Imagining the Balkans Maria Todorova Sä-:- New York Oxford DYPORPi TTMTVFRSTTY PRF<^ Preface The hope of an intellectual is not that he will have an effect on the world, but that someday, somewhere, someone will read what he wrote exactly as he wrote it. Theodor Adorno ry-i his book, more than any other project I have worked on, has been with me I ever. Therefore, it is difficult to arrange in any meaningful way (chronologic or by importance) all the different individuals, works, and events that have shy my thinking on the subject. Since, in the course of this work, I have, of neces repeatedly trespassed into fields where I have little or no expertise, I might fa acknowledge important influences. This is by no means the result of intellec arrogance but is chiefly the result of the wild and often unsystematic forays unknown territory that have, however, always been informed with curiosity and erence for the achievements of others. The ambitiousness of what I am trying to address in this book is apparer presupposes an immensely elaborate secondary literature as well as the fullest sible primary source coverage. In its ideal form, this should be the undertaking c interdisciplinary team of scholars and the result of long periods of discussion.r. this is impossible for the practical purposes of the present project is quite clear,. compelled to begin with one of a great number of proleptic remarks with which work is fated to abound, namely that I am clearly and painfully conscious of bi unable to produce what, to me, has for a long time been the ideal scholarly wo complex tapestry of captivating and meaningful design executed with full and embroidery in all details. Of necessity, I will have to resort to patches, cursory c positions, and eclectic style. I see my principal task as construing an acceptable fo work and suggesting possible lines of debate. Even if it anerely triggers argum this book will have fulfilled its purpose: I am convinced that the problem iner whoie genre of works on "balkanism." It is part of the comme il faut manner of many American academic books to b with theory, to situate themselves consciously at the outset of their work so as tc ditionally frustrate their readers' efforts: not only will they have to cope with the viii Preface ternalized, how much is simply an indication of intellectual sympathies and political loyalties, how much is just lip service, the citation syndrome. Mercifully, readers follow their own strategies. Some skip the theory claims entirely and look for what they consider to be the sound substance; others, quite in reverse, read only the theory and treat the rest as trifling empirical illustration. Only a handful of dedicated and inbepid professional readers approach the work as is in its professed or manifest intertextuality. I am only partly conforming to this style tongue in cheek (I am not quite sure whether the stress should be on conform or on tongue in cheek). This is not because I am not serious about theory: on the contrary, I hold it in enormous respect. However, to do an exhaustive and honest self-analysis of one's eclectic "Hotel Kwilu," to borrow Mary Douglas's metaphor for grand theory, requires a tortuous and possibly futile investigation. I will confine myself here to simply acknowledging my debt to many theorists from whom I have absorbed and applied a number of useful notions, or who have given me solace with their clear articulation and masterful treatment of many hazy doubts that have befallen me. I hope that how I have used them or how they have discreetly influenced my own argument does them much more credit than reiLeratiiig their main points, especially insofar as I neither wish to have followed, nor claim to have mastered, their thought in toto: Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, Tom Nairn, and the whole rich exchange of ideas around nationalism, modernity, and "the invention of tradition"; the work on the phenomenology of otherness and stereotyping; Erving Goffman on stigma and the wide and fruitful discussion his work triggered among his followers; Mary Douglas on everything from culture through objectivity, skepticism, and wager to libel and especially liminality; the growing literature on marginality; the whole postcolonialist endeavor, with all my due admiration for it but mostly for forcing me to articulate more intelligibly to myself my main points of skepticism and disagreement with the help of Arif Dirlik and Aijaz Ahmad; Fredric Jameson about his overall orientation in what he calls the "era of multinational capital" and "the global American culture of postmodernism"; the latest literature on empire and imperialism from Richard Koebner and Helmut Dan Schmidt to Wolfgang J. Mommsen; Pierre Bourdieu on describing, prescribing, representation in general, and particularly the political power of "naming"; the new writings on taxonomy (categories, naming, labeling, similarity, projection); notions like "discourse" and "knowledge as power," which by now have become so powerfully entrenched that it would be superfluous to invoke the larger framework of Michel Foucault; and, above all, David Lodge whose Changing Places, Small World, and especially Nice Work have been the best introduction to the world of critical theory, semiotics, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, aporia, and the perpetual sliding of the signified under the signifier. Because I am situating myself within the rich and growing genre of "the invention of tradition" and because of the obvious analogies between my endeavor and "orientalism," early on in my work I was advised to avoid direct intellectual alignment with Edward Said so as not to carry the baggage of the increasing criticism against his ideas. Not least because of an inborn anarchist streak, I wish at this point to acknowledge HIV intpTlpi-tnal M-irlflkWl^a,... i„ C:J T---- li . ■ i - ■ Preface ix important. I think I have distanced myself enough and have shown the basic distinctions (but also correspondences) in the treatment of my own concept of "balkanism" from Said's "orientalism." It would be, however, a sublime intellectual dishonesty not to acknowledge the stimulating and, indeed, inspirational force of Said's thought or emotion. His impassioned critique has produced followers as well as challengers, which in the end is supposed to be the effect of any genuine intellectual effort. There has appeared, in the past few years, a whole body of important studies on the region informed by the same or similar concerns as my own. Some of these studies have been written by friends, and I have profited from the fruitful dialogue with them; others are the work of colleagues I have not met but whose scholarship I admire. I have duly Tecopnized their influence in the text. It goes without saying that, in the end, I am solely responsible for all the errors of commission and omission. To acknowledge means also to confess. My motives in writing this book have been complex and diverse but, first and foremost, this is not supposed to be a morality tale, simply exposing Western bias in a framework either of imperialism or orientalism (although something could be said in favor of each perspective). By reacting against a stereotype produced in the West, I do not wish to create a counterstereotype of the West, to commit the fallacy of "occidentalism." First, I do not believe in a homogeneous West, and there are substantial differences within and between the different "western" discussions of the Balkans. Second, I am convinced that a major part of Western scholarship has made significant, even crucial contributions to Balkan studies. Biases and preconceived ideas, even among those who attempt to shed them, are almost unavoidable, and this applies to outsiders as well as to insiders. Indeed, the outsider's view is not necessarily inferior to the insider's, and the insider is not anointed with truth because of existential intimacy with the object of study. What counts in the last resort is the very process of the conscious effort to shed biases and look for ways to express the reality of otherness, even in the face of a paralyzing epistemological skepticism. Without the important body of scholarship produced in the West and in the East, I would not have been able to take on the topics in this book. It will not do justice to all those scholars who have been valuable in shaping my views to mention but a few and it is impossible even to begin to enumerate them. Nor is this an attempt to depict the Balkan people as innocent victims, to encourage "a sense of aggrieved primal innocence."1 I am perfectly aware of my ambiguous position, of sharing the privilege and responsibility to be simultaneously outside and inside both the object of inquiry and the process of attaining knowledge about it. InT/ze Rhetoric of Empire, David Spurr uses the example of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva who come from "places that define the outer limits of Western European culture: Derrida in colonial Africa, where the French empire fades into the great open space of Africa; Kristeva in Bulgaria, crossing-ground of the Crusades and the historical territory of contention between Christianized Europe and the Ottoman Empire. In such places it is possible to live both in and beyond the West, knowing the boundaries of its language, and looking southward or eastward as if toward regions of the unthought."2 Preface Preface central postulates) but to partake in the awareness of "the danger and the freedom of the boundary situation." I am acutely aware of (and at the same time tremendously savor) my own marginality vis-a-vis both my country of birth —Bulgaria—and my country of adoption —the United States. It is not a newly acquired awareness; its geography has simply expanded. Even back in Bulgaria, the consciousness of mixed ethnic background and my vocation—exploring and teaching about the hybrid society of the Ottoman Empire in the conditions of the dominant discourse of the nation-state—had conferred on me the luxurious feeling of intellectual exile. Had I remained in Bulgaria, I would not have written this particular book, although its ideas and empirical material would have informed my teaching and my behavior. I would have felt compelled to write a different one, one that would have explored and exposed the internal orientalisms within the region, that would have centered on the destructive and impoverishing effects of ethnic nationalism (without necessarily passing dogmatic strictures on nationalism as such), and that, far from exhibiting nostalgia for imperial formations, would have rescued from the Ottoman and the more recent Balkan past these possibilities for alternative development that would have enriched our common human culture. Maybe I will still write it. But, as it happens, I live here and now, and for the moment it is to this audience that I wish to tell a story, to explain and to oppose something that is being produced here and has adverse effects there. Of course, it is very uncertain whether we ever reach the audience we speak to; it is equally uncertain whether whom we think we speak for wiil actually recognize or accept it. My second proieptic remark professes that I do not mean this work to be an exercise in what Peter Gay calls "comparative trivialization"; in a word, I do not want to exempt the Balkans of their responsibility because the world outside behaves in a no less distasteful manner; nor do I want to support the erroneous notion of what Hans Magnus Enzensberger has defined as "no protagonists, only string pullers." I am not writing on behalf of a homogeneous Balkan abstraction. By now, I have realized well the limits of control one can maintain over one's own text and that it is impossible to impose rules on how one should be understood or how one should be used. Rather, 1 am speaking for this part among Balkan intellectuals who think about the problems of identity and have internalized the divisions imposed on them by previously shaped and exclusionary identities. In doing this, I am trying to emancipate them not only from the debilitating effect of Western aloofness but also from the more emotional rejection of their partners in the East European predicament of yesterday. My special and deep gratitude goes to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which awarded me a fellowship for the academic year 1994-1995 and where most of this book was written. At a time when the Balkans have generated, strong emotions and when the quest for quick fixes has promoted investment predominantly in politically expedient projects, the Wilson Center decided to support a purely speculative effort that can only seem abstruse, convoluted, and recherche to the lovers of uncomplicated and straightforward recipes. I profited enormously from the broad knowledge and critical insights of the commentators at my seminar (Larry Wolff and §erif Mardin), and from the long and friendly conversations with the other I isdanis. Brook Thomas, Geoffrey Hartman, Joel Kuipers. Special thanks are due my interns Debbie Fitzl and Angeliki Papantoniou. At different scholarly meetings I have benefited from critical remarks and friendly advice. In personal conversations or correspondence, Milica Bakic-Hayden, Robert Hayden, Vladimir Tismaneanu, Olga Augustinos, Gerassimos Augustinos, Elizabeth prodromou, Engin Akarli, Pascalis Kitromilides, Stefan Troebst, Theodore Coul-oumbis, Rifa'at Abou El-Haj, Diana Mishkova, Philip Shashko, Boian Koulov, Evelina Kelbecheva, and Bonka Boneva have shared with me information, valuable views, and critical comments. MarkThurner and my other colleagues from the postcolonial historv and theory reading group at the University of Florida helped alleviate the doubts I had about venturing into unknown waters. Special acknowledgment to Alice Freifeld, who struggled with the whole manuscript at a time when it needed radical surgery. The original manuscript for this work was longer by one third. Abbreviation necessitated by considerations of size and price, did, in some cases, contribute to more disciplined and clear-cut formulations and the removal of some interesting material that was not, however, central to the argument. For urging me to do this, I thank my editors at Oxford University Press. Yet I regret the contraction of the ■ endnotes, which, in their initial form, contained polemic deliberations and extensive historiographical characteristics. The "art of the footnote" may be losing ground, but I wish at least to document my nostalgia for it. As always, my chief debt is to my family. My husband has always been encouraging and filled with more respect and higher expectations for my profession than I have ever had. I have been thrilled to observe how, for Anna and Alexander, to carry multiple identities has not been a burden but an embellishment. Finally, this book is dedicated to my parents and written for my friends. Gainesville, Florida February 1996 M.T. fallows at Hip renter- T /liliana Slmailr Qlinpcnn Contents "Introduction Balkanism and Orientalism: Are They Different Catego; :■ I. The Balkans: Nomen 21 2. "Balkans" as Self-designation 38 .3. The Discovery of the Balkans 62 4. Patterns of Perception until 1900 89 From Discovery to Invention, from Invention to Classification 116 6. Between Classification and Politics: The Balkans and the Myth of Central Europe 140 ; 7. The Balkans: Realia — Qu'est-ce qu'il y a de hors-texte? 161 Conclusion 184 . Notes 191 Bibliography 217 Index 251 Introduction Balkanism and Orientalism: Are They Different Categories? specter is haunting Western culture—the specter of the Balkans. All the powers j\,have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: politicians and journalists, conservative academics and radical intellectuals, moralists of all kind, gender, and fashion. Where is the adversarial group that has not been decried as "Balkan" - and "balkanizing" by its opponents? Where the accused have not hurled back the branding reproach of "balkanism"? By the beginning of the twentieth century, Europe had added to its repertoire of Schimpfworter, or disparagements, a new one that, although recently coined, turned out to be more persistent over time than others with centuries-old tradition. "Balkanization" not only had come to denote the parcelization of large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the back-ward, the primitive, the barbarian. In its latest hypostasis, particularly in American academe, it has been completely decontextualized and paradigmatically related to a variety of problems. That the Balkans have been described as the "other" of Europe does not need special proof. What has been emphasized about the Balkans is that its inhabitants do not care to conform to the standards of behavior devised as normative by and for the civilized world. As with any generalization, this one is based on reduc-tionism, but the reductionism and stereotyping of the Balkans has been of such degree and intensity that the discourse merits and requires special analysis. The "civilized world" (the term is introduced not ironically but as a self-pro^ claimed label) was first seriously upset with the Balkans at the time of the Balkan wars (1912-1913). News of the barbarities committed in this distant European Mediterranean peninsula came flooding in and challenged the peace movements that not only were gaining strength in Europe but were beginning to be institutionalized. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, founded in 1910, established an international commission "to inquire into the causes and conduct of the Balkan wars." The report of the commission, which consisted of well-known public figures from .. .,«R«s«v_:i.„:„ n____;„ r>__.____... „„j Atr,, 4 Introduction the Balkan conflict, presenting the points of view and aspirations of the belligerent'^ as well as the economic, social, and moral consequences of the wars, and their rcl,/ '? tion to international law. The report included an introduction by Baron d'Estourrie!Jt-? de Constant reiterating the main principles of the peace movement: "Let us repeat! for the benefit of those who accuse us of'bleating for peace at any price,' wfiaf^f have always maintained: War rather than slavery; Arbitration rather than war; Coii^j ciliation rather than arbitration."1 j De Constant differentiated between the first and the second Balkan wars: \\*% first was defensive and a war of independence, "the supreme protest against violence -and generally the protest of the weak against the strong ... and for this reason it w3s | glorious and popular throughout the civilized world." The second was a predatna -| war in which ''both victor and vanquished lose morally and materially." Still, for j,; ■ their differences, both Balkan wars "finally sacrificed treasures of riches, lives, a heroism. We cannot authenticate these sacrifices without protesting, without (it. nouncing their cost and their danger for the future." While not optimistic about the * immediate political future of the region, the commission concluded: 'Whattheii jsf.*jt the duly of the civilized world in the Balkans? ... It is clear in the first place tliatfS they should cease to exploit these nations foi gain. They should encourage them 163 make arbitration treaties and insist upon their keeping them. They should set a gooi-Jl example by seeking a judicial settlement of all international disputes." De Constantly reiterated: «§ ..•-..t-%re The real culprits in this long list of executions, assassinations, drownings, burnings, massacres and atrocities furnished by our report, are not, we repeat, the Balkan peoples. Here pity must conquer indignation. Do not let us condemn the victims... The real culprits are those who by interest or inclination, declaring that war is inevitable, end by making it so, asserting that they are powerless to prevent it.2 In 1993, instead of launching a fact-finding mission, the Carnegie Endowment m satisfied itself with reprinting the 1913 report, preceding its title with a gratuitous S caption, "The Other Balkan Wars." Also added was an introduction by George Kennan, ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and to Yugoslavia in the 1960s, J3 best known as the padre padrone of the U.S. policy of containment vis-a-vis the USSR. * Entitled "The Balkan Crises: 1913 and 1993," this introduction was in turn preceded §• by a two-page preface by the president of the Carnegie Endowment, Morton £ Abramowitz, which recounts his almost serendipitous idea to reopen the eighty-year--^ old report. It convinced him "that others should also have the opportunity to read it. & It is a document with many stories to tell us in this twilight decade of the twcnti< century, when yet again a conflict in the Balkans torments Europe and the conscience of the international community." Abramowitz considers Kennan the person to bes|| bridge the two events and instruct the conscience of the international community (which seems to have been tormented primarily by the Balkans throughout the tweifcr-tieth century). We "all now benefit from his insight, his sure sense of history, andhi|j felicitous style."5 Kennan's introduction began with a praise of peace movements in the Unitefjj States, England, and northern Europe that souphf to rrpafp n~«r u~~i — Introduction 5 . although the initiative for an international conference on dis-..cnutxi*1 beha^°m'the Russian 'Isar Nicholas II, it was "immature dilettantism,.. . arma^^^f Taracteristic confusions of the Russian governmental establish-iijhor.ued by trie ^ ^ sen0us one." Its unseriousness notwithstanding, it was -. t offhe time,... not a serious ... ' d upon wilh enthusiasm" by the proponents of peace who convoked the two 1Ll/L'' Peace Conferences and other international initiatives. Having separated the ^imis j}^en rrom the dilettante boys, thus retrospectively essentializing cold war T p i^iM Kennan described the historical context at the turn of the century, the ubieak of the Balkan wars, and the report ot the Carnegie commission. '1 he importance of this report for the world of 1993 n'es primarily in the light it ists on the excruciating situation prevailing today in the same Balkan world with which it dealt. The greatest value of the report is to reveal to people of this age how much of today's problem has deep roots and how much does not.4 Confirming thus his belief in the maxim "Historia est magistra vitae," the second iwil of Kennan's introduction analyzed analogies with the past and the lessons of these analogies, its approach indicated by the slip "the same Balkan world." The newly created Balkan states were summed up as monarchies whose leaders were "as a *ule, somewhat more moderate and thoughtful than their subjects. Their powers -were usually disputed by inexperienced and unruly parliamentary bodies,"5 leaving one to wonder which was the rule and who were the exceptions. The Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand, "Fo\\ Ferdinand," plunged his country into the second Balkan war, despite better advice, to achieve his wild ambitions (not Balkan, but Central European, more particularly Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) to enter Constantinople as a victor; he accomplished the loss of his crown, and the unruly parliamentary body ruled that he was never to set fool in Bulgaria again. The "moderate" Milan Obrenovic humiliated Serbia in an adventurous war with Bulgaria in 1885, used by George Bernard Shaw to produce his own "peacenik" variation on a Balkan theme. Kennan could have used the bloody assassination of the last pathetic Obrenovic, Alexander, in 1903, to illustrate typical Balkan violence had he not been of royal birth. Finally, the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen dynasty of Romania was moderation incarnate, especially the soap-opera Carol II, but then his mother was the beautiful Queen Marie (a "regular, regular, regular, regular royal queen" according to a caption of the 4 August 1924 Time), the favorite granddaughter of Victoria and an intimate friend of the Waldorf Astors.6 The explanation for the Balkan irredenta, for dreams of glory and territorial expansion, was summarized in one sentence: "It was hard for people who had re- <^R% achieved so much, and this so suddenly, to know where to stop." No mention that the recent Balkan upstarts under the "moderate" guidance of mostly German .... princelings were emulating the' "frugal" imperial behavior of their western European models. Critical of the original report in that "there was no attempt to analyze the political motivations of the various governments participating in the wars," Kennan stressed that the strongest motivating factor "was not religion but aggressive nationalism. But that nationalism, as it manifested itself on the field of battle, drew on deeper traits of character inherited, presumably, from a distant tribal past. .. . And so it remains fndav " A 6 Introduction :s= 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 rion. European civilization which has continued to the present day to preserve many of ) its non-European characteristics.7 Had Kennan's essay introduced the original report, written a whole year befij^ the outbreak of World War I, one could empathize with its moral outrage even whjjj overlooking its conceptual inaccuracies: at the time, it seemed that with little effo| La Belle Epoque would endure forever. Mary Edith Durham was disgusted withi . she saw of the Balkan wars but she was confident that this could not befalb human species inhabiting the lands to the west of the Balkans: The war was over. All through I used to say to myself: "War is so obscene, so de-. grading, so devoid of one redeeming spark, that it is quite impossible there can ever be a war in West Europe." This was the one thing that consoled me in the whole bestial experience. War brings out all that is foulest in the human race, and the most disgusting animal ferocity poses as a virtue. As for the Balkan Slav and his ■ haunted Christianity, it seemed to me ail civilization should rise and restrain h;m from further brutality.8 Introduction 7 Kennan, on the otheT hand, had full knowledge of the butcheries of the two world 3? wars, or else one should assume that the spirit of Mary Edith Durham went to icstrrt "§ 1913 and was reincarnated following an innocent amnesia between 1913 and 1989,"! Although at least technically it is indisputable that the spark for the powder keg cam „ from the Balkans, very few serious historians would claim that this was the cause of • World War I. World War II, however, had little to do with the Balkans, which were3 comparatively late and reluctantly involved. It is probably because of the total in--ability to attribute World War II to anything Balkan that Kennan does not even mention it: "Well, here we are in 1993. Eighty years of tremendous change in the-remainder of Europe and of further internecine strife in the Balkans themselves have done little to alter the problem this geographic region presents for Europe." Indeed,. there is something distinctly non-European in that the Balkans never quite seem to reach the dimensions of European slaughters. After World War II, it is arrogant to hear the benign admission that "these states of mind are not peculiar to the Balkan people,.. . they can be encountered among other European peoples as well. .. .But all these distinctions are relative ones. It is the undue predominance among the Balkan5 peoples of these particular qualities."9 j Kennan has been echoed by a great many American journalists who seem to bet truly amazed at Balkan savagery at the end of the twentieth century. Roger Cohen exclaimed "the notion of killing people . .. because of something that may have happened in 1495 is unthinkable in the Western world. Not in the Balkans."10 He was quite right. In the Balkans they were killing over something that happened 500 years ago; in Europe, with a longer span of civilized memory, they were killing overJ| something that happened 2,000 years ago. One is tempted to ask whether the Holocaust resulted from a "due" or "undue" predominance of barbarity. It occured a w hole ^erieSStechnology managed to kill, in what Jean Baudnllard claimed was merely :a5IevJs1»«veut atleast half the number of total war casualties incurred by all sides SShgtetwofialkan wars.f) If this is too recent, there was the Vietnam War where eviiiceercfog .to Robert McNamara'sIn Retrospect "the picture of the world's great-isriuperf ower killing or seriously injuring i ,000 noncombaranrs a week is not a rtrettyone"With the ease with which American journalists dispense accusations of gertocide in Bosnia, where the reported casualty figures vary anywhere between - - 000 ^^jtiscutious to know how they designate the over three million dead ^mmestP Whether the Balkans are non-European or not is mostly a matter of .aewteroioand political debate, but they certainly have no monopoly over barbaric ft ,s not this book's intention merely to express moral outrage at'somebody else's ^outrage; The question is how to explain the persistence of such a frozen im 1 - - -—iw.-™ trWnrmed into one of the mostpow- mo ■jial outrage: '1 he question a ^ „„r-------- oe How could a geographical appellation be transformed into one of the most pow £tftif pejorative designations in history, international relations, political science, and, "nowadays, general intellectual discourse? This question has more than a narrow •leadeinic relevance. It is the story of (1) innocent inaccuracies stemming from im-'~»rfect geographical knowledge transmitted through tradition; (2) the later saturation of the geographical appellation with political, social, cultural, and ideological - overtones, and the beginning of the pejorative use of "Balkan" around World War I; and (3) the complete dissociation of the designation from its object, and the subse-•'^erfffeverse and retroactive ascription of the ideologically loaded designation to the region, particularly after 1989. While historians are well aware that dramatic changes have occurred on the peninsula, their discourse on the Balkans as a geographic/cultural entity is over-whelmed by a discourse utilizing the construct as a powerful symbol conveniently located outside historical time. And this usage itself is the product of nearly two ceiv furies of evolution. There has appeared today a whole genre dealing with the problem and representation of "otherness." It is a genre across disciplines, from anthropology, through literature and philosophy, to sociology and history in general. A whole new. discipline has appeared—imagology—dealing with literary images of the other.1' :::The discussion of orientalism has been also a subgenre of this concern with otherness. Orientalism has found an important and legitimate place in academia as the 1 critique of a particular discourse that, when formulated by Said, served to denote, "the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient —dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short... a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient."'4 Almost two decades later, Said reiterated that his objection to orientalism was grounded in more than just the antiquarian study of Oriental languages, societies, and peoples, but that "as a system of thought it approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; this suggests .-both an enduring Oriental reality and an opposing but no less enduring Western ,rR-.®tsence, which observes the Orient from afar and, so to speak, from above."15 Orientalism has had a tumultuous existence, and while it still excites passions, it has !w" "merceded as a whole. This is not the case in the Balkans. On the one hand, ' ':-j-i-" v^ifvant Balkan languages 8 Introduction and thus has not yet entered the mainstream discourse. On the other hand-notion has been introduced and is popularized by intellectuals who find that it scribes adequately the relationship of the Balkans with the West. Insofar as there! growing and widespread concern over this relationship, the discourse is beco circumscribed in the category of orientalism, even when not explicitly stated book argues that balkanism is not merely a subspecies of orientalism. Thus, thg gument advanced here purports to be more than a mere "orientalist variation o| Balkan theme."15 Given the above-mentioned anticipation of a growing lnfluer! of orientalism in the Balkans, the category merits a closer discussion. Inspired by Foucault, from whom he not only borrowed the term ''discoivr$gfj but the central attention devoted to the relation of knowledge to power, Said expoja the dangers of essentializing the Orient as other. He was also strongly influenced' Antonio Gramsci's distinction between civil and political society, especially | notion of cultural hegemony that invested orientalism with prodigious durability. "Fj is quite apart from how exactly Said's thought relates to the general Foucauldiam^B Gramscian oeuvre.17 Predictably, the response to Said's book was polarized: itp^^ duced detractors as well as admirers or epigones. It involved hefty criticism on tisS part of modernization theorists or from classical liberal quarters. It entailed aldl serious epistemological critique, an attempt to smooth off the extremes and go bevon^-*1 Said, and beyond orientalism.16 -| Some of the more pedestrian objections were made on the ground that Satdv^i3 negating and demonizing the work of generations of honest and well-infonueif^l orientalists who had made prominent contributions to human knowledge- Saifs^ professions that he was not attributing evil or sloppiness to each and every Orientate! but was simply drawing attention to the fact that "the guild of Orientalists has a &xM cific history of complicity with imperial power" were insufficient to assuage the ontf cry that the very idea of disinterested scholarship had been desecrated.1-' Even lcss$g distinguished objections judged his work on the basis of how it was appropriated the Arab world as a systematic defense of the Arabs and Islam, and imputed to Sakflt a surreptitious anti-Westernism. There have been more substantial and subtle crP^[ tiques of Said's endeavor aimed at refining rather than refuting his work. They coitvl cerned his nonhistorical, essentialist inconsistencies; the overgeneralization ofW-es^l em attitudes on the basis of the French and British paradigm; mostly, and justly, Sai$J§ was reproached for the lack of social and economic contextuahzation, for his con**;* centrahon on textuality, for his manifestly idealist approach.20 It was also charged"!* that by positing the falseness of the orientalist representation, Said did not addreffjjj the logical consequence "that there has at least to be the possibility of representations that is 'true.'" Yet, like most impassionate renunciations, there was an inevitable* element of reductionism. Said had successfully addressed the charge that his neg*Jgji tive polemic was not advancing a new epistemological approach.2' - V Despite his later strong declarations against imputing essentialism and iiWs-3|| toricism to his category, Said overgeneralized speaking of a generic Orient that-** accommodated Aeschylus, Victor Hugo, Dante, and Karl Marx. Maybe he con'd not resist the display of literary erudition, but the treatment of Aeschylus's The Peruani j Introduction n from charges that he was essentializing Europe and the West.22 The "TccHng"^*®" £3ncjen{- Greek culture and its elevation to the founding status of *PProPr'a^Cjjjzation'was only a gradual and controversial historical process, whereas tU-tfenid* acx0unt of the division of East and West suggested a suspicious Said's sweep*"© dS- cii»i'nll"Y ,. f.,|].K.v is rooted in the tension between his attraction to Erich * !gs a thinker and existential role model ot the intellectual in exile J and AueriJjc 1uj'fane0US],an(j incompatible, attraction to Foucault. Despite lavishly adopt-^ KoiiTuildian terminology, Said's ambivalent loyalty to the humanist project is 1U^> tialiv irreconcilable with Foucault's discourse theory with its "Nietzschean anti-i ■ ' n and anti-realist theories of representation." Moreover, his transhistorical ■entjhst discourse is ahistorical not only in the ordinary sense but is mefhodologi-°'ilv anti-Foucauldian, insofar as Foucault's discourse is firmly grounded in Euro-1 • \ modernity.Still, maybe one should listen more carefully to Said's latest self-'^'"esisvutliits recurrent insistence on Islamic and Arabic orientalism, without even •in honorary mention of his detours into antiquity and the Middle Ages. When he L.., tW "the reason why Orientalism is opposed by so many thoughtful non-Westerners is tnat: lts modern discourse is correctly perceived as a discourse onginai-in» in an era of colonialism,"241 am inclined to see in the qualifying slip — "its modern discourse" —the hubris and weakness of the academic prima donna who has to - ^"Ommodare defensively, though discreetly, his pastfaults and inconsistencies rather ihm onenly admit to them. Then, it would be possible to ascribe his iiterary digres-»> .i cuiiplexihistorical phenomenon, some of the political aspects of this new signified i\l reg&*tr*r>r>lnt*«l ,n,l A^^rt,, „;„r,;r,aA TUnt tV,;* ic 22 Imagining the Balkans Indeed, it might be interesting to approach "Balkan" as an exercise in polysemy g-* technical term used to describe "the way in which a particular signifier always more than one meaning, because 'meaning' is an effect of differences withm alar j system"; the utility of this notion is in its ability to show "how particular indiviclj^H and communities can actively create new meanings from signs and cultural pr^j ucts which come from afar."2 Against such background, it is essential to retrace^ odysseys of consecutive attachments and reattachments of the signifier, in a wcrdjjl perform an exercise that in die nineteenth century would have been simply and clears designated as Begriffsgeschichte. \J What, then, is the story of the name "Balkan"? In 1794, the British traveler Joh^j Morritt, then freshly out of Cambridge, set off on a journey through the Levant. {Jijl fervor for the "wrecks of ancient grandeur" led him from London and across Europe* to Constantinople, and from there to the sites of Troy, Mount Amos, and Athens'* On his way from Bucharest to Constantinople, he crossed the Balkan Mount the Shipka Pass in Bulgaria and wrote in a letter to his sister: "We were approaching* classic ground. We slept at the foot of a mountain, which we crossed the ne which separates Bulgaria from Romania (the ancient Thrace), and which thoiigk % now debased by the name of Bai.Kan, is no less a personage than the ancient! Haemus."5 It is only natural that for one of the "Levant lunatics" and future promil! nent member of the Society of Dilettanti, the territories of the Ottoman Empire wers first and foremost "classic ground" and any reminder of the present was, to snv tHd,: least, mildly annoying and debasing the illustrious ancient tradition. \et, later accretions were a fact, no matter how displeasing, to be dealt with, and they were, duly recorded. v -:. This was one of the very first times the mountain chain that divides Bulgaria! from east to west and runs parallel to the Danube was called the Balkans m the-English-language travel literature. Practically all British passersby before Morritt ariffl many after him had used only the ancient term Haemus (Aemus for the anciejyjj Greeks and Haemus for the Romans).4 The ones who went beyond merely mention--^ ing the name accepted the ancient Greek descriptions that went unchallenged for nearly two millennia. Edward Brown, the medical doctor and traveler from Norwich, author of popular and influential travels in 1669, maintained that Haemus continued to the west, separating Serbia from Macedonia, and that, under different names,' it stretched between Pontus Euxinus (the Black Sea) and the Adriatic.5 Like the English, most European travelers before the nineteenth centurv prej" ferred to use the classical term Haemus, but they were earlier aware that this was not| the only designation of the mountain range. The earliest mention of the name Balkan ■ known to me comes from a fifteenth century memorandum of the Italian humanist writer and diplomat Filippo Buonaccorsi Callimaco (Philippus Calhmachus, ■ 1437-1496). Persecuted by Pope Paul II, Callimaco settled in Poland and became a. close adviser to the Polish king. He was the author of a history of the deeds of Wladyslav j: III Warnenczyk, in which he left a short description of the Haemus, which he saw!