"The Balkan Wars had revealed both the strengths and the limits of Balkan nationalism. Its strength lay in its ferocity. Its weakness was its disunity. The violence of the fighting much impressed the young Trotsky, who witnessed it as a correspondent for the newspaper Kievskaia mysl. Even the peace that followed the Balkan Wars was cruel, in a novel manner that would become a recurrent feature of the twentieth century. It no longer sufficed, in the eyes of nationalists, to acquire foreign territory. Now it was peoples as well as borders that had to move. Sometimes these movements were spontaneous. Muslims fled in the direction of Salonika as the Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians advanced in 1912; Bulgarians fled Macedonia to escape from invading Greek troops in 1913; Greeks chose to leave the Macedonian districts ceded to Bulgaria and Serbia by the Treaty of Bucharest."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 76
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Macedonia_(region)
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Macedonia (region)
4 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Macedonia (region) →
Related Quotes
"Sometimes populations were deliberately expelled, as the Greeks were from Western Thrace in 1913 and from parts of Ea…"
"It was the Byzantine Empire, which was to realize Alexander's idea - Macedonian Panhellenism -in face of an Asia in r…"
"That much I can say, without endless talking and without becoming tiresome, that she [Eusebia] is of a family line th…"
"Plus me plaît le séjour qu'ont bâti mes aïeux, Que des palais Romains le front audacieux, Plus que le marbre dur me p…"
"By heaven, these scroyles of Angiers flout you, kings, And stand securely on their battlements, As in a theatre, when…"
"No one in Finland aspires to occupy Petrozavodsk, but many Finns, but not parliamentary parties, speak about their de…"
"South from Piemont and Lumbardy, lieth the Riviera of Genoa, along the Mediterrean sea: the territory of which is nar…"
"The importance of the creation of a free Ingria cannot be overstated."
"We face a difficult task – the building of a prosperous Ingrian future on the ruins of the current empire, a future i…"
"Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania marked the centenary of their independence. The fourth independent Baltic Republic must…"