Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans

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'All that is, is nationalist': Western imaginings of

the Balkans since the Yugoslav wars

Pavlos Hatzopoulos

To cite this article: Pavlos Hatzopoulos (2003) 'All that is, is nationalist': Western imaginings of
the Balkans since the Yugoslav wars, Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, 5:1, 25-38,
DOI: 10.1080/1461319032000062633

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Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans,
Volume 5, Number 1, 2003

‘All that is, is nationalist’: Western imaginings of the

Balkans since the Yugoslav wars

PAVLOS HATZOPOULOS

Who is interested in soldiers screwing each other for a patch of land? … This is
not a story anyone wants to hear … Why bring you to light?1

Thus, the British journalist responds to the cry of the Balkan soldier for his
predicament to be known—‘let the world know of my story’—in Sarah Kane’s
play Blasted. A euphemism, Kane’s unfamiliarity with the impact of the
Yugoslav wars perhaps, or an illustration of an intense feeling of Western
impotence in preventing the unfolding of a bloodbath in the ‘southeastern
corner of Europe’, there is certainly something wrong with this line.2 No,
stories of Balkan soldiers were extensively known, Western audiences were not
indifferent, but on the contrary interested, even fascinated, with both aspects of
the fictitious journalist’s description of the wars. With their intense brutality—
rape, heterosexual or homosexual, representing the primary evidence of their
distancing from regular ‘civilised’ warfare—and with their territorial obsession,
the fact that this war was fought over patches of land, especially striking when
juxtaposed to the growing influence of analyses concerning the apparent
emergence of ‘virtual’ or ‘info’ warfare.
Attesting this fascination is the growth of a Western literature of diverse
modes: journalistic accounts, travelogues, newspaper commentaries, academic
writings dealing directly with the wars in Yugoslavia. Why did they happen?
Why were they so extraordinarily brutal (amounting to ‘genocide’ for more
partisan accounts or to the less apocalyptic ‘ethnic cleansing’ for more moder-
ate writings)? How did they affect and/or were affected by international
forces? Supplementing these, there is the publication of books taking issue with
the Balkans as a whole whilst seeking explanations to the previous questions.
The aim of the paper is to draw connections among these recent writings—
both academic and non-academic—especially concerning how the role of
nationalism intersects in the socio-political analyses of the region.3 It argues
1
S. Kane, Blasted, Methuen, London, 2001, p. 48.
2
This expression has been repetitively used by politicians (Tony Blair, Madeleine Albright) when
justifying military intervention in the Balkans.
3
The choice of material is selective and the primary criterion is diversity. I have tried to include
a number of influential Western sources: articles in high-selling and respectable US and British
newspapers, statements of high-ranked politicians, and journalistic eye-witness accounts juxtaposed
to established academic volumes either in the policy-oriented field or usually history texts by experts
in the Balkan region. This diversity aims to show that the Balkans have become an object of study
which transcends epistemic boundaries, that certain modes of imagining the Balkans permeate both
scholarly and non-scholarly modes of knowledge.

ISSN 1461-3190 print/ISSN 1469-963X online/03/010025–14  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1461319032000062633
26 Pavlos Hatzopoulos

that Western writings on the Balkans in the 1990s are articulated along a set
of presuppositions and images. These are based on the notion that Balkan
social life is determined by the overbearing presence of nationalist ideology.
Nationalism in its Balkan guise is believed to ultimately explain the recurrence
of shocking patterns of violence and the submergence of every contem-
porary state of affairs into obscure past experiences. In effect, this set of
portrayals alludes to an atemporal depoliticized image of the Balkans; national-
ism is perceived as the quintessential feature of the Balkan condition.
One of the main challenges involved is the task of discussing a seemingly
disparate literature under the same umbrella. In the first instance, writings
on the Yugoslav wars appear in this paper not because of an established
cartographical fact: Yugoslavia being a part of the Balkan region. Instead,
what is more interestingly observed in these texts is that the association
between Yugoslav and Balkan transcends this banal geographical assertion and
acquires a political significance. The Yugoslav wars are often analysed as
intertwined with something inherently ‘Balkan’; they are assumed to be
unlike the European patterns of warfare exactly because they are conditioned
by dark aspects of Balkan history, or they follow specifically ‘Balkan’ patterns
of violence.4 In short, the Yugoslav wars are treated as the ‘continuation
of Balkan politics by other means’. To trace where they stemmed from,
how they were conducted, and to what state of affairs they might lead to,
researchers are expected to place them in their ‘fitting’ Balkan context. Going
through the titles of some of the influential books on the Yugoslav wars we
cannot fail to notice that their devastating face is linked to a region-specific
predicament, as in Balkan Tragedy and Balkan Babel, or that they are narrated
through the prism of modern Balkan history as in The Fall of Yugoslavia: The
Third Balkan War, and The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the
Balkans. Even one of the early international peacemakers, David Owen, thought
his diplomatic adventures could be likened to a Balkan Odyssey.5
One needs to be careful here; true, all these writings are largely diverse.
They offer a wide range of interpretations concerning the causes and outcomes
of the wars. Still, what this, at times, implicit ascription of a Balkan identity on
the wars, the attempt to emplot them in the flow of the history of the Balkan
region, enables is the re-introduction of the Balkans as a separate object of
study. A distinct identity that was partially effaced by the morphology of the
cold war (then the Balkan states with the exception of Greece and Turkey were
usually tagged as a part of ‘Eastern Europe’, or merely as part of the Soviet
sphere of influence, but in this case Yugoslavia and Albania followed far more
complex paths) seems to be forcedly revived.

