The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999 [Hardcover]

Misha Glenny (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2000

In a timely, passionate survey of Balkan history since the early nineteenth century, Misha Glenny chronicles the essential background to the recent terrible events in this war-torn region. No other book covers the entire region or provides such profound insights into the roots of Balkan violence or explains so vividly the origins of modern Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. Glenny's compulsively readable account brings the culture of different nationalisms to life in a narrative studded with sharply-drawn set pieces and colorful portraits of kings, guerrillas, bandits, generals and politicians.

Glenny shows how throughout history great-power interference in the region has been catastrophic for the peoples of the Balkans and how so-called ethnic hatreds have often been intensified by misguided diplomats in distant capitals, creating states, allocating populations, and redrawing borders--invariably with deadly results. It remains to be seen, Glenny argues, whether the most recent Western intervention will have a more benign outcome.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The history of the Balkan states, like that of so much of the world, has for centuries been marked by ethnocidal fracases, savage wars of conquest, and periods of eerie calm. The mountainous region's shifting alliances and divisions have long puzzled outside observers, writes journalist Misha Glenny, the author of The Fall of Yugoslavia: "For many decades, Westerners gazed on these lands as if [they were] an ill-charted zone separating Europe's well-ordered civilization from the chaos of the Orient."

Those outsiders, Glenny suggests, have been the source of much of the Balkans' misery. In only the last two centuries, the territory has been contested by the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, the Third Reich, and the Allies, all of whom exploited and exacerbated existing ethnic conflict. (The Nazi occupiers of Croatia, he writes, even had to rein in the fascist Ustase militia for fear that their campaign against Serbs and Muslims would only strengthen resistance to their puppet government.) And, he continues, attempts to quell the recent conflict in Bosnia have created problems of their own. He argues that war will break out anew the moment international troops are withdrawn and that the Dayton Agreement is too "full of anomalies and frictions" to stand. The intervention in Kosovo has been no better, he adds, and the Allies' misguided efforts are sure to yield only further bloodshed if the only objective is to remove Slobodan Milosevic from power. "Should the West fail to address the effects, not merely of a three-month air war in 1999, but of 120 years of miscalculation and indifference since the Congress of Berlin, then there will be little to distinguish NATO's actions from any of its great-power predecessors," Glenny concludes.

Glenny's provocative book sheds much light on recent Balkan history--and on the region's likely future. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Combining a thoughtful approach with an elegant style, Glenny (The Fall of Yugoslavia) has built a reputation as one of the leading journalists covering the Balkans. This latest book grew out of the author's realization that he needed to better understand Balkan history in order to make sound judgments on current events and to escape what he claims is a pervasive mythologizing of the region by Westerners. He argues that we need to bury the idea that the Balkan peoples are locked into a politics characterized by blood and revenge. Rather than look to the "ancient hatreds" so often cited by many Western journalists, Glenny frames his survey within the context of the Great Powers' mischievous and often destructive role in shaping Balkan affairs during the past two centuries. Both the time frame and the subject make for a gripping and accessible narrative, suitable for the interested general reader or student, but at the significant cost of ignoring other crucial background to the present crises. Economic history, geography, demographics--all important factors in Balkan developments--receive little attention. Premodern history, so crucial to an understanding of the modern era, is shortchanged. But, after all, the Balkans are a thankless subject for the observer--chaotic, complex, contradictory, even undefinable. Despite its shortcomings, Glenny's study offers a timely comment on Western intervention in Balkan affairs. In the wake of NATO's bombing in Serbia, he reminds us of the often disastrous effects of international intervention, and he warns that once intervention has taken place, the intervening forces must finish the job by securing peace and stability on the ground. Maps. History Book Club selection; 4-city author tour. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 726 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1 Amer ed edition (April 27, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670853380
• ISBN-13: 978-0670853380
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,023,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Misha Glenny is a distinguished journalist and historian. As the Central Europe Correspondent first for The Guardian and then for the BBC, he chronicled the collapse of communism and the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

He has won several major awards for his work, including the Sony Gold Award for outstanding contribution to broadcasting.

