Plea for study of South Eastern Europe - Andrei Pippidi - 1998
Aus ELib.at
|  · {{{GENRE}}} · Conference Paper · Politikwissenschaft · Geschichte · Soziologie · Osteuropäische Geschichte · Ethnologie | |||||||||||||
|
Volltext
We want to thank American Diplomacy (www.americandiplomacy.org) and the autor for their kind permission to publish the following article.
A Plea for the Study of South Eastern Europe
by Andrei Pippidi
- Reintegrating European Cultures: Intellectual Rights and Responsibilities
- A workshop held on the campus of the
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, April 16-19, 1998.
It is disappointing, to say the least, to see the response of the academic institutions, both in Europe and in the United States, to what is now happening in the so-called Balkan area. Actually, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that 'Balkan' - this almost dirty word - has always been inaccurate and to explain how we are about to reach a compromise in this delicate matter, which is less a geographical than a political subject. However, more of this will be said later.
The first problem is to acknowledge the crisis of South-East European studies at the very moment when the political map of that region has suddenly changed. A civil war raged for years in that part of the world, another one is expected to break out tomorrow. One would have thought that the reasons for which countless people perished or are doomed to die might interest the scholars who are paid for studying precisely that region. Instead of the close attention South-Eastern Europe deserves, the historical heritage, the religious and intellectual back-ground or the economic complexities of those countries were pointed out, but only as arguments for the presumptions treated with reverence by journalists. Diplomats, occupying positions of considerable responsibility, are prone to learn quickly and unguardedly from the mundane wisdom of such journalists.
If we find ourselves reduced in number and in prestige when our expertise would be most needed, it's foremost for economic reasons. Governments hesitate to spend further, because no direct danger from the East is left for them. A generation of experts is now gone and their younger successors are looking or better paid jobs. In countries, like my own, where the present economic difficulties are likely to persist, there is no hope to fill the information gaps that are wide open in most of the specialized libraries. Among our Western colleagues, on whose kind invitations we still hang on, we feel like distant relative ashamed of our genteel poverty.
I suspect also two more reasons of the present failure to grasp this unique opportunity to develop our studies, instead of neglecting them. One is the philological approach which has long been favored. Far more attention has been given to the flexion of Old Slavonic verbs than to subjects of major relevance for the contemporary South-East European realities. This reluctance to let us be involved in a work less distant from current affairs was understandable until 1989: both authors and censors knew why. Outside the Communist world, people of different political persuasions either refrained from criticizing, or avoided to discuss on the basis of incomplete figures. Important contributions on South-Eastern Europe were few, while the Soviet Union alone gave rise to an enormous amount of works, some excellent, some trivial, but all of them keeping a large public acutely aware of what was going on there. There is also the difficult task of dealing with former members of the academic nomenklatura who had made themselves acceptable as representatives of their countries and who now have insinuated themselves in the new international structures where they keep smiling.
And there is a supplementary problem which, for some time already, was the cause of disputes about the range of our studies. I dare say, it's an identity crisis. It has come with the mature age: next year we shall have the eighth international Congress of South-East European Studies (the first one was in Sofia in 1966). From some quarters we hear now the suggestion that, since the future of South-Eastern Europe looks unremittingly bleak, it would be better to merge with our colleagues who study East-Central Europe. After all, nobody would contest that neighborhood relations have created a partnership of many kinds. A collaboration between the scholars working in the two fields has always been needed and it may safely rest upon the claim that there are many common features in the historical evolution of the two regions. Nevertheless, how different they look, even for a superficial spectator!
