fleming. k. e., oriental ism, the balkans, and balkan historiography

8/6/2019 FLEMING. K. E., Oriental Ism, The Balkans, And Balkan Historiography

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Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan HistoriographyAuthor(s): K. E. FlemingSource: The American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 4 (Oct., 2000), pp. 1218-1233Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2651410

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Review EssaysOrientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography

K. E. FLEMING

TINTIN, the comic strip Belgian boy detective, has many exciting internationaladventures. He busts up an opium ring in Egypt, he frees a gorilla from a Scottishcastle, he discoversthe Yeti in Tibet, he flies to the moon. But even with so fantastican agenda, only once does he manage to travel to a thoroughly imaginary place. InKing Ottokar'sSceptre,Tintin finds himself in southeastern Europe in the fictive"Syldavia," next to the similarly invented "Borduria," at war with anarchists,corrupt military police, mustachioed fez-wearing bandits, and all manner ofnarghile-smokingBalkan buffoons.The apparent absurd confusion of Balkan history is lampooned in Herge's fauxchronicle of Syldavia, which Tintin eagerly reads as he flies in over the mountains:"In 1275 the people of Syldavia rose against the Bordurians, and in 1277 therevolutionary leader, Baron Almaszout, was proclaimed King. He adopted the titleof Ottokar the First, but should not be confused with Premysl Ottokar the First, theduke who became King of Bohemia in the XII century."1Even in being introducedto the material, one is intimidated and perplexed. If all of these people have thesame name, one might wonder, what's the point in tryingto figure out what's goingon? Politics, too, is inscrutable. In its contemporary political unrest, Syldaviabearsa striking resemblance to another fictional land, "Herzoslovakia," the Balkanhomeland of Agatha Christie's villainous Boris Anchoukoff in The Secret ofChimneys, a land, by Christie's account, of violence, brigandry, and mystery, acountry where the national "hobby" is "assassinating kings and having revolu-tions."2

Syldavia and Herzoslovakia, then, are sort of Balkan "everycountries,"compos-ites (both in name and character) based on several assumptions: that Balkancountries are more or less interchangeable with and indistinguishable from oneanother, that there is a readily identifiable typology of politics and history commonthroughout the Balkans, that there is such a thing as a Balkan ethnic or racial"type."3 Yet even as Herge and Christie assume that they know somethingfundamental about the Balkans-indeed, that they know the Balkans so well that

I Herge [Georges Remi], KingOttokar'sSceptre,Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner,trans.(Boston, 1976), 7.2 Agatha Christie, TheSecret of Chimneys (1925; New York, 1975), 105.3A similar observation has recently been made in the case of Eastern Europe. Of Bulgaria,Wallachia, and Hungary, LarryWolff points out that in many chronicles "the issue of adjacency, bywhich the neighboring lands of Eastern Europe were associated, was dramatized to suggest a sort of

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Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography 1219they can effortlessly construct fictional Balkan worlds-both Herzoslovakia andSyldavia point to an even more pervasive, and apparently contradictory,assumptionabout southeastern Europe. This is the belief that the Balkans are so hopelessly andintrinsically confused and impenetrable that there is scarcely any point in trying todistinguish between them; a novelistic or cartoon substitute is, in fact, eminentlymore manageable and presents less of an authorial problem than does the realthing. Anything vaguely East or South-East Europeanish will do. Syldavia,Moravia,Czechoslovakia, Herzoslovakia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Borduria, Bohemia-what'sthe difference, after all? Hermann Keyserling's wry observation, "If the Balkans didnot exist, it would be necessary to invent them," was perhaps understated.4 Eventhough the Balkans do exist, they must be invented anyway. Simultaneously andtautologically, then, the Balkans are both fully known and wholly unknowable. Thisis the first paradox of the way in which the Balkans are represented, perceived, andstudied.The second is this: if, according to outside observers, it is difficult to distinguishbetween the Balkan states and peoples, it is still more difficult (say those sameobservers) for Balkan peoples themselves to stop making distinctions betweenthemselves, and to stop killing one another senselessly over those distinctions."Killing one another" is not just a sort of "national hobby" but an intention orimperative that must be obeyed, and that can only be exhausted, not avoided.Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagelburger's caution against foreign inter-vention in the formerYugoslavia in the early 1990s was clearlybased in part on suchreasoning: "If people are intent on killing each other under conditions in which itis almost impossible for the outside world to do anything without losing itself manylives, then my answer is: 'I'msorry,but they are going to have to kill each other untilthey wear themselves out and have enough sense to stop.' "5One readily identifiable dimension to West European and North Americandiscussions of the Balkans, then, is the tendency to lump them all together, tooverlook any differences that might exist between countries, regimes, peoples, oreven names of countries. But a second, no less prevalent, is the direct opposite: oneof the primary characteristics attributed to Balkan lands and peoples is theparanoia, to paraphrase SigmundFreud, of small differences. To "Balkanize,"afterall, means to divide, or fragment, along absurdlyminute and definitionallyobscuregrounds. What makes the Balkans the Balkans, to the outside observer, is that theycan neither be told apart nor put together. By this argument,one of the things thatmakes the Balkans all so very much the same is the fact that they are all concernedwith demonstrating how it is that they are different from one another. Simulta-neously, then, discourse on the Balkans is one both of sameness and of difference.To these paradoxescan be added others: the relationshipbetween various Balkanstates (similar yet different) is, to an extent, replicated in the perceived correlationbetween the Balkans as a whole and the rest of Europe, which again is onegeographical destiny." Wolff, InventingEastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of theEnlightenment Stanford, Calif., 1994), 185.4 Quoted in Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997), 116.5Quoted in The SouthSlavConflict:Histoty,Religion,Ethnicity,andNationalism, Raju G. C. Thomasand H. Richard Friman, eds. (New York, 1996), 253.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2000


