Balkans
South-eastern European peninsula contested between great powers
Also known as: Balkans, Balkan
South-eastern European peninsula contested between great powers — the Ottoman successor zone whose 1914 crisis triggered the First World War (T&H 19).
Quigley's Framing
Quigley's Balkans are the textbook case of a region caught between civilizational tectonic plates: the long-running fault line between Western, Orthodox, and Islamic civilizations, complicated by the slow nineteenth-century retreat of the Ottoman Empire. The resulting political geography — multiple small states with incompatible national claims overlapping the same territory — is treated as structurally generative of crisis.
Strategic Role
T&H's Balkan chapters give particular attention to the 1878 Congress of Berlin, the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, the Sarajevo assassination and the July 1914 crisis, the inter-war Yugoslav and Romanian regimes, and the wartime resistance and Communist takeovers. The peninsula's strategic role is consistently that of the trip-wire — the region where great-power competition is most likely to generate uncontrolled escalation, as it did in 1914.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 19 Quigley
The Balkans — the long-running fault line between Western, Orthodox, and Islamic civilizations.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 222 Quigley
The Sarajevo assassination and the July 1914 crisis demonstrated the Balkans' role as the great-power trip-wire.