In this short (151 pages) book that won the 2001 Wolfson History Prize, Mark Mazower seeks to dispel the gross characterization of the Balkans as a region of unusual violence and ethnically-based racial hatred. Instead, he portrays a nuanced view of the relationships and conflicts among the various ethnic groups that have lived in Southeast Europe.

He begins with a discussion of the idea of the Balkans, observing that “at the end of the twentieth century, people spoke as if the Balkans had existed for ever. Two hundred years earlier, they had not yet come into being.” The region was, by contrast, known as “Turkey in Europe.” But when nation-states emerged during the nineteenth century simultaneously with diplomatic conferences whittling away Ottoman territory, “the Balkans” (named for the mountain range passing from central Europe to Constantinople) started to become common currency for the area.

He uses a a perceptive quote from Friedrich Nietzsche to point out:

"The reputation, name and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing . . . . all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body.”

The area as a separate entity also was useful to describe the “intermediate cultural zone between Europe and Asia - in Europe but not of it.” (This distinction is value-laden; Europe was seen as the “civilizing force” operating to modernize the “Oriental” base of rigid religious practices and the prevalence of agrarian poverty. Turks, even now, have never really been accepted as Europeans.)

Historically, life in the Balkans under Turkish rule differed considerably from life in the rest of Europe. There were no separate “nations” under the Ottomans. Christians paid higher taxes than Muslims did, but they were allowed to practice their religion freely. Although there were economic and political incentives to renounce Christianity and convert to Islam, Balkan peasants mainly clung to their ancestral identity as Christians. Nevertheless, religious toleration was much more prevalent under the Ottomans than it was in Western Europe. Mazower maintains that religious peasants tended to mix Muslim, Orthodox, and Jewish practices. Peasants cared little about doctrinal differences and by and large were hardly aware of them, using any available religious rite as a kind of insurance against evil.

Ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution began to penetrate the Balkans in the 18th century. At the same time, partially under the influence and example of the Russians, various groups began to assert their desire to have their Orthodox religious practices conducted in their own language. Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Albanian Orthodox churches that did not recognize the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople arose by the early 19th century. Moreover, as Ottoman power waned, various ethnicities, led by the Serbs, began to assert their independence. The defeat of the Ottomans in WWI led to the formation of several small independent language-based countries.

Mazower avers, not always convincingly, that for centuries, “life in the Balkans was no more violent than elsewhere.” He agrees with Arnold Toynbee that the source of the violence was the introduction of the Western notion of the nation-state, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of 1912-13 in the Balkans, of 1921-22 in Anatolia, and of 1991-95 in Yugoslavia. He claims those outrages were “not…the spontaneous eruption of primeval hatreds but . . . represented the extreme force required by nationalists to break apart a society which was otherwise capable of ignoring the mundane fractures of class and ethnicity.” It seemed to me like a specious distinction. He curtly dismisses wartime massacres in the Balkans against minority groups, writing ingenuously they “represented a fusion of older and newer mentalities and technologies.” In fact, he argued, ministerial orders had . . . been issued forbidding the display of decapitated heads…”. Besides, he adds, “there were no Balkan analogues to the racial violence displayed by Lynch mobs in the United States between 1880 and 1920 or to the class violence which labour protests elicited there are elsewhere.” Massacred Jews might beg to differ, if they could still talk….

Evaluation: This book is remarkably short for all of the information and the panoramic perspective it packs on its pages. It begins with maps and a chronology to help readers put the rest of the material in perspective. While I didn’t agree with all of what he wrote, he brings some important insights into the fascinating history of an area not well known to many Americans.

(JAB) ( )

Not what you'd call a light and easy read, but OK for history students. ( )

História breve e um tanto confusa. Não explica muito, mas sempre faz alguma luz sobre o assunto quando é a primeira abordagem ao tema, como foi o caso. ( )

Concise is not cursory. In this short book, Mazower counters the pop historians’ version of Balkan backwardness and explosive, deep-seated nationalism with a skillful consideration of the range of factors that have shaped developments in southeast Europe, from economic geography, failed ideologies and the intervention of powerful neighbors to the confluence of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Islam and the cynicism of ambitious demagogues. Of course. Consequently, we are encouraged to see the Balkan wars of the late 20th c. (the causes more modern than medieval) as from a great height. The Epilogue, an essay on the shifting mentalities and technologies of violence, gives the lie to any notion that the region is marked by a particular brutality. ( )

difficult to listen to. so much info. but i learned a lot. the turks were quite good masters if you did what you were told. no forced conversions regular but fairish taxes. ( )