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1220 K E. Flemingcharacterized by familiarity overlaid with distance. The simultaneous proximity anddistance of the Balkans (the point of reference, geographical and cultural, beingWestern Europe), the sense that they somehow constitute the "outsiderwithin"-these are among an array of factors that seem, on the surface, to add up to theparadoxical "intimate estrangement" that by Edward Said's argument is thehallmark of the West's relationship to the Orient.6Add to this the fact that such essentializing as that of Herge or Christie-or P. G.Wodehouse, Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Bernard Shaw, Lawrence Durrell(whose own fictional Balkan land was dubbed "Vulgaria"),or any one of a numberof others-clearly bears no small resemblance to what Said has described as the"Orientalist attitude," and it is tempting to declare the Balkans tailor-made forSaidian analysis. To what extent, though, is this really the case? While the impactof Orientalisn has been felt in the field of Balkan history (particularly among thosewriterswho are either themselves located in the Balkans or who have some personalconnection to them), it is unclear what the ultimate utility of a Saidian approachtothe Balkans might be. Its greatest value, in the final analysis, may not lie in anyinterpretive contribution to Balkan study per se, but rather in the possibility thatthrough testing (and perhaps ultimately rejecting) Said's model, Balkan historiog-raphy will be brought into dialogue with other, more established and dominantfields. In the process, the case of the Balkans may prove uniquely equipped tointerrogate, expand, and elucidate the theoretical categories of inquiry firstdeveloped by those fields.

A HANDFUL OF RECENT WORKS of Balkan historiographyhave addressed, head on, theSaidian Orientalist critique and its potential utility to the study of southeasternEurope. Some of these have adopted in toto the premises of Orientalism(or, moreaccurately,a simplifiedversion of them) and have grafted them onto the history ofwriting about the Balkans. The more fruitful but also less common approach is onethat has attempted to understandthe ways in which "Orientalism"and "Balkanism"are not the same thing, to assess the utility of a Saidian critique in general, and totake Said's work as an occasion to, on the one hand, historicize certain stockassumptions about the Balkans and, on the other, to theorize what has traditionallybeen an undertheorized field of study. The very best, perhaps, are histories of theBalkans that show a familiarityand agility with the theoretical vocabulary of Saidand his successors but that find it unnecessary or even counterproductive to makeexplicit use of the Saidian critique.In the first category is Vesna Goldsworthy's InventingRuritania:TheInmperialismof the Imagination.As the subtitle suggests, the work is concerned with expandingthe parameters of imperialism and colonialism, and suggests that, as categories ofinterpretation, they are, despite the absence of a literal European colonial presencein the Balkans, applicable to that region nevertheless. If "conventional" mperialists

6 Said writes, "All Arab Orientals must be accommodated to a vision of an Oriental type asconstructed by the Western scholar, as well as to a specific encounter with the Orient in which theWesterner regrasps the Orient's essence as a consequence of his intimate estrangement from it."Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; New York, 1994), 248.



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Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography 1221are concerned with natural resources and economic exploitation, the Balkancolonizer, by Goldsworthy's argument, has typically sought other, but no lesslucrative, foreign sources of revenue-cultural and economic-through the "impe-rialism of the imagination." Of her work, Goldsworthy writes that it "seeks toexplore the way in which one of the world's most powerful nations [Britain]exploited the resources of the Balkans to supply its literary and entertainmentindustries."7 What exactly those "resources" are is unclear (plot lines? stagesettings?), but to Goldsworthy'smind they have brought as much lucre as mineralsor oil. The production of fictional literatures set in the Balkans, featuring Balkanprotagonists, or otherwise concerned with southeastern Europe, according toGoldsworthy,was a means whereby the British "secure[d] their stakes as surely asEuropean colonists secured newly surveyed parcels of land in America, Australia,or New Zealand."8The premise is valid, but the claim is ultimately a bit overblown.To view the relationship between Western Europe and the Balkans as homolo-gous to colonialism is an approach that, if used with reason (and if historicized), hasvalidity and can be fruitful. In the case of eighteenth and nineteenth-centuryGreece, the argument for the link between European philhellenism and some sortof metaphoric or pseudo-imperialism has been voiced by a number of scholars. OlgaAugustinos has demonstrated that Greek travel literature of the period is directlytied to Europe's claim on the ancient Greek past and shows that this claim "made[Greece] seem closer to the West" and somehow under its control.9Artemis Leontisnotes that, while the "Greeks, former subjects of a powerful Eastern Empire, maybe said to have gained the status of modern independent nation-state withouthaving passed through administrative colonialization by the West," it nevertheless"could be arguedthat modern Greece endured a 'colonialization of the mind,' giventhat its system of education was imported directly from Germany."10 myself haveargued elsewhere that in the case of Greece the mechanisms of romantic philhel-lenism and the cultivation of the belief in Greece as the fount of Westerncivilization functioned as the underpinnings for a sort of "surrogate" colonialism,whereby Greece was brought into the intellectual and cultural penumbra of theWest, particularlyBritain and France.1"The concept of metaphoric colonialism as a tool for interpretation is useful to anextent, but its very development points immediately to the manifest difficulty ofloosing the Saidian critique from its explicitly Western imperialist moorings. Thefrequency with which arguments for a "metaphoric"colonialism have been mademay demonstrate the rich symbolic possibilities of one specific political/economicsystem, but it also is symptomaticof the fundamentally problematic task of graftingSaid onto settings that do not share the particularcolonial circumstances of, say,Napoleonic Egypt. In this regard, the Balkan instance throws some significant

7Vesna Goldsworthy,InventingRuriitania:The Imperialismof the Imagination(New Haven, Conn.,1998), 2.8 Goldsworthy,InventingRiuritania, -3.9 Olga Augustinos, French Odysseys:Greece in French TravelLiteraturerom the Renaissance to theRomantic Era (Baltimore, Md., 1994), ix.10Artemis Leontis, Topographies f Hellenism:Mapping he Homeland (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), 68, 68 n.2. 11K. E. Fleming, TheMuslim Bonaparte:Diplomacy and OrienttalismenAli Pasha's Greece (Princeton,N.J., 1999), 151-52.



