A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change

by Ian Jeffries, Robert Bideleux

Release Date: January, 1998

Edition: Paperback

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This is one of those books that bring coal to Newcastle. The main thesis of Part I is that not everything about Ottoman Empire was bad and the authors proceed to prove it by refuting statements of books written mostly in the 60's in communist countries (as if previously revisionist views on this topic haven't been almost the predominant opinion since the last few decades). The refutations are carried out mainly by quoting statements from a few books from the 50's and 60's, thus sparing the reader of supporting arguments and documentation on beliefs fostered by the most up-to-date stereotypes (such as the obscurantism of Orthodox church and the absolute rejection of 'ethnic nationalism'). We learn (together with new international students in their college orientation program)to be less Eurocentric with sentences like: "Europeans were caught almost completely off-guard by the remarkably rapid rise of the Ottoman 'menace' (as contemporaries perceived it)" : Quotation marks apparently aren't enough to warn us that the menace was subjective. They need to make the warning explicit. Throughout the book, the authors (although they 'are conversant with several European languages')have focused mainly on English-language secondary sources for the interesting reason that looking at primary sources and more specialized research monographs wouldn't be efficient enough for them to reach their geopolitical moral. Ironically, the political correct warnings and

quotation marks don't prevent the authors from their neo-colonial tendencies expressed most amusingly in their skepticism about the national liberation movements of the 19th century because of the new state's failure to become immediately indistinguishable in form from the most advanced Western European states. (By the way, they do prove convincinly that Western Europe has consistently been more prosperous than the new Balkan states.) Despite its being very readable the interested reader would be better off with other books on the subject (M. Glenny's book on the Balkans, Mazower's 'Dark Continent' come to mind) and, yes, 'more narrowly focused research monographs'.