Is the First Balkan War Really Over?

Montenegro's Oct. 8, 1912, declaration of war on the Ottoman Turkish Empire and its Oct. 9 attack on neighboring Albania, an Ottoman protectorate, stunned Europe. Montenegro, a military midget, attacking Albania, another poor and backwater Balkan nowhere? Can a tiny statelet like Montenegro spark great havoc?

When the spark strikes a powder keg of ethnic, sectarian and nationalist conflict, the tragic answer is yes. This week marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First Balkan War (October 1912 to May 1913). It was the second in a series of three wars that led to the great and not quite settled tragedy of World War I, the first being the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-1912. In that limited but dirty conflict, Italy, an aspiring imperialist, had sought to strip the decaying Turk imperialists of Libya. Italy succeeded. The Libyan civil war of 2011 played out on many of the same battlefields where a century earlier Italians fought Turks and their Libyan allies.

Italy had launched limited naval forays on Turkish European and Aegean possessions, but the First Balkan War brought heavy modern combat onto European soil. The First Balkan begat the Second Balkan War (1913), and in the summer of 1914 the Balkan assassination of an Austrian archduke ignited a war that went global -- World War I.

World War II and the Cold War reprised geopolitical issues World War I created or left unresolved. Twenty-first century conflicts roil the Central Asian and Caucasus territories once controlled by the Orthodox Christian Romanov Russian Empire and its heir, the Soviet Union. The Muslim Ottomans once controlled the Arab Spring states of Libya, Tunisia, Syria and Egypt. Yemen was also Ottoman land. The Ottoman Sultan served as caliph, nominal spiritual leader of a global Muslim caliphate. In 2001, Osama bin Laden said reviving the caliphate required global jihad. (continue reading...)