ARTICLES

Orientalist Variations on the Theme "Balkans":Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav CulturalPolitics

Milica Bakic-HaydenandRobert M. Hayden

At first we were confused . The East thought that we were West, while theWest considered us to be East. Some of us misunderstood our place inthis clash of currents, so they cried that we belong to neither side, andothers 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 Weston the East, to acknowledge only heavenly Jerusalem beyond us, and hereon earthno one .

St. Sava to Irinej, 13th century

Since the early 1980s, the crisis of Yugoslav society has been broughtto public awareness through discussions in the mass media, both withinYugoslavia and outside of the country. While the causes of the crisiswere initially analyzed within the framework of the ideology of Yu -goslav selfmanagement socialism, the past several years have seen in-creasing use by politicians and writers from the northwestern parts ofthe country of an orientalist rhetoric that relies for its force on anontological and epistemological distinction between (north)west and(south)east. '

As used originally by Edward Said, orientalism refers to pervasivepatterns of representation of cultures and societies that privilege aself confidently "progressive," "modern " and "rational" Europe overthe putatively "stagnant," "backward," traditional and "mystical" so-cieties of the Orient 2 Said derives his terminology and frame of reference from the representations and purported knowledge of "easternpeoples" that developed in Europe along with colonialism, and showshow Europe exercised control over not only 85 percent of the Earth's

Earlier versions of this paper were presented (under slightly different titles) at theannual 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 June1990: 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 thelands it ruled : their languages, literatures, religions and "mentality ."Orientalist knowledge has been both a tool for and justification ofcultural as well as political dominance, in that it both presumes andrestates the inferiority of eastern races, religions and societies to thoseof the west.

Said's polemic associates this rhetorical structure with a politicaland economic relationship of domination and submission, both ex-plaining and justifying the control of eastern societies by those of thewest. However, in the post-colonial world, the language of orientalismstill maintains its rhetorical force as a powerful set of categories withwhich 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 orientalismaxiomatic in regard to peoples or societies so labelled.

The main intellectual issue raised by orientalism is whether thecontinua of human reality can be divided into clearly differentiatedcultures, histories, traditions, societies without implying insurmount-able hostilities by the absoluteness of the distinctions? This is not todeny that distinctions as such are universally made, but rather to stress,first, that the phenomena they represent are not dichotomous ;4 andsecond, that the values associated with them are only seemingly ob-vious . But this intellectual issue is more than academic. It has becomean existential issue for Yugoslavia, first through the political contestthe rhetoric of which we examine and, by mid-1991, through armedconflict stemming from the verbal one . Further, the issue is also exis-tential for a Europe that seeks to unite itself, and for those parts ofthe world that would like to join this new, putatively united Europe.

The focus of this paper is representation of Yugoslavia that revealsan orientalist framework of analysis, primarily by Yugoslays from thenorth 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 theycome without saying ."' But common sense is hardly a neutral body ofknowledge, and is increasingly discussed in the literature as a "domi-nant symbolic framework" established by political activity that embod-ies 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 challengethe validity of the orientalist depictions of eastern Yugoslavia and its peoples, we donot take or imply any position regarding the genuine issues that have been raised byvarious political actors in Yugoslavia . Our hope instead is that exposing the distortionsof the orientalist overlay will aid in the perception of more important issues.

6. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1977), 167.

7. David Laitin, Hegemony and Culture (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1986),19, 104-8.

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matter, "Every established order tends to produce . . the naturaliza-tion of its own arbitrariness ."8

Cultural and political discourse in the late 1980s representing thevarious nations (narodi ) 9 of Yugoslavia affords opportunity to examinea--conscious or unconsciousattempt to construct a seemingly com-mon-sense symbolic framework which would cast the various peoples(narodi) concerned as inherently democratic and advanced, or author-itarian and backward . While some of the rhetoric we analyze may infact constitute conscious political manipulation, much of it is probablydone without full awareness of the implications of the images con-tained within it. But it is this nearly intuitive quality of the symbolsthat makes them of interest when they are applied, as they are incontemporary Yugoslavia, to regions and peoples for whom such ap-plications are usually marginal. In this marginal setting, the parametersof the concepts may become most apparent.

