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Mirroring Europe
 Balkan Studies Library

Editor-in-Chief

Zoran Milutinovic (University College London)

Editorial Board

Gordon N. Bardos, Columbia University

Alex Drace-Francis, University of Amsterdam
Jasna Dragovic-Soso, Goldsmiths, University of London
Christian Voss, Humboldt University, Berlin
Marie-Janine Calic, University of Munich
Lenard J. Cohen, Simon Fraser University
Radmila Gorup, Columbia University
Robert M. Hayden, University of Pittsburgh
Robert Hodel, Hamburg University
Anna Krasteva, New Bulgarian University
Galin Tihanov, Queen Mary, University of London
Maria Todorova, University of Illinois
Andrew Wachtel, Northwestern University

VOLUME 13

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsl

 Mirroring Europe
Ideas of Europe and Europeanization
in Balkan Societies

Edited by

Tanja Petrović

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Hotel Europe Sarajevo.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mirroring Europe : ideas of Europe and Europeanization in Balkan societies / edited by Tanja Petrović.
pages cm. — (Balkan studies library, ISSN 1877-6272 ; volume 13)
Summary: “Mirroring Europe offers refreshing insight into the ways Europe is imagined, negotiated and evoked in
Balkan societies in the time of their accession to the European Union. Until now, visions of Europe from the
southeast of the continent have been largely overlooked. By examining political and academic discourses, cultural
performances, and memory practices, this collection destabilizes supposedly clear and firm division of the continent
into East and West, ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europe, ‘Europe’ and ‘still-not-Europe.’ The essays collected here show Europe to
be a dynamic, multifaceted, contested idea built on values, images and metaphors that are widely shared across such
geographic and ideological frontiers. Contributors are: Čarna Brković, Ildiko Erdei, Ana Hofman, Fabio Mattioli,
Marijana Mitrović, Nermina Mujagić, Orlanda Obad, and Tanja Petrović”—Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-27507-2 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-27508-9 (e-book) 1. Balkan Peninsula—
Relations—Europe, Western. 2. Europe, Western—Relations—Balkan Peninsula. 3. Europe, Western—Foreign
public opinion. 4. Public opinion—Balkan Peninsula. 5. European Union—Balkan Peninsula—History. 6. Balkan
Peninsula—Politics and government—1989– 7. Balkan Peninsula—Intellectual life. 8. Balkan Peninsula—Social
conditions. 9. Popular culture—Balkan Peninsula.
10. Collective memory—Balkan Peninsula. I. Petrović, Tanja.

DR38.3.E85M58 2014
303.48’249604—dc23
2014014726

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering
Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities.
For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface.

issn 1877-6272
isbn 978 90 04 27507 2 (hardback)
isbn 978 90 04 27508 9 (e-book)

Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided
that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite
910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

