3 - Why the Balkans?

Summary

This book focuses on the Balkans, that is, those areas of Southeastern Europe that were part of the Ottoman Empire. Studying one region during a specific period of time allows me to make some credible assumptions about actors’ preferences, increase my analytical leverage, and control for several macro-historical and geopolitical factors that affect the planning of nation-building policies. Moreover, choosing a region and studying all non-core groups inhabiting it allows me to avoid the most common form of selection bias, namely focusing on the most prominent and well-studied cases.

Overall, the Balkan states provide an excellent laboratory in which to study nation-building policies because of the protracted intermingling of heterogeneous populations and the variation in the timing of their state-building experiences. This set of cases is also a crucial test for some of the most prominent explanations in the literature. The Balkan states have been considered as stereotypical cases of deep-rooted “ethnic hatreds” or symbolic politics. “Balkanization” is still used by journalists and academics as a pejorative term describing a range of processes from political fragmentation to irrational ethnic violence and chaos. All in all, the Balkan Peninsula is typically considered as the most turbulent and nationalistic part of Europe; thus it should be harder to discern a geostrategic logic in nation-building policies here than anywhere else. Finding a pattern would question the validity of analyses that treat the Balkans as an exception, an aberration of sorts, and improve our understanding of the process of nation-building.