A History of Eastern Europe

Crisis and Change

Robert Bideleux, Ian Jeffries

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134213184
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This welcome second edition of A History of Eastern Europe provides a thematic historical survey of the formative processes of political, social and economic change which have played paramount roles in shaping the evolution and development of the region.

Subjects covered include:

• Eastern Europe in ancient, medieval and early modern times
• the legacies of Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire
• the impact of the region's powerful Russian and Germanic neighbours
• rival concepts of 'Central' and 'Eastern' Europe
• the experience and consequences of the two World Wars
• varieties of fascism in Eastern Europe
• the impact of Communism from the 1940s to the 1980s
• post-Communist democratization and marketization
• the eastward enlargement of the EU.

A History of Eastern Europe now includes two new chronologies – one for the Balkans and one for East-Central Europe – and a glossary of key terms and concepts, providing comprehensive coverage of a complex past, from antiquity to the present day.

Part I
The Balkan Peninsula from the Graeco-Roman period to the First World War

1 The gradual ‘Balkanization’ of the Balkan Peninsula

The Balkan Peninsula, along with the nearby Aegean and Ionian seas and islands, the Black Sea, and the northern and western parts of Asia Minor (Anatolia), is widely perceived to have been the ‘birthplace’ or ‘fountainhead’ of European civilization. Indeed, during ‘Late Antiquity’ (the late Roman period) and at least until the twelfth century AD, the Balkan Peninsula remained either the most or one of the most ‘advanced’, ‘civilized’ or ‘developed’ regions of Europe, economically and technologically as well as culturally (Haldon 1997: 16). By the late nineteenth century, however, the formerly ‘primitive’ and ‘barbarian’ peoples of north-western Europe were ruling the roost and calling the shots, whereas the Balkan Peninsula had degenerated into one of the most conflict-prone and least developed regions in Europe. Somewhat nonsensically, considering that the concept of ‘Europe’ was first invented by the ancient Greeks and that the proponents of ‘European’ (and indeed ‘Western’) civilization are fond of tracing its roots back to the ancient Greek civilization which flourished in and around the Balkan Peninsula and its adjacent seas and islands, by the late twentieth century many xenophobic Western and Central Europeans had come to regard many (perhaps most) of the inhabitants of the Balkans as less ‘European’ and less ‘civilized’ than themselves and had even started questioning whether Balkan states should be eligible to join the European Union.

The overarching purpose of Part I of this book is to shed light on the protracted decline in the Balkan Peninsula’s standing relative to other parts of Europe and on the deep historical roots of some of the problems which have latterly afflicted this far from happy region. This does not mean that we see the major problems that have afflicted the Balkans in recent times as products of ‘ancient’ ethnic and/or religious hatreds, still less that we view them as manifestations of an age-old ‘clash of civilizations’. On the contrary, we regard many of the problems afflicting the Balkans as products of ‘modernity’ – this is especially the case for the nationalist ideologies and doctrines which emanated from Germanic Central Europe and the West. Others have been products of ‘postmodern’ tendencies towards fragmentation. Only a few have been peculiar and/or endemic to this peninsula.

In the Balkans during the twentieth century, to be sure, ‘history’ became a battleground upon which and/or in whose name terrible atrocities were repeatedly committed by nationalist, religious and Communist fanatics and ideologues. Particular care therefore needs to be taken to guard against the ethnic biases, cultural determinism and cultural or even racist stereotyping exhibited in many accounts of modern and even medieval Balkan history.

The biggest source of distortion in modern historical writing on the Balkans has been the strong tendency for Greek, Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian, South Slavic, Balkan émigré and Western historians to succumb to varying degrees of anti-Ottoman, anti-Turkish or Islamophobic bias. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians in or from the Balkans (including some of ‘Balkan descent’ in the West) often presented very partisan views and implicitly or explicitly championed the territorial and/or cultural claims of particular ethnic and/or religious groups. Events that took place centuries ago were frequently treated as if they were recent occurrences. Indeed, these were still ‘live issues’ that sometimes aroused strong hatreds, resentments, jealousies or national pride. Appropriately enough, the Balkans are in many ways just a reflection and a microcosm of the ‘Europe’ which they so seminally helped to create. They are ‘Europe’ writ small. Modern conflicts, and even the more ‘postmodern’ Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s, were to varying degrees intensified by over-heated memories of classical and medieval heroes, battles, atrocities, acts of valour and imperial projects. Until the 1990s, sometimes ludicrous or tragic obsessions with the distant past continued to inflame relations between, for example, the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, between the Greeks and their neighbours, between Romanians and Hungarians (especially over and between the respective communities in and territorial claims to Transylvania), and between Albanians and their neighbours (especially over Kosova, Epirus and western Macedonia). History and the misuse of history in pursuit of pernicious nationalist goals bedevilled Balkan politics and state-building from the early nineteenth century to the 1990s. On 10 December 1992, for example, more than one million Greeks (about one-third of the population of Athens) took part in mass protests against the decision of their Macedonian Slav neighbours to call their newly independent state the ‘Republic of Macedonia’. Similarly, on 31 March 1994 more than a million Greeks demonstrated in Thessaloniki (Salonika) in support of their country’s economic sanctions against the Republic of Macedonia. The Greek state even prosecuted and imprisoned some of its own citizens for daring to publicize the Macedonian Slav case and the existence of a significant Slav minority in northern Greece. In the eyes of many Greek nationalists there was and is no such thing as a ‘Macedonian Slav’ nation or nationality, and those Greeks who say otherwise have sometimes been treated and even prosecuted as ‘traitors’ to their country.

