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Balkanologie Revue d'études pluridisciplinaires
Vol. III, n°2 | 1999 Volume III Numéro 2
Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/balkanologie/666 DOI : 10.4000/balkanologie.666 ISSN : 1965-0582
Éditeur Association française d'études sur les Balkans (Afebalk)
Édition imprimée Date de publication : 1 décembre 1999 ISSN : 1279-7952
Référence électronique Balkanologie, Vol. III, n°2 | 1999, « Volume III Numéro 2 » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 30 avril 2008, consulté le 17 décembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/balkanologie/666 ; DOI : https:// doi.org/10.4000/balkanologie.666
Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 17 décembre 2020.
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SOMMAIRE
Combattants de la cause nationale : ethnicité et génocide dans les Balkans Ivelin Sardamov
Formation nationale et nationalisme dans l’aire de peuplement albanais Albert Doja
Europe du Sud-Est : histoire, concepts, frontières
South-Eastern Europe : History, Concepts, Boundaries Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis
Defining South-Eastern Europe George Schöpflin
Definitional Dilemmas : Southeastern Europe as « Culture Area » ? Pamela Ballinger
Changes of Emphases : Greek Christendom, Westernization, South-Eastern Europe, and Neo- Mitteleuropa Andrei Pippidi
The last Stop on the Orient Express : The Balkans and the Politics of British In(ter)vention Vesna Goldsworthy
The Prehistory of a Neologism : « South-Eastern Europe » Alex Drace-Francis
Notes de Lectures
Notices bibliographiques balkaniques
Pavlowitch (Stevan K.), A History of the Balkans, 1804-1945 London / New York : Longman, 1999, 375 p. Bernard Lory
Antébi (Elizabeth), Les missionnaires juifs de la France, 1860-1939 Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999, 370 pages Bernard Lory de Montclos (Christine), Le Vatican et l’éclatement de la Yougoslavie Paris : PUF, 1999, 263 p. [Bibliogr. Chrono. Annexes] Patrick Michels
Roux (Michel), Le Kosovo. Dix clés pour comprendre Paris : La Découverte (Sur le vif), 1999, 127 p. [Bibliogr. Chrono. Sites internet]. Patrick Michels
Hartmann(Florence), Milosevic : la diagonale du fou Paris : Denoël, 1999, 441 p. Yves Tomić
Balkanologie, Vol. III, n°2 | 1999 2
Combattants de la cause nationale : ethnicité et génocide dans les Balkans
Ivelin Sardamov
1 L’euphorie provoquée par la chute du mur de Berlin en 1989 s’est estompée, en même temps que la “ fin de l’histoire ”, encore une fois annoncée, semble être indéfiniment reportée. La réapparition rapide des mouvements nationalistes et des conflits nationaux en Europe de l’est et ailleurs a symbolisé ce changement de perspective. Le “nouveau désordre” a fait l’objet d’un nombre croissant de travaux scientifiques sur le nationalisme et les conflits nationaux, certes variés et inégaux. La majeure partie des chercheurs s’intéressant à ce domaine partagent un important dénominateur commun. Ils ont adopté une approche “instrumentaliste” : la récente crise de nationalisme ethnique et de violences intercommunautaires résulterait principalement de manipulations effectuées par des élites protégeant - ou tentant d’accéder à – des biens matériels, au pouvoir et au statut qui y sont liés1.
2 Le bon accueil qu’ont reçu ces théories “instrumentalistes” tient, au moins en partie, aux préoccupations politiques de la plupart des chercheurs tentant de “présenter” le nationalisme et les conflits nationaux de telle sorte qu’ils puissent paraître remédiables2. Ils ont, généralement, considéré la guerre et la violence intercommunautaires comme des “variables dépendantes” et tenté de découvrir leurs causes, afin de favoriser la prévention et la résolution des conflits. En quête de solutions réalisables, ils se sont souvent appuyés sur des analogies avec les sociétés occidentales, aux champs public, politique et économique hautement institutionnalisés. Ayant fixé l’agenda, nombre de chercheurs ont abouti à la conclusion que les conflits sont alimentés par les médias qui disséminent des identités collectives fictives et pernicieuses, et, par conséquent, que ce processus doit être réversible par le soutien à l’engineering politique. L’implication internationale dans la reconstruction des institutions démocratiques par l’organisation rapide d’élections et la transformation des identités nationales en identités “civiques” ou méta-nationales à la suite de conflits violents est alors sujet de grands espoirs.
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3 Récemment, des chercheurs ont également tenté de renverser la tendance précédente qui dépeignait le monde non-occidental comme une région socialement “en retard” sous l’emprise de passions irrationnelles. D’autres ont été contraints de démontrer que, si l’opportunité leur était offerte, la plupart des individus de par le monde choisiraient de vivre librement dans des sociétés possédant une organisation sociale et humaine de type occidental. Ces deux groupes de chercheurs ont donc accusé les élites locales d’attiser les haines nationales alors qu’elles étaient (quasi) inexistantes, et de pousser des individus récalcitrants, se trouvant dans une situation précaire, à une violence intercommunautaire d’une grande ampleur. Bien que cette approche mette l’accent sur un aspect primordial de nombreux conflits nationaux, sa crédibilité est mise à mal par la tendance de ses adhérents à considérer cette explication comme exhaustive et à déconsidérer toute interprétation alternative.
4 S’appuyer sur des analogies avec des mécanismes sociaux, des attitudes publiques ou des pratiques d’engineering social de type occidental peut rapidement devenir problématique dans le cadre de la composition sociale des Balkans, plus volatile et encore très largement corporatiste. En dépit d’avancées dans l’industrialisation, l’urbanisation et l’éducation, les structures parentales, les traditions orales et les mécanismes informels de relations sociales sont toujours partie intégrante du tissu social dans la région. Leur élasticité pose un énorme obstacle à la propagation, par les médias ou les organismes non gouvernementaux, des valeurs individuelles et universelles occidentales. La survivance de structures sociales et de formes de relations sociales “traditionnelles” n’est pas seulement la résultante du sous-développement économique et social. Elle a également été renforcée par la longue histoire des invasions et dominations étrangères, par les luttes pour l’autodétermination et le partage des possessions des empires défunts. Par conséquent, notre compréhension des dynamiques des nationalismes et des conflits nationaux dans les Balkans doit s’appuyer sur un examen minutieux de la signification qu’ont les luttes anciennes pour l’indépendance nationale et l’“unification” pour les identités nationales conflictuelles des belligérants.
Le poids de l’histoire ?
5 Un examen du “poids de l’histoire” dans la région montre que les conflits passés et les ressentiments nationaux, certains vieux de plusieurs siècles, ont conservé un haut degré de pertinence dans les débats politiques contemporains. C’est un phénomène qui ne peut pas s’expliquer par les seules habiletés manipulatrices et l’imagination débridée des politiciens et intellectuels locaux. Ce qui est commun en Europe de l’est, et que G. Steiner a appelé la « nécessaire tension du passé » d’une « grammaire [communautaire] de l’être »3, est particulièrement vive parmi les populations balkaniques. Et ce n’est pas une surprise s’il existe une parcelle de vérité dans l’assertion de C. Milosz que la conscience aiguë de l’histoire en Europe de l’est est le résultat d’une menace mortelle perçue par chaque communauté nationale4. À quelques exceptions près, les peuples balkaniques ont vécu pendant des siècles sous domination étrangère, surtout en tant que paysans confinés au bas de l’échelle sociale aussi bien dans l’Empire ottoman que dans l’Empire habsbourgeois. Ils ont ensuite été incorporés dans des États nationaux ou plurinationaux, et ont été pris dans les longues et violentes luttes de pouvoir régionales.
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6 La pertinence des références à des événements ou des personnages de l’histoire ancienne, dans la région, provient également des modes narratifs et imaginaires véhiculés par les cultures populaires locales qui ont, à une très large échelle, évolué en dehors des canaux officiels. Bien qu’elles aient été significativement influencées par la haute culture et l’endoctrinement nationaliste, elles ont précédé la littérature moderne ainsi que les traditions intellectuelles de la région et y ont apposé une marque indélébile5. Le folklore, la littérature et l’histoire interprètent souvent de manière plutôt similaire la structuration sociale, l’organisation politique et les motivations humaines.
7 La récente mobilisation des ressources nationales dans une partie des Balkans peut être analysée comme partie intégrante d’une longue suite événementielle, plutôt qu’un phénomène contemporain unique. Depuis le siècle dernier, les leaders nationalistes locaux n’ont jamais cherché à obtenir un large soutien populaire sur leurs promesses tendant à défendre les intérêts particuliers de leurs électeurs. Ils se sont régulièrement référencés aux événements et personnages du passé pour décrire les groupes nationaux voisins comme des ennemis historiques afin de légitimer et de conserver le pouvoir politique. Ils ont également évoqué des impératifs trans-générationnels, présentant les États nationaux nouvellement établis comme des réincarnations de glorieux royaumes médiévaux et les contestations politiques et militaires comme la reproduction de combats historiques : une nouvelle bataille pour Kosovo Polje, la réaffirmation du droit à l’État indépendant du peuple croate, l’insistance sur les torts causés au peuple bulgare à la suite du traité de San Stefano, etc. Même lorsque de telles références historiques sont employées comme un camouflage cynique d’objectifs politiques plus pragmatiques, le fait qu’elles aient souvent été effectives pour susciter une réponse massive d’individus normalement sceptiques est significatif en soi.
8 Afin d’attirer un large soutien populaire dans leurs luttes pour le pouvoir, la légitimité et une place dans l’histoire, les élites balkaniques ont dû favoriser le développement d’institutions et de doctrines nationales qui ne sont qu’imparfaitement instrumentales, aux objectifs et aux fonctions strictement délimités. Elles ont promu des institutions et des “idéaux” nationaux qui peuvent être perçus non seulement comme des moyens pratiques de promotion sociale, mais également comme le fondement de toutes les aspirations nationales et la garantie d’une identité commune rédemptrice. C’est le flou de ce mandat existentiel qui lui permet d’être souvent utilisé, notamment dans les périodes d’effondrement des empires et d’agitation internationale. Le mandat en lui- même a, de loin, surpassé les messages explicites de la propagande nationaliste moderne et a fourni certains standards pour l’évaluation de la “qualité” des leaders nationalistes fanatiques ou cyniques.
9 Le “traditionalisme” balkanique est également lié à une autre particularité qui explique en grande partie le lourd fardeau de l’histoire dans la région. Il a contribué au développement d’un certain degré d’ethnocentrisme populaire mettant en exergue l’ascendance ou le sang communs comme base naturelle de la communauté politique, et a empêché ainsi la formation de nations méta-nationales sur le modèle occidental6. Sans aucun doute, cet ethnocentrisme exclusif, et parfois violent, a été promu par des leaders et des intellectuels nationalistes pour leurs propres finalités politiques. Leurs efforts dans l’endoctrinement nationaliste ont été facilités par la propagation de nouvelles notions d’unité sociale liées à des innovations historiques majeures : l’apparition de la sphère publique en tant qu’espace commun de dialogue sur les mœurs
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et le gouvernement, ainsi que la généralisation de l’éducation sécularisée ; le développement de structures politiques centralisées étendant leur contrôle administratif sur des populations plus nombreuses et dont la légitimité dépend de la sphère publique ; et la transformation d’une économie reposant sur une structure essentiellement familiale à un système de flux massifs de biens, de services et d’instruments financiers aux impératifs spécifiques7.
10 Toutefois, le contrôle des actions et des opinions de leurs populations, ainsi que la demande de services exigés par les États balkaniques contemporains, ou ce que Michael Mann appelle le “pouvoir infrastructurel” de l’État8, ne doivent pas être surestimés. En dépit des ambitions des leaders souvent autoritaires et de leur entourage, les appareils d’État balkanique n’ont que rarement disposé des ressources administratives nécessaires et de l’aptitude à pénétrer tous les niveaux de la société afin de supprimer les racines des réseaux et les solidarités sociales ou d’établir un contrôle social efficient9. Ceci est vrai y compris pour les régimes communistes de Yougoslavie, Bulgarie, et Albanie, malgré le label “totalitaire” qui leur a été parfois attribué. Les identités nationales balkaniques actuelles ne proviennent donc pas seulement des messages de la propagande nationaliste institutionnalisée, mais également de la tendance générale des individus au sein de sociétés “traditionnelles” à s’identifier et à être identifiés par les autres surtout en fonction de leur appartenance à des groupes sociaux. Dans les Balkans, de tels modèles d’identification et de classification ont persisté pendant des siècles, bien que le groupe auquel les individus s’identifient se soit déplacé de la communauté locale et religieuse à la communauté ethnoreligieuse et, parfois, nationale.
11 Les approches ethnocentriques de l’identité nationale ont rendu pertinent le recours aux références historiques, en liant les expériences des générations passées et actuelles d’un même ethnos commun à un tout indifférencié. Selon l’historien bulgare Roumen Daskalov : Notwithstanding demographic catastrophes and ethnic creolage, even if these are admitted, “we” living today are identical with the historical “them”, our forefathers. They are the earlier “we”, we are the later “them” - that is what is conveyed and implied by the [historical] narrative. There are no limits to the projection of ethnicity back into history ; since the tribal period history is “our” history.10
12 Les intellectuels nationalistes des États plurinationaux ont également tenté de réaliser une telle fusion de générations distantes en un seul protagoniste d’un drame historique intemporel, mais leur tâche fut bien plus ardue et ils n’ont que rarement réussi.
13 Des exemples de définition ethnocentrique commune présentant les groupes nationaux situés sur un espace comme des espèces naturelles aux caractéristiques innées indélébiles sont faciles à trouver11. Dans l’ancienne Yougoslavie, de telles notions ont été au cœur de débats animés affirmant que le narod (ethnos) est plus pur et racialement supérieur et que “les Croates” sont marqués d’une “nature génocidaire” commune. Plus sérieusement, la définition précise de l’appartenance nationale a sous-tendu les revendications serbes d’une Yougoslavie produit d’une union des peuples plutôt que des États pré-existants. Ainsi, les peuples constitutifs jouissaient du droit à l’autodétermination, et non pas les Républiques, unités territoriales et administratives. Au contraire, la République de Croatie a été clairement constituée sur une base nationale, l’État du – et pour le – peuple croate. Le Parlement croate, élu en 1990, a accordé un droit de vote automatique aux centaines de milliers d’expatriés croates,
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dont la minorité croate de la République de Bosnie-Herzégovine souveraine. L’État bulgare a également existé pendant plus d’un siècle comme l’État national du narod bulgare. La culture et la politique bulgares sont encore marquées par l’argumentaire courant affirmant que “les Macédoniens” d’aujourd’hui sont en fait des Bulgares, d’autant plus que la constitution bulgare de 1991 reconnaît comme citoyen bulgare toutes les personnes dont les parents sont d’origine nationale bulgare12. Les présidents de Macédoine et d’Albanie ont récemment échangé des propos caractéristiques : critiquant Kiro Gligorov qui avait déclaré que les réfugiés albanais devraient aller dans leur patrie, l’Albanie, Rexhep Meidani a rétorqué que les Albanais de la région vivaient sur leur propre “territoire national”13. L’empressement récent de la population albanaise à la frontière yougoslave à aider les nombreux réfugiés du Kosovo démontre clairement le degré que les sentiments de “fraternité” ou de parenté nationales naturelles peuvent atteindre dans la région.
Communautés « historiquement » ennemies
14 Bien que les conceptions ethnocentriques de l’identité conduisent à une compassion nationale spontanée de la population albanaise, elles ont également de graves conséquences. Tout d’abord, elles impliquent une prédisposition à reconnaître les acteurs collectifs, et non pas individuels, comme éléments constitutifs des communautés politiques et les véritables détenteurs des droits, des devoirs, et même de la culpabilité. Les caractéristiques des communautés nationales voisines, transformées en ennemis mortels collectifs par le choc des missions “nationalisantes”, ainsi que celles des individus les représentant, sont considérées comme innées et, par conséquent, irréversibles. Ils sont exclus de ce qu’Andrei Simić décrit comme « un champ moral [commun], un champ interactionnel dans lequel chacun agit envers l’autre par référence à des impératifs perçus comme nationaux »14. De tels individus ont souvent été les sujets de mauvais traitements sur la seule base de leur origine nationale, d’assimilation forcée, parfois même de violentes campagnes de “nettoyage ethnique”. Ensuite, les membres des minorités nationales sont systématiquement réduits au statut de citoyens de deuxième classe, “invités” dans l’État d’un autre groupe national, quelles que soient les garanties constitutionnelles ou internationales de leurs droits15. Enfin, la tendance à considérer la langue et les traits culturels comme les indicateurs d’une ethnicité commune a abouti à douter de l’authenticité de l’auto- identification d’autres groupes nationaux, et à des conflits perpétuels à propos de l’identité “réelle” de groupes plus petits, comme les Musulmans bosniaques ou les Macédoniens aujourd’hui.
15 Dans ces conditions sociales, les luttes historiques des peuples balkaniques ont révélé un paradoxe. D’un côté, elles ont parfois inspiré compassion, persévérance et de nombreux sacrifices. De l’autre, elles ont semblé dresser l’une contre l’autre des populations entières, plutôt que des armées régulières, dans des campagnes de génocide. Elles ont donc occasionné un haut degré de violence intercommunautaire : le massacre de civils ou de prisonniers de guerre sur la seule base de leur origine nationale par des unités irrégulières, et parfois régulières, l’incendie de villes et villages, ainsi que le déplacement de populations, ce qui sera appelé “nettoyage ethnique”16. La justification de ces actes, aussi bien que le besoin primordial d’auto- sacrifice17, se trouve dans l’évocation de la mémoire de la gloire et des souffrances anciennes liées aux conflits nationaux antérieurs.
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16 Pendant longtemps, des tendances génocidaires ont marqué les guerres, les rébellions et les conflits intercommunautaires dans les Balkans sud slaves. Mais, soutenir que l’histoire de la région a été gelée et qu’elle est condamnée à se répéter dans ses conflits nationaux “barbares” est une simplification à outrance18. Tandis que l’auto- identification ethnocentrique de majorités au sein des populations locales est plutôt identique à celle de leurs ancêtres du siècle dernier, voire des siècles antérieurs, les guerres et les conflits nationaux contemporains ont été marqués par une modification radicale. Ce changement est principalement lié à la structure institutionnelle de la guerre. Jusqu’à la fin du XIXème siècle, ce sont essentiellement des troupes autonomes irrégulières qui s’affrontaient. Les individus qui y participaient disposaient souvent d’un sens aigu de l’appartenance “naturelle” à leur communauté ethnoreligieuse et, en même temps, d’un fort sentiment d’hostilité envers les autres personnes. La distinction entre combattants et non-combattants était plutôt floue et tous les membres des communautés rivales étaient perçus comme des cibles légitimes. Les détachements armés comprenaient habituellement des combattants implacables et brutaux, mais les structures et valeurs sociales traditionnelles imposaient des limites importantes de degré et d’intensité dans les hostilités. Les bandes armées, souvent de petite taille et très mobiles, n’opéraient pas à partir d’une base permanente et disposaient d’armes et d’une logistique plutôt primitives. Bien que les atrocités régulières qu’elle commettaient sur les non-combattants étaient parfois réalisées à grande échelle, la violence était, le plus souvent, en partie ritualisée et, sauf de rares occurrences, ne s’orientait pas vers une “solution finale”19.
17 Les choses n’ont dramatiquement changé qu’avec l’incorporation de nombreux soldats croyant aux notions d’attachement ethnique organique et irrévocable dans les armées modernes disposant d’une puissance de feu destructrice et de moyens logistiques accrus. Ces armées, composées de “soldats nationaux” traditionalistes, étaient au service d’« États se nationalisant »20 en quête d’expansion territoriale, à l’époque où l’effondrement des empires multinationaux promettait la création de patries nationales indépendantes qui, idéalement, uniraient tous les membres du même ethnos et permettraient aux co-nationaux présumés de retrouver leur “vraie” identité. Cette perspective a facilité la violente rencontre des missions nationalisantes et la perception accrue des autres communautés nationales comme des ennemis historiques marqués par des caractéristiques innées opposées. Ces tendances ont alimenté de nombreuses guerres et conflits nationaux sanglants qui ont été bien plus destructeurs que nombre de conflits du siècle dernier : les guerres balkaniques de 1912-1913, les combats inter- nationaux en Yougoslavie au cours de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, et les conflits marquant l’éclatement de la Yougoslavie dans les années 1990 (y compris la guerre au Kosovo en 1999). Tous ces conflits présentent bien plus d’aspects génocidaires que ceux s’étant déroulé au sein des Empires multinationaux.
Utilisations du folklore
18 Dans les Balkans, les conflits nationaux ont longtemps été commémorés en tant qu’éléments de traditions nationales vénérables. Les récits sélectionnés et dramatisés à cet effet jouent un rôle central dans les histoires nationales balkaniques. Ils obéissent à des schémas conceptuels hautement standardisés. Bien que ces récits présentent un fort aspect “mythique”, ils se réfèrent également à des événements historiques “réels” qui ont eu d’importantes conséquences sur la vie de millions de personnes.
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Invariablement, ils mettent l’accent sur les souffrances prolongées subies sous la coupe d’oppresseurs étrangers et sur les soulèvements populaires pour la “libération” nationale et “l’unification”, liant les expériences des générations passées et présentes en un tout cohérent. Les événements et personnages historiques majeurs sont transformés pour servir les buts des leaders et intellectuels nationalistes. Ces derniers, toutefois, ont souvent défini leurs propres objectifs politiques en interprétant de façon rigide quelques exemples issus de l’histoire. Ces interprétations ont évolué. Elles sont le résultat des efforts de générations d’écrivains, d’historiens et d’autres intellectuels nationalistes. Elles ont également suivi les conventions et les analyses informelles des classifications, causalités et motivations sociales présentes dans les récits de tradition orale et dans les relations sociales. En dépit de tensions internes, elles ont nourri les identités nationales balkaniques d’aujourd’hui avec un degré d’unité et de cohésion bien éloigné des processus de fragmentation culturelle de la plupart des sociétés occidentales.
19 Dans une série d’analyses brillantes, Ivan Čolović, l’un des intellectuels libéraux serbes des années récentes les plus respectés, a démontré l’efficacité des formules folkloriques dans la fédération yougoslave, et notamment en Serbie21. Il a porté son attention sur les commentaires journalistiques qui, dans les années 1980, ont présenté les matchs de football et les footballeurs yougoslaves comme des reconstitutions de batailles mythiques paradigmatiques avec un ennemi déshumanisé et ont interprété le style de jeu de chaque équipe comme une “expression de la mentalité nationale”. Il a étudié des rumeurs et des écrits qui ont fait d’un criminel serbe, assassiné dans les années 1980 en Allemagne, un héros populaire : un noble protecteur des défavorisés, même s’il a parfois été cruel, dans la plus pure tradition des hajduks. Il s’est également intéressé aux “ nouvelles chansons populaires ” et aux slogans présentant Milošević comme une nouvelle incarnation d’un héros aux dimensions quasi-mythiques, le “père-roi” serbe du folklore épique (bizarrement, Vuk Drašković a été dépeint en termes identiques dans les chansons du SPO22), ainsi qu’à de nombreuses autres chansons de style similaire décrivant la guerre yougoslave récente comme une continuation de la tradition serbe tant vénérée des luttes de “libération”, mêlant événements et personnages historiques sans liens entre eux. Selon Čolović, ces genres populaires de “littérature sauvage” ont « leur origine dans la littérature générale et le développement des moyens de communication, qui ont modifié, en grande partie, la forme de notre culture, mais non son esprit »23.
20 Lors des nombreuses guerres balkaniques, les rébellions et les exploits des chefs hajduk ont longtemps été commémorés avec une dévotion particulière. La vénération pour les actions “héroïques” de l’un des “ancêtres” du groupe national a été systématiquement inculquée au travers du système scolaire, du service militaire obligatoire, de la propagande écrite et, depuis peu, visuelle. Ces efforts ont trouvé un terrain fertile, défriché par la tradition orale. Cette particularité est surtout évidente dans le cas du folklore serbe et des relations sociales qui ont véhiculé des contes épiques détaillés des luttes passées, jusqu’à la célèbre bataille de Kosovo Polje en 1389. Le contenu quasi- historique d’autres traditions folkoriques dans la région était bien moins prononcé. Elles ont, généralement, affirmé et insisté sur la division naturelle du monde en ethnes ethniquement définies, l’identité des différentes générations appartenant au même ethnos et l’unité essentielle du passé avec le présent 24. Elles ont ainsi fourni un cadre
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interprétatif approprié aux allusions historiques récurrentes de nombreux écrivains, historiens et politiciens.
21 Des intellectuels et des politiciens locaux ont peut-être suivi les conventions du folklore local et des relations sociales relatives à leur origine rurale ou semi-rurale. D’autres, toutefois, ont trouvé des formules folkloriques suffisamment évocatrices pour la majorité de leur public ou de leur électorat co-national. Le plus souvent, les Milošević et autres Tuđman ont atteint les sommets du pouvoir en exploitant la vague nationaliste dont ils n’étaient pas les seuls initiateurs et qui, s’ils n’en avaient pas profité, aurait servi à d’autres leaders nationaux. Ils détiennent des positions d’autorité en vertu d’un “mandat de l’histoire” englobant des pratiques particulières d’action politique légitime. Bien qu’ayant très bien réussi à manipuler quelques aspects de ce mandat, la portée de leurs efforts a été restreinte par son dynamisme général.
22 Présenter les contestations politiques et militaires actuelles dans les Balkans comme des reconstitutions des luttes passées a souvent été un moyen politique efficace dans les mains des élites politiques. Mais, c’est parfois devenu une arme à double tranchant. L’utilisation de références historiques a permis aux leaders politiques et aux intellectuels d’obtenir un large soutien populaire. Ils ont été entraînés dans des rôles historiques qu’ils n’étaient que partiellement prêts à interpréter. De telles dynamiques les ont rendus vulnérables au ressentiment populaire lorsqu’ils n’arrivent pas à tenir les promesses qu’ils ont faites. Quand les leaders nationalistes échouent à remplir le “mandat historique”, ils perdent beaucoup de la légitimité nécessaire à leur revendication de pouvoir et de direction. C’est ce qui est arrivé à Ante Pavelić et son régime après qu’ils aient proclamé le NDH25 réincarnation du royaume croate, alors qu’ils furent contraints d’abandonner une bonne partie du territoire à l’Italie et de faire du NDH un protectorat de l’Axe. Dans ce contexte, l’intransigeance de Milošević face à l’ultimatum de l’OTAN et des bombardements reflète probablement une conscience aiguë de la charge de leader national serbe qu’il a dû assumer pour rester au pouvoir.
23 Quand les défaites militaires sont particulièrement douloureuses et humiliantes, elles portent un coup à la légitimité des élites politiques et aux institutions qu’elles contrôlent. Au lendemain de la Première Guerre mondiale, par exemple, l’État bulgare s’est aliéné les masses paysannes et une bonne partie de l’intelligentsia. En dépit de l’endoctrinement nationaliste par les canaux officiels, elles ne pouvaient plus être mobilisées pour soutenir les institutions et la politique étatiques, dont la “ rédemption ” des territoires perdus après le traité de San Stefano. Il reste à voir si des processus similaires se développeront en Serbie après la campagne aérienne de l’OTAN.
Transcender l’identité
24 Une des particularités de l’auto-identification ethnique balkanique, parfois relevée par des observateurs étrangers, réside dans sa dimension quasi-transcendentale, qui n’a que peu de rapport avec la religion. Du fait des diverses traditions religieuses, un « folklore religieux, localisé et basé sur la superstition » a vu le jour ; il a surtout servi de symbole d’identité collective et de différenciation par rapport aux autres communautés26 ou de « totem clanique » 27. Comme Anthony Smith et Benedict Anderson ont tenté de le démontrer, ce qui distingue l’identité nationale des autres formes d’identité sociale est sa capacité à conférer aux individus l’impression d’une immortalité terrestre. Elle y parvient en faisant des individus le lien collectif d’une
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chaîne ininterrompue de générations appartenant à une “communauté territoriale et culturelle” plus large28. Cet aspect transgénérationnel est notamment prononcé dans le modèle ethnique de la nation, avec son insistance sur l’ascendance physique et la révérence au passé ethnique. En temps de crise et d’insécurité, il peut détourner les individus de leur quotidienneté et les faire adopter ce qu’ils considéreraient autrement être de la marginalité. Une telle quête désespérée de transcendance par la participation à un acte de rédemption communautaire est probablement la principale raison de la motivation qui a poussé la masse des “soldats-libérateurs” nationaux dans les Balkans sud slaves à répondre aux appels à prendre les armes qui se sont succédés ces dernières décennies. Bien que certains d’entre eux soient des criminels de droit commun, tel le célèbre Arkan, ou des mégalomaniaques obsédés, tels Vojislav Šešelj ou Dobroslav Paraga, la plupart ont cherché plus que le butin de guerre, la réalisation de désirs sadiques, ou ont été intoxiqués par le pouvoir sur la vie qui leur été conféré. Beaucoup ont participé à des guerres pour la survie physique ou la rédemption de leur ethnos qui exigeait des efforts, parfois même des sacrifices, ainsi que de la brutalité contre les membres des communautés “ennemies”.
25 L’approche “instrumentaliste” maintenant prédominante dans l’étude du nationalisme et des conflits ethniques, soulignant les manipulations par des élites affamées de pouvoir sur des masses dociles, met en exergue des aspects importants de nombreux conflits ethniques, mais elle ne peut pas complètement rendre compte de leur férocité et de leur cruauté excessives. Elle généralise bien trop rapidement les expériences et interprétations propres aux sociétés occidentales hautement institutionnalisées et individualistes. La plupart d’entre elles sont organisées selon des clivages supranationaux, dans lesquels les cultures folkloriques ont été remplacées par les médias, eux-mêmes contrôlés par les sphères publiques. Selon l’expression du critique audiovisuel, Robert Hughes, la télévision est devenue le « principal générateur de la réalité »29. Les tenants de l’approche “instrumentaliste” tendent à extrapoler ces expériences et ces interprétations sans porter de regard critique sur les régions dont les caractéristiques sociales, culturelles et politiques sont différentes. Afin de mieux appréhender la dynamique des rivalités nationales dans les Balkans, il est également nécessaire de prendre en considération le pouvoir de la mémoire des guerres passées pour fournir des normes pratiques d’action politique légitime.
26 Malheureusement, ces normes ont trop souvent sanctionné une résolution violente des conflits et des atrocités contre les masses “ennemies” non-combattantes. De tels outrages, toutefois, ne peuvent pas être expliqués par les seules cruauté, quête du pouvoir et capacités manipulatrices d’un petit nombre de politiciens et d’intellectuels nationalistes. Des excès aussi tragiques ont accompagné la naissance de pratiquement tous les mouvements sociaux majeurs de l’histoire de l’Europe moderne : de la Réforme aux guerres du XXème siècle, en passant par la Révolution française. Bien que ce fait soit négligé, même les démocraties occidentales actuelles se sont étendues et consolidées au travers de siècles de guerre ; elles ont, elles aussi, procédé à la nationalisation de leurs populations par des politiques assimilationnistes ; elles ont mené des régimes coloniaux durs de par le monde.
27 Tous ces cataclysmes sociaux montrent peut-être la prédisposition humaine à la violence, une assertion suprême de l’identité collective au coût d’une possible destruction mutuelle30. On peut analyser cette tendance comme le problème le plus dérangeant de l’humanité depuis des temps immémoriaux, un problème que la plupart
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des sociologues et politologues a esquivé. Ils ont tenté d’exonérer les masses d’individus ordinaires des sociétés contemporaines en faisant porter le blâme de l’intolérance et de la violence intercommunautaire sur quelques “entrepreneurs” politiques en quête de pouvoir et d’un meilleur statut. La manipulation par des politiciens impitoyables et des intellectuels pathétiques est sans aucun doute un facteur important dans l’éclatement de nombreux conflits. Mais elle ne fournit aucune explication quant à leurs racines et leur dynamique. Faire de millions d’individus des robots dépourvus de tout esprit critique pouvant être facilement dupés et assumer des identités fictives, sacrifier leurs vies et celles des autres pour satisfaire un petit groupe de manipulateurs doués est une analyse simpliste et condescendante31. Si l’intention est louable, elle ne fait pas grand chose pour promouvoir les valeurs et institutions démocratiques que ses initiateurs cherchent pourtant à encourager. Il faut du temps et des moyens pour légitimer une nouvelle forme d’habitus culturel.
Instrumentalisme et primordialisme
28 Les références à des événements et des personnages historiques dans les Balkans ont parfois produit le résultat escompté, et parfois non. Les leaders et les intellectuels nationalistes ont parfois étendu leur popularité en se présentant comme les champions d’une tradition nationale vénérable ; ils ont parfois été contraints d’imiter leurs prédécesseurs “héroïques”. Quoiqu’il en soit, que les populations locales aient été incitées à l’action sur la base des luttes collectives, des souffrances et des injustices passées (datant parfois de plusieurs siècles) ou non, de telles références ont, le plus souvent, eu pour la majorité des accents de vérité. Il s’agit d’un phénomène oublié depuis longtemps dans les sociétés occidentales modernes32, dont l’éloignement du passé lointain ne peut pas être attribué aux tactiques différentes des politiciens et des intellectuels occidentaux. Comprendre la pertinence plus ancrée des références ethno- historiques dans les luttes politiques actuelles représente une tâche indispensable si nous voulons comprendre la dynamique des rivalités nationales actuelles dans les Balkans.
29 La critique présente des théories “instrumentalistes” n’implique pas que les groupes ethniques ou les nations balkaniques doivent être analysés comme étant naturels, une association humaine éternelle, selon la “tradition primordialiste”. Si les études récentes ont établi quelque chose, c’est que de tels groupes ne sont pas des communautés primales représentant des extensions directes de liens de parenté, reliant les individus dans le temps et l’espace sur le fondement d’un “sang”, d’un territoire, ou d’autres éléments humains communs. Les nations et les groupes ethniques doivent, sans aucun doute, être considérés comme des entités historiques ayant émergé à partir des expériences, des pensées et des actions individuelles et ayant subi de larges transformations. Dans les Balkans, toutefois, ces processus se sont largement révélés être un phénomène populaire33. Une partie essentielle de leur dynamique a été dessinée à la base et a surpassé les efforts manipulatoires et la propagande des politiciens et des intellectuels nationalistes. L’identité nationale et l’ethnicité ont formé une partie d’un horizon existentiel qui, pour des millions d’individus, a non seulement inclus la distribution des fonctions et des rares ressources, mais également fourni un début de réponse aux questions relatives au sens de la vie, de la mort et de l’oubli.
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30 Les Balkans semblent représenter un exemple de ce qu’Anthony Smith a dénommé le “primordialisme des participants”, à savoir un sentiment de partager des liens ethniques originaires irrésistibles avec les membres d’une même communauté ethnique34. De tels sentiments représentent « des données vitales pour enquêter sur l’ethnicité » et ne doivent pas être rejetés pour leur manque d’adéquation avec les interprétations en termes “primordialistes”35. Ils doivent être sérieusement étudiés par les tenants du “constructivisme” ou de “l’instrumentalisme” qui proclament que les identités et les liens sociaux sont ce que les individus en font, en tant qu’agents sociaux. Porter l’attention exclusivement sur les capacités manipulatrices de leaders peu scrupuleux, aussi important cela soit-il, peut être conceptuellement élégant, moralement commode et politiquement opératoire. Il semble toutefois qu’une approche intellectuellement problématique puisse aboutir à des diagnostiques, des pronostics et des prescriptions politiques contestables.
31 Sur le territoire de l’ancienne Yougoslavie, le “primordialisme des participants” qui a prévalu parmi les membres des différents groupes nationaux a été considérablement renforcé par le déploiement de la violence. À court terme, la primauté des conceptions ethnocentriques de l’identité nationale pourrait peut-être être atténuée par quelques changements dans le système éducatif. Afin d’être effectives, ces modifications ne doivent pas mettre l’accent sur l’inadéquation, ni le manque d’authenticité des identifications ethniques, mais plutôt se concentrer sur une présentation mitigée des luttes de “libération” des ethnes voisines. Une telle présentation démontrerait qu’aucune des ethnes de la région n’a le monopole sur la souffrance et le droit à une “rédemption historique”. Des changements plus profonds des identifications et classifications sociales ne peuvent que difficilement avoir lieu par la seule action de quelques organisations non gouvernementales locales et internationales, le maintien de quelques sources d’informations indépendantes et des pressions politiques, ou même militaires, des gouvernements occidentaux. Ils ne peuvent résulter que de processus sociaux complexes qui risquent fort d’être douloureux et de prendre un certain temps à se réaliser. Dans les mois à venir, une défaite serbe percutante pourrait probablement tailler les ailes du nationalisme serbe. Le problème est que le coût humain en serait très élevé et la société serbe souffrirait probablement durant des décennies de la détérioration de la vie publique que la démobilisation sociale et le cynisme excessif généralisé peuvent attirer – un sort trop bien connu par la société bulgare depuis la fin des années 1920.
NOTES
1. Voir Väyrynen (Raimo), Towards a Theory of Ethnic Conflicts and Their Resolution, Occasional Paper #6 (Notre Dame : Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, 1994) ; Ryan (Stephen), Ethnic Conflict and International Relations, Aldershot (UK) : Dartmouth, 1995 (2nd ed.). 2. Ce lien m’a été suggéré par Martha Merritt, un membre inestimable de mon comité de discussion à the University of Notre Dame.