|j when he visited the Ottoman capital on diplomatic missions. In his 1490 memorarfej dum to Pope Innocent VIII, Callimaco wrote that the local people used the name Balkan for the mountain- "nn^m in^ni- n-i-u- The Balkans: Nomen 25 the future Habsburg emperor Ferdinand I sent a diplomatic mission to In 1553' ^ ^ tasj, t0 negotiate a truce with the Ottomans and secure tilt 1 ^Habsburg control over Hungary and Transylvania. The mission was ■vc>ignl ^nton Vrančié, bishop of Peč since 1549. A Dalmatian, Vrančič came l"ntrlI!,ie jgk'jg gosnian family that had fled the Ottoman conquest, and had been ^'"''jvanian bishop under Jánoš Zápolyai before offering his services to the ■Y M)Wss An accomplished humanist, he was the author of numerous historical -|,Ji'*cograpWCi1' heatises. During his visit to Istanbul in 1553, Vrančič kept a diary "'"j n ivels between Vienna and Adrianople where he referred exclusively to Haemus "' T/f ,'irm montes, and quoted as authorities ancient authors whom he found amaz-"'"'l iccurate. Although aware of Strabon's objection, Vrančič cited as plausible M\bni řáiíd other geographers who maintained that from the highest mountain peak 1 ' could observe the Black Sea, the Adriatic Sea, and the Danube River. Over a decade later, in 1567, Vrančič was sent on a second mission to the Porte to sign the ace treaty with the new sultan Selim II. He kept notes, later united and published durinff the nineteenth century: "Diarium legationis nomine Maxímiliani II" and "Ratio itineris, quod est a Viena ad Constantinololum." The second was a detailed itinerary, marking distances between settlements and interspersed by geographic and oilier comments, where Vrančič mentioned the Bulgarian Slavic name Ztara Planina "fiWSfará Planina, Old Mountain) for Haemus. The Italian Marco Antonio Pigafetti, ^Ho travelled with Vrančič in 1567, also referred to Stará planina as the Bulgarian name oiEnio.' In fact, Vrančič was the first traveler to give the Bulgarian name, no ^doubtbecause he understood some of the local vernacular, Croatian being his :: native tongue. Stará Planina is a name that rarely appeared among Western accounts, Gerard Cornelius Driesch (1718-1719) being one of the few exceptions.8 The German Salomon Schweigger passed through the Balkans in 1577 as priest in the diplomatic mission of Emperor Rudolf II to Sultan Murad II. He stayed for .three years in the Ottoman capital and is best known for his efforts, alongside Stephan Gerlach, to bring about a rapprochement between the Lutherans and the Orthodox church, and even reach an alliance against the Pope. An alumnus of the LJniversity :of Tubingen, he translated into Italian the short catechism of Luther, since many Christians of the Ottoman Empire understood Italian. After his return to Germany, she-published a German translation of the Qur'an. Schweigger kept a journal of his travels in the 1570s, which was published in 1608. In it, he gave a detailed description of the Haemus, for which he employed the terms Emum, Hemo, and Hemus. He was the first traveler, after Callimaco, to communicate the Turkish name of the mountain, Balkan, thus documenting the spread of the name in the region. He was also the only traveler to mention a Bulgarian Slavic name (which he called Croatian), Comonitza, for the mountain: , [Haemus] is 6,000 feet high, i.e. one and a half German miles (Pliny, bklV). In the histories one can read that King Philip of Macedonia, the father of the great Alexander, climbed the mountain Haemus in four days and descended in two, in order to see the countryside around the mountain. It was believed that from the peaks of this mountain one could see the river Danube, the Adriatic Sea, and also 24 Imagining the Balkans tian or the Adriatic Sea is at more than 100 miles from the said mountain; Get-many likewise is more than 100 miles afar. Haemus is known for the silver mines it ■ once had, and the Italians therefore call it the Silver Mountain. The Turks call if: Balkan, and the [oca! papulation call it in the Croatian language Comonitza Balkan was again used by Martin Griinberg in 1582, although he ascribed ,\^\ the Rhodopes.10 Reinhold Lubenau, who in 1628 completed the manuscript ofhjj? travels between 1573 and 1587, apparently used Schweigger's information and , tioned both names in the forms Balhan and Komoniza.11 Balkan was used in \(^. '. by the Armenian traveler Simeon trir Lehatsi.12 Among the French, the nam mentioned first, although erroneously, in the 1621 journal of the ambassador extras ' dináry Luois Deshayes de Cormanin: "This mountain, which separates Bulgaria frojtif Romania [the medieval designation of ancient Thrace], is called by the Italians "Chaiif-of the world,' and by the Turks Dervent, the name given to all mountains, covers 'I with woods, just as Balkan is a name for bare cliffs, i.e. what the ancients knew hv the" ^ name of Haemus."1' This was a solitary mention and elsewhere Deshayes usci ' ancient Haemus. » Throughout the eighteenth century, Haemus and Balkan were increasingly side by side or interchangeably. Caiptain Schad in 1740 specified he was writing jiljout "the Balkan, or the mountain Haemus" or "Haemus which the Ottomans call Balkan.'"''1 RuggierBoscovich,a native of Dubrovnikand an eminent European"sei- -f entist and scholar (whom Dame Rebecca West in a characteristic slip describee! as •* "a wild Slav version of the French encyclopaedists") crossed the mountains in 1702, ■ £ As a Dalmatian, he recognized in Bulgarian a Slavic dialect, and preferred to vjse:-§ die designation Balkan although he was also aware that this was the ancient Haemus.1' f ] Baron Francois de Tott was consistent in using Balkan in the 1770s, while in the f next decades Count D'Hauterive, Felix Beaujour, and Francois Pouqueville used if both Balkan and Haemus}^ The Armenians from the mechitharist congregation in '-i \ the eighteenth century used almost exclusively Balkan, although they were aware J < also of the ancient name Emos. The famous twelve-volume "Geography of the Four; |: Directions of the World" by Hugas Indzhekian and Stepanos Agonts described the -I? Balkans as the mountain range crossing Bulgaria in the middle, and beginning at "|i the border with Venice; it also supplied a name for one branch of the mountain not |. encountered among other travelers: Chenge.17 ; Both forms for the mountain continued to be used during the nineteenth cen-_ f tury. In the Austrian cartographer Franz von Weiss's 1829 map of European Türke)', | the mountain was designated as Möns Haemus oder Veliki Balkan Gebirge, while ~l the branch between the Iskir River and Pirot was indicated as Stara planina.1^ Dur- I ing the 1820s, Balkan became the preferred although not yet exclusive term along- | side Haemus among British travelers, and A. W. Kinglake's Eothen used only | "Balcan."19 Among Russian travelers not so burdened by classical toponymy, Balkan 1 was the preferred term for the mountain chain. In 1808, during the Russo-Turkish I war, Captain Alexander Krasnokutskii was sent to Constantinople to negotiate w ith f the grand vizier Mustafa Bayraktar. He crossed the mountain twice —at Sliven and I through the Shipka Pass—and left an astonishing account of the beauty and ma|esty.....jp The Balkans: Nomen 25 Th increasing preference at first affected only the name of the mountain. In Robert Walsh repeated the earlier erroneous perception that Haemus, the for-'^I'y mountain chain, stretched for over 500 miles, beginning at the Bay of Venice "V aching the Black Sea. Now this chain was called Balkan, which meant a dif-fn it ountain. It is symptomatic that none of the travelers used Balkan as a corn-denomination of the peninsula. It was applied exclusively as a synonym for the }T!°n tain Haemus. The first to coin and use the term "Balkan Peninsula" (Balkan-' lbeildnd)™as rne German geographer August Zeune in his 1808 work "Goea." The fj ^collective use of Balkan as a description of the whole peninsula by a British travel was by Walsh in 1827, who mentioned that the bishops in this region were always Greeks, and used their own language as the liturgical language "in the Balkans," entirely in the southern parts and predominantly in the northern parts.21 The reason why Balkan became one of the most often used designations (alongside'Southeastern EUIOpe) has little to do with precise geography. In fact, for over two millennia geographers reproduced the dominant ancient Greek belief that the Haemus was a majestic mountain chain linking the Adriatic and the Black Sea, with ^•^mhiant position in the peninsula, serving as its northern border. The name was Thracian and was transmitted to the Greeks, like so much of Balkan toponymy, through the contacts between Greek colonists in the harbors of the Aegean and Black Seas and theThracians inhabiting the immediate hinterland. It appeared among the Logogfaphoi as "Aimon to oros." While Herodotus in the fifth century b.c. was the first to give some more detailed knowledge about the mountain range, his information was still obscure. During the next century, Theopomp of Chios reported that the peninsula was so narrow that from the highest mountain peak one could see both the Adriatic and the Black Seas. This story became known and reproduced among ancient writers after it appeared in Polybius, the second century r.c. geographer from Megalopolis. Polybius's text is reported only through fragments. As it appears in Strabon (63 b.c.— a.d. 26), it seemed as if Polybius's was an eyewitness account. In .the: work of Titus Livius, Strabon's contemporary, on the other hand, Polybius's text gives the story of King Philip climbing the mountain Haemus. This picturesque account, although often reproduced even in the modern period, was given little credence: already Strabon had successfully criticized it, Strabon himself stressed the . significance of the mountain as a water divide, considering it, at the same time, the ,s: natural border between the Thracian-Hellenistic world and the barbarian lands along the Danube. Among the Romans, the oldest preserved Latin geography of Pomponius Mela from the first decades of the common era, "De chorographia," reproduced the notion of the visibility of the two seas. Pliny reported the height of the mountain at . ,6,000 feet, and in Ptolemy it was mentioned as the frontier between the provinces of Thrace and Moesia. Ammianus Marcellinus, at the end of the fourth century, likened the mountain to the semicircle of a majestic natural theater that framed Thrace to the north. Not only did the notion of the Balkans as the northern mountain chain linking the Black Sea and the Adriatic persist during the Byzantine period, but Anna Comnena, the great Byzantine writer and princess, believed that, though interrupted "Balkans" as Self-designation 39 "Balkans" as Self-designation I will not blot out his name out of the book of life. Revelation, 3:5 iven the inglorious coverage the Balkans have had in the West, what is the KjJexperience of being called Balkan? How do the ones defined as belonging geographically or historically to the Balkans deal with the name? Do they consider themselves Balkan and what is meant by this? Several qualifications are in order. This \£ not a historical survey of the process of creating self-identities and self-designation, Rather, it aims at conveying an idea of present images and emotions as they are articulated in the region. As such, it has some of the advantages and all the drawbacks-: of an impressionistic painting. Since it deals with problems of present-day identification in reference to the Balkans, it would seem at first glance that the place of this account should follow chronologically the exploration of the evolution of the term "Balkan." Yet, I am doing it in a conscious breach of seeming methodological consistency for the sake of making a methodological point: introducing already at this point the most important component in this analysis of naming, classification, interpretation, and evaluation —the people of the Balkans. I want to make the reader' cognizant of the dominant self-perceptions in the Balkans, so that proceeding through1 the subsequent chapters would be informed .by a conscious awareness of this fact; It is virtually axiomatic that, by and large, a negative self-perception hovers over ■ the Balkans next to a strongly disapproving and disparaging outside perception. I am" acutely aware that resorting to a notion like "the Balkan people" and how they think: of themselves smacks distinctly of "national character," a category that I oppose passionately on both methodological and moral grounds. Therefore, lest I commit the same fallacy of essentialism 1 claim to oppose, I would like to introduce the stipulation that the phrase "how the Balkans think of themselves" should be understood to-mean how the ones among the educated elites of the Balkan nations who are charged with or are at least conscious of their ethnic, national, religious, local, and a variety; of other multiple identities define (i.e., reject, accept, are ambiguous about, or indifferent to) their link to a putative Balkan identity. As Erving Goffman, commenting; on stigma as a basis for self-conception, remarked: "representatives are not represen-,-■ •• r —1—---„ £■„_.„ 4-k„„,, iftoi-iHrin tn their Where does this self-perception originate: is it an independent product of self-reflection or has it been prompted and shaped exclusively by the outside view? Although they have been passive objects in the shaping of their image from without (not in the sense that their frantic activities have not contributed to its formation but that they have had no active participation in the articulation and spread ot the dis-course), the Balkan peoples have not been the passive recipients of label and libel. This book emphasizes the extent to which the outside perception of the Balkans has been internalized in the region itself. At the same time, it is possible to demonstrate that the critical self-reflection was, at least initially, a relatively independent component provoked by comparison and informed by expectations, values, and ideals shared ty both externa! and internal observers, but by means of common cultural sources, not through direct exchange. Therefore, many of the critical self-evaluations predated the hardening of the Balkanist discourse in the second decade of the twentieth century. The most popular literary image linked with the name "Balkan" is Bay Ganyo Balkánski, the immortal literary hero of the Bulgarian writer Aleko Konštantínov (known simply as Aleko) (1863—1897). The short stories about Bay Ganyo began to appear in the literary magazine Mistl in 1894 as feuilletons and were published in 1895 as a collection, subtitled "incredible stories about a contemporary Bulgarian." Bay Ganyo, the counterpart of Tartarin and Schwejk in French or Czech literature, and the derivative noun "bayganyovshtina" (Bay Ganyo-ness) has become the most popular byword created by Bulgarian literature, standing for boorishness, crudeness, gróssness. It would not be exaggerated to assert that this is the one literary name and the book that every single Bulgarian knows and has read. To a great extent, the history of Bulgarian literary criticism has evolved around this literary hero because his interpretation has been rightly perceived as equivalent to national self-analysis. The great divide that has passionately polarized Bulgarian literary criticism in the course of a whole century is the ethnic versus the social approach, that is, whether Bay Ganyo should be analyzed as a biological, racial, national, cultural, civilizational type or as a distinctive sociohistorical type without an indispensable ethnic/national specificity, belonging to a definite transitional period in the development of backward societies and having a concrete class profile. The best contemporary interpreter of Bay Ganyo Balkánski, Svetlozar Igov, contextualized him in a Balkan setting and introduced the notion ofHomo balkanicus. Aleko articulated the profound disillusionment of "the first post-liberation genera-:. tion of intellectuals for whom the clash between the lofty ideals of the revival period and the rapid bourgeois corruption of'free' Bulgaria" reverberated particularly pain-:. -fully. He followed a cherished model in the moralistic European literature of the ■^Enlightenment—the savage among civilized —that was employed to criticize the hypocrisy of European mores; only Aleko transformed it to convey his scathing critique of the Balkan parvenu among Europeans. There is also an important additional .nuance. While Bay Ganyo is simply a comic primitive buffoon in the first part of the book that follows his exploits in Europe, he becomes the authentic and dangerous ravage only on his return, among his own, where he is the nouveau riche and newly hatched conupt politician; "at the beginning he is the funny oddball of the Balkan Wovifir-p K,r it,c ,1:4-;__1 C___ 40 Imagining the Balkans There is no doubt that by creating Bay Ganyo, Aleko was targeting vulgarity and. anticulture in opposition to a notion of civilized Europe. He was exposing a phe. nomenon that he loathed: the superficial mimicry of civilized behavior without the'; genuine embrace of real values. Bay Ganyo, who sets on his voyage to the West in his peasant costume, returns in European attire, but the disharmony between his-'" appearance and his character is even more comic. William Miller, writing at the same' time that Bay Ganyo was created, commented on this issue: "This question ol coi-tume is, in the Near East, of more than merely artistic interest; for I have observed that the Oriental is apt to deteriorate morally when he assumes Western garb,. The native of the Balkans seems not infrequently to 'put off' his primitive faith and his simple ideas when he puts on a black coat. The frock-coated Balkan politician u ■-not by any means the same ingenious person as the peasant, who is of the same stock '■' as himself, and the silk hat too often converts an unsophisticated son of the soil into' -a very poor imitation of a Parisian man-of-the-world."5 Compare this lengthy quote with its implicit romanticizing of the simple peasant to the economy of Aleko's famous opening of his book: "They helped Bay Ganyo take off the Turkish cloak, he slipped on a Belgian mantle, and everybody decided Bay Ganyo was already a complete European."^ The central element in Bay Ganyo's stories is that this was a critique not from the outside, from a distant and, as it were, J foreign European point of view, but from within, from the point of view of a Bulgsj. '■ ian European. I am stressing "Bulgarian European," and not "Europeanized Bulgarian," because Aleko's Europeanness came not as a result of a direct sojourn ia any Western European country (his education was entirely in Bulgarian and Rus- " sian institutions) but from partaking in a shared European culture that did not have national labels and was the common nurture of any educated and cultivated person on the continent. One of the first commentators of Bay Ganyo, Ivan Shishmanov, indicated that'--' to understand Bay Ganyo, one should begin with Aleko: "Take the opposite of Bay Ganyo, and you get Aleko."5 In the view of Shishmanov, a historian, literary critic*, and prominent cultural and educational figure in Bulgaria at the turn of the century, Bay Ganyo's polar opposite was not an outsider but a product of the same soil: the author and his character were linked in an internal dichotomy. The composition of the book itself prompts such conclusion: the stories are told by a merry company of young educated men, each of whom shares an episode of his encounters with Bay Ganyo. In the case of the Bulgarian compatriots who expose Bay Ganyo, there -is no sweet romantic reminiscing about a peasant arcadia. It is the story of a Bulgarian, told by other Bulgarians.6 Thus, the standard against which Bay Ganyo is mea- -sured, although called European, is not an outside one: it is the standard held by a group of his own countrymen. Rather than explaining this simply in terms of Westernized or Europeanized elites who approach their own reality with alienated eyes and disdain as a result of having internalized the hegemonic discourse of the center, one may consider it in the light of Edward Shils's treatment of center and periphery. In his classic essay, he argued that center is not merely a spatial location but a central zone of symbols, values, and beliefs that govern society: "Balkans" as Self-designation 41 tires their concrete individual existence. They have a need to be in contact with symbols of an order which is larger in its dimensions than their own bodies and more central in the ultimate structure of reality than is their routine everyday life.7 Within such a perspective, the sharing of so-called European values would be seen not as a mechanistic appropriation on the part of belated peripheral elites of Values intrinsically emanating only from a circumscribed geographic-historical entity (Western Europe) but would demand the treatment of culture as an autonomous phenomenon within a universal human context. It is in this light, and not as an admission of non-Europeanness, that one should approach Aleko's popular dictum: "We are European but not quite." It is not a minor coincidence, and critics have not failed to emphasize it, that Bay Ganyo was conceived in the literary imagination of Aleko {(onstantinov in America, at the time of his visit to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. "On the one hand, he was depicted as the antithesis of Western culture and civilization; on the other hand, he was drawn up as a character organically related to the rapacious and selfish mechanisms of a society' whose central motivation was predator)'accumulation. In the words of Igov, Bay Ganyo is "the Balkan-Oriental embryo of this same mechanism but in the end he too is 'a wheel in the money-making machine'."8 In his own way, Herbert Vivian caught this process when summarizing his view 01 Serb peasants at the beginning of the century as "sturdy, good-looking, hospitable and merry,. . . rich in everything but money; simple, superstitious, thoroughly mediaeval." He mused that if one could go back four or five hundred years and live among one's Forefathers, they would probably tax one's forbearance as the contemporary Serbs did, and that, in fact, if one could only shed off the arrogance of civilization, their many virtues could be appreciated: It is only when they go abroad for their education, don black coats and a thin veneer of progress, that they invite criticism. They are not ripe for the blessings of democracy (such as they are), and much painful experience will be necessary to prepare them. I do not say they cannot undergo the preparation, but I do not wish to see them in the process. I prefer to remember them as I have known them — admirable survivors of the age of chivalry.9 in a similar vein, A. Goff and Hugh Fawcett described the Macedonian as "picturesque in appearance and, amongst the peasantry, earnest and hard-working. He is, however, easily contaminated by the vicious life of a town, where he prefers to : earn the best possible livelihood, without discrimination as to the means, in the easiest possible way."10 Thus, in the Western balkanist discourse, the disdain for the Balkans did not originate in its medieval, underdeveloped, primitive nature. This was even titillating, and it was the reason for the quasi-romantic appeal they exerted. What the West loathed to see was not its self-image from the dawn of humanity, but its image of only a few generations ago. The distasteful character deplored equally by Vivian as by Aleko Konstantinov was from an age of chivalry closer by: Bay Ganyo with his Belgian mantle has been aptly called the "knight of the primitive accumulation of capital."11 Nor has Bav Oanvo been a solitarv ficmre. and Aleko's an uncommon oathos in 42 Imagining the Balkans Luca Caragiale (1852-1912) is simply the most eloquent and popular piece in a rich opus dealing with an identical issue in Romania. Just as Aleko's Bay Ganyo has entered Bulgarian as a byword, so many expressions from Caragiale's work have entered Romanian everyday speech.12 Writers at the turn of the century were not looking for essentialist explanations in the realm of the murky category of culture, but were devastatingly specific. The targets of Caragiale's satire was not a Romanian ethnic archetype, but the new oligarchy. Despite the critics' attempts to blunt Caragiale's1 claws by maintaining he was attacking merely "the thin paint of western civilization that had too hastily crept down to the lower layers of society," his message was more than explicit: I hate them, man. In the Romanian country, this is called with the greatest seriousness a democratic system. . . . And this semi-cultivated or, at best, falsely cultivated oligarchy, as incapable of useful production or thought as it is greedy of profits and honors, has monopolized the state power; with eruei and revolting brazenness, it denies to the peasants (a huge submissive mass and a steady producer of natural wealth), alleging their ignorance and lack of political maturity, any right to intervene. . . .13 On the Yugoslav scene, it was Branislav Nusic ^864-1938) who observed the transformation of a small agricultural country into a bureaucratic society of the Western type. His comedies depicted the petty bourgeoisie in this "break-neck pro-cess, [where] conscience was pushed aside, lives were destroyed, resisting upright individuals ruined, and unscrupulous upstarts dominated the scene."14 The excesses of vulgar class analyses that attempted to situate the case of Bay Ganyo as a par-: ticular homo halkanicus only at the time of his genesis should not blind us to his historical specificity. In Igov's attempt to steer a middle course between the extreme articulations of Bay Ganyo's interpretations (to see him as "an idiosyncratic na-> tional and historic version of a definite social type"), he demonstrates not only the : concrete sociohistorical nature of the literary character but comments on his deep ! roots in Bulgarian realities of a tongue duree nature, something that makes the problem of Bay Ganyo's grandchildren particularly acute. He almost resignedly remarks that "this type has rather strong roots in reality, or else, this reality changes rather slowly if we see his resilient presence, modernized as his appearance and.; even his manners are."15 From a historical point of view, of course, the changes in. reality are hardly slow: after all, the provenance of this reality, in which the Balkans: have been integrated as the periphery of a West European core, its economic and social laggards, is hardly more than two centuries old. This is not the same as say— ing that the relative backwardness of the Balkans began only two centuries ago but that the technological gap between the regions of Europe became meaningful:: only in the framework of new structural relations with the creation of what Waller-stein has designated as a world-economy.16 More importantly, this is a continuing : reality. How is this reality reflected in contemporary self-identities? It has been asserted that notions like "the European" or "the Balkanite" as collective designations are nh«^nf frnm "Balkans" as Self-designation 43 ' likely that this particular preoccupation is a typically intellectual one and, as such, j3 confined to the literary languages. What did exist in the Balkan vernaculars of :-"the nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth, and may still be encountered among a certain generation, was the phrase "to go to Europe." At ihe end of the nineteenth century, William Miller wrote that "[w]hen the inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula are meditating a journey to any of the countries which fie west of them, they speak of'going to Europe,' thereby avowedly considering ■ jnemselves as quite apart from the European system."18 At the beginning of the next century, Allen Upward spoke of the Balkans as the east end of Europe or the ■least known corner of Europe: The Europe which plays the part of Providence for the Balkan world leaves off at the Adriatic Sea. The land which cradled European civilization, the isle to which Europa came borne by the sacred bull, are no part of this Europe. It may include Russia for political purposes, but otherwise the term European means, in a Balkan ear, much what Frank meant in a Byzantine one. Europe, in short, is Latin Christendom; Paris is its capital, and French its language.19 As an Englishman, Upward lamented the centrality of France in this image of Europe, but he was incorrect in confining it to Latin Christendom. "Europe," when used as a distinction from their own Balkans, was not a synonym for Western Christianity in general, let alone for Latin Christianity; it was a synonym for progress, order, prosperity, radical ideas, that is, an image and an ideal, a Europe belonging to Time (understood as development), not Europe as a geographic entity. After World War 11, the phrase faded and practically disappeared from the portion of the Balkans that : became part of Eastern Europe. There, it was replaced by West: when still used, "going to Europe" was tantamount to "going to Western Europe." While in 1904 Herbert Vivian could still write that "all over the Balkans it is customary to speak of passing north of the Danube and Sava as 'going to Europe'," fifty years later it would never diave occurred to anyone in Bulgaria or Romania to say they were going to Europe when referring to a trip to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, or East Germany, just as nobody in Greece would use tha pame stin Evropi when visiting Spain, Portugal, and even Italy, all bulwarks of Latin Christendom.20 How is the link to Europe and the Balkans expressed nowadays? To some extent, the examination of how the word "Balkan" is used in the separate Balkan languages shows the range of assessments and the degree of tolerance about one's presumed Balkanness. Still, it merits to take a closer look at how this is articulated in . literary or political discussions. "Greece—the European's European vacation" was the tourist slogan of 19S8, interpreted by some as an attempt to lure more Americans who like to emulate the Europeans.21 What it also displayed was an obsessive emphasis on their Europeanness, about whose denial the Greeks, as the only Balkan and Orthodox member of the European Union, are particularly sensitive. They do not forget to remind the world that even the word Europe is Greek, and while they use the phrase "to goto Europe," ■1 is not a resigned posture of nonbelonging. The exultant celebration of Greece in __j.L . 44 imagining the Balkans "Balkans" as Self-designation 45 When on our return from our trip to Europe—driven away by gray clouds and storms—we saw from the bottom of the valley of the Strymon a piece of blue sky, i heard my traveling companion exclaim, "This is Greece!" And she was not mistaken. It was exactly under that blue patch that our border began. It is the cradle of our spirit, the substance of our history and civilization. The ideas of Plato and the. ■ chorie odes of Sophocles are imbued with this blue, The marble harmonies of the monuments and the gaps in their ruins are filled with it. It is reflected in our seas, and thus puts our relief-carved iand between two endless strips of blue, the liquid (sea) and the airy (sky). ... it is the triumph of the blue, which permeates not only the water, the ether, the mood, the speech, the laughter, but also the stone, the ■■..■■;; mountain, the earth, which grows lighter, as if spiritualized.22 The "blue theme" appears also in Stratis Myrivilis's paean of Greece, reveling-;' in the exalted place of his country whose history "is written on its waves, which have:.;-rocked and are still rocking her fate": "As the blue pages unfold, I see on them the*'; ancient ships that carried the spirit of my race over all the Mediterranean. . . . The ; blue pages unfold and I see the Byzantine ships pass with their Imperial eagles... On the tall mast waves the banner of the Madonna of Victory who, for a thousand ■ years, guarded the civilization of Europe and spread the law of Christ to the sacred peoples— The blue pages unfold all the time."23 Nikos Kazantzakis, too, shared.in). this sentiment when he wrote about his native island, "Crete was the first bridge bc-tween Europe, Asia and Africa. And the Cretan land was the first to be enlightened in a wholly dark Europe. . . . Because four or five thousand years ago the blue bird,1;..: the Spirit, passed by this place and stayed."24 Like all national identities, the Greeks have a hierarchy of multiple identities: a j contemporary Greek would describe him or herself first as Greek, then with a local:; identity (Cretan, Macedonian, Epyrote, and so on), third as European, and only next:; as Balkan, Southern European, or Mediterranean. While there is no particular en-;; thusiasm about their Balkanness, even a mocking resignation, the pejorative edge of the Greeks is reserved for the "Orient" (more concretely for Turkey), not for the;; Balkans. There is no denial about belonging to the Balkans. If anything, there has been historically an excess of superiority complex vis-ä-vis the rest of the Balkans, i tempered in the past few decades. Not only has Greece been historically central for :. the Balkan cosmos, but its main designs and political imagination until the recent; past had been to a great extent focused on the Balkans. In academic life, "Balkan" is,; a notion that has a neutral and legitimate place: the leading institute for interdisci-;: plinary research on the Balkans is the Institute for Balkan Studies in Thessaloniki,.: its main publication is the journal Balkan Studies, and a recent journal comes out under the title Evrovalkania (Eurobalkans). Greece still views itself as playing a central role in the peninsula although nowa- i days this role is not considered a priority. Official pronouncements are unequivo-:; cab "The Balkans for Greece is not merely a dangerous region somewhere in the-; world. Greece is part of the Balkans." Defining itself as the only "Balkan member" of the European Union, Greece feels a particular responsibility for the stability of;: the Balkans and has lately endorsed an initiative to create an "Open Balkan Univer- .: selVC a static organic notion—a nexus of state, nation, religion, and Greekness—as forn> is hi ted in the early nineteenth century."26 Obviously, with the process of European integration getting ahead, Greece will face mounting pressures to reconstruct Its identity. Still, what one can observe in the Greek case is that despite ongoing dispute3 over identity and the Angst in some circles over losing their essence—the ;gonreiosini—the place of Greece in the institutionalized framework of the European Union has conferred on it a remarkable sense of security, so much so that it ■ can be postulated that in the Greek case one may speak of "the bearable heaviness of being" Balkan. Likewise, in the country that Edward Gibbon described as "within sight of Italy : but less known than the interior of America" there has never been denial that the 'Albanians are Balkan, which has been used almost exclusively in its neutral geographical meaning. At the beginning of Albanian statehood, their pronounced lobbyist Christo A. Dako asserted that the Albanians were the oldest and most beautiful race of the Balkan Peninsula and had, until the Middle Ages, occupied all Balkan countries, that their national consciousness was stronger than any of their neighbors', that they were "not only an Aryan people, but European in their national instincts," that their sense of family in particular was "European and not Turkish."27 This was not .done to extricate them from some demeaning Balkanness, but to establish their rightful place as a sovereign nation among the other Balkan nations, to argue "to admit : the Albanian people, the most ancient people of the Balkans in the circle of the family of nations," to state Albania's desire "to become an element of order and peace in the Balkan peninsula."28 That in the memoranda sent to President Wilson and to the foreign services of the other great powers Albania's "Aryanness" as well as its "European family values" should figure repeatedly and prominently, comes only to confirm the swiftness with which dominant political cliches were appropriated by the champions of the Albanian cause. Neither is their belonging to the Balkans disputed nowadays. In a speech in March 1995, President Sali Berisha referred to Albania as one of the Balkan and Eastern European countries, but sought to assert the direct, unmediated relationship with Europe to which Albania aspired: "The program is our word of honor, our contract with the Albanian electorate, democracy, Albania, and Europe."29 Conversely, writers on Kosovo sought to emphasize its "Balkan vocation," "Balkan dimension," "Balkan perspective," even when warning that it may become a new "Balkan powder keg." The common desire, however, is to make Albania "a beachhead of stability in the turbulent Balkans."30 Despite the fact that there has been no tradition of pejorative use of "Balkan" in Albanian, the new cliches of the post-■| communist period are beginning to introduce it. An Albanian article on Christian-;|'■ ity explains that "exploiting the Balkan and Albanian paternalistic tradition, fifty years :|' of hardline communism totally devastated the moral and spiritual values of man." J: , This paternalism "is a socio-psychological model typical of the Balkan peoples, rein-| forced by the Islamization of life there and primitiveness of our social and economic :;|;: development." The only hope for Albania is its young generation "which has loved ;|t European civilization and Christian values."31 This frank appeal to Christian values s# r_____ . . 1 . t r •. l , 1 • . . a j l - i t 11 46 Imagining the Balkans yet mastered the ennobling facade of the pluralist vocabulary. It is, however, also a tribute to the sound political instincts of the new Albanian political elites who have ' not been duped by the pretense of suprareligious, nonracial, and nonethnic uni ver-salism and pluralism of the European or Western discourse. The Albanian professor was doing simply what others before him had practiced: externalizing undesircd qualities on some imputed Balkanness. Romanians have usually insisted on their direct connections to the Western world (not even via Central Europe) and on their missionary role as outposts of Latinisni and civilization among a sea of (Slavic and Turkic) barbarians. While covering the Eastern front during World War I, John Reed reported from Bucharest: "If you want to infuriate a Romanian, you need only to speak of his country as a Balkan state. 'Balkan!' he cries. 'Balkan! Romania is not a Balkan state. How dare you confuse us with half-savage Greeks or Slavs! We are Latins.'"32 This had not always been the case. Even throughout the nineteenth century, with the rise of "Romanianism" and ~ its emancipation from Hellenism, as well as the purification of its strongly Slavic vocabulary, apartness was not the obsession of the Romanian idea. Reading the travelers' accounts of a dozen Romanians, such as Teodor Codrescu, Ion lonescu de la Brad, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, A. Pelimon, D. Rallet, Maior Pappazoglu, Cezar Boliac, Stefan Georgescu, and Bishop Melchisedec, one is struck by how much at home . they feel when they cross the Danube; their travelogues were written by insiders with an intuitive grasp for situations, behavior, and words.53 The idea of uniqueness and complete separateness, the "cultural Narcissism— often encountered within 'small cultures' — [which] is the counterpart to the officially entertained isolationism" was a later phenomenon, intensified to its extremes after World War I.34 Yet, there was a tension in this self-identity, present even in the writ-; ings of Nicolae lorga, Romania's greatest historian (at least in terms of the size of his opus and influence at home and abroad). The opening to his 1919 "History of Roma-:: nia" placed his country "between the center of Europe and the Russian steppe, the sombre lands of the north and the sunny Balkan peninsula in the south," clearly putting the northern boundary of the Balkan peninsula at the Danube River.35 Ye'. Iorga recognized the central place the peninsula had for the evolution of the Romanian state and nation, and used South-Eastern Europe as a unit of analysis. In Iorga's vision, L'Euwpe du sud-est or L'Europe sud-orientaie was the Balkans plus Romania, just as in German historiography Siidosteuropa was the Balkans (including Romania) plus Hungary. In his inauguration speech at the opening of the Institute for the Study of South-Eastern Europe in Bucarest in 1914, Iorga spoke of the common Thracian and Illyrian foundations of the peoples of this region, whose traces were living in the subsequent legacies of Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Turks,: and of the common character on these peoples of occidental, oriental, and septentrional influences.56 The idea of a Southeast European continuity was further developed by B. P. Hasdeu and especially Victor Papacostea, one of the few to prefer the term Balkan.37 It was under the distinguished leadership of Papacostea that an Institute of Balkan Studies functioned in Bucharest between 1937 and 1948, which published a scholarly journal Balcania. "Balkans" as Self-designation 47 Yet what wasmaybe the most brilliant cluster of Romanian intellectuals, "Romania's iiivstieal revolutionaries," firmly refused to be associated with the Balkans: their Measuring rod was Western, not even Central Europe. This generation, described as the Balkan counterpart to the revolutionary aristocratism of Ernst Jünger, was antibourgeois, antimercantile, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic. Three men of this ^neration shared the prestigious prize of the Young Romanian Writers Association jrithe 1930s: Emil Cioran, Constantin Noica, and Eugene Ionesco. A fourth, Mircea liiade, was the "recognized spiritual leader of the Young Generation." Between them, jfiey dominate the intellectual horizon of today's post-Ceausescu Romania, "where rriaiiy within the new generation of students and intellectuals identify themselves with the spirit of the rebellious radicals of the thirties.'"39 Of the four, only one, the least Romanian, who produced a single book (his first) in Romanian, did not succumb to the affliction of "rhinoceritis," as he described the seduct'on °f h's closest friends by the ideology and activities of the Iron Guard in his surrealist masterpiece Rhinoceros.^ In a piece written in 1940 and published in 1968, - ionesco attributed the phenomenon of the Iron Guard to some imputed Balkanness: An original and authentic Balkan "culture" cannot be really European. The Balkan spirit is neither European nor Asiatic. It has nothing to do with western humanism. .. . Passion can exist, but not love. A nameless nostalgia can exist, but without a face, not individualized. And rather than humor, rather even than irony, there is merely the coarse and ruthless bantering of the peasant. . . . Most of all [the Balkanites (les Balkaniques)j are devoid of charity. Their religion might not be even considered religion, so fundamentally different is it from the emotional, psychological and intellectual religion of the Catholics and the Protestants. The priests are materialist, practical, atheists in the western sense; they are brigands, satraps, cunning with their black beards, without mercy, telluric: real "Thracians." . . . The Iron Guard phenomenon is not something transitory, it is profoundly Balkan, it is truly the expression of the cruelty of the Balkan spirit without refinement.41 Despite lonesco's repudiation of Balkan irony, it is indeed ironic that the only mass grassroots fascist and anti-Semitic movement in the Balkans, the truly original, idiosyncratic, genuinely and exceptionally Romanian doctrine of Codreanu and company, was attributed to the Balkans by the group that was most vociferous about its un-Balkanness. But already here one can grasp some of the central characteristics of the general balkanist discourse: the ambiguity ("ni europeene, ni asiatique"), the externalization of evil on an abstract Balkanness, the dark side within. The undisguised revulsion with the peasantry, on the other hand, is so exclusively Romanian and unheard of in the other Balkan discourses as to render indeed the Romanian claims of un-Balkanness authentic. A phrase like Emil Cioran's: "hating my people, my country, its timeless peasants enamored of their own torpor and almost bursting with hebetude, I blushed to be descended from them, repudiated them, rejected their sub-eternity, their larval certainties, their geologic reverie" would be impossible in any other Balkan context where a very conscious propeasant discourse has been traditionally cultivated.42 The re was a definite ambiguity also in Cioran's image of the Balkans that came from hi$ nnnei^fpnf tvi 1nn nf tinnmpmc enrich/ h<^fh in fi-it* ii-i+-£ir\T7ar r^rinrl mnpn 48 Imagining the Balkans "Balkans" as Self-designation 49 and after the war, in History and Utopia in i960. He was still expecting an anu'capi3§l|^^; regirne up to the arrival of the Communists. And I'm proud to belong to a people taiist revolution but, disappointed with the failure of the Russian revolution, witnessed '?