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1222 K E. Flemingroadblocks in the path of those who would import wholesale a Saidian critique.Quite simply, the territories of the Balkans have had a very different history fromthose with which Said's Orientalism s concerned. The political development of theBalkans, especially as it has been influenced by external powers, has been shaped byfactors unlike those at play in the Orient of Orientalism.That Said wedded his interdisciplinarityto a specific group of historical taxons(which include but cannot be reduced to colonialism, imperialism, and the interplayof political and academic power) has made it easier for certain fields to flourish inthe post-Orientalismclimate than for others. The premises on which Orientalism sbased are grafted far more easily onto the terrain of Southeast Asia than ofsoutheastern Europe. Where is one to place Serbia, for instance, in the Saidianformulation? Greece, with its peculiar culturalrelationship to the West, provides astill more categorically perplexing example.The Balkans make up a part of the "old" model of empire, the late medieval,precolonial empires of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs,both of which followed,more or less explicitly, the imperial model of Rome. They are not part of Said'simperialism, an imperialism that, whatever his intentions, appears basically to beone of East versus West, European versus Oriental, an imperialism fairly bereft ofsyncretism.12 Certainly, this interpretation is the one that has dominated theacademic reception of Orientalism,13and thus the question of Said's originalmeaning or intentionality, as Said himself admits, is no longer necessarily central towhat is meant when people invoke "Orientalism."'14he imperial mechanisms atwork in the encounter between, for example, the Ottoman Turks and the Greeks ofthe South Balkans are dramaticallydifferent from those at play in the Napoleonicencounter of the French and the Egyptians. The Ottoman conquest of theBalkans-which involved policies of repopulation, a high degree of imperialcollusion with local elites (many of whom were left fully in place), the gradual (butlargely unforced) conversion over the course of generations of entire districts toIslam, and near constant military campaigns during the late medieval and earlymodern periods-shaped the Balkans in such a way that their political andhistorical development was markedly different from that of other Ottomanprovincial regions, let alone from the colonies of eighteenth and nineteenth-centuryEurope. Four centuries of direct Ottoman rule are not comparableto the historicalcircumstances that provide the backbone for Said's argument. Finally, the peculiarcircumstances of imperial rule in the Balkans-its division between the Catholiciz-

12 In the 1994 afterword to Orientalism, or instance, Said denigrates those who "[slide] back intostereotypes like 'the conflict of East and West'" and laments the fact that the enthusiastic welcomegiven the Arabic edition of the work was based largely on emotionality and misinterpretation. "Thesense of fraught confrontation between an often emotionally defined Arab world and an even moreemotionally experienced Westernworld drownedout the fact that Orientalismwas meant to be a studyin critique, not an affirmation of warring and hopelessly antithetical identities." But clearly these twothingsare not mutually exclusive, and the fact that Said's"study n critique" claimed as its territory theinterplay between these "antitheticalidentities" would make his protestations of utter innocence a bitdisingenuous. Said, Orientalism,334, 338.

13 See, for example, Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism:Litera;yEncounterswith the Orient (London, 1994), xvi-xvii.14 Said writes that "Orientalism, lmost in a Borgesian way, has become several different books" andis now characterized by a "strange, often disquieting ... polymorphousness." Said, Orientalism,330.



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Orientalism, heBalkans, and BalkanHistoriogr-aphy 1223ing Habsburgs and the laissez-faire Ottomans-shaped different Balkan territoriesin different ways.None of this should come as a surprise, but in the rush to apply Said, much of itgets occluded. The distinct, particular, and myriad geographical, cultural, andhistorical factors (pre- and post-imperial) that are the precise cause of theambiguous relationship between the Balkans and Western Europe are too easilyglossed over by the mere substitution of an "imaginary"colonialism for the realthing. Such factors constitute precisely the terrain that is most rich with theoreticalpossibility, and, through careful study of them, Balkan historiography holds thepotential to make a majorcontribution to the ways in which some of history'smostbasic categories of inquiry are theorized. It seems counterproductive, then, toobscure them by the imposition in entirety of a critique that is predicated on factorsabsent in the Balkans and then to compensate for that absence by positing that ametaphoric or "imaginary"version of them functions in the same way as the literalor real one.There is a big difference between "metaphoriccolonialism," "surrogatecolonial-ism," "colonialism of the mind," and colonialism of the sort with which Said isconcerned. Orientalismmay invite us to explore the ways in which colonialism wasas much a frame of mind as a system of West European political and economicdomination, but for Said the former always presupposes the latter. Said's critiqueis concerned not with a wholly "imagined"Orient or merely "invented" opoi:"noneof this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of Europeanmaterial civilization and culture," and Orientalism, as a "mode of discourse," isundergirdedby, among other things, "scholarship"and "colonialbureacracies."'15InGoldsworthy's formulation, however, it is the very lack of such things as real (or"conventional," to use her term) imperialism that makes it so easy to see theOrientalism at play in British depictions of the Balkans. "The concept of imagina-tive, textual colonisation," writes Goldsworthy, ". . . shows the way in which an areacan be exploited as an object of the dominant culture's need for a dialogue withitself." She suggests that "the same methodology could be readily applied to otherparts of the world, but the process can be observed with particular clarity insouth-east Europe in view of the virtual absence of fully-fledged conventionalimperialism."'16 ympathetic as I am to Goldsworthy'sbasic aim-to document an"imperialism of the imagination" in the Balkans-her project is ultimately sub-verted rather than aided by her heavy (if implicit) reliance on Said. The "systemofrepresentation" with which Said is concerned is one that is in constant and dialogicconversation with imperial structures, while for Goldsworthy, the system ofrepresentation is itself tantanount to an imperial structure.Clearly, one compo-nent-and a giant one at that-must drop out of Said if Said is to be used to discussthe Balkans.Those who are prepared to acknowledge this fact have fared better with theirapplication of a Saidian model to Balkan historiography.Milica Bakic-Hayden andRobert M. Hayden deal straightforwardlywith the different, non-imperial circum-stances of the Balkans. They argue that while Said "associates [Orientalism as a]

