Studies on South East Europe

Sabine Rutar (Ed.)

Beyond the BalkansTowards an Inclusive History ofSoutheastern Europe

LIT

Studies on South East Europe

edited by

Prof. Dr. Karl Kaser(Graz)

vol. 10

LIT

Beyond the BalkansTowards an Inclusive History

of Southeastern Europe

edited by

Sabine Rutar

LIT

To the memory of Klaus Tenfelde (1944 – 2011)

He was many things, but no Southeast Europeanist.Yet, without his intellectual curiosity and generous support

this project would never have gotten off the ground.

Editing work on this volume was generously supported bythe Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg.

Cover Image:Drawing by Y. Hakan Erdem (Istanbul), Bochum, January 2007

Layout and typesetting: Jelena Jojevic

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche NationalbibliothekThe Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the DeutscheNationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet athttp://dnb.d-nb.de.

ISBN 978-3-643-10658-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Contents

Sabine Rutar"Introduction: Beyond the Balkans" 7

Part I

Space and Temporality, Entanglement and Transfer

John Breuilly Nationalism and the Balkans: A Global Perspective 29

Diana Mishkova On the Space-Time Constitution of Southeastern Europe 47

Guido Franzinetti Irish and Eastern European Questions 67

Vangelis Kechriotis Requiem for the Empire: “Elective Affinities” Between the Balkan States and the Ottoman Empire in the Long 19th Century 97

Augusta Dimou Towards a Social and Cultural History of Cooperative Associations in Interwar Bulgaria 123

Wim van Meurs The Burden of Universal Suffrage and Parliamentary Democracy in (Southeastern) Europe 161

Helke Stadtland Sakralisierte Nation und säkularisierte Religion: Beispiele aus dem Westen und Norden Europas 181

Katrin Boeckh Perspektiven einer Religions- und Kirchengeschichte des südöstlichen Europas: Netze über Raum und Zeit 199

Part II

Approaching Agency

Y. Hakan Erdem Turks as Soldiers in Mahmud II’s Army: Turning the Evlad-ı Fatihan into Regulars in the Ottoman Balkans 227

Stefano Petrungaro Fire and Honour. On the Comparability of Popular Protests in late 19th Century Croatia-Slavonia 247

Borut Klabjan Puzzling (Out) Citizenship and Nationality: Czechs in Trieste before and after the First World War 265

Vesna Drapac Catholic Resistance and Collaboration in the Second World War: From Master Narrative to Practical Application 279

Sabine Rutar Towards a Southeast European History of Labour: Examples from Yugoslavia 323

Part III

Creating Meaning

Stefan Rohdewald Nationale Identitäten durch Kyrill und Method: Diskurse, Praktiken und Akteure ihrer Verehrung unter den Südslawen bis 1945 357

Stefan Ihrig “Why Them and Not Us?” The Kreuzzeitung, the German Far Right, and the Turkish War of Independence, 1919-1923 377

Amaia Lamikiz Jauregiondo Maintaining Alternative Memories under an Authoritarian Regime: Basque Cultural Associations in the 1960s and Early 1970s 405

Falk Pingel Begegnungen mit einem Kulturkampf. Notizen zur internationalen Bildungsintervention in Bosnien und Herzegowina 423

Vanni D’Alessio Divided and Contested Cities in Modern European History. The Example of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina 447

Contributors 477"

Index 483"

Sabine Rutar

Introduction: Beyond the Balkans

This book outlines research perspectives for southeast European history, envis-aging it as a comprehensive part of European and global history. It does so in a way that is significantly different from previous approaches. The debates about the mental map of the Balkans as the negative alter ego of “the West” (Maria Todorova), on the one hand, and about the construction of the Balkans as a his-torical space sui generis (Holm Sundhaussen), on the other, provide the frame-work for the reflections presented here. The chapters follow a methodological consensus intended to foster a comprehensive inclusion of southeastern Europe in European and global history writing.

Before going into details, a word on a linguistic convention applied in this volume: a decade ago, Karl Kaser proposed a conceptual change away from the rather rigidly perceived geographical spatial container of Südosteuropa towards the more open term südöstliches Europa.1 This linguistic trick has also been adopted in other areas; with the foundation of research centres like the Gießener Zentrum Östliches Europa it has been institutionalized. The terms westliches Europa and östliches Europa have become conventions among scholars, and such usage is most probably independent of Kaser’s suggestion.2 Thus a more general trend to semantically de-essentialize (historical) space is noticeable. In English, the same semantic difference can be signalled by the use of capital or small letters. Consequently, Western Australia is a fixed geographical space, while western Texas is simply the loosely defined western part of Texas. How-ever, English native speakers have confirmed my doubts about the transferabil-ity of this difference to the terms Southeastern Europe vs. southeastern Europe and Western Europe vs. western Europe. Be that as it may, in this volume, the authors have chosen not to capitalize geographical directions, and their intention is precisely to emphasize the dynamics, flexibilities, temporalities, constructed nature and hermeneutic semantics of any spatial definition and boundary.3

1 Karl KASER, Südosteuropäische Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft, Wien, Köln, Wei-mar 22002, 22-23.

2 Examples are Hartmut KAELBLE, Kalter Krieg und Wohlfahrtsstaat. Europa 1945-1989, Mün-chen 2011; Martin SCHULZE WESSEL, Nationalisierung der Religion und Sakralisierung der Nation im östlichen Europa, Stuttgart 2006.

3 For a global perspective on geographic-historical (mis-)conceptions of space cf. Martin W. LEWIS / Karen E. WIGEN, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, Berkeley 1997.

8 Introduction: Beyond the Balkans

This book does not attempt comprehensive thematic coverage. The contribu-tors specialize either in southeast or west European history and have written es-says guided by a corresponding theoretical, methodological, and conceptual in-terest. They problematize concepts of space, time, and scale, and they touch up-on questions of nationalism, imperialism, ethnicity, religion, cultural reference systems, practices of remembrance and symbolic semantics, citizenship, state-building, democratization, dictatorship, political parties, fascism, national so-cialism, collaboration, resistance, as well as aspects of military, war and post-war, economic, media, labour, and urban history. The book’s focus lies on his-torical agency and on what Alf Lüdtke and others after him have conceptualized as Eigen-Sinn. Although the concept Eigen-Sinn has seen a certain proliferation, it has rarely been used in studies of southeastern Europe. The concept describes contexts of interaction and communication as well as the institutions and net-works that configure human motivations, loyalties, and actions, both individual-ly and as patterns. It has mostly been applied to the study of authoritarian socie-ties.4

This volume’s most serious omission, it seems to me, is the lack of gender and/or women’s history. I attempted to find a suitable author on this topic, but for one reason or another no text materialized. Other important fields of histori-cal research have not been included, either. But I am less concerned about the-matic omissions. Clearly there are more themes than could possibly have been dealt with in any one volume. What is important is the common tune struck up by the analogous approaches to questions of writing European and global histo-ry from a southeastern perspective.

