Beyond Balkanism by Diana Mishkova

Author:Diana Mishkova
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

5 Nationalism in transnational guise

Postwar political and institutional framework

For about 20 years after World War II, Balkan studies was submerged. The Balkanski Institut in Belgrade was closed in 1941 under German pressure; the Institute of Southeast European Studies and the Institute of Balkan Studies and Research in Bucharest were shut down in 1948 by the communist regime, which saw them as carriers of “bourgeois cosmopolitanism and objectivism.”1 For a short time, between 1945 and 1947, the idea for a Balkan confederation between Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and possibly Hungary and Greece was revived on the initiative of Josip Broz Tito, the all-powerful leader of the communist-led Liberation Front in Yugoslavia. That proved to be the swan song of Balkan federalism, as Moscow refused to accept Belgrade’s independent actions, while Sofia and Tirana were reluctant to surrender their independence to a Belgrade-centered federation. The Romanian, Yugoslav and Bulgarian governments in the late 1950s revived the idea in a new form with appeals for peaceful coexistence and general disarmament in the region. The one tangible result of this campaign was the endorsement, in 1965, by the UN General Assembly of a resolution put forth in 1960 by the leaders of the three communist states on “Regional actions concerning the advancement of good neighborly relations between European states belonging to different socio-political systems.” The rhetoric of peaceful coexistence and good neighborly relations was in vogue in the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. It was recurrently undermined, however, by a series of intractable confrontational issues, most patently the Macedonian question between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia and the Cyprus question between Turkey and Greece, as well as by Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha’s increasingly autistic stance.

For the scholars in the region, the relocation of most of the Balkans/Southeastern Europe into Eastern Europe was a political act with far-reaching military and economic consequences and totally restructured terms of international affiliation. Regarding the actual spatial categories they were operating with, however, its impact was far less straightforward. Although the 1960s and 1970s saw some serious attempts from both sides of the Iron Curtain at endowing Eastern Europe with historical meaning, the concept itself failed to become a focus of self-identification or powerful frame of reference. For some time after the war, the “people’s democracies” and the quasi-political notion of “Slavdom,” as counter-concepts to the imperialist west and Teutonic pressure, gained currency and, in the following years, lingered on, but with diminishing appeal. Starting in the late 1950s, “Europe” recovered its status as a benchmark – whether to demonstrate identity or differentiation – for the historical modernization and civilizational profile of these societies. In the socialist states, this was mediated by ideologically recalibrated concepts of progress, historical laws and progressive social forces within a correspondingly readjusted teleological frame. But the core of the social-science vocabulary related to “feudalism,” “capitalism,” “nationalism,” social “classes,” and “stages of economic development” remained palpably Euro- (or western-) centric.

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