Imagining the Balkans by Maria Todorova

Author:Maria Todorova [Todorova, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

6

Between Classification and Politics

The Balkans andthe Myth of Central Europe

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

John Gunther1

The right question is not “Is it true?” but “What is it intended to do?”

S. H. Hooke2

In the geographical and political classifications after World War II, a portion of the Balkans had secured an unobtrusive place as part of a common Eastern Europe perceived as a homogeneous appendix of the USSR by the West; another portion had been willingly included into Western Europe, something inconceivable but for the prevailing anticommunist paranoia. In the Balkans themselves, the feeling of Balkan commonality was pushed aside, and the self-designation followed an East-West axis. The vanishing of the bipolar world after 1989 saw a nervous search for more appropriate categories for the organization of academic and journalistic knowledge, principally in the United States. The study of Russia and the Soviet world was euphemistically renamed “Eurasian studies.” Eastern Europe also received attention, in an effort to emancipate it not only from the former superpower but also from the tutelage of Russian studies. A reassessment of East European studies in the United States argued that “the trajectory of Russian history is substantially different, particularly from that of East-Central Europe [which] retained more religious, cultural, and economic linkages with the West than did the Russians.” The Balkans, too, were contrasted to the “the Orthodox lands that eventually fell under the sway of Moscow.” Accepting the three-region division of Europe of the Hungarian historian Jenö Szücs as “fundamentally correct,” the study argued for a further elaboration, namely that “Eastern Europe should be divided into two sections, East-Central and Southeast Europe.”3

Thus the Balkans began to reemerge as a separate entity, albeit under what was apparently considered a more neutral title: Southeast Europe. While this particular study was undoubtedly motivated by the lofty goal of stressing the diversity of Eastern Europe through reclassification, it should be clear by now that the treatment of classification as “an outcome of an ordering process as if the organisation of thoughts comes first, and a more or less fixed classification follows as the outcome” is highly problematic. Rather, “the ordering process is itself embedded in prior and subsequent social action.”4 The study in question implicitly accepted the notion of a homogeneous Western Europe to which different Eastern European entities were juxtaposed. It was simply a version of the West European syndrome “to conceive of the entire Euro-Asian land mass as four Easts (Near, Middle, Far, and Eastern Europe) and only one West, itself.”5 It explicitly grounded itself in the conception of Szücs, one of the pillars of the Central European ideology, thus elevating the whole Central European discourse to an important heuristic device.

The restructuring was not confined to academe. In 1994, the State Department decided to banish “Eastern Europe” from the lexicon of the department’s Europe bureau: “Eastern Europe would now revert to what it was before the start of World War Two in 1939—Central Europe.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.