Promitzer, Austria and the Balkans

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Promitzer, Austria and the Balkans Christian Promitzer Austria and the Balkans: Exploring the Role of Travelogues in the Construction of an Area Introduction One of the main purposes of area studies is the virtual construction of those spaces which are nominally granting their existence. This statement does not intend to postulate that the determination of global areas is totally arbitrary (the appellation of certain spaces as “historical regions” is also a matter of plausibility), but it wants to bring to the foreground that a lot of intellectual pain has to be invested, before a “historical” area is coming into being. This is also the case with the volatile region, which according to the respective viewpoint of an author may be called “Southeastern Europe”, “South-East Europe”, or the “Balkans”. During the last two decades Karl Kaser, Maria Todorova, Holm Sundhaussen, Alexis Drace Francis, Dietmar Müller and many others have tried to either deconstruct or reify these areal concepts within the given historical foci of interest since the early 19 th century. Thereby both Todorova’s approach to grasp a region by its common historical legacy and Kaser’s simple, but not simplistic relativization that the respective boundaries of “Southeastern Europe” in the eye of the researcher depend on her or his leading questions, are most convincing. 1 We would add that the historical plausibility of a region could be fully understood, if we also include all kinds of material interests which are imputed to it. Otherwise, the postmodernist renunciation of primordialism would contain the possible danger of forgetfulness about the material base of modern Capitalism and how material and in particular economic interests positioned at this base themselves influenced the construction of historical regions outside Capitalist centers of the European continent as regions for possible economic exploitation. 2 Such a viewpoint does not want 1 See Karl Kaser, Südosteuropäische Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft , UTB 8224 (Vienna – Cologne – Weimar: Böhlau, 2 nd revised edition), 23; Maria Todorova, “Der Balkan als Analysekategorie:Grenzen, Raum, Zeit”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft 28 (2002): 470-492; Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft, 28 (2002), p. 470-492.Maria Todorova, “Historische Vermächtnisse als Analysekategorie. Der Fall Südosteuropa,” in Europa und die Grenzen im Kopf , ed. Karl Kaser, Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl, Robert Pichler, Wieser-Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens 11 (Klagenfurt – Vienna: Wieser, 2003), 227-252, also online, accessed December 31, 2011, http://wwwg.uni-klu.ac.at/eeo/Todorova_Vermaechtnisse; Todorova, “Spacing Europe: What is a Historical Region?” East Central Europe 32 (1-2) (2005): 59-78; Holm Sundhaussen, “Europa balcanica: Der Balkan als historischer Raum Europas,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft 25 (1999): 626-653; Sundhaussen, Der Balkan: ein Plädoyer für Differenz,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft 29 (2003): 642-658; Alex Drace-Francis, Zur Geschichte des Südosteuropakonzepts bis 1914, in Europa und die Grenzen im Kopf , 275-286, also online, accessed December 31, 2011, http://wwwg.uni- klu.ac.at/eeo/Drace_Suedosteuropakonzept.pdf; Dietmar Müller, “Southeastern Europe as a historical Meso-region: Constructing Space in Twentieth Century German Historiography,” European Review of History 10 (2) (2003): 393-408. 2 These thoughts are influenced by a historical model of a Braudelian and/or Wallersteinian development of modern capitalism which necessarily includes the establishment of “core” and “peripheral” regions; for the Balkans as “peripheral” region in this sense see Karl Kaser, “Das Abdriften Südosteuropas vom dominierenden europäischen Entwicklungsweg seit dem 11. Jahrhundert,” Balkan Studies 29 (2) (1988): 239-264; Kaser, “Im Schatten der europäischen Weltwirtschaft. Die Verfestigung der Agrarstrukturen und die Peripherisierung Südosteuropas,“ in Südosteuropa-Fallstudien: 20 Jahre “Südosteuropäische Geschichte” in Graz , ed. Horst Haselsteiner (Graz: Abteilung to reinstate a wholesale, i.e. primordialist, variant of Marxism as an integrative world view, or even worse, Marxism-Leninism, which had been the official doctrine in the “socialist” Balkans. The latter have well enough documented that they may serve as examples for dogmatic schemes of philosophy and integral worldviews which were untainted by the lessons of constructivist epistemology. My point is that something essential is going to be missed, when the Marxian insistence on material interests for explaining the world is treated as being outdated. In such a way purportedly constructivist approaches risk to make themselves the