The Balkans: Europe's Cesspool (original) (raw)
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Nationalities Papers, 2018
Nations and Nationalism, 2015
This is an original perspective on the construction of national identity in Soviet Lithuania. Drawing on interviews with the Soviet Lithuanian intelligentsia (mostly writers) and other primary and secondary sources, Davoliūtė has written an engaging story about their contributions to the legitimation of the Soviet regime in Lithuania and their roles in deconstructing this system. Enriched with memorable photographs, this book analyses various processes related to modernisation in Lithuania, including the 'rustic turn', a cultural movement against Soviet modernity. By focusing on the construction of Soviet Lithuanian modernity and related traumas, such as mass resettlement from Lithuanian villages to the cities, collectivisation, the resistance movement, the book depicts the creation of Lithuanian collective identity during the Soviet period and its immediate aftermath. The Introduction outlines a compelling vision. Davoliūtė argues that it is necessary to incorporate the Holocaust and the displacement which other ethnic groups experienced into the story of the development of Lithuanian national identity. The first chapter describes the formation of national identity during the nineteenth century, astutely pointing out the divisions between the villages, which were mostly inhabited by Lithuanian-speaking peasants, and the cities, which were inhabited mostly by the Polish and Jewish minorities. The account of the developments during World War I and the interwar period highlights the attempts by Lithuanian intellectuals to modernise what they saw as traditional 'peasant' culture. This attempt at modernisation was interrupted by traumatic historical events, including the Holocaust and mass displacements after World War II, which radically changed the demographic structure of cities and villages in Lithuania. The author makes an astute observation that after World War II, the speed of urbanisation in Soviet Lithuania was breathtaking (from 15 per cent in 1945 to 68.1 per cent in 1989, p. 51). The following chapters explore the processes that accompanied this meteoric urbanisation, including the formation of the Soviet Lithuanian elites and their role in the creation of urban Soviet Lithuanian culture. Davoliūtė empathetically depicts the molding of the Soviet 'cultural corps' from young Lithuanian men, mostly with humble beginnings, who found pride in their new elite status in Soviet Lithuanian society. These men-very few women made it into the ranks of the Soviet Lithuanian elite-shared traumatic memories about displacement from villages and postwar dramas, but at the same time they felt an intense ambition to climb the social ladder. They became part of an exclusive and powerful guild, the Writers' Union, which gave them a privileged position in Soviet Lithuanian society and the power to shape national discourse. The chapters establishing connections between the 'rustic turn' in the 1960s and the rise of the nationalist movement Sąjūdis in the 1980s are the most interesting parts of the book. Davoliūtė conceptualises 'the rustic turn', a cultural movement that was marked by a fascination with tradition and rural life, as part of a transnational cultural movement in Europe and Russia during the twentieth century. In Soviet Lithuania, bs_bs_banner EN AS
From the Guest Editor: Neighbours and war: genocide in the Central Balkans
Journal of Genocide Research, 2006
This special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research addresses questions that have preoccupied so many commentators. How do political campaigns to break up complex societies work in practice? What are the long-term consequences of these changes? The case studies in the articles are drawn from the Central Balkans (and in particular Bosnia and Hercegovina) in the 1940s and 1990s, which were both periods when state boundaries were drastically altered and groups that had lived as neighbours for centuries often became mortal enemies. All the contributors are historians and thus bring to their investigations a particular methodological approach. All acknowledge, however, that these questions cut through disciplinary boundaries and that they are indebted to the work of other scholars, including political scientists, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists. 1 Paul Miller, a visiting scholar in Sarajevo, brings a very personal perspective to a complex and controversial subject, namely, the politics of genocide memorialization in Bosnia-Hercegovina. He has also included a photographic record of his experiences. Tomislav Dulić, author of a recent monograph on the subject, 2 examines what occurred during the Second World War. This was a subject of great controversy during the Communist period in the former Yugoslavia, which also influenced the events of the 1990s. As the subject of wartime casualties was so heavily politicized during the Tito period, it falls to the current generation of younger scholars to look at the period from 1941 to 1946 from a more scholarly perspective. The historian Milorad Ekmečić, a Bosnian Serb and founder of the radical nationalist Srpska Democratska Stranka (Serbian Democratic Party), who lost 78 members of his family in 1941 in the village of Prebilovci, recalled that "(o)ver the years when I came to visit (the village) for weddings and funerals the stories they told were about the massacres during the war. They were possessed by the memories of 1941-45." 3 Their "possession" by memories of the war period was partly due to the horrific nature of the crimes committed, but also due to the fact that the Communist regime suppressed discussion of the war. The Communists feared nationalism and knew that it could divide the people of Yugoslavia and plunge them into further civil wars, but failed to provide a durable ideological alternative. The ideology of "brotherhood and unity" ("bratstvo i jedinstvo"), which they ruthlessly promoted, was too heavily dependent on the memory of
