Article Analysis: A Look at Balkan Foundations and Development

For this week’s blog post, I decided to analyze one of the articles Angela included in her letter to our faculty sponsors. I looked at “The Role of Religion and the Culture of Identity in the Public Policy: The Balkans Case” by Stevo M. Lapcevic. Before I get into my thoughts on the piece, I want to mention any bias that might be included in the article. Lapcevic is a faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade, Serbia. As such, his perspective is an educated and academic one, albeit potentially biased towards Balkans nationalism. The article discusses the foundations of the Balkans and the influences that shaped the region while maintaining a bias that favors the region’s original Eurasian identity. The historical facts are accurate, but it is important to keep in mind this bias during analysis to avoid uninformed conclusions.

Lapcevic begins the article by describing the Balkan’s geographic location and the resultant implications. Geographically speaking, the Balkans lies in the center of the three “old continents” (the continents known and civilized before the discovery of the Americas and Australia). Since the Balkan Peninsula is in the middle of Europe, Africa, and Asia, it makes sense that the region would be influenced by cultures from all three continents. This is the foundation for the strong Eurasian influences on the Balkans throughout its history. Lapcevic describes the region as “catena mundi,” or the “buckle of the world”. This stresses the importance of the region in holding the three continents together. I’m not sure how much I agree with this phrase though. It is in the center, yes, but in my reading and research, I feel as though the Balkans have been more influenced by other regions and areas, rather than holding the regions together. Ethnically and culturally, the Balkans represent a blend of the surrounding continents, but this does not imply the region actively works towards holding the surrounding continents together. Jovan Cvijic, a well-known Serbian geographer and scientist, backs up my argument by claiming that the Eurasian heritage of the Balkans influenced the establishment of political and cultural systems of all the people on the peninsula.

Due to the Balkan’s centralized geographic location, the region has been buffeted by influences from other countries and cultures throughout history. Alexander the Great was one of the first major outside influences on the region. He gathered the Southern Balkans and influenced it with Eastern culture (the lands from which he came). According to Lapcevik, this made the Balkan men the “first Europeans to comprehend the full scope of the true East.” This statement holds truth, but also seems very prideful and opinionated. These eastern influences were suppressed due to later Roman influence, who tried to replace the eastern cultural characteristics with that of western culture. This ultimately failed because of the resurgence of eastern influence via Orthodox Christianity in the middle ages. Orthodox Christianity found a home in the Balkans in the identities of many of the peoples in the region. This Balkans religion differentiated itself from Russian Orthodox Christianity due to the previous cultural characteristics existing within the region. I find the back and forth influence between the East and West to be an interesting occurrence in the development of the area.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the article is the interplay between religion and linguistics and their role on shaping the culture in the Balkans. I had no idea that Latin is a sister language to the Cyrillic alphabet. Both are of Greek origin and represent two branches that are differentiated by the locations in which they took root. Latin developed in the west and became the language of the Catholic Church, while Cyrillic developed in the Balkans. Alexander of Macedon is credited as one of the large proponents of spreading the Latin Code and is one of the reasons it entered the Balkans. The subsequent fluctuation of prominence between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets in the Balkans became a function of the fluctuations in influences from outer regions. This is not an intuitive connection and presents an interesting argument, in my opinion. The Latin prominence was equated with the Catholic Church and western influence, while Cyrillic prominence supports the Balkan’s Eurasian heritage. In a region that always seems to be influenced by outside powers, I find it intriguing that the melting pot of cultures took on its own Balkan identity, which made its way into languages like Cyrillic. Serbian scholar Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic was responsible for bringing the Balkan languages to the masses from the scholarly monastery. Under mixed public opinion, yet respected by the Grimm brothers, Goethe, Paul Schaffarik, Nikola Tomazeo and many other authors and linguists, Karadzic collected and published Romanian, Albanian and Bulgarian folk literature in addition to his native Serbian language.

The languages of the Balkans reflected and still reflect the amount of outside influence on the region, both politically and culturally. For example, the Croatian language alternated between Croatian, Serbian, and a Serbian-Croatian mix in recent history. Speaking Serbian holds ties to the Eurasian Balkans foundation, while the newer Croatian language represents an independent and somewhat western perspective. This is a sentiment that Lapcevik repeats several times in his article, saying Croatia is ashamed about its Balkans heritage and is pioneering a “retreat from Eurasianism.” I would say this is an accurate argument. Croatia has repeatedly sought independence and western influence, most recently in its decade-long attempts to join the European Union (EU), which was successful as of June 2013. Lapcevik goes on to describe how in some cases, languages and linguistics are used as a political statement. For instance, Montenegro recently created a “Montenegrin” language, which is “linguistically unfounded” and “does not differ from Serbian at all.” In this case, the creation of a “new” language is an assertion of independence.

These language variations ultimately convey the dissociation of the Eurasian Balkans foundation, which is Lapcevik’s primary take away from the article. Spirituality is still varied in the region, but politics and economics are much more dependent upon the West and Russia. Tadeusz Zielinski, a philologist and professor at Warsaw University, offers a unique prediction about the future of the Balkans region. He stresses that the peninsula will be the pillar of the “fourth European renaissance” in which the Balkans will find a spiritual and ethical unity of variations in the region’s culture. I am skeptical of such a prediction, due to the present unrest in the region and the recent conflict, but only time will tell whether Zielinski’s prediction is accurate.

References: http://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/role-religion-and-culture-identity-public-policy-balkans-case#.UzHKFfldWSp