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The term Balkans is typically used to refer to the peninsula in southeastern Europe that includes the present-day countries of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and the lands of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia). Once referred to as European Turkey or Rumeli, the present appellation comes from the Balkan mountains of Bulgaria, which were mistakenly believed to divide the entire peninsula from continental Europe. Besides its geographical meaning, the Balkans has, since the mid-nineteenth century, carried secondary connotations of violence, savagery, and primitivism that have led some scholars to prefer the designation southeastern Europe.

The Territory And Its History

The lands of the Balkans are more than 70 percent mountainous, which has helped to produce two of its defining character is tics: its mixture of cultures and religions and its position as a relatively undeveloped borderland of empires. The Balkans have long been home to a variety of different cultures— Albanian, Greek, Roman, Slav, and Turkish, among others—and religions—Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Orthodox. The intermingling of these cultures and religions was the trait that most distinguished the region to later visitors from mainland Europe.

The region began to assume its modern form as a borderland of the Ottoman Empire, which became the main regional power in the fifteenth century and was only gradually pushed out over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A distinctive characteristic of Ottoman rule was its millet system, which granted a degree of self-government to religious groups even as all state offices were held by Muslims. One consequence of the millet system was the preservation of the region’s multiculturalism, as well as the creation of a significant Muslim minority made up largely of ethnic Slavs and Albanians who converted.

In the nineteenth century, local intellectuals picked up European concepts of the nation and nationalism and began to apply them to the region. Though they initially encountered difficulties in creating Croat, Greek, or Serb identities from predominantly peasant and religious cultures, ultimately they managed to cobble together the official cultures, languages, and histories of the lands that exist today and at the same time extinguish many of the microcultures that existed up until then (e.g., Morlachs, Vlachs). These nationalists began to lead increasingly successful revolts against the deteriorating Ottoman Empire, producing the independent states of Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia, while the territories of Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia, and Slovenia were subsumed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The meeting of nationalist ambitions with the diversity of cultures and the difficulty of classifying residents as members of one or another national group led to frequent inter-Balkan conflicts. As the great powers attempted to resolve these conflicts, they became entangled, and it was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Slav nationalist that helped to ignite World War I (1914–1918).

The end of the war led to a clarification of the region’s boundaries with the states of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania assuming near their modern forms, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (or the South Slavs) being created out of Albanians, Bosniaks, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Serbs, with the Serbs playing the leading role. It was Yugoslavia that proved the most volatile of the Balkan states, and it broke apart during World War II (1939–1945). The war was marked by brutal score-settling, particularly between Serbs and Croats, and frequently exceeding rational war aims. The communist partisan leader Josip Broz Tito managed to restore Yugoslavia to more or less its prewar borders by promulgating a myth of national resistance to the Nazis and clamping down on nationalist sentiment.

The Wars Of Yugoslav Succession

In contrast to the hard-liner communist regimes that emerged after the war in neighboring Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania, postwar Yugoslavia pursued an independent course both in foreign policy (helping to form the nonaligned movement) and in domestic affairs, where it ultimately pioneered a unique form of worker self-management. This economic and political liberalization led many to expect the country to weather the fall of communism in 1989 better than other communist nations.

In fact, the transition unleashed the bloodiest fighting in Europe since World War II. Though the relatively homogeneous Slovenia managed to extract itself from Yugoslavia with minimal violence, moves by Croatia, and particularly Bosnia-Herzegovina, to declare their independence met resistance from Serb minorities in those republics. These Serbs were backed by the remnants of the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army and paramilitary militias. Efforts to carve out territory by Serbs and Croats in Bosnia, egged on by ultranationalist leaders, led to ethnic cleansing and genocide, with Muslims bearing the brunt of atrocities. The massacre of eight thousand Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in the presence of a UN peacekeeping force and the bombing of multiethnic Sarajevo by Serb forces focused world attention on the region.

Though Western powers had been quick to recognize the new independent republics, they were slow to react to the fighting. One reason was the attribution of the conflict to “ancient hatreds,” a theory propounded by Croat and Serb nationalists and backed by many Western politicians. The theory, however, did not explain why the region had become multicultural in the first place, why much of its history was peaceful, nor the high rates of ethnic intermarriage in postwar Yugoslavia.

Public revulsion at the slaughter, however, ultimately prompted the Western powers to intervene against Serb aggression in Bosnia and force the three sides to sign the Dayton Agreement (1995) that ended the fighting and led to a UN sponsored, NATO-led mission enforcing the peace in Bosnia. Hostilities, however, later resumed in Kosovo, with Kosovar Albanians turning to violent resistance against Serb oppression and then facing massive retaliation. Ultimately, NATO intervened through a bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999, which led to UN administration and ultimately independence for Kosovo.

Aftermath Of The Conflict

The final balance of these wars was horrific. The death toll has been estimated at slightly more than one hundred thousand, and perhaps two million people were displaced from their homes. Mass rape, torture, and attempted genocide compounded the trauma, with Bosnian Muslims bearing the lion’s share of the suffering. However, the effects of the war differed dramatically by territory. While Slovenia and, to a lesser extent, Croatia managed to reform their economies and turn themselves toward Europe, the other republics have faced rockier paths. Serbia democratized in 2000, but its economy remains marked by the entangling of the security forces and organized crime, its politics by significant ultranationalist forces, and its integrity by the secession of both Montenegro and Kosovo. Bosnia continues under international administration and is de facto divided into ethnic zones with efforts at resettlement and interethnic cooperation meeting scant success. Though successful in attaining its independence, Kosovo still has not been recognized by several major powers and faces an economy in shambles.

There have been significant and productive debates in political science about the causes of these wars and what could have been done to prevent them. A key issue has been who is to blame. On one side stand those who single out volitional individuals or groups, especially the Serb leader Slobodan Miloševic´ and the Croatian leader Franjo Tudman and their allies who stirred up ethnic hatred. Some have rather pointed blame at the Slovenes or even the international community (either for recognizing the independent republics too soon or not intervening early enough).

On the other side are those who point to structural forces. Susan Woodward, for example, emphasizes how persistent economic decline and state weakness left citizens dependent on national groups for security guarantees. Still others have focused on the structure of communist-era federalism and the military, the improper sequencing of regional and national elections, the dangers of democratization without prior liberalization, and even the clash of civilizations.

There also have been enlightening debates about the justice and practicality of international involvement in civil wars and genocides. Particular attention has been devoted to the proper deployment of international peacemaking and peacekeeping operations, given the failures of a UN force without robust engagement policies and the apparent successes of more forceful interventions by NATO. The formation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which saw the first indictment of a sitting head of state and was a precedent for the International Criminal Court, also spawned a large literature on the efficacy of trials for war criminals. Critics argue that it has engaged in selective and politically inspired prosecutions, while supporters argue that it did provide justice for the victims of the war and removed important obstacles to democratization. Finally, there have been fierce debates about the normative desirability of international support for secession and state breakup versus respect for state sovereignty, both with respect to the start of the war and as a precedent for other regions. What was a tragedy for the people of Yugoslavia has led to a flourishing literature in political science.

Bibliography:

Mazower, Mark. The Balkans: A Short History. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
Ramet, Sabrina P. Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Woodward, Susan L. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Destruction after the Cold War Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995.