Regimes of ‘Balkan Historicity’: The Critical Turn and Regional Time in Studies of the Balkans before the First World War

Abstract

The period around the turn of the twentieth century, generally characterized by the radiealization of national discourses and the emergence of anti-liberal nationalism, also witnessed, for the first time, the rise of comparativist methodologies constructing a sort of Balkan/Southeast European historical unit. In many ways this new realm of historical research, devised primarily not by historians but by linguists, ethnographers, and geographers, posed a challenge to the national. Romantic canon of history as it had taken shape during and for some time after the sruggles for national emancipation. By the outbreak of the First World War, the periodizations — the chronological orders on which these national histories were built — had been put firmly in place, concocting ‘local times’ attuned to national frames. In general outline, these periodizations were structured around political and military events, starting with the creation and then the ‘rise’ of the medieval states, followed by the disaster of the Ottoman conquest and the regress caused by Ottoman (or, in the Romanian case, Phanariot) domination, which was reversed only with the national cultural ‘revivals’ and struggles for political emancipation, culminating in the establishment of national states. Significantly, this temporal scheme and the underlying vision of the main characteristics and watersheds in the national histories of the region were bolstered by the historical narratives of authoritative foreign historians.¹