R. J. Crampton - The Balkans Since the Second World War

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THE BALKANS SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR

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R. J. CRAMPTON

First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Pearson Education Limited

Published 2013 by Routledge
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Copyright Taylor & Francis 2002

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ISBN-13: 978-0-582-24883-0 (pbk)

Typeset in 10.5/12pt Bembo by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

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T heir very diversity makes the Balkans impossible to define confidently or precisely. Topographically the region varies from the mountain fastnesses of northern Albania and the higher peaks of the Carpathians, through the fertile valley of the lower Danube, to the Mediterranean coastline of Greece and its islands.

The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition 1989, has the following entry for the adjective Balkan: Of or pertaining to the peninsula bounded by the Adriatic, Aegean and Black Seas, or to the countries or peoples of this region: spec. with allusion to the relations (often characterized by threatened hostilities) of the Balkan states to each other or to the rest of Europe The Encyclopaedia Britannica confines itself to a more political definition: In contemporary usage the term Balkans signifies the territory of the states of Albania, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Slovenia, and Yugoslavia (Montenegro and Serbia), but even this authoritative source cannot have complete confidence in its definition, adding, though there is considerable doubt as to whether Slovenia and Romanian Transylvania are Balkan in any meaningful sense. The encyclopaedia then notes that The term also includes the European portion of Turkey, although Turkey is not a Balkan state.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica uses political criteria in defining the area but, when first coined in 1808 by the German August Zeune, the phrase Balkan peninsula was used as a purely geographic term and had even less political weight at that time than the word German. Balkan was a Turkish word meaning wooded upland, and was applied to what the ancients had called the Haemus mountains, that is the range which runs east-west through the centre of present-day Bulgaria. This geographic usage persisted throughout most of the nineteenth century; when a political phrase was needed it was usually Turkey in Europe, the Ottoman empire, for much of the century, being the largest political unit in the area.

That the dismemberment of Turkey in Europe took place in conflicts which became known as the Balkan wars (191213) indicated that the term had been given a political as well as a geographic loading. The association of the Balkans with the phenomena of political fragmentation and hostility was well-established by the end of the First World War, Harold Nicolson noting in his classic memoir of the Paris peace negotiations that We succeeded in Balkanizing Europe although we europeanized the Balkans. The pejorative connotations have remained and intensified. In recent months there has been a tendency among the more slip-shod of British journalists to use the term Balkan to mean those areas of the peninsula which have fallen, or which seem in danger of falling, prey to anarchy and violence; in this definition, Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia are in and Bulgaria and Greece are out.

It is generally acknowledged that like all great European peninsulas, the Balkans are a world apart; But this does not take fully into account the mercantile communities which were established in Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and at other points on the coast. Even where it did exist the first Europe began to decay from the mid-nineteenth century as production-orientated systems began to make their impact, as, soon after, did western ideas of nationalism and the nation-state. The problem was that the economic and the political odds were stacked against the Balkans. Most of the area did not have easy communication with either the great centres of consumption in central and western Europe or the oceans linking it with the wider world, and the construction of nation states was hideously difficult in areas which were not only ethnically diverse but in which ethnic divisions often coincided with social ones, meaning that the urban commercial or manufacturing bourgeoisie was frequently of a different ethnic group to the surrounding countryside. The situation was made worse by the fact that individual European great powers had their own fish to fry and invariably did all they could to ensure that it was their fish which was best cooked.