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The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Maria Todorova
Maria Todorova*
Affiliation:
The Department of History, University of Florida
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Extract

Beyond and below what was once Czechoslovakia lie the deep Balkans. They are, it has been said, a sort of hell paved with the bad intentions of the powers

By the beginning of the twentieth century Europe had added to its repertoire of Schimpfwörter, or disparagements, a new one which turned out to be more persistent than others with centuries old traditions. "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 variety of problems.

Type
Research Article
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , Summer 1994 , pp. 453 - 482
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1994

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References

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2. Thus we read that “at the University of California at Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien broods over the Balkanization taking place throughout society” (Ellis Cose review of Divided We Fall: Gambling with History in the Nineties by Haynes Johnson, in The New York Times Book Review, [27 March 1994]: 11). Likewise, in a lively academic debate over multiculturalism at Rice University, Eva Thompson, a professor of German and Slavic studies, saw the multiculturalism-curriculum not as a means of creating a shared identity but as the Balkanization of the American people (Sallyport [December 1991]: 33).

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11. There is one different use and definition of “Balkanism” which I am aware of. In 1932 Konrad Berkovici published The Incredible Balkans (New York: Loring and Mųssey, 1932), a popular historical pamphlet in which he treated Balkanism as the particular system of government fostered by the Austrians in their eastern domains (217 ff.).

12. This is, of course, a paraphrase of the title of the excellent article by Bakic-Hayden, Milica and Hayden, Robert, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans': Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” Slavic Review 51, no.l (Spring 1992): 1–15.Google Scholar

13. In this text “southeastern Europe” and “Balkans” are used as synonyms, although it is possible to look for nuanced differences in their usage.

14. On internal orientalism, see Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans.'” About the historical dimension, see Maria Todorova, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” The Ottoman Legacy, ed. L. Carl Brown (forthcoming).

15. It is symptomatic that politically correct expressions are not applied to the dichotomy “civilized-uncivilized” in geographic terms, especially in regard to Africa or to the Balkans, where it is either the response of the “civilized West” or of the “civilized world” which is evoked. (For the first, see Secretary of State Laurence Eagleburger on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Friday, 29 April 1994 commenting on Rwanda; for the second there are numerous examples, among them the recent Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 March, 1994 on the implementation of the no-fly resolution in Bosnia).

16. The members of the commission were for France: Baron d'Estournelle de Constant, a senator, and Justin Godart, a lawyer and member of the Chamber of Deputies; for the United States: Samuel Hutton, a professor at Columbia University; for Great Britain: Francis Hirst, the editor of The Economist and the journalist H. N. Brailsford; for Russia: Pavel Miliukov, a professor of history and member of the Duma; for Germany: Walther Schiicking, a professor of law; and for Austria-Hungary: Joseph Redlich, a professor of public law.

17. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of Intercourse and Education, Report of the International Commission To Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars. (No. 4, 1914).

18. Ibid., 1.

19. Ibid., 4.

20. Ibid., 4–5.

21. Ibid, 273.

22. Ibid., 19.

23. The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993).

24. The introduction was also published separately as an article in The New York Review of Books which in many ways aspires to record, if not to set, intellectual fashions in the US (New York Review of Books XL, no. 13 [15 July 1993].

25. The Other Balkan Wars, 1.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 3.

28. Ibid., 9.

29. Historians with a less “sure sense of history” will be somewhat skeptical of such a frozen historical image; others, with a pedantic attention to historical detail, will be annoyed by seemingly insignificant inaccuracies. Thus, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania are all said to have sprung up as new states at the beginning of the twentieth century. But Serbia began its road to autonomy in 1804, was granted full autonomy in 1830 and full independence in 1878, together with Montenegro; Romania was united in 1859 and shortly afterward received international recognition. Bulgaria was created in 1878 and declared its de facto independence in 1908, thus being the only country to which Kennan's assertion technically applies. Since Greece is not even mentioned among the four states (Kennan obviously knows that it was created in 1830), the statement cannot be interpreted as a generalization that by the beginning of the twentieth century there were a number of independent Balkan states (4).

