After each territorial partition in the Balkans something always remains either unhinged or incomplete. Divisions produce both errors and bad strategy while the “truths” offered by Serbians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Croatians, Albanians, Muslims, Catholics and the Orthodox are usually relative. Thus everything about the Balkans has become a matter of skewed opinion, leading to infinite misunderstanding and confusion.
In the Balkans, the past hasn’t always been given the space necessary to become history. A poor sense of historical consciousness has often triggered different views of what just happened and what’s up next. National history selected the legend that best fit it, operating outside objectivity and tailoring values to suit specific needs. In lands where the past traditionally overwhelms history, events struggle to define themselves, or lose control over their own meaning. Ideological consciousness creates its own past scenarios, leading followers and subjects to accept and believe them. Hybrids of past and present create barriers to new processes and distort memory. Opinion is more likely to lean on mythology than reality, identifying a myth with its own overcoming. Even “serious events” fall prey to historicist narratives, or to fiction itself, and as such can’t offer a functional interpretative base or even an opening for hopefulness. After each partition of Balkan territories something unsolved and unfinished has remained behind. This incompleteness and the failure to resolve outstanding issues usually created distorted facts or and bad decision-making. The “truth” offered Serbians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Croatians, Albanians, Muslims, Catholics and the Orthodox – as well as other self-interested “truths” – were considered truths only unto themselves, for those issuing them. Thus the basic idea of truth in the Balkans itself became relative, both among those who live in them and among those viewing them from the outside. The central part of the Balkans never really met up with the Renaissance, unlike coastline territories where Venice was pre-eminent and Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) emerged. The Enlightenment came late to the whole peninsula, presenting itself differently territory-by-territory but almost uniformly lacking secularism. Modernity was knocking at doors that lacked keys. Nations were formed under duress, forced to endure countless fractures while trying to win the largest possible space for themselves, in the process neglecting the interests and rights of others. National programs, even those essential and beneficial within a domestic framework, were seen by nearby neighbors as a threat or a conspiracy. Foreign powers efforts to repair the situation, to lay down rules of conduct and sketch out boundaries, efforts made on behalf of their own interests and objectives, in turn provoked discontent among those who felt harmed, their rights violated or their voices unheeded. Balkan history has repeatedly been “regulated” by international agreements, but each successive pact usually left behind it some outstanding issue, which in turn generated a new set of controversial events that came to the forefront but also went unfinished. It  resembled that game in which the volume of arriving mail is constantly increased or decreased, withdrawn or transferred, from one player to another. Examples and proof of the pattern are abundant. The Peace of Pressburg (today known as Bratislava) yielded Venice, the eastern Adriatic coast, and the “Illyrian Provinces” to Napoleon. Later, the renowned Congress of Vienna enabled Austria to occupy all the territories that were once in Napoleon’s domain, while denying aid to Serbia, whose insurrection was brutally crushed by the Ottoman Empire. The Congress of Berlin in turn was generous to the Principality of Serbia in its struggle against Bulgaria, at the same time permitting Turkey to continue its rule over Bosnia for a while longer. One after another, the Balkan wars ended with armistices rather than real peace deals. The post-World War I Versailles Treaty buttressed Serbs, then allied with the French, and ensured the creation of state for Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). But this decision took no account of other national communities present in southern Slavic areas and also neglected the interests of neighboring peoples. The tripartite conference at Yalta during World War II tried to divide the Balkans into two zones of interest, trying to enforce symmetry on an asymmetrical region. Even the Dayton Agreement of 1994 can be factored into the mix. The pact ended the war in Bosnia first, and later in Kosovo, but is today is both unproductive and insufficient. On the Balkan chessboard every move, even small ones, changes the overall situation of the board and the game, propelling it in a different, sometimes quite unexpected direction. Some part of the work at hand, usually the most important part, perpetually had to redone or corrected. Or was postponed to be dealt with in “better” times, times that arrived too late or not at all. Events were therefore never completed, never satisfactorily realized. As result incomplete periods arose, each one aggravated by its own set of internal contradictions. These were maimed periods. The peoples who became part of nations late, and above all parts of nation-states, carried around a kind of innate dualism: they acted both as people and as a nation. Under such circumstances it’s difficult to establish a secure basis for any kind of self-identification: to what extent are we one thing, to what extent another? What are we more like in certain circumstances and what are we less like in others? How and in what way are we the personification of both of these things at once? The terminology used over time (references to tribes, communities, ethnicities, people, country, nation, national group, nation, state, and so one) carried the germ of potential misunderstanding and misconception. The very essence of the Balkans being lies in its instability and its contradictions, which instead of canceling each other end up bolstering both sides of the contradiction itself. Thus producing new ones. The hybrids of the past and of history itself often grow together or are joined artificially to create barriers to new processes and further progress. We have often defined ourselves through memories, memories that different generations then fervently try to defend. But that impulse must be balanced against defending oneself from memory. The things we try hardest to perpetuate also form a part of that from which we must be saved. The danger produced by such situations has been cited by one of the best connoisseurs of the Balkans, Jovan Cvijic, who used the spider’s web metaphor in his famous essay “The Balkan Peninsula,” written at the beginning of the 20th century both in French and Serbian: “Like the spider, men weave around them a web of historical prejudices, of national vainglory, of reshaped lifestyles. These same webs spiritually isolate people from the rest of the world and allow them to become archai … Nationalist instincts inherited from previous eras, even the most deeply primitive ones, asleep until yesterday, are beginning to reawaken...” The Serbian scholar’s warning proved prophetic: the “spider” has wrapped most of the Balkan peninsula in its web, repeatedly covering it with bloody wounds, stitching around it the veil of old tragedies. The Balkan Peninsula, in Churchill’s famous words, “produces more history than it can eat.” It’s a peninsula on which “the cradle of European civilization” rests, and which, even now, is the “powder keg of Europe.”