Conflicting Loyalties In The Balkans

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the birth of new nation states in the Balkans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 'Conflicting Loyalties in the Balkans' explores the effects of the Ottoman reform era upon Balkan societies in order to shed much-needed light on the history of this region during the early nation-state period. Focusing on developments which go beyond the over-researched dimension of political or elite discourse, this book offers insights into the complex ways in which Balkan societies were transformed from different regional viewpoints - focusing o.

This book shows how current and future research on the social history of the Balkans can be integrated into a broader European framework. The contributions look at a range of methodological and empirical issues, and the theme that links the various studies is that of the contrasting, yet, at the same time, entangled ideas of the Balkans as a "mental map" and of Southeast Europe as an "historical region." (Series: Studies on South East Europe - Vol. 10)

The tumultuous history of the Balkans has been subject to a plethora of conflicting interpretations, both local and external. In an attempt to help overcome the stereotypes that still pervade Balkan history, Battling over the Balkans concentrates on a set of five principal controversies from the precommunist period with which the region’s history and historiography must contend: the pre-1914 Ottoman and Eastern Christian Orthodox legacies; the post-1918 struggles for state-building; the range of European economic and cultural influences across the interwar period, as opposed to diplomatic or political intervention; the role of violence and paramilitary forces in challenging the interwar political regimes in the region; and the fate of ethnic minorities into and after World War II, particularly Jews, Muslims and Roma. In an attempt to give a voice to eminent local authors, the chapters provide samples of new regional scholarship exploring these contested issues—most of them translated into English for the first time—and are prefaced with historiographical overviews addressing the state of the debate on these specific controversies. These translations help bridge the language barriers that often separate scholarly traditions within Southeast Europe, as well as scholars in Southeast Europe and English-speaking academia. This volume will enable readers to identify common patterns and influences that characterize the writing of history in the region, and will stimulate new transnational and comparative approaches to the history of the Balkans.

Statehood examines the extending lines of development of nation-state systems in Eastern Europe, in particular considering why certain tendencies in state development found a different expression in this region compared to other parts of the continent. This volume discusses the differences between the social developments, political decisions, and historical experience that have influenced processes of state-building, with a focus on the structural problems of the region and the different paths taken to overcome them. The book addresses processes of building social orders and examines the contribution of state institutions to social and cultural integration and disintegration. It analyses institutional and personnel continuities that have outlasted the great political changes of the twentieth century and addresses the expansion of state activity in shaping property relations in agriculture and industry as well as in social security and family politics. Taking a comparative approach based on experiential history, allowing individual experience to be detached from specific national references, the volume delineates a transnational comparison of problems shared within the region as they have been passed down through history, providing definition to the specificity of Eastern Europe and situating the historical experience of the region within a pan-European context. The second in a four-volume set on Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, it is the go-to resource for those interested in statehood and state-building in this complex region.

Containing Balkan Nationalism focuses on the implications of the Bulgarian national movement that developed in the context of Ottoman modernization and of European imperialism in the Near East. The movement aimed to achieve the status of an independent Bulgarian Orthodox church, removing ethnic Bulgarians from the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This independent church status meant legal and cultural autonomy within the Islamic structure of the Ottoman Empire, which recognized religious minorities rather than ethnic ones. Denis Vovchenko shows how Russian policymakers, intellectuals, and prelates worked together with the Ottoman government, Balkan and other diplomats, and rival churches, to contain and defuse ethnic conflict among Ottoman Christians through the promotion of supraethnic religious institutions and identities. The envisioned arrangements were often inspired by modern visions of a political and cultural union of Orthodox Slavs and Greeks. Whether realized or not, they demonstrated the strength and flexibility of supranational identities and institutions on the eve of the First World War. The book encourages contemporary analysts and policymakers to explore the potential of such traditional loyalties to defuse current ethnic tensions and serve as organic alternatives to generic models of power-sharing and federation.

This volume is critical to the two dominant historiographical paradigms on the topic of Balkan revolutions. This new treatment does not adopt a description of the national movements resulting from the dissolution of the territories of the “Sick man of Europe” from the Great European Powers (Eastern Question Paradigm). Nor is it based on the autonomous process of repetitive awakenings of sleeping Nations, drugged from the Oriental influence of their ruler (Balkan Nationalism Paradigm). Instead, the author attempts a classification as well as a new description of the Balkan national movements as a continuous feedback with the internal sociopolitical schisms in Western Europe, as expressed in the great revolutionary crises from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century.

This volume deals with the relation between heritage, history and politics in the Balkans. Contributions examine diverse ways in which material and immaterial heritage has been articulated, negotiated and manipulated since the nineteenth century. The major question addressed here is how modern Balkan nations have voiced claims about their past by establishing ’proof’ of a long historical presence on their territories in order to legitimise national political narratives. Focusing on claims constructed in relation to tangible evidence of past presence, especially architecture and townscape, the contributors reveal the rich relations between material and immaterial conceptions of heritage. This comparative take on Balkan public uses of the past also reveals many common trends in social and political practices, ideas and fixations embedded in public and collective memories. Balkan Heritages revisits some general truths about the Balkans as a region and a category, in scholarship and in politics. Contributions to the volume adopt a transnational and trans-disciplinary perspective of Balkan identities and heritage(s), viewed here as symbolic resources deployed by diverse local actors with special emphasis on scholars and political leaders.

This book focuses on the end of four centuries of Ottoman rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1870s. After an introduction to the region and the political zeitgeist of the late 1860s and early 1870s, it examines in detail the dramatic years beginning in the summer of 1875, when the outbreak of violent unrest in the eastern Herzegovinian region bordering Montenegro led to a massive refugee catastrophe. The study traces the surprising further political and social dynamics to the summer and fall of 1878, when a Habsburg army finally invaded the Bosnian Vilayet and took control of the province - but only after months of fighting against massive local resistance throughout the province. This book cannot be viewed in isolation from larger political dynamics, which are also constantly present in this study as they unfolded. However, as this book attempts to show, it is hardly possible to understand the often contradictory effects of these larger political dynamics without delving deeper into the complex local rationalities and constraints on the action of the actors involved in them. The End of Ottoman Rule in Bosnia will appeal to students, teachers, and researchers in late Ottoman and Bosnian history.