EUROPE AT THE DOOR: IDENTITY IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE, 1919-1939
EUROPE AT THE DOOR: IDENTITY IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE, 1919-1939

Summary/Abstract: In the two decades between the World Wars intellectuals in Southeastern Europe engaged in sometimes passionate debates about the identity of their region and of their respective peoples and about their past and future course of development.1 “Europe,” as they often called the West, lay at the center of their concerns and calculations. It was a presence that some welcomed and some rejected, but none of them was bold enough to ignore it. Each of the participants in this grand encounter about identity and Europe approached matters from his own highly personal philosophy of history, and thus it is difficult to arrange them neatly into groups. Nonetheless, certain general tendencies are discernible and allow for at least loose classifications. One group, then, could be designated as Europeanists because they held Europe up as a model to be followed and judged its influence on Southeastern Europe to have been generally beneficial. A second large group of theorists held the most divergent views on identity and development, but they found unity in their opposition to Europe’s intrusion into their region in the present as well as in the past. Since they were anxious to preserve what they prized as the uniqueness of Southeastern Europe’s culture and way of life, they are often called traditionalists. To a third grouping belong adherents of the so-called Third Way, those who strove to combine in some way what they thought was best in their own region and in Europe.

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