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3. Steiner (George), In Bluebeard's Castle : Some Notes Towards the Redifinition of Culture, New Haven : Yale University Press, 1971, p. 3. 4. Milosz (Czeslaw), « About Our Europe », in Kostrzewa (Robert), ed., Between East and West : Writings from Kultura, New York : Hill and Wang, 1990, pp. 100-101. 5. Voir Lord (Albert B.), « Nationalism and the Muses in Balkan Slavic Literature in the Modern Period », in Jelavich (Charles), Jelavich (Barbara), eds., The Balkans in Transition: Essays on the Development of Balkan Life and Politics since the Eighteenth Century, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1963 ; Halpern (Joel Martin), Hammel (Eugene A.), « Observations on the Intellectual History of Ethnology and Other Social Sciences in Yugoslavia », Comparative Studies in Society and History, 11 (1), 1969. 6. Cf. Just (Roger), « Triumph of the Ethnos », in Tonkin (Elizabeth), McDonald (Maryon), Chapman (Malcolm), eds., History and Ethnicity, London : Routledge, 1989. 7. La présentation de cet élément doit beaucoup à la contribution de Charles Taylor à the University of Notre Dame en avril 1992. 8. Mann (Michael), The Sources of Social Power,vol. 1, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 477. 9. Rebecca West médita sur la nature anarchique “du Slave” qui, selon elle, l’empêchait d’être le sujet de quelque pouvoir politique que ce soit. Cf. West (Rebecca), Black Lamb and Grey Falcon : A Journey Through Yugoslavia, New York : Viking Press, 1941, p. 306. 10. Daskalov (Roumen), Building up a National Identity : The Case of Bulgaria, working paper SPS no. 94/11 (Florence : European University Institute, Department of Political and Social Sciences, 1994), p. 4. 11. Voir Hall (Brian), The Impossible Country : A Journey through the Last Days of Yugoslavia, Boston : David R. Godine, 1994, p. 139. 12. Konstitutsiia na Republika Bulgaria [Constitution de la République de Bulgarie], Sofia : Sofia Press Agency, 1991, art. 25. 13. Cf. RFE/RL Newsline, 09/04/99. 14. Voir Simić (Andrei), « Obstacles to the Development of a Yugoslav National Consciousness : Ethnic Identity and Folk Culture in the Balkans », Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 1 (1), 1991, p. 31. 15. Voir Hayden (Robert M.), « Constitutional Nationalism in the Formerly Yugoslav Republics », Slavic Review, 51 (4), 1992. 16. Cf. 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, Washington D.C. : Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993. 17. Voir Elshtain (Jean Bethke), « Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice », Social Research, 58, 1991. 18. Une image véhiculée avec force par Kaplan (Robert D.), Balkan Ghosts : A Journey through History, New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1993. 19. Voir Keegan (John), A History of Warfare, Knopf, 1993, pp. 61-76. 20. Cf. Brubaker (Rogers), Nationalism Reframed : Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 55-76. 21. Čolović (Ivan), Divlja književnost : Etnolingvističko proućavanje paraliterature [La littérature sauvage : étude linguistique de la paralittérature], Belgrade : Nolit, 1984 ; Bordel ratnika : Folklor, politika i rat [Le bordel des soldats : folklore, politique et guerre], Belgrade : Biblioteka XX vek, 1993. 22. Srpski Pokret Obnove [Mouvement serbe du renouveau], le parti de V. Drašković, qui se trouvait dans l’opposition avant de devenir Premier ministre de la Yougoslavie il y a quelques mois. 23. Čolović (Ivan), Divlja književnost (op.cit.), p. 286.
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24. Voir Arnaudov (Mihail), « Naroden epos » [Épopée populaire], Epos, 2 ; Arnaudov (Mihail), ed., Bulgarski narodni pesni [Chants populaires bulgares], Sofia : Hemus, n.d., p. ix ; Radost (Ivanova), Epos, Obred, Mit [Épopée, rite, mythe], Sofia : BAN, 1995 (2nd éd.), pp. 129-131. 25. Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, État indépendant croate. 26. Sugar (Peter F.), « Ethnicity in Eastern Europe », in Sugar (Peter F.), ed., Ethnic Diversity and Conflict in Eastern Europe, Santa Barbara : ABC-Clio, 1980, p. 432. 27. Pavlowitch (Stevan K.), The Improbable Survivor: Yugoslavia and Its Problems, 1918-1988, Columbus : Ohio State University, 1988, p. 94. 28. Cf. Smith (Anthony D.), Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, Oxford : Polity Press, 1995, p. 160 ; Anderson (Benedict), Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London : Verso, 1991 (rev. ed.), pp. 10-12. 29. Hughes (Robert), interview à 60 Minutes, CBS, 28/12/97. 30. Voir Steiner (George), In Bluebeard's Castle : Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture, New Haven : Yale University Press, 1971, pp. 23-24. 31. Cf. Brubaker (Rogers), Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 72. 32. Voir Plumb (J. H.), The Death of the Past, Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1969 ; Bridenbaugh (Carl), « The Great Mutation », American Historical Review, 68 (2), 1963. 33. Cf. Čolović (Ivan), Divlja književnost (op.cit.); Sutton (David), Images of History : The Past and Present on a Greek Island, Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1995. 34. Voir Smith (Anthony D.), op.cit., pp. 34-35. 35. Ibid., p. 34.
AUTEUR
IVELIN SARDAMOV I. Sardamov est professeur à l’université américaine de Bulgarie. Ce texte a été présenté à la 4ème convention annuelle de l’Association for the Study of Nationalities (New York, 15-17/04/99).
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Formation nationale et nationalisme dans l’aire de peuplement albanais
Albert Doja
1 Les événements dramatiques qui ont secoué l’Europe durant dix années à la suite du démembrement de la Yougoslavie, surtout le dernier épisode retentissant qui a fait s’affronter les Serbes et les Albanais pour la paternité du Kosovo, ont impliqué aussi l’ensemble de la communauté internationale pour la défense d’un certain modèle de société et de relations entre groupes ethniques. Les opinions publiques en revanche, abasourdies par les bruits médiatiques et intellectualistes, n’ont toujours pas saisi la signification et les raisons du conflit, que tout le monde espère voir finir une fois pour toutes avec ce dernier et final épisode sanglant. Après une introduction sur les caractéristiques de la région définie comme une aire culturelle, je passerai en revue l’histoire du mouvement national et la formation de la nation albanaise au tournant du siècle, en essayant de rendre compte de l’affrontement des nationalismes serbe et albanais qui n’ont pas manqué de s’exacerber à tout moment. En intégrant l’approche anthropologique aux considérations historiques et géopolitiques sur la région et la culture albanaise, l’article tentera de poser une question qui me paraît essentielle pour la compréhension des phénomènes actuels, à savoir : l’héritage historique et les identités culturelles peuvent-ils raisonnablement, sinon justifier, au moins expliquer les conflits ethniques et le nationalisme, ou au contraire servent-ils tout simplement à déterminer et au mieux à rationaliser les relations interethniques entre groupes sociaux ?
2 Contrairement aux suppositions anciennes, les groupes ethniques et les cultures n’ont jamais été des entités d’une durée temporelle constante ni d’une auto-définition dérivée indépendamment des contacts extérieurs. Ils se sont formés et articulés au contact les uns des autres, parfois en conflit, parfois pacifiquement à travers les divisions de travail. Les cultures tribales, décrites comme apparemment insulaires par les anciens anthropologues, étaient rarement aussi isolées et elles le sont considérablement moins aujourd’hui. Le vieux concept de tribu est largement remplacé par le terme “groupe ethnique”, utilisé souvent comme synonyme de “culture”. Le changement décisif n’est donc pas la disparition des groupes ethniques mais le degré
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plus élevé de l’interaction entre eux-mêmes. Un résultat remarquable, qui semble échapper aux théories classiques sur la modernisation, est le renforcement des solidarités locales et particularistes. Les nationalistes et les apologistes des cultures locales donnent toujours la proéminence à la durée temporelle constante (l’inaltérable essence des origines) des entités ethniques dont ils font la propagande. En revanche, l’anthropologie actuelle s’appuie sur les groupes ethniques et les cultures en tant que “constructions”. Elles sont sujettes à de multiples pressions adaptatives, elles se transforment en conséquence et peuvent devenir sujettes à des manipulations délibérées.
L’aire culturelle
3 La considération de la région comme une aire culturelle se définit comme un champ composite. L’aire de peuplement albanais n’est pas seulement celle d’un pays de l’Europe de l’est des politologues contemporains, ni celle d’un pays de l’Europe balkanique post-byzantine ou ex-ottomane, pas plus le lieu d’expansion de certains modèles occidentaux ou d’enracinement d’identités locales, mais bien tout cela à la fois. Dans le contexte européen, les sociétés du sud-est, à l’intersection du monde méditerranéen et du reste de l’Europe, reflètent comme un miroir grossissant la civilisation “moderne” dans son ensemble. Dans une perspective comparative, le domaine géopolitique de l’Europe du sud-est peut faire l’objet d’investigations approfondies, dont l’explication ne repose que sur la définition de l’interdépendance de divers facteurs aboutissant parfois à des contradictions historiques. Au long de l’évolution historique, les facteurs politiques, culturels et idéologiques (tradition gréco- romaine et byzantine, influences orientales, tendances d’occidentalisation, etc.) ont toujours joué un rôle plus important que les conditions sociales et économiques, contrairement à ce qu’il en fut en Europe occidentale. Dans ce sens, ces sociétés nous invitent à une révision de la manière dont l’ensemble de la civilisation européenne se conçoit.
4 L’histoire culturelle, sociale et géopolitique des sociétés sud-est européennes et de la société albanaise en particulier constitue l’un des développements de ce qu’on a appelé la “question d’Orient”. À moins qu’on ne la situe dans une perspective plus longue1, on définit couramment celle-ci comme l’ensemble des problèmes géopolitiques posés, depuis le milieu du XVIIIème siècle, par la décomposition de l’Empire ottoman. La forme même de l’expression “question d’Orient” indique bien son origine. Formulée par des hommes d’États, diplomates et intellectuels occidentaux, elle dénote un impérialisme ethnocentrique dans lequel les grandes puissances, tour à tour alliées et rivales, poursuivent à la fois le maintien d’un équilibre européen et la réalisation de leurs objectifs propres. Dans cette optique, la question d’Orient se réduisait à une série de problèmes politiques à régler. On peut cependant, en changeant de point de vue, donner à cette expression une signification plus générale, celle d’une crise interne à une “région intermédiaire”2, située entre l’Occident, l’Orient et l’Afrique, et centrée sur la Méditerranée. Prendre conscience de son unité dynamique, c’est effacer la coupure entre l’est et l’ouest, le sud et le nord et reconnaître le caractère synthétique de la civilisation européenne, assimilant les traditions romaine et hellénique, byzantine et ottomane, slave et germanique, chrétienne et islamique, démocratique et autocratique.
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5 Depuis des époques lointaines, des mouvements de populations brutaux ou pacifiques ont perduré, dont l’histoire a dressé une liste impressionnante. Ces vagues successives se sont mêlées en une alchimie d’intégrations et de rejets qui a fait naître les peuples sud-est européens actuels. Le modèle républicain à la française a voulu les enfermer dans des États-nations mais ils débordent tous de leurs frontières trop rigides. Porteurs d’une culture millénaire ou pluri-millénaire, ils forment dans la péninsule le tissu humain de base sur lequel sont venus se greffer les nouveaux apports des conquérants ou des colons de l’époque historique.
6 L’un des principaux substrats du peuplement sud-est européen est constitué par des tribus illyro-thraces d’origine indo-européenne. Alors que les Grecs ont fait mouvement vers le sud au milieu du IIème millénaire avant J.-C., en se mélangeant aux autochtones policés par la Crète pour donner naissance à la civilisation mycénienne et par la suite à celle de l’Athènes classique, les Illyriens se sont perpétué durant deux millénaires non sans de nombreux apports successifs, en particulier celui des Latins et plus tard celui des Slaves, pour donner naissance au peuple albanais. La colonisation romaine s’est développée à partir de la Grèce et si la civilisation gréco-romaine préservait la langue et la culture d’époque hellénistique, les autres populations intégrées à l’Empire, à l’exception des Albanais, ont été romanisées. La pénétration des Slaves entraîna une slavisation progressive de toutes les populations sud-est européennes, à laquelle ont échappé à nouveau les Albanais, mais aussi les Grecs et les Roumains, qui ont assimilé les nouveaux venus. Byzance succède à Rome comme État impérial et domine la région jusqu’au XVème siècle. Durant toute une période de dissidences, surtout après le schisme cérulaire en 1054, les Églises orthodoxes d’Orient partagent la région avec l’Église catholique de Rome. Avec la chute de l’Empire byzantin, c’est le tour de l’Empire ottoman auquel se rattache une tradition islamique. Le christianisme a subsisté, mais contrôlé et persécuté par les Ottomans, disputés parfois par l’Empire habsbourgeois, qui renouait avec la tradition catholique.
7 De ce formidable brassage de populations subsiste une très grande diversité culturelle, ethnique, linguistique, religieuse et politique. C’est le lieu de partage par excellence entre les Empires romains d’Orient et d’Occident, entre l’islam et le christianisme, entre l’orthodoxie et le catholicisme, entre les blocs du Traité de l’Atlantique Nord et du Pacte de Varsovie. Au cœur même de ce foyer se trouve, sûrement plus que tout autre composante, le cas albanais “faible chaînon” (Braudel) entre le monde latin, grec et slave. Car le seul exemple albanais renferme en soi probablement l’essentiel d’une série de problématiques comparatives culturelles, historiques et géopolitiques. L’approche d’une population partagée de part et d’autre d’une frontière politique (les Albanais et les Kosovars), recoupant structures sociales et politiques, nationalismes et religions, relations interethniques et migrations, est certainement très riche d’enseignements.
8 Il se révèle pourtant quasiment impossible d’articuler ensemble les données localisées dans le sud-est européen, malgré les tentatives, notamment des ethnologues, de mettre en ordre la diversité sud-est européenne : elles ont été effectuées selon des critères hétérogènes entre eux. Les quelques découpages empiriques proposés par les anthropologues à l’échelle européenne3 ne se superposent que grossièrement aux cartes de l’Europe du sud-est, susceptibles d’être dressées en fonction de critères géographiques, de la répartition des éléments de culture matérielle, des familles linguistiques, des aires religieuses ou encore des ensembles historiques, aux frontières
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floues et changeantes, tels qu’ils portent les marques accumulées des événements majeurs du passé sud-est européen.
9 Ces découpages ne coïncident pas davantage, même s’ils y font souvent référence, avec la carte des substrats “ethniques”, qui renvoie davantage aux illusions de la “chasse aux ancêtres” qu’à une réalité pertinente. La diversité balkanique est effectivement renforcée par le fait que les populations données pour homogènes par la tradition des études historiques, voire ethnologiques, ont pour cadres d’identité collective des sous- ensembles sociaux et territoriaux. Il serait trop simple d’imaginer, à la manière des historiens nationalistes du XIXème siècle, une stabilité de blocs ethniques justifiant des frontières modernes intangibles. D’ailleurs, le lien ethnique n’est pas nécessairement déterminant pour rendre compte de la particularité des genres de vie. Ainsi on pourrait multiplier les exemples qui mettent en évidence le poids de l’histoire dans les formations des entités culturelles d’aujourd’hui. La conquête ottomane, avant tout, a ébranlé les groupes ethniques. La politique des sultans n’a pas reculé devant des transferts de populations et des entreprises de colonisation, tandis que l’activité économique dans les frontières d’un empire étendu à trois continents se traduisait par d’amples mouvements de populations. C’est surtout à partir du XIXème siècle que l’appartenance ethnique est mise en avant dans le sud-est européen pour soutenir les prétentions à l’indépendance. Les revendications s’expriment alors dans la littérature, dans les recherches et les publications folkloriques ou l’organisation des musées ethnographiques.
10 Il faudrait ainsi, paradoxalement peut-être, rechercher une insaisissable unité, et donc la pertinence de l’idée d’une culture, d’une civilisation et d’une histoire albanaise et sud-est européenne, dans cette diversité même, en quelque sorte dans une coexistence des dissemblances, préservées plus fortement qu’ailleurs. La démarche, ainsi définie, pourrait conférer à cette partie de l’Europe un visage distinct tout en déterminant une problématique qui lui soit proprement applicable. Les études sud-est européennes sont extrêmement vastes et complexes. Sujette aux influences extérieures rivales autant qu’aux pressions internes, l’aire sud-est européenne est un champ d’expérience pour des systèmes alternatifs.
11 La civilisation sud-est européenne devrait être comprise dans son ensemble, chacune de ses composantes ayant fait partie, à une époque historique donnée, d’une construction culturelle, religieuse ou politique plus vaste. Elle se situe à une aire de confrontation sur laquelle des Empires et des États aspirant à la puissance ont constamment débordé, où orthodoxie, catholicisme et islam se touchent et s’entremêlent, par-dessus des découpages et des espaces de coexistence ethno-culturels et ethno-linguistiques différents. Autant de particularismes et de clivages discrets, souvent ignorés ou dénaturés par le modernisme actuellement dominant dans les cultures nationales, tout comme autrefois par la volonté de nivellement des grands corps impériaux. Aujourd’hui l’anthropologie sociale et historique, la sociologie, les recherches sur les structures familiales, sur les économies traditionnelles, sur les littératures orales, ou sur les formes nombreuses de solidarité sociale et culturelle, tentent d’une manière ou d’une autre de redécouvrir et de réévaluer les différences et les ressemblances4.
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Le mouvement national
12 La formation de la nation albanaise, comme celle des autres nations balkaniques, s’est effectuée dans le cadre du démantèlement de l’Empire ottoman qui est ébranlé de l’intérieur par les mouvements nationaux tout en perdant du terrain sous les coups de la Russie et de l’Autriche-Hongrie. L’expansionnisme russe, dans sa poussée vers le sud, a débouché en 1774 sur la mer Noire, auparavant Mare Ottomanicum. Dès lors, soucieux de contrôler les détroits, il s’appuie sur les peuples balkaniques, qui recherchent également son soutien. Les puissances occidentales s’efforcent de le mettre en échec, soit en lui disputant la faveur desdits peuples, soit en s’alliant militairement avec la Porte, comme dans la guerre de Crimée (1854-1856). Contradictoirement, elles s’appliquent, soit à prolonger la survie de l’Empire ottoman, soit à encourager les mouvements nationaux qui s’y développent. Il ne s’agit pas d’ailleurs de simples mouvements d’émancipation nationale. Chez les bourgeoisies serbe, grecque, bulgare et autres, le désir de libérer la nation et d’accéder au pouvoir politique se prolonge dans un expansionnisme territorial quelque peu mégalomane, bardé de justifications historiques. Les Grecs veulent reconstituer l’Empire byzantin au nom de la Megale Idea, la “Grande Idée”, les Serbes se réclament de l’empire de Dušan, les Bulgares de celui de Siméon ou de Kaloyan. Les Albanais, seuls dépourvus de références impériales, n’en revendiqueront pas moins un assez large espace, inspirés plutôt par des références ethno-linguistiques.
13 Dans le courant du XIXème siècle, quatre États nationaux, autonomes puis indépendants, se sont formés dans la partie européenne de l’Empire ottoman : la Grèce, la Serbie, le Monténégro et la Bulgarie. Après le Congrès de Berlin de 1878, l’Empire ottoman ne conserve en Europe continentale que la Thrace, la Macédoine, l’Épire, le territoire de l’Albanie actuelle, le Kosovo et le Sandjak de Novi Pazar. Ce sont pour les États balkaniques des territoires à prendre. Apparaît alors une zone d’interférences entre prétentions territoriales dont la complexité a placé la question d’Orient dans des conditions de virtualités nationales et étatiques multiples, d’incertitude totale.
14 Cette complexité et cette incertitude tiennent d’une part à ce que ces territoires sont les derniers à conquérir, d’autre part à ce que le processus d’affirmation nationale y est moins avancé qu’ailleurs. Les États balkaniques, produits de nationalismes asynchrones, constitués par accrétions territoriales successives, y sont en compétition pour la capture identitaire des populations, ce qui devait ouvrir la voie au contrôle politique de l’espace. Ainsi, la détermination nationale des populations chrétiennes de la Macédoine constitue un enjeu entre la Serbie, la Bulgarie et la Grèce, mais aussi entre les autorités religieuses, sans compter les ingérences extra-balkaniques5. Dans ce contexte, les Albanais sont confondus avec les Turcs s’ils sont musulmans, avec les Grecs s’ils sont orthodoxes. Quant à l’intelligentsia serbe, elle les dépeint comme de dangereux sauvages, incapables de constituer une nation et de se gouverner. Ses accointances avec la bourgeoisie française contribuent à la massive et efficace reproduction d’une description digne de la vision antique du barbare et conforme à la vision coloniale des populations d’outre-mer et du sauvage6. « Les Albanais, écrivait Marcel Mauss avec un dédain exemplaire, sont dans un stade de civilisation toujours très primitif, plus primitif certes que les Indo-Européens au moment de leur entrée dans l’histoire. »7
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15 Ainsi, dans la seconde moitié du XIXème siècle, l’affirmation nationale albanaise est cependant sinon floue du moins mal reconnue. Pour Bismarck, au Congrès de Berlin (1878), il n’y a pas de nation albanaise et l’Albanie n’est qu’une expression géographique, comme l’était l’Italie pour Metternich deux tiers de siècle plus tôt. Les sources turques ne considèrent pas le mouvement national albanais comme une réalité autonome et traitent l’histoire de ces régions comme une partie de l’histoire ottomane en général. Hors de Turquie, de nombreux historiens balkaniques considèrent aujourd’hui encore, comme les voyageurs et les diplomates d’il y a 100 ans, que la fragmentation religieuse des Albanais interdisait chez eux, au contraire des autres peuples, la formation d’une conscience nationale. Dans cette optique, le mouvement national albanais, de 1878 à 1912, ne serait que le produit d’influences et d’intérêts étrangers, ce dont on pouvait déduire que le partage du territoire d’une non-nation n’avait rien d’illégitime.
16 Il est vrai que le mouvement national albanais, à cette époque, est une réalité difficile à comprendre. Il est, avec celui des Macédoniens, le moins avancé des Balkans. En première approche, les Albanais paraissent alors ne se différencier indiscutablement de leurs voisins qu’en tant qu’albanophones, alors que la Macédoine slave n’est qu’un continuum linguistique entre Serbes et Bulgares, situation propre à alimenter entre Belgrade et Sofia un débat sans fin sur son identité ethnique. Mais la spécificité linguistique, constitutive pour les Albanais eux-mêmes de leur identité nationale, a pu être tenue par d’autres pour insignifiante, au sens propre, quand on exagérait de façon colossale les emprunts et surtout à ignorer totalement les faits de structure linguistique. C’est l’existence même d’une nation albanaise qui, pour l’Occident, paraissait difficile à saisir.
17 Les raisons de cette difficulté sont de plusieurs ordres : l’outillage conceptuel des observateurs occidentaux, leur sous-information, l’ambiance tout à fait passionnelle de cette question, enfin le comportement des Albanais eux-mêmes8. L’Occident classait alors les peuples d’Europe orientale selon une échelle de valeur qui est, en fait, une échelle de distance ethno-culturelle ressentie, dont rend compte, parmi d’autres, l’ouvrage de Marcel Mauss sur la Nation9. Le raisonnement procède également en fonction de l’utilité géopolitique supposée. C’est ainsi qu’en France on place en tête les Grecs, à cause des références à l’Antiquité classique, et les Polonais catholiques que l’on peut opposer mentalement à (ou utiliser contre) l’adversaire du moment, Russie, Prusse ou Autriche. Puis viennent les Roumains et leur néo-latinité alors en voie de consolidation à l’école de la France et de l’Italie, les Slaves orthodoxes des Balkans et notamment les Serbes, francophiles et adversaires de l’Autriche. Enfin viennent les Albanais, souvent réduits à leur majorité musulmane et mal distingués des Turcs. Le fait musulman accroît ici la distance ressentie.
18 Influencée par les idéologies nationales en présence, la connaissance de la structure ethnique des Balkans demeure soumise à de grandes controverses. Il en est de même du mouvement national albanais, objet des jugements les plus contradictoires. Ce mouvement national s’est longtemps cantonné dans une attitude réformatrice et défensive. D’une part, obtenir de la Porte le regroupement de tous les territoires ethniques albanais dans un unique vilayet, “province” autonome, où la langue des autochtones serait enseignée et comprise de l’administration. D’autre part, s’opposer à toute cession, par l’Empire ottoman, des terres en question. Ce qui explique en partie la difficulté, pour les observateurs étrangers, de percevoir une telle position comme
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l’expression d’un mouvement national. Les Albanais ont été poussés en avant, jusqu’à la revendication de l’indépendance complète, à la fois par les appétits territoriaux des États voisins et par l’autoritarisme des gouvernements ottomans, sourds à leur demande.
19 Leur mouvement national coïncide d’ailleurs avec des mouvements d’une signification toute différente : la propension traditionnelle à la révolte, mais aussi la résistance conservatrice aux tentatives de modernisation administrative décidées à Istanbul, car centralisatrices et appliquées autoritairement. Ce fut déjà le cas à l’époque des réformes connues dans l’histoire ottomane sous le nom des Tanzimat (1839-1878). Il y a dans les revendications albanaises des aspects contradictoires, qui correspondent à des clivages sociaux, idéologiques et confessionnels. Les féodaux militaires et les chefs des corporations de métier désiraient retrouver leur situation économique antérieure et leur place éminente au sommet de l’échelle sociale. Les mesures centralisatrices de la Porte étaient également perçues comme attentatoires à l’autonomie traditionnelle des Montagnes. Le reste des masses paysannes se dressait avant tout contre la charge intolérable des impôts et le lourd fardeau du nizam, le nouveau service militaire obligatoire de 9 à 11 ans, qui accéléraient leur ruine économique. Les couches citadines protestaient contre l’administration bureaucratique, contre les fonctionnaires corrompus et contre les exactions manifestes. Somme toute, il s’agissait là d’une opposition spontanée, qui ne se posait aucun objectif précis et qui n’était pas en mesure de proposer les solutions de rechange.
20 Toutefois, le mouvement que cette résistance engendrait n’en préparait pas moins les conditions favorables au développement du mouvement national albanais. À travers la résistance aux réformes des Tanzimat apparaissent les premiers éléments d’une conscience nationale. À la suite de ses importants succès, l’insurrection paysanne de 1847, par exemple, subit une évolution que les révoltes antérieures n’avaient pas connue. Des liens interrégionaux furent établis par les forces insurgées et un comité de coordination fut organisé par les chefs des différentes régions. De plus, l’idée de l’unité nationale commença à germer, car les insurgés déclaraient maintenant qu’ils combattaient non plus pour leurs intérêts locaux mais pour tous les vilayets d’Albanie. Ce sont précisément ces nouveaux phénomènes dans l’évolution des idées et l’établissement des liens interrégionaux qui ont laissé une masse de chants populaires à caractère historique et national dans la tradition culturelle des Albanais10.
21 Le retard et les contradictions du mouvement national albanais s’expliquent par des facteurs internes, division confessionnelle, majorité musulmane culturellement plus proche des Ottomans, retard culturel et retard du développement économique et social qui rend compte de la faiblesse de la bourgeoisie. Les grands féodaux, très influents, avaient les mêmes intérêts que les Ottomans et ne se révoltaient que pour défendre leurs privilèges. La bourgeoisie, dans l’espoir de se concilier l’appui indispensable des chefs conservateurs dans la lutte pour l’autonomie, évitait de poser la question de la réforme agraire, alors que celle-ci était posée par les autres mouvements nationaux balkaniques. Le facteur externe est le manque de soutien international. Cet ensemble de faiblesses menaçait le peuple albanais dans son existence même. D’où les multiples appels à l’unité, véhiculés, comme bien d’autres messages politiques de ce temps-là, sous forme de poèmes et de chants.
22 La crise d’Orient qui commença en 1875 plaça le mouvement national albanais devant des choix difficiles, le Protocole de Londres (mars 1877) ignorant les Albanais. Le
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dilemme était de s’engager contre l’Empire au côté des peuples chrétiens qui déniaient l’existence d’une nationalité albanaise et qui renouvelaient leurs prétentions sur les terres albanaises ou de se ranger sous les bannières du sultan mais d’obtenir de lui en contrepartie la reconnaissance de cette nationalité. À l’initiative d’Abdul Frashëri, se tint à Janina une réunion de notables qui réclama l’autonomie de toute l’aire de peuplement albanais, la réunion en une seule province des quatre vilayets qui partageaient l’aire de peuplement albanais, avec une administration locale et la langue albanaise dans l’administration et l’enseignement. Le mémorandum de Janina demeura cependant sans effet. De plus, durant la guerre russo-turque de 1878, les Serbes envahirent le Kosovo, les Monténégrins la région de Shkodra, les Grecs celle de Saranda, tandis que le traité de San Stefano (mars 1878) englobait dans la Grande Bulgarie Korça, Pogradec, Dibra, Gostivar et Tetova. Face à ce démembrement, Abdul Frashëri convoqua des représentants des trois confessions. Les 80 délégués, venus des quatre vilayets peuplés d’Albanais, Kosovo, Shkodra, Monastir et Janina, décidèrent, selon la vieille tradition albanaise, de former une “ligue nationale”, passée dans l’histoire sous le nom de Ligue de Prizren. Elle fut cependant tiraillée entre les tendances conservatrices et nationalistes. Les conservateurs, représentés par l’aristocratie beylicale et le clergé musulman, étaient soucieux surtout de maintenir l’intégrité de l’Empire contre les nationalismes chrétiens, ce qui préserverait à la limite l’intégrité des terres albanaises. Les autres mettaient au premier plan l’union des Albanais des trois confessions pour imposer à la Porte l’autonomie du pays à l’intérieur de l’Empire.
23 La Ligue de Prizren avait du moins posé la question albanaise devant l’opinion internationale. En effet, aucune des puissances participant au Congrès de Berlin ne s’attendait que leurs décisions concernant les territoires albanais puissent susciter une telle opposition de la part des populations locales organisées par la Ligue de Prizren. C’est ce qui devait les obliger, pendant plus de trois ans, à revenir plus d’une fois sur les décisions qu’elles prenaient. Toutefois la revendication politique moderne de l’autonomie et de l’indépendance nationale ne l’emporte clairement chez les Albanais qu’à partir de 1909.
24 En ce début du XXème siècle, à la veille des guerres balkaniques (1912-1913), la quasi- totalité des régions albanaises appartenaient à l’Empire ottoman (à quelques détails près : Ulqini, par exemple, était au Monténégro depuis 1880). Le mouvement national albanais, pris entre la répression ottomane et les ambitions territoriales des États balkaniques et sans grand appui extérieur, ne put obtenir l’indépendance que d’à peine la moitié de l’aire de peuplement albanais dans les Balkans. À partir de 1913, une grande partie des Albanais va constituer une minorité nationale au sein de deux États- nations agrandis, la Serbie et le Monténégro, puis au sein d’un État plurinational qui tente de fonctionner comme un État-nation, le royaume des Serbes, Croates et Slovènes. D’autres Albanais, aussi nombreux, se sont trouvés en Grèce.11 Le reliquat est enfin contenu dans les frontières d’une Albanie sous-dimensionnée.
L’affrontement des nationalismes
25 Les circonstances qui ont déterminé, à l’issue des guerres balkaniques, l’établissement d’une frontière coupant en deux, ou plutôt en trois, ce territoire, sont fort complexes car elles mettent en jeu, outre les rapports conflictuels du gouvernement ottoman avec
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ses sujets albanais, les intérêts de quatre États nationaux déjà constitués dans les Balkans et ceux de six grandes puissances européennes.
26 Les arguments majeurs de cette amputation (au moins en ce qui concerne les régions du nord-est, au sud la situation n’étant pas d’ailleurs différente) restent toujours les prétentions serbes que ces régions appartenaient historiquement aux Serbes. Or l’application de la conception rétrospective serbe se heurtait à une difficulté majeure. Cette région, récupérée, était en majorité peuplée d’Albanais. D’où un investissement intellectuel énorme dans une querelle déjà ancienne du premier occupant, une querelle attisée et exacerbée à tout moment. L’historiographie serbe du XIXème siècle s’est efforcé de démontrer que les Albanais sont des tard-venus dans les Balkans. On les supposait, entre autres hypothèses, originaires du Caucase. Les Albanais, au contraire, se sont affirmés descendants des Illyriens. Le Kosovo, la Dardanie antique, relativement épargnée par les invasions slaves des VI-VIIème siècles qui, descendant des contrées danubiennes, se dirigeaient vers Thessalonique, aurait eu constamment un peuplement majoritairement albanais. Débats et controverses sur les origines illyriennes des Albanais se sont pourtant succédés depuis le XVIIIème siècle parmi les spécialistes dans l’affrontement des thèses thrace ou pélasgienne, voire même caucasienne.
27 Malgré un hiatus de preuves historiques du VIIème au XI ème siècles, ils ont avancé à l’appui de la thèse illyrienne des arguments d’ordre linguistique, essentiellement toponymique, ou de continuité de la culture matérielle. Pour la grande majorité des historiens médiévistes et la plupart des savants linguistes, l’absence de documents historiques n’est pas déterminante. Selon eux, les Illyriens ne disparurent pas entièrement en tant qu’ethnie. Les populations qui échappèrent à la romanisation et à l’extermination de la part des Barbares, ne furent slavisées que dans le Nord et à l’Est de l’Illyrie, alors qu’à l’Ouest elles échappèrent à la slavisation en se repliant dans les montagnes, loin de l’attention des écrivains et des chancelleries de l’époque. Les opinions en matière de définition de cette zone de repli ne sont cependant pas unanimes. Thunmann (1774), Leake (1812), Hahn (1853), Fallmerayer (1861), Sufflay (1913), Stadtmüller (1941) donnent chacun pour leur part des délimitations différentes de la zone. De leur côté, un grand nombre de linguistes, étudiant certains mots rares et un échantillon important de noms de lieux et de personnes légués par le monde illyrien, sont arrivés à la conclusion que la langue albanaise est en rapport de filiation directe avec l’illyrien, plus précisément avec l’un de ses dialectes.
28 Vers la fin du XVIIIème siècle apparaît la thèse dite thrace, soutenue aujourd’hui principalement par certains historiens et linguistes roumains ou serbes. Les principaux arguments à l’appui de cette thèse relèvent de la linguistique. Il s’agit de quelques rares mots que l’albanais a hérité du thrace, d’ailleurs tout aussi inconnu que l’illyrien. Il s’agit aussi de quelques autres vocables du dialecte latin du Danube, qui ont pénétré dans l’albanais et d’une série de mots albanais qui, de très bonne heure, se sont introduits dans le roumain. Sur la base de ces éléments, les tenants de cette thèse estiment que les Albanais sont les descendants non des Illyriens mais d’une tribu thrace. Ils pensent que leur première patrie est à rechercher non pas sur les rivages de l’Adriatique, mais dans les profondeurs des Balkans, à proximité des régions où se parlait le latin danubien et au voisinage des lieux où se constitua le peuple roumain. Les Albanais auraient quitté leur premier habitat pour parvenir à leur patrie actuelle au cours des migrations barbares (pour certains antérieurement à la venue des Slaves,
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pour d’autres postérieurement) demeurant ainsi, durant tout le haut Moyen Âge, comme un îlot dans l’océan slave.
29 On connaît bien aujourd’hui, à partir de sources narratives, la liste des tribus slaves établies au cours du VIIème siècle dans la péninsule balkanique. Leur répartition cartographique indique que durant ce siècle le gros des Slaves s’était fixé, pour ce qui concerne l’Illyrie, dans les régions actuelles de Slovénie, de Croatie, de Serbie, de Bosnie, d’Herzégovine, de Macédoine et dans l’intérieur de la Dalmatie. En dehors de ces pays, des masses importantes s’établirent en Thrace et certaines tribus en Thessalie et dans le Péloponèse. Aucune source historique du VIIème siècle ne parle d’établissement de tribus slaves dans la Nouvelle Épire, ni dans l’Ancienne Épire ou en Dardanie. Constantin Porphyrogénète mentionne une seule tribu slave, celle des Diocléens, installée selon lui dans la partie septentrionale de la Prévalitanie, approximativement sur les territoires du Monténégro actuel. Des Miracula sancti Demetrii et de la recension arménienne de Ptolémée, il ne ressort pas non plus que des tribus slaves se soient établies dans ces quatre provinces. Ainsi, si l’on tient compte du fait que dans l’Antiquité le sud de l’Ancienne Épire n’était pas habité par les Illyriens, mais par les Hellènes, il apparaît que de tout le vaste pays des Illyriens de l’époque antique, les seules régions qui ne se soumirent pas à la colonisation slave du VIIème au IXème siècles étaient la Nouvelle Épire, la Dardanie, le sud de la Prévalitanie et le nord de l’Ancienne Épire, ce qui correspond à l’aire de peuplement albanais depuis le Moyen Âge jusqu’à l’heure actuelle (Albanie, Kosovo et Macédoine occidentale).
30 D’autres chercheurs considèrent que l’importance de la toponymie slave dans tous les Balkans, y compris l’aire de peuplement albanais, serait déterminante d’une slavisation de longue date de la région. Néanmoins, la toponymie des premiers siècles du Moyen Âge est inconnue. Dans les documents historiques, les noms de lieux slaves n’apparaissent qu’assez tard, vers le XIème siècle. Et souvent ce sont des dénominations imposées par l’administration du royaume bulgare qui, du IX au XIème siècles, exerça sa domination sur l’Ancienne Épire et la Nouvelle Épire, ou par celle des États serbes qui englobèrent, pour une plus longue période les provinces de Prévalitanie et de Dardanie. Que ces premiers noms de lieux slaves aient été au XIème siècle d’origine récente est attesté par le fait qu’au Xème siècle, le basileus Constantin Porphyrogénète appelait encore Byllis, Amantia, Pulcheropolis par leurs anciens noms, alors que l’empereur Basile II, 60 ans plus tard, citait ces mêmes villes sous les noms de Gradetsin, Glavinica, Belegradon (le Berat actuel, en Albanie du Sud). En plus, les noms de lieux slaves que l’on connaît au XIème siècle sont en nombre négligeable, par rapport aux noms de lieux non slaves que les sources du haut Moyen Âge ont transmis pour cette région.
