The Anti-Europe

I must admit that I don’t like the name the Balkans. But you might rightly ask: How is it possible that I don’t like this name? Aren’t names neutral and, in a sense, also innocent because it all depends on how we use them, and in what context? Or is the name the Balkans more like a kind of supermarket where different people walk around with a shopping basket, filling it with meanings already displayed on the shelves? What reasons could I have to get emotional about this particular name? After all, the name of a geographic region is not a person to be liked or not.

Here I don’t want to discuss how we could have prevented this […] but how this verb could become just a noun again.

But I could answer that I do have a reason, a valid reason for this antipathy: I witnessed this name, the Balkans, being transformed into the verb to balkanize – and I, together with so many others, suffered the consequences of this metamorphosis. Here I don’t want to discuss how we could have prevented this from happening – that would be a stupid post-festum lamentation – but how this verb could become just a noun again.

We have all heard or read about the balkanization of the Soviet Union. Often, I also spot titles in newspapers like “The Balkanization of Kenya” or “Washington promotes Bolivia’s balkanization.” Just recently, reading a book by Ryszard Kapuscinski about Africa, I ran into the following sentence: “The African is well versed in this geography of intertribal friendships and hatreds, no less critical than those existing today in the Balkans.”

Going back to my metaphor of a supermarket, what you find today in that shopping basket depends, of course, on where you are shopping. If you happen to be doing your shopping in, say, Vienna or in some other place in the “West” or “Europe” (and there are other supermarkets loaded with meanings almost to the point of bursting!) your understanding is, to put it very simply, that the Balkans is what Europe is not. Never mind geography, the frontier is somewhere in the mind more than in the landscape itself. For contemporary people, it is most likely in their memory in the form of television images from the recent wars.

The frontier is somewhere in the mind more than in the landscape itself.

If you close your eyes for a moment and say the Balkans, what comes to your mind are probably images of refugees, women with head scarves crying, the ruins of Vukovar, dead bodies, more dead bodies, Christianne Amanpour of CNN reporting from some site of tragedy and destruction.

Then, perhaps you might remember the numbers (over 7,000 Muslim men executed in Srebrenica, 60,000 women raped, 200,000 dead in Bosnia, 10,000 children wounded and so on). Or, if you don’t remember numbers, you probably still remember faces, especially that of a skeleton-like young man behind the barbed wire fence of a Serbian concentration camp in Omarska, Bosnia. Or the faces of war criminals like Ratko Mladic, a mop-headed Radoslav Karadzic or Slobodan Milosevic.

What comes to my mind, however, is a pullover, a white handmade pullover with red splotches. It belongs to the father of a little girl who was killed by shrapnel. As her father held her tiny body, her blood soaked into his pullover which he was still wearing shortly afterwards, when the CNN camera filmed him. How could you blame a person for remembering all that when hearing the name the Balkans?

Some of you will probably also remember the extraordinary blue colour of the Adriatic Sea or the fine food, or the beach with small white pebbles there, the beach you visited with your parents back in the 1960s when everything was different. But I am afraid that the idea of the Balkans as non-Europe has already become strongly re-established in the collective mind since you last visited that idyllic place.

Maria Todorova’s book ‘Imagining the Balkans’ has made people even more aware of the “imaginary geography” we are dealing with here […].”

The Balkans is far from being merely a name. Maria Todorova’s book ‘Imagining the Balkans’ has made people even more aware of the “imaginary geography” we are dealing with here, to use Edward Said’s expression. To refresh our memory, Todorova points out that the Balkans is an old name (the Turkish name for the Stara Planina mountain in Bulgaria) but a rather new expression, dating from the end of the 19th century. Then, in a kind of “literary colonization,” the Balkans slowly became a dark, dangerous but also exotic place.

This happened thanks to various Western writers, from Bram Stoker and Karl May to Rebecca West and Agatha Christie, I might add, all the way to the postwar memoires of politicians like David Owen and Richard Holbrooke or the “travel” books of Robert Kaplan and Peter Handke. The Balkans became a space where mythology rules history, inhabited by wild and exotic people to whom blood and belonging are the most important values, where conflicts and religious wars are forever looming overhead in this space of insecurity.

Of course, as a consequence, people inhabiting this space-name-verb-image-symbol-landscape became prisoners of the negative connotations themselves. They (we) do not like to belong there and therefore we try to get out of where we don’t want to belong. Looking at it from what one would consider an inside view of the Balkans, it looks different: “The Balkans – that’s the others!” as Rastko Mocnik, a Slovene sociologist, expressed it in his ingenious paraphrase.

And consequently, each of us, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and so on, look further East for the Balkans as this symbolic/imaginary border moves from Vienna’s Landstraße to Trieste and Ljubljana, then to Zagreb and Sarajevo and then to Belgrade and even more southeast to Pristina. No border in this world is so flexible because it is not so much a border as a perception.

The Croatian writer Miroslav Krleza’s famous expression for politics as a “balkanska krčma” – i.e. a Balkan pub where, once the light is switched off, the fighting starts – was the other way we used it. But for young people there was also Johnny Stulic’s popular song ‘Balkane moj’ (My Balkans) from the mid-eighties, and it did not incorporate any of those “old” pejorative meanings.

However, we cannot dismiss this whole negative imagery because it is not only imaginary; the latest wars really re-affirmed this mental landscape as a place of horror and divisions. Moreover, new borders have been drawn and they are indeed not only symbolic but real, painted with the bright red colour of blood.