4
See M. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, pp. 186–189 for
a discussion on how a ‘Balkan’ identity was ascribed to the wars of the 1990s.
5
See S. L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Brookings Institution,
Washington, DC, 1995; S. P. Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito
to Ethnic War, 2nd edn, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1996; M. Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third
Balkan War, 3rd edn, Penguin, London, 1996; A. Pavkovic, The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism
and War in the Balkans, 2nd edn, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2000; and D. Owen, Balkan Odyssey, Victor
Gollancz, London, 1995.
 ‘All that is, is nationalist’ 27

The Balkans through popular idioms

The process through which the Balkans have captured the others’, especially
the Western, imagination has been studied, most innovatively by Maria Todo-
rova, who has attempted to tell the story of ‘how a geographical appellation
could be transformed into one of the most powerful pejorative designations in
history’.6 This was a process that gradually unfolded in the past two centuries
and according to Todorova, crystallized around the time of the Balkan wars: of
1912–1913 that is, to avoid any misunderstandings. Without wishing to repli-
cate some of these analyses I will try to sketch an outline of how this image of
the Balkans was reformulated following the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars.
This reproduction was carried mainly through popular mediums: electronic
and print journalism, travel books, political essays, and as alluded to, or spelled
out, by public figures. To these I will now turn, but in order to then show how
a number of post-1991 academic works have either echoed fragments of these
representations or have not fundamentally challenged them.
The act of writing on the ‘Balkans’ made a dramatic comeback with the
dissolution of the cold war cartography, and gained additional resilience since
the beginning of the Yugoslav wars. The return to the utilization of the term
came conjoining with the fear that ‘the Balkans’ were haunted by their
pre-communist condition. In the midst of widespread optimism for the emerg-
ence of a ‘new world order’, a ‘united Europe’, a ‘liberal world’, the Balkans
were conceived as obstinately resistant to this progressive vision. It was as if
the analysts’ reconceptualization of the region based upon past designations
was thrust upon them by the sudden drawing of the region itself in the tangles
of its past history.
To comprehend the current situation in the Balkans, one newspaper com-
mentator advises, you ought to ‘turn back your clock [and] keep going’. Move
through, but not overlook, recent (and more familiar) events like the two world
wars and how they affected the region, and then head back ‘to the 15th
century, when the Ottoman Turks seized this area and converted some inhab-
itants to Islam’.7 What this time travel to selected clips of precedent conflicts
will supposedly do for us is to emulate the process of how the inhabitants of
the Balkans think. It will immerse us into a world where perceptions of the past
are disrupting present conditions, where current political identities are ‘hope-
lessly tangled in the webs of history and myth’.8 When visiting a house and its
inhabitants in Kosovo, for instance, ‘if you ignore the refrigerator in the kitchen
and the running water in the bathroom, you are back in 1389’; the food and
drinks, the songs, the animated political discussions are unchanged since the
time of the famous medieval battle.9 Entering the realm of interpretation
depends, consequently, on the realization of how entirely intertwined is the
6
M. Todorova, op. cit., p. 7. Other similar contributions examining this powerful Balkan image,
always influenced by Saidian Orientalism, include Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The
Imperialism of the Imagination, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1998; D. A. Norris, In the Wake
of the Balkan Myth, Macmillan, London, 1999; and M. Bakic-Hayden and R. M. Hayden, ‘Orientalist
variations on the theme “Balkans”: symbolic geography in recent Yugoslav cultural politics’, Slavic
Review, 51(1), 1992, pp. 1–15.
7
R. Cohen, ‘… And a mad, mad war’, Washington Post, 15 December 1992, p. 23.
8
W. Zimmerman, ‘The demons of Kosovo’, The National Interest, 52, 1998, p. 5.
9
P. Maass, Love Thy Neighbour: A Story of War, Papermac, London, 1996, p. 16.
28 Pavlos Hatzopoulos