The author of three books on Eastern Europe and the Balkans - The Rebirth of History, The Fall of Yugoslavia, The Balkans; his latest book McMafia is about international organised crime.

He has been regularly consulted by the US and European governments on major policy issues and ran an NGO for three years, assisting with the reconstruction of Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo.

He now lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

105 of 111 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Balkans Book We've Been Waiting For, May 10, 2000

By 

Kelli - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999 (Hardcover)

In recent years, there have been many books published about specific areas of the Balkans (particularly, the countries of the former Yugoslavia), but no one book (other than Robert Kaplan's travelogue "Balkan Ghosts") has attempted to tackle the entire Balkan region, taken as a group. Misha Glenny's latest work does this admirably well, and has instantly become the most comprehensive, and comprehensible, book available regarding this fascinating region.

Misha Glenny is no newcomer to the Balkans, and some readers may be familiar with his "The Fall of Yugoslavia" which recounted the principal events leading to the breakup of Yugoslavia. However, here Glenny is focussed on surveying the major events of Balkan history over the past 200 years, drawing together the similar threads that play through various countries, while pointing out the important differences that led to different outcomes in various parts of the region. In particular, Glenny focuses on the relationship between the Balkan region and the countries outside that region, and the impact that this relationship has had in the past and continues to have on the region today. In this sense, the book is very timely and sheds much light on the present situation.

Unlike the extremely popular "Balkan Ghosts", Glenny simply doesn't buy the notion that the recent conflicts in the Balkans are principally the result of ancient ethno-religious hatreds and stubborn intractibility, but instead forcefully and convincingly argues that the carnage that we see today is the product of relatively recent Balkan history, which itself has been greatly influenced by powers beyond the Balkans. The book is convincing in its thesis, breathtakingly broad in its scope (it covers the entire region, including the former Yugolavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Greece), and yet fascinating in its attention to detail and the individual events and personages who have shaped the history of this corner of Europe.

This is simply a great history book, hands down. Anyone who wants to understand the Balkan region would be well-advised to purchase and read this remarkable book.

46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Penetrating, Clarifying & Edifying Survey of Troubled Area!, July 22, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999 (Hardcover)

In a literate, knowledgeable, and comprehensive monograph that accomplishes the incredible feat of clarifying and organizing the seemingly endless complexities of the region, Misha Glenny sets the record straight regarding the history and prospects for the Balkans. In a history going back two hundred years, Glenny illustrates how the current miasma of internecine violence, endless distrust, and legendary duplicity arose out of the mix and conflicts of ethnicities as well as the gross intermittent interference of the great powers. Far from flying with the angels, efforts by other nations such as Germany, NATO, and especially the United States have intensified and exacerbated the region's tensions and proclivities toward murderous intramural conflicts.

While to the casual foreign observer the region has long been a source of mysterious political arrangements and impenetrable complexities, the author lays to waste all of the West's convenient and self-serving notions describing the inhabitants of the Balkans as less than civilized, and shows how the nature of the troubles in the region can be traced to the arbitrary and capricious meddling foisted onto the residents from outside, usually by international agencies ignorant of the various ethnic mixes and profound historical connections standing in the way. Probably the single best example of this often well intentioned ignorance is the Dayton Peace Accords, which the author claims effectively partitioned Bosnia and Herzegovina without adequately solving any of the core problems underlying the ethnic unrest in the area. As a consequence, Glenny states, peace will reign in Bosnia only as long as the UN troops remain.

The author pulls few punches, describing recent American policies as cowardly and selfish, fashioned more to attempt to meet their obligations without risking troops and the concomitant domestic political trouble the probable loss of American servicemen would mean. Indeed, he describes the colossal blunder of NATO in stating that there would be no engagement of ground troops in Kosovo as flashing a green light for Serbian troops to have their indiscriminate bloodbath and deny it too. In a chilling extraordinary passage describing recent international attitudes dominated by short-term political convenience and its consequences for the region, Glenny quotes Swedish mediator Carl Bildt as prophetically asking that if the world chose to ignore the atrocities of the incumbent and did not prosecute Croatian President Tudjman for ethnic cleansing, "how on earth can we object if one day Milosevic sends his army to clean out the Albanians from Kosovo?"

