On the Edge of Reason: The Boundaries of Balkanism in Slovenian, Austrian, and

Italian Discourse

Patrick Hyder Patterson

Slavic Review, Vol. 62, No. 1. (Spring, 2003), pp. 110-141.

Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-6779%28200321%2962%3A1%3C110%3AOTEORT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5

Slavic Review is currently published by The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained
prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in
the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/journals/aaass.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic
journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,
and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take
advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.org
Tue Aug 7 11:57:44 2007
On the Edge of Reason: The Boundaries of Balkanism
in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse

Patrick Hyder Patterson

By blood we are brothers, by language cousins at least. But by culture, which

is the fruit of many centuries of separate development, we are much more
like strangers to one another than one of our peasant farmers from the
Carniolan highlands is to a Tyrolean, or one of our vineyard-keepers from
Gorica to his counterpart from Friuli.
-Ivan Cankar, "Slovenci in Jugoslovani" (Slovenes and Yugoslavs), 1913

In recent times, Slovenes who regard their country as Balkan have been
rare creatures indeed. Most Slovenes may think of their land and culture
as belonging to "the west," "central Europe," or simply "Europe," but al-
most never to "the Balkans." The republic's secession from Yugoslavia in
1991 has perhaps turned this commonplace public sentiment into some-
thing more of a practical reality, accelerating the reorientation of the Slo-
venes' political, economic, and cultural linkages, but these processes were
already underway, and an intellectual flight from the Balkans was appar-
ent, well before the country's political leaders made good on their deci-
sion to pursue an independent course.
In what follows I investigate the broader significance of this distinc-
tive tendency in the public discourse of Slovenian intellectuals, political
figures, journalists, and cultural critics. I first consider how influential
Slovenian contributors to debates over politics and culture in Yugoslavia
used the heavily freighted concepts of "the Balkans," "central Europe,"
and "Europe" as part of their efforts to construct a new sense of national
identity in the years of the Yugoslav breakup, that is, the last half of the
1980s and the early 1990s. This ongoing conversation about the character
of Slovene society took a central place domestically, but it was ultimately
aimed at foreign audiences as well, and these audiences proved crucial to
the project of securing Slovenian autonomy.' Accordingly, the discussion
turns to a related issue, one rather more problematic and at the same time
closely connected to the critical scholarly scrutiny directed recently at the
meanings, uses, and power of the term Balkan-a power increasingly un-
derstood as one that can mold mentalities, channel political action, and
script the fate of a region and its people.

For the valuable comments and suggestions they offered regarding previous versions of
this essay, I would like to thank John Fine, Brian Porter, Ray Grew, Tom Emmert, Miha
Javornik, Radu Florescu, Stefano Bianchini, Aldo Badiani, and Slavic Review's anonymous
reviewers.
1. In this study, the adjective Slovene refers to things linked primarily with the national
community of ethnic Slovenes. The term Slovenian is used for matters associated in a more
general way with Slovenia, that is, the polity or locale.

Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003)

Boundaries of Balkanism in Slouenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 111

Given the ascendant view that the Balkans have been constructed
largelyfrom without, as a way of shoring up the identities of more privileged
societies, we face the additional task of determining how such processes of
discursive construction worked in the case of the people often deemed
the most "western" of the former Yugoslavs. Did others concur with those
Slovenes who insisted that their society shared nothing with the Balkans?
As radical change in the socialist world forced outsiders to reconfigure
their conceptual maps of Europe, where did they place Slovenia, and how
did they respond to the republic's rhetorical Drang nach Westen?
For answers to these questions, I have looked to a range of commen-
tary from Italy and Austria, Slovenia's two immediate neighbors with the
strongest claims to a "western" identity.2Attitudes about the Slovenes are,
it turns out, a uniquely effective device for testing the strength of Orien-
talist or Balkanist understandings of the cultures, political traditions, and
"national character" of the former Yugoslavs. For if any of the national
groups of the old Yugoslavia stood to benefit from the power of rhetoric
to divide a purportedly central European or European or western "us"
from a backward Balkan "them," it would without a doubt have been the
Slovenes. Even the foremost critic of Balkanist discourse, Maria Todorova,
expressly excludes the Slovenes from her roster of the Balkan peoples,
reasoning that they do not share the "concrete historical existence" com-
mon to the Balkans, that is, the Ottoman l e g a ~ y While
.~ she is deeply
suspicious of the uses of "central Europe" and the efforts of some ex-
Yugoslavs to claim a home there, she nonetheless finds Slovenia to be a
place apart. Whatever the permissible taxon for Slovenia might be, for
Todorova the society is not properly a part of the Balkans. Building on this
analysis of "central Europe" as a discursive project steeped in exclusivity
and imagined superiority, Gale Stokes suggests that the ease of Slovenia's
break with the Balkans exemplifies the persuasive force of the Balkanist
discourse. "The success of Slovenia's strategy of redefining itself as Cen-
tral European rather than Balkan," Stokes writes, "demonstrates the com-

2. My identification of Austrians and Italians as the most securely western of the

Slovenes' neighbors may seem to slight the very earnest Croat and Magyar aspirations to
membership in the same club. The assessment, however, is simply intended as diagnostic,
not normative. At the same time, my analysis here proceeds with an awareness that some
contemporary scholars have mounted a full-scale assault against the validity of the very no-
tion of a western identity. My usage runs the risk of reifylng that now-suspect classification,
but here it is meant to reflect only the rather modest determination that the Italian and
Austrian claims to westernness, if not entirely unassailable, are nevertheless for most prac-
tical purposes unassailed, especially in the mainstream political and cultural commentary
that forms the source base for the study presented here.
3. Significantly, because of the lengthy Ottoman rule over some of the lands they
inhabited, the Croats are included on Maria Todorova's list, along with the Albanians,
Bulgarians, Greeks, Romanians, Turks, and the other former Yugoslavs. Todorova, Imagin-
ing the Balkans (New York, 1997), 12-13, 31; see also 161-83. See also Todorova, "The
Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans," in L. Carl Brown, ed., Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint
on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York, 1996), where Todorova writes: "It is . . . pre-
posterous to look for an Ottoman legacy in the Balkans. The Balkans are the Ottoman
legacy" (46, emphasis in the original).
112 Slavic Review

munity building power of the idea of Central Europe, but at the same time
it validates Todorova's point that the idea has formed itself in part against
a Balkan ~ t h e r . "Yet
~ despite the perceived strength of the Slovenes'
claims to a non-Balkan identity-or the perceived strength of Balkanist
discourse to substantiate those claims and make them appear grounded
in reality, whatever their true merits-scholars have directed very little at-
tention to the deployment of Balkanist rhetoric in Slovenia or its recep-
tion among the Slovenes' western neighbom5 Although they afford us a
valuable test case of the uses of Balkanism and a particularly revealing in-
strument for measuring its power as an intellectual export product, the
nature of Slovenian discourse and its consequences abroad remain, as yet,
largely unexplored.
If Slovenia lies outside the Balkans in the judgment of some, it never-
theless has been caught up in a smoldering dispute over the boundaries
of that region by virtue of its association with the former Yugoslav state
and its interwar predecessor. My analysis confirms that many Slovenian
commentators did indeed use the imagined Balkanness of the Yugoslav
south to precisely the ends that Todorova's elegant study describes and
(rightly, I believe) deplores. Yet while it takes no great effort to unearth
Balkanism in Slovenian cultural and political discourse, to assert that Bal-
kanist rhetoric dominated and pervaded that discourse would push the
evidence too far. Moreover, when it came time to sell the idea of Sloven-
ian exceptionalism abroad, in Austria and Italy, there were surprisingly
few takers. Slovenia was quite readily accorded a central European iden-
tity, but without the exclusivity and superiority that many Slovenian com-
mentators anticipated: it proved difficult to persuade others that Slovenia
had been a uniquely "civilized" part of Yugoslavia. Often enough, then,
Balkanism proved a discourse unavailing. All this calls into question the
extent to which Balkanism functioned hegemonically, and it suggests the

4. Gale Stokes, review of Todorova, Zmagzning the Balkans, on the HABSBURG H-Net
Discussion Network, 10 September 1997, see http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/-habsweb (last
consulted 28 September 2002).
5. The most extensive review of Slovenian sources is to be found in Milica Bakit-
Hayden and Robert M. Hayden, "Orientalist Variations on the Theme 'Balkans': Symbolic
Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics," Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 1-
15. Bakit-Hayden and Hayden highlight the statements of five Slovenian intellectuals and
public figures (Taras Kermauner, Dimitrij Rupel, Peter Jambrek, Tine Hribar, and Peter
Tancig) in support of their argument that, with the eclipse of socialism, the "orientalist
paradigm" has attained a hegemonic position in Slovenian and Croatian political rhetoric.
The other most significant critiques of Balkanism either omit Slovenian sources entirely
or treat them only in passing. This is true even of those works that examine Balkanist
rhetoric among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. See, for example, Bakit-Hayden,
"Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia," Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (Winter
1995): 917-31; Dejan Guzina,"'Inside/Outside Imaginings of the Balkans: The Case of the
Former Yugoslavia," Balkanistica 12 (1999): 39-66; Dina Iordanova, "Are the Balkans Ad-
missible? The Discourse on Europe," Balkanistica 13 (2000): 1-36; Hayden, "The Use of
National Stereotypes in the Wars in Yugoslavia," in Mient Jan Faber, ed., The Balkans: A Re-
ligious Backyard ofEurope (Ravenna, 1996), 83-100. To varying extents, these works are all
indebted to Edward W. Said's influential Orientalism (New York, 1978), though in impor-
tant respects they modify or depart from Said's analysis.
Boundaries of Balkanism in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 113

value of new inquiry into those forces that may undercut its persuasive
power.'j
Along these lines, the judgments of Austrians and Italians are espe-
cially revealing, for these peoples have had unusually rich opportunities
to develop an intimate knowledge of the Slovenes. They once governed all
or part of what is now the Republic of Slovenia, and even after their po-
litical control of that territory was extinguished, they have maintained
close ties to Slovenes through a network of economic, cultural, intellec-
tual, and touristic contacts. Briefly interrupted in the aftermath of World
War 11, these relationships were gradually repaired with Yugoslavia's in-
creasing openness toward noncommunist Europe, and following the
death ofJosip Broz Tito, the greater devolution of authority to individual
republics allowed Slovenes to pursue a thoroughgoing restoration of the
old bonds. Thus, by the 1980s, Austrians and Italians were not strangers
to the Slovenes, but neighbors who had reason to know them quite well
indeed.
This familiarity notwithstanding, it turns out to be no simple matter to
gauge the Slovenes' understandings of their own society against the re-
ception those self-images met abroad. Slovenes' self-characterizations an-
swer a set of questions very different from those their neighbors posed
when taking up what would appear to be, at least on the surface, the
same issue: Slovenia's relationship to the Balkans. And because Slovenia
has become one of the more quiescent corners of postsocialist Europe,
many commentators on the changes that have shaken Yugoslavia and
eastern Europe have found it fairly easy to overlook the problem of Slo-
vene identity. Occasionally this held true even for those looking on from
just next door.
The inattention is a little curious given some western observers' infat-
uation with Slovenia during the mid-to-late 1980s, when a republic in the
midst of extraordinary reform and cultural ferment was habitually de-
picted as a little enclave of the west inside socialist Europe. It is more re-
markable in light of what was, until recently, a burgeoning interest in the
prospects of a reconstituted "central Europen-a designation that found
a favored place in the lexicon of intellectuals and policy makers seeking
an attractive alternative to the old bilateral division of Cold War Europe
into eastern and western camps. But although Slovenes may have thought
of themselves as among the most western of the eastern Europeans, the
broad-ranging discussion that surrounded the rebirth of Mitteleuropa did
not draw much attention to the character of Slovenian culture and poli-
tics.' Most western attempts to elucidate the concept never even refer to

6. An insightful reflection of the state of the critique of Balkanism is K. E. Fleming,

"Urientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography," American Historical Review 105,
no. 4 (October 2000): 1218-33.
7. See, for example, Timothy Garton Ash, "Mitteleuropa?" Daedalus 119, no. 1 (Win-
ter 1990): 1-21; Jacques Rupnik, "Central Europe or Mitteleuropa?" Daedalus 119, no. 1
(Winter 1990): 249-78; Hanns-Albert Steger and Renate Morell, eds., Ein Gespenst geht
um . . . : Mitteleuropa" [documentation of the conference "Grenzen und Horizonte: Zur
Problematik Mitteleuropas in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart," Regensburg, 19861 (Mu-
114 Slavic Review

the Slovenes, or else give them only the most fleeting mention. While it is
not impossible to find passing references to the Slovenes in the literature
that dominated the debate on the new central Europe, these have usually
involved little more than the perfunctory inclusion of Slovenia in lists of
the area's constituent parts. In the absence of reasoned explanations for
such categorizations, we should be careful about making too much of
them. Yet it is also worth remembering that in much the same unthinking
way, Slovenia has quite frequently ended up lumped together casually
with other Yugoslav republics in discussions of the "Balkan powderkeg."
Here, too, some appropriate discounting factor should be applied. Better
sources are those like the ones reviewed here that tackle the question of
Slovene identity more directly.

