ARTICLES

Orientalist Variations on the Theme "Balkans":

Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural
Politics
Milica Bakic-Hayden
and
Robert M. Hayden
At first we were confused . The East thought that we were West, while the
West considered us to be East. Some of us misunderstood our place in
this clash of currents, so they cried that we belong to neither side, and
others that we belong exclusively to one side or the other . But I tell you,
Irinej, we are doomed by fate to be the East on the West, and the West
on the East, to acknowledge only heavenly Jerusalem beyond us, and here
on earthno one .
St. Sava to Irinej, 13th century

Since the early 1980s, the crisis of Yugoslav society has been brought
to public awareness through discussions in the mass media, both within
Yugoslavia and outside of the country . While the causes of the crisis
were initially analyzed within the framework of the ideology of Yu goslav self management socialism, the past several years have seen increasing use by politicians and writers from the northwestern parts of
the country of an orientalist rhetoric that relies for its force on an
ontological and epistemological distinction between (north)west and
(south)east. '
As used originally by Edward Said, orientalism refers to pervasive
patterns of representation of cultures and societies that privilege a
self confidently "progressive," "modern " and "rational" Europe over
the putatively "stagnant," "backward," traditional and "mystical" societies of the Orient 2 Said derives his terminology and frame of ref
erence from the representations and purported knowledge of "eastern
peoples" that developed in Europe along with colonialism, and shows
how Europe exercised control over not only 85 percent of the Earth's
Earlier versions of this paper were presented (under slightly different titles) at the
annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
(Washington, D .C ., 19 October 1990) and of the American Anthropological Association
(New Orleans, LA, 29 November-2 December 1990).
1. Milica Bakic-Hayden, "Retorika jugoslovenskogorijentalizma," Borba 2-3 June
1990 : 1, 4, 5.
2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).
Slavic Review 51, no .

1 (Spring 1992)

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territory, but also over knowledge about the peoples inhabiting the
lands it ruled : their languages, literatures, religions and "mentality ."
Orientalist knowledge has been both a tool for and justification of
cultural as well as political dominance, in that it both presumes and
restates the inferiority of eastern races, religions and societies to those
of the west.
Said's polemic associates this rhetorical structure with a political
and economic relationship of domination and submission, both explaining and justifying the control of eastern societies by those of the
west. However, in the post-colonial world, the language of orientalism
still maintains its rhetorical force as a powerful set of categories with
which to stigmatize societies that are not "western-style democracies ."
Indeed, the unfavorable normative import of adjectives such as
"byzantine" and "balkan" is so pronounced as to make orientalism
axiomatic in regard to peoples or societies so labelled.
The main intellectual issue raised by orientalism is whether the
continua of human reality can be divided into clearly differentiated
cultures, histories, traditions, societies without implying insurmountable hostilities by the absoluteness of the distinctions? This is not to
deny that distinctions as such are universally made, but rather to stress,
first, that the phenomena they represent are not dichotomous ;4 and
second, that the values associated with them are only seemingly obvious. But this intellectual issue is more than academic . It has become
an existential issue for Yugoslavia, first through the political contest
the rhetoric of which we examine and, by mid-1991, through armed
conflict stemming from the verbal one . Further, the issue is also existential for a Europe that seeks to unite itself, and for those parts of
the world that would like to join this new, putatively united Europe.
The focus of this paper is representation of Yugoslavia that reveals
an orientalist framework of analysis, primarily by Yugoslays from the
north and west parts of the country,5 and by some foreign observers.
The concepts that comprise this framework are generally unexplicated,
and indeed are stronest when they "go without saying because they
come without saying."' But common sense is hardly a neutral body of
knowledge, and is increasingly discussed in the literature as a "dominant symbolic framework" established by political activity that embodies and makes manifest hegemony .7 Or, as Pierre Bourdieu puts the
3. Ibid., 45.
4. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography,
Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
5. Our focus on examples from Slovenia and Croatia is due to the fact that the
orientalist paradigm is most clearly manifested in those writings . While we challenge
the validity of the orientalist depictions of eastern Yugoslavia and its peoples, we do
not take or imply any position regarding the genuine issues that have been raised by
various political actors in Yugoslavia . Our hope instead is that exposing the distortions
of the orientalist overlay will aid in the perception of more important issues.
6. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 167.
7. David Laitin, Hegemony and Culture (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1986),
19, 104-8.

