The End of Empires and the Consequences in the Balkan Peninsula

Abstract

In the Ottoman Empire there was no visible dividing line between secular and religious law. The Ottoman state divided its subjects according to their religion into millets or ‘communities’. Religion was the basis for these divisions; language and ethnological theories played merely a secondary part. The rationale for this state of affairs was the system of government. Ottoman law was a religious code, which could not be imposed on unbelievers, who could not be recruited into the army.
A new spirit of national consciousness awoke among the peoples of the millets with the attempt to create civil laws to replace religious ones. They had to reorganise themselves on national lines if they were hold their own at all in modern international politics because nationality was the contemporary basis of Western states and, owing to the ascendancy of the West in the world, the relations of non-Western peoples to each other and to Western powers had to approximate to the forms which the Western world took for granted. During the nineteenth century, nationality became the leading concept and nationalism celebrated its universal victory. During the nineteenth century, nationalism won hearts and minds of the Balkanites as ‘some kind of a social-emancipatory ideology’ (Moritsch 2002: 83), and ever more voices could be heard, claiming the Balkans for the Balkanites. In the Ottoman Empire, however, the Spring of Nations did not come to the Ottoman nation, but such occurred among the peoples who were under Ottoman rule. Nationalists of all Balkan nations jointly emphasised small differences between them, both in the present as well as in the past. In the process, mythology replaced history; tolerance and multiculturalism were its first victims.