The Balkans: A Short History
Mark Mazower
The Modern Library, New York 2000, $19.95

One of the best books about the Balkans is also one of the thinnest.

In a mere 170 pages, Mark Mazower, a professor of history at Princeton University, provides a lucid picture of the often-turbulent history of the Balkans. The Balkans: A Short History, an elegantly written story, not chronological but divided into four themes, allows the reader to better understand the complex history of the peninsula.

On the first page of his book, Mazower mentions that what we now know as 'the Balkans,' with all its historical and political connotations, was simply applied to the mountain range known as ancient 'Haemus,' which travellers passed on the way from central Europe to Constantinople. About 200 years ago, the Balkans started lending its name to a generic definition of divisiveness. Its people were associated with violence and primitivism. To understand the Balkans one had to admit that the people there were different. A clear distinction between civilized and savaged Europe was made. Mazower quotes Rebecca West, who, in her famous Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (originally published in the 1940s), wrote that "violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans: all I knew of the South Slavs."

The weapon of romantic nationalism has been used over and over by the power hungry as an acid to dissolve the bonds of centuries of peaceful coexistence. Yet Mazower does not accept the idea that Balkan violence is a result of ancient ethnic hatred. The source of conflict often lay outside the region. Violent nationalism, he stresses, has been imported into the Balkans from Western Europe. It was Western Europe that gave the peoples of Southeastern Europe the ideological weapons with which they could destroy each other - and themselves.

Moreover, what seems to be absent from most reflections are investigations of the consequences of Western intervention in the Balkans. As Misha Glenny, author of another acclaimed Balkan history, puts it: "The great powers, or 'the international community,' as they are now known, have always been 'dragged' into Balkan conflicts as apparently unwilling partners to local disputes whose nature has eluded them. The Balkans were thought to be impervious to the civilizing processes which the European empires claimed to have introduced elsewhere in the world."

Mazower's portrait of the Balkans under Ottoman rule is brilliant. The period has often been pictured as a dark era full of persecutions of the Christian peoples. Mazower shows that in fact Ottoman rule practiced tolerance and was better able than most to accommodate a variety of languages and religions. Forced conversions were rare and the vast bulb of the population (as much as 80 per cent) remained Christian. The sultans had no interest in converting everyone since Christians paid higher taxes. And there was more hostility between Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics, than between Christians and Muslims. "Better the Sultan than the Pope" was a sentiment often heard.

Nation building took place during the 19th century. With the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, independent states were formed according to nationality. Again, other states played a decisive role and were deeply involved in internal affairs. "The triumph of nationalism was partly due to the efforts of the Balkan peoples themselves, who had helped shake off Ottoman rule through their uprisings and resistance. But their efforts alone were fruitless until Europe's Great Powers intervened in their favour." The collapse of the Ottoman Empire did not bring peace.

Both the 19th and the 20th centuries were dominated by regional Balkan quarrels and Great Power competitiveness. Mazower, however, is optimistic about the future of the Balkans. Greek references to Northern Epirus (southern Albania), Bulgarian dreams of Macedonia, and Romanian nostalgia for Bessarabia and Moldova are meaningless echoes from issues that provoked wars centuries ago and today cannot be taken seriously.

Politics, he says, has ceased to gravitate around expansionism and national glory. "Only perhaps some Albanian nationalists have yet to abandon the dreams given up by their neighbours."