Orientalist Variations on "Balkans"

matter, "Every established order tends to produce . . the naturalization of its own arbitrariness ."8
Cultural and political discourse in the late 1980s representing the
various nations (narodi ) 9 of Yugoslavia affords opportunity to examine
a--conscious or unconsciousattempt to construct a seemingly common-sense symbolic framework which would cast the various peoples
(narodi) concerned as inherently democratic and advanced, or authoritarian and backward . While some of the rhetoric we analyze may in
fact constitute conscious political manipulation, much of it is probably
done without full awareness of the implications of the images contained within it. But it is this nearly intuitive quality of the symbols
that makes them of interest when they are applied, as they are in
contemporary Yugoslavia, to regions and peoples for whom such applications are usually marginal. In this marginal setting, the parameters
of the concepts may become most apparent.
Most of the rhetoric we examine and examples that we provide are
drawn from presentations by Yugoslav politicians and intellectuals,
published either in party political journals or in the wider circulation
public media. The representations in these texts are important not
only as cultural documents, but because many of the intellectuals who
have generated them have assumed positions of political importance
during Yugoslavia's transition from one-party socialism . Of course, the
reception of political rhetoric is a matter of a different order from the
politics contained within it. However, since the materials that we use
have either had wide circulation or have been generated by important
political actors, we may perhaps presume that their rhetoric has
achieved at least some of its intended effects.
Orientalism can be applied within Europe itself, between Europe
"proper" and those parts of the continent that were under Ottoman
(hence Oriental) rule. The evaluation implied by this distinction can
be seen in the rhetoric typically applied to the latter : Balkan mentality,
Balkan primitivism, Balkanization, Byzantine, Orthodoxy. These terms,
and the orientalist framework in general, are often used even by those
who are disparaged by . them, a point to which we shall return, and
which indicates the hegemonic nature of the concepts involved.
As evoked by Rebecca West, who rejects the characterization, the
Balkans are popularly defined by violence, incivility,-even barbarism . lo
There is little doubt that the Balkans, either Byzantine or Ottoman,
represented a cultural and religious "Other" to Europe "proper ." This
older symbolic geography was reinforced in the post-war (cold war)
period by an ideological and political geography of the democratic,
capitalist west versus the totalitarian, communist east. And no matter
8. Bourdieu, op . cit., 164.
9. The Serbo-Croatian term most often translated as "nation," narod, raises problems similar to those encountered in the multiple meanings of the German Volk . Like
Volk, narod means nation not so much in the sense of citizenry as in that of people
defined (by self and others) in cultural/religious/linguistic terms.
10. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia. (New
York : Penguin, 1982`[orig. 1941]), 21 .

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Review

how different the historical contexts, there is a striking continuity in

the nature and logic of the rhetoric as well as the images and terminology used to represent that dichotomy . As Katherine Verdery notes
in a study of the orientalizing discourses on communism by its ideological opponents in "the west," representations that take the east-west
dichotomy for granted tend to draw upon "a certain narrow spectrum
to paint a picture of the Other, a picture whose hues are taken from a palette
already in use over many centuries ." " In this century, an ideological
"other," communism, has replaced the geographical/cultural "other"
of the Orient. The symbolic geography of eastern inferiority, however,
remains.
A similar rhetoric has been preserved and applied in regard to
another orientation of post-war symbolic geography, one in which an
underdeveloped, poor south is contrasted with a developed, rich north.
This modern economic geography of the world reflects and continues
an older European political geography in which "undisciplined," "pas
sionate" peoples of southern Europe (e .g. Italy, Spain, Greece) were
contrasted to the industrious, rational cultures of the north.
These axes of European symbolic geography (both that of Europe
and that held by Europeans) form a hierarchy, revealed in terms of
relative value by religions. Thus at the most general level, the division
between east and west is symbolized by the distinction between the
eastern churches (Orthodoxy) and the western ones . Within these two
parts, hierarchy is again revealed by religion : in the east, Islam is gen
erally less favorably viewed than Orthodox Christianity ; while in the
west, the Protestant tradition is generally seen more positively than is
Catholicism 12 The entire hierarchy may be seen in terms of symbolic
geography as declining in relative value from the north-west (highest
value) to the south-east (lowest value) . In terms of cultural represen tations, of distinguishing disvalued Others, one might envision a system of "nesting" orientalisms, in which there exists a tendency for each
region to view cultures and religions to the south and east of it as more
conservative or primitive.
All of these axes of European symbolic geography intersect in Yu
goslavia, whose territory has seen the meeting place of empires (Eastern and Western Roman ; Ottoman and Hapsburg), scripts (Cyrillic and
Latin, and, into the nineteenth century, Ottoman Turkish), religions
(Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism) and cold-war politics and ideologies (between the Warsaw Pact
and NATO, communist-run but unorthodox, and non-aligned) . At this
vertex of Europe it is perhaps uniquely possible to explore some of
the ways in which these differences have been and are being used to
define "Europe" in terms of symbolic geography, inclusion and exclusion of the cultural elements native to its various regions. These processes of inclusion and particularly of exclusion are central to the
redefinition of erstwhile eastern Europe, an area previously defined
11. Katherine Verdery, "Images of East: `Orientalism,"Communism,' and the Toll
at the Border" (Typescript ca . 1988), 5 (emphasis added).
12. See, e.g., Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1923).

