Projects
The Withering Away of the Balkan Village
From the point of view of economic history, the withering away of the Balkan village is probably the single most important phenomenon in the region during the second half of the 20th C. This is one of the main keys to explaining its long-term historical change and its political, economic, demographic, social and cultural developments.
The Balkan village was the scene of the region's most dramatic and traumatic events of the second half of the century: the two civil wars in Greece and Yugoslavia, mass exodus, collectivization, the imposing of three different socialist systems of agriculture and finally - the European common agricultural policy
The agrarian question is central to the explanation of Balkan communism, of its rise and fall, as well as of the so-called transition. Industrialization has generally been emphasized to be the main engine of the Balkans' transformation. In this project I argue that its more important and far-reaching result was the profound and traumatic change of the village.
In a more general way what happened to the Balkan village and villagers was not something extraordinary. After all isn't the quintessence of modernization the gradual withering away of the village? But the gradual, century-long process in Western Europe gradually was accomplished in the backward South Eastern Europe by various versions of state socialisms in the course of a generation only. It is the speed, the scope and the ruthlessness unusual even for the standards of Eastern Europe that make the agrarian transformation of the Balkans in the second half of the 20th century so unusual.
The fate of Balkan peasant and peasantry has been in the center of attention for an army of scholars of various disciplines: anthropology, (rural) sociology, history, demography, agrarian economics, human geography, etc. If fiction and films are added, one could argue with only slight exaggeration that this is the most discussed issue of the region's recent development.
This project, which most broadly is focused on analyzing the course and the consequences of the crash transformation of the Balkan village in the second half of the 20th century, takes a different approach. It stands out against the sea of similar scholarship by its time span (the second half of the 20th C. and the beginning of the 21 C.), scope (the Balkan region), genre (economic history) and methodology (comparative, interdisciplinary)