Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, vol.4, No.1, January 2004, 175-185.

Balkan Political Club -- Istanbul, 30 May-1 June 2003

The Cultural Potential of the Balkans as a Factor of Development

What is or is there a Balkan culture,

and do or should the Balkans have a regional identity?

Maria Todorova
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

I feel very privileged to have been asked to speak to such an illustrious group

about culture. This is perhaps because I am not quite used to the idea that politicians

would come together, and devote a whole conference to issues of culture. This may be

just a prejudice: we all know that politicians and intellectuals are in a complex love-hate

relationship. Politicians prefer that intellectuals be confined at best to academia, at worst

behind bars. Intellectuals are actually worse: they prefer politicians not to exist at all.

And if, rarely, intellectuals do become politicians, they are either soon kicked out or

really become politicians. But I feel even doubly privileged. Among the 41 honorable

members of the Balkan Political Club that I counted, there are only two women. I will

not make the predictable and hasty conclusion about Old Boys Clubs and exclusively

male professions. I assume this is out of chivalry and honesty: after all, the burden of

Balkan political culture, which up to now has suffered (often justly) a very bad name,

should not be shouldered by women. At least women have not performed it. I do,

therefore, appreciate this tact, and I am delighted to participate in this first session on

cultural heritage and regional identity.

I have titled my talk “What is or is there a Balkan culture, and do or should the

Balkans have a regional identity?” I guess I could set a record for the briefest keynote

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speech by giving a straightforward answer to all questions: and it is “NO” in all cases.

Yet this is not why I have been asked to speak, and I will oblige and make the argument.

I also would like to challenge the categories we use and reproduce, and I feel very lucky

to be able to speak first, because then we could have a fruitful discussion. And I would

like to share where, according to my modest opinion, the role of politicians would be

indispensable.

I am essentially arguing four propositions:

1. There is no single Balkan culture but there are many Balkan cultures, and they are

not confined merely to the national.

2. The same is true for Balkan identities.

3. Not only are a single Balkan culture and a single Balkan identity historically non-

existent; positing their desirability is not only utopian but rather dubious and

suspicious, given the concrete and averse immediate political implications that

this can have.

4. Politicians have a crucial and responsible role to play not simply in the effort to

improve the culture of the political class and society at large (i.e. the political

culture), but in contributing to elevate the culture of every single member of each

Balkan society, because, in the end, culture is not a collective entity, but a notably

individual process.

So let me begin with this famously nebulous term “culture.” There are endless tomes

devoted to contending definitions. This is itself no reason to purge the notion and,

moreover, it cannot be purged: it is firmly embedded in the human vocabulary despite its

ambiguousness. It also is a central category of political discourse, which makes it, I

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guess, impregnable. The Commission of the European Communities, for example,

defines itself in terms of culture: “The uniqueness of European culture, which emerges

from the history of the diversity of regional and national cultures, constitutes the basic

prerequisite for European union.” Not a word about such prosaic measurements as GDP,

foreign debt, average salary, unemployment, minorities etc. basic prerequisites for

European accession. Academics, on the other hand, are divided and quite ambivalent

over the notion. In anthropology departments there are even courses offered arguing

against the employment of the category. I hope you will bear with me for a moment,

since I would like to give you a brief survey of the over 2000-year old history of culture.

I cannot help it – I teach history, after all – but I promise it will be brief, and there a

conclusions to be made.

When it was first used in Latin, culture meant tending to something, protecting it,

cultivating it. It was used primarily for crops and animals but, what is important, in all its

early uses it was a notion delineating a process: the tending, assisting of natural growth,

development. And in this sense the category persisted over many centuries. We are

making now a really drastic plunge forward because it was only from the 16 th century on

that the notion was extended, by metaphor, to humanity. Thus, one began speaking of

“the culture and profit of the mind.” But culture as an independent noun, signifying an

abstract process began to be used only with the 18th century and it became common only

in the 19th. So it is, in fact, a category of modernity, a period I believe we are still

inhabiting, despite the loud fanfares announcing the advent of postmodernity. And, most

importantly, it was used then as a synonym for civilization, equally denoting the process

of human development or the historical self-development of humanity.