Such attitudes and the recent conflicts in the Balkans have partly derived from obsessive preoccupations with ‘history’ as perceived and narrated by modern nationalists. Even ‘medieval studies in Southeastern Europe have always been a key area of confrontation for competing nationalistic discourses’ (Curta 2005: 35). Reflecting on his experiences as an international negotiator during the conflicts between the Yugoslav successor states (1991–5), David Owen wrote: ‘Nothing is simple in the Balkans. History pervades everything . . . It is not sufficient to explain away the frequently broken promises, the unobserved ceasefires, merely as the actions of lying individuals. They were also the product of South Slavic history’ (Owen 1996: 1–2). Noel Malcolm, an eminent specialist on Bosnia and Kosova, noted that during the early 1990s the major perpetrators of violence in the Yugoslav successor states tried not only to ruin their enemies’ future, but also to expunge the evidence and destroy the cultural and architectural heritage of their enemies’ past (Malcolm 1994: xxiii). Such obsessions with history are by no means peculiar to the Balkans – for example, Hitler’s occupations of France and Yugoslavia in 1940 and 1941, respectively, and the ways in which he subsequently treated both countries were in large measure motivated by his desire to settle ‘historic’ German and Austrian grievances. Nevertheless, such obsessions undeniably played significant roles in the conflicts which have bedevilled the modern and postmodern Balkans.

The Balkan Peninsula was known to the Ottoman Turks as ‘Rumelia’, to eighteenth-century Europeans as ‘Turkey-in-Europe’, to medieval Christendom as ‘Romanie’, and to the classical world as Illyricum, Macedonia and Thrace (Stoianovich 1967: 4). During the nineteenth century the term ‘Balkans’ (derived from a Turkish term for mountains) was aptly applied to the region. The term ‘Balkanization’ came into use in the early twentieth century, with reference to the problems which afflicted the post-Ottoman Balkans:

With the decline of Ottoman power and the rise of national states the Balkan Peninsula lost whatever unity it had – the unity of subjection to an outside power. The facts of geography and the nature of the Ottoman system had kept the region a mosaic of different nationalities; together with the particularism which the new nationalism introduced, they left its peoples exposed to their own internecine conflicts and to the influence or domination of the great powers of Europe. Thus there emerged . . . the classic model of what the world has come to know as Balkanization – a group of small, unstable and weak states, each based on the idea of nationality, in an area in which nation and state did not and could not coincide; all with conflicting territorial claims and with ethnic minorities that had to be assimilated or repressed, driven into unstable and changing alignments among themselves, seeking support from outside powers . . . and in turn being used by those powers for the latter’s strategic advantage. (Campbell 1963: 397)

The resultant ‘international anarchy . . . found its logical outcome in two great periods of war, from 1912 to 1922 and from 1939 to 1945’; and, during the second of these, ‘nationalism, which in a generally liberal and democratic form had inspired the Balkan peoples in the long struggle for freedom and independence, finally helped to open the gates to Hitler’ and engulfed the nations involved ‘in the fires of hatred and massacre’ (Campbell 1963: 397–8).

