Excerpt from Twenty-Five Lectures on Modern Balkan History
by Steven W. Sowards
One can't understand the Balkans without understanding its ethnic groups, and one can't understand the
ethnic groups and their history without knowing the influence of the region's geography.
Even the geographic extent of the "Balkan" region is a matter of controversy. Many scholars, especially
those writing in the Cold War era, have included only the Communist states and linked them with
Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany, while omitting Greece and ignoring Turkey and the Ottoman
era. Other historians exclude Hungary, Croatia and other Habsburg lands, because of their "central"
European character, supposedly contrary to Balkan themes. But the presence of contradictory themes is
itself characteristically Balkan.
Physical geography
Balkan geography revolves around three features: the area's situation as a peninsula, its mountains,
and its rivers.
The Balkan region is a triangular peninsula with a wide northern border, narrowing to a tip as it
extends to the south. The Black, the Aegean, the Mediterranean and the Adriatic Seas surround it;
they have served as both barriers and entry points. Unlike some peninsulas, the Balkan area has not
been physically isolated from nearby regions. In the northeast, Romania is exposed to the steppe
regions of the Ukraine, an easy invasion route from prehistoric times to the present. In the
northwest, the valley of the Danube and the flat Hungarian plain are easy points of entry. Most (but
not all) of the ethnic groups in the region entered by one of these paths.
While it is surrounded on three sides by water, the peninsula is not cut off from neighboring regions
to the east, west or south. To the east, the narrow straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles are a
natural pathway between the Balkans and Anatolia, and Asia beyond. To the west, the Italian
peninsula is only forty miles away across the Adriatic from Albania, and influence from that direction
has been another constant. Finally, the Aegean and Mediterranean islands to the south are stepping
stones to the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt. Not surprisingly, the Balkan region has been a
crossroads for traffic passing to and from all these destinations.
The mountains which divide the region are a prominent internal physical characteristic. The region
takes its name from the "Balkan" mountain range in Bulgaria (from a Turkish word meaning "a chain
of wooded mountains"). On a larger scale, one long continuous chain of mountains crosses the region
in the form of a reversed letter S, from the Carpathians south to the Balkan range proper, before it
marches away east into Anatolian Turkey. On the west coast, an offshoot of the Dinaric Alps follows
the coast south through Dalmatia and Albania, crosses Greece and continues into the sea in the form
of various islands.
The first effect of these mountains is to divide the region into small units within which distinct ethnic
groups have been able to sustain themselves. This area, a little smaller in size than France and
Germany or the states of Texas and Oklahoma, is home to a dozen or more prominent ethnic groups.
Second, the mountains have been physical obstacles, hampering efforts at regional combination,
whether political, economic or cultural. The ethnic groups have tended toward distinct national
cultures, local economies and political autonomy.
…In general, then, the mountain features of the Balkans have contributed to the continued
fragmentation of human groups in the area
...Like the mountains, the Balkan rivers have [also] done little to foster unity in the area.
Ethnic geography
The Balkans have been inhabited since prehistoric times. but today's ethnic groups descend from Indo-European migrants or
ethnic groups that arrived in historical times. The pre-Indo-European inhabitants left little behind except for archaelogical
remnants and a few place names (like Knossos on the island of Crete).
Knowledge of the area's national and ethnic groups is fundamental to Balkan history: they are the alphabet, the periodic table
of elements. At a minimum this means recognizing a dozen major ethnic groups, where they live (now and in the past), and
how their religions, languages and cultures compare and interconnect.
BBC Timeline: Break-up of Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia was first formed as a kingdom in 1918 and then recreated as a Socialist state in 1945 after the Axis powers were
defeated in World War II. The constitution established six constituent republics in the federation: Bosnia-Hercegovina,
Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. Serbia also had two autonomous provinces: Kosovo and Vojvodina.
By 1992 the Yugoslav Federation was falling apart. Nationalism had once again replaced communism as the dominant force in
the Balkans. Slovenia and then Croatia were the first to break away, but only at the cost of renewed conflict with Serbia. The
war in Croatia led to hundreds of thousands of refugees and reawakened memories of the brutality of the 1940s.
By 1992 a further conflict had broken out in Bosnia, which had also declared independence. The Serbs who lived there were
determined to remain within Yugoslavia and to help build a greater Serbia. They received strong backing from extremist
groups in Belgrade. Muslims were driven from their homes in carefully planned operations that become known as "ethnic
cleansing".
By 1993 the Bosnian Muslim government was besieged in the capital Sarajevo, surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces who
controlled around 70% of Bosnia. In Central Bosnia, the mainly Muslim army was fighting a separate war against Bosnian
Croats who wished to be part of a greater Croatia. The presence of UN peacekeepers to contain the situation proved
ineffective.
The state union of Serbia and Montenegro is all that remains of the federation of six republics that made up former Yugoslavia
- but in a referendum on 21 May, Montenegro narrowly voted for independence from Serbia. Montenegro's Prime Minister
Milo Djukanovic led the campaign for independence, although the population was deeply divided as there are close cultural
links between the two peoples. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4997380.stm
Answer the following questions in COMPLETE SENTENCES on your own piece of paper:
1. What physical characteristics make the Balkans its own region and where does it get its name from?
2. How did physical geography influence the distribution of ethnic groups in the region? Would this result in more
cultural convergence or divergence?
3. Which physical features aided cultural diffusion?
4. Josip Broz, or “Tito”, was a communist leader who kept the Republic of Yugoslavia united until his death in 1980.
What ultimately tore the republics apart in the 1990s?
5. Would Bosnia be described as a region experiencing extreme cultural diffusion, convergence, or divergence? Why?