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Balkanization = to break up (as a region or group) into smaller
and often hostile units
• bal·kan·i·za·tion
Etymology: Balkan Peninsula • Date: 1919 • first appeared
in an American book by Mowrer to signify the creation of a medley
of hopelessly mixed races and small states prey to the violent promptings
of their own passions
"The current attitudes towards the Balkans seem to leave
intact the old hierarchical structures in Europe in which the North-West
is the most enlightened corner and therefore occupies the self-conferred
leadership role, while the Balkans continue to play out European
fears and taboos on the continent's edge. They continue to offer
the site for the irrational and the obscene."
- Vesna Goldsworthy, Last
Stop on the Orient Express: The Balkans and the Politics of British
(Inter)vention
Maria
Todorova has argued that a unified discourse of balkanism emerged
at the outset of the twentieth century, specifically around the
outbreak of the Balkan wars and World War I. Rooted in the Ottoman
legacy, the extreme ethnic heterogeneity and perceived mixture of
Oriental and European traits in the region, most Europeans found
themselves perplexed before the ambiguity and complexity the Balkans
seemed to hold for those accustomed to homogenized national territories.
Based on the precarious borders and political upheavals in the region
that were closely tied to Great Power intervention in the Balkans,
this heterogeneity was soon pathologized as an unstable state of
impurity, a dangerous volatility that threatened to pollute and
bring disorder to Europe. With the hardening of racial discourses
in this early period of the twentieth century, a verdict was passed
on the Balkans as a zone of racial impurity, whose peoples were
the product of a threatening conflation of sameness and difference,
partially Oriental, incompletely European, oscillating between both
and neither. Symbolic geopolitics framed the Balkans as geographically
integral to Europe, yet culturally alien, constituting Europe’s
anticivilization or dark side within (Vesna
Goldsworthy 1999).
These characterizations were rooted in a eurocentric and ultimately
developmental paradigm, in which Europe (particularly northwestern
Europe) represented the pinnacle of progress, enlightenment, and
rationality, while the Balkans were condemned to an “intermediate
state between barbarity and civilization” (Kennan), a lower
and backward stage of development ruled by violent and barbarous
passions of a semi-oriental nature. In balkanist discourses, Balkan
nationalism was portrayed as primitive, bloodthirsty, a nationalism
of a lower order that needed to be restrained by the civilized and
enlightened nationalism of Europe. Balkan violence was similarly
framed as more primitive and barbaric, rooted in brutal tribal passions
in contrast to the rationalistic and superior technological warfare
of Europeans.
In this eurocentric narrative of Europe, modernization for the Balkans
implied Europeanization of the Balkans - European progress was to
be achieved by a “purification” of the Balkans to rid
it of its barbaric passions and backwardness. Specifically, this
meant passing from the so-called primitive nationalist particularisms
and extreme heterogeneity of the Balkans to an “emulat...[ion]
of the homogenous European nation-state as the normative form of
social organization” (Todorova 13).
Recently, throughout the 1990s and in the wake of the NATO bombing
of Kosovo and Yugoslavia, we have seen a major recrudescence of
balkanist discourses that pose the region as a threat that could
taint Europe with its violent impurities and instability. Furthermore,
what is necessary is to “de-balkanize” and purify them
before they might be allowed to “(re?)enter Europe” (as
Clinton has called for). In terms of the west’s response to
such Balkan strife, media and military technologies are being used
more than ever as a way to both violently contain and distance the
contaminating effects of such impurities within their borders. Indeed,
the two primary sites for the reconstruction of balkanist discourses
are the western media and foreign policy arenas.
