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The Balkan Wars from Contemporary Perception to Historic Memory pp 319–340Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Balkan Wars in Western Historiography, 1912–2012

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Abstract

Contemporary publications on the Balkan Wars focused on diplomatic and military events, paying little attention to their “conduct” and effects, with the exception of the famous 1914 Carnegie report. After the First World War, interest in the wars declined rapidly and remained marginal until the end of the Cold War. There was, however, a notable gradual convergence of opinion among Western scholars that the wars were an inescapable turning point in the region’s modernization. In the 1990s, interest in the Balkan Wars made an impressive comeback. This time all interest on them was during a moment of extreme violence, as a cause and inspiration for the crimes committed during the Yugoslav Wars of dissolution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Arthur Evans, “The Drama of the Balkans and Its Closing Scenes,” Contemporary Review, vol. 102 (1912), 761–66, here 761.

  2. 2.

    Wolfgang Höpken, “Archaische Gewalt oder Vorboten des ‘totalen Krieges’? Die Balkankriege 1912/13 in der europäischen Kriegsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Ulf Brunnbauer, Andreas Helmedach, and Stefan Troebst, eds., Schnittstellen: Gesellschaft, Nation, Konflikt und Erinnerung in Südosteuropa (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007), 245–60, here 246–47.

  3. 3.

    Richard J. Evans, Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 106, 111, 119.

  4. 4.

    Eugene Michail, The British and the Balkans: Forming Images of Foreign Lands, 1900–1950 (London: Continuum, 2011), 29–51.

  5. 5.

    Norman Angell, Peace Theories and the Balkan War (London: Horace Marshall, 1912), 10.

  6. 6.

    Noel Buxton, With the Bulgarian Staff (London: Smith and Elder, 1913), 21.

  7. 7.

    Florian Keisinger, Unzivilisierte Kriege im zivilisierten Europa? Die Balkankriege und die öffentliche Meinung in Deutschland, England, und Irland, 1876–1913 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2008), 101–8.

  8. 8.

    Troy Paddock, Creating the Russian Peril: Education, the Public Sphere, and National Identity in Imperial Germany, 1890–1914 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 73.

  9. 9.

    For an assessment of the historic forces that fed this narrative of the inevitable collapse of the continental empires at the start of the twentieth century, see Dominic Lieven, “Dilemmas of Empire 1850–1918: Power, Territory, Identity,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 34, no. 2 (1999), 163–200.

  10. 10.

    Hugh Seton-Watson and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe: R. W. Seton-Watson and the Last Years of Austria-Hungary (London: Methuen, 1981).

  11. 11.

    R. W. Seton-Watson, The Historian as a Political Force in Central Europe (London: School of Slavonic Studies, 1922), 30.

  12. 12.

    Hermenegild Wagner, With the Victorious Bulgarians (London: Constable, 1913), 1.

  13. 13.

    R. W. Seton-Watson, The Rise of Nationality in the Balkans (London: Constable, 1917), 276–77; George Mylonas, The Balkan States (Saint Louis: Eden, 1946), 88–104.

  14. 14.

    George Weissmann and Duncan Williams, eds., The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky, The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913 (New York: Monad Press, 1980), 117. See also Maria Todorova, “War and Memory: Trotsky’s War Correspondence from the Balkan Wars,” Perceptions, vol. 18, no. 2 (2013), 5–27.

  15. 15.

    Still, immediately after its publication the report was dismissed by many pro-Serb and pro-Greek experts as a blatant effort of pro-Bulgarian propagandists to whitewash Bulgaria’s crimes. See, for example, Ronald Burrows, “Review of ‘Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars,’” Athenaeum (29 August 1914), 223–24.

  16. 16.

    Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC: The Endowment, 1914).

  17. 17.

    Misha Glenny, “Only in the Balkans,” London Review of Books, vol. 21, no. 9 (1999), 14.

  18. 18.

    Some insightful analysis is provided in Daniel Marc Segesser, “The International Debate on the Punishment of War Crimes during the Balkan Wars and the First World War,” Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research, vol. 31, no. 4 (2006), 533–54, here 534–35.

  19. 19.

    Trotsky picked up early on the advantages gained by a state condemning the crimes committed in others’ wars, as such a move: (1) might prevent more crimes being perpetrated; (2) affirms the moral health of a group that cannot accept such crimes happening; (3) “cleanses the social atmosphere” among the wider population in the country, itself subject to all forms of injustices; and (4) is itself an attack against those within the country that support the aggressors. Weissmann and Williams, eds., The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky, 292–93. See also Frances Trix, “Peace-Mongering in 1913: The Carnegie International Commission of Inquiry and its Report on the Balkan Wars,” First World War Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (2014), 147–62.

  20. 20.

    Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report, iii.

  21. 21.

    Joachim Remak, “1914: The Third Balkan War: Origins Reconsidered,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 43, no. 3 (1971), 353–66, here 365. Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 37.

