The Balkans

Summary

The Balkans is a peninsula at the southeast corner of Europe, including Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia. It has been a crossroads of multiple civilizations since at least the time of Alexander the Great, a Macedonian. Besides Alexander's Empire, it has also served as an important part of the Roman Empire, evolving into the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, and a part of the Ottoman Empire. Over the centuries, Romans, Slavs, Huns, Turks, Crusaders, and many other groups have moved into the area, resulting in a wide variety of ethnic groups in the area.

Since the decline of the Ottoman Empire, except for the period of domination by communist Russia, the area has tended to break up into smaller more ethnically homogeneous nations. The recent breakup of the former Yugoslavia is typical of this process, which continues even now, since at the same time as we were studying this area, Kosovo was declaring its independence from Serbia.

The process has never been peaceful or tidy. Perhaps this is because of the long, stable rule of the Ottomans, during which time there was relative peace, safety, and tolerance, and the main issue was what religion you were rather than what language you spoke, so the ethnic races mixed together. As the Ottoman Empire declined, encouraged by the nation-states which had been formed in Western Europe, ethnicity and nationality became important, and groups which formerly had a common foe in the Muslim Turkish rules began to fight amonst each other. In order establish areas of relatively homogeneous ethnicity, there has been much conflict, war, and ethnic cleansing and sorting. As recently as 1998, 300,000 Turks were expelled from Bulgaria.

Essay Assignment

Balkanization is the process of dividing up a nation or region into smaller states on the basis of ethnicity or nationality.

Is balkanization a good or a bad solution for strife within a country?

Document

It is hard to find a central character or document to use for such a long, drawn-out historical process. The events which were currently unfolding in Kosovo played role in focusing the discussion at the time.

One possible suspect is Slobodan Milosevic, who had played a central role in Yugoslavia since the end of the Soviet Union's domination. But he is not a sympathetic character by any measure, and he died shortly before he could be sentenced for war crimes by the international court.

Links

Balkan Ghosts is a book recommended by Richard Maybury in his "1000 Year War in the Mideast"