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557 Pages
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF BALKAN AND SOUTHEAST EUROPEAN HISTORY
Disentangling a controversial history of turmoil and progress, this Handbook provides essential guidance through the complex past of a region that was previously known as the Balkans but is now better known as Southeastern Europe. It gathers 47 international scholars and researchers from the region. They stand back from the premodern claims and recent controversies stirred by the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution.
Parts I and II explore shifting early modern divisions among three empires to the national movements and independent states that intruded with Great Power intervention on Ottoman and Habsburg territory in the nineteenth century. Part III traces a full decade of war centered on the First World War, with forced migrations rivalling the great loss of life. Part IV addresses the interwar promise and the later authoritarian politics of five newly independent states: Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Separate attention is paid in Part V to the spread of European economic and social features that had begun in the nineteenth century. The Second World War again cost the region dearly in death and destruction and, as noted in Part VI, in interethnic violence. A final set of chapters in Part VII examines postwar and Cold War experiences that varied among the four Communist regimes as well as for non-Communist Greece. Lastly, a brief Epilogue takes the narrative past 1989 into the uncertainties that persist in Yugoslavia’s successor states and its neighbors.
Providing fresh analysis from recent scholarship, the brief and accessible chapters of the Handbook address the general reader as well as students and scholars. For further study, each chapter includes a short list of selected readings.
John R. Lampe is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park and Global Europe Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC. He is the author of a dozen books, including two editions of both Balkans into Southeastern Europe and Yugoslavia as History: Tivice There Was a Country.
Ulf Brunnbauer is Director of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg. He is also Professor of Southeast and East European History at the University of Regensburg. He is author and (co-)editor of more than twenty books, mostly on the history of Southeastern Europe since the nineteenth century, among them Globalizing Southeastern Europe: Emigrants, America and the State since the Late 19th Century (2016).
PREFACE
John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer
Since 1989, Southeastern Europe has frequently been in the news but identified still as the Balkans. The wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, centered in Bosnia, revived references to the assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 that started the First World War. The subsequent struggles of the successor states and Albania, dubbed the Western Balkans, the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union called premature, and the debt crisis in Greece — all have helped to preserve the pejorative Balkan reputation as a region separate from Europe, backward as well as bloody. Meanwhile, the region continues to aspire to European institutions and to receive recognition for its long-standing European characteristics and connections. Regional resentment of past European oversight also continues, fed by the recent NATO and IMF interventions but also by historical grievances against their near neighbors and their Great Power supporters. Populations in the region but also political elites have been repeatedly frustrated about the persisting gap in wealth and power between Southeastern Europe and the neighboring areas in the north and west. Bouts of popular dissatisfaction about the failure to close this gap help to explain why hardly any other part of Europe has witnessed such persistent emigration.
This Handbook seeks to disentangle the region’s complex history of turmoil and progress before 1989, so often oversimplified to blame or praise one side or the other, foreign or domestic. These biases have served post-1989 public policy and opinion to preserve an enduring stereotype of ethnic rivalry, recklessness, and economic stagnation. Regional controversies over ethnic origins and territorial claims cannot be ignored, although interethnic violence was almost entirely absent until the twentieth century. Neither the First nor the Second World War was started or wished for by Southeastern Europe, but their legacies of massive violence and population displacement can be felt until today. Nor was it the region’s choice to be one of the major flashpoints of Cold War confrontation, impeding regional cooperation and a more coherent economic development. By the nineteenth century, the region became not only the object of Great Power designs but also the recipient of institutional frameworks from a changing configuration of European standards, more often than not in disregard of local conditions and needs. This tension between domestic efforts to become a subject of history and foreign intervention in the region as an object for reform only increased after the two world wars and the Cold War. European history cannot be properly understood without incorporating the past of this part of the continent.
