Marie-Janine Calic - A Great Cauldron: A Global History of Southeastern Europe

A LL POWERFUL EMPIRES are alike; every poor land is poor in its own way. The Romans and Byzantines, followed by the Venetians, Habsburgs, and Ottomans, dominated and shaped southeastern Europe for centuries in imperial style. The peoples of southeastern Europe have many shared experiences, and even today their fates remain closely intertwined. Nevertheless, Albanians, South Slavs, Romanians, and Greeks responded quite differently to foreign domination. Southeastern Europe has maintained a unique sociocultural diversity, and a common identity remains elusive.

This book reinterprets the evolution of southeastern Europe from the perspective of transcultural relations and global history. It explores the interrelationship between southeastern Europe and distant continents and cultures, as well as how border-transcending processes and interactions were perceived, shaped, and socially constructed. Relationships of exchange between people, ideas, and things played a much larger role in the past than familiar historical narratives and representations have often depicted. An understanding of these historical relationships offers insight into the many facets of globalization.

Many scholars of southeastern Europe have focused on the development of nations and nation-states. For most people today, nations represent a primary source of shared identity. However, before the nineteenth centuryand to some degree, even in the twentieth centurythings were different. Most southeastern Europeans still lived in great multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural empiresconglomerates of loosely connected territories populated by members of different faiths with very different ways of life. Social groups, milieus, and networks had not yet grown into nations. Some histories have assumed the establishment of the nation-state to be the logical culmination of a supposedly linear process. Broader European and global processes, and experiences that are common to more than one region, have too easily slipped from view.

Other scholars have viewed southeastern Europe as a distinct historical region, defined by certain internal structural characteristics like geography, demography, economics, culture, or even mentality. Because the West generally serves as the model and standard in a worldwide process of modernization, other countries and regions can suffer in comparisonthrough the apparent absence of a Renaissance or Enlightenment, for example, or simply in socioeconomic backwardness. This interpretive approach tends toward Eurocentrism: processes that transcend borders are too often presented only in terms of the transfer and diffusion of Western ideas and inventions. Phenomena that do not fit within the framework of Western modernity can disappear from sight. Moreover, it can be difficult to understand the connections and interrelationships between countries, regions, and continents in southeastern Europe if too much emphasis is placed on spatial boundaries. The frequent shifting of borders, the fluidity of border regions, and the massive movement of peoples defies such analysis.

Approaching the history of southeastern Europe through imperial studies, by contrast, brings us to literature that views the region from the perspective of the great imperial centers. Sources from Venice, Istanbul, or Vienna tended to gloss over the harsher realities of the periphery. From these sources, we learn most about how the empires saw themselvesnamely, as good and just hegemonsrather than how relations between the metropolises and provinces actually functioned, how people in the regions experienced imperial authority, or how certain centrifugal dynamics emerged. Hence, the myth arose that multiethnic empires promoted a greater degree of tolerance than nation-states did. The bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia rekindled this nostalgia for empire and narrowed perspectives on southeastern Europe to investigations of nationalism and violence.

Neither nation, region, nor empire dominates this narrative. Rather, I focus on translocal, transregional, and transnational relationships of exchange. Trends in the study of history have challenged the traditional conception of space as a receptacle of culture, social formation, and identity, thereby exposing supposedly objective characteristics of space as a cultural construct. Inspired by the groundbreaking works of Edward Said and Maria Todorova, numerous scholars have subsequently investigated how Western travelers, writers, and scholars conceptualized and imagined the Balkans from the eighteenth century on. Their work shows how romantic ideals and scholarly prejudices about supposedly essential spatial characteristics continue to shape perceptions and discussions about southeastern Europe into the present day.

The new global history and research on translocality and transnationalism have encouraged scholars to look beyond the paradigm of nation-states, thereby touching off a veritable historiographical revolution.

There are advantages in telling the history of southeastern Europe from the unfamiliar perspective of worldwide interdependence. Many phenomena cannot be fully understood when considered solely within a regional or national framework, particularly in an age of increasing global connections. By focusing on interactions, interrelationships, and experiences that transcend borders, a new, multifaceted picture of southeastern Europe can emerge, in contradiction to the popular images and stereotypes of a backward and violence-ridden European other. In a global context, what was once thought to be exceptional becomes the regional expression of overarching processes. This book describes and explains the dark sides of history, too, but offers a more complete picture by including intellectual, scholarly, and cultural achievements, proposals for political reform, and not least, the agency of historical actors. These emphases necessarily lead to new questions and topics of study. How did processes that transcend borders, including globalization in the narrower sense, manifest themselves in southeastern Europe? Who and what promoted integration and exchange? How did the region fit within the structures of the world economy, and what were the political and cultural consequences of the world growing closer? How strong were the forces of resistance, and how influential were those who shunned entanglement in overarching relationships?