Are the war the factor behind the nationalist sentiments in the Balkans?

is often singled out as the powerful force that brought about the collapse of the last great land
empires of the 19th and early 20th centuries. We offer a different picture: nationalism was weak
before 1914, with war being caused by the fears of the great powers rather than pressures from
below; crucially war was less an opportunity for pre-existing nationalists to seize than a
maelstrom that created new identities.

The balkans have been a playground for the biggest powers for a mayority of its history
because of its strategic position as it connects europe with asia and africa, so these
country’s have been fighting for their independence for hundreds of years!

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Why was the Balkan region in recent centuries imbued with ferocious nationalism,
even greater than that in Western Europe?

The Balkans cannot and should not be quarantined as the “unhealthy” area of Europe, a
region where nothing can be done to expedite the transition to democracy. In all those
countries there are courageous movements that champion precisely the values of
democracy. They should be made to feel that the West is resolutely on their side.

Throughout Eastern Europe, nationalism manifests itself as an opposition to the possible

loss of identity in the EU. Many people ask: why give up national sovereignty after hundreds
of years of fighting for it?

Almost all European countries have gone through phases of nationalism and that is because
nationalism created nations and not the other way around.

Some Western European countries went through this in the 19th century. Italy and Germany
are countries that became united in the second part of the nineteenth century, and each
went through phases of nationalism and ultra-nationalism (Hitler and Mussolini).

Many countries appeared in the Balkans or EE late. When a country is not as rich as the
western colonial countries were, the only link to create a nation was nationalism.
Most of the actual nations of WE were well established at the end of the XIXth Century. In EE
the situation was different.

The ‘Concert of Great Powers’ much appreciated by Russia kept almost all EE nations under
occupation.

Below is the map of 1878. Serbia, Greece, and Romania are much smaller, a small Bulgaria is
a protectorate +Montenegro and that’s all.

All the countries in the region are relatively new state constructs, the product of the great
national awakening characteristic of the nineteenth century. They all owe their current size
and shape to the international arrangements that followed the two crucial conflagrations of
this century.

In the Balkan part of Europe, political development during the nineteenth century was late
and convoluted.

The countries that were part of the Ottoman Empire were largely isolated from the
economic and social development of the rest of Europe until the nineteenth century. Even
nationalism appeared later.
In East-Central Europe, institutions were founded upon a Western concept of law and
individual rights. In Southeastern Europe, civil society was underdeveloped and extremely
fragile. The foundations of pluralism were precarious and vulnerable to dictatorial
encroachment.

The conflicts that preexisted communism have not been abolished during the four decades
of state socialism. On the contrary, they continued to exist underneath the bogus veneer of
Marxist-Leninist propaganda. It was only in the minds of doctrinaire communists that such
things as proletarian internationalism and a socialist community of nations existed. In reality,
the traditions and memories of the past continued to inspire individual and collective efforts
to get rid of the totalitarian regimes.

Former Yugoslavia is the most complicated case.

Nationalism in the Balkans has deep historical roots, stemming from a complex mix of
ethnic, religious, and historical factors. The region has experienced a long history of foreign
domination, ethnic conflict, and shifting borders, which has contributed to the development
of strong national identities. Additionally, the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the
subsequent conflicts further fueled nationalist sentiments. Economic challenges, social
inequalities, and political instability have also played a role in shaping nationalist attitudes.
It's important to recognize that nationalism in the Balkans is a complex and multifaceted
issue, influenced by a variety of historical, cultural, and political factors.

Yugoslavia (SFRY) is often attributed to selective scholastic writings on nationalism and the role that ethnic
attachments play in nation-state formation. From the 1960s to mid-1980s theoretical studies of nation- alism
flourished and in the absence of empirical research stressed the importance of political and ethno-national congruity
for stability. Ernest Gellner, for example, claimed that the expression of nationalist senti-ment was the result of the
violation of this principle of congruity. Elsewhere, others such as Ellie Kedourie maintained that nationalism
pretended to supply the criterion for the exercise of state power and was derived from the natural occurrence of
national blocs. In this setting, nationalism was the inevitable product of state formation and political transition.