Most of the rhetoric we examine and examples that we provide aredrawn from presentations by Yugoslav politicians and intellectuals,published either in party political journals or in the wider circulationpublic media. The representations in these texts are important notonly as cultural documents, but because many of the intellectuals whohave generated them have assumed positions of political importanceduring Yugoslavia's transition from one-party socialism . Of course, thereception of political rhetoric is a matter of a different order from thepolitics contained within it. However, since the materials that we usehave either had wide circulation or have been generated by importantpolitical actors, we may perhaps presume that their rhetoric hasachieved 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 canbe 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 thosewho are disparaged by . them, a point to which we shall return, andwhich indicates the hegemonic nature of the concepts involved.

As evoked by Rebecca West, who rejects the characterization, theBalkans are popularly defined by violence, incivility,-even barbarism .loThere is little doubt that the Balkans, either Byzantine or Ottoman,represented a cultural and religious "Other" to Europe "proper ." Thisolder 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 prob-

lems similar to those encountered in the multiple meanings of the German Volk . LikeVolk, narod means nation not so much in the sense of citizenry as in that of peopledefined (by self and others) in cultural/religious/linguistic terms.

10. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia. (NewYork: Penguin, 1982`[orig. 1941]), 21 .

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Slavic Reviewhow different the historical contexts, there is a striking continuity inthe nature and logic of the rhetoric as well as the images and termi-nology used to represent that dichotomy . As Katherine Verdery notesin a study of the orientalizing discourses on communism by its ideo-logical opponents in "the west," representations that take the east-westdichotomy for granted tend to draw upon "a certain narrow spectrumto paint a picture of the Other, a picture whose hues are takenfrom a palettealready 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 toanother orientation of post-war symbolic geography, one in which anunderdeveloped, poor south is contrasted with a developed, rich north.This modern economic geography of the world reflects and continuesan older European political geography in which "undisciplined," "passionate" peoples of southern Europe (e .g. Italy, Spain, Greece) werecontrasted to the industrious, rational cultures of the north.

These axes of European symbolic geography (both that of Europeand that held by Europeans) form a hierarchy, revealed in terms ofrelative value by religions. Thus at the most general level, the divisionbetween east and west is symbolized by the distinction between theeastern churches (Orthodoxy) and the western ones . Within these twoparts, hierarchy is again revealed by religion: in the east, Islam is generally less favorably viewed than Orthodox Christianity ; while in thewest, the Protestant tradition is generally seen more positively than isCatholicism 12 The entire hierarchy may be seen in terms of symbolicgeography as declining in relative value from the north-west (highestvalue) to the south-east (lowest value) . In terms of cultural represen -tations, of distinguishing disvalued Others, one might envision a sys-tem of "nesting" orientalisms, in which there exists a tendency for eachregion to view cultures and religions to the south and east of it as moreconservative or primitive.

All of these axes of European symbolic geography intersect in Yugoslavia, whose territory has seen the meeting place of empires (East-ern and Western Roman ; Ottoman and Hapsburg), scripts (Cyrillic andLatin, and, into the nineteenth century, Ottoman Turkish), religions(Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Protestantism, Islam, Ju-daism) and cold-war politics and ideologies (between the Warsaw Pactand NATO, communist-run but unorthodox, and non-aligned) . At thisvertex of Europe it is perhaps uniquely possible to explore some ofthe ways in which these differences have been and are being used todefine "Europe" in terms of symbolic geography, inclusion and exclu-sion of the cultural elements native to its various regions. These pro-cesses of inclusion and particularly of exclusion are central to theredefinition of erstwhile eastern Europe, an area previously defined

11. Katherine Verdery, "Images ofEast: `Orientalism,"Communism,' and the Tollat the Border" (Typescript ca . 1988), 5 (emphasis added).

12. See, e.g., Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1923).

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more by the presence of one-party state socialist regimes than by anyother feature . Perhaps most important and most visible in Yugoslavia,a great deal of political rhetoric since the late 1980s has revolvedaround constructions that claim a privileged "European" status forsome 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 thatbetween the "northern" republics and the "southerners," a delineationthat, strangely enough, can also be expressed equivalently as beingbetween "western" and "eastern" republics . These are not culturallyor politically neutral distinctions . They privilege the predominantlyCatholic, formerly Hapsburg territories of Slovenia and Croatia overthe predominantly Orthodox or Muslim, formerly Ottoman territoriesin the rest of the country . Strangely, this depiction sees the essencesof the peoples of Yugoslavia as having been developed by foreignrulers who had departed from the various regions long ago, from 1867(Serbia) to 1918 (Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia), and had never completelyconquered a few places (Montenegro) . In the northwest the Europeancharacter and apparent advantages of the Hapsburg empire arestressed, while the Ottoman oriental is blamed for the ills of the restof the country.

