The Balkans as Europe, 1821-1914
Title Details

190 Pages

22.8 x 15.2 cm

8 b/w illus.

Series: Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe

Series Vol. Number: 21

Imprint: University of Rochester Press

The Balkans as Europe, 1821-1914

Edited by Timothy Snyder and Katherine Younger

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  • Contents
  • Author
  • Reviews
Focusing on state formation and the identity-geopolitics relationship, makes the case that the Balkans were at the forefront of European history in the century before World War I

This collection of essays places the Balkans at the center of European developments, not as a conflict-ridden problem zone, but rather as a full-fledged European region. Contrary to the commonly held perception, contributors to the volume argue, the Balkans did not lag behind the rest of European history, but rather anticipated many (West) European developments in the decades before and after 1900.

In the second half of the nineteenth century,the Balkan states became fully independent nation-states. As they worked to consolidate their sovereignty, these countries looked beyond traditional state formation strategies to alternative visions rooted in militarism or national political economy, and not only succeeded on their own terms but changed Europe and the world beginning in 1912-14. As the Ottoman Empire weakened and ever more kinds of informal diplomacy were practiced on its territory by morepowerful states, relationships between identity and geopolitics were also transformed. The result, as the contributors demonstrate, was a phenomenon that would come to pervade the whole of Europe by the 1920s and 1930s: the creeping substitution of ideas of religion and ethnicity for the idea of state belonging or subjecthood.

CONTRIBUTORS: Ulf Brunnbauer, Holly Case, Dessislava Lilova, John Paul Newman, Roumiana Preshlenova, Dominique KirchnerReill, Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder is Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. Katherine Younger is a research associate at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Austria.
Introduction
Balkan Initiatives to Make Europe: Two Cases from Mid-Nineteenth-Century Dalmatia
The Homeland as Terra Incognita: Geography and Bulgarian National Identity, 1830s-1870s
Liberation in Progress: Bulgarian Nationalism and Political Economy in a Balkan Perspective, 1878-1912
Emigrants and Countries of Origin: The Politics of Emigration in Southeastern Europe until the First World War
The Quiet Revolution: Consuls and the International System in the Nineteenth Century
The Hollow Crown: Civil and Military Relations during Serbia's "Golden Age," 1903-1914
List of Contributors
Index

TIMOTHY SNYDER is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books on East and Central European history.

KATHERINE YOUNGER is a historian and Research Director of the program Ukraine in European Dialogue at the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna).

"[T]his collection sheds light on the evolution of identity politics from one based on religion and ethnicity to one based on modern ideas of belonging to a state, a change that resulted in new loyalties that ultimately enveloped the rest of the continent by the 1930s. This book promises to help readers rethink the origins of European consciousness in the 20th century. Essential." CHOICE
"[G]iving agency to Balkan players is laudable and has been altogether successful." AUSTRIAN HISTORY YEARBOOK
"Innovative, well written for a broad audience, and timely, The Balkans as Europe, 1821-1914 offers fresh insight about the region, in ways that demand attention from specialists in other areas. The contributors advance a coherent set of interpretations--all pointing to the modernity and relevance of Balkan models for other parts of Europe and the world. This is cutting-edge work. --Mount Holyoke College" Jeremy King
"The Balkans as Europe, 1821-1914 is a timely, superbly documented, and truly persuasive contribution to the symbolic geography of Europe. It challenges and transcends the semantically dubious and politically supercilious characterization of the Balkans as a marginal, underdeveloped backwater, fiercely nationalist and devoid of civil society. The volume is a strong and necessary refutation of frozen (and condescending) conceptualizations which contrast the Habsburg legacies (often idealized) with the inescapable 'Balkan ghosts." Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland
"Together, the authors of the book present a multifaceted yet coherent story of the region in the long nineteenth century. . . . [T]he book succeeds in placing the history of the region into a broader European context." Ab Imperio

Hardcover

9781580469159

May 2018

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9781787442290

May 2018

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Title Details

190 Pages

2.28 x 1.52 cm

8 b/w illus.

Series: Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe

Series Vol. Number: 21

Imprint: University of Rochester Press