What is in Balkan History? Spaces and Scales in the Tradition of Southeast-European Studies

Southeastern Europe 34 (2010) 55–86

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI 10.1163/187633309X12563839996621

brill.nl/seeu

What is in Balkan History? Spaces and Scales in the Tradition of Southeast-European

Studies

Diana Mishkova Centre for Advanced Study Sofi a

Abstract Th is article takes a distance from the debate about ‘symbolic geographies’ and struc-tural defi nitions of historical spaces as well as from surveying discrete disciplinary traditions or political agendas of regionalist scholarship in and on Southeastern Europe. Its purpose instead has been two-fold. On the one hand, to bring to light a preexistent but largely suppressed and un-refl ected tradition of regionalist scholarship with the hope that this could help us fi ne tune the way we conceptualize, contemplate and evaluate regionalism as politics and transnationalism as a scholarly project. In epistemological terms, on the other hand, it proposes a theoretical perspective to regionalist scholarship involving rigorous engagement with the scales of observation, and scale shifts, in the interpretation of history. Th e hypothesis the article seeks to test maintains that the national and the (meso)regional perspectives to history chart diff erentiated ‘spaces of experience’ — i.e. the same occurrences are reported and judged in a diff erent manner on the diff erent scales — by way of displacing the valency of past processes, events, actors, and institutions and creating divergent tem-poralities — diff erent national and regional historical times. Diff erent objects (i.e. spaces) of enquiry are therefore coextensive with diff erent temporal layers, each of which demands a diff erent methodological approach. Drawing on texts of regional scholars, in which the historical reality of the Balkans/Southeastern Europe is articu-lated explicitly or implicitly, the article discusses also the relationship between diff erent spaces and scales at the backdrop of the Braudelian and the microhistorical perspectives.

Keywords spatializing , regionalization , scales of observation , Southeast-European studies , epistemology

56 D. Mishkova / Southeastern Europe 34 (2010) 55–86

Regional history has spawned considerable theoretical interest in recent years, and claim to be partaking in new trends in historical writing. 1 Th at regions as frameworks of historical representation challenging nation-centered history have moved to this position is, arguably, a consequence of their becoming an active site of convergence for several critical lines of enquiry at the intersection of scholarship and politics. Th e growth of interest in transnational (and global) history approaches—and in their associates (transfer, relational, entangled history)— stirred up by the developments towards ‘globalization’ in the last twenty years is perhaps the most obvious one. Th is in turn has led to interrogation of the premises of comparative history more generally, and spurred heated, if somewhat scholastic, polemics between comparativists (and structuralists) and transnationalists (or constructivists) — most notably and vociferously in the German academic milieu (Cohen and O’Connor 2004 ; Middell 2005 ).

All of this has been evolving against the backdrop of the spectacular ‘spatial turn’ in social and human sciences of late — more properly, the reincorpora-tion of space into social and cultural theory. An interesting corollary of the collapse of the two-block system is worth noting in this regard. Categories previously grounded in the geopolitical system are now being replaced by those derived from historical-structural characteristics of space. Th e notion of ‘historical (meso-) region’ arguably rebuts essentialism, or even geographical and political determinants of its boundaries, and is being described as “an artistic device and heuristic concept for comparative analysis in order to iden-tify transnational structures common to a constructed meta-region” (Troebst 2003 : 177; cp. Bracewell and Drace-Francis 1999 : 61). However, the notion of region tout court has been questioned by some as having been prescribed by pre-existent political divisions that became obsolete after 1989, and by others, resonating postcolonial concerns, as power– and ideologically driven sym-bolic constructions.

Needless to say, there is no obvious or unanimous answer to the question of the scholarly (“heuristic”) defi nition of regions. Th e question ultimately boils down to identifying, or rather proposing, what might lend an underlying or

1) Th is article is part of an on-going survey of the history of Southeast-European studies carried out in the framework of the ERC Advanced Grant project “Balkan Histories: Shared, Connected, Entangled” (2008-2012). It owes a lot to the research and discussions within the “Regimes of Historicity and Discourses of Modernity and Identity in East-Central, Southeastern and Northern Europe” project (2008-2010) of the Centre for Advanced Study Sofi a. I wish to thank the participants in both projects for their valuable comments on an initial, more elaborate version of this essay.

D. Mishkova / Southeastern Europe 34 (2010) 55–86 57

overarching coherence to the political, religious and linguistic diversity char-acterizing these areas. Diff erent disciplines and scientifi c criteria are likely to provide diff erent and occasionally discordant answers. 2 Th e one common characteristic that all seem to share is their self-conscious, constructivist method. Indeed, it has been the convergence of the constructivist turn in his-toriography and the cultural turn in geography that has created the epistemo-logical condition for questioning the ‘natural boundaries’ of space.

Th is article does not aspire to partake in the debate about ‘symbolic geog-raphies’ and structural defi nitions of historical spaces (and of the implicit poli-tics of each), 3 nor would it seek to survey the achievements and pitfalls of diff erent disciplinary traditions of regionalist scholarship. Its epistemological contention is of a diff erent order in that it proposes a theoretical perspective to regionalist scholarship involving rigorous engagement with the scales of observation, and scale shifts, in the interpretation of history. My starting point is Reinhart Koselleck’s observation that the way we impart and interpret a past phenomenon depends crucially on the temporal perspective in which we observe it. Koselleck’s theory of historical time is centrally concerned with “diff erent passages of time, each according to the chosen thematic, which reveal diff erent tempos of change.” His concept of Zeitschichten “gestures, like its geological model, towards several levels of time [ Zeitebenen ] of diff erent duration and diff erentiable origin, which are nonetheless present and eff ectual at the same time.” Koselleck maintained that, “[t]here are diff erent layers of the tempos of change that we must theoretically distinguish in order to be able to measure uniqueness and persistence with regard to each other” (Koselleck 2002 : 9; 207). With the dawn of the ‘new time,’ or the Sattelzeit , this vertical (“geological”) multi- layeredness of historical time became compounded with a diachronic one — with the retrospective structuring of the past, or what Koselleck calls the “temporalization” of historical perspective: “History was temporalized in the sense that, thanks to the passing of time, it altered accord-ing to the given present, and with growing distance the nature of the past also altered;” historians, then, “did not merely report, they ‘created’ history” (Koselleck 1985 : 250; 144).

Time then assumes a constitutive, creative role with respect to the content and interpretation of history. It “becomes a dynamic and historical force in its

2) See, for example, the special issue of Balkanologie 3/2, 1999, examining the defi nitions of Southeastern Europe from various disciplinary perspectives. Cp. Drace-Francis ( 2003 ). 3) As far as the Balkan region is concerned, the divergent positions came out in the dabate between Holm Sundhaussen ( 1999 ) and Maria Todorova ( 2002 ).


own right, […] acquir[es] a quality of generating experience, which, retro-spectively applied, permit[s] the past to be seen anew” (Koselleck 1985 : 246; 141).

Th is seems, or so it did to me, to invite the question: can we presume a similar constitutive function or capacity of space? Is our historical interpretation of a phenomenon as crucially dependent on the territorial scale, or ‘measure,’ within which we posit and approach it? (In another way this is to suggest that once we opt for a certain scale we also have to be aware of the constraints our choice imposes on our understanding). Rather than bringing preconceived theoretical models onto their supposed subjects and thus spatialize historical reality into, for instance, nation-states, centre-periphery or the ‘three worlds’ of the cold-war period —to mention just a few powerful models— this ques-tion reverses the perspective by asking “just what happens when one thinks and describes historical events in spatial terms” (Schlögel 2003 : 9). Th is is to endow space, and scale as its analytical counterpart, with the ‘agency’ of com-prising historical events and of revealing diverse aspects of reality or, in the words of Koselleck, to take the “space-time constitution of empirical stories” seriously (Koselleck 2002 : 81).

Obviously, the question is not, and cannot be, one of the epistemological consequences of spacing alone; it concerns the connection between the tem-poral and the spatial multi-layeredness of historical experience. Th e hypothesis about the creative force of spacing implicates both dimensions: the recogni-tion for the precedence of the historian’s point of view —for the localization of historical statement, that is to say— is synonymous to the idea that perspec-tive should be both temporally and spatially determined, “and that this would result in diverse but equally valid texts on the same substantial matter” (Koselleck 1985 :141). Compared to time, however, space has remained under-historicized and under-theorized in an overall theory of history.

