balkanize
verb
Times Literary SupplementRichard Corliss
Did you know?
The Balkan Peninsula of southeastern Europe is lapped by the Adriatic Sea in the west and the Black Sea in the east. It is named for the Balkan Mountains, a mountain range which extends across Bulgaria from its border with Serbia to the Black Sea. (Balkan comes from the Ottoman Turkish balḳān, meaning "wooded mountain or mountain range.") The Balkan States are commonly characterized as comprising Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia, with mainland portions of Greece and the European portion of Turkey often being included as well. The English word, which is often capitalized, is the lexical offspring of geography and history: the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century led to a series of revolts that accelerated the fracturing of the region into smaller states whose unstable coexistence led to violence that came to a head in World War I. Since the early 20th century, balkanize and its related noun, balkanization, have come to refer to the kind of divisive action that can weaken countries or groups, among other things.
Examples of balkanize in a Sentence
Christiaan Hetzner, Fortune, 13 Apr. 2023
Work on energetics is balkanized among different R&D units of the military, with no senior official playing point and advocating at a high level for change.
—Jeremy Bogaisky, Forbes, 9 Mar. 2023
Implementing such a scheme could balkanize the web, destroying its open essence and dramatically raising the cost of doing business.
—Steven Levy, Wired, 25 Sep. 2020
That period, before the adoption of our Constitution, left the country balkanized by predatory and punitive state measures directed against other states.
—Jonathan Turley, Twin Cities, 25 Oct. 2019
The news comes on the heels of an Oct. 1 court win (perhaps a Pyrrhic one) for opponents of net neutrality that upheld the FCC’s repeal but handed states the authority to impose stricter standards—threatening to balkanize US regulations.
—Michael J. Coren, Quartz, 3 Oct. 2019
Although our national reliance on shrill identity politics and our loud public shaming of dissenters has had the effect of balkanizing us at an ever-increasing and dangerous rate.
—John Kass, chicagotribune.com, 17 July 2019
Cite this Entry
“Balkanize.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/balkanize. Accessed 30 Oct. 2025.
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