This compiled volume on “recent” Balkan historiography pursues essentially two goals: the first reflects the intention to make a set of locally produced historical scholarship accessible to an English-speaking audience. To this end, thirty-seven excerpts from representative works by Balkan scholars were thematically sorted and translated from Greek, Albanian, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian into English. The second, and the one echoing more accurately the volume's figurative title, is to offer an English-speaking audience interested in southeast European academic production, a kaleidoscope of ongoing historiographic controversies in regional historiography. Intended as a remedy against the stereotyping of the region due to the most recent history of ethnonational conflicts, but also as a corrective to the predominance of Anglo-American publications and the nationalistic regression of local historiography due to the Yugoslav wars of succession and the generic phenomenon of post-communist historical revisionism, the volume focuses on a set of controversial questions from the pre-communist period, which are showcased in five comprehensive chapters. A variable team of historians functioning as subeditors introduces the individual chapters via succinct explanatory essays, which either summarize the main points of the debate and/or offer an outlook into the broader historiographic landscape on the specific subject matter. The respective chapter introductions are therefore a good inventory of available literature, and at times also provide insights into the different institutional research structures and academic schools of the respective countries. The book is thoughtfully dedicated to the historian Vangelis Kechriotis, who most probably co-masterminded the volume at its early stages, but who sadly passed away rather unexpectedly in 2015.
Chapter 1 (editors: Vangelis Kechriotis/Roumiana Preshlevova) concentrates on pre-1914 Ottoman history and nation-building politics within the empire's orthodox Christian communities. Essays by Nadya Danova, Roumen Daskalov, Alexander Vezenkov, and Iliya Todev deal with Bulgarian debates on Ottoman political legacy, focusing in particular on the historiographic codification of the Bulgarian national movement as “Bulgarian Revival.” The underlying central question (having a bearing not only on Bulgarian but also on other national histories) is how to correlate more comprehensive (imperial) and the more exclusive (national) historical legacies/canons to each other, a topic with no negligent epistemological, historical, and political implications. Further essays by Elli Skopetea, Sia Anagnostopoulou, Paraskevas Konortas, Eleni Gara, and Andreas Lyberatos focus on the effect of the Tanzimat reforms on millet organization, the evolution of the central institution of the Orthodox Patriarchate, and the procedural transformation of religious into national identities.
Chapter 2 (editors: Vjeran Pavlaković/Vladan Jovanović) looks at the post-1918 efforts to construct a Yugoslav state in the interwar period. The diverging interpretations surrounding the nature of the first Yugoslavia have been undeniably tainted by the nation-state building processes of the 1990s and thereafter. While in Croatia the main line was the rejection of any Yugoslavia as a crushing of Croat aspirations towards independent nationhood, in Serbia, there was a reconversion to pre-communist values such as the “memorialization of the monarchy” and Serbian war suffering. However, neither block was simply monolithic. Essays by Mira Kolar-Dimitrijević, Ivo Goldstein, and Aleksandar Jakir reflect the diverse standpoints within Croatian historiography, while essays by Ivana Dobrivojević, Zoran Janjetović, and Sofija Božić demonstrate equivalent Serbian trends.
Chapter 3 (editors: James Frusetta/Stefan Sotiris Papaioannou) examines the role of violence and paramilitary forces in challenging the monopoly of state power (Max Weber's famous dictum) from the Ottoman period to the interwar nation states. The chapter looks at the various and shifting roles and functions of bandits, guerillas, and militias (from irregular forces instrumentalized in irredentist struggles, to forces resisting state centralization, to their integration into regular armies, to paramilitary arms of political parties, and to wartime resistance groups during WWII), illustrated through different micro-regional case studies. Excerpts by Tasos Kostopoulos, Dimitar Tasić, Vladan Jovanović, and Veselin Yanchev analyze the relationship of paramilitaries vs. armies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while texts by Mario Jareb, Ivo Goldstein, Nikolai Poppetrov, and Constantin Iordachi discuss the rise of interwar fascism in the Balkans between foreign blueprints and influences, local stimuli and articulations.