Let me make this clear: by raising the above question I do not mean to endow time and space with an essentialized capacity to wreak change. But nor do I take them as empty categories to be fi lled with empirical content. What I have in mind are the inherent temporal and spatial dimensions and distinc-tions of any social interaction and activity. Addressing Southeast-European studies as a particular ‘regime of spatiality’ —a task that can only partially be undertaken here— has a twofold purpose. It seeks to discover why —that is, in conjunction with what methodological paradigms, political strategies, aca-demic/disciplinary environments and interactions, social or geopolitical experiments, performative acts of underscoring distances or reciprocity— this form of spatializing historical experience is and has been seen to be appropriate.


In doing this, it seeks to partake in an ongoing refl ection on the fl exibilization of space, and to link it to the debate on the scales of observation in the social sciences, particularly in history. 4

In the perspective of this author, two positions seem especially relevant to be distinguished in this sense. Th e fi rst was suggested by Fernand Braudel when discussing the connection between the various durées stratifying the social world. While Braudel accepted that to each temporality there corresponded a particular dimension of social reality, that dimension for him was statistical rather than ‘ontological.’ Social laws are, fundamentally, insensi-tive to variations of scale, and observations on a micro-sociological level allow us “to perceive the more general structural laws, just like the physicist detects the proper laws of physics at an infra-molecular level.” Th e various durées — accordingly the various spaces and scales— “interconnect” and “ conjoin each other [ s’emboîtent ] with ease”: they are invariant of the encom-passing and homogeneous fl ow of history, of the “imperious world time” (Braudel 1958 ).

A diff erent perspective has been encapsulated in Jacques Revel’s notion of scale shifts, jeux d’échelles , whereby each scale of observation throws into relief (‘constructs’) aspects of social reality, which remain inaccessible or invisible at any other. Contrary to the Braudelian conception of emboîte ment , the results achieved through the articulation of scales are neither compatible nor cumula-tive: “the social reality is not the same on the diff erent levels of analysis from which it is observed.” Even if cumulative in its combined eff ects and duration, the phenomenon appears as a multilayered process, which obeys discontinued and non-superimposable logic, according to the level of analysis at which one is situated. Th is “discontinuity” and heterogeneity of historical reality is cogni-tive: it makes possible the con structions of complex objects which take into account the multi-layeredness of the social, and discloses previously ‘locked’ aspects of the historical world. At the end of the day, it is not the privileging of one scale over the other but “their correlation, which provides the strongest analytical benefi t.” Th at correlation is not re-creative of a ‘total’ world how-ever, indeed the main culprit in all of this is precisely the “old mirage of an ‘integral resurrection of the past’,” “the idea that between the parts and the whole there exist quasi-organic homological relations” (Revel 1996 , 2008; Ginzburg 2001 : 147-164).

4) On the latter debate from other disciplinary perspectives see, for example, Verdier ( 2004 ).


I will formulate my own position in advance: the national and the (meso)regional perspectives to history chart diff erentiated ‘spaces of experi ence’ —i.e. the same occurrences are reported and judged in a diff erent manner on the dif- ferent scales— by way of displacing the valency of past processes, events, actors, and institutions and creating divergent temporalities — diff erent national and regional historical times. Th e ‘testing ground’ is in texts of regional scholars, primarily but not only historians, in which the historical reality of the Balkans/Southeastern Europe is articulated explicitly or implicitly. 5

If corroborated, the historicized spatial relativity of historical judgment, namely that diff erent objects (i.e. spaces) of enquiry are coextensive with dif-ferent temporal layers each of which demanding a diff erent methodological approach, would necessarily entail the formulation of another hypothesis – one concerned with the relationship between diff erent spaces and scales (e.g., emboîtement vs. discontinuity). At several points in this essay I shall return to this question, and sum up my conclusions at the end.

Interplays of universal, regional and national spaces: Ivan Shishmanov and Nicolae Iorga

Institutionalization of historical studies in the second half of the nineteenth century concurred with the general drive towards the ‘nationalization of sci-ences,’ carving out retrospective national narratives from the multi-ethnic frameworks in which peoples actually lived, and using a positivist toolkit to sustain the romantic topoi of historical continuity. In the European Southeast as elsewhere in Europe the period was marked by the systematic accumulation of ‘positive,’ ‘fragmented’ knowledge and a boom in the publication of ‘sources.’ In a situation characterized by the making of new states and identi-ties and absence of usable historiographic traditions, the task of producing ‘national syntheses’ ranked high. Altogether there was a certain fear of and reluctance towards generalizations however, a prudence that was characteristic

5) Th e history of Southeast-European studies, more properly the ways various generations and academic sub-cultures defi ned the object of their enquiries in such terms, across a fi eld which brings together (geo)politics, historiographical and methodological currents, disciplinary and institutional venues, provides the broader research canvas of this essay. For the history of regionalist historiography on the example of Central, Southeastern and Northern Europe, see the respective chapter in Middell (2010) co-authored by this writer (on Southeastern Europe), Bo Stråth (on Northern) and Balazs Trencsényi (on Central Europe).


of the age and cultivated by the positivist method. As a rule historians remained confi ned to a vision of contributing bricks to an edifi ce of national history that would be erected in the distant future. Remarkably, external scholarly interest in the region was compartmentalized in a similar way. Th e Czech Konstantin Jireček’s Geschichte der Bulgaren (1876), celebrated as laying the beginning of the modern Bulgarian historiography, was followed by the no less fundamental Geschichte der Serben (1911). Th e English historian William Miller wrote his Southeast-European collection in 1896, tellingly entitled Th e Balkans: Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia and Montenegro (reedited in 1899 and 1908), while publishing a separate volume on the “History of the Ottoman Empire” in the Cambridge World History series.

Th e period around the turn of the century witnessed the rise of comparativ-ist methodologies constructing a sort of Southeast-European (Balkan) unit of analysis. Although the term ‘Southeastern Europe’ appeared at the beginning of the century, it seems to have been initially used mainly by scholars inter-ested in comparative linguistics, especially in common elements discovered in the languages of the region (Drace-Francis 2003 : 277). 6 Th e fi rst regionalist scholarly schemes originated with practitioners of neighboring human and social sciences —particularly linguists, literary scholars, and ethnographers— while historiography, to the extent it ever ventured beyond the national frame-work of history prior to the Great War, largely followed and emulated their methods. Some of the prominent historians in the region, such as Nicolae Iorga, sought more comprehensive frameworks of explanation and were open to new tendencies in historiography at the turn of the twentieth century. However, even Iorga did not frame his ‘revisionism’ in opposition to Ranke but rather sought to reach a compromise between the Lamprechtian and neo-Rankean approaches. Until after the large-scale transformations wrought by the war, local academic studies on Southeastern Europe mostly gravitated toward cultural studies in a broader sense, not history. Awareness of, and research into, Balkan linguistic community and folklore/ethnography were the fi rst, and for quite some time the only, areas in which the idea of a Balkan historical commonality thrived. Th e notion of a Southeastern Europe, as far as it surfaced in academic discourse, stood for a cultural koine rather than a his-torical region.

Th e central role of German educational and research institutions —with Leipzig (comparative linguistics, folklore and ethnography —Weigand and

6) For more recent studies on the Balkan linguistic unity, see Асенова ( 1989 ); Sawicka ( 1997 ); Lindstedt ( 2000 ).


Leskien, Lamprecht, Wundt), Berlin ( Archiv für slavische Philologie ), and Munich (Byzantine studies, Byzantinische Zeitschrift ) at the forefront— deserves mention. One of Leskien’s students in Leipzig, the Bulgarian ethnog-rapher and literary scholar Ivan D. Shishmanov (1862-1928), considerably expanded on the assumption of crisscrossing Balkan (poetic) cultures that was originally developed in Leskien’s “Fairytales from the Balkan lands” (Leskien 1925 ). Shishmanov was among the fi rst to talk about les savants balkaniques and of the need for communication among them. In the spirit of the critical post-Romantic method he dispelled the notion of the autochthonous roots and the uniqueness of “national folklore” (as propagated by what he dubbed “patriotic romanticism”), as well as the “popular” origin of much folklore, and instead charted a vast global network of exchange —‘internationality’— of beliefs, tales, epic traditions and popular lore. He came to what were then the unconventional conclusions that

Th e existent researches suffi ce to persuade us that we should stop regarding the popular lore of any single people as its totally original creation. Th ere had been borrowings since time immemorial. […] Th is new view about the origins and diff usion of popular lore may not please some of our collectors, but it is the only scientifi c one […] and it will cure them of searching in each and every song for historical or mythological reminiscences. […] With intended or naïve forgeries, such as the ones that had been fashionable until recently not only among the Slavs but also among the other European peoples, nothing can be achieved any-more (Шишманов 1966a: 17-18).

