Imagining the Balkans Maria Todorova New York Oxford nYFDRTi TTMTVFRSTTY 4 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 i rj-i his book, more than any other project I have worked on, has been with me j jL 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 i 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, t 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 b 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 lull 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 frj work and suggesting possible lines of debate. Even if it merely triggers argum this book will have fulfilled its purpose: I am convinced that the problem mei whole genre of works on "balkanism." It is part of thecomme ilfaut 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 4-1,--,.4-U --„---J..'---„_ ^rt4- ,4. 4.U---k~,,^,4 4^ (<1 + l^nct 11 Tl viii Preface 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 intrepid 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 then 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 reiterating 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 whoie 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 liminahty; the growing literature on margmality; 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 mv intollprtnai lnrUkwlnar... t„ C:J t— li ■ ■ i - - importaiit. 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 dishonest}' 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 recognized their influence in the text. It goes without saying that, in the end, I am solely responsible for all tire 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 Dart 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/ie 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 it toward regions of the unthought."2 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 interna] 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, tar 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 will 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, I 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 ; thf*. renter- T ; Mntei Hal inpspi l Am Preface ■ Jusdanis, Brook Thomas, Geoffrey Hartman, Joel Kuipers. Special thanks are due rny 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, wn0 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, .....DUt l 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. Contents " Introduction Balkanism and Orientalism: Are They Different Categories? 3 . 1: The Balkans: Nomen 21 2. "Balkans" as Self-designation 38 3. The Discovery of the Balkans 62 4. Patterns of Perception until 1900 89 5. 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 zi-j Index 251 Introduction Balkanism and Orientalism: Are They Different Categories? specter is haunting Western culture —the specter of the Balkans. All the powers /^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 Schimpfwörter, 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 backward, the primitive, the barbarian. In its latest hypostasis, particularly in American academe, it has been completely decontextualized and paradigmatically related to a varietyofproblems. That the Balkans have been described as the "other" of Europe doesnot 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-proclaimed label) was first seriously upset with the Balkans at the time of the Balkan wars (1912-1915). News of the barbarities committed in this distant European Mediterranean peninsula came flooding in and challenged the peace movements that not Oflly 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 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 theirielj'-f tion to international law. The report included an introduction by Baron d'Estourr-l] 51 de Constant reiterating the main principles of the peace movement: "Let us repeg*.^ for the benefit of those who accuse us of 'bleating for peace at any price,' whatwl have always maintained: War rather than slavery; Arbitration rather than war; CoiO dilation rather than arbitration."' De Constant differentiated between the first and the second Balkan wars1 th»vi first was defensive and a war of independence, "the supreme protest against violence J and generally the protest of the weak against the strong . . . and for this reason it wa£« glorious and popular throughout the civilized world." The second was a predatory^ war in which "both victor and vanquished lose morally and materially." Still, for atf! their differences, both Balkan wars "finally sacrificed treasures of riches, lives, atid'l heroism. We cannot authenticate these sacrifices without protesting, without de-* nouncing their cost and their danger for the future." While not optimistic aboul the*! immediate political future of the region, the commission concluded: "What then kM the duty of the civilized world in the Balkans? ... It is clear in the first place lliaf m they should cease to exploit these nations for gain. They should encourage the make arbitration treaties and insist upon their keeping them. They should set a, example by seeking a judicial settlement of all international disputes." De Con reiterated: Introduction 5 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 inevi- . table, 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 -:4 satisfied itself with reprinting the 1913 report, preceding its title with a gratuitous ■■■3 caption, "The Other Balkan Wars." Also added was an introduction by George -I Kennan, ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and to Yugoslavia in the 1960s, best known as the padre padrone of the U.S. policy of containment vis-a-vis the USSR 1 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 fi Abramowitz, which recounts his almost serendipitous idea to reopen the cighty-yeai- J 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 twentieth \ century, when yet again a conflict in the Balkans torments Europe and the conscience ^ of the international community." Abramowitz considers Kennan the person to best bridge the two events and instruct the conscience of the international communitv '■ j (which seems to have been tormented primarily by the Balkans throughout the twen- £ tieth century). We "all now benefit from his insight, his sure sense of history, and his i\ felicitous style."- Kennan's introduction began with a praise of peace movements in the Urutprt t\ States, England, and northern Europe that sought to rrpafc n^, l^^-i J—f ■■■ , . ^though the initiative for an international conference on dis--.cnia-n--i-J behawo ' , R ■ TsarNicholasII lt was "immature dilettantism,... irlT1ameritcarne om ^^.^ confusions 0f the Russian governmental establish-.ijbi'öteö b3'.tne . serioUS one." Its unsenousness notwithstanding, it was arm , « witn enthusiasm" by the proponents of peace who convoked the two Vi/ed «P°n w ferences and otner international initiatives. Having separated the [vcnt^the time,... not a serious ižed upon f » mgn frorn the dilettante boys, thus retrospectively essentializing cold war 'crl, . •„ 'Kennan described the historical context at the turn of the century, the "break of the Balkan wars, and the report ot the Carnegie commission. "The importance or this report for the world of 1993 ]ies primarily in the light it cast; 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 ■'Côňfinning thus his belief in the maxim "História est magistra vitae," the sec-uiiti part 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 rule, somewhat more moderate and thoughtful than their subjects. Their powers wcie 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, "Foxy Ferdinand," plunged his country into the second Balkan war, de-wire 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 foot in Bulgaria again. The "moderate" Milan Obrenovic humiliated Serbia in an adventurous war with Bulgaria in 1885, used by George Bernard Shaw .*&>f reduce his own "peacenik" variation on a Balkan theme. Kennan could have used sffhe 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 recently achieved so much, and this so suddenly, to know where to stop," No mention that the recent Balkan upstarts tinder 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 haits of character inherited, presumably, from a distant tribal past. .. . And so it remains todn V Ariel Vip rrmfirm/vl- 6 l.';.'n.(!:.'i'!fiV: What we are up against is the sad fact that developments of those earlier ages, lmi only those of the Turkish domination but of earlier ones as well, had the effect of ; thrusting into the southeastern reaches of the European continent a salient of non-™^ European civilization which has continued to the present day to preserve many (ffwf its non-European characteristics.7 Had Kennan's essay introduced the original report, written a whole year befc* the outbreak of World War I, one could empathize with its moral outrage even whifji overlooking its conceptual inaccuracies: at the time, it seemed that with little effM La Belle Epoque would endure forever. Mary Edith Durham was disgusted with w%l she saw of the Balkan wars but she was confident that this could not befalfcM 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 degrading, 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 Introduction 7 haunted Christianity, it seemed to me all civilisation shou1 J from further brutality.8 - ^1 Kennan, on the other hand, had full knowledge of the butcheries of the two world .-si wars, or else one should Assume that the spirit of Mary Edith Durham went to rest m .J 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 came*-'* from the Balkans, very few serious historians would claim that this was the cause ol?l World War I. World War II, however, had little to do with the Balkans, which were-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 taf 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 Balkan: • peoples of these particular qualities."9 | Kennan has been echoed by a great many American journalists who seem to be| 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."1" Her was quite right. In the Balkans they were killing over something that happened 50^ years ago; in Europe, with a longer span of civilized memory, they were killing over, something that happened 2,000 years ago. One is tempted to ask whether the Holo? caust resulted from a "due" or "undue" predominance of barbarity. It occured a whole* ~- x. 1 • managed to kill, in what Jean Baudrillard claimed was merely ^ofiocan technology * ^ of ^ wflr casualties incucred by all sides - .vent, at iw (( ^^ ^ ^ therfi was the Vietnam War, where Lm-thetwo Balkan wars ovverkilling or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week ... is not a "?!*sUPe3 "With the ease with which American journalists dispense accusations of ••^ocI$in' Bosnia, where the reported casualty figures vary anywhere between 25,000 it is curious to know how they designate the over three million dead VVtnamese 12 Whether the Balkans are non-European or not is mostly a matter of ^ Vmic and political debate, but they certainly have no monopoly over barbarity. a j{is notthis book's intention merely to express moral outrage at somebody else's moral outrage. The question is how to explain the persistence of such a frozen im-e How could a geographical appellation be transformed into one of the most powerful pejorative designations in history, international relations, political science, and, nowadays, general intellectual discourse? This question has more than a narrow -(icaclcmic relevance. It is the story of (1) innocent inaccuracies stemming from im-»isp»ct 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 subsequent reverse and retroactive ascription of the ideologically loaded designation to the region, particular!) 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 overwhelmed 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 cells' fafiesof evolution. There has appeared today a whole genre dealing with the prob-leftt'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.15 The discussion of orientalism has been also a subgenre of this concern with other-ness. Orientalism has found an important and legitimate place in academia as the 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."14 :v^.c~;..',vA!most two decades later, Said reiterated that his objection to orientalism was 5v grounded in more than just the antiquarian study of Oriental languages, societies, iind peoples, hut that "as a system of thought it approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; this suggests nofh an enduring Oriental reality' and an opposing but no less enduring Western gsj-^erjee, 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 bepn snnerecded as a whole. This is not the case in the Balkans. On the one hand, ' 14.1,„ voUvant Balkan languages 8 Introduction and thus has not yet entered the mainstream discourse. On the other hang _| that is 'true.'" Yet, like most impassionate renunciations, there was an inevitable*-! element of reductionism. Said had successfully addressed the charge that his nega?j3 tive polemic was not advancing a new epistemological approach.21 Despite his later strong declarations against imputing essentialism and » toricism to his category, Said overgeneralized speaking of a generic Orien that \ accommodated Aeschylus, Victor Hugo, Dante, and Karl Marx. Maybe he cou'.d nut ^ resist the display of literary erudition, but the treatment of Aeschylus's The Persicifl*|ag Introduction 9 from charges that he was essentializing Europe and the West.22 The ijt.!!'1^ i"1)1 Tancient Greek culture and its elevation to the founding status of ^'^ILarion was only a gradual and controversial historical process, whereas \\t-^i:riit.j account of the division of East and West suggested a suspicious 'tiia» terminology, Said's ambivalent loyalty to the humanist project is ^ ilh ■ricconcilable with Foucault s discourse theory with its "Nietzschean anti- ' ^'-lnisni and anti-realist theories of representation." Moreover, his transhistorical !t;» i-ilist discourse is ahistorical not only in the ordinary sense but is methodologi-'■ ilh i'nii-1 odcauldian, insofar as Foucault's discourse is firmly grounded in Euro-nrnodernity.23 Still, maybe one should listen more carefully to Said's latest self-^«eeis with its recurrent insistence on Islamic and Arabic orientalism, without even ii fume ci" mention of his detours into antiquity and the Middle Ages. When he ■ fh!>t "the reason why Orientalism is opposed by so many thoughtful non-Wcsfemers is that its modem discourse is correctly perceived as a discourse originat-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 stuvminiodate defensively, though discreetly, his past faults and inconsistencies rather than onenly admit to them. Then, it would be possible to ascribe his literary digressions (which, anyway, fill only a small part of his narrative) to a tension between his professional hypostasis as a literary critic and his growing identity as Palestinian intellectual; something that might explain the foregoing of theoretical rigor for a profound emotive effect. Oe.pite distinguished and undistinguished objections, the place of Orientalism and of "orientalism" in academic libraries and dictionaries has been secured. In a mote narrow sense, it acquired an enviable although contested prestige in avant-guaKiisr cultural theory; in a broader sense, it indicated possible venues of resistance and subversion. Said undoubtedly succeeded in crystallizing an existing concern at the proper-moment, in the proper mode.25 It is healthy to react against the iconlike status Said.Jias acquired both among his apostles and his opponents. To deny, however, or even downplay a connection with Said resembles (although on an incompa-rablv more modest level) the efforts to disclaim any connection with, and even profess-aversion for, Marx, while, quite apart from the consequences of where his M-lf-ui-ofessed. followers led, deeply internalizing and unconsciously reproducing Marx's immense contribution to how we theorize today about society. The continu-'iig teMJuance of Said's category is perhaps best explained by the growing awareness oHhidcntsof society "of the role of their academic disciplines in the reproduction of .. ..patterns of domination."26 In a broader context, Said's attack on orientalism was a specific critique of what has since become known as the general crisis of representation. More significantly, he posed the question not only in epistemological but also in moral terms: "Can one . chv.d,. Im™,, r»nl,-t,. ;„A^A U.,^„ r^1;u, ro0mc hP cpnuinplv divided, into 2o Introduction between scholarly knowledge and ideology and propaganda are not so sUai Iii, ward: "[IJt seems in the end that the two forms of discourse remain distinct tt^ production of scientific knowledge moves along a line that only occasional^ ;, sects with the production of popular mythology."64 Still, it would be fair tö rtiajj that academic research, although certainly not entirely immune from theaflli of balkanism, has by and large resisted its symptoms. This is not to say that a number of the scholarly practitioners of Balkan studies in the West do notshar i vately a staggering number of prejudices; what it says is that, as a whole, the fu' scholarly discourse restrict the open articulation of these prejudices. Balkanism evolved to a great extent independently from orientalism aL certain aspects, against or despite it. One reason was geopolitical: the separate ment, within the complex history of the Eastern question, of the Balkans as a gic sphere distinct from the Near or Middle East. The absence of a colonial (despite the often exploited analogies) is another significant difference. In the of ideas, balkanism evolved partly as a reaction to the disappointment of ilicWj! Europeans' "classical" expectations in the Balkans, but it was a disappointment\vi|| a paradigm that had already been set as separate from the oriental.65 The BalB$£§ predominantly Christian character, moreover, fed for a long time the crusjrlin» I potential of Christianity against Islam. Despite many attempts to depict ik :OrtW"J dox) Christianity as simply a subspecies of oriental despotism and thus as inhereÄpt non-European or non-Western, still the boundary between Islam and ChnstiaSfii in general continued to be perceived as the principal one. Finally, the construeWi I of an idiosyncratic Balkan self-identity, or rather of several Balkan self-identifies stitutes a significant distinction: they were invariably erected against an "orie other. This could be anything from a geographic neighbor and opponent"(a| often the Ottoman Empire and Turkey but also within the region itself as ■ ith the nesting of orientalisms in the former Yugoslavia) to the "orientalizing" ofporticdl one's own historical past (usually the Ottoman period and the Ottoman lef ■.: äsliillllB The Balkans Jjtq'iM: I do not like her name. Orlando; There was no thought of pleasing you when she.was christened. Shakespeare, "As You Like It" ',' iijNaming of Cats is a difficult matter, ■ it isn't just one of your holiday games; V first you mav think I'm as mad as a hatter When I tell vou a cat must have iUSEE*DIFFERENT NAMES, T. S. Eliot, "The Naming of Cats" "v s befits the obsession of present Western academic culture with language, the /Vlijlkan Specter that haunts it is not a character but a name, a signifies In a bVniirmnd ic Saussurean system of thought, the signifier is directly related to the ■ligiiit«!, as both arc elements of a unity. While insisting on their distinction, PYr ] and communities can actively create new meanings from signs and cultural proO uets which come from afar."2 Against such background, it is essentia] to retrace tM odysseys of consecutive attachments and reattachments of the signifier, in a wnrdj perform an exercise that in the nineteenth century would have been simply and eleay'yH designated as Begriffsgeschichte. ■' jj What, then, is the story of the name "Balkan"? In 1794, the British traveler ]Q\n I Morritt, then freshly out of Cambridge, set off on a journey through the Levant tkJ 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 Athos, and Afh< iJ On his way from Bucharest to Constantinople, he crossed the Balkan Mountains 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 next day's which separates Bulgaria from Romania (the ancient Thrace), and which, thou"^* now debased by the name of Bai.Kan, is no less a personage than the ancient I Haemus."3 It is only natural that for one of the "Levant lunatics" and future pronii- "1 nent member of the Society of Dilettanti, the territories of the Ottoman Empire first and foremost "classic ground" and any reminder of the present was, to s.-» tl« least, mildly annoying and debasing the illustrious ancient tradition. Yet, latefj accretions were a fact, no matter how displeasing, to be dealt with, and thev w:e duly recorded. |j This was one of the very first times the mountain chain that divides Bulgariff 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 Morntt anS many after him had used only the ancient term Haemus (Aemus for the ancjeifl Greeks and Haemus for the Romans).4 The ones who went beyond merely mentions ing the name accepted the ancient Greek descriptions that went unchallenged for • nearly two millennia. Edward Brown, the medical doctor and traveler from Norwich;§J author of popular and influential travels in 1669, maintained that Haemus contin-ued 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 century pre*§ ferred to use the classical term Haemus, butthey 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 Callimachus,. 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 III Warnenczyk, in which he left a short description of the Haemus, which he saw when he visited the Ottoman capital on diplomatic missions. In his 1490 memoran- ' dum to Pope Innocent VIII, Callimaco wrote that the local people used the name Balkan for the mountain- "nnpm n~i~u------- ■ *" The Baihans: Nomen 25 future Habsburg emperor Ferdinand I sent a diplomatic mission to '"bfroeT'orte with the task to negotiate a truce with the Ottomans and secure the 0if jj ilKtiuig control over Hungary and Transylvania. The mission was rrcogn'1^ ^iiton vr..,,či<', bishop of Peč since 1549. A Dalmatian, Vrancic came cntrtistc^^ Bosnian family that had fled the Ottoman conquest, and had been ^"Ajvafaáii bishop under Jánoš Zápolyai before offering his services to the ^^fur s An accomplished humanist, he was the author of numerous historical ^3[^eoíffaphičal treatises. During his visit to Istanbul in 1553, Vrancic kept a diary 'fv t vets between Vienna and Adrianople where he referred exclusively toHaemus 0 dřfaárnz mantes, and quoted as authorities ancient authors whom he found amaz-3111 • accurate. Although aware of Strabon's objection, Vrancic cited as plausible !>1 biusand other geographers who maintained that from the highest mountain peak could observe the Black Sea, the Adriatic Sea, and the Danube River. Over a decade later, in 1567, Vrancic 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 luring the nineteenth century: "Diarium legationis nomine Maximiliani II" and '"'Ratio itinens, quod est a Viena ad Constantinololum." The second was a detailed itinerary, marking distances between settlements and interspersed by geographic and other comments, where Vrancic mentioned the Bulgarian Slavic nameZřara Planina '] e Stará Planina, Old Mountain) for Haemus. The Italian Marco Antonio Pigafetti, ,vho travelled with Vrančič in 1567, also referred to Stará planina as the Bulgarian name of Emo.7 In fact, Vrancic was the first traveler to give the Bulgarian name, no doubt because he understood some of the local vernacular, Croatian being his native tongue. Stára Planina is a name tíiat 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 iWthe 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 University of Tübingen, he translated into Italian the short catechism of Luther, since many Christians of the Ottoman Empire understood Italian. After his return to Germany, he published a German translation of the Quran. Schweigger kept a journal of his travels in the 1570s, which was published in 1.608. In it, he gave a detailed description of the Haemus, for which he employed the terms Emum, Hemo, and Hemus. .i 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 if - also the only traveler to mention a Bulgarian Slavic name (which he called Croatian), ■st Gomonitza, for the mountain: [Haemus] is 6,000 feet high, i.e. one and a half German miles (Pliny, bk.IV). In v.:.. 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 nan or the Adriatic Sea is at more than 100 miles from the said mountain; Germany likewise is more than 100 miles afar. Haemus is known for the silver mines if once had, and the Italians therefore call it the Silver Mountain. The Turks call it Balkan, and the iocal population call it in the Croatian language Comonitza 9 Balkan was again used by Martin Griinberg in 1582, although he ascribed the Rhodopes.10 ReinhcJd Lubenau, who in 1628 completed the manuscript nf j-^ * travels between 1573 and 1587, apparently used Schweigger's information and ni^. I tioned both names in the forms Balban and Komoniza.u Balkan was used in 160^ by the Armenian traveler Simeon trir Lehatsi.12 Among the French, the name mentioned first, although erroneously, in the 1621 journal of the ambassador extras dinary Luois Deshayes de Cormanin: "This mountain, which separates Bulgaria frora^ Romania [the medieval designation of ancient Thrace], is called by the Italians 'Ghaijjf of the world,' and by the Turks Dervent, the name given to all mountains, covetejj with woods, just as Balkan is a name for bare cliffs, i.e. what the ancients knew bvfte name of Haemus."'3 This was a solitary mention and elsewhere Deshayes used ft? 