The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans

Simon Winchester usually does a great job of meandering around a topic, giving a great deal of personal background to the subject he is covering. In The Fracture Zone, that meandering is pretty much all there is. He goes to the balkans and explores the area and the people. There are still plenty of different groups with different goals and desires. There are different groups of people that don't get along. There are also people with shared ancestors  that don't get along. It makes for all sorts of conflict.

Balkans: A Short History

The Balkans are rarely heard of except when something bad happens. World War I was kicked off by an assassination in the Balkans. More recently there was a long drawn out conflict after Yugoslavia disintegrated. What is going on there?

The Balkans were slow to develop due to their geography. The mountains made travel challenging. The rivers were not easily navigable, and seemed to flow off in to the wrong direction. It was not an area that rulers would concern themselves with. 

The region also did not have a strong ethnic identity. The population adopted Christianity, yet was ruled by Muslims. It also had an active Jewish population. These groups tended to live together without much problem. They were often willing to adopt the parts of the religion that best suited the population. Some people would switch religions as they would benefit. The population was predominantly rural and due to geography did not have significant interactions with others.

The concept of the "nation state" was somewhat forced upon the Balkans. The concept of the state came first. Then people were encouraged to join the group that fit them. People were not "Bulgarians" or "Romanians" until the country came about. However, these identities later became a nice excuse for battling those that somebody did not agree with.

The implied message from this book is that people of the Balkans largely want to go along living in peace. However, when the world decided they needed to play "state games", they obliged and set about fighting each other.

(I also find it interesting that I had read this same book a decade before without realizing it.)

Balkans: A Short History

Referring to the region of southeastern Europe as the "Balkans" is a relatively modern innovation. Prior to that, it had often been considered a component of the Ottoman Empire or "European Turkey". The region was primarily a backwater of the empire, mad up of peasants with a greater allegiance to their village than to any "nation". Religion was always important, but often flexible, with some people being "Muslims that prayed to the Virgin Mary." Freedom of religion in the Ottoman Empire was primarily a mechanism for exerting political control. The leaders did not encourage mass conversions, and thus the religions seemed to get along. (In the end, however, the head of Orthodoxy found his dominion gradually limited to net to nothing.) Intellectuals in the region often spoke Greek and thought of themselves as Greek.

The "nation states" were groupings of people that did not necessarily have strong ties to each other. Romania, for instance was a combination of two Ottoman provinces that primarily spoke Romanian (though had a large number of different elasticities and languages also.) The boundaries of Macedonia and Bulgaria were also artificial and tended to differ. It almost seems as if you would try to create new nation-states out of the United States.

For the people, the new states did not provide much benefit. They simply brought in a new group of leaders. For minorities, the condition could be much worse. Population exchanges were also used to help "balance" the residents of the new states. ("Nationality", however, was also flexible, and often times could simply require changing a name to meet the new "language") However, even when encouraging a homogeneous population, the new governments needed many of their minorities to keep the economy going.

The independence of the Balkan states was really only made possible by the intervention of other European powers. This also meant that they remained pawns in the European games. World War II lead to further partitioning as most Balkan states fell under the influence of communist Russia.

The author argues that the current warfare in the Balkans is not caused by deep-seeded tensions among the people, but by the desires of despots to invoke cruelty for their needs. These needs were often influenced by the external powers.

The book provides a good brief introduction to the Balkans and some of the background for the recent problems there. The facts presented bring out the point that the author is arguing. However, they tell only a small fraction of the story. Are they they most important part of the story?