The central question that must be posed is why it was that Yugoslavia, unlike other multinational and socialist states,
descended into war as it did? Also, while the above accounts focus on ideological positions and structural
conditions, they simultaneously ignore the role of political leaders in Yugoslavia’s new direction in the 1980s – an
essential theme of this study. A useful starting point in our analysis is a review of Yugoslavia’s history as a
multinational state and the ideologies that sustained its political leadership both during and after the communist
period.
The relationship between communism and nationalism in Yugoslavia played a central role in Yugoslavia’s demise.
As George Scho¨pflin argues in his now classic article, ‘Nationhood, communism and state legitimation’, 5 at a point
when its neighbours were looking to the West, democratic option in Yugoslavia was defeated by a strong ethno-
national consciousness among the Serbian population that felt itself to

Felix Haaß presents his research on "War and

Nationalism". This event is part of the International
Security Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre
for International Security.
Can wars breed nationalism? Together with his co-authors Alexander De Juan (Osnabrück
University), Carlo Koos (Chr. Michelsen Institute), Sascha Riaz (Harvard University),
and Thomas Tichelbaecker (Princeton University), Felix Haaß argues that civilians’ indirect
exposure to war fatalities can trigger psychological processes that reinforce hostility towards war
opponents, increase identification with their nation, and thereby strengthen support for
nationalist parties.
The authors test their argument in the context of the rise of the Nazi Party after the First World
War. To measure localized war exposure, they machine-coded information on all 8.6 million
German soldiers who were wounded or died in WW1. The empirical strategy leverages
battlefield dynamics that cause plausibly exogenous variation in the county-level death rate—the
share of dead soldiers among all casualties.

They show that throughout the interwar period, electoral support for right-wing nationalist
parties, including the Nazi Party, was 2.6 percentage points higher in counties with high death
rates. Consistent with the proposed mechanism, this effect was driven by civilians rather than
veterans and areas with a culture of war commemoration. The paper offers a micro-level,
sociopsychological perspective complementing macro-theoretical top-down accounts on the
effects of war on nationalism. It urges researchers to carefully consider regional differences in
war exposure and subsequent changes in political attitudes and behaviors.

Alexander De Juan (University of Osnabrück), Felix Haass (University of

Oslo), Carlo Koos (University of Bergen), Sascha Riaz (Harvard University)
and Thomas Tichelbaecker (Princeton University) just published an article in
American Political Science Review: "War and Nationalism: How WW1 Battle
Deaths Fueled Civilians' Support for the Nazi Party".

The authors explore the question of whether wars can breed nationalism.
They build on research in psychology that suggests that experiencing the
death of people close to us can make us more attached to our in-group,
typically our nation. In wars, the vast majority of people experience loss
through the deaths of relatives and friends on far-away battlefields. The
authors hypothesize the war is especially likely to incite nationalism in
locations that are strongly affected by the enormous human costs of war.

But testing that hypotesis is challenging. If nationalism itself can drive wars,
the reverse relationship - the effect of war on people's feelings of national
superiority - is likely to be tainted by issues of reverse causality.
To study this hypothesis, the authors look at the case of Weimar Germany
after World War I. They zoom in on a very peculiar but often overlooked
characteristic of WWI: the impact of the Great War varied widely across the
German Reich. Of these two Bavarian towns, Neuburg was hit by almost 8
times as many deaths as Deggendorf.

To measure how war exposure varied geographically, the authors use

digitized and geolocated information from over 7 million entries in the "loss
lists", which almost represent the entire population of German casualties in
WWI.This data helps them isolate the independent effect of war on
nationalism in counties across Germany: a county's casualty fatality rate -
the ratio of deaths to wounded - is strongly determined by WWI battlefield
dynamics. They then match the measure of war exposure to local-level
election results for the two main, radically nationalist parties in Weimar: the
German Nationalist People's Party (DNVP) and the NSDAP - Hitler's Nazi
party.

The effect of war on nationalism is mostly driven by civilians at the home

front, rather than returning and radicalized veterans. The authors find that
particularly those individuals too young to be drafted into the war joined the
Nazi party early, especially in those counties that were hit hard by WWI
losses.

The authors suggest that one way through which wars shaped people's
nationalist fervour was through practices of joint commemoration. They
collect data on all war monuments in Germany, especially pre-WWI, to probe
this idea. They find that the effect of war deaths on radical nationalist voting
is stronger in counties where war commemoration was already prevalent
before WWI broke out. A key implication of this finding is that the vicious
cycle between war and nationalism is driven by the politicized exploitation of
grief and sense-making over war losses by scrupulous political actors. And
that is something, the authors argue, that is very much alive to this day.