Ambiguous partisanships

Abstract

The development of Western sympathies for various national causes in the Balkans during the nineteenth century constitutes an important aspect of the over-all discourse of “Balkanology”. By comparing the rhetorical and ideological content of such discourses of partisanship, this article seeks to illuminate the relationship between the development of Balkan images and the parallel evolution of Western European ideas concerning nationality. In particular, the article examines the Eastern Question debate in Britain, from the time of the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s to the first decade of the 20th century, in view of unravelling a series of British “partisanships” that entered therein : “philhellenism”, “Turkophilia”, “Slavophilia”. While such “partisanships” were ostensibly antagonistic to each other, they were characterized by similar conceptual and moral ambiguities and by a very high degree of interdependence. Their analysis, the article argues, reveals the gradual mapping of the national Balkans in relation to the West, as well as the fundamental ideological parameters of this “Balkan” image, over and beyond Western stereotypes of particular nations.