Shishmanov’s major methodical breakthrough was his cogent refutation of the romantic notion of national uniqueness and exceptionality that precluded the quest for resemblances in the development of nations (Дановa 2005). For him, all these interactions and mutual borrowing were possibly due to the similarities in the evolution of individual nations. 7 “Th e originality of a cul-ture,” Shishmanov argued, “often lies in nothing other but its more or less self-reliant remaking of the borrowed foreign elements. Peoples —small and big— are great plagiarists” (Шишманов 1965: 373).

Th ese ‘transfers’ and ‘entanglements,’ to put it in the present-day transna-tionalist vocabulary, riveted the very fabric of a people’s wisdom and were paralleled by those characterizing what Shishmanov defi ned as, the “patriotic

7) Shishmanov pressed home his arguments about the fundamental similarities in the development of all nations in his study on “Th e song about the deceased brother in the epic of the Balkan peoples” (Шишманов 1966: 207-215).


period” in the study of the folk, when forged claims to national authenticity appeared as “some kind of vital law that implacably displays itself at the begin-ning of each scientifi c revival (sic)”. He also illuminated the mutual mirroring of over-infl ated national self-narrations across Europe. Shishmanov consid-ered a similar “exchange of the cultural concepts and achievements of various peoples” to be formative of his own scholarly environment, indeed of the very notions of scientifi city, which he saw as embedded in a constant cross-national fl ow and communication of “new outlooks” and “new methods” (Шишманов 1966: 7-22). Th e same ‘positive approach’ led him also to challenge a funda-mental contention in the master narrative of Bulgarian history: that of the destructive role of the Greeks in terms of culture and education for the Bulgarian identity. Instead, he insisted on —and corroborated via critical reading of sources— the pivotal edifying role of Greek culture, schooling and literature in the formation of the fi rst generation of Bulgarian “national awak-eners” and cultural leaders, thus underscoring the importance of what con-temporary scholarship would describe as cultural transfer in the history of nationalism and collective identity. In all that transpired Shishmanov’s convic-tion that the Bulgarians could not gain a proper understanding of their national history unless they perceived of their culture in its connectedness with other national cultures in the region — a conviction which he continued to uphold as Minister of Education by insisting that Bulgarian schools “should put an end to this culpable ignorance [of neighbors] by inculcating knowledge of the history and literature of at least the closest neighboring peoples” (Шишманов 1894; 1965: 48-59; 186-93).

When the scale and vantage moved to the level of the national however, quite diff erent aspects of the above phenomena became visible. Folklore, Shishmanov tells us, is the “people’s science,” the “science of the poor in spirit” which allows us to “probe deeply into the soul of the folk, to get to know its outlooks and the ideas driving it, the notions it had generated or inherited or borrowed, and the ways in which all these had been transformed in its con-sciousness: how they had changed, which particular form they had taken in contrast to the notions of other peoples, etc.” (Шишманов 1966: 23). Ultimately, the important question appeared to be “what infl uence all those numerous races, which had been in contact with us in the course of history, had exerted on our national type, on our culture, our customs, our language. Th at means to examine all foreign components of our nationality, culture, language, etc.” (Шишманов 1966: 268). Shishmanov was aware of the great challenge this posed in a region as ethnographically and historically ravaged as the Balkans: “Th e ethnographer’s task is anything but an easy one where the ethnographic tempest hadn’t had the time to abate.” But precisely in such


zones the science of history —“which in this case is a dangerous and biased advocate, who doesn’t forget the smallest off ence and constantly foments his client’s passions” — was of little avail. It befell ethnography 8 to perform what he saw as “a cardinal political task,” for “folkloric studies are the sole instru-ment for defi ning the ethnographic boundaries of the various Balkan peoples” (Шишманов 1966: 30-31). 9 Th us, while conceding that national isolation did not exist and that each culture evolved in a process of continuous exchange with other cultures, Shishmanov’s ‘comparativism’ pursued above all the iden-tifi cation of the “foreign elements” and borrowing in the national make-up. Th e organizing agency and the key reference remained the nation.

Both his profi ciency in various academic cultures and the contemporary state-of-the-art in ethnography induced Shishmanov to position his fi eld of enquiry on a global and, more frequently, meso-regional scale. On this level, his analysis dealt with processes of mutual borrowing and interaction, the nation’s self-containment and purity were unmade, and the national ‘dissolved’ into the international. Shishmanov thus exemplifi ed the intrinsic potential of comparativistics to undermine the national canon of history, “render the invisible visible and question our own generalizations” (Green 2004 : 42). Th e political implications of this scholarly framework were not to be underestimated:

In general, folklore and politics are two spheres not alien to each other. Th e awareness that well-nigh all nations possess the same or similar legends, that they are alike in customs, morals, beliefs, in their views on nature and on life, this awareness could not but aff ect benefi cially the political views of folklorists, many of whom are among the most fervent preachers of the brotherhood and concord between nations and among the most ardent champions of the nations’ rights against tyrants and usurpers (Шишманов 1966: 30).

Th e shift of perspective —from within the national framework— reformu-lated that same problématique and threw into relief a diff erent register of his-torical existence: on the level of the national, folklore stood out as key to the soul and the mind of the community. Shishmanov never identifi ed that which ultimately defi ned a nation’s individuality (and its “ethnographic boundaries”)

8) As a “systematic enquiry” of folklore, ethnography, according to Shishmanov, involved “literary history, on the one hand, and ethnology and popular psychology, on the other, that is the natural and the cultural history of a people” (Шишманов 1966: 23-24). 9) Corroborating the Bulgarian nationality of the Macedonians was a key target of this research programme ( ibidem ).


so that it could participate in an exchange with other nations, the ‘core’ that lay beneath all the “foreign” impacts and proved able to assimilate them while remaining the ‘same’ national individuality. But it was clear that such an ethno-cultural hub did exist, that it represented the actual agency of history, and that its thorough exploration was the scholar’s chief duty — “in order to under-stand the direction in which the nation had evolved and to chart the direction of its future development in the best possible sense” (Шишманов 1966: 23). Th ese two levels, and the diff erent ‘spaces of experience’ which they charted, coexisted side by side, without apparent confl ict. Th e operations of entangling and disentangling historical experience thus alternated or proceeded in paral-lel, and there was little sign of an awareness of tension.

It might be argued that the modes in which the historical unit of Southeastern Europe was originally conceptualized was strongly infl uenced by the preemi-nence of linguistic and folkloric comparativism in that commonalities on the level of grammar, syntax, belief, and popular lore seemed to imply an underly-ing primeval unity in the way of thinking and the unconscious. Th is trend and the call for non-national historical methodology radiating from Leipzig —especially from Karl Lamprecht— converged on the oeuvre of Nicolae Iorga (1871-1940), perhaps the most outstanding (and prolifi c) Romanian histo-rian before World War II, and a contemporary of Shishmanov. Iorga was most inclined to build his synthesis on the basis of collective psychology and a belief in culture as a binding force and a principal instrument of any ecumenicity, whose vision of the area’s specifi city and mission refl ected a distinctive rela-tionship of national, regional and global scales of historical experience.

Already at the 1913 World Historical Congress in London, Iorga had for-mulated a plea for history writing beyond the national frame (Iorga 1913a ), although he himself at that point was also busy creating a new Romanian ‘ethno-democratic’ nationalist narrative both in politics and history. Th at same year, right after the conclusion of the war between the former Balkan allies against the Ottoman Empire, he founded the Institute for Southeast-European Studies in Bucharest and a specialized journal, the Bulletin de l’Institut pour l’Etude de l’Europe sud-orientale . Shishmanov’s appeals of previous years for ‘institutionalizing’ the studies of the region in the form of “Congrés des savants balkaniques” were thus realized, albeit not quite in the spirit of his intentions. 10

10) As Iorga bluntly put it, the establishment of such an institute in Bucharest was a legitimate “affi rmation of Romania’s rights” as a major regional player (Iorga 1911 : 20). On Shishmanov’s correspondence with a number of Romanian scholars stressing the need for some form of regular exchange between the students of the area, see Siupiur ( 1968 ); Pippidi ( 1978 ).


By that time Iorga had already published his fi rst synthetic works as advocated (in fact inspired) by Lamprecht: Geschichte des Rumänischen Volkes (2 Vols., 1905) and, heralding his regionalist syntheses, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches nach den Quellen dargestellt (5 vols.,1908-13), in which he exposed the emotional nature of conceiving of the Turks and their empire as an historical anomaly detrimental to civilization, proposed the study of Ottoman history as an integral part of world history.

