"The Wars of the Balkan Peninsula: Their Medieval Origins" by Alexandru Madgearu

This book was originally published in Romanian in 2001; the author updated the original text (including information, unavailable in Romanian, he acquired through further research in the years following publication) for this English-language translation, published in 2008.

I did not know exactly what to expect from The Wars of the Balkan Peninsula, although based on the title I was worried that the author would provide an academic foundation for the sort of historic fatalism which is all to often applied to the Balkans. I am happy to report that this is not the case.

To quote the back cover:

"The Balkan Peninsula is often referred to as the "powder keg of Europe," but it is more accurately described as the "melting pot of Europe." In The Wars of the Balkan Peninsula: Their Medieval Origins, Alexandru Madgearu discusses the ethnic heterogeneity in modern-day Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia and traces its history."

Madgearu's thesis is well-developed over five chapters and nearly two hundred pages, but it is essentially this (again from the back cover):

"The Wars of the Balkan Peninsula argues that the current ethnic structure is the basis for the solution of the disputes between the Balkan states and that history should be used to explain, not legitimize, the conflicts."

In the Introduction, Madgearu states that

"The ethnic mosaic is the deepest cause the of the endemic state of conflict in the Balkan Peninsula. It is therefore necessary to clarify the circumstances that led to such an unique ethnic configuration."

It is important to note how he defines the Balkans--he sets the geographic parameters narrower than many--no Slovenia, and he considers his own country, Romania, as being both of and not of the Balkans. His reasons are essentially geographic rather than cultural, which is anything but a random choice, as he notes that:

"The ethnic configuration of the Balkan Peninsula is the result of the interaction of several geographical and historical factors. Although the role of geographical factors in historical processes should not be overestimated, undestanding of geographical determinations is necessary for any historical inquiry into the medieval Balkans."

The geography of the Balkans encourages localism and fragmentation as well as allowing for the survival of displaced cultures by retreat to the highlands, while there are a couple of extremely important routes across the region, the control of which is vital for any attempt at lasting political unification.

Because the book is so dense with information and rich with detail, I will not attempt anything like a thorough synopsis. However, the Table of Contents by itself serves as a useful outline. Below is the complete contents of the TOC, with brief commmentary in brackets after each chapter:


Part I The Past

Chapter 1. The Ethnic Aspects: The Slavization of the Balkan Peninsula - The Expansion of the Albanians - The Vlachs (Aromanians)--A People Without a State - Deportations and Colonizations Made by the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires

[Sketches not only the different ethnic groups inhabiting the region during the medieval period, but also the processes by which different groups moved around within the area, partially but never completely displacing each other, and moving from highland to lowland and from region to region]

Chapter 2. The Political Aspects: The Downfall and Recovery and the Byzantine Domination and the Rise of Bulgaria - The Small Slavic States from the Central and Western Balkans - The Byzantine Offensive (Ninth-Eleventh Centuries) - Pax Byzantina and Centrifugal Trends in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries - The Inheritors of Byzantine Imperialism - The Rise and the Breaking Up of Great Serbia - The Ottoman Conquest - Pax Ottomana

[A political history of the Medieval Balkans as well as periods before and after the Middle Ages proper. Consider the importance of "poles of power" such as the late Roman Empire, the Byzantines, the short-lived Bulgarian and Serbian Empires, and finally the Ottomans. The author stresses that modern nationalist ideologies often base territorial claims on the maximal extent of medieval empires. He also illustrates that medieval societies were built on a variety of ties other than ethnic solidarity, which means that modern nationalist claims for continuity with medieval empires are at the very least flawed, if not misguided.]

Chapter 3. The Religious Aspects: The Confrontation between Rome and Constantinople in the Balkans - The Spreading of Islam in the Balkans: A New Differentiation

[Fairly obvious topic. Recounts in some detail the history of Catholic/Orthodox competition within the region (the lines dividing Rome's sphere of influence from Constantinople's were fluid and far from clear-cut for many centuries--both Bulgaria and Serbia flirted with the Vatican even after conversion). And, of course, the arrival of Islam in the region further stirred the pot.]