15 Said, Orientalism,2.16 Goldsworthy,InventingRuritacnia,11.



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1224 K E. Flemingrhetorical structure with a political and economic relationship of domination andsubmission," the "language of orientalism still retains its force" in noncolonialsettings, pointing out that now, in the postcolonial world, it has not as a discourseof power disappeared along with the institutions of colonialism. Bakic-Hayden andHayden thus rehistoricize Said through their explicit interest in comparing acolonial world to a postcolonial one. In addition to suggesting some of the ways inwhich Orientalist discourse has outlived the very structures that first gave it life,Bakic-Haydenand Hayden's work is particularly lluminatingin showing how, whendivorced from those structures, Orientalism loses much of its unidirectionality (asa discourse imposed by the West on the East) and becomes instead embedded andinternalized in East and West alike. Or, better put (and more germane to theBalkan instance), they show how, through the adoption of "orientalist" rhetoric byboth East and West, the boundaries between the two categories begin to blur. Thus,as they argue, Orientalist rhetoric ("Balkan mentality, Balkan primitivism, Bal-kanization, Byzantine, Orthodoxy")is now deployed not just by outsiders but by thevery people whom they are meant to describe. "These terms, and the orientalistframeworkin general, are often used even by those who are disparaged by them, apoint . . . which indicates the hegemonic nature of the concepts involved."17 WhileGoldsworthy'swork assumes a model of Western imposition on or exploitation ofa non-Western "other" (despite the absence of literal colonial control of thatother), that of Bakic-Hayden and Hayden situates Orientalist discourse within thesupposed "Orient" itself, thus interrogating the nature both of that discourse andof the "Orient"as a geographical and cultural category.

WESTERN COLONIALISM, a central component in Said's model, is not the only thingthat must be let go if the model is to be fruitfully applied to the Balkans. Academicpower and the tradition of West European academic literary production about theOrient also comprise an essential feature of Said's Orientalism. As he explains,"Orientalismis not only a positive doctrine about the Orient that exists at any onetime in the West; it is also an influential academic tradition (when one refers to anacademic specialist who is called an Orientalist), as well as an area of concerndefined by travelers, commercial enterprises, governments, military expeditions,readers of novels and accounts of exotic adventure, naturalhistorians, and pilgrimsto whom the Orient is a specific kind of knowledge about specific places, peoples,and civilizations."18There is no history or tradition of West European academic interest in theBalkans that is remotely comparable to the history of Western academic study ofthe colonized Orient. Greece, alone among the Balkan territories, has as a regionof study long been a mainstay of the Western academy, a fact that, incidentally,makes the "metaphoriccolonialism" thesis more applicable to Greece than to therest of the Balkans. The West's fondness for Greece is intimately connected to thecommon tendency to consider Greece not truly "Balkan," at least not in the full

17Milica Baki6-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden, "Orientalist Variations on the Theme 'Balkans':Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics," Slavic Review 51 (Spring 1992): 3.18Said, Orienitalism, 203.



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Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography 1225connotative sense of the term (a difference of status once underscored by Greece'slack of ties to the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War era and now by its membershipin the European Union, among other geopolitical and cultural factors). ThatGreece has received so much attention only highlights the academic neglect of theBalkans in general within the Western academy. Broadly speaking, there is noacademic tradition of "Balkanism," et alone an "influential"one; the term itself isscarcely established as an academic field today, much less two hundred years ago.Western literatures such as those produced by Rebecca West, Christie, Durrell,et al. have led scholars to suggest the need for a category parallel to Orientalism (inits Saidian, discursive sense) that is applicable to the Balkan context. MariaTodorova, the real groundbreaker in this regard, explores the comparative possi-bilities of "Balkanism"and "Orientalism,"but she concludes, quite rightly,that theyare not the same thing. This is a conclusion based on many factors (differences inthe perception of the geopolitical importance of the Balkans relative to the Orient,the lack of a colonial legacy in the case of the Balkans, the largelyChristianmakeupof the Balkans versus the overwhelminglyMuslim Orient), among them a recogni-tion that the history of the West's intellectual engagement with the Balkans is notreminiscent of the history of the West's intellectual engagement with the Orient."The Balkans per se, that is, as a distinct geographic, social, and cultural entity,were 'discovered' by European travelers only from the late eighteenth century."19While Said identifies the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as themoment of birth of "modernOrientalism,"he defines this "modernOrientalism"asthe product of a renaissance-a rebirth, rather than an original one. ModernOrientalism rests on "a vast literature about the Orient inherited from theEuropean past."20Orientalism is thus a discourse characterized by a dialogicinterplaybetween past and present, a product of the modernization of Orientalismas a body of knowledge, a modernization catalyzed and effected by the experienceof colonial rule of the Orient.21Thus the late eighteenth-century "discovery"of theBalkans by the West coincides with the moment of the West's rediscovery of theOrient.Literary and academic output on the Balkans, moreover, does not differ fromthat on the Orient just in chronology and longevity. The vast arrayof Orientalistliteratures documented by Said are different in style, aim, and quantityfrom thoseproduced by Western Europe about the Balkans. As the work of Todorova,Goldsworthy, Stephen Arata,22Augustinos, and numerous others demonstrates, theliterary output of Western Europe on the Balkans (what might or might not as adiscourse be termed "Balkanism")has fallen for the most part into one of twocategories: adventure fiction and travelogue. Todorova observes that the "Balkans,together with the distant North American prairies ... tickle[d] the popularimagination as fanciful sites for the setting of morality plays, romantic orantiromantic."23Travel literature,which may or maynot have been based on actual