The Handbook’s seven parts focus on the region’s history to 1989 and beyond towards its European integration, forward from the early modern division between three surrounding empires to state- and nation-building through the nineteenth century and into prolonged involvement in two world wars. In the two postwar periods that followed, roughly the same set of borders mark out a set of states now best described as Southeastern Europe. The editors’ Overviews review the chronology of changing borders and foreign intervention or oversight in which the region’s own history was obliged to take place. Our 52 chapters devote themselves to the region and its constituent parts in peace and war, to its political transformations, its religious dimensions and ideologies, and to its economic and social frameworks. From the long efforts and aspirations within the region, mixed with frustration and failure, emerge a longer and deeper set of European connections than the enduring stereotypes of Balkan conflict or foreign domination suggest.
A Handbook of brief chapters by multiple authors has a major advantage over a singleauthored volume. It would be a daunting challenge for a single scholar to write such a volume, going beyond the single country, people, or period on which he or she has typically concentrated. Most comprehensive regional histories have confined themselves lately to the twentieth century. Witness therefore the long shelf-life since 1958 of L. S. Stavrianos The Balkans since 1453, still in print from New York University Press and long the only postwar volume covering this long period and the entire region. Only in 2019 does Marie-Janine Calic reach back much further and then past 1989 to challenge the Balkan stereotype in her The Great Caldron, A History of Southeastern Europe (Harvard University Press).
She and other authors assembled for this Handbook represent the wide range of recent scholarship from regional and German as well as Anglo-American historians. Many of them draw on archival evidence unavailable before 1989. Their chapters here balance this new evidence with recent regional scholarship to provide accessible accounts of crucial events and issues, without tying them to the footnotes and references, many in local languages that our intended readers would not need or be able to consult. Each chapter, as well as the Overviews, adds instead a brief bibliography of relevant scholarship in English, German, or the local languages.
Our handbook provides a complementary alternative to the much longer and less accessible handbook of Southeastern European history in process from the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg. To be published in German in seven volumes, each with hundreds of pages, its more detailed, massively annotated entries are intended for scholars and regional specialists. Both editors of the Routledge Handbook have been closely involved in the German project as well. Yet both of us are convinced that there is not only space but also an urgent need for a more accessible summary of modern scholarship on crucial issues of Southeastern European history. For students and teachers, public officials, and private interests, the experience of this region addresses fundamental problems of state-building in a peripheral region of a world in which power is not equitably distributed.
A massive work like such a Handbook would not be possible without the help of many. First, the editors want to thank Robert Langham, Dana Moss, and Tanushree Baijal, of Routledge, Kawtya Bakthavatchalam of Newgen and Rosemary Morlin, our copy-editor, for their continued support from the first discussion of the Handbook idea to its final production. We are also grateful to Edvin Pezo at the Leibniz Institute in Regensburg for sharing experience and information from his role as managing editor of the institute’s handbook, and to Johannes NiiBer for help with technicalities. The institute has also provided the maps that we can use in this volume. Further assistance in identifying contributors and farming the chapters came from Mark Cornwall at Southampton University, Vladan Jovanovi¢ at the Institute for the Recent History of Serbia in Belgrade, Vjeran Pavlakovi¢ at the Philosophical Faculty of Rajeka University, Theofanis Stavrou at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and Balazs Trencsényi at the Central European University in Budapest. Last not least we thank our many authors who joined us on this ambitious endeavor, some of whom taking on last-minute assignments by the editors.
A note on the maps: Their place names are largely rendered as in English today, but some historic names are also provided, especially where a modern name only would be misleading. Readers should be aware of the fact that in many places, changing regimes and populations with different languages have used different names over time for the same place. On our regional maps, we cannot fully account for these important local sequences.