31 Il convient de tenir compte ensuite d’un autre facteur de la plus grande importance : les matériaux archéologiques concernant la période allant du VIème au IXème siècles. Une poterie particulière, d’usage domestique, est répandue sur toute l’aire de peuplement albanais et nombre d’objets de parure métallique trouvés dans la moitié nord de l’Albanie s’apparentent à ce qu’on a appelé la culture de Koman (du village de Koman dans la région de Puka à l’est de Shkodra où en 1898 ont été découverts les premiers vestiges). Ils sont de facture essentiellement locale et témoignent d’une continuité incontestable de la tradition illyrienne, en tout cas préslave, encore qu’elle revête parfois des expressions différentes sous l’influence du goût de l’époque et des produits étrangers. À leurs côtés, on trouve aussi des objets métalliques fabriqués par des maîtres locaux d’après des modèles romains de la période impériale ou des prototypes
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byzantins, qui attestent que les hommes de Koman ont vécu sans discontinuité dans ces régions tout au long de l’histoire ancienne, médiévale et moderne.
32 Si les intellectuels serbes ont admis ensuite l’antériorité de la présence albanaise dans les Balkans (Cvijić même admet leur descendance illyrienne12), ils se sont généralement efforcés d’en minimiser l’importance. L’argument ab antiquo concernant le passé historique du Kosovo n’a pas cessé d’être utilisé pour souligner l’importance de la région pour la nation serbe. Il est toujours et de plus en plus répété que le Kosovo constitue le mythe central de la conscience nationale serbe, comme le “berceau” même de leur État médiéval et de leur Église. La meilleure preuve en est notamment la construction, lors du développement de l’État serbe de la dynastie des Nemanjić, de nombreux édifices religieux orthodoxes. Ainsi, aux XII-XIVème siècles, les Albanais n’auraient constitué qu’une population résiduelle, pastorale et montagnarde, presque absente du Kosovo dont la toponymie est principalement slave.
33 En fait, ceci renvoie plutôt au pouvoir qu’ont détenu les Serbes sur cette région depuis leur arrivée au VI-VIIème siècles et à leur foi chrétienne. Mais ceci ne signifie nullement que les Albanais étaient absents sur ces territoires avant la domination ottomane. On sait qu’une fois la conquête d’un territoire accomplie, qu’elle soit militaire ou pacifique, politique ou économique, la première chose à faire c’est de construire l’église de sa religion comme une preuve d’apporter la civilisation, ce qui ne témoigne en fait que d’une supériorité de statut. C’est ce que tous les colonisateurs et conquérants ont fait, Christophe Colomb au Nouveau Monde, Constantin à Byzance, Justinien à Ravenne, pour ne citer que les cas les plus parlants. L’Empire médiéval serbe ne saurait être autre chose qu’un empire multiethnique, comparable à celui de Charlemagne, et où les Albanais étaient une importante partie. Ce fait serait toutefois masqué au temps de l’Empire serbe par la conversion de nombreux Albanais catholiques à l’orthodoxie et par leur adoption d’une anthroponymie slavo-orthodoxe. En outre, les sources serbes médiévales n’auraient distingué que les Albanais catholiques, qualifiant les autres de Serbes13. Car il est tout à fait remarquable de ne pas mentionner l’existence de nombreux monuments religieux et culturels albanais dans la région. Les églises catholiques du Kosovo, par exemple, sont parmi les édifices religieux les plus anciens dans la région. D’autant plus que les églises et les monastères orthodoxes au Kosovo ont survécu au-delà des cinq siècles d’occupation ottomane notamment grâce à la protection par les Albanais, malgré leur conversion ultérieure à la religion islamique du nouveau conquérant.
34 Le passé serbe du Kosovo pourrait très bien se comparer aux relations entre l’Empire byzantin, le Patriarcat orthodoxe d’Istanbul et les Grecs d’aujourd’hui, à l’Empire carolingien de Charlemagne, sa capitale située en Aix-la-Chapelle et les Français d’aujourd’hui, ou encore à l’Espagne occupée par les Arabes. Ni les Grecs, ni les Français, ni les Arabes ne peuvent aujourd’hui avoir ouvertement des revendications de “droits historiques” sans devenir ridicules.
35 À part le fait surprenant que la communauté internationale soit préoccupée, au jour d’aujourd’hui même, par l’héritage historique des nations, ce qui paraît encore plus intrigant est qu’on ne donne pas le même poids au fait que le Kosovo est aussi le “berceau” de l’État albanais à la fois médiéval et moderne. L’État médiéval albanais de la dynastie des Balsha, surnommés les “maîtres de l’Albanie”, s’étendait dans la région depuis la moitié du 13e siècle jusqu’à la fin du XIVème siècle. La Bataille de Kosovo qui a nourri le mythe serbe de la victimisation ne fut pas la bataille des Serbes pour “sauver
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la Chrétienté”, comme on l’entend toujours. La Bataille de Kosovo fut menée en 1389 par une coalition régionale où les Albanais étaient largement partie prenante. Un des triumvirs qui a conduit l’Armée de la coalition, avec le Prince serbe Lazar Hrebeljanović et le Roi Tvrtko de Bosnie, était le “Maître” des Albanais Georges II Balsha, alors que Théodore II Muzaka, le Prince de Berat en Albanie du Sud, perdit plus de 4000 hommes dans le champ de la bataille.
36 Au siècle suivant, la formidable épopée de la résistance de Skanderbeg prouve bien, s’il en était besoin, que les Albanais ne se sont point résignés après la bataille de Kosovo. Une des pages les plus illustres de l’histoire des Albanais fut écrite notamment, sous la conduite de Skanderbeg devenu leur héros national, pour empêcher le débordement des Ottomans vers l’Occident. Issu d’une maison albanaise de moyenne noblesse, Georges Kastriote dit Skanderbeg est né vers 1403 et élevé en otage chez les Ottomans où il a reçu le surnom d’Iskander bey, “prince Alexandre”, imaginé par la suite comme un signe de reconnaissance de son ascendance illyrienne, faisant allusion à Alexandre le Grand. Il a déserté en 1443 lors de la défaite ottomane devant les Hongrois à Nis (Naissus). À la tête d’une petite troupe de cavaliers, 300 dit la tradition orale, il s’est emparé de Kruja, non loin de Durrës et de Tirana. Le lendemain, il hissait sur la citadelle le drapeau aux armes de sa famille : double symbole chargé d’avenir. Le drapeau de Skanderbeg allait devenir l’emblème de l’Albanie indépendante et la date même de la proclamation de l’indépendance en 1912, le 28 novembre, qui restera celle de la fête nationale albanaise, fut imaginée comme une réplique à ce jour ancien. En 1444, Skanderbeg fut proclamé prince des Albanais lors de la Ligue de Lezha (Alessio), dans la ville côtière contrôlée à l’époque par les Vénitiens. Il a combattu depuis contre les Turcs ottomans qu’il a pu arrêter aux portes de l’Europe durant plus d’un quart de siècle, à l’apogée même de leurs conquêtes européennes. Pratiquement seul, c’est grâce à son adresse personnelle qu’il a réussi à arrêter plusieurs offensives, conduites non seulement par les meilleurs hommes de guerre ottomans tels Evrenos Bey ou Ballaban Pacha, qui a péri au combat, mais aussi par les deux plus puissants Sultans des Turcs ottomans eux-mêmes : Murâd II qui est mort en 1451 après un long siège échoué devant les murs de Kruja, dont le héros albanais avait fait sa capitale, et Mehmet II Al Fâtih, le “Conquérant” de Byzance et des Balkans, qui a mis trois fois le siège devant Kruja sans pouvoir lui venir à bout. En janvier 1468, terrassé par une attaque de fièvre, Skanderbeg mourait invaincu à Lezha. Après sa mort, le relais a été pris par l’un de ses principaux généraux, Lekë Dukagjini, dernier descendant d’une grande maison de la noblesse albanaise, reconnu aussi par la tradition orale comme le premier législateur albanais. Il a fallu encore plus d’une dizaine d’autres longues années pour que les Ottomans arrivent à s’emparer des dernières forteresses et annexer le pays albanais.
37 Quant à l’importance de la région du Kosovo pour l’unité albanaise, il est notable que dans les temps modernes la première Ligue nationale des Albanais, après celle de Skanderbeg, fut rassemblée en 1878 dans le ville de Prizren au Kosovo, suivi par une deuxième Ligue nationale en 1899 dans la ville de Peja également au Kosovo.
38 Un autre argument est que les Albanais ne seraient venus au Kosovo, pour l’essentiel, que tardivement, après la conquête ottomane, le pouvoir ottoman favorisant cette expansion suite à leur conversion majoritaire à l’islam. C’est ainsi, en particulier, qu’ils auraient comblé le vide laissé par la grande migration des Serbes de Kosovo vers le bassin pannonien, en 1690, à la suite de la première guerre austro-turque. Leur expansion se serait poursuivie aux XVIII-XIXème siècles, s’étendant toujours plus loin
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vers le nord-est. Les historiens albanais, par contre, soutiennent que l’idée d’une migration massive des Serbes s’est imposée au XIXème siècle sans examen critique. On aurait en fait mal interprété les documents de l’époque, prenant ainsi pour une élimination totale de la population orthodoxe ce qui n’était que la destruction de son encadrement ecclésiastique14, position déjà soutenue par Jovan Tomitch15. En outre, la promptitude de la reconquête ottomane, lors de la retraite des Impériaux, aurait rendu impossible la fuite de la population. Enfin, tout cela se passait au cœur de l’hiver, ce qui rend invraisemblable un exode massif.
39 L’émigration chrétienne aurait donc été modeste, et d’ailleurs en partie albanaise, l’évêque catholique albanais de Scopia, Pjeter Bogdani, ayant appelé à la révolte contre les Turcs en même temps que le patriarche orthodoxe serbe Arsenije Carnojević. Toutefois, alors que Tomitch estime que les Serbes, privés de leur encadrement ecclésiastique, ont été ensuite islamisés et albanisés, Juka, déclarant ne pas voir pourquoi ils auraient été albanisés, conclut qu’ils étaient très peu nombreux dans ces régions avant 1690 et que, de ce fait, les Albanais y étaient déjà largement majoritaires. D’ailleurs, aucun scénario démographique n’a pu résister au fait simple que les montagnes d’Albanie du nord, d’où les historiens serbes les font descendre, n’auraient pu fournir assez de monde pour repeupler un Kosovo déserté16. Enfin, le Kosovo n’aurait pas été islamisé en masse au cours du siècle suivant, mais l’aurait déjà été aux deux tiers dès le XVIème siècle. Rizaj met également en doute l’existence de la grande migration serbe17, de même que Pulaha qui cite des sources autrichiennes de cette époque nommant le Kosovo “Albanie” et faisant état d’insurgés albanais18.
Les relations interethniques
40 Même si des incertitudes demeurent, dues à la faiblesse de raisonnements reposant en partie sur des supputations et sur une utilisation sélective de sources d’ailleurs insuffisantes pour permettre une connaissance précise des mouvements démographiques à cette époque, il paraît aujourd’hui acquis, à la suite des travaux des historiens albanais sur l’onomastique des cadastres ottomans, que les Albanais constituaient une partie importante de la population du Kosovo. Acquis, du moins, chez les historiens spécialistes de la question, car la version serbe traditionnelle est presque universellement répandue à l’étranger, où elle se perpétue comme une idée reçue et vient d’être réactivée par les nombreuses publications réalisées récemment. Cependant, en ce qui concerne l’aire de peuplement albanais en ex-Yougoslavie, actuellement il s’agit d’une population concentrée, contrairement à d’autres comme les Tsiganes et les Valaques. Elle est majoritaire dans ce territoire, malgré le maillage politico-administratif qui coïncide mal avec le territoire ethnique. La Province autonome de Kosovo, par exemple, n’est qu’une approximation institutionnelle de l’ensemble précédent. On est donc souvent réduit à considérer le Kosovo comme un succédané de l’aire de peuplement albanais, faute de disposer de données suffisantes pour le reste de cette dernière.
41 En tout cas, il est probable que des phénomènes d’assimilation ont existé dans les deux sens, entre Serbes et Albanais, selon les lieux et les circonstances. Au demeurant, l’assimilation n’est pas seulement affaire de violence, institutionnelle ou non. Elle implique aussi une adhésion collective implicite aux valeurs véhiculées par la langue dominante. En d’autres termes, il faut être dans une certaine mesure consentant pour
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être assimilé. Mais, occupés à exalter les différences entre leurs peuples, les intellectuels des deux bords ne se sont jamais intéressés à ce qu’ils ont en commun.
42 La question nationale se situe au point d’intersection entre la politique, la technologie et la transformation des sociétés. Les nations existent non seulement en tant que fonctions d’un type particulier d’État territorial ou de l’aspiration à en établir un, mais aussi dans le contexte d’une étape particulière du développement technologique, économique et culturel. Aujourd’hui, la plupart de ceux qui se penchent sur la question s’accorderont pour dire que les langues nationales unifiées, parlées ou écrites, ne peuvent apparaître en tant que telles avant l’imprimerie, l’accès d’une grande majorité des gens à la lecture et donc l’instruction de masse. Il faudra donc analyser les nations et les phénomènes qui leur sont associés en termes politiques, techniques, administratifs, économiques, culturels, et en tenant compte de tout ce qu’exigent les conditions particulières.
43 En tout cas, à l’encontre de l’histoire culturelle albanaise, l’énorme retard de l’alphabétisation ne doit pas inciter à considérer les Albanais comme un peuple inculte, comme si la culture orale n’était pas une culture, et encore moins à gommer les percées culturelles régionales, notamment dans le sud. Il est important d’envisager le décalage croissant entre une Europe de plus en plus systématiquement vouée à l’enseignement de masse et au règne de l’écrit et une partie de la population dont la culture continuait à être produite et transmise par voie orale : population plus ou moins enclavée selon les régions, privée des codes d’accès à une vie culturelle plus large, ce qui accentuait en même temps les différences culturelles au sein même de la société albanaise, notamment entre le nord et le sud. L’ignorance de la langue officielle, les différences de religion, l’analphabétisme, les conflits agraires et les vexations des autorités creusent ainsi un fossé entre les masses albanaises d’un côté et les représentants de l’État de l’autre, hier envers la domination ottomane comme aujourd’hui envers l’administration yougoslave (en ce qui concerne au moins les Albanais au Kosovo et en ex-Yougoslavie).
44 Peu familiers de l’administration et des tribunaux, dont ils craignent l’arbitraire, surtout dans les régions du Kosovo et de l’Albanie du nord, les Albanais continuaient à régler fréquemment leurs différends entre eux en se fondant sur leurs droits coutumiers. Les codes de conduite auxquels se sont référés les Albanais sont au nombre de trois : ligji i shtetit, la loi de l’État qui a pris actuellement le pas sur les deux autres, sheriati, la loi islamique pour la majorité musulmane ou ligji i kishes, la loi canonique respectée surtout par les catholiques dans les régions du nord, mais qui à vrai dire n’ont jamais eu l’influence décisive, et ligji i fshatit, la loi du village, c’est-à-dire le droit coutumier local, naguère prépondérant19. Le renversement opéré dans les rapports entre les trois codes est évident, que ce soit en Albanie ou en Yougoslavie. Toutefois, les évolutions récentes dans les deux milieux ont fait remarquer que les intéressés se réfèrent de plus en plus au code coutumier, non seulement parce qu’ils le considèrent comme le seul spécifiquement albanais, mais aussi et surtout parce qu’il ne prévoit pas d’intervention de l’État. Par les temps de crises que traverse la société albanaise actuelle, plus particulièrement en Albanie, on revient de plus en plus aux anciennes valeurs normatives, qui sont constamment mobilisées à des fins productives pour pallier à la rupture des liens sociaux.
45 Il n’est pas question d’approfondir ici l’étude de la question complexe de l’origine des codes coutumiers albanais ni les questions historiques connexes d’une “société sans
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État” depuis l’origine. Beaucoup d’observateurs étrangers, et même d’Albanais, atteints du “virus de l’essence”, selon l’expression de Roland Barthes, ont succombé à la tentation de répondre directement par l’affirmative, du fait de leur croyance dans l’irréductible originalité albanaise, ou bien dans l’anarchie et l’inaptitude de ce peuple à constituer un État organisé. Cette question est liée à celle, également controversée, du tribalisme des montagnes du nord.
46 Ce qu’il faut d’emblée souligner, c’est que l’idée de nation s’enracine dans les différences. La cohésion n’est acquise qu’au prix d’une opposition flagrante ou virtuelle à tout ce qui est étranger. Ainsi, l’une des dernières nationalités apparues en Europe, la nation albanaise est restée longtemps marquée par des traits perçus comme archaïques, tels qu’une organisation partiellement tribale, la persistance des communautés familiales et l’usage de la vengeance : caractères que leurs voisins immédiats et la majorité des voyageurs occidentaux, du milieu du XIXème siècle aux années 1930, ont “naturalisés” pour en faire l’essence même de ce peuple. Interprétation trop simple, dans la mesure où il ne s’agit pas seulement d’une culture traditionnelle, mais aussi d’une culture refoulée, marginalisée, exclue des voies ordinaires de développement. Face à l’emprise croissante d’États successifs qui les rejetaient et dans lesquels ils ne pouvaient se reconnaître, les Albanais ne pouvaient que s’affirmer en mettant l’accent sur les aspects les plus traditionnels de leur culture. Ils s’attribuaient l’exclusivité ethnique de ce qui pouvait n’être que le signe d’un décalage, l’effet d’une entrave à un besoin refoulé d’affirmation, vers l’extérieur, des formes idéologiques, religieuses ou nationales, de leurs valeurs culturelles. Souvent perçus de façon défavorable par leurs voisins immédiats, ils étaient à leur tour tentés de cultiver leur particularisme, de se poser en s’opposant. Ils ont ainsi résisté à l’assimilation par une autre stratégie de déplacement et de subversion, par la conservation et cette espèce d’“hibernation dans l’histoire”, selon l’expression d’Angelo Di Sparti, en projetant à l’extérieur l’idéologie de leur identité collective, ethnique et nationale.
NOTES
1. Grousset (René), L’Empire du Levant. Histoire de la question d’Orient, Paris: Payot, 1949, p. 7. 2. Kitsikis (Dimitri), L’Empire ottoman, Paris: PUF, 1985. 3. Arensberg (C.M.), « The Old World Peoples. The Place of European Cultures in World Ethnography », Anthropological Quarterly, 36 (3), 1963. 4. Doja (Albert), « À propos de la diversité locale des traditions culturelles albanaises », La Ricerca Folklorica, 38, 1998. 5. Ancel (Jacques), Peuples et nations des Balkans : Géographie politique, Paris : Éditions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1992 [éd. originale : 1930] ; Jelavich (Charles), Jelavich (Barbara), The Establishment of the Balkan National States (1804-1920), Seattle : University of Washington Press, 1977. 6. Roux (Michel), Les Albanais en Yougoslavie. Minorité nationale, territoire et développement, Paris : Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1992.
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7. Mauss (Marcel), Œuvres, vol. 3, Paris : Éditions de Minuit, 1969, p. 586. 8. Roux (Michel), op.cit., pp. 168-169. 9. Doja (Albert), « L’idée de nation : du postulat de Marcel Mauss à la question actuelle des identités nationales », Revue de l’Institut de Sociologie, (1-4), 1996. 10. Haxhihasani (Qemal), Chansonnier épique albanais, Tirana : Académies des Sciences, 1983 ; Fetiu (Sadri), Këngë popullore të Rilindjes Kombëtare të Lidhjes së Prizrenit, Prishtina : Institut Albanologique, 1978. 11. Le découpage des territoires albanais, notamment le rattachement du Kosovo et de la Macédoine occidentale à la Serbie, comme le rattachement de la région de Çamëria à la Grèce, fut effectué sur décision de la Conférence des Ambassadeurs des six Grandes Puissances européennes tenue le 29 juillet 1913 à Londres au lendemain des Guerres balkaniques. 12. Cvijic (Jovan), La Péninsule balkanique. Géographie humaine, Paris: Armand Colin, 1918. 13. Pulaha (Selami), L’autochtonéité des Albanais en Kosova et le prétendu exode des Serbes à la fin du 17e siècle, Tirana : 8-Nentori, 1985. 14. Juka (Safete), Kosova. The Albanians of Yugoslavia in Light of Historical Documents, New York : Waldon Press, 1984. 15. Tomitch (Jovan), Les Albanais en Vieille-Serbie et dans le Sandjak de Novi-Bazar, Paris : Hachette, 1913 16. Roux (Michel), op.cit. 17. Rizaj (Selman), « Mbi te ashtuquajturen dyndje e madhe serbe nga Kosova me ne krye patrikun Arsenije Carnojeviq (1690) » (À propos de la soi-disant grande migration des Serbes de Kosovo sous le patriarche Arsène Carnojevic, 1690), Gjurmime Albanologjike, Série historique, 12, 1983. 18. Pulaha (Selami), op.cit., pp. 74-81. 19. Il existait plusieurs normes juridiques traditionnelles dans l’aire de peuplement albanais. Le droit coutumier le plus connu est le Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit, que la tradition fait remonter au prince Lekë Dukagjini, compagnon de Skanderbeg, sans qu’on puisse confirmer la validité de cette relation. La plupart des travaux ethnographiques dénomment par ce terme les normes juridiques coutumières observées dans la région de Dukagjini en Albanie du Nord et sur le Plateau de Dukagjini jusqu’au Kosovo, c’est-à-dire sur le territoire des anciens domaines de la principauté des Dukagjini. Elles ont été recueillies dans les régions du Nord et codifiées par le prêtre catholique Shtjefen K. Gjeçov, de Janjevo (Kosovo), à la fin du XIXème siècle et au début du XXème siècle. Son recueil posthume fut publié par les soins des Fransiscains de Shkodra en 1933. Une deuxième édition, augmentée de manuscrits inédits, ne sera publiée par les soins de l’Académie des Sciences d’Albanie qu’en 1989, entretemps il fut publié en italien, en allemand et récemment en anglais (Gjeçov (Shtjefën K.), Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit (Le Code de Leka Dukagjini) [Publié et annoté par K. Nova], Tirana : Académie des Sciences, 1989 (Patrimoine Culturel des Albanais: Droit Coutumier, 1) [1933]). Dans la tradition albanaise, les droits de la coutume s’étendaient pourtant sur un domaine plus large, notamment dans ces régions où ont été repérés les derniers vestiges de l’organisation lignagère de type segmentaire. En Albanie centrale, sur la rive droite de Shkumbini, dans la région de Ghèghenie proprement dite, où s’étendaient les anciens domaines de la principauté de Georges Kastriote, dit Skanderbeg, les travaux ethnographiques ont retenu des normes semblables sous le nom de Kanuni i Arbërisë “Droit d’Albanie” ou Kanuni i Skënderbeut “Droit de Skanderbeg”. Dans d’autres régions, notamment dans la région des montagnes d’Albanie du nord depuis la montagne de Shkodra jusqu’à la montagne de Gjakova et la plaine de Kosovo c’est le terme de Kanuni i Maleve “Droit des Montagnes”, qui a été retenu. Il est cependant fort probable que ces dénominations locales soient des variantes des mêmes normes juridiques coutumières, observées depuis la vallée de Shkumbini jusqu’au Kosovo et probablement dans le sud-ouest de l’Albanie, dans les régions de Vlora, Kurveleshi, Himara, Tepelena, généralement connues sous le nom de Labëria, jusqu’aux
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montagnes des Souliotes. Dans ces régions du sud-ouest, c’est encore un autre terme, Kanuni i Labërisë “Droit de Labëria”, qui a été retenu par les travaux ethnographiques.
AUTEUR
ALBERT DOJA
Docteur en anthropologie sociale (ÉHÉSS Paris).
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Europe du Sud-Est : histoire, concepts, frontières
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South-Eastern Europe : History, Concepts, Boundaries
Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis
1 This issue of Balkanologie gathers together a selection of papers presented at a special conference organized by the Centre for South-East European Studies, London, dedicated to exploring the idea of South-Eastern Europe.
2 There is no generally agreed definition of South-Eastern Europe, but there are many reasons for this uncertainty. The most banal reason is that Europe is not symmetrical in shape, and therefore does not lend itself with ease to division according to the points of the compass. A second obvious reason is that the physical map of Europe differs from its political configurations, and the relation between land and people is never simple. A third reason is that numerous alternative names have been given to various parts of the South-East of Europe, and these have generally had preference. A fourth is that Europe is believed by many to have not only an East, West, North and South, but (and increasingly in recent years) a Centre. This possibility, however remote, naturally affects the size of the presumed South-East.
3 People have also advanced definitions based not on whether the region is real, but whether it is good and beautiful, or bad and ugly ; worth invading, or best left well alone ; peaceful or warlike ; ethically uncultivable, or ripe for improvement ; similar or different, both to itself and to other regions. This problem is old : one of the most popular and widely-disseminated texts of the mediaeval world, composed in either the 5th or 6 th centuries AD, illustrates the problem as well as any, with the following account of the contrasts to be found in South-Eastern Europe : In this part [of the world — one of the geographical klimata] are to be found the Slavs and the Phisonites, also called Danubians. The former take pleasure in eating women’s breasts filled with milk, and they break new-born babies against the rocks like mice. The latter, on the other hand, avoid consuming even meat which can be eaten lawfully and without reproach. The one are insubordinate, independent, reck no master and frequently kill their chieftain when at table or travelling ; they eat foxes, wild cats and boar and call out to each other with wolf-cries. Do not the others refrain from excessive eating, and do they not submit to the authority of the first comer ?1
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4 This text is no longer well-known ; but the tendency for geographical accounts to produce violently contrasting ethical judgements has not entirely disappeared.
5 At least Pseudo-Caesarius offered two variants on the nature of the region. Some offer only one. Here the representative text of the 6th century would be that of the geographer Kosmas Indikopleustes, who asserted that the world is not flat, but rises from the South-East to the North-West, so that the northern and westerly zones elevate like a wall behind which the sun sets. This explains why the northwestern ocean is very deep, and only averagely so in the southern and eastern parts. The Nile, whose waters “rise” from the south to the north, moves slowly, while the Tigris and the Euphrates flow swiftly, since they “fall” southwards2. Just as for Kosmas the North-West was somehow “higher up” and the South-East “lower down”, so for some modern writers categorization of peoples and states into “Central Europe” and the “Balkans” should proceed according to the exemplarity or otherwise of the natives3.
6 We are not the first to question these questions of definition. The problem was often secondary in Europe, except during periods of political upheaval in the region — but the 1990s has been just such a period, and much consideration has recently been given to interrogating the categories whereby regions are defined. After 1989, which was assumed by some to mark “the end of history”, came a kind of “rebirth of geography”, which proposed that the world’s affairs would be affected more by profound cultural differences, clearly divisible according to region, than by hard political or ideological considerations4. This controversial thesis led scholars of many disciplines to re- examine — or to examine for the first time, if they had not already done so — the bases upon which regions are theorized and proposed. Critical histories of our region were produced5 and ahistorical judgements were criticized6, confrontations anticipated and myths of confrontation exposed7. Fashionable words included “spectre”8, “borderlands”9, “invention”10, “nationalism”11. Geometry became tautologically multiple, and ethnic hatreds ancient.
7 The convenors of the conference, who are placing this selection before the public, hoped perhaps to find a way out of the spiralling vacuum of metaphors and the Krise der Kreisen by asking area specialists to consider the question of South-Eastern Europe in terms of a particular discipline. For not only the world but the domain of academic enquiry is presupposed to divide into areas : history, geography, anthropology, literature, linguistics, politics, and so forth. It was a 19th century conception that these “disciplines” would contribute, each in its own way and according to its means, to the clarification of such problems as the one we faced. Thus, the problem of how to define an area would be elucidated by an appeal to distinct but well-defined “spheres” of analysis, and the nature of a place would depend on a separate consideration of its language, customs, history, races, literature, and other criteria (or lack thereof). These points would simply be added up to provide an adequate account of a given people or region.
Debates on definitions
8 But there were obvious drawbacks to this approach. Regions were defined according to one type of knowledge : the Balkans was said to be characterized narrowly according to religion, or to selected common linguistic or ethnic factors, while factors of diversity were ignored. Furthermore, the boundaries generated by one set of disciplinary criteria
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did not coincide with other definitions, leading to border disputes among area specialists.
9 Increasingly the Golden Calves of the traditional disciplines have been melted down in the late 20th century, without being recast into one larger graven image. Scholars congregate in new, less exclusive churches presided over by the deity of “interdisciplinarity”. But as far as South-Eastern European studies were concerned, this process has been paradoxically difficult. On the one hand, many South-East European scholars, faced as they were with the paucity of sources (and the frequent need to improvise legitimacies for various causes) showed a remarkable versatility at an early stage, combining ethnography and jurisprudence, archaeology and study of religion, paleolinguistics with anthropology : all in the search for valid arguments. On the other hand, the problems of institution-building, whether in impoverished South-East European states or in Western universities, led to intense competition over resources and conflicting claims between disciplinary endeavours. Later on, notably in the 1980s and early 1990s, some scholars of the area provided valuable critiques of the roles of individual disciplines (and the competition between them) in developing national ideologies in South-Eastern Europe12. Nevertheless, the same specialists do not hesitate to reclaim the importance of their particular furrow for the welfare of the field as a whole13. An important debate between Ernest Gellner and Edward W. Said over culture and orientalism, relevant to our discussion on region, degenerated into a spat about discipline14 ; while some interesting ripples of irritation over discipline are presently corrugating the ocean of Greek studies15. Such debates can contribute to a healthy awareness of the specificities of individual disciplines — but it is still the task of knowing our subject in all its complexity, and not only the methods, that should command our attention.
10 In spite of their territorial squabbles, the different disciplinary approaches have shared problems in dealing with South-Eastern Europe. One of these has been the tendency to analyze the region in terms of models and theories developed elsewhere, with the result that South-Eastern Europe is often evaluated in terms of its likeness to or deviation from Western Europe : hence discussions of whether the Ottoman system was feudal or not ; of Balkan “backwardness” ; of “transition to democracy”. Not only are the questions framed inappropriately ; the comparison often attributes a doubtful unity and coherence to Western Europe, obliterating its diversity and changing character16. At the same time, identifying South-Eastern Europe as a unit of regional comparison in relation to the West imposes an emphasis on its commonalities and cohesiveness, at the expense of its own variety and complexity.
What criteria ?
11 How then might we define and understand the region ? Different disciplines suggest different hermeneutic approaches. The centrality of history is perhaps inevitable, given the fact that time came to constitute a fundamental category framing modern existence, alongside space, and will not be easily unlearned or forgotten. However, it is often precisely those who most loudly proclaim the importance of history who degrade it by giving it the narrowest definition, confining themselves to a history of political personalities and events17. And recent claims to make the history of Europe more “total”, in the new international context, ignore that region which is our concern18.
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Even some excellent Europe-wide studies dedicated to that supposedly Balkan subject par excellence which is nationalism, fail to take account of the South-Eastern European region in detail19. At the same time, the focus on the nation as the fundamental category of historical narrative has deflected attention from other significant units, such as the wider region (as well as the sub-national, the provincial, the local). Even attempts to approach the past on a broad regional scale quite often become parallel national histories rather than truly comparative efforts20.
12 But the question of what criteria should frame a discussion of South-East European history has many possible answers. Should the definition arise from a series of shared structures and attitudes, the legacy of a common past ? In this case, historical analysis should probably proceed within the essentially political framework of empires, states and other administrative units — obviating the need for a separate, South-East European unit of analysis21. Or should the area be understood as an arena of interaction, its coherence (if not unity) defined in terms of centuries of contact, conflict and coexistence ? This approach is typified by frontier studies, exploring the character of zones united as much as divided by their defining boundaries22. Or the area could be approached as a framework for comparison. This would follow Marc Bloch’s dictum that societies that share common linguistic, political, religious, economic or historical spaces are the best subject for comparative analysis, since they offer the best opportunity for identifying the meaningful similarities and differences23.
13 In fact the admission of the “historical imperative” does not make the problem of defining South Eastern Europe any more clear cut. To a great extent the choice of criteria depends on the prior intentions of the researcher. In this connection it is worth asking how far the centrality of history in discussion of South-Eastern Europe is also a matter of reading present-day preoccupations and purposes into the past24. The ways that versions of history have been put into the service of present politics have been repeatedly addressed, not only by Western scholars25. Appeals to the past have also framed visions of the region, from both within and without. Such claims — and their foundations — are now coming in for sustained criticism, in the hope of greater intellectual rigour and better official policies. It is open to question how far the second aim is realistic. One of the most learned and influential Western historians of the region, Noel Malcolm, has provided thoroughgoing critiques of “myths” affecting the political crises in Bosnia and Kosovo, and attacked the misleading appeals to history by the actors in these conflicts. Although his work has brought many useful clarifications, Malcolm’s definition of “myth” simply in terms of “historical untruth” is not sufficient to understand, let alone to prevent, ongoing conflicts. It may even leave the door open for new myths to enter the scene26. The questions of Bosnia and Kosovo are not (or not only) ones of “what really happened”, but also ones of why different versions of the past continue to hold the meanings that they do, and of why such importance is attributed to these meanings.
14 If a sense of historicity is important to attempts to define South-Eastern Europe, a sense of diversity and conflicting patterns of culture, religion and language is no less necessary. This is especially relevant to attempts to define South-Eastern Europe in terms of “culture”. Grand regional schemes such as those elaborated by the Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijić, or the slightly more limited ethnic and national classifications proposed by his successors, singled out common “ethno-psychological” characteristics shaped by shared historical experience and specific modes of subsistence, ultimately
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derived from a particular geo-physical environment. Similarly, the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga identified the development of rural social institutions in South-Eastern Europe as the basis of a common regional character27. The problem is agreeing on which particular traits are decisive in marking community and demonstrating regional unity ; and on how far they override political, religious or linguistic difference.
Balkan culture
15 A different approach to the issue of diversity is that proposed by Traian Stoianovich, in his Balkan Worlds, which attempts to place difference within a broader unity in a way that parallels Fernand Braudel’s treatment of the Mediterranean — treating South- Eastern Europe as speaking with many voices, its history the sum of many individual histories, and seeing the Balkans as a microcosm and emblem of a divided Europe. But Stoianovich’s Balkans are far less clearly defined than Braudel’s Mediterranean28. Again, the problem remains precisely what is specifically Balkan about the area and its culture(s), and is there anything that holds its diversity together ?
16 A recent and important article by the Greek scholar Paschalis M. Kitromilides, which constitutes a valiant and fascinating attempt to assess the term “Balkan Mentality”, takes up some of these issues29. Kitromilides dates the term “Balkan Mentality” to its usage by Cvijić in 1918, and remarks on how the latter’s conceptualization of mentalité influenced that of Braudel. He then rejects attempts to argue from ethnographic evidence in favour of either unity or specificity, citing both ethnic diversity and the fact that such materials can also be found elsewhere. Kitromilides goes on to criticize the notion of mentalité for its lack of historicity, arguing that a “mentality” cannot be attributed to anything but specific historical periods. Asserting that the emergence of nationalism in the 19th century precluded the possibility of any common Balkan mentality, he chooses to focus on three men, all Orthodox intellectuals of the mid- eighteenth to the early 19th century, and declares that their outlook on the world is the closest one may come to a Balkan mentality. A fascinating account of their lives is laid before us : but a number of basic difficulties are not addressed. A “Balkan mentality” is subsumed to the idea of a set of transnational loyalties and to « the “mentality” of Balkan Orthodoxy, which, few will disagree I am sure, primarily defines religious belief in Southeastern Europe »30. But the idea of mentalité is not reducible either to religious belief or to transnational consciousness. Furthermore, Orthodoxy was neither the sole religion in South-Eastern Europe, nor confined to it31. One may also object that Kitromilides ignores the fact that the Orthodox church both preserved and stimulated separate traditions within different regions of the Balkans32. This raises very pointedly the question of which divisions (ethno-linguistic ? political ? class ? religious ?) preclude a shared mentality and under what circumstances. If national differences annul a common mentality in the 19th century, why do such divisions within Orthodoxy not have the same consequence ? Kitromilides perceives the need to historicize the problem of collective mentalities, but converts the Braudelian concept of prisons de la longue durée into some very particular attributes of a small class of men. Meanwhile, the stress on Orthodoxy as a unifying factor contradicts his earlier, rather inspired assertion that « 18th century Balkan society could be understood as a world of concentric and overlapping circles within a broader space whose human geography was defined by a multiplicity of languages and religious doctrines »33.
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17 One solution to the problem might be to conceive of “Balkan culture” less in terms of objective criteria, and more as an argument over meanings and definitions, advanced by particular people, in particular places, for particular purposes — existing as much in the imagination as in the marketplace, in the linguistic community or in seats of political power, and reconfigured in response to changing social, cultural and political processes34. This would mean thinking about how the region was understood and viewed by its inhabitants, as well as by outsiders, and asking not whether cultural identifications such as that of Cvijić were accurate, but what symbols they promoted, what images they projected, what interests they were meant to advance. Locally- generated concepts of “Balkan culture” may have been in part the product of élite negotiations with notions of Europe, the Levant or the Orient, but they were not just simple appropriations. In every country comparable debates on identity produced particular theories, often in terms of a shared relationship with the outside world ; in every country these ideas have percolated into popular discourses. They covered a range of evaluations from the “stigmatic” to the “utopian”35.
West vs. East
18 This leads us to another direction which became important in the 1990s : the study of “alterity”, or otherness, generally seen as projected onto the region from without36. The critical study of Westerners’ ideas and attitudes towards Eastern or South-Eastern Europe is not a new preoccupation. But various factors have given new importance to what was previously the domain of only a few researchers. The need to rethink the entire political order of Europe after events of 1989 formed the general background ; new opportunities for Westerners to travel East, and experience the region at first- hand, led to a further need to challenge received and outdated ideas ; an acutely-felt shortage of adequate literature and regional expertise in the West after that date could be cited as another cause. The outbreak of the Yugoslav conflict brought with it rumours that US policy was severely prejudiced by the essentialist opinions offered in a few sketchy travel books : it was clearly time for the imagologists and orientalists to move in and provide us with a clearer historical explanation of why Westerners think what they do about the East.