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 It is with the Romantic movement, and principally with Herder, that a

juxtaposition between the two categories occurred. Herder introduced a decided

innovation when he refused to speak of one universal and unilinear culture

(understandably European at the time) but insisted on the specificity and variability of

cultures (in the plural) around the globe and in different historical periods, but also

between different social and economic groups within the nation. And this spiritual term

he opposed to the dominant and mechanical process of linear material development,

captured by civilization. This, while clearly not a generally accepted vision, became

quite widespread and influential.

To simplify a very long and complex development, we are facing today two broad

usages. One describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic

development, of which the concrete practices of intellectuals, and especially artistic

activity are the most important subcategory. These, in their institutionalized form, are

overseen and sometimes helped by Ministries of Culture. (I wonder why I didn’t spot

one single minister of culture as a member of the club). The second describes a particular

way of life, nowadays the most common usage in anthropology and among academics in

the social sciences and humanities. There is one detail here which is significant: whereas

anthropology and archaeology use culture to refer mostly to material production, in

history and cultural studies the category is applied usually to signifying or symbolic

systems, although material and symbolic production is intertwined.

I myself use culture in everyday speech in its classical meaning of education and

high-brow culture. In writing, I pedantically stick to the very broad use of culture as a

way of life, and particularly the Geertzian definition of culture as the webs of

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significance which man has spun himself and in which he has suspended himself.

Culture should not be bounded to physical location and territory; instead it is fluid and

flexible, and is part of a complex grid where class, gender, race, age, sexuality, etc. come

in. Indeed, what is the common “culture” of a fisherman from Trabzon and a nurse in

Cluj? Or what, if anything, makes it more common than the common culture of a nurse

in Bremen, Breslau and Breznik (especially when the latter is easily hired in Britain)?

And an opera diva from Sofia, Athens or Tirana will be more culturally at home with her

counterpart from Covent Garden or La Scala, than with her own pop music compatriots.

But it is not only on a horizontal level that one can expose the absurdity of homogeneous

all-encompassing cultures. The same is true for vertical, chronological depth. Except in

national discourse which flattens historical time, and makes the heroes of antiquity or the

medieval knight our contemporaries and role models, we have less in common with our

forefathers than with our neighbors. If I care about Pericles, it is because I have been

socialized and happen to have embraced the values of 19th and 20th-century democracy,

as they come principally from radical left-wing sources now summarily dismissed with a

frightening legerdemain by the new neo-conservative (or neo-liberal) gurus, and not

because one of my grandmothers (the Greek one) was telling me that I should never

forget I was a daughter of Pericles, and ancient Greek culture flowed in my veins.

There are many cultures in the Balkans, and they are not following merely

national and ethnic lines. They are professional, generational, gendered; some are

reaching deep back in historical time, others are short-lived (after all, it takes only two

generations to make something “traditional”). And most of them are not confined to the

region but envelop it in numerous different macroregions, some of them consecutive in

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time, others overlapping. The imprint of the cultural legacy of the Roman Empire

included the whole of Southeastern Europe in a space stretching from the British Isles to

the Caspian Sea and Mesopotamia (but excluding most of Northern and much of Central

Europe). The cliche goes that the area of Western Christianity (both in its Catholic and

Protestant hypostasis) is the true and only heir of Roman traditions, esp. of its legal

system. Yet, you can hear the same claim (and to me far more convincingly) that the

imperium lived on through Byzantium, and as some distinguished historians have argued,

also through the Ottomans. Likewise, communism as a way of life (and therefore culture,

totally devoid of the evaluative component) involved part of the Balkans as part of

Eastern Europe in a space stretching through the Eurasian landmass to Central Asia (and

including even China in some counts); and as an alternative vision it involved it in a

much broader space, covering much of Europe, the Americas, especially Latin America,

and different sites in Africa and Asia. But the important thing to stress yet again is that

there is not one single culture. The beauty of the Balkans is precisely in its excessive

richness of manifold cultures. And I purposely insist on this very subjective word

beauty: someone whose aesthetic tastes prefer simplicity obviously will not appreciate

Balkan complexity. It is hard for a minimalist to depict the Balkans. We need a broad

and spirited baroque brush.