INTRODUCTORY OVERVIEW
Premodern borders and modern controversies
John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer
Preceding the region’s early modern and modern history, dominated first by the Habsburg, Venetian, and Ottoman empires and then by native state-buildings efforts, there was about half a millennium of overlapping forms of internal political rule and intrusion from outside. Native regimes emerged as the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire was losing much of its hold over Southeastern Europe. The region’s mixed populations evolved under a series of shifting religious and political borders from the tenth into the sixteenth centuries after a millennium of migration and moving settlement, Roman advance and retreat. Armed conflicts that were responsible for shifting borders rarely pitted the native regimes against each other and were never generated by conscious ethnic antagonism. The initial warfare came from internal disputes or confrontation with the hegemony of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire and then the Latin Hungarian kingdom. But none of these native polities survived the expansion of Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian political and religious authority from the late fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Their threesided Balkan Wars, as detailed by David Tracy (2016), centered on the Ottoman advance across Bosnia and its reduction of Croatian lands under Hungarian oversight. Aiding the advance was an Ottoman alliance, mainly for trade, with the Venetian enclaves on the Dalmatian coast.
To follow the repeated and sometimes uncertain border changes before then required more than a dozen maps in the Palgrave Historical Atlas of the Balkans (2001).To follow the medieval political fortunes and the religious or linguistic intersections only through the fifteenth century took over 600 pages for the still standard study by John Fine (1987), including present-day Greece but not Romania. The recently published first volume of the Handbuch zur Geschichte Stidosteuropas (2019) takes more than 1,000 pages to cover the political history of the region from antiquity to the Ottoman conquest, its length indicating how complex and challenging it is to pin down the premodern history of the region.
Now, the initial chapter in a new history of Southeastern Europe by German historian Marie-Janine Calic (2019) does reach back authoritatively from before the Roman Empire through the subsequent centuries in which its legions advanced from the Adriatic through Illyrian and Thracian populations to the Dacians in modern Romania, where they left Latin as a base for the native language. The Romans left visible legacies not only manifest in the presence of speakers of Romance languages but also a road network that is visible until today. Yet, the Albanians and the Greeks can trace their languages to idioms spoken in the region even before it became part of the Roman Empire. Then came the South Slav migrations of the seventh century. In what was to become Bulgaria, their numbers soon absorbed the military advance from Turkic Central Asians at the same time. The same large Slav advance to the west had also absorbed the Serbs and Croats, both coming from small but separate corners in Central Asia as well.
Large-scale migration movements in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages combined with a lack of historical sources to turn questions of ethno-genesis, as questionable as they might seem from a scholarly perspective, into topics of ferocious debate and of pseudo-academic assertions. So have the origins and evolution of the spoken languages that stand as markers of national identities and justify modern territorial claims. Southeastern Europe is a classic case of how deeply nationalist disputes can be grounded in questions of origins and continuity, especially if they articulate conflicting claims for the same territory. Foreign as well as domestic scholars or politicians often cite these claims in choosing sides on historical or contemporary issues. And more generally, these controversies have helped to preserve for the general public and public opinion the image of the region as a contentious, eternally divided region, making “Balkanization” a synonym for any regional disorder.
The lasting legacies of ancient and medieval political configurations are evident not only as subjects of contemporary debate and patriotic agitation. The division of the Roman Empire into western and eastern halves in 395, for example, largely preconfigured the border between Western and Eastern Christianity in Southeastern Europe. The ancient Greek political framework, divided by the time of Alexander the Great in Macedonia, had come together again under the Byzantine Empire. Its commercial network and the Patriarchate in Constantinople extended its authority up to the Danube. A series of wars with the emerging Bulgarian Khanate pushed it back and forth, as did conflicts with Venice on the Dalmatian coast. The final Byzantine split with the Roman Papacy in 1054 introduced religious division between Latin and Orthodox Christianity to the region.A separate Serbian kingdom was soon contesting Byzantine authority as a Croatian regime came to terms with Hungarian suzerainty. But they did not fight each other, facing instead the same Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian advance that also swept away the Byzantine, Bulgarian, and Hungarian regimes.
