The Balkans: A Short History Read Online Free Page A

religion, far from integrating them in a new type of culture, brought them nothing but a degrading foreign dominance which interrupted for approximately four hundred years their participation in European history.”
    Following this logic, successor states in the Balkans look back to the medieval or classical past for their national roots, and encourage their historians to pass over the period of Ottoman rule as quickly as possible, as though nothing good can have come out of those years. “When at the end of the fourteenth century Bulgaria fell under Ottoman domination,” asserted Todor Zhivkov in 1981, “the natural course of her historical development was stopped and reversed.” Such a view predated Zhivkov’s Communist regime and survives it too. The Serbian legend of the battle of Kosovo in 1389 reflects the same obsession with the question of legacy. Greek historians and preservationists are much more likely to work on ancient, Byzantine or modern history than on the Ottoman period. Historians of Britain do not, on the whole, spend much time wondering how much their country owes to its Anglo-Saxon, Norman or Hanoverian heritage; but questions of continuity, rupture and historical legacy are inescapable in the Balkans since what Halecki calls “the European point of view” has shaped many of the preoccupations of scholars and popular opinion in the region itself. And this is not because people there have some peculiar propensity to lose themselves in the mists of time, but rather because to be European has meant nothing less than denying the legitimacy of the Ottoman past. Reconstructing a respectable record of nationalist struggle and resistance against imperial oppression became necessary for membership of the European club. Nationalist passions and anxieties are, in other words, expressions of the effort to produce the kind of historical pedigree once—if not still—required by Europe itself. 23
    Because the Balkans have had a bad press for so long in Europe, it has been hard for some scholars to resist bringing out the region’s virtues. National histories, until very recently, presented the past as the inevitable and entirely deserved triumph of the Nation over its enemies. More recently, a disillusionment with nationalism has bred nostalgia for the days of empire; a new trend in Ottoman historiography emphasizes ethnic and religious coexistence under the sultans and turns the empire into a kind of multicultural paradise avant la lettre. But the glossy version of Ottoman rule is not much of an improvement on the old negativity, except as a corrective to it. The truth is that while for many centuries religious coexistence was undoubtedly more accepted under the Ottomans than almost anywhere in Christendom, there was certainly no sense of religious equality. If there was no ethnic conflict, it was not because of “tolerance” but because there was no concept of nationality among the Sultan’s subjects, and because Christianity stressed the “community of believers” rather than ethnic solidarity. 24
    Normative history sets up one pattern of historical evolution as standard and then explains deviations from that. The nineteenth-century mind took it for granted that history worked in this way, and that what one was describing was the success or failure of any given society in climbing the path of progress from backwardness and barbarism to civilization. In preferring to talk about the path from tradition to modernity, twentieth-century scholars have changed the terms but retained much of the same linear view. They have drawn on supposedly universal models of economic development and political democratization in order to understand why Balkan states and societies have remained poor and unstable and have not turned out as they should have done. But it is questionable whether relative poverty in southeastern Europe—or indeed the politics of ethnic violence—can really be explained as marks of backwardness.