The whole story of the Balkans as the name-turned-verb is even more painful to me personally as a writer because real wars were preceded by “the war of words.” In this way I witnessed the harm words can do. No war happens just like that; it takes propaganda and a long psychological preparation before the killing can start. It is usually people in culture, education, and the media, such as writers, teachers, artists and, of course, journalists, who are entrusted with such a task by the regime. This should remind us that culture and its representatives are not necessarily or by definition a positive force in society – let us not forget that Radovan Karadžić was a poet and Dobrica Ćosić a writer.

Let us not forget that Radovan Karadžić was a poet and Dobrica Ćosić a writer.

Every time I give a reading or a speech in the West and in spite of the fact that so many years have passed, and so many texts in the newspapers have been written, television programmes presented and books published, perhaps a thousand of them – I get the same question: how and why did the war in Yugoslavia start? Indeed, why did such a prosperous country, free from Soviet-type communism and out of reach of Moscow, collapse in such a bloody, brutal war?

My favourite and very laconic answer is: Our country collapsed because of Italian shoes! Because we were able to travel abroad and from time to time shop for what we could not find at home, we believed that we were free. We did not bother to develop any kind of democratic political alternative and that vacuum, after the collapse of Communism, was later filled by nationalism.

After all these years (seventeen since the beginning of the last wars and thirteen since they ended) during which one whole generation had time to grow up, not only in the Balkans but in the West too, what do they know today? What does this young generation in the West know about the Balkans, except for the clichés? Here I have a problem with Western Europeans.

Because we believed that we were free, we did not bother to develop any kind of democratic political alternative.

After so many years, I suspect that people here do not want to understand how it all happened. It is too complicated, they usually say. At first I thought it was only laziness that prevented them from finally learning a few historic facts. But after being asked the same question time and again, I changed my mind. Now I think these terrible television images from the wars in the Balkans, are a very efficient excuse for not understanding; we, people from there, and our wars cannot be understood at all, simply because we are so very different; in fact, these images and memories serve as a kind of shield. If the Europeans were to say they understood these frightening events, it would mean we were all the same, or at least similar. But it is safer to reject such a possibility and keep a necessary, healthy distance from such neighbours (remembering that the Balkans is what Europe is not).

As if the West were a pristine territory, unblemished by the touch of evil ... as if, for example, European national states or revolutions had not been born in blood … as if Auschwitz had not taken place ... Yes, but – one might argue – at least it was more elegant! No blood there, no knives, no slaughter, no visible brutality. Images of emaciated dead bodies? They are perhaps not forgotten but just pushed back deeper into the memory, there has to be some space left for the latest horrors, such as Baghdad or Abu Ghraib.

After all, one can take in just so much; there must be a horror-quota, a point after which violence means nothing any more. Which makes me think about how long it took for the Germans to get rid of the image of being genocidal butchers, people prone to obey any order. That constituted for a very long period of time the idea of the German character to all of us, including me. Such a historical perspective makes me hopeful: these thirteen years from the end of the war in the Balkans is not so much time, is it?

Clearly, culture exposed to the market means its marginalisation. But culture is too important to be exposed only to the market. The importance of culture/arts is that it represents capital, i.e. culture produces “symbolic capital” which has the power of social inclusion and of spreading values. By culture here I mean people who produce cultural artefacts today: performances, videos, books, exhibitions, movies, music, theatre.

The paradox of culture and the arts – because of the comparatively small quantity of money invested therein – is that it is the best export and it creates a notable presence for the country or region within the wider community. It also creates a certain balance because even a small country can contribute a lot: for example, not long ago when the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra had a concert in Vienna, Franz Morak, the former Austrian State Secretary said: “This is the biggest success of Croatian foreign policy in the last ten years.”

By presenting and perceiving a country through culture and art you get a different and differentiated picture, undermining the image that usually reduces the countries in the region to the same common denominator. Culture can give a country instant visibility, recognition, and offer a perception of an attractive, open, interesting and culturally rich space.

Culture and art are the cheapest and quickest route to Europe.

But the best thing about it is that through such a presentation of culture and the arts everybody can gain. The country in question can gain in that because small countries fear for their national identity, culture and art, in affirming that identity on the wider scene, work against that fear of being lost in the EU and against the anxiety of globalisation.

Art and culture are, if you will, practical political tools for achieving positive effects on both the external and the internal level. They are the cheapest and quickest route to Europe.

I think that we in the Balkans must ask ourselves another important question. What could be our contribution to the EU, to the future home of us all? Usually when we are asked such a question, we are silent for a while, somehow embarrassed because we are not posing it to ourselves! But then, quickly, (improvisation is believed to be one of our strong points!) we came up with a “witty” answer: to survive! We will teach you how to survive against all the odds! Not really thinking that to you such knowledge might be superficial. Yet, we can’t admit this to ourselves.

Our life under communism was all about survival, and realising that nobody needs that knowledge now would make us feel even more of a burden. Our life would look wasted somehow. Yet the answer seems obvious to me. There are two things we could contribute: One is culture and art production and the other are young, educated people endowed with wit, intelligence, and curiosity.

If there is no culture, the economy and politics alone will not work, not in the long run. The EU needs a glue and it can come only from another sphere, from the sphere to which every country, however small and politically controversial it may be, can contribute as well. Although it does not seem very obvious – but it is visible in more than one way – people are still looking for something more than just money. At least in Europe. And so, to conclude: if, indeed, the Balkans is returning to Europe, it should be returning in the form of a noun and not as a verb.

Translation: Richard Briggs