Our Handbook starts by examining the subsequent, early modern period of imperial domination, which would give way to native efforts of nation and state-building. We intend to move beyond the stereotype of the Balkans as a region permanently mired in conflict and interethnic strife. The chapters of the Handbook review an early modern and modern history that is more promising yet still problematic, a crossroads for foreign influence and intervention mixed with domestic ambitions and initiatives. Recent scholarship from the region has started to appraise the attraction to multi-ethnic accommodation during periods of imperial reform and then through the nineteenth century to the separate nation-state, inspired first by liberal nationalism in the wake of the Enlightenment and then turned to a corporatist, potentially organic national identity (see Mishkova 2009).
Before reviewing the major questions left to these evolving and contentious national narratives, we must call attention to the continuing influence of the region’s distinctive physical geography. Its predominant uplands discouraged cultivation and scattered settlement. Mountains have also long impeded the establishment of efficient state control and the creation of denser networks of communication, as is evident even today. Their natural divisions created uncertainty over premodern borders, languages, and populations. Controversy followed as early modern division among imperial borderlands gave way to a modern set of nation-states. Designation as the Balkans began not with the later stereotype for political division and unrest but with the Balkan Mountains that divide northern and southern Bulgaria as did other ranges the rest of Southeastern Europe. The Rhodopi Mountains separate Bulgaria and Greece, the longer Dinaric chain divided the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts from fertile lowlands within the former Yugoslavia and down to Greece. The higher Carpathians separated the plains of Wallachia and Moldova from the mineral resources of Transylvania. These fertile lowlands of Romania’s two Principalities were however plagued by a low average rainfall, less than half the West European average, and repeated droughts. Elsewhere, the predominant mountains and their uplands did not allow arable cultivation of grain. Yet none of these ranges were high or continuous enough, like Switzerland’s, to prevent a foreign army from invading or to keep displaced populations from migrating. The region’s one major river, the Danube, ran west to east and emptied into the Black Sea, far from the Mediterranean let alone the Atlantic and its booming trans-Atlantic trade. Potentially more fertile lowland areas, especially along the coasts, were often swampy and malaria-infested. Through the premodern period, these limitations kept the total population small, under 5 million, and helped to prevent the emergence of any one native state to dominate these Balkans.
The resulting divisions left a long list of conflicting claims, starting with the debate over the Ottoman conquest itself. The essays assembled in Oliver Jens Schmitt (2018) review the different interpretations and recent research. At least half a dozen other major questions about origins, borders, and belonging are still disputed. Who can reasonably claim an exclusive right on specific legacies?
¢ The Macedonian question between Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and what is now recognized as North Macedonia:
Two earlier Bulgarian empires and the thirteenth and fourteenth-century Serbian empires overlapped in Vardar Macedonia. The Bulgarian claim to introducing the Orthodox religion and the Bulgarian language as a basis for modern Macedonian dates from this period, followed by the Serbian claim from its fourteenth-century expansion under Tsar Dusan with Skopje as its capital and Kosovo as the center of its own Orthodox clergy and churches. Greek claims point to the ancient Macedonians of Alexander the Great and the Byzantine tradition, while national Macedonian narratives construct the medieval Bulgarian polities on its territory as Macedonian states.
* The Greek questions over its population’s origins in Ancient Greece and territorial claims from Greek settlement originating in the Greek-dominated Byzantine Empire:
The claim to continuous demographic descent from Ancient Greece on the peninsula is well supported by Greek historians and archeologists against the denial by an earlynineteenth century German ethnographer. Open to more doubt were Greek claims in the late nineteenth century for much of Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean, called the Great Idea and based on the full reach of the Byzantine imperial dominion in the centuries preceding the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman advance in 1453. These claims ended with the Greek defeat in Anatolia by Kemalist Turkey in 1922. Recently the fourth century BC expansion under Alexander the Great, originating from Aegean Macedonia, is claimed for non-Greek Macedonians. Official historiography of the post-1989 successor state to the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia has incorporated Alexander the Great in their own national narrative.