How did the Balkan Peninsula reach such a sorry state? According to many Western as well as Balkan historians of the peninsula, the explanations are mainly to be found in the baleful impact of four to five centuries of Ottoman overlordship. Depending on the area in question, this lasted from the fourteenth or fifteenth century to the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Peter Sugar, a major Western historian of the Balkans, proclaimed that ‘South-eastern Europe became “Balkanized” under Ottoman rule’ (Sugar 1977: 287). In his view, ‘Ottoman conquest destroyed the larger units represented by the [former] states of South-eastern Europe’ and in their place created ‘a multitude of theoretically self-contained units which were small enough to be powerless but large enough to be functionally useful’ (see p.). However, ‘The result was a very strict, over-organized socioeconomic structure that soon ossified and was, at the same time, amazingly lenient. This licence prevented the enserfment of the South-eastern European peasantry and allowed the population, both urban and rural, to organize on a small communal basis under the leadership of its own elected offi-cials… and facilitated their rebirth in the form of modern nations’ (see pp. *-**). Sugar also argued that ‘the most important change that Ottoman rule brought to South-eastern Europe was the largescale demographic transformation of the area’, including the northward displacement of the Serbs, Romanian migrations into the Banat and the Crisana, and Albanian migrations into Kosova, Epirus and Macedonia. These migrations produced ‘a mosaic of hopelessly interwoven population patterns’ (see p.). Consequently, ‘Ottoman social organization and the migratory patterns created by the forces that the Ottomans had set in motion were responsible for the appearance of South-eastern Europe’s major modern international problem: large areas inhabited by ethnically mixed populations’ (see p.).

Despite ascribing ‘Balkanization’ primarily to the impact of Ottoman rule on the peninsula, Sugar’s writings nevertheless remained unusually free of anti-Ottoman cultural bias. In a more blatantly anti-Ottoman vein, Wayne Vucinich claimed that:

Ottoman rule had a devastating effect on the cultural life of most of the conquered nations. In the Balkans, for example, learning virtually dried up, and art deteriorated from the exquisite medieval masterpieces to simple primitive creations. Once on a cultural level with the rest of Europe, the Balkan peoples had fallen far behind by the nineteenth century. There were several reasons for this. The Ottoman regime obliterated many of the spiritual and material resources of the subject peoples. Medieval states were eradicated, scions of conquered nobility killed off, churches and monasteries demolished, lands devastated, settlements destroyed, and large segments of the population dispersed. The Christian communities, deprived of their own resources for development, were given no comparable substitute. Moreover, they were isolated from cities and the mainstream of civilization, and restricted to a rural and pastoral life. As a result of long Turkish rule, the Balkan peoples became ‘the most backward’ in Europe. Like the Turks themselves, they were bypassed by the Renaissance. (Vucinich 1965: 68–9)

In place of such monocausal and ethnocentric explanations of the so-called ‘Balkanization’ of the Balkan Peninsula, and in order to present the undeniably important impact of the Ottoman Empire on the Balkans in a more balanced and nuanced historical perspective, we emphasize the interplay of diverse cultural, demographic, economic, locational and natural-environmental factors and the wider international or geographical context, including the interference and impact of other imperial powers. In our view, the deteriorating fortunes of the Balkan Peninsula from the seventeenth century to the Second World War cannot be blamed monocausally or ethnocentrically on ‘the Ottoman impact’. Most of the underlying causes were largely beyond the control of the Ottoman Empire (see pp. *-**, *-**). It has become increasingly clear to us that much that has been attributed to the ‘Ottoman impact’ was either already in existence or incipient or merely inherited and perpetuated (rather than initiated) by Ottoman overlordship, and that many other evils were infl icted on the region by the major European powers which increasingly manipulated and ‘meddled’ in Balkan affairs for their own ends. The Ottoman impact on the Balkans has presented both the Balkan peoples and many Western historians of the Balkans with a convenient and superficially persuasive scapegoat, which has helped to divert attention from the ways in which their own cultures, institutions, rulers and histories must share the ‘blame’ for their deteriorating predicament. During the twentieth century it has also provided for pretexts for Bulgarian, Serbian/Yugoslav and Greek oppression of Turkish, Albanian and other Muslim minorities in the Balkans.

Rather than blame ‘Balkanization’ on any one of the successive conquering and colonizing peoples who have intruded into the peninsula, it is much fairer to emphasize the roles of location, accessibility and terrain in enticing and facilitating wave upon wave of inward migration and conquest. The terrain of much of the Balkan Peninsula is ‘a jumble of mountainous valleys and cul-de-sacs that unquestionably produce local isolation’ for its ethnically diverse inhabitants, who have therefore tended to cluster into numerous small pockets. Nevertheless, a network of major river valleys (such as the Morava–Vardar corridor and the Sava and Maritsa valleys) connects the eastern Mediterranean with the Danube basin, the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus and Asia Minor. This has provided easy access for foreign invaders and colonists from both East and West to this strategic crossroads between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ (Kostanick 1963: 2).