'I ancient Haemus. ..... J Throughout the eighteenth century, Haemus and Balkan were increasingly Usei^l side by side or interchangeably. Caiptain Schad in 1740 specified he was writing about;! "the Balkan, or the mountain Haemus" or "Haemus which the Ottomans cait2 Balkan."1'' Ruggier Boscovich, a native of Dubrovnik and an eminent European sct.il entist and scholar (whom Dame Rebecca West in a characteristic slip described^* "a wild Slav version of the French encyclopaedists") crossed the mountains in 1762, I As a Dalmatian, he recognized in Bulgarian a Slavic dialect, and preferred to use-J tire designation Balkan although he was also aware that this was the ancient Haemus.15:^ Baron Francois de Tott was consistent in using Balkan in the 1770s, while in tel next decades Count D'Hauterive, Felix Beaujour, and Francois Pouqueville used J both Balkan and Haemus.16 The Armenians from the mechitharist congregation in the eighteenth century used almost exclusively Balkan, although they were aware also of the ancient name Emos. The famous twelve-volume "Geography of the Foul Directions of the World" by Hugas Indzhekian and Stepanos Agonts described tfi| Balkans as the mountain range crossing Bulgaria in the middle, and beginnings the border with Venice; it also supplied a name for one branch of the mountain n6| encountered among other travelers: Chenge.17 Both forms for the mountain continued to be used during the nineteenth cen«. tury. In the Austrian cartographer Franz von Weiss's 1829 map of European Turkey, the mountain was designated as Morcs Haemus oder Veliki Balkan Gebirge, while the branch between the Iskir River and Pirot was indicated as Stara planina.1* During the 1820s, Balkan became the preferred although not yet exclusive term alongside Haemus among British travelers, and A. W. Kinglake's Eothen used only "Balcan."19 Among Russian travelers not so burdened by classical toponymy, Balkan was the preferred term for the mountain chain. In 1808, during the Russo-TurkisKj war, Captain Alexander Krasnokutskii was sent to Constantinople to negotiate witKj the grand vizier Mustafa Bayraktar. He crossed the mountain twice—at Sliven and through the Shipka Pass—and left an astonishing account of the beauty and majestg The Balkans: Nomen 25 asing preference at first affected only the name of the mountain. In The iricreasi g , i- prrrmPn„<, DerceDtion that Haemus, the for- . The increasing piciv-^—.....----- -- - , Robert Walsh repeated the earner erroneous perception that Haemus, the for ^I'l Ic mountain chain, stretched for over 500 miles, beginning at the Bay of Venic< 1! H 'achinf the Black Sea. Now this chain was called Balkan, which meant a dif-- ■["tn.ountain. It is symptomatic that none of the travelers used Balkan as a com-dlLornination of the peninsula. It was applied exclusively as a synonym for the nl°" \t in Haemus. The first to coin and use the term "Balkan Peninsula" (Balkan-'i']0i'i' land) was the German geographer August Zeune in his 1808 work "Goea." The ' ' coi]ech've use of Balkan as a description of the whole peninsula by a British trav-']er was by Walsh in 1827, who mentioned that the bishops in this region were 3j (i\; Greeks, and used their own language as the liturgical language "in the Balkans," £,1(.,rL]y in the southern parts and predominantly in the northern parts.2' The reason why Balkan became one of the most often used designations (alongside southeastern Europe) has little to do with precise geography. In fact, for over two millennia geographers reproduced the dominant ancient Greek belief that the Jl'ienihs was a majestic mountain chain linking the Adriatic and the Black Sea, with 3 domiii'int 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 the Thracians inhabiting the immediate hinterland. It appeared among the Logogiaphoi as ''Aimcri 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 b.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 ol King Philip climbing the mountain Haemus. This picturesque account, although often reproduced even in the modern period, was given little cre-.. dence: 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 :?.natural border between the Thracian-Heilenistic world and the barbarian lands along the Danube. Among the Romans, the oldest preserved Latin geography of Pomponius Mela horn the tirst 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 .76,000 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, lik-ened 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 ;: Conrnena, the great Byzantine writer and princess, believed that, though interrupted "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"! Vj experience of being called Balkan? How do the ones defined as belonging geo-* graphically or historically to the Balkans deal with the name? Do they consider them- f selves Balkan and what is meant by this? Several qualifications are in order. This hi not a historical survey of the process of creating self-identities and self-designation;1 Rather, it aims at conveying an idea of present images and emotions as they are at-ticulated 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 I "Balkan." Yet, I am doing it in a conscious breach of seeming methodological con-:i sistency 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 readerj cognizant of the dominant self-perceptions in the Balkans, so that proceeding through! 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 pas-' sionately on both methodological and moral grounds. Therefore, lest I commit the ' same fallacy ot essentialism I claim to oppose, I would like to introduce the stipula-i tion 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 j of other multiple identities define (i.e., refect, accept, are ambiguous about, or indJf-' ferent 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--- tntheifl "Balkans" as Self-designation 39 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 of 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 keen 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 external and internal observers, but by means of common cultural sources, riot 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, grossness. 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 his-..tory 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 ofa 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 painfully. 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 savage only on his return, among his own, where he is the nouveau riche and newly hatched corrupt politician; "at the beginning he is the funny oddball of the Balkan province Lllio ----l:i:..lf----:--------1-*-----J^1---- 40 Imagining the Balkans There is no doubt that by creating Bay Ganyo, Aleko was targeting vulgarity ancj 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 of costume 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 is "> not by any means the same ingenious person as the peasant, who is of the same stocV 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-fhe-world."3 Compare this lengthy quote with its implicit romanticizing of the simple peas- " ant 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,' foreign European point of view, but from within, from the point of view of a Bulgai- ' ian European. I am stressing "Bulgarian European," and not "Europeanized Bulgarian," because Aleko's Europeanness came not as a result of a direct sojourn iii -. any Western European country (his education was entirely in Bulgarian and Russian 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 I halo understand Bay Ganyo, one should begin with Aleko: "Take the opposite of Iky 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 cen--" tury, 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, (here is no sweet romantic reminiscing about a peasant arcadia. It is the story of a Bulgar-ian, 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 West-ernized 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 ; {Constantino v in America, atthe 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 predatory 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 ofSerb 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 rme'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 "pic-■turesque in appearance and, amongst the peasantry, earnest and hard-working. He ..lis, 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 everted. 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 apdy called the "knight of the primitive accumulation of capital."11 Nor has Rav Ganvo been a solitary fipure. 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 en-"! tered Romanian everyday speech.12 Writers at the turn of the century were not look--1 ing 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's • 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 culti-vated oligarchy, as incapable of useful production or thought as it is greedy of profits and honors, has monopolized the state power; with cruel 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. . . .n On the Yugoslav scene, it was Branislav Nusie (1864-1938) 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 process, [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 particular homo haikanicm 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 national 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 longue 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..; tbp Rail "Balkaris" as Self-designation 43 ; jjj.e]y that this particular preoccupation is a typically intellectual one and, as such, is confined to the literary languages. What did exist in the Balkan vernaculars of •'{he 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 the 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 lie west of them, they speak of'going to Europe,' thereby avowedly considering ^gjxiseives 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 Európa 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." As an Englishman, Upward lamented the centrality of France in this image of F.urope, 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 ][, 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 have 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 stín 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 1988, 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 go to Europe," it is not a resigned posture of nonbelonging. The exultant celebration of Greece in v. Khutv^ A/T„!„„'_______ -U1_____1____:..iL. :ll Ci.J .. .1.. .J..-.1.1. 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 land 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 havuv 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 be- ■ 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,...: the Spirit, passed by this place and stayed."24 Like all national identities, the Greeks have a hierarchy of multiple identities: a. contemporary Greek would describe him or herself first as Greek, then with a local':1: 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,;:: 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- : days this role is not considered a priority. Official pronouncements are unequivo-:. cal: "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- .; as '^erve a static organic notion—a nexus of state, nation, religion, and Greekness formulated 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 disputes over identity and the Angst in some circles over losing their essence—the ■Ronreiosini—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 r995, 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 Christianity explains that "exploiting the Balkan and Albanian paternalistic tradition, fifty years of hardline communism totally devastated the moral and spiritual values of man." This paternalism "is a socio-psyehological model typical of the Balkan peoples, reinforced 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 European civilization and Christian values."" This frank appeal to Christian values 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 univer-salism and pluralism of the European or Western discourse. The Albanian professor was doing simply what others before him had practiced: externalizing undesired 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 Lahnism 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 Ionescu de la Brad, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, A. Pelimon, D. Rallet, Maior Pappazoglu, Cezar Bohac,. 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.33 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 writings 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 Romania" 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 Yet, lorga 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 lorga '$■■■ vision, L'Europe du sud-est or L'Europe sud-orientale 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, lorga 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.36 The idea of a Southeast European continuity was further developed by B. P. Hajdeu 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 Bahama. "Balkans" as Self-designation 47 yet «hat wasmaybe the most brilliant cluster of Romanian intellectuals, "Romania's fEtvstical revolutionaries," firmly refused to be associated with the Balkans: their nieasurmS r0<^ was ^estern> 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 generation shared the prestigious prize of the Young Romanian Writers Association 'Tri the 1930s: Emil Cioran, Constantin Noica, and Eugene Ionesco. A fourth, Mircea Jjliade. was the "recognized spiritual leader of the Young Generation." Between them, they dominate the intellectual horizon of today's post-Ceausescu Romania, "where many 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 seduction of his 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, Jonesco attributed the phenomenon of the Iron Guard to some imputed Balkanness: A" 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)] 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 exteinalization 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 There was a definite ambiguity also in Cioran's image of the Balkans that came frmn h 48 Imagining the Balkans "Balkans" as Self-designation 49 and after the war, in History and Utopia in i960. He was still expecting an anticapu talist revolution but, disappointed with the failure of the Russian revolution, witnessed with disgust the stabilization of the decadent West, though with the mellow tired-: ness of old age. Still, even in his later book, the Nietzschean fire was present in the ■' "cult of force, of instinct, of vitality and will to power, which are represented—the West being so exhausted—by Russia and even by the Balkan peoples."43 The latter, . with their "taste for devastation, for internal clutter, for a universe like a brothel on fire" were the "last 'primitives' in Europe [who] may give her a new energy, which.. she will not fail to regard as her last humiliation."44 Even with due credit to Cioran's famous posture as gadfly, his love of paradox for the sake of the aesthetics of the exercise, there was something more to his thought.' He distinguished between major, aggressive, and messianic cultures (like the French.: German, and Russian), and small or minor cultures that were weak because they. lacked a mission in the world. Cioran expressed uncompromising aversion for the . Romanian peasantry's unredeeming backwardness, passivity, and fatalism, but still'" thought that Romania's culture could reach an intermediary status between the major. and the minor ones (like the culture of Spain) and dominate the Balkans.45 Both ' Cioran and Eliade subsequently denied links to the Iron Guard, in Cioran's case with vehemence and contempt for the movement. Yet Cioran contributed in the 1930s,: to ultranationalist and Guardist newspapers eulogizing Hitler and the Nazis and "urging Romanians to . . . enjoy the politics of delirium," Eliade, too, had published in 1937 an article entitled "Why I believe in the Triumph of the Legionary Movement" in the Guardist newspaper Buna Vestire in which he declared: "I believe in the destiny of the Romanian people. That is why I believe in the victory of the ! .1-gionary movement. A nation that has demonstrated huge powers of creation at all; levels of reality cannot be ship-wrecked at the periphery of history in a Balkanized . democracy, in a civil catastrophe,"46 Even the repudiation of democracy had to carry...... the Balkan stigma. Finally, Constantin Noica, the only one not to leave Romania, who did not and could not deny his brief ties with the Guardists, for which he was persecuted until 1964, was destined to become the cultural guru to Romania's young intellectuals in the 1980s.47 The theme of Romania's uniqueness was continued in the postwar period and. reached its frenetic culmination under Ceausescu, as a compensatory mechanism for the self-conscious and troublesome feeling of being trapped in an ambiguous status, the in-betweenness of East and West. One would have thought that the performance of Romania in the last decade of Ceausescu's rule would have sobered : somewhat the exclusiveness of Romanian intellectuals, at least in their rapport to the other Balkan nations, at least for some time. There are some indications for that; there are others against. Today, one can hear different signals from a chorus of voices striving to get out of isolation. Some are mediocre reiterations on the theme of Latin island in a Slavic or Asiatic sea. A member of Vatra Romaneasca speaks of the tolerant Romanians who welcome Hungarians and Jews and who are different from the easy-to-manipulate Slavs, with their mass mentality, and trom the cruel, brutal, and heartless Asiatic Hungarians.48 Lucian Pintilie, the acclaimed film director of Un- !+atf*A' "Tf +Hf tr ic rmp rpcrimf with which t ldpnhfv hour-*;; eojs regime up to the arrival of the Communists. And I'm proud to belong to a people fnown for their tolerance."49 More thoughtful contemplations indicate an identity that vacillates nervously over the reopened borderline between the Balkans and Central Europe, and more generally between West and East, a country embodying the "transition between Occident and the great Asian Orient," "some kind of no-man's land, not European at all. but not Asiatic at all."'0 As a whole, Balkanness is a deprecatory category to which Romanians rarely allude. While having made and continuing to make major contributions to Balkan studies, the Romanian academic community is the only one in the Balkans that does not employ the term Balkan studies, but has organized its research in the Inst it utdes etudes sud-est europeennes, with its mainpublicationRevue etudes sud-est europeennes. In 1975. Niyazi Berkes, an eminent Turkish sociologist and historian, wrote that "Turkey today is neither a Western nor a Moslem nation; it does not belong to a Christian, socialist, or capitalist community. . . . It is neither Asian nor European. .. . The dominant direction of Ottoman history has tilted more toward the west than toward the east. But its adherence to an eastern cultural reference has prevented Turkev's inclusion in the Western world."'1 This sounds like the perpetual Balkan refrain of in-betweenness, except that in the Turkish case the Balkans are not remotely •••a-'decisive vector. In the long list of dichotomies—Asian or European; Muslim or secular; settled or nomadic; grandchildren of Mehmet the Conqueror or children of Atatiirk; "the sword ol Islam or a Christian punishment"; Ottoman orphans or Turkish citizens; conquerors or conquered; warriors or civilians; part of the West or de-fenders of the West; army, community, or nation; contemporary society or historical bridge; "Eastern, Anatolian, or Western"—the Balkans are not even considered as an alternative.52 The reason for this has been suggested to be a particular case of repression. On the one hand, some Turkish historians have emphasized that the Ottoman state began as a Balkan empire, that the Balkans remained the priority of the Ottoman Empire throughout its existence, and that through its historical continuity modern Turkey is ,1 Balkan state. This view found its culmination in the passionate plea of Turkey's :date president TurgutOzal for acceptance of his country into the European Economic Community. His book Turkey in Europe and Europe in Turkey was dedicated to "the /peoples of Europe and to the Turkish people who belong among them."53 He questioned the usual East-West dichotomy: "Do the categories 'Asia' for the barbarians, and 'Europe' for the civilized and civilizing Indo-Europeans, correspond to reality?" He further claimed that the Ottoman conquest of Anatolia saved and preserved the Orthodox church which, had it been captured by Western Europe and the papacy, would have perished.54 Finally, he took considerable pride in the Ottoman Empire's Byzantine-Balkan heritage: If the Roman Empire represented the extent of the spread of Western culture, it also played a no less important part in the structure of the Ottoman Empire. In addition to the contributions of the Greeks, whether converted to Islam or not, the Ottomans received from the East Roman Empire the entire Balkan heritage, in- rllirllr,^ l,„„„lf 55 50 Imagining the Balkans On the other hand, the Balkans were the first geographic region where the-M Ottomans began to loose territory, and this shaped a feeling of resentment and bi trayah " [T]he loss of Balkan territories has functioned as a major trauma leading to-lf a deeper preoccupation with the survival of the state among both the members of -I 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 If The attitude toward the Balkans, however, is much more complex, and reflects 'K ideological tendencies, group interests, and individual preferences. There is, for: <] example, a meeting ground between the official republican nationalist ideology and-' 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 theff territorial aspect of Turkish nationalism has led to the widespread idea that the Balkans diverted precious attention and energy from "the pure Tivrkishness" of Anatolia, and in the end "betrayed" the Turks. This feeling informed the popular 1960s series of S newspaper articles and interviews by Yilnraz Cetinler in Cumhuriyet under the title "This Rumelia of Ours," published later under separate cover and in a revised edi- i 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 rcvanchisfc or irredentist designs.56 :| It is chiefly among conservative intellectuals opposed to the republican ideol-f ogy that the memory of the Balkans is kept alive. This is not, however, the almost benevolent and romantic nostalgia of descendants of or even first-generation Turk-j ish immigrants from the Balkans. On the contrary, it exhibits a hostile and haughty f 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 j Giirsel published impressions of his 1993 and 1994 visits to Bosnia, Macedonia;-! Greece, and Bulgaria in a charming volume "Return to the Balkans," dedicated te«| all the dead in the Balkan soil and to all friends living in the Balkans. It is a warm, = human description calling on friendship and cooperation between all Balkan peoples, which nevertheless falls into the trap of idealizing the Ottoman Empire as a real pax.' ottomana for the Balkan nations and ascribes their cessession and particularly the f Balkan wars to the instigation of imperialist states6" Many advocate a geopolitical J 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 her journey into the twenty-first century.. .. Anatolia is a region that quenches the Turkish., spirit The Balkans introduce Turkey to the world dimensions."6' While there is no-' r rr..;_i thp Ralkans have reentered the»- "Balkans" as Self-designation 51 The East-West dichotomy, on the other hand, is central, 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 them 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, -gast is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." For Ziya Gokalp, this was the organic blend of the Turkish people, the Islamic community and Western civilization; in the words ot the Turkish author and critic Peyami Safa, it is a synthesis between East and West, between Turkishness and Islam.62 A poet like Fazil '■ 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.0 . . A new wave in the quest forTurkish 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 reconc/uisfd 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 prominently in Turkish scholarship, they have managed to create a respectable niche for themselves: a new journal, Balkanlar, is published by the Ortadogu ve Balkanlar incemeleri Vakfi, and there is a commission for Balkan Studies (Balkan ara§tinnalari homisyonu) at the Turkish Historical Society. Alongside Bulgaria, Turkey is the only ...Qther 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 centra] category of identity. In times of extreme crisis, identities may become vague or else, perhaps more 52 Imagining the Balkans less, yet with the sharply outlined spheres of belonging or exclusion that come the fore under intense stress.64 With the Yugoslav problem in the limelight today "k one would have expected the obvious fault lines in her case to be the ones between Croatianness and Yugoslavness. In fact, Ugresic's subtle description leaves the fin/ pression of a fault line in the making, of a tissue torn in unexpected and painful places''"-' not a clear and neat cut. Two years later, this process was still unfinished for Ugrcsie when she refused to be circumscribed by an ethnic category and defined herself at';.? "anational," in the rubric "others."6' More interesting for our purpose here is \}tt: broader framework of identification, not the painful ambiguities within. Selling in '■? an Amsterdam cafe, Ugresic needs a larger frame of reference to define her place":-, (or lack of) than the borders of Yugoslavia. So she sips her coffee and jots down':: opposition pairs on a piece of paper: organized-disorganized, tolerance-intolerance,,--: civihty-primitiveness, rational consciousness-mythic consciousness, predictability.