Imagining the Balkans (Maria Todorova)

Balkanism and orientalism: are they different categories?

In her introduction, Maria Todorova reminds us that the term “Balkan”; “Balkanizing”;
“balkanization” was pejoratively associated.

By the beginning of the 20th century, it became a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward,
the primitive, the barbarian. It was related to variety of problems.

It has been emphasized about the Balkans that its inhabitants do not care to conform to the
standards of behaviour devised as normative by and for the civilized world.

Those generalization and stereotypes were reductionist and indeed stereotyped, but it has been of
such degree and intensity that the discourse merits and requires special analysis.

Regarding the world “civilized”, it echoes the attempts to strengthen peace movements and even to
institutionalize it (period from 1910). News of the barbaries (time of the Balkan wars in 1912-1913)
committed in this distant European Mediterranean peninsula came flooding in and challenged the
peace movements.

An international commission (established by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) “to
inquire into the causes and conduct of the Balkan wars” was established in this regard. The Baron
d’Estournelle de Constant emphasized in the report (1913) that despite the first Balkan war was
defensive and a war of independence, the second was predatory war seeking moral and material
destruction.

The Commission pointed out this issue and encouraged them to set a good example by seeking a
judicial settlement of all international disputes.

Few decades later, in 1993 (with the new wave of Balkan wars), the Carnegie Endownment reprinted
this 1913 report. George Kennan for this occasion made the bridge between those two Balkan wars
(1913-1993) and tried to instruct the conscience of the international community.

“The importance of this report for the world of 1993 lies primarily in the light it casts on the
excruciating situation prevailing today in the same Balkan world with which is dealt. The
greatest value of the report is to reveal to people of this age how much of today’s problem
has deep roots and how much does not.”

Kennan pointed out many events in the Balkan history (the bloody assassination of Alexander
Obrenovic in 1903, the Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand who plunged his country into the second Balkan war
etc.) to illustrate typical Balkan violence.

The explanation for the Balkan irredenta, for dreams of glory and territorial expansion, was
summarized in one sentence: “It was hard for people who had recently achieved so much, and this so
suddenly, to know where to stop.”

Kennan was critical about the first report in 1913 and stressed that the strongest motivating factor
“was not religion but aggressive nationalism. But that nationalism, as it manifested itself on the field
of battle, drew on deeper traits of character inherited, presumably, from a distant tribal past… And
so, it remains today.”
Mary Edith Durham (British artist from the 19-20 th century) wrote that she was disgusted about what
she saw during the Balkan wars.

However, as Kennan wrote, we cannot only blame the Balkan for the bloodshed as the WW I & II
have shown. Kennan even added that only few serious historians would claim that WWI & II has little
things to do with the Balkans if nothing!

To break this cliché about Balkan’s savagery, Kennan (still in 1993) wanted to point out other major
events in the World that included even more barbary:

- It was said that Balkan’s wars took origins in some events back in 1495… To counter this
argument, Kennan wrote that they were killing in Europe over something that happened in
2000 years ago;
- It was reminded that during the Gulf War operation, in 17 days, at least half the number of
total war casualties incurred by all sides during the two Balkan wars;
- Also, there was the Vietnam War, where World’s greatest superpower killing or seriously
injuring 1000 non-combatants a week.

He added that is it curious that some American journalists would depict killing in Bosnia (between
25.000 and 250.000 casualties) as a genocide while the over three million dead Vietnamese were not
given any specific adjective.

 Balkans certainly do not have the monopoly over barbarity.

However, the reputation still stands. Todorova sees three potential causes:

(1) Innocent inaccuracies stemming from imperfect geographical knowledge transmitted

through tradition
(2) The later saturation of the geographical appellation with political, social, cultural, and
ideological overtones, and the beginning of the pejorative use of “Balkan” around World war
I
(3) The complete dissociation of the designation from its object, and the subsequent reverse and
retractive ascription of the ideologically loaded designation to the region, particularly after
1989

The book, Todorova says, argues that balkanism is not merely a subspecies of orientalism. Todorova
dig a bit more in this topic and analyse the conceptualization of orientalism by said (p. 6 of the PDF).

