Imposing Particular Identities: The Balkans as a Meeting Place of Ethnicities and Religions.

• Author: Krijestorac, Mirsad
• Position: ARTICLE - Essay

Balkans: Representations and Possibilities (1)

This paper will argue that monotheistic religions, which have coexisted for many centuries and, in fact, mark the most important axis of the human conception of history and individual self, are not the source of the exclusivism and particularism in the Balkans which so often led to war. Rather, the conflicts are the products of political processes that originated outside of the Balkans and which are anti-religious in essence. This becomes obvious when we consider that the Balkans, throughout their history, have experienced both periods of war and long periods of peace, characterized by cross-regional solidarity among the local peoples. Multiple religions have been present in the Balkans during all its modern history; therefore, something else must have disturbed the cross-regional solidarities and caused those conflicts. Thus, religious coexistence should be considered as a natural state of being, and viewed as such by all who are looking for solutions to the Balkan issues, with the peaceful and continuous complementary existence of the people in the Balkans as the final teleology. Since the opposite position has been well advertised and emphasized among the general public through various hegemonic mechanisms for the production of representations, for us to argue otherwise is a tall order, but we have to consider the alternative to the current perspective of conflict and antagonism among different religions and ethnicities in the Balkans and elsewhere. (2) This paper is just a step in the different direction, as we keep in mind that the geopolitical production of representations of regions and peoples are long-term processes (3) and, as such, should be important considerations for international relations inquiry. (4) Our optimistic approach to the problem at stake is not unique. Another similarly aspiring approach to inquiry was suggested by Lijphart when he noted regarding democracy that, "if politicians and political scientists are convinced that democracy cannot work in the plural societies, they will not even try to introduce it or make it work." (5) So the optimism in the quest for the 'conflict solution in the Balkans will not only be an underlying part of the logic of this paper, but should also be a part of the method of proceeding in the quest of achieving lasting harmony in the region. (6)

In our quest, we have to observe two issues: first, the geo-cultural context of the Balkans and the normative determination of the term 'Balkanization; and second, the negative perception of religion in reference to the peace process, and with it the implications of such a view vis-a-vis ethnicity in the Balkans. (7) This paper will employ a historical approach and will first address the intra-European regional representations and then the Balkans' religious and ethnic elements and their history of amity and enmity. In conclusion, this paper will offer an alternative position which argues for a serious and unbiased examination of the various political processes based on the different Northern European ideas of particularism as a source of 'vision and division,' and a consideration and emphasis of religious universalism as a way forward in the Balkans.

The Balkans as a Close Territory with Distant Peoples

The Balkans is a well-known region of the world and most of the political constructions associated with it carry particularly heavyweight for the countries located there. The region was the subject of a Carnegie Endowment report originally published in 1914 and reprinted in 1996, which castigated the region, stating that, the "Balkan civilization was inferior and backward. Compared to the civilized world, its people had not yet obtained the stability of character found in older civilizations' nor the 'synthesis of moral and social forces embodied in laws and institutions giving stability of character, forming public sentiment, and making for security."' (8) These heavy words should make us wonder how far the region and its people could move forward with these sorts of prejudices and representations circulating about it. (9)

Although the Balkan region is also designated as Southeastern Europe, in geopolitical language it is often alluded to as a region of instability and war and, for this reason, its 'Europeanness' is not emphasized; the Balkans are rather seen by Northern Europeans as the "other within," (10) or as Europe's internal Orient. This terminology denotes social and cultural distance primarily from the peoples of the Balkans, and less so from the territory itself. Europe's two-sided orientation toward the Balkans can be seen in the fact that the regional countries Romania and Bulgaria were readily accepted into the 'northern project' of the European Union as territories, while people of those countries still have a number of restrictions about traveling or remaining in most of the Northern European countries. Similar duplicitous European attitudes toward the region are also observed by Gerolymatos who noted, "It's called the Balkans when it's at war and Southeastern Europe when it's enjoying a period of peace." (11) So the interplay of the Balkans being a part of Europe in terms of geography and whiteness, (12) but with too little Northern calculus and too much Southern passion, determines largely when and what is going to be seen in the Balkans and what is not. All of that, not because of some intellectual interest in such a culturally rich region, but mainly because "its messes might become ours," as H. Charles Woods noted a long time ago. (13)

The Balkans owes a lot to the Ottomans--most prominently their name--which is of Turkish origin, and signifies a mountain with bare cliffs. The name or adjective 'Balkans' was not much used until the 1880s. (14) It replaced the ancient Greek name for the region, "Peninsula of Haemus." (15) The connection with ancient Greece and the Balkans as the birthplace of Europe is often forgotten or lost among many other designations of the region. Cioroianu reminds us that "Europe is a creation of the Balkans... let's remember that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were Balkan and it was they who created Europe as a vision of world, philosophy, and wisdom. To the extent that it got Balkanized, Europe became Europe." (16) Those who produce a socially known reality (17) do not point to such representations of the Balkans because any process of signification "produces truth rather than simply recording it." (18) Remembering the Balkan origins of Europe as well as the region's continuous and distinct ethnic and religious diversity, could bring forth some uncomfortable questions such as why the rest of Europe lacks such diversity. Obviously, the Northern European myths of their own origin involve more forgetting (19) and alleviating perceived deficiencies in those myths than remembering. (20)

The relations between Northern Europe and the Balkans fit common worldwide north-south patterns, in which the representation of the "South has been discursively represented by policymakers, scholars, journalists and others in the North." (21) We will note just some of the implications of those representations to show that the role for the Balkans is preset, and how the region is expected to fit in. (22) As Slavoj Zizek noted in an interview, the people of the Balkans "are not caught up into their own dreams, but into European dreams of the Balkans." (23)

The Southern European region is sometimes referred to as the Balkan Peninsula, but that geographical orientation does not completely coincide with a geopolitical reference. Geographically, the peninsula is widely regarded as a European region which bridges Europe with the Middle East and Asia; it is delimited by the Adriatic Sea in the west, the Black Sea in the east, the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas in the south, and the Alpine-Carpathian mountain folds with the Danube, Sava and Krupa rivers serving as the physical boundaries in the north. The countries of the region now are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro. However, the countries that are considered part of the geopolitical region also include states that are largely situated north of those rivers, such as Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, as well as Romania and Moldova, which are located mostly past the eastern slopes of the Balkan Mountains. Sometimes geopolitical representations of the Balkans also include Turkey, though not when it is shrewdly categorized as a non-European. Many of these states, such as Slovenia and Romania, shy away from being referred to as Balkan countries, but the regional pull often keeps them within the region's imagined boundaries.

It seems that the Balkans is one of those regions which is more than a spatial unit; rather, it is an entity interlinked with cultural, linguistic, economic, and political ties among various agents who come and go. (24) Katzenstein notes that geographic designations in general often are not "'real,' 'natural,' or 'essential.' They are socially constructed and politically contested and thus open to change." (25) Therefore, we can see the possibility for different productions of representations of the region, which then can set very different goals and expectations for their peoples and countries.

The main reasons some countries wish to escape the Balkan designation involve the widely accepted impression of regional instability and the perpetuated notion that the peoples of the Balkans belong to war-prone nations (26) that resort to particularism and fighting more often than other European regions. As we saw, this perception figures into the EU's policies towards the citizens of the Balkan countries that had already become member states such as Bulgaria and Romania, or the different treatment of Greece's financial difficulties in comparison with northern European countries with the same problems. In fact, Orientalists even...