ABSTRACT
Post-World War-I Balkan researches in France, Britain and the United States demonstrate several conspicuous resemblances, which in some important respects distinguish them from the German Southeast European studies. The idea of confederation between the national Balkan states chimed with France's policy of propping up a Balkan military-political union as a bulwark to German and Russian expansionism. In the years preceding the Balkan wars, both academic literature and the popular media saw the Ottomans and Islam as alien to the indigenous Balkan Christian culture–an attitude that vindicated the young Balkan states' systematic efforts at erasing all traces of their Ottoman past. The notion of underdevelopment, informed as it was by a robust progressivist worldview with roots in the Enlightenment, rendered the image of a Balkans living in an earlier cultural paradigm while inexorably moving toward civilization. Most of these modernist western interpretations of the Balkans predated the breaking out of First World War.