Orientalist Variations on "Balkans"

more by the presence of one-party state socialist regimes than by any

other feature . Perhaps most important and most visible in Yugoslavia,
a great deal of political rhetoric since the late 1980s has revolved
around constructions that claim a privileged "European" status for
some groups in the country while condemning others as "balkan" or
"byzantine," hence non-European and Other.
This orientalist dichotomy is embodied in distinctions such as that
between the "northern" republics and the "southerners," a delineation
that, strangely enough, can also be expressed equivalently as being
between "western" and "eastern" republics . These are not culturally
or politically neutral distinctions . They privilege the predominantly
Catholic, formerly Hapsburg territories of Slovenia and Croatia over
the predominantly Orthodox or Muslim, formerly Ottoman territories
in the rest of the country . Strangely, this depiction sees the essences
of the peoples of Yugoslavia as having been developed by foreign
rulers who had departed from the various regions long ago, from 1867
(Serbia) to 1918 (Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia), and had never completely
conquered a few places (Montenegro) . In the northwest the European
character and apparent advantages of the Hapsburg empire are
stressed, while the Ottoman oriental is blamed for the ills of the rest
of the country.
Lest these categories seem self-evident, we must note that the purported benefits of Hapsburg rule and degradation of the Ottoman
Empire may not have been so apparent to those who lived them. While
Ottoman Christians were second-class citizens of the Empire, they enjoyed substantial local autonomy . Hapsburg peasants, on the other
hand, had virtually no political rights at any level, ls at least until the
beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman lands in the
Balkans were becoming independent . The different conditions of the
two peasantries reflect the contrast between the diffuse and decentral
ized Ottoman rule and the centralized, indeed authoritarian Hapsburg
imperium . Current political rhetoric reverses these descriptions, as we
shall see.
The orientalist paradigm has gained prominence in political rhetoric from the northwestern republics as the old socialist paradigms
have faded. Since its establishment during and after the Second World
War, one of the dominant ideological principles of socialist Yugoslavia
was that the differences between the peoples contained within the
country were not to be recognized as being of great magnitude. This
is not to say that these differences were denied ; quite to the contrary,
Yugoslavia was defined as a federal state, composed of republics and
provinces that were defined primarily in terms of the dominant national groups contained within each. However, pillars of socialist Yugoslavia were the "brotherhood and unity" of the Yugoslav peoples,
and their equality. As in many other modern, multinational states, a
great deal of effort was put into ensuring (or at least symbolizing) this
13. Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Vol.
1 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1983) : 166 .

Slavic Review
mutual tolerance and equality . All of the languages and scripts of the
Yugoslav nations had equal status, high federal political positions ro
tated among the various national groups according to a predetermined
schedule, there were quotas for proportional representation in government service and in the awarding of various federal benefits and a
certain amount of pageantry and ceremony was aimed at reinforcing
the ideology of brotherhood and unity.
While the image of brotherhood always had implications that were
not necessarily positive (perhaps best exemplified by the saying that
"if it were good to have a brother, God would have one"), the postwar communist ideology drew on only the positive connotations of the
relationship . This emphasis was not artificial, at least for the generation that had fought and won the war, because of their experience of
unity in their struggleeven though some of that struggle had been
against their own brothers in what was a civil war as well as one of
liberation against the Germans and their allies . By the late 1980s, however, widely publicized works by important intellectual figures exhibited a shift away from stressing the positive connotations of brotherhood, and accentuation of the potential conflicts in the relationship.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the same period saw the replacement of
the partisan generation by politicians who had been born during or
after the war, and who did not share a background of struggle against
common enemies.
The new image of the "brother nations" of Yugoslavia was one of
mistrust, threat and exploitation, each so characterizing the others.
Thus, Serbs discovered that some Serbian industries had been transferred to Slovenia in the post-war reconstruction, and claimed that
they had been robbed to build up the Slovenes, 14 while a "group of
intellectuals" at the Serbian Academy of Sciences asserted that Serbia
had suffered systematic discrimination against its vital political and
economic interests in Yugoslavia. 15 Slovenes and Croats, on the other
hand, complained that their money was going to Belgrade and that
their sons were being drafted to fight Serbia's battles against the majority Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo . 16 From these
northern republics, brotherhood was suddenly characterized as a burden and imposition, as seen in the Slovenian writer Taras Kermauner's
open "Letter to a Serbian Friend," which was published in 1987 in
both Slovenia and Serbia in wide-circulation news media:
A brother is a brother . The question, however, is whether I want to
live with my brother in the same house . It's not enough that he wants
to live with me. Perhaps behind his brotherly feelings he hides a desire
14. Potapanje Srbije, Interuju (Belgrade), special publication no. 14, 11 August 1989.
15. Memorandum : Sta pile a sta se eita u oz1oglasenom dokumentu SANU, Duga(Bel-

grade), special issue, June 1989.

16. We must note that similar charges of exploitation were made during the
political crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which in turn led to the decentralized
political system introduced by the 1974 constitution. Thus the charges were not novel,
but had been dormant for nearly twenty years .

