The mountain masses and mountain chains of the peninsula do not constitute a regular, well-defined system... This irregularity... has its analogue in the distribution of the various races which inhabit the peninsula.
Hungary has a homogeneous population, if we compare it with that of Turkey; for in the latter country there are districts where eight or ten nationalities live side by side within a radius of a few miles.1
Macedonia lies confounded within three vilayets (i.e.
provinces), which correspond to no natural division either racial or geographical... the result is that no race attains a predominance, and no province acquires a national character. The natural arrangement would have been to place Greeks, Serbians, and Albanians in compartments of their own, leaving the Bulgarians to occupy the centre and the East.[632] [633]One might think that the primary role of geography is to describe the Earth's landscapes, environments, peoples and places. As such, the way it acts as a bridge between the social sciences and humanities on the one hand and the natural sciences on the other ought to be benign. Nobody would normally associate the study of geography with the perpetration of genocide. Here we argue to the contrary, not because the making of accurate maps, the topographic descriptions of a region or the compiling of comprehensive statistics about its inhabitants is in itself toxic, but because in the way they have been deployed as tools of modern, post-Enlightenment orderings of the world as their practitioners imagine it ought to be, they intrinsically are. Of course, the fin-de-siecle observations - and irritations - as quoted above, of a renowned French geographer, Elisee Reclus, and an influential British journalist, H. N. Brailsford, as to the failure of both physical and human Balkan geography to fit into neatly contained boundaries would not count for too much if these were purely idiosyncratic. But they were not. They influenced, fed into or otherwise were part and parcel of wider Western scientific and cultural assumptions that there was something wrong and ill-formed, if not about the physical then certainly about the ethnographic landscape of the Balkans; that something radical by way of demographic engineering was pivotal to its reform but at the same time this could not be achieved under Ottoman imperial rule.
At which point supposed empirically led analysis bled into a whole slew of racial or gendered stereotypes as to the ‘uncivilised, crude, cruel and without exception, dishevelled' nature not just of Turks but of all Balkan peoples.[634] More surprisingly, perhaps, it was exactly such ‘thinking', as imbibed by indigenous Balkan elites, which helped catalyse and drive their own transformational nation-state building agendas.It is in the transmission belt from an Enlightenment project to observe, describe and categorise the world to the political one of ‘seeing like a state' that we posit the seeds of genocide in the Balkans.[635] Or to put it another way, it was through the insistent, hegemonic proposition that the only way healthy, modern societies might cohere, develop and take their legitimate place within an international system of such states was through the separation of previously jumbled up ‘national' elements into their correct, bounded ‘national' territories that drives for cultural homogenisation had their corollary in the urge towards ethnic cleansing. This was not some straight, unilinear or inevitable trajectory. For one thing it assumed the supersession of a great, age-old, dynastic Ottoman world empire by contending and actually aggressively competing if paradoxically weak national states. Indeed, before 1900, these were all protean, peripheral to the empire, necessarily geographically circumscribed or, quite possibly, existing only in the minds of their national dreamers. It was the concatenation of their respective aggrandising ambitions with the historically contingent that produced an imperial shatter zone in which a genocidal reordering of political and hence human geography took place.
Yet the fin-de-siecle perception of the Ottoman Balkans (and Ottomania more generally) as a power vacuum in the making was hardly limited to small, putative, neighbouring - themselves ex-Ottoman - states but rather was equally driven by the competing geopolitical interests of the great powers.
If Britain and France, the truly avant-garde nation states among these, were also the first (competing) purveyors of a modern, liberal, geographically informed, economically interconnected, international nation-state system, they were also at the same time imperial powers in their own right, competing with other European imperial powers, in this instance to determine the fate of, or, if one prefers, the spatial arrangements of a postOttomania. It was this wider geopolitical power struggle, as it catastrophically launched or more plausibly slid into the 1914 Great War, that spread an already emergent Ottoman shatter zone from the onset of the Balkan wars two years earlier, to embrace - on their 1917-18 collapse - the Russian, Austrian and German empires too. Or again, more precisely, those parts of these empires which were not reconstituted or failed to fully cohere within their successor radically anti-liberal, Soviet and eventual Hitlerian states but were either fragmented, indeed Balkanised, as a series of smaller and what at the time looked like provisional polities - the post-1919 ‘New Europe' - or remained ‘problem' regions within the USSR or post-Ottoman Middle East.Here we have our exact historical conjuncture between a Western presumption to recast the world in its own metropolitan image and the realities of the political breakdown of previously normative world empires: in Wallersteinian terms, what we might call a semi-periphery to a Western core.[636] But it was at the geographical intersection between these two systems, at the exposed European or near-European rim of the semiperiphery that the full brunt and genocidal consequences of being turned into a shatter zone were fully borne. It was in these rimlands between 1912 and 1953 that there was a concentrated yet repeated incidence of genocide, the completion of which coincided (in most cases) with the triumphant compartmentalisation of alleged national groups within fixed, impervious boundaries over forms of historic multicultural co-existence within fluid zones of cross-frontier human engagement.
In this chapter we will focus on Macedonia and Thrace - regions which often have been overlooked or ignored in the history of genocide - to illustrate and develop this trajectory in microcosm. But first, we need to return to the wider geography of early to mid twentieth-century genocide: to the landscape of the rimlands.