Structural Devices and Imaginaries

The Balkans still tend to be characterized, often in a rather unreflective manner, as negative, backward, chaotic, and violent – terms like powder keg and bal-kanization immediately come to mind. With reference to eastern and western types of European nationalisms, Maria Todorova aptly notes that the representa-tion of European space in western societies is underpinned by a mental pattern that is guided by a qualitative hierarchy in which whoever is on top precedes the others in time. As a consequence, societies defined as “Western” are by defini-tion the progressive ones that have discovered things. Their eastern neighbours, logically, are only derivatives of the original, and thus of inferior quality. They

4 Alf LÜDTKE, Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus, Hamburg 1993; Thomas LINDENBERGER (ed.), Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur. Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR, Köln, Weimar, Wien 1999. Inspiring are also many of the contributions to Belinda DAVIS / Thomas LINDENBERGER / Mi-chael WILDT (eds.), Alltag, Erfahrung, Eigensinn. Historisch-anthropologische Erkundungen, Frankfurt/M. 2008.

Sabine Rutar 9

are, in short, subaltern importers of others’ ideas.5 From such a perspective, even nationalism, which is a global phenomenon that developed consecutively over the long durée, ends up being interpreted in a hierarchical and qualitative manner, and a rather narrowly European one, too. The eastern and southeastern variants of nationalism are characterized as less progressive, less civil, more ethnic and substantially more negative than their western counterparts. To-dorova argues that exploring the dialogical nature of historical development could help to create a more balanced picture, analogous to what Reinhart Kosel-leck has called the contemporaneity of the uncontemporaneous, that is the “temporal layers of diverse duration and origin which however take effect con-temporaneously”.6 Koselleck has never been understood as wishing to do away with historical temporal sequences – and this is not Todorova’s goal, either. Her plea is directed against the moralizing stance inherent to the progress vs. back-wardness dichotomy and towards a more complex perspective. In this sense, she advocates a decisive spatial and temporal dynamization of historical thinking.7

The contributors to this volume accomplish just that. They invite us to en-gage in a dialogue that strengthens our consciousness of yet unexplored poten-tial and also to reflect upon our own cultural framing. This amounts to an up-dated variant of what Jürgen Kocka wrote more than a decade ago with refer-ence to east central Europe: the imperative is to take up the challenge to create a comparative and entangled European history that includes, in a balanced man-ner, all of Europe’s subregions.8 A vast array of topics remains understudied, and the heuristic potential is enormous. This is particularly true with regard to methodological and theoretical connections to wider European and global themes. By fostering the dialogue not only in the fields of social and cultural

5 Maria TODOROVA, The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism, in: Slavic Review 64 (2005), no. 1, 140-164, 149-150. Cf. also Stephen SHULMAN, Challenging the Civic/Ethnic and West/East Dichotomies in the Study of Nationalism, in: Comparative Political Studies 35 (2002), no. 5, 554-85. On the not to be un-derestimated self-identifications of southeast Europeans in this regard cf. Alexander KIOSSEV, Self-Colonizing Metaphor, in: Zbynek BALADRÁN / Vit HAVRÁNEK (eds.), Atlas of Transfor-mation, Prague / Zürich 2010, available at http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/s/self-colonization/the-self-colonizing-metaphor-alexander-kiossev.html.

6 Reinhart KOSELLECK. Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik, Frankfurt am Main 2000, 9. The concept originally refers back to Ernst BLOCH, Erbschaft dieser Zeit, Frankfurt/M. 1962 (orig. 1935), 104 and passim.

7 TODOROVA, The Trap of Backwardness, 145. Cf. the analogous reflections in Iván Zoltán DÉNES, Liberalism and Nationalism: An Ambiguous Relationship, in: Id. (ed.), Liberty and the Search for Identity. Liberal Nationalisms and the Legacy of Empires, Budapest / New York 2006, 1-17, 3 and 8: “A way should be found to avoid the usual schematic models of the original backwardness of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, the different romantic na-tionalistic Sonderwegs and their various national uniqueness mythologies [emphasis in the original, S.R.].”

8 Jürgen KOCKA, Das östliche Mitteleuropa als Herausforderung für eine vergleichende Ge-schichte Europas, in: Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 49 (2000), no. 49, 159-174.

10 Introduction: Beyond the Balkans

history, but also in the new political history, the interrelations and transfer routes between southeastern Europe, the rest of the continent, and the world be-come apparent. Until now, these connections have largely been hidden beneath both lingering mental mappings and the institutionalized boundaries between so-called general history and its geographically defined subdisciplines. Unfor-tunately, twenty years after the end of the bipolar system, ten years after the first EU enlargement eastwards, and at the moment when the second Yugoslav suc-cessor state, Croatia, joins the union, there continues to be relatively little dis-cussion among geographically defined subdisciplines, and especially so when it comes to the Balkans. An intensified methodological and theoretical dialogue could contribute significantly to fostering empirical research that either con-firms or rejects what, until now, has largely been framed by persistent and ex-clusionary mental mappings.

To be sure, for southeast European historical studies (and related fields), Car-sten Goehrke’s and Heiko Haumann’s point about eastern Europe remains valid: studying it in the framework of a separate subdiscipline will only become super-fluous when historians have achieved an equal standing among themselves. This goal must be accomplished with regard to historians’ linguistic training and their cultural predispositions, regardless of whether they study Russia, Hungary, Serbia, England, France or Switzerland.9 From the postulate to do away with Eastern European History10 to the so-called spatial turn – the search for specific historical features and structures that define historical regions11 – the debate has focused on east central and eastern Europe, largely ignoring southeast European regions.12

9 Carsten GOEHRKE / Heiko HAUMANN, Osteuropa und Osteuropäische Geschichte. Konstrukti-onen – Geschichtsbilder – Aufgaben. Ein Beitrag aus Schweizer Sicht, in: Jahrbücher für Ge-schichte Osteuropas 52 (2004), no. 4, 585-596, 591.

10 Jörg BABEROWSKI, Das Ende der Osteuropäischen Geschichte, in: Osteuropa 48 (1998), no. 8-9, 784-99. His was a reply to Thomas BREMER / Wim van MEURS / Klaus MÜLLER, Vorwärts in die Vergangenheit? Zur Zukunft der Osteuropaforschung, in: ibid. 48 (1998), no. 4, 408-416. Cf. also the subsequent reaction by Dietrich BEYRAU, Totgesagte leben länger. Die Osteuropa-Disziplinen im Dschungel der Wissenschaften, in: Osteuropa 48 (1998), no. 10, 1041-1049; for a synthesis of the discussion e. g. Stefan CREUTZBERGER et al. (eds.), Wohin steuert die Osteuropaforschung? Eine Diskussion, Köln 2000.

11 In the path of Karl SCHLÖGEL, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik, München 2003. Cf. Ulrike JUREIT, “Raumbilder sind die Träume der Gesell-schaft.” Zur Organisation des Nebeneinanders, in: Id., Das Ordnen von Räumen. Territorium und Lebensraum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Hamburg 2012, 7-29, esp. 10-15, for a critical assessment of the consequences of the so-called spatial turn.