I think I have made the point about the multiplicity and variety of Balkan cultures,

not of one Balkan culture, following empirical evidence and logic. But I want to make

the argument also from a different angle, one of utility. The whole thoroughly deplorable

exercise in stereotyping, marginalizing and ghettoizing the Balkans, which occasionally

erupts and was so ubiquitous in the past decade, has been based precisely on a

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mechanical, structural and unitary understanding of culture. The dynamic vision of

culture, of which I spoke, has regrettably not spilled over outside academe. Least so has

it affected political discourse where the boundedness of culture and cultural differences

has gained new prominence in the context of European integration, and globalization in

general. In fact, culture has emerged as “the key semantic terrain” in political

discussions. The contemporary cultural fundamentalism is based on two conflated but

unproven and unprovable assumptions: that cultures are incommensurable, and that they

are naturally hostile, because humans are supposed to be inherently ethnocentric. One of

its few differences from racism is that instead of ordering cultures hierarchically, it

segregates them spatially. It is also a very structural concept of culture, one that is

fundamentally hostile to what I have tried to outline as its most important characteristic:

dynamics, fluidity, changeability, internal diversity.

The idea of structurally definable or characterizable cultures is at the center of the

(in)famous Huntingtonian civilizational theory. The clash is between civilizations (used

as a synonym to cultures) because these are understood as having a set of characteristics

that pitch them against each other, and these characteristics (if one has gone through the

intellectual genealogy of Huntington’s thought) are based on Toynbean and Spenglerian

classifications, arguing essentially about an organicist hereditary model of culture that

produces clearly definable entities. Huntington’s theory was, tellingly, totally dismissed

from any serious academic discussions but has secured a prominent, if controversial, life

in politics.

…. Here more on the Harvard project + World Bank on “culture matters”…..

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And if you allow me to play with the etymology of the verb develop (which comes from

dis-velop as opposed to en-velop) what we in the Balkans should be striving for is to

develop, i.e. cultivate all our different cultures, and disvelop ourselves from the way we

have been enveloped in a cultural straightjacket and the fog of prejudice.

How do we achieve this? Some have argued that the proper strategy is to create a

regional Balkan identity. Others think it exists anyway, and the task is simply to refine it.

In any case, the notion of a Balkan identity has become lately a cornerstone and

panacea in both academic and political fora. In the past decade memory and its

manipulation have been posited to be one of the central aspects of Balkan identity and

consequently of Balkan conflicts. In a less analytical vein, one of the popular and

ongoing, if cheap, stereotypes about the Balkans conceives of it as a region cursed with

too much history per square mile, with an excess of historical memory and, as a result,

with unmasterable ancient hatreds, and a proliferation of intractable and incompatible

ethnic and religious identities. The notion of “historical memory” has been

conventionally and widely used both in academic circles as well as in popularizing

educated discourse in an essentialist fashion, as one of the “objective” attributes of the

ethnic group and the nation, alongside language, territory, state, economy and social

structure, as well as culture. It has been traditionally treated as the repository of ideas

about common origins and the past, creating a deep feeling of group solidarity, i.e. of

identity. The usual object of study is the memory constructed by politicians and

intellectuals, while the memory in the private spheres of family, workplace,

neighborhood, friends may be very different, and this poses not only the problem of

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studying popular memories but also the important and difficult issue of reception. Let me

use as an illustration a largely untapped source for scholarly use, the otherwise well

known and celebrated East European political anecdote.

