Abstract: In this posthumously published essay, Traian Stoianovich traces reasons for the crisis of modernity in the Balkans, from the Late Antiquity to the modern era. Stoianovich approaches the subject from the perspectives of both a micro historian and a transnational and global historian, always in dialogue with other disciplines. He looks at how the development of premodern Balkan nations and their medieval states was impacted by imperial conquests (Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman). He points out at both ruptures and continuities while analysing Balkan societies during the Ottoman era. The question of socioeconomic backwardness is given due consideration. Contrary to popular perceptions, the ideas of Enlightenment reached the Balkans and had an impact on the region, which tried to copy outside models. Following the Protestant Reformation and especially the French Revolution, two models of modernity emerged in Europe: Europe I of liberties (privileges) and Europe II of liberty. Stoianovich argues that among Orthodox Christians in the Balkans advocates of modernity tended to favour Europe II.
Keywords: The Balkans, modernity, Europe, Ottoman Empire, Enlightenment, histoire total
Summary
In this posthumously published essay, Traian Stoianovich traces reasons for the crisis of modernity in the Balkans, from the Late Antiquity to the modern era. His approach is that of histoire totale, associated with the French Annales school, to which Stoianovich, a former student of Fernard Braudel belonged, and about which he wrote. The essay moves effortlessly between different eras of history, between history, archeology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy and political science, between the Balkans, Europe, and the Near East, and between micro and global history, utilising works in English, French, German, and Serbo-Croatian. Stoianovich looks at the premodern origins of Balkan nations, at discontinuities caused by the Ottoman conquest and at continuities that survived it. The article makes an important contribution to ongoing discussions about modernity in Serbia and former Yugoslavia. For example, Stoianovich points out that however reformist in nature, Ottomanism was not a civil society and argues, as he has done in his other works, that the Balkans did not remain isolated from and unaffected by the western intellectual revolution. As early as the 1490s first printing presses were introduced in Montenegro, while the ideas of the Enlightenment would reach the Serbs, Greeks, and Romanians, mainly thanks to their compatriots from the Habsburg Monarchy. He also shows how global economic crises of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries impacted the Balkan economies and societies in both the short and the long run. The discussion about the crisis of modernity in Europe—or, in Professor Stoianovich’s interpretation, two Europes: Europe I of liberties (privileges), favoured in Protestant parts of the continent, and Europe II of the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, favoured among nineteenth century Balkan Orthodox peoples – forms a central part of the article. Stoianovich also revisits the post-Versailles order and the Habsburg legacy in an attempt to explain the post-1918 instability in the Balkans, and elsewhere.