Orientalist Variations on "Balkans"

to freeload. Perhaps he causes enough damage that his closeness does
not make me happy "

Indeed, Kermauner reverses the image of brotherhood, of closeness

due to relationship, from a positive condition to a negative, regressive,
even primitive one:
I declare that the tribal-familial gentile natural bonds with a brother
do not control me . I understand them as an ideology which takes
away my sovereignty . . . . To me it is preferable to live with foreigners
who appreciate my living habits, my cultural type, my autonomy than
with a brother who . excuses his rights of primogeniture and superior authority over me with the etiquette of the obligations of blood

This rejection of the bonds of relatedness was soon extended, to

include the concept of a Yugoslav state, a state composed of brother
nations, based on their common origins and linked destinies . The in
itial step was to reject the concept of "unity" as itself an undesirable
limitation of the self-determination of each Yugoslav nation . To again
quote Kermauner: 19
I will not be united in anything or with anyone. Unity is another word
for terror. In place of the central structural pair of tribal society,
brotherhood-terror, which is the reality of the slogan brotherhoodunity, I propose the pair from civil society:20 communal living-freedom. Communal living can mean association, community with those
close and distant, agreement, understanding which proceeds from the
equality of the subjects.

This assertion of freedom in isolation, in individuality, was explicitly extended to the level of the nations (peoples, narodi) comprising
Yugoslavia: none could be bound to the others without having its freedom and right to selfdetermination impaired . This rhetorical position
became an actuality in terms of the formal structures of the Yugoslav
state in September 1989, when the Slovenian parliament passed a set
of amendments to the constitution that had the effect of proclaiming
it superior to the federal constitution. 2 1 By the logic of that position,
federal laws and structures were not binding on any of the republics,
which could instead choose for themselves whether to follow them. In
effect, the Slovenian position was that that republic could choose for
17. Taras Kermauner, "Pismo srpskom prijatelju," Nin (9 August 1987) : 23.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.

20. In Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, "civil society" referred to a Slovenian model
of a demilitarized, non-authoritarian associationof people(s) that contrasted to what
Slovenian intellectuals posited as the authoritarian models of Yugoslav communism.
See, e.g., Dimitrij Rupel, Od vojnog do civilnog drustva (Zagreb: Globus, 1990) . With the
demise of that communism, "civil society" seems to have lost its utility and thus passed
from use.
21. See Robert M . Hayden, "Constitutional Events in Yugoslavia, 1988-90 : From
Federation to Confederation and Paralysis?" (Final report to the National Council for
Soviet and East European Research under contract number 804 .06, 21 June 1990) .

Slavic Review

itself, on all issues, whether or not it wished to associate with the rest
of Yugoslavia. This position was advanced with vehemence by the na
tionalist governments elected in Slovenia and Croatia in the spring of
1990, which proclaimed their respective republics to be "sovereign . '+22
Sovereignty indeed became the key concept for some political forces
in Yugoslavia, those who wished to transform its federal structure,
weak though it had been under the 1974 constitution,23 into a confederation of independent states, with no federal authority of any kind . 24
In effect, this transformation would eliminate Yugoslavia as anything
more than a geographical term, no longer a legal or political entity.
The intent of this attempted transformation seemed twofold . First,
it would achieve political independence for parts of Yugoslavia that
had not had that status since medieval times, and thus achieve a key
nationalist goal . At the same time, the aim of this independence was
to enable the regions asserting it to "join Europe," meaning the EEC,
seen as the key to the attainment of both a "civil society (as opposed
to communism) and, perhaps most importantly, economic prosperity.
These two goals could be made complementary by defining the
(north)western parts of Yugoslavia as different from the (south)eastern
parts : more progressive, prosperous, hard-working, tolerant, democratic in a word, European, compared to the primitive, lazy, intol
erant Balkans . Were this characterization to become accepted, it would
be clear, first, that Yugoslavia was an impossible union of parts not
only disparate, but completely incompatible ; and second, that the
(north)western parts of the country were really parts of Europe, artificially separated by their, imprisonment in the Balkans. This Eurocen tric position leads, more or less directly, to a rejection of the rest of
the world, and the Balkans with it . It also rejects the non-aligned foreign policy that was a central tenet of socialist Yugoslavia:
We Slovenes have difficulty identifying ourselves with the pro-Asian
or pro-African Yugoslavia . We cannot identify with such a Yugoslavia
so long as we have the character that we have acquired in a thousand
years of history . The symbolic fact that the rulers of the Slovenes were
Charlemagne, Charles V, and Napoleon is less important : it is more
important that we embodied the way of life that was created in centralwestern Europe .25

A particularly clear statement of the orientalist position of the

northwest is found in the work of Slaven Letica, a medical sociologist
22. Similar constitutional doctrines were advanced at roughly the same time by
republics in the Soviet Union, each seeking to negate federal authority within
it. These parallels cannot, unfortunately, be pursued here . It should be recalled, however, that the same concatenation of issues and "confederal" doctrines led to the
American civil war. See Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address (1861).
23. Dennison Rusinow, Yugoslavia: A Fractured Federation (Washington, D .C . : Wilson Center, 1988).
24. See Robert M . Hayden, "A Confederal Model for Yugoslavia?" (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Slavic Studies, Washington, D .C ., 21 October 1990).
25. Kermauner, 22 .

