The Great Cauldron by Marie-Janine Calic — history of the Balkans

A panoramic look at the region dispels preconceptions and restores its place in Europe

Tony Barber | July 2, 2019 | Financial Times

At the height of the Bosnian war in 1993 John Major, the UK prime minister, told the House of Commons that “the biggest single element behind what has happened in Bosnia is the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the discipline that that exerted over the ancient hatreds in the old Yugoslavia”. It was a profoundly misleading statement. In its reference to supposed “ancient hatreds”, however, it conformed to a pattern of stereotypical thinking about southeastern Europe that was at least two centuries old.

In her panoramic and convincingly presented history of the region, Marie-Janine Calic omits to mention Sir John’s remarks, but she offers two equally good examples. Edward Gibbon, the 18th-century historian, asserted near the start of his Decline and Fall of the Roman empire that Croatia and Bosnia were “still infested by tribes of barbarians”. Closer to our own day, the novelist Agatha Christie invented a country called Herzoslovakia, of which she wrote: “Principal rivers, unknown. Principal mountains, also unknown, but fairly numerous. Capital, Ekarest. Population, chiefly brigands. Hobby, assassinating kings and having revolutions.”

The central theme of The Great Cauldron is that southeastern Europe — Calic mostly avoids the term “Balkans”, pointing out that it is too often associated with “powder keg” and other pejorative expressions — has been more intimately connected with the wider world than understood. Clichés about backwardness and obscure, unsolvable conflicts miss the point that the region’s ancient Greek, Roman and medieval Christian origins, not to mention its connections with modern western culture and politics, make the area part of a common European civilisation.

As professor of eastern and southeastern European history at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Calic is an authoritative guide. Her book is a work of ambitious chronological and thematic scope, taking the story from Alexander the Great to the present day.

She is well qualified to discuss the 1990s wars of the Yugoslav succession, having worked for the international tribunal in The Hague that investigated war crimes and other atrocities committed in those conflicts. Her conclusion is unambiguous: “Mass crimes were overwhelmingly ordered by higher authorities; they were not driven primarily by the ethnic hatred of neighbours against neighbours.”

Throughout The Great Cauldron Calic draws attention to the interaction between southeastern Europe and the western world. In 1776, the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier, a future French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, visited a Greek Orthodox monastery on the island of Patmos and was astounded to hear the first question from a local monk: “Is Voltaire still living?”

In Romania, after the outbreak of the US civil war in 1861, “boyars, soldiers, priests, intellectuals and educated ladies read the translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, finding in the push to abolish slavery in the US a model for the cause of social reform at home. Likewise, Jovan Skerlic, an early 20th-century Serbian literary theorist, wrote that the choice facing his region was “either to accept western culture and live, as the Japanese have done, or to oppose it and be overrun, as has happened to the American Indians and Australian aborigines”.

In Calic’s view, the region slowly diverged from western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the world economy’s centre of gravity shifted to the Atlantic. The mainly agrarian societies of southeastern Europe, living under an Ottoman system that fell into relentless decline, were on the periphery of the new global trading networks and the arrival of industrialisation.

Modern nationalism was, in a sense, a curse for the Balkans. Between the French revolution and the first world war, the region’s peoples came increasingly to think of themselves as belonging to specific nations rather than being simply Catholics, Orthodox or Muslims. Unfortunately, “since clear geographic and ethnic boundaries existed neither in the past nor in the present, conflicts among the national movements were foreordained”.

Some of the best passages of Calic’s book are her vivid reconstructions of daily life in the region’s big cities and ports, such as Istanbul, Dubrovnik, Thessaloniki, Plovdiv, Belgrade and Sarajevo. She also includes lively sketches of characters such as Skanderbeg, the 15th-century Albanian hero (well known to western Europeans in his day), and Ivan Dominik Stratiko, the progressive Croatian bishop.

Calic ends with a touch of optimism: the region’s post-communist states appear on course to join the EU, and “the Balkan countries are in no way fated to remain in the poorhouse of Europe”. But she is realistic, too. “Today state- and nation-building in the former Yugoslavia is not yet finished, and numerous questions of identity, borders and status remain unresolved.”