19 An important study in this direction was provided by L. Wolff which, using the works of Foucault and Edward W. Said in theoretical support, traced the origin of the idea of Eastern Europe to the writings of the philosophes and voyageurs of the (mainly French) 18th century37. M. Todorova was wider in scope, covering writings from the 16th century to the present day and presenting a case of remarkable polemical vigour against those who would generalize unguardedly about the characteristics of the inhabitants of the South-East38. V. Goldsworthy’s book is basically of the same medicine but treats a specific version of the myopic condition, namely the representation of the Balkans in popular British fiction, travel writing and reportage39 ; while Kiril Petkov traced German perceptions of the Balkan “other” in medieval and early modern textual attitudes40.
20 All these works provided a justified and necessary critique of the way the West looks East. At the same time, however, we need to bear in mind the other half of the story. After all, it is not as if South-Eastern European writers are completely devoid of the tendency towards mythologization or ideological evaluation of the East-West divide.
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Recent critical studies of cultural mentalities from within the region have used similar theoretical premises to come to a completely different conclusion : that the tensions within “South-Eastern” or (to use the B-word) Balkan identities are often the result of local as much as Western, manipulations of geography and notions of civilization 41. Where does the happy medium lie ? And who is “inventing” whom ?
21 A comparative study of, say, Voltaire’s Histoire de Charles XII and Dimitrie Cantemir’s History of the Ottoman Empire, would surely show that both North-Western and South- Eastern historians make use and abuse of “the map of civilization” — each for their own purposes, of course, but indisputably using comparable techniques. Likewise, ideologically motivated allegations of barbarism are not the exclusive intellectual property of the Western enlightenment. It was not just Bram Stoker who implicitly disparaged the nobility of the voevodes of the region ; a Turkish chronicler is on record as describing John Hunyadi — with obvious political intent — as an « uncouth infidel peasant »42.
22 To obtain a balanced picture of the role of literary discourse in shaping perceptions of the region we need to take into account more than just the West’s — undeniably questionable — ideological role and interests. Moreover, cultural critiques of images of the region have paid remarkably little attention to important Russian and Ottoman perspectives43. A synthesis comparable to Bernard Lewis’s brilliant book44, which could eventually chronicle Balkan attitudes to the outside, might help us to reach a more justly complex understanding of the problem. After all, as Montaigne pointed out long ago, we are all somebody’s barbarians45.
23 Orientalist approaches nevertheless deserve credit for having problematized the popular notion of the Balkans, revealed its constructed (and arbitrary) quality, and examined new dimensions of the workings of power (certainly hegemonic, probably oppressive) that continue to animate and sustain the notion. Moreover, they raise very pointedly the question of how to do Balkan / South-East European studies at all — and whether South-Eastern Europe or the Balkans can be a useful category of analysis, given the “invented” quality of the concept and its political uses, let alone the fact that it is often a residual category, defined more by what it is not than by what it is. The academic enterprise of South-East European studies is unlikely to vanish overnight in a paroxysm of self-doubt, although the concept of area studies generally — not just that of our region — is being eroded with the end of Cold War imperatives ; criticisms of its lack of theoretical rigour ; and a growing suspicion, in fields as far apart as rational choice theory and anthropology, of the concept of “culture” as a meaningful variable. Still, institutional interests, within and without both the academic milieu and the region itself, are likely to keep South-East European studies going, at least for the time being. Funding initiatives responding to continuing crises in the former Yugoslavia and their effect on the region as a whole, will doubtless prolong the income-generating life of the Balkan idea, albeit at the cost of re-defining and limiting the sort of work that is done under this rubric. Contestations between insiders and outsiders and between specialists and generalists over who is authorized to “do” South-East European studies will doubtless continue. The answer, however, should not be one-sided46 ; and one of the positive developments of the past decade has been an increasing degree of conversation, especially about methodology and outlook, between scholars working in the region and in the West. But the question still remains, is there any there there ?
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24 The Orientalist / post-colonialist / post-structuralist critique has no real answer to this question — or rather, it answers it, but in a way that is insufficient. If the imputed differences that define “the Balkans” are simply the markers or epiphenomena of power politics, then the implication can be that there is no reason to single out anything that is specifically Balkan. If the differentiation of Central Europe from territories “down there” in the Balkans is basically a matter of establishing hierarchies, and the signs of this difference are not important in themselves, what if anything does characterize the Balkans as a coherent or meaningful entity besides its image in the eye of others ? For instance, it has been shown that the cleanliness of the inhabitants in South-Eastern Europe was a question subject to manipulative generalization by Westerners in the 19th century 47. Yet however ideologically-motivated or influential such descriptions may have been, they do not render the problem at hand — what was hygiene and sanitation like in 19th century South-Eastern Europe ? — either unanswerable or irrelevant in itself48. Since the Orientalist critique is really about the West, and since the Western construction of the Balkans is largely a by-product of its own process of self-definition, it is not very useful for thinking about South-Eastern Europe in itself. Or to put it another way, this approach focuses on the Balkans as the Other to the West, not on the Balkans as Self (except to the extent that it explores the ways people in the Balkans accept, internalize or contest Western definitions, on unequal terms — but this too is really about Western hegemony). In short, the Orientalist approach merely re-marginalizes the Balkans.
Contributions
25 The contributors to this issue have taken up these and other challenges, looking for ways to ways to go beyond a critique of “Balkanism”, and suggesting other approaches to the study of the area. They profess, respectively, the disciplines of political science (George Schöpflin), history (Andrei Pippidi), anthropology (Pamela Ballinger), and literature (Vesna Goldsworthy) - although it would be an injustice to accuse any of them of inability to think about the region beyond their disciplinary specializations.
26 George Schöpflin, pondering South-Eastern Europe’s distance from Western European norms of modernity, vigorously criticizes the post-structuralist critique’s emancipatory promises ; the condescending assumption that Western rationalism provides a universal explanatory model ; and the absence in this approach of any way of understanding collective action. Posing the very useful question of why traditions, identities and myths have such power, he calls for a return to notions of common culture as animating and giving meaning to such identities, and he locates this culture in the specificities of South-East European history.
27 The political scientist’s use of the notion of culture often necessitates that a compilation of characteristics - whose origin are not dated, whose standard deviation is not taken into account, and whose parameters are not given - be synthesized into an “average” model, which is then redistributed. Schöpflin presumes a common regional identity, attempts to define it with reference to selected traits, and posits a cultural unit with more or less permanent and impermeable boundaries. He then proceeds to use this definition as an analytical tool. But the traits which define South-Eastern Europe are not inherently obvious, nor peculiar only to the region. Any attempt to define South-Eastern Europe must provide a theory of both region and causation. Mere
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enumeration of internal characteristics is not sufficient, because for most of the last two thousand years it has been ruled from outside or from its margin, and because even theories of its homogeneity must account for its variegation, in time as well as in space. A comparative approach may suggest that a unique South-Eastern European culture does not necessarily underwrite South-East European exceptionalism ; and that South- Eastern Europe’s role as a measuring-rod to Central Europe may not last. Schöpflin is right, however, not to treat the region as a tabula rasa which must passively await “transition” or “stabilization” from above - a common assumption among authors of projects for reform both within and without.
28 The discordances between the papers in this volume reconfirm that any number of configurations are possible, and that the choice often depends on political purposes. As Pamela Ballinger points out in her paper, the process becomes tautological : the same traits that are chosen to define the region then become proof of its cultural unity. In the end, this doesn’t help us grasp Balkan cultural specificity, or situate it in relationship to other areas and histories, or understand Balkan mentalities. It just endorses the perceptions — and the politics — that we started out with.
29 One way out of this trap might be to conceive of “area” and of the Balkans / South- Eastern Europe as a heuristic device, defined for specific analytical or pedagogical purposes, its boundaries seen as intellectual constructs, provisional, open to question and over-lapping. This would have the advantage of interrogating definitions, traits and boundaries, rather than letting them pass unexamined. It would also make possible comparative work across areas, raising issues of what variables are pertinent, at what levels can comparisons be made, what differences and similarities are meaningful. And this in turn might yield more convincing accounts of what it is that is particular to the region. The same point might be made about more thematically-based research. But as Ballinger points out, even heuristic devices have a habit of becoming real (or institutionalized, which comes to much the same thing). They also, as Vesna Goldsworthy shows, can have real political consequences, whether intended or not. Furthermore, thematic topics can all too easily reproduce area definitions, so that area once again becomes explanation. Ballinger mentions post-socialism ; discussions of gender and of nationalism often go the same way49.
30 Andrei Pippidi observes that some choose to emphasize the unity of the region, and others its diversity. His approach affirms a rigorous insistence on historical context, and focuses on the ideas and structures that are relevant at a particular time, in particular circumstances, to particular people. This avoids anachronistic reading into the past or tautological definitions, and gives us a way of thinking about specificity — by comparing Balkan phenomena with similar patterns in Northern and Western Europe, with other Southern European peninsulas ; by investigating specific definitions, identities and entities, their interrelations and their after-life as historical legacies. Many key models - for instance the opposition between Central and South- Eastern Europe - are assessed as to their age, their significance and their political valencies in different times. The models of the Balkans that are put forward are in many ways older than we think, but also subject to degrees of alteration over time, or “Changes of Emphasis”, as Pippidi has called them.
31 Can we guess what “changes of emphasis” the future will bring ? Pro-Europeans often strive to emphasize the region’s similarity to the West ; while those who see the West and the South-East as separate often entertain a negative vision of the other party. But
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there should be room for both similarities and differences. A dolphin is not a fish : but a general description of that animal which noted only its similarity to mammals would be inaccurate. A key precondition of an adequate understanding of both regions will be a dissociation of the notions of “difference” and “resemblances” from moralizing rhetoric. As Schöpflin and Goldsworthy observe in their different ways, South-Eastern Europe will not necessarily be “better” if it is more like Western Europe. Nor will the latter immediately improve either by dissociating itself further from, or successfully assimilating, the former. It should be possible to recognize that the peace and welfare of the region is in the West’s interests, but that tolerance or unity cannot be imposed from outside50.
32 The most unique features, like any ordinary birth mark or fingerprint, may not be the most useful keys to character – but that is no reason to obliterate them. Comprehending what is particular about the phenomenon were are examining is a necessary enterprise. South-East European studies face the same challenge as the wider post-colonialist project — finding ways of grasping historical specificity and particularity in a world where the definitions and the desiderata have generally been elaborated elsewhere. We have become accustomed to seeing the world as culturally and socially constructed, but with the emphasis on the drawing-board and the planner’s office rather than on the construction site itself. We have, to an extent, lost sight of the cultural materials — and the craftsman’s techniques — that make this whole process possible and informs it. Pointing an accusing finger at “the designs of Western hegemony” is not sufficient to explain the content or shape of cultures and societies that are thus built. Nor is it conducive to identifying factors of agency within the societies studied, particularly at the grass-roots level.
33 How do we go about this ?
34 An ongoing interrogation of the disciplines is essential. Are the fundamental questions of the present academic démarche adequate for our context ? Not always, not entirely. The questions have been formulated in particular circumstances, and are not easily detachable from their contexts51. On the other hand, ideal types are not always designed for reprojection onto real maps. The task of “locating” our analytical concepts must be attended to prior to that of “describing” our objects of study52.
35 We need to take advantage of the possibilities of interdisciplinary work, and the advantages in sharpening methodological and theoretical assumptions by working across disciplines. Here the issue is to identify what sorts of problems provide the right framework for this sort of work. Fundamental is the set of issues around identity and the conditions of its production, through textual, structural, historical analyses. Given the function of the national as area-defining in our part of the world, differentiation in those terms is probably the starting point, but this needs to be understood in terms of the intersection of the national with other discourses53. And this necessarily then means more serious analyses of these other forms of identity : class, religion and gender, of course, but also individual, family, sexuality, profession, region.
36 This would open up a number of relatively unexplored issues. As historians, we note that the lack of serious social history of all kinds is a problem which affects scholars in all fields, whether they are political scientists looking to formulate paradigms, anthropologists trying to date the contemporary phenomena they are recording, or students of literature seeking a context for their texts. There has been all too little research on social groups, structures and processes. Marxist schools of history in the
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individual countries produced relevant work, but the focus on class struggle and progressive forces meant that entire spheres of human activity (women, nobility, the family, marginality) went largely unexplored. There were some stimulating attempts in the West to elaborate theories of society and social change in the region54. But these initiatives were not often followed up in detail, and South-East Europeanists only rarely attempted the sort of social and socio-political analysis that absorbed the Western historical profession in the 1970s and 1980s (perhaps partly because of the difficulties of archival research in the region). Western “history from below” sometimes approached the trivial, but the aspiration to a more total exploration of human experience was fruitful, and would certainly benefit our area. This is not to condemn the important study of states and élites, but it is difficult to know what states and élites are without considering their social consistency and the extent of their recognition. The harsh domination of ruling groups and the gap between state and society do not exclude extensive social mobility which needs to be studied55. Or, to turn a Balkan proverb on its head, not all fish rot from the head down.
37 On the other hand, a “Balkanocentric” vision of the world, which might try to suggest that only what is specific, unique or original to the region is relevant to its study, will fail to generate interesting conclusions. It is nearly twenty years since Katherine Verdery pointed out that even accounting for apparently compact and stable rural villages requires a long distance-view over centuries and regions : « with anything less, one cannot adequately render intelligible the actions of villagers or comprehend why their lives take the form they do »56.
38 So comparative projects, within an area, and across regions. Even the most powerful, and the most oft-invoked “defining characteristics” of the region are not incomparable with other regions. The great so-called “legacies” : the Ottoman, the Byzantine, the Communist, affected the region profoundly but also operated in other territories, and cannot be studied in their totality if South-East Europe is examined hermetically57. Characteristic “Balkan” institutions spread beyond the region : for instance, the Habsburg Empire’s treatment of the Orthodox population in her southern confines owed more to the model of the Ottoman millet than to the example of her former Spanish possessions. There is no reason why attitudes to minorities, or violence, or the character of state-building in South-Eastern Europe cannot bear comparison with other situations in Europe, or for that matter South-East Asia or South America, although necessary care should be taken as to context58.
39 Some writing recently about Eastern Europe in general have remarked how the region perhaps may only be defined not in terms of common roots or an international culture but an atomization and a consciousness of distance from the West59. But solidarities are never so geometrical. Moreover, an ambiguous attitude to Europe can be found in Spain, Scandinavia and the British Isles, as well as in the Czech Republic. And to understand even Western or Central Europe requires an understanding of what is going on elsewhere60. South-East Europe, then, is not a mere reflection or defiant mirror held up to the North-West or the centre : for the mirror is in the minds of us all, wherever we come from61. It is not the opposite of “North-Western Asia” either. It is a reality whose meaning may be subject to normal contestation, but whose contentiousness does not have to be its most characteristic feature. The name we have chosen to examine, and to accept with all due disclaimers befitting a convention, benefits from being both provisional and specific ; arbitrary but also accurate ; distinct, but also connected to a
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wider world. South-Eastern Europe will always be part of what geographers have not yet called The Ural Pensinsula, namely Europe ; ignore it at your peril.
NOTES
1. Pseudo-Caesarius, Eratapokriseis (5th-6th C.), cited by Tapkova-Zaimova (Vasilika), « Entre le nord pontique et le Danube : mouvements des peuples historiques et légendaires à la haute époque », Bulletin de l’AIESEE, 28-29, 1998-1999, p. 52. 2. McCrindle (J. W.), ed., The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk, London : Hakluyt Society (First Series, nr. 98), 1897, esp. pp. 40-41. 3. Hyde-Price (Adrian), in International Affairs, 75 (4), October 1999, p. 860, believes Croatia should be classified in Central Europe if it is good, and the Balkans if it is bad. He is slightly less extreme than Pseudo-Caesarius in his evaluation of these criteria, referring to « a poor human rights record and an authoritarian-nationalist character ». 4. Huntington (Samuel P.), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York : Simon & Schuster, 1996. 5. Most recently Pavlowitch (Stevan K.), A History of the Balkans, 1804-1999, London / New York : Longman, 1999. 6. Todorova (Maria), Imagining the Balkans, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1997. 7. Halliday (Fred), Islam and the Myth of Confrontation, London : I.B. Tauris, 1995. 8. Kaplan (Robert),Balkan Ghosts. A Journey Through History, New York : St. Martin’s, 1993. A ghostly coincidence : in 1988 J. Rupnik announced that « the spectre of Central Europe haunts the lands of “real socialism” » (Rupnik (Jacques), The Other Europe, London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988, p. 4) ; in 1989,G. Schöpflin wrote that « the idea of Central Europe became, unquestionably, one of the spectres that came to haunt the politics of Europe as a whole in the 1980s. » (Schöpflin (George), « Central Europe : Definitions Old and New », in Schöpflin (George), Woods (Nancy), eds., In Search of Central Europe, Cambridge : Polity, 1989, p. 7), while in 1997 M. Todorova declared that « a specter is haunting Western culture - the specter of the Balkans » (Todorova (Maria), op.cit., p. 3). Marx would have been, if pleased to see his metaphor still hovering in the imagination, disappointed to find it applied to an ideology of region rather than one of class. 9. This buzzword was not unique to the Balkans, but drew on it. Some representative travel books : Nicolson (Adam),Frontiers. From the Arctic Circle to the Aegean, London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985 ; Malcomson (Scott L.),Borderlands : Nation and Empire, London / Boston : Faber & Faber, 1993 ; Reid (Anna),Borderlands. A Journey through the History of the Ukraine , London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997 ; Applebaum (Anne),Between East and West : Across theBorderlands of Europe, London : Papermac, 1995. Books entitled Between East and West number over one hundred titles in the last twenty-five years and deal with regions stretching from Moravia to Japan, via Bessarabia, Cyprus and the Suez Canal. 10. Wolff (Larry R.),Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1994 ; Goldsworthy (Vesna),Inventing Ruritania. The Imperialism of the Imagination, London / New Haven : Yale University Press, 1998. 11. For “Nationalism”’s appearance on the front cover of Time magazine in 1990, see Nairn (Tom), « Demonizing Nationalism », London Review of Books, XV (4), 25 February 1993, p. 3. A
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recent survey of an increasingly saturated market in Smith (Anthony D.), Nationalism and Modernism, London / New York : Routledge, 1999. 12. Verdery (Katherine), « The Production and Defence of “the Romanian Nation”, 1900 to World War II », in Fox (Richard G.), ed., Nationalist Ideologies and the Production of National Cultures, Washington, DC : American Ethnological Association, 1990 (American Ethnological Society monograph series, no. 2) ; Herzfeld (Michael), Ours Once More : Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece, Austin : Texas University Press, 1982 ;Čolović (Ivan), « Le folklore et la politique. Une affaire moderne », Revue des études sud-est européennes, 30 (3-4), 1992 ; Deletant (Dennis), Hanak (Harry), eds., Historians as Nation-Builders, London : SSEES / Macmillan, 1988. 13. Herzfeld (Michael),Anthropology through the Looking Glass, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1987 ; Pearton (Maurice), « Notions of Nationalism », Nations and Nationalism, 2 (1), 1996. 14. Gellner (Ernest), « The Mighter Pen ? Edward Said and the double standards of inside-out colonialism », Times Literary Supplement, (4690), 19 February 1993, and ensuing correspondence in February 26, March 5, March 19, April 2, April 9, June 4 and June 11 1993. 15. Reviews in Carabott (Philip), Karakasidou (Anastasia) in European History Quarterly, 29 (3), July 1999, pp. 425-434 and Brown (Keith), « Review of Peter Mackridge & Eleni Yannakakis, eds, Ourselves and Others. The Development of a Greek Macedonian Cultural Identity since 1913. Oxford 1997 », Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 23, 1999. 16. Cf. Roberts (Henry L.),Eastern Europe : Politics, Revolution and Diplomacy, New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1970, pp. 3-15. 17. Misha Glenny’s The Balkans, 1804-1999. Nationalism and the Great Powers (London : Granta, 1999)is only the most recent case in point. His claim (p. xxv) as to the absence of histories of the region set in international context does a disservice to the competence of more pedestrian but more accurate works such as Anderson (M.S.), The Eastern Question, 1774-1923 (London : Macmillan, 1968, rev. ed.), and Jelavich (Barbara),History of the Balkans (2 vols., Cambridge UP, 1983). 18. Norman Davies’s Europe: A History (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1996) made great play of expanding the historiographical horizon of Europe beyond the West but seriously ignored the South-East. 19. Hroch (Miroslav),Social Preconditions of the National Revival in Europe, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1985, speaks merely of “insurrectional” nationalism in the Balkans. Gellner (Ernest),Nationalism, London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997, pp. 41-43, admits that his theory linking nationalism to industrial development doesn’t work well for the Balkans. The most thorough attempt to typologize East European nationalism to date is Sugar (Peter), « External and Domestic Roots of East European Nationalism » in Sugar (Peter), Lederer (Ivo), eds., East European Nationalism, Seattle : University of Washington Press, 1969. 20. This is especially true of textbooks of political history, e.g. Jelavich (Charles), Jelavich (Barbara),The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920, Seattle : Washington University Press, 1977. 21. The position of those who see the Balkans in terms of its Ottoman legacy, e.g. Todorova (Maria), « The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans » in Brown (L. Carl), ed., The Imperial Legacy. The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East, New York : Columbia University Press, 1996. 22. The classic text is McNeill (William H.), Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500-1800, Chicago : Chicago University Press, 1964 ; for some more recent work see Roksandić (Drago), ed., Microhistory of the Triplex Confinium, Budapest : Central European University Press, 1998. 23. See e.g. Lampe (John R.),Jackson (Marvin R.),Balkan Economic History, 1550-1950, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1982. See also Andrei Pippidi’s article in this collection. 24. Cf., on the idea of Central Europe, Péter (László), « Central Europe and its reading into the past », European Review of History, 6 (1), 1999.
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25. The list could be endless : see more recently, Zanić (Ivo),Prevarena povijest (L’histoire détournée), Zagreb : Durieux, 1998 ; Boia (Lucian),Istorie şi mit în conştiinţă românească (L’histoire et les mythes dans la constitution de la roumanité), Bucureşti : Humanitas, 1997 ; Žirojević (Olga), « Kosovo u istorijskom pamcenju (mit, legende, ćinjenice) » (Le Kosovo dans la mémoire historique, mythe, légende, faits), Republika, 7, 15/03/95, etc. 26. Malcolm (Noel),Bosnia : A Short History, London : Macmillan, 1996 ; idem., Kosovo : A Short History. With a New Preface, London : Macmillan, 1999. Cf. the balanced critique of Winnifrith (Tom),Shattered Eagles, Balkan Fragments, London : Duckworth, 1995, pp. 7-9. 27. Cvijić (Jovan),La Péninsule Balkanique, Paris : J. Gamber, 1918 ; cf. his adaptor, Tomašić (Dinko), Društveni razvitak Hrvata (Le développement social des Croates), Zagreb : Naklada hrvatska, 1937. Iorga (Nicolae), Le caractère commun des institutions du sud-est de l’Europe, Paris : J. Gamber, 1929. 28. Stoianovich (Traian),Balkan Worlds. The First and Last Europe, Armonk / New York : M.E. Sharpe, 1994. 29. Kitromilides (Paschalis M.), « “Balkan mentality” : history, legend, imagination », Nations and Nationalism, 2 (2), 1996. 30. Ibid., pp. 171. 31. There is not the space to discuss them in detail here, but some similar problems are raised by A. Duţu’s equally stimulating contribution, Duţu (Alexandru), « Y a-t-il une Europe orthodoxe ? Leçons faites au Collège de France », Sud-Estul şi contextul european. Cultură şi solidarităţi în „Europa Ortodoxă”. Buletinul institutului de studii sud-est europene, 7, 1997. 32. One could cite the Slavonic menaion of 1761 entitled Srbljak, which structured a year of worship around specifically Serbian saints; or the prefaces to the menaia published by Bishop Chesarie and his successors at Râmnic in the 1770s and 1780s, which did much the same for the Wallachians; not to mention Paisii Hilendarski’s Istoriya slavenobolgarskaya completed in 1762. 33. Kitromilides (Paschalis M.), art.cit., p. 168. 34. For example, D.Rihtman-Auguštin gives a stimulating account of Croatian shifts in and out of Balkans in the 20th century (Rihtman-Auguštin(Dunja),«Zašto i otkad se grozimo Balkana » (Pourquoi et depuis quand abhorrons-nous les Balkans), Erasmus, 19, 1997. 35. S. Antohi has used these concepts to study different facets of the Romanian social imaginary : see Antohi (Sorin),Imaginaire culturel et réalité politique dans la Roumanie moderne, Paris : L’Harmattan, 1999. His theoretical framework could be profitably used in study of collective identity elsewhere in the region. 36. Some remarks on the development of the field, and welcome suggestions for further research, in Todorova (Maria), « L’image de l’autre », Bulletin de l’AIESEE, 28-29, 1998-1999. The following five paragraphs are somewhat revised from Drace-Francis (Alex), « Inventions and Intentions : Miscellaneous Remarks on South-Eastern Europe and the New Discourse History », South-East European Newsletter (London : SEESA), 39, October 1998. 37. Wolff (Larry), Inventing Eastern Europe : The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford University Press, 1994. See Andrei Pippidi’s article in this number for a nuanced evaluation of this claim. 38. Todorova (Maria), Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, 1997. Themes already foreshadowed in Allcock (John B.), « Constructing the Balkans », in Allcock (John B.), Young (Antonia), eds., Black Lambs and Grey Falcons. Women Travellers in the Balkans, Bradford : Bradford University Press, 1991. 39. Goldsworthy (Vesna), Inventing Ruritania, Yale, 1998. 40. Petkov (Kiril), Infidels, Turks and Women : The South Slavs in the German Mind, ca. 1400-1600, Peter Lang, 1997. 41. For ideas of “The Balkans” and “The West” within Yugoslavia and her sucessor-states, see Bakić-Hayden (Milica),Hayden (Robert), « Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans” :
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Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics », Slavic Review, 51 (1), 1992 ; and Bakić- Hayden (Milica), « Nesting Orientalisms : The Case of Former Yugoslavia », Slavic Review, 54 (4), 1995. A recent collection of articles (some in Western languages) on Romanian visions of “others” in : Zub (Al.), ed., Identitate şi alteritate în spaţiul românesc, Iaşi : Univ. „Al. I. Cuza”, 1996. 42. Iorga (Nicolae), « Cronicele turceşti ca izvor pentru istoria românilor », Academia Română. Memoriile secţiunii istorice, 3 (9), 1928-1929, p. 12. 43. Shaw (Stanford), « The Ottoman view of the Balkans », in Jelavich (Charles), Jelavich (Barbara), eds., The Balkans in Transition, Berkeley : California University Press, 1963, deals mainly with political considerations in the Middle Ages. A great deal of work has been done on Russia’s diplomatic and military role in the Balkans, but very little of value on cultural similarities and differences. Brower (Daniel R.),Lazzerini (Edward J.), eds., Russia’s Orient : Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1997, opens up some useful perspectives. 44. Lewis (Bernard), The Muslim Discovery of the West, London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982. Reprinted by Phoenix, London 1994. 45. See Pippidi (Andrei), « Naissance, renaissances et mort du “bon sauvage” : à propos des Morlaques et des Valaques » in Hommes et idées du Sud-Est européen à l’aube de l’âge moderne, Bucureşti : Editura Academiei / Paris : Editions du C.N.R.S., 1980. 46. Balamaci (Nicholas S.), « Can the Vlachs Write Their Own History ? », Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 17, 1991 ; cf. Chakrabarty (Dipesh), « Postcoloniality and the artifice of history : Who speaks for “Indian” pasts ? », Representations, 37, 1992. 47. Rivals were dirty ; protégés cleanly, or « though not as yet tidy, they are particularly anxious to become so ». Bracewell (Wendy), « Opinion-makers : the Balkans in British Popular Literature, 1856-1876 », in Kačavenda (Petar), ed., Jugoslovensko-britanski odnosi / British Yugoslav Relations, Beograd : Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1988, pp. 101-102. 48. See, e.g., Panzac (Daniel), La peste dans l’Empire Ottoman, 1700-1850, Leuven : Editions Peeters, 1985. 49. Much work on “Mediterranean” masculinity suffers from this tendency : see e.g. Gilmore (David D.), ed., Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean, American Anthropological Association, no. 22. Washington DC, 1987 ; cf. for the Balkans, Dzadzić (Petar), Homo balcanicus, homo heroicus, Belgrade : BIZG, 1987. The same could be said of “eastern” and “western” models of nationalism : e.g. Plamenatz (John), « Two types of nationalism », in Kamenka (Eugene), ed., Nationalism : The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, London : Edward Arnold, 1973 ; and E. Gellner’s “zones” of nationalism in Europe, most recently in Gellner (Ernest),Nationalism (op.cit.), pp. 50-58. 50. Cf. the judicious thoughts of Mazower (Mark), « Tolérance et intolérance dans les Balkans », Revue des Deux Mondes, (11-12), novembre-décembre 1999 ; and the singularly injudicious ones of Kadaré (Ismail), « Ecrire une histoire nouvelle des Balkans », ibid. 51. An interesting example is the term “Renaissance”, which was first used in French in 1554 to denote a revival of Greek learning within the Ottoman Empire ; but later came to define that surge in Western cultural confidence which had begun earlier and which the Greeks were subsequently condemned for not having undergone. Huppert (George), The Style of Paris. Renaissance Origins of the French Enlightenment, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1999 (citing Belon (Pierre), Les Observations de plusieurs singularités et choses mémorables trouvés en Grèce, Asie, Judée, Arabie et autres pays estranges, Paris, 1554). 52. Bhabha (Homi),The Location of Culture, London : Routledge, 1994. 53. Duţu (Alexandru),Political Models and National Identities in “Orthodox Europe”, Bucharest : Babel, 1998. 54. E.g. Stoianovich (Traian), « The Social Foundations of Balkan Politics, 1750-1945 », in Jelavich (Charles), Jelavich (Barbara), eds., The Balkans in Transition (op.cit.), pp. 295-341 ; Stokes
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(Gale), « The Social Origins of East European Politics », in Chirot (Daniel), ed., The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe. Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century, Berkeley / Los Angeles / Oxford : California University Press, 1989 ; Beck (Sam),Cole (John), eds., Ethnicity and Nationalism in Southeastern Europe, Amsterdam : University of Amsterdam, 1981. 55. Codarcea (Cristina), « Le caractère de l’Etat valaque. Quelques considérations », in Laurenţiu (Vlad), ed., Pouvoirs et mentalités. Textes réunis à la mémoire du Professeur Alexandru Duţu, Bucarest : Babel, 1999 ; LeDonne (John P.), Absolutism and the Ruling Class. The Formation of the Russian Political Order, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 3-60. 56. Verdery (Katherine),Transylvanian Villagers. Three Centuries of Political, Economic and Ethnic Change, Berkeley / Los Angeles / Oxford : University of California Press, 1983, p. 2. 57. Among many studies of these “legacies”, one might mention : Runciman (Steven),The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1968 ; Brown (L. Carl), ed., op.cit. (esp. in this last volume essays by Maria Todorova and Halil Inalcik discuss what “legacy” might mean) ; Schöpflin (George),Politics in Eastern Europe, 1945-1992, Oxford / New York : Blackwell, 1993. 58. Some useful remarks on comparing Slovenia with Wales in Okey (Robin), “ Education and Nationhood in Wales, 1850-1940 ”, in Tomiak (Janusz) et al, eds., Schooling, Educational Policy and Ethnic Identity, Aldershot : Dartmouth / New York : New York University Press (Comparative Studies on Governments and Non-dominant Ethnic Groups in Europe, 1850-1940. Vol. I), 1991, pp. 35-62. 59. « The dialogue about an eventual all-European cultural identity is entirely a West European affair which so far does not address us in the East. » (Kusý (Miroslav), « We, Central-European East Europeans », in Schöpflin (George), Woods (Nancy), eds., op.cit., p. 96). Cf. R. Pynsent and S.Kanikova who remark that a sense of Europe as something external is one of the few unitary characteristics of East European literature : Pynsent (R. B.),Kanikova (S.I.), « Preface », The Everyman Companion to East European Literature, London : J.M. Dent, 1993, p. vii. 60. Anderson (Perry), « The Central Europe Problem », London Review of Books, 25 (20), 25/11/99. 61. Hartog (François), Le miroir d’Hérodote. Essai sur la représentation de l’autre, Paris : Gallimard, 1980 (see also English translation by Janet Lloyd published by University of California Press, 1987).
AUTEUR
WENDY BRACEWELL AND ALEX DRACE-FRANCIS Wendy Bracewell is Senior Lecturer in History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London ; and director of the Centre for South-East European Studies there. Alex Drace-Francis is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
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Defining South-Eastern Europe
George Schöpflin
1 The question of South-Eastern Europe raises the central difficulty of definitions. How is an area or topic to be defined in such a way that it has consistently valid characteristics and the area so defined is distinct from others ? This requires the establishment of boundaries, which both include and exclude and, correspondingly empower and disempower. But that is only one half of the problem. The other is to identify the shared structures that define the area. This point is crucial. Structures are universal, while the content may be quite diverse. Many people are misled by this polarity between structure and content. They look at the content and conclude that what they are seeing is unique. In a way they are, indeed, unique, but the underlying structure makes comparisons possible. That in turn means that in any attempt at defining an area, in our case South-Eastern Europe, we must first seek to identify the structures that are shared. That is what makes comparative work possible and legitimate and, at the same time, demarcates the area from others. Indeed, this identification of the structure is vital. Without doing so, we can easily become captives of our own data and end up collecting piles of fascinating but trivial information that we are unable to contextualise.
2 Let us look next at the problematic of South-Eastern Europe. How are we to define an area, or a community ? It must have certain shared characteristics, notably established boundaries, geographical and non-geographical, that are recognised and recognisable, but geography on its own is not sufficient - geography is not destiny. Indeed, in many ways looking at a map and seeing a certain geographical unity is misleading, in as much as a map is no more than a representation, a scientific metaphor for physical and other realities. There is a clear tendency in a certain range of historical and political analysis to assume without further scrutiny that geographical unity must also involve other kinds of unity. It is vital, therefore, in defining an area that all shared characteristics, not just geographical - let alone cartographical - boundaries be assessed.
3 In order that these boundaries be regarded as real, they must include and exclude and must empower and disempower. Then, the greater the number and variety of overlapping and mutually reinforcing boundaries, the better they will resist penetration and the stronger will be the identity that it contains. Thus the more
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powerful the boundary, the more successful it will be in creating an internal coherence - a process that takes place in continuous interaction with the boundary and the boundary traffic from outside. This is the sense in which geographical definitions on their own say very little ; there must be cultural, historical, linguistic, administrative, political boundaries functioning cumulatively to establish lines that are very difficult to cross. Time-processes operating over time generate recognisable patterns, a longue durée, by making these processes a part of what the community comes to regard as “normal and natural”, as a part of its world of implicit assumptions. Overall, communities within such boundaries acquire shared habits in their ways of life, shared ways of solving problems, defining strategies and understanding experiences. They acquire membership of a shared web of meanings and reproduce the shared thought- styles and thought-worlds that are built upon these processes. These are real communities, with well established qualities that are continuously reproduced and giving rise to cultural norms.
4 Cultural norms establish a set of rebuttable presumptions often encoded in the implicit world of doxa, the cultural grain. These norms are not absolute and not deterministic, it is always possible to go against them, but that makes matters harder, it is more difficult to legitimate ideas if they are deviant in terms of established cultural norms and the potential to revert to the status quo ante if innovations go against the grain is high. Change imposed against the grain of cultural community will certainly change it, the act of resistance produces change, but the imposed change will always be seen as alien, as abnormal. At most what will emerge is something hybrid and hybridised. This, after all, was the outcome of the communist experience.
5 The Enlightenment state, the modern rational and rationalising state, is an extraordinarily powerful instrument. It has the capacity to create order, meaning, security amidst ever greater complexity and at best it can generate good governance, transparency and accountability. It can integrate social and political action to prevent it from creating chaos or degenerating into anomie, while simultaneously making provision for individual choice. It exists as a concrete reality and as symbol, particularly in its ideal-typical form.
6 It was in this form that it was exported to South-Eastern Europe. This is significant, because it means that it had its origins and contours in a different cultural matrix, a culture with different cultural capital. Hence it was received in the region in a complete form and had to compete against the local pre-existing thought-worlds and thought- styles. The two have been at odds ever since. The fit between the modern state and the varieties of the South-East European thought-style has never been a good one, though that has not prevented the South-East European polities from retaining the aspiration to enrooting the modern state in its received Western form.
7 What, then, are the tensions ? First, the reciprocity of rights between rulers and ruled, a very deeply encoded pattern under Western Christianity and feudalism, establishes a counterfoil to the bureaucratic norms of the modern state, which is predisposed to see itself as the repository of ultimate rationality. Alternative perspectives, alternative rationalities are vital in ensuring that the state does not become the captive of its bureaucratic norms and be ensnared by them. Reciprocity here means feedback and self-limitation. None of these is well established in South-Eastern Europe. If anything, the state continues to be seen as the key agent of transformation, possibly even the pre-eminent agent of transformation.
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8 Then, in South-Eastern Europe the complexity of social structures is not matched intellectually, cognitively or semantically by society and social knowledge. Modernity was taken over by the state rather than by the society that had still to be modernised when the reception occurred, leaving the state the primary agent of modernisation in a dominant position over society, thereby reproducing the problem, because society finds it difficult to take on the state with inadequate information and social knowledge. The state assumes control of modernisation, because it sees itself as supremely rational and seeks to transform society in its own image. Communism was the apotheosis of this. But society resists this, because it does not necessarily accept the vision of the state as its own. The outcome is an uneasy hybrid, with contrasting and contradictory aspirations and thought-styles in conflict. All of this gives modernisation a bad name, a teleological and alien quality, something programmatic over which society has little control. The consequence is passivity and not the civil society upon which the democratic state is predicated. In this sense, modernisation from above becomes a moral issue.