Balkan present with the Balkan past, rather how their past is inescapable,
ineffaceable, and in consequence catastrophic for their present-day inhabitants;
how it induces these people to kill and ‘die for what their great-grandparents
once did’.10
This command of the past is not to be considered as simply the context
within which extreme, violent actions are perpetrated; as an indication that
parts of the population have transcended the limits of the, otherwise dominant,
‘rational’ political debate. Instead it is ingrained in the very heart of Balkan
social life. Individual and collective identities are totally constituted by the
inhabitants’ perspectives on past events: in the same commentator’s experience
of local discourse, ‘[n]ot one meeting doesn’t start with the saying: “Let me
give you a history of …” ’;11 and this episode to be narrated could fall within
the range of the same 500 year time span.
Or, to articulate it somewhat differently, the Balkans acquire their distinc-
tiveness because they have defied the possibilities of deep social transformation
during the 1990s. Post-communist times signalled not the emergence of new
social patterns, expected to integrate them with the rest of Europe, but a
‘return’ to past barbarities, the ‘re-emergence’ of perpetually unfinished busi-
ness the content of which seems as an ‘irrelevant history to an American’.12 Not
only does then the outside analyst need to dig into these ‘irrelevant’ episodes
of the Balkan past but also to attempt establishing associations, to relate the
present to a relatively obscure indigenous history.
In the wake of the Yugoslav wars, the task becomes that of identifying the
aspects of the history of the region that have prefigured and shaped the
contemporary conflict. There can of course be no convergence on a prime list
of seminal events, just a patchwork of historical—even fictitious—references
handpicked for their extraordinary brutality. This is, in effect, an act of de-
politicization; the selection does not allude to any sort of political criterion, the
treatment of the Yugoslav wars as a political event which can be studied
through the prism of past dynamics in the region. Instead it is the intensity of
violent outbursts that weaves these instances together. A 14th-century battle in
Kosovo Polje marking allegedly the conquest of the medieval Serbian kingdom
by the Ottoman armies is distinguished as ‘the primal act of slaughter from
which all Balkan history since has flowed’.13 Or if we follow one other piece of
advice, ‘[f]or an analogy with modern times one has to go back to the Bulgarian
atrocities of 1876’. Again, the logic of this analogy is based on the recurrence
of indiscriminate slaughter among the opposing sides: a death toll of ‘15,000
men, women and children’ murdered ‘in horrible circumstances of torture,
arson, rape and sodomy’ by Ottoman troops. Reminding vividly but in reality
being ‘small beer compared with what has happened in the 20th century’ if
numbers is all.14
In spite of these associations the doubt that possibly the enigma of the
Balkan history of violence is not revealed, that these handpicked episodes are
10
R. Cohen, op. cit., p. A23.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
M. Kelly, ‘Surrender and blame’, New Yorker, 19 December 1994, p. 44. Quoted in M. Todorova,
op. cit., p. 186.
14
R. Blake, ‘Steer clear of the Balkans’, The Independent, 24 August 1992, p. 19.
 ‘All that is, is nationalist’ 29

not really determining, is looming. Uncovering past formative events becomes

thus a perpetual process, amended usually in the light of contemporary
developments15 and this uncertainty of discovering the secret of Balkan viol-
ence can even lead to somewhat odd claims. Even archaeological findings
‘dating from as much as 200,000 years ago’ are interpreted by a journalist of The
Times as indications that the ‘Balkans may have been in conflict since the Ice
Age’. A speculation, more than anything else perhaps, but interestingly,
articulated to question the conception of the Balkans as a bridge linking Europe
to the Middle East. In contrast, as the newly recovered evidence suggests, ‘the
landscape and the inhabitants may have been just as difficult to deal with in
the Ice Age as today’.16 Doubt persists only on whether we have discovered the
secret of the region’s propensity to violence but not that Balkan history has
anything else to illustrate.
Some narratives, though, attempt to transcend these somewhat ambiguous
accounts and provide an overall explanation of the enduring, recurrent pat-
terns of Balkan violence. Obscure Balkan stories, frightening hatreds, the
spectres of the past that are haunting the region are woven together through
the introduction of ill-defined concepts: ‘competing Balkan histories and cul-
tures and ethnicities’ that have purportedly ‘led to such a situation as this’.17 In
other versions, the brutality of Balkan social life is attributed to ‘the virus of
aggressive nationalism’ whose ‘long-suppressed forces have been unleashed’
once more in the present.18 Or, to the perpetual struggle of ‘rival ethnic groups’
competing ‘for imagined national spaces’.19 These concepts are overlapping
and precisely introduced to ensure us that the task of comprehending the
Balkans has been fulfilled. In spite of the absurdities, historical intricacies,
larger than life passions, encountered in the Balkans, they seem to suggest, we
have now understood their distinctiveness, what they are all about. It is as if
the Balkan condition can be condensed in the saying of a Macedonian journalist
approvingly quoted in the Balkan Ghosts infamous travelogue: ‘here the men sit
back like the old men of Crete, talking about nationalism and hate while the
women do all the work’.20

The heart of the matter

This aspiration to reduce with one stroke the entire problem of the Balkans to
a single culpable factor has proliferated across popular media. ‘Nationalism’ or
‘ethnic ’ (and this blank could be variably filled) is exposed as the essential
reality of the Balkan present and past and as the heart of the secret looming
15
Notice, for instance, the proliferation of media references to the 1389 battle of Kosovo as the
breaking event haunting the Serbian—Muslim relationship, but also the Balkans as a whole, at the
time of the 1999 Kosovo crisis.
16
N. Hammond, ‘Balkans may have been in conflict in the Ice Age’, The Times, 26 December 1994,
p. 14.
17
S. Winchester, The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans, Viking, London, 1999, p. 29.
18
R. Gutman, A Witness to Genocide: The First Inside Account of the Horrors of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia,
Elementary Books, Longmead, 1993, p. 175. Note that this volume was a 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner.
19
P. Beaumont and N. Wood, ‘Fragile peace shatters as Balkan hatred overflows’, The Observer, 11
March 2001, ⬍ http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4150090,00.html ⬎ (10 May 2002).
20
R. D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History, Papermac, London, 1994, p. 70.
30 Pavlos Hatzopoulos