various


Orientalist Variations on "Balkans"

and contributor to popular as well as scientific journals and one of the

closest advisors to President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia from the elections in Croatia in May 1990 until March 1991 . In an article in the
Zagreb newsweekly Danas in March 1989, Letica asserted that "two
ideal-typical models of political systems (and cultures) have developed
in Yugoslavia," a "monistic (one-party) democracy " linked territorially
with Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia (the "eastern model"), and a
"pluralistic (or parliamentary) democracy" linked territorially with
Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina : the "western model .' ''6 This
construction puts Bosnia, with its large Muslim population and Oriental culture par excellence, into the western world, presumably for geo strategic reasons but surely not for cultural ones . Letica's delineation
establishes a link between the physical geography of Yugoslavia and
the wider, cold-war symbolic geography of Europe . Indeed, in Yugoslavia, as in much of erstwhile "Eastern Europe," the adjective "eastern" seems antithetical to the noun "Europe ."27 Thus a pre-election
" reform congress" of the former Slovenian Communist Party in February 1990 was held under the slogan "Evropa zdaj!" ("Europe nowt"),
as if Slovenia (and Yugoslavia) were not already part of Europe . But
this interesting view of geography was not confined to Slovenia . In
Croatia, the journal of the Croatian Democratic Union, a right-wing
nationalist party that won the elections of 1990, saw its victory as the
ultimate step in
the inclusion [of Croatia} in the states of central Europe, the region
to which it has always belonged, except for the recent past when
balkanisms and the forcibly self proclaimed national representatives
have constantly subordinated the Croatian state territory to an asiatic
form of government, while the justified anger and protests of certain
Croatians have been qualified as terrorism and even fascism 2 6
For those who regard Marx, Engels and Lenin as being as central Eu ropean as, say, Kafka, this is a striking formulation.
Since Yugoslavia is physically in Europe, however, the question
must be raised as to what criteria are used to exclude parts of the
country from the symbolic continent . The answer seems to be that
"Europe" does not include the Orthodox church, "byzantine culture
or the Balkans . Thus, Kermauner asserts that Serbia will never become
a "civil society" so long as it maintains a `Balkans-type church and
Orthodox Christianity. i29 Why this should be so is not specifically
stated, but seems due to an association between Orthodox Christianity
and "authoritarian" politics . Thus Peter Jambrek, a professor of soci
ology on the law faculty of the University of Ljubljana who was
26. Slaven Letica, "Vodje, mase i modeli," Danas, 7 March 1989.
27. See Timothy Garton Ash, "Does Central Europe Exist?" in The Uses ofAdversity
(New York : Vintage, 1990); "Eastern Europe . . . Central Europe . . Europe," Daedalus 119,
no. 1 (Winter 1990).
28. Marko Bariiic, "Hrvatska suverena!" Glasnik Hrvatske dernokratske zajednwe no.
15 (6 August 1990): 4. Emphasis added.
29. Kermauner, 6.

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appointed to the Constitutional Court of Slovenia in 1990, in a paper

in English on "Human Rights in a Multi-ethnic State : The Case of
Yugoslavia" for presentation to American and international audiences,
asserts that there has been an attempt "to impose a hegemonic regime
in Yugoslavia by the Serbian based totalitarian movement" and that
this "[a]uthoritarian state would namely [sic] in all likelihood be dominated by the political forces of the [sic] crypto-Orthodox-Christian origin ." 3o
Jambrek cites Letica for support of the proposition that the political
culture of eastern Yugoslavia is authoritarian while that of western
Yugoslavia is pluralistic . Similarly, Dimitrij Rupel, then a sociology
professor at the University of Ljubljana, founder of the first opposition
political party in Slovenia and editor of the first opposition newspaper
in Yugoslavia, and later Minister for Foreign Affairs in the DEMOS
coalition government that came to power in the 1990 elections, in a
paper prepared for presentation to American audiences on "some recent political events in Slovenia and in Yugoslavia" noted that
the most visible politicians in contemporary [1989] Yugoslavia are the
Serb Miloievic and the Slovene Kucan. . . . Miloievic (who comes from
an Orthodox Christian background
. and whom some journalists have
called an outright fascist) believes in a strong (Serbian run) state.
. . In Slovenia, Kucan (whom somejournalists have called the Slovene
Gorbachev, and who comes from a Protestant background) initiated a debate about political pluralism a year or two ago, and he even proclaimed the Party's secession from power si
The association of Orthodox Christianity with fascism and centralism,
and protestantism with political pluralism and reform (and implausibly with Gorbachev) is gratuitous ; when asked to explain it following
a lecture in Pittsburgh, Rupel could not do so . He seems to have included the protestant identification only to provide a western counterpart to oriental Orthodoxy, since few Slovenes (and virtually no
Croats) are protestant, and the political rhetoric of nationalistic Slovene anti-communists has been to posit Catholicism as a counter to
communism.32
This type of orientalist rhetorical structure is also found in "western" analyses, particularly in the media . Just before the Slovenian elections a New York Times article referred to the Slovenes as "industrious
Roman Catholic Slays whose culture was shaped by centuries spent
under Austrian rule," and to whom "southern Yugoslavia, where the
religion is either Muslim or Eastern Orthodox, is a foreign country,
strange and threatening. "33 In a similar vein, although involving other
countries, the same reporter, Celestine Bohlen, explained a "conserv30. Peter Jambrek, "Human Rights in a Multiethnic State : The Case of Yugoslavia," in Vojtech Mastny and Jan Zielonka, eds ., Human Rights as a Security Issue in
East-West Relations, (forthcoming) . Emphasis added.
31. Dimitrij Rupel, "Some Recent Political Developments in Slovenia and Yugoslavia," paper delivered at University of Pittsburgh, 10 October 1989 . Emphasis added.
32. See, e .g., Tine Hribar, "Duhovna prostost Slovencev," in T. Hribar, Slovenska
drzavnost (Ljubljana : Cankarjeva zaloiba, 1989).
33. New York Times, 6 April 1990, A8 .

