EU, Europe Unfinished

Mediating Europe and the Balkans in a Time of Crisis

Zlatan Krajina, Nebojša Blanuša

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783489800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is the meaning of the Balkans in the early 21 st century? Former Yugoslav countries seek a self-flattering alliance with ‘the West’ via EU membership, while the Union’s citizens increasingly declare to be ‘Eurosceptic’. At the same time, economic turmoil in countries like Greece confronts massive incoming waves of refugees, for whom Europe’s south-eastern borders are the nearest shelter. In this time of crisis, the Balkans return on the agenda as a parable of Europe’s haunting questions about its future. EU, Europe Unfinished brings together established and emerging media and cultural scholars to explore colliding visions of space and identity within a declining continent. Whereas Europe imagines the Balkans to be the source of its nearest trouble, the region envisions Europe as a refuge from ongoing post-socialist transition. The book adopts a variety of critical perspectives – from media and policy analysis to anthropology, art history and autobiography – to investigate where Europe is headed with the Balkans in its skein, 25 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Part I

Introduction

Why the Balkans, Why Now, Who Cares?

Zlatan Krajina

This book explores what it means for the Balkans to belong in Europe, and for Europe to find a home in the Balkans, 25 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain. At a moment of a particular political and economic crisis in Europe, the Balkans return to global screens to haunt Western Europe, and to remind it of its own incompleteness as the self-perceived source and centre of the modern world. Some time ago, in the 19th century, the Balkans were known only to a few Western European travellers who side-tracked from their trips to the Orient, discovering a scenic, “open-air Volksmueum of Europe” that conserves Europe’s pre-Enlightenment ways of life1. In the early 20th century, following regional wars, the Balkans were made into an image of violent nationalist self-determination, where nationalism, imported from Western Europe, was found in a displaced, and extreme, form. This image was rehabilitated in the early 1990s, when postmodern Europe found itself pulled back, travelling back in time, to once again witness medieval barbarism as socialist Yugoslavia disintegrated. At the same time, the concept of the Balkans retained its plural definition (even linguistically), encompassing the Greek classicist heritage (resourced, inter alia, by Germany during the Nazi regime for an image of pure Europe), the former Yugoslav non-aligned orientation (“socialism with a human face”) and the former communist countries where the mountain carrying the region’s name is located. Even though the European Union (EU) has sought to rename the Balkans as the “Western Balkans” and “South-eastern Europe”, certain common ways of perceiving the Balkans negatively have continued to inform dominant definitions of critical European developments, currently staged in the continent’s South-eastern peninsula.

Firstly, the “Western Balkan Route” (straddling parts of Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary or Croatia, Slovenia and Austria) has appeared as the most frequent path taken by nearly a million refugees on their journey from countries like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Eritrea, to Germany and Nordic countries during 2015. In what has been unfolding as the largest exodus since the Second World War, media reports on refugees’ troglodyte existence and disputes over who should accept refugees have reactivated the notion of the “Balkan powder keg”. Secondly, the Greek Balkans have generated suspicion about the future of the EU’s monetary union, the Eurozone, after Greece’s de facto bankruptcy in July 2015. The failure of its economic system, linked to Balkan laziness and trickery, also showed leading European institutions to be torn between profitable lending and political solidarity. Thirdly, the Balkans have been constructed as a space of conditional EU enlargement for those in former Yugoslavia who forever seek to become recognised as part of what Ivaylo Ditchev calls “the heavens of modernity, currently called ‘Europe’”2. And while we acknowledge the first two developments (the refugee and economic crises), which have dominated headlines in the global media during the completion of the book, in this collection we focus on the third one, which we argue provides a crucial background against which the former two processes are to be usefully observed in further studies. It is precisely the occasionally visible Balkans which provide a lens onto the transformations of Europe as a multiple, self-reflexive and contradictory space, defined relationally and stratified geographically.

Having adopted the continent’s name, the EU has also brought those central characteristics of Europe into sharp relief. As the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the EU consolidated post-war cooperation in Western Europe, but simultaneously built, dissolved and re-built a series of boundaries, both formal and informal, to its nearest East. The EU is a transnational, voluntary, political and economic association, a polity of 500 million people, the world’s seventh largest territory, a leader in the world economy, a legislative system, a confederation and, not least, a laboratory: in a word, a project “unprecedented” in human history3. The EU’s trajectory has been one of expansion, both in territory and in form: starting in 1952 as a peace-building economic alliance between former Second World War enemies (namely West Germany and France), as well as Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy, it evolved into the European Community (from 1957) and then into a Union (from 1993), encompassing also the UK, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Finland and Sweden. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the EU admitted twelve former Soviet and “Central and Eastern European” (CEE) countries between 2004 and 2007: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus, Malta, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. Croatia became an EU member in 2013 after the longest accession process, while negotiations with other former Yugoslav countries (Montenegro and Serbia) began in 2012 and 2014, respectively. Macedonia, Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina have also applied for membership, while Kosovo awaits the start of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement4. Yet key motifs behind EU enlargement (sustaining peace and expanding the market) have come to be clouded by an unprecedented sense of uncertainty, which seems to be here to stay.

The professed EU identity – a commitment to democracy and a market economy – has been refracted through a specific crisis which has affected both of Europe’s key forms of social organisation: multiculturalism and the welfare state. The former, specifically modelled as a coexistence of difference rather than assimilation, including free transnational movement, has been openly proclaimed “dead” by German, British and Hungarian political leaders. The latter, which began to decline sharply in the 1970s with the “neoliberal revolution”5, is currently being demolished during an epidemic of austerity following the global “credit crunch”. In that context, Europe considers Greece as inept for global business, former Yugoslavia as insufficiently competitive and “economic” Islamic refugees as covert social welfare scroungers – even though the killing of Europe’s key offspring, the welfare state, contradicts the predominant argument for keeping the migrants out6. In this contradictory but paired promotion of capital mobility and ethnic conservatism7, old issues, concerning the imaginary locations of “east” and “west”, re-emerge in new guises. This ongoing debate has brought back a topography of ancient and modernist pedigrees, such as locating “barbarians” and assessing the East’s “development” through the West’s criteria of “complexity” and “civility”. Barriers were unenthusiastically and only gradually removed for workers from countries like Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia, while the gates for nearly a million people floating or hiking into EU’s inner borderless cosmos (the “Schengen” zone) from Europe’s war-torn periphery are closing down entirely. Lights glimmering from remote Greek islands, as spotted from North African shores during clear nights, signal only leftovers of a Europe that once was. Reaching their first stop, refugees themselves encounter a humanitarian trauma caused by Greece’s financial collapse, while, progressing further into the continent, in some places more than others, they confront state-authorised tear gas and water cannons, as well as civic first aid and improvised friendly greetings.

To make sense of this disturbing moment, one may reach for historical reasoning. The 1683 Battle of Vienna, the 1848 revolutions, the 1914 Great War, the antifascist movement, the 1989 Velvet Revolution and the wars of the 1990s form a narrative in which the Balkans “again” provi...