Further, Greece is again omitted from the description of the outbreak of the Balkan wars, although it is well known that it played a crucial role in the Balkan alliance system. Instead, we read the assertion that “the hostilities had been inaugurated in the first war by the Balkan Slavs” (6).

To speak of a Byzantine penetration of the Balkans is an absurdity both historically and conceptually. Southeastern Europe was the realm of the Byzantine Empire and it is the Byzantine state which was penetrated by different tribes, most prominently by the Slavs, who at one point or other created their independent medieval states. To speak of the “Balkans” as a pre-Ottoman construction displays an anachronistic attitude which is pardonable for a journalist but usually is considered ignorance in a historian (13).

30. The Other Balkan Wars, 4.

31. This event was used by George Bernard Shaw to produce his own “peacenik” variation on a Balkan theme.

32. Zeman, Z. A. B. ( “The Balkans and the Coming War,” The Coming of the First World War, eds. Evans, R.J. W. and Pogge von Strandmann, Hartmut [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988])Google Scholar has not missed the point. Zeman flatly asserts that it was not the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 but the brutal military coup in Belgrade in 1903, five years earlier, which was the turning point in the relations between Austria and Serbia, impressing the idea that it was the particular distastefulness of the deed to which civilized Austrians objected, and not some esoteric economic frictions, nationalism and raison d'etat.

33. Time, 4 August 1924.

34. As befits a soap-opera performance, Simon and Schuster recently published a soap-opera biography of Queen Marie: Pakula, Hannah, The Last Romantic: A Biography of Queen Marie of Romania (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984 Google Scholar.

35. The Other Balkan Wars, 4.

36. Ibid., 6.

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38. One of the last attempts in this direction was Joachim Remak, “1914—The Third Balkan War: Origins Reconsidered,” Journal of Modern History 43 (1971): 364–65. Recently it has been taken up again by Z. A. B. Zeman, “The Balkans and the Coming War. “

39. The Other Balkan Wars, 12–13.

40. Ibid.

41. For war losses of the Balkan belligerents, see the same Carnegie report, 395, 243. This does not take into account the losses from disease, misplacement of civilian population, etc. The same criterion, however, is applied to the Gulf war casualties, which do not include the losses of the Kurdish population, the effects on the infra structure of Iraq, the hunger, child war trauma, etc. Of course, an official number for the Gulf war was never released and it is curious that American mass media have forgotten this story. The only attempt to calculate the Iraqi losses was quickly squelched. For a review of the Gulf war and some of the relevant literature, see Theodore Draper, “The Gulf War Reconsidered,” The New York Review of Books, 16 January 1992; and “The True History of the Gulf War,” ibid. 30 January 1992.

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49. Ibid., 112–14.

50. Kaser, Karl, Südosteuropäische Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft (Vienna: Bohlau, 1990, 91–92 Google Scholar.

51. For a useful survey of the evolution of geographical ideas about the Balkan mountain, see ibid., 94–95.

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54. Karl Kaser, Südosteuropäische Geschichte, 96.

55. The original was published in French: Cvijić, Jovan, La péninsule balkanique: géographie humaine (Paris: A.Colin, 1918)Google Scholar; the Serbian translation followed in 1922: Balkansko poluostrvo i južnoslovenske zemlje (Belgrade, 1922).

56. A Voyage into the Levant. A Breife relation of a Journey, lately performed by Master H. B. Gentleman, from England by the way of Venice, into Dalmatia, Slavonia, Bosnah, Hungary, Macedonia, Thessaly, Thrace, Rhodes and Egypt, unto Gran Cairo: with particular observations concerning the moderne condition of the Turkes, and other people under that Empire (London: Andrew Crooke, 1636).

