The Burden of the Balkans

Abstract

At outbreak of First Balkan War in 1912, a young political correspondent left Vienna on 25th of April, traveling by train to Belgrade. Although he had visited Balkans before, he was still impressed with natural beauty of landscape, and still intrigued with what he called this multicultural, motley, culturally and politically confused East. Aboard train, he observed, first and second class carriages were occupied by middle-class passengers, clean-shaven and rather homogenous in appearance. Third class carriages, by contrast, were filled with a mix of peoples communicating in an incredible language made up of Bulgarian, German, Serbian, and French words. Throughout his writings on Balkan War, this journalist-and activist-- consistently referred to Balkans as the East. This imagery seems to have been provoked by spectacle of violence, and a pervasive injurious sense of lack expressed among populace, set in a context of unresolved conflict. The correspondent repeatedly comments on lack of industry in countries he visits. His commentaries on backwardness of peasantry are reminiscent of Marx's now infamous analogy to a sack of potatoes. The autocratic character of Balkan monarchies (installed by European monarchs), and behavior of their armies, compelled him to conclude that mere departure of Ottoman rule did not make Balkans European. While some cities, such as Belgrade, show him signs of modernization, possessed with vitality of political and cultural life, his impression of countryside is that it remains so distant from modernity, inhabited by ignorant peasants whom also comprised bulk of army recruits. Such descriptions, I'm afraid, are all too familiar on Balkan scene even today. During last decade or so, many of us have read accounts by Western journalists and travelers, diplomats and politicians, or scholars and humanitarian aid workers, that give similar impressions of Balkans: a multicultural Babel that just might be chaotic enough to make peaceful co-existence an impossibility. Maria Todorova has crafted an excellent historical analysis of ways Europeans have imagined Balkans over past two centuries. And there has been some lively discussion of how discourses of Balkanism have been employed in Western gaze over this troubled region. There are a great number of arenas in which such discourses are expressed and performed. Today, I would like to turn our critical gaze to one such arena, that of international The Roots of Neo-Diplomatic Dependency Contemporary observers of Balkans may also find familiarity in, or perhaps even sympathy with, this early twentieth-century correspondent's acerbic commentary on bankruptcy of European diplomacy. The First Balkan War became inevitable, he claimed, as efforts of Great European Powers to create new political states went awry. He charged that there was never any genuine effort to address economic needs and cultural development of Balkan peoples. Europeans, he argued, have an abstract and moralistic humanitarian view of Balkans, and a rather paternalistic hope to find a way to help a few different tribes live together peacefully. Such characterizations will be familiar to those who study history of European colonial empires. The product of this approach, he suggested, would be a hereditary object of European This is not a comforting prediction, yet in a sense it is precisely what we have witnessed. European history regards many of Balkan states as officially created in 1878, at Congress of Berlin, following Russo-Turkish War. They scratched lines with their fingernails to their heart's content, political correspondent reflected sarcastically, thus setting fate of nations. To him, world was heading with evolutionary inevitability toward creation of petty states within a grander universalizing system, and doing so at expense of cultural, social, and economic diversity. …