Part II The Present. Historical Propaganda and Balkan Nationalist Ideologies

Chapter 4. Theories of Ethnogenesis with Political Implications: The Greeks - The Albanians - The Bulgarians - The Serbs and the Croats - The Vlachs (Aromanians)

[An examination of competing ethnic histories used by different nationalities and ideologies as a way to "prove" the primacy of one's own nationality to a given geographic area.]

Chapter 5. The Legitimation of Expansionism by the Abuse of History: Kosovo--Serbian or Albanian? - The Historical Macedonia--The Apple of Discord among Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia

[For any student of the Balkans, the general subject of this chapter should be obvious from the title and subtitles alone. This chapter is a very good brief summary of the conflicting arguments for Greater Serbia, Greater Albania, Greater Greece, Greater Bulgaria, and even Greater Macedonia.]

The three chapters in Part I are relatively straightforward and recount in as much detail as the author's knowledge and recent research will allow the facts of the respective matter in some detail. The author has looked into a very fundamental issue in the Balkans--who are the peoples of the Balkans, and where and when did they come from?

Part II is more analytic and critical, as the author admirably takes the penchant among Balkan peoples to abuse the historic past as a way to legitimize contemporary geopolitical ambitions without taking into consideration the very different circumstances of the different eras.

The Conclusion contains some good final insights, none better than the opening sentences:

"The great obsession of Balkan policy and propaganda was and continues to be ethnic purity (of the Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, Albanians, and Greeks). This ethnic purity is an illusion in this most mingled European region,the scene of a long series of ethnic and cultural changes, where there are no pure ehtnies and races."

Some of the other points are also interesting. He argues that the intense centralization of Balkan medieval states had a centrifugal effect, where areas on the periphery were pushed away. In Western Europe on the other, fragmented medieval polities slowly evolved towards centralization in a process that favored the development of national identities and ultimately relatively uniform nation-states. It is generally understood that nationalism came late to the Balkans, but often the focus is on the Napoleonic period and later, when Balkans peoples were subsumed in multinational empires. Madgearu's contention that the root cause of stunted Balkan nationalism can be located further back, in the medieval period, is worth considering.

I do have some reservations about this book. The most serious concern is that I am not quite sure what the author believs the solution to Balkan is exactly; his later statement that

"Only the present ethnic configuration could be the starting point for the resolution of the international disputes."

invites more questions than it answers, and some of those questions are troubling.

Still, this book contains the sort of sober, demythologized academic study of the Balkans that we need more of. Finding the explanation for the region's history and ethnic mosaic in specific historical and geographic peculiarities rather than in romantic notions of an impossibly "complex" and romantized region populated by savage, indecipherable others is a step in the right direction.

"Muslim Identity and the Balkan State" ed. by Hugh Poulton and Suha Taji-Farouki

I have read most of the collected essays in this fine collection:

Muslim Identity and the Balkan State

Published in 1997, no doubt some of the data and interpretations are now dated; also, because the status of Bosnia was very much in doubt in late 1996 when this volume was being prepared for publication, the editors chose not to discuss the Muslims of Bosnia. Rather, this book looks at the Pomaks of Bulgaria and Greece, ethnic Turks throughout the Balkans, the Slavic Muslims of Macedonia, ethnic Albanian Muslims in Macedonia, Kosova, and Albania proper, and the Slavic Muslims of the Sandzak.

The book can be read in its entirety, or individual essays can be read independently. For a general reader intersted in gaining a broader perspective on the complexities and varieties of different Muslim communities throughout the region, this book is an easily readable resource.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [31]

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: YUGOSLAVIA'S FUTURE: IS IT BULGARIA?

In 1999, a former member of the UDF, Bulgaria's center-right anti-Communist party, wrote an "open letter" to the Serbian opposition. The author was Blagovesta Doncheva, who had her letter to be published on Balkan Revisionist Jared Israel's Emperor's Clothes.

A cursory Google search for Doncheva turns up various links to her letter and a second letter, as well as a handful of other works in support of Serbia against NATO, and very little else. One does learn that Doncheva, at least for awhile, was enamored with a Russian writer by the name of Alexander Dugin. To get a taste of his ideals (from an article translated into English by Doncheva herself--a real labor of love), you should check out this link:

War Is Our Mother!