behind the disasters that hit the region in the 1990s. Crucially though this
revelation is never extensively elaborated, always leaving the outside observer
in a state of bewilderment or helplessness. Western political figures, for
instance, have predominantly utilized this interpretation in the context of
excluding, or at least alluding to the perilous aspects of, the prospect of
intervening in Balkan politics.21 Illustrative, along these lines, are the remarks
of the then Secretary of State Warren Christopher outlining US policy towards
Bosnia: ‘the hatred between these three groups [Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and
Croatians] is almost unbelievable … it’s centuries old. That really is a problem
from hell’. Christopher’s official position is nearly flirting with historical
fatalism narrating the conflict as defined by the resurgence of ‘ancient ethnic
hatreds’.22
These comments betray a state of bewilderment through the realization that
the Balkans are in a position of stasis, bound to fall back to old, pre-modern
social patterns. Failed international negotiator David Owen’s apologetic ac-
count invokes once more the near fatalistic portrayal of the region: ‘[h]istory
points to a tradition in the Balkans of a readiness to solve disputes by the
taking up of arms and acceptance of the forceful or even negotiated movements
of people as the consequence of war’. Owen presents a dreadful picture of the
Balkan political situation which intensifies a feeling of impotence when the
possibility of action is contemplated. Effective involvement is improbable in the
face of explosive divisions that are deeply embedded in ‘a culture of violence
within a crossroad of civilisation where three religions, Orthodox Christianity,
Islam and Roman Catholicism, have divided communities’. The primary cause
of these ongoing disasters that have haunted the region is identified as ‘a dark
and virulent nationalism’.23
Claiming ‘nationalism’ to be the overall explanation of the Balkan condition
is more assumed than elaborated by popular media. ‘Balkan nationalism’
remains in a way empty: there is no serious engagement with trying to either
analyse or criticize its ideological dimension. It is rather destined to follow the
threads of a unique path; ‘Balkan nationalism’ is inherently reducible to the
fostering of mutual hatred.24 The function of the ideology of nationalism, in this
context, seems to rely on an undeviating causal chain: people in the Balkans
are nationalists, their nationalism generates mutual hatred which under
particular circumstances might lead to bloodshed. This ideological–emotional–
praxeological chain is assumed to be working virtually automatically upon the
indigenous population leading inevitably to intense tensions among them. An
article in The Guardian explains the phenomenon in more detail:

[t]he spectre of ethnic strife is stalking the Balkans … The Serbs hate the

21
This argument connecting the designation of ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ with a politics of
non-involvement is made strongly in ‘Separating history from myth: an interview with Ivo Banac’,
in R. Ali and L. Lifschultz (eds), Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War, Pamphleteer’s Press, Stony
Creek, CT, 1993.
22
Quoted in D. Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia, University
of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1998, pp. 49–50.
23
D. Owen, op. cit., p. 3.
24
See, for instance, US President Bill Clinton’s characterization of the NATO Kosovo campaign as
a battle ‘against hatred in the Balkans’. W. J. Clinton, ‘Remarks by the President: on Kosovo’, 27
October 1998, ⬍ http://www.nato.int/usa/president/s19981027a.html ⬎ (10 May 2002).
 ‘All that is, is nationalist’ 31

Albanians, who are not very keen on the Macedonians, who in turn have a
mighty grudge against the Bulgarians, who are not very fond of the Turks, who
are not exactly enamoured of the Greeks.25

An image of a veritable vicious circle is portrayed. Still, nothing else is said of

its functions rather than the blunt assertion that it is: that the Serbs do hate the
Albanians who indeed detest the … and so forth. Or, following a more intricate
formulation: that is the way it is since that is the way it has always been. If we
were being attentive to the lessons of history, this position maintains, the
resurgence of conflict in the Balkans during the 1990s had to be expected,
history in the Balkans is somehow inevitably recurrent. The Yugoslav wars are
thus explained (and could have been predicted) by the mere fact that indige-
nous people could not ‘get beyond Word War II, when ethnic antagonisms
between Serbs and Croats led to mass slaughter’.26 Nationalism drew the
Balkans into conflict as—and importantly—because it has done so in the past.
Conduct in this war is also suggested to have followed the course of nationalist
manifestations developed in past conflicts, organized around ‘the tactic of
population expulsion that has been the currency of Balkan wars for more than
a century’.27 These ethnic patterns of violence need, in a way, to be ‘old’; the
analysis of the conflict as a ‘recurrence’ or ‘re-emergence’ of former and lasting
regional dynamics purports to keep Balkan nationalist politics separate from a
close identification with nationalism in other forms, especially to its west
European manifestations. The study of the ‘Balkans’ becomes in this way
associated with distinguishing a Balkan type of nationalism, understood as an
‘old-fashioned atavistic nationalism [which] had not disappeared … though it
is no longer dressed in peasant costumes’.28