||; ■ fnown for their tolerance."49 with disgust the stabilization of the decadent West, though with the mellow tired- 'M-. More thoughtful contemplations indicate an identity that vacillates nervously ness of old age. Still, even in his later book, the Nietzschean fire was present in the 'I over the reopened borderline between the Balkans and Central Europe, and more "cult of force, of instinct, of vitality and will to power, which are represented—theTtj gnerally between West and East, a country embodying the "transition between West being so exhausted—by Russia and even by the Balkan peoples."4'The latter, " I Occident and the great Asian Orient," "some kind of no-man's land, not European with their "taste for devastation, for internal clutter, for a universe like a brothel orii^^^K:-? all, but not Asiatic at all."50 As a whole, Balkanness is a deprecatory category to fire" were the "last 'primitives' in Europe [who] may give her a new energy, which '■.ft ffhich Romanians rarely allude. While having made and continuing to make major she will not fail to regard as her last humiliation."44 :.£f ■ contributions to Balkan studies, the Romanian academic community is the only one Even with due credit to Cioran's famous posture as gadfly, his love of paradoxus-' ;n the Balkans that does not employ the term Balkan studies, but has organized its for the sake of the aesthetics of the exercise, there was something more to his thought.'"'%| ' tesearch in the Institut des etudes sud-est europeennes, with its main publication Revue He distinguished between major, aggressive, and messianic cultures (like the French, rfes etudes sud-est europeennes. German, and Russian), and small or minor cultures that were weak because they J In 1975, Niyazi Berkes, an eminent Turkish sociologist and historian, wrote that lacked a mission in the world. Cioran expressed uncompromising aversion for the'iia^-:..>-^urkey today is neither a Western nor a Moslem nation; it does not belong to a Romanian peasantry's unredeeming backwardness, passivity, and fatalism, but still | Christian, socialist, or capitalist community. ... It is neither Asian nor European, .. . thought mat Romania's culture could reach an intermediary status between the major j The dominant direction of Ottoman history has tilted more toward the west than and the minor ones (like the culture of Spain) and dominate the Balkans.45 Borh:"58|toward the east. But its adherence to an eastern cultural reference has prevented Cioran and Eiiade subsequently denied links to the Iron Guard, in Cioran's case 'SM ■ Turkey's inclusion in the Western world."51 This sounds like the perpetual Balkan with vehemence and contempt for the movement. Yet Cioran contributed in the 1930s.;m - ' .refrain of in-betweenness, except that in the Turkish case the Balkans are not remotely to ultranationalist and Guardist newspapers eulogizing Hitler and the Nazis and^^i.l^a'.decisive vector. In the long list of dichotomies—Asian or European; Muslim or "urging Romanians to . . . enjoy the politics of delirium." Eiiade, too, had publishedjji|.;: ^secular; settled or nomadic; grandchildren of Mehmet the Conqueror or children of in 1937 an article entitled "Why I beiieve in the Triumph of the Legionary Mov^^-'^^teturk; "the sword of islam or a Christian punishment"; Ottoman orphans orTurk-ment" in the Guardist newspaper Buna Vestire in which he declared: "I believe in ish citizens; conquerors or conquered; warriors or civilians; part of the West or de- the destiny of the Romanian people. That is why I believe in the victory of the Le--.|i:;;; fenders of the West; army, community, or nation; contemporary society or historical gionary movement. A nation that has demonstrated huge powers of creation at all.:l||>-abridge; "Eastern, Anatolian, or Western"—the Balkans are not even considered as levels of reality cannot be ship-wrecked at the periphery of history in a Balkanized™|i ■ an alternative.52 democracy, in a civil catastrophe."46 Even the repudiation of democracy had to carry^^-^W:.;. The reason for this has been suggested to be a particular case of repression. On the Balkan stigma. Finally, Constantin Noica, the only one not to leave Romania,^^ xvi-ihe one hand, some Turkish historians have emphasized that the Ottoman state began who did not and could not deny his brief ties with the Guardists, for which he vra5;^*'^:-.:-'-.:--:as a Balkan empire, that the Balkans remained the priority of the Ottoman Empire persecuted until 1964, was destined to become the cultural guru to Romania's young-afe. throughout its existence, and that through its historical continuity modern Turkey is intellectuals in the 1980s.47 -^.iSfiiY 'a Balkan state. This view found its culmination in the passionate plea of Turkey's The theme of Romania's uniqueness was continued in the postwar period and late president TurgutOzal for acceptance of his country into the European Economic reached its frenetic culmination under Ceausescu, as a compensatory mechanisriiSSp.--Community. His book Turfey in Europe and Europe in Turkey was dedicated to "the for the self-conscious and troublesome feeling of being trapped in an ambiguous .peoples of Europe and to the Turkish people who belong among them."55 He ques- status, the in-betweenness of East and West. One would have thought that the per-kA:Y:.:;..v;. tioned the usual East-West dichotomy: "Do the categories 'Asia' for the barbarians, formance of Romania in the last decade of Ceausescu's rule would have sobered M and 'Europe' for the civilized and civilizing Indo-Europeans, correspond to reality?" somewhat the exclusiveness of Romanian intellectuals, at least in their rapport tb^^-..-;-''..::,;He further claimed that the Ottoman conquest of Anatolia saved and preserved the the other Balkan nations, at least for some time. There are some indications for thaf;';: ;||;.-;::- .Orthodox church which, had it been captured by Western Europe and the papacy, there are others against. Today, one can hear different signals from a chorus of voices;'^^/ would have perished.54 Finally, he took considerable pride in the Ottoman Empire's striving to get out of isolation. Some are mediocre reiterations on the theme of Latin ,;| Byzantine-Balkan heritage: island in a Slavic or Asiatic sea. A member of Vatra Romdneasca speaks of the toi&<-M%:.-..: ,rU n r , ,in t , fL, , c,,r , ,, , , . ',. — . ^""viB^'X-'- lr the Roman Empire represented the extent or the spread or Western culture, ant Romanians who welcome Hungarians and Jews and who are different from the :.;| jt a]so pkyed a nQ ^ imp0ltant part in the stmcture of the Qttoman EmpirC] In easy-to-mampulate Slavs, with their mass mentality, and from the cruel, brutal, and......addition to the contributions of the Greeks, whether converted to Islam or not, the heartless Asiatic Hungarians.48 Lucian Pintilie, the acclaimed film director of Un- v:::| Ottomans received from the East Roman Empire the entire Balkan heritage, in- fnraaffsthlo dimmer etat^r!- "Tf tHfrf1 ic nnp rprjiTn^ with whir-Vi T lrlpnhfv it's tfii^ Km 11*-.. . rlnriin/r Pv^^ [-.^.-^If 5? y:.: Imagining the Balkans -a On the other hand, the Balkans were the first geographic region where thei-l Ottomans began to loose territory, and this shaped a feeling of resentment and be- ~. trayai: "[T]he loss of Balkan territories has functioned as a major trauma leading to ■ ■ a deeper preoccupation with the survival of the state among both the members of the Ottoman ruling class and the adherents of the Young Ottoman and Young Turk movements." The response to this trauma seems to have been an "official tendency to forget about the Balkans," a tendency grafted on the official republican ideology; -. that rejected any continuity between the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey.56 ■■: The attitude toward the Balkans, however, is much more complex, and reflects" ideological tendencies, group interests, and individual preferences. There is, forl| example, a meeting ground between the official republican nationalist ideology and;|f the radical Turkist-Turanist nationalism in their preference to forget about the Balkans not simply as the attribute of an undesirable imperial past but also as the most trouble- ' some region of Modern Europe. The stress on Anatolia in the construction of the -territorial aspect of Turkish nationalism has led to the widespread idea that the Balkans — diverted precious attention and energy from "the pure Turkishness" of Anatolia, and in the end "betrayed" the Turks. This feeling informed the popular 1960s series of -1 newspaper articles and interviews by Yilmaz Cetinler in Cumhuriyet under the title f "This Rumelia of Ours," published later under separate cover and in a revised edi-- -Lion.''7 In the case of the Turkists, it has fueled a "revengeful, hostile and humiliat-ing" attitude toward the Balkan nations without necessarily presupposing rcvanchist or irredentist designs.58 .1 It is chiefly among conservative intellectuals opposed to the republican ideology that the memory of the Balkans is kept alive. This is not, however, the almost jj benevolent and romantic nostalgia of descendants of or even first-generation Turk-; ish immigrants from the Balkans. On the contrary, it exhibits a hostile and haughty _ posture toward "those hastily founded states [which] cannot even be as noble as a.. former slave who sits at the doorsteps of her master who has lost his fortune."59 At the § same time, there is a matching rise of interest toward the Balkans among leftist and Westernist liberals, often from a neo-Ottoman perspective. The popular writer Nedim . Giirsel published impressions of his 1993 and 1994 visits to Bosnia, Macedonia. | Greece, and Bulgaria in a charming volume "Return to the Balkans," dedicated to I all the dead in the Balkan soil and to all friends living in the Balkans. It is a warm, j human description calling on friendship and cooperation between all Balkan peoples. | which nevertheless falls into the trap of idealizing the Ottoman Empire as a realjHv I ottomana for the Balkan nations and ascribes their cessession and particularly thj jj Balkan wars to the instigation of imperialist states.50 Many advocate a geopolitical I approach as a means of securing Turkey's European integration. In the words of \ Cengiz Candar: "The Balkans once again make Turkey into an European and world power just like the Ottomans started becoming a world power by expanding into ! Rumelia. . . . Therefore Turkey has to become a Balkan power in the course of he-journey into the twenty-first century.. .. Anatolia is a region that quenches the Turkish spirit. The Balkans introduce Turkey to the world dimensions."61 While there is no <- n-_:_i 4,^ Rnlkans have reentered the "Balkans" as Self-designation 51 The East-West dichotomy, on the other hand, is centra], especially in the present passionate search for group identity between Islam and a secular statist Turkishness. While it prominently figures among the other Balkan nations, not a single one among ■:• jkgrn accepts even a minor redeeming quality about "Easternness." The Turks, while certainly feeling the tension between East and West, seem to have reached a certain synthesis, not the incompatible talking at cross-purposes Kipling described in his "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." For Ziya Gdkalp, this was the organic blend of the Turkish people, the Islamic community and Western civilization; in the words of the Turkish author and critic Peyami Safa, it is a synthesis between East and West, between Turkishness and Islam.62 A poet like Fazll ■ Husnii Daglarca gives a splendid articulation of this feeling in "The Epic of the Conquest of Istanbul": East or West cannot be told apart. The mind heralds the funeral whose images abound. Your feet, your feet . Are swept off the ground.65 A new wave in the quest for Turkish identity was unleashed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, particularly with the possibilities it opened in Muslim and Turkic Central Asia. The disintegration of Yugoslavia, and especially the war in Bosnia, '■; inflamed Islamic passions in Turkey, stronger even than the ones triggered by Cyprus ?: two decades earlier. The overriding slogan that Andalusia would not be repeated was an allusion to the Spanish reconquista and the expulsion of Muslims from Spain. The lively interest toward Bosnia and to the fate of Turkish minorities in the Balkan .countries, the activization of Turkish diplomacy, even the existing nostalgia in some /circles about "bizim Rumeli" ("our Rumelia") should not mislead one in overestimating the place of the Balkans in Turkish political and cultural priorities. The Balkans are significant primarily as the "western" hypostasis of the Ottoman historical legacy, and their importance is elevated or rejected in a complex and indirect correlation to the rejection or acceptance of the Ottoman past, especially today with the passionate reexamination of Atatiirk's republican legacy by practically all the Turkish ideological and political spectrum. Most important, the category Balkan is devoid of any pejorative meaning. While Balkan studies as such do not figure promi- : nently in Turkish scholarship, they have managed to create a respectable niche for themselves: a new journal, Balkanlar, is published by the OrtcirJogu ve Balkanlar Incemeleri Vakfi, and there is a commission for Balkan Studies (Balkan ara§tirmalan fomisyonu) at the Turkish Historical Society. Alongside Bulgaria, Turkey is the only-other country where "Balkan" is employed as a proper name. Although in Turkish Balkan" can appear both as a personal and family name, this is rare compared to the frequently used Bulgarian family name "Balkanski." Whenever the concept Balkan" is evoked at all, it vacillates between the neutral and the nostalgically positive, maybe because it has never been seriously considered a central category of identity. In times of extreme crisis, identities may become vague or else, perhaps more 52 Imagining the Balkans "Balkans" as Self-designation 53 less, yet with the sharply outlined spheres of belonging or exclusion that come-i^»Bf^:;:f humanity; elsewhere an almost-market and an almost-democracy forthe ones who the fore under intense stress.64 With the Yugoslav problem in the limelight tbd^^r^^. an aversion to communists. one would have expected the obvious fault lines in her case to be the ones betoeerlňi'1.' ■ The other reference of the Balkans occurs when Ugrešič alludes to the war in Croatianness and Yugoslavness. In fact, Ugrešic s subtle description leaves the irr,. I yUgosSa\ ia: it is "the mounds of deaths 'down there' in the Balkans." Later, while not pression of a fault line in the making, of a tissue torn in unexpected and painful places;:^;entioning Balkan by name, she utilizes the "down there" as a label. Before the war, not a clear and neat cut. Two years later, this process was still unfinished for Ugresif' 4 ■ ^e Yugoslavs are different from "them"; despite today's emphasis on civihzational when she refused to be circumscribed by an ethnic category and defined herself "Í^visions along Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslims lines, the Yugoslavs had in toto "anational," in the rubric "others."65 More interesting for our purpose here is trí^|^'f^jected their belonging to the Balkans. The only exception had been the world of broader framework of identification, not the painful ambiguities within. Sitting in |f. scholarship where Balkan has had a legitimate place and is used as the name of insti-an Amsterdam café, Ugrešic needs a larger frame of reference to define her placní:íf^tes and journals. Already between 1934 and 1941, a Balkan institute in Belgrade was (or lack of) than the borders of Yugoslavia. So she sips her coffee and jots dowríá■ issuing the Revue Internationale des etudes balkaniques; today's Balkanoíoški institut opposition pairs on a piece of paper: organized-disorganized, tolerance-intolerancéÍ|p^^^.:. aV the Serbian Academy of Sciences publishes Balcanica; and a new journal, Balkan civihty-primitiveness, rational consciousness-mythic consciousness, predictabilif^^^i-'-':;.--'j7oriimj is published in the former Macedonian Republic. Outside of academia, the unpredictability, citizen-nationality, and so on; the first column she calls Western M Yugoslavs had preferred to be seen as a Danubian or Adriatic presence, or even bet-Europe, the second Eastern Europe: | ^ in nongeographical terms, as the elite of the nonaligned world. Now, they are And at once it seems that I clearly see this Eastern Europe. It sits at mv table and ISM.-:.:'.:■■. ■ , . „<, j .1 »ttT .1 ■ ■ ,11 u „ .. • jk,. .„„ j„„j, of „„„u „,ur „„ ;f ■„ „ „,;,.,„, r ™ t,„;^,i „1,1 „kio, „=„j^„t=d ;},;„ ^ relative, we guys down there. 68 In a way, this is exactly how they are peiceived by "vr" """" v"w.x"° 'V" " "IT"1' \"T "'T^1 '~'"~"}J -.-riA: •".'*: fn„ west as the dark side within a collective Europe. For the former Yugoslavs, too, makeup, an expression oi servility and impudence on its lace, it wipes its mouth :rim.'■ ■■■111 ' r. 1 ■ 1 ■ 1 with its hand, it speaks too loud, it gestures as it speaks, it talks with its eyes. I see a ......^--Balkanness serves to susta.n their Croatianness, Serbianness, Macedomanness, and glow of despair and cunning in them at the same time; I see the desperate desire to y-so on pure and innocent, or at least salvageable, while enabling them to externalize be "someone." . . . Mv sister, my sad Eastern Europe.66 :; ,."3:|. :/. .: their darker side. IApprehending the horror of the future war, in September 1990, the Sarajevan .:... daily Oslobodenje published a piece with one of the first mentions of "Balkan," a notion that had faded during the past few decades from the Yugoslav vocabulary and ;. self-perception: "Thus, instead of being an integral part of Europe," read the article, ^■■■■"'■vSve are again becoming the Balkans, we are sinking into it equally in Ljubljana as : :?weli as in Zagreb, in Belgrade, Stara Pazova and Foča, in Veliká Kladuša, Pristina P:^;-arid Skopje."69 "Balkanization," the author pointed out, has entered the political even Eastern but Central European, looks with aversion and a feigned incompre^|||: ;: vocabulary as a synonym of "lebanonization," that is, divisions accompanied by hension at the Yugoslav quandary as if it belongs to an entirely different species, does5fc|,;:; vi internecine conflicts. Imbued with liberal and democratic ideas, the piece accused it become possible for Yugoslavs to refer to Eastern Europe, and in a moment of | all Yugoslav political leaders of the moment—Milosevic, Tudjman, Izetbegovič, despair to recognize it as an equal, a mirror image. . :| Raskovič, and so forth—of leading the country, instead to democratic liberties, "into This goes even more so about the relation of Yugoslavia to the Balkans. Twicé^f^.: the gloom of the Balkan call for 'soil and blood..'" It takes, indeed, some significant Ugrešič mentions them by name. Once, when among the different positive qualities j'.l historical ignorance to ascribe to the Balkans the "Blut und Boden" ideology and of her Yugoslavia—what she calls her "trump card"—she speaks of "the beauty of ;v| practice, something that makes this statement the unconscious, and therefore Dubrovnik, the diversity of cultures in a small Balkan country, the beauty of our coast, | pardonable, predecessor of Robert Kaplan's infamous and very conscious statement the advantages of our self-management, our relative democracy, our free passport,"^/:. .... about the Balkan origins of Nazism. It also takes the arrogance and innocence of our absence of censorship, our variant of soft communism."67 These are all, of course, :'-.| someone who really has never felt Balkan and who has internalized the anti-Balkan the staple advertising lures of a tourist agent, tailored for the Western customer. They;j| .. stereotype to heap on the Balkans all the burden of her own Yugoslav frustrations, all relate to the whole spectrum of the West's professed beliefs and preferences, and--* Apart from that, this is a well-known mechanism in psychology where stigmas have would serve different, even opposing tastes: here some sunny Adriatic with a touclt^l::;'.; a distinct relief function and serve as the externalization and projection of repressed of cultivated Renaissance Italy in Dubrovnik for either curious and adventurously/./.. preoccupations.70 westerners or for second-class ones who cannot afford Venice or the Riviera; there ;- Four years into the Yugoslav war, with all due exemptions one may feel for schol-bit of multiculturalism a la balkanique and some soft communism for university J ars under stress and in isolation, one marvels at the nerve and hubris of declarations violence Slobodan S 54 Imagining the Balkans "European type of development"; even today's rump Yugoslavia is assigned an" ■'' tion "between the East and West as Switzerland has between the Latins artrjjk Germanics."71 It may be pardonable for people under duress to think they are center of the world, but it is unacceptable to think they are the center of the Balkg In an otherwise admirable piece, for its advocation of tolerance and Christian lo^1 the Croatian American theologian Miroslav Volf constantly described the warjj^1 tween Serbs, Croats, and Muslims as Balkan: "[N]ew demons had possessed Balkan house and were preparing their vandalistic and bloody feast, first in Cro-1* . and then in Bosnia," the new Europe is vanishing "into the thick smoke of the s born Balkan fire," "today, Balkan is aflame in the name of Serbia's identity with' i|." self," "the Balkan conflict," "the Balkan war," "Balkan hate," and so on, ad nauseam^ Slavenka Drakulic, too, writes about "the war in the Balkans," about the Ba/foj'Jj Express, although she never would refer to herself as Balkan. Even the so-calle^JP "Croatia syndrome," coined to describe posttraumatic stress in patients who "have -I! committed or witnessed ghastly acts" has to be reported under the heading of "Ball^ |^ "n On the other hand, a cosmopolitan Yugoslav author, the Croat piaywrighf- j najder, who lives in Germany, has voiced a spirited defense of [he Balkans;' J The Balkans are a mythical territory. . . . Just as the Mediterranean can be described ^ as the cradle of human history, this is true of the Balkans. I would like to stress that \ this is not only a region of misfortunes but also a space in which the strong tradr- T tions that have shaped European culture are oscillating. One should not connect: * the Balkans necessarily with something negative, even as the word "balkanization" \ makes us think about a suicidal war.74 J The other Balkan countries, in the meantime, are not at war and have no intention to go to war, despite the constant apocalyptic scenarios that the Yugoslav ctish is impossible to contain within Yugoslav borders. They are also amused by the n< (and unwillingly) discovered Balkanness of some of the former Yugoslavs, b it » understand: it is the need for solidarity in the abyss. To quote the Bulgarian poe! Boris Khristov, it is an abyss with a maze at the bottom.''5 Among the Balkan nations, the Bulgarians share in all the frustrations of being Balkan, and yet they are the ontt ones who seriously consider their Balkanness, probably because of the fact that the Balkan range lies entirely on their territory. There is no other Balkan literaturetha; has dedicated such eulogies to the Balkans as the Bulgarian; in fact, there is no other where it even figures as an object. The Balkans appear in many folk songs as the abode and shelter of the haiduti, the venerated resistance-fighters; they were the symbol of Bulgaria's urge for national liberty in the poetry of Dobri Chintulov (1822-1886), Khristo Botev (1848-1876),^ Vazov (1850-1921). Lyuben Karavelov's 1867 declaration of love to his countrv begins with: "I love you, my dear fatherland! I love your balkans, forests, creeks, cliffs.and their crystal-clear and cold springs! I love you, my dear native land!"'6The "Balkan lion" as the epitome of Bulgaria's victorious spirit appeared in the first national hymn of the country, composed by Nikola Zhivkov, until 1944: Lion of the Balkans, thy winged spirit glorious, "Balkans" as Self-designation 55 ' I ^Balkan Mountains are also a central image in the present national hymn. ^ 'l Inassionate troubadour of the Balkans was the poet Pencho Slaveikov, maybe 'fhe^°|:^e|lectuaj am011g a brilliant group of modernist poets at the turn of the jjje j.a(j immortalized the mountain in his epic poem Kirvava pesen (The Hither and thither was I carried by Fate, Hither and thither in the labor of my days, gut jlways there stood before me and always there will stand Tbeshape of the proud, the wonderful Balkan, por I hold it in my soul's sacred place Balkan, our father Balkan, have eyes of grace, Harshly dost thou look from the judgment place. What of our mothers now, of the tears they brought To blot away the sins which the fathers wrought? Look on those who look upon thee from the graves — Did they live no life save the life of slaves? Had their children naught save the milk of slaves? Had their souls no thought save the thoughts of slaves? Behold the wounds that out of our bosom stream! Count the numberless heroes who fell for a dream! In thy crevasses, there on the rugged heights We, thy sons, have died 111 a hundred fights - But yet we awakened Time and we urged him on, We drew the curtain of night and the daylight shone. Now turn thy glance to the queen of the mountain throng, Hear thou the music of swords, hear thou of songs the song! Thither thy people fly, for liberty lies in chain, Thither we fly, the dead, to the glorious place again. Ah! we have risen, we ride from a shadowy shore To see the fate that our country shall have in store. And softly then as the stars to the twilight sing So slept the voice that spoke to the mountain-king. And as he looked to the gloom of the woodland glades The chin of the Balkan drooped and his lips were dumb And he was sunk in a dream of the days to come.78 The popular story "Balkan" by Iordan Iovkov, possibly the greatest Bulgarian short-story writer, recalls the second Balkan war of 1913 when Romania invaded -Bulgaria. In the story, Balkan is the name of a military dog that guards the frontier and becomes the allegory for patriotism and human dignity.79 In 1904, Pencho Slaveikov wrote an extended preface to a collection of Bulgarian folk songs, published in-London and appropriately called "In the Shadow of the Balkans." He stressed the close alliance between the Balkan and the Bulgarians, for whom "Father Balkan" appeared as a synonym for Fatherland. There is not even an inkling of awareness that Balkan might mean something ignoble, although less than a decade later the name was already saturated with a pejorative meaning: 56 Imagining the Balkans "Balkans" as Self-designatioii 57 The word "Balkan" should not in this case be narrowly applied, that is, not meielv to the glorious troop of mountains which from the north-west set out on their mysterious journey, which proceed through the center of Bulgaria and hasten tn-wards the east, where in magnificence they tower above the Black Sea, listening |Q the sleepless waves and their unconquerable song. "Balkan" is the name of all tfie mountains that are scattered over the peninsula which lies to the south of the "white — and silent Danube"—and despite the fact that every mountain has its own name fair, melodious and intertwined with memories and poetic legends.80 : The Balkan range as a pillar of Bulgarian independence and symbol of it tionhood continued to be a central theme in the works of contemporary writer Emiliyan Stanev, Iordan Radichkov, and Georgi Dzhagarov. It was taken up a!' ■ : philosophers and historians who emphasized the crucial role of mountains in eral, and of the Balkan range in particular, in Bulgarian history: "Without the Ball and then also without the mountains on our soil, here in the European soul! : what has existed now for so many centuries under the name of Bulgarians w hardly have survived and might not have appeared." "The Balkan in our history' Petir Mutafchiev's popular historical essay that illustrated the role of the mow \y\ MmnA^fin/r ^in^ AnEm-iAi-nrr D.Jw^^^^ „4^4-., ,---i.___^1 j ____, 1 . V oi-ijJIJi'li.iiig mm u-.i^iiuing tiit. JU Lllgai idil 3 Id LC 111 113 Ctl 1LU11 CS"01U 5 U UggifiS ■ W^ST^l1' Byzantium. Himself a medievalist, Mutafchiev drew on numerous examples 1 Byzantine sources to show the decisive strategic significance of the mountain rang£$|F for preserving Bulgarian statehood. His essay ended at the time of the Ottoman "a- „____:i._ui____________________.1 iu.. o„n____ . i -I i , , . ' ijut.jL. m a. vnndunj wmiiui un gudiu, inc uaiivaii uiu uoL uenay us uury to proteet:;,-'i ' the Bulgarian state from its mighty neighbor. And if several centuries later it did not'Sf succeed in defending it from the hordes of Bayezid, this was because medieval Bul-:lf- garia, having exhausted its life-force in an existence filled with insoluble contradic4;f% tions, was stepping into its own grave.81 What is remarkable about this essay, despite its occasional romantic affectations, ■ typical for the mterwar period, is the fact that "Balkan" was the name employed i unreservedly by Mutafchiev. For a first-class medievalist, conversant with his sources^ I and faithfully reporting from them the only existing name "Haemus," to utilizer'^.-"Balkan" (the designation brought by "Bayezid's hordes") indicated merely the ex£;-jt"' tent to which the name was deeply and firmly rooted in the Bulgarian language nnd j imagination. These literary examples can be continued ad infinitum but there arfe£t-:-more than literary proofs for the special place that "Balkan" has among the Bulgar--:>:|-ians. Geography is an important element of the school curriculum, and the 199^*,'-seventh-grade textbook features three parts: Europe, the Balkan Peninsula, and Bulr-'l ■ garia. Bulgaria is a country whose airlines are called "Balkan," whose tourist agei>.^?l-: cies are "Balkantourist" and "Balkan holidays," whose record-making industry ls-';3|:;' "Balkanton," whose best export to the COMECON was an electrocar called f. "Balkancar," whose most fashionable hotel in the center of Sofia is "Sheraton-Balkan/f v|-whose third largest bank is "Balkanbank," and which has thousands of citizens witli V-.:| the family name "Balkanski." ■ ±et, m hie uuigarian case tiiere is also strongly present the standard pejorative^jm-attitude toward Balkanness. In his work on the Balkan Union of the 1930s, in all other :;f;|-aspects a solid work of factological research, Geshkov had accented the Western ste^Vt about "the proverbial Balkan mentality—the inability to give and take."82 A ;;jei'ls :'olin!Mlisiii essay lamented "the late, partial and unequal incorporation of ^'lykaui into the genuine Europe." The Balkans are the crossroads between two t worlds —the West and the East: "different cultures, languages, traditions A yen civilizations. The demarcation line, which during the cold war was called IJon curtain,' is the same where several centuries ago the Turkish conquering -"^f :bol had stooped and which had saved the West from violence and assimila-tt^'r„'-j'|ie unSystematic, improvised, provincial Europeanization of the Balkan coun-I''':'"' nl.,}.;es qualities like generosity, tolerance, goodwill, respect for the individ-'■'''fliien to the Balkan mores. As a result, '"uncorrupted politician' sounds in our ■ [f jiari vocabulary as 'virtuous criminal.'"83 Pieces like this attest to the fact that the rhelbric of Bafkanism, created and imported from the West, has been completely itjteirnalized. ' 'finis, a Balkan name and a Balkan identity is seriously considered only by the ■gujgarians, but even among them it is ambiguous and subordinated to their claim of ■g.^opeanness. In the words of a former UDF deputy foreign minister: "We live in ^■irope and in the Balkans, which are part of Europe and have their own peculiar - ' 1 . »ur .1 r»..i.......iU„ 13„11.,.- :„ :„t;.„„i„l,.l.„„.,n,. iUPrr ■ MsStorJcal aspects. 111 uie ouiganau case, uie jjai&an is juunioLCiy kiiufci, mcic-j- rt, f]K. name is a Bulgarian predicament, from which Bulgarians not only cannot £Si.aue j;,,,; have found a way to aestheticize. Balkan studies have had a particularly c|,n!1.:, development in Bulgaria where they serve, among others, to overcome the >.|susl parochialism or tne nation-state approacn so typical 101 an oaiKau tuuimio.--Despite the fact that some accept, although reluctantly, their Balkanness while 6tliers actively renounce any connection with it, what is common for all Balkan ^nations is the clear consensus that the Balkans exist, that there is something that can be defined as Balkan, although it may be an undesired predicament and region. What they would like to prove is that they do not belong to the repellent image that has |;cen constructed of it. The problem of identifying with the Balkans is a subspecies 0fthc larger identity problem of small peripheral nations. To borrow Paul Valery's Rhetorical question: "Comment peut-on etre ce que Ton est?" has a different meaning depending on the distance from what is or what is perceived as the core. While ../someone from the "center" can ask oneself "How can one be what one is?" and arrive at abstract philosophical conclusions, the same question for someone outside of the "center" is "likely to be less abstract and less serene," as Matei Calinescu has ■: aptly remarked. It more likely would evoke feelings of envy, insecurity, inferiority, ^■"frustration or distress at the marginality or belatedness of his culture." It can also "trigger a mood of self-abuse; finally it could provoke resentment that could, in some cases be transmuted, by way of compensation, into a superiority complex.86 In all Balkan cases, we are clearly dealing not only with different ways to cope .with stigma but also with self-stigmatization. Although the psychological mechanism ■ of self-stigmatization has not yet been exhaustively researched, there is a plausible (correlation between self-stigmatization and destigmatization (Selbststigmatisierung ^dsEntstigmatisierung). In the hypothesis of Wolfgang Lipp, self-stigmatization be-scpmes a reflective process that is relocated and directed not against the stigmatized but a?ainst the "controlling authorities."87 Another feature common to all Balkan 58 Imagining the Balkans having the character of a bridge between cultures, in this respect the Balka not unique or even original in their awareness; it is common to most-other Eastg * ropean nations. Within this context, the frustrations of the Balkan intelligentsi an indelible part of the frustrations of the Eastern European intelligentsia that almost without exception infused with the residues of material lack and the f; technological backwardness."88 The strong insistence of the Visegrád group thai indisputably belong to the West is delivered in a firm voice usually meant for ex With the possible exception of the Czechs, everywhere else the metaphor 0 bridge, the quality of in-betweenness, is evoked in internal discussions. As reci mi as the spring of 1994, the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest had staged an e\cjj lent exhibition on "Hungarians Between 'East' and 'West'" which explored th lient ambiguity in Hungarian identity.89 Elisaveta Bagryana's verse about the garian spirit being between East and West is not much different from Gyorgy Kon musings on the "transitory, provisional" nature of Central Europe, its being "ne east nor west; it is both east and west."90 This tension is, of course, a permanenl ture of Russian identity and it exists also, with more subdued overtones, among Pi East is a relational category, depending on the point of observation: East ( mans are eastern" for the West Germans, Poles are "eastern" to the East Germans Russians are "eastern" to the Poles. The same applies to the Balkans with their pro-Density to construct their interna! orientalisms, aptly called by Milica Bakic-HavdeR the process of "nesting orientalisms." A Serb is an "easterner" to a Slovene, 1 Bosnian would be an "easterner" to the Serb although geographically situated to the":; west; the same applies to the Albanians who, situated in the western Balkans, are perceived as easternmost by the rest of the Balkan nations. Greece, because of its unique " status within the European Union, is not considered "eastern" by its neighbors in the '; Balkans although it occupies the role of the "easterner" within the European imu'Ui-tional framework. For all Balkan peoples, the common "easterner" is the Turk, al-" though the Turk perceives himself as Western compared to real "easterners," such as Arabs. This practice of internal orientalisms within the Balkans corresponds to whif« Erving Goffman has defined as the tendency of the stigmatized individual "to stialiiy his 'own' according to the degree to which their stigma is apparent and obtrusive. He " then can take up in regard to those who are more evidently stigmatized than himself the attitudes the normals take to him. ... It is in his affiliation with, or separation from, his more evidently stigmatized fellows, that the individual's oscillation of identification is most sharply marked."91 With the exception of the Turks, in whose self-identity the East occupies a definite, although intensely discussed, place, all other Balkan nations have renounced what they perceive as East and think of themseUei as, if incompletely Western, certainly not Eastern. They would allow to have been marked by the East, but this is a stain, not a sign in any fruitful way. Although competing in their pretense to be more "European" than the rest, and creating their internal hierarchies of less and more "orientalized" members, the only constituents who are brandished by an ultimate and absolute "orientalness" are the Turks. What is symptomatic and, admittedly, disquieting is the perception that the ^tale of transition, complexity, mixture, ambiguity is an abnormal condition. In-betwcen-ness is rejected not only by Western observers and hurled on the Balkans as stigma. "Balkans" as Self-designation 59 H known that one cannot live on a bridge or on a crossroads. . . . The bridge ~^lSi\ art of the road, a windy and dangerous part at that, not a human abode."92 ^ "Metaphor of bridge or crossroads has acquired a mantralike quality that most 111 j-^e region like to evoke as its central attribute: "|T]he Balkans have always ^^fied fragmentation and adversity. The junction of western and oriental cultures threshing floor of different peoples (Greeks, Latins, Slavs, Bulgars and Turks) 3 , £]jgjons (Catholics, Orthodox and Muslim), Southeastern Europe appears 3 sense to be a crossroads of continents."93 The metaphor is evidently premised eV6^e endorsement of an East-West dichotomy, an essentialized opposition, an ac-0ti ted fundamental difference between Orient and Occident: "The Balkan penin-u « a region of transition between Asia and Europe—between 'East' and 'West'— cep1 ■ith their incompatible political, religious and social ideals."94 Yet, with all the mbi^uity of the transitional position, the central pathos of all separate Balkan discourses (with the sole exception of the Turkish) is that they are not only indubitably European, but have sacrificed themselves to save Europe from the incursions of Asia; a sacrifice that has left them superficially tainted but has not contaminated their essence. ^ ^ , „, . In the face of a persistent hegemonic discourse from the West, continuously disparaging about the Balkans, which sends out messages about the politicization of essentialized cultural differences (like in the Huntingtonian debate), it is hardly realistic to expect the Balkans to create a liberal, tolerant, all-embracing identity celebrating ambiguity and a negation of essentialism. And yet there are some heartening symptoms of resistance to the dominant stereotype. Eva Hoffman noted in her "journey through the new Eastern Europe a remarkable "acceptance of ambiguity," which struck her as typical for the Bulgarians, Romanians, and Hungarians. Of course, the interesting twist is her added Polish/American perspective when she writes: "Perhaps such acceptance is characteristic of these regions, which are closer to the Oriental East, after all." This neologism "the Oriental East" can come only from an -insider or someone who has acquired the insider's eye, someone intimately conversant with the internal orientalisms of the region.95 An early case of reaction against ■ the presumed abnormality of life on the bridge has been registered in a short ethnological piece. Reflecting on the well-known phenomenon of symbiosis between Christianity and Islam, a Bulgarian scholar concludes: Humans and gods meet and pass each other on a bridge and on a cross-roads. In the Balkans they join in a complex process of contact-conflict, which makes them different from the ideal types of religious or ideological doctrines. In the evolution of human civilization, the Balkans are not a transitionary zone, but a space, in which humans overcome the contradictions of God and go-WlC ' ^e discovery of the New World.9 However, what came to prevail in the % s '.vi'-h the new European power were considerations of balance of power ^ 'cly inspiring the famous Franco-Ottoman alliance) as well as the desire to bet-'"'■f'!fow)\v and accommodate the new masters of important trade routes and lands.10 . 'cr j'n(:SC had always been travelers traversing the peninsula, but most were in a '■'■■'■^'■'■'txj cross and reach the two focal points of attraction: the Holy Land and ''""nsianiiuoph • Among European writings from the first centuries of Ottoman rule, ■.'^.