11

Orientalist Variations on "Balkans"

ative streak in the Balkans," as opposed to more progressive Hungary

and Czechoslovakia, as being in part due to religion : "The populations
of Czechoslovakia and Hungary are either Roman Catholic or Protes
tant, but Romanians and Bulgarians are for the most part Eastern
Orthodox--a more conservative religion that historically has acted as
the servant rather than the rival of the state ."3 4 Similarly, a reporter
for the Washington Post asserted that "In [the] Balkan states, the authoritarian traditions of the dominant Orthodox Church have helped fashion
intense nationalism but have not fostered participatory democracy ." 35
A New York Times editorial saw Yugoslavia's "Roman Catholic republics" as "the country's most advanced and politically enlightened region" but facing "bullying" from a "bloc [of] Orthodox Christian republics. ,,36
The association of Roman Catholicism with industriousness and
economic development might have surprised Max Weber, but seems
to pass unquestioned in these writings . In regard to the putative excessive association of the Orthodox church[es] with the state, could
this really be more extreme than the support offered by the Catholic
church to Mussolini's Italy, the quisling "Independent State of Croatia"
(1941-45), or contemporary Ireland? And it is certainly difficult to see
the Orthodox tradition as more "authoritarian" than that of Catholicism. These comparisons are not, of course, made to disparage Catholicism, but rather to point out that in these implicit "comparisons"
of different religious traditions, both "domestic" and "foreign," the
Eastern Orthodox Church does not score very highly for reasons that
are not at all self-evident. What is self-evident is a chronic lack of
knowledge about the Orthodox Churches and the differences in their
historical development. For example, figures of the Serbian Orthodox
Church at times supported the governing system while others, at othertimes, opposed itmuch like leaders of other European churches in
other places. Partial knowledge creates simplistic representations,
which are then used as "arguments" and "explanations ."
Nationalism itself is subject to orientalism. Dimitrij Rupel claims
to discern a good, western variant of nationalism in Yugoslavia as well
as bad, eastern ones . He writes:
1. Premodern nationalism (non-European nations, Albanians in
Kosovo: fighting against foreign colonial domination ; this is an irrational world of hatred, revenge and bleeding for ideals and ideologies).
2. Modern nationalism (Serbs : nationalism with a rational, sometimes with an economic "mission," fighting for "historical rights," for
"Lebensraum," bringing "freedom" to other nations; often obsessed
with "feelings" of frustration and unfulfilled national action).
3. Post-modern nationalism (Slovenes, Croats, several European
nations: non-aggressive, non-defensive, non-expansionist, multi34. New York Times, 17 June 1990, El.
35. Washington Post, 9 February 1990, A22 .
36. New York Times, 4 April 1989.

Emphasis

added.

