Challenging the Balkans

By AM Sunday, December 6, 2009

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Anthony McIntyre ✒ The Balkans despite frequently capturing world headlines have long seemed a place apart. ‘In Europe but not of it’, the Balkans have, like a horror movie, both fascinated and repelled. The politics, rivalries, wars and disputes there seem endless and incomprehensible, almost as if it is part of the DNA of the people who inhabit the territory, goaded on by their religious and political affiliations. Not being relaxed with the ‘fight like cats and dogs’ explanation for the disputatious nature of the region and lacking any real familiarity with its politics, I set myself the task many years ago of developing a better understanding. The moment to take the plunge eventually arrived last year when I decided to take a book about it to Majorca. It had been on the shelf quite a while along with a range of others professing to offer contextualisation and understanding of that long troubled part of the world. The bulk of them are likely to go to the crematorium with me unread, once I pop my clogs. Fuel for the fire. Mark Mazower’s The Balkans was spared that trip. That I picked it up was fortuitous. Like a slot machine I put my hand in the Balkans section and took what came out. Brief as it was, once into it I half regretted bringing it along. Hardly a holiday read, where being slightly or not so slightly inebriated doesn’t really matter, the book was a challenge to get through in the heat of a Mediterranean sun. It required disciplined concentration. Up until the 1880s the ‘Balkan peoples’ had little currency in the discursive vogue of the times. The area where the Balkans later acquired an integrated sense of identity was referred to by many as ‘European Turkey.’ By the outbreak of World War 1 ‘the Balkans’ had become the common sense of political and geographic discourse. But it was a term that has laboured to escape the image of ‘violence, savagery, primitivism’ that is etched on the mind alongside the emblazoned names of war criminals like Slobodan Milosevic and Arkan. This negative image of ‘the Balkans’ prompted Mazower to look at the region in a fresh way without gazing through the prism of ‘the Balkans.’ His book, first published nine years ago, rose to the challenge with intellectual rigour. It comes like Dr Who’s Tardis where more information and detail is packed in than 135 pages of narrative would seem to allow. In the very first page Mazower opts to confront a myth of nationalism head-on. ‘At the end of the twentieth century, people spoke as if the Balkans had existed forever. Two hundred years earlier they had not yet come into being.’ It was not until the twentieth century that nation building took off in earnest throughout the Balkans; and then for most of it. It did little for many people there who became subject to the domination of an imperial power. The newly created Balkan states were treated as puppets by the Great Powers that created them. The rest is history and there have been problems ever since. Although, it is always more comfortable to blame it on the people living there. When hatred and violence are on the move religion is never too far from the scene of the crime. Early into the opening pages the old scourge raises its ugly head when the reader finds that ‘the Ottoman dynasty might have seen itself as the successor to the universal monarchies of Rome and Byzantium, "the shadow of God on earth".’ By way of some intellectual solace, there was the view of Eric Christiansen that the ‘Holy Wars of the Mediterranean’ were ultimately ‘a sad waste of time, money and life.’ They proved beneficial no doubt to some who waged them but not because they made anyone holier or more favoured in the eyes of their make believe god than their neighbours, who were dutifully trying to kill as many enemies of their own imaginary god as was possible to put to the sword or burn. When I first read this book the apartment where I stayed overlooked the Med Sea. While it was simply imagination there was tranquillity to the view so in contrast to the maelstrom conjured up in my mind of religious maniacs hacking each other to death in a bid to prove that the god of the hackers was a more loving god than the god of the hacked. Peaceful sorts, both gods and those who worship them. Much Western writing on religious violence in the region arbitrarily selected only the cruelty inflicted by one side. Mazower records an American diplomat writing in 1842:

No war, ancient or modern, was ever carried out with such unrelenting fury and such cruelty as the war against the Greeks by the Turks. It is a matter of astonishment that the Christian nations of Europe could have so long remained silent spectators of its atrocities.

This is in spite of the evidence that ‘for many centuries religious coexistence was undoubtedly more accepted under the Ottomans than almost anywhere in Christendom...’ By citing a contrary view, that of Edith Durham, Mazower, struck at the heart of Western bias, cutting through the cant:

When a Moslem kills a Moslem it does not count ... when a Christian kills a Moslem, it is a righteous act; when a Christian kills a Christian it is an error of judgement better not talked about; it is only when a Moslem kills a Christian that we arrive at a full blown atrocity.

Think of the Christian cranks Bush and Blair, acting on the advice of god to invade Iraq, and Durham’s wisdom all too readily appears timeless. In the process of de-Islamicisation many acts of savagery were inflicted on the area once dominated by the Ottomans. And as ever the story would not be complete if the molesting men of god failed to make an appearance and of how easily religious allegiance could turn on boy lust.

We read for example of a sixteenth century Istanbul man who vowed in the midst oif a dangerous fever that if he recovered he would give up his taste in young boys. Cured, he thought better of it, but hesitated to break his vow. Having been advised by the ulema of Istanbul that he could not wriggle out of an oath once made, he sought the advice of the rabbis of Salonica to see if they could find a loophole. (They suggested he try women.)

It would read funny were it not for the very real misery and despair that such people bring as has been made only too clear again in Ireland. Mazower makes a useful point about how nationalism comes to hegemonise political discourse. He states that because the history of the Balkans was written for the most part by the descendants of the nationalist patriots the voices of the peasantry those patriots were trying to recruit have ‘rarely made it into the archives.’ The introduction of the oral history technique and more so the world of the internet has given tomorrow’s historians an advantage over todays. Yet, nationalism like religion, is merely an opinion about what type of political unit people should organise themselves within. Nationalists resent this and, as with their counterparts in the world of religion, often claim some sacred status based on the opinion they subscribe to having been elevated to an ahistorical and eternal truth: roughly translated this status expresses itself as ‘our way or no way.’ Mazower strives in the book to reject the view of people like the former British prime minister John Major that ‘the conflict in Bosnia was the product of impersonal and inevitable forces beyond anyone’s control.’ The logic and language of Major has roots in the past. It is also strikingly similar to what has come out about Africa. A certain ‘unalterable otherness’ is ascribed to the peoples of these regions and the West washes its hands of them. Mazower favours the much less ahistorical interpretation which recognises the role of Milosevic.

On the lookout for evidence of Balkan bloodthirstiness, however, western observers have often mistaken the myths spun by nineteenth century romantic nationalists for eternal truths. Ethnic cleansing whether in the Balkans in 1912-13, in Anatolia in 1921-2, or in erstwhile Yugoslavia in 1991-9, was not then the spontaneous eruption of primeval hatreds but the deliberate use of organised violence against civilians by paramilitary squads and army units; it represented the extreme force required by nationalists to break apart a society which was otherwise capable of ignoring the mundane fractures of class and ethnicity.

A harrowing novel on the region’s wars read back in 1996 was the sole item on my list of ‘books read’ on its conflict. Mazower’s account now makes two but it has more than doubled the knowledge. The Balkans, by Mark Mazower. Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2000.