Iorga’s historiographic discourse both before 1918 and during the 1920s-1930s, can be considered a key example of the fusion of regional and national canons; of using diff erent paradigms for diff erent ‘branches’ of his-tory (e.g. cultural vs. political history), and of re-cycling both the national and the regional through his ‘ sămănătorist ’ (agrarian/ethno-populist) politico-ide-ological code. His syntheses and regional histories thus provide a synoptic list of the diff erent defi nitions of regionalist historical approaches.

Iorga was no doubt the fi rst regional historian to grasp the signifi cance of a common heritage and to plead for the study of the “great territorial entities” defi ned by specifi c historical evolution, life forms and culture. Th is specifi city, drawing upon the great Th raco-Illyrian-Roman tradition and epitomized by Byzantium, was taken over by the Ottoman Empire and constituted the heri-tage that the Balkan peoples shared. All of them —Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Albanians, and Turks— had been subject to the same great Western, Eastern, racial, and religious infl uences. It was this heritage, the com-monalities of experience and the “fatalities of geography,” Iorga implored, that made imperative the study of national history on a broader basis that would view the various common Balkan traditions as one whole (Iorga 1935; 1940). In several of his programmatic texts he emphasized the necessity of the compara-tive approach for the study of history and civilization. He did not hesitate to openly challenge all those for whom “each nationality appears as individuality clearly separated from the others” and to counteract “the prejudice that there is too little common ground between the nations in this region of Europe.” Against “the habit that everyone should confi ne oneself to one limited domain” he asserted the historian’s duty “to consider this whole in its totality and gen-eral lines which are more or less uniform” (cit. in Cândea 1972 : 189).

In the same stroke, it was precisely this broader regional canvas, the com-monality underlying the particularities and the history of “the great territorial entity” that, in Iorga’s reading, provided the context wherein the pivotal place of Romania and the Romanians’ historical mission in world history could stand out. Th e insistence on the notion of “Southeastern Europe,” in outspo-ken opposition to the Balkans and the Balkan Peninsula, was, in Iorga’s


historiographical perspective, intended to capture the integral space of “Eastern Romanity”: the “Carpatho-Balkanic” or “Carpatho-Danubian” realm incor-porating the Romanians with the once Romanized inhabitants (the Vlachs ) to the south of the Danube, i.e. in “the Balkans” proper (Iorga 1999: 122-25; 135-37). In this, as in the general semantics of what he called “our people’s balkanism,” Iorga presented “a historiographical perspective attuned to the imperative to form and maintain an integral Romania” (Duţu 1996 : 15).

It would nevertheless be misleading to presume that these interlocking national and regional projections were only scholarly variations on a political tune. Th ey were no doubt that as well, but both conceptually and as historical schemata they were more complex and elaborate than those of the bulk of nation-building historians at the time. To understand their actual meaning the introduction of a third ‘scale’ —that of universal history— is necessary.

Aligning himself, in the vein of Lamprecht’s global vision of historical phe-nomenology, with the new cultural history which concerned itself above all with what was “deep, fundamental, and vital” in human life, Iorga upheld an emphatically organicist conception of the historical evolution of humankind. In the perspective of the latter, the understanding of the history of an indi-vidual nation, which itself encapsulated the organic and unitary character of history both synchronically (across all its manifestations) and diachronically (across time) 11 could not be achieved by studying it independently. Th e peo-ples, being “necessary, permanent and, in a certain sense, eternal creations,” encroached on, transferred to, borrowed from, conquered and were subdued by each other. Resonating Shishmanov’s views, Iorga asserted that this process of continuous interaction had totally changed the understanding of the notion of people. It was not the pure and self-contained entity of the Romantic period anymore, but a natural whole with its own organic life, similar to the life of individuals: it grew by what it gained from outside, it got cleansed and rejuvenated by what it gave up after a certain time, it died and resurrected. What ultimately de fi ned a people’s power and value in the world was “that inherent, elemental energy, which determines its potential to assimilate and to radiate, and the proportion in which it abandons its worn-out elements” (Iorga 1911 : 14-15).

A striking consequence of all that was the “disappearance of the distinction between world history and national history,” since

11) “Today the past, which is only another life, is represented not through scattered elements […] but through a unitary conception of history, through an attempt to resurrect in spirit the overall vision of what had once happened” (Iorga 1999: 115).


Th e life of a people is continuously enmeshed with the lives of other peoples, depending on and continuously infl uencing them. Each nation is an energy with its own sources and particular circumstances, its special character and mission. But none of these energies can be absolutely isolated for study and must not be isolated in this way. All these intersecting streams function in the same atmos-phere and fl ow on the same earth […]. Th e history of a people, thus, touches the history of others, not through fl eeting mentions or short chapters about recipro-cal infl uences, but is established and preserved in the natural medium of human universality, to which it belongs in its highest essence. And universal history, in turn, is not anymore (just) a collection of national histories, clustered by geo-graphic or cultural criteria, but the study of those con nections of cultures, politi-cal ideas, expansions and conquests on all terrains, transfers, transformations, reinforcements and enfeeblements, which should alone be its domain — one that is suffi ciently ‘scientifi c’ and ‘philosophic’ as to leave no space for any other sci-ence or philosophy of history (Iorga 1911 : 17).

So, as a Lamprechtianist and participant in Lamprecht’s project of Weltgeschichte , Iorga was most concerned with situating Romanian history into universal history. Th e regional in this spectacular scheme was assigned a key role as it came to stand as a mediating zone and a condition for global integration. His Byzance après Byzance (Iorga 1935) brilliantly exemplifi es the synthesis of universal and national history by underwriting “the universal vocation of Southeastern Europe and the role of the Romanians in the fulfi ll-ment of this vocation” (Cândea 2000 : 8). On the one hand, it postulates the belonging of the peoples of Southeastern Europe to a universal civilization bridging the East and the West yet being neither of the two, possessing a unique ecumenical role and a unique contribution to world history. On the other hand, it stresses the idea of Byzantium’s spiritual and institutional con-tinuity through the Romanians once it had ceased to exist politically — an idea also expressed in his “History of the Balkan States in the Modern Age” (1913). “Th ere was a time,” Iorga contended in the introduction to that book,

when it appeared that the entire Byzantine, Balkan legacy should be inherited by our [Romanian] princes who […] showed that they wanted to preserve it and that they were capable of sacrifi cing themselves for it. […] For fi ve hundred years we had given asylum to the whole higher religious life, to the whole cultural life of the peoples from across the Danube. Th e Greek Byzantium and the Slav Byzantium, which derived from it, had thus lived for another half millennium among us and through us, if not for us […] (Iorga 1913b: 8, 11).

It was the wreaking of a place for the Romanité orientale in the world history —an eff ort crowned by his monumental La place des Roumains dans


l’histoire universelle (3 Vols., 1935-36)— that led Iorga to elaborate on the historical continuity and cohesion of Southeastern Europe. If that “ formă de universalitate” which Byzantium presented, 12 could survive until the nineteenth century, it was due to the Ottomans (“not […] the destructors of the Byzantine empire, but its continuers”) and, above all, to the Romanians. Confronting the nationalist convention of the time, Iorga thus came to vindicate both the Byzantine and the Ottoman legacy. Th e peace, local autonomy and opportu-nities for the small nations, which these two empires had ensured, made pos-sible the endurance of that “unity in diversity” that came to distinguish the region (Iorga 2000: 71-88; Iorga 1940: 14). But no less crucial in this whole process was Romania’s role as the ‘real’ Byzance après Byzance, a role that guaranteed its place in the history of mankind.

Taking into account the political conjuncture is also important to interpret Iorga’s regionalist frame. Both the institutionalization of Southeast-European studies in Bucharest and the regional re-positioning of the Romanian past were meant to underwrite Romania’s growing political weight in the area after the Balkan wars (1912-13). 13 Special mention in this direction is due to his ethno-populist narrative of the Balkan peasantry and the “spiritual life of the village” as the ultimate repository of a nation’s distinctive culture — of its “ideas.” Th e latter was one of the three “historical permanencies” —the other two being “soil” and “race”— which, in contrast to the constant fl ux of events, traversed time and space and determined “all ‘pragmatic’ history” (Iorga 1999: 271-282). Permanencies, once again, manifested themselves on two scales: in Iorga’s phenomenological perspective they underlay the unity and the conti-nuity of a Southeast-European “form of civilization,” but in their specifi c blends transformed into the mainstay of national authenticity.