Going westwards, one finds cities everywhere, the wealth and independence of which are proudly symbolized by old crenellated walls. The land where one is coming from used to know only villages, either free, or inhabited by serfs, before the new settlers founded market-towns. Instead of the humble Byzantine churches, one discovers cathedrals and abbeys. The hammams (saunas) and the Oriental inns exercised the function of clubs and coffeehouses (with the necessary addition that coffee, in spite of Greek nationalist recriminations, is of Turkish origin). Whatever art collections and libraries existed here were of predominantly religious character and closed to visitor from outside. The idea of opening such treasures for the public benefit came first in the modern West. Are these only stylistic differences? Could it be said that they don't make more sense than the identification of noodles, Wiener Schnitzel and beer with Central Europe, not to say of the garlic which any Western tourist expects to smell as soon as he/she enters Transylvania?
No, it's not a haphazard choice of contrasts. Centuries spent in the atmosphere of urban civilization, with the tradition of municipal autonomy, have shaped the mind otherwise than the authoritarian rule of the village lord, or of the prince, or of the Sultan himself. It is now fashionable to accuse the Orthodox Church both of being, in the present circumstances, nationalist and of having been, in the recent past, subservient to the Communist regimes. The truth of such allegations can be discussed, but not flatly denied. A historian will know to explain how the long association of the Church with Imperial power - even with a Moslem emperor - has censured its initiatives and prevented the clergy from any civic commitment which would have risen the ruler's jealousy. The great revolutionary upheaval in France brought first a lasting fear of any change, and then the secularization of the intellectuals, who felt that their coveted assimilation by Western Europe was at the price of rejecting fifteen hundred years of Byzantine Christianity. Their new attitude, patronizing but contemptuous, left the Church in subjection to the state - and the worst experiences were to follow. Nowadays, the anti-Western standpoint of this Church is partly borrowed from the Communist discourse, partly inherited from the right-wing movements which, before the Second World War, opposed modernization and tried to give life to an Orthodox nationalism. Other than religious forms of identity developed in South-Eastern Europe with a delay: the delay, precisely, which I mentioned about coffeehouses, museums, and libraries. Equality of chances to get education, freedom of information and freedom of debate were never conform to the Western paradigm; thwarted as they had been already, they were imposed a rigid control by totalitarian regimes. Therefore, the stylistic differences between Central and South-Eastern Europe suggest two inter-related, but inevitably contrasting, spaces.
On the list of the principal themes drafted for the next Congress, the first one deals with this problem, under the title:"Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the historical place of the Balkans. An issue of political and spiritual geography." Three regional definitions are present in this formula and no agreement has been reached until now; on any of them. Perhaps, after Kundera, we find ourselves closer to a better understanding of what Central Europe is. Prague and Vienna have been Imperial capitals and even now, when the countries over which they are towering were much reduced in size, they still keep something of their old grandeur. Does this Central European space include Poland? Traditionally, yes, but only within borders which are no longer in existence: it means the fifteenth-century kingdom, leaving aside the much bigger grand-duchy of Lithuania. On the map, it coincides roughly with the extension of Gothic architecture (Baroque and neo-Classical were enthusiastically adopted in Eastern Ukraine and Russia). As about Slovakia, its present isolation on economic and political grounds cannot be a reason for aggregating it to Eastern Europe. Like in the case of Slovenia and Croatia, a long historical association with Hungary, first, then to the Habsburg Empire worked as a source of undeniable arguments for integrating Slovakia with Central Europe
The same reasons have been frequently brought in to argue that Transylvania belongs to Central Europe. By now, it should be sufficiently clear that the Romanian majority of the population in that region forms a strong element of unity with the other parts of Romania. Without needlessly overstating the contribution of the Romanians to the civilization of Transylvania, it is obvious we cannot privilege the Hungarians, who have already absorbed the Szeklers into their mass, or the Saxons, whose culture would entitle them to consider themselves as Central Europeans. We are witnesses today, much against our will, to a massive emigration to Germany that has virtually deserted the Saxonvillages. The Hungarian minority is viewing with restraint and resentment the progress of cultural integration carried out mainly through the educational system. However, it would be a gross exaggeration to say that this is really detrimental to the maintaining of Hungarian ethnic identity. A more realistic assumption is that Transylvania, as a multi-cultural space, represents for Romania the window flung open to Central Europe. As such, it has, during past centuries, furnished the Romanian culture with several invaluable contributions. Among them, we can take into account a great, perhaps excessive sensitivity to the Latin origins, an efficient determination to build the modern nation-state, an anti-Oriental prejudice which counterbalanced other influences, to culminate with these last gifts of the Transylvanian Romanians to their unified country: a sense of the Rechtsstaat, a tradition of bourgeois values and an experience of how civil society works.
