The collection of essays at hand places the Balkans at the center of European developments not as a problematic conflict zone, but rather as a quintessential region of Europe.

Contrary to existing stereotypical views, the authors of this volume argue that the Balkans were not lagging behind compared to the rest of Europe, but in many cases led and anticipated many Western European developments in the decades before and after 1900.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Balkan states became independent nation-states. As they struggled to solidify their national sovereignty, these countries looked beyond traditional strategies in state formation, in a search for an alternative vision inspired by militarism and national political economy; in this way, they not only succeeded on their own terms but also changed Europe and the world from 1912-1914 onwards.

As the Ottoman Empire weakened and more and more forms of informal diplomacy were applied by the great Powers in its territory, the relationships between identity and geopolitics were simultaneously transformed.

As the contributors to this volume indicate, the result was a phenomenon that would permeate all of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s: the gradual replacement of perceptions of religion and ethnicity with the idea of citizenship and belonging to a state.