Lest these categories seem self-evident, we must note that the pur-ported benefits of Hapsburg rule and degradation of the OttomanEmpire may not have been so apparent to those who lived them. WhileOttoman Christians were second-class citizens of the Empire, they en-joyed substantial local autonomy. Hapsburg peasants, on the otherhand, had virtually no political rights at any level, ls at least until thebeginning of the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman lands in theBalkans were becoming independent . The different conditions of thetwo peasantries reflect the contrast between the diffuse and decentralized Ottoman rule and the centralized, indeed authoritarian Hapsburgimperium. Current political rhetoric reverses these descriptions, as weshall see.

The orientalist paradigm has gained prominence in political rhet-oric from the northwestern republics as the old socialist paradigmshave faded. Since its establishment during and after the Second WorldWar, one of the dominant ideological principles of socialist Yugoslaviawas that the differences between the peoples contained within thecountry were not to be recognized as being of great magnitude. Thisis not to say that these differences were denied ; quite to the contrary,Yugoslavia was defined as a federal state, composed of republics andprovinces that were defined primarily in terms of the dominant na-tional groups contained within each. However, pillars of socialist Yu-goslavia were the "brotherhood and unity" of the Yugoslav peoples,and their equality. As in many other modern, multinational states, agreat 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 Reviewmutual tolerance and equality . All of the languages and scripts of theYugoslav nations had equal status, high federal political positions rotated among the various national groups according to a predeterminedschedule, there were quotas for proportional representation in gov-ernment service and in the awarding of various federal benefits and acertain amount of pageantry and ceremony was aimed at reinforcingthe ideology of brotherhood and unity.

While the image of brotherhood always had implications that werenot necessarily positive (perhaps best exemplified by the saying that"if it were good to have a brother, God would have one"), the post-war communist ideology drew on only the positive connotations of therelationship . This emphasis was not artificial, at least for the genera-tion that had fought and won the war, because of their experience ofunity in their struggleeven though some of that struggle had beenagainst their own brothers in what was a civil war as well as one ofliberation against the Germans and their allies . By the late 1980s, how-ever, widely publicized works by important intellectual figures exhib-ited a shift away from stressing the positive connotations of brother-hood, and accentuation of the potential conflicts in the relationship.Perhaps not coincidentally, the same period saw the replacement ofthe partisan generation by politicians who had been born during orafter the war, and who did not share a background of struggle againstcommon enemies.

The new image of the "brother nations" of Yugoslavia was one ofmistrust, threat and exploitation, each so characterizing the others.Thus, Serbs discovered that some Serbian industries had been trans-ferred to Slovenia in the post-war reconstruction, and claimed thatthey had been robbed to build up the Slovenes, 14 while a "group ofintellectuals" at the Serbian Academy of Sciences asserted that Serbiahad suffered systematic discrimination against its vital political andeconomic interests in Yugoslavia. 15 Slovenes and Croats, on the otherhand, complained that their money was going to Belgrade and thattheir sons were being drafted to fight Serbia's battles against the ma-jority Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo . 16 From thesenorthern republics, brotherhood was suddenly characterized as a bur-den and imposition, as seen in the Slovenian writer Taras Kermauner'sopen "Letter to a Serbian Friend," which was published in 1987 inboth Slovenia and Serbia in wide-circulation news media:

A brother is a brother . The question, however, is whether I want tolive with my brother in the same house . It's not enough that he wantsto 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 decentralizedpolitical system introduced by the 1974 constitution. Thus the charges were not novel,but had been dormant for nearly twenty years .

