Imagination and Ignorance
The Balkans
today exist less on maps than in the imagination and broad ignorance of
the west. For centuries, the peninsula has existed on the fringes
of Europe and Asia, and by now the Balkans are more an idea than a reality,
evoking ideas of strife, division and irreconcilable disagreement. Applied
to the point of cliché, the term Balkanization is used to describe
everything from racial politics in the US to the devolution of Britain.
The Balkans inhabit the edges of understanding, located on the edge of
European consciousness and comprehension — a perpetual frontier between
Europe and Asia that has been misunderstood, mysterious and even mythical
for centuries untold.
The mountains
and valleys of the Balkans have always been a fringe. Once, they
formed the limits of the Roman empire, with the mountains of Romania serving
as the northeastern counterpart to Hadrian’s Wall; as the Roman empire
fell into decline the importance of the Balkans to Europe fell as power
in the region shifted to Byzantium. Over the ages the peoples and
places between the Adriatic and the Black seas would serve as both southern
periphery of medieval Europe and then the northern outskirts of the Ottoman
realm.
As the
twentieth century began and the fundamentally Asian influence of the Ottomans
waned, conflict in the Balkans would become a little-understood spark that
set off a war remembered today for the battles fought on the fields of
France, far from the streets of Sarajevo. As the twentieth century
moved on, the region would form the outskirts (geographically and politically)
of the Soviet bloc. Today, though the Balkans have become central
to questions of post-cold war politics and policy, they remain on the edges
of understanding. Once limiting geographic definitions are abandoned,
the Balkans can be found on the peripheries of Europe’s comprehension and
attention.
The idea
of the Balkans as a misunderstood peripheral area is one that goes far
towards explaining the modern issues that plague the area, though its roots
are millennia old. For more than a thousand years, the Byzantines
were the most important cultural force in the area, and the Christianization
that came with Byzantine rule was equally significant, serving both to
unite the and divide the area’s peoples as the Church splintered.
As the
second millennium dawned, the Balkans were left in an early power vacuum.
Byzantine was well past its prime, and the empires of central and western
Europe were occupied with their own conflicts. With the catastrophic
sweep of the Black Death through all of Europe in the 14th century, the
way to dominance in on the peninsula was clear for the Ottomans, already
the uncontested rulers of Anatolia and the Middle East.
According
to one historian, “Rival emperors of Constantinople, Serbian and Bulgarian
tsars, independent princes of Greece, the city-states of Venice and Genoa,
popes and Crusaders kept the Balkans in such a state of constant turmoil
and confusion that Murad [the Ottoman sultan from 1360-1389] ... never
had to worry about facing a consolidated offensive. ” By the time
of the Serb’s defeat and Murad’s death at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389,
the Balkans had moved from the periphery of Europe’s geographical and cultural
boundaries to an orbit around the Ottoman core that would prove profoundly
formative. Balkan historian Barbara Jelavich identifies the five
centuries of Ottoman domination as leaving “the deepest mark ... in the
entire history of the peninsula. ”
Ottoman
rule reinforced the peninsula’s status as alien to both the core of the
Ottoman empire and the cultures of western Europe. The Ottoman empire
ruled territories it conquered not as a national organization but as a
religious one, and provided a large degree of tolerance and allowances
for limited self-government with the millet system. While this style
of rule allowed the Ottomans to rule without too much trouble for five
centuries, it also left the conquered territories outside the central culture
and rule of the Ottoman Empire .
At the
same time, senior analysts argue that the Ottoman influence was more than
enough to separate the Balkans from Europe permanently:
[the Turkish Ottoman presence]
had the effect of thrusting into the southeastern reaches of the European
continent a salient of non-European civilization that has continued to
the present day to preserve many of its non-European civilization that
has continued to the present day to preserve many of its non-European characteristics,
including some that fit even less with the world of today than they did
with the world of eighty years ago.
Another
important factor in the isolation of the region was the religious influence
of both Byzantium and the Ottomans. The line between Roman Catholicism
and Orthodoxy — a legacy of the Byzantine influence that affected much
of the peninsula — served to separate the area from western Europe starting
around the eleventh century. The later imposition of Islam as the
dominant religion cut the region off even further, though the maintenance
of Christian faith prevented most of the peoples of the Balkans from ever
achieving either parity with the Islamic Turkish ruling class or unity
with the rest of the empire.
Ottoman
rule also served to focus national identities on reaction to foreign domination.
