Remembered Homelands, Divided Lands: Ottoman Legacies and the Roots of Ethnic Conflict

This talk argues that the ethnic conflicts of Southeast Europe are not the result of “ancient hatreds,” but of a specific historical configuration shaped during the Ottoman period. Under Ottoman rule, earlier forms of statehood did not disappear but survived in memory and identity in a kind of “suspended animation,” while at the same time demographic structures were significantly reshaped. Conflict emerged where these two processes intersected. In regions such as Kosovo, Bosnia, Vojvodina, and Transylvania, one group could claim historical precedence based on earlier statehood, while another could claim legitimacy based on later demographic dominance. The Greek–Turkish case shows a similar pattern, where a Byzantine territorial memory and Turkish nationhood collided over territories that became ethnically mixed during the Ottoman rule. The result is a particular type of conflict: not between truth and falsehood, but between competing and internally coherent forms of historical legitimacy — where both sides can plausibly claim that the land is, in different senses, their own. Csaba B. Horváth, PhD earned his PhD in International Relations at Corvinus University of Budapest after completing degrees in History and Political Science at Eötvös Loránd University. He is a member of the General Assembly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on geopolitics, with a particular emphasis on the Indo-Pacific as well as on Central and Eastern Europe. He has held visiting research fellowships at several universities in Australia, China and Taiwan, and earlier in his youth, spent two years living in Japan, where he acquired conversational proficiency in Japanese. He is also a regular participant in international conferences and held public talks across the Indo-Pacific, including in Australia, China, India, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore. The Kościuszko Chair serves as a center for Polish Studies in the broadest sense, including learning, teaching, researching, and writing about Poland’s culture, history, heritage, religion, government, economy, and successes in the arts, sciences, and letters, with special emphasis on the achievements of Polish civilization and its relation to other nations, particularly the United States. **Learn more about IWP graduate programs: https://www.iwp.edu/academics/graduate-degree-programs/ ***Make a gift to the IWP Kosciuszko Chair of Polish Studies: https://wl.donorperfect.net/weblink/WebLink.aspx?name=E231090&id=4