This book explores the historial role of the Balkan Wars. In Eastern Europe, the two Balkan Wars of 1912/13 had greater importance than the First World War for the construction of nations and states. This volume shows how these “short” wars profoundly changed the sociopolitical situation in the Balkans, with consequences that are still felt today. More than one hundred years later, the successors of the belligerent states in Southeastern Europe memorialize the wars as heroic highlights of their respective pasts. Furthermore, the metaphor that the Balkans were Europe’s “powder keg”, perpetuated at the beginning of the twentieth century in the face of these wars, was reactivated in both the West and the East up through the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The authors entangle the hitherto exclusive national master narratives and analyse them cogently and trenchantly for an international readership. They make an indispensable contribution to the proper integration of the Balkan Wars into the European historical memory of twentieth-century warfare.

Though persistently overshadowed by the Great War in historical memory, the two Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 were among the most consequential of the early twentieth century. By pitting the states of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro against a diminished Ottoman Empire—and subsequently against one another—they anticipated many of the horrors of twentieth-century warfare even as they produced the tense regional politics that helped spark World War I. Bringing together an international group of scholars, this volume applies the social and cultural insights of the “new military history” to revisit this critical episode with a central focus on the experiences of both combatants and civilians during wartime.

In the fall of 1912, the Ottoman Empire was in turmoil. In addition to the Albanian and the Yemen rebellions, the Empire was at war with Italy over the Libyan territory. Worse yet, cholera was spreading throughout the country, leaving a decimated population in its wake. In its weakness, the Ottoman Empire was ripe to be attacked, and the Balkan countries did so. On October 8, 1912, Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Empire, beginning the first of the Balkan Wars. Embracing maturity and setting their differences aside, four nations joined together to form the Balkan League-Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, and Bulgaria. Despite the tremendous land victory celebrated by the Balkan League, disputes over dividing the won territory soon arose. Dissatisfied with its share of the Macedonia, Bulgaria attacked its former allies Serbia and Greece. On August 10, 1913, the Treaty of Bucharest ended the second conflict, but it did not bring the peace. In the First World War, which was initiated by Sarajevo assassination, Balkan again became theater of the war. The Balkan wars have been a popular topic for scholarly research since their resolution. Despite the attention this topic has received, however, the research is far from complete. In this study contributing to the documentation and understanding of this conflict, author Igor Despot has not only reviews the events of the wars, but also considers these events in light of pertinent cultural aspects, identifying the commonalities and differences that may have determined alliances or sparked conflict throughout Balkan history.

The Balkans, war, and migration / Nedim Ipek -- The Balkan wars and the refugee leadership of the early Turkish republic / Erik Jan Zürcher -- The traumatic legacy of the Balkan wars for Turkish intellectuals / Funda Selçuk Şirin -- The loss of the lost : the effects of the Balkan wars on the construction of modern Turkish nationalism / Mehmet Arısan -- What did the Albanians do? : postwar disputes on Albanian attitudes / Çağdaş Sümer -- The legacy and impacts of the defeat in the Balkan wars of 1912-1913 on the psychological makeup of the Turkish officer corps / Doğan Akyaz -- The influence of the Balkan wars on the two military officers who would have the greatest impact on the fortunes of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey / Preston Hughes -- More history than they can consume? : perception of the Balkan wars in Turkish republican textbooks (1932-2007) / Nazan Çiçek -- Chronology of the Balkan wars

Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe shows that Muslims were citizens of modern Europe from its beginning and, in the process, rethinks Europe itself. Muslims are neither newcomers nor outsiders in Europe. In the twentieth century, they have been central to the continent's political development and the evolution of its traditions of equality and law. From 1878 into the period following World War II, over a million Ottoman Muslims became citizens of new European states. In Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe, Emily Greble follows the fortunes and misfortunes of several generations of these indigenous men, women and children; merchants, peasants, and landowners; muftis and preachers; teachers and students; believers and non-believers from seaside port towns on the shores of the Adriatic to mountainous villages in the Balkans. Drawing on a wide range of archives from government ministries in state capitals to madrasas in provincial towns, Greble uncovers Muslims' negotiations with state authorities--over the boundaries of Islamic law, the nature of religious freedom, and the meaning of minority rights. She shows how their story is Europe's story: Muslims navigated the continent's turbulent passage from imperial order through the interwar political experiments of liberal democracy and authoritarianism to the ideological programs of fascism, socialism, and communism. In doing so, they shaped the grand narratives upon which so much of Europe's fractious present now rests. Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe offers a striking new account of the history of citizenship and nation-building, the emergence of minority rights, and the character of secularism.

This book centers on the Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, published in Washington in the early summer of 1914 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The volume was born from the conviction that the full assessment of the significance of the Carnegie Report—one of the first international non-governmental fact-finding missions with the intention to promote peace—requires a deeper exploration of the context of its birth. The authors examine how the countries involved in the wars handled the inquires of the Carnegie Commission and the role of the report in the remembrance of the wars in the respective states. Although the report considered both the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan nation-states insufficiently civilized to wage wars within the limits of the codes of conduct of international law, this orientalist conclusion can in part be explained by the liberal internationalist strategy of the Carnegie Endowment, and of the commission members’ professional, political, and ethnic background. Overshadowed by the outbreak of World War I, the Carnegie Report’s direct impact on international arbitration or international criminal law was limited, yet—in the authors’ opinion—it ultimately contributed to the further juridification of international relations