19Todorova, Imaginingthe Balkans, 62.20 Said, Orientalism,42.21 Said, Orientalism,43.22 See, for example, Stephen D. Arata, "The Occidental Tourist:Dracutlaand the Anxiety of ReverseColonization,"VictorianStudies 33 (Summer 1990): 621-45.23 Todorova, Imaginingthe Balkans, 73.



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1226 K E. Flemingtravel, largely served a similarrole as didactic entertainment. While a large portionof the Orientalist literatures documented by Said fall into these same categories, itrests in the Saidian instance on the shoulders of a long and respected Orientalistacademic tradition, one concerned with philology, textual analysis, history, and thestudy of religion. The West European academic study of Sanskrit, Arabic, Aramaic,and other Oriental languages and literatures is the single most important precursorto modern Orientalism as Said defines it.24 In the case of the Balkans, therelationship between "Balkanism"as a field of study and "Balkanism"as a categoryroughly equivalent to Said's "Orientalism" is, if anything, the reverse. The WestEuropean and North American academy, perhaps in response to a century's worthof depictions of the Balkans as wild, exciting, and filled with mysteryand danger, isonly now beginning to hire specialists in Balkan history, language, and culture inany number. "Balkanism" as a discourse does not rest on an earlier academictradition of "Balkanism"for the simple reason that there isn't one.It is during moments of "crisis"(as in the disintegration of Yugoslavia or duringthe conflict in Kosovo) that most scholarly, or semi-scholarly,work on the Balkanshas been written. This has historicallybeen the case, as well. A book on the Balkanspublished in 1911 is called TheDangerZone of Europe: Changesand Problems n theNear East. From its introduction, we learn that "historyhas proved that the NearEast [the Balkans] has been both the scene of and the reason for war afterwar. Fora variety of reasons this quarterof the universe is still a continual source of dangerto the peace of the world. The Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor may alwaysbe thescene of insurrection or massacre."25There is nothing of inherent intellectualinterest in the region; it is simply prudent to learn about it because its messes mightbecome ours. The book's author, H. Charles Woods, is, like most writing on theBalkans today, interested in his subject matter because contemporary conflict hasrendered it "timely."While this is a pragmatic and reasonable approach, it is alsoone that has shaped the academic study of the Balkans in a way that makes itdistinct from most other fields.In both the colonial and the postcolonial periods, then, Western academicscholarly production on the Balkan countries has been most consistently linked tothe perception of them as dangerous, unstable, a war zone. But here, we must viewthe term "academic"with caution, for the vast majorityof suchwritingis in actualityproduced not by academiciansin the strictest sense of the term but ratherby Balkan"experts"whose expertise derives from their experience as journalists, travelers, orpolitical strategists.This has produced a majorbifurcationwithin the ranksof thoseconcerned with Balkan history. One group consists of Balkan "specialists" (largely,if not exclusively,North American and West European), whose work is targeted inthe main at a nonspecialist, non-academic audience and purports to explain andunravel the intricacies of Balkan history and politics for lay readers. Robert D.Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (1993) is perhaps the mostcommerciallysuccessful of this genre, but a slew of other recently published booksabout the Balkans fit the bill as well. These works vary wildly in quality and utility

24 See, for example, Said, Orientalism,136-37.25 H. Charles Woods, The Danger Zone of Europe: Changes and Problems in the Near East (Boston,1911), 5.



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Orientalisn,the Balkans, and BalkanHistoriography 1227(I hasten to say that some are quite good), but all are drawn together by theirshared interest in addressing newcomers, or at least nonspecialists, whose interestin the Balkans has been sparked solely by contemporary political events. WithinWestern Europe and certainly North America, such extra-academic specialistsoutnumber "academic"ones, by which latter I mean those historians, scholars ofliterature,political scientists, and the like who hold doctorates in the topic, who arehoused in universities, whose entire careers have been devoted to the field, andwhose interest in it was first sparked by the usual eccentric panoply of factors,contemporary geopolitics usually not among them. This academic group is small,not usually focused on current events and, incidentally, for the most part, made upof individuals who are in many instances of Balkan origin-with the interestingresult that the strictly "academic" study of the Balkans is emerging as a sort ofsubaltern, hybrid field, as has also happened in the case of the academic study ofpostcolonial South Asia (a topic that deserves further exploration in its own rightbut which in this context I can refer to only in passing).There is thus a two-tier professional study of the Balkans, in which the moredominant tier consists of those working specifically on the contemporaryBalkansand outside the academy.The less visible tier consists of a tiny group of academics,who may or may not be interested in contemporary events. There is little contactbetween the two, for obvious reasons-they are inter-ested in different questionsand problems, and write for very different audiences. This bifurcation, along withan array of preexisting factors, has made the field of Balkan studies even smallerand less visible. For working above, or at least parallel to, academic Balkanists is afreelance, pseudo-academic (the term is not necessarilypejorative) cottage industryof "specialists"on the Balkans, whose work gives the impression that Balkanists asa whole are basically political wonks who are not interested in the broadertheoretical questions that inform other fields of history.Within the Balkan nations themselves, where there obviously is no great lay orpublic demand for Balkan "specialists,"the study of Balkan history, literature, andculture is emerging much more clearly as a field in its own right, one that is in closetouch with, informed by, and in dialogue with theoretical shifts and trends across awide spectrum of fields. Not surprisingly, then, coming out of the Balkans are anumber of studies that (like those of Todorova, Bakic-Hayden and Hayden,Goldsworthy, and a handful of others in this country) strive to bring the study ofsoutheastern Europe into direct conversation with the theoretical and conceptualconcerns of other fields. In Serbia, for instance, a number of scholars (Ivan Colovic,for example, or Marko Zivkovic) have devoted considerable time to Said's model.In Romania, the Revue des EtuidesSud-EstEutropeennes as devoted two issues totheoretical debates stemmingfrom Orientalism. n Greece, the case with which I ammost familiar,a numberof scholars are currentlydirectly engaged with post-Saidiantheoretical questions, among them Loukia Droulia, Stathis Gourgouris, PaschalisKitromilides, Yiorgos Kokkinos, JoannaLaliotou, Antonis Liakos, and Elli Skope-tea, to give only a few specific names. Some (Skopetea, for instance) have directedtheir attention specifically to the relevance of Said's model to the Balkans, whileothers (like Kitromilides) use paradigmsthat are clearly influenced by Said and hissuccessors.