Anywhere But There: Slovenes Balk at a Balkan Identity

While Slovenian discourse on "national character" and political culture
has done little to sharpen the blurry conceptual boundaries that suppos-
edly demarcate "the west," "Europe," "eastern Europe," "central Europe,"
and "the Balkans," it is clear that in the waning years of the Yugoslav fed-
eration, Slovenian commentators often turned to precisely these cate-
gories to characterize their society vis-5-vis the other Yugoslav peoples.
They affirmed an identity grounded in traditions understood to be west-
ern, and not Balkan (or even east European). Frequently, the images of
the west that Slovenes cited as reflections of their own values were explic-
itly identified with the vision of Mitteleuropa that had been revived in the
last decades of state socialism by Milan Kundera, Gyorgy KonrBd, Czeslaw
Milosz, and other members of the east European literary and cultural
elite. Traditionally attentive to culture-as opposed to politics-as the
arena in which they could most successfully propagate a distinct national
identity,8 Slovenian writers on politics and culture were strongly attracted
to this new east European rhetoric of central Europe. By the time Yugo-
slavia had begun to unravel for good, many influential Slovenes had come
to think of their society as unambiguously central European (if, in fact,
they had not done so earlier) .g
-

nich, 1987);Markus Schubert, Die Mitteleuropa-Konreption Friedrich Naumanns und die Mittel-
mropa-Debatte der 80erJahre, Libertas Paper no. 3 (Sindelfingen, 1993). Cf. RudolfJaworski,
"Die aktuelle Mitteleuropadiskussion in historischer Perspektive," Historische Zeitschrift
247, no. 3 (1988): 529-50. Although Slovenian writers were keenly attuned to these dis-
cussions of the concept of central Europe and cited them frequently, Jaworski's review il-
lustrates that the flow of ideas went mostly one way. See also Jaworski, "Zur Tauglichkeit
und Akzeptanz eines historischen Hilfsbegriffs," in Winfried Eberhard et al., eds., Westmit-
teleuropa Ostmitteleuropa: Vergleiche und Baiehungen: Festschrqt fur Ferdinand Seibt rum 65.
Geburtstag (Munich, 1992), 37- 45.
8. Dimitrij Rupel characterizes this emphasis on cultural matters as one of the fun-
damental modes of, or perhaps substitutes for, political activity among Slovenes, a reflex
born of their long experience as constituents of much broader multinational states. In his
view, this "Slovene cultural syndrome" developed as a response to Slovenes' weakness in
more expressly political spheres. Rupel, Slovenstuo kotpolitihopepriCanje (Ljubljana, 1992),
14-16. All translations from foreign languages are my own unless otherwise noted.
9. My emphasis on the 1980s and 1990s here is not meant to imply that influential
Slovenes had not looked to central Europe as a framework for elaborating their national
Boundaries of Balkanism in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 115

The allure of Mitteleuropa seems to have been strongest for writers

influenced by Slovenia's sturdy traditions of political Catholicism and for
those concerned with the articulation of slovenstvo as a principal basis for
political organization. Many of these figures coalesced around the journal
Nova revija, which after its launch in 1982 became one of the main sound-
ing boards of nationalist sentiment, opposition to communism, and resis-
tance to efforts to centralize the Yugoslav federal structure.1° The em-
brace of central Europe was not without some reservations, however, as a
number of critics found the concept outmoded or too constraining for a
society hoping to open itself to contact, notjust with Austria and Germany,
but with the broader European Union as well."
When Slovenes did assert claims to membership in central Europe,
they typically grounded their arguments in the perception that they share
a common culture with the other peoples of that region.12 This was, for
instance, the position advanced by Dimitrij Rupel, a sociologist, opposi-
tion leader, and postcommunist statesman who has been one of Slovenia's
most prominent and prolific public intellectuals in the past two decades.
Slovenia's cultural alignment with central Europe has been a recurrent
theme in Rupel's work. He has described Slovenian society as bonded to
central Europe primarily through a complex of intellectual, artistic, polit-
ical, and social affinities common to the former members of the Habsburg
empire, and the conviction that Slovenia's natural affiliations lie there,

identity well before that time. See, for example, Edvard Kocbek, "Sredjna Evropa," Dejanje
3 (1940): 89-92.
10. For a representative sample of the journal's political concerns, see Tine Hribar,
"Nova revija v novi dobi," Nova revija 9, nos. 101-2 (September-October 1990): 1097-
1100.
11. See, for example, AleS Debeljak, "Zgodovina slovenske srameiljivosti," Melan-
holitnefigure: Eseji o knjiz'evnosti (Ljubljana, 1988), 133-44. Debeljak sympathized with the
project to affirm a non-Balkan identity, but he suggested that the idea of central Europe
threatened to keep Slovenes stuck in their role as "something in between," as "the Balkan
Europeans and the Europeans of the Balkans" (135, 142-43). Tine Hribar, one of the
most important members of the Nova revzj'a circle, generally accepted Slovenia's
identification with central Europe but expressed doubts that the concept of central Eu-
rope could have much in the way of real-practical meaning given the supervening pro-
cesses of European political integration. Hribar, "Podoba srednje evrope" (1991), Slovenci
kot nacija: SooCanja s sodobniki (Ljubljana, 1995). See also Bogo Grafenauer, "Srednja
Evropa? Zakaj ne preprosto Evropa?" in Peter Vodopivec, ed., Srednja Evropa (Ljubljana,
1991), 15-26. The Vodopivec collection offers a particularly valuable sample of the range
of opinions that Slovenes and others entertained with regard to Mitteleuropa.
12. For examples of such associations, see France BuEar, "Slovenija v Evropi," Nova re-
vzj'a 10, no. 115 (1991): i-vii; BuEar, "Slovenia in Europe," Nationalities Papers 21, no. 1
(Spring 1993): 33-41; Drago JanEar, "Memories of Yugoslavia," in Niko Grafenauer, ed.,
The Case ofSlovenia [Nova revija special edition] (Ljubljana, 1991), 64-78; Andrej Capuder,
Mozaik svobode: Politika i n kultura 1985-I992 (Ljubljana, 1992), 95; Ernest Petri?, "'Srednja
Evropa' obstaja v sferi duhovnega," NaSi razgledi 37, no. 7 (8 April 1988): 232-33. Histo-
rian Ervin Dolenc, a specialist in Slovenian culture, concludes that "just as the political
history of the states Slovenes lived in typifies Mitteleuropa, the cultural development of
Slovenes does not differ much from the contemporaneous development of central Eu-
rope." Ervin Dolenc, "Culture, Politics, and Slovene Identity," in Jill Benderly and Evan
Kraft, eds., Indqendent Slovenia: Origins, Movements, Prospects (New York, 1996), 69. See also
Valentin Hribar, "Slovene Statehood," Nationalities Papers 21, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 43- 49.
116 Slavic Review

and not with the purportedly alien and despotic Balkans, has strongly in-
fluenced his thought and political commitments.13 Shortly before Slove-
nia's secession, for example, Rupel described a gravely fractured Yugoslav
society where modern understandings of political and social order ex-
tended only as far as the borders of central Europe, that is, only to Slove-
nia, Croatia, and perhaps Bosnia-Herzegovina. Consequently, he claimed,
"the struggle to define the border between east and west is taking place to-
day on Yugoslav territory."14Elsewhere, Rupel observed that the first few
years of Slovenian independence amounted to a "shift from the Balkans
to (central) Europe," a transition grounded in the proposition that "Slo-
venes must establish ourselves in the company of the civilized nations. . . .
'The Balkans' is, to be sure, a geographic concept, but even more so the
mark of a cormpt and primitive society. With our attainment of indepen-
dence we ought to rid ourselves of the Balkans in this sense, too."15
In contrast to all this Balkan backwardness and unreason, the central
European identity that emerges from much of the Slovenian commentary
is said to be securely rooted in traditions of democracy, pluralism, and
even multiculturalism. (This interpretation is difficult to square with the
Slovenes' traditional resentment of pressures for Germanization during
the Habsburg era and their frustrations with Austria's deafness to the call
for the unification of the Slovenian lands in an autonomous regional ad-
ministration.) Against an image of a stable, orderly, civil, and democratic
central Europe, Slovenian opinion has frequently portrayed its counter-
part, the Balkans, as a region sinking into disorder, violence, mismanage-
ment, and authoritarianism.
One of the most pointed examples of this tendency has come in the
work of Taras Kermauner, another important literary figure and a con-
tributor to Nova revija. Writing in 1988, Kermauner drew a sharp distinc-
tion between the Balkan chaos that he saw as dominant in southern Yu-

13. Dimitrij Rupel, Besede boije i n boianske (Ljubljana, 1987), 55-80. See, for example,
Dimitrij Rupel, "Slovenia's Shift from the Balkans to Central Europe," in Benderly and
Kraft, eds., Indqbendent Slouenia, 187, 194-95. See also Rupel, Caspolitike (Ljubljana, 1994),
30-37; Rupel, Odtarancc Slouenija: knjiga o slouenski pomladi i n jeseni (Ljubljana, 1993), 59,
151, 161; Rupel, "Srednja Evropa, prehodno obdobje," in Vodopivec, ed., Srednja Europa,
95-105. Rupel's concern for the "withdrawal of Slovenia from the Balkans" has persisted;
see, for example, Rupel, "Narod prihodnosti," Delo, 30 April 1999, 32.
14. Dimitrij Rupel, "Samostojna in evropska Slovenija: PoroEilo ob prvi obletnici
demokracije" (April 1991), Slouenska pot do samostojnosti i n priznanja (Ljubljana, 1992),
137-38 (emphasis in the original); see generally 100-106, 131-40.
15. Dimitrij Rupel, "Mojstri, vendar ne naSi, Rqjublika, 24 April 1993, reprinted in
Rupel, Edinost, sreta, spraua (Ljubljana, 1993), 17-18 (emphasis in the original). Along the
same lines, see, for example, Rupel, "ArneriSki sen," Republika, 26 November 1994,
reprinted in Rupel, Edinost, 176-77 (on how Slovenia saved itself from the "sinking ship
of premodern and preindustrial Balkanness"). Related themes surface repeatedly in Ru-
pel's essay on the Slovenes' fate in postcommunist Europe, "Slovenci in Evropa," in Rupel,
Edinost, 191-250. See also Rupel, "Slovenia in Post-Modern Europe," Nationalities Papers
21, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 51-59. In this article written in November 1991, Rupel argued that
a "part of Yugoslavia has a good chance of remaining outside Europe. Slovenia, which
senses that it is Europe or nothing, strives to escape from the Yugoslav bondage which
keeps it apart" (55).
Boundaries of Balkanism i n Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 117

goslavia and a Slovene community notable for its central European values
of productivity, respect for civil society, religious and political pluralism,
and the subjection of the state to popular control.16He argued that Slove-
nia, despite being mired in the Balkans by virtue of its association with the
Yugoslav state, really had little or nothing to do with Balkan society, which
was marked by the deep penetration of what he called "the spirit of the
Ottomans." As a result of these vast historical divides, the character of
Slovene culture was essentially different from that of the Serbs, the Mace-
donians, and the Kosovo Albanians, all of whom were, in Kermauner's
view, thoroughly Balkan peoples:
Today Slovenes are discovering their own history [and discovering] . . .
that, as regards their type of culture and civilization, they belong much
more to central Europe and western Europe than to the Balkans and the
Near East, that is, to the lands of the former Ottoman empire. (The for-
mer center of the Ottoman empire-today's Turkey-is moving away
from that Near Eastern spirit most successfully. Balkan Yugoslavia is closer
to revolutions of the Libyan, Palestinian, and Iraqi type than Turkey;
sympathizing with that type is, for Yugoslavia, a civilizational tragedy.) l 7

The clear message of Kermauner's work was that the formation of the Yu-
goslav state had unnaturally bound Slovenia to the Balkans, and that one
way or another, it was time to make a break: "At least to the great majority
of Slovenes, it now seems that central Europe is in harmony with the fun-
damental or positive trends of world history, and that the Balkans are a
dead-end street." l8 This view, obviously, encouraged the separatist move-
ment that was growing in Slovenia at the time. Kermauner maintained
that if Slovenia was nevertheless to remain associated with Yugoslavia, it
would be required to fulfill what he called its "political-civilizational mis-
sion" to inculcate the values of the west in Yugoslav society. "Maybe it
sounds pathetic, but it is true: In terms of civilization, Slovenia is today the
Yugoslav Piedmont, just as Serbia was its military Piedmont in 1918."19
More recently the work of Veljko Rus, another prominent intellectual,
political figure, and occasional contributor to Nova revija, has voiced sim-
ilar sentiments. In his view, Slovenia's "mission" in former Yugoslavia had
been to curb the charismatic, authoritarian style of politics favored by Tito
and later adopted, with a populist and pseudo-democratic twist, by Slo-
bodan MiloSeviS. According to Rus, Slovenes had understood their calling
to be nothing less than the "Europeanization" and "enlightenment" of the
Balkam20

16. Taras Kermauner, "Slovenija med Srednjo Evropo in Balkanom" (10 March
1988), in Taras Kermauner and Matjai Krnecl, Pisma slovenskemu przjatelju (Celovec [Kla-
genfurt] , 1989).
17. Ibid., 215-16.
18. Ibid., 211.
19. Ibid., 224, 225. See also Kermauner, Pisma srbskemu pqatelju (Celovec [Klagen-
furt] , 1989).
20. Veljko Rus, "Uvod," in Veljko Rus, ed., Slovenia po ktu 1995:Razmiiljanja o pihod-
nosti (Ljubljana, 1995), 9.
 Slavic Review

