Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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)
Slavic Review
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.
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 .
Slavic
Review
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-
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
various
Orientalist Variations on "Balkans"
Slavic Review
11
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.
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