The Mytho-Logics of Othering and Containment: Culture, Politics and Theory in International Relations

ABSTRACT

In this article, we adopt a socio-anthropological approach to understand how hegemonic international representations are constructed in the politics and theory of international relations, specifically how Southeast Europe is perceived in West European imagination. We focus on various forms of travel writing, media reporting, diplomatic record, policy making, truth claims and expert accounts related to different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars, both old (1912–1913) and new (1991–1999). We show how these perspectives are rooted in different temporalities and historicizations, and how they contribute to international representations that affect international politics, particularly in relation to perpetuating othering and containment of Southeast Europe. We demonstrate through a detailed analysis and problematization how these international representations are culturally and politically constructed. They do not neutrally refer to a reality in the world; they create a reality of their own. As such, how international representations are constructed is itself a form of power and hegemony in both the practice and the theory of international relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Balkan wars
• Yugoslav wars
• collective representations
• Balkanism
• discourse

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 From a variety of viewpoints, many have criticized the sharply bounded and overly neat and tidy picture suggested in the dominant concept of culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). However, Geertz's work still remains both foundational to and in critical counterpoint with that vast interdisciplinary spectrum of scholarship known today as cultural studies (Ortner 1999). In particular, considering the continuing implications of the expanded anthropological perspective of culture in the contemporary context may become another significant instance in which the theoretical understanding of the world can be made to progress, along the overarching revival of the kind of vigorous theoretical debate toward causal explanations that tended to disappear from anthropology in the 1980s onwards.

2 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sent an International Commission of Inquiry to Southeast Europe in August 1913 with the explicit objective to investigate allegations and collect evidence for “the causes and conduct of Balkan wars” (Carnegie Endowment 1914). In 1990s, a reprint of the 1913 inquiry with a gratuitous caption on “Other Balkan Wars” (Carnegie Endowment 1993) and with a substantial introduction to “Balkan Crises 1913/1993” (Kennan 1993) left no room for doubt that conflict inherited from a distant tribal past prevailed in the same Balkan world. Again a sequel on “Unfinished Peace” tried to show the endurance of the pattern (Carnegie Endowment 1996).

3 The debate followed in Anthropological Theory 4 (4): 545–581.

4 If one insists on certain facts, for instance, if Peter Handke is “just a good writer,” if the protests are just feelings of some Bosnians and Albanians, or if there are also political and opportunistic attitudes of one or another former Nobel laureate in the past, this means the same moral relativism and even a certain amorality. Bosnian and Albanian protests can be deemed prejudiced and therefore irrelevant, while a deliberate diversion of public attention to relativize and minimize the compromising scandals, in which the Nobel Academy was itself entangled, could be backed by an even more scandalous award to Peter Handke, an author who promotes war crimes and genocide in former Yugoslavia. For more details on this issue, see Doja (2019c).

5 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” (see “The Jesting of Arlington Stringham” in Chronicles of Clovis [1911] by Saki, alias Hector Hugh Munro; cited from Oxford Dictionary of Quotations [2014], edited by Elizabeth Knowles, 8th ed., 7.7). It echoes with the English proverb “when Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war” (see The Rival Queens or the Death of Alexander the Great [1677] by Nathaniel Lee, act4, sc. 2; cited from Oxford Dictionary of Quotations [2014], edited by Elizabeth Knowles, 8th ed., 12.56).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Albert Doja

Albert Doja is currently Professor at the University of Lille, France, and an ordinary member of the National Academy of Sciences, Albania, holding the first Chair of anthropology. He is on the editorial board of international academic journals and he has so far published a couple of books and many original articles in international peer-reviewed and indexed journals. Special interests include politics of knowledge, power and ideology; political anthropology of symbolism and religion; intercultural communication, interethnic relations and international migrations; cultural heritage and social transformations; social moralities and intellectual productions in the context of global religious pluralism and diversity; international politics of hegemonic representations; comparative politics of identity transformations; instrumental politics of civic ideas and ethnic motivations; comparative politics of European identity and European integration; identity structures, discourses, practices, and processes; political technologies of the self, personhood, gender construction, kinship organization, and reproduction activism; anthropology of politics and history; political-anthropological theory, structural analysis, post-structuralism and neo-structuralism (https://pro.univ-lille.fr/en/albert-doja/).

Enika Abazi

Enika Abazi is Professor of International Relations, and Director of the Peace Research Institute, Paris. She has been Director of the Center for Balkan Studies, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, and Deputy Rector at the European University of Tirana. She has participated in several symposia and international conferences and has published many book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed and annotated academic journals (http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2482-5691). Her research interests include exploring the influence of the past on current international policies and interventions, the role of political elites, ideologies and religions in the mobilization of conflict, and the normative context of peace building. Another area of her research interests is the theoretical and analytical framework of the dynamics of European integration and enlargement towards the Western Balkans and the understanding of the transformational processes of ethnic and religious motivations under the normative pressure of civic ideas.