On a number of occasions, the editors of Nova revija made their jour-

nal a platform for extraordinarily Balkanist readings of Yugoslav and
Slovenian society. Contributor MiSo Jezernik, for example, noted Slove-
nia's difficulties in assimilating an immigrant workforce from southern
Yugoslavia "which not only is by and large unskilled but also has its origins
in a completely ulien cultural- historical environment, and which thus is differ-
entiated from the autochthonous population by language, by work habits,
and by manner and style of living, as well as, and above all, by the social
values it has assimilated. In short it represents a foreign body i n a relatively
hornogeneous ethnic tissue and in a central European space characterized by a har-
mony of values. "*I In another instance, the review reprinted excerpts from
the work of Dinko TomaSid, a Croat sociologist and 6migrC to the United
States whose 1948 book traced the weaknesses of the Croat and Slovene
national movements to their subjection to the Serbs, a nation with politi-
cal and cultural traditions which were, it was alleged, utterly alien to those
of Europe. The analysis Nova revija offered readers in this case was breath-
taking in its essentialism, reductionism, and embrace of stereotypes: Serbs
were primitive and antimodern "herdsmen-warriors" who had effectively
displaced the Turks but inherited the Ottomans' dynastic despotism, mil-
itarism, authoritarianism, and corruption. After 1918 the Slovenes and
Croats lost the comparative autonomy granted them by the Austrians
and Hungarians-whose traditions and culture they shared, for the most
part-and were governed according to the "Uralic-Altaic"and "Byzantine-
0tt0man"'~racticeskept alive by the Serbs who dominated the new Yugo-
slav state.22 Tito's Yugoslavia, TomaSid concluded, merely perpetuated
these methods and the underlying social-political structure of medieval
and contemporary Serbia.23
Judgments such as these, reflective of the harshest variant of Sloven-
ian rejection of the Balkans, portrayed Slovenia as one of the borderlands

21. h4iSo Jezernik, "Slovenci o sebi in drugih," Nova revija 8, nos. 84-85 (1989): 964
(emphasis added).
22. Joie Pirjevec, a Slovene historian at the University of Trieste, argues that when
Slovenesjoined the first Yugoslav state in 1918 they "departed from the cultural and civi-
lizational circle of central Europe and joined a foreign, Levantine world precisely in the
hope that they would with its help preserve their ethnic unity." Pirjevec,Jugoslavija, 1918-
1992: Nastanek, rarvoj ter razpad Karadjordjeviieve in Titove Jugoslavije (Koper, 1995), 29;
see also 14-15, 31, 45, 63, 67, 103. Pirjevec offers a more unreservedly Balkanist analysis
in "The Levant and Central Europe in the History of Former Yugoslavia," in Stefano
Bianchini and Paul Shoup, eds., The Yugoslav War, Europe and the Balkans: How to Achieve
Security? (Ravenna, 1995), 83-91. On the Slovenes as the product of "Central European
civilization processes" and the "foreign," that is, "Slavic, Eastern, Balkan, and Orthodox
orientation" of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, see Janko Prunk, "The
Origins of an Independent Slovenia," in Da~licaFink-Hafner and john R. Robbins, eds.,
Making a New Nation: The Formation ofSlovenia (Brookfield, Vt., 1997), 22-23.
23. Dinko TomaSii: [TomaSie], "Osebnost in kultura vvzhodnoevropski politiki,: Nova
reuija 9, nos. 93-94 (January-February 1990): 188-94 (translated by Vladimira Stivan
from Tomagit, Personality and Culture in Eastern European Politics (New York, 1948). Com-
pare the companion piece in which ethnologist Boiidar Jezernik examines what he iden-
tifies as a Serb tendency, influenced by romantic nationalism, to stereotype Albanians as
uncultured "savages" and "bandits" (divjaki and roparje).Jezernik, ''05, da ne vidijo," Nova
reuija 9, nos. 93-94 (January-February 1990): 199-216, esp. 201, 213-14.
Boundaries of Balkanism in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 119

of European civilization, if not in fact the last land where western tradi-
tions of democracy and rational political discourse held sway. Slovenia
was, in this view, the carrier and defender of European democratic ideas
in a backward Yugoslavia-"the Europe within the A n t i - E u r ~ p e . "The
~~
idea of order was keyed to the west; to the south lay chaos, violence, and
Balkan emotionalism. Seen from this vantage point, Slovenia was indeed
on the edge of reason.
At this juncture, however, a word of caution is needed. Following this
sample of the most thoroughly Balkanist texts, it is important to note that
such extreme positions by no means typified Slovenian commentary on
Yugoslav affairs during the period in question. These perspectives were
certainly influential, and they are easy enough to find, but Slovenian
opinion was far from monolithic, and we come away with a mistaken pic-
ture of Slovenian cultural politics if we engage in a sort of proof-texting
that acknowledges only evidence of the sort just reviewed. On the con-
trary, the main participants in the debates over Slovenia's future with Yu-
goslavia did not consistently resort to such sharp rhetoric.
Even writers in the Nova revija circle often avoided such reductionist
terms when voicing their many complaints about the political life of the
Yugoslav south.*The journal did undoubtedly seek the primacy of the
ethnonational in Slovenian affairs, and it almost certainly must be ranked,
among the press outlets favored by Slovenia's public intellectuals, as the
venue in which Balkanism was most likely to turn up. Yet it was hardly suf-
fused with Balkanist stereotyping. In its analyses of Yugoslav politics and
interethnic relations, Balkanism was an important and recurring motif.
It was not, however, a uniform and pervasive strategy. Just as often, if not
more so, Nova revija attacked state socialism, Serbian policy, and jugoslo-
vanstuo without reliance on Balkanist rhetoric. Even the notorious no. 57,
the 1987 issue widely viewed as the Slovenian intelligentsia's most provoc-
ative contribution to the secessionist movement, largely avoided Balkanist
language while consistently trumpeting the Slovene nation's right to sov-
ereignty and self-determinati~n.~~ The other famous "national" issues of
Nova revija-a 1990 volume on "the emancipation of Slovenia" and a 1993
collection on "Slovenes and the futuren-are similarly varied.27National-

24. Joie Snoj, "TisoE let samote," Nova revija 9, no. 95 (1990): 257. For a critical treat-
ment of other Slovenian opinions along the same lines, see Bakit-Hayden and Hayden,
"Orientalist Variations on the Theme 'Balkans."'
25. For example, BuEar, "Slovenija med Balkanom in Evropo," Nova revija 8, no. 91
(1989): 1491-1503; Ivan Gams, "Skozi Srednjo Evropo v Evropo?" ,Vova revija 9, nos. 101-2
(1990): 1338-40. Cf. Ivan Urbantit, "Refleksije o mednarodnih (ne)razumevanjihvJugo-
slaviji,"Noua revija 6, nos. 67-68 (1987): 2053-63.
26. Noua revija 6, no. 57 (1987) ["Prispevkiza slovenski nacionalni program"]. In this
issue, see especially the editors' introduction and the pieces by Urbantit, Rupel, Putnik,
Jambrek, Hribar, BuEar, Gregor Tomc, and Marjan Roianc.
27. In Nova reuija 9, no. 95 (1990),see the contributions by Butar, Hribar, Vodopivec,
PuEnik, Niko Grafenauer, Ivan Kristan, Andrej Fink, Bogo Grafenauer, Veljko Rus, Toma?
Mastnak, and the Slovenian political alliance DEMOS, which formed the first noncom-
munist government following the elections of April 1990; in these pieces Balkanist rhetoric
is virtually absent or plays no great role. They may be contrasted with a number of other
essays. Among the most emphatic in the use of Balkanist stereotyping are Jambrek and Ru-
120 Slavic Review

istic they are indeed, but taken on balance they present only occasional
forays into Balkanism while maintaining a much steadier emphasis on
slovenstvo, Slovene autonomy, and the inseparability of the political from
the ethnonational.
In much the same way, even the extensive Slovenian engagement with
the idea of central Europe did not yield an unmitigated descent into
Balkanism. Considering, for example, one of the leading Slovenian con-
tributions on the topic, the secession-year volume Srednja Evropa edited by
historian Peter Vodopivec, the reader finds only a little evidence to sup-
port the judgment that talking about central Europe necessarily meant
maligning other Yugoslavs as "Balkan." Even in those essays most sympa-
thetic to the concept, most wedded to Mitteleuropa as a cultural and po-
litical reality, and most insistent on Slovenia's full participation in it, there
is a certain effort at distancing, but not much outright disparagement of
the Balkans.28Of course, if the mere acceptance of the term central Europe
is to count an exercise in Balkanism, then almost every one of these con-
tributions, like much other Slovenian public discourse, would be found
culpable. Such an interpretation, however, risks substituting a reduction-
ist linguistic analysis for thorough and sensitive textual interpretation: too
much meaning is assigned to too few words, not enough to what the writer
has expressed in the bulk of the text. Todorova is no doubt right when she
insists that "marking out is not an innocent act" and points to the danger

pel, Snoj, Viktor Blaiit, and Frane Adam. Milder or more limited exercises in Balkanism
may be found in the pieces by Peter Klinar, Miro Cerar, and Franc Rozman; compare the
more ambiguous contributions of Urbantit, Rupel, Tomc, Alenka Puhar, and Boris Pahor.
In Nova reuija 12, nos. 134-35 (June-July 1?93), see, for example, the pieces by
BuEar, Jambrek, Bogo Grafenauer, Debeljak, Rudi Seligo, Boris A. Novak, Edvard KovaE,
and Marko Kos; of special note are the odd typology of nationalisms developed by Jan
MakaroviE and the ambivalent views of historian Peter Vodopivec as to the Slovenes' west-
ernness. These may be contrasted with the thoroughly Balkanist perspectives of Rupel,
Tomc, MiSo Jezernik, and Viktor BlaiiE; rather more muted is the rhetoric found in the
contributions by UrbanEiE, Niko Grafenauer, Tomo Virk, and Niko Prijatelj. This issue was
published in book form: Niko Grafenauer, ed., Slouenci i n prihodnost (Ljubljana, 1993).The
journal's tradition of special "national" collections continues: see Niko Grafenauer et al.,
eds., SproSCena Slouenija: ObraCun zaprihodnost (Ljubljana, 1999).
28. For Slovenia and Mitteleuropa, see Vodopivec, ed., Srednja Europa. Slovenian con-
tributors who were in one way or another favorably disposed toward the concept of
Srednja Europa include Hribar, Rupel, BuEar, Roianc, JanEar, and Janko Kos; of these, the
strongest tendency to see the non-Catholic Yugoslavs as alien is probably to be found in
the three pieces by Roianc. By contrast, Bogo Grafenauer takes a decidedly skeptical atti-
tude toward the notion of central Europe. Also valuable are the balanced and subtle in-
troductory remarks by Vodopivec. In the main, these essays treat Slovenia as a part of cen-
tral Europe and tend to exclude the Serbs, or at least most of them; the status of the Croats
is often left ambiguous.
But concerning disparagement of the Balkans, note the essay by Hribar: in a conclu-
sion that smacks of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" analysis, Hribar suggests
that the enduring split between eastern and western Europe might be healed by an un-
derstanding that the real threat lay elsewhere: "Gradually, the west has begun to realize
that eastern Europe, which like western Europe is a part of Christian civilization, repre-
sents a protective shield against other civilizations. And eastern Europe has most likely al-
ready recognized that its true adversary or competitor is not in the west, but rather in the
far east." Hribar, "Podoba sredjne Evrope," in Vodopivec, ed., SrednjaEuropa, 39. One anti-
dote for Balkanism, it would appear, is simply a new and stronger dose of Orientalism.
Boundaries of Balkanism i n Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 121

that "an excessively marked attention" may, without great care, "result in
constructing Southeast Europe as fundamentally different and hopelessly
marginal to the rest of E u r ~ p e . Admittedly,
"~~ the delimitation of socio-
cultural boundaries is rarely if ever innocent of the ideological, political,
and historical contexts in which it takes place. This does not imply, how-
ever, that every instance of such "marking out" is necessarily a guilty act
(and the discourse on Balkanism is one concerned to some extent with the
imputation of guilt). Great care is important, not only to the way we talk
about the Balkans, but to the way we talk about others who do as well. And
a more open approach to the Slovenian literature on central Europe, one
that looks beyond mere categorization to what is actually being said about
central Europe and the rest of Europe, turns up a fairly mixed record.
Still, for all the shadings of Slovenian opinion, there remained a re-
markable consensus-and a remarkably enduring consensus-around
the idea that no matter which "Europe" Slovenia belonged to, it was not
really part of the Balkans. This conviction helped propel Slovenes away
from a Yugoslav federation whose other constituent peoples were seen to
varying degrees as Balkan, and hence as culturally alien. While Balkanism
may not have been as powerful and pervasive as the critique of it might
suggest, it has had real political consequences in and for Slovenia. The
negative, sometimes stereotyped opinions of influential Slovenian com-
mentators about their fellow Yugoslavs likely served as an important cata-
lyst for the dissolution of the federal state, as earlier Slovenian efforts at
the incremental reform of the country's socialist system mutated into a
wholesale rejection of the federation itself-a rejection conditioned in
part by the judgment that Yugoslavia was a collectivity incurably tainted by
Balkan modes of politics. In the end, Slovenes forsook whatever mission
they believed they had to "Europeanize" and "civilize" the Balkans. In-
stead they simply applied for an exit visa. And as a result, other Europeans,
particularly those in bordering states, were called upon to judge Slovenia's
claims to a western identity, to decide whether the Slovenes were really to
be admitted to membership in "central Europe" or "Europe."

