Misha Glenny's thesis about the Balkans

In The Balkans 1804-1999, Glenny recounts the First Serbian Uprising and the Greek civil war/war for independence, both of which took place in the early part of the 19th century. The Serbs were led by tribal bands of peasants and sheep farmers known as pashaliks; the Greeks likewise but with also a substantially Westernized intelligentsia who were influenced by Enlightenment ideals. The peasants who led the revolution, meanwhile, were not educated -- Glenny recounts a telling example of a Greek scholar visiting one of the klephts (brigand, guerilla warriors who had expelled the Turks) and calling him "Achilles" as an honorific. The influential leader responded, "What rubbish are you talking about? Who is this Achilles? Handy with a musket was he?"

Russia, France, and Britain also played a strong role in establishing modern Greece -- the so-called philhellenes, led by Byron, called for the Great Powers to support the fledgling Greek nation. The European nations ultimately resolved amongst themselves to establish as Greek autocrat the Bavarian prince Otto, who would "guarantee the controlling interest of the great powers over the young state." This paragraph appears to portend Glenny's overarching analysis of the region:

"The First Serbian Uprising began over half a century before the unification of Italy; the first modern Greek state was proclaimed forty years before the unification of Germany. But the national identities of Serbs and Greeks were ill-defined. Both national movements owed their success more to Ottoman decay than to their own inherent strength. To compensate for their political and economic weakness, the national elites sought support for their aspirations from the European powers. Herein lies the start of the Balkan tragedy -- these were peasant societies poorly equipped to assimilate the ideas of the Enlightenment, and located at the intersection of competing absolutist empires. The result was a stunted constitutional development whose shortcomings would inevitably be exploited by the great powers as competition between them intensified in the region in the second half of the nineteenth century." -- p. 39