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to freeload. Perhaps he causes enough damage that his closeness doesnot make me happy "

Indeed, Kermauner reverses the image of brotherhood, of closenessdue to relationship, from a positive condition to a negative, regressive,even primitive one:

I declare that the tribal-familial gentile natural bonds with a brotherdo not control me. I understand them as an ideology which takesaway my sovereignty . . . . To me it is preferable to live with foreignerswho appreciate my living habits, my cultural type, my autonomy thanwith a brother who . excuses his rights of primogeniture and su-perior authority over me with the etiquette of the obligations of blood

This rejection of the bonds of relatedness was soon extended, toinclude the concept of a Yugoslav state, a state composed of brothernations, based on their common origins and linked destinies . The initial step was to reject the concept of "unity" as itself an undesirablelimitation of the self-determination of each Yugoslav nation . To againquote Kermauner: 19

I will not be united in anything or with anyone. Unity is another wordfor terror. In place of the central structural pair of tribal society,brotherhood-terror, which is the reality of the slogan brotherhood-unity, I propose the pair from civil society:20 communal living-free-dom. Communal living can mean association, community with thoseclose and distant, agreement, understanding which proceeds from theequality of the subjects.This assertion of freedom in isolation, in individuality, was explic-

itly extended to the level of the nations (peoples, narodi) comprisingYugoslavia: none could be bound to the others without having its free-dom and right to selfdetermination impaired. This rhetorical positionbecame an actuality in terms of the formal structures of the Yugoslavstate in September 1989, when the Slovenian parliament passed a setof amendments to the constitution that had the effect of proclaimingit 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. Ineffect, 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 whatSlovenian intellectuals posited as the authoritarian models of Yugoslav communism.See, e .g., Dimitrij Rupel, Od vojnog do civilnog drustva (Zagreb: Globus, 1990) . With thedemise of that communism, "civil society" seems to have lost its utility and thus passedfrom use.

21. See Robert M . Hayden, "Constitutional Events in Yugoslavia, 1988-90 : FromFederation to Confederation and Paralysis?" (Final report to the National Council forSoviet and East European Research under contract number 804 .06, 21 June 1990) .

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itself, on all issues, whether or not it wished to associate with the restof Yugoslavia. This position was advanced with vehemence by the nationalist governments elected in Slovenia and Croatia in the spring of1990, which proclaimed their respective republics to be "sovereign . '+22

Sovereignty indeed became the key concept for some political forcesin Yugoslavia, those who wished to transform its federal structure,weak though it had been under the 1974 constitution,23 into a confed-eration of independent states, with no federal authority of any kind . 24In effect, this transformation would eliminate Yugoslavia as anythingmore 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 thathad not had that status since medieval times, and thus achieve a keynationalist goal . At the same time, the aim of this independence wasto enable the regions asserting it to "join Europe," meaning the EEC,seen as the key to the attainment of both a "civil society (as opposedto 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)easternparts: more progressive, prosperous, hard-working, tolerant, demo-cratic in a word, European, compared to the primitive, lazy, intolerant Balkans . Were this characterization to become accepted, it wouldbe clear, first, that Yugoslavia was an impossible union of parts notonly disparate, but completely incompatible ; and second, that the(north)western parts of the country were really parts of Europe, arti-ficially separated by their , imprisonment in the Balkans. This Eurocen -tric position leads, more or less directly, to a rejection of the rest ofthe world, and the Balkans with it. It also rejects the non-aligned for-eign policy that was a central tenet of socialist Yugoslavia:

We Slovenes have difficulty identifying ourselves with the pro-Asianor pro-African Yugoslavia . We cannot identify with such a Yugoslaviaso long as we have the character that we have acquired in a thousandyears of history . The symbolic fact that the rulers of the Slovenes wereCharlemagne, Charles V, and Napoleon is less important: it is moreimportant that we embodied the way of life that was created in central-western Europe . 25

A particularly clear statement of the orientalist position of thenorthwest is found in the work of Slaven Letica, a medical sociologist

22. Similar constitutional doctrines were advanced at roughly the same time byvarious republics in the Soviet Union, each seeking to negate federal authority withinit. These parallels cannot, unfortunately, be pursued here . It should be recalled, how-ever, that the same concatenation of issues and "confederal" doctrines led to theAmerican civil war. See Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address (1861).

23. Dennison Rusinow, Yugoslavia: A Fractured Federation (Washington, D .C . : Wil-son Center, 1988).

24. See Robert M. Hayden, "A Confederal Model for Yugoslavia?" (Paper pre-sented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement ofSlavic Studies, Washington, D .C., 21 October 1990).