One Free Ticket to Klub Mitteleuropa:

Austrian Understandings of Slovene Identity
Notwithstanding some frictions, most notably over the treatment of the
Slovene minority living in Austria, the Slovenes' neighbors to the north

29. See Todorova, "Marking Out Is Not an Innocent Act" (address to a plenary
session of a conference on southeast Europe, Graz, Austria, 14 November 1998), see
www.see-educoop.net/graz/graz98/plenary/todorova.htm(last consulted 29 September
2002); see also Todorova, "Isn't Central Europe Dead?" in Christopher Lord, ed., Central
Europe: Core or Periphery? (Copenhagen, 2000), 226. At the Graz conference, Todorova
faulted the west for any paranoid streak in Balkan political culture: 'When we stricture the
Balkans for their delusion of persecution, let us not forget that their affliction is only one
part of an inseparable ~ u r o ~ e dyad.
a n It exists next to but also because of the delirium of
grandeur of Europe's better half." Todorova, "Marking Out Is Not an Innocent Act"; the
same argument also appears in Todorova, "Afterthoughts on Imagining the Balkans," Har-
uard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 5 (1999-2000) : 145.
122 Slavic Review

generally encouraged their efforts to dissociate themselves from the Bal-

k a n ~Significantly,
.~~ they were among the first to do so. On a purely prac-
tical level, the Austrian government proved one of the earliest and most
ardent supporters of Slovenian (and Croatian) independence. Especially
in the years leading up to Slovenia's secession and shortly thereafter, Aus-
trian discourse tended to adopt, at least in a casual and somewhat attenu-
ated form, the basic assertions advanced by Slovenes concerning their
fundamentally central European character. Indeed, a review of leading
Austrian news outlets such as Vienna's Der Standard, Die Presse, and Profil
and Graz's Kleine Zeitungreveals that the Austrian press in recent years has
habitually deemed Slovenia a part of central Europe and a place only in-
cidentally associated with the Balkans.
One striking feature of Austrian commentary throughout the period
in question-and a significant divergence from Slovenian usages-is the
extent to which the central European nature of Slovenian society is sim-
ply assumed, as something natural, self-evident, and uncontroversial. Al-
though both groups were certain enough that Slovenia was not Balkan,
only the Slovenes usually found this proposition so open to question as
to require much in the way of proof. In Austria, the equation of slowenisch
with mitteleuropaisch has not sparked much debate. It is almost taken for
granted that the Slovenes' long history as Habsburg subjects have left
them with some indelible central European stamp. In the traditional Aus-
trian conceptions of Mitteleuropa, the old empire is received as the
standard-bearer, if not the very embodiment, of a western civilization set
explicitly or implicitly in opposition to an alien eastern culture linked with
the Russian and Ottoman empires and their successor^.^^ This easy as-
sociation of central Europe with the confines of the Habsburg realm, of
course, places the Slovenesjust where many of them have said they be-
longed all along.
Echoing common elements of Slovenian opinion, two principal mo-
tifs of the predominant Austrian vision of central Europe are the unifylng
effects of a shared experience under the Habsburgs and the persistence
of cultural, economic, and political connections between the peoples of
the region, connections not severed by the rise of nationalism, the ex-
tinction of the empire, and the advent of state socialism. Thus, in the view
of one Austrian journalist, Slovenes were surely to be counted among the
many natives of central Europe who, drawn together by a common, dis-
tinctive culture, "travel on a network of subterranean emotional canals, in

30. For historical background on the Slovenes in Austria, see Thomas M. Barker, The
Slovene Minmity of Carinthia (Boulder, Colo., 1984);Tom Priestly, "Denial of Ethnic Iden-
tity: The Political Manipulation of Beliefs about Language in Slovene Minority Areas of
Austria and Hungary," Slavic Review 55, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 364-98.
31. See Hans-Georg Heinrich, "Nachbarschaftpolitik, ein Mythos?" osterreichische
Zeitschrijt furPolitikwissenschaft 17 (1988): 163. For another of the same author's critical as-
sessments of the Mitteleuropa debate in the country where it has arguably figured most
prominently, see Heinrich, "Die osterreichische Gesellschaft und die Mitteleuropa-Idee,"
in Andreas Pribersky, ed., Europa und Mitteleuropa? Eine Umschreibung Osterreichs (Vienna,
1991),46-58.
Boundaries of Balkanism in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 123

an immense mitteleuropaisch Venice."" Alois Mock, a longtime leader of

the center-right Austrian Peoples' Party who served as foreign minister
when Yugoslavia disintegrated, sounded similar themes in justifying his
countrv's close ties to the new Slovenian state. Slovenia, Mock wrote, "is
joined to Austria through a common history lasting hundreds of years and
through a dense network of relationships at all levels," and so Austria had
a keen interest in seeing Slovenia take "the place it deserves in the com-
munity of democratic ~ t a t e s . " ~ W o nthe
g same lines, Klagenfurt historian
Andreas Moritsch portrayed the movement toward regional cooperation
in the area of the Alps-Adriatic Working Community as a welcome return
to the more natural state of interethnic communication and understand-
ing that had prevailed before the era of nationalism fortified the borders
in the heads of both Slovenes and German-speaking Austrians." The re-
marks of another notable observer intimately associated with the Austrian
cultural legacy, though almost certainly overstated for effect, are nonethe-
less instructive about the perceived consequences of the imperial past for
Slovenian society. In this view, there were no especially noteworthy dif-
ferences between the two populations on either side of the boundary
separating Austria from Slovenia. Those to the south spoke Slovenian, of
course, "but they are Austrians, on both sides of the border."" Many

32. Wolfgang Broer, unidentified text quoted in Karl Schlogel, "Nachdenken iiber
Mitteleuropa," in Dietrich Spangenberg, ed., Die blockierte Vergangenheit: Nachdenken uber
Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1987), 20. Tellingly, Croats were said to share the same bonds, but no
other peoples of Yugoslavia made Broer's list, which appears to coincide with the old Habs-
burg realm.
33. Alois Mock, "Die Haltung ijsterreichs in der Balkankrise und die Beziehungen
zu den Nachfolgestaaten auf dem Gebiet des ehemaligen Jugoslawien," Osterreichisches
Jahrbuch fur Politik, 1993 (Vienna, 1994), 121 (emphasis added). A lengthier exposition of
Mock's views on events in the region can be found in his book Das Balkan-Dossier:Der Ag-
gressionskrieg in Ex-Jugoslawien-Peektiven fur die Zukunft (Vienna, 1997). Significantly, the
Croatian edition of the book changes its title to distinguish Croatia from the Balkans
and begins with a foreword reassuring readers that despite the explicitly "Balkan" subject
matter of the analysis, Croatia, like Mock's Austria, belongs to central Europe. Nikola
Ruiinski, "Predgovor hrvatskom izdanju," in Mock, Dossier Balkan i Hrvatska: Ratna agresija
u biuioj Jugoslaviji-perspektiue za buduinost, ed. Herbert Vytiska, trans. Sreeko LipovEan
(Zagreb, 1998).
34. Andreas Moritsch, "National-provinziell-regional? Kiirnten und die Alpen-
Adria-Region," Karntner Jahrbuch fiirPolitik 1995 (Klagenfurt, 1996), 45-55.
35. Otto von Habsburg, interview in Die Presse (Vienna), 8 October 1993, cited in
Bruno Luver2, Oltre il conjine: Regzonalismo europeo e nuovi nazionalismi in Trentino-Alto Adige
(Bologna, 1996), 2007222. Also revealing are von Habsburg's remarks at the opening of a
major conference on central Europe held in 1983 in Duino, near Trieste, just as the con-
cept was beginning to find a new life in political and cultural discourse. Lamenting the
"tragedy" that "Mitteleuropa" had virtually disappeared from European political vocabu-
lary, von Habsburg argued for the continuing vitality of the idea: "Central Europe is now
a reality. Whoever travels with his eyes open across our continent knows that Trieste and
Vienna, Budapest and Prague, Bratislava and Zagreb, Ljubljana and Krak6w have much in
common. The languages are different, but the spirits are to be found on the same wave-
length. And the interests are mutual as well." Colloqui di Duino: Mitteleuropa passato efuturo,
ouuero, La signzjication Europienne de Mitteleurope [proceedings of conference in Duino, Italy,
19-21 September 19831 (Trieste, 1986), 12-13. Conspicuous by omission from this list of
the hubs of central European culture are Yugoslav cities like Belgrade, Skopje, and Sara-
124 Slavic Review

Slovenes might recoil from this characterization, but the sentiment was
still probably reassuring to those who sought a secure place in central Eu-
rope. (It is perhaps safest not to speculate as to how these "Austrians"
would react upon learning that the notable observer offering these com-
ments was Otto von Habsburg.)
To the extent that Austrian commentators voiced an implicit distinc-
tion between the Balkans and Europe (or central Europe), they did so less
through any outright affirmation of Slovenes' qualifications as Westerners
than through the habit of seeing the Slovenes' new adversaries, the Serbs,
as a people constrained by their history and their allegedly warlike cul-
ture. This tendency is most pronounced in commentary produced just
after Slovenia's break with the federation and the brief war with the Serb-
dominated Yugoslav National Army. Significantly, it appears to have
abated later on. In this vein, for example, the Austrian diplomat Albert
Rohan opined gloomily that the prospect of a resistance movement
against the MiloSevii: regime "appears more than questionable . . . in view
of the Serb mentality, which accepts the 'struggle against the entire world'
as part of the destiny of the Serbian people."36Against this image of the
Serbs, the Slovenes were depicted as peaceful, businesslike, and demo-
cratic-if not yet completely European, then certainly on the way. As a re-
sult of the "European orientation and the political maturity of the Slovenian
leadership, which certainly make the country's passage toward Europe eas-
ier," Slovenes were able to evade the consequences of "Serbian covetous-
ness," Rohan argued. As a result, "Slovenia has, once and for all, said
goodbye to the balk an^."^^
To some extent, then, the Austrian evidence might seem to bear out
the arguments of Todorova and other critics of Balkanism who contend
that the concept of "central Europe" has developed into a way of essen-
tializing the Balkans and reifjing negative stereotypes. The construct, in
this view, protects the self-images of those privileged groups who are
counted as "in" central Europe by screening them off from Balkan "oth-
ers" who are fated to be "out."38For Todorova, Mitteleuropa has been im-
portant not for how it might bring some European peoples closer to-

jevo (the latter of which was, at least in the minds of some, rendered more central Euro-
pean by forty years of Habsburg rule from 1878-1918).
36. Albert Rohan, "Der Konflikt in ehemaligen Jugoslawien: Hintergriinde, Reaktio-
nen, Argumente," OsterreichischesJahrbuch fiirlnternationale Politik, vol. 10 (Vienna, 1993), 7.
37. Rohan, "Entwicklungen auf dem Balkan aus osterreichischer Sicht," 525 (em-
phasis added). It speaks to the perceived strength of the Slovenes' claims that this official
raised no doubts about Slovenia's rapid integration into "Europe" but presented Croatia
as a more uncertain case. Rohan subtly called into question the argument advanced by
Croatian president Franjo Tudjman that, as Rohan put it, "Croatia is indisputably a part of
Mitteleuropa [and] has only very little to do with the Balkans." Rohan agreed that Croatia
shared a "European calling," but he suggested that the Croatian government was not yet
conducting its affairs as befit that calling, with a respect for western values and norms
(532-34).
38. Todorova, Imagzningthe Balkans, 140-60. See also Todorova, "The Balkans: From
Discovery to Invention," Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 478-79; BakiS-Hayden,
"Nesting Orientalisms," 924; BakiS-Hayden and Hayden, "Orientalist Variations on the
Theme 'Balkans,"' esp. 2-5; Iordanova, "Are the Balkans Admissible?" 5 , 11, 16-17.
Boundaries ofBalkanism i n Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 125

gether but for how it divides them from the rest. Todorova's hostility to-
ward "central Europe" derives from her deep suspicion of the obvious and
not-so-obvious political uses of terms of this type. To her mind, the con-
cept is deployed to perpetuate western hegemony: "Western Europe and
the U.S. would naturally like to preserve their status of the privileged club
of rich, wealthy nations. They are creating a fence around themselves and
this is being legitimized by intellectuals with all those kinds of discourses
about insufficient historical development, about archaic traits, about pri-
mordial cultural features."3g In this view, both Balkanism and its mit-
teleuropaisch dialects serve to deliver "a clear message [about] who
should be in and who out."40"Central Europe" is thus to be understood,
above all, as a part of the contemporary instrumentalist discourse on the
Balkans, and as Todorova sees it, "current discourse on the Balkans, when
the overexpansion of European institutions endangers the exclusiveness
of the privileged club, is . . . perfectly clear."41
But a closer look at the leading lines of Austrian discourse in recent
years should warn us against pushing this judgment too far. Certainly the
most influential Austrian exponent of Mitteleuropa has been Erhard
Busek, an Austrian People's Party politician, former vice-chancellor, and
one of the key figures in Austria's relations with its neighbors to the south-
east, who has written frequently and at great length on the renewal of
Mitteleuropa and its meanings for modern Austrian society. If we ap-
proach the notion of central Europe as an exercise in inclusion and ex-
clusion, a determination of winners and losers, as it were, then Slovenia
clearly emerges from Busek's writings as a winner: a full participant in the
enterprise, if perhaps not one of the most important. When Busek and his
collaborator Emil Brix catalogue the urban nodes of central European
culture, when they wax nostalgic over the wonderful coffeehouses where

