The Balkans Andrew Roberts

(To be published in the International Encyclopedia of Political Science )

The term Balkans is typically used to refer to the peninsula in southeastern Europe that includes the present-day countries of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and the lands of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia). Once referred to as European Turkey or Rumeli, the present appellation comes from the Balkan mountains of Bulgaria, which were mistakenly believed to divide the entire peninsula from continental Europe. Besides its geographical meaning, the Balkans has, since the mid-19 th century, carried secondary connotations of violence, savagery, and primitivism which have led some scholars to prefer the designation Southeastern Europe.

The Territory and its History

The lands of the Balkans are more than 70% mountainous which has partly produced two of its defining characteristics: its mixture of cultures and its position as a relatively undeveloped borderland of empires. The Balkans have long been home to a variety of different cultures – Greek, Slav, Roman, Turkish, and Albanian, among others – and religions – Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim. The intermingling of these cultures and religions was the trait that most distinguished the region to later visitors from mainland Europe.

The region began to assume its modern form under the Ottoman Empire, which became the main regional power in the 15th century and was only gradually pushed out over the course of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. The distinctive form of Ottoman rule was its millet system, which granted a degree of self-government to religious groups even as all state offices were held by Muslims. One consequence of the millet system was the preservation of the region’s multiculturalism as well as the creation of a significant Muslim minority made up largely of Slavs who converted to gain administrative posts.

In the 19 th century local intellectuals picked up European concepts of the nation and nationalism and began to apply them to the region. Though they initially encountered difficulties in creating Greek, Serb, or Croat identities from predominantly peasant and religious cultures, ultimately they managed to cobble together the national cultures and histories of the lands that exist today and at the same time extinguish many of the microcultures that existed up until then (e.g., Vlachs, Morlachs). These nationalists began to lead successful revolts against the deteriorating Ottoman Empire producing the independent states of Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria, while the territories of Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina were subsumed under the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The meeting of nationalist ambitions with the diversity of cultures and the difficulty of classifying residents as members of one or another national group led to frequent inter-Balkan conflicts. As the Great Powers attempted to resolve these conflicts, they became entangled and it was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Yugoslav nationalist which helped to ignite World War I.

The end of the war led to a clarification of the region’s boundaries with the states of Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, and Romania assuming near their modern forms and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (or the South Slavs) being created out of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Montenegrins, Albanians, and Macedonians, with the Serbs playing the leading role. It was Yugoslavia that proved the least stable of the Balkan states and it broke apart during World War II. The war was marked by brutal score-settling on both sides, frequently exceeding rational war aims. The communist partisan leader Josip Broz Tito managed to restore Yugoslavia to more or less its prewar borders by promulgating a myth of national resistance to the Nazis and clamping down on nationalist sentiment.

The Wars of Yugoslav Secession

In contrast to the hardline communist regimes that emerged after the war in neighboring Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania, after 1948 Yugoslavia pursued an independent course both in foreign policy (helping to form the non-aligned movement) and in domestic affairs where it ultimately pioneered a unique form of worker self-management and relatively open borders. This economic and political liberalization led many to expect the country to weather the fall of communism in 1989 better than other communist nations.

In fact, the transition unleashed the bloodiest fighting in Europe since World War II. Though the relatively homogeneous Slovenia managed to extract itself from Yugoslavia with minimal violence, moves by Croatia and particularly Bosnia-Herzegovina to declare their independence met resistance from Serb minorities in those republics who were backed by the remnants of the Yugoslav People’s Army based in the Serb Republic. Efforts to carve out territory by Serbs and Croats in Bosnia, egged on by ultranationalist leaders, led to ethnic cleansing and genocide, with Muslims bearing the brunt of atrocities. The massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in the presence of a UN peacekeeping force and the bombing of multiethnic Sarajevo by Serb forces focused world attention on the region.

Though Western powers had been quick to recognize the new independent republics, they were slow to react to the fighting. One reason was the attribution of the conflict to “ancient hatreds”, a theory propounded by Croat and Serb nationalists and backed by Colin Powell among others. The theory, however, did not explain why the region had become multicultural in the first place, why much of its history was peaceful, nor the high rates of ethnic intermarriage in postwar Yugoslavia.

A rich scholarly literature has grown around the conflict and yielded more persuasive explanations that emphasize the contingency of the wars. Susan Woodward has argued that the combination of persistent economic decline and state weakness left citizens dependent on national groups for security guarantees. Valerie Bunce meanwhile has emphasized how the federal structures of the communist era created “states in the making” who could easily turn themselves into actual states, with the structure of the federation and the army helping to produce violence. Others have focused on the dangers of democratization without prior liberalization or the improper sequencing of regional and national elections. Even this summary does not do justice to the vast number of studies analyzing the causes and consequences of the wars.

Attention to these alternatives along with public revulsion at the slaughter ultimately prompted the Western powers to intervene against Serb aggression in Bosnia and force the three sides to agree to the Dayton Agreement (1995) that ended the fighting and led to a UN- sponsored, NATO-led mission enforcing the peace. Hostilities, however, continued in Kosovo with Kosovar Albanians turning to violent resistance against Serb oppression and then facing massive retaliation. Ultimately, NATO intervened through a bombing campaign in 1999, which led to UN administration for the republic.

These interventions have led to much theorizing about the justice and practicality of international involvement in civil wars and genocides. Particular attention has been devoted to the proper deployment of UN and NATO peacemaking and peacekeeping operations, the efficacy of trials for war criminals (the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia saw the first indictment of a sitting head of state and was a precedent for the International Criminal Court), and the desirability of international support for secession and state breakup (particularly with respect to Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008). What was a tragedy for Yugoslavia has led to a flourishing literature in political science.

Bibliography

Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History (New York: Modern Library, 2000). Sabrina P. Ramet, Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Susan L.Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Destruction after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995).