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The Balkans and the International Construction of the Mediterranean

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The Balkans and the International Construction of the Mediterranean The New Mediterranean in a Changing World The Balkans and the International Construction of the Mediterranean Manuel Montobbio most common way of referring to the territories that Diplomat later would be known as the Balkans, and before Ph D in Political Science1 1888 — the year of the Berlin Congress — it is rare Dossier to find texts referring to the Balkan peoples (indeed, for a long time they were known in the heart of the Proposition Ottoman Empire as Rumelia, or Rums — Romans — as this was the provenance of the peoples of an- The Mediterranean, as its very name indicates, is a cient Byzantium). Nevertheless, by the start of the 2011 geographical reality, a landlocked sea. It is also a First World War, this had become the habitual way Med. cultural and historical reality, derived from a time in of referring to the region from the outside. Even which its inhabitants considered it their Mare Nos- though the term is based on a geographical referent, trum-Our Sea, and saw in it a cultural possibility. It is Mazower maintains that from the start the Balkans and can be a border sea, and it is and can be a sea are more than a geographical concept: of unity. And it can be these things because of the possibility of constructing it politically around its per- From the very start the Balkans was more than a 115 ception as a common space. For throughout its his- geographical concept. The term, unlike its pred- tory the Mediterranean has been as evident in its ecessors, was loaded with negative connota- presence as in its absence; its construction both as tions – of violence, savagery, primitivism – to an a bond and as a border, as a place in which we are extent to which is hard to find parallel… Europe who we are, which defines an us, and as a border quickly came to associate the region with vio- sea that marks the place where the other begins, lence and bloodshed. (Mazower, 2000: 4) and where we encounter him. Similarly, the Western Balkans do not constitute a Though recent events could lead to a similar identifi- differentiated political and geographical unity. Rath- cation, only with difficulty can it be explained were it er, they are the product of a historical creation from not for the Balkans’ historically constituting the place without, their differentiation based on orographic cir- where the lines dividing the us from the them have cumstance: the Balkans is a relatively recent denom- been drawn: between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, ination, in historical terms, that originated with the between Christianity and Islam. This allows for the powers that, in the diplomatic congresses of the differentiation from the rest of Europe of a zone that 19th Century, drew up maps to a large extent on geographically is at the heart of Europe. what had until then been territories of the Ottoman This is why to speak of the Balkans and the Mediter- Empire, which, together with the historians and ranean is indeed to speak of geography, but not academicians who wrote the history books, they only, or not even mainly. It is to speak of — and per- later attempted to turn into reality. As Mark Mazower haps to be stakeholders in — one of the possible (2000) points out, during the 18th Century and the stories of history. The story of the Mediterranean as better part of the 19th, “Turkey in Europe” was the an object of international construction on the part of 1 The author of this article personally underwrites its content. the political entities that agglutinate its inhabitants zation and differentiation of what had previously and all their relevant international actors. The story been common ground. Common, first of all, with the of the Balkans as a subject of international action in rest of the Roman Empire, and hence with the Medi- the Mediterranean. Which brings us to postulate the terranean (known to its inhabitants as the Mare Nos- what, the why, the wherefore, and the how of that trum), then with the rest of Europe, and finally with possible story of history. the Ottoman Empire. A singularization precisely in order to differentiate them from the rest of the Otto- man Empire, whose centuries-long configuration To speak of the Balkans and the constitutes one of the great historical events in the Mediterranean is indeed to speak international configuration of the Mediterranean – for of one of the possible stories of centuries fundamentally a question of the relation- ship between the Empire and the Christian powers history. The story of the – and whose disintegration lies at the origin of many Mediterranean as an object of of the contemporary geopolitical crises and tensions Dossier international construction on the from the Middle East to the Balkans. part of the political entities that On the other hand, the Balkans are viewed as a point of encounter among cultures, civilizations, worlds, agglutinate its inhabitants and all whose political articulation is conditioned by high- their relevant international actors tension wires that divide and structure them and by 2011 factors and actors vis-à-vis which their organization into states constitutes a historical phenomenon that Med. To speak of the Balkans and the Mediterranean is to is both recent and often transcended by them: speak of certain facts — the entry of Albania into the scraps of history that remain alive through history, Barcelona Process in November 2007, and later beyond the life and death of the world that gave that of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Mon- birth to them. Scraps, waves, or fluxes of history, the tenegro in the Union for the Mediterranean in 2008 past and present of Romanization, which neverthe- 116 — and of their potentialities. less ran up against Greek and Illirian linguistic re- And to consider these facts and potentialities, this sistance (hence Greek and Albanian/Illirian consti- possible version of history, in the light of the above tute, together with Basque, the only living languages interrogatives, we are going to embark on an intel- that precede Latin); of the line of Theodosius, the lectual journey through the Western Balkans and emperor who in the year 395 divided the Roman their collective and international dynamics vis-à-vis Empire into East and West, which henceforth would the Mediterranean, and through the Mediterranean be reflected in the Catholic and Orthodox worlds; of as an object of international construction and of the the Slavic invasions after which the Slavic peoples Euro-Mediterranean Process (first the Barcelona have co-existed in the region with Albanians and Process, then the Union for the Mediterranean) as a Greeks; of the Ottoman invasion and the dynamics path in this direction. We shall not lose sight of the of inte gration and resistance it generated, along fact that this journey is undertaken in a special mo- with the Islamization of part of the population. His- ment of Mediterranean history, when the southern torical resistance or identitary continuity which, shore is traversing an Arab spring that obliges us, that added to nationalistic trends and the weakening of brings home for us, the need to rethink everything. the empire, laid the groundwork, from the Greeks on, for the process toward independence of the peoples of the region and their political organiza- on the balkans and their International tion into states. A process born, to be sure, as an Projection toward the Mediterranean act of orthodox solidarity through the support of Catherine the Great for the Greek independentists; A Dual Point of Departure and which as a geostrategic factor includes access to the Mediterranean for the central Slavic powers, On the one hand, as has already been noted, the and the presence, in the Mare Nostrum, of central Balkans did not construct themselves, but rather are powers such as the Russian or Austro-Hungarian constructed from without, in a process of singulari- Empires, the Germanic and Slavic worlds. The culmination of this process was the political or- positive sum cooperation based on commonality to a ganization of the Balkan peoples and territories into zero sum confrontation based on the exaltation of states, in which two phases can be distinguished: difference. This led to the emergence of new states first, the phase of their independence from the Otto- living side by side in a landscape with other factors man Empire — and the Austro-Hungarian one — in play. Fundamentally homogeneous states seen which came to a head following the First World War from an ethnic, religious, and identitary perspective; with the creation of the kingdom that in time would be and pluralistic states such as Bosnia and Herzegovi- transformed into the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia na or the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In and the Albanian state; second, the phase of the dis- this landscape the “Serbian factor” and the “Albani- integration of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. A an factor” made frequent appearances in the explan- process which, with the referent of Greek independ- atory discourses of the regional dynamics. ence, accelerated at the time of the Congress of Ber- Once the phase of armed conflict was overcome lin, spurred on by nationalisms and Catholic (Austro- through a negotiated solution and the creation of Hungarian) and Orthodox solidarity toward the new states, and with the perspective of European peoples of these religions, a context in which the Al- integration following the Thessaloniki European Dossier banian case proved to be an exception. The coexist- Council, the Balkans could envision the achievement ence in the heart of Albania of a Catholic north and of integration by means of the process of stabiliza- an Orthodox south, a good portion of whose popula- tion, association, and integration in the EU.
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