Re-imagining the Balkans: The Other Side of a Periphery

Instead of looking at the Balkans through a negative prism, and viewing the region as an “incomplete self” of Europe and as a region permanently short of modernization, this paper suggests a different, more balanced perspective. It intends to explore the creative or at least revelatory dimensions of the recent cultural and political history of the Balkans, summed up in the notion of productive periphery. The Balkans, as a region is defined by its peripheric situation; by a distant, yet tight relation to a center; by a clearly subaltern, yet somehow decisive position. While being peripheral to historical trends, Balkan nations were also paradoxically very close to the political and educational centers (Istanbul and Vienna) but still relatively free from other historically weighty centers (Berlin, Cairo and Moscow). Several developments have played out in which Balkan states have taken a belated, imitative route towards modernity – nationalism, Islamic modernism and communism. Yet, during the unfolding and (according to this analysis) also thanks to its position as a liminal periphery, those routes have developed into hybrid and original phenomena attesting to the fact that the periphery may be a productive space and that the productiveness of periphery should be studied.