57. Ibid., 2.

58. Like most other travelers, Blount called them Turks.

59. A Voyage into the Levant, 2.

60. Ibid., 97.

61. Ibid., 103–4.

62. Ibid., 2.

63. Frustrated philhellenism has been the subject of many studies illustrating either the lack of continuity between ancient Greece and the degenerate situation of its modern heiress or else the abyss between ballroom expectations and stark reality.

64. John B. S. Morritt of Rokeby, A Grand Tour, 245.

65. Ibid., 109.

66. Ibid., 171.

67. Ibid., 179.

68. Ibid., 136.

69. Ibid., 156.

70. Ibid., 180.

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72. Searight, Sarah, The British in the Middle East (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, 16–20 Google Scholar.

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78. Ibid.

79. Ibid., VIII.

80. Ibid., XI. The reference was to the bloody suppression of the April uprising in Bulgaria in 1876 which provoked an outcry all over Europe and precipitated the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878.

81. Ibid., XII.

82. See Shannon, Richard, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1976 (Hamden: Nelson, 1975 Google Scholar; Millman, Richard, Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875–1878 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979 Google Scholar.

83. On the early perceptions, see Beck, Brandon H., From the Rising of the Sun: English Images of the Ottoman Empire to 1715 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987 Google Scholar.

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85. In the testimony of Rebecca West (ibid., 1089), “I became newly doubtful of empires. Since childhood I had been consciously and unconsciously debating their value, because I was born a citizen of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen, and grew up as its exasperated critic. “

86. Roman Szporluk, Communism & Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 169–92.

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90. Ibid., I: 475–76.

91. Ibid., I: 477.

92. Ibid., I: 417.

93. “A Dramatic Realist to His Critics,” The New Review, July 1894. Reprinted in ibid., I: 506.

94. Ibid., I: 507.

95. Ibid., I: 490.

96. Ibid.

97. Ibid., I: 490–91.

98. Ibid., I: 385.

99. Ibid.

100. Ibid., I: 384.

101. Crampton, Richard J., A Short History of Modern Bulgaria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 103 Google Scholar.

102. For a short historical background of the 1885 events and war, see ibid., 28–31.

103. Stettenheim, Julius, Bulgarische Krone gefällig? Allen denen, welcheja sagen wollen, als Warnung gewidmet, Zweite Auflage (Leipzig: L.Freund, Buch—und Kunst-Verlag, 1888)Google Scholar.

104. Ibid., 22.

105. It is an irony, of course, to subsume socialists under this heading, but bourgeois here is understood in its broadest meaning of urban, rational, industrialized, etc.

106. Impalings are described by Thomas Glover, Fynes Moryson, Peter Mundy, Henry Blount, etc.

107. See Florescu, Radu, Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989)Google Scholar, and Dracula, a Biography of Vlad the Impaler, 1431–1476 (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973); see also Treptow, Kurt W., ed., Dracula: Essays on the Life and Times ofVlad Tepes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 Google Scholar.

108. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 21.

109. Keyserling, Count Hermann, Europe, trans. Samuel, Maurice (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928)Google Scholar.

110. Ibid., 319.

111. Ibid., 321–22.

112. Ehrenpreis, Marcus, The Soul of the East: Experience and Reflections, trans. Alfhild Huebsch (New York: Viking Press, 1928 Google Scholar. The original was published in Stockholm: Hugo Gebers Förlag, 1927.

113. Ibid., 208–9.

114. Ibid., 11.

115. Ibid., 12–13.

116. John Gunther, Inside Europe, 437.

117. Kaplan, Robert D., Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (New York: St.Martin's Press, 1993), XXIII Google Scholar. Kaplan's unfortunate and pretentious book has received a devastating (and excellently written) review by Henry R. Cooper, Jr. in Slavic Review 52, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 592–93. See also the serious objections by Malcolm, Noel, “Seeing Ghosts,” The National Interest, no. 32 (Summer 1993)Google Scholar; and the heated exchange between Kaplan and Malcolm in The National Interest, no. 33 (Fall 1993).