Parenti, perhaps desperate for fresh material and quote sources, essentially turns Chapter 18 over to Doncheva. Most of this chapter is simply a discussion of the issues and concerns she raises in her "Open Letter to the Serbian 'Democratic Opposition.' "

Even if Doncheva were merely a disappointed and distraught former UDF member, Parenti's decision to essentially lean on the text of her open letter to the Serbian opposition betrays the intellectual weakness of Parenti's argument and the lack of substance to his objections.

In order to appreciate how weak Doncheva's arguments are, and to experience how crudely she expresses them, read for yourself:

With Her Eyes Opened

Aside from the maudlin, almost Dickensian, tone of the letter (it should be noted that I have not found a single post or letter or article by Doncheva which does not mention how destitute she is), a few things stand out. Given that this letter was written in implicit support of Milosevic and the Socialist Party in Serbia, the last item on her short list of actions taken by Bulgaria in support of NATO's war is worth noting:

"For the first time since the end of the 500 year Turkish Yoke last century Turkish ground force passed through Bulgaria."

Oh the horror--the Turks are coming! This is not the only example of such sentiment in her work. Not surprisingly, Parenti makes no notice of her implicit bigotry.

As for much of the "substance" of her charges, two factors need to be kept in mind. One--I myself spent an entire summer in Bulgaria in 2000, and my wife and I have many Bulgarian friends who have lived through the entire post-Communist period and continue to live there. There were indeed hard times, and Doncheva is not lying when she says that street beggars, extreme poverty, and a weakening of the health care system are elements of the new Bulgaria. It is also true that in 1999, it would not have been at all clear that things were going to get better--the latter half of the 1990s had not been good even for educated and employed Bulgarians, and there were no obvious indicators that the worse was behind for good.

However, Doncheva was being rather selective in her use of statistics and anecdotes to paint a picture of life in Bulgaria. 1999 was not nearly as bad as 1996 had been, for example, and even in 2000 at least some of the Bulgarians I know were cautiously optimistic. There were still areas of real concern--indeed, there still are--but there were also signs that the imminent collapse into Third-World level economic collapse had been avoided.

Secondly, Doncheva makes much of the social and economic disruptions incurred by the sudden (and admittedly often painful and poorly or even criminally managed) transition to a free-market economy. Left unsaid is the fact that the society and economy being disrupted were the products of draconian wholesale top-down changes carried out by the Bulgarian Communist Party; Bulgaria's agricultural sector was completely collectivised, and like all Warsaw Pact nations Bulgaria's economy was geared to serve as part of the larger Socialist Bloc economy, rather than as an organically developed and diversified domestic economy. Any changes to the old system--a system which was brought down from the inside in part because it was failing--was bound to bring about drastic and often painful social and economic changes.

Parenti apes Doncheva's logic throughout this chapter, extending his thesis to suggest that the fate of Serbia under NATO/UN/EU/IMF rule might be even worse than Bulgaria--maybe Yugoslavia would end up just like Romania. Revealing his true nature and his real values underneath the patina of humanist concern, Parenti writes:

"A November 1999 poll stunned the capitalist-restorationist Romanian government when it reported that 61 per cent felt that life had been better under the Communist government of Nicolae Ceausescu. Despite the shortages and serious problems under that regime, everyone had some measure of security and the problem of survival was neither an everyday challenge nor frequent tragedy."

Given that Parenti think Stalin has been unfairly maligned by historians, such an interpretation should not come as any surprise. Still, I trust the reader possesses the requisite intellectual flexibility needed to reject Parenti's simple-minded interpretation of that bare statistic.

Parenti also brings Iraq into the discussion; given current events and my desire to keep this blog moving to the next subject (only two short chapters to go), I will not take up this comparison, which is only in passing at the end of the chapter regardless.

Doncheva published a second letter on this subject, just as bathetic and bombastic as the first. If the reader is interested:

Slavery Is Freedom

While virtually worthless as a serious critique of Bulgaria's situation, of the geopolitical issues regarding Serbia in 1999, or of Western foreign policy, this chapter does an admirable job of exposing the thinness and reactive nature of Parenti's analysis of world events. If the man wanted to be taken seriously, he could have started by deleting this entire chapter from his manuscript before he ever submitted it to the publisher.