The author's narrative is immensely educational and useful for those of us less than fully familiar with the region, tracing the progress of each national group amid the ongoing struggles for statehood. His description is punctuated with provocative and fascinating stories illustrating the rich variety of peoples and cultures inhabiting the area. At the same time, he interweaves these anecdotes with a sharply focused narrative that succeeds marvelously in threading together the key events in the context of international affairs, and shows how powerfully these interactions have influenced the emergence of the different national groups and the explosive amalgams of the 1990s.

It is this key relationship between the interference of other countries and international agencies that Glenny has been so catastrophic for the region, and often the ethnic and regional enmities and hatreds have been intensified and magnified by the actions of these outsiders. In a stirring warning at the end of the epilogue, he warns "if the great powers fail to seize the present opportunity by investing heavily in the region, the suffering of the Balkans will surely continue for several decades into the new millennium". This is an important and seminal book, one that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand this area of the world, and a great introduction into the history of the region. Enjoy!

51 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Deeply flawed, May 2, 2001

By 

Edward Bosnar - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999 (Hardcover)

Misha Glenny is a good reporter and an even better writer, but it takes more than that to make a good historian. This is particularly true for such an ambitious history, which covers events in the Balkans for an almost 200-year period. Indeed, much of the time this book reads like an extended newspaper feature for the Sunday edition rather than a work of in-depth, intelligent analysis. Not much more can be expected, since Glenny depended primarily on (generally very good) secondary sources and a number of travelogues, memoirs and similarly "light" primary literature. Even here, though, it's obvious that Glenny found the vastness of the material daunting, so he often fails to integrate the findings and conclusions of the many authors who came before him and neglects many major themes in Balkan history. The result is a summary of wars, crisis, etc. and even here the coverage is rather episodic: countries and peoples emerge, disappear and then abruptly reappear throughout the text. Thus, Romania is dealt with until its provinces were first unified and its independence was recognized during the 1860s, then fades out only to reappear for a brief cameo in the Balkan Wars over 40 years later. History in Bulgaria apparently ended after communist dictator Zhivkov assumed power in the mid-1950s, while Greek history peters out somewhere during the 1970s. By the 1990s, only the republics of the former Yugoslavia receive any attention at all, and this is rather piecemeal at that. There is also a rather odd section devoted to post-WW2 Turkey, which, if one can still consider it a Balkan country after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, leaves one to question why Glenny neglected telling us something about the crucial interwar period, when Kemal Ataturk initiated the efforts to transform Turkey into a modern, secular state. This is truly a journalist's approach to history: always focusing on major, often violent and traumatic events and the movers and shakers like kings, dictators, generals and major politicians, while almost completely ignoring the less noticeable people (writers, scholars, intellectuals) and often confusing (hence the need for illumination) economic, social and cultural trends and changes so crucial to a true comprehension of the region's history. There is therefore never any meaningful discussion of nationalism - part of the book's subtitle! - which has had such an inestimable impact on Balkan history. Instead, nationalism is just treated as some sort of amorphous force that emerges to make matters even worse during times of trouble. The local manifestations of other ideologies that have had and still do exercise a great influence on events in the region (socialism, communism, fascism, peasant populism) are similarly neglected. Glenny instead frequently resorts to the simpler (and much more readable) device of using anecdotal evidence to illustrate larger points. This is at times interesting and informative - particularly the section that deals with the memories of Holocaust survivors from several Balkan countries - but falls short of providing an understanding of the causes or motives behind specific events. Perhaps this failed effort best illustrates the fact that there are few if any living Balkan historians in the English-speaking world who are willing to take on the task of writing a well-researched, well-argued and well-written integrative contemporary history of the Balkans for both students and lay readers alike. This leaves the field open to talented and well-meaning, but nonetheless unqualified publicists like Glenny.