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World War I
Over the course of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria gained their independence from the Ottoman Empire. The heterogeneous ethnic and religious composition of the Balkans both gave rise to and legitimized ongoing power struggles among the newly independent countries of the region, the empire that had once ruled them, and the "Great Powers" of western Europe. In 1912, the Balkan League, formed by the four countries mentioned above, declared war on the Ottoman Empire, with a view to dividing the remaining Ottoman lands in the Balkans among themselves. The ferocity of the rivalry between these competing nationalisms and nation-states was such that a second war broke out between the countries of the league and the Ottoman Empire immediately after the end of the first in 1913. The empire's ensuing loss of most of its lands in Europe was viewed by both the Ottoman political elite and the public as a humiliating catastrophe, and the Balkan Wars have come to be viewed in the literature as a turning point in the history of the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican eras.1
The structure of wars altered drastically over the course of the long 19th century, and the Balkan Wars were a capstone to this transformation. During this process, combatants and civilians became increasingly difficult to differentiate. States at war in the Balkans tried to convince the Great Powers, diplomatic circles, and their own publics that their cause was just and legitimate. This last endeavor was necessitated by the development of mass society and popular politics in both the Balkan countries and the Ottoman Empire. During the Balkan Wars and World War I, competing nationalisms were waged not only on the battlefields but also in the diplomatic and public spheres. Although World War I was not yet a full-fledged "people's war," and subsequent wars were to "remain in the hands of armies," as Hew Strachan argues, different sectors of society were increasingly involved in the mobilization efforts.2In other words, mobilization was no longer restricted to the military domain; rather, society was militarized as a result of the mobilization and propaganda campaigns of these wars.