International representations of Balkan wars: a socio-anthropological approach in international relations perspective

Earlier versions of this article were presented at a series of international conferences: The Balkan Wars 1912–1913: a conference to mark the 100th anniversary, organized by the Faculty of History, University of Oxford (UK), 17–18 October 2012; From Balkan Wars to Balkan peace project: the EU integration, organized by the Center for Strategic Research, Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Tirana (Albania), 16 May 2012; The Balkan Wars 1912–1913: an international academic conference, organized by the Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung, Regensburg (Germany), in Tirana (Albania) 10–11 June 2013. We have benefitted greatly from the comments, encouragements, discussions and presentations of many participants, as well as from numerous friends and colleagues who have read parts of this paper at various stages and have helped to improve our argument: Nicholas Onuf, Sabrina Ramet, Mark Almond, Robert Evans, Tom Buchanan, James Pettifer, Maria Todorova, Bernd Fischer, Conrad Clewing, Leen d’Haenens, Thomas Lindemann, Chris Wright. We are also very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and recommendations.

Abstract

This article introduces the socio-anthropological concept of international representations to examine the relationship between a civilizational rhetoric, the West European and the international politics of otherization and containment of Southeast Europe, and an essentialist and timeless bias in international relations theory, including both radical and constructivist trends. We first explore the different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century. Their subsequent problematization is aimed at challenging the way they have constructed commonplace and time-worn representations, which international society shares with different consequences in international affairs. This is a limited conception since international representations as a socio-anthropological concept are always socially, culturally and politically constructed, contested and negotiated. They do not neutrally refer to a reality in the world; they create a reality of their own. Moreover, this limited conception ignores the fact that how, by whom and in whose interest international representations are constructed is itself a form of power in international relations. Therefore, the way international representations are constructed can be problematized as an example of political and ideological projects that operate in the West as well as in the Southeast European countries that are the object of Western foreign policy.

Notes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at a series of international conferences: The Balkan Wars 1912–1913: a conference to mark the 100th anniversary, organized by the Faculty of History, University of Oxford (UK), 17–18 October 2012; From Balkan Wars to Balkan peace project: the EU integration, organized by the Center for Strategic Research, Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Tirana (Albania), 16 May 2012; The Balkan Wars 1912–1913: an international academic conference, organized by the Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung, Regensburg (Germany), in Tirana (Albania) 10–11 June 2013. We have benefitted greatly from the comments, encouragements, discussions and presentations of many participants, as well as from numerous friends and colleagues who have read parts of this paper at various stages and have helped to improve our argument: Nicholas Onuf, Sabrina Ramet, Mark Almond, Robert Evans, Tom Buchanan, James Pettifer, Maria Todorova, Bernd Fischer, Conrad Clewing, Leen d’Haenens, Thomas Lindemann, Chris Wright. We are also very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and recommendations.

¹ While arguing for considering Southeast Europe normally as an integral part of European history and politics, we also use “Southeast Europe” as a term much more appropriate than “the Balkans”. It implicitly acknowledges the fact that Southeast Europe is a part of Europe, and correspondingly that the problems which have arisen are European and that solutions to these problems must be European.

² For an illustrative substantiation of this argument, see Doja (2000).

³ In August 1913, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace created an International Commission of Inquiry to collect evidence for ‘the causes and conduct of the Balkan wars’ (Carnegie Endowment 1914). In the 1990s, a reprint of the 1913 Inquiry with a gratuitous caption on ‘The Other Balkan Wars’ (Carnegie Endowment 1993) and with a substantial introduction to ‘The Balkan Crises 1913 and 1993’ (Kennan 1993) left no room for doubt that conflict inherited from a distant tribal past prevailed in the same Balkan world. Later, a sequel on ‘Unfinished Peace’ tried to show the endurance of the pattern (Carnegie Endowment 1996). In a simple Google books search, just a single passage—‘Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred … such were the means used by the Serbo-Montenegrin soldiery, with a view to the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians’ (Carnegie Endowment 1914, 151)—is reproduced, sometimes verbatim in extenso, though more often truncated, in no fewer than 70 books and many thousands of press and journal articles, policy reports and other documents dealing with the wars of the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. See <https://www.google.com/search?q=Carnegie+1914+homes+ashes&btnG=Chercher+des+livres&tbm=bks&tbo=1&hl=fr&gws_rd=ssl#newwindow=1&hl=fr&tbm=bks&q=houses+and+whole+villages+reduced+to+ashes%2C+unarmed+and+innocent+populations+massacred+with+a+view+to+the+entire+transformation+of+the+ethnic+character> (Last accessed 11 November 2015).

⁴ The Oxford conference in October 2012 stressed, with few exceptions, the supposed neutrality of Britain and Western Europe before the outbreak of the Great War (Pettifer and Buchanan 2015); the Tirana conference in June 2013, which was sponsored by the Regensburg Institute, showed ethnic atrocities perpetrated by Serbian armies against non-belligerent Albanians, while the Tirana conference in May 2012, sponsored by the Turkish Foreign Ministry, saw the insinuation of a supposed Albanian allegiance to Ottomanism. Other cases in point are the massive proceedings of a commemorative conference held in the US with the sponsorship of Turkish agencies, in which voice was frequently given to current Turkish views of Neo-Ottomanism (Yavuz and Blumi 2013), or a special issue of the Turkish Foreign Ministry Journal of International Affairs that was aimed at “overcoming prejudices, building bridges and constructing a common future” between Turkey and the Balkans (special issue, Perceptions vol. 18, no. 2 [2013]).

⁵ Lenard J. Cohen (1992) ‘…And a mad, mad war’, Washington Post, 15 December, 23.

⁶ P. Beaumont and N. Wood (2001) ‘Fragile Peace Shatters as Balkan Hatred Overflows’, The Observer, 11 March.

⁷ I. Traynor (1990) ‘Ghosts of Ethnic Feuding Revive in the Balkans’, The Guardian, 26 February, 7 .

⁸ The term “securitism” is formed with a suffix originally derived from Ancient Greek, reaching English through Latin via French. The same applies to other “isms”, such as sensationalism, essentialism or pacifism, as well as Orientalism or Balkanism. According to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Grand Robert Dictionary of French, the suffix is often used to define an opinion system, an axiological tendency or a positive attitude towards a specific practice, behaviour, action, state, condition or social norm that a certain class or group of persons aims to promote, as a result of a distinctive principle, doctrine or ideology, typically a political ideology. Even though qualifying determinations may only be informed by popular opinion regarding the specific ideology, the suffix often indicates a pattern of qualification for the action or process or result indicated by the root word, such as in religionism, capitalism, nationalism, feminism, racism, sexism, humanrightsism and many others.

⁹ The overstated catchphrase credited to Winston Churchill is taken from a Scottish short-story writer and humourist: ‘the people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally’. Saki, pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), “The Jesting of Arlington Stringham”, Chronicles of Clovis, 1911 (Quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations).

¹⁰ “The Balkans, Europe and Reconciliation”, Speech by EU Commissioner Olli Rehn to students at Sarajevo University on 11 July 2005, http://www.westernbalkans.info/htmls/save_pdf2.php?id=779.

¹¹ For an illustrative case, see Doja (2000).