Zaman Gazetesi
January 1, 2008  

[INTERVIEWS] - What is the Western Balkans? by
What is meant by “the Western Balkans” or the Balkans in general?Entering 2008 in the wake of widespread questioning of the meaning of various identities -- both national and otherwise -- in this region, I can’t avoid asking myself that question on behalf of all southeastern European peoples seeking to join, sooner or later, the EU.
The question concerns Turkey as well. The people of the Balkans people forget that the region owes its name, originally meaning “a chain of wooded mountains,” to the Turkish language. As proof, there is another such chain somewhere in Caucasus, and Balkan province is one of the five provinces of Turkmenistan, with Balkanabat as its capital. Above all, almost the whole of the European Balkans was ruled by the Ottoman Empire for centuries, and modern Turkey still keeps one of its feet on that part of Europe’s soil.

Aside from that corner of southeastern Europe belonging to Turkey, popularly known as Rumelia among the Turks, the countries commonly included in the Balkans are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. Slovenia, Romania and Moldova are also sometimes included in the list. In fact, the northern borders of that region were always controversial ones due to the refusal of certain people to be associated with the Balkans. For centuries, the Balkans was the meeting point of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, and later of Islam and Christianity, in addition to Judaism brought by Spain’s exiled Jews. However, the term “Balkans” gradually acquired political connotations, far from its initial geographical meaning, beginning with political troubles in the late 1800s and increasing with the Balkan wars in 1912. World War I was sparked in 1914 by the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The term “powder keg,” which is how Westerners had already started referring to the Balkans, became more meaningful and remained so until the end of the 20th century, if not until today. The wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s further added negative connotations to the region’s name. More recently, the whole region was officially renamed Southeastern Europe, and the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe was established in 1999.

Nevertheless, through all these developments the Balkans remained the Balkans. Not divided between its western and eastern regions, it was instead already divided and split into diverse ethno-linguistic groups and nations, all claiming their own national rights. Last year there re-appeared Montenegro, and Kosovo is only now becoming independent.

Thus, the Western Balkans became a new geographic feature of Europe, covering Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia and, sooner or later, Kosovo. It is known that the German geographer August Zeune first used the term “Balkan Peninsula” in 1808, but I have not been able to find who first used the term “the Western Balkans.” It was introduced recently in EU documents now that some Balkan states have acceded to the EU and others have entered the accession process. An EU declaration from 2003 set out a generous strategy for accession and increasing the pace of reforms in the Western Balkans to create in the whole region of the southeastern Europe an area of peace, stability, prosperity, freedom and human rights.

And what happened to the other Balkan countries?

Starting from the north, Slovenia by entering the EU has successfully removed itself from the Balkans, never being quite happy there in the first place. To the east, Romania and Bulgaria joined Greece in the extended family of the EU. Turkey remained a special case, becoming closer or more distant from the EU, depending on the prevailing European attitude -- sometimes more conservative, sometimes less, but always prejudiced.

Thus, the EU has gradually substituted a symbolic partition between the Balkan countries already integrated into the EU versus those countries not yet in the running for the traditional perception of Balkans. This kind of dispersion in favor of a staggered enlargement process into the EU, however, is leaving many questions that can hardly be answered logically. Does this distinction bring more peace, security, economic and social progress and freedom to the Balkans and Europe? Or it is bringing more suspicions among the Balkan nations that some of them are more, and some less European? How can one explain to a Croatian, or even a Bosnian, that their countries are more distant from the EU than Romania and Bulgaria? News on poverty and corruption in those countries are making many Europeans regret the EU’s early acceptance of some former communist, or more politely put, “transitional” countries. Or is this the only possible way to get beyond national tensions and crises, as it was said in Brussels?

So, a vague term like “the Western Balkans” provokes some semantic questions. I would like for one of the EU experts on enlargement to explain why they invented this term when there is no complimentary term, like the “Eastern Balkans.” Could the eastern Balkan countries be more Western, meaning European, than those belonging to the Western Balkans?

I am afraid that an approach of the common people, those who are more victims than subjects of “greater politics,” could be also applied to this situation. “Everything is calculated and decided,” say such people, “amongst the big powers.” In other words, the current Balkan developments should be observed as part of the re-emerging power of Russia and its rivalry with the US and the EU in this region. While I was the Bosnian ambassador in Ankara , I was surprised to be informed that in Tirana there was a meeting of defense ministers of the “South Balkans,” Albania, Turkey, Macedonia and Greece and the US, it was an initiative to establish a security and military grouping of southern Balkan countries with the intention of preventing conflict in the north from spreading to that area.

Maybe “the Western Balkans” will disappear as well one day and the Balkans will remain simply the Balkans, with all the connotations that go with this name.


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*Hajrudin Somun is the former ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Turkey