| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Maria Todorova. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. 1997. Pp. xi, 257. $19.95.

If we posit that the historian outraged at a stereotype read back into the past for political purposes can best respond by reading that stereotype properly and painstakingly forward, then Maria Todorova has largely succeeded. Her much-discussed volume responds superlatively to that challenge in its first five chapters on evolving perceptions of the Balkans there as well as in the West, and in the seventh chapter on what she considers to be the region's most distinctive historical feature: the Ottoman legacy. Todorova's indignation over contemporary issues predominates early in her introduction and throughout chapter six and the conclusion. She begins and ends with an indictment of George F. Kennan's preface to The Other Balkan Wars, a 1993 edition of the Carnegie Endowment's 1913 report on the two Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. To her, both preface and new edition stand for a particularly American disposition to view the Balkans as a hopeless, uncivilized whole. But just how representative Kennan's dismissal of "unruly" democratic strivings in the newly independent Balkan states even before the Balkan Wars is, given his preference for monarchic authority before 1914, should not detain us. Nor should the author's well-argued objections in chapter six to the idea of a "good" Central Europe, somehow minus Germany, that Czech, Hungarian, and Polish intellectuals advanced during the late 1980s and early 1990s. . . .

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