^: unpredictability, citizen-nationality, and so on; the first column she calls Western*-Europe, the second Eastern Europe: And at once it seems that I clearly see this Eastern Europe. St sits at my table and we look at each other as if in a mirror. I see twisted old shoes neglected skin cheap makeup, an expression of servility- and impudence on its face. It wipes its mouth with its hand, it speaks too loud, it gestures as it speaks, it talks with its eyes. I see a glow of despair and cunning in them at the same time; I see the desperate desire to be "someone." . . . My sister, my sad Eastern Europe.66 This is an important identification given that Yugoslavs throughout the cold-war period proudly refused to identify with Eastern Europe and looked down on it. Ugresic -herself describes how, in the better days of Yugoslavia, when confronted with ques-.:;j tions about life behind the "iron curtain," she would explain "that we are not 'like ' them,' like Romania, Bulgaria, or Czechoslovakia. We are something else." Only at a moment when Eastern Europe is disintegrating, and part of it, claiming not to be;:: even Eastern but Central European, looks with aversion and a feigned mcor.iprc-hension at the Yugoslav quandary as if it belongs to an entirely different species, dues it become possible for Yugoslavs to refer to Eastern Europe, and in a moment o£~: despair to recognize it as an equal, a mirror image. This goes even more so about the relation of Yugoslavia to the Balkans. Twice, Ugresic mentions them by name. Once, when among the different positive qualities:-of her Yugoslavia—what she calls her "trump card"—she speaks of "the beauty of Dubrovnik, the diversity of cultures in a small Balkan country, the beauty of our co.'st, the advantages of our self-management, our relative democracy, our free passport: our absence of censorship, our variant of soft communism."67 These are all, of course,/;' the staple advertising lures of a tourist agent, tailored for the Western customer. They: ■ all relate to the whole spectrum of the West's professed beliefs and preferences, and would serve different, even opposing tastes: here some sunny Adriatic with a touch* of cultivated Renaissance Italy in Dubrovnik for either curious and adventurous i westerners or for second-class ones who cannot afford Venice or the Riviera; there a bit of multiculturalism a la halkanique and some soft communism for -university n rrvfil PTAr f on/1 <-i4Jl"i j=i I" *-ii-i1tE>.'"iiji11t.' Afii-r/i/-d in$-rt.ll»-irt4~i-ij-ili'i 111 lin nr;i n.ini-1 niii^ nk/iiii 4-1™. fi flrl 3 of tne country, compose a by Lion of the Balkans, thy winged spirit glorious, Balkan Mountains are also a central image in the present national hymn. oassionate troubadour of the Balkans was the poet Pencho Slaveikov, maybe ;r5~!f°i jj^ellectual among a brilliant group of modernist poets at the turn of the ^ ^ r who had immortalized the mountain in his epic poem Kirvava pesen (The SSSie Blood): Hither and thither was I carried by Fate, Hither and thither in the labor of my days, gut always there stood before me and always there will stand The shape of the proud, the wonderful Balkan, For I hold it in my soul's sacred place Balkan, 0UT 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 thev 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 m 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 jn 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 Ihat Balkan might mean something ignoble, although less than a decade later the name was already saturated with a pejorative meaning: 56 Imagining the Balkans The word "Balkan" should not in this case be narrowly applied, that is, not mei^y . v to the glorious troop of mountains which from the north-west set out on tbci-mysterious journey, which proceed through the center oFBulgaria and hasten tn~';S* wards the east, where in magnificence they tower above the Black Sea, listening to the sleepless waves and their unconquerable song. "Balkan" is the name of all mountains that are scattered over the peninsula which lies to the south of the "\v and silent Danube" —and despite the fact that every mountain has its own na fair, melodious and intertwined with memories and poetic legends.80 The Balkan range as a pillar of Bulgarian independence and symbol of its uil ; tionhood continued to be a central theme in the works of contemporary writers li]^. -' Emiliyan Stanev, Iordan Radichkov, and Georgi Dzhagarov. It was taken up als'o^ philosophers and historians who emphasized the crucial role of mountains 111 gei!. eral, and of the Balkan range in particular, in Bulgarian history: "Without the Balka^S and then also without the mountains on our soil, here in the European southeast • what has existed now for so many centuries under the name of Bulgarians wortlr] " hardly have survived and might not have appeared." "The Balkan in our history" w^.l Petir Mutafchiev's popular historical essay that illustrated the role of the mountain - rpporti its centuiics-old struggles witE; Byzantium. Himself a medievalist, Mutafchiev drew on numerous examples frn;n Byzantine sources to show the decisive strategic significance of the mountain range for preserving Bulgarian statehood. His essay ended at the time of the Ottoman ccr,- _______1 ii_.. T>_n_____ _ . íLieiiu, luč i->£iiKtiu inu iiur ucuay us uucy ro protect i the Bulgarian state from its mighty neighbor. And if several centuries later it did not succeed in defending it from the hordes of Bayezid, this was because medieval Bulgaria, having exhausted its life-force in an existence filled with insoluble contradict tions, was stepping into its own grave,81 What is remarkable about this essay, despite its occasional romantic affectations^ typical for the interwar period, is the fact that "Balkan" was the name employed^ unreservedly by Mutafchiev. For a first-class medievalist, conversant with his sources' and faithfully reporting from them the only existing name "Haemus," to utilize'.':": "Balkan" (the designation brought by "Bayezid's hordes") indicated merely the ex-tea! to which the name was deeply and firmly rooted in the Bulgarian language and);.1 imagination. These literary examples can be continued ad infinitum but there aw more than literary proofs for the special place that "Balkan" has among the :' " -mean that travelers' accounts or other descriptions were only a post-eighte'ej century phenomenon. Many of the earliest reports, especially the ones compile political observers, intelligence officers, and diplomats, were often the prodii keener eyes and better informed than some of the later travelers' accounts N "discovery" a precise term to describe the earlier accounts, implying that areas1,. : known in antiquity and the Middle Ages were subsequently obliterated frorfi i],., I memory of the West and had to be "rediscovered" anew. Byzantine and Balkan the had always been present to some degree in West European historiography and erature, but after the fifteenth century there was growing individualization and c creteness rather than a literal "rediscovery."8 Several circumstances make the later accounts significant and the object r,f j immediate interest. First, one can trace in them the beginnings and gradual foi tion of a perception of the Balkans as a distinct geographic and cultural entity, ral than just the site of classical history or the provinces to be traversed on the way to I he" f Ottoman capital. Second, they were produced and published for a comparative^1'- J broad-reading but enthusiastic public; thus, these travelers functioned as latter-cky | journalists: they shaped public opinion, expressing themselves the dominant taster f and prejudices of their time. Almost none of the earlier descriptions were specif-cally written for publication: with a few notable and influential exceptions, most were' published either in very limited editions, which turned them immediately into bibliographical rarities, or only later in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, which'-confined them mostly to a scholarly clientele. Some, popularized at a later stage;-introduced perceptions or earlier prejudices in the formation of a comprehensive' image. Third, it is precisely among the later accounts that one can trace the combination of almost all elements that have shaped the existing stereotype of the Balkans--. ■ I Of course, some elements can be observed already in the travelogues and descriD-; | tions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: after all and pace Troeltsch -.vlio I saw the commencement of moderity only in the eighteenth century, they were writ- : ten at the beginning of the same period of history in which we are still partaking, the,--declared advent of the postmodern predicament notwithstanding. Many have accepted with Henri Pirenne that with the arrival of Islam, the "Vlecli-terranean world" was irretrievably split into two irreconcilable camps of Christianity',/ and Islam, which cut medieval Christendom from its sources in the Near East. The establishement of the Ottomans in the southeastern corner of Europe was the final blow to the crusading urge of the West to reestablish this connection. The successful Ottoman expansion toward Central Europe until the end of the sixteenth cen-tury kept the idea of crusade alive, at least several decades after the Battle of Lepanto'. ■ in 1571 and even in the wars of the Holy Leagues until the end of the seventeenth ■::' century when the recession of the Ottoman Empire in Europe finally became defi-. '■' nite and irrevocable. It would be a simplification to maintain that there was a homo-geneous and monolithic response of the "West" to the "Ottoman peril," although ■ ■' 1 The Discover)'of the Balkans 65 nd literary works dealing with the Ottomans far outnumbered those dedi-l0SlCiiQ j-he discover}' of the New World.9 However, what came to prevail in the '3li> s with the new European power were considerations of balance of power ' 1' 'tj'inspiring the famous Franco-Ottoman alliance) as well as the desire to bet-'^'briovi' and accommodate the new masters of important trade routes and lands.10 Jbcse had always been travelers traversing the peninsula, but most were in a to cross and reach the two focal points of attraction: the Holy Land and ^nstaritinople- Among European writings from the first centuries of Ottoman rule, ^narrative accounts of travelers par excellence occupy a relatively modest place, he Bulk being works of anti-Ottoman polemic and propaganda, descriptions of mili-iv campaigns> and political treatises.11 No doubt, the best knowledge of the Otto-íiilŠ 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 (Vindámental 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 skilliul diplomacy between appeasement, collaboration, neutrality, 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 pahiciate. 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- I 66 Imagining the Balkans century saw the peak of Catholic propaganda in the Balkans, through the activjf"'^ of the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith, founded in Rome in 1622 h^Z special missionary policy toward the Balkan Slavs, the Counter-Reformation was v! "an ideologically motivated force as well as a product of a system of Western al^A ances directed against the Turks."1' In 1637, Francesco Bracciolini, former secreta^f to Antonio Barberini, cardinal and head of the Propaganda Fide, dedicated a poe(; "~ devoted to the Christianization of Bulgaria to the cardinal. This came at a time Protestantism viewed Greek Orthodoxy as closer to the evangelical tradition and h I' made several attempts to promote closer ties with it. An openly polemical and pjft, pagandist piece, "La Bulgheria Convertita" was also a baroque morality tale strut/ tured around the dichotomy of Good and Evil, Evil being represented by the tri| force of schismatic Orthodoxy, Islam, and Protestantism.14 Papal propaganda ( seminated in the vernaculars of the region, made a sustained and successful effort (^-f acquire immediate and detailed knowledge of the different Slavic peoples. In this I respect, it continued the Venetian diplomatic legacy of keen and concrete observv-''! tions. The intimacy of Venice's, and later Italy's, relations with the Balkans was promoted also by the continued presence of Balkan emigres, particularly the prosper-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 Porte, "| Italy acted as intermediary between east and west in a complicated relationship fined as "Italo-Greco-Russian symbiosis." Italy's traditional ties to the Balkan world -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 idea1; to ' Greece, and from thence to the rest of the Balkans.10 At the same time, maybe be-" -cause of its physical proximity or because it did not become organically afflicted with'"1 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 produccda " demonized antagonist epitomizing the hereditary enemy of Christendom. This pro*J paganda was utilized for internal political problems, closely linked to the issues of absolutism and the "social disciplining" of the population.'7 At the same time, the popular mind was deeply marked by what has become known as "TurkennotuncL Tiirkenfurcht" (Turkish troubles and Turkish fright) attested for by numerous folksongs, sermons, and specific customs.18 On the other hand, the image of the Ottoman Empire in the travel literature or the same period was remarkably different from the abstract stereotypes of the prop*: panda materials The nprrpntivp nhsprvntinns hmirnl fnr tl-ip Vptiptian rolMioni fiaVt--. The Discovery of the Balkans 67 e travel literature, which has left the most numerous, detailed, and informed "3!'^nts of the Balkans from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.19 These were aL°\ rdescriptions of regions coming from journals compiled during official diplo-missions to the Porte, but also diaries of merchants, pilgrims, or war prisoners. 3ia*'C writers were usually high-ranking officials of the Habsburg Empire with excel- t^ditcation, often leading humanist scholars. Some of them were of Slavic 'tni .. n Slovenian, Czech, and so on) descent, which gave them an additional Sdiacy of observation. ffhe intimate knowledge and detailed interests of the Habsburg emissaries made ^liaise much more sensitive to the ethnic differences in the peninsula, and many ''the sixteenth-century travelers —Kuripesic, Vrancic, Dernschwamm, Busbecq, Gerlach' Schweigger, Lubenau—differentiated correctly between Slavic groups and [eft valuable descriptions of costumes, dances, and customs among Serbs, Bulgar-'ans 'Dalmatians, and so forth. There was a wealth of concrete knowledge often missing (:om the later observation of travelers from lands farther away from the QrJorhan Empire. Anton Vrancic has given one of the first and most detailed descrip-noni of the hairstyle and headgear of Bulgarian women, a favorite topic among $urop£tin 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. Vrancid, 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 them asked us whether onr 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 weie the few travelers of nonaristocratic provenance, like Hans Dernschwamm or Reinhokl 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 family in Konissbere, the Protestant Lubenau received a good education 68 Imagining the Balkans aversion to Catholicism. Once entering Bulgaria, he gave detailed descriptions of the language and dress of its inhabitants. Far from being surprised, let alone shocked, by their clothing, Lubenau sensibly remarked that "the men go around with long 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 women, with their colorful shirts, and ornaments, adorned themselves just like "the Pruss: Estonian, Kurlandish, Russian and Lithuanian women do in our parts, so that thirre is no difference. When I reached the Danube, I thought that the Lithuanian won had moved there from their lands." This is a world apart from the mockingly shoe description of Vrancic. 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 had learned some Czech, Lubenau wrote that he found it easy to communicate with Ihe local inhabitants who were speaking Croatian or Slavic. (He maintained that the S over the whole huge territory of Poland, Lithuania, Russia, the Czech lands, Moravi.i, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Thrace, Macedonia, Dalmatia, Albania, Illyria, and ., on were speaking the same language which he called Slav or Dalmatian.) Lubenau was told that the women with the strange decorated hats were descendants of the old Bulgarian noble houses that had disappeared, and found this the proper moment to add some of his own philosophical reflections on aristocracy, using Bulgaria as the scene for a morality tale: T . . . n i - ,! ■ 1-1-, ! <.....!. -i - - •■ - .11 il- - rn....l. 1 Ill Li]is courtuy DLUgana inert is HO uuDimy wnaoucvci, jusi a= in an uic i uiwsu lands. . . . Many coming from the families of ancient rulers, even the ones from the house of the Paleologues, are 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 Habsbnrg 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 Vrancic'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 col-lected. 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- 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, when going into detailed description of institutions and events, the writers were favorably impressed by the efficiency of Ottoman bureaucracy and the organization 0f its military force, by the sobriety of the society in contrast to the alcohol problem jn the German lands, even by their friendly disposition. It was in this period of harsh interdenominational struggles and wars in most of Europe, thatthe toleration, albeit vyith 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 ...0f 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 of newly discovered peoples, mixing up ethnic and local names, social and professional groups, and sobriquets: "Hussaren, Heydukken, Tolpatchen, Insurgenten, Sclavoniern, Panduren, Varasdinern, Lycanern, Croaten, Morlaken, Rairzen, Walachen, Dalmatinem, Uskoken," that is, hussars, robbers, Butterfingers, insurgents, Slavs, Albanian guards, inhabitants ofVarasdin, 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 ::iale to fill in the negative extreme of the picture. The tableau compares these figures in seventeen categories: temperament, nature, intellect, vices, passions, knowledge, 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 intelligent and wise, the Frenchman as cautious, the German as witty, and the Englishman 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 m everything, and the Russians were dissenters. The Turco-Greek was described as -o Imagining the Balkans able," the German "imitating," the English "following the French ways," to the] dress of the Poles, the many colors of the Hungarians, the furs of the Russians -"^f the womanly dress {"auf Weiber art") of the Turks and Greeks. While Spartj^jí* French, Germans, and English were compared to elephants, foxes, lions, andhoi Poles, Hungarians, Russians, and Turco-Greeks were matched with bears, v.q] !' donkeys, and rats. More significantly, however, they were all "European naj!0 For our purposes, of course, the most interesting aspect was the monolithic vi j0 the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire, a vision that was very different from the i\.. dichotomy between Christians (albeit Orthodox) and Muslims, something that ca>j' be explained with the deteriorating stage of knowledge of the European southeast £u this period. i It was only after the end of the seventeenth century that a substantive shifl perception of the Ottomans set in with the Enlightenment. The reassessment of thf1 image of Islam in general and the creation of a positive Ottoman image in particular! was pioneered in France but gradually also influenced the Germans.28 Gerard' Cornelius Driesch served as "secretary and historiographer" to the magna legaiio to Constantinople by the Habsburg emperor in the wake of the Peace of Passarcnvifc -in 1718. He published his bulky Latin journal in 1721 in Vienna, and two Germaii f editions followed in Augsburg and Nürnberg. Not only was Driesch's account tremely well informed, a virtual treasury about everyday life in the Ottoman Empire-he openly admired certain aspects of the Ottoman social and political system, par-" ticularly the absence of hereditary aristocracy, which he contrasted positively tothgt behavior of the Habsburg nobility.29 | Captain Schad, traveling through the Balkans in 1740 and 1741, shared these vieivs -but prefaced the first part of his notes with a phrase from Voltaire: "Able conqueróršf among tyrants and bad rulers exist, but even they are closer to the latter." He offeredV 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 ofthef 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 influenced the| reading public: until the 1780s, the German readers were the main consumers of travel literature in Europe.51 By the end of the eighteenth century, even the good Turk, "le Turc genereux," had made his entry into the German-speaking world and was popu-larized with Mozart's "Entführung aus den Serail," to mention only the most popus. lar among numerous examples.52 During the nineteenth century, the Christian-Muslim dichotomy was dropped|| from the political and cultural vocabulary, at least in the terms known before. Now* 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 hero-:;;; ism,"33 The German kind was almost exclusively of the latter two varieties. Despite. the fact that Byron's stature and the voluminous literature nn Fnalícl-i -Oiill ,->!li>r?t The Discovery of the Balkans 71 ns who actually fought for Greece far outnumbered any other European 1 •* • among the 940 known European philhellenes fighting in Greece, the major-n3*1^'.third) were Germans, followed by French, Italians, and only after them Brit-J Americans/1 For comparison, the volunteers from the other Balkan nations kkaIjnuch more numerous. The Bulgarians alone who fought on the Greek side ^ere foe war were reported by a contemporary Greek writer to be over 14,000. The <^Brl" ^ at least 704 of them have been preserved in Greek and Russian archives, fl3 e than any of the western philhellenes.35 That the participation of other Balkan ""hifiteers may not be technically subsumed under the narrow heading of phil-fjtljeriism does not justify the silence over this expression of Balkan solidarity, especially *n ^e k°e °^s0 muc^ emPnasis on incurable Balkan enmities. iyloltke's "Briefe aus der Türkei" have been praised as surpassing even Goethe's "Ualfen'sc'ie ^-e'se" 'n ^e objectivity of detail and beauty of description.36 The future military genius served in his youth as instructor in the Ottoman army, which "Ottoman government, after the radical destruction of the Janissaries, was determined to reform on the European model. Moltke had no qualms to attribute the sad «täte 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 General 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 tiiaxim that the perfect traveler should run the middle road between an excess and a lack 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.3" 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- ji Imagining the Balkans standing of the problems besieging Greece and of the progress achieved so far if/ made subtle comments on the identity transformations among the Greeks when were gradually shedding off their self-designation as "Romaioi" and "Graikoi " 5-* adopting an identifications as "Hellenes." He was extremely critical of the niec'h^ ' nistic methodology of contemporary European (especially German) ethnography tfigj^ by "statistically calculating the percentage of blond and dark hair, counting bluea brown eyes, and taking detailed measures of the skull," passed authoritative ments on whole nations. Of course, there was a self-congratulatory element in ]^ comparison of Greek tenacity, sharpness, and steady forward-looking ways to I manners of the Prussian state but, in general, he judged the Greeks on their own' * merit. For Krumbacher, the Balkans definitely existed as a separate entity and he sa^ its originality in the ethnic diversity, different costumes, and specific social relatione-rather than in some kind of deeply imprinted cultural attitudes or value system. Origin Corfu, he remarked on its Italian character where only occasional Albanian street sweepers, Vlach spinners, and Greeks dressed in fustanellas reminded one oftKe-proximity of the Balkan peninsula.40 The newly emerged Bulgaria also attracted attention and in the 1880s insmred ' even a literary/theatrical attempt. After the abdication of Alexander Battenbcrgin 1886, the Bulgarians were desperately looking for a new prince to satisfy the demands.1 of the great powers, primaidy Russia. By August 1887, the new prince was found Ferdinand von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha — who ruled the country for the next thirty-offe ■ 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, iL 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 of bur-lesque letters written in Berliner dialect to Prince Ferdinand ("Muckenich mij Bulgaria"); and two short pieces ("To the solution of the burning question" and "Buh' garian miscellanea"). The advice given to Ferdinand was concise: "Take to Bulgaria" only the most essential. Deposit all your valuables at the Coburg bank. Pack, at the 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 Steftenheim's ridicule was directed at the pretensions of German princelings whose megalomania was in reverse pn>' portion to their significance at home, he documented well the current view of the Balkans: the southeast was a backward and disorderly place manipulated by Russians,. and German princelings had better watch out. Indeed, the new values of Ordnunf und Gesetz were already so deeply internalized that, at the turn of the century, a student 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. bv the inflow barl r^a^b^fl n ^irf^nLrinn nf rwrpr fnrhj_fii^ million nr,A Itm,^ Krniiofli The Discovery of the Balkans 73 ■ . jqe has since been rehabilitated, his pacifism and even anti-imperialist repa fi jjasjzed, and has secured a prominent place in this peculiar black-and-ttance 0f adventure literature whose knightly heroes do not fail to inspire the v\hite ^y^ough his popularity rested on his Red Indian novels, and generations of \ttf-rjg- ^ acj0]escerits have been weaned on his stories about Old Shatterhand and ^nnetou, Karl May also published a series of novels on the Near East. His >talische Reiseromane, whose fourth volume was "In the Balkan mountain gorges," ^riiortalized the romantic protagonist Kara Ben Nemsi. Karl May had not visited jgUkans and the Near East, just as he had never set foot in North America, but h\$ Sear Eastern novels were so well researched, mostly from travelers' accounts and eographica' works, that it is possible to verify his travel routes.4' Karl May may be said to be the 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.