Southeastern Europe 33 (2009) 147–154 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI 10.1163/187633309X421247 brill.nl/seeu A Response to Marko Attila Hoare and Tvrtko Jakovina’s Comments on Te Balkans: A Post-Communist History Robert Bideleux Swansea University Professor Ian Jeffries and I appreciate the time these two reviewers have devoted to Te Balkans. Unfortunately, neither review presents what the book sets out to do nor summarises and assesses its overarching theses and conceptual framework. Instead, Dr. Hoare uses selective and out-of-context quotations to hugely misrepresent our views and theses (they are almost the opposite of what he claims), and Dr. Jakovina largely mistakes legitimate differences of opinion, position, conjecture, and interpretation for right-or-wrong factual matters. Tese reviews reveal far more about the reviewers than about the book under review. We have long understood that Balkan history and politics are minefields of ethnocentric distortion and highly charged ‘national’ claims, counter-claims, and sensitivities. We have understood also that some Balkan, as well as Western, historians of the Balkans have tended to deal in crude ethno-cultural stereo- types, caricatures, cultural determinism, and ‘essentialized’ group characteristics and identities, and to vilify those who do not fully share their particular sensitivities, obsessions, and prejudices. We have long argued that ethnocentric approaches to Balkan history and politics are highly misleading and potentially dangerous (see Bideleux and Taylor 1996: 225-228, 286-290; and Bideleux and Jeffries 1996). Te “Preface” to Te Balkans states: Te Balkans is profoundly concerned to avoid and guard against the widespread cultural, religious, national and ethnic caricatures and stereotyping of the supposed ‘behaviour,’ ‘conduct,’ ‘mentalities,’ ‘attitudes,’ syndromes and ‘mindsets’ of the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula […]. Looking at the Balkan Peninsula through such distorting lenses […] is a profoundly lazy, arrogant and dangerous substitute for more thorough and open-minded