Recapitulating Iorga’s ‘regimes’ of spatiality after all that is anything but an easy task. In many ways his regionalist projections turned out to be founda-tional. But they also fused a series of contradictory dimensions concerning the theory and practice of history, scholarship and political visions, evolutionary and presentist perspectives, methodical subjectivity and positivism, ‘nostalgia for totality’ and obsession with Romanianism. Yet, in some important respects

12) Defi ned “as a complex of institutions, a political system, a religious formation, a type of civilization, comprising the Hellenic intellectual legacy, Roman law, the Orthodox religion, and everything it created and preserved in terms of art” (Iorga 2000: 25). 13) See for example Iorga 1913a : III. On the way Iorga’s system of political values had construed his historical knowledge through strictly scientifi c researches, see Pearton (1983: 157); Pippidi ( 1991 : 646-647).


one can discern the contours of a system, or logic, of ‘spatiality’ reminiscent in a way of the Braudelian model of the conjoining ( emboîtement ) of diff erent scales which ultimately converge on “universal history” or “économie-monde,” respectively. Th e spatial and the temporal discontinuity is, on the one hand, obvious: the organic characteristics of the bigger regional entity, the processes chosen to defi ne it —above all the succession and superimposition of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman imperial traditions— and the tempos of change which they implied diff ered fundamentally from those characterizing the eth-nocultural make-up and the historical trajectory of the nation. So did the respective valorization of the national and the regional at either scale. Embodied in and transmitted by peasant’s culture, the “permanencies,” on the other hand, brought together these parallel spaces and times. Rather than leaving historical representations on diff erent levels and discontinuing the ‘totality’ of historical reality, as Shishmanov essentially did, Iorga thus came up with a chart of interlocking circles of the national, the regional, and the universal, where the smaller circle encapsulated the inherent characteristics of the bigger one. At a certain juncture in his historiology , the polymorphism of the Southeast-European region succumbed to a deeper common factor — the popular rural institutions (Iorga 1929), while geography (“soil”) ever imposed itself. However, the structural and explanatory conceptual tool for him was neither ‘law’ nor ‘structure’ but supra-institutional culture — the persistence of collective ideas, ways of thinking and instinctive behavior that furnished the continuity and the organic unity of history across space and time.

Th e new science of Balkanology between regionalism and autochthonism: Milan Budimir, Petar Skok and Victor Papacostea

In many ways Iorga’s regionalist discourse, saddling diff erent historical epochs and paradigms, prefi gured those crystallizing after the Great War. In the inter-war period, once again, one can observe a duality of autarchic nationalist proj-ects in the historical sciences and some eff orts at creating a trans-national comparative agenda. On the whole, the national framework retained its pow-erful position. By the outbreak of the war, many individual problems and particular periods of the national Balkan histories had been studied by native scholars in a thorough and ‘critical’ fashion. Much less was accomplished in terms of great ‘national synthesis.’ With very few notable exceptions, the bulk of scholarly synthetic works covered only the Middle-Ages. Th e special inter-est in the medieval period by the most prominent Balkan historians since the


late nineteenth century was closely (although not solely) related to the devel-opment of Byzantine studies in the latter part of the century. Many of the leading Balkan historians were trained as Byzantinologists in Western European or Russian universities. Between 1927 and 1934 international Byzantine stud-ies congresses and conferences were held in Belgrade, Athens, Bucharest and Sofi a. Th e result was bifurcated. Whilst the scholarly methods and sources thereby accumulated prompted a general ‘medievalization’ of national histories, at the same time it created a basis for looking upon the region as a unit with a common heritage. Practically all avowed ‘Balkanologists’ of that period, most notably linguists, historians and literary scholars, were Middle-Age experts.

As in the initial period, political circumstances and engagements strongly marked the institutionalization of Southeast-European studies. A Balkan Institute was founded in Belgrade in 1934 under the auspices of the King of Yugoslavia with the aim of furnishing regionalist geopolitics with the support of Balkan solidarity. A Balkan Near-Eastern Institute, inaugurated in Sofi a in 1920, off ered advanced courses in Balkan languages, international law and the modern history of the Balkan peoples. Regionally oriented historical research in Bucharest after the establishment of the fi rst Institute of Southeast-European Studies in 1913 proceeded at the Institute of Byzantine Studies established by Iorga and at the Institute of Balkan Studies and Research ( Institutul de Studii şi Cercetări Balcanice ), founded in 1937 by medieval historian Victor Papacostea. Th e institutionalization of Balkan studies also meant the emer-gence of a series of academic publications framing their scope in explicitly regional terms, such as the Romanian Revue historique de sud-est européen (23 Vols., 1924-1946, a successor of the Bulletin de l’Institut pour l’étude de l’Europe sud-orientale ) and Balcania (8 Vols., 1938-1945). Finally, Revue internationale des études balkaniques (6 Vols., 1935-1938) was an ambitious Yugoslav journal that sought to add a scholarly facet to Balkan cooperation following the estab-lishment of the Balkan Pact in 1934.

All in all, the 1930s and the fi rst half of the 1940s saw the crystallization of a more rigorous and systematic research programme for the region of South eastern Europe. Th e initial attempt at defi ning the new “science of Balkanology,” aimed at elucidating regional commonalities while “drawing upon the comparative method of the nineteenth century,” belongs to the two editors of the Belgrade-based Revue internationale des études balkaniques : the Croat Petar Skok (1881-1956) and the Serb Milan Budimir (1891-1975), both linguists. In many ways both the object and the methods of this new sci-ence, as they developed them, mark a radical departure from the national paradigm.


Starting from the observation of the “estrangement of the Balkan sciences into national compartments,” which had led to “duplication of state particu-larism with scientifi c particularism,” Budimir and Skok pleaded that

Th e time has come to contemplate the coordinating of the national academic Balkan studies, giving them cohesion and, above all, orienting them towards the study of a Balkan organism that had constituted one whole since the most distanced times […]. Th is is the principal goal of the science which we have called Balkanology and to which our journal is devoted (Budimir and Skok 1934 : 2-3).

Th e phenomena marking the history of this “Balkan organism” set an interpre-tative frame which discontinued the national and the regional in a much more thorough way than Iorga and even Shishmanov ever contemplated. Two his-torical tendencies —unifi cation and particularism— are said to have crystal-ized into “a unique law of the Balkans [ loi balkanique ] guiding the vicissitudes of the total of their history.” Since antiquity these tendencies had alternated and defi ned the peculiar evolution of the region, the major forces of “Balkan aggregation” being the Macedonian dynasty, the Romans, the Byzantine Empire, and the Ottoman Empire.

Signifi cantly in terms of its utterly divergent national-historiographic valency, the role of the “Turks” in imposing social and cultural cohesion on the region was seen to be the most salient. Modern science very often misin-terpreted the results of the aggregation which their empire had achieved, and refused to see what was benefi cial in a regime which had never implemented the denationalizing policy characteristic of many European states. Th e roots of this defective interpretation of the facts lay in nineteenth-century Balkan romanticism: Balkan intellectuals, eager to deliver their peoples from Ottoman rule, used to see in it solely the degradation of all that represented the ancient independence of those peoples. Th e new national sciences echoed that atti-tude, which was why they focused on the study of the periods preceding the coming of the Turks while almost completely ignoring the study of national life under Turkish domination.

Th e spheres where the two Balkanologists found the unifying impact of the Ottomans to have been most consequential for the future “regional aggrega-tion,” which they considered impending, are worth noting. First, by imposing the same political and social conditions, the Turks had eff ectively amalgam-ated the mentality of the Balkan peoples. By favoring, at the same time, the mixture of Balkan races, they had to some extent eff aced the mental diff er-ences that the previous particularist medieval states had induced. Another


unifying factor was the introduction of “Oriental urbanism” — the Balkan city created by the Turks which was “totally diff erent from the ancient and the European” and whose strong impact made itself felt in the Balkan vocabulary of everyday life. Remarkably, even folklore and popular literature more generally were found to be the product of the Turkish unifi cation: “Among all those peoples, the period of Turkish domination had stimulated the blossom-ing of national epopees [which are] major sources of pride for these peoples.” Popular poetry, furthermore, traveled freely across the Turkish realm creating common themes and vocabularies. It was to the Turkish regime, again, that the Romantic literary movement, the “Balkan Romanticism,” owed its special complexion, so diff erent from those of European romanticisms. Finally, it was utterly erroneous to consider the Turks hostile to the civilization created in the Balkans before them since their empire had maintained a number of Byzantine institutions (Budimir and Skok 1934 : 5-6; 12).

Here we can see some of the central arguments of the preexistent Balkanist scholarship, as developed by Shishmanov and Iorga, being brought to their logical completion. Individual Balkan renascences, and quite nearly national ‘individualities’ themselves, became conceivable only in the framework of the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the entire Romantic structure of nation-hood in its eurocentric mold was turned on its head without subverting the state-building project as such.