* The Kosovo question for Serbia and Albania:
It starts with the date of arrival and the later proportion of ethnic Albanians in what was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the center of a Serbian kingdom and its Orthodox churches and monasteries. Claiming original state and religious rights to Kosovo, the Serbian argument maintains that Albanian migration into Kosovo began only after the Ottoman conquest and then grew after the Great Migration of Serbs following the Ottoman defeat of a Habsburg advance in 1683.The Albanian argument emphasizes settlement in the Balkans long before the Serbs and at least some Albanian presence in Kosovo before the Ottoman conquest. In the absence of state rights, the Albanian argument rests on religious evidence of their Christian conversion, particularly from the records of their Catholic clergy. The pace and origin of the Albanian increase under the Ottoman regime in the early modern period to an early twentieth century majority continues to be debated, in the absence of clear political borders before the Ottoman conquest and a clear ethnic census afterwards. ¢ The Bosnian questions around a set of disputed legacies:
The territorial legacy of the separate Bosnian state of the fourteenth century reached into the Croatian territory of its twelfth-century kingdom. The religious legacy was divided between Latin, Orthodox, and separate Bosnian churches.The ethnic legacy was controversially debated between Serbian and Croatian, later also Boniak historians arguing over the disputed timing of Orthodox Serbs assimilating the non-Slav Vlachs of Herzegovina, originally separate upland clans relying on transhumant livestock herding for trading and their horses for banditry and arms for hire, pushed back before the Ottomans. A second ethnic debate concerns the forced versus voluntary conversion of a large, disputed number of the Christian Bosnian population to Islam under the Ottoman regime, joined by Bosniak historians exploring a pre-Ottoman Muslim presence.
¢ The Croatian question:
The rise of tenth- to twelfth-century Croatia to cover western Slavonia and Dalmatia, minus only several ports and islands held by Venice, also included Bosnia as a potential future claim. The ruling nobles’ agreement in 1104 to accept Hungarian suzerainty over all of Slavonia is also disputed, either as voluntary and preserving the right of a separate regime or a forced submission to Hungarian domination that ended Croatia’s standing as an independent state.
¢ The Transylvanian question between Romania and Hungary over its original settlement and governance:
The Romanian claim rests on original settlement by the Romanized Dacians, predating the Hungarian migration from the tenth century, and then remaining as a majority of the population. The Hungarian claim rests on a better documented record of governance from its noble estates, joined by the earlier Hungarian related Szeklers and the German Saxon immigrants but with no representation for the Romanian majority, to form the three recognized “nations” of the Principality of Transylvania in the fourteenth century. This hegemony was briefly interrupted — but long remembered — by the Romanian Michael the Brave’s proclamation of union with the two Principalities of Wallachia and Moldova at the start of the sixteenth century.
These questions continue to provoke disagreement among professional historians, as shown in Brunnbauer’s survey of history writing (Brunnbauer 2004). Their salience not only points to the importance of history as a political argument but also the fundamental fact that only little historical documentation has survived from late antiquity and the Middle Ages, leaving space for imaginative “inventions of tradition.” Conflicting interpretations of events from the nineteenth and especially the violent first half of the twentieth century often rest on alleged earlier divisions. Historical writing and popular perceptions of history in Southeastern Europe have indeed created the image of an inherently antagonistic past, overlooking the many similarities in historical development and shared legacies devoid of initial ethnic conflict. Some of the most important scholarly initiatives after the wars in the former Yugoslavia attempted to overcome nationalistic bias in history writing. Under the guidance of Christina Koulouri (2005), for example, a set of new regional textbooks emerged to promote a balanced view on contested topics from Balkan history.
Our Handbook looks past these debates about premodern origins to the region’s early modern and modern history, to the promise and problems that have shaped its ongoing transition from the Balkans into Southeastern Europe.
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