9 Third, this means that the legacy of the pre-modern networks of power becomes significant in understanding South-Eastern Europe, together with the entire cultural capital of the region. The networks of power and the forms in which power was exercised, the style of public pronouncements, for instance, are reshaped by the coming of modernity, but they do not vanish entirely. The way in which power is exercised, notably in the existence and authority of patron-client networks or the persistence of informal regulation over formal, can bring about a subtle metamorphosis of institutions and make them operate in ways not intended by their original founders.
10 Further, there is the problem of secularisation, which was a central aspect of Enlightenment rationality, in that early modernity was defined against religion if it was defined against anything ; but secularism has a very different resonance in non- Western Christianity, where the secular sphere has never been as sharply differentiated as in the West. Some of the cultural capital conserved from the pre- modern past in South-Eastern Europe is clearly the residue of religion and these residues are different from their equivalents in the West.
11 The question then is, can there be a South-Eastern European model of modernity ? The answer is yes, but it will have to be constructed on the basis of South-Eastern European thought-styles and thought-worlds, practices, traditions rather than by a mass importation of ideas and patterns from elsewhere. If that means giving greater saliency to ethnicity or hierarchy or whatever, so be it. The alternative will not work very well. The key structures of modernity - complexity, change, contests for power - are the same as anywhere else, but the South-East European content will be different from that of the West.
12 In theorising the nature and quality of South-Eastern Europe as a whole, we should try to identify the series of shared experiences, patterns and structures operating interactively, generating particular types of collective meanings and cultural capital.
13 The area has had an experience of a particular type of imperial rule - different from the West - based on alien and unpredictable forms of social knowledge and power, alien patterns of exclusion and alien legitimation. Thus the Ottoman legacy tended to emphasise timelessness, changelessness, the futility of individual endeavour, and centrally this mode of exercising and legitimating power lacked a model of far-reaching change consonant with South-Eastern European expectations. Power was sacralised in
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an alien way. The modern state has been constructed against this legacy and necessarily took on some of its features as contestants invariably do ; that opposition in turn became the primary resource for the modern state and the coherence that it sought to create.
14 The system of administration created by the Ottoman imperium was highly oppressive and arbitrary. It had no concept of a public sphere or public good. Taxation excluded all reciprocity and little to nothing was returned to those who were taxed. It was also inefficient. It gave the individual and the community minimal protection in terms of law and policing and it was remote, opaque and non-responsible. The states constructed on this legacy took over some, not all, of these features and reproduced them. The local élites that lived under this imperium were weak and the styles of power constructed then live on in an attenuated form and are reproduced in modernity.
15 Peasant subsistence agriculture creates weak models of the future. All resources, non- material as well as material, are treated as zero-sum, there is very little surplus given the marginality of much of the land and the low level of skills, collective cultivation of the land undermines individual initiative and the area suffered from remoteness from the market. Adult illiteracy was widespread in the absence of a religious or educational tradition that stressed adult participation in either church or etatic institutions.
16 The area shares certain myth structures, notably the antemurale myth of being the last bastion of the West against the East, the myth of victimhood and betrayal by “Europe”, a mythic compensation for that suffering (Kosovo is the most obvious case in point), as well as a myth of imperial oppression as justification for time lag and perceived backwardness.
17 Religion creates recognisable thought-worlds and thought-styles. Orthodoxy and Islam, the dominant religions, interacted with Western Christianity directly and indirectly and regarded themselves as threatened centres of moral virtue. Religion establishes a shared world of rituals and cognitive norms, a particular conception of sacred time and sacred space, a set of moral regulations and sense of order. These bring their own cultural capital with them. The question is what kind of thought-style emerges from Orthodoxy and Islam ? In general, these thought-styles privilege the collective over individual responsibility, encode a strong sense of hierarchy, pronounce non- negotiable truth claims, offer weak cognitive models of change and radical rather than incremental change, through the idea of redemption and salvation.
18 The strength or weakness of urbanisation is a key variable. The city functions as the locus of continuous change and exchange, but in South-Eastern Europe it has been weak, static, small and ruralised ; it seldom had the capacity to integrate the surrounding countryside. Then, the South-Eastern European city was massively ruralised with communist modernisation, something that it has still to overcome. Furthermore, the communist models of urban integration offered little or nothing to these newly arriving rural masses that would allow them to weather the trauma of the rural-urban shift and to come to terms with the dynamic diversity that the city creates. If anything, communism offered counterproductive models, that of “ the classless communist man ”, which was static and empty of content in the context of various forms of the real social stratification and interactions that people encountered.
19 It is worth adding here that pre-modern models of ethnic coexistence in pre-modern cities like Sarajevo, say nothing about modern ones, for in modernity the nature of power, of complexity, of resources, of contest are utterly different. There are many
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who think otherwise, but this is idle dreaming. Where urban cognitive and behavioural models have existed, they were inadequate or swamped so that the city failed to emerge as a locus of civility.
20 Finally, why is South-Eastern Europe different from Central Europe, why has Central Europe proved more readily integrable into Western Europe than South-Eastern Europe ? Some of the answers should follow from the foregoing. Central Europe has better state capacity, superior ability to adjust to and accommodate post- Enlightenment requirements, its thought-worlds are closer to the Western European norm (because of the legacy of Western Christianity) and is thus better able to cope with the diversity that modernity generates. This does not mean that Central Europe is possessed of some inherent virtue as some South-East Europeans occasionally suggest, but that the criteria of integration were established in the West and Central Europe, despite its self-characterisation of intermediacy, has been structurally closer to those Western criteria than South-Eastern Europe.
AUTEUR
GEORGE SCHÖPFLIN George Schöpflin holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European integration with reference to Central and Eastern Europe at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies/ University College London.
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Definitional Dilemmas : Southeastern Europe as « Culture Area » ?
Pamela Ballinger
1 In the popular and scholarly imaginations, the region of the world bearing the label Southeastern Europe (among others) has typically been conceptualized as either a transitional zone, an area of cultural hybridity and cross-fertilization, or as a site of violent, “tectonic” culture shifts. The area thus appears either as a linking bridge or as a dividing fault line between civilizational complexes. This article examines such problematic understandings from the disciplinary viewpoint of the anthropologist, the ostensible custodian of culture and the culture area. In doing so, I address a series of questions : what spaces have Southeastern Europe and its subsets (like the Balkans) occupied vis-à-vis broad constructs of symbolic geography, such as those of “Europe” (West and East) and the “Mediterranean” ? How have specifically anthropological definitions of the region built upon key symbolic boundary markers like those demarcating Occident and Orient, democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and feudalism and so on ? Finally, what are the political and epistemological consequences of defining the world in terms of such culture areas ?
Discovering the Southeastern Europe
2 In fixing the boundaries of putative culture areas like Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Southeastern Europe, anthropologists have not engaged in wholesale geographic imagination or invention, of course, but rather have drawn upon what Gupta and Ferguson deem “ the prior conceptual segmentation of the world into different cultures, areas, and sites that makes the enterprise of fieldwork possible ”1. Anthropology thus “ inherited a field of significance that preceded its formalization ”2. Among the deeply rooted images upon which anthropologists in Southeastern Europe have drawn are those familiar to most scholars of the region : of Eastern Europe and the Balkans as liminal spaces or demi-mondes poised between darkness and light 3. The
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transitional status accorded the region reflected the manner in which the moral and geographical entity of “Europe” has been historically constructed in opposition to other geographical and cultural complexes, notably the Orient4, with internal symbolic axes in turn differentiating Northern from Southern Europe, and later, Western from Eastern Europe. Lying at the intersection of these various axes, the areas deemed the “Mediterranean”, “Eastern Europe”, and the “Balkans” have been paradoxically associated with both classical antiquity and modern barbarism. In the 18th and 19 th centuries, for instance, the Mediterranean was popularly viewed by Northern Europeans (and some Americans) as the “cradle of civilization(s)” whose lessons were eagerly absorbed by aristocratic gentlemen and (as time went on) ever larger numbers of middle-class tourists. John Pemble's study of Victorian and Edwardian travelers to various Mediterranean locales suggests that many apprehended the region as hauntingly familiar, as recalling “the childhood of man”, freedom and life ; at the same time, many visitors regarded the people themselves with disdain5. The Romantic movement — and in particular poets like Byron, Keats and Shelley — often contrasted the beauty of the landscape and the architecture of Southern Europe with the roughness of its people, envisioned as decadent or degraded after the evils of foreign conquest (whether it be Bourbon, Austrian, or Turkish).
3 In discussing the peoples of Southern Europe, many 19th-century travel accounts focused on the most “primitive” or backward group, the peasantry. Peasant women proved an especial object of curiosity6 and, at least in the areas that came to be known as “the Balkans”, were often praised for their beauty in contrast to the rudeness of their menfolk7. The Southern peasant, like the non-European primitive, seemed to embody the past in the present as a kind of living fossil8. « For many travellers, the south of Europe, like “the South” in general, was their own past. It was equally encompassed in an ideological map of geographical and existential opposition », writes anthropologist Caroline Brettell in her study of 19th-century travel accounts9. Just as the peasant possessed both positive and negative connotations for the Northern European, the South in general created contradictory impressions : on the one hand, a place of sunshine and health, light and immortality ; on the other hand, a land of decay, disease and corruption.
4 What came to be known as “Eastern Europe” and its Balkan subset represented similarly liminal spaces, physically and historically overlapping as they did upon the ambiguous domain marked out by classical antiquity and contemporary backwardness. Well into the 18th century, for example, the mountainous range that gave the Balkans its geographic appellation was typically referred to by its classical designation of Haemus (from the Latin) or Aemus (from the Greek) 10. In contrast to the absolute foreignness embodied by the notion of the Orient, then, what became known as Eastern Europe instead seemed to constitute a transitional realm poised between light and darkness, civilization and barbarism. This West/East division displaced (albeit incompletely — perhaps it is better to say they complicated) an older North/South conceptualization that viewed the South (locus of classical antiquity and early Renaissance humanism) as the pre-eminent site of civilization11. Attention to the ancient past ultimately stimulated interest in the ethnographic present, facilitating the reconceptualization of the internal European border from North/South to West/East. Notes Maria Todorova, « the effort to study the ancient world through the lives of the contemporary inhabitants of the classic lands brought an awareness of the present
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Greeks and their problems. This was soon extended to the different Slavs and other ethnic groups inhabiting the peninsula who became the live figures of what came increasingly to be seen as the Volksmuseum of Europe »12.
5 The work of Herder and other scholars interested in philology and cultural diffusion furthered the European imaginary's movement into the “ethnographic present”. In Herder's intellectual trajectory, Eastern Europe became increasingly figured as the domain of the pure and uncontaminated folk (Volk) and their cultural products (Kultur). As Ismail Kadare's folklorists breathlessly gasp in his novel, The File on H, the Balkans in particular appeared to be the “last living laboratory” of epic ballads. Voicing what had become a common-place view of the region, Kadare's 20th century protagonists are (fictional) descendants of earlier travelers and folklorists, such as the Venetian priest Alberto Fortis and the Serbian philologist Vuk Karadžić, who had viewed the Balkans as a repository of traditional customs and songs.
6 In his intellectual history of Eastern Europe, Larry Wolff focuses on its “imagining” by key Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, as well as more “native” intellectuals like Fortis and Karadžić. Todorova's Imagining the Balkans offers a detailed picture for the “discovery” of the Eastern European subset known as the Balkans. Todorova offers a broader range of sources for Balkan imagery than does Wolff for Eastern Europe and admirably devotes space to the various ways in which peoples of Southeastern Europe have understood, elaborated or rejected notions of Balkans and Balkanness ; this issue of just who is Balkan or who is European remains hotly contested in contemporary Southeastern Europe13. Todorova sees a particular understanding of “Balkanism” as having evolved independently from “Orientalism” and in certain aspects against it, given that Balkan self-identities have been resolutely constructed in opposition to “Orientals”, i.e. Ottoman rulers and their legacies. In contrast to Orientalism, then, which sets up a clear-cut dichotomy between East and West, « balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity »14. As with Eastern Europe more generally, the Balkans have thus come to be explicitly defined as a crossroads of civilizations, with Balkan peoples appearing to abide « in a twilight zone illuminated neither by the radiance of the West nor by the exotic glow of the East »15.
7 Like Todorova's work, Vesna Goldsworthy's recent study Inventing Ruritania : The Imperialism of the Imagination focuses on the construction of Balkan backwardness. Goldsworthy offers a different twist, however, in her exploration of « the concept of imaginative, textual colonisation »16. She does so by narrowing in on British imaginings of the Balkan peninsula, specifically popular culture representations (« vampires, spies, murder and the Orient Express ») in novels and films. Although approaching the topic of the Balkans' “invention” from diverse starting points, both Goldsworthy and Todorova's books reveal that no one concept (or stereotype) of the Balkans exists.
8 Todorova does suggest, however, that by the beginning of the 20th century, a more consolidated image of the Balkans began to crystallize outside of the region. The contentious Macedonian question, the Balkan Wars and Franz Ferdinand's assassination in Sarajevo linked the region with an image of endemic violence, cruelty, terrorism and fanaticism. The interwar period brought to the fore another leitmotiv already long present, that of cultural and racial hybridity. 18th- and 19th-century travel accounts had often emphasized the “mongrel nature” of Balkan peoples like those Dalmatians whom one female traveler depicted as « wild like animals » singing « in their half-Latin, half-Slavic tongue »17. Though these early descriptions expressed a
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sense of strangeness, they did not yet possess the wholly pejorative connotation that they would acquire by the 20th century, when they became associated with « hybrid races » and « the handicap of heterogeneity »18.
9 This intermixture presumably explained the tendency to “balkanization”, a term that entered the popular lexicon after World War I to signify what American journalist Paul Scott Mowrer called « the creation, in a region of hopelessly mixed races, of a medley of small states with more or less backward populations, economically and financially weak, covetous, intriguing, afraid, a continual prey to the machinations of the great powers, and to the violent promptings of their own passions »19. Having entered both journalistic and political discourse, “balkanization” also became a convenient shorthand in academic writing for the danger supposedly inherent in the breakup of « larger political units into smaller, mutually hostile states »20. Though these images of balkanization and factionalism receded somewhat from the intellectual horizon during the subsequent Cold War — replaced by images of collectivistic and authoritarian societies21 — since 1989/1991 they have been revived together with their most negative connotations, among them tribalism, barbaric cruelty and atrocities, and blood feud. Indeed, in popular discourse at least, events in former Yugoslavia appear to have given new currency to the image of balkanization as a defining cultural characteristic of Southeastern Europe, separating it off to some degree from the rest of Eastern Europe or Central Europe. Given this broad canvas of scholarly, political, and journalistic mappings of Southeastern Europe, how have anthropologists in particular conceptualized this area and its peoples ?
Area studies
10 Without a doubt, anthropologists have drawn upon the rich field of images and classifications of the region that my summary here has only hinted at. At the same time, however, Anglo-American anthropological thought has also borne the imprint of specific disciplinary conventions and usage. Given the durability of the culture area notion in anthropology, the historical development of the concept — which constitutes an important part of both the construction of knowledge and the institutional framework (the organization of courses, departments and so on) of anthropology and other disciplines — merits some discussion. By the end of the 19th century, evolutionary classifications of societies and cultures in time began to give way to classifications in space. Rather than categorizing societies by means of a linear and temporally organized framework (i.e. primitive or civilized, thus less or more advanced upon the evolutionary timeline), the culture area primarily categorized societies across space and according to ostensibly stable sets of culture traits. As stated in the 1968 edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, « Culture areas are geographical territories in which characteristic culture patterns are recognizable through repeated associations of specific traits and, usually, through one or more modes of subsistence that are related to the particular environment »22.
11 In anthropology, this particular notion of culture areas developed in the context of museum work, much of it initially focused on native peoples of the Americas. Indeed, the timeless ethnographic moment embodied by the “new” museum display techniques of life groups and dioramas reflects the static view of culture underwriting the very notion of culture areas23. While I refer here primarily to an Anglo-American (and, to
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some degree, French) tradition of anthropology, thereby neglecting a continental European folkloric discipline focused on the study of “popular traditions”24, these understandings of culture areas nonetheless resonate with the Herderian ideas of Volk so crucial to that folkloric tradition. Furthermore, this similarity is not coincidental since German-born and educated Franz Boas, the so-called “father of American cultural anthropology”, contributed to U.S. anthropology precisely this Herderian notion of Kultur25. Boas helped make culture (and the culture area) the primary focus of American anthropology, in contrast to British and French preoccupations with society and social structure26.
12 Together with his students and colleagues Otis Mason, Clark Wissler and Alfred Kroeber, Franz Boas articulated and then refined the culture area concept through efforts to establish areal subdivisions for North American Indian groups. Wissler, for example, attempted to refine the area concept by positing culture centers based upon ethnic factors from which traits diffused outwards and subsequently became fixed by environmental conditions. Heeding Wissler's admonition that « a culture is not to be comprehended until the list of its traits approaches completeness »27, Kroeber and his students painstakingly compiled trait inventories in order to locate the culture centers or climaxes28 from which diffusion originated. Throughout the 1940s, the laborious work of compiling trait lists continued apace and generated massive amounts of data.
13 The rise of area studies in the Anglo-American academies after World War II signaled a transformation in the conceptualization and institutionalization of the culture area concept. Within the United States, a broad shift occurred from salvage anthropology's classification and documentation of “vanishing” native cultures to the pragmatic training of linguistic and cultural specialists in areas of vital national interest. The exigencies of global leadership brought by the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War provided the impetus for this change, as « governments discovered an alarming shortage of individuals who were seriously acquainted with the languages, cultures, and topographical characteristics of the world areas in which troops had to fight and about which important political and social decisions had to be made »29.
14 The Soviet Union/Eastern Europe and the Middle East were targeted as particularly vital to U.S. strategic interests and after the war Columbia and Harvard Universities (among others) quickly established Russian and East European study centers30. France and Britain also participated, often with American financial support, in the institutional building of area studies or further developed their own traditions of area studies in places like the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London. In 1955, for example, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded monies to the École Pratique des Hautes Études for the development of studies in the Far East, Soviet Union, India and Islam. Six years later the British University Grants Committee similarly allocated funds for Hayter Centres specializing in area studies31.
15 The anthropological articulation of culture area concepts for Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean — problematic conceptualizations in and of themselves and at whose even more problematic intersection sits Southeastern Europe — were inextricably bound up with the creation of these interdisciplinary area studies programs and more indirectly with larger geopolitical power shifts. The establishment of NATO bases in the Mediterranean, the threat of communism in Italy and Greece (persisting well into the 1950’s), the fear of a Soviet land invasion of Europe through the Balkans, and the perceived dangers of “Arab nationalism” rank among the prime considerations which
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rendered both Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean objects of intense interest to Anglo-American policymakers32.
16 As a recognized and delimited domain within anthropology, Mediterranean studies began to crystallize in the 1950s in response to British anthropologist E.E. Evans- Pritchard’s insistence that anthropologists should conduct fieldwork in “complex societies”. Despite the move to study closer to home, anthropologists still sought out the marginal and the exotic. Thus it was not businessmen in London or New York who anthropologists took as their subjects but rather isolated, “morally backward” peasant communities in the Mediterranean. Alternatively, anthropologists turned their attention to what Katherine Verdery has called the “Communist Other”, often seen to be critically (perhaps fatally) hampered by Czarist or Ottoman legacies of inefficiency and stagnation, as well as by “Asiatic despotism” and Asiatic modes of production33.
17 As a self-conscious discourse of Mediterranean anthropology developed, initial attempts at regional definition relied heavily upon geographical and climatic features, following upon Fernand Braudel’s extended discussion of a homogeneous climate34. Anthropologists soon went beyond Braudel's own circumscribed claims to a historical unity extending only through the 16th century, however, and attempted to identify in the contemporary Mediterranean common cultural traits. Anthropologist David Gilmore contends that a Braudelian understanding of historical interchange alone does not make for a culture area : « intense mutual contact does not by itself justify a “unity” label. Were this so, then the entire Hispanic world would constitute a unity, and to stretch the point so would the Sea of Japan or even the North Atlantic. It is rather the combination of historical convergences with synchronic parallels in culture, all within a homogeneous environment, that provides both internal consistency and distinctiveness to the Mediterranean area »35.
18 In the face of the enormous linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity of the circum- Mediterranean, anthropologists have argued for an internal consistency to the region on the basis of cultural traits such as scratch plow agriculture, urban orientation, dowry, patronage, and social inequality accompanied by or masked by egalitarian ideologies36.
19 In seeking to identify the dominant institution or complex that characterizes and therefore embodies the geographical area of the circum-Mediterranean, anthropologists including Pitt-Rivers, J.G. Peristiany and Pierre Bourdieu (as well as a later generation of scholars like Gilmore) quickly fastened upon the so-called “honour and shame complex”. According to this view, Mediterranean societies have in common notions of male honour largely defined in terms of the potentially shameful behavior of female kin and affines37. Despite extensive criticism of this notion in recent years, “honour and shame” remains the privileged cultural diacritic for a putative Mediterranean cultural unity.
20 Deeming traits like honour and shame “gatekeeping concepts”38, which work to delimit the range of inquiry and set the direction for the field, anthropologists like Arjun Appadurai have also attacked the broader notion of the culture area supposedly defined by such traits. A few anthropologists who work within so-called Mediterranean societies, like Michael Herzfeld, have gone so far as to deny a regional unity outright. Yet in spite of Herzfeld’s reiterated assertions that « we may one day be able to look back on “Mediterranean anthropology” (…) as a culturally, politically and historically localized discourse »39, most anthropologists accept the classification of the
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Mediterranean as a cultural entity of some sort, although debates regarding the nature and extent of that unity prove heated. Concepts like honour and shame even appear to be enjoying a revival of sorts in explanations of recent events in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in the re-invocation of indigenous ethnographic concepts like that of Jovan Cvijić's Dinaric man40.
21 While notions like that of honour and shame often hindered the critical anthropological investigation of Mediterranean societies, the conception of Eastern Europe within anthropology has been even less self-consciously articulated (and less deconstructed) than that of the Mediterranean. The taken-for-granted nature of Eastern Europe as a conceptual entity (at least until 1989) reflected the Cold War political divisions which appeared to render its boundaries obvious and unproblematic (Eastern Europe = Soviet bloc + socialist Yugoslavia and Albania). Prior to World War II, anthropological work in Eastern Europe had tended to focus upon the Balkans, particularly Albania, and the joint family form known as the zadruga41. In the Cold War era, what work was done in Eastern Europe remained weighted towards Yugoslav materials, especially in relation to kinship, migration, industrialization and rural-urban relationships. The influence of this work in broader discussions of European kinship remained slight, however, until fairly recently. As Maria Todorova notes, broad typologies of European family forms often ignored the Balkans and instead discussed Southern Europe primarily in terms of Italian materials42.
22 Ironically, then, Southeastern spaces like Yugoslavia fell under and in some ways typified the Eastern European rubric, as well as the Mediterranean one, at the same time that they (like these regions generally) remained marginal in broader theoretical discussions.Given its early repudiation of Soviet hegemony and its experiments with self-management and non-alignment, Yugoslavia proved problematic even within the conceptualization of Eastern Europe. (Such difficulties were compounded for Balkan societies like Greece, which were neither Slavic nor socialist but were “Mediterranean”.) Furthermore, little of the pioneering work on traditional Balkan peasant society and its “modernization” explicitly conceptualized the region or made claims about Southeastern Europe or Eastern Europe as a whole43.
A geopolitical zone
23 Since the détente of the mid-1970’s (and then again post-1989), a considerable amount of work has been done on other East European countries such as Hungary, Poland and Romania. These states played an important role in the conceptual crystallization of Eastern Europe laid out by Joel Halpern (a scholar of Serbia) and David Kideckel (a student of Romania) in their 1983 review article on the « Anthropology of Eastern Europe ». This article helped define the field constituted by a new generation of Anglo- American scholars which included Gail Kligman, Katherine Verdery, and Martha Lampland, as well as Kideckel and the Halperns, working in Eastern / Southeastern Europe.
24 Halpern and Kideckel delimited the region of Eastern Europe along standard geopolitical lines as being comprised by « the Slavic states outside the U.S.S.R. and the geographically contiguous states of Albania, Hungary, and Romania, excluding East Germany for sociocultural historical reasons »44. They defined Eastern Europe as characterized by 1) a rural orientation, given that the « bases of East European national
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identities have resided historically with the rural folk »45 ; 2) an ethnic shatter zone in which ethnic affiliation often coincides with religious affiliations ; and 3) (from 1945 to 1989) state socialism marked by central planning. Halpern and Kideckel’s comment that « the historical dynamics of this region form an analog in terms of cultural processes to Southeast Asia »46 — Southeast Asia representing a kind of “leftover category”, defined more by what it is not than by what it is — underlines the difficulty anthropologists and others have had of constructing a unified Eastern European culture area, let alone of situating an area like Southeastern Europe (or one of its component parts, like the former Yugoslavia) within such an area. Paradoxically, then, Eastern Europe has appeared simultaneously as an “obvious” region and a “non” region defined in part by what it is not.
25 Historian Garrison Walters' description of Eastern Europe offers one typical example of this conceptual hedging on the part of scholars. In 1988, Walters wrote of a region which only a year later would undergo a radical political transformation, « perhaps the only definition that could approach unanimous support is one that simply points out that the solidly Russian areas to the east and the solidly German and Italian lands to the west are not a part of Eastern Europe »47. Such a definition effectively excludes the areas where I have focused my own anthropological research, the border between Italy and former Yugoslavia. Not surprisingly, it is in such border areas that the difficulties (not to mention the absurdities) of fixing the boundaries of culture areas becomes most apparent. Defining Eastern Europe primarily by political alignments, Walters includes Yugoslavia and Albania with the (former) Soviet bloc states since they shared the same communist “milieu” (a statement, no doubt, that many Albanians and Yugoslavs would have contested). Walters gives Greece a kind of honorary status since « Greece, non- communist after a near miss, will be mentioned frequently simply because the Greek people and their culture had such a profound impact upon the Balkans »48.
26 As Walter's comments hint at, notions of the Balkans or of Southeastern Europe have remained as poorly defined as the larger Eastern Europe category of which they form a subset. Both inside and outside of Anglo-American anthropology, understandings of the Balkans often rest on primarily geographical references to the states that occupy or border the Balkan peninsula as defined by cartographers : Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Greece49. Events in former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, however, suggest the renewed currency of ideas of balkanization as defining, in tautological fashion, the Balkans and as separating this area off from the rest of Eastern Europe (home of transitology) and from Central Europe (site of a renewed vision of Mitteleuropean civility). Although the term “balkanization” is also frequently used in a generic sense50, popular discourse about the Yugoslav wars now tends to re-anchor balkanization geographically and to locate it in a primordial ethnicism supposedly specific to the “powder keg of Europe”51. Among anthropologists, the response to this primordial thesis has been either to counterattack with a kind of historical perennialism, or as has been more common, to proffer instrumental explanations which locate the Yugoslav crisis in the very recent machinations of indigenous élites52.
27 Now, perhaps more than ever, situating and defining Southeastern Europe has become problematic since the historical and cultural differences that separated Southeastern Europe from the rest of the Cold War bloc of socialist states appear to have been deepened by post-1989 events. Some anthropologists have nonetheless sought to go beyond the confines of culture area definitions by carving out a discourse centered
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around a common post-socialist space. Distinguished by certain common features such as mafia, problems of privatization, economic stagnation, nationalism, and “democratic deficits”, this thematically defined area potentially includes both Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe, as well as parts of Asia and Africa.
28 In practice, however, the “postsocialist” label often appears to merely reinscribe Eastern Europe. I will offer here merely one anecdotal example of how easily this reinscription occurs. In the mid-1990s, a group of largely U.S. based anthropologists formed an association known as Soyuz in order to promote the anthropological study of post-socialist societies. The name Soyuz indicates that, in this case, postsocialism essentially proves synonymous with the former Soviet bloc. As someone who works in the former Yugoslavia (as well as Italy), I have attended several Soyuz meetings and while always made to feel welcome, I have found relatively few points of dialogue with most of the other scholars. Many of these scholars not only work in former bloc countries but more particularly in the former Soviet Union. (Indeed, the Soyuz events at the annual American Anthropological Association meetings seem to be attracting younger scholars more successfully than the programs of the Anthropology of Eastern Europe group.) At Soyuz's 1998 gathering, a scholar of China attended, saying that he had hoped to find a group interested in broad theoretical issues of socialism/post- socialism but had instead found an association which de facto is organized on fairly strict area lines. This episode reveals the difficulties all scholars face in conceptually resituating the areas known as Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe and so on. Even if we seek to go beyond area definitions by means of conceptual devices such as “postsocialism”, the inertia of institutional practice and scholarly identity/self- selection proves a challenge.
29 That said, anthropologists like Katherine Verdery have made impressive contributions to the literature on postsocialism. Verdery has moved between carrying out very specific local analyses (in her case of Romania) and devising broader theoretical frameworks for a socialist and post-socialist space53. In her collection of essays, What was Socialism and what comes Next ?, Verdery sketches out points of convergence regarding the problems of socialist command economies, the gendering of tradition and national identity, and the privatization of land. She does so in a manner that provides a critical alternative to the transitologist perspectives dominant in other disciplines, such as political science. At the same time, Verdery herself proves the first to admit that her perspective is inevitably shaped and hence delimited to some degree by the specificity of the Romanian case she knows so well.
30 Verdery's most recent work, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, even suggests a morbid social geography spanning from the former Soviet Union to former Yugoslavia in which the remains of both illustrious ancestors and anonymous victims of past violence provide crucial moral and political capital in the struggles to reshape these societies54. Yet even here, the Yugoslav case is set apart somewhat, appearing either as anomalous or an exaggeration of tendencies found elsewhere in the post-socialist world. Does this suggest some Southeastern European specificity ? Verdery's work further prompts the question as to whether in scholarly analyses, just as in popular discourse, nationalism and virulently exclusive ethnicities are replacing state socialism as key boundary markers for the region(s) of Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe55. Given the difficulties previous generations of anthropologists faced in identifying cultural traits, are phenomena like nationalism being read (at least implicitly) as cultural expressions
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of a regional unity ? Has nationalism become the new gatekeeping concept for Eastern Europe and, in particular, Southeastern Europe, not only appearing to define these areas but dictating the focus of research through the kinds of questions asked and the type of research funded ?
31 Whether defined as a postsocialist or nationalist space, Southeastern Europe rests uneasily in these varied attempts at new regional and thematic definitions, just as the region rested uneasily in the past. The specificity of the former Yugoslav case proves troublesome, for instance, and the Greek case falls completely out of such classifications. In addition, the presentist focus on recent political arrangements neglects longue durée commonalties of the sort Braudel focused on. In popular and political discourse, however, as well as in scholarly practice (courses on « Peoples and Societies of the Balkans/Southeastern Europe/Eastern Europe, etc. » appear to have a long shelf life), regional and culture area understandings have a durability with which scholars must necessarily contend.
Conclusions
32 This article has argued that places located within the territorial confines of a Southeastern European space seem to potentially fall under and to stretch across several well-established classificatory rubrics : the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. This would not prove problematic if one recognized such categories as merely reflecting heuristic and/or historical boundaries. The problem arises, however, when we as scholars begin to talk in terms of cultural unities, with the end result that we ourselves easily fall into the essentialist trap for which we criticize nationalist politicians. If understood in essentialist terms, as they often have been, the traits associated with these areas create all sorts of contradictions when one confronts the problem of how to situate Southeastern Europe. For example, the association of urban values with the Mediterranean and a rural orientation with Eastern Europe implies an irreconcilability between such essentialist categories despite the fact that spaces like former Yugoslavia uneasily straddle both the “Mediterranean” and “Eastern Europe”. In the past, anthropologists like Wissler and Kroeber tried to overcome such difficulties through a series of mental gymnastics, speaking of culture centers and climaxes and treating problematic spaces like Southeastern Europe or the Adriatic littoral as transitional zones56. Through such exercises, definitions may become so qualified as to prove useless even within the logic of culture areas.
33 More importantly, all too often what we as scholars set out to prove (i.e. the question of is there a unity or how do we conceptualize it ?) becomes the explanation for cultural traits identified. These traits are in turn taken as “proof” of an area's cultural unity, resulting in tautological reasoning57. Furthermore, the problem is that academic discourse both reflects and helps constitute new social realities. Though scholars may inherit previously defined fields of signification, they help to shape and legitimize those discursive fields. While scholars must avoid the hubris of presuming that we (and we alone), “invent the world” we must also face up to our responsibility in regards to the knowledge/power nexus. In the present moment, the issue of what name we give to the area sometimes referred to as Southeastern Europe and the related question of where we draw the boundaries between Europe and Southeastern Europe/the Balkans have become key sites of political contestation in the societies we study.
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NOTES
1. Gupta (Akhil), Ferguson(James), « Discipline and Practice : “The Field” as Site, Method and Location in Anthropology », in Gupta (Akhil), Ferguson (James), eds., Anthropological Locations, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997. 2. Trouillot (Michel-Rolph), « Anthropology and the Savage Slot : The Poetics and Politics of Otherness », in Fox (Richard), ed., Recapturing Anthropology : Working in the Present, Santa Fe : School of American Research Press, 1991, p. 18. 3. Wolff(Larry), Inventing Eastern Europe : The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1994. 4. For useful discussions of how notions of the “West” and “Europe” replaced understandings of Christendom, see : Chabod(Federico), Storia dell’Idea di Europa, Bari : Laterza, 1991 ; Said(Edward), Orientalism, New York : Vintage Books, 1979 ; Fabian(Johannes), Time and the Other, New York : Columbia University Press, 1983. 5. Pemble(John), The Mediterranean Passion : Victorian and Edwardians in the South, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1987. 6. Brettell (Caroline), « “Nineteenth Century Travelers” Accounts of the Mediterranean Peasant », Ethnohistory, 33 (2), 1986 7. Todorova(Maria), Imagining the Balkans, New York : Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 67, 92. 8. On the ways in which the font of European civilization could also appear to be the site of contemporary European aboriginals, see Michael Herzfeld's excellent studies of the Greek case : Herzfeld(Michael), Ours Once More : Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece, Austin : University of Texas Press, 1982 ; Herzfeld (Michael), Anthropology through the Looking-glass : Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe, New York : Cambridge University Press, 1987. 9. Brettell (Caroline), art.cit., p. 169. 10. Todorova (Maria), op.cit., pp. 22-24. See also Goldsworthy (Vesna),Inventing Ruritania. The Imperialism of the Imagination, London / New Haven : Yale University Press, 1998, p. 3. 11. Wolff (Larry), op.cit. The initial predominance of the north/south division within Europe should also not be overstated when considered in light of broader symbolic geography. « In medieval cosmography, as the mappae-mundi imply, the east-west axis, and especially the east, appears to hold primary symbolic significance » : Helm (Mary), Ulysses' Sail, Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 213. 12. Todorova (Maria), op.cit., p. 63. 13. Hayden (Robert),Bakić-Hayden (Milica), « Variations on the Theme “Balkans” : Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics », Slavic Review, 51 (1), 1992 ; Bracewell (Wendy), « “Europeanism”, “Orientalism” and National Myths in Yugoslavia », unpublished manuscript, 1994 ; Ballinger (Pamela), « Convivenza e Civiltà : Visions of Europe at the Edge of the Balkans », in Bianchini (Stefano), Nations (Craig), eds., The Yugoslav Conflict and its International Implications, Ravenna : Longo Editore, 1998 ; Goldsworthy (Vesna), op.cit. 14. Todorova (Maria), op.cit., p. 17. Vesna Goldsworthy argues, in contrast, for a balkanized symbolic European geography in which « “Britishness” and “Balkanness” stand at opposing ends of the hierarchical diagonal (...). A study of late Victorian and Edwardian literature inspired by the Balkans reveals an implicit opposition between Britain and Europe where Europe itself is seen as a threatening Other, an orientalised space of which the Balkan peninsula could be said to represent the most exotic — yet paradoxically “typical” — instance » (Goldsworthy (Vesna), op.cit., p. 9). 15. Todorova (Maria), op.cit., p. 78. 16. Goldsworthy (Vesna), op.cit., p. 211.
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17. Todorova (Maria), op.cit., p. 79. 18. Ibid., pp. 124, 128. 19. Quoted in ibid., p.34. 20. Der Derian (James), « S/N : International Theory, Balkanisation and the New World Order », Millennium, 20 (3), 1991. 21. See, however, the cautionary note in Goldsworthy (Vesna), op.cit., p. 203. She maintains that « Hidden behind the seemingly clear-cut opposition between “'Communist” and “capitalist” Europe in the post-war era, nineteenth-century ideas of the Balkans had remained alive. The “Balkan” identity seemed forceful enough to emerge through any superimposed Communist structures ». 22. Ehrich (Robert W.),Henderson (Gerald M.), « Culture Area », in Sills (David), ed., International Encylopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. III, New York : MacMillan & the Free Press, 1968. 23. Jacknis (Ira), « Franz Boas and Exhibits : On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology », in Stocking (George Jr.), ed., Objects and Others, Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 1985 ; Hinsley (Curtis), « The World as Marketplace : Commodification of the Exotic at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 », Exhibiting Cultures, Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. 24. I focus on the Anglo-American anthropologists who have defined and dominated the discipline ; this hegemonic discourse has effaced its link to various state-building and nationalist projects. For a somewhat dated overview of the ethnological tradition in Yugoslavia, consult Halpern (Joel),Hammel (E.A.), « Observations on the Intellectual History of Ethnology and other Social Sciences in Yugoslavia », Comparative Studies in Society and History, 11(1), 1969. 25. Duden (Barbara), « Rereading Boas : A Woman Historian's Response to Carl N. Degler », Culture versus Biology in the Thought of Franz Boas and Alfred L. Kroeber, New York : Berg, 1989. 26. Kroeber declared the culture area concept « a community product of nearly the whole school of American anthropologists ». Quoted in Harris (Marvin), The Rise of Anthropological Theory, New York : Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968, p. 374. Julian Steward similarly maintained that « the culture area concept has become so crucial a tool in the operations of anthropologists that to question it might seem to throw doubt on anthropology itself ». Cited in Freed (Stanley), Freed (Ruth), « Clark Wissler and the Development of Anthropology in the United States », American Anthropologist, 85 (4), 1983, p. 812. 27. Cited in de Waal Malefijt (Annemarie), Images of Man : A History of Anthropological Thought, New York : Knopf, 1976. 28. Kroeber also speaks of gaps between culturally productive centers and cultural margins or peripheries. Kroeber (Alfred), Anthropology : Culture Patterns and Processes, San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963, p. 227. 29. Wood (Bryce), « Area Studies », in Sills (David), ed., op.cit.(vol. I), p. 401. 30. The similarly rapid development of Middle East area studies programs represented a (largely American) redefinition of the epistemological space carved out by the earlier Anglo-French Orientalist tradition. On this, see Said (Edward), op.cit. 31. Wood (Bryce), op.cit., p. 402. 32. Admittedly, one should be cautious in claiming a direct relation and I certainly recognize that other factors — including the increasing difficulty in conducting fieldwork in many areas outside of Europe due to independence struggles, the Cold War, and growing hostility towards anthropologists — prompted interest in areas closer to home. Nonetheless, the timing of the development of “Mediterranean anthropology”, in particular, coincides with the renewed strategic relevance accorded the region. Anthropological fieldwork in the Soviet bloc proved much more difficult to obtain permission for and hence less common until the 1970s.
