Authors

Discussion

The Balkans, as a regional construct, have stood the test of time due to their cultural and political fluidity, emerging and disappearing from European historiography and political discourse.In cases where the geopolitical landscape of the region is of strategic importance to the West, mention and examination of the region is made through the lens of Western conceptions. It is during these cases when the West fixates on the ethnic violence that plagued the region marking its perspective of the region as backward, primitive, and uncivilized. However, when the region does not prove of interest to the West, the region is little more than a footnote in European affairs as European geopolitical discourse once again turns its attention to the affairs of Western Europe. 

Since the turn of the century commonly known as Fin de Siècle, the Balkans have been depicted as the “tinderbox of Europe”; the region where the combination of ethnicity and nationalism, also referred to as ethno-nationalism, culminated in the outbreak of the First World War and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. It was also in the region where the Revolutions of 1989 were the most violent, most notably with the Romanian Revolution of 1989 and the Albanian revolution of 1992. The “1989 moment”, which saw the collapse of communism, led to decisive breaks with the past in many “Eastern European” states such as Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. That did not happen in the Balkans. Instead, 1989 marked the descent into disintegration, war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. The economic and political systems that emerged in these nation-states following the 1990s has led the West to view the region as corrupt, clientelistic, and hardly modern.

This paper will examine the evolving or in this case sustaining geopolitical discourses of the Balkans as outlined in post 1989 historical narratives of the territory. The Balkans (commonly known as Southeastern Europe), a region geographically inextricable from Europe, has been culturally constructed as “the other”. While no longer a powder keg in the 21^st century, the region is still a crisis zone. It is this crisis zone to which Maria Todorova has shaped her provocative claim that the “specter of the Balkans” is “haunting” and continues to haunt Western culture. Todorova’s argument highlights the underlining premise that scholars of European history have claimed – eruptions of ethnic conflict in the 21^stcentury stem from the Balkans and continue to shape concurrent, ongoing political and historical discourses. It is the nature of this crisis zone that has pushed historians to “imagine” and “reimagine” the collective mental map of the Balkans.