The large Balkan Peninsula takes up the whole of south-eastern Europe, its southern shores overlooking the eastern Mediterranean. But the images in most people's minds rarely have much to do with the Mediterranean, even though from a historical or geopolitical point of view this clutch of countries maintains close links with the region. The question of where the Balkans stand, and their particularity as a homogeneous entity, is frequently asked. The choice of the name goes back to the Ottoman presence in the Europe of the 19th century, when the German philologist August Zeune suggested the word for the area that was also called “European Turkey” – (balkan being Turkish for a chain of wooded hills). Since then, the name has become part of history, but during the 20th century it took on a more negative connotation, inexorably linked with the tensions and conflicts that developed there – which gave rise to the adjective “balkanized” – and so the word is now extended to countries which never experienced the Ottoman Empire, but which are struggling with this type of geopolitical problem. How can we justify such a definition? The form and recurrence of conflicts in the Balkans come from the fact that the people there have experienced a history very different from the rest of Europe, originating from the sometimes tense relations between the peoples who shared the peninsula. The long Ottoman domination of the Balkans, followed by the Soviet one for those countries which experienced it, are often called “against nature”, and they delayed the emergence, by definition conflictual, of nation-states. “The peoples' prison” is an expression used in turn to describe the Ottoman Empire and Tito's Yugoslavia, to give legitimacy to the multiple secessions which have taken place in this region.

 

Nevertheless, doubts can be raised about the validity of such assumptions, which implicitly indemnify the “great powers” of any responsibility in these conflicts by claiming all the problems are home-grown. The people living there often try to shake off this designation, almost never claiming they belong to the Balkans. To them it feels like a designation created outside, part of an uncontrolled and poorly understood otherness, always with overtones of a negative value judgement, suggesting a political backwardness which is almost tribal, primitive, close to some form of barbarism. This is the reason why some prefer the expression “Southeast Europe”. Maria Todorova, in a book which has become a reference, falls in with Edward Said, interpreting what she describes as a discourse of domination, just like the Orientalism denounced by Said. However, this set of images came back into vogue in recent decades, during the wars and political upheavals of the 1990's, when the region was the centre of new conflicts and new tensions.