Essay

Students are required to submit an essay of around 2-2,500 words. The essay must include a bibliography of works actually read and citations indicating the sources of direct quotations and paraphrased passages. Two options are available for the essays.
Option One:
On the basis of your own interests in the subject and area you may formulate your own essay question. The choice of topic is up to you but please remember that the question should address a specific problem and that this is not an opportunity to merely list a succession of facts about an issue. The question may follow a similar form to those listed below, or it could be concerned with a particular document or incident. When you have a good idea of the topic you MUST confirm the title with the course tutor, who can give additional guidance on readings, formulation of the question, and so on.    
Option Two:
Write an essay answering one of the following questions, or one of the questions posed in the class discussions. Some readings are given at the end of this syllabus as starting points but they far from exhaust the possibilities.
- How and why has the term ‘the Balkans’ come to have negative connotations attached to it?  Is ‘South-Eastern Europe’ preferable?
 - Did the ‘Great Idea’ of national unification take basically the same forms in all of the south-east European countries? What factors contributed to convergences or divergences?
Why were the Muslim peoples of the Balkans relative latecomers to nationalism?
Why has Macedonia been such a site of conflict in the Balkans? (Either specify a period, or examine the changing contexts of the Macedonian question.)
What did the Balkan wars mean to the Balkan peoples and to the rest of the world?
Were the states created in South-eastern Europe after WWI the results of the ‘will of the people’?
Why did Romania (or any other Balkan country) drift to the right?
What was specific about Romanian (or any other Balkan country) fascism?
Evaluate the resistance to Nazi Germany mounted in Yugoslavia or Greece.
What distinguished WWII and post-WWII experience in the Balkan countries?
Assess the international involvement in Greek (or Yugoslav) civil war.
How far did the post-WWII states of south-eastern Europe satisfy the aspirations of national minorities and ethnic groups?  (You may answer with reference to any one state or minority.)
Does Gellner’s theory of the relationship between nationalism and modernization work for the Balkans?
‘States make nations, not nations states’.  Is this true for the Balkans?
When, and why, did nationalism become a mass phenomenon in the Balkans?
Was the revival of nationalism in the 1980s dependent on the erosion of communism? Use the example of Romania or Yugoslavia or Bulgaria.
Why did Yugoslavia fall apart, and so violently (and, by implication, why did the other Balkan states not)?
What are the similarities and differences between Balkan nationalisms in the 19th century and late 20th century (post-communist)?