^1 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 imagination 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 ■ Habsburgs 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 En-: glish. The only exception was the active policy of Burgundy under the rule of Philippe Tile 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 011 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 74 Imagining the Balkans to persist with ups and downs until Napoleon's days. Between the urges ofhun,.,,, V, ism dictating a rational and empirical approach, and the political consideration°- ~* French interests, the French travel literature of the sixteenth century created a r; positive image of the Ottoman Empire.48 It was the sense of order and tranqu%r."-' that most impressed the observers. Jean Chesneau spoke with admiration abou excellent organization of police and the security at night, and Pierre Belon cil Greek from Lemnos who extolled the beneficial effects a long-term peace had fo) '~ 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, JacqUe5 Gassot, and Pierre Belon, all in 1547, Nicolas de Nicolay (1551), Philippe du Fresne-Canay (1572), Pierre Lescalopier (1574). Their views of the institutions of the Otto, 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 genera! ' 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 -European, particularly French, ideology of absolutism.51 A problem that intimately interested foreign observers was the religious institii-tions of the empire and the modus vivendi of the rich variety of religions and denominations. Pierre Belon, the prominent natural scientist, clearly impressed that " the different Christian denominations, as well as the Jews, who had found leiuge 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 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.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 Ga rgdnfua andPantagruel, written between the 1530s 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, 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 cannibalistic "rascally Turks," would have been most surely roasted on a spit larded like a rabbit, were it not for the mercy of divine will.53 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 ac- „i 4-U„ U.,1,.,1,. The Discovery of the Balkans 75 , >en diplomatic actions to foster resistance movements among the Christian Ikan populations. This was partly a result of the overall activization of Catholic ®* 3„anda during the Counter-Reformation, partly an attempt on die part of France Pf^nj.erba]ance the adverse impression its alliance with the Ottomans had left.'4 t0 eordingly, both lines were represented in the travelers' accounts of the seventeenth ^tury, which were written, as in the previous one, almost exclusively by diplomats. 16 is Gédoyn, "le Turc," was first secretary to the French embassy in Constantinople iftween 1605 and 1609 and served as French consul in Aleppo in 162,3-1625, where Sje 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 ainst the Ottomans, and who had sent emissaries to Serbia and Bosnia. In a letter from Belgrade in January 1624, Gédoyn 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."55 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 sufhec. and it seems that heaven is reserving this victory for His 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 ladies' toilette in Dubrovnik, which made them look like "a pair of buttocks without any body."59 Still, using decolletage covers was a most 1 . . ■ 1 ■ ■ , ■' •! ■ i..____________ij____^.r 76 Imagining the Balkans relations, particularly commercial, between France and the Ottoman Empire • cal notes were creeping in, and illustrations of weakness, venality, and overajhjfe cline were increasingly accompanying the general descriptions. ' ' This dichotomy of judgment continued during the eighteenth century >" U, > de Peyssonnel, diplomat and writer, left valuable descriptions of the Otto'rrjnV8"' pire and the Crimea from the 1750s to the 1770s, in which he explored th{ ir c " mercial potential. He was a staunch supporter of the Ottoman Empire, parhti/j in view of its role as counterbalance to the rising power of Russia. No less Jr^ 4 advocate of the official French line, Esprit-Mary Cousinery provided his govt 1 with detailed and useful information about the territories in which he server sul until the rygos. His chief and passionate interest was the ancient world-sides collecting several tens of thousands of ancient coins and medals, whi adorn the museum collections of Paris, Munich, and Vienna, he left one oft valuable and impartial descriptions of Macedonia, despite the characteristic class cal affectations of his prose. Baron Francois de Tott, diplomat and general,: whovvas -instrumental in the efforts to modernize the Ottoman army, could not hide his di'" dain at the persistence of erroneous ideas about the courage, splendor, dignity ^ even justice among the Turks. So harsh was his verdict that he was criticized if overstating his case.60 Where there were only Greeks and Turks, after the middle of the century V\ travelers began to discover or distinguish also the other Christian Balkan nations^ Toward the end of the century, the skeptical and critical opinions expressed m.i& gard to the future of the Ottoman Empire turned into open rejection, espi 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 afflip' tion: "Not all monarchies are despotiques; only the Turkish, is of that kind." Stilb/it was only with the enormous popularity of Montesquieu's De Fesprit des foisthatthc term became central to eighteenth-century political thought and, with the exception -of Voltaire, was maintained as a distinct type of government qualitatively differed from monarchy and typical for all the great empires of Asia and Africa, notably Iff. ¥ Rousseau, Mably, Holbach, Boulanger, and Turgot.62 The pronounced antictett^ calism of the Enlightenment, its onslaught on religion as the sanctuary of conserijfc-tism, prejudice, and backwardness, also produced a twist in the assessment of Islatiu The view of the Ottoman Empire as the epitome of despotism was coupled with, tltt.-.; conviction of the unreformability of Muslim religion, afflicted with fanaticism and' bigotry, a far cry from the previous views about Muslim tolerance. Count FernerP-, de Sauveboeuf, a passionate Jacobin, wrote in 1790: If only the Turks could enlighten themselves one day! Vain dreams! Fed with ignorance, fanaticism restricts their horizon and they aspire to nothing else but en-tertainment . . . The Ottomans may be driven out of Europe but they wrll ncvei 1 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, bein^ The Discovery of the Balkans 77 -]ar was the verdict of Francois Pouqueville, doctor and member of the ' | sc;entific expedition sent to Egypt in 1798, who was captured by the Otto-'r0iltaid speIlt tr!ree years ^n ^e Ott°man Empire: "The Turks, sunk in profound fB3lli" *tv think only how to devastate, something which they relish, and this misfor--ij3» - j.^e(j t0 tnejr religious beliefs." Pouqeville, who in 1805 became French iaf,e 1 at the court of Ali pasha of Ioannina and later in Patras, published memoirs C"'lS'riding jn va]Uab]e statistical data and geographic detail. He was one of the first ^^the notion of Europe in an allegorical rather than purely geographic sense 11'." ^associate the Ottomans from the family of civilized European nations, f'fjstantmople had become "a city inhabited by a people who belong to Europe 1 oh account of the place they are inhabiting." Likewise, the famous traveler entomologist Guillaume-Antoine Olivier attributed the decline of the Ottoman gjjjpjje to the fanaticism of "an oppressive religion" and to the moral degeneration ofsociety-64 in 1829» when Count Louis-Auguste Felix de Beau jour published memoirs sum-uiari2!ngWs impressions of his stay in the Ottoman Empire, he shared Pouqeville's ludgtnefitand wrote that "estranged from the big family of European nations by its customs and beliefs, as well as by the despotism of its rule, Turkey cannot encounter any support or sympathy for its political existence and is sustained solely by the 11 rslty of the 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 ■:i touched 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 art: «0 far from civilization, because they possess none of the passions which pre ju-dicc 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-Gouffrier published the extremely popular "Voyage pittoresque de la Grece" in 1782, ihyears after his visit to Greece. The illustrations to his book depicted the Maineotes m apastoral 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 XVI's ambassador to the Porte. The British ambassador, Sir Robert Ainslie, duly informed the sultan of his French rival's ^oversive ideas and showed him the book with a raised eyebrow and the comment: fhisis the man France is sending you!" Not losing face, Choiseul had a pro- lurkish. Version nriTr-a+f1!^ nrintorl anA nmnnnn^p^ tli^ nrirrinal K»=- o fnrrv^rw 66 78 Imagining the Balkans Still, the new ideas of the eighteenth century had introduced a fundarn ■ transformation in the attitudes toward the non-Turkish populations of the Biiij/' ' Peninsula. The abasement of the modern Greeks compared to their illustrious k-^' fathers was treatedat length in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century account; ^ whenever they would muse on its etiology they would attribute it "to inner forr*'^ 0e decay and to the stray ways of the Greeks." Not only were expressions of syrrriiy rare but there was practically no desire to see the Greeks independent. Christian they were, they were schismatics, and although different from their rulers, were pW'^j "in a twilight zone illuminated neither by the radiance of the West nor by the e\0 glow of the East." With the elevation of the natural and civil rights of men, and t powerful critique against absolute authority, the decline of the modern Greek v viewed as a result of loss of freedom first under the Byzantines, but especially unc ■ the Turks. The political emancipation of the Greeks began to be seen as the sole ' guarantee for reviving the classical past with its rejuvenating influence. It was t linking of politics and culture that brought about this reassessment.67 Francois-Rene Chateaubriand is the most famous example of the first attitu< 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, Gustave 1 Flaubert, Gerard de Nerval, and Maurice Banes, h was a new type of travel aecou.ii. focused not on external reality but on the subjective world of the author. Comple'u 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 for ^ his journey, Chateaubriand retorted he had come to see people and "especially the 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 in-" dependence, 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. Merelv a flashing exception to his previous and subsequent views about modern Greece, this secured 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 civilisdtrice of culturally superior Europeans, "who sought to bring about the rehabilitation of the modern Greeks on their own terms, namely, through the efficacious imitation of Western-derived classical models. Ironically, although it proposed-the reunification of Greek culture, in actuality it fostered its bifurcation because it pitted its more recent Christian-Byzatine-Ottoman legacy against its ancient past "6S Du ring the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, diplomats were outnumbered for the first time by travelers per se: antiquarians, merchants, scholars, or simply adventurers. For many of them, the attractions of the Balkans were linked to theit relationship with the classical world. Marie-Louis-Jean-Andre-Charles, Viscount de Marcellus, a Restoration politician, philhellene, and passionate admirer of antiquity, who left a description of his voyages between 1816 and 1820, remembered Homer, Strabon, and comic verses from Menander about polygamy while barefooted women, The Discovery of the Balkans 79 ,e owe the presence of the splendid Venus of Milo in the Louvre.69 One is so .y Jjifli \ ^ st0ries about the venality of Ottoman officials or the greed of igno-e°n gaj}jan peasants who were selling off their classical and medieval heritage for rjTf. ^ cared but little that it is worth citing the complaint of an earlier traveler, kucas who was desperate that he could not acquire manuscripts from the P2U . 0f ls.lt. Athos because the monks would become "furious even if one offers jibrari ^ beauty left almost none of the French travelers indifferent. The same V ul Lucas was amazed that the peasant women in the Maritsa valley had the man-of gentlewomen, and he compared them to the bacchantes of Nicolas Poussin.70 wrote about the freshness of young girls picking roses in the Rose Valley r.ers car the town of Sliven who reminded him of pastoral scenes described by the ancient authois.71 Males fared worse. While Pouqueville opined that the lecherous Oriental mon-irchs should look for their roses of love among Bulgarian women endowed by great beauty high stature, and noble gait, their male counterparts were portrayed as hav-[pPa'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, «as 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 "m their haif-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, with the creation of the French province of Illyria in Slovenia, Croatia, and Dalmatia, the reestablishment of French rule in the Ionian islands, and the activization 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 and 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 ini828, Felix de Favier in 1830), the military engineer (Antoine-Francois, Comte de sAndreossy m 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 in 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 last 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 im-.mensely advance the concrete knowledge of the peninsula.'4 The great French poet, diplomat, and politician Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamarime 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 failfrmr tt olej-i n/ao m^hvotprl Vi\r nnhfrir'C anrl nnKhfitv tn lR?C hp nnh- So Imagining the Balkans well despite the mixed critical reception. Lamartine's arresting and emotional m ' his views on the Eastern question, and especially his enormous popularity as a r>. ' ■ had a powerful influence in shaping public opinion against the official foreign poli I line of upholding the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. He employed all pop«]^ keywords of the period—liberty, reason, civilization, progress — and was in the for"": front of propagating the struggle for national independence. Yet his parliament Ti speeches immediately after his return were more concerned with the issues oFEmjJ. pean balance of power disturbed by the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Lamartine's -solution was an European protectorate over the Middle East to the exclusion of unilateral intervention by any single power.75 Having come down with serious fevef in a Bulgarian village, Lamartine came to know and appreciate the peasants, was one of the first to profess they were completely mature for independence and I would, together with their Serbian neighbors, lay the foundations of future states in 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 Islamism against civilization, reason and the more advanced religions they oppress. Do not participate in the vok|l and devastation of the most beautiful parts of the world."/b The Bulgarian peasants reminded Lamartine of the Alpine population ofll Savoy, their costumes of German peasants, their dances of French. Writing at the!l height of the folklore craze, when uniqueness was the yardstick, he displayed in 1m penchant for similarities the work of another attitude, that of class: "The customs oft 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 toll 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 infi; the vicinity of Nish after having quelled a Serbian uprising. This notwithstanding,: i 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 re- : spect 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- ■■; ceived ideas or outright prejudice but the amount of disciplined and critical obser-vation 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, oroeranhv o-erwrr^h" <-~~~~—i--- ' ■ WBKk ilPlllt The Discovery of the Balkans 81 • hv linguistics, and literature of the nations inhabiting the Otto- ,1,ikk>re'dem7£Tsoue set himself the task to correct the "inborn or acquired Euro-^ Tees against the Ottomans and their subjects." He knew that by follow-?tm?L rmd be would disappoint both the excessive enthusiasts of the sultan's to* middle road he would disappoint bom as well as his opponents. While he hailed the liberation of Greece, he also f£ attention to the other nations of the empire, particularly the Slavs who were ^re* ^ «l0 join the development of European civilization and the balance of power." AithoiJgb operating with the hazy categories of East and West, Boue was a precursor conversion theory and hoped that "in the merging.of East and West, the lat- ..... a£er grafting the useful aspects of its civilization onto the ancient Asian customs, ,yin find in the East as many ideas to correct its overly artificial and complicated life as &e 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 locals is worth circulating today. He apparently was successful in "conversing frankly with 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 with the militant Serb, the rough Bosnian and the cheerful Hercegovinian."80 It is the enormous body oi 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 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 tire 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 8i 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 -ii> j„» j„_ r..„„ rn +kc (;(+a&r,th wnhirv Russia exnanded to the east 82 Imagining the Balkans century did it turn southwest, clashing with the Ottomans. Beginning with Peter'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 types of-Russian travelers: clergymen en route to the Holy Land or to the monasteries of Moisg Athos; the military visiting on a reconnaissance mission; and scholars or writers pur. suing a specific project. There was also a variety of diplomatic and journalistic at counts which, although not strictly belonging to the travelogue genre, had a eompa-rable 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 later-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, hut had a strong propensity for internecine struggle and antistate rebellions. While' Tolstoy 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 inexorable tax burden and constant humiliation. Even the idea of Christian coreligionists was used not to legitimize Russia's policy, but to illustrate the feeling of thrcal 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, when Russia emerged as the main Ottoman opponent, Russian accounts became informed with real passion and undisguised championship for the oppressed Chrislians; 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 Turfs, 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 Greeks, 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 tradh tion of neglect or indifference. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that the time-when the Bulgarians came to the attention of west Europeans coincided with grow-' ing apprehensions toward Russia and panslavism. The real deviation from this rale were, of course, the Russians. Not only did they, because of linguistic 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-uMi-oW Ukrainian had completed his studies at the University of Moscow and became inter- - - 1 1 ■ ■ .1 n----it:----*,.,„.,„!„mo d-urk of TVie Discovery of the Balkans 83 of unparalleled-importance in spurring national consciousness among the R Irarians.85 Venelin's summary of the position Bulgarians were occupying in the -'Ottoman ^mP're' comParec^to ^e omer Balkan peoples, has dominated Bulgarian ^.perceptions ever since: For the Turks this unhappy people 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 enor- - - rnous 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. . . ,86 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 (1844-1.845), E, Yu/hakov (1859), O. M. Lerner (1873). Because of the linguistic link and their 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.38 Fonton spoke of the selfless policies of Russia and referred to the unjustified suspicions of "Europe" (as a generic name for the other great powers) without implying Russian non-Europeanness. The poet Viktor Grigor'evich 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 antiquities, Teplyakov managed to gather a collection of thirty-six marble bas-reliefs and inscriptions, two 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!"90 For 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 veri- table frontier between the Romanian "Europe" and the Bulgarian "Asia" r,l-,t.„„ffX 84 Imagining the Balkans lar plan in the quarter. Here, on the other hand, there is no dust, and there is enougl, water in the reservoirs, but these stone wall 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 primi-tive and naively open earthly street order are so new and peculiar to us, that th^v instinctively invoke curiosity and sympathy precisely with their novelty and originality. i Not only was Krestovskii partial to the charm of the Orient, he preferred it in untainted purity. His description of the home and family costums of the Wcnlt]^' Bulgarian merchant Vilko Pavurdzhiev is a valuable ethnographic portrait both of 1 urban Bulgaria in the 1870s and of tire patronizing affectations of the educated Ru^ 1 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 and parcel of the refinement and luxury of the eastern furnishing. And how unpleasant - -: to the eye when, side by side with these objects, one sees sometimes in the same -5 room winding Viennese chairs, a table for cards and similar objects of the all-En-ropean, so to say, civilized banal quality. They fit the original atmosphere as murli as European clothes fit the Bulgarian man and woman.91 Russian attitudes toward the Bulgarians were often reminiscent of the general European philhellenic stance: just as Europeans were discovering their Greeks muuLívLi, i\uůjiciiu ui^uv^tui^Lííťi* Ajuigauaiis as me rooti of Slavic culture. Although some Russians were fascinated with ancient marbles ar# 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 described 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 j us now to read the service in Slavic—they arc asking us to make them happy by j hearing Slavic sounds in their church. . . . One feels the urge to apologize for, tD absolve the ones who have brought them to this condition. . . . But how can one H forgive them?92 i "Discovering" the Bulgarians at the height of the slavophile sentiment after.the j middle of the nineteenth century—when both the cultural slavism of the Czechs j and the Russian slavism of Mikhail P. Pogodin, Aleksei S. Khomiakov, Aleksandr S,;" Danilevskii, Timofei N. Granovskii, Jurii F. Samarin, and the brothers Ivan S. and j Konstantin S. Aksakov, despite creeping overtones of imperial power politics, still inspired an all-encompassing solidarity and affinity with the Slavic world at large— I brought an additional air in the dominant melody of commiseration: I It is sad and painful to see how, at a time when so many Slavs enjoy the fruits oi peace and liberty, proudly and knowingly look into their future, benefiting from ,f „„„„„„ their untroubled present, and are hurriedly rnarchin thing which made the Europeans watch them with respect, the Bulgarians —th strong and healthy nation yearning with all its power to go ahead—with hearts filled rnc-is The Discovery of the Balkans 85 • ethe Eastern crisis of 1875-1878, the grassroots feelings for solidarity with rn Slavs surpassed any of the manifestations of Western philhellenism, tbeSputnern . . _ _ ..... as usually :onfined to the educated strata. The Russian intelligentsia was ■ us in passionately opposing the oppression of the Balkan Slavs; many sup-ti:l j ajs0 their political efforts to achieve independence from the Porte. Among T well-known Russian writers, Ivan Turgenev, Feodor M. Dostoevskii, Leo \j Tolstoy, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Vladimir G. Korolenko, Gleb I. Uspenskii, VsevolodM- Garshin, Vasilii I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, and many others conirib-ae3 immensely to the formation of a public opinion that forced Russia to enter the ^'against the Ottoman Empire. Tolstoy himself, feeling that "All Russia is there, nd I should go myself," was dissuaded only with great difficulty from joining as a Yet, one should not overestimate the intensity of slavophile feelings and their influence on Russian foreign policy, characterized by Barbara Jelavich as defensive .ltK3 peaceful rather than expansionist, paternal rather than messianic.95 The real interests and attention of Russia during the nineteenth century—economic, strategic military, and even cultural — although involving the Balkans, were not intractably fixated on them; they were almost exclusively concentrated on Central Asia and subsequently 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 twentieth century', there were complaints that not merely the ordinary Russian but educated high-ranking officials and a great number of intellectuals were better informed about 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 1 it— ' erature 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 in order 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 that 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: r .i. _ a /r: J Jl ~ A , 88 Imagining, the Balkans "patriarchal habits with bourgeois-liberal customs" and turned from protagoni Homer and Cooper into characters of Thackeray and Gogol. To them, Leo preferred the Turks who were "honest, artless, pleasant in conversation, go0fj mild, until their religious feeling is inflamed." He was convinced Turks admired^' administrative system of the Russians, their submissiveness and deference: "I am ^t that if tomorrow the Turkish government left the Bosphorus and not all Turk ■ lowed but remained in the Balkan Peninsula, they will always hope that we w defend them against the inevitable troubles and humiliations inflicted on lliem^r1 the formerly enslaved Balkan nations, who in general are far too cruel and coarse."" In an article written a few years later on national psychology, Leont'ev desci ibtr] all Balkan nations as more practical, shrewder, more diplomatic, and more cautious'' than the Russians, which had to do with the commercial spirit prevailing over idealism; the Bulgarian intellectual in particular was the "bourgeois par excellence.