In the late 1980s, at the height of the so-called “revival process,” the euphemistic

label for the forceful change of names of the Muslim population in Bulgaria, a joke was

circulating, telling the story of two policemen on the main route that Turkish

Gastarbeiters would take to reach Germany: the Vienna-Belgrade-Sofia-Istanbul road.

The policemen stop a Turkish car for exceeding the speed limit, and one of them beats up

the driver. “Why are you doing that?” the other one asks, “He’ll pay his fine; just let him

go.” “But weren’t we under their yoke for 500 years?” “Sure, we were, but didn’t you

know that?” “No, I just learned it,” responds the first policeman.

The idea of the joke is much more subtle than the message about the

constructedness and manipulability of memory and of identity. Of course, everyone

knows about the 500 years of “Turkish yoke.” Even when it is translated into the neutral

“Ottoman rule,” it still is the inevitable cornerstone of the historical and literary education

of the modern independent state both in Bulgaria and elsewhere in the Balkans. The

question to be posed is: when is this knowledge informed with an emotive component

which makes it inflammable? It is naive to think that this happens when crafty and nasty

politicians decide to manipulate the “innocent” and “simple-minded,” i.e. implicitly,

stupid people. After all, the message of the horror of the yoke has always been there, and

in any society there always exists an extreme interpretation as well as an extreme call for

action. The real question is not that memory and identity can be manipulated (of course

they can), but why does the person hear the message at a particular moment, so that s/he

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can then say that s/he learned what s/he has always known, and moreover insist that this

is part of a collective memory and a collective identity.

Can we really speak of a collective Balkan mentality and, thus, of Balkan memory

and of Balkan identity? "Balkan mentality" has been one of the most abused

mythologemes in journalistic and, generally, in popular discourse. It is supposed to hint

at an analytical explanation of events in the Balkans when real analyses seem to be too

difficult or time consuming, or not worth embarking on. The tradition was started in the

interwar period when, after two centuries of gestation, the distinct patterns of perceptions

that characterized attitudes toward the Balkans finally crystallized in a specific discourse

about the region after the Balkan wars and World War I. In the next decades this

discourse that I have called balkanism gained additional features but its main

characteristics were already in place, and in its broad outlines it continues to be handed

down, acquiring a dominant explanatory status whenever the Balkans come into the

news. In this period “Balkan mentality” entered even many scholarly studies as an

operative term. This was part of the dubious academic vogue over national psychology

or what the Germans called Volkscharakterologie. Even after the demise of this pseudo-

scientific discipline, most research on "Balkan mentality" continued to be done on ethnic

lines. There have been even attempts to postulate the linguistic basis of a specific

"Balkan mentality" and the existence of a homo balcaninus.

In a thoughtful analysis of the methodological dimensions of the problem,

Paschalis Kitromilides concluded that all anthropological and social psychological

arguments in favor of the existence of a shared Balkan 'mentality' turn into sociological

metaphysics unless they convincingly demonstrate what is specifically Balkan about it.

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Despite this unequivocal rejection of the category, it continues to be used in attempts to

define the characteristics of the Balkan region, especially when juxstaposed to the

broader entity Europe. Recently, it was utilized in a model of the Balkan region as a

historical space to describe what was believed to be a particularly Balkan propensity for

myths. These myths, according to the model, include the “golden” pre-Ottoman period,

the myth of the “Turkish yoke,” the myth of the pure and organic nation, the myth of

national rebirth, the Kosovo-myth, the haiduk-myth and the victimization myths. In a

word, this model posits the existence of a Balkan identity characterized by a myth-

producing propensity. However, I would submit that it is very difficult to distinguish

these myths structurally from the “golden” myth of antiquity, the myth of the Dark Ages,

the myth (and practice) of the Nüremberg laws of the 1930s and ius sanguinis, the myth

of Rome (as in Italian national ideology, with the myth of the Roman Republic, the