plaything of external interests when they try to formulate new strategies in order to overcome the ascertained general crisis of area studies: The latter (if we leave aside their pendants in the former “socialist” states – as is the case with “Balkan Studies” e.g. in Bulgaria and Serbia) can be considered as conforming transdisciplinary Western approaches that, due to changing external material interests since the end of Cold War, have lost their raison d'être, and are now trying to find new bases of legitimacy vis-à- vis their financing and patronizing institutions. In contrast to such a prospective muddling along a general “crisis”, we would rather suggest a retrospective procedure and examine the underlying ideological foundations and origins of area studies, since these may partly still be the disguised guiding principles of academic research. This, exactly, is the task of a group of young researchers at the Center for Southeast European History (“Fachbereich Südosteuropäische Geschichte”) at the Institute for History within the University of Graz. The group studies various travelogues from Austrian resp. Austro-Hungarian authors on the Balkans from the 1830 up to 1912 in order to assess the share of the Danube Monarchy in the Western process of “Imagining the Balkans.” 3 In the following I will, first, try to illuminate some aspects of the representation of the Balkans in the Austrian mind, and, second, I will consider Austrian travelogues as a possible source for a wholesale representation of a region. The Balkans in the minds of Austro-Hungarian and modern Austrian elites With respect to the study of Southeastern Europe in Germany some preliminary work has been done with respect to the discipline’s roots in National Socialism. 4 But for little Austria’s interest in the Balkans and for that one of its not so small imperial predecessor the respective labor is still mostly für Südosteuropäische Geschichte) 49-81, Kaser, Südosteuropäische Geschichte , 98-106.. 3 Maria N. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009/2 nd edition [1997]).. Members oft he team are: Karin Almasy, Bernhard Bachinger, Indira Durakovi ć, Brigitte Fuchs, Kurt Gostentschnigg, Harald Kleinberger, Manfred Pfaffenthaler, Christian Promitzer, Ursula Reber, Martin Sauerbrey, Jana Schumann, and Silvia Stecher of whom many useful thoughts and finding were used in this chapter. 4 Michael Fahlbusch, Wissenschaft im Dienst der nationalsozialistischen Politik? Die “Volksdeutschen Forschungsgemeinschaften” von 1931-1945 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999); Helmut Schaller, Der Nationalsozialismus und die slawische Welt (Regensburg: Pustet, 2002); Mathias Beer, ed., Südostforschung im Schatten des Dritten Reiches: Institutionen, Inhalte, Personen , Südosteuropäische Arbeiten 119 (München: Oldenbourg, 2004); Christian Promitzer, “The South Slavs in the Austrian Mind: Serbs and Slovenes in the Changing View from German Nationalism to National Socialism,” in Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict & Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe , ed. Nancy M. Wingfield (New York – Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), 183-215. ahead of us. In Austria itself analogies between current and former interests in the region at its Southern border are in a specific way, and they were engaged several times after the end of the Communist regimes in Eastern Central and Southeastern Europe. But even before, in the mid-1980s the Austrian politician Erhard Busek together with the historian and diplomat Emil Brix addressed historical connections between Vienna and the Balkans, namely links Serbia and Montenegro. This happened within a general, liberal-conservative discourse on Central Europe (“Mitteleuropa”) which should both help to strengthen various local dissident persons and groups in their endeavor to fight and topple their respective Communist regimes, which due to various symptoms of crises were already on the defense. Such endeavors were supposed to secure Austria, as the core of the former Habsburg Empire, a convenient position as intermediary in the political rollback in East Central Europe. 5 About a decade later, in 1999, NATO was engaged in aerial warfare against Serbia and the European Union and other Western states launched the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe. In this year Busek published his book “Austria and the Balkans.” There the subsequent Special Coordinator of the Stability Pact complains that “the average Austrian only possesses of scanty knowledge about Southeastern Europe.” He pleads for refreshing old links and he reminds: “Around 1900 the city of Vienna has been a kind of world capital for a few seonds of global history would have never existed without this intellectual background [i.e. of Southeastern Europe – C.P.]. Even today
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