118. See Petnadeset godini institut za balkanistiska, 1964–1978: Istoricheska spravka i bibliografiya (Sofia: CIBAL, 1979); Todorov, Nikolay, Razvitie, postizheniya i zadachi na balkanistikata v Bilgariya (Sofia: CIBAL, 1977 Google Scholar.

119. Bernath, Mathias, “Südosteuropäische Geschichte als gesonderte Disziplin,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte (Wiesbaden: O.Harrassowitz, 1973), 142 Google Scholar.

120. Karl Kaser, Südosteuropäische Geschichte, 106. With the exception of this brief but very valuable overview by Kaser, there has not appeared anything comparable to the extremely important Burleigh, Michael, Germany Turns Eastward: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988 Google Scholar.

Most likely its use by the nazis rendered the designation “Southeastern Europe” undesirable despite appeals for its re-introduction, e.g. the Yugoslav geographer Josip Roglic's call to use “Southeast European Peninsula” (quoted in Hoffman, George W., The Balkans in Transition [Princeton: D.Van Nostrand Company, 1963], 11–12 Google Scholar). On the other hand, when, at the annual convention of the AAASS in Phoenix in 1992 a panel was entitled “Can the Balkans Become Southeastern Europe? A Current Assessment,” this provoked the question whether this was not an already deja vu scenario from the interwar period.

121. For a theory of central European identity, see Szücs, Jenö, “Three Historical Regions of Europe,” in Keane, John, ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (New York: Verso, 1988 Google Scholar; Carton Ash, Timothy, “Does Central Europe Exist?” The New York Review of Books, 9 October 1986 Google Scholar; Feher, Ferenc, “On Making Central Europe,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 3, no. 3 (Fall 1989)Google Scholar; and especially the collection of essays edited by Schöpflin, George and Wood, Nancy, In Search of Central Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 Google Scholar which has references to all pertinent titles published until then.

122. See, for example, Franzos, Karl-Emil, Aus Halb-Asien (Leipzig: Verlag von Knopf und Härtel, 1878)Google Scholar; de Vindt, Harry, F.R.G.S., Through Savage Europe, Being a Narrative of a Journey (undertaken as Special Correspondent of the “Westminster Gazette,” Throughout the Balkan States and European Rusiia (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1907)Google Scholar; Walters, E. Garrison, The Other Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988 Google Scholar.

123. Havel, Vaclav, “New Democracies for Old Europe,” The New York Times (17 October 1994): E 17.Google Scholar

124. MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, 7 February 1994.

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126. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 72.

127. Ibid., 61–68, 73.

128. The Other Balkan Wars, 14.

129. Ibid., 14–15.

130. See, for example, William Pfaff, “The Absence of Empire (Eastern and Balkan Europe),” The New Yorker 68, no. 25 (10 August 1992).

131. “Anomaly” was used rather indiscriminately, for example, by Lafore, Laurence in The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I (New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1971)Google Scholar to explain the Austrian paradigm as the central cause for the war, next to Serbian nationalism: the second chapter of the book even was entitled “The Austrian Anomaly. “

132. This merits a separate study and has been the subject of some of my own work. See Maria Todorova, “Die Osmanenzeit in der Bulgarischen Geschichtsschreibung seit der Unabhängigkeit,” Die Staaten Südosteuropas und die Osmanen, ed. Hans Georg Majer (Munich, 1989), 127–61; “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” The Continuing Ottoman Legacy, ed. L. Carl Brown (forthcoming).

133. Barthes, Roland, “Bichon chez les nègres,” Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957, 72–73 Google Scholar.

134. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 73.

135. Academic research on the Balkans, although certainly not immune from the affliction of Balkanism, has by and large still resisted its symptoms.

136. Iser, Wolfgang, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, 238–39Google Scholar.

137. Ibid., 240–41.

138. A. Breckenridge, Carol and van der Veer, Peter, “Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament,” Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, 5.Google Scholar

139. Iser, Wolfgang, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Chartering Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), XVII Google Scholar.

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