^řratíve accounts of travelers par excellence occupy a relatively modest place, thebttft being works of anti-Ottoman polemic and propaganda, descriptions of mili-\ ' campaigns, and political treatises.11 No doubt, the best knowledge of the Otto-siirns and the Balkans in the early period was generated by the Venetians who had traditionally strong commercial, political, and cultural ties to the late Byzantine "inpire. The creation of a vigorous Greek intellectual diaspora after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 secured a continuous and fruitful exchange that became a ■ fundamental element of the humanistic spirit of the Renaissance. Vitally dependent on the preservation of its elaborate and sophisticated trade mechanism, Venice "managed, by vacillating with skillful diplomacy between appeasement, collaboration, -neutralit)', and war, to maintain its privileged position in the Ottoman realm until the-end of the sixteenth century, in the face of the increasing competition from the ■ emerging continental European powers. Long after its eclipse, Venice continued to ■be present even physically in parts of the Balkans (the eastern Adriatic and.the Peloponnesus until the beginning of the eighteenth century) and the reports of the Venetian ambassadors are of unrivaled quality. The Venetian relationi were an indicator of the evolution of Venetian political discourse and perceptions of the Ottoman Empire. There was a drastic change of assessment around 1560. Before, the ambassadors' dispatches, while never completely free from the traditional Christian view of Islam, showed an inquisitive and rational curiosity in the reasons for Ottoman success. This led them to informed fascination and openly pronounced respect for the internal order of the empire, which was linked to the absolute power of the sultan, views that also informed the attitude of the Ragusan patriciate. What set in after that was a complete and abrupt reversal: the discreet ^admiration for the sultan's absolute rule was transformed into a harsh verdict of his ■tyrannical practices; the Ottoman Empire began to be painted as the epitome of despotism. This was due to a shift in the Venetian understanding of the nature of tyranny, prompted by political changes taking place in Italy, especially the rivalry : between the Medici principáte of Florence and the Venetian republic: "Once the dichotomy between the state of liberty and the state of tyranny was conceptually formed, it was then applied to the Ottoman empire as a tyranny par excellence, for what could be predicated of the Florentine Principáte largely, it could be said of the Ottoman empire absolutely."12 Ironically, the Renaissance value of liberty entered Venetian political discourse as its central tenet at the height of the Counter-Reformation. Its anti-Ottoman aspect, moreover, explains the further paradox that the militant post-Tridentine Ca- tk„l;____ _r ti_________"__________.• i.. j_______d___:_____„ .,„1,, „„ (U. ;i„ ,.„m;^ 66 Imagining the Balkans century saw the peak of Catholic propaganda in the Balkans, through the actiy of the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith, founded in Rome in 162- [ special missionary policy toward the Balkan Slavs, the Counter-Reformation was] "an ideologically motivated force as well as a product of a system of Western ances directed against the Turks."1' In 1637, Francesco Bracciohni, former secret^ to Antonio Barberini, cardinal and head of the Propaganda Fide, dedicated a p, devoted to the Christianization of Bulgaria to the cardinal. This came at a time w Protestantism viewed Greek Orthodoxy as closer to the evangelical tradition and made several attempts to promote closer ties with it. An openly polemical and pagandist piece, "La Bulgheria Convertita" was also a baroque morality tale st tured around the dichotomy of Good and Evil, Evil being represented by the tt force of schismatic Orthodoxy, Islam, and Protestantism.14 Papal propaganda seminated in the vernaculars of the region, made a sustained and successful effo acquire immediate and detailed knowledge of the different Slavic peoples. Iti respect, it continued the Venetian diplomatic legacy of keen and concrete obsc tions. The intimacy of Venice's, and later Italy's, relations with the Balkans was moted also by the continued presence of Balkan emigres, particularly the pros ous and influential Greek diaspora, but also representatives of the different Slavic ' ethnic groups. In the second half of the eighteenth century, when the activation ot Russian policy-in the Mediterranean stirred parts of the Balkans in open revolt against the Pone Italy acted as intermediary between east and west in a complicated relationship defined as "Italo-Greco-Russian symbiosis." Italy's traditional ties to the Balkan worie -nourished "Hellenic enthusiasm, solidarity with the Greek exiles, neo-classical visions, discovery of the Russian world" as elements strongly affecting the culture of Venice, Tuscany, Naples, and even Piedmont.15 Italy, alongside France, became the most important cultural channel for the transmission of enlightenment ideas to Greece, and from thence to the rest of the Balkans.16 At the same time, maybebe--cause of its physical proximity or because it did not become organically afflicted with a mission civilisatrice, Italy on the whole did not develop an abstract and hectoring pose toward the Balkans and never lost sight of their concreteness. Like the Italians, the German-speaking world came in direct contact with the Ottomans, and the Habsburgs became the main bulwark against further Ottoman expansion into Europe, which coincided with the exhausting Reformation struggles in the German lands. The enormous output of anti-Turkish propaganda created a stereotyped image of the Ottoman as savage, bloody, and inhuman, and producecia demonized antagonist epitomizing the hereditary enemy of Christendom. This propaganda was utilized for internal political problems, closely linked to the issues cf-absolutism and the "social disciplining" of the population.17 At the same time, the popular mind was deeply marked by what has become known as "Turkennotund Turkenfurcht" (Turkish troubles and Turkish fright) attested for by numerous folk songs, sermons, and specific customs.18 On the other hand, the image of the Ottoman Empire in the travel literature c: the same period was remarkably different from the abstract stereotypes of the propH- canda materials The nprrpnfivp nKQ^rvnfinnc fimii^a] fnr rhp \/pnptian ro]rtiif\ni haVC-. The Discovery of the Balkans 67 pe travel literature, which has left the most numerous, detailed, and informed sjiigu3? £j.jie Balkans from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.19 These were .-counts ___ „„:„„„ —„,:„„{,„„, ;„,,„„„i„ —„„:i„j „ff;~;„l j;„l„ ^OjTdescriptions Q£re^ons commg h-0m journals compiled during official diplo-iicr 6 Slovenian, Czech, and so on) descent, which gave them an additional "0i missions 1° me Porte, but also diaries of merchants, pilgrims, or war prisoners, '^ducation, often leading humanist scholars. Some of them were of Slavic riters were usually high-ranking officials of the Habsburg Empire with excel- ■Croatian ^ ^ediacyofobservation. The intimate knowledge and detailed interests of the Habsburg emissaries made also much more sensitive to the ethnic differences in the peninsula, and many fthe sixteenth-century travelers—-Kuripesic, Vrancic, Dernschwamm, Busbecq, Geriach Schweigger, Lubenau—differentiated correctly between Slavic groups and j,^ valuable descriptions of costumes, dances, and customs among Serbs, Bulgar-vjis Dalmatians, and so forth. There was a wealth of concrete knowledge often ■lissing from later observation of travelers from lands farther away from the Ottoman Empire. Anton Vrancic has given one of the first and most detailed descrip-':ons of the hairstyle and headgear of Bulgarian women, a favorite topic among Furopesn writers and readers of the period. The inexpensive decorations seemed "strange and simple" and "light and funny" to the tastes of the Habsburg mission, conditioned to court jewels and ceremonial dress. Vrancic, however, magnanimously brushed aside the aristocratic hauteur of his fellow travelers with such an explanation, that only iis well-meaning innocence matches the extent of its prejudice: "If the plainness [of their ornaments] was not among an oppressed and mostly rural people, we would hardly have believed that these were sensible individuals. Their clothing hardly deserves to be called that. It is shaggy, coarse and cheap, made of hairy furs, like the ones worn probably by the primitive people." Yet, this was followed by an elaborate full-page description of the unique headgear of Bulgarian women of the Pirot district, their rings and bracelets, and ends with a good-natured philosophical digression on fashion: Once, when we had many women around, and they were marveling at us, and we were marveling at them and their ornaments, one of diem asked us whether our women adorned themselves as well. How happy were these women, who did not know our extravagance, and theirs was confined to objects which cost nothing. They were no less content in their poverty- than our women were in their wealth.20 Ever the gallant gentlemen, almost all Habsburg aristocratic observers focused ■on the beauty of the country women they encountered, and emphasized their hospitality and industry. Unlike their later French and English counterparts, who also .extolled the beauty of Balkan women but contrasted it to the wild and beasdy appearance of their men, the Germans preferred to pass the males in silence. An exception were the few travelers of nonaristocratic provenance, like Hans Dernschwamm or Reinhold Lubenau, who were equally and nonjudgmentally interested in the male costume of the natives. Reinhold Lubenau traversed the Balkans in 1587 as pharmacist to the imperial mission bringing the annual tribute to the Porte. Born to an old burgher familv in Koniesbere. the Protestant Lubenau received a eood education 68 Imagining, the Balkans aversion to Catholicism. Once entering Bulgaria, he gave detailed description the language and dress of its inhabitants. Far from being surprised, let alone shoe! by their clothing, Lubenau sensibly remarked that "the men go around with 1< hair like our Kurlanders and Lithuanians, dressed in gray coarse cloth, usually w out a hat, and remind me of the Kurlandish and Estonian peasants." The won with their colorful shirts, and ornaments, adorned themselves just like "the Pruss ■ Estonian, Kurlandish, Russian and Lithuanian women do in our parts, so that tl is no difference. When I reached the Danube, I thought that the Lithuanian woi had moved there from their lands." This is a world apart from the mockingly shoe . description of Vrančič. Here was someone who had been used to the sight of pi . ants and who, moreover, had keenly observed them. Since he knew Polish and learned some Czech, Lubenau wrote that he found it easy to communicate with the local inhabitants who were speaking Croatian or Slavic. (He maintained that the Slavs over the whole huge territory of Poland, Lithuania, Russia, the Czech lands, Morav Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Thrace, Macedonia, Dalmatia, Albania, Illyria, and i - ,! ■ 1 -i ■, .11 .1. . rr.--l.: i. in tins country miigarut mere is no nODliliy wiiawucvei, |im as in an uic t uimmi lands. . . . Many coming from the families of ancient rulers, even the ones from the house of the Paleologues, arc marrying sheperds' daughters, so that the aristocracy is completely uprooted. Such among our nobility who become too arrogant and despise the ones around should better ponder over the fact that here delicate young women of noble lineage are marrying peasants.21 Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Flemish aristocrat, scholar, polyglot, and distinguished diplomat of the Habsburg court, wrote perhaps the most popular account of the Ottoman Empire, one of the few published in the lifetime of its author. Known as "Legationis Turcicae epistolae quatuor," Busbecq's account saw over twenty editions in many European languages throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Commenting on the headgear of the Bulgarian women at the same time and in the same region as Vrančič s observations, Busbecq thought that they looked like some Trojan Clytemnestra or Hecuba entering the scene.22 The classical education and obsession with antiquity paid off handsomely in his case. The scores of materials that he assembled and sent back to the emperor's library in Vienna laid the foundation. of the rich collection of Greek manuscripts: "I am carrying a countless number of coins____I filled numerous carriages and ships with Greek manuscripts that I collected. I sent about240 volumes by sea to Venice."23 Busbecq was no exception: all visitors to the Balkans were well educated, almost all were intimately acquainted with, classical learning, and many were accomplished humanist scholars and passionate, antiquarians. Still, the bulk of information in their accounts, indeed, the reason they com- __1 4.U^,-m + l->^ f;^l- ^l^v.^ „rnnlň friira o A ůfi 11 t±A i A ^ +tl *=> nrcfom fiňvfimmPTlt The Discovery of the Balkans 69 overall impression of the Muslim empire was one of tyranny, plunder, disorder, and oppression, the descriptions they left are surprisingly rich and matter of fact. Often, " jjen going into detailed description of institutions and events, the writers were javorably impressed by the efficiency of Ottoman bureaucracy and the organization • 0f its miliary force, by the sobriety of the society in contrast to the alcohol problem - in the German lands, even by their friendly disposition. It was in this period of harsh interdenominational struggles and wars in most of Europe, that the toleration, albeit wjth a subordinate status, of Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire made a great impression on the observers, especially on Protestants. The despotism of the sultans, in particular, was the object of a somewhat ambiguous admiration where " considerations of efficiency often took the upper hand in overall evaluations.24 The Habsburg accounts of the sixteenth century were unique in their quality compared to later descriptions, and especially in the attention given the ordinary population.25 This comes as no surprise, since the seventeenth century was a period of intensive ideological and political struggle around the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, and a strenuous power equilibrium between Habsburgs and Ottomans, all of which accounts for the cultural stagnation in the German-speaking world. As : late as 1743, a book appeared in Jena with a title advertising the minute description ř of newly discovered peoples, mixing up ethnic and local names, social and profes-: sional groups, and sobriquets: "Hussaren, Heydukken, Tolpatchen, Insurgenten, [ Sclavoniern, Panduren, Varasdinern, Lycanern, Croaten, Morlaken, Raitzen, Walachen, Dalmatinern, Uskoken," that is, hussars, robbers, Butterfingers, insurgents, Slavs, Albanian guards, inhabitants of Varasdin, Lycaners (?), Croats, Morlachs, Serbs, . Wallachians, Dalmatians, bandits.26 An early eighteenth-century oil painting from Styria shows the reigning perceptions of ethnic hierarchies and the place of Germans in the family of European nations.27 This "Brief description of the European nations and their characteristics" shows ten male figures portraying different nations and obviously ranged from positive to negative: Spaniard, Frenchman, Dutchman, German, Englishman, Swede, Pole, Hungarian, Moskovite, Turk, or Greek. While the ranging comes as no surprise, it is remarkable that Turk and Greek are represented together by a turbaned male to fill in the negative extreme of the picture. The tableau compares these figures in seventeen categories: temperament, nature, intellect, vices, passions, knowl-; edge, costume, diseases, military prowess, religion, political form, and so on. It is an amusing illustration not merely of stereotypes but of the powerful and unexpected shifts of stereotype. In terms of qualities of mind, the Spaniard is categorized as in-; telligent and wise, the Frenchman as cautious, the German as witty, and the En-- glishman as ill humored. In the same category, the intellect of ridiculed nations is described as "limited" for the Pole, "even less" for the Hungarian, "nothing" for the Russian, and "less than ;: that" for the Turco-Greek. The painting was obviously executed by and for Catholics, because the church service was given highest scores in Spain, good in France, :. and fair in Germany. The English were "changing as the moon," the Poles believed in everything, and the Russians were dissenters. The Turco-Greek was described as yo Imagining the Balkans able," the German "imitating," the English "following the French ways dres: the 'toil, ;s of the Poles, the many colors of the Hungarians, the furs of the Russians womanly dress ("auf Weiber art") of the Turks and Greeks. While Spani'J^f French, Germans, and English were compared to elephants, foxes, lions, and hdrse' Poles, Hungarians, Russians, and Turco-Greeks were matched with bears, donkeys, and rats. More significantly, however, they were all "European t\,\\Xi ' \ For our purposes, of course, the most interesting aspect was the monolithic: ision^' : inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire, a vision that was very different from the \: ' dichotomy between Christians (albeit Orthodox) and Muslims, something that 03^' be explained with the deteriorating stage of knowledge of the European southeast!*! the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire, a vision that was very different from the w^M m this period. It was only after the end of the seventeenth century that a substantive shift J, s ^ perception of the Ottomans set in with the Enlightenment. The reassessment of image of Islam in general and the creation of a positive Ottoman image in parlicnj^ was pioneered in France but gradually also influenced the Germans.28 Gcratd" Cornelius Driesch served as "secretary and historiographer" to the magna /egafiosm; to Constantinople by the Habsburg emperor in the wake of the Peace of Passaiowit?"'-' in 1718. He published his bulky Latin journal in 1721 in Vienna, and two Genien ? editions followed in Augsburg and Nürnberg. Not only was Driesch's account ejtl tremely well informed, a virtual treasury about everyday life in the Ottoman Emp^ ' he openly admired certain aspects of the Ottoman social and political system, , ticularly the absence of hereditary aristocracy, which he contrasted positively to the behavior of the Habsburg nobility.29 ' ,; Captain Schad, traveling through the Balkans in 1740 and 1741, shared these views but prefaced the first part of his notes with a phrase from Voltaire: "Able conquerots -! among tyrants and bad rulers exist, but even they are closer to the latter." He offered.-j extremely detailed and lively descriptions of everyday life in the Balkans and remarked that the Christians in Europe were greater thieves than the Muslims. Instead of the conventional pictures of grim Janissaries, Schad commiserated with them at the outrageous price (1.2 florins against their daily pay of only 6 florins) that they had toj pay for the services of Gypsy prostitutes near Razgrad.30 While Schad's journal was not published during his lifetime, similar travel accounts increasingly influencedtlw reading public: until the 1780s, the Gennan readers were the main consumers of travel -f literature in Europe." By the end of the eighteenth century, even the good Turk, %t Turc genereux," had made his entry into the German-speaking world and was popularized with Mozart's "Entführung aus den Serail," to mention only the most popular among numerous examples.'2 I During the nineteenth century, the Christian-Muslim dichotomy was dropped from the political and cultural vocabulary, at least in the terms known before. No\vf the opposition was phrased as nations eager to develop along the path of European, progress against a backward traditionalist polity. Philhellenism has been defined as "an international movement of protest in which nationalism, religion, radicalism and commercial greed all played a part, as well as romantic sentiment and pure heroism."33 The German kind was almost exclusively of the latter two varieties. Despite the fact that Byron's stature and the voluminous litpratnrp nn Fnorl^v. nl-iilViellpn«« Iß* Germans The Discovery of the Balkans 71 who actually fought for Greece far outnumbered any other European ntucn in"1'-""""""......----d-------------- ---------a 1 athe war were reported by a contemporary Greek writer to be over 14,000. The q of at least 704 of them have been preserved in Greek and Russian archives, 113 thaJ1 any of the western philhellen.es.'5 That the participation of other Balkan "otaiteers may noj. be technically subsumed under the narrow heading of phil-Vllenism does not justify the silence over this expression of Balkan solidarity, especially in rne face °^s0 mucn emphasis on incurable Balkan enmities. Jvfoltke's "Briefe aus der Türkei" have been praised as surpassing even Goethe's " .jl^jj^nische Reise" in the objectivity of detail and beauty of description.36 The fu-h-ts miiitar} gen'us served in his youth as instructor in the Ottoman army, which ^'Ottoman government, after the radical destruction of the Janissaries, was determined t0 reform on the European model. Moltke had no qualms to attribute the sad (fate of Wallachia to the "Turkish yoke which has thrown this nation in complete servitude." Whatever progress he encountered in the country-- liberation of the peasants, easing of their tax burden, training of a local militia, organization of an efficient antiplague system —he attributed to the Russian occupational forces under Oerierai Kisselev. Yet he did not dismiss the reform attempts of the Porte as mere political hoax to accommodate the powers, something other Europeans did. In 1837, he accompanied the sultan on his tour of the Balkans. Listening to his speeches delivered two years before the official proclamation of the Tanzimat, in which the sultan proclaimed equal treatment before the law for all his subjects irrespective of ■religious affiliation, Moltke conveyed his moderate optimism that this was the right path that would lead to success.37 Moltke proved to be the ideal executor to his own maxim that the perfect traveler should run the middle road between an excess and a Lick of enthusiasm, but in his time there were also others who produced perceptive accounts of high quality and nonjudgmental lucidity. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the breadth of vision, diversity of interest, and quality of information of the scholars from the German-speaking world surpassed even the accomplishment of the German humanists.38 An exquisite example in this respect was the ■ work of Felix Philipp Kanitz, the result of travels in the course of two decades and a -veritable mine of rich and scholarly information on Bulgarian and Balkan geography, ethnography, demography, archeology, linguistics, folklore, art, and so forth; no attempt at summarizing this achievement can do it credit. It was also a work of great literary merit and until World War I the unrivaled source of serious information on the Bulgarians who were, no doubt, Kanitz's "pet" folk.39 The great archaeologist and philologist Karl Krumbacher, founder of German Byzantine studies, visited the new state of Greece and the Greek-inhabited regions of the Ottoman Empire in his late twenties. The account of his journey was dedicated to the "great philhellene Ludwig I, the King of Bavaria." Krumbacher opposed the injustice of harsh judgments passed on Greece, stemming from the disappoint- :_______1______ J2 Imagining the Balkans standing of the problems besieging Greece and of the progress achieved so far made subtle comments on the identity transformations among the Greeks whui ■ were gradually shedding off their self-designation as "Romaioi" and "Graikoi "r^\* adopting an identifications as "Hellenes." He was extremely critical of the nistic methodology of contemporary European (especially German) ethnography ft!^" * by "statistically calculating the percentage of blond and dark hair, counting blue ajj brown eyes, and taking detailed measures of the skull," passed authoritative ments on whole nations. Of course, there was a self-congratulatory element ii comparison of Greek tenacity, sharpness, and steady forward-looking ways tr manners of the Prussian state but, in general, he Judged the Greeks on their oiyiT merit. For Krumbacher, the Balkans definitely existed as a separate entity and hi its originality in the ethnic diversity, different costumes, and specific social relations rather than in some kind of deeply imprinted cultural attitudes or value system t in Corfu, he remarked on its Italian character where only occasional Albanian sweepers, Vlach spinners, and Greeks dressed in fustanellas reminded one of the proximity of the Balkan peninsula.40 The newly emerged Bulgaria also attracted attention and in the 1880s inspired even a literary/theatrical attempt. After the abdication of Alexander Batten berg irj 1886, the Bulgarians were desperately looking for a new prince to satisfy the dcmjn& of the great powers, primarily Russia. By August 1887, the new prince was found*" Ferdinand von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha —who ruled the country for the nextthirty%i|': years. The same year, a short book was published in Leipzig under the title "Would You Care for a Bulgarian Crown? To All Those Who Would Like to Say 'Yes,' Dedicated as a Warning." Written by Julius Stettenheim, a popular Berliner satirist, it consisted of four parts: an opera in fifteen minutes with piano accompaniment ('The trumpeter of Sakkingen or the solution of the Bulgarian question"); a series ofba-lesque letters written in Berliner dialect to Prince Ferdinand ("Muckenich an£ Bulgaria"); and two short pieces ("To the solution of the burning question" and "Bulgarian miscellanea"). The advice given to Ferdinand was concise: "Take to Bulgaria.' only the most essential. Deposit all your valuables at the Coburg bank. Pack, attHf very most, three suits, underwear, your shaving things, several loaded guns, a cook* book, several pounds of insecticide, and a used scepter. Once you arrive, make them pay you the advance for the first quarter."41 While Stettenheim's ridicule was directed at the pretensions of German princelings whose megalomania was in reverse pro-portion to their significance at home, he documented well the current view ofthq;; Balkans: the southeast was a backward and disorderly place manipulated by Russian's; and German princelings had better watch out. Indeed, the new values of Ordnung. und Gesetz were already so deeply internalized that, at the turn of the century, a sfu--dent of Johann Gustav Droysen working on a dissertation about the Turkish fright during the Reformation ended with a criticism of the present policy of the great powers-for upholding an unreformable state based on conquest and power instead of law. and order.42 The Balkans, although as part of the Near East, were also the object of a very-different muse: this time of a romantic incarnate, Karl May (1842-1912), whose boob' lw thp 1 nflOS harl r^a^h^d □ f^ir^nlat-inn nf nupr fi^rh^fii^ milli^Ti nn/1 Vn-n^ ki-nifulir The Discover)' of the Balkans 73 - jje has since been rehabilitated, his pacifism and even anti-imperialist r-P ernphasized, and has secured a prominent place in this peculiar black-and-iidfice 0f adventure literature whose knightly heroes do not fail to inspire the lute ^jjj^ n ys popularity rested on his Red Indian novels, and generations of -yo^ng- ac}0Iescerits have been weaned on his stories about Old Shatterhand and "^pnetou, Karl May also published a series of novels on the Near East. His 'entalische Reiseromane, whose fourth volume was "In the Balkan mountain gorges," °n ortalized the romantic protagonist Kara Ben Nemsi. Karl May had not visited the Balkans and the Near East, just as he had never set foot in North America, but his Near Eastern novels were so well researched, mostly from travelers' accounts and eograpf"cal works, that it is possible to verify his travel routes.43 Karl May may be ^aid to ke rne first practitioner in the new genre of invention-tourism describing the relationship between tourism and staying at home, and aptly termed as ecritour in distinction to ecriture.^ As late as 1980, a German linguist visiting Kosovo and Albania admitted he had rather nebulous ideas of these lands that "amounted to little more than an image of a predominantly rural, patriarchal, conservative society, unfamiliar in its Oriental tendencies and with pronounced martial characteristics. Certainly the image reflects childhood readings of Karl May's works."45 What Karl May also inspired, although he did not invent the genre, was a host of less talented experts on imaginary adventures, chivalric contests, and less chivalric Battles, many of which took place in the Balkans. There was a proliferation of so many "Karl Mays" specializing in imaginary combat that Stettenheim took them to task. Writing for the satirical journals "Mephistopheles," "Kladderadatsch," and "Die Wespen," he contributed immensely popular fictitious war communiques from the site of the Russo-Turkish war in the Balkans signed with the name of the invented war correspondent "Wippchen." "Wippchen" has entered the German vocabulary as yet another word for fairy tales.46 What is remarkable is how the nearby Balkans, together with the distant North American prairies, could tickle the popular imagina-- lion as fanciful sites for the setting of morality plays, romantic or antiromantic. The Enlightenment brought a reassessment of the Turk image and nowhere was it stronger exemplified than by the French case. With the French, however, it was the energizing of a continuity rather than an abrupt shift. Where Venice and the fiabsburgs had to go through a direct clash with the victorious Ottomans from the outset, France was not involved in an immediate relationship because of lack of proximity and its absorption in the almost continuous Hundred Years War with the English, The only exception was the active policy of Burgundy under the rule of Philippe Jlle Bon. The few accounts from this period were informed by the traditions and pathos of the crusades, in which the Ottomans were referred to as Saracens, although : on occasion an intelligent observer would surmount some of the dominant cliches. Bertrandon de la Broquiere, who traveled on a secret mission in 1432-1433, praised the military prowess of the Turks and their greater friendliness compared to the Greeks. He preferred them in general to the Greeks who showed open hostility toward a representative of the Catholic nobility, no doubt sustained by fresh memories of the dubious activities of the crusaders in Byzantium.47 ,..k:„k . 74 'mag. linz the Balkan to persist with ups and downs until Napoleon's days. Between the urges of hurnajj'Tl ism dictating a rational and empirical approach, and the political considerations of French interests, the French travel literature of the sixteenth century created a ratfie^ positive image of the Ottoman Empire.48 It was the sense of order and tranquil;^" J that most impressed the observers. Jean Chesneau spoke with admiration about%e4 excellent organization of police and the security at night, and Pierre Belon cited a'^1 Greek from Lemnos who extolled the beneficial effects a long-term peace had fot "S the prospering of the countryside.49 Although this travel literature was the result of -* firsthand impressions, practically all sixteenth-century accounts, with minor excep-' tions, were written by members of diplomatic missions: Jean Chesneau, Jacques Gassot, and Pierre Belon, all in 1547, Nicolas de Nicolay (1551), Philippe du Fresno--Canay {1572), Pierre Lescalopier (1574). Their views of the institutions of the Orfcjfef man Empire were important not only for the formation of French foreign policy but' greatly influenced French essayism, drama, prose, and verse, as well as the general --development of ideas about culture and religion.50 The image of the despotic but -well functioning Ottoman Empire exerted an important influence in shaping the--J European, particularly French, ideology of absolutism.'1 A problem that intimately interested foreign observers was the religious instity- " tions of the empire and the modus vivendi of the rich variety of religions and de-nominations. Pierre Belon, the prominent natural scientist, clearly impressed that'"* the different Christian denominations, as well as the Jews, who had found refuse in the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion from Spain and Portugal, had their own ' houses of worship, attributed the strength of the Ottomans to the circumstance that ? "the Turks force nobody to live according to the Turkish way, but all Christians are ' allowed to follow their own law. This is precisely what has supported the power of j the Turk: because, when he conquers a country, he is satisfied if it obeys, and once he receives the taxes, he doesn't care about the souls."52 While such impressions have '. been instrumental in creating the widespread notion of Muslim tolerance, it needs to be emphasized that they were conceived at the peak of religious intolerance in :;, Europe, particularly France, and should therefore be properly contextualized. At the same time, the effect of these positive images of the Ottomans on public | perceptions cannot be overestimated. Rabelais's Gargantua and Vantagrud, written between the 15305 and 1550s, for all its humor and humanistic breakthrough, was-;-| informed by the popular spirit of crusade and prejudice when it came to the Turks. . When Picrochole was assured that his army had won him everything from Brittany, Normandy, Flanders through Lubeck, Norway, Swedenland, had overcome Russia, j Wallachia, Transylvania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turquieland, and was now at Constantinople, his fiery exclamation was: "Come ... let us join with them quickly, for I will be Emperor of Trebizonde also. Shall we not kill all these dogs, Turks and, ■* Mahometans?" Panurge, on the other hand, having fallen in the hands of cannibal-;; istic "rascally Turks," would have been most surely roasted on a spit larded like a :| rabbit, were it not for the mercy of divine will.5* 3 By the end of the sixteenth century, there was an increasing ambiguity toward ;' the Ottoman Empire, manifest throughout the next century. While the line of ae- 4-k_ U..L,1_______ The Discovery of the Balkans 75 , n diplomatic actions to foster resistance movements among the Christian Balkan populations. This was partly a result of the overall aetivization of Catholic agancja during the Counter-Reformation, partly an attempt on the part of France counterbalance the adverse impression its alliance with the Ottomans had left.54 According')'' both lines were represented in the travelers' accounts of the seventeenth century, which were written, as in the previous one, almost exclusively by diplomats. jjHiisGedoyn, "le Turc," was first secretary to the French embassy in Constantinople between 1605 and 1609 and served as French consul in Aleppo in 162,3-1625, where witnessed the conspiracy of Charles Gonsague, Due de Nevers, a French nobleman of Greek descent, who had enlisted the support of the pope, the Holy Roman emperor. Spain, Poland, and even the Druze in Syria in a holy Christian league against the Ottomans, and who had sent emissaries to Serbia and Bosnia. In a letter from Belgrade in January 1624, Gedoyn exclaimed: "God grant that all this can be achieved and that this first attempt succeeds in awaking the Christians, who today are asleep." Only a month later, this time from Sofia, he concluded: "The Levantine Christians are awakening everywhere and long for the support of Christian princes."5' After the Thirty Years War, the Habsburg Empire was so enfeebled that Louis XIV even sent a military unit to join the victorious coalition against the Turks at the battle of St. Gotthard in 1664. The French also sent help to Crete in the 1660s, jeopardizing but never completely severing their relations with the Porte. At a time when the Ottoman Empire was clearly on the defense and its structural defects came to the fore, there appeared in France the first plans for its future partition.56 In the 1670s, Delacroix, son of the famous orientalist and official royal translator from Turkish and Arabic, was sent with a mission to collect oriental manuscripts, an activity that had become a unique feature of France's policy in the Levant. After ten years in the Near East, Delacroix became head of the chair of Arabic at the University of Paris and inherited his father's post at the court. A prolific writer and translator from Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, he published his memoirs in 1684, exposing the corruption of the main Ottoman institutions and concluded that "the Ottoman empire is much stronger in the imagination of the foreigners than it is in actuality, and that Christian rulers need not unite in order to vanquish this might. The French kingdom would suffice, and it seems that heaven is reserving this victory for Mis Majesty."57 The former line of favorable depictions continued but lost much of its convincing argumentation. In 1657, A. Poullet passed through Sofia and was impressed by the beauty of Bulgarian women in the adjacent villages. They did not cover their faces like other women in the Orient and struck him as "gentle, almost identical to our French women," polite and possessing a French temperament. He was even more deeply impressed with their dress and necklaces made of copper, silver, or gold coins: "On their breasts they wear kerchiefs covered with some of these coins so that they hide everything beneath, arranged and attached quite deep down on the cloth like tiles on a roof; all this makes one suppose that the oppression is not such as our writers would make us believe."58 Poullet was certainly a connoisseur, having previously expressed his scorn for the Sadies' toilette in Dubrovnik, which made them look like a pair of buttocks without any body."'9 Still, using decolletage covers was a most 76 Imagining the Balkans relations, particularly commercial, between France and the Ottoman Empire cal notes were creeping in, and illustrations of weakness, venality, and dveraf cline were increasingly accompanying the general descriptions. This dichotomy of judgment continued during the eighteenth century de Peyssonnel, diplomat and writer, left valuable descriptions of the Ortom pire and the Crimea from the 1750s to the 1770s, in which he explored their? mercial potential. He was a staunch supporter of the Ottoman Empire in view of its role as counterbalance to the rising power of Russia. No less dr-v advocate of the official French line, Esprit-Mary Cousinery provided his goverrtm^y with detailed and useful information about the territories in which he served \ sul until the r79os. His chief and passionate interest was the ancient world sides collecting several tens of thousands of ancient coins and medals, which (to^ adorn the museum collections of Paris, Munich, and Vienna, he left one of the nio-t valuable and impartial descriptions of Macedonia, despite the characteristic cfc cal affectations of his prose. Baron Francois de Tott, diplomat and general, who&ai' instrumental in the efforts to modernize the Ottoman army, could not hide hi${i$.r dain at the persistence of erroneous ideas about the courage, splendor, dignity, aw:,f even justice among the Turks. So harsh was his verdict that he was criticized fgjf^| overstating his case.60 :^ | Where there were only Greeks and Turks, after the middle of the century Frt 1 ; travelers began to discover or distinguish also the other Christian Balkan natfohj,8*f Toward the end of the century, the skeptical and critical opinions expressed infect gard to the future of the Ottoman Empire turned into open rejection, especialk' among the ones imbued with the views and tastes of the Enlightenment and shaped""' by the events of the French Revolution. The romance with efficient despotism was over; already in the seventeenth century the Ottoman Empire began to be identified as the seat of Oriental despotism, while the French monarchy was spared this-affJsfv' tion: "Not all monarchies are despotiques; only the Turkish is of that kind." Still, was only with the enormous popularity of Montesquieu's De I'esprit des his thatili;-term became central to eighteenth-century political thought and, with the except!®" of Voltaire, was maintained as a distinct type of government qualitatively different from monarchy and typical for all the great empires of Asia and Africa, notably\ Rousseau, Mably, Holbach, Boulanger, and Turgot.62 The pronounced antielen?