In this paper we examine the views of ordinary people in Hungary and Romania about developmental trajectories and developmental hierarchies. Our work extends research on perception of global ...hierarchies as we include the views of ordinary people in the countries of Hungary and Romania. In addition, our research makes a unique contribution to the development and developmental hierarchy literature by examining, for the first time, how individuals define development. Although the main focus of this paper is the developmental views of Hungarians and Romanians, at times we add to our discussion results from a survey in Bulgaria and another from Albania. In this paper we conclude that developmental models are widespread among ordinary people in Hungary and Romania; we also find that the South-East European region does show some specificities in terms of the over- and under-positioning of certain countries relative to the dominant international rating system. China and, to a lesser degree, Russia were over-positioned by respondents relative to the developmental index scores of those countries. Within the region, unlike Bulgarians and Albanians, who severely underrated themselves, Hungarian and Romanian respondents put themselves in a middle position on the developmental scale. Concerning developmental items with some differences between the two countries, our data show that the economy is the most important development criterion in the minds of Hungarians and Romanians, followed by democracy, science and technology, and education.
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In this article, we explore various forms of travel writing, media reporting, diplomatic record, policy-making, truth claims and expert accounts in which different narrative perspectives on the ...Balkan wars, both old (1912-1913) and new (1991-1999), have been most evident. We argue that the ways in which these perspectives are rooted in different temporalities and historicisations and have resulted in the construction of commonplace and time-worn representations. In practical terms, we take issue with several patterns of narratives that have led to the sensationalism of media industry and the essentialisation of collective memory. Taken together as a common feature of contemporary policy and analysis in the dominant international opinion, politics and scholarship, these narrative patterns show that historical knowledge is conveyed in ways that make present and represent the accounts of another past, and the ways in which beliefs collectively held by actors in international society are constructed as media events and public hegemonic representations. The aim is to show how certain moments of rupture are historicised, and subsequently used and misused to construct an anachronistic representation of Southeast Europe.
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This paper explores the extent to which Eastern Europe has been historically subject to a process of 'othering' in the Western literary imagination; and how far the Western practice of 'Balkanism' ...can be considered congruous with the wider practice of 'Orientalism' throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first. Drawing on theoretical work by Vesna Goldsworthy and Maria Todorova, it shows that in both fiction and literary scholarship Western writers have been unable fully to conceptualise Eastern Europe, with the result that their fictional portrayals are evasive and indistinct and their literary analysis unable to define a clear object. Malcolm Bradbury's novel Rates of Exchange (1983), Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995) and Jim Crace's Six (2003) are explored alongside Edward Said's Beginnings and Fredric Jameson's Political Unconscious to show that this under-conceptualisation has continued to dominate literary representations of Eastern Europe during the late- and post-Cold War periods, thereby subjecting Said and Jameson to a rigorous critique of their own methods with regard to the Western practice of 'Balkanism' of which they are uncritical.
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The foreclosure of the Balkans' postcoloniality is a fragment of a much larger strategic manoeuvring inside a European historiography ruled by the national paradigm aimed at disowning colonial ...history. Because the European Union is a new political entity without a previous history, and because it has formally denounced colonialism and anti-Semitism, there is a creeping assumption that it somehow deserves a clean slate and the right to shift the ownership of its colonial histories to its former colonial subjects. As an effort to 'de-provincialize' Europe from the position of the Balkans' marginal history, Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova, the leading scholar in the critical studies of Balkanism, insists on the incommensurability between Orientalism and Balkanism on the grounds that the Balkans, unlike the Orient, 'lacks colonial predicament'. The history of Bulgarian Zionist settlers in Palestine challenges Todorova's claim. Bulgarian Zionists were agents of a double colonization, in Bulgaria as subjects of internal colonization, and in Palestine as colonizers.