-The1' whole "Eastern Christian intelligentsia—Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian" wax marked 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 iitflei sophistication of thought. Additionally, they had taken up the role of parvenu yjs i. vis Europe and progress. Indeed, it takes an aristocrat with the panache of a Leortt'ev'i to describe labor as disgrace.105 -': Leont'ev's verdict was opposite to Krestovskii's romantic enchantment witiiI Bulgarian patriarchal mores. For Krestovskii, "Balkan, and especially Bulgaria Slavdom, is probably the only comer of Europe, where family morals have retained" their inviolable purity. And this is so, because European civilization has not becstl able to import here its worldly goods and its debauchery." To Leont'ev, this was ratheil a testimony to the feeble imagination and boredom reigning in the Balkans. EveiR murders in the Balkans had nothing to do with poetry: the Bulgarian, Serb, and Greek* could kill out of jealousy, greed, or vengeance but not out of disappointment, de-| spair, yearning for fame, or even boredom as in Russia. Bourgeois simplification audi European radicalism were replacing the former primitiveness or simplicity of thftl Eastern Christians. What they were skipping was the middle stage, the authentic nourish, the continuity that alone was instrumental in the preservation of a nation and;, that was most distinctly expressed in the development of "aristocratic England, lessL-so in continental Europe and even weaker, but still noticeably so in Russia."106 The!: southwestern Slavs, as Leont'ev called them, that is, Czechs, Croats, Serbs, and Bulgarians, were, due to their youth and without exception, democrats and constitik tionalists: "their common feature, despite all their differences, is their predisposition. toward equality and liberty, i.e., towards ideals American and French, but not 13w-antine and British."107 The pairing of Great Britain and Byzantium evokes a striking:-, fault line that invites the comment of thinkers in the Huntingtonian mode. Wharis-even more striking is that Leont'ev's pure and sincere aristocratic scorn was only., seldom surpassed by the most arrogant among descriptions by the English whom he so strongly admired; ironically, however, one can find similar overtones, despite the; different value given to the word democracy, in recent diatribes against the Balkans. Patterns of Perception until 1900 _ , jh\[c travel literature became a fashionable genre and produced a significant VV bodv of writings all over Europe, its widest and most welcome market was Britain, which had the strongest opportunity to disseminate particular attitudes to a comparatively large audience. It is impossible to compare the travel literature of different countries fairly, but there is no doubt that in Britain travelers' accounts were the preferred reading after novels in the course of several centuries, and "although ■ the literature of travel is not the highest kind,. . . yet a history of English literature rightly assigns a space apart to such books, because this kind of writing, perhaps more than any other, both expresses and influences national predilections and national .character."1 In the eighteenth century, there was hardly an important English writer who did not produce some kind of travel writing, and the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who considered travelogues "the chief materials to furnish out a library," compared "them to the books of chivalry in the days of his forefathers.2 If approached strictly as historical sources containing useful information, the British accounts before the end of the eighteenth century do not compare favorably to the earlier, detailed, and sustained interest of Germans and French. This is easily explained by the discreet presence of the British in continental affairs and by the much J: later activation of their relations with the Ottoman Empire. During the nineteenth century, on the other hand, British accounts became informative and knowledgeable, rising high on the comparative scale of European travelogues. It is not, however, their quality and significance as historical sources that warrants the special . attention they are given. For one thing, they represented the travel literature of the most important global colonial power. More significant, it is primarily through these works that the transmission of perceptions was accomplished within the English-speaking realm (what came to be known in Europe as the Anglo-Saxon tradition). As already pointed out, the bulk of European writings on the Ottoman Empire during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries consisted of political treatises, usually ■ • ' ••' " •' 11-------uj— n«,„ „c o I1 90 Imagining the Balkans establishment of the Turkey Company in 1581 and the opening of permanent ' tivities. Accordingly, the travelers' accounts displayed a more competent knowledge and were occasionally marked by deep insights and genuine human empathy. The great romance of the English in the second decade of the cenluiy waj Greece. "We are all Greeks," said Shelley in the preface to his poem "Hellas," written shortly after the outbreak of the Greek revolt. Shelley had never set foot in Giceee. -The ones who did often remembered Chateaubriand's maxim: "Never see Gitcco 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 ne^er. 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."2' 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 rise, nourished by pro-Greek journals and pamphlets: "The Greeks thus joined the Sjan iards, 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 war effort and even fewer committed to the building of an independent Greece staved behind. The epithets that had been used about the Greeks before, and that bad all but disappeared during the philhellenic thrill, resurfaced in full order. 1 he ueiV Patterns of Perception until igoo 95 Several decades into independence philhellenism had become incomprehem P , an(j Constantinople and the provinces were more popular with travelers. There 51 however, a fundamental difference in that there was no question of reestablish-•^Ottoman rule; Greek independence was a fait accompli.26 inf? ^/jthout entering into the question of the reciprocity of foreign policy and pub-J'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 were 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 at increasing 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 1830s, 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/0 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 majority 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 pos-isessed 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 England, 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 ohsessivp nassinrK Tn í IrrmkmrFs TTiíiífŕ'miŕ^p The Sihirit nf tho FVfeŕ From Discovery to Classification 117 From Discovery to Invention, from Invention to Classification Si les Baicans n'existaient pas, il faudrait les (nventer.1 Hermann Keyserling y the beginning of the twentieth century, an image of the Balkans had already ^ keen 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.3 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 Merleau- . 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 nrnressps nf Hiqi-tk/ptv and in-:, discovered and described, the process of accumulating knowledge did not yet ^Jl - compartmentalize it in prearranged schemata. Wre are all aware that there is lt»1 ^ category as "essentially descriptive," that to describe is "to specify a locus of l!£,S|ning to construct an object of knowledge, and to produce a knowledge that will nl£| und by that act of descriptive construction."6 And yet, it was the process of ^ Siring and accumulating knowledge that gave the image of the Balkans in this bd a more fl°aonS character, generally devoid of categorical and excruciating ^lc-ments. Indeed, "where there is no differentiation there is no defilement." Yet it 'eerns that the "yearning for rigidity is in all of us," the longing for "hard lines and 5[ear 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 -oerience is with the past, the more confidence we can have in our assumptions."7 The essence of the patterning tendency—the schema—although certainly dynamic jr terms ollongue duree, 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 as 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 In 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 of Yane Sandanski's bands. Although the affair ended happily and Miss Stone was released against a handsome ransom 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 ::nf ITlirnT^o r,rtr.r, fni-tlio lnrt t, , ,r.AraA iionrt " Tint* KlUP Kp(=n fn ffinfpr Hfl rl 1 tinni31 WP.lP fit n8 Imagining the Balkans A singularly grisly act of violence outraged Western public opinion inn murder and defenestration of Alexander and Draga in Belgrade, a regicide pa^ larly distasteful to royalists in Austria-Hungary and Great Britain. The New YorfcTi^ explained that defenestration was "a racial characteristic" attributed to "a pri'miftv^--Slavic strain": "As the bold Briton knocks his enemy down with his fists, as the sout^" " ern Frenchmen lays his foe prostrate with a scientific kick of the savante, as 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 historic -. late as 1988 to maintain that "the turning point in the relations between Austria arjd Serbia was not so much the annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1908, as the brutal military coup in Belgrade five years earlier."14 It seemed that it was the partieufej repulsiveness of the deed that the civilized Austnans could not stomach, and not 401 esoteric economic frictions, nationalism, and raison d'etat. H. N. Brailsford; active "■ in the British Relief Fund after the suppression of the 1903 revolt in Macedonia. M one of the first to spell out in disgust his belief in a fundamental difference behvc the moral standards of London or Paris and those of the Balkans. Without.sccc thoughts about English performance in South Africa, the Indian continent, or ltC- ".1 land, he wrote: I have tried, so far as a European can, to judge both Christians and Turks'as toler- - '-antly as possible, remembering the divergence which exists between the standards of the Balkans and of Europe. In a land where the peasant ploughs with a rifle or. his back, where the rulers govern by virtue of their ability to massacre upon occasion, 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.11 Robert W. Seton-Watson, the redoubtable historian of the Hahsburgs audtk Balkans, took the dual monarchy to task for not being consistent in its political and; cultural mission in the Balkans. He maintained that the triumph of the Pan-Serb,-' idea would mean "the triumph of Eastern over Western culture, and would ki-fatal blow to progress and modern development throughout the Balkans." Thercii no doubt that aggressive Serbian expansionism was not the most desirable develop ment in the Balkans, yet to ascribe the phenomenon of nationalism, of all things.fe "Eastern culture" sounds strange from a specialist on the rise of nationality mfe Balkans.16 It was always with reference to the East that Balkan cruelty was explained. Ilanjr" De Windt, describing a scene of vendetta in Montenegro, concluded that "He'' _ valued here almost as cheaply as in China and Japan."17 Comparison with the \ enforced the feeling of ahenness and emphasized the oriental nature of the Balkans, For all the growing criticism of Balkan performance, it was not until the second Balkan war that the existing, if only moderate, expectations of betterment were substitute! for almost total disappointment: according to Seton-Watson, "excessive enthusisSJ for the triumphs of Balkan unity has been replaced in Western Europe by excess* ■ • ■! r ' -j._:r„ L„j....„„„ tko Wmor ollj^c and hv an lllclinfstion'tO From Discovery to Classification 119 'rial sin, were the shots of Gavrilo Princip, which signaled the outbreak of World ^'v'| This left an indelible mark on all assessments of the region. While even after ."lAlacedonian rising of 1903, the British correspondent to the Graphic could speak "^od-naturedly of "the good old Balkans, where there's always something going," 1914 ed off any ambivalence.19 The immensely popular Inside Europe of John Gunther Jf-os summarized the feelings on this side of the Atlantic: l^ls 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 taiise 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 alrnost 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 sec-ttonwas preserved even in the war edition of 1940. The snarls of Hitler were, obvious!'/, more intelligible to Western readers, because they were Western. It is only y.iC 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 take, and over fifty years were needed for someone to take it. Robert Kaplan, who openly aspires to become the Dame Rebecca West of 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 infectiously."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 been 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 arid 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, uncleanh-ness, and so on), it was so vague and unspecified that it could be applied to people outside the Balkan re gion. Whenever employed, its persuasive power was based on its haziness 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, boorishness, instability, and unpredictability. Both categories were used against the concept of Europe symbolizing cleanliness, order, self-control, strength of character, sense of law, justice, efficient administration, in a word, the culturally higher staee of develoDment which also ennobles human behavior."22 aiiasonic camenom ouisiuciuv LisLuusucicAi-Lic::iuui<-!ul ^uuljlic had spent seven years between 1913 and 1920 m Romania, Ser bia, and ' " extraordinary envoy and minister plenipotentiary 01 the United States J memoirs, although sometimes imperfect on historical particulars and inf IBSi typical American Wilsonian optimism and naivete, were nevertheless ad their verdict: "The World War began in the Balkans, yet its origin was irftfy of the unscrupulous autocrats whose ruthless ambition knew neither ii -y 'ea*1 -1;mit."24 He refuted the insinuation that the Balkan peoples were natura] fr ° akers but instead depicted them as pawns in a great power game "u3!-. 11m ma The prevailing spirit of the time, however, blamed the war on the >ral anrt on IVip SiprB<; in n^i-tir-nl^r X./[arv Prlilb Hurlnm , general, and on the Serbs in particular. Mary Edith Durham, confident sh-* be taken as seriously as she took herself, returned the order of St. Sava to kmn-'p with an accompanying letter saying she "considered him and his people guj]| '.\ greatest crime in history." Serbia was a "hornet's nest" and the nation Montenegro and Serbia, knew only how to love or hate; there was no1 rhei The episode reprovingly illustrating the Serbs' incapacity for moderation was tl ing to a book Durham had written some fifteen years earlier. In it, the informer yfr told her "One must either like or hate" was unspecified, simply a Balkan ma he is but one example of many, for thus it is with the Balkan man, be he Grct- . Sn k ' Bulgar, or Albanian, Christian or Moslem." When Durham first started her ,\pC(jf' tions, she stepped into the Balkan world with the same notions and emotions with which today's children step into a dinosaur museum: "Its raw, primitive ideas, wliit1 " date from the world's well-springs, its passionate strivings, its disastrous failures gfirr the mind; its blaze of colour, its wildly magnificent scenery hold the eye." Yet, at this" point she was still enchanted with the region and admonished the heetoringpropsn,, ,v sities of the ones who posed as a kind of Salvation Army to the different Baikal^ ~* 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 th( nineteenth century; up till then punishments of the most brutal description wer< inflicted for comparatively trivial offenses. In dealing with the Balkan Peninsula 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 rare.., glimpse into the reaction of Balkanites who were apparently well aware of how thej^ were judged by the West. One of her acquaintances, most likely an Albann her passionately: 0f Durham's statements read like the introspective diary of a modern an- 1 t- she wrote about the dilemma of not being abie to see the Balkans with -•- tOT? vet at the same time "you never again see it with Western ones." She K^en>%,': „,ln after you learn to eat, drink, and sleep with the natives, indeed jKntedthate , . , , . . . ---------- ; as the} 131 cvi." «"«••■• J ---- do and just as you think you are beginning to understand them, some- \f» 3»l" s-:^ns an(j yQU rea]iZe "you were as far as ever from seeing things from their flnghfPP Tn(.lntnls plicity of the older geography, should feel rather impatient at the complexity 'v To do this you must leap across the centuries, wipe the West and all its 7' 1 out of you, let loose all that there is in you of primitive man, and learn six ^eastron ^ ^ useless in other parts of the world."28 In about a decade, Durham '"'^lized the Balkans were too complex to fathom as a whole. At about the same ba<3 repatjj Scott Mowrer, the author of the book introducing the concept of zation," shared the same exasperation: "To the schoolboy, certainly, the ^"e of Turkey and Austria-Hungary is a severe blow; instead of learning two ?' <; he must now learn ten; and no wonder that elderly persons, brought up in irn " ''^^Otie had to specialize only in some aspects of this complexity, and Durham ordingly followed the pattern of all Westerners dealing with the Balkans: she found 7Ct t nation. Durham has secured a richly deserved place in Balkan historiography for the high quality of her ethnographic descriptions of tribal life in Northern Albania and Montenegro, particularly for paying attention to one of the least known ■ijlions in the Balkans, Albania, but she herself knew not the medium of affections. Herdislike 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 singular tact, and one which should be emphasized." To her, "it was largely to the fanaticism of the Orthodox Church that the Balkan people owed their conquest by the Tiirks." Although nota particular friend of the Turks, she fell for and reproduced (fie 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 :md 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. Yei this was not an abrupt occurrence and even during the Balkan wars the Western pressswas more ironic than contemptuous.31 The image of the Balkans brought to as the leitmotiv of the Balkans was jj|§§ ally taken as idiosyncrasies 01 ujc iuh.i herentiy biological qualities. Violence 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 Slavs I derived die knowledge from memories of my earliest interest in Liberalism, of leaves, fallen from this jungle of pamphlets, tied up with string in the dustiest corners of junk-shops, and later from the prejudices of the French, who use the word "Balkdn ■ as a term of abuse, meaning a mstaquouere type of barbarian.32 The image of specifically Balkan violence inspired Agatha Christie in write a mystery of the kind aptly described as "romances dealing with miagma^ -Balkanoid principalities of homicidal atmosphere."33 Christie created a sinister c> -acter, Boris Anchoukoff, with Slavic features (although not the typical featui , „1 South Slavs): "a tall fair man with high cheekbones, and very deep-set blue e"es, j 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 bfiif. 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 he is dead, and I still live, my eyes shall not know sleep, or my heart rest, until I have' 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 his: coat and brandished it aloft. "Not all at once will I kill him —oh, no! —first 1 wilf slit his nose, and cut off his ears, and put out his eyes, and then —(hen, into his black heart I will thrust this knife."54 The shocked Englishman muttered in response: "Pure bred Herzoslovakia] ], of course. Most uncivilized people. A race of brigands." Herzoslovakia was the itivcn- " tion of Agatha Christie: "It's one of the Balkan states.. . . Principal rivers, unknown Principal mountains, also unknown, but fairly numerous. Capital, Ekarest. Population, chiefly brigands. Hobby, assassinating kings and having revolutions."35 Whatis charming about this geographic invention is that it nicely illustrates two points::one " is that Christie reproduced a crystallized collective image of the Balkans, nof 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 times. -it looked at Czechoslovakia as tire distant and unknown land of Neville Chamberlains celebrated mot. There was no inkling of the future guilt feeling that would inform 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 ~o r m be traced already i H "was rounded in those intellectual currents which made their mark in the eii°'1 S ith century in both western and central Europe, namely, the new sciences of tvhtenment and the Pietistic revival of Christianity." The geographic discov-&f fostered curiosity in distant cultures and gradually gave birth to the new sci-^anthropology, concerned with humanity's place in nature and specifically "l "the classification of the human races. There was exultation in nature as opposed artificia5ity of human society, but the early idealization of the noble savage W ave w a}'t0 a feelmg of superiority. Natives were assigned a lower stage in the llV'tchain of being and were quickly stigmatized as barbarians who had to be domi-'^|aruJ educated. When the Balkans became the focus of attention, the myth of SToble savage was long passe. ^.distinctive feature of modern racism was the "continuous transition from sci-to aesthetics," accomplished by the fusion of the main techniques of the new >nces—observation, measurement, and comparison—with valuative statements fed on the aesthetic criteria attributed to ancient Greece: "All racists held to a rtain conCept of beauty—white and classical —to middle-class virtues of work, of oderation and honor, and thought that these were exemplified through outward noearance." Even after the retreat of the pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy, the highly subjective categories of beauty and ugliness remained important principles of human classification alongside measurement, climate, and envi-»«nrnenr. Beauty, based on an immutable classical ideal, became "synonymous with "& settled, happy, and healthy middle-class world without violent upheavals —and a ivorld attainable solely by white Europeans."36 As a rule, it was based on racial purity. In \ ery few circumstances did racial mixture allow for even some positive counterbalancing quality: "The Balkan Slavs represent the most remarkable blending, and it was this blend of various Indo-European and Asiatic tribes, that imprinted upon the Balkan Slavs many unsympathetic as well as many admirable traits."37 The racial verdict over the Balkans began with a more open rendering of the formerly subdued and nonjudgmental motif of racial mixture. At the beginning of the century, Thessaloniki was still only an uncouth Tower of Babel with a sprinkling of civilization from the West: "Bulgarians, Servians, Albanians, Vlachs, Armenians, Anatolians, 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 Mostar where one was "jostled in the dark, narrow streets by the same Jews, infidels snd heretics as in the bazaars of Stamboul." Sarajevo "swarmed with strange nationalities": Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians; Dalmatians, Greeks, Turks, Gypsies.39 Some 124 Imagining the Balkans two decades later, these almost neutral renderings of the ethnic and religioj plexiiy of the Balkans, which evoked only an occasional characterization as • nationalities," produced feelings of revulsion and impurity. In 1921, two Erig] contemplated the inevitably "hybrid race" of the inhabitants of Macedonia] Being essentially cross-bred, the Macedonian is hardly distinguished fof physique. . , . The Turks are perhaps the best physical specimens of the vari Macedonian types, probably because they have indulged in less cross-breeding, Turkish women, when not interbred to any pronounced extent, are generallj tractive, but those of Bulgar or Greek extraction usually have broad and very colikc I features of the Slav type. Such features, comprising thick lips, broad flat nosesj-id \ high cheek-bones, scarcely conduce to beauty in a woman. Darkish hair withy.