Chapter 4 (editors: Preshlevova/John R. Lampe) discusses the range of European economic and cultural influences across the interwar period as opposed to diplomatic or political history. While evaluations concerning the economic performance of the interwar Balkan states are indeed more controversial (compare here the texts by Roumen Avramov and Dimitar Dimitrov on Bulgarian development), the section on culture deals less with contentious interpretations but rather amplifies and supplements the already existing picture concerning the range of foreign influences on the interwar Balkan states: texts by Ranka Gašić on British and German influences on interwar Belgrade elites, Miroslav Jovanović on anti-Bolshevik Russian emigration to the Balkans, and Milcho Lalkov on the role of Germany in Bulgaria. It needs to be stated that the subeditors’ generic conclusion on the “retreat from economic history” (211) appears debatable. Though not prominent, economic history has its faithful followers and in some countries, like Greece, it maintains a strong academic tradition (see the Bulletin of the Greek Economic History Association, www.hdoisto.gr). Moreover, the field of economic history has advanced by incorporating diverse aspects of social history, and nowadays concerns not only macro-economic performance, bank, fiscal, and monetary policies, but has come to include the history of entrepreneurship and free professions, urban and agrarian development, history of social subjects, history of production, commerce and commercial branches, and gender divisions. In addition, the field of comparative economic history is not without its advocates (see here various works by the Romanian economic historian Bogdan Murgescu).
Finally, chapter 5 (editors: Constantin Iordachi/Frusetta) deals with the Holocaust and the treatment of religious minorities in wartime Balkans, introduced through a comparative overview of historiographic developments in Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Greece. The first set of essays (Report of the international commission on the Holocaust in Romania and text by Lya Benjamin) deal with the characterization and canonization of the Ion Antonescu regime in historiography and politics in face of the various waves of revisionism before and after 1989. The second set of essays by Yosif Ilel, Mikhail Gruev, Artan Puto, and Valentina Duka tackle the historiographic controversies surrounding the topic of the rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria and Albania, respectively, and the motivations behind them.
Taken together, the five chapters do fulfill the volume's initial pledge to acquaint the English-speaking reader with a selection of controversial issues in Balkan historiography. Though the excerpts are at times too short to fully contextualize all arguments, the texts’ condensed character is utterly justified by the nature of the exercise. Historiographic controversies concern here mainly diverging interpretations, almost never debates over methodological problems or approaches, which are altogether rare in Balkan historiography. The five chapters are in sum more interesting and stimulating than the generic introduction into the volume, which feels rather conventional and does not really hit the mark. Concentrating in the main on traditional political/diplomatic history and—despite all praise for transnational approaches—a conventional country-by-country discussion of historiography and historical canons, their portrayal in the introduction is not only restricted but also leaves important works unconsidered. Equally opaque are the criteria that were applied in this selection. Though wishing to bring locally produced scholarship closer to the English-speaking audience, the introduction reflects almost exclusively English-speaking historiography, practically undermining the volume's intention. Moreover, some topics are presented through an outdated historiographical canon, which in the meanwhile has significantly expanded and advanced, for example the introduction's treatment of WWII (for a more up-to-date discussion, see here exemplarily the discussion in Comparative Southeast European Studies / Südosteuropa, 65 (2017) no. 2, “The Second World War in Historiography and Public Debate”). Finally, there are several typos, some awkward translations, and at times small mistakes (Adam Tooze is a British and not a German historian, 213), which could have been avoided had the volume been subjected to an ultimate round of proofreading. Having said that and in conclusion, Battling the Balkans is an informative and analytical volume, which indeed opens up a window into Balkan historiography by bringing local works closer to an interested international academic audience, and will be appreciated precisely for this important contribution.
