Jane Dodge’s Reviews > The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804 - 1999 > Status Update

“Yugoslavia lasted as long as it did because its very existence offered an apparently workable solution to the two most complex problems in the Balkans — those of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia.”

“The Albanian language emerged from the ghetto and, before long, textbooks and other publications from Albania proper flooded the schools and libraries of the province. The assumption that [Yugoslavia’s] dismissal would be gratefully received by submissive Albanians was mistaken. An articulate younger generation dominated the university in Pristina and was hungry to assert Albanian national rights.”

“Then came Albania’s electrification. The last village was attached to the national grid in the early 1970s although one experienced observer of Albania has pointed out that ‘the system has been on the blink ever since.’”

“The religion of the Albanian is Albanianism” Albanian poet Pashko Vase Shkodrani

“Above all else, Albania was dreadfully poor and riven by the most fragmented social structure in Europe, the product of extreme underdevelopment and manifold internal rivalries exacerbated by the divide-and-rule policy of the late Ottoman sultans and the Young Turks.“
Time period is late 1900s but we still can expect to see the same problems….

“The mob always has the effect of minimizing or obscuring the role of those who bear political responsibility for its direction. All Balkan massacres this century [twentieth] have enjoyed the specific approval of state organs, whose agents have usually been the instigators as well.”

“The difficulty in defining the Balkans arises from the conflation of political and geographic descriptions that are themselves problematic.”