ABSTRACT
The period between the two world wars saw the peak of supranational scheming focused on the Balkans and Southeastern Europe, both inside and outside the region, spurring on intriguing parallelisms and clashes of regional mappings. The concept of the Balkans was a central one in the pre-World War-I socialist and interwar communist discourses. The early twentieth century Balkan social democrats construed their revolutionary-federalist genealogy by appropriating the national-liberal federalist tradition of the nineteenth century while, in their own day, legitimating their stance by opposing the nationalist policies of the "liberals in power." The oft resurfacing slogan "The Balkans for the Balkan people" admittedly encapsulated this ambitious but basically defensive vision, where regional economic and intellectual collaboration was seen as the most promising field of action preparing the ground for political unification. The political designs for a Balkan Union provoked considerable intellectual stirring and had direct bearing on the institutionalization of Southeast European studies in the region.