12 In a rather defensive dialectic (with regard to the subdiscipline Eastern European History) Frithjof Benjamin SCHENK, Der spatial turn und die Osteuropäische Geschichte, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, 1 June, 2006, available at <http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/2006-06-001>. In what sounds like an echo of what is put forth in this volume, he pointed out that “precisely the field of tension between the perspective onto a historical region as an invention, construc-tion and product of processes of perception and communication on the one hand, and its un-

Sabine Rutar 11

Todorova’s exposition of the persistence of (negative) mental maps of the Balkans13 was countered by Holm Sundhaussen, who constructed the Balkans as a historical region that is distinguished by nine elements: 1) instability and eth-nic heterogeneity; 2) loss and late perception of ancient heritage; 3) Byzantine-Orthodox heritage; 4) anti-western dispositions and patterns of cultural dis-tancing from western and east central Europe; 5) Ottoman-Islamic heritage; 6) socio-economic backwardness in the modern era; 7) the modalities of state and nation-building processes; 8) mentality and inclination to historical mythopoe-sis; 9) the Balkans as an instrument of Great Power politics. It is not the individ-ual elements, he continued, but their clustering over a long period of time that turns the region into something historically specific.14 Todorova denounced the (cultural) presupposition that “the West” is “naturally” inscribed with features and values like tolerance, democracy, and rationality, while these same features are equally “naturally” declared to be non-existent in the Balkans. Hence the proposal to Europeanize, indeed globalize, the Balkans – since the only valid presupposition is that the historical complexity of the Balkans as a European subregion can only be understood within a wider European and global context, and without declaring the subregion “West” to be the norm and the subregion “Southeast” to be its deviation.15 Sundhaussen declared himself in favour of dif-ference, i.e. in favour of the right of this historical-cultural entity located in the area south of the Danube and Sava rivers, to be different. Both Todorova and Sundhaussen have a point. It quickly became apparent that they were concerned about quite different matters: Todorova about imaginaries, and Sundhaussen about spatial boundaries that can claim historical legitimacy. The latter later

derstanding as a structural and structuring space on the other offers plurifold linkages to analogus terrains of European history writing”.

13 Maria TODOROVA, Imagining the Balkans, New York 1997. Todorova drew on Milica BAKI4-HAYDEN, Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia, in: Slavic Review 54 (1995), no. 4, 917-931. Among the pertinent works on discursive Balkanism that followed suit are Vesna GOLDWORTHY, Inventing Ruritania. The Imperialism of the Imagination, Lon-don 22013 (orig. 1998), Pamela BALLINGER, Definitional Dilemmas: Southeastern Europe as “Culture Area”?, in: Balkanologie 3 (Dezember 1999), no. 2, 73-91; Dušan I. BJELI4 / Obrad SAVI4 (eds.), Balkan as Metaphor. Between Globalization and Fragmentation, Cambridge/Ma. 2003.

14 His reaction was to the – quite poor – German translation of TODOROVA, Imagining the Bal-kans, see Die Erfindung des Balkans: Europas bequemes Vorurteil, Darmstadt 1999. Cf. Holm SUNDHAUSSEN, Europa balcanica. Der Balkan als historischer Raum Europas, in: Ge-schichte und Gesellschaft 25 (1999), n. 4, 626-653. Following this essay, the debate between the two scholars continued in the same journal, cf. Maria TODOROVA, Der Balkan als Analy-sekategorie: Grenzen, Raum, Zeit, in: ibid. 28 (2002), n. 3, 470-492; Holm SUNDHAUSSEN, Der Balkan: Ein Plädoyer für Differenz, in: ibid. 29 (2003), n. 4, 608-624.

15 TODOROVA, Der Balkan als Analysekategorie, 489.

12 Introduction: Beyond the Balkans

summarized the previous debate with Todorova and wrote about the “mingling of mental map and historical region”.16

Writing European and Global History

In so-called general European history writing, southeastern Europe has largely been omitted, and maybe it is here that the notions of being different and of be-ing constructed as the spatial and temporal “other” have led to the most regretta-ble consequences. A lively debate about a renewed European history, which has been broadened and enhanced by analytical categories like translocality, trans-regionality, transnationality and globality, has been under way for years. Partici-pants have sought to include the eastern European space in this debate. Yet, for the most part they have done so to the exclusion of the southern part of eastern Europe.17 In fact, the latter continues to be consciously excluded from histories of Europe and the world.18 Apart from certain historical moments, southeastern

16 Holm SUNDHAUSSEN, Die Wiederentdeckung des Raums: Über Nutzen und Nachteil von Ge-schichtsregionen, in: Konrad CLEWING / Oliver Jens SCHMITT (eds.), Südosteuropa. Von vor-moderner Vielfalt und nationalstaatlicher Vereinheitlichung. Festschrift für Edgar Hösch, München 2005, 13-34, 30. For a good overview of the semantics of the concepts “Balkans”, “Southeastern Europe”, “Central Europe”, “Eastern Europe” and of the historiographic de-bates connected to them cf. Stefano PETRUNGARO, L’Europa dell’Est, o a est dell’Europa. In margine a un dibattito intorno a mental maps, confini e balcanismo, in: 900. Per una storia del tempo presente 10 (2004), 77-86; for Germany cf. Dietmar MÜLLER, Southeastern Europe as a Historical Meso-region: Constructing Space in Twentieth-Century German Historiography, in: European Review of History 10 (2003), no. 2, 393-408.

17 Cf. the forum Zur Europäizität des östlichen Europa, May/June 2006, available at <http:// hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/index.asp?id=744&pn=texte>; Anna Veronika WENDLAND, Randgeschichten? Osteuropäische Perspektiven auf Kulturtransfer und Verflechtungs-geschichte, in: Osteuropa 58 (2008), no. 3, 59-116. Of the vast literature on how to conceptualize comparative, entangled, relational, and global history I mention only Jürgen OSTERHAMMEL, Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats: Studien zu Beziehungs-geschichte und Zivilisationsvergleich, Göttingen 22003, who does consider the southeast Eu-ropean space; Heinz-Gerhard HAUPT / Jürgen KOCKA (eds.), Beyond Comparison? Debates on Comparative and Transnational History in Germany, New York 2008, who do not take much account of it. The contributions to Agnes ARNDT / Joachim C. HÄBERLEIN / Christiane REINECKE (eds.), Vergleichen, Verflechten, Verwirren? Europäische Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Theorie und Praxis, Göttingen 2011, are a welcome exercise in both including eas-tern Europe and reflecting upon the “western bias” (Bo Stråth, 67). Unfortunately, no south-east Europeanist has been invited to contribute to this volume, either. To be sure, Hungary is included (as a part of east central Europe, Márkus KELLER), as well as a comparative look at the British and Habsburg Empires (Bruno GAMMERL).

18 Josep FONTANA, The Distorted Past. A Re-interpretation of Europe, Oxford 1995, is a case in point, providing for an otherwise fascinating reading. Another history of Europe that omits the Balkans and Turkey is Rainer LIEDTKE, Geschichte Europas. Von 1815 bis zur Gegenwart, Paderborn 2010. Omitting this “other”, this periphery Balkans seems particularly telling in volumes that expressis verbis are concerned with Europe’s fringes and with pro-

Sabine Rutar 13

Europe is deemed too peripheral to be of much relevance, even in those ac-counts that do not programmatically exclude it. Ultimately, in both European and global histories, one does not learn much about southeastern Europe.19 In-stead, information is communicated in a subtle way and/or without much re-flection. It genuinely comes across as a – negative or at best completely uninter-esting – “other”. To be sure, such “othering” has been practiced not only in the western part of the continent, but also in east central Europe, eastern Europe, and not least within southeastern Europe itself.20

This is not to say that works that attempt to take a genuinely comprehensive European approach do not exist. They do – mostly in the form of collective vol-umes and online projects. These works signal that the path paved by the authors of this volume has in fact begun to be trodden, albeit cautiously and often as an effect of individual academic networks rather than programmatic research. But this may be a harbinger of things to come.21

cesses of othering, cf. Frank BÖSCH / Ariane BRILL / Florian GREINER (eds.), Europabilder im 20. Jahrhundert. Entstehung an der Peripherie, Göttingen 2012; Bo STRÅTH (ed.), Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other, Bruxelles et al. 42010 (2000). Both volumes include east-ern Europe, yet focus on non-European areas.

