Challanging Balkan Exceptionalism

I found the quote in the last post in this review of two books on the Balkins in the London Review of Books written by Misha Glenny during the 1999 NATO bombing campaign of Yugoslavia. It begins with the absurd quote by Tony Blair that Kosovo is "on the doorstep of Europe", what does this metaphor even mean? This doesn't make any sense geographically, it must mean something else. Mr. Glenny ends the review of Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination by Vesna Goldsworthy and Imagining the Balkans by Maria Todorova with listing these six little known facts about recent Balkan history:

1. The only country allied to the Axis that refused to allow any of its Jewish citizens to be deported to Nazi death camps was Bulgaria.
2. There were twice as many Turkish casualties at Gallipoli as Allied ones (the Turks, lest we forget, were defending their home territory).
3. The single most violent period in Balkan history in terms of casualties sustained and the territorial extent of the warfare was a direct consequence of Hitler’s decision to occupy Greece, a decision prompted by Mussolini’s failed attempt to invade Greece in 1940. The Nazi resolve in March 1941 to dismember Yugoslavia was accompanied by the installation of a brutal Fascist administration in Croatia that was entirely
   unrepresentative of the political aspirations of the Croat people. Until Pavelic
   was installed in Croatia, there had been no history of mass violence between
   Serbs and Croats.
4. The Stalinist dictatorships that took root in Romania and Bulgaria were imposed by an agreement reached by Stalin and Churchill. In exchange for handing over these territories to Soviet influence, Churchill, and later Truman, were given a free hand by Stalin to smash a Communist insurgency in Greece that was on the verge of taking power with minimal foreign support.
5. Since 1989, the governments and people of Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia,
   Albania and Greece have all resisted attempts by nationalists to destabilise the
   local or regional polity.
6. The main victims of the sanctions imposed by the UN on Serbia have been the surrounding states, a number of which are attempting to steer their economies through the transition from Communism to capitalism. Bulgaria, for example, has been losing an estimated $2 billion a year. The impact on the economies of Western Europe and America has been negligible. The UN refuses to give Bulgaria any compensation.

Here are some more quotes:

Its inhabitants were in the main white and Christian, but in important
contrast to the Middle East, the region was never colonised by Western powers,
which allowed it to become the repository of any manner of fantastic
imaginings.

[Bram] Stoker’s Gothic novel [Dracula], published in the 1890s, demonstrates an important development in representations of the peninsula. In the period beginning with the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and ending with the protracted negotiations that led to the various treaties of Paris after the First World War, the adjective ‘Balkan’ ceased to be a vague geographical concept and was transformed (for the 20th century at least) into one of the most consistently pejorative epithets in Western political discourse. [see Balkanization]

The new [post-1878 Congress of Belin] Balkan states were thus accepted into the great European hierarchy at the invitation of the Great Powers. As the long list of
conditions attached to their recognition as independent states made clear, they
were expected to know their place and to accommodate the foreign policies of
those Great Powers that demonstrated an interest in the region...Yet already, in
the minds of Western policy-makers and public alike, the new Balkan states were
part of an unbroken pattern of wild, aggressive behaviour stretching back
centuries.

The term ‘Balkans’ was barely used during the Communist period.
Four of the countries were subsumed into the phrase ‘Eastern Europe’ while
Greece and Turkey were ‘Nato’s southern flank’... After the fall of Communism,
Goldsworthy observed how some preposterous portrayals of the Balkans were

"dusted down and cited by journalists and newspaper columnists who, lacking the time to research their subjects thoroughly, are ever eager for readable – and quotable – accounts of life and death in the Balkans. While the turmoil of the Nineties forged new perceptions of individual Balkan nationalities, these frequently grew out of the archetypal representations of the region which were first established in the 19th century and then transmitted and transformed by successive generations of writers."

And you'll never look at the Balkins the same way again.