* calism of the Enlightenment, its onslaught on religion as the sanctuary of conserve 1 tism, prejudice, and backwardness, also produced a twist in the assessment ofistafi*-'* The view of the Ottoman Empire as the epitome of despotism was coupled with die- ,-J conviction of the unreformability of Muslim religion, afflicted with fanaticism attfi bigotry, a far cry from the previous views about Muslim tolerance. Count Ferrifcre\ de Sauveboeuf, a passionate Jacobin, wrote in 1790: If only the Turks could enlighten themselves one day! Vain dreams! Fed with iEv norance, fanaticism restricts their horizon and they aspire to nothing else but un-:, tertainment. , . . The Ottomans mav be driven out of Europe but they will uevei change. Their fanaticism will follow them everywhere and the veil of religion Will always cause this lack of consciousness which makes them despise all that, bong-. The Discovery of the Balkans 77 - . -]ar was the verdict of Francois Pouqueville, doctor and member of the 'scientific expedition sent to Egypt in 1798, who was captured by the Otto ^^arid spent three years in the Ottoman Empire: "The Turks, sunk in profound i&if£> fjjjjjj; only how to devastate, something which they relish, and this misfor-^f^3'"! linked to their religious beliefs." Pouqeville, who in 1805 became French H'ne j-g^e court of Ali pasha of Ioannina and later in Patras, published memoirs tiding in valuable statistical data and geographic detail. He was one of the first the; notion of Europe in an allegorical rather than purely geographic sense ''"^jjj $ the court of Ali pasha of Ioannina and later in Patras, published memoirs *° n© disassociate the Ottomans from the family of civilized European nations, r'jjstantinople had become "a city inhabited by a people who belong to Europe letely on account of the place they are inhabiting." Likewise, the famous traveler ^entomologist Quj]laume-Antoine Olivier attributed the decline of the Ottoman ■^Irvirp to the fanaticism of "an oppressive religion" and to the moral degeneration Fmpire of society^ In 1829, when Count Louis-Auguste Felix de Beaujour published memoirs sum-niarizing his impressions of his stay in the Ottoman Empire, he shared Pouqeville's Hidgnicni .,m[ wrote that "estranged from the big family of European nations by its ciistoiWS and beliefs, as well as by the despotism of its rule, Turkey cannot encounter srtv support or sympathy for its political existence and is sustained solely by the - tkalty °fme other governments who fear that it might be conquered by one of them, to the detriment of all the rest." On the other hand, whenever instances of religious tolerance were encountered, they were attributed to the ignorance of a populace untouched by the graces of civilization, another category elaborated during the Enlightenment. When Alexandre-Maurice, Count d'Hauterive visited the empire in 1785, he admired the "religious skepticism, so quiet and good-natured" among the Bulgarians, which he deemed "quite pardonable." But while he thought that the -peculiar symbiosis between Christianity and Islam, which Lady Mary Montagu before him had noticed among the Albanians, was preferable to the religious wars in Hungary and Transylvania that had left more than a million dead Hussites, Jacobites, and Catholics, he nevertheless attributed it not to any innate nobility of character but to the "ignorance and simplicity of a people without education and enlightenment."This "blindness" as he defined it was due to the fact that "these unfortunates are sofar from civilization, because they possess none of the passions which prejudice renders so common and incurable elsewhere."65 The passion of their enlightenment ideas and revolutionary fervor did not entirely break the practical streak of these men. Count Marie-Gabriel de Choiseul-Codffrier published the extremely popular "Voyage pittoresque de la Grece" in 1782, six years after his visit to Greece. The illustrations to his book depicted the Maineotes in a pastoral idyll, but Choiseul was calling on France and the other European countries to join forces with Catherine II and liberate Hellas. Two years after the publication of his book, Choiseul was appointed Louis XVFs ambassador to the Porte. The British ambassador, Sir Robert Ainslie, duly informed the sultan of his French rival's Hioversive ideas and showed him the book with a raised eyebrow and the comment: This is the man France is sending you!" Not losing face, Choiseul had a pro-Turkish 78 Imagining the Balkans Still, the new ideas of the eighteenth century had introduced a fundain transformation in the attitudes toward the non-Turkish populations of the B? Peninsula. The abasement of the modern Greeks compared to their illustrious fathers was treated at length in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts whenever they would muse on its etiology they would attribute it "to inner hxr decay and to the stray ways of the Greeks." Not only were expressions of synir. rare but there was practically no desire to see the Greeks independent. Christi.ni' they were, they were schismatics, and although different from their rulers, were pl;;^ "in a twilight zone illuminated neither by the radiance of the West nor by the e glow of the East." With the elevation of the natural and civil rights of men, and the powerful critique against absolute authority, the decline of the modern Greek; viewed as a result of loss of freedom first under the Byzantines, but especially under-" the Turks. The political emancipation of the Greeks began to be seen as-the guarantee for reviving the classical past with its rejuvenating influence. It vva linking of politics and culture that brought about this reassessment.67 Francois-Rene Chateaubriand is the most famous example of the first attitude " who only later fell under the sway of French political philhellenism. His "Itinerant; '*"' ■ inspired by his passage to Greece in 1806 and 1807, was the first truly literary travel account in French literature and paved the way for Alphonse de Lamartine, Gustaye.,2 Flaubert, Gerard de Nerval, and Maurice Barres. It was a new type of travel accoustsil focused not on external reality but on the subjective world of the author. Completed" engrossed in his own romantic persona, Chateaubriand became the foremost poet' of Greek landscape. The modern Greeks, just like the Albanians and the Turks,-annoyed him with their uncivilized manners. Asked by a Turk about the reasons fof his journey, Chateaubriand retorted he had come to see people and "especiallythc Greeks who were dead." The ones alive he disdained and rendered in distorted; caricaturesque descriptions. Only in 1825, at the height of the Greek struggle for independence, did he endorse the Greek Revolution and call on Europe to assist it in the name of Hellenism, Christianity, and the natural rights of men. Merely a flashing exception to his previous and subsequent views about modern Greece, iliis seemed Chateaubriand's immortality in the heart of grateful Hellas. And yet, even when '.; they embraced the ideal of Greek liberty, the French could not shed the air of mis-sion civilisatrice of culturally superior Europeans, "who sought to bring about tlx rehabilitation of the modern Greeks on their own terms, namely, through the efficacious imitation of Western-derived classical models. Ironically, although it propi I the reunification of Greek culture, in actuality it fostered its bifurcation became it | pitted its more recent Christian-Byzatine-Ottoman legacy against its ancient pasl."'11 ; During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, diplomats were outnumberd j for the first time by travelers per se: antiquarians, merchants, scholars, or simply;VT' adventurers. For many of them, the attractions of the Balkans were linked to their vi=j". relationship with the classical world. Marie-Louis-Jean-Andre-Charles, Viscount de^Sf: Marcellus, a Restoration politician, philhellene, and passionate admirer of antiquih', j who left a description of his voyages between 1816 and 1820, remembered Homerr =S| Strabon, and comic verses from Menander about polygamy while barefooted wom-'ii- j VrmnCr nnrt n\A t/^n^rl tl itt! m^ale in o Cmnll */i'11nrr^ iti fl-i£> 6-,^.f nf tlio RnlVnnC Till..........i... The Discovery of the Balkans 79 '''' • -t owe the presence of the splendid Venus of Milo in the Louvre.69 One is so i.-.to-h"^ j ^ siorjes about the venality of Ottoman officials or the greed of igno-Ct>tl Ba!';au Peasan^s were selling off their classical and medieval heritage for ""'di thev cared but little that it is worth citing the complaint of an earlier traveler, 'j^uCas who was desperate that he could not acquire manuscripts from the '"v" % of Mt. Athos because the monks would become "furious even if one offers ' buV'" Female beauty left almost none of the French travelers indifferent. The same p ' l'liiicas was amazed that the peasant women in the Maritsa valley had the man-as of gentlewomen, and he compared them to the bacchantes of Nicolas Poussin.70 ■ B^upur wrote about the freshness of young girls picking roses in the Rose Valley ■ . [tsg town of Sliven who reminded him of pastoral scenes described by the an--.cient authors." tyfales fared worse. While Pouqueville opined that the lecherous Oriental mon- ■ ^rcjis should look for their roses of love among Bulgarian women endowed by great beai'ty, high stature, and noble gait, their male counterparts were portrayed as hav- "iij'!r "a pleasant appearance, without possessing a noble stature; their open face, small eyes and protruding forehead describe them better than their crude character."72 This was a comparatively mild verdict over the male part of populations that were usually characterized as "wild" or "semi-wild." An earlier traveler and female admirer, Poullet, -was repulsed by the boisterous dances of the Catholic Slavs along the Dalmatian coast, ■ but especially by the religious ceremonies of these men "wild like animals," who sang prayers "in their half-Latin, half-Slavic tongue."7' Even as an aside, the theme of the mongrel nature becomes increasingly present among the travelers. The rise of the Napoleonic Empire saw direct French presence in the Balkans, vvith the creation of the French province of Illyria in Slovenia, Croatia, and Dalmatia, the reestablishment of French rule in the Ionian islands, and the aetivization of French diplomacy in Serbia, Wallachia, and Moldavia, as well as among the semi-independent rulers of Northern Greece and Western Bulgaria— Ali pasha Tepedelenli .ifid Osman Pazvantoglu. A new type of traveler appeared: the military (J.-C. Margueritte, Compte de Charbonelle in 1801, Louis de Zamagna in 1807, Compte Armand-Charles Guilleminot in 1826, J.-J.-M.-F. Boudin, Compte' de Trommelin 111:1828, Felix de Favier in 1830), the military engineer (Antoine-Francois, Comte de Aridreossy in 1812, Francois-Daniel Thomassin in 1814, Jean-Jacques Germain, Baron de Pelet in 1826, G.-B. Richard in 1828), and the geographer (J.-G. Barbie de Bocage :ri 1828) joined the diplomat in important intelligence missions. This also produced a new genre: itineraries with detailed information on topography, the state of the roads, villages, and towns, fortifications, and so forth, but where the local population was ■the fast priority, and the ethnographic and other types of data often yielded in quality to earlier descriptions. There is no doubt, however, that these descriptions, many of which appeared in scholarly journals or remained unpublished, served to immensely advance the concrete knowledge of the peninsula./4 The great French poet, diplomat, and politician Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine passed through the Balkans in the early 1830s as part of a long-cherished dream to visit the eastern Mediterranean, The realization of an essentially romantic |-»^ mnrniai) rl nnhli^it^ Tn iRor hp nnh- 8o Imagining the Balkans The Discovery of the Balkans well despite the mixed critical reception. Lamartme's arresting and emotion.! " '1 , demography, linguistics, and literature of the nations inhabiting the Otto- h«.views on the Eastern question, and especially his enormous popular,^ ^ ' n re.78 Boue set himself the task to correct the inborn or acquired Euro. ---------r-----v v..ut.uuus popularity as.ap had a powerful influence in shaping public opinion against the official foreign pof line of upholding the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. He employed all p0p^ keywords of the period—liberty, reason, civilization, progress—and was in thefo " front of propagating the struggle for national independence. Yet his parliamentary speeches immediately after his return were more concerned with the issues of Eiiro-pean balance of power disturbed by the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Lamartinff solution was an European protectorate over the Middle East to the exclusion of unilateral intervention by any single power.7' Having come down with serious fever/ in a Bulgarian village, Lamartine came to know and appreciate the peasants, a was one of the first to profess they were completely mature for independence a would, together with their Serbian neighbors, lay the foundations of future states ity: Europe. Despite his favorable opinion of Mahmud II and his reforms, he thought ' the empire was doomed and called on Europe not to hasten its demise but also to not actively prevent it: "Do not help barbarity and Isiamism against civilization, tea-" • son and the more advanced religions they oppress. Do not participate in the vol-p • -and devastation of the most beautiful parts of the world."'6 The Bulgarian peasants reminded Lamartine of the Alpine population of Savoy, their costumes of German peasants, their dances of French. Writing at the" height of the folklore craze, when uniqueness was the yardstick, he displayed in hi* penchant for similarities the work of another attitude, that of class: "The customs of «-the Bulgarians are the customs of our Swiss and Savoyard peasants: these people are simple, subdued, industrious, full of respect toward their priests." His only objection was that, like the Savoyards, they had an expression of resignation, a remnant of their — slave condition. The Serbs, on the other hand, impressed him with their devotion to..... liberty and reminded him of the Swiss in the small cantons. He dedicated several moving paragraphs to the monument of human skulls the Ottomans had erected in -the vicinity of Nish after having quelled a Serbian uprising. This notwithstanding, Lamartine considered the Turks "as a human race, as a nation, still the first and most dignified among the nations of their vast empire," because he thought that liberty. . -" left an indelible imprint on one's appearance; it was the degeneration of their rule and customs, their ignorance and lawlessness that had turned them into inept masters.77 Full of inaccuracies, a typical romantic piece, Lamartine's work fostered a sustained interest in the peoples of the Ottoman Empire. Despite professed and internalized reservations about objectivity, reading some ^;|| nineteenth-century products of the great descriptive effort aimed at the collection ■ and accumulation of positive knowledge cannot fail to fill one with enormous respect for the broad endeavor, immense erudition, and tireless labor that went into. ;|| these works. This is not to say that there are not the occasional flashes of precon- f¥; ceived ideas or outright prejudice but the amount of disciplined and critical observation vastly superseded the minor faults one is always bound to discover. Von Moltke was of this kind; so was Kanitz. Maybe the crowning achievement was the multi-volume work of Ami Boue, a truly encyclopedic mind, who left important scholarly works in geology, mineralogy, orosranhv o^nm-^l^ <■.-----—i ' ' ,re.. demography, ,------------- 10lW Cmoire.78 Boue set himself the task to correct the "inborn or acquired Euro-fft3n rejudices against the Ottomans and their subjects." He knew that by follow-K-8^jy! tniddle road he would disappoint both the excessive enthusiasts of the sultan's !flf s as well as his opponents. While he hailed the liberation of Greece, he also > attention to the other nations of the empire, particularly the Slavs who were ^eVV ^ «to j0in the development of European civilization and the balance of power." Uthough operating with the hazy categories of East and West, Boue was a precur-'' of conversion theory and hoped that "in the merging.of East and West, the lat-' ^ after grafting the useful aspects of its civilization onto the ancient Asian customs, will find in the East as many ideas to correct its overly artificial and complicated jjfe as the changes triggered in Europe by the Crusades."79 "The manner of travel in Turkey," the appendix to his last volume, is an exquisite introduction to everyday life and displays the sensitivities of an accomplished anthropologist. Boue's advice on how to listen and extract information from the , jcjcals is Worth circulating today. He apparently was successful in "conversing frankly \v-trh the serious and good-natured Ottoman, as well as with the witty Albanian, the refined Greek or the shrewd Vlach; with the industrious Bulgarian, as well as wiiii the militant Serb, the rough Bosnian and the cheerful Hercegovinian,"80 It is the enormous body of systematic knowledge assembled, organized, and analyzed by Boue that not only gave an immense impetus to different branches of social and natural science dealing with the region but continues to be one of the richest sources for the ■ nineteenth-century Balkans. With Ami Boue, one is forced to believe that it is possible to reach, or at least approach, the precarious point of balance where one has grown over one's "enthousiasme" but has not yet lost it completely. The same may be said of his illustrious compatriots, Emile de Laveleye, Cyprien Robert, and Louis Leger. Laveleye held strong opinions on the Eastern question and was an exponent of the idea of Balkan federation, all of which did not prevent him from writing an .' informative and impartial account of the Balkan Peninsula. Cyprien Robert authored v numerous works on the Slavs, some of which dealt in particular with Balkan Slavs or "the Slavs of Turkey." Writing with great sympathy, Robert saw the chief role of Slavdom in history as the perpetual mediators between "Asia and Europe, between immobility and progress, between the past and the future, between preservation and revolution," a channel between the Greeks and the Latins, between East and West. This mediating, undefined role was acclaimed by Robert, something quite in reversal with the soon-to-follow unflattering assessment of the in-betweenness of {he Balkans. Louis Leger left among his numerous works a valuable description of Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and Bulgarians from the early 1880s, although in his case the occasional affectations of the civilized visitor who lauds the return of these nations into the European family, bringing into a "regenerated Orient the precious elements of power, order and civilization" serve as an anticlimax, or reminder of the preoccupations of European discourse at the end of the century.85 Compared to the Italian, French, and German, Russian descriptions of the peninsula came from a later period. This was only natural as, following the "gathering rn ' - 1 -- J~" J~~T--"" T,T ^« fifl-ocntti cpnhiro Russia exnanded to the east 82 Imagining the Balkans century did it turn southwest, clashing with the Ottomans. Beginning with Prjler's reign, the Russians gained a foothold on the Black Sea but it was only with Catherine the Great that they finally became a Black Sea power. There were three typt3 0f Russian travelers: clergymen en route to the Holy Land or to the monasteries of rvloiinf Athos; the military visiting on a reconnaissance mission; and scholars or writerspvjr, suing a specific project. There was also a variety of diplomatic and journalistic accounts which, although not strictly belonging to the travelogue genre, had a comparable significance for shaping contemporary opinions. Although the few seventeenth-century accounts distinguished between Slavic and non-Slavic Christians, and between the different Slavs, there is no sign of the latei pathos of solidarity either for Slavs or for Orthodox in general.82 Even the detailed " and professional account of the finances, military state, and diplomacy of the Ottomans by the ambassador, Count Peter Tolstoy, in 1703 was an evenhanded treatment of the Turks as a "proud, mighty and ambitious nation," remarkable for their sobriety, who were not only cruel to the Christians and members of other religions, but had a strong propensity for internecine struggle and antistate rebellions. While Tolstov pointed out the oppression of the Greeks, he did not single them out but enumerated them alongside Serbs, Vlachs, Arabs, and others as suffering from the memorable tax burden and constant humiliation. Even the idea of Christian corehginrmts was used not to legitimize Russia's policy, but to illustrate the feeling of threat the Turks felt from Russia and the hopes arising among Greeks and other oppressed peoples that their liberation would arrive from Russia.83 Several decades into the nineteenth century and the Eastern question, wheu Russia emerged as the main Ottoman opponent, Russian accounts became infoimed with real passion and undisguised championship for the oppressed Christians, to F. P. Fonton in 1829, "The coexistence of Muslims and Christians is the epidemic sin of the present situation. Until it is put to an end with the emigration of the Turks, there can be no prospect for an acceptable arrangement."84 All Balkan nations at one time or other have served as pet nations for the great European powers. The Gieeks, due to the magnetism of their ancient history and the influence of Enlightenment ideas, have been the chosen ones. Because of their geographic position, lack of a glorious ancient period, and their relatively later (several decades after the Greeks) national mobilization, the Bulgarians were not only "discovered" last but, with few exceptions, inspired only scarce degrees of compassion in an otherwise typical tradition of neglect or indifference. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that the Lime-when the Bulgarians came to the attention of west Europeans coincided with glowing apprehensions toward Russia and panslavism. The real deviation from this rale were, of course, the Russians. Not only did they, because oflinguistic closeness, recognize quite early the distinctiveness of Bulgarians, but they singled them out as the nation mostly oppressed by the Turks. Almost at the same time as Fonton, in 1830, Yuri Ivanovich Venelin, an accomplished philologist and historian, went on a mission to study the Bulgarians in the northeastern regions of the Ottoman Empire. Born Georgii Khutsa, the 28-year-ok Ukrainian had completed his studies at the University of Moscow and became inter' 1 . . ., n----tt:----;„„1 *..,„ cfudvof. The Discover)' of the Balkans 83 -ere of unparalleled importance in spurring national consciousness among the *j garians.85 Venelin's summary of the position Bulgarians were occupying in the Ottoman Empire, compared to the other Balkan peoples, has dominated Bulgarian .self-perceptions ever since: For the Turks this unhappy peopie is like a sheep for man, i.e., the most useful and necessary animal. From it they get milk, butter, cheese, meat, fur, wool, i.e., food and clothing. ... It serves the Bulgarians bad that they are the best builders and craftsmen in Turkey. In a word, Turkish domination and existence in Europe is based mostly and perhaps exclusively on the Bulgarians. The Moldavians and ' Wallachians have always been half free. Some of the Serbs have intermingled with the Turks, others have totally-converted, yet others have maintained their independence, and all of them have profited from the protection of the mountainous terrain. The Albanians have always been semi-independent, being by nature proud warriors who have served the Turks only for profit and for payment. Their enormous mountains have shielded them in their little corner. The same can be said of the Greek mountaineers in the Morea. The Greeks of the islands have had different advantages and have breathed more freely. . . . Among the Slavs, the Bulgarians have suffered the worst. . . }6 Heart-rending and detailed stories of the Bulgarians' plight were present in practically all Russian descriptions of the region, something unique among the travel literature in general: Fonton (1829), E. Kovalevskii (1840), V. Grigorovich (1844-1845), ......1____/.qj„\ n t C, lUZlldXUV ^lujyy, ^. ivi, ij (1873). ^f thf l»nrrniefir* lint- nnrt thpir '"6""" "* concerns over Orthodoxy, they were the first to pay close attention to the Bulgarian-Greek church conflict.87 Contrary to Friedrich Engels's disparaging remark that the Russians, coming themselves from a country "semi-Asiatic in her condition, manners, traditions and institutions," best understood the true situation of Turkey, the most interesting circumstance about the Russian travelers was their self-identity as Europeans.88 Fonton spoke of the selfless policies of Russia and referred to the unjustified suspicions oP'Europe" (as a generic name for the other great powers) without implying Russian non-Europeanness. The poet Viktor Grigor'evieh Teplyakov had been imprisoned as Mason and Decembrist, but was pardoned and sent as war correspondent to the front in 1828-1829. Well-educated and a connoisseur of antiq-. ruties, Teplyakov managed to gather a collection of thirty-six marble bas-reliefs and inscriptions, hvo statues, eighty-three coins, and so forth and shipped them to Russia: Lord Elgin's Russian version on a modest scale. He was charmed and thrilled with the oriental appearance of Varna, the bustle, noise, and colors of its streets: "Among this Asian crowd, one could encounter many sons of Israel and a lot of Europeans: Russians, French, Italians, Germans, English."89 In the same vein, M F, Karlova, probably the first Russian woman to travel to Macedonia and Albania, exclaimed: "Men stop, examine the travellers, and with utter amazement scrutinize me, the unseen miracle: an European woman!"90For Vsevolod Vladimirovich Krestovskii, the famous Russian writer who accompanied the Russian troops in 1877-,1878 as war correspondent of the Government Newspaper, the Danube was the veritable frontier between the Romanian "Europe" and the Bulgarian "Asia": 84 Imagining the Balkans The Discovery of the Balkans 85 lar plan in the quarter. Here, on the other hand, there is no dust, and there is ertou^l, water in the reservoirs, but these stone wali fences and these impossibly narrow-streets are such a labyrinth that, unused to it, even the devil might break his foot In a word, there it is Europe, and here—Asia, but its appearance and all of its prirm. tive and naively open earthly street order are so new and peculiar to us, that the\ instinctively invoke curiosity and sympathy precisely with their novelty aii^ originality. Not only was Krestovskii partial to the charm of the Orient, he preferred it in ;js untainted purity. His description of the home and family costums of the Wuinn Bulgarian merchant Vilko Pavurdzhiev is a valuable ethnographic portrait both $< 1 urban Bulgaria in the 1870s and of the patronizing affectations of the educated Ruj/" sian middle class caught in the middle of the European romantic vogue: § The embroidered tablecloths, the covers on the divans, the low tables are part aruf ' parcel of the refinement and luxury of the eastern furnishing. And how unpleasant J to the eye when, side by side with these objects, one sees sometimes in the same room winding Viennese chairs, a table for cards and similar objects of the all-European, so to say, civilized banal quality. They fit the original atmosphere as much as European clothes fit the Bulgarian man and woman.91 . Russian attitudes toward the Bulgarians were often reminiscent of the geneiaj" European philhellenic stance: just as Europeans were discovering their Greeksas'l the source of their civilization, Russians were discovering their Bulgarians as the roots | of Slavic culture. Although some Russians were fascinated with ancient marbles and -texts, the real counterpart to the West European craze was the Russian craze over . Slavic manuscripts. Yuzhakov, a journalist at Sovremennik, traveled in 1859 and de- 1 scribed how the Bulgarians in Kukush asked to hear the service in the Slavic tongue; My God! This people, from whom we have received the Church Slavonic books, who has taught us to read and write in the Slavic language, this people was asking \ us now to read.the service in Slavic—they arc asking us to make them happy by hearing Slavic sounds in their church. . . . One feels the urge to apologize for, to * absolve the ones who have brought them to this condition. . . . But how can one forgive them?92 § "Discovering" the Bulgarians at the height of the slavophile sentiment after.lhe -1 middle of the nineteenth century—when both the cultural slavism of the Czechs and the Russian slavism of Mikhail P. Pogodin, Aleksei S. Khomiakov, AleksandrS. < Danilevskii, Timofei N. Granovskii, Jurii F. Samarin, and the brothers Ivan S. and Konstantin S. Aksakov, despite creeping overtones of imperial power politics, still inspired an all-encompassing solidarity and affinity with the Slavic world at large-brought an additional air in the dominant melody of commiseration: It is sad and painful to see how, at a time when so many Slavs enjoy the fruits of. || peace and liberty, proudly and knowingly look into their future, benefiting from j| oad of progress, sornc- their untroubled present, and are hurriedly inarching on the thing which made the Europeans watch them with respect, the Bulgarians —this strong and healthy nation yearning with all its power to go ahead—with hearts filled During the Eastern crisis of 1875-1878, the grassroots feelings for solidarity with uthern Slavs surpassed any of the manifestations of Western philhellenism, ^hicb ffas usuau^ connned to tne educated strata. The Russian intelligentsia was ' - "mous in passionately opposing the oppression of the Balkan Slavs; many sup-^n d als° tne'r Pouuca' effortsto achieve independence from the Porte. Among vVell-known Russian writers, Ivan Turgenev, Feodor M. Dostoevskii, Leo \j Tolstoy, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Vladimir G. Korolenko, Gleb I. Uspenskii, VsevoIodM- Garshin, Vasilii I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, and many others contrib-iteH immensely to the formation of a public opinion that forced Russia to enter the var against the Ottoman Empire. Tolstoy himself, feeling that "All Russia is there, irid I should go myself," was dissuaded only with great difficulty from joining as a volunteer.94 Yet, one should not overestimate the intensity of slavophile feelings and their influence on Russian foreign policy, characterized by Barbara Jelavich as defensive .md peaceful rather than expansionist, paternal rather than messianic.95 The real interests and attention of Russia during the nineteenth century—-economic, strate-^tnilitary, and even cultural—although involving the Balkans, were not intractably fixated on them; they were almost exclusively concentrated on Central Asia and .nhsequently on the Far East. Knowledge of things Slavic, especially South Slavic, was by no means a widespread phenomenon. As late as the beginning of the twenties, Century, there were complaints that not merely the ordinary Russian but educated high-ranking officials and a great number of intellectuals were better informed .bout Germany, France, Italy, Spain, England, and Sweden than about the neighboring Slavic nations. Cadets at the military academy were guessing as to the Romanian or Hungarian origins of the Serbs who were supposed to be a Protestant nation, and newspapers erred on the generous side, enumerating as separate Slavic languages Czech, Bohemian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Dalmatian, "Horvatski," and "Kroatski."96 Even among "Balkan specialists," apologies were not the only genre. Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont'ev had been embassy secretary, vice-consul, and consul of Russia on the island of Crete and in loannina and Tulcea during the 1860s and 1870s. Born of an old noble family, he was an open, vocal, and unrepentant exponent of aristocratic superiority, and focused his mortifying disdain on the mediocrity of bourgeois standards. Completely alien to the moral pathos of nineteenth-century Russian literature with its acute social criticism, he pronounced that "a magnificent, century-old tree is more precious than twenty common peasants and I will not cut it down border to buy them medication against cholera."97 A devout Orthodox Christian, but only of its rigorous monastic Byzantine version, Leont'ev admired the Catholic hierarchy and saw in Catholicism the mightiest weapon against egalitarianism. A Nietzschean before Nietzsche, a precursor of Ibsen and the French aestheticists, this "philosopher of reactionary romanticism" and self-professed "friend of the reaction" stood closest to Joseph Marie de Maistre in his desire for a revolution on the right tnat would exonerate beauty, religion, and art from bourgeois drabness. His most piercing condemnation was reserved for "the tumor of progress," this fetish of positivism. In Leont'ev's philosophy, society passed through three developmental stages: n n: J Jl „ \ —„ 88 Imagining, the Balkans "patriarchal habits with bourgeois-liberal customs" and turned from protagonlfj. Homer and Cooper into characters of Thackeray and Gogol. To them, Lerjj tv' preferred the Turks who were "honest, artless, pleasant in conversation, good mild, until their religious feeling is inflamed." He was convinced Turks admira administrative system of the Russians, their submissiveness and deference: "I arr> \Utl i that if tomorrow the Turkish government left the Bosphorus and not all Turlc< lowed but remained in the Balkan Peninsula, they will always hope that we % defend them against the inevitable troubles and humiliations inflicted on them ly the formerly enslaved Balkan nations, who in general are far too cruel and coats* In an article written a few years later on national psychology, Leont'ev desci all Balkan nations as more practical, shrewder, more diplomatic, and more caiilions than the Russians, which had to do with the commercial spirit prevailing over i< ism; the Bulgarian intellectual in particular was the "bourgeois par excellence." , whole "Eastern Christian intelligentsia—Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian" was ma by its "greater proclivity to work in order to make its living compared to our upper class," by its crudity, lack of creativity, deficient refinement of the feelings, and little" sophistication of thought. Additionally, they had taken up the role of parvemj vis *. vis Europe and progress. Indeed, it takes an aristocrat with the panache of a Leont'ev'' to describe labor as disgrace.1 j»' upset only at the end of the century. Remarkable in the English accounts of the time was the conscious attempt tG ,-reach an "objective" verdict for the differences in civilization. The corollary ot this j approach was Henry Blount's "Voyage into the Levant," published in 1636 and char-: acterized as setting "a new standard for fairness and impartiality in English travel -literature."6 Describing his travel of two years earlier, Blount, the son of a founder of . Oxford's Trinity College and himself a highly educated lawyer, was in many whys ; the practical embodiment of Bacon's empiricist philosophy which postulated that -. knowledge could be reached only through experience and that generalizations could §j be based only on observation. True to this commitment, Blount decided "to observe the Religion, Manners, and Policie of the Turkes," so as to ascertain whether "the -; Turkish way appeare absolutely barbarous, as we are given to understand, or rather " an other kinde of civilitie, different from ours, but no lesse pretending."7 This was one of the first attempts to depict the Ottoman ways in their own context without the usual Christian prejudice against Islam; Blount's is "an account which • merges into the history of Deism in England."8 There was an undisguised admira; -~ tion for the Ottomans, because they were "the only moderne people, great in action, and whose Empire hath so suddenly invaded the World, and fixt it selfe such firme; foundations as no other ever did." According to Blount: >U if ever any race of men were borne with Spirits able to beare downe the world before -: . them, I thinke it to be the Turke.. . . The magnanimous are apt to be corrupt with an haughty insoiency, though in some sort generous: this is the Turkish wav, remorcelesse to those who beare up, and therefore mistaken for beastly; but such it is not; for it constantly receives humilioiWi «"i-r, -—1 • — Patterns of Perception until igoo 91 Despite his criticism and constant fear that the Turks might sell him as a slave for the sake of ransom, he concluded that "this excepted, the Turkish disposition is generous, loving, and honest; so farre from falsefying his promise, as if he doe but lay Ik hand on his breast, beard, or head, as they use, or chiefly breake bread with me, ;f[ had an hundred lives, I durst venture them upon his word, especially if he be a ■natural] Turke, no More, Arab, or Egyptian."10 It is attractive to explain this magnanimous attitude with Blount's overall philosophy. Indeed, he saw as his first task -the unprejudiced observation of "Turkes." However, when tiris statement is compared ■jo others, it is clear that behind the favorable assessments of the Ottomans (whom . glount like most other travelers called Turks), there were other motivations at work. His'second great task, Blount wrote in his introduction, was "to acquaint my selfe wilh those other sects which live under the Turkes, as Greekes, Armenians, Freinks, and Zinganes, but especially the Iewes; a race from all others so averse both in nature and institution, as glorifying to single it selfe out of the rest of mankinde, remains obstinate, contemptible, and famous."11 ... What actually transpires from Blount's account is the almost unconscious reverence to political success. In the Ottoman he described the character of a master nation. Blount could empathize with it. A master nation in the making was recognizing an established one. This trend is displayed in much of the travel literature ■and was certainly present among the English ambassadors to the Porte whose "gen- ,1 ,u:t,,A,- -j' +H Ottoman ruling class was one of favor, of approval even. For Sir Richard Bulstrode, a Stuart diplomat, Constantinople was "a post of more honour, and more profit, than Paris," and William, Lord Paget, ambassador between 1693 and 1703, found the Turks "grave and proud, yet hitherto they have received and used me upon all occasions very civilely," so that he could accomplish "reasonable fair dealings in common business."12 Some three decades after Blount, Paul Rycaut produced his major literary work, a firsthand account of The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668) in which he .echoed Blount's misgivings about how things were termed "barbarous, as all things :are, which are differenced from us by diversity of Manners and Custom, and are not dressed in the mode and fashion of our times and Countries; for we contract prejudice from ignorance and want of familiarity." Better acquainted with Ottoman society, for the next forty years Rycaut's prolific voice was moving "forward from the context of'crusade' to the context of a peaceable intercourse through trade." Indeed, he wrote in a period when both Islam and the West were folding the "tattered banners of Crusade and fihad."]i During the eighteenth century, "the peaceable trade intercourse" was intensified and, without effecting any drastic change of opinion, the accounts became more detailed and concrete. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters from the East were published in 1763, the year of her death; before that, they seem to have been handed around in manuscript, Lady Mary was one of the first to savor the ancient authors in the authenticity of their country of birth. Her great fame, however, derived from the introduction of inoculation against smallpox in England, a practice she encountered among the Greeks in Constantinople. Other than that, as wife of the British ambas- 92 Imagining the Balkans is told, scandal invented," served as the inspiration to the famous 1862 painting^"-' Ingres, "Le bain turc." In the baths of Sofia, Lady Mary admired Turkish w'd with skins "shineingly bright," whereas the Bulgarian peasant women on the' were "not ugly but of tawny complexion," a striking example of the aesthetic pr ence for class rather than race.14 The encounter with the subject races produced ambiguous responses. Therf a tension between the natural empathy with the rulers and the traditional opposite to the Muslims but quite often the first feeling took the upper hand. Steeped asthey " were in classical learning, many visitors looked for living illustrations of ancier,[ museum archetypes. This was especially true for the ones on their Grand Tour, which by the latter half of the century was increasingly shifting from France and Italy Jq'-' Greece.15 In the words of Eisner, "the great age of travel to Greece—to paint it to loot it, write about it—had begun."16 The travelers, or tourists, a word coined iii thu period, were usually disappointed, particularly in the case of the Greeks, part! ■: the lack of striking physical resemblance but mostly by the absence of classical mari. ners. The lack of continuity between ancient Greeks and the degenerate situation of ' their modern heirs or else the abyss between ballroom expectations and stark reality '" can be traced in many works, which can be described as frustrated philhelleriism even before the advent of the phenomenon. Nowhere was the outcry of disappoinLcl classical taste more desperate than in John Morritt who, on observing laughing, dancing, and wrestling Greeks in the Peloponnesus in 1796, exclaimed; "Good Godfifa -free ancient Greek could for one moment be brought to such a scene, unless his fate -was very hard in the other world I am sure he would beg to go back again."17 : Only young women were graciously spared these inclement verdicts. Instead;" they were, as a rule, described as astoundingly beautiful, a tradition that was faithfully observed and created quite a reputation for Greek women. Describing Greek women around Smyrna in 1794, Morritt, who otherwise had despaired of the Greek -" race, wrote: You will, of course, ask me if the praise travellers generally favour Greek beauties', with are deserved. Indeed they are; and if you had been present with us, you would, I think, have allowed that the faces of our village belles exceeded by far any collection in any ball-room you had ever seen. They have all good eyes and teeth, but their chief beauty is that of countenance. ... It is an expression of sweetness and of > intelligence that I hardly ever saw, and varies with a delicacy and quickness that no painter can give. . . . Besides this, their appearance in their elegant dress did not give us the least ideas of peasants, and joined to the gracefulness of their attitude < and manners, we began to think ourselves among gentlewomen in disguise.18 These statements were more revealing about the phantasms of young, heallhy " English aristocrats of classical education in the transitional age between enlightenment and romanticism than about the merits of Greek female physique at the eii'14 | the eighteenth century. They were, however, a very clear illustration of a distinct class attitude that was unfailingly present in the majority of accounts although with differ-ent degrees of intensity. "Gentlewomen in disguise" was the qualifying feature for"-. the Greek females. The absence of gentiemanhood was the primary complaint against-,, rv^l, m=„ ;+„ „,™„„„„ iU„u;„u—>.—:„,. f„..4.k„ r"us.„.