Before 1999, the great powers had intervened three times in
the Balkans. The first was at the
Congress of Berlin in 1878 when European diplomats agreed to replace Ottoman
power by building a system of competing alliances on the Balkan peninsula. The second began with the Austro-Hungarian
ultimatum to Serbia in the summer of 1914 and culminated in 1923 with the
Treaty of Lausanne and the Great Population Exchange between Greece and
Turkey. The third started with Italy's
unprovoked attack on Greece in March 1940 and ended with the consolidation of
unrepresentative pro-Soviet regimes in Bulgaria, Romania and a pro-Western
administration in Greece.
These three interventions were so destructive that they
guaranteed the Balkans' relative economic backwardness, compared to the rest of
Europe. And the violence that these interventions encouraged, often inflicted
by one Balkan people on another, ensured the continuation of profound civil and
nationalistic strife. In the West
however, these events are rarely regarded as the result of external
intervention. On the contrary, the Balkan
countries are seen as culprits who force the reluctant outside powers into
their unfathomable conflicts. This
imagined Balkans -- a world where people are motivated not by rational
considerations but by a mysterious congenital bloodthirstiness -- is always
invoked when the great powers seek to deny their responsibility for the
economic and political difficulties that the region has suffered as a
consistence of external interference.
"The Balkans," Theodore Geshkoff wrote in 1940, "are
usually reported in the outside world only in time of terror and trouble; the
rest of the time they are scornfully ignored." It is during these long
periods of neglect that the Balkan counties have badly needed the engagement of
the great powers. Yet the only country
to demonstrate a sustained interest in the economic development of the Balkans was
Nazi Germany during the 1930s.
The Balkans
Misha Glenny
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