Academic imaginings29
The images of the Balkans through popular media are generated upon a
paradox: the symbiosis of an indelible presence and a void. ‘Nationalism’ is
perceived as omnipresent, both territorially and temporally, embracing the
entirety of the Balkan peninsula and acquiring the status of the culminating
feature in the course of the history of the Balkans, at least in the modern era.
Concurrently, this ever-presence is invested with doubt, the modes of the
function of nationalism are ultimately unintelligible, Balkan nationalism is
viewed as possessing something that lies beyond our grasp, that remains
25
I. Traynor, ‘Ghosts of ethnic feuding revive in the Balkans’, The Guardian, 26 February 1990, p. 7.
26
Editorial, ‘Yugoslavs, united or not, need to talk’, New York Times, 28 June 1991, p. 2.
27
E. Sciolino and E. Bronner, ‘How a president, distracted by scandal, entered a Balkan War’, New
York Times, 18 April 1999, ⬍ http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kospol.htm ⬎ (10 May 2002).
28
Quoted in J. L. Sadkovich, The U.S. Media and Yugoslavia, 1991–1995, Praeger, Westport, CT, 1998,
p. 123.
29
The names of some of the writers referred to here sound Slavic and indeed they are. Ivo Banac,
for instance, is Yugoslav and Sabrina Ramet is half-Polish by birth. Still, their works on the Balkans
do fall under the category of ‘outside perspectives’ that I am discussing here. Here, one should
distinguish between the ‘subject of the enunciation’ and ‘the position of the enunciation’. What matters
is that these works are written from a position within the US academia where Banac and Ramet have
lived and practised for most of his public life. For an elaboration of this point, see S. Žižek, Did Somebody
Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions on the (M)isuse of a Notion, Verso, London, 2001, pp. 121–125.
32 Pavlos Hatzopoulos

obscure. Reading through academic writings on the Balkans since the end of
the cold war we immediately notice that they aim at releasing us from this
ambiguous perspective.
The rationalization of the popular images is conducted through an initial
questioning of the description of the Balkans as a cauldron of ‘ancient ethnic
hatreds’. Let us divert, at this point, to note that, at times, passages in academic
texts may come conspicuously close to reproducing this stereotype. Two
illustrations:
Thus viewed in historical perspective, particularly in the context of the Balkan
proclivity for ethnoreligiously based violence at times of regime breakdown, an
explosion of intercommunal hatred and savagery was not at all surprising when
ethnic elites proved tragically inept at peacefully resolving their differences.30

And:
There is no ideology in the Balkans which matches nationalism’s profound effect
upon individuals and groups. This accursed land was always prone to tectonic
collisions (both literally and symbolically), and those who have reignited the
ethnoreligious hatreds have hurled the entire nations into the inferno.31

These should probably though be regarded as slips, not reflecting the main
argument of the respective books. It would be tempting to expand more on the
implications of verbal or written slips. However, in this section I am interested
in the professed critical engagement with the ‘land of ancient ethnic hatreds’
argument as a common point of departure for academic works on the Balkans.
Obviously, the concept collapses in front of any kind of serious scrutiny.
Still, the notion of ‘ethnic hatreds’ is not considered as fundamentally flawed
by many academic writings; instead they attempt to show that it is analytically
and historically grounded. I do not want to imply that the usage of the term
‘ethnic hatreds’ is strictly applied in academic texts, but that it is not funda-
mentally different from identifying—as they do—‘nationalism’ as the fixed
category of all Balkan political consciousness and the main source of the
proclivity to conflict in the region. To interpret the recent fervour of nationalist
sentiment by the peoples of the Balkans, one writer suggests, ‘we must better
understand the roots of their passions’.32 Once more the need to examine their
past is deemed essential for the appropriate study of the Balkans, a realization
that theirs is ‘obviously … a problem with deep historical roots’.33 The dis-
covery of the origins of the problem is predicated upon the highlighting of a
separation; a temporal breaking point marking the dissociation of the Balkans
from socio-political developments in the rest of Europe.
This might be traced by George Kennan, for instance, ‘not only into the
centuries of Turkish domination but also into the Byzantine penetration of the
Balkans even before that time’. By reading ‘Byzantine’, and its subsequent
30
L. J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1993,
p. 270.
31
P. Mojzes, Yugoslavian Inferno: Ethnoreligious Warfare in the Balkans, Continuum, New York, 1994,
p. 86.
32
G. F. Kennan, ‘Introduction’, in The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in
Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan, Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, 1993, p. 13.
33
W. W. Hagen, ‘The Balkans’ lethal nationalisms’, Foreign Affairs, 78(4), 1999, p. 52.
 ‘All that is, is nationalist’ 33

substitution with ‘Turkish’, as incongruent with ‘European’, the effect of these

encounters is viewed as ‘the thrusting into the southern reaches of the
European continent [of] a salient of its non-European civilization that has
continued to the present day’.34 Academic analysis is, therefore, invited to trace
this breaking point and then understand how it fuelled a subsequent regional
development in a distinct Balkan path.
In a slightly modified version, the focus is placed on the expansion of the
Ottoman Empire which reinforced the ‘extraordinary dispersion and intermix-
ture of ethnic groups’ and thus circumvented ‘premodern state formation in
the Balkans’.35 At the time when European nationalism ‘penetrated’ into the
region in the 18th century, it was no longer the same ideology, and this
disparity between the two variants—‘European’ and ‘Balkan’—remains today.
Nationalism grew in the Balkan context, influenced by the presence of acute
ethnic heterogeneity within the framework of predominantly peasant societies.
These two factors separate it from its European face where nationalist ideology
emerged within a quite different political topology and was supported by an
alternate middle-class social base. As a result, Balkan nationalisms adopted an
antagonistic, populist character; they were distinctively articulated in irreden-
tist forms, demanding relentless state expansion until the recovery of ‘ideal’
national territories was completed. Popular fascination with ‘[t]hese ideal
nations—Greater Serbia, Greater Albania, Greater Greece, and the like’ erected
the major bulwark against the survival of national minorities, and the pro-
motion of civic rights inside their borders.36 ‘Aggressive nationalism’, the
commentator concludes, has ensured that ‘[t]oday’s Balkan states … possess
next to nothing of the Western liberal tradition, with its emphasis on individ-
ualism and protection for dissenters and minorities’.37