---------1—I- nlorltn .. Patterns of Perception until jqoo 93 'th the British consul "who is poor and Greek, two circumstances which together Wi , rS make a man a scoundrel." The Greeks were invariably described as cheaters 3 ! ,„nK although the only actual mention of theft was the indulgent report on and crooks, am & , _ _ ^ b r j) w the British party was acquiring ancient marbles: Some we steal, some we buy, ud our court is much adorned with them."19 3 Without entering into the great Elgin Marbles controversy, one may remember how the archeologist Edward Dodwell described the reaction of the locals: "the Athenians in general, nay, even the Turks themselves, did lament the ruin that was com-'tted' and loudly and openly blamed their sovereign for the permission he had wanted!"20 The sovereign was unjustly, or too severely, blamed: the firman he had issued to Lord Elgin authorized a group of painters to fix scaffolding around the ancient Temple, model ornaments and figures in plaster and gypsum, measure the remains of other ruined buildings, excavate the foundations in order to discover inscriptions, and only at the end of this lengthy list was there a broadly stated mention that some pieces of stone with old inscriptions or sculptures could be taken away. The measuring and drawing expedition was quickly reorganized into a demounting one. Another traveler, Edward Clarke of Cambridge, reported how the disdar, on observing the removal of a particularly beautiful Parthenon metope "letting fail a tear, said in the most emphatic tone of voice, 'Telos!' positively declaring that nothing should induce him to consent to any further dilapidation of the building."21 Dodwell himself was not particularly sentimental about the Greeks or prudish about the ways in which he acquired his rich collection of bronzes, marbles, ceramics, and coins. Known for his bribes as "the Frank of many 'paras,'" most of his collection was sold to wealthier or more enthusiastic collectors: his vases (143 of them, including the famous "Dodwell vase") were purchased by the Munich Glyptothek, other objects were sold to the crown prince of Bavaria.22 In stark contrast to the description of the Greeks was that of the magnanimous behavior of their Turkish masters. While in Lesbos, tired of their poor Greek quarters, Morritt's party managed to invite themselves to the local aga, who treated them handsomely. A sumptuous dinner with excellent Cyprus wine relaxed Morritt's repugnance of the Levant: "I begin to think there are gentlemen in all nations. These Agas live very comfortably. Their houses are large, good, and well adapted to the climate. . .. They have many horses, are fond of shooting and hawking, and have often, with their agricultural servants, not less than three or four hundred attendants." In Thessaly and Boeotia, Morritt was revolted by the few miserable villages entirely inhabited by Greeks and Jews. The Greeks exercised their self-rule in a such a rascally manner that "we inquired after Turks as eagerly as we should elsewhere after Englishmen.... I assure you the Turks are so much more honourable a race that I believe, if ever this country was in the hands of the Greeks and Russians, it would hardly be livable." He reiterated this in another elaborate letter of 1795: We are very well with the Turks here, and particularly with the governor of the town, who has called on us, sent us game, made coursing parties for us, offered us dogs, horses, etc., and is a very jolly, heart}' fellow. We often go and smoke a pipe there, and are on the best of terms. I shall really grow a Mussulman. If they are Hm 94 Imagining the Balkans lowest, is that of lords and masters, as they are, and their civility has something dignified and hearty in it, as from man to man; while I really have English h'iood "1 enough in me almost to kick a Greek for the fawning servility he thinks politeness ;i What in Blount's case seemed the unconscious recognition of a master race h' one in the making here was consciously and openly asserted. The only differ! was the slight change of roles: the master nation of the world was recognizing on»-that was beginning to pass away. Morritt s attitudes were shared by a number ol En»]rJ) observers although his conscious bluntness, stemming from aristocratic arrog;ii1Ct and young age, was more subdued in the descriptions of his countrymen. They gen. erally preferred Turks to Greeks, and not only deplored the Greeks' lack of clas scholarship and affinities but also found their degenerate religion totally repulsive The Greeks were factious, unfriendly, obsequious, ignorant, superstitious, greedy, venal, intriguing, dirty, ungrateful, and liars.24 Still, the nineteenth cei brought more intensive and more regular contacts with the Balkan populations through commerce and increased political, military, religious, and educational ao tivities. Accordingly, the travelers' accounts displayed a more competent knowL.dgt and were occasionally marked by deep insights and genuine human empathy. The great romance of the English in the second decade of the century was Greece. "We are all Greeks," said Shelley in the preface to his poem "Hellas," \\iit-__ ten shortly after the outbreak of the Greek revolt. Shelley had never set foot in Greece-The ones who did often remembered Chateaubriand's maxim: "Never see Greece, Monsieur, except in Homer. It is the best way." C. M. Woodhouse summarized English philhellenism as a brief caesura in a continuity of "prejudice and indifference": "Before the flame was lit by Byron and again after it was extinguished, although there was some interest in Greece, there was no philhellenism." This interest was the product of classicism, the Grand Tour, and strategic interests in the eastern Mediterranean, apprehensive first of France and later, mostly of Russia; it was never, however, an interest in the Greeks per se. The love for Greece has been brilliantly characyterized by Woodhouse: "They loved the Greece of their dreams: the land, the language, the antiquities, but not the people. If only, they thought, the people ■' could be more like the British scholars and gentlemen; or failing that, as too much to be hoped, if only they were more like their own ancestors; or better still, if only they were not there at all."23 Before the outbreak of the revolt, the prevailing opinion was that until the Greeks got better educated, independence was premature. This opinion was voiced not only by Europeans but also by some of the leaders of the Greek enlightenment, notably , Adamandios Korais. During the war itself, sympathy for the Greeks was on the use, nourished by pro-Greek journals and pamphlets: "The Greeks thus joined the Spaniards, the Italians and the Latin Americans (but not the Irish) among the oppressed nationalities for whom British hearts should bleed and British pockets be touched " The romance was brief. Few of the philhellenes persisted throughout the whole wai effort and even fewer committed to the building of an independent Greece staged behind. The epithets that had been used about the Greeks before, and that had all but disappeared during the philhellenic thrill, resurfaced in full order. The new Patterns of Perception until 1900 95 Several decades into independence philhellenism had become incomprehen-P-, - ' ^ Constantinople and the provinces were more popular with travelers. There 51 however, a fundamental difference in that there was no question of reestablish-ľ^Q^oman rule; Greek independence was a fait accompli.26 >n^ YVithout entering into the question of the reciprocity of foreign policy and pub-l'c discourse, suffice it to say that a correlation between the tone of the majority of British travelers' accounts and the main trends in foreign policy is clearly discern-'ble The 1830s were a dividing line in both British Near Eastern policy and the character of travel literature. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, relations between England and the Ottoman Empire weTe mainly commercial, and only during the eighteenth century did diplomatic duties gradually take precedence.2' By the end of the eighteenth century, Great Britain had become the leading industrial and commercial nation on the globe, and after Napoleon's defeat and the expansion of its overseas territories, it was also the greatest colonial power whose policy was directed atincreasing the predominance of "Pax Britannica." In Europe, this policy was implemented in maintaining the system of "balance of power," one of whose decisive links the Ottoman Empire had become. Up to the 1850s, however, Britain had not formulated a specific foreign policy line toward the Ottoman Empire. Only with the emergence of Russia as a central figure on the European scene, and its territorial successes against the Ottomans, was a definite line of action shaped. British foreign policy after 1830 was not completely new but it assumed the form of a definite program of preserving the integrity and inviolability of the Ottoman Empire/8 The extraordinary assertion of British power led, by the middle of the nineteenth century, to the attempt by Palmerston "to overturn the world power balance of power, in hopes of ushering in a period of British global hegemony and shoring up a pseudoliberal status quo at home."29 One can observe also the politicizing of many of the travelers' accounts during this period. A majorít)' were tainted strongly with the authors' political views, which almost never dissented from the official government line except when they were zealous enough to overdo it, as in the case of the prominent Turkophile and possessed Russophobe David Urquhart With minor exceptions, the political implication of the travelers' books in the nineteenth century was that, as Barbara Jelavich has aptly put it, "what they described was what was generally accepted as true."30 In this lengthy panorama of Western verdicts of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, it would be refreshing to hear a voice and an opinion from the other side. At the turn of the century, Allen Upward reported about his encounter with a Turkish statesman, renowned for his sagacity, who had told him: "I have noticed that your ruling class can always make the people think what it wants them to think." Upward tended to agree: "In spite of Parliament and the Press, there is probably no country at the present time in which the bureaucracy exercises such unchecked power as in En-■ gland, and in which the influence of the public is so slight."31 With his subsequent career, Urquhart was the most eloquent example of thwarted philhellenism. Having almost sacrificed his life for the Greek cause (his brother ..actually did), he subsequently discovered the Ottomans and bestowed them with his excessive and nhspssivp níKsinnc Tri í Irmi VmrFs nníicfŕ'ťniŕ>riŕi Tri*? SiJiíri^ n-ftho fsiQi From Discover)' to Classification From Discovery to Invention, from invention to Classification Si ]es Balcans n'existaient pas, il faudrait ies inventer.1 Hermann Keyserling -j-^ y the beginning of the twentieth century, an image of the Balkans had already -Lj- been shaped in European literature; moreover, it was almost exclusively under the name Balkan that it was further elaborated. Although far from being unanimous it held many features in common. The geographic discovery was going hand in hand with a simultaneous invention of the region; the two processes are, in fact, inseparable. A travel narrative, like any other, "simultaneously presents and represents a world, that is, simultaneously creates or makes up a reality and asserts that it stands independent of that same reality."2 The discovery of the Balkans falls within the general rubric of how people deal with difference. The human attempt to give meaning and order to the world has been called a "nomos-building activity" involving the process of typification which confers knowability and predictability.5 What exactly impels humans to develop formal categories has not been answered in a formal categorical fashion, but it is clear this is a deep-seated craving and "the categories in terms of which we group the events of the world around us are constructions or inventions. . .. They do not 'exist' in the environment." Among the different achievements of categorizing, the primary ones reduce complexity and the necessity of constant learning; the two main goals of perception are stability and clarity or definiteness.1 In perceiving, we fit our impressions into what has been called "schemata" by Frederic C. Bartlett, "recipes" by Alfred Schutz, or "forms" by Maurice Merlcau-Ponty: "Perceiving is not a matter of passively allowing an organ—say of sight or hearing—to receive a ready-made impression from without, like a palette receiving a spot of paint----It is generally agreed that all our impressions are schematically determined from the start." We organize the information we receive into "patterns for which we, the perceivers, are largely responsible."5 While postulating the inseparable nature of the discovered and described, the process of accumulating knowledge did not yet ^vtt'compartmentalize it in prearranged schemata. We are all aware that there is lCh category as "essentially descriptive," that to describe is "to specify a locus of ,!t> aning to construct an object of knowledge, and to produce a knowledge that will ^bound by that act of descriptive construction."6 And yet, it was the process of kC Jring and accumulating knowledge that gave the image of the Balkans in this od a more floating character, generally devoid of categorical and excruciating feľ ments. Indeed, "where there is no differentiation there is no defilement." Yet it 'U ms that the "yearning for rigidity is in all of us," the longing for "hard lines and clear concepts" is part of the human condition. In the course of piling up and arranging more information, one invests deeper in a system of labels: "So a conservative bias is built in. It gives us confidence. At any time we may have to modify our Structure of assumptions to accommodate new experience, but the more consistent rience ^ t[ie pas^ fae more confidence we can have in our assumptions."7 The essence of the patterning tendency—the schema—although certainly dynamic in terms of longue durée, has a certain fixity over a short-term period. Already, brigandage in Greece had strongly contributed to the decline of nhilhellenism and, after the Dilessi murders of several English tourists in 1870, to its death- The return of Macedonia to the direct rule of the Porte after the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 opened the way for revolutionary action against the Ottoman Empire and, at the same time, guerrilla warfare between the contending factions of the neighboring countries. The birth of the Macedonian question enhanced the reputation of the peninsula as a turbulent region and of Macedonia as the "land of terror, fire, and sword." The hatred and atrocities committed by rival Christian bands prompted a well-informed and well-meaning writer like Fraser to label the peninsula "a confused kettle offish," and the Macedonian question "the Balkan problem."8 For a tradition boasting about its empiricism, the English of the period were surprisingly prone to facile generalizations. Harry De Windt recounted his journey through the Balkans and European Russia ás a trip "through savage Europe," traversing the "wild and lawless countries between the Adriatic and the Black-Seas" which were "hotbeds of outlawry and brigandage."9 Describing Macedonia in a book with the significant subtitle A Flea for the Primitive, two British authors mused on the "immature, unenlightened intellect" of the Macedonian peasant. In a short passage about the character of the Macedonians, they achieved a virtual synthesis of the nature-nurture debate: "Oppression and an entire lack of education . . . have joined forces and evolved a crafty disposition and a natural tendency towards savagery."10 & the United States, nothing advanced this opinion more than the famous Miss Stone affair when a long-time American missionary and educator was kidnapped in 1901 : by one ofYane Sandanski's bands. Although the affair ended happily and Miss Stone was released against a handsome ranstim and later became a sympathizer of the Macedonian cause, it sealed to the region the epithet "terrorist."11 The Macedonian question was so much at the center of Balkan affairs that it was difficult for observers to remember its fairly recent origins. The reason Berkovici, an otherwise informed writer, declared in the early 1930s that "the affairs of Macedonia have kept the whole :flf Pnmnfl fnr 1-nrf VniT-^lro^ woot-c " nno Vin\r& k/^n fn rnnfpr arlrlirinn^ll WPlPht n8 Imagining the Balkans A singularly grisly act of violence outraged Western public opinion iriii (|, murder and defenestration of Alexander and Draga in Belgrade, a regicide larly distasteful to royalists in Austria-Hungary and Great Britain. The New YorkT^ explained that defenestration was "a racial characteristic" attributed to "a prmiiti^ Slavic strain": "As the bold Briton knocks his enemy down with his fists, as the souifj. ' ern Frenchmen lays his foe prostrate with a scientific kick of the savante, a. ian uses his knife and the German the handy beermug, so the Bohemian and ■ 'chucks' his enemy out of the window."13 The violence led a respected hisl late as 1988 to maintain that "the turning point in the relations between Au :Tw ,lTV| Serbia was not so much the annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1908, as t military coup in Belgrade five years earlier."14 It seemed that it was the paihcufef * repulsiveness of the deed that the civilized Austrians could not stomach, and 11 esoteric economic frictions, nationalism, and raison d'etat. H. N. Brailsford, attain the British Relief Fund after the suppression of the 1903 revolt in Macedonia.^ one of the first to spell out in disgust his belief in a fundamental difference between the moral standards of London or Paris and those of the Balkans. Without second' thoughts about English performance in South Africa, the Indian continent, or Inland, he wrote: I have tried, so far as a European can, to judge both Christians and Turks as l:i1ci-"~ antly as possible, remembering the divergence which exists between the standards ot the Balkans and ot Europe, in a land where th his back, where the rulers govern by virtue of their ability to massacre upon occa-: sion, where Christian bishops are commonly supposed to organise political murders, life has but a relative value, and assassination no more than a relative guilt. There is little to choose in bloody-mindedness between any of the Balkan races— they are all what centuries of Asiatic rule have made them.1-' Robert W. Seton-Watson, the redoubtable historian of the Habsburgs andtk Balkans, took the dual monarchy to task for not being consistent in its political anil cultural mission in the Balkans. He maintained that the triumph of the Pan-Seib idea would mean "the triumph of Eastern over Western culture, and would be a fatal blow to progress and modern development throughout the Balkans." ThereB no doubt that aggressive Serbian expansionism was not the most desirable development in the Balkans, yet to ascribe the phenomenon of nationalism, of all things, to "Eastern culture" sounds strange from a specialist on the rise of nationality info ; Balkans.16 It was always with reference to the East that Balkan cruelty was explained.Flam De Windt, describing a scene of vendetta in Montenegro, concluded that ''life is-valued here almost as cheaply as in China and Japan."17 Comparison with the Edit enforced the feeling of alienness and emphasized the oriental nature of the Balkans: For all the growing criticism of Balkan performance, it was not until the second Bate war that the existing, if only moderate, expectations of betterment were substituiea for almost total disappointment: according to Seton-Watson, "excessive enthusiasts for the triumphs of Balkan unity has been replaced in Western Europe by excessive- ■ - -1 r . - .-j.i _i_:r„ u_i.„,„„„ A0 f«mnor ollicc and hv an inclination 19 From Discovery to Classification HQ . . aj sin, were the shots of Gavrilo Princip, which signaled the outbreak of World 'Varl This left an indelible mark on all assessments of the region. While even after ^Macedonian rising of 1903, the British correspondent to the Graphic could speak ^j-naturedly of "the good old Balkans, where there's always somethinggoing," 1914 ?-oed off any ambivalence.19 The immensely popular Inside Europe of John Gunther fjtus summarized the feelings on this side of the Atlantic: [tis an intolerable affront to human and political nature that these wretched and unhappy httle countries in the Balkan peninsula can, and do, have quarrels that cause world wars. Some hundred and fifty thousand young Americans died because of an event in 1914 in a mud-caked primitive village, Sarajevo. Loathsome and almost obscene snarls in Balkan politics, hardly intelligible to a Western reader, are still vital to the peace of Europe, and perhaps the world.20 Understandable as the bitter feelings might be, it is symptomatic that this section was preserved even in the war edition of 1940. The snarls of Hitler were, obvi-0([dy, more intelligible to Western readers, because they were Western. It is only-one step from here to the flat assertion that even World War II can be blamed on the Balkans. Admittedly, ii is a difficult step to lake, and over fifty years were needed for someone to take it. Robert Kaplan, who openly aspires to become the Dame Rebecca , Weitof the 1990s, maintained, in Balkan Ghosts, that "Nazism, for instance, can claim Balkan origins. Among the flophouses of Vienna, a breeding ground of ethnic resentments close to the southern Slavic world, Hitler learned how to hate so infec-b'ously.''21 It is ironic to read the paragraph about "the mud-caked primitive village" in the light of today's eulogies about the multicultural paradise of the beautiful cosmopolitan city of Sarajevo destroyed in the 1990s. Following Gunther's logic, it must have become this wonderful city under the barbarous rule first of the independent South Slav monarchy and especially under the Yugoslav communists, while it had ken a loathsome village under the Western enlightened rule of the Habsburgs. Even during the course of the war, the Balkan stereotype was not immutable. Mechthild Golczewski's analysis of German and Austrian war accounts between 1912 and 1918 shows a differentiated treatment of the separate Balkan nations in the absence of a clear-cut notion of what Balkan actually represented. Insofar as the category was utilized to denote general regional characteristics (e.g., hospitality, cliches about peasants and mountaineers, people close to nature, backwardness, uncleanli-iieus, and so on), it was so vague and unspecified that it could be applied to people outside the Balkan region. Whenever employed, its persuasive power was based on itsWiness in combination with an emotive component. Moreover, it was used alongside other generalizing catchwords, of which "Oriental" was most often employed, to stand for filth, passivity, unreliability, misogyny, propensity for intrigue, insincerity, opportunism, laziness, superstitiousness, lethargy, sluggishness, inefficiency, incompetent bureaucracy. "Balkan," while overlapping with "Oriental," had additional characteristics as cruelty, boonshness, instability, and unpredictability. Both categories weie used against the concept of Europe symbolizing cleanliness, order, self-control, strength of character, sense of law, justice, efficient administration, in a word, Hie culturally higher sta?e of develooment which also ennobles human behavior."22 and some came irom outside me had spent seven years between 1913 and 1920 in Romania, Serbia, -and*B extraordinary envoy and minister plenipotentiary of the United States Th" memoirs, although sometimes imperfect on historical particulars and infer -typical American Wilsonian optimism and naivete, were nevertheless ad-'^^ their verdict: "The World War began in the Balkans, yet its origin was in y} of the unscrupulous autocrats whose ruthless ambition knew neither m< limit."24 He refuted the insinuation that the Balkan peoples were natuia] ' ^ I makers but instead depicted them as pawns in a great power game. ; The prevailing spirit of the time, however, blamed the war on the B- ■ general, and on the Serbs in particular. Mary Edith Durham, confident si r.. W '1 ft be taken as seriously as she took herself, returned the order of St. Sava lo Kiti'tP^ j with an accompanying letter saying she "considered him and his people giu'l^f^' j greatest crime in history." Serbia was a "hornet's nest" and the nation bcth"^ if Montenegro and Serbia, knew only how to love or hate; there was no m< " * The episode reprovingly illustrating die Serbs' incapacity for moderation was the m ing to a book Durham had written some fifteen years earlier. In it, the inrormer_Ms * told her "One must either like or hate" was unspecified, simply a Balkan man he is but one example of many, for thus it is with the Balkan man, be he Gice?; Si»k ^ Bulgar, or Albanian, Christian or Moslem." When Durham first started her expect tions, she stepped into the Balkan world with the same notions and emolmijs\yijjj K"i which today's children step into a dinosaur museum: "Its raw, primitive ideas, write1' ~- I date from the world's well-springs, its passionate strivings, its disastrous failures 1 the mind; its blaze of colour, its wildly magnificent scenery hold the eye." Yef at point she was still enchanted with the region and admonished the hecto: h ,g sities of the ones who posed as a kind of Salvation Army to the diffeien nationalities: None of the Balkan people are so black as they have often been painted. They all possess fine qualities which only require opportunity to develop, and their faults in most cases are but those of extreme youth. The atrocities which they will all commit upon occasion are a mere survival of mediaeval customs once common to all Europe. 'Humanity' was not invented even in England till the beginning of the" nineteenth century; up till then punishments of the most brutal description were inflicted for comparatively trivial offenses. In dealing with the Balkan Peninsu! -far too much 'copy' has been made out of 'atrocities' for party purposes.26 Durham's account of this period is particularly important because it offers a glimpse into the reaction of Balkanites who were apparently well aware of howl were judged by the West. One of her acquaintances, most likely an Albanian, her passionately: f Durham's statements read like the introspective diary of a modern an-^°al^- f she wrote about the dilemma of not being abie to see the Balkans with l0logis ■ ^ ^e same timg, yQU never again See it with Western ones." She *'} ' ,. 1 . ... 1 • 1 ___j .1___il________ :„J__j fi**rl* j^at even after you learn to eat, drink, and sleep with the natives, indeed, jjsuente ^ ^ ^ _ust as you are beginning to understand them, some- *e' enS'an(] y0U realize "you were as far as ever from seeing things from their ^tngiwr^* ^ jo tnjs yQU must jeap across the centuries, wipe the West and all its ,j»ito v tofy-ou> Jet loose all that there is in you of primitive man, and learn six fcjeasiron ^ useless in other parts of the world."28 In about a decade, Durham jaBgua&^j ^e Balkans were too complex to fathom as a whole. At about the same ^^Paul Scott Mowrer, the author of the book introducing the concept of ' " 1 ■' "y0 the schoolboy, certainly, the •vll;1^ation," shared the same exasperation: It sa of Turkey and Austria-Hungary is a severe blow; instead oi learning two CC' y 'es he must now learn ten; and no wonder that elderly persons, brought up in f}U" rolicity of the older geography, should feel rather impatient at the complexity °^OTie had to specialize only in some aspects of this complexity, and Durham •cotdingly followed the pattern of all Westerners dealing with the Balkans: she found -lt- net nation. Durham has secured a richly deserved place in Balkan historiography for the high quality of her ethnographic descriptions of tribal life in Northern Vbania and Montenegro, particularly for paying attention to one of the least known nations in the Balkans, Albania, but she herself knew not the medium of affections. Her dislike for the Serbs, and by extension for the Balkan Slavs, was so bitter that she in all seriousness ascribed the venom of the Janissaries to their Balkan origins, "a arcrplv lo thf Mfigitlar tact, and one wmcli should be emphasized, fanaticism of the Orthodox Church that the Balkan people owed their conquest by the Turks." Although not a particular friend of the Turks, she fell for and reproduced the myth of their tolerance. Her commendable love for the Albanians blinded her to indiscriminately allot religious and racial slurs instead of coolly analyze geopolitical configurations. Her Albanians, who had "resisted denationalization for a thousand vears" and were only begging to "take their place in the Balkans and live in freedom and harmony," were now facing a far worse foe than the Turk, "and that was the Slav: Russia with her fanatical Church and her savage Serb and Bulgar cohorts ready to destroy Albania and wipe out Catholic and Moslem alike."50 The term "balkanization" came into being as a result of the Balkan wars and World War I, and a thoroughly negative value was conclusively sealed to the Balkans. Yetthis was not an abrupt occurrence and even during the Balkan wars the Western press-was more ironic than contemptuous.31 The image of the Balkans brought to ally taken as idiosyncrasies 01 u«t imvu- -------- herently biological qualities. Violence as the leitmotiv of the Balkans vi^ ^ speaking, a post-Balkan wars phenomenon. To quote Rebecca West: Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans: all I knew of the South SI derived the knowledge from memories of my earliest interest in Liberalism, of It fallen from this jungle of pamphlets, tied up with string in the dustiest rone junk-shops, and later from the prejudices of the French, who use the word' Balkan" as a term of abuse, meaning a rastaquouere type of barbarian.32 The image of specifically Balkan violence inspired Agatha Christie in io,3-1( j write a mystery of the kind aptly described as "romances dealing with lrriagi-Balkanoid principalities of homicidal atmosphere."'5 Christie created a sinister c acter, Boris Anchoukoff, with Slavic features (although not the typical features:, > South Slavs): "a tall fair man with high cheekbones, and very deep-set blue eyes, an impassivity of countenance." Naturally, the man spoke English with a harsh eign accent. He was the valet to the freshly murdered Prince Michael and, as;b«fiV ted Balkan characters, was burning with desire to avenge his master: "I say this to you, English policeman, 1 would have died for him! And since heis dead, and I still live, my eyes shall not know sleep, or my heart rest, until I hav-avenged him. Like a dog will I nose out his murderer and when I have discovered him—Ah!" His eyes lit up. Suddenly he drew an immense knife from beneath hi coat and brandished it aloft. "Not all at once will I kill him —oh, no!—first I will slit his nose, and cut off his ears, and put out his eyes, and then —then, into hi-, black heart I will thrust this knife."'4 .p, jn be traced aireaay in mxiccuui-wu nded in those intellectual currents which made their mark in the The shocked Englishman muttered in response; "Pure bred Herzoslovakian,-rjf-course. Most uncivilized people. A race of brigands." Herzoslovakia was the invcit ' tion of Agatha Christie: "it's one of the Balkan slates.. . . Principal rivers, unknot Principal mountains, also unknown, but fairly numerous. Capital, Ekarest. Papula-'" tion, chiefly brigands. Hobby, assassinating kings and having revolutions."55 What is charming about this geographic invention is that it nicely illustrates two points: one is that Christie reproduced a crystallized collective image of the Balkans, not the previous differentiated treatment of separate Balkan nations; the other is the lack of differentiation between the Balkans and the newly created states of Central Europe. Herzoslovakia is obviously a rhyming parody of Czechoslovakia, a combination between Herzegovina and Slovakia. Written in 1925, much before appeasement Limes, it looked at Czechoslovakia as die distant and unknown land of Neville Chamberlain's celebrated mot. There was no inkling of the future guilt feeling that would infom' British and American writing about "the most civilized Slavic outpost." Even though The Secret of Chimneys is not Agatha.Christie's most popular novel, it underwent several editions in the next decades and, given the omnivorous obsession of Christie s 11 "was giour - i(l * ^ t tntury in both western and central Europe, namely, the new sciences of -!s v j.^htenment and the Pietistic revival of Christianity." The geographic discov-fostered curiosity in distant cultures and gradually gave birth to the new sci-L-rl£'; 0f anthropology, concerned with humanity's place in nature and specifically '^uthe classification of the human races. There was exultation in nature as opposed ^'ijje artificiality of human society, but the early idealization of the noble savage '° pave way to a feeling of superiority7. Natives were assigned a lower stage in the S°0ft chain of being and were quickly stigmatized as barbarians who had to be domi-"§"tedand e(]ucatecl. When the Balkans became the focus of attention, the myth of te noble savage was long passe. ' A distinctive feature of modem racism was the "continuous transition from sci-ice to aesthetics," accomplished by the fusion of the main techniques of the new sciences-observation, measurement, and comparison—with valuative statements iijsed on the aesthetic criteria attributed to ancient Greece: "All racists held to a 'rrtain concept of beauty—white and classical—to middle-class virtues of work, of oderation and honor, and thought that these were exemplified through outward g pearance." Even after the retreat of the pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy, the highly subjective categories of beauty and ugliness remained impor-iant principles of human classification alongside measurement, climate, and envi---nrnent. Beauty, based on an immutable classical ideal, became "synonymous with 3 settled, happy, and healthy middle-class world without violent upheavals—and a ft-orld attainable solely by white Europeans."56 As a rule, it was based on racial inrity. In very lew circumstances did racial mixture allow for even some positive coun-Forbnlancmg quality: "The Balkan Slavs represent the most remarkable blending, and i1, was this blend of various Indo-European and Asiatic tribes, that imprinted upon (lie Balkan Slavs many unsympathetic as well as many admirable traits."57 The racial verdict over the Balkans began with a more open rendering of the forfnerly subdued and non judgmental motif of racial mixture. At the beginning of the century, Thessaloniki was still only an uncouth Tower of Babel with a sprinkling ofeivilization from the West: "Bulgarians, Servians, Albanians, Vlachs, Armenians, •\iiatolians, Circassians, Greeks, Turks, Jews, infidels and heretics of every land and language. Between and among these are sprinkled the races of civilized Europe."58 "Infidels and heretics" to denote Muslim and Orthodox Christians had apparently become a catchphrase and was used by another British author in his description of Mestar where one was "jostled in the dark, narrow-streets by the same Jews, infidels sue) heretics as in the bazaars of Stamboul." Sarajevo "swarmed with strange nationalities": Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians. Dalmatians, Greeks, Turks, Gypsies.59 Some 124 Imagining the Balkans two decades later, these almost neutral renderings of the ethnic and relrgi{nTs^ „> plexity of the Balkans, which evoked only an occasional characterization as * nationalities," produced feelings of revulsion and impurity. In 1921, two Ent contemplated the inevitably "hybrid race" of the inhabitants of Macedonia Being essentially cross-bred, the Macedonian is hardly distinguished to physique. . . . The Turks are perhaps the best physical specimens of the vai Macedonian types, probably because they have indulged in less cross-breeding Turkish women, when not interbred to any pronounced extent, are gencrallv -i.u 1 tractive, but those of Bulgar or Greek extraction usually have broad and very cnan* I features of the Slav type. Such features, comprising thick lips, broad flat noses :,nd I high cheek-bones, scarcely conduce to beauty in a woman. Darkish hair wit! lowish brown complexions cause them to resemble the Greek type, which, variably sallow, with jet black hair and luminous eyes.40 It is disputable whether the "coarse features of the Slav type" were typi< lineated or common among Greeks, but the description of the unprepossi , sique reminds too much of Negroid characteristics usually held at the bottom 'if1 referential scale. Racial impurity went hand in hand with "an immature, 111 n-siligj,}. [ ened intellect, ... a crafty disposition and a natural tendency towards sa\.iLTty> i Although the Germans were only apprentices of Joseph-Arthur de Gobii _ '. H. S. Chamberlain, they overdid the masters. Hermann, Graf von Keyserh:^, i;-u!. ■ ried to a granddaughter of Bismarck, was an influential figure in the philu-i .pj^ n{ | self-knowledge, and had created a school of wisdom in the 1920s that aimed. ; ing people through creative knowledge to self-attainment. In 1928, he publi Spektrum Europe, produced in a simultaneous translation in the United States. Of j his twelve chapters, one was devoted to the Balkans: What is the significance of the Balkans to us who live in other lands? . . . Why is it ' that the word 'Balkanization' is almost always rightly understood and rightly ap- J plied? ... Its symbolic sense may best be apprehended from two starting-points; 1 the first is the generally accepted statement that the Balkans are the powder-maga-\g|f. zine of Europe. The second is the fact of a peculiarly elemental and irreconcilable racial enmity.42 Having provided lengthy characteristics of Greeks, Romanians, and Turks (Sera. I Bulgarians, and Albanians he deemed "primitive warrior and robber races" notv c: { thy of attention), Keyserling summarized the essence of the Balkans: * The Balkans of today are nothing but a caricature of the Balkans of ancient times, i The spirit of the Balkans as such is the spirit of eternal strife. Inhabited as they arc | by primitive races, they present the primal picture of the primal struggle between'; the one and the all. Jn the case of the highly gifted and highly educated nations and individuals, this picture emerges as the spirit of the agon. But the earth-spirit of the Balkans as such is the primal formative power.45 The same year saw the American translation of a Swedish book that appeal) ' Stockholm in 1927. It clearly articulated a motif only discreetly present in the ptt-.s- { ous century. Its author, Marcus Ehrenpreis, had traversed the Balkans, Egypt From Discover)' to Classification 125 i'rii'j hoiei bills": "This is notthe way to visit the Orient! If you would win some-^ ,-. New Orient which has deliberately broken with its past and renounced :;L its ancient heritage. "■' fhe description of the inhabitants of this Levant (as contrasted to the true East) illustrated their racial degeneration: .\/'There is something eccentric in their conduct, they are overloud, too sudden, too ■■'.'eager,. . . Oddish, incredible individuals appear on all sides —low foreheads, sod-Jen eyes, protruding ears, thick underlips. . . . The Levantine type in the areas ■ between the Balkans and the Mediterranean is, psychologically and socially, truly ■■_ ■ a "wavering form", a composite of Easterner and Westerner, multilingual, cunning, superficial, unreliable, materialistic and, above all, without tradition. This absence , of tradition seems to accountfor the low intellectual and, to a certain extent moral, '' quality of the Levantines.... In a spiritual sense these creatures are homeless; they "are no longer Orientals nor yet Europeans. They have not freed themselves from the vices of the East nor acquired any of the virtues of the West.45 '.-'■'In both Keyserling's and Ehrenpreis's ideas one can distinguish unmistakably . pyertones that were present previously but that are immeasurably more intense. The former diehofomv between gentlemanly overlords and cringing subjects had found :i theoretical rationalization: it was the cultural expression of a fault line, and the "■ Facial and cultural crossbreed was worse than the purebred oriental Other. Long ■'.iurgotten was the brief flirtation with the Greeks, but then even the Philhellenic ■ ".support was in some sense racist, "bestowed not merely in libertarian support for yet .'one more European revolution but in the conviction that the modern Greeks were ■ lineal descendants of the ancient Greeks and the Turks were barbarians."46 Already ■■!rv 1830, in Gesckichte der Halbimel Morea wahrend des Mittelalters, Jakob Fall-'; metayer shattered this prevailing belief with his theory that the ancient Greeks were : .submerged into the subsequent waves of Slavs who actually constituted the racial baas of contemporary Greeks, and that "not a drop of genuine and unmixed Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of modern Greece."47 This ■ theory made him a persona non grata in Greece until recently. Fallmerayer's fervid .. dismissal of the Greeks was intended as an antidote to the prevailing philhellenism ft uavaria at the time, and was motivated by a paranoid fear of Russian political ■ ^nrjancy.43 While highly exaggerated, his theory nevertheless had some valid com- '. ?!,!lClltS, DartienlarlvtViP nnslancrhi aoralncH-Vip irlpn nf rcr-iat i-inrihf Tn Min-i P.»mmnu 12Ó Imagining the Balkans benefit of classically educated officers, so they could excuse their atrocities agai^ the Greeks as done to an inferior, not a noble, race."49 It was no sheer coincidence that both Keyserling's and Ehrenpreis's books appeared in successful simultaneous translations on the other side of the Atlantic Tfte 1920s were the culmination of the activities of the Immigration Restrictive League the most important pressure group for protectionist laws. Imbued with the Autr^ Saxomsm of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the league, whose backbones the Boston Brahmins, advocated restriction of influx from Central and Eastern [ rope "or else the American 'race' would be committing suicide."50 The 1920s was also a time of hectic activities of the American Eugenics Society, which espoused 3 theory of natural genetic superiority of races and social groups. Many of its member believed that racial mixture would bring about social deterioration and advo^j diat assimilation with cultural inferiors, particularly Slavs, should be avoided as much- „ as overbreeding of social inferiors. The Balkan Slavs, in particular, were shunned treated as outlaws, and called Iiunkies (Huns) in the industrial cities. Even the ones who pleaded for their active inclusion in American society" warned that "we must bear in mind that the Balkan Slavs, in spite of their continual gravitation Lov,asia> an lethal he would capture. More interesting was Mucha's reaction to the Balkan Slavs. Although full of ipathy for Serbs, Montenegrins, and Bulgarians, they hardly aroused in him the ijj^praise he heaped on Mother Russia. With their curved Turkish sabers, oriental V t>ers and costume, they seemed to him mere curiosities, worthy only of a wax museum. Only during his second visit, when confined to the medieval monasteries if Mt Athos, was he really stimulated. It was not only that they did not conform to his own image of what was supposed to be Slav. One can perceive in Mucha also a -tibdued version of the longing for cultural and racial purity, the ideology that dominated the civilized world of Europe at the time, with no foreboding yet for its disastrous consequences. The Balkan Slavs lacked the purity of a single breed (or of how jhe breed was imagined); in their case the mongrel nature was more than visible — it was their essence. It is true that in Mucha this tension is very delicate and barely discernible under the thick and rich slavophile layer; there is nothing of the crude and frank aversion articulated by his contemporaries, Keyserling and Ehrenpreis. For Mucha, the Balkan Slavs simply did not conform to his purebred ideal abstraction of Slavdom; for Keyserling and Ehrenpreis, the Balkans were a contemptuous deviation from the less than flattering abstraction of the Orient. It would be dogmatic and simplistic to insist that there were no exceptions to this discourse of rigid and harsh qualifications: not everyone subscribed to the temptation ...... „1.