ 01:00
by Mark Mazower (2000)
A short but broad-ranging history book, it challenges the common one-dimensional stereotype of “the Balkans”. From the Romans to the present, including the Byzantine and Ottoman experiences, it treats the former Turkish domains as part of a common, if complex, historical inheritance.
The book opens with an introduction that explores the origins of the term and attitudes to the region. In the first two chapters, Mazower analyses the geography and its inhabitants, and how “the primitive, eternally unchanging peasant was a figment of the Western romantic imagination.” The differences in religions and ethnicity, exist as they did, often mattered little in daily life, where practicalities mattered more than ideological beliefs and debates.
For the second half of the book, Mazower then analyses the emergence of the political map of “the modern Balkans” when “the Eastern Question” came to an end in 1923. While these independent states came about through the efforts of the Balkan people themselves, Europe’s Great Powers played a considerable role, as did Ottoman military and administrative weakness — especially at the empire’s fringes. Involvement and (resented) interference of the Great Powers, the uprisings in Greece and Serbia, the highly contentious and late emergence of Bulgaria, unexpected creation of Yugoslavia, and the final collapse of empires that did not bring the anticipated peace as the existence of ethnic minorities undermined the claims to rule in the name of the Nation.
This volatility of the ethnic kaleidoscope is discussed further in the last chapter, with minorities assimilated and repressed to achieve the supposedly long-term goal of homogenisation. Mass executions, concentration camps and deportations were deployed, as were less extreme means such as “population transfer”. Minority right treaties imposed by the League of Nations irritated both the majority (for the intervention) and the minority (because the complaints fell on deaf ear due to lack of effective machinery). Triggered by the Nazi occupation, ethnic civil war spread more widely in the Balkans. Mazower also discusses the political shifts, i.e. from democracy to right-wing dictatorship, and the resulting modernisations as the Balkans became a field of competition between the “Free World” and Soviet communism. Mazower believes that all these were struggles to create a nation-state, but “the irony was just as this struggle ended, economic and political changes at the international level threw the very idea of the nation-state into question.”
In his epilogue, On Violence, Mazower concluded his challenges on the stereotypical perception of “vicious brutality” in the eye of modernised norms of violence. It is well-researched and densely-packed (also comes with maps and index), and Mazower makes no attempt to write in meticulous details or chronological order.
May 12th, 2006 01:12
[…] New reviews at books @ cc. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb. Challenges the common assumptions of the Victorian age as a tabloid image of homophobic hell populated by mean-spirited, fearful and envious ignoramuses from which gay people eventually liberated themselves. Jump: and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer. No-cadence stories of (moral and psychological tensions of) life in a racially-divided country written with seemingly no committed specific political ideologies. As expected of Gordimer. We Did Nothing: Why the Truth Doesn’t Always Come Out When the UN Goes In by Linda Polman. Common horrifying-slash-absurd images of “humanitarian” movements gone wrong (as always). If anyone wants the book, I’ll ship it to you gladly. The Balkans by Mark Mazower. A short but broad-ranging history book, challenging the common one-dimensional stereotype of “the Balkans”. […]