A young girl in downtown Sofia, Bulgaria, explained to this writer two
months ago that the city’s oldest Orthodox churches were characteristically
located underground because of Bulgaria’s long suffering “under Turkish
slavery,” a phrase that both in pronunciation and degree underscored the
idea of self-identification as a persecuted people. The Battle of
Kosovo is a defining moment for Serbs in much the same way. In contrast,
none of the peoples of western Europe (save Spain) were ever subjected
to the rule of a non-European power, let alone a non-Christian power, making
the Balkan experience markedly different.
A final
effect of Ottoman rule was the interruption or delay of national linguistic,
cultural, literary and political identity development. As the peoples
of the Balkans learned that to survive and succeed at the height of the
Ottoman empire some assimilation was necessary, the development and distinctions
flourishing in western Europe during the Renaissance and the industrial
revolution that followed were missed. Only when the Ottomans began
to decline drastically in power — the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
— did the Balkans begin to shift back towards Europe. Political scientist
Gale Stokes, in a discussion of Serbia, identified the 1800s as the era
Southeastern Europe turned
its orientation from southward-looking to northward looking. From
being culturally peripheral to the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans became culturally
peripheral to Europe ... By 1900 all the Balkan countries had become independent
participants in the European state system, had adopted political systems
that in form approximated those of Western Europe, and had adopted Western
cultural models as their standard of intellectual respectability.
The combination
of Ottoman decline and the rise in importance and prestige of Western style
governments and independence movements did much to bring the Balkans closer
to Europe in the eyes of Europeans and those who lived in the region.
Still, there was still a wealth of disinformation and ignorance on both
sides that reinforced the Balkans’ relative isolation on the fringes of
Europe.
A perfect
example of an incident caused largely by misunderstanding that went on
to fuel the twentieth century view of the Balkans is the beginning of the
first World War. After several years of struggle with both the remnants
of Ottoman power and the increasing Austro-Hungarian moves southward, the
region was split along many lines in terms of its alliances and the interests
of great powers, making it difficult for the European powers to respond
intelligently to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. As
the war began in earnest, the major fronts formed far from the strategically
marginal mountains of the Balkan peninsula, and once again the area was
left on the fringes of military and political calculations.
The chaos
between WWI and WWII did not spare the nascent regimes in the Balkans,
but it did not bring them any closer to Europe, either. In the end,
it was the global power calculus after WWII that finally brought the region
to prominence in foreign affairs. Still, while the nations were important
to strategists and politicians, they remained in an ill-defined zone beyond
the influence of the US but not quite within the orbit of the Soviet satellite
states.
Yugoslavia
is a prime example of such a system, as it clearly straddled the political
and economic divides that characterized the world order during the Cold
War. Yugoslavia’s break with Stalinist Russia in 1948 set the stage
for “a socialist country with extensive economic liberalization and political
decentralization ... the relative prosperity, freedom to travel and work
abroad, and landscape of multicultural pluralism and contrasts that Yugoslavs
enjoyed were the envy of eastern Europeans. ”
According
to analyst Susan Woodward, the disintegration of Yugoslavia that occurred
just after the end of the Cold War occurred not along age-old lines of
ethnicity, as most journalists and analysts of the area argue, but along
the admittedly tense lines of an effective, heavily decentralized federation
system. If so, the reactions to the crisis in the former Yugoslavia
on the part of Western powers is evidence of ancient ignorance deeply affecting
modern policy towards this fringe. In contrast to Henry Kissinger
— who voices the simplest, easiest and therefore the most common explanation
for the conflict when he insists that “whenever the various [Yugoslav]
ethnic groups have lived together in apparent harmony, it was due to the
pressure of some outside force that overwhelmed their passions ” — Woodward
puts forward a coherent argument for the idea that the issues are far more
complex, saying that “the conflict grew and infected Western alliances
because those making policy and shaping public opinion toward Yugoslavia
misunderstood the nature and origins of the conflict from the beginning.
“
If Woodward
is right, the past six years have been just one more highly publicized
episode in an ages-old series of misapprehensions and misunderstandings;
one more oversimplified error adding to the myth of the Balkans as a region
where ethnic strife and violence are as ubiquitous as the mountain ridges
that define the area topographically. In the imagination and understanding
of Americans and western Europeans, the reality of the Balkans has been
supplanted by a mythical realm dark valleys inhabited by benighted peasants
and ruled by a long line of cruel, corrupt autocrats stretching from Vlad
the Impaler to Nicolae Ceaucescu and Radovan Karadzic.
While
the myth is easier to swallow than the infinitely complex reality, it creates
a vicious circle of misguided intervention doomed to failure, in the end
returning the Balkans to the fringes of comprehension and consciousness
once again. |