Skok’s and Budimir’s programmatic statement presents the fi rst attempt I know of formulating the methodology of a “new science” intended “to defi ne and explain the parallel facts that make themselves manifest in the diff erent domains of human activity in the Balkans.” To this end they suggested a divi-sion of labor corresponding to the diff erent scales of observation: the study of only what is specifi c to a given people should be left to the specialists in the national sciences. Th is did not imply a rift between regional and national scholars as it was from the latter that regionalists would extract information about particular aspects, their work presenting a “superior interconnected-ness” by means of inter-Balkan comparisons. A series of examples were adduced in support of the contention that a Balkanological perspective alone was capa-ble of shedding proper light on major historical processes which, when being placed in a strictly national framework, remained incomprehensible. It is quite signifi cant that the advocacy of transnational comparison as a method of the proper historical explanation actually led them to transcend the confi nes of the region and advocate a cross-regional comparison of the Ottoman legacy in the Balkans with that of the Arabs in the Iberian Peninsula (Budimir and Skok 1934 : 7-12).


Th e coherence of this remarkable agenda was rounded off with a map of the “domains of Balkanology” where comparativism was deemed particularly per-tinent: above all history (especially political, cultural and religious), linguistics (which had to deal with not just mutual infl uences but also with “establishing the Balkan particularity” of the Balkan linguistic union) and folklore, but also economic development, law, “the written or ‘high’ literature,” arts, architec-ture, and especially those sciences whose object was “the Balkan man” — anthropology, demography, statistics, human geography (Budimir, Skok 1934 : 13-19). In sum,

Balkanology appears as an immanently comparative science. In essence it repre-sents a system of inter-Balkan comparison whose main objective is to reveal, understand and defi ne the Balkan reality such as it has manifested itself, across time and space, in the various spheres of human activity. To get to know what was and is typical of the Balkans , such is the object it envisages for itself (Budimir and Skok 1934 : 23-24; italics added)

Th is had two facets — theoretical and practical. “As a theoretical science [Balkanology] is called to deepen our knowledge about the relations between the Balkan peoples and throw light on the intrinsic laws which had governed and continue to govern their development and their life.” As a practical sci-ence, it had moral importance in that it was “entitled to infl uence the Balkan mentality” by giving the Balkan statesmen the opportunity to know the Balkan man, his natural and social environment, way of thinking and feeling, and at the same time by teaching the Balkan communities the necessity to know, understand, and cooperate with each other ( ibidem , 24-25).

I deliberately dwelt at some length upon this Balkanological manifesto not only because it is the fi rst of its kind. Later-day Balkanistics would have, as it turned out, little to add to the theoretical and methodological conceptualiza-tion of the fi eld. Balkan comparativism, as conceived here, was not just a multi-disciplinary and problem-oriented exercise. It evolved in two interde-pendent directions — two analytical scales: as a study of “mutual infl uences” and exchange between national entities (what we would call today ‘transfer history’) and of “common Balkan traits” or “Balkan peculiarity” (‘ transnational history’). Balkanology was meant to deal with the general, the syncretic —the “Balkan reality,” the “Balkan man,” the “Balkan organism,” and “intrinsic laws”— not with the nationally specifi c. It came up with a research agenda and a method aimed at a regional “synthesis drawing on the elements of Balkan interdependence and unity” (Papacostea 1938 : vi). Th is, at the same time, did not undermine ethnic and national frameworks: the actual historical actors


were, invariably and self-evidently, the Balkan peoples, if not always the Balkan states. Th e proposed division and scale shift seemed to imply two parallel his-torical existences, interrelated yet distinct, each subordinated to its own “laws,” agencies and rhythm.

Proceeding from the notion of ‘Balkan organicity’ and the Balkanological ‘curriculum’ of his Yugoslav predecessors, the founder of the Bucharest-based Institute for Balkan Studies and Research in 1937, Romanian medievalist Victor Papacostea (1900-1962), left us perhaps the most radical assertion of what he called the “impossibility of studying the life of any Balkan people separately” and of the imperative for a transnational and multidisciplinary approach to the past of this part of Europe (Papacostea 1996; 1938 ; 1943). “Determined in its investigations by the frontiers fi xed by geography and his-tory, Balkanology,” Papacostea re-affi rmed, “aims at revealing the characteristic laws and circumstances , under whose operation there has developed, century after century, the life of the Balkan peoples, in its whole and for each of them.” More radically however, Papacostea considered the adoption or forced imposi-tion of the very idea of the nation-state, one that was “created in the West and for the West,” to have had catastrophic consequences in the Balkans — a region that, unlike Western Europe, was marked by a unity of economic geog-raphy, by “the same community of culture and civilization born by long coex-istence,” and by being “in the main subordinated to the same political systems and infl uenced by the same currents of ideas.” Above all it was the “common ethnic base” and the “millennia-long mixture of races that has resulted, ever since antiquity, in the strongly relative value of the idea of nationality in the Balkans.”

Papacostea spoke instead of a “Balkan nationality” and “Balkan society” as well as of a “ homo balcanicus ” — a syncretic type defi ned by complex ethno-genesis, mental and spiritual structures and linked to, above and beyond his native and linguistic group, “the great Balkan community through organic links coming from a complex and lengthy ancestry.” Under such conditions the idea of nationality remained precarious and uncertain, “in reality a notion, not ethnic, but mostly political and cultural,” whereas one realized “how intensive the exchange of infl uences among these peoples was and how easily important elements of culture and civilization passed from the one to the other. But above all: how misplaced and ridiculous appear the exaltation of national particularisms.” Th e inference that a serious scholar should draw from all that was clear: “Scientifi c research in the Balkans —in linguistics, historiography, ethnography, folklore, economics, arts, literature, etc— can-not be chained in national compartments but become unifi ed through close


intellectual cooperation and through persistent application of the comparative methods in all above-mentioned disciplinary fi elds.” Th e system of research that Papacostea promoted thus directly challenged the legitimacy of the nation-state framework of reference and pled for locating the study of national history within a transnational context — in “a new historical synthesis of the Southeast[-European] humankind.”

All this sounds deeply at odds with the general autochthonist thrust and nationalist historiographic mainstream of the time. Should we assume the existence of a chasm —“theoretical and practical”— between the regionally and the nationally oriented scholarship?

Th e “space-time constitution” of the national and the regional stories diverged in many essential ways. National history and regional history them-selves were said to rest on dissimilar objects and methods of study. Th e shift of spatial perspective also entailed a shift in the manner in which the same occurrences were described and judged. Next to the one concerning the impact of the Ottoman rule, which was already mentioned, the contrast between the regionalist and the nationalist historiographic valuation of the eff ects of the Byzantine oikoumene can exemplify these discontinuities. When seeking to explain what he saw as a deeply inconsistent and disrupted evolution of the medieval Bulgarian states and society, marked by abrupt rises and falls, the leading Bulgarian medievalist of the interwar period, Petar Mutafchiev, singled out the “infl uence of Byzantinism” as its underlying source. Th e constant political antagonism with, and heavy cultural and institutional borrowing from, the Byzantine Empire were what, in Mutafchiev’s view, forced the Bulgarians onto the road of inorganic development “in directions where nothing healthy and stable could be created.” Th e political and moral decay of the Bulgarian state was thus immanently linked to the predominance of the Byzantine infl uence, whereas its temporary ascendancies and cultural fl owerings materialized from resistances to the corrosive impact of Byzan-tinism and the resurrection of pagan traditions. Orthodox Christianity was seen, not as promoting regional unity, but as part of Byzantium’s alien and subversive culture, in opposition to which Bogomilism had emerged as a major manifestation of “the people’s instinct for self-preservation and authen-ticity.” Th is detrimental impact, however, was not evenly distributed across the region, and the relative geographic distance from its centre accounted for the diff erent trajectories and “national specifi cs” of the Serbs and the Romanians (Мутафчиев 1931).

Th e ‘space of experience’ which this interpretation of the role of Byzantinism and Greek Orthodoxy described —as one blatantly disruptive of the Balkan


organics both inside the national body and between the individual nations in the region— is at stark variance with that which Iorga defi ned as a Byzantine longue durée, or the self-aware Balcanologists posited as generative of Balkan diversity and “sense of independence.” It also stood out against the post-Byzantine Orthodox historiographic discourses (as exemplifi ed by the Roma nian Nichifor Crainic) which composed one of the favored forms of regional syntheses after World War I.

