The Balkans, a region of southeastern Europe, figures here not simply as a place but as a contested name: the book argues that the region became “Balkan” in the European ideological imagination during the mid-nineteenth century, as European modernization reached it. The traits later attached to the label—intolerance, ethnic violence, and fixation on historical trauma—are presented not as an ancient regional essence but as a reflection of Europe’s own history and its power to define others.

A Name Made by Modernity

The distinction between the geographical region and the image called “the Balkans” is central. The latter, the book argues, took shape when the region was fully exposed to the political, economic, military, and ideological effects of European modernization. The timing unsettles the assumption that European observers merely discovered an already-existing Balkan character: in this account, the encounter helped produce the category through which the region would be understood.

Earlier European accounts complicate the later stereotype. In the sixteenth century, Pierre Belon observed that Turks did not compel everyone to live according to Turkish ways. The book also recalls that, after Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, many found asylum and religious freedom in Muslim countries. These examples present the region’s earlier religious arrangements as more accommodating than the image of inherent intolerance would suggest.

A 1788 account of Istanbul describes churches, mosques, and synagogues in close proximity, and people of different religions conversing in ordinary social and commercial settings. Yet the visitor interpreted this pluralism as evidence of Muslim decline. The episode exposes a reversal in European judgment: a practice later celebrated in Europe as a mark of cultural superiority could, when observed under Muslim rule, be treated as degeneration.

Religious Pluralism and Its Ironies

The history of the Star Mary Trappist monastery sharpens that reversal. Expelled from France under Napoleon, its monks first took refuge in Germany. After they were driven out of Germany in 1868, no Christian state would receive them; they sought and obtained the sultan’s permission to buy land near Banja Luka, in what is now the Serb part of Bosnia. The monastery endured there until it became caught up in conflicts among Christians in the Balkans.

The episode makes the region’s religious history difficult to square with a simple opposition between tolerant Christian Europe and intolerant Muslim territory. A Christian community found a home under Muslim authority after Christian states refused it refuge, and later conflict emerged among Christians themselves. The account does not make the Balkans an uncomplicated haven; instead, it uses this reversal to question who gets to define tolerance and where intolerance is presumed to reside.

Europe’s Projected History

The book locates the familiar image of Balkan intolerance and violence in Western Europe rather than in an unchanging regional character. Through what it calls Hegelian reflexive determination, Europe condemns in the Balkans a history it helped introduce: the violence it sees there is its own legacy, intensified and returned in a form it can disown. The region becomes Europe’s troubling double, a place onto which the observer can assign features of its own past.

The argument extends to the Armenian genocide and the oppression of the Kurds, cited as crimes attributed to the Turks in the twentieth century. The book distinguishes the military modernizers who carried out these acts from traditionalist Muslim political forces: the modernizers, it argues, sought to free Turkey from tradition and remake it as a European nation-state. The distinction redirects attention from an alleged Muslim essence to the political projects and modernizing forces involved.

Mladen Dolar’s observation, based on Freud’s references to the region, that the European unconscious is structured like the Balkans gives this reversal a psychoanalytic form. In the book’s reading, Balkan otherness lets Europe encounter a stranger within itself: its own repressed history. The region’s image therefore reveals not only how Europe represents the Balkans, but what that representation permits Europe to refuse to recognize about itself.

History as Screen

The post-Yugoslav war of the early 1990s appears in a discussion of how Europe accounts for the region’s conflicts. Jean-Claude Milner called the war a particularly revealing case because understanding it required returning to historical moments before the founding treaties of European integration, including the Second World War, the Treaty of Versailles, and the Congress of Vienna. His account describes Europe as perplexed by history’s return and turning to the United States for help.

The book disputes that characterization of European ignorance. Western European media and politicians repeatedly invoked centuries of history and the explosion of ancient grievances to explain the crisis. In this reading, history was not simply forgotten: the familiar story of the Balkans’ historical passions became an ideological screen. By framing the conflict as the recurrence of old enmities, European observers could avoid confronting its immediate political stakes. The Balkans thus serves as both the object of historical explanation and the place where that explanation may conceal what is happening in the present.