This book examines the de/re/construction process of the image of the Balkans as a space embedded in the European discourse in different media from 1830 to the present days. According to the author, the Balkans have served as a stereotypical media paradigm for a simulacrum of particular western and eastern phantasms. Those phantasms had and continue to have effects on the process of recreating new cultural and political concepts of identity and space in the Balkans. Zimmermann analyses literature, travelogues, paintings and scientific writing to guide us between the different poles of the creation of predominantly negative and secondary Balkan stereotypes. As the Great Ottoman Empire slowly dissolved by the mid-19th century, two of the Great Powers (Russia and Austro-Hungary) saw an opportunity to increase their imperial influences. However, they discovered small, corrupt and bankrupt states at odds with each other. Soon this region would be called the Balkans Powder Keg. It is interesting to learn that the initial interest by both Western and Eastern imperial states were not the Balkans but the liberated Greece. However, for the travellers who met Greek liberation fighters, the fighters did not mirror the pre-constructed stereotype of Hellenic civilization, but were instead perceived as disorganized combatants and robbers. Hence, Pan German and Pan Slavic antagonistic discourses created a stereotype of fatalistic, primitive, devious and bloodthirsty Balkans. For instance, Alexander Sergejewitsch Puschkin and Michał Czajkowski sent their fictional characters to disappear into the Balkans void. When Bosnia became part of Austro-Hungarian Protectorate, the image of the Balkans slowly altered through e.g. travelogues, doctors' anecdotes and Freud's visit to " a space beyond the pleasure principle " , where pathological eroticism unites with thanatological phantasm. Later in the book Zimmermann links such Balkan phantasms with Baudrillard's theory of simulacra hyper-reality and video installations of Marina Abramović.2 The longest chapter is devoted to the analysis of Yugoslav identity creation under Tito and is well-founded on abundant media materials. As a reaction to the 1948 conflict between Tito and Stalin, the creators of Yugoslav identity tried to counter accusations of being primitive and backward by turning them into an affirmative multicultural model. Miroslav Krleža and Otto Bihalji-Merin, the leading intellectuals of that time, tried to construct Yugoslav identity based on a heretic sect of Bogomils, medieval religious dualists, who did not belong either to the Catholic or Orthodox Church. They converted to Islam by the mid-15th century and anticipated Bosnian multiculturalism. Bogomil symbolism reflects Yugoslav neither West nor East oriented religious-belief as well as Yugoslav position being related neither to Western Capitalism nor Eastern Communism. Zimmermann aptly succeeds in explaining how the ideas and concepts used to create this original, positive, and alternative image of Yugoslavia transmuted and then created the fertile ground for the break-up of Yugoslavia. The focus on peoples' folk art (e.g. Bogomil tombstones, medieval Macedonian frescos, naïve paintings, autodidacts, archaism, etc.) turned in the case of Serbia into nationalistic populism through the reawakening of the epics about Kosovo. Zimmermann analyses the transformation of the Kosovo myth that was used for the creation of the first Yugoslav project in detail. For instance, Ivan Meštrović's model for the Kosovo Tempel from 1915 was converted into a nationalistic Serbian propaganda instrument in the late 1980s. The author presents how the newly constructed, affirmative third way ended up in death and destruction. Subsequently the last chapter deals with thanatological phantasms and its post-Bosnian war (1992-1995) implications on visual media (self)perception that was caught between reality and fiction. Zimmermann's primary focus is on the influence of foreign images on the construction of identity among Slavic people who lived on the territory of the former SFRY. The author succeeds in presenting the Balkans' duality in a multidisciplinary way (literature, history, art history, memory and media studies), while her art-historic background (her first doctorate is in art history) offers the reader a superb analysis of various media examples of " inbetweenness " , such as Danatti all'inferno/The Damned Cast into Hell by Luca Signorelli as a source of Freud's simulacrum or Ron Haviv photo from Bijeljina in 1992 that inspired/provoked many artists and philosophers to write about it.