The bottom line is: in a narrower sense, orientalism acquired an enviable although contested prestige
in avant-gardist cultural theory and in a broader sense, it indicated possible venues of resistance and
subversion.

(Disclaimer: I am not too much of a philosopher, so feel free so get back to page 6-7, but I am writing
down the most “sensed” parts as I assume that we do not have many philosophers among us).

Let me quote James Carrier to have the context of the “orientalism question”:

“Seeing Orientalism as a dialectical process helps us recognize that it is not merely a Western
imposition of a reified identity on some alien set of people. It is also the imposition of an identity
created in dialectical opposition to another identity, one likely to be equally reified, that of the West,
Westerners, then, define the Orient in terms of the West, but so Others define themselves in terms of
the West, just as each defines the West in terms of the Other… Of course, the way I have cast this
privileges the West as the standard against which all Others are defined, which is appropriate in view
of both the historical political and economic power of the West.”

Introducing the notion of “nesting orientalism”

(Source: wikipedia)

Background

As developed by Milica Bakić-Hayden, Nesting Orientalisms is a conceptual variant of Edward Said's

theory of Orientalism; an additional influence is Larry Wolff, but, in fact, she already had used the
term 'Nesting Orientalism' in the article 'Orientalist Variations on the Theme "Balkans": Symbolic
Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics" (1992), co-author Robert Hayden, before Wolff
published Inventing Eastern Europe.

The concept

This concept explains "a tendency of each region to view the cultures and religions to its South and
East as more conservative and primitive". It explains how a group which creates the Orientalized
other can also be the subject of Orientalization by another group, and so on. According to this
concept Asia is more "east" or "other" than Eastern Europe. Within Eastern Europe the Balkans is
perceived as most "eastern". Such hierarchy continues within the Balkans.

Nesting Balkanisms

In the case of the Balkans there are many rankings connected with this concept, which "play a
significant role in . . . identity building [and proclaiming] a more prestigious position within a
generally negatively assessed entity". Proclaiming one's European character was a tool in creating the
pattern of "nesting orientalisms" in the Balkans.

Hence, Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova introduced the related concept of "nesting balkanisms".
Todorova emphasized the importance of this concept in identity constructions, which in the case of
the Balkans involve the dual perception of the Balkans as a part of Europe but also as in opposition,
as the "darker side" of Europe.

(End of the Wikipedia reference)

The author, Todorova aims to position herself vis-à-vis the orientalist discourse and elaborate on a
seemingly identical, but actually only similar phenomenon, which she calls balkanism.

What are, then, if any, the differences between these categories?

First: the historical and geographic concreteness of the Balkans as opposed to the intangible nature
of the Orient.

The opposition between an abstract East and West has been as old as written history. The ancient
Greeks used Orient to depict the antagonism between civilized and barbarians. This distinction was
used numerous times throughout history.

In all cases, the dichotomy East-West had clearly defined spatial dimensions: it juxtaposed societies
that coexisted but were opposed for political, religious, or cultural reasons. Note that throughout
history, East was not always the pejorative component of this dichotomy.

As showed by Larry Wolff (American historian), this division East-West came late (around the 18 th
century), and this new division (compared to the dominant one North-South), though also spatial,
began gradually identified with economical lagging, lack of social relations and institutions.

Back to the Balkans. Unlike some other “concepts”, the Balkans have a concrete historical existence.
While surveying the different historical legacies that have shaped the southeast European peninsula,
two legacies can be singled out as crucial.

One if the millennium of Byzantium with its profound political, institutional, legal, religious, and
cultural impact. The other is the half millennium of Ottoman rule that gave the peninsula its name
and established the longest period of political unity it had experienced.

Not only did part of southeastern Europe acquire a new name -Balkans- during the Ottoman period,
it has been chiefly the Ottoman elements (or the ones perceived as such) that have mostly invoked
the current stereotypes.