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In this article, we explore the ways in which from the beginning to the end of twentieth century different temporalities and historicizations stemming from different narrative perspectives on the ...Balkan wars have constructed different commonplace, timeworn and enduring representations. In practical terms, we take issue with several patterns of narratives, such as the sensationalism of media industry, the essentialization of collective memory, the securitization of imaginary threats and the pacifist activism of normative transformations. It is our contention to argue that they historicize certain moments of rupture, which are subsequently used and misused to construct an anachronistic representation of Southeast Europe that may conceal hidden interests. Contrastingly, an alternative narrative that emphasizes a “history from below” as an apperception of the temporality of being can offer a revisionist approach that may show the futility of ahistorical accounts.
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Byzantinism, a not sufficiently explored field, is still today a fundament of the pejorative explanation of the terms “Balkanization” and “Balkanism”. Byzantinism, the Hellenic one, actually ...represents the whole idea for the Balkans; the idea of how, due to the hegemonization of an ethnic identity, an empire that persisted for about a millennium could collapse. The idea of this text is to show the connection between Byzantinism and Balkanism and by using synthesis and comparative analysis to prove the thesis that: The hegemonization of the Byzantine-Greek identity in the past contributed to the birth of today's Balkan nationalism – Balkanism. In this text, the author analyses the appearance of Byzantium as a par excellence addition to ancient Hellenism, especially its conversion into hegemonic Hellenism, which was intended to submerge and assimilate all the other non-Greek identities in Byzantium. In fact, the author will prove that Byzantinism, which is a product of Hellenism, is the source of Balkanism, which itself leads to the idea that the fundament of today's Balkan nationalism, that is, Balkanism, is nothing but the hegemonic Hellenism during the Byzantine Empire
The article presents the perceptions of global and internal developmental hierarchies in Romania. According to our empirical results, the Western-centred developmental paradigm has deeply penetrated ...the worldviews of ordinary people in Romania. As a consequence, national self-perceptions, respectively, constructions of internal regional and ethnic differences in Romania, are powerfully shaped by the idea of East–West developmental hierarchies. Melegh introduced the concept of an “East–West slope” to denote a discursive construction used since the eighteenth century. This construction suggests that there is a gradual decline of development (or “civilization”) as one moves from the West (North West) toward the East (South East). The author argues that this framework not only defines how Romanians position themselves in the global developmental hierarchy but also how they define their internal (regional and ethnic) hierarchies. The article also discusses Todorova’s concept of Balkanism. This interpretive framework not only defines the perceptions of external observers but (following a process of cultural penetration) may also shape the self-perceptions of those involved. This article argues that Romanians have succeeded in avoiding—at least partially—the most severe consequence of the “Balkanizing gaze,” which is a constant sense of inferiority. It is also important, however, that this Balkanizing gaze can be reproduced at a national/local level and (in interrelation with other types of developmental discourses) can organize internal hierarchies.
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Having left the Balkans emotionally repressed when she was 20, Abramović returned there as middle-aged woman at the turn of the century, to review her birthplace on the occasion of the war in ...Yugoslavia. In the Balkan Baroque (1997) she performs a deep political gesture by investing a surrealistic tableau vivant with traditional songs. In a completely different ambiance, Balkan Erotic Epic (2005) plays with the boundaries of pornography by extending the path of folklore to imply an ethnography course. In both cases, traditional laments and prayers between Christianity and Paganism are read as apotropaic against the cruelty of nature or the brutality of humans. However, by using the energy of the performance, which consecutively accumulate and then emits physical violence (as symbol, as object of consciousness or as body art), the folkloric loans are staged as cultural acquirements which are ideologically disguised in an archetypal-metaphysical body, in order to justify (or perhaps to submit?) another violence, latent and inherent. In the Abramović’s work the folklore is synonymous with the Balkan "physical vitality", taking place in the same stereotypic denominator with anarchy, corruption and the easy crime, that the Balkans recall associatively in Western consciousness.Insofar as this works are linked with a certain diachronic conflict, Abramović's comment touches eventually the very status of this denominator.
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