However, the relationship between the diff erent scales, regional and national, was not just one of disjuncture, but of mutual conditioning. As it happened, the same regionalist scholars operated, in parallel if not in the same texts, on another ‘Balkanistic’ register, employing quasi-academic and meta-historical arguments to underwrite a notion of ‘Balkanism’ closely replicating national autochthonism. A common set of modernity dilemmas and identity-related predicaments, typically thematized in terms of an encounter with “Europe” and the “West,” appear to have set the fundament for these interac-tions and exchange. Two telling imports from the then prevalent national-autochthonist vision —the argument of profound cultural diff erence between the countries of the region and the Occident, and the notion of a region-wide renaissance— became hallmarks of interwar Balkanology.

Already in Papacostea’s analytical frame, summed up above, one can detect the outlines of a political vision, at whose centre was the relationship between the Balkans and Europe, more properly of their impact on the region. At the very end of their programme, Budimir and Skok in fact stressed that that was precisely the domain where the method of inter-Balkan comparison should be applied most widely: “It is to Balkanology that befalls the ingrate task to com-bat a prejudice which for centuries has been deeply rooted in the [European] public opinion” — the assumption that the Balkans were lacking in civiliza-tion and abounding in militancy, which ignored the great role the region had played as a foyer of civilization and mediator in a vast cultural exchange. Th us “a general misunderstanding of all things Balkan has become one of the char-acteristics of the average intellectual in Europe.” But just as Byzantinology had succeeded to redress such misunderstanding as regards Byzantine civilization and medieval Balkan history, so the other Balkanistic disciplines must bring to light the merits of the peninsula for global human civilization: not only what Europe had done in the Balkans and the relations between Balkan and non-Balkan states, “but also what the peninsula had meant, in the course of centu-ries, for the formation of a common culture by exploring its role of an intermediary between the East and the West, between the eastern and the western Mediterranean, what it had transmitted from the ancient eastern


civilizations and what it had generated by its own forces in order to lay it at the disposal of Europe” (Budimir and Skok 1934: 19).

Th is line of reasoning was later elaborated in detail and integrated into a comprehensive narrative linking the Balkans’ past and future. In a strategic text entitled “Th e Balkan destinies” (Skok and Budimir 1936 : 601-612) the Revue internationale des études balkaniques (RIEB) editors embarked on vindi-cating the “strong and irreducible Balkan individuality” which they saw as a token for the region’s “historic function.” Th e tendencies of unifi cation and particularism, which were previously posited as the diff erencia specifi ca of the area, were now transfi gured into “the two most precious elements” which “the Balkan man” had granted to human progress: “the spirit of independence [ samosvojnost ] (= individualism) and the spirit of association (= collectivism).” Th e harmony of individualism and collectivism, they argued, had been the hallmark of regional history since antiquity, which manifested itself in the tolerance and mutual respect between individuals and nations. Unlike “Pax Romana” with its “uniform unity,” the Balkans of both the Byzantine and the Ottoman eras “tended towards a unity in variations, a diverse unity.” And, as the numerous Slav, Albanian and Arumanian participants in the Greek war of independence had testifi ed, “the varied commonality is more effi cient and more durable than the uniform unity, the organized variety having, properly speaking, bigger ‘biological’ value than the unity without variations.”

So, instead of treating it as a ‘European anomaly,’ as the conventional Western wisdom had it, the Balkan ‘melting pot’ was revalorized as a source of humanism and heroism, of fi erce sense of independence and urge for solidarity:

All in all, the Balkans is the genuine cradle of humanism [ čojstvo ] and heroism. Th ese are the principal characteristics of the Balkan mountaineer and also the true ideas of a sincere humanism. Th ey had preserved the Balkan people [ Balkanci; les Balkaniques ] throughout all the centuries of grandeur and suff erance. According to the Balkan conception, the cult of man and heroism cannot be realized but in a community resting on independence (= individualism) and the spirit of associa-tion (= collectivism).

Here the exertion to fuse national ideals and supranational agendas, liberal concepts and autochthonist values is noteworthy. It was further impelled by the diagnosis given to the impact of Western civilization.

Th e ‘immanent’ Balkan violence, that proverbial European indictment, was asserted to be utterly alien to the local tradition and imposed from the outside. It had made its inroads during the Balkan “Risorgimento,” the period of the


national struggles and the creation of the free Balkan states, when a major “re-orientation of the Balkan civilization” took place: the Oriental culture in its Islamic form gave way to the Western culture based on scientifi c and tech-nological progress. All Balkan peoples, once liberated, aimed to develop in accordance with Western concepts. “Th e Balkan men of letters and the schol-ars of that time considered it to be their primary duty to approach as much as possible the European spirit, to ‘Europeanize,’ to ‘Westernize’ themselves, to imitate the ‘European taste’.”

It was at this juncture that the Balkan scholars saw the source of a major historical regression: “the European civilization failed to give the Balkan peo-ples internal cohesion, appeasement and good mutual relations, it failed to develop among them the spirit of association or nourish the spirit of true independence. […] Europe, which had suff ered and continues to suff er from lack of cohesion, was not in a position to bestow on the Balkans what itself did not possess.” Hence the “evident paradox” that a Balkanologist came to encounter: all previous civilizations —the Hellenistic, the Roman, the Byzantine, the Ottoman— had brought unity to the region, “while modern European culture during the Balkan Risorgimento, on the contrary, divided politically and morally the inhabitants of the Peninsula at the same time as it leveled them through its cultural infl uence.” Th e “curious result” was that the only assets Europe readily acknowledged to the local peoples —their epic poetry, music, painting, architecture— dated from the times prior to the European penetration in the Balkans.

Where did this proto-Orientalist critique lead? Th e conceptual tool-kit of the ‘ethno-ontologists’ and the Balkanologists when devising solutions were in many ways similar, however their ‘horizons of expectation’ were diff erent.

In the opinion of the RIEB editors, “the moment seems to have come when the Balkans itself should defi ne its proper cultural orientation on the new basis of independent national states and upholding its ancient traditions of inde-pendence (individualism) and mutuality (collectivism) in view of creating on these bases a better common Balkan fatherland [ patrie balkanique commune ], where humanism and heroism will reign freely.” Th roughout all its great epochs the peninsula had had its authentic spiritual orientation, which made itself manifest in “a sort of homogeneity unique to the Peninsular.” Having existed in the times of Hellenism, Rome, Byzantium and the Ottomans, such spiritual homogeneity should be regained now, following the formation of the Balkan states, on the basis of the principle of nationality. But, in order to be able to foresee the quality of “this new homogeneity of the Balkan future,” the Balkanologist should, fi rst, defi ne the very essence of the Balkan


Risorgimento 14 and, second, give answer to the question of “what cultural orientation, what cultural principle” was necessitated by the new conditions in the Balkans marked by the triumph of independent national states.

Th e answer which the Balkanologists gave to the latter question, rather than spontaneously springing from an ancient tradition, was made contingent on a consistent and coordinated pedagogic eff ort: “Th e principle of Balkan spiri-tual homogeneity” could only be “based on the unity of variations,” where “the variations are represented by the particular cultures of the respective Balkan peoples.” It must be the work of a special programme devised by Balkan scholars (“who study scientifi cally the Balkan reality in the present and in the past”) and implemented by Balkan statesmen and Balkan pedagogues. Th e cultivation of a “Balkan spirit” among the peoples in the region was thus seen as the special duty of the post-war generation:

Th is Balkan spirit demands fi rst of all that the whole spiritual and material civilization, such as it has emerged in the Balkans, should be envisaged, criticized and organized not in view of Western Europe but, above all, in view of the needs of the Balkan fatherland taken as one whole. Any foolish dashing after Europe […] precludes the revival of the Balkan peoples and the resurrection of the Balkan spirit.

So, a new authentic spirit, regenerated and elevated to a new level, a new sense of an all-Balkan fatherland, a new Balkan culture based on a long-standing tradition of unity in diversity, regional self-reliance and self-suffi ciency — these were the key concepts on which the politics of the “new Balkan science” were made to rest.

