“Political Antiquity” in the Post-Yugoslav Space

Abstract

The problem of the formation and development of state and social structures in the countries that emerged after the collapse of SFR Yugoslavia is closely related to the issue of the formation of their new national identities. An important role in this process is played by the image of a hostile “other” in the ordinary consciousness of the people, which has become one of the main means of internal consolidation of the new Balkan states. The tragic events of the 1991–1995 Yugoslav War and the 1998–1999 Kosovo Crisis brought a variety of myths and concepts about their national identities to the fore, resulting in new searches for their ethnic identities. In the context of the polysemous notion of “us and them”, images of empires from the distant past have become an important tool in the formation of ethnic identities of post-Yugoslav countries, designed to form a distinctive, different from neighbouring nations, perception of “homeland” in society, to emphasise its uniqueness and antiquity, especially as in the historical development of the Western Balkans it proved impossible to combine state borders with ethnic boundaries, as well as to correlate the concepts of identity and territory. Here too, the images of antiquity are not subject to scholarly inquiry or debate, but are presented to society as an “indisputable” historical argument and a fait accompli in territorial disputes with its neighbours. Thus, the ancient past of the Balkan region becomes an important instrument in a kind of memory war aimed at destroying any reference to the “strange” people who once lived on this territory and to the time of their forced neighbourhood, as well as “incontrovertible” proof that the small people belonged to the West and its values – the legacy of that same antiquity.