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1228 K E. FlemingThis being the state of affairs, it should be manifestly clear that Said's model,once again, needs some significantmodification if it is to be applied to the Balkans.Said's understanding of Orientalismas a discourse is predicated on the relationshipbetween Orientalism as an established and "influential" academic field on the one

hand and colonial power on the other. Thus far, as we have seen, there is no suchrelationship in the case of the Balkans. In fact, there is neither a history of"Balkanism" as an established academic field nor of colonialism except of an"imaginary" or metaphoric sort. Balkanism as an academic field of study hasemerged most potently within the Balkans themselves or as a largely subal-ternesque, hybrid discipline within North America and Western Europe. As such,it is a new field and is characterized by its familiarity with Western theoreticalparadigmsfor study of the "other,"as well as by a remarkable agility in using theinstance of the Balkans to challenge, rework, and expand those paradigms. Clearly,then, "Balkanism" as a discourse must be something quite different from Orien-talism. Left without an influential and longstanding Western academic tradition ofstudying the Balkans and bereft of a framework of literal colonial domination, inwhat ways might it still be said that Orientalism can, or should, be used to studysoutheastern Europe?

HAVING THROWN OUT THE BATHWATER, as it were, we might look now to see if weshould just throw out the baby, as well. If Orientalisn is rendered of dubious use inthe Balkan instance because of the absence both of West European colonial controlover the Balkans and of a longstanding Western academic tradition of studyingtheBalkans, it becomes more beleaguered still when faced with the fact that it isunclear whether or not the Balkans are in any sense (geographical, cultural, ordiscursive) "Oriental" at all. Where the "Orient" begins and where it ends is, ofcourse, a topic of no small debate, and its resolution has been determineddifferently at different historical moments. A map of the "Near East" published in1911 has as its westernmost point Banjaluka, in Bosnia, and as its easternmostKonya, in Turkey.26The Near East now has disappeared,or become a chronological(as in "the ancient Near East") rather than locational marker.We have a West anda Middle East, even a Far East, but the Near East-or what it used to be-hasbecome so near that it is no longer the East but the West.The confusion over what is East and what is West, particularlyas it attaches itselfto the Balkans, is nothing new. In an epistle of the thirteenth century, St. Sava, thefounder of the Serbian Orthodox Church, famously wrote: "At first we wereconfused. The East thought we were West, while the West considered us to be East.Some of us misunderstood our place in this clash of currents, so they cried that webelong to neither side, and others that we belong exclusively to one side or theother. But I tell you . .. , we are doomed by fate to be the East on the West, andthe West on the East, to acknowledge only heavenly Jerusalembeyond us, and hereon earth-no one."27Sava's felicitous turn of phrase is echoed in the title of one of

26 Woods, DangerZonie of Eltrope, appendix.27 Quoted in Baki6-Hayden and Hayden, "Orientalist Variations," 1.



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Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiog7raphy 1229the best recent works of Balkan historiographyto grapple with Said's model, ElliSkopetea's I Dysi tis Anatolis, which can be translated as "The West of the East" or"The East's West."28As Skopetea and others suggest, of the various features of Balkan history andcircumstance that invite (and problematize) Saidian modes of investigation,perhaps most salient is the matter of the location of the Balkans vis-'a-visWesternEurope, and the changing way in which that location has been represented atdifferent historical moments. Central, of course, is the relativity of geographicalspaces; the sense of simultanous Balkan distance and proximity, while a constantfeature of Western depictions of the Balkans over at least two centuries, is not astatic frame for investigation. The concepts of "distance" and "proximity" can,varyingly,be understood to refer to physical, intellectual, cultural, chronological,political, and moral states. The "intimate estrangement,"which by Said's formula-tion characterizes the West's relationship to the Orient is, in the case of theBalkans, both heightened and literalized. Even as Europe, through the discursivemechanisms he so trenchantly and disturbingly identifies, defined and thus mas-tered the "Orient," so, too, did it define itself. And in the process, the Balkans,which in the seventeenth centurywere regarded as decidedly "Oriental," morphedfirst into "European Turkey" and, finally, into part of "Europe,"albeit a hazy andill-defined part. The supposedly "alien" nature of the Balkans-an alienness andestrangement most famously and vividly dramatized (and romanticized) in theworks of Lord Byron-derives not from their distance from Western Europe butrather their proximity to it. This, yet again, is a departure from the Orient withwhich Said is concerned, where the intimacy of its estrangement from the Westderives from Western academic and political knowledge of and mastery over analien other, not from any perceived sense of deep similarity to it. In the Balkaninstance, intimacy derives precisely from such a perception of similarity, whileestrangement stems from the awkwardnessand ill ease with which that similarityisgreeted.The Balkans stand as Europe's resident alien, an internal other that is an affrontand challenge by virtue of its claim to be part of the West, as well as by its apparentability to dramaticallyaffect Western history. So it is, for instance, that commen-tators have long been flummoxedby the fact that such a seemingly "wretched" andirrelevant part of the world can have been the cause of a major global conflict: "Itis an unhappy affront to human and political nature that these wretched andunhappy little countries in the Balkan peninsula can, and do, have quarrels thatcause world wars. Some hundred and fifty thousand young Americans died becauseof an event in 1914 in a mud-caked primitivevillage, Sarajevo."29Would so manydeaths have seemed less senseless, one wonders, had the chain of events that led tothem been set in motion in Paris or in London? John Gunther, the author of thesewords, was writing on the eve of World War II-at a time when the Balkans werebeing blamed for other conflicts, as well, and a time also when the Habsburgs andthe Ottomans had already begun to fade from memory-and thus when one could