-]. | lowish brown complexions cause them to resemble the Greek type, which is r„ j variably sallow, with jet black hair and luminous eyes,10 - * It is disputable whether the "coarse features of the Slav type" were typically^ I lineated or common among Greeks, but the description of the unprepossessingpV(/Vf:~ sique reminds too much of Negroid characteristics usually held at the bottom oftjipli referential scale. Racial impurity went hand in hand with "an immature, unenli(^;., f ened intellect, ... a crafty disposition and a natural tendency towards savager^M|S^ Although the Germans were only apprentices of Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau aa« J| H. S. Chamberlain, they overdid the masters. Hermann, Graf von Keyserling,:i|p:|^ ried to a granddaughter of Bismarck, was an influential figure in the philosophy of" ":|. self-knowledge, and had created a school of wisdom in the 1920s that aimed ut isiijji.- | ing people through creative knowledge to self-attainment. In 1928, he published0ip|i; Spektrum Europa, produced in a simultaneous translation in the United Statesi;§p|;: 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 plied? ... Its symbolic sense may best be apprehended from two starting-points; -t the first is the generally accepted statement that the Balkans are the pcwder-111 iga- . 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 iSsiv •I Bulgarians, and Albanians he deemed "primitive warrior and robber races" notwo I thy of attention), Keyserling summarized the essence of the Balkans: The Balkans of today are nothing but a caricature of the Balkans of ancient tirries.".--The spirit of the Balkans as such is the spirit of eternal strife. Inhabited as they are.-by primitive races, they present the primal picture of the primal struggle between f the one and the all. In 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 appcaredr|||^ Stockholm in 1927. It clearly articulated a motif only discreetly present in the p.rg ous century. Its author, Marcus Ehrenpreis, had traversed the Balkans, Egypt, a'' [ ,1 „f+1, He hnntW* From Discovery to Classification 125 ,Ibia»l0i':r' kius": "Tms's not the way to visit the Orient! If you would win some-. ijfthe soul of the east do not approach it as you would a strange country but as vve.re returning home—to yourself. ... Do not go condescending as a bringer {;|^v]jzaiion, but as a disciple, humbly and receptively."44 This spirit was conspicu-0?Xjl'v'a|):.ent [rum his first chapter, "Across the New Balkans." Already, his opening made the crucial distinction between the Balkans and the authentic Orient: [,e Orient is already in evidence at the Masaryk railway station in Prague. Not " iherea' orient of the Azhar at Cairo or the one of Haifa's street cafes, but that riant of the East known as Levantinism; a something, elusive of definition — the body of the East but without its spirit. It is a crumbling Orient, a traitorous deserter from itself, without fez, without veil, without Koran: it is an artificial, ■'trumpery New Orient which has deliberately broken with its past and renounced -.its ancient heritage. The description of the inhabitants of this Levant (as contrasted to the true East) illustrated their racial degeneration: iffhere is something eccentric in their conduct, they are overloud, too sudden, too eager____Oddish, incredible individuals appear on all sides —low foreheads, sodden eyes, protruding ears, thick underlips. . . . The Levantine type in the areas between the Balkans and the Mediterranean is, psychologically and socially, truly ^■'wavering form", a composite of Easterner and Westerner, multilingual, cunning, - superficial, unreliable, materialistic and, above all, without tradition. This absence cftr.iditii'ii seems to account for 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 boil. Keyserling's and Ehrenpreis's ideas one can distinguish unmistakably : overtones that were present previously but that are immeasurably more intense. The former dichotomy between gentlemanly overlords and cringing subjects had found 's theoretical rationalization: it was the cultural expression of a fault line, and the racial and cultural crossbreed was worse than the purebred oriental Other. Long '.forgotten was the brief flirtation with the Greeks, but then even the Philhellenic ■■ iuppbrt was in some sense racist, "bestowed not merely in libertarian support for yet cm;: more European revolution but in the conviction that the modern Greeks were lineajiclescendants of the ancient Greeks and the Turks were barbarians."46 Already '« iSjC- in Geschichte der Halbimel Morea wahrend des Mittelalters, Jakob Fall-;.mer|y'er shattered this prevailing belief with his theory that the ancient Greeks were : subrnerged into the subsequent waves of Slavs who actually constituted the racial "iisilof contemporary Greeks, and that "not a drop of genuine and unmixed Hel-icmcblood 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 ■■ ^'Missal of the Greeks was intended as an antidote to the prevailing philhellenism liruayaria at the time, and was motivated by a paranoid fear of Russian political :ascc^^ncy.48 While highly exaggerated, his theory nevertheless had some valid com- ■ pOllgJltS, DarticillarlvttlP nnslancrhr acraincl-t-tip irlpa nf rar-ial niirittr Tr> Nwi P-crmnnu 12.6 Imagining the Balkans benefit of classically educated officers, so they could excuse their atrocities agar the Greeks as done to an inferior, not a noble, race."49 - f_ it was no sheer coincidence that both Keyserling's and Ehrenpreis's bo< peared in successful simultaneous translations on the other side of the Al uintic Tljg, 1920s were the culmination of the activities of the Immigration Restrictive 3 the most important pressure group for protectionist laws. Imbued with the Ai>c. Saxonism of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the league, whose backbone the Boston Brahmins, advocated restriction of influx from Central and Eastern Ku-rope "or else the American 'race' would be committing suicide."50 The 1920s was' '"I also a time of hectic activities of the American Eugenics Society, which esp ! theory of natural genetic superiority of races and social groups. Many of its menib believed that racial mixture would bring about social deterioration and advoca diat assimilation with cultural inferiors, particularly Slavs, should be avoided as mi as overbreeding of social inferiors. The Balkan Slavs, in particular, were shunned treated as outlaws, and called Hunkies (Huns) in the industrial cities. Even the 0. who pleaded for their active inclusion in American society" warned that "we in bear in mind that the Balkan Slavs, in spite of their continual gravitation tuw European and, particularly, Western civilisation, are intrinsically Oriental."51 Theo--^ retically at odds with social Darwinism, the society nevertheless attracted comic able numbers of social Darwinists on the basis of a commonly espoused ualh ism.52^, These ideas have reverberated and occasionally reappeared although never with the " mantle of propriety and official support as in the early decades ot the century. '; Echoes of these views can be discerned even in the best intentioned enterprises "-" Although his monumental project "Slovanská epopej" fell on the last three deca of his life, Alphonse Mucha, the great Czech master of art nouveau, was inspirec the romantic aspects of cultural slavism. In fact, this was the reason for the mi response he received after he donated "The Slav Epic" to the city of Prague irj.1928, : while still continuing to work on it. Many critics deemed it more appropriate of 184$" * * and imbued by a romanticism that was considered passé in the nervous interwar. period. In a direct paraphrase of Herder, Mucha believed that "each nation ha own art, as it has its own language."53 He had conceived of his idea while still m:he United States and in 1910, after intensive consultations with slavicists, he set ou! a trip to Russia, Poland, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria to get a firsthand fee! the culture of the different Slavs. What Mucha saw was what he wanted to see: he was inspired by his owia expectations and visions of Slavdom. The' culmination of his trip was Russia whett he believed to have found his own origins. He wrote in ecstasy to his wife: "Mi and singing, all profoundly Byzantine and Slavic. It's like living in the ninth cen- -tury. . . . Nothing has changed for two thousand years."54 Mucha was mo\ednat only by a sentimental romanticism, although this is what mostly animated his ico-. nography. His observations were informed by other notions that dominated the ideo* logical horizon of his time. One was the belief that the eastern fringes of Europe presented a unique view of the dawn of humanity, the preinodern stage of Europe,'-: the historical museum of Europe's own past. Only with this in mind can one t ■. --------L1:__r..ll.. I---nmfn„nJ nlnnnrrnc l^Vina nlfire IB" From Discovery to Classification .127 - ar)Cj instead was enchanted by the fantasy of two millennia frozen in a pic-f°e that he would capture. 1' More interesting was Mucha's reaction to the Balkan Slavs. Although full of mathy for Serbs, Montenegrins, and Bulgarians, they hardly aroused in him the lofo'pr3'se 'ie neaPed on Mother Russia. With their curved Turkish sabers, oriental v '0ers and costume, they seemed to him mere curiosities, worthy only of a wax jnuseum- Only during his second visit, when confined to the medieval monasteries f Mf 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 ■isbdued 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 •the 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. If 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 r 1 i---1„,.„,'f;„„4-:^„ 4-k„4- ;n-„,l )■„ ,„„1,„ „„„„„ „(lk„ T3„ll„„ ,a,„„„ U..4- T0f OrtltUV CittJiMi-l*- I ,ej tne problematic notion of "civil society," "the neweduse celebre, the new Ccline 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 i;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 thai, 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."54 These three axes should not be associated with another opposition delineated by Milosz which, decontextualized, has been taken to represent his definition of Oonfr.,! "t Knm .inrl rrr<=n7 iiti nn thp 1/ctv hnrdprline between Rome and 144 Imagining the Balkans Wilno, can one properly understand the true qualities of Europeanstess " George Schopflin was aware that such an interpretation raises "the nrbn graphical and semantic question that if Central Europe constitutes the cm ^ Europe, where is Eastern Europe to he found?" he still persisted in it' Between Classification and Politics 145 don the different literatures partaking in the Central European literary jFh0o e eriumerated "Czech or Polish, Hungarian or Estonian, Lithuanian r r f an"" he also referred to the Ukraine, Slovakia, and Romania. With-' ^ g the Balkans separately, Milosz clearly embraced them together with -Russian Eastern Europe in his Central Europe which was "an act Milosz had an ambivalent attitude toward Russia: he spoke of the o . (he non-ivnsM.m uwi^.i 1-,^^^ ui ^ ^..u., ^uiu^ v>lu^. >.oj «,j division of Europe between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Christian project, let us say, even a Utopia."19 It was the ambiguity toward Russia that same time hastened to specify that the sense of menace he felt came "not fro "^Nl^" ' ' - ern Christianity, of course, but from what has arisen as a result of it: ■ " '" order to illustrate Russian isolation, he went so far as to quote the absurd sf t' by Russian historian Georgii Fedotov that all of Russia's misfortunes hadste -from having substituted the universality of Greek for the Slavic idiom A he never entirely purged Russia from Europe; what he did was to oppose Rijjjj^ messianism to the body of Western ideas. ' 1,11 Milosz was also much more political than his interpreters allowed \mni fw * He not only raised his voice for the emancipation of all of Eastern Europe butf^-"' was doubly political: directly, by documenting the cynicism of the cold-wan of Europe, and more subtly, by recognizing the political significance oft iliUf3J ! images: " - The literary map of Europe, as it presented itself to the West, contained until ft-cently numerous blank spots. England, France, Germany, and Italy hada deftt it-place . . .; while to the east of Germany the white space could have easuVbo the inscription Ubi hones (Where the lions are), and that domain of wild beasts. "-included such cities as Prague (mentioned sometimes because of Kafka), Wars Budapest, and Belgrade. Only farther to the east does Moscow appear on the rr The images preserved by a cultural elite undoubtedly also have political sign.fi-cance as they influence the decisions of the groups that govern, and it is no der that the statesmen who signed the Yalta agreement so easily wrote off ah dred million Europeans from these blank areas in the loss column.17 Once the discussion over the fate of Central Europe was in the air, M joined it with an essay that at first glance left the impression that he was be much more explicit about his Central Europeanness: "I assume there is such as Central Europe, even though many people deny its existence."18 Althoug himself the task to define specific Central European attitudes, it is a tribut : : humbleness and intellectual integrity of Milosz that whenever he would vent broader generalizations, he was careful to do so within the confines of the. world lit { knew best: the domain of literature. To Milosz, the most striking feature in Central European literature was if. p'.Jie- \ ness of history. The other characteristic trait was that "a Centra! European "Titer | receives training in irony." Here Milosz made a rare lapse into reductionisin ing that, in contrast to the Central European realm of irony, "Russian conti. art and literature, obstinately clinging to cliches, frozen by censorship, seem and unattractive." This statement is preposterous in the face of a splendid authors like IF ia Iff and Evgenn Petrov, Isac Babef, Mikhail Bulgakov, ' . ■ ■ Platonov, Ven'yamin Erofeev, and Vladimir Orlov, to mention but a few. butx* _ I the nnlv hrear-h nf hon tnn Althrmcdi it sppmpd ttiat Milne? tiarl hponn tn acceofffe' * ffrs 3fnbiguity was transformed into prohibitive certainty in the best known 1 ' «irJteh' read of the three pieces, the essay on Central Europe by "the man 'T inrt hah'anyone else has given it currency in the West... a Czech, Milan Kh(y 11! ^ :viuxv_ rereading Kundera after more than ten years is disappointing in 0f logical consistency and moral integrity: the essay sounds melodramatic and, k"'5S s outfight racist but, given the historical context of the time, its emancipatory ^'f"* was genuine; thus, the sincere emotional appeal, alongside its excessive re-?3 .[joiiiirri explains the attention that it received. Kundera's essay became the rif -in intensive intellectual turnover, and it has become impossible to approach t|., uriginai'text without taking into account the ensuing powerful but less numer-uSCTltiqucs and the more numerous but less powerful endorsements. It is as if the ' 'itial text has lost its autonomy; one cannot revisit it with innocence. J TKisTorces me to resort to a differcnt strategy: presenting Kundera's view through (lie eves of people familiar with the debates and who share in his belief about the - distinctiveness of Central Europe—the editors of In Search of Central Europe. This "oostmbdernist" technique is justified by the fact that Kundera himself did not allow die publication of his essay in their volume "for reasons of his own," and Schopflin -nd Nancy Wood supplied a summary of his argument. Iver Neumann throws some light on the reasons for Kundera's refusal by evoking the postscript to the Czech -,v will' of A Joke where he insisted that "the essay falls into that part of his produc-■■. rich he disowns, because it was tailormade for Western consumption."21 According to Schopflin and Wood, Kundera recast the upheavals in Hungary (1956), Chechoslovakia (1968), and Poland (1956, 1968, 1970, and 1981) not as East Euro-pepn dramas but as quintessentially dramas of the West. "In Kundera's schema, it is iKsi politics, but culture which must be seen as the decisive force by which nations tC-iisfitste their identity, express that identity and give it its own distinctive mould." Within this cultural approach, Kundera argued that the Central European identity i%the identity of a family of small nations was an inextricable part of the larger Eu-forieairexperience, while at the same time having its own distinctive profile. In the owe of Russia, on the other hand: Kundera asserts . . . both the continuity of Russian traditions and their profound difference horn the European ones, This explains why in his view Centra! Europe's adherence to the West is a natural disposition, arising as it does from a constant ar.djntimate intermingling of cultural traditions, whereas Russia represents an other' civilization, a fundamentally different culture, despite its periods of cultural ' rapprochement with Europe.22 Kundera S essav nrndnred a torrent nf reactions revolving around the rnmnlere 146 Imagining the Balkans object against assigning "a demonic power to the Russians1 """" 9 is occupied C> vakia, they did everything possible to destroy Czech culture "Simp*l-„ '°C - ■ " ■ ■ ' - - < - ' V 1 Kl P'Mlifc > Responding to Kundera's allegation that ussians was Mila, I when the Russians occupied Cz that "we are not too distant from the events, however, to forget that if'-Russians who put paid to Czech culture ... It was our lot: Central Rurc and bred. . . . Our spiritual Biafra bore an indelible local trademark ' Krij! ^ ^ j to SWeeping generalizations). Maybe the issue does not deserve more ^rdict about the Czechs who, "like other nations at the fringes of the West, if -ifc^^pularlv susceptible to the siren song of this elitist snobbeiy," the conve- ■ I Between Classification and Politics H7 v'^?51''option 0f the unbridgeable cultural gap between West and East.26 In ^'fCjit presUJ becoming "Central Europe's constituting other." What was remark- cribed much weight to the pan-Slavic idea for the fate of Central Europe-"[ the error made by Central Europe was owing to what I call the 'ideology of th' 5f^? world.'" He did not go so far as to assert that Czechs were not Slavs {like Jo in 1916 for the Poles) but he affirmed that apart from their linguistic kin; Czechs nor Poles had anything in common with the Russians.23 There is a detail in Kundera's argumentation that stands out because it licated later in an almost symmetrical way by his compatriot Vaclav Havel I (1pj'^ evoked Kazimierz Brandys meeting Anna .Akhmatova, who responded to his' * plaint about his banned works that he had not encountered the real ho'iro-imprisoned, expelled, and so on. To Brandys these were typically Russian c tions, the fate of Russia was foreign to him, Russian literature scared indcc iicu nun, nc picicticu 1101 tu nave known men woria, nor to nave known itevef" existed." Kundera added: "I don't know if it is worse than ours, but I do know it' different: Russia knows another (greater) dimension of disaster, another image of spaa (a space so immense entire nations are swallowed up in it), another sense of tinV (slow and patient), another way of laughing, living, and dying."24 In 199.^ Joseph Brodsky wrote an open letter in response to Havel's speech on the nightmare postcommunism. This was a philosophical manifesto of a kind and, without nece* -sarily agreeing with it, one has to respect it for its profound intellectual effort and honesty. It addressed problems of human nature and society, the role and response; -bility of intellectuals, particularly philosopher-kings. Havel's polite respoiw w^cv-sentially a rebuttal; he refused to discuss the crucial problems raised by Brodsky (about " the legacy of the Enlightenment, Rousseau, and Burke, compromise and saintnftg, survival and conformism, mass society and individualism, bureaucracy and culture,-' and so on), on the ground that these matters were too complex and it would require -"an essay at least as long." Instead, he wrote an essay about one-third of Biodsky'>m length whose only idea was that there was an essential difference between that "* experiences: For ordinary people in your country of birth, any change aiming at a freer system, at freedom of thought and action, was a step into the unknown. . . . By contrast, 1 ---Czechs and Slovaks enjoyed a considerable degree of freedom and democrat;} ill . the late nineteenth century under the Austro-Hungarian constitutional monarchy. _ . . . . The traditions of those times live on in family life and books. Thus, although the renewal of freedom is difficult and inconvenient in our country too, freedom was never a completely unknown aspect of time, space and thought.25 Thus, while the Russian was raising existential problems of universal significance,, the civilized Central European was responding in a patronizing manner evoking,jB' a typically provincial way, a relatively less significant issue about differences of de- ' Kundera is that there was no mention of the Balkans whatsoever; the only lis m ^u'*- * Irion was Russia. -itthe beginning round of its articulation, there was an attempt to define European idea both in cultural (Kundera and Milosz) and in historical '"'"^'lics) while always describing it in opposition to Russia. At this stage, the 'l'^ 'sinipty did not exist as a separate entity: they were either ignored or subsumed ^ilkJ1T,°ral Eastern Europe or sometimes, although rarely, in Central Europe itself 1 ^ral European idea of the 1980s was an emancipator}' idea, "a metaphor of -*^e e,. which in itself was a subspecies of a whole genre dealing with "European-''l"'L' ^presented in different periods and intensity in all European countries. The '"^ nines were the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of Europe, and since a lot more ate than merely intellectual prowess, the discussion was highly impassioned. During the second round in the development of the Central European idea until both al -the Eastern European annus mirabilis—many works were published in b< " istream Western editions and publications of the East European intellect ation and the samizdat: Cross Currents, East European Reporter, Eastern Eu-Npam Politics and Society, Daedalus, Cadmos, The New York Review of Books, <-vkitvi, La Nouvelle Alternative, Nowa Koalicja, and so on. A representative part sembled in the 1989 volume In Search of Central Europe. The introductory idmitted that the discussion over the Central European identity "takes a puta-lentral Europeanness as its launching pad, seeks to define it in terms most -favowable to its unstated though evident goals and insists that the whole concept is . Dtic, that it is up to its opponents to prove it false." The "evident goals" were '..iStifly described in negative terms: the construction of a consciousness emphasiz-::.