25. Kermauner, 22 .

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and contributor to popular as well as scientific journals and one of theclosest advisors to President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia from the elec-tions in Croatia in May 1990 until March 1991 . In an article in theZagreb newsweekly Danas in March 1989, Letica asserted that "twoideal-typical models of political systems (and cultures) have developedin Yugoslavia," a "monistic (one-party) democracy" linked territoriallywith Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia (the "eastern model"), and a"pluralistic (or parliamentary) democracy" linked territorially withSlovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina: the "western model .' ''6 Thisconstruction puts Bosnia, with its large Muslim population and Ori-ental culture par excellence, into the western world, presumably for geo -strategic reasons but surely not for cultural ones . Letica's delineationestablishes a link between the physical geography of Yugoslavia andthe wider, cold-war symbolic geography of Europe . Indeed, in Yugo-slavia, as in much of erstwhile "Eastern Europe," the adjective "east-ern" seems antithetical to the noun "Europe ."27 Thus a pre-election"reform congress" of the former Slovenian Communist Party in Feb-ruary 1990 was held under the slogan "Evropa zdaj!" ("Europe nowt"),as if Slovenia (and Yugoslavia) were not already part of Europe . Butthis interesting view of geography was not confined to Slovenia . InCroatia, the journal of the Croatian Democratic Union, a right-wingnationalist party that won the elections of 1990, saw its victory as theultimate step in

the inclusion [of Croatia} in the states of central Europe, the regionto which it has always belonged, except for the recent past whenbalkanisms and the forcibly self proclaimed national representativeshave constantly subordinated the Croatian state territory to an asiaticform of government, while the justified anger and protests of certainCroatians 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 questionmust be raised as to what criteria are used to exclude parts of thecountry from the symbolic continent . The answer seems to be that"Europe" does not include the Orthodox church, "byzantine cultureor the Balkans . Thus, Kermauner asserts that Serbia will never becomea "civil society" so long as it maintains a `Balkans-type church andOrthodox Christianity.i29 Why this should be so is not specificallystated, but seems due to an association between Orthodox Christianityand "authoritarian" politics . Thus Peter Jambrek, a professor of sociology 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 paperin English on "Human Rights in a Multi-ethnic State : The Case ofYugoslavia" for presentation to American and international audiences,asserts that there has been an attempt "to impose a hegemonic regimein Yugoslavia by the Serbian based totalitarian movement" and thatthis "[a]uthoritarian state would namely [sic] in all likelihood be dom-inated by the political forces of the [sic] crypto-Orthodox-Christian origin."3oJambrek cites Letica for support of the proposition that the politicalculture of eastern Yugoslavia is authoritarian while that of westernYugoslavia is pluralistic . Similarly, Dimitrij Rupel, then a sociologyprofessor at the University of Ljubljana, founder of the first oppositionpolitical party in Slovenia and editor of the first opposition newspaperin Yugoslavia, and later Minister for Foreign Affairs in the DEMOScoalition government that came to power in the 1990 elections, in apaper prepared for presentation to American audiences on "some re-cent political events in Slovenia and in Yugoslavia" noted that

the most visible politicians in contemporary [1989] Yugoslavia are theSerb Miloievic and the Slovene Kucan. . . . Miloievic (who comes froman Orthodox Christian background . and whom some journalists havecalled an outright fascist) believes in a strong (Serbian run) state.

. . In Slovenia, Kucan (whom somejournalists have called the SloveneGorbachev, and who comes from a Protestant background) initiated a de-bate about political pluralism a year or two ago, and he even pro-claimed the Party's secession from power si

The association of Orthodox Christianity with fascism and centralism,and protestantism with political pluralism and reform (and implausi-bly with Gorbachev) is gratuitous ; when asked to explain it followinga lecture in Pittsburgh, Rupel could not do so . He seems to have in-cluded the protestant identification only to provide a western coun-terpart to oriental Orthodoxy, since few Slovenes (and virtually noCroats) are protestant, and the political rhetoric of nationalistic Slov-ene anti-communists has been to posit Catholicism as a counter tocommunism. 32

This type of orientalist rhetorical structure is also found in "west-ern" analyses, particularly in the media. Just before the Slovenian elec-tions a New York Times article referred to the Slovenes as "industriousRoman Catholic Slays whose culture was shaped by centuries spentunder Austrian rule," and to whom "southern Yugoslavia, where thereligion is either Muslim or Eastern Orthodox, is a foreign country,strange and threatening."33 In a similar vein, although involving othercountries, the same reporter, Celestine Bohlen, explained a "conserv-

30. Peter Jambrek, "Human Rights in a Multiethnic State : The Case of Yugo-slavia," in Vojtech Mastny and Jan Zielonka, eds ., Human Rights as a Security Issue inEast-West Relations, (forthcoming) . Emphasis added.