The obliteration of alternatives

This attempt to demystify the Balkans, by elucidating the operations of Balkan
nationalism, has invested it with distinctive qualities. The suggestion that a
historical and sociological investigation can efface the obscurity of Balkan
nationalism is coupled with attributing a kind of exceptionality to it. By
endorsing this exceptionality, further analysis is confined within the limits set
by a binary distinction, juxtaposing Balkan to European nationalism.38 The
asymmetry between these two modes of nationalism is then presumed to
account for the dark aspects of the Balkan socio-political life and to also explain
the regular resort to all-out cruel conflict. What this assumed uniqueness of the
Balkan condition serves is to enforce the study of the Balkans under the
category of nationalism. If the task of investigating the origins of nationalism
34
G. F. Kennan, op. cit., p. 13.
35
W. W. Hagen, op. cit., p. 52.
36
Ibid., p. 53.
37
Ibid., p. 54.
38
This move is reflected in the binary categorization of ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ nationalism which is
particularly influential in academic circles. ‘Ethnic’ nationalism does not refer exclusively to the
Balkan condition but always encompasses it. See particularly M. Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, Viking,
Toronto, 1993, pp. 3–5 for a discussion on the disparities between the Balkans and Europe. For the
original formulation, see A. D. Smith, National Identity, Penguin, London, 1991, pp. 82–83.
34 Pavlos Hatzopoulos

against the current of popular notions of ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ might be

commendable, locating its origins sometime in the distant past and then
assuming its totally domineering influence afterwards, for most, actually, of
Balkan modern history, is problematic.
The Balkans, through this conceptualization, are not allowed an alternative
existence, past or present. Ideologies and political projects that have at different
historical junctures flourished in the outside world—particularly Europe—are
consistently believed to evade the contours of Balkan nationalist politics or at
least to be shaped by it to such an extensive degree that they become radically
distorted. The exceptionality of the Balkans lies exactly in this predicament,
that they obstinately retain their aggressive nationalist posture unscathed by
developments elsewhere. It becomes then necessary to highlight this resistance
of the Balkans to outside influence: features believed to be part of European
political culture need to be dissociated from the Balkans. Reading a recent
analysis, we learn that:

true, in the 1920s … the independent Balkan states developed multiparty politi-
cal systems in which broad-based peasant parties urged land reform and other
anti-oligarchic measures. But these parties were also strongly nationalist, as were
the right-wing authoritarian monarchies and protofascist regimes that eclipsed
them in the 1930s.39

Along these lines, the existence of Balkan social movements beyond a national-
ist ideological framework is denied; the agrarian movement in the Balkans,
especially complex and polymorphous during the inter-war period, is rendered
nationalist in essence. Even measures towards free and fair elections and some
form of wealth distribution, which are considered to be part of what can be
termed as—anachronistically, I admit—‘democratisation’ are in a way per-
verted since they are described to occur within a nationalist framework. And
to push time a bit forward, it is equally striking how regional history during
the cold war is conceptualized. One tendency is to treat the period of the cold
war as a ‘black hole’ within the horizon of a Balkan perspective. The period of
communist rule is deemed to be ultimately not important, representing an
ephemeral inane peace. Communism is, in other words, likened to a lid that
contained for a while the real dominant forces of Balkan politics. That is
the cold war story can be narrated showing how Balkan state and society
structures were slowly eroded by nationalist elements. Alternatively, in a
homologous inversion, the same period is interpreted within the framework of
a ‘communists as nationalists’ view.40
In this case, perplexingly, the extensive debate on the strained relationship
between the ideologies of Marxism and nationalism both on a theoretical level
and on their dynamic historical interaction, is effortlessly resolved in the
Balkan case. Communist rule in the region is assumed to adopt a nationalist
39
Ibid., p. 55 italics added.
40
C. Cviic, Remaking the Balkans, 2nd edn, Pinter, London, 1995, p. 2. Similar arguments showing
how communist state apparatuses built their legitimacy by adopting elements of nationalist ideology
are made in J. Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War
II, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, pp. 214–216 and 245–249; and K. Verdery, National Ideology
under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania, University of California Press,
Berkeley, CA, 1991 for Bulgaria and Romania, respectively.
 ‘All that is, is nationalist’ 35

