Lecture 9.

Topic:  The Peoples of the Balkans

1. General characteristics of theBalkans.

2. History and geopolitical significance of Balkans.
3.Politicsandeconomyof Balkans.

1. General characteristics of the Balkans

The Balkans, orthe BalkanPeninsula, is a
geographicareainsoutheastern Europe withvariousanddisputeddefinitions.The
regiontakesitsnamefromthe BalkanMountains thatstretchfromthe Serbian-Bulgarian bordertothe 
BlackSea.
The BalkanPeninsulaisborderedbythe AdriaticSea onthenorthwest,
the IonianSea onthesouthwest, the AegeanSea inthesouthandsoutheast,
andtheBlackSeaontheeastandnortheast. The northernborderofthe peninsula isvariouslydefined. The
highestpointoftheBalkansis MountMusala, 2,925 metres (9,596 ft), inthe Rila mountainrange.
The Balkan region was the first area in Europe to experience the arrival of farming cultures in the
Neolithic era. The Balkans have been inhabited since the Paleolithic and are the route by which farming
from the Middle East spread to Europe during the Neolithic (7th millennium BC). The practices of
growing grain and raising livestock arrived in the Balkans from the Fertile Crescent by way of Anatolia
and spread west and north into Central Europe, particularly through Pannonia. Two early culture-
complexes have developed in the region, Starčevo culture and Vinča culture. The Balkans are also the
location of the first advanced civilizations. Vinča culture developed a form of proto-writing before the
Sumerians and Minoans, known as the Old European script, while the bulk of the symbols had been
created in the period between 4500 and 4000 BC, with the ones on the Tărtăria clay tablets even dating
back to around 5300 BC.
The identity of the Balkans is dominated by its geographical position; historically the area was
known as a crossroads of cultures. It has been a juncture between the Latin and Greek bodies of the
Roman Empire, the destination of a massive influx of pagan Bulgars and Slavs, an area where Orthodox
and Catholic Christianity met, as well as the meeting point between Islam and Christianity.
In pre-classical and classical antiquity, this region was home to Greeks, Illyrians, Paeonians,
Thracians, Dacians, and other ancient groups. The Achaemenid Persian Empire incorporated parts of
the Balkans comprising Macedonia, Thrace, Bulgaria, and the Black Sea coastal region of Romania
between the late 6th and the first half of the 5th-century BC into its territories. Later the Roman Empire
conquered most of the region and spread Roman culture and the Latin language, but significant parts
still remained under classical Greek influence. The Romans considered the Rhodope Mountains to be
the northern limit of the Peninsula of Haemus and the same limit applied approximately to the border
between Greek and Latin use in the region (later called the Jireček Line). The Bulgars and Slavs arrived
in the 6th-century and began assimilating and displacing already-assimilated (through Romanization and
Hellenization) older inhabitants of the northern and central Balkans, forming the Bulgarian Empire.
During the Middle Ages, the Balkans became the stage for a series of wars between the Byzantine
Roman and the Bulgarian Empires.
2. History and geopolitical significance of Balkans