All this appears as resonating intimately with the prevailing ‘nativist’ cur-rents and autarchic thrusts in nationalist political and intellectual thought of the late 1920s and the 1930s, captured by calls for resurgence of national authenticity and self-suffi ciency. Th e themes about the disruptive and degrad-ing impact of Europe and inorganic Western imports on the texture of society, the breach of tradition and the lack of cultural continuity, the call for libera-tion from the tyranny of Western precedence and authority, the search for a new identity and a new mission — these were topoi that transgressed the

14) According to Skok and Budimir, that transition period for the Balkan peoples performed three functions: 1) it created national states on a linguistic and national basis such as were created by analogous movements in the rest of Europe; 2) it enacted a volte-face of civilization —a genuine cultural revolution— by introducing the Western conception of the state in the Balkans; 3) it abolished the theocratic state of Byzantine and Islamic complexion ( ibidem , 609).


boundaries of the national and the regional discourses. On both levels the prevalent visions for the future, tellingly enough, were premised on the notion of “rebirth,” “revival,” or “renaissance,” while attributing diff erent regenerative valencies to diff erent epochs. Th us, for the generation of Mutafchiev, as for the bulk of the Bulgarian nationalist intellectuals of the interwar years, the return to the “spirit of the Risorgimento” —the same that Balkanologists disparaged as having been marked by “maladies of childhood” such as “naïve historicism and […] enthusiasm for the ‘glorious’ epoch of the national past”— was what they deemed capable of redressing the dire state of the nation’s morale and values, recuperating its social cohesion and mobilizing it for the fulfi llment of the “national ideal” (Мутафчиев 1940). In justifying the need for a “thorough Revival” the Bulgarian philosopher and historian of culture Nayden Sheytanov pled for the resurgence of “the ancient-Balkanic” and “the Th raco-Balkanic,” as epitomized by Orpheus and Dionysius, and for the creation thereby of “Th ra cianism as a culturally-regenerating direction” to the future (Шейтанов 1937). For the Croatian philosopher and ethno-psychologist Vladimir Dvorniković, the way out of what he defi ned as a deep cultural crisis of the Yugoslav nations was in reconstituting the “old epic world” with “its own religion, own wisdom, own esthetics and especially ethics” (Dvorniković 1930 : 123).

Th e vision of the Balkans’ resuscitation and future (what Skok and Budimir dubbed “the forth renaissance”), in comparison, explicitly dissociated itself from reenactment of a particular era of the past, specifi cally —as that was the largely canonized scenario— of that form of Balkan civilization which pre-ceded the Ottoman invasion: “Th e dead form of a past life cannot be revived by whatever élan of enthusiasm” (Skok and Budimir 1936: 609). It was instead based on the reenactment of the accumulated, long-standing, but in modern times and under Western impact, suppressed Balkan tradition of “fraternal peace and mutual tolerance,” of “harmony between individualism and collec-tivism” as it had fi rst emerged during classical antiquity. Th e three previous renaissances — the Latin-Christian of Charlemagne, the Romance of the 14 th century, and the German of the 18 th century, could not fulfi ll this “Balkan ideal.” In contrast to these,

Th e Balkanic renaissance, which should and could embrace the whole human-kind, will not be limited to one race, one religion or one nation. […] It should be supra-national and supra-confessional if it wants to lay the foundations of a cos-mopolis where ‘humanitas renata’ will be living and where ‘litterae renatae’ will be developing. Only in this way could be raised, in the spiritual sphere, that global empire whose creation Alexander the Great was dreaming of. Only thus the


Balkan destinies […] will follow the route laid out by ancient humanism, which can merge with modern Americanism (Skok and Budimir 1936 : 610).

Th us envisioned, the Balkanic renaissance was not an obsolete utopia but the inevitable consequence of the needs of the contemporary civilized world.

Th e empire of Americanism and technique cannot be maintained unless it con-cludes a durable union with the empire of humanism and the spirit, whose thrones had been occupied by so many sons of the Balkan land, a mountainous source of cosmic and human forces. One of the Balkan destinies resides, it seems, in that these peoples could also lay down the conditions for a harmonic fusion of Americanism and humanism, a harmony which the present-day humankind clearly feels a need for (Skok and Budimir 1936 : 612-13).

In many ways the regional here exhibits the features of methodical nationalism — a sort of national autochthonism writ large. Th e national and the regional operated with essentially the same stock of spatial determinants of identity, encapsulated by the notion of catena mundi . Th ere was also a clear tendency of replicating the national ‘cyclical time,’ marked by spiritual rebirths or returns to a preexistent authenticity, with a similarly structured regional temporality. It refl ected a drive to move away from the linear concept of time —and from its metaphoric derivatives such as ‘primitivity,’ ‘belatedness,’ ‘backwardness,’ ‘catching-up’— and assert the ‘space-time uniqueness’ of the region (as an extrapolated nation) and, in the same stroke, its capacity to gen-erate ‘universality.’ Th is double maneuver became possible through an identi-cal operation of indigenizing the norms and the achievements of Western civilization that characterized much of an interwar meta-political national dis-course. Not only did the Balkans prove to be the birthplace of fundamental Western values and ideals, thus stultifying the claim about belatedness and backwardness — a favoured repositioning in most nationalist discourses. It had actually preserved them in their pure, unspoiled form and could now bring them back to Europe and the world: indeed, the Balkan renaissance “should always keep its eye on the whole humankind and the whole humane-ness” (Будимир 1939: 56).

Even so, the two scales and discursive registers signifi ed diff erent ‘spaces of experience’ and charted diff erent ‘horizons of expectation.’ Th e historical con-tinuity and self-containment of the nation qua ethnic community was strongly relativized by transposing it on the multinational, occasionally ‘supranational’ region. Balkanology sought the displacement of the nationalist semantic framework, where the ethnic community was the locus of the authentic, so


that the proper understanding of one’s nationality and true patriotism would involve awareness of their Balkan embedment. “Our patriotism, if it wants to be real, should be a Balkan patriotism,” asserted the founders of the Belgrade Institute (Parežanin and Spanaćević 1936: 321). Furthermore, what national canons conventionally deplored as implacable contradictions, generated by “foreign” (e.g. Byzantine, Ottoman, European) intervention or emulation, Balkanology described as a precious synthesis endowed with a global mission: the “empire of Americanism” and the “empire of humanism” — “biology-ethics: an antithesis that will become a synthesis” (Dvorniković 1930 : 103). Last but not least, whilst national ‘revivalist’ visions were, as a rule, not just anti-European but in most cases anti-modernist, interwar Balkanology com-bined the posi tivist ideals of the ‘new critical school’ (where the critical method also implied ideology critique and critique of romantic history myths) with holism, organicism and progressivism in a liberal vein. Th e conceptualizations of the Balkans discussed above projected a sort of neo-liberal vision of devel-opment and identity seeking to achieve regional independence and progress, autarchy and “Americanization” simultaneously, while backing away from right-wing ideologies. It is with such orientation that interwar Balkanology envisaged the “new and better destinies” of the region, “not as a utopia, an unrealistic ideal, but as a consequence […] of the collaboration of all the fac-tors which determine the course of history” (Skok and Budimir 1936 : 613).

I cannot delve more deeply into the circumstances that made Southeast-European regionalism seem a viable option here. Th at would involve discuss-ing a wide range of problems —of state sovereignty and international realignments, of development, of renegotiating the political community’s rela-tionship to the trans-national economic, social and cultural processes— to mention just a few. My purpose here has been two-fold. On the one hand, to bring to light (even if not elaborate at length on) a preexistent but largely suppressed and un-refl ected tradition of regionalist scholarship with the hope that this could help us fi ne tune the way we conceptualize, contem -plate and evaluate regionalism as politics and transnationalism as a schol-arly project. In epistemological terms, on the other hand, it should have become clear that the rapports between the regional and the national histori-cal frameworks give full support to neither the Braudelian nor the micro-historical position. (One might evoke at this juncture Braudel’s scorn for la petite histoire and l’histoire événementielle , matched only by that of ‘ fundamentalist’ micro-historians, such as Giovanni Levi, for ‘structural his-tory.’ Instead it points to a relationship of mutual conditioning without merging.


Th ere exists between the diff erent scales a methodological aporia, which does not allow their contamination: a hiatus, because their extension cannot be forced into congruence, “neither in experience nor in scientifi c refl ection.” Th e interrelation between diff erent levels should not be allowed to annihilate their diff erences, if they are to retain their epistemological object of disclosing the multiple strata of history. 15 In this perspective the regional/transnational and the national cannot be viewed as alternatives: albeit diff erent, the ‘histo-ries’ they render on the same matter are present and eff ectual at the same time. Even if incompatible, they are equally valid. Th e disputes among social and human sciences about the validity of one or the other scale are not likely to subside on this admission. But, theoretically and empirically, there seems to be much to gain from a consensus on the spatial determinacy (and limitations) of our judgments and on the importance of taking the notion of Zeitraum — ‘time-space,’ as one structuring our historical knowledge, literally.

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What is in Balkan History? Spaces and Scales in the Tradition of Southeast-European Studies

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