Imagining the Balkans

Citation

Hudson, R.C. (2002), "Imagining the Balkans", European Business Review, Vol. 14 No. 4, pp. 305-307. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2002.14.4.305.2

Once again South‐eastern Europe, specifically the Balkans, has attracted a tarnished reputation in the eyes of the West, where popular opinion, influenced by the media and the academy, has distanced the region from mainstream Europe. The Balkans have been marginalised and excluded and collectively transmogrified into Europe’s “other”, whilst some communities in the so‐called western Balkans, the “former” Yugoslavia, have been represented in the collective conscience as tribal peoples who have been essentialised and stereotyped largely through a reductivist media, which itself has built its narrative upon two centuries or more of populist and, often, pseudo‐academic writing. Just as Western opinion has patronised, excluded and marginalised the peoples of Africa and Asia in the past (as it is barely refraining from doing in the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001, with its representation of Islam) so it continues to do so with the Balkans. What, then, are we to make of expressions such as, “Balkan mentalities”, “Balkan savagery” and “Balkan tribalism”, which seem to do little more than relegate the Balkans to a lower civilisational category? It is this crisis of representation and the inherent dangers of observing the Balkans from above and from afar, which has affected the disciplines of anthropology, history, literature, philosophy and sociology in the past, and it is this very question of how we visualise, represent and think of the Balkans which concerns the Bulgarian‐born American academic, Maria Todorova, in her excellent book Imagining the Balkans. She asks how it is that a simple geographical appellation has been transformed into one of the most powerful pejorative designations in history, international relations, political science, and, nowadays, general intellectual discourse? To this end, she advocates an interdisciplinary approach to representing the Balkans by interweaving the discourse of nationalism and national identity (with references to Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson, inter alia) with a post‐colonial theory that is clearly intellectually indebted to Edward Said, in the face of the criticism that emanates from some sectors of the academy of his work on “Orientalism”.

Of course, it would be so easy to reduce the conflicts of the last decade to a “clash of civilisations” à la Samuel Huntington (1997), in which lines of cleavage drawn across the maps of Europe, Africa and Asia, have been represented as perennial lines of confrontation. This controversial approach might have had some appeal as a generalised theory, but it soon falls apart under closer scrutiny. For example, if Bosnia has been described as a cleft society arising from three different faith communities, how does one explain away the fact that Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks have lived together in relative peace and harmony, with only the occasional outbreak of tension, for a period of five centuries? Likewise, it might be appealing to explain away the raft of conflicts that have taken place in the area since 1991 with reference to “ancient enmities”, “blood drenched earth” and “Balkan ghosts”, but when one reads that such an approach has allegedly influenced the US State Department and President Clinton in their policy making during the early 1990s, with reference to Robert Kaplan’s essentialist travelogue of the region (1993), then there is some cause for concern. As Todorova quips so teasingly in her conclusion: Herder’s Balkan Volksgeist has been virtually transformed into Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, whilst for Todorova, the only spectre that has been haunting Western culture over the past two centuries has been the spectre of the Balkans.

Yet although the Balkans, from a geographical perspective, are inextricably part of Europe, they are culturally constructed as other, branded, from the early nineteenth century with the epithet of “Balkan powder keg” as a focal point for tribal enmity and concomitant slaughter. Nevertheless, as Todorova remarks, the people of the Balkans have no monopoly over barbarity: “Indeed there is something distinctly non‐European in that the Balkans never quite seem to reach the dimensions of European slaughters”. And one wonders why it is that so many commentators in the West have failed to consider the number of Vietnamese who were killed by US forces during the 1960s, to say nothing of other American policies throughout the developing world and its own “backyard” during the Cold War and its contemporary aftermath.

