What makes the Balkans unique and how does that relate to the trend toward national self-determination?
With self-determination, you first have to ask the question, Who is the self which is determining itself? Over a long period of time in Western Europe, by the beginning of the 20th century, there had been a gradual development of national self-consciousness. The Brits knew who they were and the French knew who they were and the Germans knew who they were and the Italians knew who they were and the Spanish knew who they were — though there were complications with the Irish and the Basques and others. In Eastern Europe, however, ever since the 14th century, for 500 years, there had been a Turkish hegemony where everybody was equally ruled by these foreign conquerors. They had no opportunity to develop a concept of national self-consciousness. What did develop, however, was a concept of religious self-consciousness — Christians protesting and rising up against the Muslim dominator. At the beginning of the 19th century, you saw three different focuses of religious resistance developing:
