Corrigendum

This article refers to:

“Are you Hungarian or Romanian?” On the Study of National and Ethnic Identity in Central and Eastern Europe

It has come to the attention of the editor that the article “Are You Hungarian or Romanian? On the Study of National and Ethnic Identity in Central and Eastern Europe,” by Alina Curticapean published in Nationalities Papers, Vol. 35, No. 3 (July 2007), pp. 411–427 reproduced parts of the following articles and books without due references. Ms. Curticapean has apologized to the authors. As a correction, Nationalities Papers is publishing the affected sentences in the article with excerpts from the original sources marked in italics.

Patrick Hyder Patterson, “On the Edge of Reason: The Boundaries of Balkanism in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse,” Slavic Review , Vol. 62, No. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 110–141.

Page 419

a view of political and cultural discourse as an articulatory practice that constitutes and organizes social relations. (original article p. 138)

Approaching the discourse on the Balkans (so-called Balkans) from this standpoint, they view it as a very effective method of setting the Balkans apart, of making them a subaltern place. (original article p. 138)

as a power discourse - and an extraordinarily powerful one - which not merely describes but in fact structures and constrains both insider and outsider responses to the Balkans. (original article p. 138)

Maria Todorova argues in her highly influential Imagining the Balkans (1997) that the term Balkan has become “one of the most powerful pejorative designations in history, international relations, political science, and, nowadays, general intellectual discourse.” The rhetoric in this view amounts to “a persistent hegemonic discourse from the west, continuously disparaging about the Balkans, which sends out messages about the politicization of essentialized cultural differences.” (59). Todorova also treats Balkanism as a discourse that severely constrains the options of the people of the Balkans. Confronted with the hegemonic Western construction imposed on them, she writes, it is hardly realistic to expect the Balkans to create a liberal, tolerant, all-embracing identity celebrating ambiguity and a negation of essentialism. (59) (original article p. 140).

Pages 419–420

Balkanism as a discourse that relies on the apparent naturalness of the categories it employs to acquire an almost unshakable stigmatizing effect. “Indeed,” these scholars write, “the unfavorable normative import of adjective such as byzantine and Balkan is so pronounced as to make orientalism axiomatic in regard to peoples and societies so labelled.” (original article p. 138)

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They argue that the Balkanist discourse is interiorized by the people in the former Yugoslavia and present this situation as an argument of the hegemonic quality attained by Balkanism. (original article p. 138)

approaches to the Balkans may be rather more nuanced and plural than the critique of Balkanism admits. (original article p. 138)

it is important to note that such extreme positions by no means typified Slovenian commentary on Yugoslav affairs…analyses of Yugoslav politics and interethnic relations, Balkanism might have been an important and recurring motif…While some Austrian and Italian observers did engage in harsh Balkanist stereotyping…. (original article pp. 119–120)

discourse-as-power …discourse-as-straitjacket. If we are to…and there are good reasons to do so, we must still. (original article pp. 140–141)

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Note 38: To varying extents, these critiques…on Said's influential Orientalism (1978). However, some of them modify or depart in important respects from Said's analysis. (original article p. 112, footnote 5)

K.E. Fleming's article “Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography,” American Historical Review 105, no. 4 (2000): 1218–33.

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But here, Fleming warns us, we must view the term academic with caution. Referring to the Balkans, he expresses the opinion that the vast majority of such writings is in fact produced not by academicians in the strictest sense of the term but rather by what he calls experts whose expertise derives from their experience as journalists, travellers or political strategists. (original article, p. 1226)

David Campbell, National Deconstruction : Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis, Min.: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

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Bosnia as an ethnically ordered world of Croats, Muslims, and Serbs, in which no other conceptions of identity had political significance, and where group relations could not be other than mutually exclusive and conflictual. Partition seemed the inevitable result. (original book, p. 157)