This is one of those subjects that has long fascinated me but I've never actually had the time to sit down and find out much about it. Happily, Misha Glenny paints as close to an all-encompassing picture as one could hope for in his voluminous history of The Balkans, which covers the period from 1804 to 1999.
This troubled region has long been seen as backwards and troublesome in traditional Western narratives, ranging from Bismark's prediction that the war would begin over 'some damned foolish thing in the Balkans' to the general perception that the region is always a half-step outside of modernity- a perception that Glenny turns on its head with his well-defended thesis that Western Europe bears much of the blame when it comes to the history of warfare that has rocked the region over the course of the past century.
Glenny's narrative opens in the early 19th Century, which saw the acceleration of the long decline of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence, slowly but surely of national movements all across the region- Serbia being amongst the first to break away, followed quickly by Greece and then Bulgaria- and then the rest. As the Ottoman Empire grew weaker, the European powers grew progressively more predatory. feeding off the Ottoman economy and saddling the sclerotic empire with more and more debts it could not afford. It took about a century to do it, but eventually, the Ottomans were essentially chased out of Europe, confined to the small chunk of land west of Istanbul that Turkey holds today.
In it's wake, the Ottoman Empire left a new region for the great powers to squabble over. Austria-Hungry pushed deep into what is now Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia- Russia tied itself to Serbia and soon the other Great Powers were jockeying for influence as well, creating a system of alliances so complex and so rigid that when Gavarilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, the explosion that followed afterward seemed almost inevitable.
Through the tumultuos period of the First and Second Balkan War, which laid the groundwork for the bloody nationalisms which racked the region after the end of the Cold War through the equally chaotic interwar period of the various dictatorships that emerged and into the horrors and bloodshed of the Second World War and the long hard Cold War, the Balkans have been victims of the power politics of the era time and time again and the series of wars and ethnic strife that has resulted has been the collateral damage of great power meddling that encouraged nationalism and pitted one country against the other to further their own ends. That's Glenny's thesis from page 1 and the next six hundred pages or so present more than enough evidence to back that up and then some.
Thesis aside, the sheer amount of knowledge that Glenny backs into his book is impressive, to say the least. I know a lot more about pretty much every country in the region now. I did think Macedonia and Slovenia got short shrift- especially in his description of the events leading up to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. And Glenny completely glosses over the events of 1989 in Bulgaria, Albania and Romania at the expense of the rapidly disintegrating Yugoslavia. But then again, Glenny is faced with the extremely hard task of bringing the distinct cultures and histories of these countries together into one overarching volume- so it's probably inevitable some things got missed, but Glenny does an extraordinary job pulling it off. It's no surprise that he's written another book, The Fall of Yugoslavia. That has now 'fallen' onto my Amazon.com Wish List.
Overall: It's kind of a long, hard slog, but it's oh so worth it- you want to get your knowledge on about the Balkans? Want to understand why we were bombing Kosovo way back when? This is the book for you!
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