19 Examples are Julian JACKSON (ed.), Europe 1900-1945, Oxford 22009; and Mary FULBROOK (ed.), Europe Since 1945, Oxford 32009. Both volumes are part of the “Short Oxford History of Europe” and both feature chapters on Europe’s interconnections with the wider world (Rajnarayan CHANDAVARKAR, Imperialism and the European Empires; and David ARMSTRONG / Erik GOLDSTEIN, Interaction with the Non-European World). Other examples include Tony JUDT, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945, New York 2005; Hartmut KAELBLE (ed.), The European Way. European Societies During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, New York 2004; Peter N. STEARNS (ed.), Encyclopedia of European Social His-tory. From 1350 to 2000, 6 vols., New York et al. 2001; David REYNOLDS, One World Divisi-ble: a Global History since 1945, London 2000; Göran THERBORN, European Modernity and Beyond: the Trajectory of European Societies, 1945-2000, London / Thousand Oaks/Ca., 1995. Eric J. HOBSBAWM’s eminent trilogy also belongs here (The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, London 1977; The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, London 1987; Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, London 1994).

20 Cf. KIOSSEV, Self-Colonizing Metaphor. On the southern part of eastern Europe in the context of a problematization of the spatial category of the European south cf. Stefan TROEBST, Le Monde méditerranéen – Südosteuropa – Black Sea World. Geschichtsregionen im Süden Eu-ropas, in: Frithjof Benjamin SCHENK / Monika WINKLER (eds.), Der Süden. Neue Perspekti-ven auf eine europäische Geschichtsregion, Frankfurt/M. 2007, 49-73.

21 Cf. the online portals Europäische Geschichte Online, available at <http://www.ieg-ego.eu>, the Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, available at <http://www.europa.clio-on-line.de/site/lang__de-DE/40208781/default.aspx>. A pioneering Berlin institution, the Zent-rum für Vergleichende Geschichte Europas (2001-2004), saw its follow-up in the Berliner Kolleg für Vergleichende Geschichte Europas (2004-2009). Today the institution continues in spirit at the former managing director Arnd Bauerkämper’s Chair for History of the 19th and 20th Century at the Free University. Unfortunately, in spite of Holm Sundhaussen’s having been one of the Directors both of the Zentrum and the Kolleg, it carried out only few research projects dealing with Europe’s southeastern part. The potential to take the initiative seems in-

14 Introduction: Beyond the Balkans

Two books by Hartmut Kaeble, one of the most renowned German scholars of European social history, illustrate just how pervasive the established patterns of perception are.22 My aim here is not to criticize, but rather to illustrate pars pro toto how mental maps forcefully condition our thinking. The “Europeaniza-tion” of Europe, a “process of different, yet entangled developments”, should “give credit to the complexities of Europeanization”, Kaelble and his co-editor Martin Kirsch write in the introduction to their volume “Selbstverständnis und Gesellschaft der Europäer: Aspekte der sozialen und kulturellen Europäisierung im späten 19. und 20. Jahrhundert” (Europeans’ ways of seeing themselves and their society: Aspects of social and cultural Europeanization in the late 19th and 20th centuries). This volume advocates the imperative “to comprehend this con-cept [of Europeanization, S.R.] not as a closed European history, but as one of Europe’s entanglements and relationships with global history”. “Researching transfer and entanglements”, the volume’s editors continue, “poses a challenge for historical research on Europe, as such research in most cases cannot be con-ducted only bilaterally, but must scrutinize a network of transfers and entan-

herent here, though. In print cf. Adrian BRISKU, Bittersweet Europe. Albanian and Georgian Discourses on Europe, 1878-2008, New York / Oxford 2013, a study that originates in a framework of so-called “general history”, albeit one situated at another of Europe’s fringes, the Helsinki-based ERC project “Europe 1815-1914. Between Restoration and Revolution, National Constitutions and Global Law: an Alternative View on the European Century”, led by Bo Stråth. But see also Pim DEN BOER et al. (eds.), Europäische Erinnerungsorte. Mythen und Grundbegriffe des europäischen Selbstverständnisses, 3 vols., München 2012; Pavel KOLÁT / Miloš TEZNÍK (eds.), Historische Nationsforschung im geteilten Europa 1945-1989, Köln 2012; Isabella LÖHR / Matthias MIDDELL / Hannes SIEGRIST (eds.), Kultur und Beruf in Europa, Stuttgart 2012 (Schriftreihe Europäische Geschichte in Quellen und Essays 2); Arnd BAUERKÄMPER, Das umstrittene Gedächtnis. Die Erinnerung an Nationalsozialismus, Fa-schismus und Krieg in Europa seit 1945, Paderborn 2012; Werner DAUM u. a. (eds.), Hand-buch der europäischen Verfassungsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert. Institutionen und Rechts-praxis im gesellschaftlichen Wandel, vol. 2: 1815-1847, Bonn 2012; ARNDT / HÄBERLEIN / REINECKE (eds.), Vergleichen, Verflechten, Verwirren?; Iris SCHRÖDER / Hannes SIEGRIST (eds.), Europa und die Europäer. Quellen und Essays zur modernen europäischen Geschichte. Festschrift für Hartmut Kaelble zum 65. Geburtstag, Stuttgart 2005; Mark MAZOWER, The Dark Continent. Europe’s 20th Century, London 1998. More than a decade earlier and before the fall of the so-called Iron Curtain, a German-based Handbook of European Economic and Social History demonstrated what a history that includes all European subregions might look like, cf. Wolfram FISCHER et al. (eds.), Europäische Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zur Gegenwart, Stuttgart 1987 (Handbuch der europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte 6); Id. et al. (eds.), Europäische Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart 1985 (Handbuch der euro-päischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte 5).

22 Kaelble was a director of the Berlin-based Zentrum für Vergleichende Geschichte Europas and the Berliner Kolleg für Vergleichende Geschichte Europas. Beside him, Holm Sundhaussen, Manfred Hildermeier and Jürgen Kocka were part of the directorate of these two institutions.

