The Enlightenment origins of the European idea in the Balkans
The relationship between the Balkans and Europe has often been interpreted primarily through the lenses of geopolitics, imperial rivalry, or the nineteenth-century process of nation-state formation. Yet long before the emergence of independent Balkan states, the idea of Europe had already begun to acquire intellectual, cultural, and political significance among the educated elites of the region. During the eighteenth century, the diffusion of Enlightenment thought from Western and Central Europe transformed the intellectual landscape of the Balkans by introducing new concepts of reason, liberty, education, constitutional government, and civic identity. These ideas did not simply challenge the structures of Ottoman rule; they also provided the conceptual foundations upon which modern national movements would later be built. Only during the nineteenth century, under the combined influence of Romanticism and the rise of nationalism, was this universalist programme progressively adapted to the construction of individual nation-states. In this perspective, the European idea constituted not merely an external aspiration but one of the principal intellectual forces shaping the political modernisation of the Balkans.
The Enlightenment in the Balkans was an ideological, philological, linguistic, cultural, and philosophical movement among Balkan elites that sought to transmit the ideas and values of the French Enlightenment into the intellectual and spiritual world of the Balkans. It was the product of an entire generation of scholars, not only in the social sciences but also in the natural sciences, such as Adamantios Korais, Neophytos Doukas, Rigas Feraios, Methodios Anthrakites, Evgenios Voulgaris, Athanasios Psalidas, Balanos Vasilopoulos, and Nikolaos Darbaris, who were in direct contact with Western philosophy, as most of them studied in Paris, London, Vienna, or Berlin. A significant part of their political and cultural discourse concerned the revival of Greece, the values of classical antiquity, and the transformation of Greece into a modern European state. In this sense, the European idea is central in their works, as it appears as a connecting vector between the glorious Greek past and its modern national rebirth.
The Greek Enlightenment developed in the major centres of European culture, but also found two important peripheral hubs where it influenced local intellectual traditions. One of these was the “New Academy” (Nea Akademia), a precursor institution founded in Voskopoja, in present-day Albania, where Greek, Vlach, and Albanian cultural elements intersected, leaving a lasting imprint on the historical memory of the region. Another was the Academy of Bucharest, established under the patronage of the Phanariote princes who governed the Danubian Principalities for over a century, as well as the court of Ali Pasha of Tepelena in Ioannina, where Greek Enlightenment intellectuals enjoyed patronage and protection in exchange for diplomatic and administrative services.
Among these Enlightenment thinkers, the most prominent figure was Rigas Velestinlis (Rigas Feraios, 1757–13 June 1798), an eighteenth-century Greek Enlightenment intellectual who, in his constitutional drafts inspired by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, did not conceive the future state in narrow national terms. Instead, reflecting the intellectual spirit of his time, he endowed it with a universal character. He drafted constitutional projects for almost all Balkan populations and, influenced by the Enlightenment idea of the “philosopher-king,” envisioned Sultan Selim III—known as the reforming sultan due to his military and administrative reforms—as the potential sovereign of this new political order. Like European Enlightenment thinkers who appealed to monarchs to govern justly, he appealed to the Ottoman Sultan to embrace reason and provide better governance for his subjects. Even the Greek language, which he envisioned as the lingua franca of this pan-Balkan state, was not conceived as an instrument of domination or assimilation, but as a universal cultural medium that had been used for over four centuries by Balkan elites.
In one of his songs written in modern Greek, he called upon “Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians, Romanians, and oppressed Turks” to abandon the occupied cities and flee to the mountains, where they could enjoy freedom. Due to his revolutionary ideas, which advocated a unified Balkan political space, Rigas was arrested by the Austrians in Trieste, who viewed his activities as a threat to the Ottoman order, which they had an interest in preserving due to their conflict with revolutionary France. He was subsequently handed over to the Ottoman authorities, who, after torturing him in the prison of Belgrade during his transfer to Constantinople, executed him and disposed of his body in the Danube. This marked the tragic end of his life, but not the end of his ideas.
Equally significant is the figure of Adamantios Korais, a “teacher of the nation,” who spent most of his life in France, where he became deeply influenced by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He contributed to the Greek national cause and to the European idea by publishing classical Greek texts accompanied by extensive introductions in modern Greek. His aim was to construct a standardised language based on vernacular usage while eliminating foreign influences and restoring archaic forms that had not yet been fully assimilated. His model was Luther’s translation of the Bible into German, and he sought to achieve a similar linguistic reform through his commentaries in modern Greek.
In the beginning, in Greece and later in other Balkan states, under the influence of nationalist ideas that initially penetrated those regions and groups with close contact with Western and Central Europe, nationalism emerged as a movement aimed at the construction of nation-states. The nineteenth century thus represented the triumph of nation-state formation in the Balkans, a process that, while affirming national identities, also generated intense competition over the territorial inheritance of the Ottoman Empire.
