The Balkan Merchants: Changing Borders and Informal Transnationalization

Abstract

In the Balkans transnationalism is currently associated with foreign interventions and organized crime. In between these extremes, rests a vast area of informal or ‘grey’ economy. This burgeoning transnational activity, which eludes official statistics, invites comparisons with the Balkan's last truly transnational period: the merchant-based economy of the late Ottoman Empire. Against such a historical backdrop contemporary informal and illicit trade in the Balkans proves to be an integral part of the world economy, a local response to the rise of global merchant networks, and a zone of sovereign exception which has affirmed and enabled the continuing existence of the international state system through a period of significant economic and political turbulence.