In his still unsurpassed synoptic history of the Balkans, Leften Stavrianos emphasized that the location and the accessibility of the peninsula encouraged frequent and prolonged invasions. ‘The struggle against these invasions . . . hindered the process of racial assimilation which has been the characteristic development in Western Europe. The complex terrain is also an important factor. If the peninsula had been a plateau instead of a highly mountainous and diversified region, it is probable that the various races would have amalgamated to a considerable degree. A common Balkan ethnic strain might have evolved’ (Stavrianos 1958: 12). Unusually complex ethno-cultural tapestries or mosaics were formed and perpetuated in the Balkan Peninsula, in contrast to the somewhat larger and seemingly more homogeneous ethno-cultural units which were forged by the protonational monarchical states of late medieval and modern western Europe. Contrary to Sugar’s claim that ‘South-eastern Europe became “Balkanized” under Ottoman rule’ (Sugar 1977: 287), Stavrianos pointed out that ‘By the fifteenth century the Slavs were in firm possession of a broad belt from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. The dispossessed Illyrians were concentrated in present-day Albania and the scattered Thraco-Dacians were reappearing as the nomadic Vlachs of the central highlands and as the Romanians of the newly-emerging trans-Danubian states, Moldavia and Wallachia. This ethnic distribution that took place in the Byzantine period has persisted with slight changes to the present’ (Stavrianos 1958: 32).

The migrations and processes of acculturation and assimilation which occurred under Ottoman rule did result in some signifi cant alterations to the ethnic complexions of Bosnia, Kosova and Croatia. These continued up to the 1990s and fuelled rival territorial claims to all or parts of these areas. Nevertheless, Stavrianos is much more accurate than Sugar: a complex Balkan ethnic mosaic was largely established before rather than during Ottoman rule, and mosaics of this sort are to be found even in areas which were only briefly or slightly affected by that rule. However, these later migrations did not greatly augment the overall complexity of the ethnic patchwork in the Balkans. Crucially, the Ottoman system was essentially a response to (rather than the cause of) the ethnocultural complexity of the region. Therefore, even if the Ottoman Empire had never been established, the later spread of the ideas of nationalism, national self-determination and the nation-state would still have had highly disruptive and potentially explosive consequences within the Balkan ethnic mosaic. These consequences cannot and should not be blamed on ‘the Ottoman impact’.

For millennia, the Balkan Peninsula has served as a major ‘crossroads’ and ‘bridge’ between civilizations and continents. The metaphor of the Balkans as a ‘bridge’ has long informed local conceptualizations of its role in history, most famously in Ivo Andric’s Nobel Prize-winning novel The Bridge over the Drina (1945). Such an area was bound to be unsettled in times of conflict.

When the Balkans are compared and contrasted with western Europe, it is often insufficiently recognized that most western European nations are also amalgams of many different ethnic and linguistic ‘strains’. France comprises Frankish, Norman, Gallic, Iberian and Ligurian ‘strains’ (among others), while Italy has long been an ethnic ‘melting pot’. Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain also very visibly incorporate diverse ethnic and linguistic groups. In this regard, the crucial difference between the Balkans and western Europe lies not in the presence or absence of a multiplicity of component linguistic and ethnic ‘strains’, but rather in the particular circumstances which favoured or made possible the extensive fusion or unification of diverse ‘strains’ into relatively discrete and homogeneous units in western Europe and the equally extensive perpetuation of separate ethnic identities and allegiances in the Balkans. Indeed, ‘the unique feature of Balkan ethnic evolution is that virtually all the races that have actually settled there, as distinguished from those that have simply marched through, have been able to preserve their identity to the present’ (Stavrianos 1958: 13). Conversely, few of the peoples who have settled in the Balkans during the past two or three millennia have evolved and amalgamated into clearly delineated nationstates, partly because of the distinctive physical geography of the Balkans and partly because of the relatively late survival of multi-ethnic imperial polities in the eastern half of Europe. These two factors have been the main contributors to the preservation of the peninsula’s unusually complex ethno-linguistic diversity and mosaics.

SOME PROBLEMS POSED BY MARIA TODOROVA’S IMAGINING THE BALKANS (1997)

Among the many academic books on the Balkan Peninsula published since 1989, Imagining the Balkans (1997) by the Bulgarian émigré historian Maria Todorova has been the most influential and talked about. The book provides many valuable insights into Balkan identities and culture(s) and the ways in which they are perceived, both within and outwith the Balkans. Professor Todorova has become the best-known writer on so-called ‘Balkanism’. Nevertheless, this influential book is flawed in ways that illuminatingly illustrate the potential pitfalls facing those who venture into this difficult terrain.

Professor Todorova reaffirms the current standard view that ‘By the beginning of the twentieth century . . . “Balkanization” had not only come to denote the parcelization of large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian . . . What has been emphasized about the Balkans is that its inhabitants do not care to conform to the standards of behaviour devised as normative by and for the civilized world’ (Todorova 1997: 3). Thus, what had begun simply as ‘a geographical appellation’ was ‘transformed into one of the most powerful pejorative designations in history, international relations, political science, and nowadays, general intellectual discourse’ (Todorova 1997: 7).

The occasional objections from aggrieved inhabitants of the p...