Roman Empire, and the Papacy), the myth of the battle of Poitiers (both the one in the 8th,

and the one in the 14th centuries), the myth of the Walküren, and the myth of a fortress

besieged by enemies (both as in the Masada as well as in the German military doctrine in

World War I). While the model acknowledges that many of these characteristics are not

specific only to the Balkans, it posits that what makes up the Balkan specificity is the

cluster of these characteristics that unmistakably defines it. However, positing a

diachronically stable evolution which produces a cluster of characteristics leads to a static

analysis that pays no attention to the fact that these myths, while existing and undergoing

a continuous transmission through education or other cultural and political channels, are

inflamed and get operative only at certain periods. In recent years, this was the case in

Yugoslavia, a country disintegrating and caught up in a civil war. Characteristics of the

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extraordinary Yugoslav situation were externalized and, in a totally unwarranted fashion,

were rhetorically sold to the political class and to the broad public as Balkan. “Balkan

mentality” and “Balkan memory” are chimeric and fruitless notions. There are varieties

of individual and group memories in the Balkans, but no single “Balkan memory.” There

are, likewise, instances of collective mentality, and at times one can speak of national

mentality. At specific time periods and in specific social groups (like the Orthodox

clergy in the 18th century) one can find even something like a Balkan-wide mentality, but

these should be carefully contextualized and historicized.

This is equally true of the putative Balkan identity. In the past couple of

centuries, the largest group that has managed to command a kind of collective identity

has been the nation. Supranational identities (like, for example, the European one) are

still a social experiment, at best a work-in-progress. National identities in the Balkans,

like elsewhere, have been defined and have operated in opposition to each other. There

has never been, however, a common Balkan identity. At best, there has been the

occasionally romantic, occasionally reluctant recognition of cultural similarities

accumulated over the centuries which, at times, assume the form of a defensive common

response to an ascriptive identity from the outside. After all, the Balkans is a more

unified concept in the mind of outside observers.

One may very carefully speak of the existence of tentative Balkan identities (in

the plural) as part of the multiple identifications of the separate Balkan national identities.

As I have tried to show, even dealing with the name Balkan has been a problematic issue

in identity politics in the region. It has varied from complete rejection of the name as

self-identification (as in most cases) to an ambivalent and even positive usage only in the

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case of the Bulgarians, and for specific geographic and historical reasons. As a whole,

whenever a Balkan identity is discussed in the Balkans, it usually has had to do with

different ways to cope with stigma but also with self-stigmatization. On the other hand,

the attempts to hypostatize a Balkan identity have historically been noble but utopian

political exercises, like the movement toward a Balkan federation, doomed from the

outset both by internal opposition but, more significantly, by outside forces. It is

therefore imperative, when assessing the unprecedented present-day rhetoric, especially

in the aftermath of the NATO bombing over Yugoslavia, calling on constructing a

positive Southeast European identity, to look carefully into the political motivations

behind these calls, as well as the political and cultural costs of the project. After all,

identity politics is as much a form of social control and political mobilization as any other

kind of politics.

I am not preaching against a regional Balkan identity. All I am saying is that up

until now it has not really existed except in alternative projects, and certainly not in

political practice. On the other hand, regional identities, as the word presupposes, are

necessarily juxtaposed to each other, even if not in a hostile relationship. So, what would

be the relationship of a putative Balkan identity as a project to another putative European

identity, widely accepted and desired in the Balkans as a more distant project? And what

does it mean when the Balkan accession is made conditional on the creation of a Balkan

identity, or at least this is posited as a desirable goal? Did we have similar conditions for

the creation of Mediterranean, or Iberian, or Scandinavian, or Baltic identities? What I

question is the uncritical belief that this could be a panacea, and what I call on is a more

critical attitude toward the recipe.

