Conference Paper

At various points in history the Balkans were a vivid locus of intersection among different cultures, religions, civilizations, and ideologies. The view of this region as a threshold of contact and mixture fuels opposing discursive practices either to champion a Balkan cultural pre-eminence or to justify its exclusion from Europe. Though claimed by the local nations as ‘the cradle of civilization’, for Western imagining the region has featured as “part of Europe, yet not of it” (Mazower, 2000). In view of the Ottoman legacy, the West has construed the Balkans as an ambiguous borderland, not as an oriental Other but rather as “an incomplete self” (Todorova, 1997) which is denied “an access in the European sphere of modernity” (Norris, 1999). This negative demi-orientalizing discourse - called ‘Balkanism’ by Todorova (1997) - which stigmatized the Balkans as a vortex of stagnation and violence has been thought to fade away with the integration of the Balkan countries into the European Union. Still, a recent term, ‘Western Balkans’, invented as a seeming mask of political correctness, seems to testify to a prevailing stigma and to the obstacles to the process of European integration. This paper reflects on this stigma, suggesting that the European integration of the Balkans may not be simply subsumed to their strained acculturation within the imagined Western paradigm. Instead, the embracing of the Balkan cultural legacies and identities can mean a new vision of Europe as a perichorestic project where different cultures do not blend but coinhere.