While, in the narrow sense of the word, the presence of the Ottoman empire in the southeast
European peninsula had a lifetime spanning from the 14 th to the early 20th centuries, the Ottoman
legacy bears first and foremost the characteristics of the 18 th and 19th centuries.

 In practically all spheres in which the Ottoman legacy can be traced, a drastic break occurred
at the time of secession and largely completed by the end of WWI (while sphere of popular
culture legacy had a more persistent and continuous life.)

The process of “Europeanization”, “Westernization”, or “modernization” of the Balkans in the 19 th

and 20th centuries included the spread of rationalism and secularization, the intensification of
commercial activities and industrialization, the formation of a bourgeoisie and other new social
groups in the economic and social sphere, and above all, the triumph of the bureaucratic nation-
state.  Shedding the last residue of an imperial legacy and emulating the European nation-state as
the normative form of social organization.

Interestingly enough, the Orient nourished the imagination of the romantics (N.B. For the Romantics,
imagination, rather than reason, was the most important creative faculty.). The Orient became a
symbol of freedom and wealth for liberals stifled by the rise of conservatism.

The imagined Orient served as a refuge from the alienation of a rapidly industrializing West but also
as metaphor for the forbidden (more freedom, nudity, scenes of harems, bath...)
The situation in the Balkans, on the other hand, could be summarized with this Latin phrase “Lux
Balcanica est umbra Orientis” (The light of the Balkans is the shadow of the Orient). Compared to the
Orient, experiences from different travellers to the Balkans were for the greatest part prosaic.

It might be since the Balkans have been compared to a bridge between East and West, between
Europe and Asia. The Balkans are also a bridge between stages of growth, and this invokes labels as
semi developed, semicolonial, semicivilized, semi oriental.

 The Balkan peninsula is - broadly speaking - the land of contradictions.

One of the versions of East-West dichotomy played itself out in the opposition between Greek
Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

There is also the racial component. There exists a discourse that describes the Balkans as a racial
mixture, as a bridge between races. Despite the presence of the theme of racial ambiguity, the
Balkans are still treated as positioned on his side of the fundamental opposition: white versus
coloured, Indo-European versus the rest. This also comes to explain the preoccupation with the War
in Yugoslavia.

In conclusion: Balkanism evolved to a great extent independently from orientalism and, in certain
aspects, against or despite it.

One reason was geopolitical: the separate treatment, within the complex history of the Eastern
question, of the Balkans as a strategic sphere distinct from the Near or Middle East.

The absence of a colonial legacy (despite the often-exploited analogies) is another significant
difference.

Balkanism evolved partly as a reaction to the disappointment of the West Europeans’ “classical”
expectations in the Balkans, but it was a disappointment within a paradigm that had already been set
as separatee from the oriental.

The Balkans’ predominantly Christian character, moreover, fed for a long time the crusading
potential of Christianity against Islam.

Finally, the construction of an idiosyncratic Balkan self-identity, or rather of several Balkan self-
identities, constitutes a significant distinction: they were invariably erected against an “oriental”
other  This could be anything from a geographic neighbor and opponent (most often the Ottoman
Empire and Turkey but also within the region itself as with the nesting of orientalism in the former
Yugoslavia) to the “orientalising” of portions of one’s own historical past (usually the Ottoman period
and the Ottoman Legacy).

The Balkans : Nomen (from p. 12 PDF)

At the same time that “Balkan” was being accepted and widely used as geographic signifier, it was
already becoming saturated with a social and cultural meaning that expanded its signified far beyond
its immediate and concrete meaning. The term also signifies a complex historical phenomenon,
political aspects too.

What is the story of the name “Balkan”?

In 1704, the British traveler John Morritt, went on a trip. On his way from Bucharest to
Constantinople, he crossed the Balkan Mountains at the Shipka Pass in Bulgaria.

This was one of the very first times the mountain chain that divides Bulgaria from east to west and
runs parallel to the Danube was called the Balkans in the English-language travel literature.