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33. Verdery (Katherine), « Images of East : “Orientalism”, “Communism”, and the Toll at the Border », unpublished manuscript, 1988.For an example of this argument in action in popular writing, see the now infamous Kaplan (Robert), Balkan Ghosts, New York : Vintage Books, 1994. 34. Braudel (Fernand), The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Time of Philip II, Vol. I., New York : Harper & Row, 1966. 35. Gilmore (David), « Anthropology of the Mediterranean Area », Annual Review of Anthropology, 11, 1982, p. 181. 36. Ibid., pp. 177-180. 37. The “honour and shame” concept was formulated by chance over the course of a 1959 Wenner-Gren conference and follow-up meetings held in 1961 and 1963. The contributors to the seminal 1966 volume Honour and Shame : Values of Mediterranean Society generally agreed that an honour and shame system distinguishes the Mediterranean as a cultural entity, reflecting the « constant preoccupation of individuals in small scale, exclusive societies where face-to-face personal, as opposed to anonymous, relations are of paramount importance and where the social personality of the actor is as significant as his office ». Peristiany (J.G.), Honour and Shame : Values of Mediterranean Society, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1966, p. 11. Participants in a 1983 American Anthropological Association conference session devoted to overhauling the honour and shame paradigm criticized the posited uniformity and uniqueness of the concept and took up « nagging questions about the alleged uniformity, validity and geographical boundedness of honour-and-sham [and] about origin, diffusion, causality ». Gilmore (David), « Introduction : Honour and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean », American Anthropological Association, 22, 1987. Various scholars called for comparative research to identify the peculiar Mediterranean variant of this complex. Participants generally agreed that in its Mediterranean variation the honour and shame complex encodes a distinctive power relation of male control over female sexuality. Power competition among men thus becomes mediated through women. While representing an advance, this theoretical refinement nonetheless leaves the larger culture area concept unquestioned. 38. Appadurai (Arjun), « Theory in Anthropology : Center and Periphery », Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28, 1986. 39. Herzfeld (Michael), « “As in Your Own House” : Hospitality, Ethnography and the Stereotype of Mediterranean Society », American Anthropological Association, 22, 1987, p. 88. 40. Meštrović (Stjepan), Habits of the Balkan Heart : Social Character and the Fall of Communism, College Station : Texas A & M Press, 1993. 41. Halpern (Joel), Kideckel (David), « Anthropology of Eastern Europe », Annual Review of Anthropology, 12, 1983, p. 381. On debates over whether the zadruga represents a distinctive Balkan family form, see Halpern (Joel), Anderson (D.), « The Zadruga, a Century of Change », Anthropologica, 12 (1), 1970 ; Hammel (E.A.), « The Zadruga as Process », in Laslett (P.), Wall (R.), eds., Household and Family in Past Time, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1972 ; Byrnes (R.F.), ed., Communal Families in the Balkans : The Zadruga, Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 1976 ; Stahl (Henri), « The Domestic Group in the Traditional Balkan Societies », Zeitschrift für Balkanologie, 14, 1978. For discussions of Balkan areas which do not exhibit the zadruga, consult the Stahl piece previously noted, Erlich (Vera), Family in Transition : A Study of 300 Yugoslav Villages, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966 ; and Winner (Irene), « The Question of the Zadruga in Slovenia : Myth and Reality in Zerovnica », Anthropological Quarterly, 50 (3), 1977. In an insightful critique, Maria Todorova has gone so far as to suggest abandoning the term zadruga altogether, contending that arguments about the prevalence of the zadruga in Southeastern Europe prove “presumptuous”. Todorova (Maria), Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern : Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria, Washington, D.C. : American University Press, 1993, p. 158. 42. Todorova (Maria), Balkan Family Structure (op.cit.), p. 5.
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43. Admittedly, the work of Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern and Joel Halpern did make some efforts to situate trends in the Balkans within broader cultural and social processes. In an article on oral traditions, the Halperns classify the Balkans as occupying « perhaps an intermediate position » with oral genealogies existing alongside Byzantine, Ottoman and 19th-century written records. Halpern (Joel),Kerewsky-Halpern (Barbara), « Oral Genealogies and Official Records : Serbian Data », Southeastern Europe / L'Europe du Sud-est, 10 (2), 1983, p. 151. Elsewhere, Joel Halpern suggests the usefulness of considering Serbian materials in a comparative light. Comparing culture change in Serbia and Laos, Halpern sought to identify « possible tendencies toward universal organizational patterns ». Halpern (Joel), « Culture Change in Laos and Serbia : Possible Tendencies toward Universal Organizational Patterns », Human Organization, 20(3), 1961. 44. Halpern (Joel), Kideckel (David), art.cit.. 45. Ibid.,p. 379. 46. Ibid. 47. Walters (E. Garrison), The Other Europe : Eastern Europe to 1945, Syracuse : Syracuse University Press, 1988, p. xi. 48. Ibid., p. xiii. 49. Jelavich (Barbara), History of the Balkans : Twentieth Century, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1989. 50. The 1999 killings at Columbine High in Colorado, for example, have been described in some popular press as a result of the balkanization of American high schools. « the cafeteria is like a tiny former Yugoslavia, with each clique its own faction : the Serbian jocks, Bosnian bikers, Kosovar rebels, etc. », Corliss (Richard), « Bang, You're Dead », Time, 03/05/99, p. 50. 51. It may be redundant to cite Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, one of the grossest examples of such writing and one frequently taken to task by scholars. 52. In an instance of the former argument, Eugene Hammel locates the origins of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s in demographic causes (i.e. migration) and the historical creation of boundaries. Hammel (Eugene), « Demography and the origins of the Yugoslav Civil War », Anthropology Today, 9 (1), 1993. Considering the creation of new constitutions, as well as the uses of the past (particularly memories of genocide), Robert Hayden has offered powerful instrumentalist analyses of the Yugoslav break-up. See Hayden (Robert), « Constitutional Nationalism in the Formerly Yugoslav Republics », Slavic Review, 51 (4), 1992 ; Hayden (Robert), « Imagined Communities and Real Victims : Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in Yugoslavia », unpublished manuscript, 1993 ; Hayden (Robert), « Recounting the Dead : The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia », in Watson (Rubie), ed., Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism, Santa Fe : School of American Research Press, 1994. Compelling instrumentalist accounts from outside of anthropology include Silber (Laura), Little (Allan), Yugoslavia : Death of a Nation, New York : Penguin Books, 1997 ; Gagnon (V. P.), « Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict : The Case of Serbia », International Security, 19 (3), 1994-1995. Anthropologist Tone Bringa's work mediates between the perennialist and instrumentalist poles. On the one hand, her monograph on life in a Bosnian village in the period immediately before Yugoslavia's dissolution reveals the long-standing distinctiveness (if not tensions) between Muslims and Croats. Bringa (Tone), Being Muslim the Bosnian Way, Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1994. On the other hand, her documentary film We're All Neighbors depicts the rapidity with which hatred is sown from outside within a community once marked by peaceful ethnic coexistence. 53. Verdery (Katherine), What was Socialism and What Comes Next ?, Princeton : Princeton University Press. 54. Verdery (Katherine), The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, New York : Columbia University Press, 1999.
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55. Admittedly, however, Verdery now seems to be turning her attention to privatization and away from issues of nationalism and ethnic conflict. Though anthropologists are actively studying the privatization process in some southeastern countries like Romania and Hungary, the states of former Yugoslavia (the most Balkan of the Balkans ?) continue to be investigated primarily through the lens of identity politics. 56. In a 1963 article, for instance, Donald Pitkins defines Mediterranean Europe as « including the lands of Eastern Spain, south of the Ebro drainage, Italy south of the Po, and Greece. The southern coast of France and the Adriatic exposure of the Balkan peninsula are to be regarded as linking zones and as of essentially secondary importance within the context of the whole area ». Pitkins (Donald), « Mediterranean Europe », Anthropological Quarterly, 36 (3), 1963, p. 120. Pitkins excludes from the Mediterranean the part of the Adriatic coastline that includes Trieste and Venice (both north of the Po River). Contradictorily, however, Pitkins also identifies urbanism as a defining culture trait and includes Venice as a primary example. Venice and her trade colonies in Istria and Dalmatia — so-called Mediterranean-style cities surrounded by Eastern European peasant hinterlands — would thus appear to possess a rather shaky position within this culture area. In proposing that these territories fall outside the “climaxes” of both a Mediterranean and an Eastern Europe area, Pitkins employs the classical language of the culture area concept with unsatisfactory results, thereby underscoring this vocabulary's inherent conceptual deficiencies. 57. On the dangers of this in Mediterranean anthropology, see Herzfeld (Michael), « The Horns of the Mediterraneanist Dilemma », American Ethnologist, 11, 1984.
AUTEUR
PAMELA BALLINGER
Pamela Ballinger is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College, Maine.
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Changes of Emphases : Greek Christendom, Westernization, South-Eastern Europe, and Neo- Mitteleuropa
Andrei Pippidi
1 « The composition of a provincial history is only a legitimate undertaking if the province in question has formed down the ages a coherent social entity, distinct from and even hostile to its neighbours, enclosed within more or less stable frontiers, and conscious in some fashion of its unity. »1 In these words, Marc Bloch intended to delineate the matter on which he focused his research. Accordingly, we are going to see if we can agree on considering the Balkans a province of Europe.
2 Seeing, as I do now, the title I announced for this conclave of scholars dealing with the Balkan area, I am shocked at my own temerity. Particularly so in that I appear to be bringing owls to the goddess Athena, or, as we say in Romania, coxcombs to the gardener. My hope is to show how some stages in the historical development of this region coincide with definitions, old and new, of South-Eastern Europe. One can choose to emphasize the existing contrasts in the region, or one can allow them only secondary importance and retain instead the homogeneity of mores and institutions.
The Balkan disunity vs. the homo-balkanicus
3 The former viewpoint is well illustrated by some remarks made on the subject, 60 years ago, by a one-time expert on Central and Eastern Europe whose studies can still be found in the bibliography of U.S. foreign relations, Joseph S. Roucek2. In 1939, when he explained that the foreseeable satellization of Balkan countries by Hitler’s Germany was driven by the ebb of democracy in their internal organization, Roucek signalled also that « the grouping of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Roumania and Yugoslavia under the common term Balkan is in a sense artificial, because the five states do not form a
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cultural or an economic unit ». And he added : « up to our day, the Balkans have remained a striking example of disunity - geographic, ethnical, linguistic, religious, cultural and political »3.
4 Another professor at Columbia, but one of the previous generation, William M. Sloane, admitted that « the Balkan Peninsula » was a « loose » designation, but found it « historically very useful »4. Two themes which were later to influence Roucek’s vision might already be discerned in these reflections dating back to 1914. On the eve of another world war, Sloane noted the social and political backwardness of the region, which he attributed to the « the early patriarchal state », and, when describing Bucharest as a city of strong contrasts - an image which we can still recognize - Sloane concluded that it was « a microcosm of the country as a whole ; at first sight unorganized, disconnected, a mechanical mixture of unrelated parts ». Ab uno disce omnes : Bucharest being taken as a paradigm of Romania, that country offered likewise a model for the totalizing treatment of the Balkans.
5 The rigid framework of such clichés continues to impede the efforts of modern explorers to understand the Balkan reality. Nevertheless, assessments like those of the above-mentioned American academic travellers were right to note a retarded rhythm of development. Had they crossed Europe one century earlier, they would have found the same variety of states, languages and confessions of faith everywhere going east from France : the Kleinstaaterei was still flourishing in Germany and Italy till 1848 or even until the ‘60s and ‘70s of the 19th century. Looking at the complex tapestry of the Balkan region, Roucek was impressed by « scores of tongues, dialects and religions », while Sloane felt like being a visitor in an « ethnological museum ». Actually, the map of language areas from Hungary’s Eastern border to Istanbul does not show more than nine languages (15 dialects). The religious distribution includes ten traditional confessions of faith, representing the three main religions5. We could compare this not only with the unprecedented and still-growing number of Churches and sects in the U.S. today, but also with the historical situation in Central Europe, where both before and after the Reformation the tendency for religious identity to be added to ethnic difference was by no means unknown. So, after all, what was perceived by foreigners as a patchwork, in political and ethnic terms, was the exaggerated reflex of a situation that could have been met more westwards at an earlier stage. The judgement passed by such descriptions of the Balkan peninsula might also be influenced by two other factors : the migrations called by Cvijić « metanastatic movements » - which, in many cases, were mass deportations ordered by the Ottoman administration, or some exodus of a fugitive population (Bežanija, bejenie) - and the pattern set by nationalistic-minded scholars who, in every Balkan country, tried to present their own civilisation as the oldest, downgrading the others. Last but not least, our libraries contain quite a few pamphlets under frightening titles, like Atrocités bulgares en Macédoine, Atrocités grecques en Macédoine, Bulgarian Atrocities, or The Balkan Massacres : A Turkish Appeal6. That stream of horror journalism was produced by the wars which, in 1912-1913, led to certain adjustments being made to the borders of the first succession states detached from the Ottoman Empire. But in our own day we are witnesses of a second, no less violent, succession crisis, and as a result the stereotype of Balkan multiplicity tends to be reiterated or confirmed.
6 However, like in the old Greek myth, variance of form does not necessarily mean every time a new content. Maybe, we should listen more carefully to the opposite version, in
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favour of the unitary perspective. The Balkans are what they are because, during their long and dramatic history, they were a dead end for successive invasions which left alluvial strata by mixing with the surviving native population. The same thing happened in the two other European peninsulas : for the most Western of them, the last invaders were the Arabs ; Italy, after centuries of servitude and many barbarian assaults, was thoroughly swept by the Spaniards (the Austrian rule, the last to be established, should properly by considered a military occupation). In South-Eastern Europe, the retreat of the Turks did not mean a major demographic change before the 19th and 20 th centuries, Of the peoples who had preceded them, the Slavs and the Bulgars, the Hungarians and the Germans (Saxons), as well as the Gypsies7, settled down and in the meantime the large Romanized core of the Balkan population was constantly diminished, being assimilated. Archaeologists and ethnographers refer to a folk culture, presumably of neolithic origin, and they draw our attention, rightly or wrongly, to the ancient Thracians and Illyrians, mythic ancestors of the Balkan races. An exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, showing the results of archaeological excavation in Bulgaria, presented recently several beautiful examples of gold jewellery of the 5th century B.C. , an art of which analogous vestiges could easily have been found on the Northern bank of the Danube.
7 The claims of ethnologists and especially those of anthropogeographers - of a school once brilliantly represented by Cvijić and Ancel8 - are less convincing. From the study of economic and technological data, of traditional dress and popular beliefs, of space perception and distribution, or of kinship relations, some specialists have asserted the existence of a homo balcanicus. What is questionable in this perhaps too sanguine opinion is the interpretation of a complex set of circumstances as relevant for, or unique to, our particular civilization area, though similar situations may be discovered in completely different societies that find themselves in the same stage of development. For instance, the fictitious genealogies which accounted for the land distribution in the traditional village community of Wallachia and Moldavia have been identified by the anthropologist Jack Goody during his fieldwork in Ghana9.
8 On the other hand, the view, largely shared in the West, about the Balkan wars, including the recent conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia, has been that they were an outbreak of ancient and violent hatreds among the local populations, but this line of interpretation is essentially false10. For most of their history, the Slavic peoples of the region have lived mixed together, without a clear-cut division, for instance, between Bulgarians and Serbs. The absence of an ethnic identification was still evident in 1848 from the answer given by the peasants of Himara (a zone presently mapped on the Albanian coast), when Edward Lear asked them what they were : “Christians” was their first reply, then “Himariots” (the actual designation, according to our knowledge, would probably have been Vlachs)11. The religious specificity was the only one deeply ingrained, as it had been accepted and encouraged by the Turks, who invented the collective identity system of the “millet”, a community based on shared adherence to a non-Moslem faith. During the Ottoman period, terms like “Bulgarian” or “Greek” were not used to refer to ethnic or national groups : they designated sociocultural categories, or, if you wish, estates, mostly associated with one language : “Greek” for a merchant, “Vlach” for a shepherd and “Bulgarian” for a farmer or market gardener12. When the language distinction was not considerable, the differentiation was imposed from above either by the political authority, or by the spread of literacy, which was instrumental in developing the sense of national identity. Literacy was not something innocent,
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acquired for pure pleasure, but was part of the drill imparted by the modern liberal state.
9 Thus, even in this representation of the Balkans as a historical and cultural unit, we find two lines of argument : one, which gives it the dimensions of a primordial fact, and the second, which concludes that this unity is the product of special geopolitical conditions (above all, the successive foreign rules : first, that of the Roman Empire, then of the Byzantine state, followed by the “Tourkokratia”). This last interpretation, pointing out the remnant conditions which have brought coherence to the region, has a further variant, overcharged with emotionalism, which emphasizes the role of the Orthodox Church as having protected the Christian people under Turkish domination from any alien influence. However, this assumption fails to explain why the Bulgarians and Serbs were capable of mutual ferocity, no less than were the Serbs and Croats when they were fighting each other without having in common the same religious creed.
10 Huntington’s notorious theory has, on the contrary, turned the division between Catholic and Orthodox into a major and general conflict, one for which it is impossible to achieve concilation. But not only does the association of Orthodox and Moslem contradict both the logic of the demonstration and the historical tradition ; what is more questionable in this new partition of Europe is the integration of the Baltic countries into the Western pattern. They are obviously Northern, neither Western, nor Eastern, and only their annexation by Russia made them a part of Eastern Europe since the 18th century ; otherwise, they would have claimed their independence from Sweden, and would have got it more easily. Another strong objection is that the borderline between the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires did not acquire its importance because of its religious function, but as a result of the imperial policies aimed at building up military bulwarks, and more especially as a consequence of different rates of cultural evolution. The fierce opposition of the Orthodox clergy to Catholicism should not be treated as a fatal hostility, of the “cats and dogs” type. Catholicism being hierarchic and heavily disciplinarian, the village priests, who were elected by their flock, struggled for their autonomy, as did the monastic houses : it was therefore a rural solidarity movement from below which cemented Orthodox conservatism.
11 Two more recent interventions in the debate deserve particular attention. For Larry Wolff, “Eastern Europe” is an invention of the Western Enlightenment. The separation of Europe into spheres of domination in 1944-1945 was possible, because Eastern Europe « had long ago been imagined, discovered, claimed and set apart »13. The is true, of course ; however, the peculiarities of the Eastern pattern of development had already existed for at least three centuries before the Enlightenment (tales about the cruelty of barbarous rulers like Vlad the Impaler, or Ivan the Terrible, had propagated a repellent image of the Eastern society only because the Western mind was already prepared to accept it)14. At a time when historians indulge themselves in anatomies of “inventions” and “imagined communities”, another attack upon the present identification of the Balkans has come from Maria Todorova. She is ready to admit the objective existence of this geographic/cultural unit, but, her critique being directed against the prejudiced Western image, this is indeed a passionate plea for the European integration of this region. In the Balkan identity as seen by Todorova, the decisive component is the Ottoman legacy. As such, her last word is to doubt that this originality will last15.
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12 This brings us again to the variations undergone by the name of the region through the medieval and modern centuries, keeping in mind that each one referred to a different historical reality. As long as the basileia ton Rhomaion was alive, nobody, either inside, or outside its frontiers, thought to separate the Balkan peninsula from the Empire. The rise of the Bulgarian and Serbian states did not have the significance of a secession : they were simply competitors to the Byzantine Empire. Samuel or Dušan could never have been what the nationalist mythology has made of them. As Robert Lee Wolff was right to argue : « to peoples starved of history, suddenly conscious of national identity, trying to acquire heroic traditions, the deeds of princes long since dead assumed enormous importance »16. If ever conceived as a whole, the territory between Constantinople and the Danube was identified with the core of the Empire, the Romania, a space which the Turks called Roumeli, while medieval Western travelers knew it as Romanie. The same expression is familiar to the reader of Italian sources, where it meant the maritime possessions of Venice or even, in a broad sense, the Aegean basin, surrounded by the shores of Asia Minor, Thrace, continental Greece and the Peloponnese. Though it is not attested in contemporary texts, the most convenient designation for the Balkan Peninsula from the 13th to the 15 th century seems to be “Greek Christendom”. “Slavia Orthodoxa” would suggest more about the ethnic character of the majority of the non-Moslems and about the language of the manuscripts which survived in monastic libraries. These were, however, translations, for the most part, and their original language was, unmistakably, Greek. There was not a severance of contacts with the outside world, but in the relation with the West, whether confrontational or collaborative, the nature of this society was perceived as alien and usually associated with the Eastern Church, a generalization which caused a lasting distrust. Meanwhile, the internal situation in this phase was characterized by an inexorable drive towards fragmentation. Less so in the Romanian principalities, where, nevertheless, vague, indeed unformulated, rules of succession to the throne, coupled with the instability of borders, lay behind most of the military adventures throughout the 14th and 15 th centuries. It was the proximity of the two, relatively more consolidated, kingdoms of Hungary and Poland which precipitated the concentration of power in Wallachia and Moldavia. An important observation which must be added is that the blatant assertion of Christianity did not preclude the survival of heresy and pagan beliefs (the number of extant charms, spells, incantations, and magical prayers is surprisingly large, most of such texts being of quite recent date). This religious confusion is almost general in the Balkans and bears the stamp of the complex, archaic, Byzantine tradition17.
About the area’s originality
13 Our periodization cannot avoid the phase of Ottoman domination, with the historical legacy it has left. Its main consequence is that Islam is there to stay, which does not mean only the existence of scattered minorities (in Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania), but also to stay in the shape of the newly built state of Bosnia - a project which does not seem more “unreasonable” than Bernard Newman’s idea, at the end of the Second World War, to create a Jewish state in Bessarabia. Up until the turn of the 19th century, the presence of the Ottoman Empire achieved in our region a single, independent and virtually closed system. It is also the only epoch
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during which the name of Balkan might have been appropriately applied. The interests which the economic and political network between Constantinople and Hotin was intended to serve were those of the Turkish military machinery. Without any exaggeration, we can say that the prolonged wars - either against the sultan’s enemies, or fought inside the system - were the crucible in which ethnic consciousness reached crystallization. This process progressed from the periphery to the centre. The first territorial communities which acquired a sense of their historic identity were the Romanian principalities and then Serbia. Greece was not a borderland, but the first Greek subversive actions, though inspired by and from centres of Hellenism which were in a peripheral position, did not aspire to a local independence : they envisaged the future organization of a space no less multinational than the Byzantine Empire had been. Rhigas stressed the unity of those speaking Greek - who was not then fluent in that language, among the cultural, ecclesiastical and economic élites of the Balkans ? Whereas the Great Church of Constantinople emphasized the unity of all orthodox Christians, irrespective of their mother tongue, the only criterion for differentiation to be acknowledged by the Turkish bureaucracy was that of status in the hierarchy of the Ottoman state. Consciously or not, the Turks played one ethnic group against the other, encouraging some divisions and conflicts which we now accept too easily as spontaneous. Even when they did suppress internal strife or forced it into compromise, they did so in order to maintain the military order and the state organization. I wonder whether we should include the Ottoman period in this sequence of historical conditions which changed something in the definition of the region. Oddly enough, it would seem that only when it became a thing of the past, did it lend its symbolic weight to our perception of the region.
14 It was only Westernization which gave rise, together with national consciousness, to a general sense of the region’s originality, lost until then in the network of bonds with the imperial capital. Every nation started to idealize its own past, as a compensation for present frustration or as a promise of a great future. When the new states endeavoured to construct their own administrations, they tended to acquire privileged bureaucracies which inherited from the Ottoman one strategies to eschew responsibility and to form protégé networks. Later, every political party would develop its own clientèle system on this model. Lacking cities of the Western medieval type, these countries maintained a relationship between city and rural environment from which all the benefit was drawn by the urban consumers. The orientalization of the Balkans under Ottoman rule had reinforced the old reaction of seeing there a medley of peoples “half Christian half Turkish”18. A long range of projects which prepared the partition of the Ottoman Empire - or, at least, its mutilation - identified “Turkey in Europe” as a space to be colonized and annexed by the Western powers19 : a way, they already argued, to return to Europe. Whenever travellers from the “enlightened” West ventured to cross the Balkans, they discovered what they expected to find : that is, a striking contrast with their own society. The state of things they witnessed differed from the more familiar landscape of England or France in two essential respects : the backwardness of economy and that lack of liberty which came to be called “despotism”20. The most scholarly-minded among these explorers were also in search of Greek and Roman ruins, and another contrast, that of a venerable past with the humble present, was no less typical for this kind of literature.
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15 Although the first description of the region under the name of Balkanhalbinsel, or in more classical terms, Haemushalbinsel, dates from 1808, these designations at first had a merely geographic meaning. Was it not Metternich who, at the same time, contested that Italy might be more than a geographic expression ? It is surely significant that, in the Balkans and in the Romanian lands, when somebody travelled westwards, he was said to be going “inside”. The West was identified with the core, by the inhabitants of the outposts : the position being essential in this system of values, it was already a form of idealizing Western Europe21. As a result of their own experience, if they had the opportunity to visit it, those who ascribed positive qualities to the West came to be conscious of the gap existing between their own world and the superior civilization of the Enlightenment. The same providers of knowledge were, in their own countries, the most influential propagators of modernization. They would not have thought of the Balkans as a unitary structure, nor would they have expected the necessary reforms to be directed by the Ottoman officialdom. Once they had conceived the mould of the nation-state, innovation could come only through a bilateral contract between the nation and that West which they represented as the sole custodian of all sciences and skills. Therefore the idea of a confederation established around a Balkan or a Danubian nucleus was suggested only by observers from outside, who dreamt of a solution to appease ethnic antagonism. Their expectations could not be fulfilled, even in a lesser form - King Charles I of Romania was to refuse the crown of Bulgaria in 188722 - and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire continued.
16 When the name of “South-Eastern Europe” was found, it was once again a German geograher, Theobald Fischer, who was responsible for its theoretical elaboration and popularization. The date was 1893, only a few years before that other catchword, “Mitteleuropa”, became fashionable. The new concept expressed the striving towards a larger unity, as it included Romania, at least the Old Kingdom. Two political connotations can be grasped in the history of this notion of “Südost”. One is revealed by the goals of Habsburg politics around 1908, at the time when the annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina marked a short-lived victory of the Triple Alliance in the Balkans. The truth is that the 1876 intervention of Austrian troops, which had opened the way for the latter move, had been justified by the need to use force to impose a negotiated settlement after a brutal outbreak of Moslem intolerance23. In the present circumstances, we can not blame this attitude. The interest of Austrian and German scholars in the Balkans (Nopcsa, Weigand, Jireček, Patsch, etc.) was increasing by the turn of the century and in 1911 a first centre for the study of South-Eastern Europe emerged at the University of Vienna24. It aimed to introduce the Balkan nations and the intricate historic connections among them to diplomats who wrestled unsuccessfully with such problems. Their failure to assess events correctly was quick to show and the war brought this activity to a premature end. The second time around, Südosteuropa did not have any more luck. This was in the Thirties, in an atmosphere charged with ideological passion. The political stimulus to consider this “Raum” as naturally complementary to the “Reich” became more pointed, and Nazi propaganda had begun to exert a perceptible, though veiled, influence within the structure of academic life in the Balkan countries as well as in Romania and Hungary25. In the prospect of that united Europe which was offered by Hitler’s ambition, Südosteuropa found a justification. And soon, one after another, the countries of the region concluded alliances with the Axis or were occupied. Hence in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s this compromised term was difficult to accept, also because the Soviet occupation and
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Communization had again divided the region in two camps, as it had been during the revisionist campaigns, but on a different separation line.
17 A remarkable effort to introduce the name of South-Eastern Europe, with the advantage of including Romania, was made in Bucharest following the end of the Balkan wars in 1913. It was not only a plea for the peaceful solution of international disagreements and for the reciprocation of more understanding in the relations among the irascible Balkan nations. What the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga intended to do was to assert the cultural unity of the Peninsula and to assure for his own country, by a rational approach, the allies she needed when, from both sides, Russia and Austria- Hungary, she had experienced the arrogance of imperialist politics. This independent initiative won some support in Romania from the intelligentsia, Iorga being assisted by two younger colleagues, the archaeologist V. Pârvan and the geographer and geologist G. M. Murgoci. The creation of an Institute “pour l’étude de l’Europe sud-orientale” in 1914 contributed substantially to the development of this interest, especially through the publication of a “Bulletin”, to become, ten years later, the Revue historique du Sud-Est européen26. Before Budimir and Skok issued in Belgrade their Revue internationale d’études balkaniques, the Romanian journal was the only one in the field, though gradually, reflecting the tireless activity of Iorga, who was himself writing most of the articles and all the reviews, it adopted a broader scope, so that it covered the medieval and modern history of Western Europe as well. As early as 1914, Iorga had published a history of the Balkan states (in Romanian, of which there is also a French translation)27. Author of a classic work on the Ottoman Empire28, he was now giving it a counterpart : after a survey of the life of the subject peoples, most of the book described the contacts with Russians and Austrians, the national awakening and the achievement of independence. Although the Romanians, clinging to their distinctive Romance language, used to reject any suggestion that they were a Balkan people, Iorga, whose political doctrine is often classified as being chauvinist, emphasized their close relations with the South Danubian territories, their religious allegiance to the oecumenical Patriarchate, the protection they granted to the Balkan culture and later to the Balkan revolutionary emigration. The question was again discussed in two later works, Le caractère commun des institutions du Sud-est de l’Europe (1929), where Iorga’s scholarship was drawn to the historical sociology of the peasantry, and Byzance après Byzance (1935), which studied the survival of Byzantine tradition in several autonomous enclaves.
18 To analyze in the light of modern theories and methods what historic experience the Romanians share with their neighbours of the Balkan Peninsula has been the concern of the scholars who are working in the Bucharest Institute since 1963, when it was revived after a 15 years’ eclipse. When the late Nicolae Ceauşescu, in search of an independent version of Communism which would make his regime popular, started talking about positive historical associations with the other South-East European nations, it was a way of idealizing the attempts to defend Romanian freedom against Russian, Turkish and Habsburg encroachments. This led gradually to an extreme nationalist discourse which implied isolationism, thus contradicting the very purpose for which these regional studies had been encouraged. Since 1990, a dialogue is freely engaged between those who adopt, more or less openly, the same autistic view of Romania’s history and the rival conception which would enlarge the notion of Romania, regarding this country as part of one context, or another29.
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Definitions’ and borders’ changes
19 The trouble is that, as always, the course of ideas is determined less by their own dynamic force than by external pressure. We are watching a new shift of emphasis. As an alternative both to “South-Eastern Europe” (too close to a grim image of the Balkans), and to the Soviet-dominated “Eastern Europe”, “Central Europe” is proving a more fashionable definition, which already has the blessing of the U.S. State Department. I learnt from one of President Iliescu’s speeches that Romania is in Central Europe. Every time I have been talking with somebody holding office in the Romanian government or diplomatic service, I was given the same disappointing answer : « we are not concerned about South-Eastern Europe, we are in Central Europe, you know ».
20 No, I wasn’t aware. There is one feature of this situation which worries me. The term “Central Europe” was not resuscitated (by Milan Kundera in 1984) for the purpose of extending South-Eastern Europe to the West, but for that of distinguishing what was then Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary from the Eastern bloc and from the Balkans. The Višegrad treaty, signed in an apt location near the picturesque ruins of a castle that had been already, in the 14th century a meeting place for the three kings, and the recent welcoming to NATO of the same three states (no mistake : Slovakia was a province of medieval Hungary) successfully demontrated to us that Central Europe has this political significance. When Naumann, in 1915, launched the idea of a space, placed between the two empires then at war, Germany and Russia, which he considered adequate for German and Austrian economic and cultural hegemony, it did not include Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. They are still left out in the shadows of the Balkan mountains. The only exception is Greece, whose membership in both NATO and the EU is equivalent to being an honorary Central European. But, then, one has the right to ask : what is left of South-Eastern Europe ?30
21 One of the lessons of this argument is that not only the definitions change : the borders also are liable to move. I could tell you the story of a friend of mine who was born in Soviet Bessarabia at the end of 1940, lived for the first three years of her life in Romania (without moving from her mostly Albanian village) and then, because her parents fled west in front of the Red Army, found herself in Romania - same name, but another country, - while the village fell within Ukraine. But this is another story. A more challenging question is how a country may change location. If South-Eastern Europe did not exist before the continent qualified as a historical unit, the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, though they belonged to the Ottoman Empire, were not a part of the Balkans. Their unification, which was one of the results of the Crimean War, marked the day when a new nation was born. However, no sooner had the confiscation of monastic properties been promulgated in 1863, in imitation of a similar reform enacted in Greece, 30 years before, than the country began to leave South-Eastern Europe. The quarrel with the Constantinople Patriarchate and the decision to use in church only the Romanian language were omens of a new orientation, which was confirmed by the declaration of independence in 1877. Of the provinces acquired in 1918, Transylvania and Bukovina had a strong Central European character, owing to the centuries of Habsburg administration. From then on until 1940, the tradition which prevailed was the South-East European one. Not only the loss of Northern Bukovina, not only the mass emigration of the Transylvanian Saxons, but the social ascension of a rural population whose values were decidedly of Balkan origin
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have been, during the Communist regime, factors which accentuated the development of this tradition. There is, nevertheless, the question of the future path to be taken by Romania. The contacts, suddenly revived with Turkey and Greece, and, quite recently, the sympathy shown by the Romanian press for Serbia’s plight, are valid reasons to think that Romania’s aspiration to join Western Europe will coexist many years ahead with those elements of her historic inheritance - Byzantine, Ottoman, 19th-century liberal and populist - which attach her to South-Eastern Europe.
NOTES
1. Bloch (Marc), The Ile-de-France. The Country Around Paris, Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 1971, p. 120. 2. He was already the author of a paper on the educational experiment at Vălenii-de-Munte in Romania, published in School and Society, 14, 1931, pp. 199-200. The last of more than 60 items bearing his signature is The United States and the Persian Gulf. 1985. 3. Roucek (Joseph S.), The Politics of the Balkans, New York / London, 1939, p. 1. 4. Sloane (William M.), The Balkans, a Laboratory of History, New York, 1914, pp. 3, 83, 125. 5. See Stoianovich (Traian), A Study in Balkan Civilization, New York, 1967, figures 3a and 3b, which omits three minorities : the Armenians of the Gregorian creed ; the Uniates ; and the (mostly Hungarian) Uniates. “Traditional” here means older than the 18th century. 6. All these brochures are cited by Seton-Watson (R. W.), The Rise of Nationality in the Balkans, New York, 1918. 7. It is difficult to assign a date to the first Armenian settlements, but, most likely, they were already present in the Byzantine Empire, in mediaeval Bulgaria and in the Romanian Principalities. The arrival of the Roma, who spread all over the region as blacksmiths and who, in the Romanian lands, were reduced to slavery, can safely be attributed to the 13th century. 8. Cvijić (Jovan), La Peninsule Balkanique. Géographie humaine, Paris, 1918 ; Ancel (Jacques), Peuples et nations des Balkans, Paris, 1926. 9. Burke (Peter), « History as Social Memory », in Butler (Thomas), ed., Memory. History, Culture and the Mind, Oxford, 1989. 10. The demonstration of Malcolm (Noel), Kosovo : A Short History, New York, 1999, pp. xxvii- xxix, is very welcome. 11. Lear (Edward), Journals : A Selection, London : ed. Herbert Van Thal, 1952. 12. See the excellent observations of Danforth (Loring M.), The Macedonian Conflict. Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World, Princeton, 1996, pp. 57-65. 13. Wolff (Larry), Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford, CA, 1994, pp. 34, 7, 143. 14. See the stimulating contribution of Schöpflin (George), « The Political Traditions of Eastern Europe », in Graubard (Stephen R.), ed., Eastern Europe - Central Europe - Europe, Boulder, CO, 1991. 15. Todorova (Maria), Imagining the Balkans, New York / Oxford, 1997, pp. 12-13. 16. Wolff (Robert Lee), The Balkans in Our Time, New York, 1967, p. 55. Much earlier the same observation was made by Brailsford (H. N.), Macedonia. Its Races and their Future, London, 1906.
