The Balkans: A Short History Read Online Free Page B

Since the ethnic mix of the Balkans has remained remarkably unchanged for centuries—during most of which there was no ethnic conflict at all—why is it only in the last one or two centuries that the cocktail became politically volatile? Contemporary contingencies of mass politics and urban, industrial life, the rise of new state structures and the spread of literacy and technology may well turn out to be as important in the Balkans as the supposed eternal verities of religious fracture, peasant rootedness and ethnic cleavage. We might find then that the story we tell does not so much affirm as undermine any sense of European superiority. For just as Europe gave the Balkans the categories with which its peoples defined themselves, so it gave them also the ideological weapons—in the shape primarily of modern romantic nationalism—with which to destroy themselves. Trying to understand the Balkans, in other words, challenges us to look at history itself as something more than a mirror which we hold up, blocking out the past to reflect our own virtues.

1
    THE LAND AND ITS INHABITANTS
Mountains come first.
    —FERNAND BRAUDEL 1
    Over millions of years, the play of the earth’s tectonic plates pushed up a series of mountain ranges in the Mediterranean along the geological frontier between Europe and Africa. Stretching from the Iberian peninsula in the west to the ranges of southeastern Europe in the east, they eventually link up with the mountain chains of Asia Minor and central Asia. To their north, the great Eurasian lowlands extend with scarcely a break from Calais to the Urals. There rainfall is abundant, arable land is plentiful and numerous navigable rivers connect the interior with the sea. To the south, it is a different story: good farming land becomes scarcer, the ground is more broken and rainfall less frequent.
    Unlike the mountain chains guarding the necks of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, the Balkan ranges offer no barrier against invasion, leaving the region 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 its component parts, so that Dubrovnik, for instance, has had closer ties for much of its history with Venice than with Belgrade. In this way, mountains have made commerce within the region more expensive and complicated the process of political unification.
    The effect of mountains is felt everywhere from the skies to the sea. Rain shadows deprive much of the peninsula of the moisture found in Europe’s continental climatic zone. Kolašin in Montenegro has an average annual rainfall of 104 inches, while a little way east, Skopje in Macedonia has only 18 inches per year. A tiny coastal strip running down the Dalmatian coast to western Greece enjoys sufficient rain to soften the impact of the harsh Mediterranean summers. On Corfu the vegetation is luxuriant; the Cyclades, by contrast, are parched and dry. The former is able to support itself, the latter—as wartime starvation revealed—relies on food imports to keep going. In general, the annual precipitation east of the mountains is at least 10 to 20 inches less than farther west, leading to recurrent droughts even in the fertile plains. “A dreary arid sandy level” was how the Vardar valley presented itself to an intrepid Englishwoman crossing it in the mid-nineteenth century. “For many miles the country is entirely without trees.” 2
    In the Mediterranean climatic zone, watercourses dry up during the summer, leaving rocky beds and canyons. The result is parched, broken upland with scarce water supplies—a harsh environment for human habitation that is suited chiefly to abstemious plants. “A curious feature in the mountains began to make itself painfully felt,” noted Arthur Evans in 1875, walking across the Hercegovinan karst. “There was no water.” He describes