'These Ancient Arenas of Racial Struggles': International Law and the Balkans, 1878-1949

This article revisits the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of national statehood in the Balkans. It traces this transitional process between the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the United Nations involvement in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). I show that this transition from empire to the nation-state was overdetermined by the partial and fragmented, yet influential, internationalization of significant questions regarding state building, including decisions about autonomy and independence, the drawing of boundaries, the protection of minorities and the continuation of economic relations. In fact, the Balkans became a site of experimentation for international legal techniques, such as fact-finding, peacekeeping missions or the administration of population exchanges, that would later acquire wider significance in the process of decolonization. The image of international law emerging from this account troubles the liberal understanding of international law and institutions as benevolent, cosmopolitan forces opposing, restraining and taming 'nationalist passions'. Rather, it was precisely because the relationship between nationalism and internationalism was one of cooperation and co-constitution, as much as one of antagonism, that this multitude of international legal techniques conditioning sovereignty in the Balkans arose.