Yet, Todorova does not wish to simply expose Western bias towards the Balkans from an imperialist or orientalist (in her case, she has adopted the term “balkanist”) perspective – which she nevertheless does so brilliantly – but to trace the myths that have grown up about the Balkans and look at the links between reality and invention, through her survey of a selection of travelogues, diplomatic accounts, academic surveys and journalism that have been gleaned from a raft of European languages, from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Culture is, of course, inherently political, and the impact of culture upon identity, politics and conflict needs to be fully addressed if one is to gain a better understanding of the issues of the early twenty‐first century. How culture is represented in the area of south‐eastern Europe is an issue which is admirably addressed by Todorova, and in this crisis of representation the manner in which the South Slavs have been tainted with the pejorative appellation of “Balkan primitivism” by Western commentators becomes blatantly obvious. By contrast, many South Slavs have identified with this image, celebrating it as a badge of pride so that if, during the so‐called wars of Yugoslav succession, Serbs were represented as monkeys by cartoonists in the Independent, whilst journalists in the New York Times ranted on about “virulent Serb nationalism”, (see Burgess, 1997, p. 41), there was a popular cultural backlash in Serbia itself, as a process of self‐fulfilling prophecy from a socio‐psychological perspective, in a mood that was propagated on the imagery of the Internet during NATO’s bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999. Such self‐fulfilling prophecies expressed in demotic culture have also been exploited in Serbian literature; witness, for example, the late poet, Desenka Maksimovi – with the exposition of her poem Balkanac (Man from the Balkans):

I am not ashamed of being, as you would say, a barbarian from the Balkans home of all that’s unclean and stormy …

Other writers, such as Vesna Goldsworthy (1998, p. 4) have remarked on the distinction in a language that was once called “Serbo‐Croat” between the upper‐case Balkanac and lower‐case balkanac, between a “man from the Balkans” as opposed to a “primitive individual”.

Furthermore, it is often argued that the Balkans are the Ottoman legacy, although few writers ever bother to explain at what level, how or why this should be the case. Certainly, the idea of the Balkans as an Ottoman legacy may seem to operate at times at the level of popular culture; witness for example the recent resort to Turkish rhythms during the Turbo Folk music craze in 1990s Serbia, but at no other level, given that when the break came in the aftermath of the First World War, political independence, modernism and national sovereignty would kick in pretty fast in those states which were classified as being Balkan.

By contrast, if one insists in imaging the Balkans as an Ottoman legacy this plays into the hands of a Western imperialist and hegemonic Weltanschauung not just on a cultural level, but also in the area of international relations and Western foreign policy. If the Balkans are non‐European, or other, then there is no compunction to intervene politically or militarily in times of heightened tension and crisis. For example, there was a lot of hesitation over intervening in the affairs of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia before 1994. There is another side to this approach, an economic one. If there were no economic gains to be made or secured in the Balkans, then why intervene at all? There was no oil to exploit in BiH in 1992, unlike Kuwait in 1991, a point which was beautifully illustrated by the cartoonist Plantu, in a series of cartoons appearing in Le Monde between 1992 and 1994, which emphasised the political impotence, political pragmatism and economic greed of the West against the backdrop of a primitivist representation of all things Serb.

However, it is this perception of an Ottoman legacy that had also been enforced within the region itself by the discourse of Balkan nationalism, which, in all cases, has painted a black picture of 500 years of Ottoman oppression. Into this, it is incorrectly argued, the peoples of the Balkans became cut off from major Western influences, most notably: the Renaissance, Civic Society, the Enlightenment and their concomitant offshoots, scientific discovery, technological revolution and nationalism. Todorova rightly points out that such an approach would be nonsensical, given that countless examples of Western influence and dialogue with Western ideas exist in Balkan societies. Yet, far from reinforcing the nationalist discourses of individual Balkan states or communities, such an approach can also have a retrograde and deleterious effect, as this plays into the hands of reductionist and hegemonic Western interpretations, as expounded in the works of twentieth century writers, such as Huntington, Kaplan, George Kennan and Rebecca West, to say nothing of their nineteenth century forebears. Todorova demonstrates that it is this reification of civilisational fault lines between Orthodoxy, Islam and Western Christendom (read Judaeo‐Chrisitanity or Catholicism) as with the reification of “orientalism” and “balkanism”, which lies at the very heart of the crisis of re‐thinking international relations at the start of the twenty‐first century.

In her conclusion, she daringly argues that given the increasing tendency towards political correctness and attempts to curb the expression of xenophobic and racialist ideas throughout the last three decades of the twentieth century, it became more and more fashionable to avoid criticising the states and peoples of the so‐called developing world. By contrast, the peoples of the Balkans are white Europeans. There is, as she sees it, no similar desire to spare these peoples from any criticism.

Imagining the Balkans is an extremely valuable contribution to our understanding of South Eastern Europe. It is a beautifully written book which can be read in conjunction with Adam Burgess’ (1997) Divided Europe and Vesna Goldsworthy’s (1998) Inventing Ruritania to provide the reader with a thorough grounding in the mis‐representation of the Balkans in the West.