39. "UF Professor Explains How Balkans Got Their Reputation" [interview with
Todorova], University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences CLASnotes, vol. 10,
no. 10 (October 1996),see www.clas.ufl.edu/CLASnotes/96lO/Todorova.html (last con-
sulted 29 September 2002). Applying Todorova's analysis to the Croatian case, Nicole
Lindstrom and Maple Razsa arrive at much the same conclusion. Balkanism of the sort
Todorova describes, they argue, has proved a very effective method of reining in and "dis-
ciplining" Croatia and other marginal states with "European" aspirations. Thus Lindstrom
and Razsa contend that "the enormous fall in Croatia's international standing did not rely
solely on Western perceptions of its political failings or its economic performance but in-
volved a deployment of 'Balkan' stereotypes on a massive scale." Ultimately, they see in
this discursive practice evidence that "the West will designate who will be European
and who would be kept out of the club." Nicole Lindstrom and Maple Razsa, "Reimagin-
ing the Balkans" (paper presented at The Socrates Kokkalis Graduate Student Work-
shop "New Approaches to Southeast Europe," Harvard University, 12 February 1999),see
www.ksg.harvard.edu/kokkalis/GSWl/GSW1/03%20Lindstrom%2ORazsa.pdf (last con-
sulted 29 September 2002).A revised version of this paper is to be published in 2003 in
East European Politics and Societies under the title "Balkan Is Beautiful: The Role of Balkan-
ism in Contemporary Croatian Political Discourse."
40. See Todorova, "The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention," 479, quoting Law-
rence Eagleburger, MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, 7 February 1994;see also Imagining the Bal-
kans, 158.
41. Todorova, "The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention," 479;see also Todorova,
Imagining the Balkans, 158.
126 Slavic Review

central European "neighbors" of the most diverse ethnicities (yet in some

sense all good Austrians, too) built a common intellectual world, when
they survey the sites of central European literary production-there, re-
liably enough, is L a i b a ~ hThe
. ~ ~Slovenes are, without a doubt, "in."
Yet can the Slovenes, in this view, really claim to be select members of
such an exclusive club? Is Mitteleuropa the conceptual scalpel that lets
Slovenia sever its purportedly unnatural ties to those distanced cousins of
the Balkan south? In the end, does the "power discourse" of Balkanism
command a hegemonic force sufficient to erect an unbreachable ideo-
logical border between the cultured north/west and uncivilized south/
east? Perhaps not. As it turns out, the central Europe that Busek and Brix
yearn for is not all that exclusive, or at least not nearly as exclusive as some
varieties of Slovenian opinion would have it. Their work, produced at the
height of the Mitteleuropa fever in the late 1980s, suggests that the Serbs,
too-and the allegedly Ottomanized Bosnians, and perhaps even those
stereotypically warlike Montenegrins!-might make a credible case for
inclusion in central Europe, if perhaps not as effortlessly as the S l o v e n e ~ . ~ ~
And the Busekian campaign to project Mitteleuropa ever farther to the
south and east has only intensified more recently (just as interest in the
idea of central Europe has subsided in many quarters for want of a wholly
satisfactory raison d'Ctre). Countering an Austrian climate marked to
some degree by an abiding hostility toward the Serbs for their role in
World War I, Busek's later work has continued to treat Mitteleuropa as,
surprisingly enough, a concept through which Austria may develop closer
ties with its old antagonist, Serbia.44With apparent sensitivity to the trou-
bling implications of Balkanist discourse, he has recently called for the re-
jection of the term Balkans as an appellation for anything other than the
mountain range. "The people living to the southeast of us," he reminded
readers of one of Vienna's major daily newspapers, "are also Europe-
a n ~ . In" ~fact,
~ the efforts of Busek and others to open a new channel of
Austrian attention toward what is now increasingly termed "southeastern

42. Erhard Busek and Emil Brix, Projekt Mitteleuropa (Vienna, 1986). See also Brix,
"Europa jenseits der Blockgrenzen," in Pribersky, ed., Europa und Mitteleuropa? 42, where
the writer lists Ljubljana with Prague, Budapest, and Vienna as one of the historical "for-
mative elements" (Baubestande) of central Europe. Brix's inclusion of the Slovenian capi-
tal among the centers of central European culture is perhaps all the more significant given
that his remarks appeared in the year when Slovenes sought to solidify their central Euro-
pean identity by seceding from the Yugoslav federation, a move that succeeded in no small
part due to early support from official Austria.
43. Busek and Brix, Projekt Mitteleuropa, 102-3. See also Erhard Busek, "Versuchssta-
tion fiir Weltuntergange-Hoffnung auf eine bessere Zeit?" in Sven Papcke and Werner
Weidenfeld, eds., Traumland Mitteleuropa? Beitrage zu einer aktuellen Kontroverse (Darmstadt,
1988), 15-31.
44. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of a prior version of this study who called
attention to the importance of lingering animosity toward Serbia in contemporary Aus-
trian politics.
45. Erhard Busek, "Kann man noch 'Balkan' sagen?" Der Standard (Vienna),
7 May 1997. See also Busek, "Das Ende von Mitteleuropa?" Der Standard (Vienna), 4 De-
cember 1996,27.
Boundaries of Balka~zismin Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 127

Europe," and thereby blur whatever conceptual lines might have fenced
off that region from central Europe, appear to have raised the hackles of
some Slovenes, who see in such initiatives the possibility that they will be
stuffed back into the balk an^.^^
And Busek is by no means the only Austrian proponent of an expan-
sive central European community that would welcome the Serbs and oth-
ers. Despite the tendencies of some government officials to lace their lan-
guage with Balkan stereotypes, it would stretch the facts too far to claim
that even they saw the Balkan peoples' "path toward Europe" as hopelessly
blocked by their cultures and political traditions. In the strongest currents
of Austrian political thought, the message about who should be in and
who should be out has hardly been a "perfectly clear" exclusion of those
peoples of the region who lived longest under the Ottomans. Even in the
period shortly after Slovenia's secession, when attention was riveted on
the conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia and when Austria sought
to assume a leading role in cementing a new political order in the em-
pire's old territories, the makers of Austrian discourse did not slip uni-
formly into frank Balkanist demonization of their friends' enemies. The
Serbs, for example, were described at that time (by a writer otherwise not
immune to Balkanism) as having before them a genuine choice between
authoritarianism and democracy, and much as in the case of the Slovenes,
it was emphasized that they too might draw on centuries of often cooper-
ative relations with the Austrians as a basis for future collab~ration.~'
Leaving aside the very fair question of whether these misty watercolor
memories of the empire may forget too much, it is clear that to many
influential Austrian commentators, the legacy of the Balkans is generally
seen as real and burdensome, but-and this point is critical to an under-
standing of the more nuanced lines of Austrian thought-not ultimately
determinative. Accordingly, while the Slovenes' claims on the west have
tended to be taken at face value, not nearly as much credence is given to
the idea that Slovenia represented a genuinely special case within the old
Yugoslav federation.
In the end, there seems to have been no real Austrian challenge to
Slovenian hopes for membership in central Europe. Perhaps not surpris-
ingly, given a near-universal acceptance of the Slovenes as echte mittel-
europaische Leute, much of the Austrian literature on the Slovenes con-
sciously or unconsciously dodges the question of whether those people
living just to the south are "Balkan" or not.48These patterns of Austrian
discourse are, I suspect, a natural consequence of the peculiar atmo-
sphere in which the Austrian discussion of Mitteleuropa has gone for-
ward. For Austria is a country still, as in decades past, deeply uncertain

46. Marianne Sajdik, "'Nicht zuriick auf den Balkan!'" Der Standard (Vienna), 28 Jan-
uary 1997.
47. Rohan, "Der Konflikt in ehemaligen Jugoslawien," 20.
48. For example, Hellweg Valentin, "Eine schwierige Nachbarschaft: Die Beziehun-
gen zwischen E r n t e n und Slowenien mit besonderer Beriicksichtigung derJahre 1965 bis
1995,"Karntnerjahrbuchfur Politik I997 (Klagenfurt, 1997),303-34.
128 Slavic Review

about its own identity, especially with respect to its more powerful, and
now unified, German neighbor.4gIt is a society nervous enough about
its place in the rapidly changing political order to prompt one diplo-
mat to complain that Austrians themselves had been unjustly excluded
from membership in "Europe" and relegated to the ranks of the "other
Europeans." 50
Seen against this backdrop, Mitteleuropa emerges as a means for a
people worried about their own European credentials to retrieve a place
at the heart of European politics and culture. Thus, contrary to what the
critique of Balkanism asserts and implies, musing on "central Europe"
seems less significant as an exercise by which Austrians could cultivate a
sense of superiority by making fine judgments about which nations were
included or excluded-by seeking a Balkan "other" against which they
might define themselves-than as a vehicle for them to think of them-
selves as once again vitally important by virtue of their similarities to a host
of neighboring peoples. If this latter aim is more properly the defining
characteristic of the Austrians' Projekt Mitteleuropa, then it is in Austria's in-
terests to construct a strikingly expansive central European space, one in
which Austrians acknowledge many other national groups as their cultural
kindred. From such a perspective, there would of course be a tremendous
incentive to recognize the Slovenes as partners in the community. Admit-
tedly, for all their inclusivist leanings, these Austrian visions do entail some
effort at exclusion, at creating and reinforcing conceptual boundaries.
The Austrians' reincarnated Mitteleuropa is no realm universal, and the
common Austrian understandings remain somewhat vulnerable to charges
of Orientalism or B a l k a n i ~ mBut
. ~ ~at a time when national particularisms
have taken the upper hand, the soft, comparatively welcoming Austrian
version seems remarkable precisely for its inclusivity-an inclusivity that,
as it reaches farther into southeastern Europe, might well prove discon-
certing to some of the Slovenian participants in these debates, while at the

49. On the many ambiguities of Austrian identity, see Anton Pelinka, Zur osterreichis-
chen Identitat: Zwischen deutsclzer Vieirzigung und Il,fitteleuropa (Vienna, 1990); Pribersky, ed.,
Europa and Mitteleuropa?;Papcke and Weidenfeld, eds., Traumland Mitteleuropa?
50. Ludwig Steiner, "~sterreichwar schon immer in Europa," OsterreichischesJahrbuch
fur Politik, 1994 (Vienna, 1995), 455- 69.
51. Not every use of language linked to a discourse in disrepute should be treated
as suspect, however. It would be wrong, for example, to dismiss as unfair Balkanist stereo-
typing the Austrian foreign minister Mock's condemnation of the "barbarian" bombing
of Dubrovnik, the "brutal" destruction of Croatian towns, the "aggressive" nationalism of
the MiloSevit government, and the "ever more violent" actions of the Serbian leader-
ship against Slovenia, Croatia, and Kosovo. See Mock, "Die Haltung Osterreichs in der
Balkankrise," 115-17. It is a serious error to treat the violent acts of any of the Yugoslav
peoples as characteristically "Balkans-indeed, a good case can be made for a traditional
"Balkan" mode of comparatively peaceable interethnic coexistence. Nevertheless, adjec-
tives such as these are no less apt for the acts in question simply because they are favored
by those who would reduce Balkan history to a collection of misleading set pieces. Some-
times it is justified to decry injustice in harsh but accurate terms and to announce with no
apologies, like the protagonist of Miroslav Krleia's novel On the Edge of Reason, that "it is all
a crime, a bloody thing, moral insanity." Krleia, On the Edge ofReason, trans. Zora Depolo
(London, 1987), 34.
Boundaries of Balkarzism in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 129

same time rendering more problematic those critiques that treat "central
Europe" as a device for divisiveness.

"Nothing But Europe" ...

and Yet Not Quite:
Italy's Lukewarm Welcome to the Slovenes
While many Austrians reacted sympathetically to their southern neigh-
bors' efforts to be recognized as full members of "Europe," central or oth-
erwise, most Italian commentators gravitated toward a somewhat different
perspective, one that largely ignored Slovenes' arguments about their na-
tional character and focused instead on their emerging state as a factor
(and then simply one of many) in the greater game of European interna-
tional politics, a game in which many Italians hoped to secure, or recover,
their country's role as a central player. Italians, of course, have tradition-
ally exercised considerable influence in the Balkans, and their cultural
ties to eastern Europe are deeper than is often recognized.Jealous of Italy's
status in regional affairs, Italian commentators often asserted a vital inter-
est in monitoring, guiding, and assisting-and sometimes resisting-the
changes that shook eastern Europe and the Balkans in the 1980s and
1990s. Bluntly put, however, Italian opinion did not care all that much
about Slovenia. Aside from a circumscribed set of bilateral disputes, Slove-
nia seems to have been marked only faintly on the Italian mental map.52
The republic's moves toward independence did to some extent redirect
Italian attention once more to a set of nagging, unresolved issues that had
complicated Italo-Yugoslav relations since World War 11: the fate of the
Italian minorities in Istria and of Slovenes in the Triestine hinterland, the
rights of Italians to recover real property confiscated or abandoned fol-
lowing the war, the continuing validity of the 1975 Osimo Treaty that had
finally resolved-or so it was thought-the border dispute between the
two countries, and the historiographical and political controversy over the
foibe, those limestone pits of the northern Adriatic littoral into which Yu-
goslav partisans seeking to settle old scores had tossed the bodies of the
many Italians executed for their real or perceived contributions to the
Axis cause as the fighting drew to a close. While a vigorous body of Italian
commentary did spring up around these sore points, the contributors typ-
ically did not stray toward the more ethereal question of whether the
Slovenes on the opposing sides of these disputes were "Balkan," "central
European," simply "European," or perhaps something else entirely.
In stark contrast to the solicitous tone of the Austrian discussion, Ital-
ian commentators evinced a belief that Italy-a European power, they
stressed-had much more pressing issues to worry about. Italian writers

52. There were exceptions to this pattern, mostly coming from the Italian regions di-
rectly bordering Slovenia. See, for example, the Trieste journal Est-hest and the Italian
contributions to the essays collected in Giuseppe Dal Ferro, ed., Veneto i n Slovenija: Due kul-
turi za Europo (Vicenza, 1990). On the "remarkable lack of awareness concerning the Bal-
kans, and particularly Yugoslavia, within Italian political culture," see Luigi Vittorio Fer-
raris, "Contemporary Italy and the Balkan Crisis," in Bianchini and Shoup, eds., The
Yugoslav War, 151.
130 Slavic Review

could pour out pages of ink on the deeper meanings of events in Poland,
Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, but the fate of Italy's little next-door neigh-
bor rarely merited any mention in their analyses of the transformation
of socialist Europe or.the uncertain progress.of European political and
economic i n t e g r a t i ~ n . ~ W eSlovenia
n was explicitly identified as part of
"central Europe," as opposed to "the Balkans," the distinction was often
made in only a very cursory fashion, with little or no rationale in support
of the categorization (and, significantly, with very little intimation that
such a categorization involved any meaningful "marking out" of Slovenes
and other central Europeans as separate and superior).54Even pieces
dedicated to a subject that Italian politicians and cultural critics did care
quite deeply about, the reemergence of Mitteleuropa, could easily over-
look the Slovenes' zealous claims to i n c l ~ s i o n . ~ ~
Yet Slovenia was hardly singled out for neglect: With few exceptions,
Italian commentators displayed surprisingly little interest in develop-
ments anywhere in Yugoslavia until the conflict turned ugly and violent.
When they did turn their gaze to Yugoslav affairs, they frequently viewed
matters in sweeping terms, with scant attention to the particularities of the
country's constituent parts." The snowballing secessionist movement
rectified this tendency somewhat, eliciting some fine scholarly analyses,
but by the time most Italian writers noted the Slovenes' profound alien-
ation, violence elsewhere in Yugoslavia overshadowed the schism in the
northwest.