Anyway, the confrontation between Central and Eastern Europe has left room for a third possible compartment. Its name and configuration have changed through the last two centuries. The creation, recreation, enlargement and even diminution of this cluster of societies, which we imagine as a symbolic community, have been described more than once, the last time by Maria Todorova. No division of such sort is completely innocent. Behind each of the patterns designed by scholars there were various political motivations.
When the Balkanhalbinsel label emerged at the time of the Napoleonic wars, the German geographer August Zeune did not guess that he had invented a stereotype. For the following decades, the French and British authors used to call this region 'la Turquie d'Europe,’ or ’European Turkey,’ none of them anticipating that the inhabitants of the Peninsula were soon to break the bond of a despotic tutelage. On the eve of the Berlin Congress, a new term was stamped, 'Südost Europa', also of German origin, if we can credit with finding it the traveler and diplomat Freiherr von Hahn. By the end of the century, 'South-Eastern Europe' was still alternating with 'the Balkans' and 'the Near East' as names for a practically identical map. In 1898, William Miller protested: 'It is no exaggeration to say that many regions of Africa are more familiar to the cultured Englishman or German than the lands which lie beyond the Adriatic.' And the British historian added: 'Yet to the politician and the historical student to the traveler and the artist, to the man of business and the man of letters, few countries should prove so interesting as these.’ [1] The same statement could be made today.
When Miller was writing, the scholars and policymakers who adopted 'South-Eastern Europe' were either Austrians, or Liberal Germans. For the Berlin politicians, whose program carried in it the development of the Baghdad Railway, the term en vogue was 'Mitteleuropa,' consistent with their view of an intermediary space between the two rival Empires, Germany and Russia. The Russian expansionist designs on the Straits were too well known and Germany hoped that it might assume a control position in the Ottoman Empire as well as in the satellite Balkan states, or in the restored kingdom of Poland. It was the Austrians, in fact, who cultivated the notion of 'Südost Europa' since the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Kallay's policy, which is, I'm afraid, the first responsible for the recent disaster, had been to create a Bosnian (Moslem) ethnic identity as a shield against Slavdom, in a country where the major fault lines of conflict had been social.[2] Any arrangement which would have served to instore the Habsburg hegemony over the Balkan states amounted to open a corridor towards the South across the Peninsula: the old dream of Prince Eugene realized by a crazy capitalist. When the Dual Monarchy asked to share the spoils, its diplomacy fancied the idea of a partition of Romania and even contemplated the prospect of an extensive oil exploitation in Mesopotamia. [3]
A glimpse at the journals which were then published for the German academic and economic circles will show that, before the First World War, conceptual differences were already consistent. 'Orientalism' was well represented, not only in France (where the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales existed since the Revolution), but in Germany (with the venerable Deutsche morgenländische Gesellschaft) and in Austria ('die Kunde des Morgenlandes' was an as wide-ranging and thoroughly explored field as any scholar could wish). The interest in oil and railways was also a driving force. In Vienna there was an active Orientverein supported by Jewish businessmen in Galatzi and by Romanian landlords in Czernowitz. In Berlin, during the war years, similar speculations about the future spheres of influence could be found in the monthly Balkan-Revue, the title of which stated quite plainly: Monatschrift für die wirtschaftlichen Interesse der südosteuropäischen Länder.
The nexus between politics and scholarship cannot be concealed: the Viennese Institute for the study of South-Eastern Europe, the first one the world, appeared as a result of the 1908 Bosnian crisis. [4]
After Trianon, Austria clung to its definition as a Danubian state. Under this heading, it draws together not only Hungary, the traditional partner, but Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, linked to each other by the great trade artery of Eastern Europe which is flowing through their territory.