12
culturalist orientation ; nations with the "feeling" of national fulfill ment and sovereignty).
In Yugoslavia, all these types of nationalisms exist at the same
time. (It is, therefore, no coincidence that some authors and even
politicians today speak about Western and Eastern Yugoslavia) . . .
The types of nationalism active in [the] (Western and Eastern) Yugoslav republics coincide with their respective cultural, economic and
political structures . '37
The contrast that these various orientalist images seek to portray
was graphically represented in a cartoon in the Croatian newsweekly
Danas, showing rows of falling dominoes that spelled "Europe" opposed to dominoes falling from the other direction and spelling the
word "Byzantine" with tottering dominoes in the colors of the Croatian
flag caught between them .38 Similarly, in the days following a near
insurrection by Serbs against the Croatian government in a part of
Croatia in which they form the majority, a cartoon in the Zagreb daily
Vjesnik showed a Croatian car bound for "Europe" stopped by a blockade of armed, unkempt ruffians wearing Serbian caps . In Slovenia, a
famous cover of the satirical youth magazine Mladina portrayed a cartoon of a country, unnamed but with details indicating Yugoslavia, in
which the north was modern and prosperous while the south contained
slaves under the whip of a pharaoh, references virtually everyone in
Yugoslavia read as commentary on putative differences between
north(west) and south(east) Yugoslavia.
These contrasting images help nationalist political figures in Croatia and Slovenia to justify the need to break away from the Balkans.
Further, the adoration of a posited (western) Europe was meant to
build support for the separation and "post-modern nationalism"
among those who count: the West. This conjuncture of orientalist caricature and political appeal was most clearly expressed by the Slovenian Minister of Science, Dr. Peter Tancig, in a letter sent via BITNET to Slovenian intellectuals throughout the world on 29 June 1991,
with the request that it be used to "`spread the true word about Slovenia' to some relevantin politics and public opinion making--(sic)
places in your country." Dr . Tancig wrote that
the basic reason for all the past/present "mess" is the incompatibility
of two main frames of referencelcivilization, unnaturally and forcibly
joined in Yugoslavia. On one side you have a typical violent and
crooked oriental-bizantine (sic) heritage, best exemplified by Serbia
and Montenegro . . . On the other side (Slovenia, Croatia) there is a
more humble and diligent western-catholic tradition [T]rying to
keep Yugoslavia afloat . . . is also very bad geostrategical thinking, as
independent (and westernized) Slovenia (and Croatia) could and
would act as a "cordon sanitaire" against the eastern tide of chaos.39
37. Rupel, "Recent Political Developments," 7.
Dances, 4 September 1990.
39. Open letter from Peter Tancig, Minister of Science and Technology of the
Republic of Slovenia, 29 June 1991, sent to Slovenian scientists in the USA on the
E-mail nets "Pisma Bralcev" and "soc .culture.yugoslavia ."
38.

Orientalist Variations on "Balkans"

13

The "naturalness" of the orientalist concept of the Balkans is exemplified by such depictions . The parts of Yugoslavia that are not
physically in the Balkans have been attempting to "balkanize " the
country (i .e., "divide it into small, mutually hostile segments"), while
blaming this development on the putative Balkan mentality" of those
whom they wish to exclude ; and this effort has been accepted at face
value by many western observers . Further, politicians and publicists
trying to counter the increasingly xenophobic nationalisms in the various regions of Yugoslavia have warned, apparently unselfconsciously,
that the country was in danger of being perceived by Europe as a
"balkanizing factor" in the region.
Yet the images of the Balkans and central Europe can be inverted,
as they are in an aphorism heard in Belgrade in the summer of 1988:
"The Balkans gave the world two great civilizations : the Greek and
Byzantine. Central Europe gave the world two ideologies : communism
and fascism ." In Yugoslavia, as in Romania and other countries on the
margins of (western) Europe, 40 the image of Europe has always been
an ambiguous one. Before the communist period, for example, there
was admiration for the educational and cultural centers of western
Europe, but also concern about what was perceived as their decadence.
Later, non-alignment, the international movement of which Yugoslavia
was a founding member, was not only meant to counter military and
economic dominance (imperialism and colonialism), but was also an
indirect rejection of Eurocentrism . The non-aligned movement was
meant to bring to the international arena those who until then had
not been heard, thus permitting them to represent themselves rather
than being represented by others.
Indeed, the view of "Europe" afforded by the periphery of the
continent may be a particularly revealing one, and not only because
of its reflections of the European self-image .'" As anthropologists well
know, the marginal observer is often the most acute one . Those who
are within Europe, yet repeatedly told that they are not really "European," may be better placed to evaluate the meaning of the (north and
west) European construction of itself.
From the perspective of the Balkans, it may be possible to view the
self assertively "European" actions of the non-Balkan areas of Yugoslavia as indeed revealing a European logic, but not one with uniformly
positive import. As one intellectual in Serbia has put it, the nationalisms arising in Yugoslavia are quintessentially Central Europeanand
antidemocratic. He does not see this as a contradiction . Quite to the
contrary,
40. See Susan Gal, `Bartok's Funeral : Representations of Europe in Hungarian
Political Rhetoric," American Ethnologist 18, no . 3 (1991) : 440-58 ; Katherine Verdery,
"Is Romania in Europe? Interstitial Elites and the Politics of Identity" (paper presented
at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Phoenix, AZ,
Nov. 1988); and Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism : Identity and Cultural Politics in
Ceausescou's Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
41. Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in
the Margins of Europe (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1987) .