Sabine Rutar 15

glements amongst many European countries”.23 In the contributions to this vol-ume, Europe is most frequently seen in relation to the USA, but some of the es-says link Europe with Latin America, Asia, Russia, the Arab countries, the Ot-toman Empire, and Turkey. There are also reflections on Europe’s eastern bor-ders, which vividly illustrate discursive changes and their motives in the 19th and 20th centuries. As the nucleus of Europe emerges, however, it is defined by basic Christian values, the enlightenment, achievements in parliamentary gov-ernance and the rule of law, and Cold War anti-communism. This amounts to a focus on western Europe and “the world” to the exclusion of the European pe-ripheries in the east and southeast, not to mention the north, south, and – in fact – the continent’s geographical far west.24 While the Balkans are by no means defined as an extra-European territory, they are perceived as even more periph-eral than the easternmost rim of eastern Europe. The Balkans exist beyond the editors’ interest; they are clearly not worth problematizing. The paths from western Europe towards Turkey and the Arabic and Islamic worlds lead across – nowhere. The editors thereby forgo the opportunity to see these regions as con-nected.25 The Balkans are only mentioned in passing in Kaelble’s concluding chapter when he refers to the “discussion over Europe’s border in the East and Southeast in the framework of EU enlargement [my emphasis, S.R.]”.26 The “European peculiarities” upon which Kaelble reflects here include forms of or-ganizing the family, labour, social milieux, the city, the welfare state, consump-tion, as well as religion, the public sphere, intellectuals, state administration, the rule of law, industrial relations, migration, and minorities. These aspects of Eu-ropean history are examined against a decidedly west European backdrop, lead-ing to astonishing formulations like the following: “Still, the average age of

23 Hartmut KAELBLE / Martin KIRSCH, Einleitung: Zur Europäisierung des Selbstverständnisses und der Gesellschaft der Europäer im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, in: Id. (eds.), Selbstverständnis und Gesellschaft der Europäer. Aspekte der sozialen und kulturellen Europäisierung im späten 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/M. et al. 2008, 11-26, 13-14.

24 Cf. on neglected European peripheries in “European” history writing Diana MISHKOVA / Bo STRATH / Balázs TRENCSÉNYI, Regional History as a “Challenge” to National Frameworks of Historiography: The Case of Central, Southeastern, and Northern Europe, in: Matthias MIDDELL / Lluis ROURA (eds.), Transnational Challenges to National History-Writing, Ba-singstoke 2013, 257-314.

25 Recently attention has been drawn to the historical elements shared by the Balkans and the Near and Middle East, which certainly could help overcoming Euro-centric/western reductive patterns of thought, cf. Karl KASER, The Balkans and the Near East. Introduction to a Shared History, Wien et al. 2011 (Studies on South East Europe, 12); Eyal GINIO / Karl KASER (eds.), Ottoman Legacies in the Contemporary Mediterranean. The Balkans and the Middle East Compared, Jerusalem (forthcoming).

26 Hartmut KAELBLE, Europäisches Selbstverständnis und Gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen im 20. Jahrhundert, in: Id. / KIRSCH (eds.), Selbstverständnis und Gesellschaft der Europäer, 421-447, 435.

16 Introduction: Beyond the Balkans

marriage in Europe is significantly higher than in the United States or in East-ern Europe […] [my emphasis, S.R.].“27

Several years later, in 2011, Kaelble published his “Kalter Krieg und Wohlfahrtsstaat. Europa 1945-1989” (Cold War and welfare state: Europe 1945-1989).28 Here, he wishes “to ask what accounts for European history as a whole”. Yet, he immediately adds the caveat that the “really important Euro-pean tendencies” rarely touched all of Europe’s subregions. Thus, he also wish-es to point out intra-European “differences, their increases and decreases”. He continues that he has no intention of producing, based on such differences, a “dogma of a continent of exceptional internal diversity”. Instead, he wishes to pursue each epoch’s indelible differences and commonalities in a way that “no handbook on the history of Europe since 1945 has yet accomplished.”29

Kaelble suceeds impressively in this endeavour. Perhaps most conspicuously, he refrains from any moral judgment in describing the developments of the Cold War and the welfare state in both liberal capitalist and state socialist econ-omies. He describes both as characterized by “euphoric planning”,30 which pro-vides the basis for a common, if varied narrative of modernization and indus-trialization (as well as relative prosperity and social security) in both “the East” and “the West”. At the end of the Cold War divide, Kaelble argues, European societies were closer than ever before. To be sure, Kaelble’s argument is con-vincing not least because he focuses on societal, cultural, and economic history rather than on political developments. No attempt is made to problematize the concepts of democracy and dictatorship – let alone relate them to one another as part and parcel of contemporary European history and thus transcend the bipolar systemic divide in terms of a comprehensive political history of Europe after 1945.

On a more subtle level, the difficulty of setting aside long-rehearsed mental patterns pervades this book as well. At times Kaelble sweeps aside differences with statements couched in the expression “Europe as a whole” (Europa als Ganzes).31 He does sometimes go on to expand on this whole with differentiat-

27 Ibid., 439. 28 KAELBLE, Kalter Krieg und Wohlfahrtsstaat. Europa 1945-1989. The book appeared in the 10-

volume series “European History” of the C.H. Beck publishing house, which aims at “making accessible the newest state of the art of research on European history in an up-to-date man-ner”, cf. the information on the series available at <http://www.chbeck.de/Kalter-Krieg-Wohlfahrtsstaat/productview.aspx?product=862921>.

29 KAELBLE, Kalter Krieg und Wohlfahrtsstaat, 9-10. 30 Ibid., 112. 31 Ibid., 93: “In the 1950s and 1960s, Europe as a whole was urbanized once and for all.” 179:

“Between 1970 and 1980, prices rose on the average two-and-a-half-times in Europe as a whole, according to offical documents.” 190: “The share of students per age-group by the 1950s and 1960s had quasi quadrupled in Europe as a whole, rising from 4% to 15%.” 191: “In the 1950s and 1960s, in Europe as a whole men gained five, women as many as six years in life expectancy […]”. 214: “In both western and eastern Europe the state in this epoch [the

Sabine Rutar 17

ing details. Elsewhere, on the contrary, he points to an alleged unavailability of information with regard to eastern Europe.32 As a consequence, while more ge-neric treatments of “East” vs. “West” come across as balanced, those aspects treated in an in-depth manner are taken predominantly from the western part of Europe. To be sure, Kaelble makes it quite clear that certain developments oc-curred much more quickly in the eastern and southeastern parts of Europe. Ur-banization and industrialization processes, for example, continued apace in east-ern Europe even as western Europe experienced stagnation, if not decline in these areas. Indeed, these divergent trajectories account for the structural simi-larities that European societies had reached by the end of the Cold War.33

Nevertheless, the mental map of the western scholar interferes. Kaelble main-tains, for example, that while some European states were still “colonial rulers” after 1945, others had quite recently been “a sort of colony” themselves. Kaelble applies the latter description to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bul-garia, “the countries of the Balkans”, Finland, and Ireland under imperial rule.34 This experience as “a sort of colony” was relived, he continues, in Soviet domi-nation after 1945.35 But what is “a sort of colony” in the first place? And can the Empires and the Soviet sphere simply be subsumed under such a “sort of” common denominator?

Anna Veronika Wendland has noted an important difference between colo-nial and imperial societies. Colonial societies acted against a hegemonic Eu-rope. Imperial (and, in a different way, Soviet) societies, however, acted against local elites and power structures perceived to inhibit these societies’ otherwise natural path towards Europe. The countries under Tsarist, Ottoman, and Habs-burg imperial rule as well as those later under Soviet influence perceived them-selves as intrinsically European. They did not consider themselves extra-Euro-pean, as the colonized countries did.36 In a complementary vein, yet from a completely different perspective, Alexander Kiossev sees the cultural identities of the small nations in the east emerging “as a spin-off in the process of Euro-colonial hegemony, in an asymmetrical symbolic exchange with the colonial center”. Thus, these states’ cultures were not created by the imperial power as a

1970s] ended up with an amounted lack of trust.” 245: “Around 1990 in Europe as a whole more than two fifths of all employees still worked in the industrial sector, many more than in any other region of the world.”

