National Conflicts

Abstract

Between 1878 and 1914 the Balkan states’ conflicting aspirations for national expansion, and intensified nationalist movements among Balkan populations lacking states of their own, produced a period of incessant turmoil. So tumultuous was the time that Western Europeans came to characterize the Balkan nations as inherently belligerent, irreconcilable mutual antagonists set on gaining their individual national goals no matter the costs. Although the term “balkanization,” which was coined in the West to describe the turmoil, has retained currency into the present, it reflects more its creators’ perceptions than those of the Balkan nations themselves. The national divisiveness manifested in the Balkans during the period operated within the framework of adopted Western European nation-state nationalism. It was the European Great Powers themselves who legitimized the Ottoman Empire’s fragmentation at Berlin by recognizing new nation-states carved from its lands while, at the same time, they blocked them from acquiring territories claimed on the basis of nation-state imperatives. In adopting the term, Western Europeans, who historically demonstrated a near messianic impulse to spread their cultural values to non-westerners, proved unable to fathom accurately the Frankenstein monsters that they created.