guise, dominated by ‘supposedly internationalist-minded leaders [who] contin-

ued to pursue the traditional objectives of their individual countries’.41 Either
playing the game of ‘false appearances’ tout court, preserving appearances
whilst ‘manipulating nationalism in a pragmatic way’, or ‘making an open
appeal to nationalist sentiment’ communism, in the Balkans, was ‘deeply
nationalist in nature despite its internationalist phraseology’.42 The infiltration
and the subsequent taking centre stage of communist ideology in the realm of
Balkan politics resulted in its gradual derision; suffering the evaporation of its
internationalist character, communism became nationalized.43
Balkan communism underwent—necessarily—an inner metamorphosis
when it was forced to face the fact that the ‘nation rather than class has been
the main political category throughout the region’s recent history and still is
today. This is no temporary aberration but the result of centuries of experi-
ence’.44 By realizing how deeply embedded nationalism is in the core of Balkan
politics, and how communists had to adapt to this fact, the story of the
communist movement in the region ought to be narrated accordingly. If we
look, again, at the inter-war period, the communist project advocating the
amalgamation of existing nation-states into a Balkan federation can be accu-
rately interpreted through a nationalist prism. What is suggested, in effect,
amounts to the de-communization of one of the most prominent—at that
time—political goals of the Balkan communist parties, treating the federation
project as a mere sum of its parts, rather than acknowledging that it reflects an
element of a common, unitary identity. It then becomes a story of distinct
perspectives and strategies narrated through ‘Bulgarian, Greek and so on,
eyes’. Accordingly, this nation-based perspective is subsumed under its impli-
cations or influences by the antagonistic nationalist ideologies. The Bulgarians
were supporters of the Balkan communist federation—as long as they were not
virulent anti-communists, I guess—since it enlivened the ‘possibility of reopen-
ing the Macedonian issue’, its loss in 1918 being a cause of widespread
resentment around the country; Greeks were against it since they were afraid
of loosing their portion of Macedonia and Western Thrace; and Yugoslavs were
ambivalent: non-Serbs saw the federation as a viable prospect of releasing them
from their ‘Serbian-dominated state’, while Serbs ‘never warmed to the idea’ of
a federation for pretty much the same reason.45
Moving forward beyond the inter-war period we observe that even the
overwhelming success of the Yugoslav communist party at drawing multi-na-
tional active support during World War II is not mainly related to its communist
character. Historian Ivo Banac explains: ‘In fact, only a minority of the Croats
sided with the Ustašas. In the absence of a Croat non-communist resistance
movement, Croats massively participated in the communist-led Partisans and
thereby gave ample testimony to their anti-Ustašism.’46 The commitment of the

41
Ibid.
42
W. W. Hagen, op. cit., p. 55; C. Cviic, op. cit., pp. 3 and 4.
43
For this formulation, see C. Cviic, op. cit., p. 2.
44
Ibid., p. 4.
45
On a de-communized reading of the plan for a Balkan communist federation, see ibid., pp. 11–14.
All quotations are taken from this passage.
46
I. Banac, ‘The fearful asymmetry of war: the causes and consequences of Yugoslavia’s demise’,
Daedalus, 121(2), 1992, p. 154.
36 Pavlos Hatzopoulos

indigenous population to the communist movement was, Banac implies, un-

natural: it only became possible because the ‘normal’ state of things was
somehow circumvented. Croats would of course be expected to join a national
Croat party struggling for their national liberation if they had the chance, but
as this was lacking, they were forced to fight for the same goal through a
different guise. Popular support was only misdirected as a consequence of
unique circumstances when there was no national-based alternative to follow.
In Banac’s version, communism is once more not allowed an autonomous
treatment, merely functioning as a substitute of the last resort for its followers
and succeeds because it is invested with nationalist aspirations and goals by
them.
Is not a similar attitude also reflected in the arguments for the artificiality
of the state of Yugoslavia? ‘Without communism there would have been no
post-war Yugoslav state’, Banac imagines, and this might be commented in
multiple ways. But that his point is exactly that the Yugoslav project lacked any
substantial popular basis but was rather thrust upon its inhabitants is evident
later in the text: ‘The state was held together by the skilful use of fear: the fear
of a Great Serbian restoration, the fear of a return to the wartime massacres,
and (after 1948) the fear of the Soviet Union’, and one might add the fear
instilled by the communist regime’s repressive measures against its own
people.47 ‘Yugoslavia’ poses a problem, its official multi-national existence—
and 80 years is not such a short time—questions the assumed absolute
preponderance of the category of nationalism in modern Balkan history. Not
surprisingly, therefore, it is treated as an aberration, Yugoslavia’s multi-
national character does not reveal anything but its ephemeral presence: how
unfitting to this particular part of the world, this multi-national experiment
actually was. As one other, startled writer observes: ‘Throughout the existence
of the Yugoslav state from 1918 to 1991, survival against the odds was its
quintessential feature.’48 The odds were ominous because they were hit by a
chronic plague of Balkan society: the antithetical character of the different
nationalist projects emerging throughout the region, in this case, of
Yugoslavia’s constituent groups:
Since 1918 there has been constant tension between Serbs and non-Serbs in this
polyglot country, as Serbs has repeatedly tried to Serbianize and/or dominate
the non-Serbs, and non-Serbs have doggedly fought such domination. This
struggle between Serbs and non-Serbs lies at the heart of the instability for which
Yugoslavia was famous for.49
Yugoslavia, then, is best analysed through the parameters of competing nation-
alisms which ultimately brought the whole erection down. It would be produc-
tive, according to this account, to see the story of Yugoslavia as similar to the
biblical myth of the tower of Babel: its constituent national groups sentenced to
misperceive, distrust, and ultimately turn against one another. It was an
experiment doomed to failure, ‘disintegration seemed to be sewn into the very
fabric of the state’.50
47
Ibid., p. 168.
48
L. J. Cohen, op. cit., p. 1.
49
S. P. Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to Ethnic War, 2nd
edn, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1996, p. 1.
50
Ibid., p. 299.
 ‘All that is, is nationalist’ 37