32 Ibid., for example on pages 125 and 232. 33 Ibid., 93 and 125. 34 Ibid., 49. Cf. the conspicuous conceptual and perceptive difference between this stance of

“empires as colonizers” and Kiossev’s defining “Europe” or the “West” as the disseminator of “a Europe-centered colonial conceptual repertoire” transferred via local intermediary intellec-tuals, cf. KIOSSEV, Self-Colonizing Metaphor, 2.

35 KAELBLE, Kalter Krieg und Wohlfahrtsstaat, 51. 36 WENDLAND, Randgeschichten?, 106-107.

18 Introduction: Beyond the Balkans

colony of sorts, but rather by the urges of an imaginary imposed by the pro-cesses of modernization and colonization in “the West”.37

What is more, if the experiences of “colonies” and “sort-of-colonies” are seen as somehow analogous, should this observation not have inspired more in-depth reflection on newly established links between former colonies and Europe after 1945? The non-aligned movement is a case in point. Yugoslavia, one of the movement’s leading countries, was composed of former “sort-of-colony” re-gions, yet it lay outside the Soviet “sort-of-colonial” sphere. Kaelble hardly even mentions the 1948 split between Stalin and Tito – he refers to it as the “Yugoslav conflict”38 – and does not list the non-aligned movement among Eu-rope’s “five new developments” in global relations before the mid-1970s.39 Eu-ropean governments did not attempt to counteract their regional interdepend-encies conditioned by the Cold War order and the will of the two superpowers, Kaelble maintains. He simply notes that “the only exception” to this rule was “the politics of global cooperation of the non-aligned states of the Yugoslav President Tito together with the Indian Prime Minister Nehru and the Egyptian President Nasser”.40 An exceptionalism established in this succinct way reads like a missed opportunity for a more inclusive narrative. This is especially true because the non-aligned movement did attempt to challenge the bipolar world order. On the whole, the book contains much more information on non-Euro-pean contexts than on southeast European ones.

The trap of the western mind snaps firmly shut in the epilogue. Here Kaelble, who set out to sketch the “really important European trends”, asks whether the events of 1989 can be defined as a “European event”. “Decisive in the interpre-tation of 1989 as a European event”, he writes, “is the fact that 1989/90 also deeply changed the political landscape in western Europe.”41 Ergo “really im-portant European trends” only occur when the subregion western Europe is in-volved. Had the systemic change of 1989 in the east not also affected the west, it would only have been an east European event, not “a really important Euro-pean trend”. Understandably, scholars who focus on eastern and/or southeastern Europe in their work – or on any European periphery, or on global history, for that matter – , cannot but wish for substantial corrective research that challenges such lingering mental patterns.

37 KIOSSEV, Self-Colonizing Metaphor, 4. 38 KAELBLE, Kalter Krieg und Wohlfahrtsstaat, 65 and 113. 39 Ibid., 147; cf. also the subchapter “De-Colonisation”, 154-164. 40 Ibid., 168. 41 Ibid., 271.

Sabine Rutar 19

Beyond the Balkans

Diana Mishkova has pointed out that

“if over the last decades the study of the Balkans has laid claim to the status of a meaningful field of research – that is, if the field has generated knowl-edge that could affect the methods and categories used by other fields (such as historiography, anthropology, cultural studies) as well as the theoretical (Western) models of exploring ‘the Other’ – the credit should largely be given to those projects that have involved the field in a direct dialogue with the theoretical and conceptual discussions unfolding in other areas.”42

Karl Kaser struck up the same tune when he wrote that

“the comparison of European cultures and historical-anthropological ap-proaches [are] those most interesting for our discipline [i. e. Southeast Euro-pean History, S.R.]. These are also the fields in which Southeast European History can offer relevant knowledge, thereby contributing to an innovation of general history.”43

As a matter of fact, studies in modern southeast European history can hardly do without reference to France, Great Britain, Germany, and even Italy. Yet, west-ern European societies are usually studied without taking account of, say, Po-land, Serbia, Bulgaria, or Greece. The contributions to this volume prove that this approach lacks historical legitimacy.

In January 2007, historians of southeastern and western Europe convened to foster dialogue. The conference took place at the Institute for Social Movements in Bochum, a place where the Balkans are not usually the primary focus of scholars’ attention. The workshop turned out to be an explorative historio-graphical laboratory in which the participants problematized the analytical cate-gories of space, time, comparison, transfer, and entanglement for European so-cial history of the 19th and 20th centuries from a southeastern perspective, chal-lenging many western European mental parameters. In his keynote lecture, Holm Sundhaussen outlined several fields of research that could contribute to the evenly matched inclusion of southeastern Europe in European historiog-raphy. These included philo-Serbian attitudes in the German-speaking lands of the early 19th century,44 the positive reputation of socialist Yugoslavia, as well as manifold processes of modernization that await more intensive research from

42 Diana MISHKOVA, Symbolic Geographies and Visions of Identity. A Balkan Perspective, in: European Journal of Social Theory 11 (2008), no. 2, 237-256, 238.

43 KASER, Südosteuropäische Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft, 5. 44 Cf. from the perspective of the literary scholar Boris PREVIŠI4, Die topologische Festschrei-

bung Südosteuropas aus dem Geist der Dichtung: Goethe und Vuk Karadži5, in: Markus WINKLER / Ralf SIMON (eds.), Die Topographie Europas in der romantischen Imagination. Fribourg 2009, 137-154.

20 Introduction: Beyond the Balkans

a comprehensively European and global perspective. These processes include the pronounced urban-rural contrasts between the elites and the masses, re-search on (changing) value systems, and the history of migration, all of which could contribute significantly to overcoming the single national master narra-tives that have largely functioned in isolation from each other.45 The question of why some countries on the European periphery that were economically back-ward in comparison to the European centre in the 19th century succeeded in catching up, while others have been unable to do so, has not been comprehen-sively answered.46 The fact that similar questions have instead been tackled by experts on extra-European societies indicates that the field of Southeast Euro-pean History has ignored important issues, Sundhaussen maintained. Perhaps most importantly, and not only with regard to the tasks he mentioned, Sundhaussen pointed out that literally hundreds of thousands of sources from the period since the second half of the 19th century remain unexplored.47

After the conference, the dialogue between the participants continued, and several more advocates of the “common cause” were found before this book fi-nally materialized. Its chapters are the result of an intense practising of what Mishkova calls the “direct dialogue with the theoretical and conceptual discus-sions unfolding in other areas”.

Future research will need to develop the integration of studies of representa-tion and imagination (mental mapping) with those based on historical documen-tation. This will allow to counterbalance the stereotypes and prejudices – which are alive and well – with empirical studies that focus on historical agency within social structures, cultural contexts, and the new history of the political.48 The intention should not be to do away with difference in the name of a “normaliza-tion” of the Balkans in favour of Europe. That would be just as misguided as is the current discriminating against the Balkans. Instead, the objective should be

45 Cf. from the perspective of the history of migration Ulf BRUNNBAUER, Der Balkan als translokaler Raum. Verflechtung, Bewegung und Geschichte, in: Südosteuropa-Mitteilungen (2011), no. 2, 79-94. Christiane REINECKE, Migranten, Staaten und andere Staaten. Zur Ana-lyse transnationaler und nationaler Handlungslogiken in der Migrationsgeschichte, in: ARNDT / HÄBERLEIN / REINECKE (eds.), Vergleichen, Verflechten, Verwirren?, 243-267, using the ex-ample of German and British migrants, aptly illustrates how migrants are focal points of both national and transnational logics of migration regimes as well as of individual action, in many ways fostering the nation rather than transnationalizing it.