53. On the transformation of socialist Europe, see, for example, Adriano Guerra, "Lo
spazio della sinistra,"Rinascita, no. 10 (15 April 1990): 82-84; Sebastiano Corrado, "Avanti
a destra," Rinascita, no. 9 (8 April 1990): 58-61. See also Giulano Torlontano, ed., "L'idea
democratica dopo i sommovimenti dell'EstX[interviews with Gianni Baget Bozzo, Augusto
Barbera, Norberto Bobbio, Leo Valiani, Miklos Vasarhelyi, and Mario Luzi], Nuova Antolo-
gza 126, no. 2177 (January-March 1991): 1-31. Of those interviewed in this piece, only
the Hungarian Vasarhelyi took note of the Slovenian case. He included the republic-
along with Croatia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary-among those countries that
"by virtue of their political traditions and their culture, belong to central Europe. These
countries have always been connected to Europe" (28).
On European political and economic integration, see, for example, Carlo Maria San-
toro, "La ricostruzione dell'Europa," IlMulino 44, no. 357 (January-February 1995): 148-
62; Vera Zamagni, "L'idea di Europa," I1 Mulino 44, no. 357 (January-February 1995):
139-47.
54. See, for example, Sergio Romano, "L'Italie et llEurope du Danube et des Balkans,"
Politiqueitrang&e57,no. 2 (1992): 353; Domenico Caccamo, "La questionejugoslava (1989-
gennaio 1992),"Rivista di studi politici internazionali 59, no. 1 (January-March 1992): 53.
55. See the articles collected under the rubric "Osservatorio: Mitteleuropa" in Rina-
scita, no. 16 (27 May 1990): 48-54. For early contributions by Italians (and others) to the
resurrection of Mitteleuropa, see Collnqui di Duino: Mitteleuropa passato efuturo. The fore-
most Italian advocate of restoring (northern) Italian ties to Mitteleuropa has been Clau-
dio Magris. See, for example, his wide-ranging and enormously erudite compendium of
reflections on the region, Magris,Danube, trans. Patrick Creagh (New York, 1989).For Ital-
ians interested in a renewed central Europe, the concept offered, perhaps most notably,
the prospect of happier times for torpid Trieste, a formerly thriving port city that has lan-
guished following its severance from the Habsburg lands it once so busily served.
56. For example, Gianni de Michelis, "Reaching Out to the East,"Foreign Policy, no. 79
(Summer 1990): 50-52. The author is a former Italian foreign minister.
Boundaries of Balkanism i n Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 131

Just as Italian foreign policy proved reluctant to accept Slovenian

independence, Italian opinion was not overly impressed with the notion
of Slovenian distinctiveness. To be sure, some accepted the prevailing
stereotypes of Slovenia's "western" identity. Journalist Dino Frescobaldi's
early book on the Yugoslav catastrophe, for example, concluded that the
Slovenes did indeed represent a special case. In comparison to other Yu-
goslavs, he asserted, the Slovenes were much more politically sophisti-
cated, flexible, practical, and adaptable, with highly advanced technical,
industrial, and cultural capacities and unsurpassed skills at organization.
The chief distinction lay in their willingness to work. Repeatedly, Fres-
cobaldi told his Italian readers that the Slovenes were "hard-working,"
"diligent," and "disciplined," while the Slovenian culture and national
character he depicted had a distinctly un-Balkan cast. Wandering among
the baroque streets and churches of Ljubljana, it was said, visitors felt "a
little of the spirit of M i t t e l e ~ r o p a . " ~ ~
Yet given the generally reserved and skeptical tenor of Italian com-
mentary, we should pause to ask whether Frescobaldi's subtle hedge-
"un po"' (a little)-holds more significance than it may seem at first
blush. Even this otherwise rather indulgent reading of separatist senti-
ment, which took Slovenes' convictions of uniqueness more or less at
face value, could not quite concede to them a fully European nature. For
Frescobaldi also found it important to remark on the "dual spirit" of
Slovenian society: despite their longings for Europe, Slovenes were also
said to feel "profoundly Slavicw-and one suspects that to this Italian ob-
server and others, something profoundly Slavic might not be fully Euro-
pean. Accordingly, the Slovenes' aspirations betrayed some tinge of arti-
ficiality, and their society came across as perhaps not the genuine article
but "a sort of optical extension of central Europe which advances, with bor-
dering Croatia, in the direction of eastern and Balkan E ~ r o p e . ' ' ~ ~
Even with such reservations, Frescobaldi ultimately endorsed the Slo-
venes' exodus toward "the more advanced parts of the continent," a move
motivated, as he saw it, by resistance to "the traditionally proudest and
most hostile" nationalism in the region, "the old and unshakable nation-
alism of the Serbs": "A mitteleuropaische Ljubljana could not resign itself
to missing the bus of liberalization; much less could it remain in the tow
of a federation in which the prospect of Balkanization and a relapse into
authoritarian systems is appearing once again through the reemergence
of old nationalisms and the rioting-manipulative to some extent-of
the crowds that fill the squares of Belgrade."5Wlearly,Slovenian efforts to
cast off the Balkan label made sense to at least some of those looking on
from Italy at events in the Yugoslav republics.
But to others, the Slovenes' insistence on their western and European
traditions could come across as overreaching, comical, even pathetic.
Another representative popular account thus noted a "pompously Euro-

57. Dino Frescobaldi, JugoslauiaperchC I1 suicidio di uno Stato (Florence, 1991), 52.
58. Ibid., 52-53 (emphasis added).
59. Ibid., 55, 56.
132 Slavic Review

pean spirit" circulating in triumphalist Ljubljana just before the 1991

war. Ljubljana, these authors observed, "considers itself Habsburg once
more. . . . It feels Austrian but 'sovereign,' light years away from 'Asiatic
and communist' Serbia."'jOTo Italian eyes, the Slovenes' clamor for recog-
nition as real Europeans and their parallel tendency to orientalize their
"Balkan" statemates could verge on the risible. Thus these journalists re-
ported that efforts to prove an uninterrupted, centuries-long historical
tradition for the Slovene nation came in tandem with the assertion that
Slovenia presented "Europe in miniature . . . [with] a bit of everything
that is typical of the Continent," even mountains and sea-just like Italy.'jl
It is not too difficult to imagine those same Italian eyes rolling in skeptical
amusement at what must have come across as fantastically grand claims.
In addition to this inclination to suspect Balkanist imagery as an in-
strument of unwelcome Slovenian (and Croatian) secessionism, it seems
possible to detect in reactions of this variety the Italians' own attachment
to their self-image as quintessential stewards of European culture and a
certain concomitant inclination to draw the boundaries of the "real" Eu-
rope quite narrowly. Driven in part by a deep skepticism of the Habsburg-
infused dichotomization of central Europe and the Balkans, a number of
Italian commentators throughout the period in question remained unim-
pressed with the proposition that the northern South Slavs were so very
different. Perhaps for this reason, Italian usage frequently seems to have
employed the terms Balkan and the Balkans more innocently, as a conve-
nient geographic and political appellation not necessarily tainted with all
the ills that the critics of Balkan-talk qua power discourse have enumer-
ated. Yet at the same time, the idea of "Europe" remained very much alive
in Italian discourse, and one wonders whether Italian standards would ad-
mit as fully European those who were safely outside the Balkans and east-
ern Europe but who had never figured as key factors in European politi-
cal and cultural life (the Finns, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Irish),
those who had lost their former political or cultural significance (the
Swedes and perhaps even the Spaniards), or those who had become, worse
yet, both relatively poor and relatively insignificant (the Portuguese).
From some quarters in Italy, especially in the work of scholars and
public intellectuals, even more pointed and serious reservations about
Slovenian exceptionalism emerged, as well as a frank mistrust of the
Slovenes' claims to cultural and political advancement. Some Italians per-
ceived these as thinly disguised xenophobia, religious bigotry, and racism.

60. Gigi Riva and Marco Ventura,Jugoslavia, il nuovo Medioevo: La guerra inJinita e tutti
i suoi perchi (Milan, 1992), 44.
61. Ibid., quoting Alenka Puhar, unidentified text. Along the same lines, one spe-
cialist in ethnic relations at the confluence of the Italian and Slavic territories cites the re-
marks of a journalist from Trieste who ridiculed the line from Ljubljana as "Europe, Eu-
rope, nothing but Europe!" Pamela Ballinger, '"Convivenza e Civild': Visions of Europe at
the Edge of the Balkans," in Stefano Bianchini and Robert Craig Nation, eds., The Yugoslav
Conflict and Its Implications fnr International Relations (Ravenna, 1998), 238, citing Mauro
Manzin, "Wary Eyes on a New Neighbor," Balkan War Repnrt 1994/95, 29. "Italian Tri-
estines," Ballinger further observes, "often view Slovene 'pretensions' to European status
with either paternalistic amusement. . . or contempt" (ibid.).
Boundaries of Balkanism in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 133

The controversies in Yugoslavia, one wrote disapprovingly, "have visibly

delimited on the ground the area that belongs, in the proper sense, to Eu-
rope and to the west: assimilated Slovenia and Croatia, Catholic and
Europeanized lands. The rest of Yugoslavia-for Bosnia there is also the
awkward presence of the Muslim community-is relegated to an indis-
tinct periphery of dependency and i n f e r i ~ r i t y . Because
"~~ of its favoritism
toward those who could claim most successfully to be "western," this writer
continued, "the west does not treat Serbia and Bosnia as part of Europe,
and therefore not as a part of the world entitled to privileges and
rights."63
Similarly, another commentator decried the "openly racist character"
of Slovenian and Croatian separatism, dismissing the idea that the Catho-
lic north was too highly evolved to coexist with the allegedly retarded
south as "an attitude of superiority that seeks separation and domination
rather than cooperation and mutual exchange."64Slovenia, in this analy-
sis, sought to move beyond its proper station yet lacked the capacity to re-
alize its grand ambitions:
Now, liberated from the dead weight of the Balkans, and intending to be-
come another Austria or Switzerland, it will be reduced instead to their
mere satellite, or more precisely a satellite of Germany, no matter what
standard of living and level of purely economic development it manages
to reach. A sad conclusion to a centuries-long history characterized "by
a long, proud resistance to Germanization" in the defense of its own na-
tional identity. . . . Instead of being welcomed by Europe, Slovenia re-
mains excluded from it.'j5
The effort to "return to Europe" was, in this view, selfish, misguided, and
fated to fail.
The identification of Slovenian interests with those of political Cathol-
icism, alluded to in these texts, highlights another major theme of the
Italian commentary. Just as Slovenian aspirations found substantial sup-
port from the Vatican and from Italy's Christian Democrats, they ran
headlong into a powerful countercurrent of suspicion about the political
designs of the church and its adherents. A number of critics fretted over
the influence of Catholic opinion, that, as one put it, saw in Slovenian and
Croatian independence "the 'reconquest' of two 'Roman' province^."^^
Italian political life has been shaped to a great extent by attitudes toward
political Catholicism, and this issue produced no exception: an important

