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SESSION I – 1
Reinventing the Balkans
“Geopolitics, Art and Culture in South-East Europe”
The New War Economy and the Politics of Representation in South-Eastern Europe
Marius BABIAS
Head of Communication
Kokerei Zollverein | Contemporary Art and Criticism in Essen
Germany
Introduction
The geographical region that is called the Balkans and contains a myriad of linguistically, religiously and culturally diverse groups, states and quasi-states in South-Eastern Europe, is the discursive product of a centuries-old struggle for political influence and power. It is also the outcome, in microcosm, of a clash of world religions and ideologies – Catholicism against Orthodoxy and Christianity against Islam, communism against capitalism and ethno-nationalism against globalization, to name but the main fault lines in the seismology of Balkan conflict.
However much the discursive product that is the Balkans is based on geopolitical interests and cultural imputations, this chimera has come to life – the Balkans as a discursive whole have become a reality of huge effect, and that is precisely where the problem lies. Centuries of Western prejudice, antipathy, racism and Catholic fundamentalism directed against the countries, regions and social groups of South-Eastern Europe have produced a political and cultural agenda that has found its way without challenge or question into the dispositive of civilization.
It seems to us a matter of dire necessity to turn to the Balkans at the present time since most large exhibitions of the last few years have forgotten Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and have instead focused on the South. As important and justified as post-colonial discourse is, the East-West dialogue must not be forgotten. The last Documenta exhibition, for example, took absolutely no account of these issues. The recently dominant post-colonial discourse made the East appear a backwater, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 seemed to have implicitly promised that East-West bloc confrontation would be overcome. That promise has not really been fulfilled. Even if the integration of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe has made headway through measures and structural adjustment programmes introduced by such different transnational organizations and institutions as NATO, the EU, the World Bank and the IMF, we must still inquire as to how these changes have come about and at what price. A little later I will go on to deal in detail with the question of why the West repeatedly intervenes in the Balkans – politically, militarily, economically and culturally – instead of leaving this region to its own historical development and political responsibility.
NATO membership alone, as Balkan states such as Bulgaria and Romania now realize, has not brought the expected economic upswing. States of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, on the other hand, that have become EU members or are due to join the EU, complain of a loss of sovereignty, of paternalism and being told what to do. The revision and redefinition of their own history that accompanies integration into the EU and the world market is perhaps the most difficult aspect of East-West rapprochement. The opportunity to thoroughly reappraise bloc confrontation was largely neglected on both sides in the post-communist phase after the end of the Cold War. When any efforts were made, the Western perspective glorified capitalist interests while the Eastern perspective glossed over or even falsified socialist reality. In some states of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe the old elites have succeeded to this day in hindering the establishment of an authority to review the injustices. Instead, history was dealt with in the West, where it was emotionalized and demonized – the former secret services, East Germany’s Stasi or Romania’s Securitate, were made into metaphors for the old system in an attempt to create a new conception of democracy.
There is a growing tendency for critical artists and authors from the Balkans to use their own political and cultural definitions to counter the Western image of the Balkans. At first that is disconcerting – an artist from France or Germany would not dream of framing their artistic work in terms of national identity politics. The counter-argument of bourgeois universalism, with which artists from the East are judged and then mostly devalued, is founded on the supposed aesthetic autonomy of the work of art, but the idea of a universal aesthetic language is itself the product of a modernist ideology that is crumbling. Identity politics, which is what the artists demand in the exhibition In the Gorges of the Balkans, is very much an artistic resource. Some of the most interesting works of the last few decades, regardless of whether they were created in the West or the East, deal with questions of identity politics – the body and gender within social and intercultural parameters.
When, a good two hundred years ago, the Western European nation states developed something like historical consciousness and subsequently began to legitimize their colonial interests historically, politically and culturally, they not only rediscovered classical antiquity but also claimed the central ideals of that civilization for themselves. In doing so they excluded entire regions of Europe whose history they defined as underdeveloped, barbaric, “Asiatic” and “oriental”. Prejudices, cultural imputations and hostile attitudes to the Balkans have endured persistently, albeit with different composition and occurrence, to this day.