The European idea in the Balkans became a central reference point for all Balkan populations, which, being geographically close to European cultural centres, aspired to transform their status from provinces of “European Turkey” into integral parts of Europe. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a process of intensified cultural contact contributed to awakening these societies from their long Ottoman “lethargy.” By the end of the eighteenth century, the Balkan Peninsula was less known in Europe than its overseas colonies. This lack of knowledge was reflected in geographical literature, where these territories were often described simply as European provinces of Turkey, and classical Greco-Latin nomenclature was still used for rivers and mountains.
Although the Enlightenment and Classicist intellectual movements had stimulated European interest in ancient Greece as the cradle of classical civilisation, no systematic effort had yet been made to explore the Balkans themselves. This was not due to European indifference or denial of the region’s historical importance, but rather reflected the political and administrative realities of Ottoman rule, as these territories had been part of the Ottoman Empire for more than three centuries, an entity regarded as a single political unit across Europe and Asia. Furthermore, for a long period, the region had been a battleground between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, making travel, exploration, and scholarly study extremely difficult. The end of the Austro-Ottoman wars in 1689 and the subsequent peace treaties not only reduced the risk of Ottoman incursions into Central Europe but also ushered in a relatively stable period between the Sublime Porte and European powers.
A century later, 1789 marked a turning point in European history. The triumph of the French Revolution and the subsequent campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte—first in Italy in 1796 and then in Egypt in 1798—fundamentally transformed the Mediterranean world and the Near East, with which the Balkans were closely connected. Shortly thereafter, in 1797, France, through the Treaty of Campo Formio, annexed the Ionian Islands from Venice. This unexpected proximity between revolutionary France and the Balkans had a dual impact on the political, social, and cultural development of the region.
First in the Ionian Islands and then in adjacent territories, nationalist ideas and concepts of the nation-state began to penetrate. New political terms such as “republic,” “constitution,” and “human rights” entered the political vocabulary of the region. This period coincided with the moment when these territories acquired renewed strategic importance for expanding European powers. Revolutionary France, and later Great Britain and the Russian Empire, quickly became major political, cultural, and diplomatic actors in the region. This European presence was further strengthened by a new phenomenon: travel. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the traditional Grand Tour underwent a profound transformation: France and Italy were gradually replaced by Greece, Albania, and the Ottoman East as fashionable destinations.
This direct contact not only enabled more detailed knowledge of the region but also inspired major intellectual movements in Europe, such as Philhellenism and Romantic Orientalism. A parallel development can be observed in the ideological tensions between Turkophilia and Slavophobia, as well as Turkophobia (or Islamophobia) and Russophilia, which emerged from the interplay of diplomatic travel, tourism, and Great Power interests. As a result, this new European perspective disrupted the previously unified perception of the “Orient” and laid the foundations for the “rediscovery” of the Balkans. This rediscovery was accompanied by a gradual transformation in nomenclature: from “European Turkey” in the early nineteenth century, to the “Near East” in the mid-century, and finally to the term “Balkans” at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The term “rediscovery” is used here because these territories, as former parts of the Roman and later Byzantine Empires, already existed within European collective memory through their classical provincial and thematic designations. Even if we situate the “discovery” of the Balkans at a relatively late historical moment, this does not mean that earlier testimonies and travel accounts did not exist. Many earlier accounts—particularly those written by political observers, intelligence officers, and diplomats—were often more accurate and better informed than those of later travellers. However, regardless of the relative quality of these accounts, there is no doubt that the publication of travel narratives contributed significantly to the formation of a more systematic European perception of the Balkans—not only as a distinct geographical space, but also as a cultural region characterised by an extraordinary mosaic of peoples, religions, and traditions.
The Enlightenment laid the intellectual foundations upon which the modern European orientation of the Balkans was constructed. By disseminating the principles of rational inquiry, secular education, constitutionalism, and civic responsibility, Enlightenment thinkers transformed the political imagination of the region and provided new frameworks for understanding the relationship between society, state, and nation. Although the movement assumed different forms across the Balkans, its leading representatives shared the conviction that cultural regeneration and educational reform were indispensable prerequisites for political emancipation. The careers and writings of Rigas Velestinlis and Adamantios Korais illustrate the two complementary dimensions of this transformation. On the one hand, they articulated a universalist vision of political liberty that transcended ethnic and confessional boundaries; on the other, they laid the intellectual foundations for the national revivals that would reshape the political map of Southeastern Europe during the nineteenth century. Their engagement with European philosophical currents demonstrates that the Balkan Enlightenment was neither an isolated nor derivative phenomenon, but an integral component of the broader European Enlightenment adapted to the historical realities of Ottoman Southeastern Europe.
Equally important, the gradual European rediscovery of the Balkans through diplomacy, scholarship, and travel literature transformed the region from a largely unknown imperial frontier into a recognised historical and cultural space within Europe. This reciprocal process—through which Balkan intellectuals embraced European ideas while Europe rediscovered the Balkans—created the conditions for the emergence of modern national movements and established Europe as the principal normative horizon of political modernisation. Consequently, the European idea should be understood not as a twentieth-century geopolitical project, but as a long-term intellectual tradition rooted in the Enlightenment, whose legacy profoundly shaped the political cultures and state-building processes of the Balkan peoples.
Bibliography
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