ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the nature and the sources of nationalism, its relationship to security, and how this relationship contributed to the genesis and evolution of the ongoing crisis in the Balkan peninsula. Anthony D. Smith, one of the foremost students of nationalism, amplifies the cultural component and speaks of two types of nationalism: territorial or civic and ethnic or ethnonational. Western European nationalism was a political development used as a vehicle to build the nation-state. In contrast, East European and Balkan nationalism predated the nation-state and became a means of preserving a non-state nation in empires that functioned as the main political power in the Balkans until the late the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the mutual security pact of 1934, Balkan states pledged to consult each other in matters of security. Successive and culturally similar Slavic groups, originating from Asia, settled in different parts of the Balkans in the sixth and seventh centuries.