Conclusion
What I have tried in this paper is to represent a powerful outside view of the
Balkans which calls for a reaction, to show that there is something now to fight
against. One significant problem is posed by the conditions for a convincing
generalization. I have hitherto referred to approximately 30 sources, 15 in
popular media and 15 in academic texts. This is by no means an exhaustive
account of the prolific literature that has investigated Balkan issues in the
1990s. Still, the claim put forward here, is not simply that ‘the Balkans are
imagined as …’, which would be insufficiently supported by the material
covered. Rather, what I have tried to illustrate are certain presuppositions that
are common in seemingly disparate texts, which draw very different con-
clusions about what the Balkans are or how the outside world should treat the
region. And to show that the connections between academic and non-academic
writings in reproducing a certain Balkan imagery are far more explicit than is
usually admitted.
The critical task cannot, therefore, be simply equated with writing from an
academic reflective standpoint, aiming to ‘challenge’ and ‘correct’ popular
misperceptions and stereotypes. It is not altogether helpful to identify the
problem of the derogatory portrayal of the Balkans, as Banac does (although
his critique is accurate strictly speaking), with the predicament of insufficient
research: ‘the knowledge of South Slavic affairs is indeed limited in the West,
as is evident from virtually all historical references in the media, including the
highbrow press’.51 This is not simply an issue of erroneous historical references
that can be amended through careful academic investigation. Many academic
writings of the 1990s are, on the contrary, complicit in the construction and
reproduction of a particular conception of the Balkans. Instead of acting as
a ‘bulwark’ against the influence of popular conceptualizations, they have
revolved around the same discourse.
Academic works have been furthermore liable in the reproduction of the
representation of the Balkans as ‘the land of the living past’.52 They have
repetitively described the Balkans and their future possibilities as hampered by
the scourge of their own history; as trapped in the shadow of a past that they
cannot transcend. This conceptualization of the region as backward looking
functions to constitute the Balkans as a supposedly distinct object of study. As
one academic writer puts it, in the Balkan region: ‘The past has never been laid
to rest … By contrast with the United States, where historical memory is quite
short, peoples in the Balkans talk about events in 1389, 1459, 1921, 1941, 1948,
1970–1971, as if they were fresh.’53 On these overbearing spectres of the past the
purported dominance of the ideology of nationalism in the Balkans rests.
The choice of these particular dates: 1389, 1459 … and so on, highlights the
embeddedness of collective memories in a Balkan perception of history; they
mark events celebrated in the region’s respective nationalist histories. Studying
the Balkans becomes, thus, an examination centred around the category of

51
I. Banac, op. cit., p. 143. See some of the references in the ‘Balkans through popular idioms’
section.
52
The concept is applied–albeit not critically–by T. Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the
Destruction of Yugoslavia, 2nd edn, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2000, p. 313.
53
S. P. Ramet, op. cit., p. 40.
38 Pavlos Hatzopoulos

nationalism. Nationalism is treated as the ordering principle of Balkan history.

Accordingly, the Yugoslav wars are interpreted as one more episode proving
nationalism’s domineering and potentially destructive presence; the communist
and agrarian movements as corrupted by the ideology of nationalism and
ultimately forced to adopt its political objectives; while the experiment of
establishing the multi-national state of Yugoslavia as exacerbating the contra-
dictions among different nationalist projects and set to perish all the more
violently because of it. The Balkans are seen as the region par excellence where
alternatives to the nationalist ideology are persistently obliterated almost by a
sheer definitional contradiction.
As I have tried to hint in the paper this is where the task of re-imagining
the Balkans can begin. It would involve the questioning of the principal
presuppositions that support the representation of the Balkans as tangled in
past, pre-modern forms of social life that uncouple the region from contempor-
ary international developments like European integration. This task would
initially have to resist from narrating the Balkan present and past centred
around the phenomenon of nationalism. It would then first reject the supposed
exceptionality of Balkan nationalism and attempt to emphasize connections to
its manifestations elsewhere.54 A second direction would be to challenge the
orthodoxy that views nationalism as the arch ideological factor of Balkan
modern history; to revisit and concentrate on alternative social formations that
emerged in the region. To discuss how Balkan societies were affected by the
introduction and re-articulation of diverse ideologies, for example, Marxism,
agrarianism, and liberal internationalism, instances which after all highlight the
mutual interconnectedness between Balkan and European social dynamics.

Pavlos Hatzopoulos is a research student in the Department of International

Relations at the London School of Economics. He is the co-editor of the
forthcoming book Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile
(Palgrave, New York, 2003).

Address for correspondence: Department of International Relations, London

School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
E-mail: [email protected]

54
One example would be to examine the connections between Serb or Greek nationalist imagery
concerning Albanians and Italian perceptions of Albanian immigrants.