What are the Balkans — an area of the Ottoman Empires legacy?
If so, what is the legacy? Ideologies and social thought are missing. The first noun in the subtitle — “nationalism” — is never defined or analyzed; it is merely assumed. The same can be said of liberalism, socialism, communism, and fascism. This history of the modern Balkans does not even discuss the nature of partisan conflict, other than in terms of foreign patronage. Glenny deems Yugoslavia’s King Aleksandar important, but he never mentions his political decisions, like the creation of the banovinas in 1929 that redrew the borders of the country’s historical provinces. Religion, politics, society, and culture are missing. Whole nations (Slovenia) and movements (Nationalist Youth, Orthodoxism) are missing. Glenny has produced a history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Balkans with no reference to Petar II Petrovic-Njegos, Montenegro’s great poet and prince-bishop. Indeed, there are hardly any references to Montenegro itself. Despite a few references in the bibliography, Gl