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 Where do I see what I have already characterized as the indispensable and central

role of politicians? Not, in what you would expect, namely in creating and promoting a

new political culture, although this is, of course, very desirable. But I believe that it is

impossible to sever political culture from the general process of societal cultivation. Let

me be more concrete, and give an example with what has been lately happening in

Eastern Europe. I hope I am not unduly caricaturing but my impression is that most of

the support channeled in the past decades toward NGOs in Eastern Europe was meant to

teach and promote the culture of democracy; and to teach and promote the culture of

tolerance toward minorities in regions where this culture was considered to be lacking,

minimal or inorganic. Within the last rubric, a real cottage industry developed, namely

that of textbook writing, specifically history textbooks. This was premised on the idea

that a new cultural paradigm disbursed through textbooks would socialize the new

generation in new values. I actually don’t object to the fact that a lot of funds were

allocated to textbook writing: it gave an honorable means of support to a number of

underpaid academics; it also created a number of useful intellectual networks. But I think

it was premised on a wrong intellectual assumption: it doesn’t need much theoretical

savvy to know that even the best textbook in the hands of a bad, not to speak of a hungry,

teacher is helpless, as well as the reverse: a good teacher can produce miracles even

without a textbook, let alone with a bad one which can serve as a wonderful example for

what not to do. It is a public secret (and in a country like Bulgaria which I know best, a

public scandal) that the educational system has all but collapsed. Teachers are not simply

severely underpaid; they virtually cannot survive; and I am not even speaking of the

retired ones where one can really speak of gerontocide. Last summer I witnessed an

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occasion where an old schoolteacher was rummaging through the garbage, and several

others where former students are collecting alms, as it were, to help out their former

teachers. And I am not even addressing issues of dignity, etc. I am talking plain hunger.

On the other hand, and this I heard quite often, were conspiracy theories of the sort:

“They, i.e. the West, want to reduce us to a stage where we can only count and

distinguish signs so that we wouldn’t be in the way of the Nordic race, or the Germans, or

the Scandinavians.” This is, of course, the mirror image of the same cultural

fundamentalism which has been applied to the East but in reverse. And I believe I am not

overdramatizing or overgeneralizing

Basically, where I want to lead this is to call for more investment in the basic

human capital of the region not only through occasional and directed infusions in NGO’s

and research projects, or through concerted efforts at rapprochement at the highest

political and intellectual levels. All of this is very good but we need serious infusions in

the basic educational infrastructure. In this sense it would be building upon a tradition of

education, which was also very strong under communism (an element of the legacy even

its greatest critics find difficult to ignore). I don’t want to be misunderstood. This should

in no way dissipate the very useful support that has been flowing in, at the academic,

artistic and journalistic level, and which does create wonderful networks of excellence

that stimulate intellectual and cultural exchange. But it should go further and deeper at

the bottom of what constitutes the present crisis in education in the region. In my own

wishful thinking I dream of the time when a minister of education or of culture would

carry more political clout than a minister of interior, or war, or even a foreign minister

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(and if that were the case, they might be even deemed worthy of becoming members of

the club).

To reiterate, I am not arguing either against culture or against identity. What I am

arguing against is the reduction of such complex, voluminous and capacious notions,

which accommodate very different, often contradictory elements, to territorially bound,

unidimensional and simple, not to say simplistic projects. I would also like to emphasize

that both of these notions – culture and identity – despite the great pronouncements of

their collective and even totalizing character, are in the end an individual endeavor.

Culture is acquired and resides with the individual, not with groups or territories. Here I

would quote a distinguished psychologist, Edward Sapir: “In spite of the oft asserted

impersonality of culture, a humble truth remains that vast reaches of culture, far from

being ‘carried’ by a community or group... are discoverable only as the peculiar property

of certain individuals, who cannot but give these cultural goods the impress of their own

personality.”

That being so, allow me to conclude on a simple note of appeal. A single Balkan

culture, in my reading, may not exist, and a unified Balkan identity may not necessarily

be the most felicitous project, but politicians in particular should be doing everything in

their power to help and raise the culture (in the most conventional sense of the word) and

an identity of self-respect of the individuals who inhabit the large space of what is

conditionally designated as the Balkans.

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