31. Dimitrij Rupel, "Some Recent Political Developments in Slovenia and Yugo-slavia," paper delivered at University of Pittsburgh, 10 October 1989 . Emphasis added.

32. See, e .g., Tine Hribar, "Duhovna prostost Slovencev," in T. Hribar, Slovenskadrzavnost (Ljubljana: Cankarjeva zaloiba, 1989).

33. New York Times, 6 April 1990, A8 .

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ative streak in the Balkans," as opposed to more progressive Hungaryand Czechoslovakia, as being in part due to religion : "The populationsof Czechoslovakia and Hungary are either Roman Catholic or Protestant, but Romanians and Bulgarians are for the most part EasternOrthodox--a more conservative religion that historically has acted asthe servant rather than the rival of the state ."34 Similarly, a reporterfor the Washington Post asserted that "In [the] Balkan states, the author-itarian traditions of the dominant Orthodox Church have helped fashionintense nationalism but have not fostered participatory democracy ."35A New York Times editorial saw Yugoslavia's "Roman Catholic repub-lics" as "the country's most advanced and politically enlightened re-gion" but facing "bullying" from a "bloc [of] Orthodox Christian re-publics . ,,36

The association of Roman Catholicism with industriousness andeconomic development might have surprised Max Weber, but seemsto pass unquestioned in these writings . In regard to the putative ex-cessive association of the Orthodox church[es] with the state, couldthis really be more extreme than the support offered by the Catholicchurch to Mussolini's Italy, the quisling "Independent State of Croatia"(1941-45), or contemporary Ireland? And it is certainly difficult to seethe Orthodox tradition as more "authoritarian" than that of Catholi-cism. These comparisons are not, of course, made to disparage Ca-tholicism, but rather to point out that in these implicit "comparisons"of different religious traditions, both "domestic" and "foreign," theEastern Orthodox Church does not score very highly for reasons thatare not at all self-evident. What is self-evident is a chronic lack ofknowledge about the Orthodox Churches and the differences in theirhistorical development. For example, figures of the Serbian OrthodoxChurch at times supported the governing system while others, at oth-ertimes, opposed itmuch like leaders of other European churches inother places. Partial knowledge creates simplistic representations,which are then used as "arguments" and "explanations ."

Nationalism itself is subject to orientalism. Dimitrij Rupel claimsto discern a good, western variant of nationalism in Yugoslavia as wellas bad, eastern ones . He writes:

1. Premodern nationalism (non-European nations, Albanians inKosovo: fighting against foreign colonial domination; this is an irra-tional world of hatred, revenge and bleeding for ideals and ideolo-gies) .

2. Modern nationalism (Serbs : nationalism with a rational, some-times with an economic "mission," fighting for "historical rights," for"Lebensraum," bringing "freedom" to other nations; often obsessedwith "feelings" of frustration and unfulfilled national action).

3. Post-modern nationalism (Slovenes, Croats, several Europeannations: non-aggressive, non-defensive, non-expansionist, multi-

34. New York Times, 17 June 1990, El.35. Washington Post, 9 February 1990, A22 . Emphasis added.36. New York Times, 4 April 1989.

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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 evenpoliticians today speak about Western and Eastern Yugoslavia) . . .The types of nationalism active in [the] (Western and Eastern) Yu-goslav republics coincide with their respective cultural, economic andpolitical structures . '37

The contrast that these various orientalist images seek to portraywas graphically represented in a cartoon in the Croatian newsweeklyDanas, showing rows of falling dominoes that spelled "Europe" op-posed to dominoes falling from the other direction and spelling theword "Byzantine" with tottering dominoes in the colors of the Croatianflag caught between them.38 Similarly, in the days following a nearinsurrection by Serbs against the Croatian government in a part ofCroatia in which they form the majority, a cartoon in the Zagreb dailyVjesnik showed a Croatian car bound for "Europe" stopped by a block-ade of armed, unkempt ruffians wearing Serbian caps . In Slovenia, afamous cover of the satirical youth magazine Mladina portrayed a car-toon of a country, unnamed but with details indicating Yugoslavia, inwhich the north was modern and prosperous while the south containedslaves under the whip of a pharaoh, references virtually everyone inYugoslavia read as commentary on putative differences betweennorth(west) and south(east) Yugoslavia.