However, most European travelers before the 19 th century preferred to use the classical term
Haemus (while knowing that it was not the only designation of the mountain range).

Callimaco in the 15th century, wrote that the local people used the name Balkan for the mountain. It
was also used subsequently used by other people. For instance: by Schweigger in the 16-17th, who
was the first traveler after Callimaco to communicate the Turkish name of the mountain, Balkan. He
was amsp the only traveler to mention a Bulgarian Slavic name (which he called Croatian):
Comonitza. Balkan was again used in the 16 th by Martin Grünberg. Also, by Reinhold Lubenau, Simeon
Trir Lehatsi etc. (P. 14 of the PDF)

There was also the name Ztara Planina - Stara Planina, Old Mountain - (mentioned by Vrancic in the
16th century).

Throughout the 18th century, Haemus and Balkan were increasingly used side by side or
interchangeably.

Both forms of the mountain continued to be used during the 19 th century: Mons Haemus oder Veliki
Balkan Gebirge (Franz Von Weiss) or Stara Planina.

During the 1820s, Balkan became the preferred. Because at first, it was applied exclusively as a
synonym for the mountain Haemus.

The first to coin and use the term “Balkan peninsula” was the German geographer August Zeune in
1808. But the reason why Balkan became one of the most often used designations (alongside
Southeastern Europe) has little to do with precise geography.

In fact, for over two millennia, geographers reproduced the dominant ancient Greek belief that the
Haemus was a majestic mountain chain linking the Adriatic and the Black Sea, with a dominant
position in the peninsula, serving as its northern border. In the 5-6 th century, Theopomp of Chios
reported that the peninsula was so narrow that from the highest mountain peak one could see both
the Adriatic and the Black seas. This story became known and reproduced among ancient writers.

Among the Romans, the notion of the visibility of the two seas was reproduced.

Not only did the notion of the Balkans as the northern mountain chain linking the Black Sea and the
Adriatic persist during the Byzantine period, but Anna Commena, the great Byzantine writer and
princess, believed that, though interrupted by the Adriatic, it continued on the other shore further to
the west.

Back to the 1830s, the French geologist Ami Boué authoritatively and definitively destroyed the
widespread perception and correctly described the mountain (ran for 555 km from west to east).

The world Balkan has a strong link with Ottoman period. For instance, most Ottoman and Turkish
dictionaries explain it as mountain or mountain range, some specify it as wooded mountain.

 It has been widely accepted that “Balkan” is a word and name that entered the peninsula
with the arrival of the Ottoman Turks. (And even “pre-Ottoman” when Türkmen tribes lived
in an area east of the Caspian sea).
Until the congress of Berlin in 1878, the designations of the regions were based from the presence of
the Ottoman Empire in the peninsula (for instance: Turkey-In-Europe, European Ottoman Empire”
etc.). Balkan was not the widespread geographical self-designation.

In the second half of the 19th century, “Balkan peninsula” or simply “Balkan” was affirming itself.

By the turn of the century, Balkans began to be increasingly filled with a political connotation. In
1929, the term “Southeastern Europe” was reinforced (For instance: Otoo Maull) as the adequate
designation of the peninsula.

It was also a period when the words “Balkans” and “Balkanization” had become terms of reproach,
while Nazi German counterpart “Südoseuropa” was disgraced by them -> it shows how much the
different linguistic traditions differ from one another.

Overall, the concept Balkan has been treated as either synonymous to or narrower than
Southeastern Europe.

Most generally, the definition of Balkan has followed a set of geographic, political, historical, cultural,
ethnic, religious, and economic criteria and most often a combination of criteria.

However, geographers and historians differ in their way to define the Balkans.

As a rule, geographers accept that the peninsula is well defined by seas to the east, south, and west.
The definition given by Cvijic for instance tend to exclude Romania from the scope but include Croats
and Slovenes.

George Hoffman, on the other hand, defined Balkan as only three countries: Albania, Bulgaria, and
Yugoslavia. Hoffmann recognised that Greece and Romania have to be included in a discussion of the
“Balkan core”.