By the end of the 16th-century, the Ottoman Empire had become the controlling force in the
region after expanding from Anatolia through Thrace to the Balkans. Many people in the Balkans place
their greatest folk heroes in the era of either the onslaught or the retreat of the Ottoman Empire. As
examples, for Greeks, Constantine XI Palaiologos and Kolokotronis; and for Serbs, MilošObilić and Tzar
Lazar; for Montenegrins, Đurađ I Balšić and Ivan Crnojević; for Albanians, George Kastrioti Skanderbeg;
for ethnic Macedonians, Nikola Karev and GoceDelčev; for Bulgarians, VasilLevski, Georgi Sava
Rakovski and HristoBotev and for Croats, Nikola ŠubićZrinjski.
In the past several centuries, because of the frequent Ottoman wars in Europe fought in and
around the Balkans and the comparative Ottoman isolation from the mainstream of economic advance
(reflecting the shift of Europe's commercial and political centre of gravity towards the Atlantic), the
Balkans has been the least developed part of Europe. According to Halilİnalcık, "The population of the
Balkans, according to one estimate, fell from a high of 8 million in the late 16th-century to only 3 million
by the mid-eighteenth. This estimate is in harmony with the first findings based on Ottoman documentary
evidence."
Most of the Balkan nation-states emerged during the 19th and early 20th centuries as they
gained independence from the Ottoman Empire or the Austro-Hungarian empire (Greece in 1821,
Serbia, Montenegro in 1878, Bulgaria in 1908, Albania in 1912).
In 1912–1913 the First Balkan War broke out when the nation-states of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece
and Montenegro united in an alliance against the Ottoman Empire. As a result of the war, almost all
remaining European territories of the Ottoman Empire were captured and partitioned among the allies.
Ensuing events also led to the creation of an independent Albanian state. Bulgaria insisted on its status
quo territorial integrity, divided and shared by the Great Powers next to the Russo-Turkish War (1877–
78) in other boundaries and on the pre-war Bulgarian-Serbian agreement. Bulgaria was provoked by the
backstage deals between its former allies, Serbia and Greece, on the allocation of the spoils at the end
of the First Balkan War. At the time, Bulgaria was fighting at the main Thracian Front. Bulgaria marks the
beginning of Second Balkan War when it attacked them. The Serbs and the Greeks repulsed single
attacks, but when the Greek army invaded Bulgaria together with an unprovoked Romanian intervention
in the back, Bulgaria collapsed. The Ottoman Empire used the opportunity to recapture Eastern Thrace,
establishing its new western borders that still stand today as part of modern Turkey.
The First World War was sparked in the Balkans in 1914 when members of MladaBosna, a
revolutionary organization with predominately Serbian and pro-Yugoslav members, assassinated the
Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Bosnia and Herzegovina's capital,
Sarajevo. That caused a war between the two countries which - through the existing chains of alliances
—led to the First World War. The Ottoman Empire soon joined the Central Powers becoming one of the
three empires participating in that alliance. The next year Bulgaria joined the Central Powers attacking
Serbia, which was successfully fighting Austro-Hungary to the north for a year. That led to Serbia's
defeat and the intervention of the Entente in the Balkans which sent an expeditionary force to establish a
new front, the third one of that war, which soon also became static. The participation of Greece in the
war three years later, in 1918, on the part of the Entente finally altered the balance between the
opponents leading to the collapse of the common German-Bulgarian front there, which caused the exit
of Bulgaria from the war, and in turn the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ending the First World
War.
With the start of the Second World War, all Balkan countries, with the exception of Greece, were
allies of Nazi Germany, having bilateral military agreements or being part of the Axis Pact. Fascist Italy
expanded the war in the Balkans by using its protectorate Albania to invade Greece. After repelling the
attack, the Greeks counterattacked, invading Italy-held Albania and causing Nazi Germany's intervention
in the Balkans to help its ally. Days before the German invasion, a successful coup d'état in Belgrade by
neutral military personnel seized power.
Although the new government reaffirmed Serbia's intentions to fulfill its obligations as member of
the Axis, Germany, with Bulgaria, invaded both Greece and Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia immediately
disintegrated when those loyal to the Serbian King and the Croatian units mutinied. Greece resisted, but,
after two months of fighting, collapsed and was occupied. The two countries were partitioned between
the three Axis allies, Bulgaria, Germany and Italy, and the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state
of Italy and Germany.
During the occupation the population suffered considerable hardship due to repression and
starvation, to which the population reacted by creating a mass resistance movement. Together with the
early and extremely heavy winter of that year (which caused hundreds of thousands deaths among the
poorly fed population), the German invasion had disastrous effects in the timetable of the planned
invasion in Russia causing a significant delay, which had major consequences during the course of the
war.
Finally, at the end of 1944, the Soviets entered Romania and Bulgaria forcing the Germans out
of the Balkans. They left behind a region largely ruined as a result of wartime exploitation.

3. Politics and economy of Balkans

Currently all of the states are republics, but until World War II all countries were monarchies.
Most of the republics are parliamentary, excluding Romania and Bosnia which are semi-presidential. All
the states have open market economies, most of which are in the upper-middle income range ($4,000 –
$12,000 p.c.), however, Greece and Romania have high income economies (over $12,000 p.c.), and is
also classified with very high HDI in contrast to the remaining states which are classified with high HDI.
The states from the former Eastern Bloc that formerly had planned economy system and Turkey mark
gradual economic growth each year, only the economy of Greece drops for 2012 and meanwhile it was
expected to grow in 2013. The Gross domestic product (Purchasing power parity) per capita is highest in
Slovenia (over $34,000) and Greece (over $25,000), followed by Romania and Croatia ($24,000) and
then Turkey, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia ($10,000 – $15,000), Bosnia, Albania and
Kosovo (below $10,000). The Gini coefficient, which indicates the level of difference by monetary
welfare of the layers, is on the second level at the highest monetary equality in Albania, Bulgaria and
Serbia, on the third level in Greece, Montenegro and Romania, on the fourth level in Macedonia, on the
fifth level in Turkey, and the most unequal by Gini coefficient is Bosnia at the eighth level which is the
penultimate level and one of the highest in the world. The unemployment is lowest in Romania (below
10%), followed by Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania (10 – 15%), Greece (15 – 20%), Montenegro, Serbia,
Bosnia (20 – 30%), Macedonia (over 30%) and Kosovo (over 40%).

Glossary:

Hardship - severe suffering or privation.

Income–money received, especially on a regular basis, for work or through investments.
Destination – theplacetowhichsomeoneorsomethingisgoingorbeingsent.
Allocation - the action or process of allocating or sharing out something.

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