—4-U f„ m„1.„ „„„„„ „£i.k„ TJ.,ll-„„ „U„„„ U.,4-JJL.±iiliLL\-tl (.U iiicti*,*_ Ul LiiC Uclli\.clll LlldUJ, U LI L nonconformists are always the minorit}' and they did not challenge or change the dominant stereotypes that finally crystallized in this period. Rarely would someone exclaim with the Englishman Archibald Lyalh "I knew enough of South-eastern Europe never : to believe anything anybody told one if it was humanly possible to look into the matter for oneself." Lyall himself left witty and spirited descriptions of late 1920s' Romania (with Bucharest as a sort of Balkan Hollywood), Istanbul, Greece, Albania, Montenegro, , andDalmatia in The Balkan Road. An acute and epigrammatic observer, he managed to articulate the reasons for the uneasiness a westerner would feel in- the Balkans in a matter-of-fact manner not only devoid of venom but with mocking sympathy. One of the chief reasons was the lack of bourgeois comforts and behavior: Amost everywhere east of the lands of solid German and Italian speech there is a thin whiff of the Balkans in the air, hardly perceptible in Bohemia, but growing stronger with every eastward mile —a certain lack of comfort, a certain indifference to rules and timetables, a certain je-m'en-fichisme with regard to the ordinary machinery of existence, maddening or luminously sane according to temperament and circumstance.55 Punctuality was never a Balkan virtue, although even there progress has been : tttade in the half-century after Lyall. Greek steamers, he complained, were always iate an hour and a half but this was nothing compared to the annoying propensity of Yugoslav trains to leave ten minutes ahead of schedule. The most unsettling characteristic of the "pays balkaniques, pays volcaniques," however, was "the cult of the gun" that had led to the barbarity of the Skupština murders in Belgrade, the Sveta 12b Imagining the Balkans would earnestly insist that the Balkans were no more unsafe for the fore anywhere else: The natives only shoot their friends and acquaintances, and they seldom inter fere with strangers. In Paris or Chicago you kill a man because you think he rrrt\ have the price of a drink in his pockets, but in the Balkans you only kill a m u\ for some good cause, as that you disagree with his political views, or that his great uncle once shot a second cousin of yours, or for some equally sound reason of that kind. If you are seized with a desire to go for a walk in a Balkan town at three in the morning, the risk of being knocked on the head is so small that it i worth while not doing it.'6 Lyall wrote this in the section on Albania, where he thoroughly enjoved hinisetf'-despite warnings about the "horrible country" by a Persian Presbytarian with whoa, he spent some time in Athens. It is curious to listen to the funny incantatic Persian, that is, to a prejudice from the east, rather than the usual one from the \ The standard offense to the Balkans in a Western rendition is that they are too I ern; in the hierarchies of a civilized easterner the pejorative referral was Africa: ^ \. Why do you want to go to Albafinia, my dear sir? Zcre is nothing to see zere, only black stones. And no houses, only little forts wiz cracks and holes in zem, wiz rifli peeping out of zem; and ze Albahnians, zey sit zere and zey go pop-pop-pop." It is " w~ worse zan ze Wild West. Kentucky! Tennessee! Zey are orphans to Albahnia! Orphans! Children! It is Timbuctoo, my dear sir. je very middle ofTimbuctoo. Prom ise me you will not go to Albahnia. It is a pity. You are so young. ... I teil von /is my dear sir, God 'e made ze Albahnians after he'd just had a fight wiz his muz/cr-in-law.'7 It was the ethnic complexity of the Balkans that proved the most frustrating c acteristic. Unlike Western Europe where nations lived in more or less homogeneous blocks, in the East they were jumbled in a way that added the word macedoine to the - ■ vocabulary of menu writers. This complexity that has continued to defy easy categfl-" rizations and upsets neat recipes invoked, instead of condemnation, a simple smd -fair remark by Lyall: "Everywhere east of the Adriatic there are at least ten siiL every question, and it is in my mind that one thing is as good as another.'"* Tht r complex ethnic mixture was held responsible for the instability and disorder of the -peninsula, which was diagnosed as afflicted by "the handicap of heterogeneit Indeed, minority issues have been an endemic part of the development of the na slate particularly in Eastern Europe. Practically nobody, however, emphasized the -fact that it was not ethnic complexity per se but ethnic complexity in the framework of the idealized nation-state that leads to ethnic homogeneity, inducing ethnic con- : flicts. Not only was racial mixture conducive to disorder, racial impurity was disor- -' der. "The confused experiences and training of the races and states of the Balka was explained with their particular "stage of civilization." In the words of a Brit diplomat: "Nationalism in Eastern Europe is naturally more prone to warlike cxpi ■ sion tha is in an earlier stage uf development." The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth saw culmination of theories of evolutionism, particularly its version of progressjonbm From Discovery to Classification 129 ervteenth century, matured in the eighteenth, and modified the dominant static és^11 "cjiajn of being." This modification, which first appeared in Leibniz, re-d'the stages of the hierarchy as coming into existence successively in time, j^om ifjwer to higher. In this way, the understanding of a static chain of be-mí>x,IIi ns£orrne(j jnt0 the idea of a unilinear process of ascent to greater perfec-''^''Vhe assumption of continuous improvement made the very notion of develop-il0!1 cultafe-inlPre§natec^ "li ^aS assumec'tne status °fan absolute, a universal value, iflcntcu^ o£ modernity and, as such, a conscious goal or ideal in a growing number 5es win iSb sal cultures."61 One of the central categories employed in the progressivist as-^ment of the historical process was that of civilization which, alongside culture, *' ed currency in European thought during the eighteenth century. Shaped in the nineteenth century, research on the Balkans was influenced heavily o!h by the traditions of romanticism and evolutionism. The first resulted in an ex-' ' ^fascination with, coupled with a methodical study of, folklore and language, , earcji of the specific Balkan Volksgeist(s); the second, in the framework of the taxonomical obsessions of nineteenth century academics, grounded the Balkans firmly in the dawn of humanity. The elevation of folklore and language as the essence of pjes' Hjcntities and as the legitimation of their existence revolutionized social thought through the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder. The breakthrough of Herder's ideas can be genuinely appreciated only if juxtaposed to the assessment advanced by his former teacher and intellectual adversary, Immanuel Kant, who in '7 ______j iL.^iL,. ",i.„i.„u;„„" „4ru,„ «„„4.;„„„i,. „f i7,,,„„„-..-. rr,., hlSAnthwpOLOgy icasuueu Luac me SKeaeuiiig ui liic utiuuudij ui uumpuu i ui- Icey," as well as those of Poland and Russia, could be passed over because "they have never been and never will be up to what is requisite tor the acquisition of a definite folk-character." Herder's revolution was sustained in the east of Europe principally because it triggered the passionate self-interest among the nations of Eastern Europe and gave them their raison d'etre. It delineated the main spheres of research until today: language, history, ethnography, folklore. In the West, on the other hand, it did little to elevate their status within the hierarchy of nations but at least it put them on the map, even if only as folkloric groups. Hegel accepted Herderian categories and even Conceded that Eastern Europeans played a role as advance guards in "the struggle between Christian Europe and non-Christian Asia," but was indifferent to Herder's obsession with folklore. His criterion foi historical value was whether a group had "stepped forward as an independent force in the array of the forms of reason," and the state was paramount in this array of forms. The Slavs, much as they had become part of the political history of Europe, were not worth a historical survey, even though put of them had been conquered by Western reason, since they still were merely "intermediaries between the European and the Asiatic spirit."62 Ironically, "Herder, m formulating the Slavs as above all an object of folkloric study, helped to establish the philosophical perspective according to which Hegel would exclude them from historical consideration."63 The legacy is so strong that, despite the general demise of evolutionary thinking in Western historiography, the Balkans still come out as the Volksmuseum of Europe even in most sophisticated discourses. Even though in the mterwar period there was widespread disappointment with the idea of progress, it 130 Imagining the Balkans ally exclusive forms. One was premised on the conviction that the Orient (infQ the Balkans were often subsumed) was immobile. Therefore, the study ofthe * inhabitants would throw adequate light on the past. The opening to Br-I.? Macedonia stated: tils'3rt|,s That nothing changes in the East is a commonplace which threatens to b'%on tyrannical. Assuredly there is something in the spirit of the East which is singula] kindly to survivals and anachronisms. The centuries do not follow one anothe They coexist. There is no lopping of withered customs, no burial of dead ideas' Nor is it the Turks alone who betray this genial conservatism. The typical Sla^ v lage, isolated without teacher or priest in some narrow and lofty glen, leads :ts own imperturbable life, guided by the piety of traditions which date from pagan times.6'' The other approach accepted that the Balkans were also subject to the uinvert' laws of evolution but theirs was a backward culture and civilization. Even the moit' benevolent assessments stressed their "inexhaustible but underdeveloped powers"! one should not expect from them "the principles and point of view peculiar !o the-more advanced civilization of the West."65 This is a most rigidly persisting view. Ever! at the end of World War II, Bernard Newman could not resist from noting that ''despite their great advance during this last generation, Balkan codes of conduct do poi: yet approximate to Western standards."65 Because of their intermediary state somewhere between barbarity and civilization, the Balkans weie considered to be"\> mar*-velous training school for political scientists and diplomats" of the First World preparing to perform in the Third; they were utilized as a "testing ground": "In the" nonacademic world, for example, a significant proportion of American governmental and semigovernmental personnel at present attempting to cope with the prub*-' lems ofthe Afro-Asian countries received its training, so to speak, for such work in the Balkans, which have thus retrospectively become the original underdeveloped area."67 Likewise, although civilization and culture as central categories of the deveiop-mental process, and the elevation of Western civilization as the apex of human achievement, were increasingly considered problematic in the wake of World War II, they remained operative notions in the public mind. True, there are sophisticate^ treatments of culture and civilization in the specialized academic literature and, as a whole, social sciences have been averse to utilizing "civilization," either in the sin--.',-gular or in the plural: "Civilization has thrived only in the bastard field of Orientalism,--: which came to be defined precisely as the study of other 'civilizations.'"68 These conclusions, however, have rarely been popularized outside the graduate level of educa-' tion. On the contrary,pace all passionate academic debates, criticisms of ethnoccn-"-trism and pledges toward multiculturalism, the general thrust of American and Weslj European humanistic undergraduate education revolves around the subject of "West-;." ern civilization." *' TV,* S10US arouna Samuel liuntington's latest article conferred tu the category a new legitimacy. Huntington claimed the fundamental source of conflict in the future will be cultural rather than economic or ideological. Defining civi- ISilS From Discovery to Classification 131 ' ts of g'°t>al politics will occur between nations and groups of different civili-. ,' stepping openly on the debatable legacy of Toynbee, Huntington identi-' 'en or eight major civilizations in the present world: Western, Confucian, i-,ed "% jsjarnjc, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African, ''^"^/one sensitive to the dynamics and subtleties of the historical process, hcton's piece cannot fail to strike as overly mechanistic, designed to engineer -criphon rather than a vision. Huntington has encountered devastating criti-^fCfroui very different quarters, but his name, stature, and the appealing simplic-£l5of his ideas have assured that the phrase "clash of civilizations" is abundantly AtowrVaround, especially by academics and journalists who have read neither Hun-',. ij- nor bis critics.69 Huntington first proclaimed that the conflict between com-fcjisni, fascism-Nazism, and liberal democracy, as well as the struggle between the WO superpowers during the cold war, were conflicts within Western civilization, 'western civil wars." This implicitly embraced all of Eastern Europe and Russia within the category of Western civilization. Yet, he declared that with the disappear-jriceoftne ideological, "the cultural division of Europe between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other, has reemerged." The logical conclusion is that while atheistic communism, despite the cold war, placed the lands of traditional Orthodox Christianity within the sphere of Western ivilization, liberal democracy and the end ofthe "Evil Empire" returned them to ((■here they belonged. The fault line was pronounced to be the eastern border of Western Christianity around 1500. It came to supplant the previously fashionable cold-war line of Leningrad-Trieste, which ran a little more to the west and subsumed all of the former lornrnunist Europe. Now, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, gf'well as the two parts with Hungarian minorities (Transylvania and the Vojvodina) were pronounced Western. Naming the civilization east ofthe fault line "Slavic-Orthodox" instead of simply Orthodox, apparently tried to account for Greece, "the _:adle of Western civilization" and a NATO and European Union member, but at the same time crammed into it non-Slavs (Romanians, Gagaouz, Georgians, Albanians, and so 011) and left out many Slavs (Poles, Czechs, Croats, and so on) whose Catholicism apparently saved them from the cumbersome "Slavic" quality. But the map that was supplied in the article to make sure that the fault line was not imaginary but that stressed its physicality had Greece 011 the wrong side of the fault line. Of course, it can be argued that exceptions prove the rule, but this did not reassure the Greeks, who reacted strongly against their implicit marginalization.70 Huntington would have us believe that the fault line he proposed between "Western civilization" and the Slavic-Orthodox world (incidentally the only land border of "Western civilization") was one shaped not of economy or politics but one -of culture. Yet when defining the two civilizations, economic characteristics were paramount: The peoples to the north and west of this line are Protestant and Catholic; they shared the common experiences of European history—feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution; they are generally economically bet-tpr nff than ffiP nannies to the east; and they may now look forward to increasing Between Classification and Politics 141 Between Classification and Politics The Balkans and the Myth of Central Europe Beyond and below what was once Czechoslovakia lie the deep Balkans. They are, it has been said, a sort of hell paved with the bad intentions of the powers. John Gunther' The right question is not "Is it true?" but "What is it intended to do?" S. H. Hooke2 n the geographical and political classifications after World War II, a portion of the i Balkans had secured an unobtrusive place as part of a common Eastern Europe perceived as a homogeneous appendix of the USSR by the West; another portion had been willingly included into Western Europe, something inconceivable but for the prevailing anticommunist paranoia. In the Balkans themselves, the feeling of', Balkan commonality was pushed aside, and the self-designation followed an East-West axis. The vanishing of the bipolar world after 1989 saw a nervous search for more appropriate categories for the organization of academic and journalistic knowledge, principally in the United States. The study of Russia and the Soviet world was :i euphemistically renamed "Eurasian studies." Eastern Europe also received atten-"' tion, in an effort to emancipate it not only from the former superpower but also from the tutelage of Russian studies. A reassessment of East European studies in the United . States argued that "the trajectory of Russian history is substantially different, particularly from that of East-Central Europe [which] retained more religious, cultural, and economic linkages with the West than did the Russians." The Balkans, too, were contrasted to the "the Orthodox lands that eventually fell under the sway of Mas- " cow." Accepting the three-region division of Europe of the Hungarian historian )en& " Sziics as "fundamentally correct," the study argued for a further elaboration, namely I Thus the Balkans began to reemerge as a separate entity, albeit under what was apparently considered a more neutral title: Southeast Europe. While this particular ■study was undoubtedly motivated by the lofty goal of stressing the diversity of Eastern Europe through reclassification, it should be clear by now that the treatment of classification as "an outcome of an ordering process as if the organisation of thoughts comes first, and a more or less fixed classification follows as the outcome" is highly problematic. Rather, "the ordering process is itself embedded in prior and subsequent 'social action."4 The study in question implicitly accepted the notion of a homogeneous Western Europe to which different Eastern European entities were juxtaposed. ]t was simply a version of the West European syndrome "to conceive of the entire - guro-Asian land mass as four Easts (Near, Middle, Far, and Eastern Europe) and only one West, itself."5 It explicitly grounded itself in the conception of Sztics, one ; -0f the pillars of the Central European ideology, thus elevating the whole Central European discourse to an important heuristic device. The restructuring was not confined to academe. In 1994, the State Department -decided to banish "Eastern Europe" from the lexicon of the department's Europe ■:-bureau: "Eastern Europe would now revert to what it was before the start of World \V,u Two in 1939—Central Europe." While it was unclear how an entity was to have a center flanked only by a west, this episode is a testimony that the claims of the Central : European champions were taken seriously, at least lor the sake of diplomatic nomenclature. Later, by speaking about the "two large nations on the flanks of Central Europe," Richard Holbrooke intimated that Russia was assuming the role of Eastern Europe but never spelled it out explicitly, because "at the State Department, nomenclature is an expression of foreign policy."6 The newscast tried to reform, too. As of 1 January 1995, the daily report "Central and Eastern Europe" of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) split in two daily digests of the Open Media Research Institute (OMRI): "East-Central Europe" (the Visegrád four [Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia], the three Baltic republics, Ukraine, and Belarus) and "Southeastern Europe" (the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova). In this classification the unarticulated "Eastern Europe" seemed to be reserved for Russia. While one need not envisage a conspiracy with macabre consequences, in general, structures can become self-generating, and the apportioning of knowledge is geared to a subsequent validating of the structure. OMRI's classification may be attributed to a genuine effort to overcome the legacy of cold-war divisions, but its "Southeastern Europe" was castrated exactly along the former cold-war line: Greece and Turkey continued to .be subsumed under "Western Europe" and the "Middle East." The great vogue over Central Europe began in the early 1980s with the almost simultaneous publication of three works by well-known authors representing the voices of the three countries claiming partnership in the idea: Jeno Sziics, Czeslaw Milosz, and Milan Kundera. The most erudite of the three pieces was written by the ...Hungarian historian Jeno Sziics, and had enormous influence in Hungary but remained virtually unknown in the West and in Eastern Europe outside the narrow-circle of professional historians. This was due not only to its length and dense profes- 142 Imagining the Balkans fall of the Western Roman Empire to the end of the eighteenth century, Sz(i gued that the notion of the West had been born already in the ninth century r '" expanding to the north and eastEuropa Occident enlarged its bounds to include Eg .i Central Europe. In the meantime, "a 'truncated' Eastern Europe and South-Eaite^ Europe . . . took shape under the sphere of influence of Byzantium." The mode f period witnessed the second expansion of the West over the Atlantic and the almost" simultaneous expansion of "truncated" Eastern Europe, which assumed its "com-plete" character by annexing Siberia. "East-Central Europe became squeezed be tween those two regions, and at the dawn of the Modern Times... it no longer kne% whether it still belonged within the framework of Europct Occidens or whether "ft remained outside it." ; Sziics's piece was not a loner; there was a whole genre of works dealing with the dilemma of Hungarian identity crucified between "East" and "West," and especiafiv--; for the roots of its backwardness. According to Sziics, Hungary carried the predie a-ment of a border region between two opposing centers. These two poles developed'.': divergent trends: urban sovereignty and intensive commodity exchange growing up-in the interstices between the sovereignties of rival powers in the West versus centralized bureaucratic state structures holding in their grip the traditional urban civt> lization of the East; Western corporate freedoms and the system of estates against the East's "ruling power with an enormous preponderance over the fairly amorphous society"; "the internal principles of organizing society" dominating over those ofthf : Western state, and the reverse in the Eastern case; the different development of serf; dom with the Western absolutist state compensating for its disappearance of serfdom, and the Eastern consolidating it; Western mercantilism with the capitalist compahv ■ at its center versus state dominance of the industry in the East; Western evolution -toward national absolutism against Eastern development toward imperial autocracy; , Latin Christianity versus caesaropapist Orthodoxy; and so on.7 His doubtless erudition notwithstanding, Sziics can be criticized on his own turf. Sometimes he resorted to reductionism, as with Russian absolutism, which he reduced to Byzantine autocratic mysticism, disregarding the legal and political discussions over absolutism that led to a short-lived but nevertheless constitutional change in the nature of the Russian polity; despite his considerable historical culture-in medieval and early modern history, he conveniently preferred to ignore the—by-now enormous—literature exposing the simplified treatment of the Byzantine tradition as caesaropapism; more seriously and surprisingly for a historian, he assumed a ho- ■ mogeneity of the West almost out of a political science textbook. Most importantly. Sziics built his case on the notion of Europe unfolding around two poles that seemed to have evolved independently of each other; he went so lar as to describe "the organic western process of changes in forms," implicitly suggesting an "inorganic'' process for the East.8 Within a different methodological approach, this polarized view,.; would have been much more shaded, and the sharp spacial borders delineated by; ■ Sziics, in which he conveniently established his East-Central Europe, would have been transformed into more transparent and gradual temporal transitions. But Sziics ■ made this conscious methodological choice in order to wrap up an indirect political Between Classification and Politics 143 u'ment. Although not drawing explicit political conclusions, Sziics uti-^rLill the Pr0Per terms of the current political science vocabulary. He abundantly • ■' -Hematic notion of "civil society," "the new cause celebre, the new '"gjytic j.ey mat will unlock the mysteries of the social order,"9 although the idea of ['society was developed theoretically only during the Scottish Enlightenment, utilized it to show that a societas civilis had appeared in the West already in 1 — 1 : .■■;1p]0yed the problematic notion of "civil society :■■'* fie mid-thirteenth century "as a synonym for the autonomous society," where the anizing principles of la wand freedom" had managed to carve out a "plurality of ailspheres of freedom." Even the feudal categories of medieval honor and fidelitas ...„'ere reinterpreted in terms of "human dignity" as a constitutive element of the West, ■ riot to speak of the fortuitous combination of virtus and temperantia in European behavior.10 ■.; Actually, there was a direct political message, although Sziics chose to present it from the viewpoint of Istvan Bibo: "the search for the deepest roots of a 'democratic way of organizing society.'" Always careful to hide behind Bibo, Sziics outlined his view of the structural preconditions for democracy and presented Hungary as fitting the objective preconditions. His grand finale was an undisguised appeal for action, again legitimized by Bibo: "His basic concept, which he put down several times and ..meant to serve as a long trend, is also valid and opportune: chances inherent in reality are not necessarily realized —their realization depends on effort and goodwill." Sziics's vision, as indeed all the Central European debate, was informed with "the grand history . . . of human progress towards freedom."11 Within majestic framework, \\\c Balkans were not even deemed relevant to be analyzed; already at the beginning of his argument, Sziics had disposed of what he called South-Eastern Europe: "Since ill is last area was to secede from the European structure along with the gradual decline of Byzantium by the end of the Middle Ages, I shall disregard it."12 The second founding father of the Central European idea was the author of a "much more culturally argued definition, in which he makes the point of Central "Europe's liminality to Europe as a whole."13 In The Witness of Poetry, Milosz did ■not specifically use the term Central Europe let alone define it. His 1983 essays are a contemplation on the world of poetics by a refined and nuanced intellectual who was well aware that "the twentieth century, perhaps more protean and multifaceted than any other, changes according to the point from which we view it." Milosz spoke from what he defined as "my corner of Europe," but this was not the Central Europe ascribed to him. It was both broader and more confined than Central Europe. In the narrow sense, his "corner" was his Poland, more specifically his even smaller corner in the Lithuanian periphery, revolving around three axes: the North-South axis, the ;'opposition but also synthesis between Latin and Polish, between Roman classicism and its ancient poets and the poetry produced by his Polish predecessors; the West-East axis, between home and the new capital of the world, Paris; the Past-Future axis, the quality of poetry as "a palimpsest that, when properly decoded, provides testimony to its epoch."14 These three axes should not be associated with another opposition delineated : by Milosz which, decontextualized, has been taken to represent his definition of Pontr.,! "t I,/,™ ^r,A mpTO nn nn tinf v<=ru h nri-1 erl i n e between Rome and sa ern Christianity, of course, but from what has arisen as a result of its d< frjt < order to illustrate Russian isolation, he went so far as to quote the absu k.. D..^„;„„ U:„4-„.:„„ r^„„_„:: t?„j„j.„.. i.u„i „n „£D_____:„>____:_r_... . 1-^fitni 144 Imagining the Balkans Wilno, can one properly understand the true qualities of Europeanness ' George Schopflin was aware that such an interpretation raises "the more'-" I graphical and semantic question that if Central Europe constitutes the outer % Europe, where is Eastern Europe to be found?" he still persisted in it'1*-' ^ Milosz had an ambivalent attitude toward Russia: he spoke of the centu-division of Europe between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Christianity J^65*^!^ same time hastened to specify that the sense of menace he felt came "fit tr - ^ 1, r. . 0!tlE| In by Russian historian Georgii Fedotov that all of Russia's misfortunes had ^"n'"3" from having substituted the universality of Greek for the Slavic idiom And^V' he never entirely purged Russia from Europe; what he did was to oppose R(f messianism to the body of Western ideas. f'li3!l Milosz was also much more political than his interpreters allowed hi He not only raised his voice for the emancipation of all of Eastern Europ was doubly political: directly, by documenting the cynicism of the cold-war dji n,[0 of Europe, and more subtly, by recognizing the political significance of i nliUf3[ images: The literary map of Europe, as it presented itself to the West, contained unt cently numerous blank spots. England, France, Germany, and Italy hada def place . . . ; while to the east of Germany the white space could have easily h the inscription Ubi leones (Where the lions are), and that domain of wild bsasts included such cities as Prague (mentioned sometimes because of Kafka), Warsaw Budapest, and Belgrade. Only farther to the east does Moscow appeai on the mat). " J ' The images preserved by a cultural elite undoubtedly also have political sie cance as they influence the decisions of the groups that govern, and it is n< der that the statesmen who signed the Yalta agreement so easily wrote off; died million Europeans from these blank areas in the loss column.17 Once the discussion over the fate of Central Europe was in the air, Mdoszre joined it with an essay that at first glance left the impression that he was■beeuimiiL much more explicit about his Central Europeanness: "I assume there is sm. as Central Europe, even though many people deny its existence."'8 Although he iei himself the task to define specific Central European attitudes, it is a tribute toths humbleness and intellectual integrity of Milosz that whenever he would ven broader generalizations, he was careful to do so within the confines of the v. oriel ht_i„| knew best: the domain of literature. | To Milosz, the most striking feature in Central European literature was itsafff.ns< _J ness of history. The other characteristic trait was that "a Centra! European mfKt^l receives training in irony." Here Milosz made a rare lapse into reductionism JDvfc- f ing that, in contrast to the Central European realm of irony, "Russian contemporary 4 art and literature, obstinately clinging to cliches, frozen by censorship, seems sterile ' J and unattractive." This statement is preposterous in the face of a splendid linerf : J authors like IFia Iff and Evgenii Petrov, Isac Babel', Mikhail Bulgakov, Arid* " | Platonov, Ven'yamin Erofeev, and Vladimir Orlov, to mention but a few. but\W" 1 tbp nnlv brparb nf bnn ton A^tl-inncd-i if- ^ppmprl ifiaf N/lilnt? fiad ti^crnn tn ICCt'Ot s Between Classification and Politics 145 don the different literatures partaking in the Central European literary Jibt,lj" ^ gflumerated "Czech or Polish, Hungarian or Estonian, Lithuanian ^ jtfi'rt'^ j^jan"; he also referred to the Ukraine, Slovakia, and Romania. With-.* > d*' - I'^g fne Balkans separately, Milosz clearly embraced them together with *' ""^saeö^j^ön-Russian Eastern Europe in his Central Europe which was "an act •\k 0 . . i„f us sav even a utopia."19 It was the ambiguitv toward Russia that ^th.ap«>Iect' ,ine ro the fore Tj i ambiguity was transformed into prohibitive certainty in ' ...:. ;-.t. i..__nfthp tbrpp nieces the pqsav nn Central Enrr the best known ^'"r widely read of the three pieces, the essay on Central Europe by "the man :■■ tjwn any0ne else has given it currency in the West... a Czech, Milan f1 ,r?p jvfow, rereading Kundera after more than ten years is disappointing in ^"'i oflorical consistency and moral integrity: the essay sounds melodramatic and, s outright racist but, given the historical context of the time, its emancipatory 'ijUmvss genuine; thus, the sincere emotional appeal, alongside its excessive re-!jJl tionism explains the attention that it received. Kundera's essay became the nf ah intensive intellectual turnover, and it has become impossible to approach lisc'origirial text without taking into account the ensuing powerful but less numer-iiS-critirYu20slavian Slovenes; are we just Croats or Yugoslavian Croats? By the - , is a Serb exclusively a Serb or is he also a Yugoslavian Serb and a tMiro-':.:.,«>Se.?''3'This was worlds apart from tire ensuing process of "nesting orientalisms," ^fer'jl part of Yugoslavia was unwillingly forced to rediscover a Balkan identity. t-cihervoice originating from Romania was Eugene Ionesco, who advocated a i\n'ni! Kuropean confederation, encompassing "not only Austria, Hungary and nia, but also Croatia, Czechoslovakia" and representing "the only European (Man defense against the pseudo-ideological barbarity of Russia and its spirit ■ quest." The choice of Vienna as center revealed not merely nostalgia for the jlabdiurgpast, but the appeal of the envious niche contemporary Austria had man- >"carve for itself in the bipolar world.36 The only writer before 1989 who articu-he "divide between Catholic Central Europe and the Orthodox Balkans" was is Rupnik. Though he wisely recognized that visions of Central Europe change sountry to country, affording interesting insights into the motives involved and the perception of one's neighbours," Rupnik was amazed at lonesco's idea: "Poland h conspicuously absent, but then Ionesco is the undisputed master of the absurd." tlx "absurdity" consisted in lonesco's crossing civilizational fault lines and includ-.■.-ifig,Orthodox Romania while not even mentioning Catholic Poland.57 The second round of the Central European idea until 1989 saw its expansion ffltf the elaboration of its cultural aspects. In its attitude to the Balkans, it replicated is perspectives of the founding ideologues. It has been suggested that Central Eu-.- fnpeshoukl be interpreted as a case of region-building, "which is itself a subgroup of -,Mat may be called identity politics, that is, the struggle to form the social field in . Erscimage of one particular political project."38 Being undoubtedly a search for iden-■..■l)l¥,'Traiim oder Trauma,"39 the debate over Central Europe was hardly a region-,.)Mi0 of collective self-gratification for the intellectuals of Cafe ZentraleuL^ ^ always delighted to escape from history, and always willing to be stoical inrt* other people's misery."40 Despite their skepticism, both Feher and Agnes WrfNr poused the categorical view of an intrinsic difference between Central andF?^" Europe: while civil society- was emerging in the former, this could net the latter,41 Still, during this period of its development it was the pathos that was the focus of the Central European idea. smarten Between Classification and Politics The attitude to Greece extended also to the Byzantine Empire: Halecki the so-called caesaropapism had been overrated. Eastern Europe was tf!Jofi'-' J^^Roman form of Europe's Ancient and Christian heritage." Though -Str Asiatic influences on the Byzantines, his final verdict was unques- European than Western Europe" but "it participates in both the ■= -' ^!^'atory: "It must never be forgotten that the same Byzantine Empire was JU-„ 1 continuous, frequently heroic, and sometimes successful defender kriaing Asiatic ' trjn a continuous, frequently nciy^, emu ^uiuciulh-o jul^wolui uvi 11 'fc c -^ajnst Asiatic aggression, exactly as ancient Greece had been."48 B The Central Europe of the 1980s was by no means a new term but it v, concept. It was not the resurrection of "Mitre! europa": that had been a (jerri Central Europe was an East European idea; "Mitteleuropa" had always Ge its core, Central Europe excluded Germany.42 Friedrich Naumann, the moqf-3"5'5' proponent of "Mitteleuropa," foresaw an enormous political body from tl ■ Sea to the Alps, and down to the Adriatic and the Danube, excluding in his sion Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece, but also Switzerland and the \laľ'' lands; a year later, Bulgaria was deemed ripe to be included.43 Betou \hntr, Partsch had conceived of a "Mitteleuropa" with Germany and Austri,. Hi me nuclei, ana consisting or tíelgium, tlie í\euierlands, Switzerland, Moi Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria; Greece and Turkey were excluded from thit ■ '_ Yet it would be also farfetched to look for non-German antecedents.to th« Ci*.". \ European idea of the 1980s back to the interwar period. Strední Evropa w pression of Czech political thought; it was Thomas Masaryk's "peculiar zone ofsaiall nations extending from the North Cape to Cape Matapan" and including Laplander*, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Finns, Estonians, Letts, Lithuanians, Poles, Lusabs^^ Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Serbo-Croats and Slovenes, Rumanians, Bulgarians,^ banians, Turks and Greeks, but no Germans or Austrians 45 In this period, Po1sb$---was more concerned with Polish matters than with Central BTiropean politic.il m-nt. raphy and the Hungarians clung to their "fanatic levisionism; at best they envisioi a Danubian Europe revolving around their own nation."46 The passionate writings of the 1980s were not the first attempt at the intcllwliiTi emancipation of the region. In 1950, an American of Polish descent, Oscar I lakct published a small volume, followed, thirteen years later, by an extended study that : was an undisguised Christian polemic against the Marxist view of history andoffe a vision of a united Christian Europe: "A positive approach, replacing the Marxist,!* badly needed. . . . The alternative is indeed of general significance, because. .11 raises the question whether the Christian interpretation of history and the emphsih ofthe religious, purely spiritual element in the evolution of mankind is notthehfa. answer to the claims of historical materialism."47 Halecki's definition of Europe was strictly cultural: "the European commtiiiitr. especially in the period of its greatness, was always primarily a cultural community i He was denied the identification of Christianity with Western culture, which he saw ' t as a synthesis of Greco-Roman civilization with Christianity. His verdict on ífie T Europeanness of ancient Greece was unequivocal: it not only gave European isaiíit-1 but was "the nucleus of the Europe of the future," "this part of Europe which"1*®. | alreadv 'historic' two thousand vpart arm šnŕdsiľW] t-l-ip Rill-.iT-, Tieninculít .H ilecki, the Slavs were an important component of European history, and - f^jly included Russia, whose Christianization "had made the eastern Slavs ' ' j.gj'part of Europe." There was, of course, an ambiguity in his treatment of = ' ^riich as a Christian state was part of the European community but had also the effects of Asiatic influences. These influences were not so much due ■npact of Byzantine autocracy but to the Asiatic form of government ofthe f' 'wis Speaking in terms of the now revived Eurasian character of Russia, Halecki ^fthelcss accepted its European character between Peter I and Nicholas 11. Pre-j^hhlv'"it was with the ascent of Lenin and the Bolsheviks that Russia became "non-"te'pean if not anti-European."49 -.J.