In spite of the imperialist undertones of the label Südost Europa, much valuable work was accomplished on Balkan history and philology. But, on the other hand, the same name of 'South-Eastern Europe' gave a new lease of life to a contribution of still greater importance, theoretical and practical, which was coming from the rival camp. This can fairly be said about the Institute founded in Bucharest in 1913,thanks chiefly to the initiative and indefatigable energy of the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga. But Iorga, whose lead was followed by two younger scholars, the geologist and geographer G. M. Murgoci and V. Pârvan, an outstanding archaeologist, had a political activity of particular significance. As an irredentist, sympathizing with Serbian nationalism, he refused the idea of an alliance with Austria-Hungary, on the grounds that the Habsburg Monarchy oppressed the Romanian population of Transylvania and Bukovina. As a partisan of social reforms, he felt close to the agrarian democracies of Serbia and Bulgaria. When the Balkan wars were over, Iorga criticized the dangerous doctrine of imperialism and, using his own contacts with political life, made himself the advocate of Balkan solidarity. He has justly been regarded as a pioneer of South-East European studies. [5]
The scope of South-Eastern Europe, as it was then understood, depended on the peaceful solution of international disagreements. The 1913 Peace of Bucharest didn't last and, after the First World War, the Petite Entente and the Balkan Pact provided for a while the focus around which the agreements of mutual defense grouped themselves. All countries involved in those diplomatic arrangements were related by a certain similarity in their patterns of culture and in their political behavior, as a result of historical experience. Of course, the differences between Greece and Turkey, on one side, and the other Balkan countries, on the other side, were accentuated after 1948 by the fact that the second group (Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania) became Communist, the last two of them lying within the new Soviet sphere of influence.
The question is now to what extent the economic interests will help the traditional solidarity of this historical and geographical entity to prevail over nationalist particularisms. It is meaningful that the major challenges are coming from the successor states born from the disintegration of Yugoslavia and from Albania, where national consciousness developed the latest and where the state territory does not yet coincide with the extension of the Albanian population. But this situation would need a more detailed consideration. What is left for us to appreciate is how solid the common background in the history, politics, and economics of the area might prove in the future, if there is still to be a natural unit as it has been in the past.
Notes
1. William Miller, Travels and Politics in the Near East, London, 1898 (reprint New York, 1971), pp. XIII-XIV.
2. Charles Diehl, En Méditerranée, Paris, l925, pp.86-l27 (chapter En Bosnie-Herzégovine). See also Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, Cornell University Press,1988.
3. Frank G. Weber, Eagles on the Crescent. Germany, Austria and the Diplomacy of the Turkish Alliance,1914-1918, Cornell University Press, 1970.
4. Walter Leitsch, Manfred Stoy, Der Seminar für ost-europäische Gescnichte der Universität Wien, Vienna, l983. Another Institute, the one für Balkankunde, formerly in Sarajevo, was directed by Carl Patsch, who brought it to Vienna in 1922.
5. Virgil Cândea, Nicolas Iorga, historien de l'Europe du Sud-Est, in D. Z. Pippidi (ed.) Nicolas Iorga, l'homme et l'oeuvre , Bucarest 1971, pp.157-249; M. Berza, Nicolae Iorga et les traditions culturelles du Sud-Est européen, Cahiers d'histoire mondiale, XIII, 3, 1971, pp.390-416; Domenico Caccamo, Una regione storica: i Balcani, in D.Caccamo,Gaetano Platania, Il Sud-Est europeo tra passato e presente, Cosenza, 1993, pp.17-20
| |
|
[ Autoren ] · [ Werke ] · [ Literatur ] · [ Land ] · [ Themenkreis ] · [ Uni-Fachgebiet ] · [ Rezension ] · [ Tools ] · [ Schlagwort ] · [ Community ] |