14

Slavic Review
the chief structural characteristic of Central Europe is the dominance
of culture over politics, . . . [but] not in the sense that autonomous
cultural values constitute the primary goal of political activity . In Central Europe . : . political rationality self-destructs into a type of irrationality that bears the protective label "culture" and is thereby difficult to criticize or to disregard .
. Most important for cultural
identity are language, ethnic identity, a feeling of unity, a past, collective myths. If any of these elements were to be politicized, in the
sense that, for example, the question of [the basis of and justification
for] a state becomes a function of a question of language [identity],
it would lead to the destabilization of politics, to its sinking into depths
in which it loses a sense of balance and becomes incoherent. And in
this place that we call Central Europe all of these questions are politicized and not only some few elements of culture.''

While Zoran Djindjic's assessment may be seen as a negative counterpart to the exaggerations of those who view Central Europe in uncritically favorable terms, it is certainly true that some of the worst excesses
of modern central Europe have been justified by asserted needs to
protect a dominant nation . And with a truly East European sensitivity
to the excesses of ideology, the Slovenian writer Mile Setinc, dissenting
in 1990 with the nationalist policies of the post-communist Slovenian
government, argued that ''[n]ationalism . . only exchanges the ideology of the universal liberation of `the working class' for the ideology
of `total national sovereignty.' This is not in any sense a matter of
rational categories, but rather of sovereignty as a value in itself, as the
highest value, the cost of which is irrelevant.s43
In theoretical terms, these assessments lead us to a quandary . On
the one hand, much of contemporary anthropological theory recognizes that cultures, and "traditions," are constructed rather than found,
permeable rather than bounded, multifaceted rather than uniform and
evolving rather than static .44 At the same time, students of nationalism
are well aware that the ideology of nationalism requires adoption of
views of the given nation as unchanging in its essential elements, uniform (except as threatened or polluted by others), and often in need
of "recovery" of its true "identity."45 This ideology may, in fact, be
highly European, particularly central European, although not uniquely
so. In any event, we are confronted with political actors who build
support by manipulating cultural "facts" that we often know to be
mistaken. This situation can cause the scholar who observes it a certain
sense of cognitive (or professional) dissonance.46 On the other hand,
42. Zoran Djindjic, "Hrabrost driaca sveee," Borba 18-19 August 1990 . Djindjic
became a leading figure in the Democratic Party in Serbia in 1990-91.
43. Mile Setinc, "Da li je gradjanski rat u Sloveniji zavrsen?" Demokratija (Belgrade)
1, nos. 10-11 (3 August 1990) : 17.
44. See Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger,
The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
45. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London : Verso, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,
1990) .

46. See Jonathan Spencer, "Writing Within : Anthropology, Nationalism and Culture in Sri Lanka," Current Anthropology 31 (1990) : 283-300 .


Orientalist Variations on "Balkans"

15

explaining why people believe these constructions is a continuation of

an anthropological tradition that itself goes back at least as far as
Malinowski . It is, after all, part of the anthropological stock in trade
to explain why the informants believe something that the observer
knows just isn't true. Turning this particular analytical lens on Europe
may be a departure, but is one of degree (of "development" of the
subjects of study) rather than of kind.
If we return, finally, to Yugoslavia and the "Balkans," we may see
opportunities for developing a criticism of "Europe" that may be used
to propel European constructions of itself past the seeming naturalness
of bounded "nations" and towards recognition of the interdependency
of the peoples, and people, of Europe . In this regard, Yugoslavia provides an example both positive and negative in implication . We can
view its struggle for identity as a test for Europe's own attempt to bring
its diverse peoples and cultures into a common political and economic
structure . And in both cases it is the concept of identity as such that
has to be defined . However, the starting points of these attempts at
self definition have been different. Yugoslavia's post-war identity has
been built on a concept of ideological uniformity, while "Europe"
(western Europe) was built on mutual differentiations . The peak of
Yugoslavia's multifaceted crisis reveals that its identity can no longer
be defined through the ideology of the post-war communist era . All
that this kind of unity has left behind it are differences : cultural, linguistic, religious, economic. The fact that in addition to those differ ences there have always been significant overlapping of territories,
languages or customs which granted the continuity of mutual relations
is being systematically neglected, underestimated or outright denied.
And yet it is the experience of and from these overlapping areas of
life that is relevant for any redefinition of Yugoslavia and of its constituent parts. The latter are not simply the several components comprising Yugoslavia, not is Yugoslavia an empty framework imposed on
its constituents . Rather, it is a manifestation of their interdependence.
From the standpoint of Europe, it is the recognition of such interdependence that has brought about the movement for a Europe as an
entity larger than the sum of its several parts . Yugoslavia, which was
created in recognition of interdependence at times (1918 and 1943)
when the concept of "Europe" as an entity did not exist, was thus ahead
of its time. Ironically if not tragically, it is now in danger of succumbing
to the ideology of bounded nations that has for so long driven European thought. Thus the Yugoslav peoples, looking for salvation to an
idealized unified Europe that does not yet exist, may fall victim to the
illusions of severable nations that have twice in this century destroyed
the Europe .that has long existed .