28 Elli Skopetea, I Dysi tisAnatolis: Eikones apo to telos tis OthomanikisAuttokwatoriasAthens, 1992).29 John Gunther, Inside Europe, rev. edn. (New York, 1937), 437.



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1230 K E. Flemingno longer imagine a time when the Balkans might have seemed somehow central.30The present political environment has given rise to a new version of the same sortof rhetoric; Eagelburger's attitude (see above) is not far removed from that ofGunther.

It is unclear whether the Balkansare the East or the West, but unclear, too, is justwhat counts as Balkan. On the eve of World War I, Turkeywas decidedly "Balkan"(it no longer is), as was Greece (it is now trying hard not to be); Hungary sometimeswas (now it never is). "Balkan,"clearly, is as much a conceptual designator as ageographic one, and just as its contours have changed over history, so, too, has theentire category shifted between East and West. The Balkans now are, albeitgrudgingly,unanimously agreed to be in the West (that is, in Europe), whereas theyused to be relegated to the East (the "Orient"). The eastern and southeasternreaches of Europe, in fact, were Western Europe's first Orient, and seventeenth andeighteenth-century continental attitudes toward them provided a template for howWestern Europe would ultimately perceive the entire non-Western world. InInventingEasternEurope: TheMap of Civilizationon the Mind of theEnlightenment,Larry Wolff explains Eastern Europe's role as an internal "other": "It was EasternEurope's ambiguous location, within Europe but not fully European, that called forsuch notions as backwardness and development to mediate between the poles ofcivilization and barbarism. In fact, Eastern Europe in the eighteenth centuryprovided Western Europe with its first model of underdevelopment, a concept thatwe now apply all over the globe."31 Traian Stoianovich's Balkan Worlds:The Firstand Last Europe takes us back to a still earlier paradigmfor Europe, reminding usthat the current,Northern definition (which regardsthe Balkans with ambivalence),is relatively new, dating from the founding of modern history as a field some 500years ago. Before that, "Europe," by the Southern, Greek definition, was firstequivalent to mainland Greece, then later to the "entire northern land mass ofwhich Greece was a part."32Anything northwest of the Balkan peninsula was thusoutside of Europe. By Wolff's argument, then, the Balkans provided Europe's firstexperience of the other (and thus concretized the Western category of "Europe"),while by Stoianovich's the Balkans were the first Europe. Both make effective useof the distinctive geographic and cognitive liminality of the Balkans as the point ofdeparture for their work.Said has alerted us to the fact that the "Orient" is less an actual place than aframe of mind, and he defines it in fact not as a territorybut as a mode of thought.But this does not mean that more or less any place can be de facto Oriental. Saidwrites, "The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representa-tions."33It is precisely this dimension of his work that has led to such widespreaduse (and abuse) of his interpretive model across a wide array of disciplines andfields, among them those concerned with the Balkans.34The "Balkans" hat appear

30 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 119.31 Wolff, InventingEastern Europe, 9.32 Traian Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds:The First and Last Europe (Armonk, N.Y., 1994), 2-3.33 Said, Orientalism,202-03.34 On Said's own multiple definitions of "Orientalism,"see Aijaz Ahmad, "Orientalism and After:Ambivalence and Cosmopolitan Location in the Work of EdwardSaid," Economic and Political Weekly(July 25, 1992): 98-116.



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Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography 1231in "Balkanism" as a discursive category parallel to "Orientalism")can similarly bedefined as "a system of representations," but this system is based on differentreferents-historical, geographical, and conceptual."Orientalist"cannot simply be a catchall category that denotes something alongthe lines of "making gross and vaguely deprecating generalizations about other(especially non-Western) cultures and peoples." This, however, is what many seemto have understood the "Orientalist attitude" to mean. "The Orientalist attitude,"writes Said, "shares with magic and with mythology the self-containing, self-reinforcing character of a closed system, in which objects are what they are becalusethey are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that noempirical material can either dislodge or alter."35But this is not all that the"Orientalist attitude" is. If it is, then far too much seems suddenly to "count" asOrientalist. Said's Orientalismpresupposes, along with a historyof colonialism andan established history of academic study of the Orient, a clear supposition (on thepart of Western Europe) as to what the Orient is-first and foremost, anunderstanding that the Orient is distinct from Europe itself. (Said'swork, of course,challenges precisely that supposition and blurs the distinction between categoriesEurope has traditionally held separate.) Here, the Balkans once again elude Said'scriteria. Their liminality, their status as an "inside other," their own claims toEuropean primacy, their geographical location (on the borders of but neverthelesswithin Europe), Western Europe's uncertainty as to where to place them-all makethe Balkans ripe with theoretical possibility. These factors also challenge some ofthe most fundamentalpremises of Said's model and urge us to expand it or developnew ones that might better address the circumstancesof the Balkans. The conceptof liminality-both physical and "imagined"-is the single most provocative andpromising theoretical terrain for the Southeast Europeanist, and the one throughwhich scholars of the Balkans can contribute most to the theoretical frameworks ofinquiryused by a broad array of fields and disciplines.36