};uliies "other than those propagated by the existing system" and of an identity altic enough to act as an organizing principle for those seeking something other tiuti Soviet-type reality."27 Sshbpflin followed Szucs in the central attempt to prove the essential contrast . en Russia and Western Europe, and then position Central Europe between •isim but as an organic part of the West because the incompatibility between the wo ideal types effectively precluded transitional models. The real differences were mltura!, "thereby making a discussion of European values essential." Europe had "developed values specific to itself and these appear to be immanent, as well as ineradicable." How such statements accommodate the spirit of experimentation and innovation in the European cultural tradition "in which no solution is permanent" i* difficult to envision logically, but logic is not the most important prerequisite for -1 political manifesto. And this is how Schopflin himself conceived of it: "In the late iyjOs,;allthe evidence suggests that the identity of Central Europeanness is attrac-live enough to a sufficiently wide range of people to give it a good head of steam."28 Hesnite the clear distinction from Russia this treatment of Central Europe was 148 Imagining the Balkans reflected uncertainty about this region. In some statements, the Bal sumed in a broader Eastern Europe that was not clearly distinguisha'A r^'V^ tral Europe: "The Polish eastern marches—the Kresy—the PannoiiM, V01"1**--1 mention the Balkans, were the untamed Wild East of Europe." Al the religious fault line between Latin and Orthodox lands was strictly "Croatia and Slovenia see themselves rightly as Central European, vi hdst't^l-der of the country is not."29 The logic was amazing: the pretension-; of tlT"l were justified, while the perceptions of the latter were not even consideircl- flj were not part of Central Europe. „ ^ In the 1980s, one can trace the progression of the three master narraf '4^30^*■ necessarily in terms of ethnic continuity but in methodology, style, and overateS^* cerns. With one exception, the contributions did not move out of the cultural parameters of the idea. The exception was Peter Hanak, who fc the steps of Sziics, attempting to update his narrative for the nineteenf Hanak's piece, even more than Sziics's, displayed the dominant concern,'it] i '• * wardness and modernization. Hanak's definition of Central Europe conn nl^j I the Habsburg realm: "The Monarchy (including Hungary) as a system of s-t-.ii^,.. - X ers and of politics stood in the middle between the fully-fledged parliani 1 mocracy in the West and autocracy in the East, This is precisely the ti cimij.,; ! Central Europe." While postulating the radical difference between-the^o^j^f' terns of Central and Eastern Europe, his argumentation revealed onlv r vi degree: "In Hungary and Poland the nobility was more numerous, b nized and more independent than in Russia," "there were quite considr?rablt(li^ ences in the development, legal position and economy of towns,"3" Comparative judgments on difference and similarity are relative, and "variation in both relevance- > and importance can be enormous," the crucial variable being "who makes the c$$:' : parison, and when."'1 It comes as no surprise that while Hungarians, Poles." &f [~ Czechs focus on the differences between Central and Eastern Europe (exemp'iii.! '. by Russia), their German counterparts stress the differences between VVestmifl^'1 ::f: europa and Ostmitteleuropa}2 Czaba Kiss, following in Milosz's footsteps in the attempt to outline a Gait*!". European identity through literary works, was remarkably nonexclusive. His [iterss-y . map of Central Europe was marked by three aspects: "the intermediate and fmritict " character of the region and interpretations of being between West and EasTr'ty)' ; literary formulation of the fate of small nations"; and "the linguistic and cultural vatfetr ; of the region, as well as their coexistence."'3 Literary Central Europe was lepresenSeA^ -by two halves: one German and the other consisting of a series of peoples iron) "11,111 countries—Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Roma, and Bulgarians; he also added Finns and the Baltic peoples, Belorussians, U!ice that did not come from or on behalf of the trio —Poland, Hun-""*"o hvakia—was Predrag Matvejevic's "Central Europe Seen From the _ ■, ^ Matvejevic did not feel threatened by exclusion from the vision of ^ ,f hif'h ^j^gygh ]ie offered a correction to Kundera's claim that "today, all , ,rJi ''"'ll^g has been subjugated by Russia with the exception of little Aus-^'■TlJrc« ittention to other little countries who were likewise not under Rus-^* -^tion like "Slovenia, Croatia and other regions of Yugoslavia, where 3n l'"r is one of the most frequently translated authors." His Central Europe was ^"'"^n, !f ilziest: "Central Europe might even be said to extend as far as its styles— , Bicdenncicr and Secession, or a certain distinctive music, painting and "' " ivlatvejevic never spoke of the Balkans per se but Belgrade and Bucharest '1 1" '(i^mgh Bulgaria was not even mentioned. What is really interesting in this Wl. u,%'cb;f'rsT appeared in 1987, was how much it was informed by an organic ^^ifY'igoslavness despite the realization of divisive identities: "are we just ;.cr ^Yugoslavian Slovenes; are we just Croats or Yugoslavian Croats? By the " token,is a Serb exclusively a Serb or is he also a Yugoslavian Serb and a Euro-".-ii>re.?",!'This was worlds apart from die ensuing process of "nesting orientalisms," j^part of Yugoslavia was unwillingly forced to rediscover a Balkan identity. Mother voice originating from Romania was Eugene Ionesco, who advocated a Qta-wl European confederation, encompassing "not only Austria, Hungary and n'a, but also Croatia, Czechoslovakia" and representing "the only European tiiian.defense against the pseudo-ideological barbarity of Russia and its spirit (,i...()nfluest.'' The choice of Vienna as center revealed not merely nostalgia for the jfgpast, but the appeal of the envious niche contemporary Austria had man-•.•^.3 to carve-for itself in the bipolar world.36 The only writer before 1989 who articu-ie "divide between Catholic Central Europe and the Orthodox Balkans" was fiCtpesRupnik. Though he wisely recognized that visions of Central Europe change xrantry to country, affording interesting insights into the motives involved and ;>llieperception of one's neighbours," Rupnik was amazed at lonesco's idea: "Poland ■■^conspicuously absent, but then Ionesco is the undisputed master of the absurd." The "absurdity" consisted in lonesco's crossing civilizational fault lines and includ-_";8jj0rihodox Romania while not even mentioning Catholic Poland.37 The second round of the Central European idea until 1989 saw its expansion ■:ffl(f the elaboration of its cultural aspects. In its attitude to the Balkans, it replicated "leijecpectives of the founding ideologues. It has been suggested that Central Eu-iwpe.i'noukl be interpreted as a case of region-building, "which is itself a subgroup of -i,ll.ferRay be called identity politics, that is, the struggle to form the social field in iMffiage of one particular political project."38 Being undoubtedly a search for iden-Traum oder Trauma,"39 the debate over Central Europe was hardly a region-tuikfingattempt, because it never came up with a particular concrete political project - We region qua region, outside of the general urge for liberation from the Soviets. Jlitwas about was negating a particular political project. íqo Imagining the Balkans It skeptically warned against the possibility that "it could degenerate i»t„,. d. of collective self-gratification for the intellectuals of Cafe Zentrale—-' '>r":'" *" UTP.pa, rJ? fir always delighted to escape from history, and always willing to be stoical in rt, " ■** other people's misery."40 Despite their skepticism, both Feher and Agrie>, u ^ ' poused the categorical view of an intrinsic difference between Central tijjj Europe: while civil society was emerging in the former, this could ne^ 4 the latter.41 Still, during this period of its development it was the er pathos that was the focus of the Central European idea C'f' yK"" Between Classification and Politics 151 The attitude to Greece extended also to the Byzantine Empire: Halecki jj^jetf1^' , u (. so-called caesaropapism had been overrated. Eastern Europe was fjj&^-v. ']gSS European than Western Europe" but "it participates in both the ^cff5'., f'i' g.::,ni.ui form of Europe's Ancient and Christian heritage." Though v, The Central Europe of the 1980s was by no means a new term but il \. concept. It was not the resurrection of "Mitteleuropa": that had been a Geri'ľ'S- Central Europe was an East European idea; "Mitteleuropa" had always Get its core, Central Europe excluded Germany.42 Friedrich Naumann, the'mostfa^^ proponent of "Mitteleuropa," foresaw an enormous political body from tlifV^l Sea to the Alps, and down to the Adriatic and the Danube, excluding in his fir* sion Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece, but also Switzerland andthe>yŕ ; lands; a year later, Bulgaria was deemed ripe to be included.43 Befon Mai,^ " Partsch had conceived of a "Mitteleuropa" with Germany and Austria-Hun the nuclei, and consisting of Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland Mm fu L Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria; Greece and Turkey were excluded fromfhisvi&^.f it would be also farfetched to look for non-German antecedents to -|,. tMlu \ European idea of the 1980s back to the interwar period. Strední Evropi pression of Czech political thought; it was Thomas Masaryk's "peculiar znns ol fyrf } nations extending from the North Cape to Cape Matapan" and including I .:i|]lii!i(!rT! i Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Finns, Estonians, Letts, Lithuanians, Poles, Lus Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Serbo-Croats and Slovenes, Rumanians, Bulgaria banians, Turks and Greeks, but no Germans or Austrians 4; In this period, 1 was more concerned witir Polish matters than with Central European political ap])> -raphy and the Hungarians clung to their "fanatic revisionism; at best they envi a Danubian Europe revolving around their own nation."46 The passionate writings of the 1980s were not the first attempt at the intel emancipation of the region. In 1950, an American of Polish descent, OscarFI published a small volume, followed, thirteen years later, by an extended stu was an undisguised Christian polemic against the Marxist view of history and 1 a vision of a united Christian Europe: "A positive approach, replacing the Ma badly needed. . . . The alternative is indeed of general significance, because . >| raises the question whether the Christian interpretation of history and the err of the religious, purely spiritual element in the evolution of mankind is nottl answer to the claims of historical materialism,"47 Halecki's definition of Europe was strictly cultural: "the European communis -especially in the period of its greatness, was always primarily a cultural community.' \-He was denied the identification of Christianity with Western culture, which hesa*'' as a synthesis of Greco-Roman civilization with Christianity. His verdict: on lb* Europeanness of ancient Greece was unequivocal: it not only gave Europeits name but was "the nucleus of the Europe of the future," "this part of Europe which v» already 'historic' two thousand vpars non inrdnrWl rl-ip Uoll-in n^rm-mila " Halet'M Asiatic influences on the Byzantines, his final verdict was unques- ;^*^a^jatory: "h must never be forgotten that the same Byzantine Empire was 'aUjn a continuous, frequently heroic, and sometimes successful defender ' 'a''j'against Asiatic aggression, exactly as ancient Greece had been."48 ''•"nl^ja|eCki, the Slavs were an important component of European history, and Sip IBS fica Jifii Asiatic liv included Russia, whose Christianization "had made the eastern Slavs ' ' -!il oart of Europe." There was, of course, an ambiguity in his treatment of " "'which as a Christian state was part of the European community but had also ^'"eiiced the effects of Asiatic influences. These influences were not so much due "'^''-Viipact of Byzantine autocracy but to the Asiatic form of government of the *r rtils Speaking in terms of the now revived Eurasian character of Russia, Halecki .'fheless accepted its European character between Peter I and Nicholas II. Pre-it was witii the ascent of Lenin and the Bolsheviks that Russia became "non-^ierjean if not anti-European."49 " While strongly arguing the unity between Western and Eastern Europe, Halecki ^siicd his great and essential other as "the Asiatic." He first mentioned the term in 4,-nctiod of antiquity where he recognized the political dualism of the European ipihoii deriving from Greco-Roman origins but not coinciding "with the opposi-iw! between western and eastern Europe. ... It can be correctly understood only 11st ah oriental background which is not Greek, indeed, nor East European, but This undefined Asiatic was "alien to the tradition of both the Roman Republic and free Greece." Halecki attempted to deorientalize Greece, sanitize the jiiidcntGreeks from some of their fundamental formative influences and from their jolid roots in Asia Minor, a perfect illustration to what Martin Bernal has described irlk'cleansing of ancient Greece from its African and Asian influences. But this Iporuhous "Asiatic" was soon identified with Islam. Christianity and Islam were "two mirelv different civilizations.. . . Compared with the basic difference between these lite, the internal differences between Latins and Greeks were really insignificant." lining set this axiomatic premise, Halecki's assessment of the Ottoman conquest ones as no surprise: and centuries-long presence is logically portrayed as an intrusion "completely alien to its European subjects in origin, tradition, and religion" ■fliieh effectively interrupted "for approximately four hundred years their participator European history." Notwithstanding the geographical continuity between the Siianlineand 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 al! 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 nou-Euro-. pean conqueror and a growing danger to what remained of Christian Europe.50 ■■■ U„i _ «,1. . _____.- _________j. _rii. n ~ 11.......___:_____1„ ;., „ „k..: —,. 152 Imagining the Balkans "the division of the Balkans among the Christian successor states of the ( ' Empire [which] reunited drat region of Europe during the last period of its hi There was no doubt in Halecki's mind that the rebirth of Greece and of tt Balkan states was an inspiration and encouragement for the nationalities "in the c ' -of Europe." In a remarkable passage Halecki came to the defense of balkanizatj^T The national states of the Balkan area, in which the long submerged nations of southeastern Europe regained their freedom and independence, represented sn apparent triumph of self-determination —apparent only, because the great pov n, after contributing to the liberation of the Christian peoples of the peninsula, continued to interfere with their difficult problems. The troubles which resulted from such a situation were soon used, as an argument against national self-determinaliovt 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 of the oldest in Europe—but an obstacle to any unprejudiced approach to the claims for self-determination in the region north of the Balkans.52 The really interesting question is the difference between Halecki and the exponents of the Central European idea. There was a change in the political cliniaScof 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 miioducrion--.--of martial law without a Soviet invasion—signaled that Moscow was considerinii alternatives to its direct interference in the satellite countries. By that tune, it was ' also clear that the treatment of the satellites was specific, something that piomptal attempts at piecemeal emancipation. Indeed, when Halecki wrote his second book in 1963, he could only bitterly exclaim that "the liberation of the nations of East /-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 world"5' 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 re-/" solved in the very near future, were nevertheless far removed from this apocalyptic-, vision. Yet it is not merely the political background that ultimately sets apart Halecfe 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 Christianity. -He also had a subtle understanding of the character of Orthodoxy and was unquestionably opposed to polemic reductionism and to the exclusion of the Orthodox —i nations from Europe, With him, one can still appreciate Anatole France's famous, aphorism: "Catholicism is still the most acceptable form of religious indiffctence. The 1980s, on the other hand, brought a different attitude toward Islam, or istlier - -toward what was permissible to be said about Islam. The irony is that the complete') (or for the most part) secular zealots of the Central European idea, who have no g«nd 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- Between Classification and Politic) ■ n liberals convincingly "bolstered Russia's claim to 'Europeanness' by con-jt t0 the barbarous Turk."54 This is already unacceptable for the new gen-Ěr3S. which has to show it has overcome Christian prejudice and which, in a move ,fS '^come the legacy of anti-Semitism, has added and internalized the new at-'"iTie to the roots of Western culture: Judeo-Christian. One wonders how long it ^'iltake before we begin speaking about the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition and 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-"^qvi with different motivations and goals. This explains why it was news for Soviet uiitefs at the time: when in May 1988, at the meeting of Central European and So-.je{ 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 world 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 Union "'' Lam' Wolff has remarked that the Enlightenment idea of Eastern Europe, which was perpetuated in the West in the next two centuries, presupposed neither itsdeiindive exclusion nor its unqualified inclusion.56 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 sec-find was always "positive, affirmative or downright sentimental." For all his sympathy with the Central European Zivilisationsliteraten, Ash's acute analytical pen could iotbut comment on the mythopoetic tendency of the idea: [TJhc 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 ail the 'Dichter und Denker', Eastern Europe h left wiidi the 'Richter und Henker'.57 Still, for Ash: "The myth of the pure Central European past is perhaps a good myth." His most interesting observation was the apartness of Poland: Michnik him-\ft!fWl t^,m„,i „f r^n+ml Pumne ■snA Mílns/c Central Enroneanness was more 154 imagining the Balkans Between Classification and Politics 155 eastward is still at least equally important to most Poles," "Poland is to Cen rope as Russia is to Europe." Exploring some of the similarities between the'■ contributions to Central Europeanness (the shared belief in antipolitics thf**''0'*" tance assigned to consciousness and moral changes, the power of "civil soci< partiality for nonviolence), Ash found many more differences that made him >' in an exasperated manner whether it was "no more than a side product 0 powerlessness." His final verdict on the Central European idea was that" that: an idea. It does not yet exist," and that its program was "a programme for tuals." In his evocative ending, Ash refers to the Russian poet Natalya Gorban who had told him that George Orwell was an East European. Having aeee] idea of Eastern Europe in acta, Central Europe in potentia, Ash added: "Pí t would now say that Orwell was a Central European. If this is what we mean [ tral Europe', I would apply for citizenship."58 In the meantime, Eastern Europe in acta ceased to exist (while nobo the West applied for citizenship either before or after), but it inaugurated a third lomi^ in the development of the Central European idea after 1990 when it made its erfe.' from the cultural into the political realm. It also marked for the first time the enf*» -of the Balkans as an entity in the argumentation. This period spelled the erfr] antipolitics; politics was on the agenda. Gyorgy Konrád had precipitously declateá-before. "No thinking person should want to drive others from positions of powerrir-' order to occupy them for himself. I would not want to be a minister in anv govern* ment whatever," and Havel had spoken of "anti-political politics" and againsttlitr'" over/estimation of the importance of direct political work in the traditional sense that 1 is, as seeking power in the state.59 This chapter was over. Now, one could begin ex- -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 igS6 piece, he never explored the potential exclusiveness of the Central European idea because'-; he accepted it as an intellectual utopia, the realm of "intellectual responsibility;?^"'; tegrity, and courage."60 However, early on in the years of the painful efforts of East .-European societies at transformation, he lobbied for the acceptance oiparl of Kast-*;-.' ern Europe in the institutional framework of Western Europe, although he was sen-, sitive enough to promote his plea for no more than what it was: a pragmatic answer to a political challenge: Yet where would this leave the rest of post-Communist Europe? Bulgaria, Rorna» .■ nia, Slovenia, and Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, to name but a few, ali :-also want to "return to Europe." And by "Europe" they, too, mean First and foremost the EC. The first, pragmatic answer must be that the EC simply cannot do everything at once. It makes plain, practical sense to start with those that are nearest, and work out to those which are farthest. Poland, Hungary, and Czechosiova- ■ :. 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 f. market economy.61 The post-1989 world gave the Central European idea for the iirst time the chance tn artn^lijTf1 itsplf u\1 3 rpcnVin.knilrliriri nnr,Aanntt,; T^ac,,^,!-^ rk r, \ ^.mA A £n r\\-i rp 3nft "- rved that "the liberation from Pax Sovietica 1989-1990 revealed drat drere ° ■ t any 'Central Europe,'" Dusan Tfestik wrote that "we rather feel like fstill respectable Almosteuropeans and only some, for whom begging is '• $ are poor but proud Centraleuropeans," Adam Krzemiriski added that tf'^^erdog wants to be at the center," and Peter Hanak published a bitter es- , 62 y'luHittlie ^anger of burying Central Europe prematurely.' 'n ^tic genre gives ample opportunity for a happy combination of analytical Gyorgy Konrád wrote an ardent supplication Central Europe Redivivus. rlyilh emotive power. Konrád exhibited only the latter. Central Europe "was, is, ' obably will continue to be"; it existed, Konrád maintained, just like the Balkans, 5 Vliddle East, and the Commonwealth of Independent States. It was defined as thesf'^ naoons between two large ones: Germany and Russia; thus expropriating fits Central European nature the country that used to be its embodiment: Germany, gul then, a Central Europe without Germans and Jews had been the dream, and hjjj become the achievement of many groups of Central Europeans.65 Konrád also 'merged as a major theoretician on ethnic civil wars and provided their most con- definition, rivaling Stalin's definition of the nation: "An ethnic civil war requires jcheckered array of ethnic groups, a mountainous terrain, a long tradition of guerilla 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 wiwtfione characterized by his translator as an "exemplary Central European writer" letftto Havel and implicitly as the greatest Hungarian writer, and described unas-jjuijngly by himself in a self-introduction in the third person singular as: "K. ... a fjf{y.year-old novelist and essaist. .. . His wardrobe is modest, though he has several typewriters."64 '1 he ideal of intellectual solidarity in the region all but disappeared: immediately after 1989, intellectuals from the former Soviet block countries had decided to -Bubiish a journal called East-East to deal with problems of postcommunist East-Ccu'mi European societies, to come out in all the languages of the region. The names ■ ja the editorial board included Adam Michnik, Marcin Krul, Milan Samečka, Ferenc Met, Richard Wagner, Dobroslavv Matějka, Andrej Cornea, Anca Oroveanu, Eva Kamdi, Evgeniya Ivanova, Ivan Kristev, and others, but the journal was published ■ ordyin Bulgarian. The rest did not want to participate in a dialogue with the East; in tier, they did not want to have anything to do with the East. The denial of over four clgcades of common existence is understandable, but it nevertheless breeds the par-'.icukiism 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 experiment of the twentieth century, rather than with the Manichaean implications of she East-West dichotomy.65 Iver Neumann has argued that despite the failure of an institutionalized Cen-;rai F.urope.Mi framework, the Central European project "could still be used pobudily vis-a-vis Western Europe and Russia" as a moral appeal and reproach addressed ,J Ar 156 Imagining the Balkans supplications. This is most evident in the drive to enter NATO and the instil framework of the European Union. The argumentation is usually based on 1 lars: the affinity of Central Europe to the European system of values and the . ration of the ominous threat of a possible takeover in Russia by imperialist, cl ist, antidemocratic, and antimarket forces. In this context, Central Emope became a device entitling its participants to a share of privileges. President Ha\t' argued: If. . . NATO is to remain functional, it cannot suddenly open its doors to anyi at all. . , . The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia—and Austria ; Slovenia as well —clearly belong to the western sphere of European civilizati They espouse its values and draw on the same traditions, . . . Moreover, the c tiguous and stable Centra] European belt borders both on the traditionally agsta Baikans and the great Eurasian area, where democracy and market economics only slowly and painfully breaking away toward their fulfillment. In short, it key area for European security.67 Again the Balkans were evoked as iue constituting other to Central Enron, side Russia. The reason for this was the annoying proclivity to treat Eastern ■ as an inseparable entity. Scholars wdro want to trace structural changes hi the ik.-\4. 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 *o distinguish between an East-Central Europe and the Balkans, the main arguments a collective reference to Eastern Europe."68 Scholars' blunders may be annoying,' but more painful was the European Union's decision to treat the emerging democracies in a package deal: as of 1 February 1995, the association agreements of th< ( Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria (which joined the earlier admitted Po land and Hungary) with the European Union went into effect. This en grouj 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 admission to NATO was more urgent than joining the ELJ. If the West accepts that certain, 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 that if. these "particular Central European countries" were admitted to NATO, but 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 bai bare cepted as unavoidable, the question is where exactly should the limes run. For someone like Ryszard Kapuscinski, there is no hesitation: "the limes normally di Eastern Europe is the frontier between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet."60 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, perpetuates them and makes them potentially explosive. " -1'—«"".mn»nipiit rould be annroached calmly as simply a rhetoi Between Classification and Politics 157 lltics Ironically, this reasoning echoed much of the argumentation of the former i^irrrnun'^ regimes in their (not unsuccessful) attempts to co-opt intellectuals: "I C° d onCC a friend of mine, a wonderful man and a wonderful writer, to fill a cer-"V olitical post. He refused, arguing that someone had to remain independent. I „_i._____1,:.- r„_ T)____ ..1.. .'_j;ofl'>M-.- Between Classification and Politics 159 "■' be an end in itself.82 Or, as the British journalist Charles Moore recently stated ''^.