The work of the team of authors on the example of the Balkan countries (Serbia - Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece) explores some aspects of the transformation of traditional society into an industrial one, taking into account the initially low degree of its readiness to enter the path of modernization and the peculiarities of the attitude and mentality of the Balkan peoples. Attempts by the Bashkan states created in the 19th century, which were purely agrarian, with an incomplete social structure and dependent on foreign policy, to connect in the last third of the 19th - the first half of the 20th century. to the pan-European modernization process are analyzed on the basis of the general theory of modernization and its offshoots in the form of the theory of modernization of "another Europe."