These contrasting images help nationalist political figures in Croa-tia and Slovenia to justify the need to break away from the Balkans.Further, the adoration of a posited (western) Europe was meant tobuild support for the separation and "post-modern nationalism"among those who count: the West . This conjuncture of orientalist car-icature and political appeal was most clearly expressed by the Slo-venian Minister of Science, Dr. Peter Tancig, in a letter sent via BIT-NET to Slovenian intellectuals throughout the world on 29 June 1991,with the request that it be used to "`spread the true word about Slo-venia' 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 incompatibilityof two main frames of referencelcivilization, unnaturally and forciblyjoined in Yugoslavia. On one side you have a typical violent andcrooked oriental-bizantine (sic) heritage, best exemplified by Serbiaand Montenegro . . . On the other side (Slovenia, Croatia) there is amore humble and diligent western-catholic tradition [T]rying tokeep Yugoslavia afloat . . . is also very bad geostrategical thinking, asindependent (and westernized) Slovenia (and Croatia) could andwould act as a "cordon sanitaire" against the eastern tide of chaos.39

37. Rupel, "Recent Political Developments," 7.38. 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 theE-mail nets "Pisma Bralcev" and "soc .culture.yugoslavia ."

Orientalist Variations on "Balkans"

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The "naturalness" of the orientalist concept of the Balkans is ex-emplified by such depictions . The parts of Yugoslavia that are notphysically in the Balkans have been attempting to "balkanize " thecountry (i .e., "divide it into small, mutually hostile segments"), whileblaming this development on the putative Balkan mentality" of thosewhom they wish to exclude ; and this effort has been accepted at facevalue by many western observers . Further, politicians and publiciststrying to counter the increasingly xenophobic nationalisms in the var-ious 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 andByzantine. Central Europe gave the world two ideologies : communismand fascism." In Yugoslavia, as in Romania and other countries on themargins of (western) Europe,40 the image of Europe has always beenan ambiguous one. Before the communist period, for example, therewas admiration for the educational and cultural centers of westernEurope, but also concern about what was perceived as their decadence.Later, non-alignment, the international movement of which Yugoslaviawas a founding member, was not only meant to counter military andeconomic dominance (imperialism and colonialism), but was also anindirect rejection of Eurocentrism . The non-aligned movement wasmeant to bring to the international arena those who until then hadnot been heard, thus permitting them to represent themselves ratherthan being represented by others.

Indeed, the view of "Europe" afforded by the periphery of thecontinent may be a particularly revealing one, and not only becauseof its reflections of the European self-image . '" As anthropologists wellknow, the marginal observer is often the most acute one . Those whoare within Europe, yet repeatedly told that they are not really "Euro-pean," may be better placed to evaluate the meaning of the (north andwest) European construction of itself.

From the perspective of the Balkans, it may be possible to view theself assertively "European" actions of the non-Balkan areas of Yugo-slavia as indeed revealing a European logic, but not one with uniformlypositive import. As one intellectual in Serbia has put it, the national-isms arising in Yugoslavia are quintessentially Central Europeanandantidemocratic. He does not see this as a contradiction . Quite to thecontrary,

40. See Susan Gal, `Bartok's Funeral : Representations of Europe in HungarianPolitical Rhetoric," American Ethnologist 18, no . 3 (1991): 440-58; Katherine Verdery,"Is Romania in Europe? Interstitial Elites and the Politics of Identity" (paper presentedat the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Phoenix, AZ,Nov. 1988); and Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism : Identity and Cultural Politics inCeausescou's Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

41. Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography inthe Margins ofEurope (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1987) .