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17. Maguire (Henry), ed., Byzantine Magic, Dumbarton Oaks, MD, 1995. For a comprehensive general account see Mathiesen (Robert), « Magic in Slavia Orthodoxa, the Written Tradition », in ibid. 18. Wolff (Robert Lee), Inventing Eastern Europe (op.cit.), pp. 22, 177, 288, 291, 293, illustrates to what extent the Western travellers were inclined to use expression like “mélange” or “miscuglio” of races and tongues when speaking about the population of Russia and Turkey. 19. There is still some profit to be had in consulting Djuvara (T. G.), Cent projets de partage de la Turquie, Paris, 1914. 20. See for instance the description of Serbia in 1717 by Wortley Montagu (Lady Mary), Letters from the Levant, During the Embassy to Constantinople, 1716-1718, New York, 1971, p. 101. Cf. Wolff (Robert Lee), Inventing Eastern Europe (op.cit.), pp. 38-43. 21. Todorova (Maria), op.cit., p. 43, cites the British historian William Miller, who, in 1898, remarked that « going to Europe » meant a journey to any of the countries situated west of the the Peninsula, « thereby avowedly considering [the Balkan region] as quite apart from the European system ». 22. Seton-Watson (R. W.), op.cit., pp. 122, 147. 23. Evans (Arthur J.), Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot, London, 1876 ; Trevor (Roy), My Balkan Tour, London - New York, 1911 ; Schmitt (Bernadotte E.), The Annexation of Bosnia, 1908-1909, Cambridge, 1937. See now Malcolm (Noel), Bosnia : A Short History, London, 1994. 24. From 1911 to 1914, Th. Schiemann, L.K. Goetz, Otto Hotzsch and H. Übersberger were publishing in the Berlin Zeitschrift für Osteuropäische Geschichte. 25. See for instance the Osteuropäische Jahrbücher, where Georg Stadtmüller was already active. In 1942 it became Süd-Ost Forschungen. 26. Pippidi (Andrei), « Pour l’histoire du premier Institut des études sud-est européennes », Revue d’études sud-est européennes, 16 (1), 1978. 27. Iorga (Nicolae), Histoire des Etats balcanique, Paris, 1925. Cf. idem., Histoire des Roumains des Balcans, Bucarest, 1919 ; idem., Histoire de l’Albanie, Bucarest, 1919. 28. Iorga (Nicolae), Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, 5 vols., 1908-1913. 29. Pippidi (Andrei), « Necesitatea unui institut pentru studiul sud-estului european », Buletin (Bucuresti), 5, 1994. 30. See Ash (Timothy Garton), « The Puzzle of Central Europe », New York Review of Books, 46 (5), 18/03/99.
AUTEUR
ANDREI PIPPIDI Andrei Pippidi holds a PhD from Oxford University. He is Professor of Mediaeval Studies at Bucharest University, a senior researcher at the Institute for South-East European Studies (Bucharest) and President of the Romanian Commission for Historic Monuments. Among his numerous publications is Hommes et idées du sud-est européen à l’aube de l’âge moderne (Paris/Bucharest, 1980).
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The last Stop on the Orient Express : The Balkans and the Politics of British In(ter)vention
Vesna Goldsworthy
1 Although this examination of possible definitions of the Balkans concentrates initially on the human rights discourse which accompanied Western involvement in the former Yugoslavia over the past decade – especially as it preceded and underpinned NATO military action over Kosovo – its aim is not to dissect the rights and wrongs of intervention. Rather, I focus on the way in which the rhetorical strategies used to justify it reflect on the debate about definitions of South-Eastern Europe. Of particular interest in this context is the stance adopted by the British Labour Government, whereby the intervention in the Balkans was described not as a one-off, but as a starting point for a new kind of world-wide humanitarianism. The media’s emphasis on a new “ethical” foreign policy was undiminished until the end of 1999, when the renewed Russian military action in Chechenya presented a situation in which the use of Western force, whatever the human rights position, was clearly not considered an option. Humanitarian interventionism or – as Noam Chomsky defined it – “new military humanism”1, practised in the Balkans in the aftermath of the Cold War, proved to be of limited value in relation to Moscow.
Humanitarian intervention ?
2 In his study Feeling Global, Bruce Robbins defines the discourse of human rights as universalising and therefore opposed to the notions of culture determined by differentiation which, he maintains, now dominate academic scholarship2. In this context, in the academic circles at least, the human rights debate could prove liberating in its potential ability to transcend the ever increasing production of real and imaginary Others which now marks the culturalist discourse. In practice, however, there are some troubling parallels between the “evangelical” humanitarianism of the late 1990s and the enlightened forms of 19th-century imperialism. In his article entitled
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« Globocop ? Time to Watch the Watchers », published in The Nation in 1994 and cited in Feeling Global, C. Douglas Lummiswrites : We can be confident that only the borders of middling and small countries will show a new legal permeability. These are the same countries whose borders were always permeable throughout the age of colonialism and European continental imperialism : the countries of the Third World and Eastern Europe. However much good might be achieved by, say, Norwegian or Nigerian peacekeepers protecting human rights in Los Angeles or Detroit, it’s not something we are likely soon to see3.
3 However different the new humanitarian context might seem when compared to even the most enlightened colonial aspirations, the division between the states which determine the need for an intervention and have the means of conducting it, and the states subjected to new human rights interventionism, remains relatively familiar. One might compare the way in which Paddy Ashdown was considered for the position of Commissioner for Kosovo with the role of his 19th century predecessor as British Liberal Party leader, Gladstone, as the Commissioner for the Ionian Islands. The former French health minister Bernard Kouchner, who was eventually appointed to the Kosovo post in preference to Ashdown, is described as the « inventor of the concept of humanitarian intervention » in his official curriculum vitæ4. He is acutely aware of the possibility of being seen in an imperialist role in the Balkans and remains keen to avoid this : « we are not in southern Sudan. We don’t have to teach people here how to vote »5. However, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, restrictions imposed on the local media and political organisations have already attracted accusations of a colonialist mentality.
4 Many political commentators continue to examine both the positive and the negative aspects of “human rights imperialism” in South-Eastern Europe. The time has come, it seems, for the “white man to take up his burden” again. That he – and in very few cases, she – is taking up his burden in the Balkans this time round is perhaps not surprising. In an area populated by white peoples – a part of Europe (even if frequently described by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair as being on the “European doorstep”) – this new form of imperialism should in theory be free from any imputations of racism. In Europe, yet obviously different from it, the Balkans provide a suitable context for an exercise in apparently benevolent Western paternalism. The fact that a relatively enlightened and prosperous Balkan federation, such as was once Yugoslavia, has in the course of that exercise become a collection of small to middling states, several of which will remain for the foreseeable future in dire need of foreign caretakers, is most usually ascribed to its “Balkanness” rather than any form of external intervention. The troublesome and bloody nature of Balkan nationalism has offered Britain – as it assumed the leading role amongst the European participants in the military action against the Milošević regime – a timely opportunity for developing a self-promoting and self-congratulatory stance at a time of deep anxiety about its own position in Europe.
5 I am troubled by the possibility that the “new humanitarianism” in the Balkans largely appears to depend on the West’s self-attributed status of superior enlightenment, which seems to me very similar to the position of the 19th century enlightened imperialism. “Media-driven” government policy in Britain does open up an opportunity for a more ethical approach to foreign policy. Nonetheless, it also contains a danger that the Western media, and in particular television, with its self-confidence based on its economic strength and its demand to be allowed freedom of movement and absolute protection anywhere in the world, puts those whose foreign policy it guides in a
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position equivalent to that of the 19th-century “monarch of all I survey”6. Like the explorers, adventurers and map makers who preceded the colonial armies in Africa and Asia, journalists and cameramen announce the arrival of the new “humanitarian” troops. The imperial eye is now watching through the lens of the camera.
Europe vs. Non-Europe
6 As far as the possible definitions of the Balkans are concerned, the attitudes of the 1990s towards the peninsula seem to leave intact the old hierarchical structures in Europe, whereby the north-west represents the most enlightened corner and therefore occupies the self-conferred leadership role, while the south-east plays out European fears and taboos on the continent’s edge. Much as in late-Victorian gothic novels, the Balkans continue to offer a site for the irrational and the obscene, European and yet yielding up nightmares “unthinkable” in Europe. In practical terms, the only way to join Europe is to escape from the Balkans.
7 Instead of a bi-partite, Manichean division into Eastern and Western Europe which dominated the Cold War period, our continent is now divided into “Europe” (i.e. the European Union), “Central Europe” (those at the top of the waiting list to join the European Union), and those “beyond the pale” (i.e. much of the Balkans, Russia, Ukraine, etc.). This division is symbolic and deeply hierarchical, and it has considerable practical consequences on every aspect of cooperation between the West and former “Eastern Europe”, from the definition of financial aid (“economic” for Central Europe, “humanitarian” for the Balkans), to visa regimes. The recent introduction of visas for Croatian visitors to Britain was described in the Croatian press as a hostile attempt to push Croatia back into the Balkans. One image that comes to mind is the location for one of the last rounds of Kosovo peace talks in June 1999, an inn by the side of a Macedonian road near Kumanovo, with Yugoslav and Nato army delegations, in combat uniforms, disappearing through the door above which the name, in the Cyrillic alphabet, spells out “Europe 93, owner I. Sadiku”. Mr Sadiku probably named his locale after an international football cup or some such event, little knowing that its image would one day be offered five Warholian minutes of fame by the world news media. The symbolism was not lost on Western commentators whose references to Balkan “aspirations” to European status barely attempted to hide condescension. It was ridiculed as a typically “Balkan” image, with the cunning and barbarous little countries trying to gain quick entry by the back door into “our” Europe of peace and plenty.
8 A lot has already been said and written about the different ways in which the Balkans confirm, or undermine, the binary oppositions between the Occident and the Orient, particularly in the context of the orientalist theories developed by Edward Said and his successors over the past two decades. While the post-colonial debate struggled to undo the Orient, many of its projections came to be redirected towards the Balkans (coinciding with the post-1989 reappearance of the area from under the withdrawing tide of Communism). Allegedly European, the Balkans became again a useful repository for feelings of European superiority which could no longer be acted out elsewhere. Instead of contrasting Europe with Africa and Asia and risking accusations of racism, we now often define it as orderly, prosperous and enlightened in comparison with the Balkans. Trying to catch up with a Europe which is itself progressing, the Balkans always seem to remain at the same distance away from it – always at the point of
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“beginning to be civilised”, always about to join Europe, always in its backyard, or at best on its doorstep.
9 How should the Balkan peoples react to this type of rhetoric ? So long as the hierarchical distinctions are accepted, their reaction as neo-colonial subjects can either be acquiescence and complicity, or a kind of counter-attack. Examples of both these strategies can easily be identified. A deferential attitude can be detected among those Balkan politicians who – like mission-educated Africans or Anglo-Indians in the 19th century – accept the idea of the inferiority of the society which envelopes them, while denying that they are part of it. « Yes, indeed, the Balkans are every bit as Balkan as you say, but we here are really European. If you want the real Balkans, just look at the Barbarians next door ». The media (both Western and “Balkan”) frequently tend to amplify this pattern by using the Balkan name very selectively, and rarely in any kind of positive context. Meanwhile, anything positive that comes from the Balkans is attributed to Central Europe. The Macedonian National Ballet, performing at the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith, London, last year, was described in the programme as « one of the leading Central European ballet companies ». A Polish speaker at the Central European Festival held in London in the summer of 1998, talked about Central Europe as the area of Europe which has the largest number of Nobel Prize winners per square kilometre and then referred as his examples to writers such as the Bulgarian- born Elias Canetti, and two novelists from the former Yugoslavia, Ivo Andrić and Danilo Kiš. (Although not a Nobel winner, Kiš was presumably included on the grounds that he most certainly deserved the prize.) Conversely, an unpleasant Central European “exception”, Hitler, has been blamed upon the proximity of Vienna to the Balkans7.
10 Central Europe now seems to act as a kind of clearing house for those about to be admitted to the fully-fledged Western status. In the chapter entitled « Where is Central Europe Now », in his new book History of the Present, Timothy Garton Ash writes about the way in which the notion of Central Europe, used until not long ago as a cannon to fire against Russia, is now largely directed against the Balkans8. For politicians everywhere, and especially for Polish, Hungarian and Czech politicians – Garton Ash writes – the Manichean contrast between “Central Europe”, bathed in light, and “the Balkans” drenched in blood, was irresistible. Central Europeans are seen as “civilised, democratic, cooperative”, and therefore have a better chance of joining the EU.
11 Complicity in accepting an opposition between Europe and the Balkans, frequently involves – for Balkan countries – a desperate attempt to escape what is perceived as the bloody grip of the peninsula. In an incisive article entitled “Flight from the Balkans”, the Romanian Foreign Ministry official Elena Zamfirescu describes the way in which « the obstinate perpetuation of old prejudices about that area’s destiny and destination, has become one of the factors which encourage the flightfrom the Balkans », while at the same time defining Romania as central-Central European9. « For both geographical and geopolitical reasons, fully substantiated by the history of this century », Zamfirescu argues, « the author shares the view that Romania and Hungary could be considered “the centre” of Central Europe. Therefore the term Central-Southern Europe, coined by the author covers the Central-European nations situated south of the Danube »10. While explaining that the Romanians define their country as one which is “close to” and not simply “bordering on” the Balkans, Zamfirescu sees Romania’s desire to be included in the Western sphere as “a natural one” : « Central Europe is also about a sense of belonging and about political options. As a country whose institutional,
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political, cultural and economic life has been, with the exclusion of the Cold War years, an intrinsic past of the Western world, Romania’s desire to be included in Western institutions is a natural one »11. Demonstrating a similar attempt to distance his country from the Balkans, at a recent conference entitled NATO and Southeastern Europe : Security Issues for the Early 21st Century , the Slovene speaker asserted : « there is a difference between Southeast Europe and the Balkans. Slovenia is a country of Southeast Europe, but not a Balkan state »12. In December 1996, coinciding with the moment when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Belgrade were promising to topple Milošević, a German journalist described Serbia as being in the Western Balkans, a first sign of its possible future move into Central Europe. At the moment, it is obviously, and firmly, back in the East even though it is to the West of Romania. In a similar vein, European Union officials now refer to Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Albania and (only occasionally) Yugoslavia as the Western Balkan countries13. Such taxonomic subterfuges, to borrow a phrase from Elena Zamfirescu, might leave Bulgaria as the only – simultaneously Central and Eastern – Balkan country, unless we accept the suggestion that it belongs to South-Central Europe, thereby embracing the idea of the Balkans emptied of the Balkan states.
Conterassaults
12 The counterassault against such hierarchies comes in different guises. One is exemplified by those who accept the bipolar opposition, but attempt instead to “talk up the other side”. The Balkans are described as the cradle and the enduring guardian of European civilisation, while Western Europeans are willingly joining the ranks of the lotus eaters in the fold of American globalism. The Byzantine and Ottoman Empires have found new apologists both in the Balkans and in the West, talking up the advantages of either the Greek–speaking civic commonwealth or the Ottoman Millet system.
13 While “Europe” (i.e. the EU) is itself ambiguously suspended between an attempt to promote and encourage new nation states in the Balkans and an effort to declare nation-statism a bankrupt project, there is no shortage of proponents of every side of the argument. In Central Europe meanwhile, the nation states which are ethnically the most homogenous (Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Czech Republic) are also the best off, as Garton Ash points out, in the queue of applicants for membership in the (firmly multicultural) European Union.
14 A different kind of couterassault against hierarchical oppositions between Europe and the Balkans now comes from academia – myself included – with a wariness of the new essentialising traps that such a project might present. Here the Balkans are frequently described as mulitply marginal. Always, seemingly, on the borderlines between externally defined entities – Europe and Asia, East and West, this religion and that religion, the Mediterranean and Continental Europe – the Balkans seem destined to remain in a kind of deconstructionist mise-en-abîme. Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance[sic], applied to literature, where any section of the text, however minute, always reveals internal contradictions reflected in the whole, seems to be translated into symbolic geography. There is no part of the Balkans which represents a stable identity, everything is defined through difference. This might be profitable for academic investigations, but it is not easy to see it as a springboard for constructing
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any kind of stability. The problem, it seems to me, is that seeing the Balkans as permanently transitional in itself stigmatises the area. It implies – falsely in my belief – that other areas are monolithic and not transitional themselves. (To put it crudely : Is this really a differentiaspecifica of the Balkans ? Couldn’t we describe the British isles as a transitional area between America and Europe, or Germany as a transitional area between Western and Central/or Eastern Europe ?) Emphasising some uniquely Balkan marginality, we end up where we started. Wishing to undo the privileging of Europeanness, we might fetishise the concept of “transitionality”, which is perilously close to reaffirming the idea of culture as a kind of tectonic bloc. The civilisations – however minutely we choose to define them – clash, Huntington style, and the Balkan peninsula remains the earthquake zone.
15 I have to conclude, however, that I am not sure at the moment just how – short of resorting to neo-romanticist constructions – one might talk about the Balkans beyond the culturalist debate which pitches the Self against the Others, seemingly reinforcing the very identities it sets out to undo. On the other hand, and given the degree of cynicism with which it has been exploited until now, the human rights discourse – although potentially liberating – might well continue to be seen as useful in providing a set of politically correct rhetorical devices.
16 In Európa Köldöken (The Navel of Europe), his tellingly titled collection of essays, the Hungarian writer Gyorgy Konrád writes : One of my heads is Eastern, the other Western…We live on the Western edges of the East and we are forced always to compare things and appearances. We are born comparatists … We cannot reject either of our sides, hence the paradox in our attitudes. Our specificity is contained in this. In effect, we are never at home. In our permanent abode we are homesick for god knows where… At home, we always feel a bit uneasy….14
While17 this almost schizophrenic, pervasive anxiety of belonging is certainly not unique to this corner of Europe, few areas seem express it so persistently. If we are ever to begin to feel at home in the Balkans, we need new kinds of definitions pretty desperately.
NOTES
1. Chomsky (Noam), The New Military Humanism : Lessons from Kosovo, London : Pluto Press, 1999. 2. Robbins (Bruce), Feeling Global : Internationalism in Distress, New York : New York University Press, 1999, p. 72. 3. Lummis (C. Douglas), « Globocop ? Time to Watch the Watchers », The Nation, 26/09/94. Quoted in Robbins (Bruce), op. cit., p. 74. 4. Available on the Internet, on http://www.info-france-usa.org/news/statmnts/kou_bio.htm (5/1/00) 5. Erlanger (Steven), « After Slow Start, U.N. Asserts Role in Running Kosovo », The New York Time, 11/08/99, p. A4.
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6. Cf. Pratt (Mary Louise), Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, London / New York : Routledge, 1992, pp. 201-227, for an analysis of the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” genre in Romantic and Victorian writing. 7. Kaplan (Robert D.), Balkan Ghosts. A Journey Through History, New York : St Martin’s Press, 1993, p. xxiii. « Nazism, for instance, can claim Balkan origins. Among the flophouses of Vienna, a breeding ground of ethnic resentments close to the southern Slavic world, Hitler learned how to hate so infectiously », Kaplan asserts. 8. Garton (Timothy Ash), History of the Present, London : Allen Lane, 1999. Also in « The Puzzle of Central Europe », The New York Review of Books, 18/03/99. 9. Zamfirescu (Elena), « The Flight from the Balkans », Südosteuropa, 44 (1), 1995. 10. Ibid, p. 53. 11. Zamfirescu (Elena), « Romania’s Role in Post-Cold War Central Europe », Occasional Papers in Romanian Studies, (1), 1995. 12. Conference presentation available on http://www.harvard.edu/kokkalis/NATO/nato33.htm (06/01/00). Perhaps any country which denies its Balkan identity is ipso facto Balkan. 13. Bojčić (Miroslav), « Brisanje podela », Vreme, (467), 18/12/99. 14. Konrád (Gyorgy), Európa Köldöken, quoted from the Serbo-Croat translation : Na pupku Evrope, Belgrade : Vreme knjige, 1995, p. 10.
AUTEUR
VESNA GOLDSWORTHY Vesna Goldsworthy teaches English and drama at Birkbeck College, University of London, and St Lawrence University, New York. She is the author of Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (Yale UP, 1998).
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The Prehistory of a Neologism : « South-Eastern Europe »
Alex Drace-Francis
1 The general scholarly consensus regarding the origin and development of the term “South-Eastern Europe” is, briefly, as follows1 :
2 a) first used in German in 1861, it was theorized and popularized by the geographer Theobald Fischer in an article of 1893 and another one of 1909 ;
3 b) it was subsequently promoted, notably by the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga, as a neutral term in the wake of the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 ;
4 c) various official bodies and research units adopted it starting from the interwar period, but it was notably discredited by its usage to promote German hegemony in the South-East ;
5 d) it never really caught on in public life, although it continued to be used in Romanian, German and to a lesser extent Anglo-American academic and diplomatic circles, following the older traditions ;
6 e) Some object to the term as a covert means whereby nations deny their Balkan heritage2 ;
7 f) I have few disagreements with the later points of this account ; but the term has some interesting prehistory, hitherto unobserved, which it is the purpose of this article to relate. “South-Eastern Europe” has enjoyed a remarkable resuscitation in recent months : the immediate reason for this is its usage in the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe, signed by a very large number of international organizations in Cologne on June 10, 19993. A new look at the history of the term may prove useful at such a time.
8 During the course of some research on a completely different topic, I came across an article published in 1813 by the illustrious Slovene philologist Bartholomaeus (Jernej) Kopitar (1780-1844), which begins as follows : About four (by their own account fully six) million people speak Wallachian [i.e. Romanian, AD-F]. The importance of the language for the history of the Latin and Slavic languages, and likewise the history of the people for the general history of South-Eastern Europe, has often been sensed by great scholars, Schlözer for
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instance. Both, history and language, are still truly and deeply cloaked in obscurity4.
9 Kopitar offers no definition of South-Eastern Europe in this article, a review of the Transylvanian Romanian scholar Petru Maior’s History of the Origin of the Romanians in Dacia (Buda, 1812). It is possible that in his choice of the term he was influenced by a division he had made in an earlier article of the Slavic Volkstämme into two principal branches. He divided the Slavs into a south-eastern branch (including Russians ; so- called “Sloveno-Serbs” south of the Danube, Sava and Kupa rivers as far as the Balkan mountains together with their colonies in southern Hungary and Slavonia ; the Slovenes of Inner Austria, Provincial Croats and Croats of Western Hungary) and a north-western one (including Poles, Bohemians, Moravians together with the Slovaks and the Lusatian Wends)5. But the range of references in the 1813 article makes it fairly clear he had no narrowly Slavic language-area in mind : he goes on to comment on Romanian history and language in relation to those of all the major peoples of the region : Greeks (ancient and modern), Romanic peoples (north and south of the Danube), South Slavs and Albanians. It is scarcely remarkable that this usage, fifty years earlier than any known hitherto, has passed unobserved. But its very inconspicuousness is important : there was absolutely no confusion or surprise among his readers, who knew precisely what he meant by “South-Eastern Europe”. Unlike the term Balkan, it required little elaboration or geographical tinkering to make it work.
10 The name derived from the points of the compass betrays the more general tendency in European science towards accurate division and measurement of all kinds, and the achievement of a more complete knowledge of the earth’s surface in the latter half of the 18th century. By the early 19 th-century, stratigraphical classification and “geognostic maps” were all the rage. It is to be expected, then, that publications in a fashionable science like geology would also yield usages of the term “South-Eastern Europe”. And a brief sampling of the works of one of the great geological travellers of the period, Ami Boué (1794-1881), shows this to be the case. In 1825 Boué published a very elaborate Synoptical Table of the Formations of the Crust of the Earth6 ; two years later he reworked it in an article published in German where he went so far as to declare that, as far as secondary (Mesozoic) formations in Europe were concerned, « one may conclude that two major general types are to be found in this great continent, namely one type for the terrains of the north-west of Europe and another for the south-east »7. The term “südostliche Europa” appears again in this article, and several more times (as “le sud-est de l’Europe”) in the revised French version of part of the same piece published in 18328. Boué also used the term in English in an letter sent to the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal in 1837 : The sienitic porphyry of the Bannat also contains crystals of glassy feldspar. It is to be hoped that competent judges may soon travel all over South Eastern Europe, where trachytes as well as sienitic porphyries occur, and they will soon agree with Beudant and myself in thinking that Montdor, the Cantal, the whole of Italy, the Alps, and the lowest portions of the Rhine, present no porphyritic rocks like those which I have mentioned as occurring in Turkey.9
11 The distribution of these special sienitic porphyries was said to cover central Hungary, Serbia and Macedonia, among other places, which shows roughly what Boué’s usage intended. Thus he implicitly conceived of the space as extending beyond the northern and western political frontiers of the Ottoman Empire into parts of the Habsburg Empire.
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12 But Boué made no systematic attempt to introduce the term “South-Eastern Europe”. He is well known as the scholar who permanently refuted the notion that the Balkan range extended across the entire peninsula, so one would hardly expect him to have used the term “Balkan”10. He generally preferred la Turquie d’Europe, notably for his classic four-volume monograph of that name, published in 1840. Boué wrote that, having directed his favourite studies “above all to oriental and meridional Europe”, Turkey had long ago aroused his curiosity11. The book’s prestige, and its moderately pro-Ottoman stance, probably helped to perpetuate the name la Turquie d’Europe. As with Kopitar, the interest for us today is precisely that “South-Eastern Europe” was used discreetly and meaningfully, without polemic ; and not that its usage might give any real support to a bogus theory of elemental distinction stretching back into geological time. As it happens, in historical time Boué seems to have used the term “Central Europe” even earlier, in 182212.
13 There may be further usages in scientific texts of the early 19th but I, who am no great authority, have not found them. It would not be surprising if there were, given the fairly well-developed conceptualization of an East and a West of Europe, replacing an older North and South, by around 1800. August Zeune, the man notorious for the creation of the notion “Balkan Peninsula”, had an “Eastern” and a “Western” Europe ; but he placed his neological formation, for reasons of his own, in the latter ; the former consisted only of the Russian Empire, Prussia and Poland13.
14 Another famous contemporary geographer, Adriano Balbi (1782-1848), came up with the term la Péninsule Orientale. Balbi posited a Western Europe (divided into Northern, Central and Southern) and an Eastern Europe, initially including only Russia but later also the “Oriental Peninsula” and Republic of Cracow. He argued that European Turkey was improper, mainly for anti-Turkish reasons : the Turks are strangers there ; they are a minority not just of the whole population but even compared to the Greco-Latin element, seen as the ethnic core ; many of these lands have already won their autonomy and do not allow Turks to settle there. He therefore selected what he claimed was “ a designation which, embedded as it is in Nature itself, offers none of the difficulties for which others may be faulted ”14. Names are of course never as “natural” as this, and Balbi was not devoid of prejudice15. But the term did not catch on. For instance, an English adapter of his substituted the term “Slavo-Grecian peninsula” in 184216.
15 A theoretical division of Europe on racial-linguistic lines in 1861 led Gustav Adolf von Klöden to propose the concept of “South-Western, or Roman Europe” (including the Iberian and Italian peninsulas plus France). The other two areas were “German Europe” (including the British Isles, Iceland, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries including Belgium), and “Slavic Europe” which came (albeit in smaller script) “together with the Finnish and the Greek”. This last included “the Greek-Turkish peninsula”, which is « the most diverse of the Southern European Peninsulas in its formation [Bildung] »17.
16 In 1861 the German diplomat and scholar Johann Georg von Hahn (1811-1869) first gave a solid definition of the term (in fact using Südosthalbinsel, not Südosteuropäische Halbinsel or Südosteuropa), as « the true triangle, in which Europe tapers off towards the South-East ; for all other proposed collective terms have met with more or less well- founded objections »18. Hahn mentioned Boué several times in glowing terms ; but did not attribute the term’s invention to him. Fischer, who is generally given the credit for
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the establishment of the term in geographical science, likewise mentioned Boué favourably, but attributed the coinage to Hahn19.
17 On a more political level, the economist Friedrich List, in an article of 1842 entitled “Farming conditions, the pygmy economy and emigration”, developed a programme which included many of the essential elements of the 20th-century German drive to the South-East. Writing from New York, he bemoaned the continuing flow of German emigrants to the unpromising American lands, and sketched a strongly-worded and motivated program for expansion into the “unused, but naturally fertile” lands along the banks of the Danube from Pressburg to its mouth, the northern provinces of Turkey and the western shores of the Black Sea. « The entire South-East beyond Hungary is our hinterland. » This would be « the basis of a powerful German-Hungarian Eastern Empire, bordered on one side by the Black, and the other by the Adriatic Sea, animated by German and Hungarian spirit », or, as he states elsewhere, by « German phlegm and Hungarian fire ». Hungary would be saved from the ignominious fate of Poland, which stands to her north-east as an example of what not to do. Thus the idea of a strong Central Europe was connected at an early stage with a planned domination of the South-East. But the phrase “South-Eastern Europe” is not to be found, naturally enough as List did not intend to encroach on independent (and infertile) Greece20.
18 These and other near misses on the Continent make it all the more surprising that the place where the name “South-Eastern Europe” was used most continuously at high official level in the late 19th century was England. Yet, beginning from December 1883, a series of official papers began to be printed for the recently created Eastern (Europe) Department of the Foreign Office entitled Correspondence relating to the affairs of South- Eastern Europe. This was one of a number of series specially produced for use not as an official public record but for limited circulation among the Queen, the Cabinet and other statesmen who needed a handy printed collection of recent confidential correspondence when making policy on such affairs21. The South-Eastern Europe series initially covered Greece, Bulgaria, Eastern Roumelia, Serbia, Montenegro and Roumania. It continued, with various brief interruptions caused by differently-named wars and necessary administrative changes, until 1947. In other words, when dealing with “the Balkans” all the most important people in England had to consult “South-East European” papers.
19 How did this come about ? After all, England was the place where the elite who attended Eton College in the early 19th century used a geography textbook which divided up modern Europe in two pages into Western, Central, Southern and Northern22. Eastern Europe did not exist even as a geographical expression.
20 Nevertheless, it was largely those who had learnt from Arrowsmith’s geography who were responsible for the administrative reorganization of the Foreign Office in 1882. The division of work by country in this august institution had undergone many changes since its establishment, with a “Northern” and a “Southern” Department, exactly a hundred years previously (1782). By 1857 there were six regional departments :
21 a) the Central Powers and Denmark ;
22 b) the Near East (Turkey) ;
23 c) Russia, Greece, Sweden and the Italian States ;
24 d) France, Switzerland, the West Indies ;
25 e) the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and the South American States ;
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26 f) North and Central America, China, Japan.
27 These categories reflected the vestiges of various defunct historical entities, a certain degree of commercial logic, and the respective ambitions of the senior civil servants and parliamentarians responsible, who sometimes wished to reserve control over different states according to their importance rather than their location23. In 1865, these were refined into five : b) and c) were reorganized together as the “Turkish Department” (Russia, Greece, Turkey, North Africa and the Middle East), and the others were reorganized and renamed as the German, French, Spanish and American departments24. More clearly separated geographical regions were thus introduced, even if the nomenclature remained largely national.
28 The reorganization which interests us, that of 1882, simplified matters still further and divided that portion of the world’s surface not under British rule into three. Among other things the French and German departments of 1865 were amalgamated. Most of the correspondence on the matter which has been preserved in the Foreign Office Distribution of Business file deals with really important matters like pay and who was to have which office. But, in December 1882, geographical considerations surfaced. « The members of the Franco-German Dept. », minuted Philip Currie, Assistant Under- Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, on the 15th, « have raised the question what the new department should be called -They suggest “European” but I think that is rather too comprehensive a title. “Franco-German” is ugly. Would it do to call it the “Western dept.” and the Turkish the “Eastern Dept.” ? I presume that the question should be submitted to Lord Granville for decision »25.
29 About six senior officials put in an opinion, one of whom, apparently Sir Charles Dilke, came up with the refinement of “Eastern (Europe) and Western (Europe) Departments”26. One official noted that these « in common parlance would be West & East » but did not think Eastern and Western Europe would « do »27. The objection to “Europe” probably owed as much to the fact that both “Franco-German” and “Turkish” departments dealt extensively with countries in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East as it did to any putative Victorian repulsion from the idea that the Balkans or Turkey could be considered European. The names “Eastern (Europe)”, “Western (Europe)” and “American and Asiatic” Departments were approved by the Foreign Secretary on December 20, 188228.
30 It was almost certainly as a direct result of this reorganisation that the name “South- Eastern Europe” came to be used for a print series. As it turns out, this series had been started in April 1876 as Correspondence relating to Affairs in the Herzegovina (Parts 1-4), was continued as Further Correspondence relating to Affairs in Turkey (parts 5-75, August 1876 - November 1883), to become Further Correspondence relating to the Affairs of South- Eastern Europe in December 1883 29. The use of print for important collections of documents had increased at the insistence of Lord Salisbury, Foreign Secretary from 1878-1880 ; and the Eastern Crisis, as well as the directly-related Cabinet crisis in Britain, brought with it a corresponding urgency of information. Disraeli had on occasion had the unfortunate need to call on the Foreign Office for documents on a Sunday or before 11 o’clock on a weekday morning, only to find nobody in30. Edward Hertslet, the Foreign Office librarian, was greatly proud of this practice of printing, and tells with pleasure an anecdote about a Frenchman who came to visit him in 1877 and was astonished at the confidence British officials placed in the civic loyalty of their printers in having them handle confidential papers31.
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31 Another official, Sir John Tilley, who started off in the Eastern Department in 1893, recalled the “South-Eastern Europe” print series as an office chore. But there was certainly no department of that name32. Indeed, the name can hardly be said to have imposed itself. Three years after the sanctioning of the Eastern (Europe) Department name, one of the officials who had been party to its christening wrote anachronistically to the Foreign Secretary that « on Monday Bertie gives up charge of the Turkish Department to Mr. Sanderson »33. And it is extremely rare to find the term in the documents of the series. The documents were confidential and subject to paraphrasing by the decipherers : a fact which opens up the possibility that the very title may have initially been hit upon by a paraphraser for “the Balkans” ; but when we read in such- and-such a paraphrased telegram that « the dethronement of Prince Alexander is a very great warning to the Balkan nations… »34 it is hardly likely that the original diplomat had wired « …a warning to South-Eastern Europe ».
32 The phrase, then, though intelligible and meaningful to all, remained largely unused in practice except on the title page series of dull but important despatches read by Queen Victoria, her cabinet, and a few officials. One might, however, care to reflect on the fact that its first consecration in governmental nomenclature followed on from a substantial crisis in which a British government involved itself substantially and lost substantial face. The new name was a product of the acknowledged need for better information, after a crisis had blown over. The neutrality of the term was not deemed appropriate for the period 1912-1914, when the “Balkan Wars” broke out and caused, among other horrors, a change in the filing system35. The same wars were also the spur for Nicolae Iorga (1871-1940) to set up an institute for “South-East European Studies” in Bucharest. In one of the last lectures Iorga gave before his murder in 1940 by members of the Fascist Iron Guard, and as war was beginning to rage in Europe again, he recalled how heads of state had rallied in the 1913 post-bellum reconstruction phase to his importunate requests for sponsorship of the South-East European idea, in search of a basis for unity and enduring peace in the Balkans. He was bitter about the superficiality of the Balkan Ententes of the 1930s, and their failure to achieve anything in the face of squabbling nations and the claims of the Great Powers. Nevertheless, he remained convinced of the validity of the South-East European idea and the common culture of the different groups. « Everything binds us together, whether we want it to or not. »36
33 That statement is valid for our age too, in more ways than one. Conflicts are called “Balkan” and reacting Western governments (and intellectuals) produce plans for stability and reconstruction which are known as “South-East European”37. The President of the United States remarked that « the conflicts in the Balkans highlight the need to strengthen stability across Southeastern Europe »38. Likewise, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine has said that one of the aims of the Stability Pact was to “Europeanize the Balkans”39. As Hobbes pointed out, it is always bad news if something has two names : « …considerations being diversely named, divers absurdities proceed from the confusion, and unfit connexion of their names into assertions »40. If the region is “South-Eastern Europe” when the wars are over, and “the Balkans” during their duration, we might hope that the former term will prevail. But for peace to prevail the region must be attended to whatever its name.
