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Tonči Valentić Media Construction of Balkanism This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Tonči Valentić Multimedijalni institut ISBN 978-953-7372-70-5 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National and University Library in Zagreb under 001105374. Media — electronic publication Zagreb, June 2021 Construction of Balkanism Content 7 INTRODUCTION OVERVIEW 17 THE CONCEPT AND DEFINITION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY 17 The concept and definition of national identity 35 Change of the ideological direction due to the emergence of new Balkan states 45 Croatian national identity and national way of cross 65 MEDIA DISCOURSE AND SOCIOLOGICAL CONTEXT ANALYSIS 65 Media discourse and national identity 72 The conception of media and mass communication 79 The theory of discourse analysis 95 THE IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXT OF THE DISCOURSE ON THE BALKANS 95 Balkan between the worlds – the castaway part of European continent 107 Theories of Balkanism 115 Mapping the Balkans and escaping to Europe 131 Croatian Europeanization of the Balkans and the desire for Europe 145 EMPIRICAL RESEARCH 215 Overall analysis 245 Croatia after 1991: Years of Independence 265 CONCLUSION 277 SUMMARY 281 AKNOWLEDGEMENTS 283 LITERATURE INTRODUCTION OVERVIEW The basic intention of this work is to point out the existence of certain stereotypical patterns that represent the constant media usage of Balkanism and Europeanism. The work will be based on analysis of various discourses about the Balkans, on which social identity is created and transformed, where I will analyze the situation in Croatia from 1995 until 2013. In fact, in the past, the official political ideology and historiography avoided to put up Croatia in the Balkan region, advocating instead its Mediterranean and Central European identity. Since the aforementioned period is quite long, the area of analysis will be limited to three main units in which one can recognize the shift in media representation of the Balkans as a negative form of identity formation: media rhetoric in the periods from 1995 and 1999/2000, when there is a change of political direction and descent of authoritarian regime from power, up to 2007, when the negotiations on accession to the European Union were intensified, finally including 2013 when Croatia joined EU. I believe that in these periods we can clearly see the media transformation of Balkanism as categories of politically driven rhetoric. After the social and political changes in early 2000 the Croatian identity is attempting to multiply locate and cognitively map itself as European, Balkan, Central European and Mediter- ranean, so this research will focus precisely on such social trans- formation. First of all, I want to explore the extent to which the Media Construction of Balkanism 7 press, as a very powerful medium, produces a desirable form but rather strengthened the image of the Western Balkans where of symbolic identity with political discourse induced by trying rules primordial violence, ineffective and authoritarian political to modify the collective memory. This book is methodologically leadership, as well as the lack of social integration. situated in the field of sociology, but it is an interdisciplinary In following analysis it’s primarily important to detect research that, due to the complexity of the topics, also includes the disclosure of theoretical and conceptual apparatus of un- some elements of ethnological, cultural and historiographical derstanding of the Balkans whose purpose is to simultaneously analysis and related disciplinary patterns. amaze and disappoint Westerners (oriental romanticism versus Hermann Keyserling in his book on Europe says: “If the tribal barbarism). Negative stereotypes about the Balkans are Balkans would not exist, one would have to invent it.” When it inevitable, however they do not function within the semantic di- comes to creating a mental image of the Balkans, the greatest mension, but as a pragmatic tool of discourse, therefore, serve to contribution was by the classic colonial-anthropological methods of understand the ideological mechanisms that produce an image data gathering: based on diplomatic reports, academic research, of the Balkans, one should have in mind their pragmatic rather travel writing and newspaper articles image of the Balkans as than semantic or linguistic function (while analysing, I conferred the space between reality and imagination was created, the notion with the existing works, such as Todorova 1999, Hammond 2004, of “Balkanism” as a completely different discursive product than Savić and Bijelić 2005, Kourvertais 2002, Detrez and Plas 2005, it is “Orientalism”. Such “ontology of the Balkans” is responsi- Čolović 2000, etc.). The rhetoric of Balkanization primarily ble for the construction of ethnic, national, social and political refers precisely to the above connotations. Discourse in these sense of belonging, so that it could easily be said that the identity works is understood in the classical philosophical sense as a of the nation in Southeast Europe has always been relational, it linguistic structure which is used as a form of representa- depended on the mental images of Westerners. Mythologization tion: it is not just a medium that objectively reflects the reality, has turned the Balkans into a synonym for violence, political but it necessarily distorts it. Given that the text will discuss the and social unrest and wars. This is how the cultural construc- discursive formations and practices, it should be noted that it tion of “Other” discursively produced “Balkanism” which is not is taken in the traditional sense of the word: the first indicates only banal ethnocentrism, but it is primarily structural element the cluster of knowledge that can be institutionalized, and the of expansive European capitalism in the 20th century. In this second relates to the use of a discourse and behaviour in ac- sense, “Balkanization” inevitably appears as negative category, cordance with it. and the Balkans (“European Other”) as a reservoir of negative Southeast Europe has always been the scene of various characteristics on which the identity of Western Europe has conflicts, situated between imperial and local powers and shaped been created. In further chapters, I will provide explications of by complex configurations and constant changes of borders; it the concept of identity, as well as the notion of stereotypes, which was constantly forced to re-articulate the collective identities. Al- sometimes should not be seen as something exclusively negative, though we could not separate it from the rest of Europe, it is evi- depending on the content. The stereotype of the region which dent that the scars of conflict in the south-eastern part of Europe primarily arose due to scientific discourse (and media reports have not healed since the war events at the end of the twentieth during the war in Croatia and Bosnia 1991-1995) is not weakened, century. Until now, many cultural-studies scholars have analyzed 8 Tonči ValenTić Media Construction of Balkanism 9 the changes that have occurred in the last two decades when it Given that the discourse on the Balkans has two faces, comes to the sociological, anthropological, psychological, and even therefore, it’s always used in two ways (“bloody Balkans and ro- cognitive research. However, there is a lack of systematic study manticized Orient”), traditional narratives about it were always on the performative effect of media rhetoric in the creation of structurally limited and prejudiced. The relationship between identity politics when it comes to the issue of memories that still history, memory, identity, and power in the Balkans contains di- represents an interpretative challenge. This research aims to bridge verse ethnographic, sociological, postcolonial, and philosophical this gap. As I already mentioned, memory plays an important role perspectives. So I will apply various approaches in the analysis in the construction of national, regional and local identity, and which will set some fundamental questions: what are the strat- very often it is abused so that the power structures could gain egies used in a way that the Balkan area could be presented as a an adequate scientific legitimacy. One of the tasks is to analyze narrative full of prejudice? Can the media reconstruction of per- such strategies of “cultural defilement”, identifying vulnerabili- sonal experience (newspaper feuilletons on “Balkan culture”) ties in the latest research and paying attention to the problem of take precedence over the dominant historiographical data when fictionalization of history and historicization of fiction in Croatia it comes to authenticity? Certain attention will be also paid to the in the past twenty years. Media articles from 1995-98 to 2008 rhetoric of Balkanization due to its different use in Croatia and (and even up to 2014) largely associated concepts “Balkans” with Slovenia. “socialism”, trying to show that this is epistemological cut originat- Large number of contemporary sociologists, historians and ed in 1991 and especially in 2000, when Croatia ceased to be part cultural-studies scholars believe that history occurs only when of the Balkans and became “civilized” European country. In this the social memory begins to crumble and fall apart, when it stops context, there are large number of studies and books that talk being functional. In accordance with this understanding, there about the experience of post-socialism