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Slavic Review

the chief structural characteristic of Central Europe is the dominanceof culture over politics, . . . [but] not in the sense that autonomouscultural values constitute the primary goal of political activity . In Cen-tral Europe . : . political rationality self-destructs into a type of irra-tionality that bears the protective label "culture" and is thereby dif-ficult to criticize or to disregard . . Most important for culturalidentity are language, ethnic identity, a feeling of unity, a past, col-lective myths. If any of these elements were to be politicized, in thesense that, for example, the question of [the basis of and justificationfor] a state becomes a function of a question of language [identity],it would lead to the destabilization of politics, to its sinking into depthsin which it loses a sense of balance and becomes incoherent. And inthis place that we call Central Europe all of these questions are po-liticized and not only some few elements of culture.''

While Zoran Djindjic's assessment may be seen as a negative counter-part to the exaggerations of those who view Central Europe in uncrit-ically favorable terms, it is certainly true that some of the worst excessesof modern central Europe have been justified by asserted needs toprotect a dominant nation . And with a truly East European sensitivityto the excesses of ideology, the Slovenian writer Mile Setinc, dissentingin 1990 with the nationalist policies of the post-communist Sloveniangovernment, argued that ''[n]ationalism . . only exchanges the ideol-ogy of the universal liberation of `the working class' for the ideologyof `total national sovereignty.' This is not in any sense a matter ofrational categories, but rather of sovereignty as a value in itself, as thehighest value, the cost of which is irrelevant.s43

In theoretical terms, these assessments lead us to a quandary . Onthe one hand, much of contemporary anthropological theory recog-nizes that cultures, and "traditions," are constructed rather than found,permeable rather than bounded, multifaceted rather than uniform andevolving rather than static . 44 At the same time, students of nationalismare well aware that the ideology of nationalism requires adoption ofviews of the given nation as unchanging in its essential elements, uni-form (except as threatened or polluted by others), and often in needof "recovery" of its true "identity ."45 This ideology may, in fact, behighly European, particularly central European, although not uniquelyso. In any event, we are confronted with political actors who buildsupport by manipulating cultural "facts" that we often know to bemistaken. This situation can cause the scholar who observes it a certainsense of cognitive (or professional) dissonance . 46 On the other hand,

42. Zoran Djindjic, "Hrabrost driaca sveee," Borba 18-19 August 1990 . Djindjicbecame 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 Hobs-bawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1990) .

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

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explaining why people believe these constructions is a continuation ofan anthropological tradition that itself goes back at least as far asMalinowski . It is, after all, part of the anthropological stock in tradeto explain why the informants believe something that the observerknows just isn't true. Turning this particular analytical lens on Europemay be a departure, but is one of degree (of "development" of thesubjects of study) rather than of kind.

If we return, finally, to Yugoslavia and the "Balkans," we may seeopportunities for developing a criticism of "Europe" that may be usedto propel European constructions of itself past the seeming naturalnessof bounded "nations" and towards recognition of the interdependencyof the peoples, and people, of Europe. In this regard, Yugoslavia pro-vides an example both positive and negative in implication . We canview its struggle for identity as a test for Europe's own attempt to bringits diverse peoples and cultures into a common political and economicstructure . And in both cases it is the concept of identity as such thathas to be defined. However, the starting points of these attempts atself definition have been different . Yugoslavia's post-war identity hasbeen built on a concept of ideological uniformity, while "Europe"(western Europe) was built on mutual differentiations . The peak ofYugoslavia's multifaceted crisis reveals that its identity can no longerbe defined through the ideology of the post-war communist era. Allthat this kind of unity has left behind it are differences : cultural, lin-guistic, 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 relationsis being systematically neglected, underestimated or outright denied.And yet it is the experience of and from these overlapping areas oflife that is relevant for any redefinition of Yugoslavia and of its con-stituent parts. The latter are not simply the several components com-prising Yugoslavia, not is Yugoslavia an empty framework imposed onits constituents . Rather, it is a manifestation of their interdependence.

From the standpoint of Europe, it is the recognition of such inter-dependence that has brought about the movement for a Europe as anentity larger than the sum of its several parts . Yugoslavia, which wascreated in recognition of interdependence at times (1918 and 1943)when the concept of "Europe" as an entity did not exist, was thus aheadof its time. Ironically if not tragically, it is now in danger of succumbingto the ideology of bounded nations that has for so long driven Euro-pean thought. Thus the Yugoslav peoples, looking for salvation to anidealized unified Europe that does not yet exist, may fall victim to theillusions of severable nations that have twice in this century destroyedthe Europe .that has long existed .

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