The resurgence of balkanist discourse in Western media coverage
of the dissolution of Yugoslavia is pervasive. Over the course of
the 1990s, a progressive reorganization of the symbolic geography
of the Balkans occurred that cast the region outside of 'civilized'
Europe. These media discourses have an obsessively local focus that
prevents any considration of the regional or international factors
that have played a role in the Balkan spectacle. Anything negative
or violent that occurred was due to purely indegenous factors based
on essentialized balkanist traits, never to the shaping of local
factors and competing nationalisms in response to broader geopolitical
processes or Western actions in the region. The extreme visibility
and focus on local nationalist dynamics that confirm balkanist perspectives
of the region lies in marked contrast to the invisible and assumed
backdrop of authority and legitimizing agency that Europe and NATO
now carry in the region. Yet, as Misha Glenny has shown, the particular
dynamics of competing local nationalisms in the Balkans have always
been shaped by Great Power interests in the region, and the outcome
more often than not has been determined by “domestic imperatives
in great power foreign policy [rather] than by ancient enmities”
or local interests (Todorova).
18th century Austro-Hungarian military
map depicting the Austro-Hungarian attack on a Belgrade under Ottoman
rule
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'At first we were confused. The East
thought that we were West while the West considered us to
be the
East,' Some of us misunderstood our place in this clash of
currents, so they cried that we belong to neither side, and
others that we belong exclusively to one side or the other.
But I tell you, Irinej, we are doomed by fate to be the East
in the West, and the West in the East, to acknowledge only
heavenly Jerusalem beyond us and here on earth -- no-one.
- St Sava (Nemanjic, 1175-1235), the
founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church, writing in an epistle
In Európa Köldöken
(The Navel of Europe), his tellingly titled collection of
essays, the Hungarian writer Gyorgy Konrad writes: "One
of my heads is Eastern, the other Western. We live on the
Western edges of the East and we are forced always to compare
things and appearances. We are born comparatists. We cannot
reject either of our sides, hence the paradox in our attitudes.
Our specificity is contained in this. In effect, we are never
at home. In our permanent abode we are homesick for god knows
where. At home, we always feel a bit uneasy".
If...Nato is to remain functional,
it cannot suddenly open its doors to anyone at all...The Czech
Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia - and Austria and Slovenia
as well - clearly belong to the western sphere of European
civilisation. They espouse its values and draw on the same
traditions....Moreover, the contiguous and stable Central
European belt borders both on the traditionally agitated Balkans
and on the great Eurasian area....'
- Vaclav Havel, 'New Democracies for
Old Europe', New York Times, 17 October 1993
What we are up against is the sad fact
that developments of those earlier ages, not only those of
the Turkish domination but of earlier ones as well, had the
effect of thrusting into the southeastern reaches of the European
continent a salient of non-European civilization that has
continued to the present day to preserve many of its non-European
characteristics, including some that fit even less with the
world of today than they did with the world of eighty years
ago... No one...wants or should be expected to occupy the
entire distracted Balkan region, to subdue its excited peoples
and to hold them in order until they can calm down and begin
to look at their problems in a more orderly way. Conceivably,
such an occupation may be momentarily helpful .... [but] could
only be the most temporary of improvisations.
- George Kennan (key figure in the US
policy of containment towards the USSR), The Balkan Crisis:
1913 and 1993
DEBALKANISE THE BALKANS: CLINTON
14.25 -- US President Bill Clinton told media yesterday that
Europe now had no option but to bring the entire area of South-East
Europe into the European Union family. Clinton was speaking
in Aachen during a three-day visit to Germany where he became
the first American president to win the prestigious Charlemagne
Prize for promoting European unity. The goal should be, he
said, to debalkanise the Balkans once and for all and that
the international community counted on the Serbian opposition
for that. "President Milosevic and his policies should
not have a future," said Clinton.
Why do so many Westerners shake their
heads in laughter and despair at the Balkans? Why are the
region's inhabitants seen either as congenitally irrational
and bloodthirsty mobs, never happier than when they are slitting
the throats of their neighbours, or as incompetent clowns
in fanciful uniforms that mysteriously invoke a medieval past?
It would be hard to find academics or Balkan specialists who
take the view that the collapse of Yugoslavia was a product
of ancient hatreds. But this belief is stubbornly held by
the Western media and Western policy-makers, including many
who have participated or are still participating in the crisis,
and whose influence helps to perpetuate the myths.
- Misha Glenny, Only
in the Balkans |
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