HISTORIANS WORK NOWwithin an intellectual environment that is unself-conscious-ly-indeed, at times unconsciously-interdisciplinary, an environment adumbratedperhaps by Clifford Geertz but enabled (and typified) most decisively by Said.Indeed, the boundary-crossing, f not boundaryless, qualityof Said's work has beenidentified as the ur-source of its power to move, annoy, influence, and enrage, aswell as to elude concrete analysis.GyanPrakashremarks,"More than anything else,what accounts for the extraordinary mpact of Orientalism s its repeated dissolutionof boundaries drawn by colonial and neocolonial Western hegemony. The bookignited an intellectual and ideological conflagration by its insistent undoing ofoppositions between the Orient and the Occident, Western knowledge and Westernpower, scholarly objectivity and worldly motives, discursive regimes and authorial

35 Said, Orientalism,70.36 In the instance of the Balkans, one cannot help but suspect that a geographical fact has beenreplicated and instantiated in the world of scholarship.On the physical margins of Europe, the Balkanshave also been relegated to the margins of the academy. Balkan historians can be found housed in manydifferent fields, including European History, Middle Eastern History, Islamic Studies, and HellenicStudies.



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1232 K E. Flemingintentions, discipline and desire, representation and reality, and so on. Violatingdisciplinaryborders and transgressing authoritative historical frontiers, Orientalismunsettled received categories and modes of understanding."37It is in this broad regard-its call to interdisciplinarity-that Said's work has themost to offer to the study of southeastern Europe. In fact, the particularities ofBalkan history and geography make interdisciplinarity ndispensable. Kitromilides,for instance, is explicit in his views regarding the virtues of an interdisciplinaryapproach to the study of the Balkans. He argues that not only is such a methoddesirable, but the specifics of the Balkan case render it imperativeas well. "In [the]task [of historicizing the origins of Balkan nationalism] the method has to begenuinely interdisciplinary . . . As a matter of fact, nationalism constitutes one ofthose fields of social science research whose fluidity and invertebrateness makeinterdisciplinarity imperative."38Kitromilides's work, much of which is concernedwith challenging various theories of nationalism, particularlyas they are applied tothe Balkans, thus identifies the field of Balkan history as singularlywell-suited tointerdisciplinary investigation (even as he laments the fact that most Anglophonehistorians seem ignorant not just regarding Balkan history but Balkan historiogra-phy of the Balkans, as well). The work of Gourgouris, too, to provide but one moreexample among many, illustrates the use of interdisciplinarityto the study of theBalkans. Gourgouris's apt observation, "Much like anthropological and ethno-graphic subjects interrogated since the invasion of these disciplines, the inhabitantsof modern Greece were subjected to so much discursive bombardment about thenature of their being as to learn to respond in accordance with the expectations ofthe questioners," is clearly part of a broader inquiry, catalyzed largely by Said,concerned with the business of documenting the so-called other, and highlydependent on an interdisciplinaryapproach.39Prakash's assessment of the source ofOrientalism'spotency might well be read also as a description of the Balkans;themselves "boundary-crossing,""boundaryless,"challenging to the categories ofOriental and Occidental, and "transgress[iveof] authoritative historical frontiers."The Balkans' liminal status-at the interstices between worlds, histories, andcontinents-is tantamount not so much to marginalityas to a sort of centrality.Tobe "liminal,"after all, is to be between(and overlapping) two (or more) domains,while to be marginal is merely to be at the edges of one. The Poles have claimedWarsaw as "the heart of Europe." Joannis Kolettis, the first prime minister ofGreece, declared in 1844 that Greece was "in the center of Europe." Other EastEuropean and Balkan lands have made similar claims of European centrality.Clearly, much work remains to be done in explainingthe vast chasm between suchself-perceptions and the ways in which Eastern and southeastern Europe have beendiscursively described by Western Europe. Can it all (or any of it) simply beexplained awayas the product of Orientalism?No. "Orientalism"and "Balkanism"are definitely not the same thing, though they certainly are mutually illuminatingcategories. While it is Said who has made it possible for us to even consider such

37 Gyan Prakash, "Orientalism Now," Historyand Theory34 (October 1995): 200-01.38 Paschalis Kitromilides, Enlightenment,Nationalism,Orthodoxy: tudies in the Cultureand PoliticalThoughtof South-easternEurope (Aldershot, 1994), 150.39 Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institutionof ModernGreece(Stanford, Calif., 1996), 150.



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Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography 1233a discourse as "Balkanism,"Said's model alone cannot show us what it is. In theabsence of engagement with post-Saidian cultural-historical concerns, the Balkans,and their study, will, like Tintin's Syldavia, remain "remote," "inaccessible," andlargely based on fantasy.With such engagement, however, the Balkans may emergeas more central than we ever had imagined.

K. E. Fleming is an assistant professor in the departments of History andMiddle Eastern Studies and in the Program in Hellenic Studies at New YorkUniversity. She is the author of The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy andOrientalismin Ali Pasha's Greece (1999) and has written on a variety of topics,among them the Turkish reformer Ziya Gokalp, Greece and the Balkans in thelate Ottoman period, and the fall of Constantinople (1453). Most recently, sheis the author of "Athens, Constantinople, 'Istambol': Urban Paradigms andNineteenth-Century Greek National Identity," in New Perspectiveson Turkey22(Spring 2000). Fleming is currently working on a history of the Jews of Greece.


fleming. k. e., oriental ism, the balkans, and balkan historiography

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