62. Giampaolo Calchi Novati, "La Jugoslavia di Tito P dawero finita," I1 Ponte 51,
no. 10 (October 1995): 9.
63. Ibid.
64. Costanzo Casucci, "La dissoluzione della Jugoslavia: Un crimine dell'Europa," I1
Mulino 42, no. 345 (January-February 1993): 159. Cf. Bianchini, "The Collapse of Yugo-
slavia: Sources of Its Internal Instability," in Bianchini and Shoup, eds., The Yugoslav War,
23 (on the danger of Slovenian provincialism and the "anti-southern racist tensions pres-
ent in Slovenian society").
65. Casucci, "La dissoluzione della Jugoslavia," 160- 61.
66. Sergio Romano, Guida alla politica estera italiana (Milan, 1993), 208. Romano, a
former Italian ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Soviet
Union, is one of the country's leading commentators on foreign affairs.
134 Slavic Review

line of Italian opinion, marked by resistance to Catholic influence, proved

hostile to the state-building project of Slovenes and Croats and, as a re-
sult, wary of the Balkanist rhetoric used to further that project.'j7
But above all, Slovenia's quest for independence signaled for Italians
a heightened threat of Germanic dominance in European affairs.'j8Quite
often, the Slovenian question was really the German question. To mention
Slovenia was thus to open a larger conversation about German-Italian re-
lations, a discussion fraught with unsettling implications for Italian iden-
tity. Many Italians viewed the rebirth of Mitteleuropa with suspicion, and
their misgivings about Germanic designs on central Europe engendered
considerable skepticism about the Slovenes' desires to join in that enter-
prise. Italy, of course, has historically nurtured its own ambitions in the re-
gion, and in the events of 1989, some Italians saw an opportunity for the
country to reassert its role as a "bridge" or "hinge" between central Eu-
rope and the balk an^.^^ The prospect of a restored Mitteleuropa threat-
ened those aims. While German power posed the most serious danger,
some Italian observers also worried about Austrian intentions. Thus
Bruno Luvera, in an analysis focused on separatist currents among Italy's
German-speaking minorities, found it disturbing that the leading Aus-
trian voice for Mitteleuropa, Erhard Busek, had indicated his intention
to attend celebrations of Slovenian and Croatian independence. A par-
ticular menace to Italy was, Luvera concluded, the Austrian vision of a
Mitteleuropa formed of small, ethnically homogeneous states or "state-
regions."'O A fear that the Slovenian and Croatian examples would pro-
vide a model for nascent secessionism in Italy also appears to have shaped
Italian responses to the Yugoslav crisis." Just as the Habsburg empire had
once frustrated Italian unification, a new wave of Habsburgernostalgze now
seemed to jeopardize continued Italian unity. Along these lines, one ob-
server worried about a "Slovenia effect" whereby the more prosperous
northern regions of Italy might seek to throw off the perceived burdens of
the Italian south to pursue independent relationships with the European

67. Along these lines, Stefano Bianchini has observed that the recent stress on con-
nections with central Europe has not successfully induced Slovenes to forget the cultural
context in which their society and their nationalism evolved, a context more complex (and
arguably much richer) than Balkanist rhetoric admits. "Even though this is denied by
Ljubljana's propaganda," Bianchini suggests, "the appeal of Slav culture is as strong as that
of Slovenian 'exceptionalism,"' and as a result, Slovenia may still be, as before, suspended
between "the conservative Catholic world that enveloped and permeated it and the Slav
attraction that pushed it southward." Bianchini, "Conclusions," in Bianchini and Shoup,
eds., The Yugoslav War, 179.
68. See Marco Lachi, "Le prime secessioni: Pace in Slovenia e tregua in Croazia," in
hlarco Carnovale, ed., La Guerra di Bosnia: Una tragedia annunciata (Milan, 1994), 27-32;
Lucio Leante, "Allargamento a Est: Prospettive di un'Europa diversa," I1 Mulino/Europa 44,
no. 1 (July 1995): 28-46; Sergio Romano, ''Perch: 1'Italia no ha una politica balcanica,"
Est-Doest, no. 5 (1994): 9-17.
69. Marta Dassu, "Diplomazia internazionale e Italia: I1 rebus dei Balcani," Politica ed
economia, no. 1 (July 1993): 64.
70. Bruno Luveri, Oltre il conJine: Reponalismo europeo e nuovi nazionalismi i n Trentino-
Alto Adige (Bologna, 1996), 199. See also Luverii, "Prospettive e rischi del neoregionalismo
europeo," I1 Mulino 45, no. 363 (January-February 1996): 136-48.
71. Dassu, "Diplomazia internazionale e Italia," 65.
Boundaries of Balkanism in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 135

Union.'* Here, too, the Slovenian question prompted a deeper consider-

ation of Italian national identity: Slovenian separatism tapped into Ital-
ians' attitudes about the longstanding regional split in their own country,
and in Slovenian condescension toward juinjaki, "southerners," some rec-
ognized parallels to the treatment of the supposedly backward, simple,
and uncivilized people of Italy's s o ~ t h . ' ~
While Italian analyses were generally much more reluctant to buy into
the ideology of "central Europe" than their Austrian counterparts, Italian
writers could at times draw from a deep reservoir of Orientalist or Balka-
nist stereotypes. One profound example is Alessandro Damiani's judg-
ment that Yugoslavia suffered from "a historical curse," dooming the
country's people to inhabit the same territory but rendering them inca-
pable of living together. Damiani, an ethnic Italian from Rijeka whose
commentary on Yugoslavia was published widely in Italy, did not venture
an opinion about whether Slovenia participated in the Balkan syndrome
he identified-except perhaps to the extent that a negative conclusion
can be divined from Slovenia's conspicuous absence from his discussion.
His reading of the Yugoslav debacle resembles in many ways the Balkanist
interpretations that Todorova and others have analyzed: an assessment
grounded in the harmful lingering influence of Ottoman control, and re-
plete with findings of "cultural backwardness," "immaturity," "anachro-
nistic hatreds," "barbarity," and "an arrested process of civil, cultural
and economic g r ~ w t h . " 'While
~ we should be hesitant to read too much
into Damiani's silence on the specifics of the Slovene case-and indeed
Damiani himself argues that when it comes to the "retrograde and often
counterfeit mythologies" all of the nationalisms of the Balkans were on
equal terms-it is hard to overlook the Balkanist tones of his assertion
that "Serb culture . . . not only does not distance itself from this bloodbath
or condemn it, but instead glorifies it in an anachronistic climate of cru-
sade, one that is antiwestern, anti-Catholic, anti-Islamic, in short, without
any exaggeration, 'anti-everything.' " 75
Once again, however, a call for scholarly caution is in order. Italians
certainly were not immune to Balkanist rhetoric, but quite frequently
Italian perspectives on Yugoslavia, and on southeastern Europe more
generally, avoided the temptation to overgeneralize about the balk an^.'^

72. Federico Lampini, "Ci conviene Framania?" Limes, no. 2 (1995): 22, cited in Lu-
veri, Oltre il conJine, 220.
73. For an exploration of Italians' "Meridionalist" views toward their country's south,
see the essays collected in Jane Schneider, ed., Italy's "Smthern Question": Orientalism i n One
Country (Oxford, 1998). Drawing upon the analysis of Bakic-Hayden and Hayden, who di-
agnose a thoroughgoing Balkanism in the discourse of nationalist Slovenes and Croats,
Schneider finds similarities between that separatist rhetoric and the logic of Italy's North-
ern League. Schneider, "Introduction: The Dynamics of Neo-Orientalism in Italy (1848-
1995)," in Schneider, ed., Italy 's "Southern Question, " 3.
74. Alessandro Damiani, "Jugoslavia:Una maledizione storica," IlPonte 48, no. 1 (Jan-
uary 1992): 19-33.
75. Ibid., 22-23. See also Sandro Damiani and Alessandro Damiani, Jugoslavia: Gen-
esi di una mattanza annunciata (Pistoia, 1993).
76. For a particularly arresting equation of "the Spirit of the Balkans" with not only
nationalism but group hatred more generally, see Paolo Facchi, Melita Richter Malabotta,
136 Slavic Review

Instead, the terms Balkan and the Balkans tended to be used in a fairly cir-
cumspect and judicious way, without frequent resort to heavy-handed
pronouncements about cultures and political traditions, and the prospect
of integration into "Europe" was not reserved for Slovenia and Croatia.77
Even when the writers in question painted with a broad brush and distin-
guished the region from "the west" or the remainder of once-socialist Eu-
rope, the result was typically not a crude, essentialist reading of Balkan
so~iety.'~Whatever the hegemonic aspirations of Balkanist rhetoric, its
potency was diluted in important ways by several guiding concerns of Ital-
ian domestic and foreign policy: a history of ambivalence toward political
Catholicism, a lingering resentment of Habsburg influence and a distrust
of fresh Austrian ambitions, an outright fear of renewed German domi-
nance in southeastern Europe, and a prized tradition of Italian national
unity across regional lines that sensitized at least some Italians to the mis-
leading qualities of Balkanist argumentation. Thus the Italian evidence,
like the Austrian (and to some extent even the evidence from Slovenia it-
self), suggests the need to pay more attention to factors that may seriously
limit the power of Balkanist discourse to dominate thought, foreclose
consideration of contrary views, and obscure the complex realities of pol-
itics and culture in southeastern Europe.

The Hegemony of Boundaries and the Boundaries of Hegemony

Austrian and Italian observations on Slovenian society thus present a de-
cidedly mixed record. While Slovenian commentary on the Balkan ques-
tion often drifted toward the comforting answer of Slovenian exception-
alism, Italians and Austrians remained largely unpersuaded by any claims
to a special status for their most immediate South Slav neighbors. Even
when they acknowledged Slovenia's affinities with western Europe or the
Habsburg successor states, they rarely embraced the notion that the Slo-
venes represented something uniquely European or mitteleuropaisch

and Claudio Venza, "Lo spirit0 balcanico si diffonde per llEuropa?" in Facchi, Malabotta,
and Venza, eds., Conjlittualitci Balcanica IntegrazioneEurqpea (Trieste, 1993), 19-22, English
translation by Diane Crampton at 31-34.
77. This is the case, for example, in the work of Balkans specialist Stefano Bianchini.
See, for example, Bianchini, Sarajevo: Le radici dell'odio; Identita e destino dei popoli balcanici
(Rome, 1993); Bianchini, "Dimenticare Tito," Rinascita, no. 2 (18 February 1990): 38-39.
More recently, Bianchini and his collaborator Marco Dogo have stressed the need "to over-
come a misperception of the historical isolation of the Balkan region and a sense of ex-
clusion based on the assumption that the Balkans do not really belong to European cul-
ture and tradition." "Foreword," in Stefano Bianchini and Marco Dogo, eds., The Balkans:
National Identities i n Historical Perspective (Ravenna, 1993), 15-16; similar skepticism toward
Balkanist reductionism may be found in Bianchini, "Conclusions," in Bianchini and
Shoup, eds., The Yugoslav War, 177-92. See also Carlo Jean, "Interessi e politiche italiane
in Europa centro-orientale e nei Balcani," Est- Doest, no. 6 (1996): 21.
78. See, for example, Paolo Calzini, "Doppio destino per le nazioni dell'Est," I1
Mulino 41, no. 343 (September-October 1992): 913. Even writers with rather strong pro-
Slovenian and pro-Croatian leanings could make their cases against Serbian policy with-
out indulging in crude Balkanist stereotyping. See, for example, Angelo Panebianco,
"La dissoluzione della Jugoslavia: Un'eredid dell'autoritarismo," I1 Mulino 42, no. 345
(January-February 1993): 165-71.
Boundaries of Balkanism in Slouenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 137

among the peoples of Yugoslavia. And while some observers engaged in

fairly harsh Balkanist stereotyping, Slovenia only infrequently reaped the
benefits of such prejudices. More typically, the republic's western neigh-
bors failed to recognize any special Slovenian mission to "civilize" a Bal-
kan Yugoslavia, and the Italian commentators in particular, leery as they
were of the implications of a resurgent central European identity, often
just grouped Slovenia together casually with the remainder of the Bal-
kans, though not necessarily as part of any larger exercise in Balkanist
lumping and splitting.
Neither body of opinion proved particularly sympathetic to Slovenes'
efforts to fortifji a conceptual border with the Balkans along their south-
ern frontier (or perhaps, for those Slovenes more charitable to their own
neighbors to the south, at the southern fringe of the Croat lands). Still,
the Austrian and Italian approaches did diverge significantly in one key
respect: their willingness to recognize the question of Slovenia's place out-
side the Balkans as an issue of great importance for Slovenian society.
Throughout the period under consideration, Austrian observers were
usually more sensitive to the subtleties of the conversation taking place
among the Slovenes.As explained above, the Austrians' solicitous attitude
helped them shore up their own identity as important members of "Eu-
rope." Italian commentators, on the other hand, were by and large reluc-
tant to see Slovenia move out of the handy "Balkan" box where it had been
shelved for decades. Even if Italy's relations with Yugoslavia and other Bal-
kan countries have not always been smooth, they have been manageable,
and they have usually accorded Italians considerable influence and pres-
tige.7gCoverage of events in Slovenia and Yugoslavia leaves the impression
that Italian opinion, like Italian statecraft, looked with disfavor on any
threat to the familiar old order. In addition, it sometimes proved difficult
for Italians to see Slovenia as fully "Europeann-a term Italian discourse
appeared to associate with a short list of great political and cultural pow-
ers. And if the thought of "Europe" was close to the Italian heart and pro-
foundly implicated the Italian sense of pride, then the fairly alien notion
of "central Europe" stirred all manner of Italian fears.
In the end, Italian and Austrian commentators could seldom contem-
plate the question of Slovenia's place vis-2-vis the Balkans without raising
questions, often disquieting ones, about their own societies. A concern for
their own problematic self-images frequently shaped the answers they
gave. And as a result, neither Italian nor even Austrian opinion could be
fully comfortable with the line advanced by the more ardent defenders of
Slovene distinctiveness, those who argued that their nation was a unique
fragment of "central Europe," artificially affixed to "Balkan" Yugoslavia for

