See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298721818 Austria and the Balkans: Exploring the role of travelogues in the construction of an area Chapter · January 2015 CITATIONS READS 3 530 1 author: Christian Promitzer Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz 29 PUBLICATIONS 46 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Racial Anthropology and Eugenics in Bulgaria View project Infectious diseases in the Balkans (19th and early 20th centuries) View project All content following this page was uploaded by Christian Promitzer on 17 March 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. CHRISTIAN PROMITZER AUSTRIA AND THE BALKANS: EXPLORING THE ROLE OF TRAVELOGUES IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN AREA INTRODUCTION One of the main purposes of area studies is the virtual construction of those very spaces that form the basis of their existence. This statement does not in- tend to postulate that the determination of global areas is totally arbitrary (the definition of certain spaces as “historical regions” is also a matter of plausibil- ity), but it wants to bring to the foreground the intellectual energy that has to be invested, before a “historical” area can come into being. This is especially the case with the volatile region that depending on the respective viewpoint of an author may be called “Southeastern Europe,” “South-East Europe,” or the “Balkans”. In the last two decades Karl Kaser, Maria Todorova, Holm Sundhaussen, Alexis Drace Francis, Dietmar Müller and many others have tried to either deconstruct or reify these areal concepts within their given histor- ical foci of interest. Both Todorova’s suggestion that a region should be under- stood on the basis of its common historical legacy and Kaser’s simple, but not simplistic, relativization that the respective boundaries of “Southeastern Eu- rope” depend on the leading questions a scholar asks are most convincing.1 1 See Karl Kaser, Südosteuropäische Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft, UTB 8224 (Vi- enna – Cologne – Weimar: Böhlau, 2nd revised edition), 23; Maria Todorova, “Der Balkan als Analysekategorie:Grenzen, Raum, Zeit,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für histori- sche Sozialwissenschaft 28 (2002): 470-492; Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft, 28 (2002), p. 470-492.Maria Todorova, “Historische Vermächtnisse als Analysekategorie. Der Fall Südosteuropa,” in Europa und die Grenzen im Kopf, ed. Karl Kaser, Dagmar Grams- hammer-Hohl, Robert Pichler, Wieser-Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens 11 (Klagenfurt – Vienna: Wieser, 2003), 227-252, also online, accessed December 31, 2011, http://wwwg.uni-klu.ac.at/eeo/Todorova_Vermaechtnisse; Todorova, “Spacing Europe: What is a Historical Region?” East Central Europe 32 (1-2) (2005): 59-78; Holm Sundhaussen, “Europa balcanica: Der Balkan als historischer Raum Europas,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft: 190 CHRISTIAN PROMITZER I would add that the historical plausibility of a region might be better under- stood, if we also include all the material interests that are imputed to it. Not to do so would risk that the postmodernist renunciation of primordialism forgets the material base of modern capitalism and how material and in particular eco- nomic interests themselves influenced the construction of historical regions outside capitalist centers of the European continent as regions for possible eco- nomic exploitation.2 To take such a perspective does not imply the desire to reinstate a wholesale, i.e. primordialist, variant of Marxism – and much less Marxism-Leninism – as an integrative worldview, variants of which were for forty years official doctrine in the “socialist” Balkans. The latter have well enough documented that they may serve as examples for a dogmatic philoso- phy and an integrated worldview untainted by the lessons of constructivist epis- temology. My point is that something essential is going to be missed, when the Marxist insistence on material interests for explaining the world is ignored. In doing so, purportedly constructivist approaches risk making themselves the plaything of external interests when they try to formulate new strategies in order to overcome the ascertained general crisis of area studies: The latter (if we leave aside their pendants in the former “socialist” states – as is the case with “Balkan studies” for example in Bulgaria and Serbia) can be considered as conforming to transdisciplinary Western approaches that, due to changing ex- ternal material interests since the end of the Cold War, have lost their raison d'être, and are now trying to find new sources of legitimacy vis-à-vis their fi- nancing and patronizing institutions. As opposed to such a prospective muddling through a general “crisis”, I would, rather, suggest a retrospective approach and examine the underlying ideological foundations and origins of area studies, since these may in part still be the disguised guiding principles of academic research. This, exactly, can be done with respect to various German travelogues from Austrian resp. Austro- Hungarian authors on the Balkans from the 1830 up to 1912 in order to assess the role of the Dual Monarchy in the Western process of “Imagining the Bal- kans.”3 In tracing this phenomenon I will, first, illuminate some aspects of the Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft 25 (1999): 626-653; Sundhaussen, “Der Balkan: ein Plädoyer für Differenz,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für historische Sozial- wissenschaft 29 (2003): 642-658; Alex Drace-Francis, “Zur Geschichte des Südosteuropakon- zepts bis 1914,” in Europa und die Grenzen im Kopf, 275-286, also online, accessed Decem- ber 31, 2011, http://wwwg.uni-klu.ac.at/eeo/Drace_Suedosteuropakonzept.pdf; Dietmar Mül- ler, “Southeastern Europe as a historical Meso-region: Constructing Space in Twentieth Century German Historiography,” European Review of History 10 (2) (2003): 393-408. 2 These thoughts are based on a historical model of a Braudelian and/or Wallersteinian devel- opment of modern capitalism that necessarily includes the establishment of “core” and “pe- ripheral” regions. On the Balkans as a “peripheral” region in this sense see Karl Kaser, “Das Abdriften Südosteuropas vom dominierenden europäischen Entwicklungsweg seit dem 11. Jahrhundert,” Balkan Studies 29 (2) (1988): 239-264; Kaser, “Im Schatten der europäischen Weltwirtschaft. Die Verfestigung der Agrarstrukturen und die Peripherisierung Südosteuro- pas,“ in Südosteuropa-Fallstudien: 20 Jahre “Südosteuropäische Geschichte” in Graz, ed. Horst Haselsteiner (Graz: Abteilung für Südosteuropäische Geschichte) 49-81, Kaser, Südost- europäische Geschichte, 98-106.. 3 Maria N. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009/2nd AUSTRIA AND THE BALKANS 191 representation of the Balkans among Austrian elites, and, second, consider Austrian travelogues as a possible source for a wholesale representation of a region. THE BALKANS IN THE MINDS OF AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN AND MODERN AUSTRIAN ELITES With respect to studies of Southeastern Europe in Germany, some preliminary work has been done with respect to their form during National Socialism.4 But for little Austria – and above its mighty imperial predecessor – the respective study of the form that it’s interests in the Balkans took is still ahead of us. In Austria itself, analogies between current and past interests in the region on its southern border are a recurrent phenomenon, especially since the end of the communist regimes in Eastern Central and Southeastern Europe. In the mid- 1980s the Austrian politician Erhard Busek, together with the historian and diplomat Emil Brix, addressed the historical connections between Vienna and the Balkans, specifically links to Serbia and Montenegro. This took place in a general, liberal-conservative discourse on Central Europe (“Mitteleuropa”) and how best to support various local dissidents and dissident groups in their en- deavor to fight and topple their respective communist regimes, which for vari- ous reasons found themselves at that time on the defensive. Such endeavors were supposed to secure Austria, as the core of the former Habsburg Empire, a convenient position as intermediary in the political rollback in East Central Europe.5 A decade later, in 1999, NATO was at war with Serbia and the Euro- pean Union and other Western states launched the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe. In this year, Busek published his book “Austria and the Bal- kans.” There the subsequent Special Coordinator of the Stability Pact com- plained that “the average Austrian only has scanty knowledge of Southeastern Europe.” He called for refreshing old links, arguing that: “Around 1900 the city of Vienna was a kind of world capital for a few seconds of global history. It would have never existed without this intellectual background [i.e. of South- eastern Europe – C.P.]. Even today, cultural life in Austria is determined ex- ceedingly by people from Southeastern Europe, as is documented, for example, edition [1997]). 4 Michael Fahlbusch, Wissenschaft im Dienst der nationalsozialistischen Politik? Die “Volks- deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaften” von 1931-1945 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999); Hel- mut Schaller, Der Nationalsozialismus und die slawische Welt (Regensburg: Pustet, 2002); Mathias Beer, ed., Südostforschung im Schatten des Dritten Reiches: Institutionen, Inhalte, Personen, Südosteuropäische Arbeiten 119 (München: Oldenbourg, 2004);