The Balkans: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles) - Hardcover

Mazower, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679640878 ISBN 13: 9780679640875

Verlag: Modern Library, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Examines the causes of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, discussing how the meeting of European and Asian cultural influences and the blending of Christian and Muslim populations have created a complex and divisive situation.

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Mark Mazower is a professor of history at Princeton University and has recently been appointed professor of history at Birkbeck College, London. He is the author of several books, most recently Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century.

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Throughout history, the Balkans have been a crossroads, a zone of endless military, cultural and economic mixing and clashing between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Subject to violent shifts of borders, rulers and belief systems at the hands of the world's great empires--from the Byzantine to the Habsburg and Ottoman--the Balkans are often called Europe's tinderbox and a seething cauldron of ethnic and religious resentments.
        
Much has been made of the Balkans' deeply rooted enmities. The recent destruction of the former Yugoslavia was widely ascribed to millennial hatreds frozen by the Cold War and unleashed with the fall of communism. In this brilliant account, acclaimed historian Mark Mazower argues that such a view is a dangerously unbalanced fantasy. A landmark reassessment, The Balkans rescues the region's history from the various ideological camps that have held it hostage for their own ends, not least the need to justify nonintervention. The heart of the book deals with events from the emergence of the
nation-state onward. With searing eloquence, Mazower demonstrates that of all the gifts bequeathed to the region by modernity, the most dubious has been the ideological weapon of romantic nationalism that has been used again and again by the power hungry as an acid to dissolve the bonds of centuries of peaceful coexistence. The Balkans is a magnificent depiction of a vitally important region, its history and its prospects.

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Excerpt

Over millions of years, the play of the earth's tectonic plates pushed up aseries of mountain ranges in the Mediterranean along the geological frontierbetween Europe and Africa. Stretching from the Iberian peninsula in the west tothe ranges of southeastern Europe in the east, they eventually link up with themountain chains of Asia Minor and central Asia. To their north, the greatEurasian lowlands extend with scarcely a break from Calais to the Urals. Thererainfall is abundant, arable land is plentiful and numerous navigable riversconnect the interior with the sea. To the south, it is a different story: goodfarming land becomes scarcer, the ground is more broken and rainfall lessfrequent.

Unlike the mountain chains guarding the necks of the Iberian and Italianpeninsulas, the Balkan ranges offer no barrier against invasion, leaving theregion open to easy access and attack from north and east. On the other hand,their irregular formation hinders movement between one valley and the next.Communication is often easier with areas outside the peninsula than between itscomponent parts, so that Dubrovnik, for instance, has had closer ties for muchof its history with Venice than with Belgrade. In this way, mountains have madecommerce within the region more expensive and complicated the process ofpolitical unification.

The effect of mountains is felt everywhere from the skies to the sea. Rainshadows deprive much of the peninsula of the moisture found in Europe'scontinental climatic zone. Kolaßin in Montenegro has an average annualrainfall of 104 inches, while a little way east, Skopje in Macedonia has only 18inches per year. A tiny coastal strip running down the Dalmatian coast towestern Greece enjoys sufficient rain to soften the impact of the harshMediterranean summers. On Corfu the vegetation is luxuriant; the Cyclades, bycontrast, are parched and dry. The former is able to support itself, thelatter?as wartime starvation revealed?relies on food imports to keep going. Ingeneral, the annual precipitation east of the mountains is at least 10 to 20inches less than farther west, leading to recurrent droughts even in the fertileplains. "A dreary arid sandy level" was how the Vardar valley presented itselfto an intrepid Englishwoman crossing it in the mid-nineteenth century. "For manymiles the country is entirely without trees."

In the Mediterranean climatic zone, watercourses dry up during the summer,leaving rocky beds and canyons. The result is parched, broken upland with scarcewater supplies?a harsh environment for human habitation that is suited chieflyto abstemious plants. "A curious feature in the mountains began to make itselfpainfully felt," noted Arthur Evans in 1875, walking across the Hercegovinankarst. "There was no water." He describes "a prospect of desolation. . . . Inevery direction rose low mountains, mere heaps of disintegrated limestone rock,bare of vegetation . . . aptly compared to a petrified glacier or a moonscape."Where summer rain permits, mountain forests and woodland?with beeches, oaks andsweet chestnuts?testify to perennial supplies of running water. Even so, thepeninsula suffers drought more than anywhere else in Europe, except southernSpain and Malta, and deaths caused by water scarcity were reported fromMontenegro as late as 1917.

Not everywhere in the Balkans is as dry as this. In the Rhodope mountains,rivers flow throughout the year; the Albanian uplands remind travelers of Alpinemeadows. Farther east, large parts of former Yugoslavia, Romania and northernBulgaria enjoy something closer to a central European weather pattern. Long coolwinters and heavy rains nourished the impenetrable Shumadija, which once coveredmuch of lowland Serbia in dense oak forest. "Endless and endless now on eitherside the tall oaks closed over us," wrote Alexander Kinglake in Eothen,describing a ride toward Constantinople in 1834. "Through this our road was tolast for more than a hundred miles."

To the east, the Danube estuary shares climatic features with the southernsteppes and the Black Sea, though it suffers from a lack of rainfall where therain shadow of the Carpathians makes itself felt. Mountains make the contrastbetween Mediterranean and these northern and eastern weather zones a sudden one,as anyone who has climbed the road from Kotor on the Dalmatian coast to the oldMontenegrin capital Cetinje will know. "The climate had suddenly changed," wrotea traveler after having traversed the Balkan mountains in Ottoman Bulgaria. "Awarmer air surrounded us. The whole of European Turkey, from the southerndeclivities of the Haemus, lies in a delightful climate, which can display allthe charms of the tropics as well as the vigor of the higher latitudes, withoutsuffering their disagreeable effects." For this sun-deprived northerner, noteven the plague was enough to overshadow his sense of warmth and well-being ashe came closer to the Mediterranean.

Rivers are generally crucial for prosperity because until modern timestransportation was easier and cheaper by water than by land. Some historiansexplain the "European miracle" by the abundance of navigable waterways thatconnect coasts and the interior. But river systems that compare with the Rhineand Rhone in west Europe, or the Vistula-Dnieper trade route in east Europe, donot exist in the southeast of the continent. Balkan rivers, when more thanwinter torrents, descend too rapidly to be navigable, or else they meander idlyin curves and loops away from the nearest coastline. Important rivers such asthe Sava, the Vardar and the Aliákmon are thus of limited use for tradeand communications. "Nothing can be more striking," wrote Henry Tozer in 1867 ashe traveled south down the Vardar, "than the entire absence of towns along thisgreat artery of internal communication. . . . The river itself is a fine sightwhen it flows in one stream, but . . . the work of making it navigable would nowbe a difficult one." Even the Danube has served the region less well than itmight, blocked from the Mediterranean by the mountains and then headingnorth?in quite the wrong direction from the merchant's point of view?beforereaching the Black Sea. Before the Second World War, the lower Danube iced overfor four to five months of the year. And before the early nineteenth century,while fought over by the Russians and the Turks, it was scarcely used forcommerce at all; trade caravans between the Balkans and central Europe went byroad, while travelers and diplomats en route to the Ottoman capital frequentlyleft the river halfway along its course and completed their journey overlandinstead.

Copyright © 2000 Mark Mazower. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-679-64087-8

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Modern Library
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0679640878
• ISBN 13: 9780679640875
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 188
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar