Society, Politics, and State Formation in Southeastern Europe during the 19th Century

The BalkansTASSOS ANASTASSIADIS and NATHALIE CLAYER, eds., Society, Politics, and State Formation in Southeastern Europe During the 19th century (Athens: Alpha Bank, 2011), Pp. 403, £ 39.00 clothThis excellent volume devoted to state formation in Southeastern Europe during the long nineteenth century is premised on the conviction that is more fruitful to engage in comparative study of the different state cases in the region rather than comparing them individually with Western European states (19). Only in this way, assert the editors in their comprehensive introduction, can one avoid the biased, deterministic and ultimately useless diagnoses of clientelism, incomplete liberalization, absence of civil society, traditionalism and backwardness, offered to explain the failure of the transplanted and caricatured models of Western modernity. The volume seeks to challenge this verdict by showing that state formation was a complicated affair that involved juggling various institutional models (local as well as imported ones), coping with societies of sometimes inextricable ethnoreligious diversity and marked by varying degrees of political allegiance to central power, and last but not least dealing with foreign interference (11). The twelve chapters assembled are grouped under four rubrics deemed significant to generate future research: the emergence of modern bureaucracy; issues of legitimacy and practices of power; the implementation of public policies; the relationship between individuals and the state. All contributions offer new and interesting archival material; most capably synthesize existing research; all advance and complicate our concrete knowledge of the region. Only two are explicitly comparative (Parusheva and Preshlenova). It is pity that the volume lacks an afterword where the promise of comparative analysis is carried out. The introduction gestures in this direction but often by outlining future research possibilities rather than novel hypotheses.Grandits's chapter on Tanzimat bureaucracy in Herzegovina sheds light on the challenges faced by the reformed administration in this Ottoman periphery, and especially the issue of taxation which became the crux of the social conflict in the 1870s. In doing so, Grandits ably demonstrates the explosive nature of unique constellation where rising taxes coexisted with pre-reform feudal duties. The question is how exportable is this model to the rest of the Ottoman Empire and can we make meaningful comparison, as suggested in the introduction, with the formation of civil officialdom in Bulgaria in different chronological period, 1878- 1912, and in different political context? Two other contributions might have been better choice for comparison. Karapadakis's analysis of the role of reform-minded republican notables in Corfu in 1797, caught up in the role of intermediaries between the population and the demanding French occupation forces, reveals the conundrum of marrying ideology to practical issues of everyday governance. And Levy, in her chapter on the institutionalization of the state police in late nineteenth- century Istanbul and its interaction with the traditional forces of urban order, offers flexible conclusion: the integration of local bekci appears to be the final move toward complete centralization in the following Young Turk period, but it can be also seen as continuation of the practice of delegating power to local actors. Leaving the problematic question of comparison aside, Lyberatos's essay is genuine contribution to the growing literature on Bulgarian bureaucracy. …