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This chapter begins with a discussion of Macedonia — its regional boundaries, economy, and population — and the ‘Macedonian Question’. It then considers the factors that made Macedonia a politically sensitive region. Among these were the imminent political and social disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of nationalism among the Balkan peoples, the irredentist claims of the newly established Balkan states on territories outside their borders (and particularly on Macedonian lands inhabited by their unredeemed brethren), and finally Great Power rivalries in the area.

The conclusion from the case study of the making and unmaking of Yugoslav states presented in this book, both in general, and in its religious dimension in particular, offers scholars a kind of “laboratory” from which findings and deductions can be made. These are discussed under the following headings: multinational states and legitimacy by religion; the myth of the religious revival; religion and Yugoslav communism; and the continuing Balkan nightmare.

This chapter talks about how, throughout the years of 1913–14 until its entry into the war, the Ottoman government carried out a basic ethnic-cleansing operation, particularly against the Greeks in Thrace and the Aegean littoral. They used a dual-track mechanism extensively. On one hand, they signed separate “population exchange” agreements with the governments of the Balkan states; on the other hand, they terrorized Ottoman Greek subjects, including with massacres, to force them to move to Greece. This wide-scale suppressive policy brought the Ottomans to the brink of war with Greece in the summer of 1914. The policy of forceful expulsion of ethnic groups was not, however, unique to the Ottomans, as other Balkan countries also commonly employed it against Muslims.

The beginning of the chapter briefly discusses the degradation of the Balkan successor states to Yugoslavia, and the despise with which they were held by the West (except for Slovenia) – Serbia and Croatia came into conflict with the West, while Bosnia‐Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia became Western protectorates. The two main parts of the chapter discuss the role of the Catholic Church in the return of Croatia to the West, and the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in relation to the West and the failure of the Serbian revolution under Milošević. The last part of the chapter discusses the legacy of Yugoslavia, and current attitudes to Balkan nationalism, which has undergone heavy blows from demography (a diminishing population of children and young people) and migration to the West – which have replaced Marxism as the new key menace to the Churches.

In the interwar period, the modernizing and democratizing Balkan states witnessed a steady disintegration of parliamentary democracy and the concomitant rise of authoritarian leaders and modes of governance. Thus, Albania (1928), Yugoslavia (1929), Bulgaria (1934), Greece (1936), and Romania (1938) all experienced dictatorships of the right. In the context of war, occupation, and revolution, Communist regimes emerged everywhere except Greece, which experienced civil war. This chapter assesses the reasons for the drift toward authoritarianism, examining the extent to which regional traditions and conflicts contributed to ostensibly modern forms of dictatorial government and political violence, and to what degree interwar authoritarianism contributed to a culture of intolerance.

The Balkan Wars resulted in huge military casualties, and in military terms, were the precursor of World War I. Mass mobilization, large turning movements, and trench warfare all occurred during the conflict. New weapons, such as airplanes and rapid-fire artillery, were utilized. However, few lessons from the Balkan Wars enlightened the European military establishments that would soon find themselves engaged in conflict. One reason was the brief interval between the end of the Balkan Wars and the beginning of World War I. Another reason was that the Balkan states did not welcome foreigners who wanted to observe their operations. Many of those military attaches who did examine the Balkan Wars ignored the tactical lessons that might have had import for the conduct of World War I. Instead, they focused on issues that tended to confirm preconceived doctrines.

Like most other nations of modern Europe, the geographic spread of the Bulgarian state and nation have varied considerably with time. Again in conformity with other European models, the confines of the Bulgarian nation and state have rarely been coterminous. The Bulgarian state seldom, if ever, contained only Bulgarians and, conversely, it equally infrequently encompassed all Bulgarians. Even at the opening of the 21st century, there were Bulgarian communities in Serbia, Romania, Albania, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Turkey, with emigre groups scattered throughout the world. The Bulgarian communities outside the confines of what is now the Republic of Bulgaria contributed hugely to the evolution of the nation and the foundation of the state. Nor did their contribution end with the liberation from Ottoman rule.

National revival in Bulgaria exhibits many of the features of other nationalist reawakenings: a cultural quickening, the ‘apostles’ and ‘awakeners’, the emergence of an ‘imagined community’, the need for a committed social group with sufficient material wealth to further the cause, the importance of external as well as internal factors, and the equal or probably greater importance of ‘the defining other’. As with all other nationalisms, it was conditioned by historical, social, cultural, political, and international factors whose relative strengths and juxtapositions were unique. Furthermore, although the Bulgarian national state was a successor state of the Ottoman empire, the national revival that made that state possible, was, ironically, less the result of the empire's decline than of its regeneration. The evolution of Bulgaria's nationalism was conditioned by political and economic developments outside as well as within the Ottoman empire.

This chapter explores how the EU has worked to anchor the seven Balkan states into the process of European integration. Since 1999, the clear prospect of EU membership has provided a relatively constant set of incentives for elites to pursue strategies of regional peace-building, ethnic tolerance, and economic reform. Before 1999, this prospect was much less clear — and the logic of qualifying for membership certainly failed to overpower domestic forces with very different political agendas in Croatia or Serbia. The prospect of eventual EU membership failed to motivate leaders in many Balkan states to follow a path of reform compatible with joining the EU as rapidly as possible. But it did not fail to motivate all of them.

In Great Britain during the second half of the 20th century, Bulgaria was probably the least known of all the East European states. Even Albania, under the egregious leadership of Enver Hoxha, seemed to receive more media coverage. Only with the occasional scandal, such as the murder of Georgi Markov, was this apparent indifference abandoned and this ignorance dented. Shortly after the First World War, a major Bulgarian critic and scholar regretted that of all the foreign influences on Bulgarian culture, the English has been the weakest. The distance between Bulgaria and England remains too great today, even though Bulgaria is now on the threshold of membership of the European Union (EU).

Nationalism as a force of change transforming European societies in the direction of modernity and secularization inevitably involved a confrontation with the Orthodox Church and with the foremost institution around which Orthodox society cohered in Southeastern Europe, the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This confrontation could be traced on three levels: first on the level of relations with the new national states of the Balkans, which claimed the autocephaly of their local churches as part of their nation-building process; secondly on the level of governance of the Orthodox community within the Ottoman Empire, a community which in the age of Ottoman reforms claimed a voice in the management of its affairs along the ecclesiastical hierarchy; thirdly on the level of relations with the Ottoman state, once the empire itself was set into the orbit of nationalist transformation.