46 Cf. as an important step into the right direction Bogdan MURGESCU, România 3i Europa. Acumularea decalajelor economice (1500-2010), Ia3i 2010. In his long durée economic his-tory of Romania, Murgescu takes an in-depth comparative outlook on Denmark, Ireland, and Serbia/Yugoslavia.

47 Cf. the conference report, Revisiting South Eastern Europe. Comparative Social History of the 19th and 20th Centuries, Bochum, 25-28 January, 2007, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, 14 March, 2007, available at <http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=1510>.

48 Cf. the pointed essay on stereotypes and prejudices between the centre and the periphery by Augusta DIMOU, European History and European Stories. Ironic Encounters Between the Canon and the Fringes, in: Silvia MARTON (ed.), Europe in Its Making, la3i 2006, 237-254.

Sabine Rutar 21

to ensure a serious historical comprehensiveness that seeks to establish both dif-ferences and shared ground. In fact, a global history perspective can serve as a corrective here.

After the First World War, the nation state appeared as the essence of moder-nity, indeed the final goal of history. The historicization of this nation state premise has been under way for a while, albeit much more in a declaratory than in a factual manner. In an almost counter-cyclical manner, the nation state framework has found favour in the study of southeast European states over the last two decades. Nationalism has filled much of the ideological void left by the demise of state socialism. The historicization of the recent past and the systemic change of 1989/91 has just begun. Under no circumstances, however, can the contemporary history of southeastern Europe be written as a continuation of the shipwreck narrative that – implicitly or explicitly – assumes that the region’s nationalizing, modernizing, and state-building projects of the 20th century were doomed to fail because they were, by definition, backward and characterized by absences.49 It might help to remember that the premise of an original matrix against which everything else is to be measured and the feeling of backwardness that results from such measuring are by no means exclusive to the historiogra-phy on southeastern Europe. For decades, German national self-identifications have been conditioned, to varying degrees, by the imaginary of a belated Son-derweg.50

The history of Yugoslavia is a case where teleological ex post facto interpre-tations have been particularly evident. The most pressing question has been why so much violence was generated in the course of the country’s break-up. All too often, explanations have implied that the multinational state was doomed from its beginnings, thus approaching it with yet another pre-set analytical grid. If in hindsight, a core feature of Yugoslav statehood from 1918 onwards may appear to have been its failure to create sustainable legitimacy, suggesting that it was doomed from the beginning disregards the fact that generations of state engi-neers did not intend their project to fail.51 Ultimately, Jürgen Kocka’s observa-

49 Cf. KIOSSEV, Self-Colonization, on the degree to which this is a mental framework also in the region itself; Maria TODOROVA, The Process of Remembering Communism, in: ibid. (ed.), Remembering Communism. Genres of Representation, New York 2010, 9-34, for a general assessment of the state of the art of the (comparative) history of state socialism (s).

50 Cf. Reinhart KOSELLECK, Deutschland – eine verspätete Nation, in: Id., Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik, Frankfurt/M. 2000, 359-380; Thomas WELSKOPP, Identität ex negativo. Der “deutsche Sonderweg” als Metaerzählung in der bundesdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft der siebziger und achtziger Jahre, in: Konrad H. JARAUSCH / Martin SABROW (eds.), Die histori-sche Meistererzählung. Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte nach 1945, Göttingen 2002, 109-139.

51 Sabrina P. RAMET, The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918-2005, Washington/DC 2005, is a sophisticated analysis that nevertheless proceeds from this analyti-cal flaw. By flatly declaring the Titoist state to be illegitimate, for example, Ramet dispenses with the need to consider its legitimizing efforts. However, she also insists on the emergence

22 Introduction: Beyond the Balkans

tion remains valid that the historians’ task is to “investigate the differing paths that have led to civil society in Europe and strive for a typology of these paths, instead of declaring one path as the norm and the others as exceptions”.52 Or, one might add, as failures.

The same is true when it comes to a more adequate inclusion of southeastern Europe in European and global history. Comparison, transfer, and entanglement can be vehicles with which to turn the stances of both Todorova and Sundhaus-sen into points of departure for fruitful research. We need meso- and microhis-torical approaches that lead to detailed research on specific social groups, social and political movements, ideological currents, and that focus on defining their objects of study ex novo, applying a definition that places them in a comprehen-sively European and global investigative framework. Such approaches should nurture the historiography on southeastern Europe with a methodological inno-vation that will verify – or reject – existing mental maps of the Balkans. The ul-timate goal must be to historicize rather than perpetuate them.

Taking up the admonition of Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace Francis, who have argued that orientalist studies are actually interested in “the West” and therefore substantially marginalize the Balkans yet once more,53 I maintain that only a history that engages in a lively debate with the methodological, theoreti-cal, and conceptual framings of so-called general history can make visible the peculiarities of the region, and its heuristic and conceptual borders. Structural, historical-regional reflections à la Sundhaussen must be counterbalanced with the problem of a category that was an object of geopolitical instrumentalization from its inception and in turn played a substantial role in creating (academic) institutions dedicated to this region in the first place.54 The great potential inher-ent in an intensified entangled academic dialogue between historical sub-disci-

of a crisis of legitimacy, thus producing both a paradox and a circular argument. Useful against any type of teleological history writing is John BREUILLY, Conclusion: National Pecu-liarities?, in: Id., Labour and Liberalism in Nineteenth Century Europe. Essays in Compara-tive History, Manchester 1992, 273-295, 278-279: “Historians seek to understand change over time. They cannot wipe from their minds their knowledge of how more recent history relates to more distant history. Nor should they, even if they could, because it would involve tossing away the one advantage the historian enjoys over the historical actors – that is, knowing what comes next. What, of course, is objectionable is the assumption that what comes next had to come next or to analyse earlier situations in terms of the forces ‘promoting’ or ‘hindering’ the later events.”

52 KOCKA, Das östliche Mitteleuropa als Herausforderung, 172. 53 Wendy BRACEWELL / Alex DRACE-FRANCIS, South-Eastern Europe: History, Concepts,

Boundaries, in: Balkanologie 3 (1999), no. 2, 47-66, 60. 54 Cf. Mathias BEER (ed.), Südostforschung im Schatten des Dritten Reiches: Institutionen - In-

halte - Personen, München 2004; MÜLLER, Southeastern Europe as a Historical Meso-region; also Carl FREYTAG, Deutschlands “Drang nach Südosten”. Der Mitteleuropäische Wirt-schaftstag und der “Ergänzungsraum Südosteuropa” 1931-1945, Göttingen 2012. An important more general contribution in this context is JUREIT, Das Ordnen von Räumen.

