Biondich, Mark. The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 564 Biondich, Mark. The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878. Zones of Violence. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2011. xv + 384 pp. Maps. Tables. Chronology. Notes. Bibliography. Index.£65.00. Since the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s scholars have dedicated a considerable amount of effort in countering the common perceptions of a certain Balkan exceptionalism and a particular predisposition to violence. Theories and methods from a range of disciplines have been utilized both to deconstruct the othering discourses that inform such myths — Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997) remains the classic text in this field — and to offer alterative explanations as to the causes of violence in the region. It is within this tradition that Mark Biondich’s book falls. It approaches the task with the historian’s tools, producing a serious survey of the most violent chapters of modern Balkan history. In less than three hundred pages the book covers an impressive amount of data, offering quick summaries of long tracts of Balkan history that will be very helpful to the non-specialists, along with focused studies of key violent episodes of Balkan history. It is all informed by an impressive bibliography that is remarkably diverse, relevant and up to date. Biondich has produced the new essential reference work on the history of violence in the Balkans. As with all stereotypes, the image of the violent Balkans relies on vagueness and elusiveness as to the origins, aims and forms of violence, but Biondich does not tackle this methodological challenge head on. ‘Revolution, war and political violence’ could mean many things. Soon, however, it becomes clear that the author is really focused on the link between violence and nationalism, on which he puts all his analytical attention. And in this he is excellent: detailed and balanced, offering long passages of creative synthesis, avoiding any sort of deterministic linearities, looking persistently for explanations that are time and space specific, and always in dialogue with his extensive bibliography. The most original sections of the book are on this nationalist-related theme: on the Macedonian Question at the turn of the twentieth century (pp. 63– 75), the treatment of minorities and the rise of the fascist ‘New Right’ in the interwar (pp. 98–130), the civil war in Yugoslavia during the Second World War (pp. 130–49), the minority policies of the Cold War Communist states (pp. 159–80) and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. It is on the latter that the author offers his most elaborate analysis on the forms and motives of violence (pp. 215–37). Balkan modernities — their roots, adaptations and effects — are an old scholarly preoccupation. At least since John Allcock’s Explaining Yugoslavia (London,2000)modernityhasbeenalsocentralinthemorefocuseddiscussions on the origins and particularities of violence in the region. It is in the same REVIEWS 565 pool where Biondich looks for his overarching argument. His model focuses on the long, and frequently ‘abortive’, modernization process undergone by the region, starting from the early national independence wars of the nineteenth century and going all the way to the recent crises in Yugoslavia. Seen through this overstretched, but not unappealing, explanatory framework, the wars of the 1990s were ‘in actual fact the culmination of a process of state-building that had been initiated in the nineteenth century’ (p. 195). The key link here is the slightly vague concept of the ‘modernizing’, ‘nationalizing state’ (pp. vi) and its elites, which opt for violence always as a calculated choice in order to establish and affirm their authority. The book charts how again and again, in conflict after conflict, local actors made specific choices that led to specific forms and acts of violence. Despite its relativizing tendencies, Biondich’s argument leaves Balkan exceptionalism without any oxygen on which to breathe, political choice being the author’s answer to the stereotype of primordial instincts. Although the nebulous spectre of ‘Europe’ is never far away (see p. 156), nonBalkan players have a secondary role in this story. They are present mainly diplomatically, while the foreign occupation regimes of the two World Wars receiveonlyabriefmention.Butthisisanoddomission.Balkanexceptionalism cannot be understood outside the European comparative framework on which it...