Discourses function like double agents – they structure our thought and our subconscious. Cultural imputations survive generations and political systems, and generate values and convictions. They produce identity, even if they are completely wrong, pure fantasy, rooted in racism, or derived from religious or ideological fanaticism. The Balkan discourse is above all else a Western invention that over time has also been implanted in the thought and the subconscious of people and social groups in South-Eastern Europe, with the result that identity-forming elements of these Western imputations have become lodged in their perceptions of themselves and ways of seeing things. In many cases these identity-forming elements have nothing to do with reality and yet have become reality. The Balkan discourse is a minefield of prejudices, antipathies and racism, an ideologically contaminated discursive field that is dangerous to tread – at the risk of permanently reproducing precisely these structuring elements. The only way of breaking out of this cycle of reproduction, it seems, is to critically examine the Balkan discourse and to deconstruct it in such a way that two potentially liberating elements emerge:
1. naming the motives / reasons / interests behind the West’s construction of a Balkan identity, and
2. criticizing and correcting the prevalent images / representations / values regarding the Balkans.
In the following discussion I will attempt to set out precisely such a two-pronged approach of naming and correcting in five steps. First I will give a historical example of the construction of a Balkan identity whose effects are still felt today – that of Greece, which in the Western view had undergone a cultural and political metamorphosis over the centuries. Then, in a second step, I will go into one of the central building blocks of Balkan identity – the metaphors of violence which were and are inseparably connected with this region of South-Eastern Europe. The third part of my lecture deals with the conventional dispositive of civilization, which interprets the Balkans as a demarcation line between Europe and Asia or civilization and barbarism. The fourth part is devoted primarily to the above-mentioned criticism and correction of prevalent images, representations and values regarding the Balkans. Here I will look into the representation of the “other” and the “culture of mixing”, as well as the problematic concept of “ethnopluralism” that, since the 1990s, the wars in former Yugoslavia and the waves of migration they triggered, has become embedded in a modernized theory of neo-racism. The fifth and final part deals with the politics of self-appropriation and representation. It looks at reasons for the West’s massive political and military intervention in the Balkans in the past decade and attempts to point out perspectives for drawing up new political landscapes, liberated identities and options for action that could serve both self-liberation and a new dialogue between equal partners.
1. Greece – An Example of a Constructed Balkan Identity
“Europe” as a collective term of bourgeois universalism is of Greek provenance, and the enlightened European bourgeoisie considered Greece the cradle of civilization. As Maria Todorova sets out in her book Imagining the Balkans, it was in particular English travel writers in the second half of the eighteenth century who kindled the great English romanticism about Greece. This turning to Greece was, on the one hand, a product of classicism and on the other hand a result of Britain’s strategic interests in the eastern Mediterranean. But this love of Greece was an abstraction – it was not for the Greeks themselves, who in many accounts were described as seditious, uneducated, grovelling, ignorant, lazy, greedy, corruptible, scheming, ungrateful, etc. This love was for an abstract, ancient ideal that seemed suitable to legitimize the values and interests of a rising bourgeoisie. Whereas Greece was exalted and the Greeks denigrated, the English at this time – around the end of the eighteenth century – characterized the Ottomans as noble, courteous and generous, basically a master nation equal to the English. Incidentally, this expression of respect for the Ottomans explains the mutable paradox of cultural imputations. While the Ottomans were considered a master nation despite all supposed religious and cultural incompatibility, Turkey, the legal successor of the Ottoman Empire, is today refused admission to the EU with the same argument of cultural incompatibility.
“Greek”, on the other hand, was still a synonym for thief, shark, villain in the United States during the peak immigration phase of the early twentieth century. How is that compatible – admiration for Greece on the one hand and contempt for the Greeks on the other?