Sabine Rutar 23

plines defined by the geographical area they study – and including all European regions – has been nicely summarized by Thomas Welskopp: 1) to identify questions that […] would probably never have come up otherwise; 2) eventu-ally, to correct false presumptions; 3) to define more precisely possible fields of research; 4) to broaden the general perspective, without losing sight of details and the empirical.55 Analyses of mental maps and of discourses will become more convincing if they are firmly tied to historical analyses that interconnect social contexts and make transfer empirically visible. In this manner, the rela-tionship between imaginaries and empirical evidence will eventually become more balanced.56 The concluding words of Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent are conducive to this aim: “If Europeans can give up their desperate desire to find a single workable defintion of themselves and if they can accept a more modest place in the world, they may come to terms more easily with the diversity and dissension which will be as much their future as their past.”57

Towards an Inclusive History of Southeastern Europe

The basic aim of the chapters in this book is the creation of an entangled, translocal, and transregional vision of southeastern Europe that incorporates Eu-rope and the wider world. The authors work towards this goal in a variety of ways. Some place more emphasis on the meta-level; others focus on an empiri-cal case exemplary for many others; some combine both of these approaches. All highlight the potential of a history of entanglements, transfers, and compari-sons that takes historical agency seriously.

The volume consists of three parts. The first contains chapters on “Space and Temporality, Entanglement and Transfer” and problematizes, firstly, meta-historical issues: questions of Balkan nationalism in a global perspective (John

55 Thomas WELSKOPP, Stolpersteine auf dem Königsweg. Methodenkritische Anmerkungen zum internationalen Vergleich in der Gesellschaftsgeschichte, in: Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 35 (1995), 339-367, esp. 363-365. To mention two studies that have accomplished this in terms of intra-southeast European comparison, focusing on Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece cf. Diana MISHKOVA, The Interesting Anomaly of Balkan Liberalism, in: DÉNES (ed.), Liberty and the Search for Identity, 399-456; Augusta DIMOU, Entangled Paths Towards Modernity. Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism in the Balkans, Budapest 2009. Cf. also Roumen DASKALOV / Tchavdar MARINOV (eds.), Entangled Histories of the Balkans, vol. 1: National Ideologies and Language Policies, Leiden 2013.

56 Cf. Johannes PAULMANN, Regionen und Welten. Arenen und Akteure regionaler Weltbezie-hungen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, in: Historische Zeitschrift 296 (2013), no. 3, 660-699, for a lucid reflection on this relationship and, in reality, for the whole contextualisation of “per-spectives and methodological building blocks with a practical intention for research” (ibid., 669) undertaken in this volume.

57 Mark MAZOWER, Epilogue: Making Europe, in: ibid., Dark Continent. Europe’s Twentieth Century, New York 2000 (orig. 1998), 395-403, 403.

24 Introduction: Beyond the Balkans

Breuilly); the space and time constitution of southeastern Europe (Diana Mishkova); the analogies and differences between Irish and eastern European questions (Guido Franzinetti); and the “elective affinities” between the new Bal-kan states and the declining Ottoman Empire (Vangelis Kechriotis). In the se-cond half of this part, authors explore comparative and/or entangled perspec-tives of exemplary historical phenomena: the social and cultural history of cooperativism (Augusta Dimou); universal suffrage as part of democratization processes and of interwar autocratic reactions to them (Wim van Meurs); as well as issues of nationalism, secularization, religion, and church history (Helke Stadtland and Katrin Boeckh).

The second part of the volume approaches historical agency and Eigen-Sinn in imperial military history (Y. Hakan Erdem); in the social history of peasants (Stefano Petrungaro); in issues of citizenship and loyalty (Borut Klabjan); con-cerning resistance and collaboration in World War II (Vesna Drapac); in labour history (Sabine Rutar). The authors in the third part exemplify how discourses, constructions and articulations of meaning can be pursued in an entangled and comparative manner. They focus on discourses and practices of veneration (Stefan Rohdewald); on ideological transfer generated and guided by the media (Stefan Ihrig); on the practice of an alternative culture under conditions of dicta-torship (Amaia Lamikiz Jauregiondo); on conflictual constructions of meaning in a postwar society (Falk Pingel); and on a broad perspective on issues of con-tention and meaningfulness in the history of multiethnic, multireligious cities in Europe and beyond (Vanni D’Alessio). This last chapter closes the circle, deliv-ering an illustration of the reflections found in John Breuilly’s opening chapter on the global perspectives of Balkan nationalism. Within this circle, the other chapters also “speak” to each other with regard to broader and multilayered is-sues concerning the historical scrutiny of Europe and the world from a southeast European perspective which the reader is invited to discover and explore.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the support and advice of the colleagues and insti-tutions that made the publication of this book possible, and to express my sin-cere gratitude to everyone involved in this project.

Karl Kaser accepted the volume into his series “Studies on South East Eu-rope”, and magnanimously supported it throughout the longish period of its de-velopment. The same is true of the Vienna-based Lit Verlag editor, Richard Kisling. I thank them both for this opportunity for fruitful cooperation.

The Institute for Social Movements at the Ruhr-University in Bochum pro-vided both logistical and financial support for the conference “Revisiting South-eastern Europe. Comparative Social History of the 19th and 20th Centuries” (25 - 28 January, 2007). That conference is at the root of this volume, so a special thank you is due to the institute’s former managing director, Jürgen Mittag. The

Sabine Rutar 25

volume is dedicated to the institute’s former director: Klaus Tenfelde. Without his intellectual curiosity and generous support, this project would never have gotten off the ground. His passing in 2011 has been a lasting shock.

The Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg generously funded the book during its final editing stage. Thus, a second special thank you is due to the institute’s directors, Ulf Brunnbauer and Jürgen Jerger. The institute’s chief of administration, Angelika Meier, helped tackle the ad-ministrative issues.

Without the opportunity to take a one year sabbatical, made possible by a fel-lowship at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, this book would still not be ready for publication. Accordingly, a third special thank you is due to the Kolleg’s di-rectors, Joachim von Puttkamer and Włodzimierz Borodziej. I am grateful to them for the ideal working conditions that allowed me to spend an extremely productive year at the idyllic Prinzessinnenschlösschen.

My sincere gratitude is also due to Augusta Dimou, Michal Kope7ek, Dietmar Müller, Boris Previši5, Natali Stegmann, and Joachim von Puttkamer, who read and commented on the introduction and my own contribution to the volume. Marian Rothstein read, commented on, and corrected several contribu-tions. Her continuous support, growing out of twenty years of friendship, kept me going throughout the long and sometimes tedious hunt for the devil in the details of the editing process.

Each author whose work appears in this volume engaged in an intensive dia-logue with the editor; everybody’s input was well above-average. Methodologi-cally connecting what might otherwise have been an excessively shimmering topical kaleidoscope was no easy task. It was only through extended debates and discussions that the book gained its present shape. Thanks are due to all of the authors for their diligence, good ideas, passion, and, not least, for their pa-tience with an editor distracted by other obligations for long periods of time.

Y. Hakan Erdem drew what has become the book’s cover image while lis-tening to the papers and discussions during the 2007 Bochum conference. I would like to sincerely thank him for providing this unique cover; especially because he created the image without any intention of having it published.

In preparing the book for print, Jelena Jojevi5 was a model assistant – effi-cient, thorough, and sensitive to every detail. Steve Milder assiduously edited the non-native speaker English language texts. Anne Elisabeth Boden gave the final touch to the introduction. A final thank you is due to all three of them.

Sabine Rutar, Jena / Potsdam, June 2013