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The Balkan Peninsula: Part I. Building an Empire

© Carey Goodman

Sources of conflict are never as simplistic as "this war is about religion" or "this war is fought for oil" or "this is a civil war in some place Americans cannot pronounce and never heard of until today". As intricate as the causes of international or inter-ethnic conflict may seem, the knots of aggression are more easily unraveled if observers and participants to those conflicts comprehend the underlying historical forces that set fire to the often long kindling flames of warfare.

For inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula, these aspects are especially difficult to explain. Lineages of those ethnic groups are intertwined, but the angst of long-constrained resentment and hostility persist and linger in the souls of Balkan peoples like the effects of a strong Serbian liquor.

The Balkan Peninsula lies in southeastern Europe. Geographers usually consider its borders to extend from Trieste on the Adriatic Sea to Istanbul on the Bosperus River. It is a vaguely defined region east of Western Europe and west of Turkish Anatolia and the Caucasus Mountains. It includes the states of Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Serbia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Romania, Turkey, and Bulgaria. This region long ago earned its reputation as "the powder keg of Europe".

Crises among Balkan states trace their origins to the ancient wars between Athens and Sparta. That rivalry endured for more than a century and resulted in the creation of the Delian League. This entity born of the peace pact negotiated at Delos is generally regarded as the first multilateral collective security arrangement. The agreement also introduced and sustained an era of Greco/Balkan order and stability that prevailed for several hundred years.

The next bit of trouble occurred when the Roman Empire expanded its borders eastward and established its second capital at Constantinople. The conquest of the Balkan Peninsula was accomplished by simple military campaigns, but keeping that territory was the bane of imperial life until the empire collapsed.

Less than fifty years after the emperor Diocletian founded the second Roman capital, migratory shifts caused an influx of ethnically diverse peoples into the Empire. Most of this migration came from Asia; the foreigners settled in the eastern imperial districts. Emperors Constantin and Constantius spent much of their reigns on the battle field. Emperor Theodosius the Great (who was slain in battle in 381 AD) realized that to preserve the Empire, he needed to integrate the foreigners into the Roman army. He adopted a mix of divide-and-conquer and why-fight-them-when-we-should-conscript-them strategies. Theodosius recognized that the foreigners he hoped to integrate were more independent minded and better disciplined soldiers than the legions he commanded. The Empire survived thanks to the fractious tempers of the new conscripts, but the settlers soon quarreled among themselves and sought imperial intervention to solve their land feuds.

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