Balkans

Developing the Term

The Turkish word Balkan denotes “wooded mountain.” The term entered the literature in the beginning of the 19th century, first used by the German geographer August Zeune (1809) to describe the countries south of the Old Mountain in Bulgaria. Zeune's intention was to name the southeastern part of the European landmass according to the main mountain systems, analogous to the Pyrenean and Apennine peninsulas. The geographical peculiarity of the Balkan peninsula is the nonexis-tence of a mountainous demarcation line dividing it from the rest of Europe on its northern part. Given the negative political connotation that the term later obtained, that geographical fact led to ideologically motivated debates among the countries of the region about who does and does not belong to the Balkan Peninsula.

From the beginnings of its usage, the term had a broader geopolitical meaning in addition to the narrow geographical one. Initially, the term was used for the territories directly or indirectly under the control or influence of the Ottoman Empire. Today, the term is used in a historical and political sense to indicate the territories of the modern countries of Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo in the southwest part of Serbia along the Albanian border, and the European part of Turkey. Depending on how the northern demarcation line is drawn, many authors also designate Croatia and Slovenia as being in the Balkan region.

The evolution of the negative connotation of the Balkans in the modern political discourse can be connected with the period of the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The competition among the great powers (mainly Russia and Austria-Hungary) to replace the declining Ottomans, combined with national revolutions, created social and geopolitical instability. Terms like the eastern question, powder keg of Europe, and tinderbox entered the vocabulary of international politics.

In a period characterized by general tranquility in the rest of Europe, the Balkan Peninsula was a scene of continuous conflicts through the 19th century. The Balkan wars (1912, 1913) and World War I definitively pushed the perception of the Balkans as being imbued with political, social, cultural, and ideological overtones, and Balkan became increasingly used as a pejorative term. This period also gave birth to the concept of balkanization, denoting political and territorial fragmentation within the context of ethnic heterogeneity and territorial and border disputes. The term Balkan started to signify the disintegration of viable nation-states and the reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, and the barbarian.

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