  22. 22.

    Nevill Forbes et al., The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1915), 247.

  23. 23.

    Ernst C. Helmreich, The Diplomacy of the Balkan Wars, 1912–1913 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938).

  24. 24.

    Diplomatic history remained the main focus of publications on the Balkan Wars, especially during the second half of the Cold War. See, for example, Richard J. Crampton, The Hollow Detente: Anglo–German Relations in the Balkans, 1911–1914 (London: G. Prior, 1980), and Andrew Rossos, Russia and the Balkans: Inter-Balkan Rivalries and Russian Foreign Policy 1908–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981).

  25. 25.

    Margareta Faissler, “Review: The Diplomacy of the Balkan Wars 1912–1913,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 12, no. 1 (1940), 113.

  26. 26.

    Bernadotte E. Schmitt, “Book Review: The Diplomacy of the Balkan Wars, 1912–1913,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3 (1939), 448–50. See also Höpken, “Archaische Gewalt.”

  27. 27.

    M. Kennedy, “The Decline of Nationalistic History in the West, 1900–1970,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 8, no. 1 (1973), 77–100.

  28. 28.

    Leften Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (London: Hurst, 2000), 412.

  29. 29.

    Edgar Hösch, The Balkans: A Short History from Greek Times to the Present Day, trans. Tania Alexander (London: Faber, 1972), 140. Hösch’s focus on Austria possibly also reflected the period’s popular consensus on the role of Austria and Germany as the key agents of destabilization in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

  30. 30.

    Traian Stoianovich, A Study in Balkan Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1967), 119.

  31. 31.

    Traian Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe (New York: Sharpe, 1994), 199–200.

  32. 32.

    William Miller, The Balkans: Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, and Montenegro (London: Unwin, third ed., 1923).

  33. 33.

    Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453, 537–40.

  34. 34.

    Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans: Twentieth Century, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 99.

  35. 35.

    For a more nuanced comparison between the two periods, see Wolfgang Höpken, “Performing Violence: Soldiers, Paramilitaries and Civilians in the Twentieth-Century Balkan Wars,” in Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod, eds., No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20th Century (Göttingen: Wallstein 2006), 211–49.

  36. 36.

    Daniel Vernet and Jean Marc Gonin, Le Rêve Sacrifié: Chronique des Guerres Yougoslaves (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1994), 92.

  37. 37.

    Tim Judah, The Serbs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, sec. ed., 2000), 83–86. Not uncommon were identifications of the conflict of the 1990s as a Third Balkan War: e.g. Mojmir Križan, “Postkommunistische Wiedergeburt ethnischer Nationalismen und der Dritte Balkan-Krieg,” Osteuropa, vol. 45, no. 3 (1995), 201–18.

  38. 38.

    Paul Mojzes, Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 242–46.

  39. 39.

    Fabian Klose, “The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention: Three Centuries of ‘Enforcing Humanity,’” in idem, ed., The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas and Practice from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 6–12.

  40. 40.

    Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3–6. For an excellent overview of the 1990s literature, see Enika Abazi and Albert Doja, “International Representations of Balkan Wars: A Socio-Anthropological Account in International Relations Perspective,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 29, no. 2 (2016), online at DOI:10.1080/09557571.2015.1118998.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 184.

  42. 42.

    Thomas A. Emmert, “A Crisis of Identity: Serbia at the End of the Century,” in Norman M. Naimark and Holly Case, eds., Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 160–78, here 165.

  43. 43.

    Eugene Michail, “Western Attitudes to War in the Balkans and the Shifting Meanings of Violence, 1912–91,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 47, no. 2 (2012), 219–39.

  44. 44.

    See, for example, Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4; and Donald Bloxham and Fatma Müge Göçek, “The Armenian Genocide,” in Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 363–66.

  45. 45.

    Holm Sundhaussen, “Nation und Nationalstaat auf dem Balkan. Konzepte und Konsequenzen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Jürgen Elvert, ed., Balkan: Eine europäische Krisenregion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997), 77–90, here 87.

  46. 46.

    Mark Mazower, The Balkans (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), 106. See also Mark Biondich, The Balkans: Revolution, War and Political Violence since 1878 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79–84.

  47. 47.

    Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 234.

  48. 48.

    Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 7.

  49. 49.

    The main exceptions are Katrin Boeckh’s study of the immediate postwar period and Richard Hall’s military history of the conflicts: Katrin Boeckh, Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg: Kleinstaatenpolitik und ethnische Selbstbestimmung auf dem Balkan (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996); Richard C. Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912–1913: Prelude to the First World War (London: Routledge, 2000).

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  1. School of Humanities of the University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

    Eugene Michail

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  1. Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany

    Katrin Boeckh

  2. Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany

    Sabine Rutar

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Michail, E. (2016). The Balkan Wars in Western Historiography, 1912–2012. In: Boeckh, K., Rutar, S. (eds) The Balkan Wars from Contemporary Perception to Historic Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44642-4_14

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