Hungary always had more important tied with central Europe. Interestingly enough (as also showed
during the Yugoslav period), Croats and Slovens shared the same sentiment, but they were still
included in the Balkan core.

However, with all due refinements that some regions are more Balkan than others, the book covers
as Balkan: Albanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Romanians, and most of the former Yugoslavs.

Balkan in some languages:

French: le Balkan (designed the mountain), les Balkans (name for the peninsula)

German: der Balkan (borth mountain and the peninsula), while Balkanisch can have a pejorative or
neutral connotation.

English and Russian: both use the plural forms (Balkans, Balkany) as a name for the peninsula and its
political formations. In English, Balkan in singular only used as an adjective.

Italian: Balcania (designate the region), Balcano neutral but can acquire negative connotation.

Turkish: Balkanlar (to designate the states of the Balkan peninsula) and Balkan (mountain)

Greek and Roumanian: only plural noun Ta Valkania and Balcani (peninsula), adjectives are
Valkanikos and Balcanic.

Serbo-croatian and Albanian: only in singular Balkan and Ballkan (names for the region), adjectives
are Balkanski and Ballkanit
Bulgarian: Balkan (can use as synonym for the mountain), Balkani (for the peninsula), Balkanets
(pejorative connotation), Balkandzhiya (someone who possess independence, pride, courage, honor.

 In all languages, with two exceptions (Turkish, Bulgarian), Balkan is used with an emotional
ingredient varying from neutral to derogative.

The most important word and notion deriving from Balkan is Balkanization. It implies a political
connotation.

The term is most often used to denote the process of nationalist fragmentation of former geographic
and political units into new and problematically viable small states  the great proliferation of small
states as a result of the Great War was triggered by the disintegration of the o and Romanov Empires
and the emergences of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

To this post-World War I legacy, should be added Yugoslavia, whose creation was, technically
speaking, the reserve of Balkanization.

The most accurate definition of Balkanization can be found with the one from Norman J. G. Pounds
“The term balkanization has been used to refer to the breaking up of a geographic area into small
and often hostile units.”

In many other languages, the term balkanization is often misleading.

Balkanization entered the lexicon of journalists and politicians at the end of WW I. A second round in
the use of “balkanization” emerged with the beginning of the decolonization process after WWII.

An interesting note here: Du Bois showed how the notion of “balkanization” was being used to
perpetuate a sense of disgrace and dishonour among the luckless people of the earth, while
rationalizing the practice of the dominant western powers to keep smaller countries within their
sphere of influence.

The term balkanization was overall (even for distant countries like the USA), defined as “the
antithesis to the melting pot ideal”.

The term has been also used in the world of academia by exponents of different and often opposing
political views: multiculturalism has been equated with balkanization, it is the name for excessive
specialization, a metaphor for postmodernism and post communism. The word became synonymous
with dehumanization, deaesthetization, destruction of civilization.

But the word Balkan has become also a welcome and easy metaphor.

Conclusion:

Why, in the face of such richness of notions, words, sounds, is “Balkan” snatched from its ontological
base and recreated as an abstract demon? Why has it been turned into a linguistic weed?

The Balkans as reality have acquired a reputation that is far from laudatory (quite apart from
questions of how deserved or adequate this reputation is).

In many respects, “Balkan” is a nomen nudum (In taxonomy, a nomen nudum is a designation which
looks exactly like a scientific name of an organism, and may have originally been intended to be a
scientific name, but fails to be one because it has not been published with an adequate description.),
the taxonomical (taxonomic = concerned with the classification of things, especially organisms) term
used to denote a name “which has no standing because it was introduced without publication of the
full description demanded by the rules governing botanical and zoological nomenclature.”

Nowadays, the word is used within a cultural and political nomenclature, but the problem is that it
was and is continually used also to denote a concrete geographical and historical reality with its flora
and fauna, thus conforming to the rules of the botanical and zoological nomenclature.