^Vhile strongly arguing the unity between Western and Eastern Europe, Halecki 'Veiled his great and essential other as "the Asiatic." He first mentioned the term in !>,.'. svtiod of antiquity where he recognized the political dualism of the European 'vidition deriving from Greco-Roman origins but not coinciding "with the opposi-sM't between western and eastern Europe. ... It can be correctly understood only jpinstan oriental background which is not Greek, indeed, nor East European, but tiaticf This undefined Asiatic was "alien to the tradition of both the Roman Re- -larfhto and free Greece." Halecki attempted to deorientalize Greece, sanitize the kcicitt Greeks from some of their fundamental formative influences and from their alid roots in Asia Minor, a perfect illustration to what Martin Bernal has described stk cleansing of ancient Greece from its African and Asian influences. But this HSiurohous "Asiatic" was soon identified with Islam. Christianity and Islam were "two srdrelydifferent civilizations.. . . Compared with the basic difference between these -ho the internal differences between Latins and Cheeks were really insignificant." Haungset this axiomatic premise, Halecki's assessment of the Ottoman conquest Mincsas no surprise: and centuries-long presence is logically portrayed as an intru-ficn "completely alien to its European subjects in origin, tradition, and religion" •'■litcheffectively interrupted "for approximately four hundred years their participa-iiimiii:European history." Notwithstanding the geographical continuity between the temtine and Ottoman Empires, they had nothing more in common: The Eastern Roman Empire, in spite of four centuries of ecclesiastical schism, had always been an integral part of Christian Europe, and never, in spite of ail political :■"■: rivalries with Latin powers, a real threat to the West. The Ottoman Empire, though it moved its capital to Constantinople, remained a non-Christian and non-Euro-pean conqueror and a growing danger to what remained of Christian Europe.50 152 Imagining the Balkans "the division of the Balkans among the Christian successor states of the Oft Empire [which] reunited that region of Europe during the last period of its histo ^ There was no doubt in Halecki's mind that the rebirth of Greece and ot I Balkan states was an inspiration and encouragement for the nationalities "in tl of Europe." In a remarkable passage Halecki came to the defense of balkai The national states of the Balkan area, in which the long submerged natioi southeastern Europe regained their freedom and independence, represente apparent triumph of self-determination — apparent only, because the great pow after contributing to the liberation of the Christian peoples of the peninsula, < tinued to interfere with their difficult problems. The troubles which resulted such a situation were soon used, as an argument against national self-determinai The loose talk about a threatening "Balkanization" of Europe by the creation of "new" small states was and is not only unfair to the Balkan nations —some 0 oldest in Europe—but an obstacle to any unprejudiced approach to the 1 funis for self-determination in the region north of the Balkans.52 The really interesting question is the difference between Halecki and ihe exponents of the Central European idea. There was a change in the political climate of" the 1980s, which may have been reflected in the timing of the Central European-idea. The events in Poland—the rise of Solidarity and the subsequent mtroducfioB-"-of martial law without a Soviet invasion—signaled that Moscow was cor alternatives to its direct interference in the satellite countries. By that time, it was"' also clear that the treatment of the satellites was specific, something that prompted attempts at piecemeal emancipation. Indeed, when Halecki wrote his second book in 1963, he could only bitterly exclaim that "the liberation of the nations .r Last Central Europe is simply impossible in the present conditions without a war which', most certainly would be a nuclear war involving all Europe and probably the worki."J! -What a difference from the feelings that informed East European intellectuals in " the 1980s which, although with little hope or foreboding that things would be resolved in the very near future, were nevertheless far removed from this apocalyptic --vision. Yet it is not merely the political background that ultimately sets aparl Ilalecb from the ideologues of the 1980s. Halecki was an ecumenical Christian thinker and -was openly professing his interpretation of history on behalf of a united Chnstianity He also had a subtle understanding of the character of Orthodoxy and was unques-.' tionably opposed to polemic reductionism and to the exclusion of the Orthodox.--nations from Europe, With him, one can still appreciate Anatole France's aphorism: "Catholicism is still the most acceptable form of religious indiffcience. The 1980s, on the other hand, brought a different attitude toward Islam, or rather -toward what was permissible to be said about Islam. The irony is that the completely (or for the most part) secular zealots of the Central European idea, who have no grand visions but function essentially within a framework of national, or at the very most. _ regional interests, are waving the banner of religious intolerance within Christianity and are essentializing religious differences of which they know but little. At the same time, they have excellently internalized the cultural code of politically correct liber- --- • ' 1 1 " 1- tt t 1 •> 1 •. .1--..--------~t.rirrfa&.. Between Classification and Politics 15^ liberals convincingly "bolstered Russia's claim to 'Europeanness' by con-^USS-l3ff it to the barbarous Turk."54 This is already unacceptable for the new gen-jfjisting jjas to show it has overcome Christian prejudice and which, in a move ^■ercorne the legacy of anti-Semitism, has added and internalized the new at-59 °V the roots of Western culture: Judeo-Christian. One wonders how long it Ibute to 1 lition and •n l-p before we begin speaking about the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradi „ofs of European culture. -Therefore, the Central Europe of the 1980s was not simply the latest incarna-■ 0f a debate going back to the 1950s. The debate of the 1980s was a new phenom-wjj^h different motivations and goals. This explains why it was news for Soviet triters at time: when in May 1988, at the meeting of Central European and Soviet writers in Lisbon, Gyorgy Konrád challenged his Soviet colleagues with the estion: "You have to confront yourself with the role of your country in a part of the ^GilrJ that doesn't want your presence in tanks but as tourists" and triggered a heated debate. Tatyana Tolstaya answered in amazement, "When am I going to take my tanks out of Eastern Europe?" and added that "this was the first she had ever heard of Central Europeans speaking of their culture as something separate from that of the Soviet Onion."'5 Larry Wolff has remarked that the Enlightenment idea of Eastern Europe, -which was perpetuated in the West in the next two centuries, presupposed neither its definitive exclusion nor its unqualified inclusion.;ň In this perception, the Balkans were an integral part, and it is only in the last decades that a real attempt at their exclusion is taking place. By the end of the 1980s, the argument for an intrinsic difference between Eastern and Central Europe had already taken shape and was internalized by a considerable number of intellectuals. The last article in the Schopflin/ Wood collection squarely dealt with the question "Does Central Europe Exist?" Writing in 1986, Timothy Garton Ash chose to analyze three authors as representative of their countries: Havel, Michnik, and Konrád. With his usual brilliancy as essayist, Ash explored the meaning of the concept as it emerged from voices from Prague and Budapest, rather than from Warsaw. He pointed to an important semantic division between the use of "Eastern Europe" and "Central Europe" in Havel and Konrád. The first was used invariably in a negative or neutral context; the second was always "positive, affirmative or downright sentimental." For all his sympatii}'with the Central European Zivilisationsliteraten, Ash's acute analytical pen could not but comment on the mythopoetic tendency of the idea: jTJhe inclination to attribute to the Central European past what you hope will characterize the Central European future, the confusion of what should be with what was —is rather typical of the new Central Europeanism. We are to understand that what was truly 'Central European' was always Western, rational, humanistic, democratic, skeptical and tolerant. The rest was 'East European', Russian, or possibly German. Central Europe takes all the 'Dichter und Denker', Eastern Europe is left with the 'Richter und Henker'.57 Still, for Ash: "The myth of the pure Central European past is perhaps a good niyth." His most interesting observation was the apartness of Poland: Michnik him-.SRlfWl *~Ti,«j Afp.ntml P.imno onA Milni7J rope as Russia is to Europe." Exploring some of the similarities between the' contributions to Central Europeanness (the shared belief in antipolitics^th tance assigned to consciousness and moral changes, the power of "civil sc partiality for nonviolence), Ash found many more differences that made him «j ] -'v 1 in an exasperated manner whether it was "no more than a side product of &1't> powerlessness." His final verdict on the Central European idea was that'it ! that: an idea. It does not yet exist," and that its program was "a programmefm hut*^" Í tuals." In his evocative ending, Ash refers to the Russian poet Natalya Gorbano á ^ who had told him that George Orwell was an East European. Having ácceptej^ ^** idea of Eastern Europe in acta, Central Europe in potentia, Ash added: "Perfum ' would now say that Orwell was a Central European. If this is what we mean ny '(^ tral Europe', I would apply for citizenship."58 In the meantime, Eastern Europe in acta ceased to exist (while nobody fro ' h the West applied for citizenship either before or after), but it inaugurated at! in the development of the Central European idea after 1990 when it made ill t„i". -f from the cultural into the political realm. It also marked for the first time ' of the Balkans as an entit)' in the argumentation. 1 his period spelled the et ■ antipolitics; politics was on the agenda. Gyorgy Konrád had precipitously dec] ■ before, "No thinking person should want to drive others from positions powers, ' order to occupy them for himself. I would not want to be a minister in any go' ment whatever,' and Havel had spoken of "anti-political politics" and agairis ■ overestimation of the importance of direct political work in the traditional sense. thaL is, as seeking power in the state.59 This chapter was over. Now, one could begi ploring the Central European idea not only in thought but also in action. : One of the first to make the pragmatic jump was Ash himself. In his 1986 p he never explored the potential exclusiveness of the Central European idea bee he accepted it as an intellectual utopia, the realm of "intellectual responsibilii tegrity, and courage."60 However, early on in the years of the painful efforts oi European societies at transformation, he lobbied for the acceptance of parto? crn Europe in the institutional framework of Western Europe, although he wa; sitive enough to promote his plea for no more than what it was: a pragmatic ar to a political challenge: I Yet where would this leave the rest of post-Communist Europe? Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, and Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, to name but a few,:all ■ also want to "return to Europe." And by "Europe" they, too, mean First and fore-.:: most the EC, The first, pragmatic answer must be that die EC simply cannot doj everything at once. It makes plain, practical sense to start with those that are near-: est, and work out to those which axe farthest. Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslova-: kia are nearest not only geographically, historically, and culturally, but also in the progress they have already made on the road to democracy, the rule of law, and al market economy.6' The post-1989 world gave the Central European idea for the first time the chance - j Between Classification and Politics 155 0|jSeneá that "the liberation from Pax Sovietica 1989-1990 revealed tírat drere sexist any 'Central Europe,'" Dusan Tfestik wrote that "we rather feel like 'ut still respectable Almosteuropeans and only some, for whom begging is jging are poor but proud Centraleuropeans," Adam Krzeminski added that > underdog wants to be at the center," and Peter Hának published a bitter es-* out the danger of burying Central Europe prematurely.62 U993 Gyorgy Konrád wrote an ardent supplication Central Europe Redivivm. ssayistic genre gives ample opportunity for a happy combination of analytical tvith emotive power. Konrád exhibited only the latter. Central Europe "was, is, 'probably will continue to be"; it existed, Konrád maintained, just like the Balkans, 'iddle East, and the Commonwealth of Independent States. It was defined as she srnrfl nations between two large ones: Germany and Russia; thus expropriating pfils Central European nature the country that used to be its embodiment: Germany, girt then, a Central Europe without Germans and Jews had been the dream, and 1,3; become the achievement of many groups of Central Europeans.65 Konrád also enicrged as a malor theoretician on ethnic civil wars and provided their most con-»!«■ definition, rivaling Stalin's definition of the nation: "An ethnic civil war requires j checkered array of ethnic groups, a mountainous terrain, a long tradition of gue--pita warfare, and a cult of the armed hero. Such a combination exists only in the Balkans." it is comforting to hear such reassurance for the rest of the world from w'TiHone characterized by his translator as an "exemplary Central European writer" m^tto Havel and implicitly as the greatest Hungarian writer, and described unassumingly by himself in a self-introduction in the third person singular as: "K. ... a "f-fty-year-old novelist and essaist. . . . His wardrobe is modest, though he has several (typewriters,"64 The ideal of intellectual solidarity in the region all but disappeared: immedi-afcly after 19'"":;'. intellectuals from the former Soviet block countries had decided to -publish a journal called East-East to deal with problems of postcommunist East-■:Ceňtral European societies, to come out in all the languages of the region. The names ■ i:ithe editorial board included Adam Michnik, Marcin Krul, Milan §imečka, Ferenc .. fehér; Richard Wagner, Dobroslaw Matějka, Andrej Cornea, Anca Oroveanu, Eva : Karadi, Evgeniya Ivanova, Ivan Krfstev, and others, but the journal was published only in Bulgarian. The rest did not want to participate in a dialogue with the East; in .fact, they did not want to have anything to do with the East. The denial of over four decades of common existence is understandable, but it nevertheless breeds the par- ■ ticularism and parochialism of much of today's Central European discourse. No wonder that one of the most exciting postmodernist accounts of the political aesthetic of communism was written recently by a Bulgarian, who was concerned with the .ontology of the modernist impulse that produced the greatest (and failed) social ex-Tpfriment of the twentieth century, rather than with the Manichaean implications of the East-West dichotomy.65 Iver Neumann has argued that despite the failure of an institutionalized Central European framework, the Central European project "could still be used politically vis-á-vis Western Europe and Russia" as a moral appeal and reproach addressed ř"n'"1 - 11 fifir. J._j _i±L;----U„ .t----j ;„,„„ „r nn ^„OM„n, )„ fl,,, 156 Imagining the Balkans supplications. This is most evident in the drive to enter NATO and the lnstiluK - - T|~ framework of the European Union. The argumentation is usually based on Wvq "I" lars: the affinity of Central Europe to the European system of values and thi j * tation of the ominous threat of a possible takeover in Russia by imperialist, c 1, ( ^* \ ist, antidemocratic, and antimarket forces. In this context, Central Europeanr became a device entitling its participants to a share of privileges. President: Hi" > ' argued: If. . . NATO is to remain functional, it cannot suddenly open its doors to any at all. ... The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia —and Austria Slovenia as well—clearly belong to the western sphere of European civilizal They espouse its values and draw on the same traditions. . . . Moreover, the < tiguous and stable Central European belt borders both on the traditionally agrt, Balkans and the great Eurasian area, where democracy and market economic only slowly and painfully breaking away toward their fulfillment. In short, it is a key area for European security.67 Again the Balkans were evoked as ihe constituting other to Central Europe nlrma. side Russia. The reason for this was the annoying proclivity to treat Eastern Europe as an inseparable entity. Scholars who want to trace structural changes in the newly-emerging democracies of the former Warsaw Pact prefer to pursue their analysis m the framework of the whole of Eastern Europe: "although it is often useful to dkfin- -guish between an East-Central Europe and the Balkans, the main arguments... allow -a collective reference to Eastern Europe."08 Scholars' blunders may be annoying, -but more painful was the European Union's decision to treat the emerging democracies in a package deal: as ofi February 199;, the association agreements of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria (which joined the earlier admitted 1'6-r land and Hungary) with the European Union went into effect. This en gmvpe treat-" ment annoyed the Czechs, who lately want to go it alone. In an interview published in Der Spiegel on 13 February 1995, Havel said that for the Czech Republic sion to NATO was more urgent than joining the EU. If the West accepts thatcer- _ tain, particularly Central European, countries belong to the Russian sphere of influence and thus should not be allowed to join NATO, Europe is heading to a "new Yalta," Havel warned. One would suppose that the logical alternative to this is thatrf these "particular Central European countries" were admitted to NATO, but the rest were relegated to the Russian sphere of influence, a "new Yalta" would be avoided; -If the notion of a limes between the civilized west and "les nouveau barbares" isac--cepted as unavoidable, the question is where exactly should ihelimes run. For someone like Ryszard Kapuscinski, there is no hesitation: "the limes normally drawn in ,, Eastern Europe is the frontier between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet."6'1 It is a rule that any social perception (of an out-group by an in-group) tends to construct differences along dichotomic lines. But it is only the degree of institutionalization of these perceptions, or their relative importance and strength for the collective whole, which perpetuates them and makes them potentially explosive. " -1'-----~.i™on-if>nt onuld he approached calmly as simply a rhetorics] oe- Between Classification and Politics 157 1'fics Ironically, this reasoning echoed much of the argumentation of the former ', Kissinger, who pleaded for an immediate expansion of NATO to extend rncmhsr-ship to the Visegrad countries. Later, Kissinger decided that Slovakia was diso ■ able and appealed to the administration to support the inclusion only of Poli Hungary, and the Czech Republic.81 Richard Holbrooke, on the other hand, was extremely cautious not to overcora-mit his administration. There were at present three wings of the security arch: ture in Europe: the West (which more or less coincided with NATO), CentralTn-rope, and Russia. In this architectural vision, Russia was becoming Eastern Eorop'' and the Balkans, although not explicitly stated, were subsumed under "the fifteen j countries of Central Europe." However, when it came to the expansion of ■ into Central Europe, the only countries mentioned were the Visegrad foiu and a 1 r----„,,!„ „.„„_____1 r__tX. ~ «n__l_____r__n_____" .....____________■. ii. . ■ -i____i-.J:..™u>fl..." ,.,1 Between Classification and Politics 159 i .Just ■: V ■ an end in itself.82 Or, as the British journalist Charles Moore recently stated T^y^pectator: "Britain is basically English-speaking, Christian, and white. 5'* want to bring Poles, and Hungarians, and Russians slowly into the EEC, and niafScets for their goods, so we should try to open our doors to their people., . . "vlims and blacks, on the other hand, should be kept out strictly as at present."8' ■I!1^ prophetic vision of Sami Nair: .'Iff There are two ways, only two ways: either confessionalism will win and everywhere in Europe community ghettoes will be erected (as would follow from Pope John ■ Paul lis sermon on the conquest of Christian Europe), and in this sense democ- ■ ncy will be the inevitable casualty; or Europe will modernize its democratic alli-■jrice it will enforce its republican model, based this time not on the unconscious ■ enH,lalio'i of the papist-caesarean model, but guaranteed by a concrete humanis- ■ tie universalism.' ■-■ -Speaking of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition and roots of European cul-'hjreis:not such a paradoxical notion. It could mean the opening up of Europe and "The recognition of its rich and variable roots; on the other hand, it could mean the elective appropriation of traits that are then determined to be part of the European, Respectively Western tradition. The first option has had some modest success; the second has had a rich tradition. While the beginnings of Western thought usually lead to Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and the Hebrew Bible, the social and political bodies in which these traditions have been developed have been neatly relegated to ■ í different, third, world, The part of Europe that was first and exclusively bearing This name (the ancient Greeks called "Europe" the Balkan mainland beyond the islands) has been stripped of it and bequeathed at best with a modifier—southeast-Vem—in a purely geographic context, and at worst with the Schimpfwort Balkan and without the modifier European in almost any other discourse. It is not difficult to .■anticipate how Islamic traditions can become cleansed of their historical reality and -elevated to adorn the tiara of European Western Tolerance in an act of self-crowning. : Back to the Central European idea, Arthur Schnitzler had once remarked that "the things which are most often mentioned do not actually exist."85 He was speaking of love. But there is no love lost in Central Europe and the competition to be the : first to enter Europe dealt a blow on the Central European project itself: "the program of Havel the participant in the debate about 'Central Europe' was thwarted by, -afnongothers, Havel the president."86 Václav Klaus, Václav Havel's less poetic, more 'realistic, and more successful political counterpart, angrily rejected the institution-■:ij];Eation of cooperation among the Visegrad group as an alternative to Czech mem-.faership in the European community and said that "any concept of the group as a ■poor man's club and buffer zone to keep the Balkans and the former Soviet Union at viisafe distance from Western Europe" was unacceptable.87 The transformation of ■the Central European conceptfrom an emancipatory idea to a politically expedient -tool was accompanied by a parallel transformation of the concept of Europe from a :..vultiii'al definition identified with liberalism and democracy into "the international iolidarity of capital against poverty."88 ..........To summarize, the third round in the development of the Central EurODean 160 Imagining the Balkans merit in the drive for entry into the European institutional framework. It is dn this stage that the Balkans first appeared as a dichotomical opponent, soincli alongside with, .sometimes indistinguishable from Russia. This internal hierarcl \^ tion of Eastern Europe was born out of political expediency but in its rhetoric itf< on the balkanist discourse. After all, it is not symbolic geography that creates j tics, but rather the reverse. There are two strategies that one can pursue. One would entail the analyl critique of the line of division as conceived by the Central European idea: totiki the challenge of the Central European identity as an apodictic concept. Fdr-ij attractions as polemic, this is an exercise in disproving and repudiating, but "rrtyrli u beyond truth and falsity." It is the pragmatic function of myth that should be the f< of attention and it requires a closer look not only into the motives of its creators bill also into the quality of the recipients, because "the effectiveness of myth depenc large measure upon ignorance or unconsciousness of its actual motivation."pq Buti; is not enough to expose the Central European myth as insidious, or its atterni contrast itself to the Balkans as invidious. Tire other strategy would considerthep lem of the nature of the Balkans, its ontology and perception, and compare itlc Central European idea. Juxtaposing the notion of Central Europe as an idea with jjj-" short-term cultural/political potential to the concept of the Balkans with its powerful historical and geographic basis, but with an equally limited although muchJctrip: historical span, one can argue that the two concepts are methodologically mcorrma- , rable, and therefore incompatible constructs. 7 The Balkans Realia: Qu'est-ce quit y a de hors-texte? And yet. if the Balkans were no more than horror, why is it, when we leave them and make for this part of the world, why is it we feel a kind of fa]]_an admirable one, it is true —into the abyss?1 Emil Cioran rphe volume In Search of Central Europe ended with Timothy Garton Ash's essay 1 entitled "Does Central Europe Exist?" No such question can be posed for the Balkans.-There is no doubt in anybody's mind that the Balkans exist. EvenCu/fura/ LHeracy, the 1988 national best-seller, included among its 5,000 essential names, phrases, dates, and concepts the noun "Balkans" and the verb "to balkanize," neatly jlatikedby "balance of power, balance of terror, balance sheet, Balboa," and "ballad, ballerina, ballet, ballistic missile."2 This is telling, given the fact.that Professor E. D. llirjehjjr., was not overgenerous with geographic notions. All European states were included, among them all Balkan states at the time of writing: Albania, Bulgaria, " Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia. There were some technical omissions: for example, Turkey was missing (instead there was the song "Turkey in the Straw"), but the Ottoman-Empire was in, as was Istanbul, the Bosporus, and the Black Sea. Although it was an oversight, one cannot keep wondering about a psychological slip in omitting two Central European states: Poland and Austria. It goes without saying that geographical entities like Eastern or Western Europe, let alone Central Europe, were slot in the list. The Balkans, however, were in, much before the world even surmised -hat it would witness the tragedy of Yugoslavia generalized by the West as a Balkan conflict, a Balkan war, a Balkan tragedy. If for Central Europe, like for the Orient, one can play with the Derridian "il ny a pas de hors-texte," the appropriate question for the Balkans is "qu'est-ce qu'il y "»tne second organic interpretation also has its caveats. One of trie approach that focuses exclusively on the continuity from the Byzantine j finis trivializing the Ottoman phenomenon, as was done in Iorga's famous ': jential work.10 Although Iorga's theory may be today no more than an exotic T'snde in the development of Balkan historiography, his formulation Byzance apres is alive not only because it was a fortunate phrase but because it reflects r-iuiL1 than its creator would intimate. It is a good descriptive term, particularly for presenting the commonalites ofthe Orthodox peoples in the Ottoman Empire in jjgffiou/pfivate law, music, and the visual arts, but also in emphasizing the continu-h,.,->f,vvo imperial traditions where the cultural fracture delineated by the advent of igfjrmer and father of the first Ottoman constitution, Midhat pasa, can be >od and described only within the organic approach, although it is possible ■ -. Srafive to distinguish between dominant and less important traditions in the ■ of their outlook and activities, and in the extent of their influence on differ- Conclusion Yet, like the poor, the Balkans shall always be with us. Konrad Berkovici' Perhaps the best solution would be to plow under every third Balkan. Howard Brubaker2 1-i he Balkans are usually reported to the outside world only in time of terror .isil trouble; the rest of the time they are scornfully ignored. Kipling epitomized attitude by exclaiming in The Light That Failed: 'Speaking of war, there'll be troi in the Balkans in the spring."' This was the opening paragraph of a book while . 1940.3 It can be the opening paragraph to a book written in 1995. To the ones • reproduce an essentialist image of the Balkans, it would be simply another proof ■ nothing has changed in the past fifty, one hundred, and even one thousand y< Yet, as I have argued, the Balkans have a powerful ontology that deserves sei ions complex study, and it is an ontology of constant and profound change. If one were to make more of the frozen vision of the Balkans than merely define it as the product of casual, dismissive, or hectoring journalism, one could argue this image is more than a stereotype. It appears as the higher reality, the reflectic the phenomenal world, its essence and true nature, the "noumenon" to the'"' nomenon," to use the Kantian distinction. None of the politicians, journalists at writers who have specialized in passing strictures on the Balkans have ever ma claim for a philosophical basis of their argument, yet this is what they have achie The frozen image of the Balkans, set in its general parameters around World \V has been reproduced almost without variation over the next decades and opeiat. a discourse. To come around full circle and link the Kennan prelude of the introduc with a Kennan coda, what one can hear in his piece are motives of a distinct well-known earlier melody with some fresh improvisations. It is the American p cian version of the old aristocratic European paradigm garnished with nmete< century Victorian righteousness. It manifests an evolutionary belief in the >upe ■ ity of orderly civilization over barbarity, archaic predispositions, backwards eniiakkl^c uni-nnfrirrnincr and 11 nniwl iViahl p hehavior. that is. "tribalism." T he VCiy Conclusion 185 rnarily °y Africans, to whom the term is usually applied. Africa and Asia have been classified by Elie Kedourie, according to their alleged political tradition, as the legacy 0f tribal rule and Oriental despotism. Tribal society's central feature is its primitive-■rjess, lack of complexity and, implicitly, weakness, because when confronted "with {he demand of modernization for a sophisticated system of law and political representation- it merely collapses into tyranny." It is also intrinsically passive, incompatible with initiative and enterprise. The classification of people according to notions otiCsocial and technological) complexity and activity is a fundamental principle of the imperial discourse that has been inherited primarily by the press.4 It also releases ^"civilized world" from any responsibility or empathy that it might otherwise be-S{0W on more "reasonable" people. . Thus, responding to the question "What is to be done?" Kennan concluded that 'no one - no particular country and no group of countries —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 calm down and begin to look at their problems in a more orderly way."5 Ivo Banac interpreted this declaration of Balkan rjn^Europeanness as the basis for the politics of noninvolvement: ;!;::y hi fact, his essay, which recommends noninvolvement, would be of no particular '""-""interest were it not for his candid opinion on the apartness of the Balkans from the ■I'?ip:. European civilization. That is no small matter and, though hidden under wraps of riiiiimil taboos, probably is the chief reason for Western aloofness and indifference 'IJ:' to the area itself and to any action or involvement in it.6 There were many more practical reasons for the initial Western noninvolvement, ■but this is certainly no small matter. The alleged non-Europeanness of the Balkans might have been used to legitimize noninvolvement but it was not its cause. After all, the same West did not falter in its involvement in non-European, non-Christian, kit oily Kuwait. Besides, Western noninvolvement itself is a problematic category. Understandably reluctant as the West was to involve itself directly in a war in Yugoslavia, it was certainly neither aloof, nor indifferent, nor inactive, nor even unanimous at the time of the country's breakdown and throughout its ugly divorce. It is preposterous to refuse to face the responsibility of both internal and external thugs audarussionaries who plunged Yugoslavia into disintegration, and explain the ensuing: quagmire by "Balkan mentalities" and "ancient enmities." There are equally important practical reasons for the West's final involvement in Yugoslavia. Most of them are prompted by extra-Balkan considerations: the place and future of NATO, the role of the Unites States as the global military superpower and especially its strategic slake in European affairs, and so forth. All of this is euphemistically enveloped in the favorite word in recent American diplomatic vocabulary: credibility. If ancient examples are any good, perhaps the most evocative is the behavior of the deities in bie Trojan war who followed their own game when tipping the scales without, how-wcTj pretending they were doing it for the sake of humankind. But they were deities, "fterall. There is an additional nuance that separates the West Europeans from their American countemarts. In the non-Ynposlav Ralkans the war in the former Yiiffosla- i86 Conclusion Europe, it is usually defined as the war in ex-Yugoslavia or in Bosnia, although tfi is occasional mention of a Balkan war, In the United States, the war is usuailv ■-t'C' eralized as "the Balkan war," although there is occasional mention of the war h ■ former Yugoslavia, Some journalists have gone so far as to eradicate all Balkan tory and reduce it to Serbian history. So, one reads that in June 1389 on the p]ajn ^ Kosovo "occurred the primal act of slaughter from which all Balkan histoiy s has flowed."' It is insubstantial that, except for the Serbs, the battle of Kosuvo 1 not mean much for the rest of the Balkan nations who have had their own and q different Kosovos. One of the charms of the Balkan nations, but also their cur< that they have incredibly rich and dense histories, but they are usually self-contai Save for historians, Kosovo came to the attention of the other Balkan publics at the " same time that it reached their American contemporaries. ' . Why does the war need to be Balkan? The Spanish civil war was Spanish, not Iberian or Southwest European; the Greek civil war was never Balkan; the problem of Northern Ireland is fittingly localized —it is called neither Irish, nor British not even English, which it precisely is. Why is it, then, that "Balkan" is used for a courj. try at war that, before the sad events, insisted it was not Balkan and was previa ' not labeled Balkan but considered to be the shining star of Eastern Europe b Western supporters? Has "Balkan" become so much of a Schimpfwort that it is hr that those to whom it is applied would be horrified? Psychology should penuade. . politicians and journalists that bearing the brunt of collective stigma has never been a good deterrent. Studies on social policies dealing with stigma have shown that integration, rather than isolation, is the adequate solution.s It would do much better if the Yugoslav, not Balkan, crisis ceased to be explained -in terms of Balkan ghosts, ancient Balkan enmities, primordial Balkan cultural patterns and proverbial Balkan turmoil, and instead was approached with the same rs-tional criteria that the W7est reserves for itself: issues of self-determination versus inviolable status quo, citizenship and minority rights, problems of ethnic and religious " autonomy, the prospects and limits of secession, the balance between big and small -nations and states, the role of international institutions.9 It is paradoxical to read American journalists bemoan the split of their society (which they call "balkanization") while their politicians and their allies sealed the virtual, not potential, balkanization of Yugoslavia by embracing unconditionally the principle < determination. This is not to deny the legitimate nature of processes of secession and self-determination, but to call on giving phenomena their proper names and on having " a clear perspective of their repercussions. It is, of course, a sublime irony to observe -leaders of the cleansed societies of Western Europe fifty years after their ugliest performance raise their hands in horror and bombard (in words and in deed, and safely hidden behind American leadership) the former Yugoslavs in preserving "ethnic diversity" for the sake of securing a Volksmuseum of multiculturalism in a cornei i>l Europe, after having given green light to precisely the opposite process. There is another component, relevant in illuminating geopolitical choices and explicating baikanism as a discourse different from orientalism. As illustiated ear- -lier, before the twentieth century, there existed an ambiguous attitude toward the Turks: an almost unconscious emrmthv with the rulers mincderl with traditional -SVrfi" Gonclusion 187 ^v for fellow-Christians. Britain, in particular, with its dominant anti-Russian ^ttitude, upheld the Ottoman Empire as a barrier against further Russian expansion, jjjjj geopolitical configuration was in many ways inherited by the United States, and Jaxhs) became an important element in the cold war anti-Soviet alliance. But there ft,asrro longer the admonishing figure of the suffering Balkan Christian. The former Christians were now all, with the exception of Greece, under the "evil empire" of communism. Besides, the central discourse had shifted from religion to ideology. Additionally, since World War II, it has become illegitimate to openly bash jjQrivvhite races, non-Christian religions, and non-European societies. Kennan's introduction accordingly downplays the role of the Ottoman Empire and the Turks for the historical fate of the Balkans: current problems stem from their "distant tribal T»st," and have roots that "reach back, clearly, not only into the centuries of Turkish domination." Finally, "one must not be too hard on the Turks"; after all, "there was more peace when they were still underTurkish rule than there was after they gained jfjgjr independence. (That is not to say that the Turkish rule was in all other respects supenor to what came after.)"10 There is, actually, nothing objectionable in this, either academically or politically- For one thing, the virtues of empires will be critically reassessed after close to two centuries of dubious performance of the nation-states. Epithets as "anomaly" for empires will probably fall into disuse in academic writing. It is time to reconsider with humility the effects of exporting the nation-state to societies that are ethnic and religious mosaics, and creating a mosaic of nation-states in place of the mosaic of nations." The humility is even more imperative given the so-called "organic" growth of West European societies into nation-states. This outcome was the result of several centuries of social engineering—ethnic and religious wars and expulsions (i.e., ethnic cleansing) accompanying the process of centralization — triggered by a fundamental hosility to heterogeneity, which in the end brought about relatively homogeneous polities that "organically" grew into the modern nation-states. While this is an obvious reduction of a complex process, it is necessary in order to expose the moral pretensions that inform it. At the same time, putting the West European record straight certainly does not exempt the Balkans from their responsibilities. And it is absolutely not valid for Balkan politicians and intellectuals to use the Ottoman Empire and Turkey as the convenient scapegoat for all their misfortunes and misconducts, to attempt to define themselves against ademonized other, in this case very literally resorting to orientalism. What is objectionable, though, is that Kennan has essentialized the Balkans: virtually transforming Herder's Balkan "Volksgeist" into Kaplan's "Balkan ghosts." Yet it is objectionable on epistemological grounds only insofar as one deals with the intellectual hypostasis of Kennan. If he is contextuahzed in the structure of an imperial geopolitical continuity, he would not be seen (or not seen only) as the hostage of a tradition of stereotypes. Certainly, Kennan is in the same relationship to Balkanist" texts that all readers, according to Wolfgang Iser, are with written texts, t ne text, in his formulation, is bracketed off from the world it represents and "what K within the brackets is separated from the reality in which it is normally embedded." The 1" vtttnjn«&. 188 Conclusion doubling—one affecting the recipient, the other the w this duality serves to aestheticize the fictionality in lifes 1 'i ** Agnes Heller maintained that "the recognition of the acconiiil»'i»Kitf«*P , position of civilization with barbarism but rather of one civi-and that "European (Western) cultural identity has been bcentrtc and anti-ethnocentric."17 If Europe has produced s-antiracism, not only misogyny but also feminism, not only its repudiation, then what can be termed Balkanism has not ^complementing and ennobling antipariicle. 224 Bibliography Dako, Christo A., and Dhimitri Bala, Albania's Rights, Hopes and A-&; -of the National Consciousness of the Albanian People, Boston- i % s" ' "tr ■< - Dako, Christo A,, and Mihal Grameno, Albania's Rights and Claim Territorial Integrity, Boston: 1918. t,idei Danchov, N. G., and I. G. Danchov, BUgarska entsiklopediya Sofia- K Atanasov, 1936. 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