ABSTRACT
As the Ottoman empire receded (see Chapter 9), pieces of it won auto-nomy or independence, the adjacent Habsburg and Russian empires calculated what they could get out of it and three forces shaped the future: religion – Christianity, mostly of the Orthodox variety and essentially anti-Turkish; nationalism, pitting one emergent state against another; and a romantic megalomania, dreaming of old empires and carefully oblivious of embedded minorities (Greater Greece, Greater Serbia, Greater Albania). Between the two world wars they were pawns where Germany manoeuvred more successfully than other Europeans for trade and influence. After the Second World War they became Soviet satellites (except Greece) and, with central Europe, constituted unwillingly the eastern half of bisected Europe during the Cold War.