The English, like other “civilized nations” of Europe, projected their yearning for antiquity onto Greece and dissociated this yearning from the actual people and social groups there, whom they met with a whole arsenal of racist prejudices. Interestingly, this bourgeois passion for Greece is one of the reasons why Churchill, at the Yalta negotiations on the post-war division of Eastern Europe, insisted that Greece should become part of the Western sphere of influence. The Greeks’ way of seeing things and their self-determination were ignored once more. During the Second World War Churchill’s maxim was, “What concerns us most now is who is doing the most damage to the Germans”, but in the post-war period the supreme political goal was to drive back and contain communism. The Yugoslav and Greek partisans were suddenly no longer welcome. The anti-German fighters in Greece were now considered gangsters, robbers, simple brigands from the mountains. In the Greek civil war of 1945–49 the left was bloodily crushed with American assistance and British consent, and Greece was built up into a bastion against the Soviets. The brutal Greek military government was given a free hand in domestic affairs.
During the Greek civil war the Slavic Macedonian minority fought on the side of the Communists who promised the disadvantaged Slavs autonomy. When the nationalists gained the upper hand in the last days of August 1949, the guerrillas fled across the border into former Yugoslavia, among them 28,000 children. Many of the children were then dispersed over South-Eastern Europe and lost touch with their families. In 1982 the Greek government under Pasok-founder Andreas Papandreou made a first step towards reconciliation with this bloody history. Old guerrillas were let back into the country, but only if they were “ethnic Greeks”. Some of them even became government ministers. Macedonians, however, were excluded from this regulation. When Macedonia declared its independence in 1991 after the collapse of Yugoslavia, the old Greek fears of the north of their country seceding arose again. Even today travel restrictions for former Macedonian refugees are very strict, and there is no debate on compensation for the expropriations, or on cultural or political autonomy. The history of the oppression and expulsion of the Macedonian minority remains taboo in Greece to this day.
This brief historical sketch of Greece brings up a whole range of points typical of South-Eastern Europe, although the composition and intensity of the factors differ from area to area – naturalization of political conflicts and geopolitical interests, racial and ethnic demarcation, the issue of minorities, oppression, expulsion, strivings for political and cultural autonomy, questions of compensation and reparation, etc.
So is Greece part of the Balkans? There are very different answers to this question depending on who poses it and from what angle. We can see that belonging to or identifying with the Balkans can be a political and cultural construct handed down over generations.
2. Balkan Metaphors of Violence and the War Economy
A central structuring element of Balkan identity regards metaphors of violence which are applied to South-Eastern Europe as a whole. The Balkans have even become a synonym for politically motivated violence and bloodthirstiness, national hatred, “ethnic cleansing” and barbarism.
The term “Balkanization” has become established in everyday language – on both the right and the left – as a general political metaphor for disharmony, unrest and chaos. To give an example from German politics: in August 2003 the Under-secretary of the Ministry of Social Affairs, Klaus Theo Schröder of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), accused the chairman of the opposition Christian Democratic Union’s youth organization, Philipp Missfelder, of “Balkanizing health reform” by saying that the health service should not finance artificial hip joints for 85-year-olds. Politicians who like to speak of a “Balkanization of the state and the community” in debates on citizenship and immigration are probably well aware that the effect of such language is instinct-driven acculturation. The term Balkanization was coined in the 1920s when numerous small states (like Czechoslovakia) arose out of what had been the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, the German Empire and Russia, and it plays an important role in the arsenal of cultural racism. Balkanization refers to the fragmentation of multinational states into small nation states often hostile to one another. This term has come a long way and carries with it a strong racist nuance of antipathy towards the Balkans. In the more recent political discourse since the 1990s it was incredible to what extent Serbia in particular was demonized (in the broader sense of the word). The stylistic device of demonization has been part of the political armoury since expressionism and is generally aimed at stigmatizing political opponents and preventing discourse analysis.