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NOTES
1. Kaser (Karl), Südosteuropäische Geschichte und Geschichtwissenschaft. Eine Einführung, Wien / Köln : Böhlau, 1990 ; Todorova (Maria), Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 27-30, 46. Todorova’s excellent work, an essential analysis of manipulations surrounding the terms “Balkan” and “South-Eastern Europe”, nevertheless contains a few minor errors : she writes that the Romanian scholar B. P. Hasdeu took up Iorga’s ideas on South-East Europe after World War I. Hasdeu (1838-1907) in fact preceded Iorga, and favoured the term “Balkan”, meant to include Romania, in most of his theories of regional unity published from 1876 to his death. Useful summaries of his ideas in Fochi (Adrian), Recherches comparées de folklore sud-est européen, Bucarest : AIESEE, 1972, pp. 20-33 ; and Rosetti (Al.), La linguistique balcanique, Bucureşti : Univers, 1985, pp. 16-22. 2. Opponents of “South-Eastern Europe” have included Papacostea (Victor), « La péninsule Balkanique et le problème des études comparées », Balcania, 6, 1943, p. v, who called it “vague and anonymous” ; and Ortalyi (Ilber), « Les Balkans et l’héritage ottoman », Bulletin de l’AIESEE, 28-29, 1998-1999, p. 214, who notes « Why use three words when one will do ? », and argues that users of the term covertly attempt to minimize the role of the Ottoman Empire in the region. 3. For a full text of the pact, see : http://www.seerecon.org/KeyDocuments/KD.1999062401.htm. 4. Kopitar (Barth), « Walachische Literatur », in Wiener allgemeine Literaturzeitung (1813), p. 1551 ; repr. in Barth. Kopitars Kleinere Schriften. Sprachswissenschaftlichen, geschichtlichen, ethnographischen und rechtshistorischen Inhalts (Herausg. von Fr. Miklosich), Wien : Friedrich Beck, 1857, p. 230 : « die allgemeine Geschichte des südöstlichen Europa ». 5. Kopitar (Jernej), « Patriotische Phantasien eines Slaven » (1810) repr. in Kleinere Schriften, p. 61 ; English version by Miriam Levy in Lencek (Rado L.), Cooper (Henry R., Jr.), eds., To Honor Jernej Kopitar 1780-1980. Papers in Slavic Philology, 2, Ann Arbor : University of Michigan 1982, pp. 195ff. 6. Boué (Ami), « Synoptical Table of the Formations of the Crust of the Earth », Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 13, April-October 1825. 7. Boué (Ami), « Synoptische Darstellung der die Erdrinde ausmachenden Formazionen, so wie der wichtigsten, ihnen unter-geordneten, Massen », Zeitschrift für Mineralogie, 2, 1827, p. 81. 8. Ibid., p. 98 ; cf. Boué (Ami), « Considérations générales sur la distribution géographique, la nature et l’origine des terrains de l’Europe », Mémoires géologiques et palaeontologiques, t. I, Paris : L’auteur / Paris / Strasbourg : F.G.Levrault / Bruxelles : Librairie Parisienne, 1832, pp. 47, 52, 65, 68. 9. Boué (Ami), « On the Geography and Geology of Northern and Central Turkey. Part II : Geology », Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 23, April-October 1837, p. 61. 10. Fischer (Theobald), « Die südosteuropäischen Halbinsel », in Alfred Kirchoff, Hg., Unser Wissen von der Erde. Allgemeine Erdkunde und Länderkunde. Dritter Band : Länderkunde von Europa. Zweiter Teil, zweite hälfte, Wien / Prag : K. Lempsky / Leipzig : G. Freytag, 1893, p. 65 ; Carter (Francis W.), ed., An Historical Geography of the Balkans, London : Academic Press, 1974, p. 7 ; Todorova (Maria), op.cit., p. 28, overrates Boué’s geographical accuracy : he did not say the Balkan range was 550 kilometres long, nor are the altitudes he gives for various mountains very close to today’s accepted figures. Cf. Boué (Ami), La Turquie d’Europe, Paris : Arthus Bertrand, 1840, t. I, pp. 90-95. 11. Boué (Ami), La Turquie d’Europe (op.cit.), Preface, p. viii. 12. Boué (Ami), « Mémoire géologique sur l’Allemagne », Journal de Physique, de Chimie, d’Histoire Naturelle et des Arts, 45, septembre 1822, p. 181.
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13. Zeune (August), Gea. Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Erdbeschreibung (Zweite Auflage), Berlin : L. W. Wittich, 1811, p. 58. 14. Balbi (Adrien), Abrégé de Géographie, rédigé sur un nouveau plan d’après les derniers traités de paix et les découvertes les plus récentes, Paris : Jules Renouard & Cie, 1833, pp. 107-108 ; 502-503. This was a set text in French universities for many years and was translated, abridged and adapted in many European languages. I was not able to consult Balbi (Adriano), Compendio di geographia universale (Venice 1817), where he apparently first developed his ideas on the division of Europe. 15. For some “cultural” rather than “natural” considerations, see his article Balbi (Adriano), « D’alcuni contrasti fra l’oriente e l’occidente », Gazzetta di Milano, Maggio 1839 (repr. in Balbi (Adriano), Scritti geografici, statistici i vari. t. IV, Torino : A. Fontana, 1842). 16. [Laurie (James)] The System of Universal Geography, Founded on the Works of Malte-Brun and Balbi, Edinburgh : A. & C. Black / London : Longman &c., 1842, p. 140. 17. Klöden (Gustav Adolf von), Handbuch der Erdkunde. Zweiter Theil: Politisch Geographie. Länder- und Staatenkunde von Europa, Berlin : Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1861, pp. ix-xi, 1035. 18. Hahn (Johann Georg von), « Reise von Belgrad nach Salonik », Denkschriften der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophish-Historische Classe, 11 (2), 1861, p. 2 n. 2. (Not 1863, as in Todorova (Maria), op.cit., p. 28). 19. Fischer (Theobald), art.cit. 20. List (Friedrich), « Die Ackerverfassung, die Zwergwirthschaft und die Auswanderung » (1842) in Herausg. von Erwin V. Beckerath et al., Schriften / Reden / Briefe, Band V, Berlin : Reimar Hobbing, 1928 (quotes from 502, 498-499). For the context of List’s ideas see Meyer (Henry Cord), Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1815-1945, The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff, 1955, p. 13 ; and Droz (Jacques), L’Europe Centrale. Evolution historique de l’idée de “Mitteleuropa”, Paris : Payot, 1960, pp. 31-62. 21. Atherton (Louise), « Never Complain, Never Explain » : Records of the Foreign Office and State Paper Office 1500-c.1960, London: PRO Publications, 1994, pp. 97-98. 22. Arrowsmith (Aaron), A Compendium of Ancient and Modern Geography for the Use of Eton School, London / Eton : E. Williams, 1831, pp. 48-50. The section on ancient European geography was four times longer than that on the modern period, where we learn only that Austria « stretches far beyond the limits of ancient Germany to the Eastward » and Turkey includes « the Thracian provinces on the Danube, together with Macedonia and parts of Illyricum, Epirus and Thessaly, Crete and several islands in the Aegean Sea. To the S. of Turkey is the Kingdom of Greece ». 23. Cecil (Algernon), « The Foreign Office », in Ward (Sir A. W.), Gooch (G. P.), eds., The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, 1783-1919, Cambridge University Press, 1923, Vol. III, p. 589 ; Roper (Michael), The Records of the Foreign Office 1782-1939, London : HMSO, 1969, pp. 12-15. 24. Roper (Michael), op.cit. ; Cromwell (Valerie), « The Foreign and Commonwealth Office », in Steiner (Zara), ed., The Times Survey of Foreign Ministries of the World, London : Times Books, 1982. Responsibility for Sweden was transferred to the “German” Department. 25. London, Public Record Office, Foreign Office, (hereafter PRO, FO), 366/386 (Distribution of Business, 1838-1903), circular with comments by Philip Currie, Sir Julian Pauncefote, Sir Francis Alston, Thomas Lister and Earl Granville, 15 Dec 1882. 26. PRO, FO 366/386, Sir Julian Pauncefote’s note of 18 Dec 1882 ; Jones (Ray A.), The Administration of the British Diplomatic Service and Foreign Office, 1848-1905, PhD thesis, University of London, 1968, p. 147 n. 1. 27. PRO, FO 366/386, Thomas Villiers Lister in circular of 15 Dec 1882. 28. PRO, FO 366/386, note by Granville, 21 Dec 1882; cf. PRO, FO 366/678, Domestic Entry Book, Vol. XI (1878-1883), p. 427. “Western (Europe)”= Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Austria [sic], Germany, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, North Africa Madagascar, Miscellaneous; “Eastern (Europe)” = Greece, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Persia, Central Asia; “American + Asiatic” = The Americas, China, Japan and Siam. This last had
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originally been called “American”, and was changed despite objections raised over composite names by Philip Currie (PRO FO 366/386, circular note of 15 Dec 1882). For comparison, note that the Russian Foreign Ministry dealt with the Balkans through its Asiatic Department until 1914. 29. All these series in PRO, FO 881 (Confidential Print, Numerical Series) and PRO, FO 421 (South- Eastern Europe 1812-1933). The British Library, London, has bound copies of parts 89 to 134, covering the period from March 1886 to December 1889, together with a series of Confidential Telegrams on the Affairs of South-Eastern Europe (6 July 1886-20 Dec 1889) : these appear to have been for the personal use of Lord Salisbury, as they are stamped with the words “Prime Minister”. 30. Cecil (Algernon), art.cit., p. 606. 31. Hertslet (Sir Edward, K.C.B.), Recollections of The Old Foreign Office, London : John Murray, 1901, pp. 50-51. 32. Tilley (Rt. Hon Sir John),Gaselee (Stephen), The Foreign Office, London / New York : Putnams & Sons Ltd., 1933, pp. 127-130. 33. PRO, FO 366/386, Sir Julian Pauncefote to Lord Salisbury, 15 August 1885. 34. Further Correspondence respecting the affairs of South-Eastern Europe, Part 94, p. 103 : Wyndham to Iddesleigh, August 26 1886. 35. For completists : alongside Balkan Wars (1912-1914), a print series from Dec. 1912 on Aegean Islands, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Roumania, Serbia & General ; from Jan 1914, continued as Eastern Europe ; from 1919, South-Eastern Europe (= Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and the Vatican, Hungary, Roumania, Jugoslavia, Montenegro and General) was revived ; from 1934-1941, the series dealing with the same states was called Southern Europe ; from 1941-1947, South-Eastern Europe including Turkey ; from 1948, Eastern Europe. 36. Iorga (Nicolae), Ce este sud-estul european, Bucureşti, 1940, p. 14. 37. Two recent works implicitly carry this distinction in their titles : Nelson (Daniel N.), Balkan Imbroglio. Politics and Security in Southeastern Europe, Boulder, CO : Westview, 1991, and Hall (Derek),Danta (Darrick), Reconstructing the Balkans. A Geography of the New Southeast Europe, Chichester, UK / New York : John Wiley & Sons, 1996. An older instance : D. Mitrany published Mitrany(David), The Effects of the War in Southeastern Europe, London : Oxford University Press / New Haven : Yale University Press, 1936 ; during that war, he had contributed to a history of The Balkans (London : Wm. Heinemann, 1915). 38. Joint press conference with Jacques Chirac, 19/02/99. This appears to be Clinton’s first use of the term in recent official statements relating to NATO, since when he has used it over forty times, sometimes for a more extensive region than the Balkans, sometimes as a synonym with more positive associations. He is doing both here. See his major statements since 1997 on the Internet at http://www.nato.int/usa/president.htm. 39. A phrase cited approvingly by François Lamoureux, a deputy director general of the European Commission, in a speech in Paris, 28/06/99, available on the Internet at the time of writing (18 January 2000) at : http://www.europa/eu.int/com/dg1a/see/docs/medef_lamoureux.htm. 40. Hobbes (Thomas), Leviathan, Part I, Ch. 4.
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AUTEUR
ALEX DRACE-FRANCIS Alex Drace-Francis is a PhD candidate and Teaching Assistant at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
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Notes de Lectures
NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR
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Notices bibliographiques balkaniques
En Bosnie-Herzégovine
Filandra (Šaćir), Bošnjačka politika u XX. stoljeću (La politique bosniaque au XXème siècle), Sarajevo : Sejtarija, 1998, 414 p.
1 L’ouvrage traite de l’histoire politique de la Bosnie-Herzégovine et plus particulièrement des Slaves musulmans (Bošnjaci) au XXème siècle. L’auteur aborde le processus d’affirmation nationale et culturelle des Bosniaques musulmans au début de notre siècle, ainsi qu’au cours des années 1970, après la reconnaissance par le régime titiste d’une nation musulmane, leur position dans le royaume de Yougoslavie (rôle de l’Organisation musulmane yougoslave - JMO), leur situation durant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale et dans la Yougoslavie communiste, ainsi qu’au moment de la désintégration de cette dernière.
Ibrahimagić (Omer), Bosna i Bošnjaci : izmedju agresije i mira (La Bosnie et les Bosniaques : entre agression et paix), Sarajevo : Rijaset islamske zajednice u Bosni i Hercegovini, El-Kalem, 1998, 339 p.
2 Receuil d’articles, d’essais, de lettres traitant de la question constitutionnelle en Bosnie-Herzégovine en rapport avec les différents plans de paix proposés pendant la guerre (études comparatives avec les institutions politiques et constitutionnelles suisses et belges), du conflit armé (1992-1995) et de la vie politique bosniaque.
Zgodić (Esad), Bošnjačko iskustvo politike : osmansko doba (L’expérience bosniaque du politique : période ottomane), Sarajevo : Euromedia, 1998, 458 p.
3 Histoire politique et culturelle des Slaves musulmans à l’époque ottomane en Bosnie : pensée politique, relations entre islam et politique, etc.
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Za Bosnu i Hercegovinu : izbor iz dokumentacije Dr. Harisa Silajdžića (Pour la Bosnie-Herzégovine : sélection à partir de la documentation du Dr. Haris Silajdžić), Sarajevo : Bosanska knjiga, 1998, 276 p.
4 Recueil de documents concernant différents aspects de la vie politique, économique et sociale (question des personnes déplacées, droits de l’homme, privatisation, etc.) de la Bosnie-Herzégovine et mettant en avant le travail du Vice-président du Conseil des ministres de Bosnie-Herzégovine, Haris Silajdžić.
En Bulgarie
Andreeva (Rumâna), Naciâ i nacionaliz ’m v b’lgarskata istoriâ, (Nation et nationalisme dans l’histoire bulgare), Sofia : Paradigma, 1998, 181 p.
5 Etudes sur les concepts de “nation” et “nationalisme”, en tant que phénomènes historiques clés de l’histoire bulgare entre 1878 et 1912.
Bulgaria and the European Union : Towards an Institutional Infrastructure, Sofia : Center for the study of democracy, 1998, 287 p.
6 Ouvrage traitant du processus de transformation (économique, politique et social) de la Bulgarie dans l’optique d’une adhésion future à l’Union européenne.
Dainov (Evgeni), ed., The Awakening : a chronicle of the bulgarian civic uprising of january-february 1997, Sofia : Democracy network program, Centre for social practices, 1998, 214 p.
7 Receuil de témoignages des différents acteurs des manifestations de l’hiver 1996-1997 en Bulgarie.
Hinkova (Sonâ), Ûgoslavskiât slučaj : etničeski konflikti v ûgoiztočna Evropa (Le cas yougoslave : les conflits ethniques en Europe du sud-est), Sofia : KH, 1998, 182 p.
8 Étude sur les conditions conduisant à l’émergence des conflits interethniques, le rôle de la communauté internationale dans le réglement de ces conflits et sur la construction de la paix : cas de la Bosnie-Herzégovine, du Kosovo et de la Macédoine.
En Croatie
Šarinić (Hrvoje), Svi moji tajni pregovori sa Slobodanom Miloševićem 1993-95 (98) (Toutes mes négociations secrètes avec Slobodan Milosevic 1993-1995[98]), Zagreb : Globus International, 1999, 343 p.
En Serbie (RFY)
Dimić (Ljubodrag), Borozan (Ðorđe), Jugoslovenska država i Albanci (L’État yougoslave et les Albanais), Beograd : Službeni list SRJ : Arhiv Jugoslavije : Vojno-istorijski institut, 1998-1999, 2 vol. (785 p., 891 p.)
9 Ouvrage rassemblant des sources militaires, diplomatiques et autres sur l’histoire des Albanais en Yougoslavie au cours des premières années d’existence du Royaume des Serbes, Croates et Slovènes fondé en 1918.
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Popović-Obradović (Olga), Parlamentarizam u Srbiji od 1903. do 1914. godine (Le parlementarisme en Serbie de 1903 à 1914), Beograd : Službeni list SRJ, 1998, 472 p.
10 Étude sur le fonctionnement des institutions parlementaires (relations entre le parlement, le gouvernement et le roi) en Serbie de l’assassinat du roi Aleksandar Obrenović en 1903 à l’éclatement de la Première Guerre mondiale en 1914.
Tošić (Desimir), Snaga i nemoć: naš komunizam, 1945-1990 (Force et impuissance : notre communisme, 1945-1990), Beograd : Akademija nova, 1998, 346 p., ouvrage en cyrillique.
11 Receuil d’articles parus dans Naša reč, revue de l’émigration politique serbe d’après 1945 publié à Londres, et analysant le régime communiste yougoslave. L’auteur était membre avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale de l’organisation de la jeunesse du Parti démocrate en Yougoslavie.
1948, Jugoslavija i Kominform : pedeset godina kasnije, Beograd : Međunarodna politika, Službeni list SRJ, Arhiv Jugoslavije, 1998, 337 p.
12 Ouvrage collectif analysant 50 ans plus tard les relations soviéto-yougoslave et la rupture entre la Yougoslavie et le bloc soviétique de juin 1948. L’ouvrage comporte 54 p. de documents divers relatifs au conflit soviéto-yougoslave.
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Pavlowitch (Stevan K.), A History of the Balkans, 1804-1945 London / New York : Longman, 1999, 375 p.
Bernard Lory
RÉFÉRENCE
Pavlowitch (Stevan K.), A History of the Balkans, 1804-1945, London / New York : Longman, 1999, 375 p.
1 On ne peut que saluer la parution de cet ouvrage de synthèse, clair et précis, qui couvre une période cruciale de l’histoire balkanique. Destiné en premier lieu à un public d’étudiants, il s’inscrit directement dans la lignée des ouvrages de Stavrianos et Jelavich, ou bien, hors de la sphère anglo-saxonne, de ceux de Hösch ou de Castellan1. En choisissant de ne couvrir un laps que d’un siècle et demi, l’auteur fait preuve de sagesse et d’efficacité. Si l’histoire balkanique ne se comprend bien que dans une approche longue, les ouvrages que nous venons de mentionner pèchent souvent, par une avalanche de noms et de faits, d’un effet décourageant pour le lecteur averti.
2 Guidé par un souci pédagogique constant, l’ouvrage est sans surprise dans sa structure : quinze chapitres chronologiques, scandés par les grands événements militaires et diplomatiques, consacrant la moitié de l’ouvrage aux années 1900-1945. L’exposé est segmenté en fonction des États ou des groupes nationaux, ce qui constitue une des contraintes incontournables pour toute histoire de la zone, mais l’auteur s’applique à souligner les traits communs à des évolutions le plus souvent parallèles. On note aussi son souci d’intégrer une histoire économique, souvent trop négligée, non seulement comme arrière-plan, mais comme moteur explicatif : elle permet de relativiser les flamboyances théâtrales (tragédie antique ou opérette viennoise) trop souvent associées à l’histoire balkanique, en problématisant la difficile insertion d’une région périphérique dans le développement industriel européen.
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3 On peut regretter la cartographie très rudimentaire, qui n’apporte aucun soutien au lecteur.
4 Il faut en revanche souligner l’intérêt de la conclusion où Stevan Pavlowitch quitte le ton académique, froid et distancié, pour une prise de position plus personnelle particulièrement stimulante. Comment aborder l’histoire balkanique entre les récits nationalistes exaltés et la vision occidentale minorisante ? En quelques pages vigoureuses, il déblaie des mètres cubes de préjugés et d’incompréhension (pp. 331-337) et propose un heureux antidote à ceux qu’afflige la sinistrose balkanique !
NOTES
1. Stavrianos (L. S.), The Balkans since 1453, New York, 1958 ; Jelavich (Barbara), History of the Balkans, 2 vol., Cambridge, 1983 ; Hösch (E.), Geschichte der Balkanhalbinsel von der Frühzeit bis zur Gegenwart, München, 1988 ; Castellan (Georges), Histoire des Balkans, XV-XX siècles, Paris, 1991 (édition revue et complétée, Paris, 1999).
AUTEURS
BERNARD LORY
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Antébi (Elizabeth), Les missionnaires juifs de la France, 1860-1939 Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999, 370 pages
Bernard Lory
RÉFÉRENCE
Antébi (Elizabeth), Les missionnaires juifs de la France, 1860-1939, Paris : Calmann-Lévy, 1999, 370 p.
1 Derrière ce titre un peu provocateur, Elizabeth Antébi se propose de nous raconter la vie d’une vingtaine d’enseignants de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) entre 1860 et 1939. « Missionnaires », ils le furent, non pas du judaïsme, qui n’est pas une religion de prosélytisme, mais d’une certaine conception de la civilisation qu’ils allèrent diffuser loin de leur lieu de naissance, parmi leurs coreligionnaires juifs des Balkans, d’Afrique du nord ou du Proche-Orient. « Missionnaires de la France », peut-être, si l’on prend soin de dissocier l’État français, incarné par le Second Empire puis la Troisième République (lequel appuya plutôt mollement l’action de l’AIU), d’une vision quasi mythique de la France émancipatrice, égalitaire, universaliste, éclairée par la science et la raison, et dont la langue était censée avoir des vertus de clarté et de précision incomparables. C’est de cette France-là que se firent les missionnaires les personnages dont nous découvrons les destins mouvementés.
2 L’ouvrage ne se veut pas une histoire de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, bien qu’au travers des récits de vie, toutes les phases et les crises que connut l’institution se trouvent évoquées : le Congrès de Berlin, l’affaire Dreyfus, la Première Guerre mondiale, la montée en puissance du sionisme, l’émergence des États nationaux successeurs des Empires.
3 Cinq destins sont explicitement liés à l’histoire de la zone balkanique. Celui d’Elie Nathan, instituteur à Istanbul qui affronte le déploiement du nationalisme turc sous le régime kémaliste ; Rosalie Chéni qu’une carrière difficile mène de Jambol à Istanbul ;
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Sarah Ungar, juive allemande, qui de 1890 à 1911 se consacre à l’éducation des filles à Edirne ; Moïse Cohen, installé dans une existence de notable à Plovdiv, qui reçoit de plein fouet la première vague du sionisme en 1901-1903 ; enfin, la figure de Joseph Nehama, le grand historien des juifs de Salonique, nous est présentée.
4 Il ne faudrait pas croire que l’intérêt balkanologique de l’ouvrage s’épuise avec ces cinq cas. Six autres biographies suivent la carrière de juifs originaires de la Péninsule, que le service de l’AIU enverra dans les destinations les plus variées. Yomtob Sémach, natif de Jambol, fut successivement instituteur à Sousse, Plovdiv, Tatar Pazardžik, Damas, Bagdad, Beyrouth, fit une mission exploratoire au Yémen, pour achever sa longue carrière au Maroc. Jacques Valadji, natif de Tatar Pazardžik, enseigna à Bagdad, Damas, Jérusalem, Izmir, Edirne, Meknes et Fez. Né à Karnobat, Albert Contino enseigna à Ispahan avant de devenir inspecteur de l’AIU en Algérie. Joseph Halévy, érudit de grand renom qui étudia les Falashas d’Éthiopie et explora le Yemen, était natif d’Edirne, de même qu’Ezra Menda, instituteur à Alep. Né à Šumen, Isaac Astruc enseigna à Damas et Ruse, et intervint courageusement en faveur des juifs de Bessarabie, victimes des pogromes de 1905. Enfin, au détour des chapitres ou des notes, nous rencontrons Maurice Sidi, né à Tatar Pazardžik, en poste à Mossoul, Joseph Almaleh de Čirpan, en poste à Ispahan et Tripoli, Joseph Niego d’Edirne en poste en Palestine, etc.
5 Si le cadre de l’Empire ottoman explique le champ d’action étendu de ces juifs de Roumélie, il faut souligner le paradoxe de ces « Bulgares » qui prennent à cœur la diffusion de la langue française parmi leurs coreligionnaires d’Algérie… citoyens français ! Si l’influence de la culture française dans les Balkans a fait l’objet de multiples études1, la filière de diffusion de la langue et de l’« idéologie citoyenne » françaises par les écoles de l’AIU mérite de retenir notre attention. D’autant plus que l’AIU refusa toujours l’enfermement communautaire et ouvrit ses écoles à un certain nombre de non-juifs.
6 L’ouvrage d’Elizabeth Antébi laisse cependant un relent d’insatisfaction. Ce n’est pas son parti-pris biographique et donc forcément anecdotique, que l’on contestera, car il est plein de vivacité et permet de savoureuses citations de documents inédits, mais le côté hâtif et parfois bâclé de sa rédaction. Cela se marque dans des citations et paragraphes mal raboutés (p. 60), une biographie laissée en suspens (celle d’Isaac Astruc, p. 267), des expressions incohérentes (« battre en lisière », p. 168) et un vocabulaire peu orthodoxe (« barquiers » au lieu de bateliers, p. 294 ; « vacherie » au lieu d’étable ou de laiterie, « sériculture » (sic) au lieu de magnanerie, p. 296). C’est bien mal honorer la mémoire de ces apôtres d’un français clair et rigoureux.
7 Les négligences dans les explications sont plus gênantes encore : Deuxième (au lieu de Première) Guerre mondiale (p. 144), influence soviétique (au lieu de russe, p. 168), pour aboutir à quelques énormités : Diyarbakır dans le Caucase (p. 217), « Skopje est désormais une ville albanaise » (p. 354), etc.
8 La précipitation amène à formuler des jugements erronés sur le plan historique : « l’Alliance s’est retirée en 1936. En un lustre les sentiments antijuifs et pro-nazis de la Grèce n’ont fait que croître et embellir. Les déportations, à partir de 1941, en seront l’effroyable conséquence » (p. 208). S’il est exact que la dictature de Metaxas (août 1936 – janvier 1941) connut une dérive fascisante, on ne peut passer sous silence le fait que la Grèce combattit les forces de l’Axe, fut envahie, démembrée territorialement et connut un des mouvements de résistance parmi les plus actifs d’Europe. Le raccourci
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stylistique et le lien de cause à effet ici établi laisse clairement entendre que la déportation des juifs de Grèce aurait été une initiative grecque. C’est inadmissible2.
9 La précipitation dans l’écriture et l’absence de relecture critique de la part des maisons d’éditions rendent ce genre de dérapages malheureusement trop fréquents.
NOTES
1. Voir le récent numéro d’Études balkaniques de Sofia ou encore Makedonsko-francuski odnosi (Bitola, 1999, 485 p.). 2. On peut se reporter au chapitre que M. Mazower consacre à la “solution finale” en Grèce dans Mazower (Mark), Inside Hitler’s Greece ,New Haven / London : Yale University Press, 1993.
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de Montclos (Christine), Le Vatican et l’éclatement de la Yougoslavie Paris : PUF, 1999, 263 p. [Bibliogr. Chrono. Annexes]
Patrick Michels
RÉFÉRENCE
de Montclos (Christine), Le Vatican et l’éclatement de la Yougoslavie, Paris : PUF, 1999, 263 p. [Bibliogr. Chrono. Annexes]
1 C. de Montclos a écrit un livre intéressant sur la politique du Vatican par rapport à l’éclatement de la Yougoslavie. Évitant la plupart des clichés véhiculés par la presse et nombre de « spécialistes spontanés », elle offre aux lecteurs un travail de recherche mêlant analyses historiques et de politique internationale. Le Vatican ne pouvait pas rester indifférent à ce qui se déroulait en Yougoslavie, du fait qu’une partie des acteurs étaient catholiques, que les évêques croates ont mobilisé les épiscopats des différents États. De plus, le Vatican était bien plus sensible aux revendications exprimées par les catholiques que par les autres religions (d’où son appel à voter pour la HDZ, Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica, Communauté Démocratique Croate, en 1990). Toutefois, c’est la presse vaticane (Osservatore Romane) qui a été la plus virulente dans son soutien à la cause des républiques slovène et croate, notamment par anticommunisme. Mais le Vatican n’a pas non plus été très critique envers l’État croate à ses débuts, étant donné que « l’action dans l’urgence exclut la prise en compte des causes plus profondes et moins actuelles » (p. 92), il n’a pas non plus « cherché à mobiliser les instances internationales avec la même intensité que dans l’ancienne Yougoslavie » dans le cas des autres guerres se déroulant de par le monde. Le Vatican a tenté de ne pas affirmer de position radicale, en prenant conscience du nationalisme du régime croate et, également, pour éviter de s’aliéner le monde orthodoxe slave, et, enfin, parce qu’étant
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une autorité morale, il ne peut que donner conseils et avis (ce que le Vatican se contentera de faire pour la Bosnie-Herzégovine).
2 C. de Montclos opère une lecture balancée, ni pro-vaticane, ni anti-serbe. Elle a réalisé un travail sérieux d’analyse qui n’est, malheureusement pas, exempt de défauts, tenant au mauvais système d’information dont la Yougoslavie (entre autres) a bénéficié dans la presse. Il y a d’abord des erreurs typographiques (espérons-le) : le coup d’État du 27 mars 1942 arrive un peu tard (p. 10), Josip Broz Tito devient Josef (p. 10). Ensuite, des erreurs d’interprétation : le mémorandum de l’Académie serbe des Sciences et des Arts (ASSA) est « largement diffusé à partir de 1986 » (p. 11), alors que l’étude critique du titisme (effectuée dans un état d’esprit certes spécial) n’a jamais été terminée et que c’est l’ébauche d’un mémorandum qui a circulé ; Franjo Tuđman n’a pas été élu en 1990 (p. 15), mais désigné par le Parlement ; le séparatisme croate en Bosnie-Herzégovine n’est pas “renaissant” en 1996 (p. 155). Enfin, une méconnaissance de la constitution yougoslave : la distinction narod / narodnost n’est pas connue de l’auteur (p. 18), qui est persuadée que le droit de sécession est reconnu dans la constitution yougoslave (p. 69). On regrettera également les nombreuses références au slaviste P. Garde, alors que des spécialistes français (historiens, sociologues, politologues, …) de l’“ex-Yougoslavie” existent. Le plus surprenant provient de la chronologie, qui rassemble les « grandes étapes de l’éclatement de la Yougoslavie » (p. 197, n. 1). Elle débute par « 1980, 4 mai, mort de Tito » : la Yougoslavie ne pouvait donc pas exister sans Tito ? L’entrée suivante est 1986, avec les premières manifestations nationalistes serbes au Kosovo et le mémorandum de l’ASSA. Il ne s’est donc rien passé en 1981, et on n’apprendra pas non plus qu’un programme national slovène a été publié en 1987 dans une revue littéraire slovène (Nova Revija), reproduit en serbo-croate en 1988 dans une revue de sciences sociales zagréboise (Naše teme). Mais ces défauts sont mineurs, n’ayant qu’un rapport très éloigné avec le sujet traité.
AUTEURS
PATRICK MICHELS
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Roux (Michel), Le Kosovo. Dix clés pour comprendre Paris : La Découverte (Sur le vif), 1999, 127 p. [Bibliogr. Chrono. Sites internet].
Patrick Michels
RÉFÉRENCE
Roux (Michel), Le Kosovo. Dix clés pour comprendre, Paris : La Découverte (Sur le vif), 1999, 127 p. [Bibliogr. Chrono. Sites internet].
1 Une fois de plus, M. Roux publie un travail de qualité, plus proche du travail scientifique d’analyse que de la propagande pro ou anti très courante dans ce qui s’est écrit sur la Yougoslavie et l’“ex” ses dix dernières années.
2 Synthétique, clair et précis, simple, l’ouvrage se veut abordable par tous ceux que les événements troubles qui se sont déroulés dernièrement au Kosovo ont interpellés. Une sorte de mise au point. D’analyses sérieuses en perspectives explicatives, l’opus ne se contente pas d’éclaircir ce qui s’est déroulé, mais également les conséquences de la guerre de l’OTAN contre la “Yougoslavie” sur de nombreux pays (cf. chapitre 10).
3 Mais, comme souvent, on peut ne pas être d’accord avec toutes les assertions de M. Roux (peut-être à cause de la simplification nécessaire à l’édition d’un livre grand public ?) : les militants et dirigeants de l’UCK n’œuvrant pas pour la réalisation de la “Grande Albanie”. Ce n’est pas parce que les Albanais (de Serbie, de Macédoine, d’Albanie, du Monténégro, selon leur classe sociale, …) sont divisés sur la question que l’organisation terroriste n’a pas d’avis tranché. Le géographe-historien montre bien l’enchaînement qui a conduit à la politique du pire, les Albanais du Kosovo n’ayant plus vraiment le choix. On aurait aimé une analyse des conflits entre Ligue Démocratique du Kosovo et Armée de Libération du Kosovo, qui, malheureusement, se situait en dehors du sujet de ce livre.
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4 Tout au long de son travail, M. Roux montre bien comment « après ce qui s’est passé entre mars et juin 1999, une réintégration réelle du Kosovo en Serbie est impossible ». On saluera sa terminologie précise, tout en regrettant qu’il ait adopté, concernant la Bosnie-Herzégovine, celle prônée par P. Garde, dont la finalité, même involontaire, est de faire des Croates et Serbes de Bosnie des allogènes1. On regrettera également quelques vétilles : « l’éclatement de l’ex-Yougoslavie », et non de la Yougoslavie, en 1991 ; le double “jj” de Djakovica (Ðjakovica), et la disparition des pages 77 à 80, imputables à la relecture et à l’imprimeur2. On s’interrogera plus sur le fait que les critiques croates vis-à-vis de la décentralisation soient passées sous silence (p. 31). Mais, là aussi, ces défauts sont mineurs, et ne nuisent aucunement à la qualité du travail fourni. Enfin, on appréciera la présentation de sites internet liés, sinon dédiés, au Kosovo.
NOTES
1. P. Garde avait proposé, sur le modèle souhaité par les élites musulmanes de Bosnie- Herzégovine, que les Musulmans soient désignés par “Bosniaques”, terme en cours jusqu’alors pour désigner tous les habitants de la Bosnie-Herzégovine qui devenaient (et deviennent) les “Bosniens”, appellation plutôt rare en Occident. Rare mais pas inexistante : par Bosnien, le traducteur de Gellner (Ernest), Nations et nationalisme, Paris, Payot, 1989 (p. 109) faisait mention des Musulmans et non des habitants de la Bosnie-Herzégovine. 2. Nous-mêmes sommes très friands de ce genre d’erreurs.
AUTEURS
PATRICK MICHELS
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Hartmann(Florence), Milosevic : la diagonale du fou Paris : Denoël, 1999, 441 p.
Yves Tomić
RÉFÉRENCE
Hartmann (Florence), Milosevic : la diagonale du fou, Paris : Denoël, 1999, 441 p.
1 Ce livre consacré à Slobodan Milošević est le premier du genre publié en France. L'actuel président yougoslave qui domine la vie politique de la Serbie depuis 1987 n'avait pas encore fait l'objet d'études plus approfondies en France, hormis dans le cadre de quelques articles publiés dans diverses revues. L'auteur, journaliste, connaît bien son sujet : Florence Hartmann a été correspondante du Monde pendant plusieurs années à Belgrade, elle connaît le serbo-croate et a donc eu accès à des sources locales (ouvrages, témoignages).
2 L'ouvrage retrace rapidement l'ascension politique de Slobodan Milošević au cours des années 1980. L'auteur fait ensuite le récit de la désintégration de la Yougoslavie et de l'éclatement des conflits armés en Slovénie, en Croatie et en Bosnie-Herzégovine soulignant à chaque fois le rôle et l'implication de Slobodan Milošević dans ces événements tragiques. Un reproche que l'on peut d'ailleurs adresser à l'auteur est qu'il suit le parcours de Slobodan Milošević uniquement à travers le prisme des guerres : il ne présentent pas suffisamment les évolutions politiques internes en Serbie, le système de gouvernement du président serbe, etc. Il n'explique pas suffisamment comment Slobodan Milošević a pu se maintenir au pouvoir si longtemps malgré les résultats désastreux de sa politique. En effet, plus qu'une biographie politique de Slobodan Milošević, il s'agit d'un récit sur les différents conflits armés qui se sont succédés dans l'espace yougoslave depuis 1990. Florence Hartmann décrit d'ailleurs très bien la machine de guerre instaurée par S. Milošević, notamment le rôle assigné au ministère de l'Intérieur de Serbie, aux services secrets et aux milices constituant son “armée parallèle”. Son récit relie les événements isolés, les met en perspective et contribue à
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une meilleure compréhension de l'entreprise militaire menée par S. Milošević à Belgrade. L'auteur montre clairement que le dirigeant de Belgrade n'était pas intéressé par les Serbes de Croatie et leurs territoires : son principal objectif était la séparation des peuples serbe et croate et surtout le dépeçage de la Bosnie-Herzégovine au profit de la Serbie et de la Croatie. Les Serbes de Croatie n'étaient qu'une monnaie d'échange dans le cadre du partage de la Bosnie-Herzégovine. Le chapitre sur « l'abandon de la Krajina » par la Serbie est à ce propos éloquent.
3 À plusieurs endroits de l'ouvrage, l'historien reste sur sa faim. En effet, des affirmations sont avancées sans qu'elles soient étayées de sources précises : par exemple, Florence Hartmann attribue un rôle moteur à Dobrica Ćosić en évoquant les manifestations de 1988-1989. S'il est indéniable que le romancier serbe un joué un rôle primordial dans le réveil national, peut-on affirmer qu'il a orchestré la « croisade nationale à travers la Serbie » à cette époque (p. 38) ou que le Mémorandum de l'Académie serbe des sciences et des arts a été rédigé « sous ses ordres » (p. 393) ? De même lorsque l'auteur évoque (p. 256) les services de renseignement yougoslaves chargés d'évaluer la détermination de l'OTAN à intervenir ou encore le plan RAM visant à conquérir la Bosnie-Herzégovine (p. 264), des sources s'imposaient pour renforcer la crédibilité du récit. Ce n'est pas que l'auteur ne cite pas de sources, mais étant donné l'importance du sujet et les nombreuses polémiques qui ont eu cours sur les événements en question un appareil de notes plus riche aurait été appréciable. Une carte de l'ex-Yougoslavie ou au moins de la Croatie et de la Bosnie-Herzégovine permettrait une lecture plus facile de l'ouvrage par les non-spécialistes de la question.
4 Certaines affirmations sont contestables : dire que le nationalisme serbe de la fin des années 1980 a généré le nationalisme croate et a conduit Franjo Tuđman au pouvoir à Zagreb (p. 87), c'est oublier que le nationalisme croate s'était déjà manifesté en Croatie, surtout entre 1967 et 1971, et que ce mouvement nationaliste avait été réprimé par le régime communiste titiste à partir de 1971. Indépendamment de la situation en Serbie, les acteurs du mouvement national croate avaient une revanche à prendre sur les communistes : sans Milošević, ils auraient pris place sur la scène politique croate.
5 Ces quelques remarques n'enlèvent rien à la qualité de l'ouvrage en question qui est certainement l'un des meilleurs parus en France sur la désintégration de la Yougoslavie et les guerres qui ont ravagé la Croatie, la Bosnie-Herzégovine et le Kosovo, notamment grâce à l'utilisation de sources précieuses en serbo-croate.
AUTEURS
YVES TOMIĆ
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