Understanding the Balkans
Anyone who knows anything about the Balkan region knows that there's something very silly about the headline above. "Understanding the Balkans" is about like "Undertanding the Arab/Israeli conflict." Yeah, good luck, right?
Having said that, Sheila O'Malley has written a series of essays centered on Macedonia that are well-informed, but informal and accessible. If you have any interest in European politics, you should give them a read.
I'll bet she'd love some feedback, too.
What's so hard about understanding the Arab/Israeli conflict?
I do.
But...but... Macedonia has about a 30% Albanian minority population, increasing demographically, with eager relatives on the Albanian side of the border sending across all sorts of political instigations and hardware. Won't that just confuse the issue, if sympathetic Muslim states (hey, and any Turkish soreheads who remembers that there are STILL Turkish villages in Macedonia) also decide to stir the pot.
What I understand about the Balkans is that they represent the intractable hatred of the human mind. We're not going to fix them, not in any forseeable generation.
What Bill said
soul-deep, religious and nationalistic blood feud.
What goes on in the Balkans is just a microcosm of what goes on in the rest of the world. It is not different. Given the close proximity of one group to another, the conflict appears more intense.
Put another way, the Balkans are the playground for what ails the world , vis-a-vis, East meets West.
Mr. Dooley and ESP,
Try backing off on the cliches, and read some history other than Kaplan. Say, Milovan Djilas or L.S. Stavrianos or Rebecca West, all of whom have a far deeper understanding of the Balkans than Kaplan's once-over-lightly.
The period between 1945 and 1989 was a pretty good cliche-buster in itself. But over a period of say 500 years, Macedonia, or Yugoslavia, has seen no worse slaughters than the wholesale ones put on by the nominally civilized western Europeans in the same period, or the Communist regimes run by 'intellectuals' like the Bolsheviks or Mao or the Khmer Rouge.
It wasn't always peace and love, but the stereotype of endless villages of Hatfields and McCoys is a failure too.
Not a very good summary. No explanation of the ethnic makeup or geography. I have to wait for the end to read that the Macedonians are primarily Bulgars? Also, the Bulgarians did NOT "gladly" ship their Jews to the Nazis. And the problem with Jerusalem has nothing to do with geography. Also....
I can see why democracies don't go to war with each other. If you try to figure out which country should represent Macedonians, you start a major argument. If Macedonians can vote though, it doesn't matter. They can represent theirselves.
Rebecca West's book about Yugoslavia is phenomenal.
The movies 'Underground' and 'No Man's Land' both play upon the Balkan stereotype while also rejecting it.
West's book is outstanding albeit, I got the distinct impression she despised the Croatian lack of national chauvinism that she admired so much in the Serbians. Of course, nationalism and the concept of nation-state comes late to the Balkan psyche as compared to the 'civilized' west.
The creation of nation state in the former Yugoslavia cannot be a natural occurrence. The geography and demographics offers no easy way to partition off groups of people without a massive ethnic purge of the likes we have seen. Even then... It makes me think of how 'different' we here in America are. Political redistricting maps - recently in the news for Texas and certainly common in Chicagoland, are great examples of how 'different' it is not.
As Sheila demonstrated, one cannot study the history of any of the republics that made up the former Yugoslavia without delving into the rise and fall of empires surrounding it.
Researching the history of the Balkans and Yugoslavia in particular is akin to studying Western Civ. It has it all. Fascinating.