In 1922, as R. W. Seton-Watson assumed the new Masaryk Chair of Central European History at King's College, he delivered an inaugural speech entitled “The Historian as a Political Force in Central Europe.” In this speech he referred to the challenges facing Central and Southeastern Europe in the wake of the World War I and the role of the historian in affecting change in the region. Fast-forward to 2007 and Southeastern Europe is again in the historical-geopolitical spotlight and again in the context of war and transition, as the title of John Lampe's new book affirms.
In eight chapters Lampe tracks this region's “European credentials and aspirations” (viii) through the twentieth century. He outlines three war-transition pairings: the Balkan Wars and World War I followed by “liberal and national transitions,” World War II followed by “Communist and Cold War transitions,” and Yugoslavia's Wars of Dissolution and the collapse of Communism paired with “post-Communist transitions.” Lampe concludes with a final, if still incomplete, “transition,” namely, that from “regional stability to European Integration.” Balkans into Southeastern Europe is a solid and informative contribution to our understanding of the political, military, and diplomatic history of a region that for Lampe encompasses Yugoslavia and its successors as well as Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Greece.
The decision to include Greece in the story is both novel and long overdue. The geopolitical negotiations of the post-World War II order sought to rip Greece out of its regional context, but the centrality of Greece to so many events of the twentieth century—from the Balkan Wars, to the plans of the great powers for the region, to the success of indigenous Communist movements—is undeniable. Furthermore, in examining the comparative economic charts that Lampe offers, Greece clearly fits right into the region in ways that Transylvania, for example, does not (24). In general, the inclusion of such economic figures throughout the work and Lampe's dedication to understanding the political in light of the economic—in sections dealing with pre-World War I trade spectra, responses to economic depression, and later German and Soviet economic unilateralism—are among the other great strengths of this work.
Lampe's prose is packed with detail and brimming with countless insights accumulated over decades of research and conversations with political scientists, historians, and policy makers. As such, however, it is likely to intimidate at least part of the broad audience of students, scholars, policy makers, and the general public for which it was intended. The barrage of unfamiliar names, places, and events starts early and never diminishes. This is a perennial problem faced by individuals writing on this extremely complex region, but the confusion might have been ameliorated, at least in part, with a few more attempts to link the less familiar with the more familiar. Noting that both Trotsky and the European peace movement cut their teeth while observing the Balkan Wars, for example, might also have served the desired end of showing how the region's history has been bound to European trends and has not been merely on the receiving end of history.
In terms of where studies of this region might go from here, both Lampe and Mark Mazower have laid the groundwork for a variety of avenues of scholarly inquiry. Among these is the question of where the designation “Southeastern Europe” comes from, how historians and statesmen have used it, and what it has come to mean. Is it now merely a shorthand for all the states of the former East Bloc that did not make it through the first round of European Union expansion? And what did it represent to Seton-Watson when he used the term in 1922? Nada Švob-Đokić, Maria Todorova, and Andrei Pippidi—to name a few—have drawn attention to the politics and interests behind the concept of Southeastern Europe, and the plea for follow-up scholarship is one I hope will not remain unanswered.
Lampe also reminds us of the extent to which the domestic concerns of Western European nations influenced their policy toward this region (Great Britain's take on minority rights as informed by tensions with the Irish, or France's security concerns and the Little Entente, for example). The reader wonders to what extent concerns about minorities, national boundaries, and security have influenced regional attitudes toward large-scale European projects, like Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europe, Hitler's New European Order, or the European Union. Lampe's book thus provides a reliable comparative synthesis, as well as a strong basis, for future scholarship.