•ySpectd'.oi: "Britain is basically English-speaking, Christian, and white... . Just '" wanM0 bring Poles, and Hungarians, and Russians slowly into the EEC, and ■. niarkets for their goods, so we should try to open our doors to their people.. . . ''^^jjjjis and blacks, on the other hand, should be kept out strictly as at present."8' ■%lthe prophetic vision of Sami Nair: ■ -r^gfg are two ways, only two ways: either confessionalism will win and everywhere i" jn Europe community ghettoes will be erected (as would follow from Pope John ■"Paul It's sermon on the conquest of Christian Europe), and in this sense democ-"■jgey will be the inevitable casualty; or Europe will modernize its democratic alli-' ance it will enforce its republican model, based this time not on the unconscious ■ "eiriU]ation of the papist-caesarean model, but guaranteed by a concrete humanistic universalism.84 ^■Speaking of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition and roots of European cul- ■ hire is 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 selective appropriation of traits that are then determined to be part of trie 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 io E(',/'ph Mesopotamia, India, and the Hebrew Bible, the social and political :'b:cSes:in which these traditions have been developed have been neatly relegated to a tlilrerent, 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-em—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. t Back to the Central European idea, Arthur Schnitzler had once remarked that "file ;!ii:igs which are most often mentioned do not actually exist."85 He was speak- ■ ingoflovc. But there is no love lost in Central Europe and the competition to be the first to cnler Europe dealt a blow on the Central European project itself: "the pro-gram of Havel the participant in the debate about 'Central Europe' was thwarted by, among others, Havel the president."86 Vaclav Klaus, Vaclav Havel's less poetic, more 'realistic, and more successful political counterpart, angrily rejected the institutionalization of cooperation among the Visegrad group as an alternative to Czech mem- bership 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 afe distance from Western Europe" was unacceptable.87 The transformation of '.heCentral European conceptfrom an emancipatory idea to a politically expedient '0:)1 v.'as accompanied by a parallel transformation of the concept of Europe from a Ciiuural definition identified with liberalism and democracy into "the international solidarity of capital against poverty."88 To summarize, the third round in the develonment of the Central EurODean i6o Imagining the Balkans ment in the drive for entry into the European institutional framework. It is <[mm this stage that the Balkans first appeared as a dichotomical opponent, sometitsfl' alongside with, sometimes indistinguishable from Russia. This internal hierarchic tion of Eastern Europe was born out of political expediency but in its rhetosic on the balkanist discourse. After all, it is not symbolic geography that crea tics, but rather the reverse. There are two strategies that one can pursue. One would entail the an critique of the line of division as conceived by the Central European idea: to the challenge of the Central European identity as an apodictic concept. F attractions as polemic, this is an exercise in disproving and repudiating, but' beyond truth and falsity." It is the pragmatic function of myth that should be ll . .. of attention and it requires a closer look not only into the motives of its creators but also into the quality of the recipients, because "the effectiveness of myth dej large measure upon ignorance or unconsciousness of its actual motivation." 'Butii is not enough to expose the Central European myth as insidious, or its alti contrast itself to the Balkans as invidious. The other strategy would consider tl lem of the nature of the Balkans, its ontology and perception, and compare it to foe Central European idea. Juxtaposing the notion of Central Europe as an id< short-term cultural/political potential to the concept of the Balkans with its pi . historical and geographic basis, but with an equally limited although mucl ■ ■ historical span, one can argue that the two concepts are methodologically incornp*. rable, and therefore incompatible constructs. i it- - SSL lllli 7 The Balkans Rcalia: Qu'est-ce quil 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 ffllj_an admirable one, it is true —into the abyss?1 Emil Cioran qphe volume In Search of Central Europe ended with Timothy Garton Ash's essay I 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. Even Cultural literacy, 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 flanked by "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. Hirsch, Jr., 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 Ot-ieaianEmpire 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 not in the list. The Balkans, however, were in, much before the world even surmised that 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 I'}' a pas de hors-texte," the appropriate question for the Balkans is "qu'est-ce qu'il y a de hors-texte?" What, then, are the Balkans? -Vsurvey of the different historical legacies that have shaped the southeast Euro-j?6ui peninsula would usually begin with the period of Greek antiquity when the ^'-states colonized the littoral and slowly expanded into the hinterland; followed l'!> the.short HeUenkHr- nprind when nnrtnf the Balkans was united under Macedonian Imagining the Balkans Roman Empire and, for the first time, was politically united. Alth. illennium the pen mented, it secured a cultural entity if not political unity, with the spread" ,'| ( J*"' aough (Ji subsequent period of the Byzantine millennium the peninsula was politi tianity in its Greek Orthodox version from Constantinople, the adaptation of ft, law among the Slavs, the influence of Byzantine literature and art, in a vrar ' ,Tn emulation of Byzantine cultural and political models. It is during this peiior linguists place the beginning of the ''Balkan linguistic union."5 The Ottoman quest that gave the peninsula its name established the longest period of polities ■„ that the region has experienced. Although the century following the reir , '' Ottomans witnessed the new political fragmentation of the peninsula, its cb-'^ ents experienced the same waves of economic, social, and cultural integraho' Europe, where the Balkans invariably held a peripheral status.4 During the pasl century the cold-war line effectively divided the Balkans, and its members func M . within the framework of two, and maybe three political frameworks, if the Yiit experience is to be granted its neutral state. Forty-five years of isolated commoii in a maybe mesaliance, but nevertheless marriage, have left their imprint This, is n$!' a commonality historically as long, and arguably not as profound, as the Habshurg*"-Ottoman, or imperial Russian, and one might expect that its marks will wither sooner* it is, however, a commonality of only yesterday with the generations whoiivwj ,f-■ still alive. In urn sequence of hisioiical legacies, iiic most nupoiialll for our purpose was. the one that left its name on the peninsula; it would not be exaggerated to say thai -the Balkans are the Ottoman legacy. This in no way underestimates the profouiirpj effects of the Byzantine legacy and the concomitant discourse of "byzantinism," which not only functions alongside and on the same principles as "balkanism," but is often-, superimposed on it. This is especially the case with the treatment of Orthodoxy, where ' long-standing medieval prejudices are revived and combined with cold-war rhetoric.1 and post-cold war rivalries, a problem that deserves separate attention and thought- « ful study. Yet it is the Ottoman elements (often including Byzantine ones) o: the ones perceived as such that are mostly invoked in the current stereotype of the Balbms. 1 There are two main interpretations of the Ottoman legacy. One has it that it was a religiously, socially, institutionally, and even racially alien imposition on auloch- -thonous Christian medieval societies (Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serbian, and so on}.5 The centra] element of this intetpretation is based on the belief in the incompatibility between Christianity and Islam, between the essentially nomadic civilization of the newcomers and the old urban and settled agrarian civilizations of the Balkans and the Near East. Most nineteenth-century European assessments and most assess- < ments emanating from within Balkan historiography are based on this belie This view in its extremes has been dispelled from serious scholarly works, but if. -often unconsciously reproduced in what can be described as the mechanical i'ot separate spheres) approach, that is, the attempts to decompose the legacy mm vs supposed constituent elements: language, music, food, architecture, art, dress, administrative traditions, political institutions, and so on. Within this appiopc'li, no : matter whether the research comes from the Balkans, Turkey, or outside the icgion,"-Ottoman becomes synonymous with Islamic or Turkish (and to a lesser extent Ara- Realia: Qu'est-ce qu'ii y a de hors-texte? 163 t. ■ tal elements. This mechanistic division in otherwise excellent but usually ifl£ -vejy empirical works is brought about by methodological constraints and lack j^pjetical framework, rather than deliberate attempts at isolating constituent "^'Jn'ts Within the Balkan historiographical tradition, which insists on the exis-&t>n» of distinct and incompatible local/indigenous and foreign/Ottoman spheres, danger lies not so much in overemphasizing "the impact of the West" and over-s> continuities and indigenous institutions, but rather in separating artificially l^Venous" from "Ottoman" institutions and influences. '' This interpretation of the Ottoman period in the Balkans, however flawed, has .effajn rationale behind it. It rests on the not so erroneous perception of segrega-of the local Christian population. For all justified objections to romanticized j -irtbreaking assessments of Christian plight under the "infidel" Turk, the Ottoman f.-ipire was first and foremost an Islamic state with a strict religious hierarchy where ' 'p.fttelims occupied the backseats. While this statement can be refined as to de-jofvalidity in different periods, there hardly seems to be a serious objection to Jsorerall relevance;"the comprehensiveness of Islam—the bedrock of the Ottoman srcl1j system" can be interpreted as an idiom whose "operational rules were shared b< rriany Ottomans of both low and high status."7 Islam formed a vertical self-cient space within Ottoman society that was not coterminous with the whole -population of the Ottoman Empire. But it is not only the strict division on religious lines that pjevented the possible integration, except in cases of conversion. At no time, but especially in the last two centuries, was the Ottoman Empire a '-(iotintry with strong social cohesiveness or with a high degree of social integration. Hot only was there no feeling of belonging to a common society but the population felt it belonged to disparate (religious, social, or other) groups that would not converge. This is not meant as an evaluative statement—in other words, it can be translated simply as meaning that the Ottoman state until well into the nineteenth century jiwas a supranational (or, better, nonnational) empire with strong medieval elements, where the bureaucracy seems to have been the only common institution linking, but not unifying, all the populace. That the Ottoman Empire did not create an integrated society is beyond doubt; what some Balkan historians seem not to want to -understand is that this empire did not necessarily strive to achieve such integration, let alone assimilation. Once embarked on efforts to attain self-identitv, the emerging Balkan nations tried to delineate boundaries between themselves and their rulers. This was done in (.aframework and a rhetoric — the national — inherently incongruous with the imperial principle, but more importantly, the dominant discourse in Europe. It was a national idea based mostly on ethnicity, with a strong linguistic core. In this light, the belated attempt to forge a common Ottoman identity based on citizenship after the middle of the nineteenth century was a utopian experiment doomed at the outset.* What is important is that the alienation long predated the disintegration of the empire, and is thus a systemic element of the Ottoman past. The question to be debated is not whether it did exist but how strong it was in different periods, and what parts of the population il encompassed. Whereas for modem Turkey and the Middle East, the Ottoman legacy can be considered organic (despite vehemently negative "'' n "-----lL-""-"'-'■'»"+-in»mr,i-in rlpm'rt-it as alien is based on 164 Imagining the Balkans more than mere emotional or political conjecture. While the Ottoman pci consistently been the ancien regime for Republican Turkey, this is much trio plicated in the circumstances of the Balkans from the eighteenth to the h\ century. Analytically, it is also the ancien regime but, based on the specifici of Christianity in a Muslim empire, it was constructed and perceived almost tvi' sively as foreign domination or, in the irreformable language of the regior Ottoman yoke. This brings in a completely different framework of assessment: that of struts! for national emancipation and the creation of nation-states that are not ou!v plete and radical breaks with the past, but its negation. To some extent this < holds true also for the Turks (and to a greater degree for the Arabs), but in the case the break was facilitated and made effective by the existing double bom language and religion, the two central foci around which Balkan ethnicity tionaiism was constructed. Whereas Islam provided an important linklo tl man past in both Turkish and Arabic cases, language served as an important delnt. eator for the Arabs. It took Kemal Atatfirk's political genius to realize th t , of language in the transmission and reproduction of traditions and to strike d« with his language reform.9 The second interpretation treats the Ottoman legacy as the complex s,y of Turkish, Islamic, and Byzantine/Balkan traditions. Its logical premise is cumstance that several centuries of coexistence cannot but have produced ■ ■ mon legacy, and that the history of the Ottoman state is the history of all its c ent populations (notwithstanding religious, social, professional, and other divisions), The facts underlying this interpretation are the early syncretism in the r< cultural, and institutional spheres, the remarkable absorptive capacity- of the cunqutr-ors, as well as the high degree of multiligualism until the end of the einp Orthodox church that, in the first interpretation, has been depicted as the on ine institution of the conquered and subject peoples of the Balkans, as a pre religion, language, and local traditions, can be successfully seen, in the sc< terpretation, as quintessentially Ottoman. It benefited from the imperial dm of the state, and its ecumenical character and policies are comprehensible an Ottoman framework. It is symptomatic that the secession of the emerging meant also an almost simultaneous secession from the Constantinople patri that is, from the Orthodox church of the Ottoman Empire. It is interesting to speculate whether the success of the imperial venture power of its bureaucracy in the first centuries of Ottoman expansion did 1 mand to some extent the loyalties of the Balkan population or, at least, hii tdc complete alienation. There is good reason to believe this was the case I controversial dev§irme (the periodic Christian child levy that effectively finet istrative posts and especially the Janissary corps) and the ambiguous attifudi il S*11 erated can be seen, aside from questions of motivation, as an integrative 1 in. J ' 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-ness, back of complexity and, implicitly, weakness, because when confronted "with the 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 0f (social 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 l|te "civilized world" from any responsibility or empathy that it might otherwise be-siow 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 un-Europeanness as the basis for the politics of noninvolvement: In 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 European civilization. That is no small matter and, though hidden under wraps of cultural taboos, probably is the chief reason for Western aloofness and indifference to the area itself and to any action or involvement in it/' There were many more practical reasons for the initial Western noninvolvement, bat 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, hut 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 pieposterous to refuse to face the responsibility of both internal and external thugs audmissionaries 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 stake in European affairs, and so forth. All of this is euphemistically enveloped h 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 'iie Trojan war who followed their own game when tipping the scales without, however, pretending they were doing it for the sake of humankind. But they were deities, -fej all. ;:inhere is an additional nuance that separates the West Europeans from their Aruer.cau counternarts. In the non-Ynposlav Balkans the war in the former Yiniosla- i86 Conclusion Europe, it is usually defined as the war in ex-Yugoslavia or in Bosnia, aldioug], th is occasional mention of a Balkan war. In the United States, the war is usually* eralized as "the Balkan war," although there is occasional mention of the war 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 plain or Kosovo "occurred the primal act of slaughter from which all Balkan histor has flowed,"' It is insubstantial that, except for the Serbs, the battle of Koso\ not mean much for the rest of the Balkan nations who have had their own and ' different Kosovos. One of the charms of the Balkan nations, but also their < that they have incredibly rich and dense histories, but they are usually self-contain^ Save for historians, Kosovo came to the attention of the other Balkan publii ., al thc 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 Briti even English, which it precisely is. Why is it, then, that "Balkan" is used for a country at war that, before the sad events, insisted it was not Balkan and was previously noi labeled Balkan but considered to be the shining star of Eastern Europe by its Western supporters? Has "Balkan" become so much of a Schimpfwort that it is booed that those to whom it is applied would be horrified? Psychology should penuadc -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 drat 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 cultu terns and proverbial Balkan turmoil, and instead was approached with the same rational criteria that the West reserves for itself: issues of self-determination versus inviolable status quo, citizenship and minority lights, problems of ethnic and religions 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 lo road American journalists bemoan the split of their society (which they call "I =:■ ization") while their politicians and their allies sealed the virtual, not pol balkanization of Yugoslavia by embracing unconditionally the principle 1 it" self-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 observer-leaders of the cleansed societies of Western Europe fifty years after their ugliest per- -formance raise their hands in horror and bombard (in words and in deed, and >. ire" hidden behind American leadership) the former Yugoslavs in preserving "ethnic " diversity" for the sake of securing a Voiksmuseum of multiculturalism in a corner w, ■-Europe, after having given green light to precisely the opposite process. There is another component, relevant in illuminating geopolitical choices and -explicating balkanism as a discourse different from orientalism. As illustrated on-her, before the twentieth century, there existed an ambiguous attitude towaidthc Turks: an almost unconscious emnatbv with the rulers minsded with traditional SVf ■ si Conclusion 187 thv i"or fellow-Christians. Britain, in particular, with its dominant anti-Russian ^ffitiide, upheld the Ottoman Empire as a barrier against further Russian expansion. ■ his geopolitical configuration was in many ways inherited by the United States, and ' urkey became an important element in the cold war anti-Soviet alliance. But there , as no longer the admonishing figure of the suffering Balkan Christian. The former ' 'fcristians were now all, with the exception of Greece, under the "evil empire" of jjjjjmunism. Besides, the central discourse had shifted from religion to ideology. .. additionally, since World War II, it has become illegitimate to openly bash fioriwhite races, nomChristian 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 Diist," and have roots that "reach back, clearly, not only into the centuries of Turkish tlfiffiination." Finally, "one must not be too hard on the Turks"; after all, "there was more peace when they were still under Turkish rule than there was after they gained their independence. (That is not to say that the Turkish rule was in all other respects superior to what came after.)"10 There is, actually, nothing objectionable in this, either academically or politically- Eor one thing, the virtues of empires will be critically reassessed after close tc 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 •,ie mosaic of nations.11 The humility is even more imperative given the so-called "organic" growth of West European societies into nation-states. This outcome was die 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 neces-iaryin 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 horn their responsibilities. And it is absolutely not valid for Balkan politicians and intellectuals to use the Ottoman Empire and Turkey as the convenient scapegoat far 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 tile,intellectual hypostasis of Kennan. If he is contextualized in the structure of an imperial geopolitical continuity, he would not be seen (or not seen only) as the hos-tage.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. > pe text, in his formulation, is bracketed off from the world it represents and "what within the brackets is separated from the reality in which it is normally embedded." The 188 Conclusion doubli ling-one affecting the recipient, the other (he wc this duality serves to aestheticize the fictionality in litera i tially staged discourse, fiction in philosophical (or ouV-r rl ^ and, therefore, can be subject to rules of practical appiiei'to specific purpose, in a word, can be falsified.12 Indeed "fh 1 is precisely the challenge of a discursive formation thai lu c and nondiscursive implications and consequence-.'1 O From this perspective Kennan could be conceived a!s< i well as porte-parole of a power-political attitude. In this p1Trc shapes representation (or appropriates existing types of reprw political expediency arises. That someone operates entii apparatus of a certain discourse is not, then, the result o course but a conscious and deliberate choice. In Is.i s li mobilization" on the part of the activator.14 Kennan is thus an example of one at an inter-.ectioi plex and dialectical chain reaction, between knowledge violence we do to things or, at all events, as a practice th? a configuration where (political) power yields knowledge indivisible."1' To resort to the vocabulary of social psy Bertram Raven differentiate between six bases of socis legitimate, reference, expert, and informational.16 Hxdci ception, on the part of the target, that the agent possesses whereas informational power depends entirely on the qu its persuasiveness, and the logic of the argumentation. Tl power that someone like Kennan exerts is enhanced by, : a double responsibility because of, the dual target of his i the public. Faced with stark political realities, and work with the modest means of academe, one can hope onlv power of expert authority. By being geographically inextricable from Europe as "the other" within, the Balkans have been able to abs of externalized political, ideological, and cultural frusti . sions and contradictions inherent to the regions and sd Balkanism became, in time, a convenient substitute for t. orientalism provided, exempting the West from charj eurocentrism, and Christian intolerance against Islam. Europe; they are white; they are predominantly Christian ization of frustrations on them can circumvent the usual gations. As in the case of the Orient, the Balkans have se live characteristics against which a positive and self-congr. "European" and the "West" has been constructed. With th and orientalism as independent semantic values, the Balkansai anticivilization, alter ego, the dark side within. Reflecting or Agnes Heller maintained that "the recognition of the accomj ,I„„„,1,M„.....*~J-----1 - t? • ' '•' " thirst Conclusion 189 Imposition of civilization with barbarism but rather of one civi-■r." and that "European (Western) cultural identity has been ffinccentric and anti-ethnocentric."17 If Europe has produced Jso=antiracism, not only misogyny but also feminism, not only lso its repudiation, then what can be termed Balkanism has not -hits complementing and ennobling antiparticle. irra an ■l HH "dmfctm&K ■% •wini-fe-f^'f' thctQafi(SKH''"P 1 rhpuifflfle^- fc* iientfoo lifriiitiniii&M*' side the MssL the fttlbtfinV rr tort the . 01 ''r t in Eurflp'!''^1'^* Eiirop??t*'^f'iii!j- 224 Bibliography Dako, Christo A., and Dhimitri Bala, Albania's Rights, Hopes and A-i ■ ■ of the National Consciousness of the Albanian People, Bostoi' i i0nS' ^ Dako, Christo A., and Mihal Grameno, Albania's Rights and Claims t Territorial Integrity, Boston: 1918. Danchov, N. G., and I. G. 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