79. For an overview of Italian policy, see the very useful collection Italy and the Bakans
[special issue of the Italian foreign-affairs journal Limes] (Washington, 1998).While these
analyses place great weight on Italy's unique concern for protecting Serbia in the interests
of geopolitical balance, they are not without the occasional slip into Balkanist language.
Thus we read, for example, that the "ultimate aim of Italy's policy must be to integrate the
entire area with itself and with Europe through the agency of Italy. In short, the Balkans
must become southeastern Europe." Serpicus [pseudonymous, high-ranking Italian diplo-
mat], "Why Italy Helps Serbia," ibid., 33.
138 Slavic Review

seven decades, which now deserved to be reunited with its cultural kin-
dred in "the west."
The body of commentary reviewed here thus problematizes one of the
fundamental conclusions of the new critical analysis of Balkanist rhetoric.
Central to that critique is the idea that this sort of conceptualization has
been an extraordinarily efective method of setting the Balkans apart, of
marking their subaltern place and keeping them securely bound to it.
Whether the discourse involved is taken as a species of the Orientalism
that Edward Said has described or as something related but distinct, the
governing conclusion is that such rhetoric is, in any event, pervasive,
dominant, and overpowering. Balkanism, its critics suggest, exercises a
near-stranglehold over the way the Balkans are represented and under-
stood, both within the region and e l s e ~ h e r eThe
. ~ ~rhetoric has achieved,
in a word, hegemony.
That word, of course, comes packed with meanings of a distinctly
Gramscian and Foucauldian hue, succinctly invoking an armamentarium
of theory and a view of political and cultural discourse as "not a merely
'cognitive' or 'contemplative' entity. . . [but] an articulatorypractice which
constitutes and organizes social relation^."^' Approaching the problem
from this standpoint, the most prominent critiques of Balkanist rhetoric
share the judgment that it has functioned as a "power discourse"-and an
extraordinarily powerful power discourse at that-a mode of thought and
expression that not merely reflects but in fact profoundly structures and
constrains both "insider" and "outsider" responses to the Balkamg2
Accordingly, almost all critical studies of Balkanist language stress its
great potency, its ability to limit and control thought, choice, and behav-
ior. In their highly influential essay, Milica BakiS-Hayden and Robert M.
Hayden thus treat Balkanism as a discourse that relies on a deceptive
"common sense" quality and the apparent naturalness of the categories it
employs to achieve an almost unshakable stigmatizing effect. "Indeed,"
they conclude, "the unfavorable normative import of adjectives such as
'byzantine' and 'balkan' is so pronounced as to make orientalism axio-
matic in regard to peoples or societies so labelled."8These writers view
the internalization of Balkanist categories and stereotypes by the residents
of former Yugoslavia as evidence of the force of the discourse and the
hegemonic quality of the concepts at work,84while elsewhere Hayden ar-

80. See Guzina, "Inside/Outside Imaginings of the Balkans," 43.

81. Ibid., 49 (emphasis in the original), quoting Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985), 96.
82. For example, Todorova, Imagzning the Balkans, 11, and more generally, 8-20;
Bakit-Hayden and Hayden, "Orientalist Variations on the Theme 'Balkans,'" 2-3; Guzina,
"Inside/Outside Imaginings of the Balkans," 50, 59; Iordanova, "Are the Balkans Admis-
sible?"3 - 4, 17-1 8; Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagina-
tion (New Haven, 1998), 9-10; cf. Lindstrom and Razsa, "Reimagining the Balkans."
83. Bakie-Hayden and Hayden, "Orientalist Variations on the Theme 'Balkans,"' 2.
84. Ibid., 3. Studying the nation-building project of a number of Croatian leaders,
Daphne Winland likewise finds that their urge to "vehemently denounce any association
with the appellation Balkan . . . reproduces the same tendency to impose essentializing bi-
naries that has been used (by the West) to disparage or marginalise Croatians (as a Balkan
people)." Winland, "'Projekt Mitteleuropa': Croatians and the Politics of Recognition in
Boundaries of Balkanism in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 139

gues that 'West Europeans' arrogation to themselves of the power to

define 'Europe' has been accepted by East Europeans, in perhaps as fine
an example of hegemony as any Gramscian could hope to find."85Simi-
larly, Dina Iordanova contends that because "Europe" is presupposed as
the benchmark against which the Balkans must be judged, the range of
possible outcomes is dramatically constrained. "Even if liable to nego-
tiation," Iordanova asserts, "this very premise necessarily confines the
discussion to abstract issues of suitability and admissibility, making any
practical steps of political and economic coexistence dependent on the
culturist perceptions of the region."86Attributing profound practical con-
sequences to the strictures imposed by the discourse, she ventures that
"while the obsessive struggle for admissibility to Europe may at first glance
seem an innocuous fixation, it accounts for many of the gravest misde-
meanors that characterize the Balkan region today."87 he formulation
advanced by Dejan Guzina goes perhaps even further, describing Balkan-
ism as a discourse that has apparently all but dictated responses of people
in the Balkans: "The imagery, themes and notions invoked by rhetorical
strategists in the former Yugoslavia reflect the 'classification struggle' of
the European periphery for recognition by the more powerful 'Western'
players. These images were not chosen accidentally, but were predetermined
by their implicit acceptance in the West as accurate descriptions of the Bal-
k a n ~ . According
"~~ to Guzina, the new, postcommunist western under-
standing, grounded in notions of culture and civilization instead of the
old ideological distinctions, "required that 'alternative' accounts of the
Yugoslav identity from the 1960s and 1970s be virtually forgotten
o ~ e r n i g h t . Or
" ~ ~as Hayden puts it, "borders had to be created between
these peoples, or the ideologies of 'nation' and 'civilisation' would be
meaningless. . . . The stereotypes involved became, in fact, destiny, as the
worst features of each become realised in self-fulfilling prophecy, ac-
cepted both at home and by foreigner^."^^'

the 'New Europe"' (unpublished paper presented at the conference "Creating the Other:
The Causes and Dynamics of Nationalism, Ethnic Enmity, and Racism in Central and East-
ern Europe," Hubert H. Humphrey Center, University of Minnesota, 6-8 May 1999). But
interestingly, Winland concludes on the basis of her field research in Zagreb, Split, and
Dubrovnik in 1997 and 1998 that such strategies "do not, for the most part, resonate with
quotidian sentiments, practices and experiences of Croatians" and thus have had mixed
results at best, thanks also to a deep suspicion of state-sponsored messages: 'While it is rare
to find a Croatian without strong political convictions or opinions about the social and cul-
tural fabric of Croatian society,;here were few who expressed their views using the exclu-
sivist and nationalist rhetoric of the state" (ibid). This evidence of daily experience "on the
ground" in the former Yugoslavia suggests that we may likewise need to redraw the pre-
vailing picture of publics trapped in the Orientalist nests constructed for them by the west.
In this bay, too, the concreterealities of life in the Balkans, so strikingly plural and vari-
able, may be seen once again to have frustrated attempts at neat generalization.
85. Hayden, "Use of National Stereotypes in the Wars in Yugoslavia," 97.
86. Iordanova, "Are the Balkans Admissible?" 3 - 4.
87. Ibid., 28.
88. Guzina, "Inside/Outside Imaginings of the Balkans," 40 (emphasis added); see
also 49-50.
89. Ibid., 59.
90. Hayden, "Use of National Stereotypes in the Wars in Yugoslavia," 100.
140 Slavic Review

Thus focused on the considerable harm done by Balkanism, and less

concerned with how some may already have found ways and reasons to
avoid that harm, the critical understanding of discourse-as-power verges
on something more like discourse-as-straitjacket. Todorova, cataloguing
an imposing Balkanist syllabus of errors, argues that the term Balkan has
become "one of the most powerful pejorative designations in history, in-
ternational relations, political science, and, nowadays, general intellectual
d i s c o ~ r s e . The
" ~ ~ rhetoric in this view amounts to "a persistent hegemonic
discourse from the West, continuously disparaging about the Balkans,
which sends out messages about the politicization of essentialized cultural
difference^."^^ And given the dramatic imbalance of power at work,
Todorova sees little prospect for escape: "Balkanism and its subject," she
writes, "are imprisoned i n ajield of discourse in which 'Balkans' is paired in
opposition to 'West' and 'Europe,' while 'Balkanism' is the dark other of
'western ~ i v i l i z a t i o n . " ' ~her
~ n recent reflections on the state of the cri-
tique, K. E. Fleming echoes these judgments, concluding that "the Bal-
kans stand as Europe's resident alien, an internal other that is an affront
and challenge by virtue of its claim to be part of the West, as well as by its
apparent ability to dramatically affect Western history."g4
The critique of Balkanist rhetoric, moreover, typically treats it not just
as a remarkably powerful discourse, but as a remarkably pervasive, persis-
tent, and uniform mode of thought as well. In this vein, Todorova asserts
that the image of the Balkans has undergone "discursive hardening," with
the result that "in its broad outlines, it was and continues to be handed
down almost inalterable."g5Balkanism in this view now admits of very little
variety, and the self-image of the west, sustained in part by a demonization
of the unruly Balkans, has become virtually impervious to counterevi-
d e n ~ eThe . ~ ~problem, it would appear, is nearly insurmountable, and so

91. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 7.

92. Ibid., 59. Todorova also treats this discourse as one that has powerfully con-
strained the political and cultural options open to people in the Balkans. Confronted with
the hegemonic western construction imposed on them, she writes, "it is hardly realistic to
expect the Balkans to create a liberal, tolerant, all-embracing identity celebrating ambi-
p i t y and a negation of essentialism" (ibid).
93. Todorova, "The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention," 482 (emphasis added).
Elsewhere, however, Todorova has advanced a somewhat different view, arguing that as
politicians, exponents of Balkanist discourse ought not necessarily be seen as "hostages of
a tradition of stereotypes." Rather, she argues, "these figures could be conceived as im-
portant architects as well as pmte-paroks of a power-political attitude. In this pattern it is
authority that shapes representation, or appropriates its existing type, whenever the polit-
ical expediency arises. That someone operates entirely within the conceptual apparatus of
a certain discourse is not, then, the result of the constraints of this discourse, but rather a
conscious and deliberate choice." Todorova, "Afterthoughts on Imagining the Balkans,"
144-45. In the main, however, the critique of Balkanism is noteworthy for how it tends to
treat the discourse as a serious constraint on thought and action.
94. Fleming, "Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography," 1229.
95. Todorova, Imagining the BaAans, 19. For the concept of "discursive hardening,"
Todorova cites James Clifford, "On Orientalism," The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Cen-
tury Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 264.
96. See interview with Todorova at www.clas.ufl.edu/CLASnotes/9610/Todorova
.html (last consulted 29 September 2002). Here Todorova observes that "even after the
Boundaries of Balkanism in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse 141

Todorova gloomily concludes that "the Balkans are left within Europe's
thrall, anti-civilization, alter ego, the dark side within."g7
We are left with a grim image of western writing and thinking about
the Balkans, a discourse portrayed as unremittingly myopic and distress-
ingly uniform in its prejudices-not only highly programmatic but also
largely programmed, with the limited range of possible expression virtually
foreordained by the structural power of the categories involved. Against
this bleak picture, it is all the more significant that a number of Austrian
and Italian commentators, surveying the Yugoslav breakup and the ex-
ceptionalist rhetoric advanced by some Slovenes, proved surprisingly
open to counterevidence and found reason to discount the Balkanist as-
sumptions that undergirded those claims. In the end, the appeal of Bal-
kanist interpretations of Slovenian westernness could be trumped both by
the imperatives of domestic politics and by the subtle but powerful inter-
nal dynamics of Austrian and Italian identity, interests that could not al-
ways be squared with the inside/outside categorizations presupposed by
the anti-Balkanist critique. If we are to understand Balkanist rhetoric as
a power discourse, and there are some good reasons to do so, we must still
ask in light of this evidence why the power of the discourse proved limited
in these instances, especially when it might otherwise have been expected
to serve as a very reliable instrument of the distancing campaign under-
taken by some Slovenes. As the Austrian and Italian cases suggest (and
with them even some varieties of Slovenian opinion), approaches to the
Balkans may be rather more nuanced and plural than the critique of Bal-
kanism now admits. These examples point to the need to devote more at-
tention to those countervailing forces that may curb the power of rhetoric
with aspirations to hegemony. Moreover, they serve as a reminder that
scholarship should be careful not to replicate a fundamental error of
Balkanism by reducing the ideas of the west, or the idea of "the west," to
something black-and-white, uniform, invariably nefarious. Fusing the di-
versity of outsider opinion on the Balkans into some stable, monolithic,
perhaps even essentialized "western discourse" is doubtless a much less
pernicious practice than the harsh and unfair stereotyping of the Balkan
peoples. It is nevertheless an undesirable practice, one that may blind us
to the "concrete historical existence" of Europe's recent past.g8At its best,
the critique of Balkanist discourse is a compelling demand to acknowl-
edge variety, local specificity, and the potential for change. Such concerns
should also consistently guide the critical assessment of discourse on the
Balkans.
most uncivilized violence was perpetrated by the Germans during the Holocaust, Europe
continues to view the Balkans as barbaric and always warring."
97. Todorova, "The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention," 482; see also Todorova,
Imagining the Balkans, 188.
98. The phrase is from Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 12. It speaks to a fundamen-
tal but unresolved tension in Todorova's work-and indeed, in much of the anti-Balkanist
critique-a tension between the desire to see the Balkansportrayed accurately and an episte-
mological stance that challenges the very notion of accuracy and treats categorization and
the analysis of historical difference as inherently suspect. Along these lines, see Gale Stokes's
review of Imagzning the BaAans on the HABSBURG H-Net Discussion Network, 10 September
1997, see http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/-habsweb (last consulted 28 September 2002).