Acknowledgements vii
List of Illustrations viii
Notes on Contributors ix

part 1
De-Provincializing Western Europe 1

1 Introduction: Europeanization and the Balkans 3

Tanja Petrović

2 On the Privilege of the Peripheral Point of View: A Beginner’s

Guide to the Study and Practice of Balkanism 20
Orlanda Obad

part 2
Performing Europe 39

3 Balkan Music Awards: Popular Music Industries in the Balkans

between Already-Europe and Europe-To-Be 41
Ana Hofman

4 Regimes of Aesthetics: Competing Performances Surrounding

the Skopje 2014 Plan 64
Fabio Mattioli

part 3
Europe as Nostalgia / Utopia 89

5 Mourning the Lost Modernity: Industrial Labor, Europe, and

(post)Yugoslav Post-socialism 91
Tanja Petrović
vi contents

6 IKEA in Serbia: Debates on Modernity, Culture and Democracy

in the Pre-Accession Period 114
Ildiko Erdei

7 Nostalgia and Utopia in Post-Yugoslav Feminist Genealogies

in the Light of Europeanization 135
Marijana Mitrović

part 4
Europe in Political Imagination 161

8 The Quest for Legitimacy: Discussing Language and Sexuality in

Montenegro 163
Čarna Brković

9 The European Union as a Spectacle: The Case of the Slovenian-Croatian

Dispute over the Sea Border 186
Nermina Mujagić

Index 205
Acknowledgements

Most of the contributions to this volume resulted from the project Negotiating
Europeanness: Austria, Slovenia and the Western Balkans, financed by the Austrian
Science and Research Liaison Office Ljubljana (ASO) in cooperation with the Centre
for Social Innovation (ZSI) in Vienna (2010–2011). The texts published here are the
result of intense cooperation and exchange of ideas among the authors, as well as
other colleagues who were part of the Negotiating Europeanness project: Asim Mujkić,
Ines Prica, Martin Pogačar, Andreas Pribersky and Petra Bernhardt.
We are very thankful to the editor-in-chief of Brill’s Balkan Studies Library, Professor
Zoran Milutinović, who believed in this project from the beginning and was a patient
and thoughtful reader of various versions of the manuscript. His advice and construc-
tive criticism significantly contributed to the final shape of the book. Two anonymous
reviewers have also provided us with valuable comments and suggestions. Ivo Romein,
the subject editor for Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Brill Academic Publishers, made
the journey from the manuscript to the published book smooth with his good humor
and always available technical support. Manca Gašperšič and Mitch Cohen have
invested a lot of effort and patience in copyediting.
A visiting fellowship at the Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in
Regensburg in May 2013 enabled the volume’s editor to do significant editorial work
on this collection. The final steps towards the publication were made during her fel-
lowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social
Sciences in winter semester 2013.
List of Illustrations

FIGURE Caption
3.1 Logo of the Balkanika Music Television (copyright: Balkanika Music
Television) 48
3.2 Turkish singer Hadise, BMA 2010 (copyright: Balkanika Music
Television) 56
5.1 A small exhibition in the Jagodina Cable Factory. Photo by
Tanja Petrović 107
5.2 A small exhibition in the Jagodina Cable Factory. Photo by
Tanja Petrović 107
5.3 A memorial room in Breza, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo by
Tanja Petrović 108
6.1 Fake IKEA store in Pančevo, Serbia. Photo by Ildiko Erdei 121
8.1 A photograph which illustrates the nexus of NGOs, EU, and legality in
the LGBTIQ struggles in Montenegro. Taken at the first Montenegrin
Pride Parade, held in Podgorica in October 2013, it shows LGBTIQ activists
from former Yugoslav region, an EU representative in Montenegro, and
three out of 2000 police officers which separated 150-200 participants
from other residents of Montenegro in order to ensure safety. Photo by
Vanja Gagović 182
Notes on Contributors

Čarna Brković’s
research interests are the intersections of the state, humanitarianism,
borders, morality and welfare in post-Yugoslav countries. Her doctoral
research in social anthropology at the University of Manchester addressed
healthcare, social security, and humanitarianism in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
exploring how people’s movement through social space recreated political
collectives and outlining modalities of power generated by informal and
semi-formal practices of state-run welfare systems. In her ethnographic
research in Montenegro, she focused on the post-socialist reconstruction of
the publics, which resulted in several published articles and chapters in
edited volumes. She is currently a Fellow at the CEU Institute for Advanced
Study.

Ildiko Erdei
is an ethnologist and anthropologist. She is an Associate Professor at the
Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, School of Philosophy at
Belgrade University. Her research interests range from politics of time and
space in contemporary political rituals, relations between media and rituals
as symbolic systems and creators of “meaningful universes” to problems
related to childhood and growing up during socialism, while her recent
research interest includes cultural and symbolic dimensions of post-socialist
transformation in Serbia and former Yugoslavia. She published articles and
chapters in edited volumes on consumption and consumer culture in social-
ism and post-socialism and two monographs, most recently “Waiting for Ikea:
consumer culture in post-socialism and before” (Belgrade, 2012).

Ana Hofman
an ethnomusicologist, recieved her PhD from the Graduate School for
Intercultural Studies at the University of Nova Gorica. Currently, she is a
research fellow at the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences
and Arts in Ljubljana. She teaches at the Faculty of Humanities of University
of Nova Gorica, Slovenia and is a co-founder of the Center for Balkan Music
Research from Belgrade, Serbia. Her research interests include music in
socialist and post-socialist societies with an emphasis on former Yugoslavia;
music and gender and feminist studies; music and cultural memory, music
in conflict and border areas, applied ethnomusicology. She has published a
number of book chapters and articles. In 2011 she published the monograph
x notes on contributors

Staging socialist femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in

Serbia, Balkan Studies Series, Brill Publishing.

Fabio Mattioli
obtained his BA in Political Philosophy from Florence University (Italy) and
his MA in Social Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales (EHESS, Paris, France). Before joining the PhD program in
Anthropology at the the City University of New York, he has been visiting
researcher at the university Ss Cyril and Methodius of Skopje, Rep. of
Macedonia. Fabio is working on a project regarding the multiple credit and
debt relations in the building industry in Skopje, Macedonia. He is also
interested in questions of Economic Anthropology, Urban Anthropology,
Aesthetics, Post-Socialism, and Ethnicity. His secret dream is to learn how to
prepare burek.

Marijana Mitrović
is an anthropologist and gender studies scholar. She is a PhD candidate at the
Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, Department of Ethnology and
Anthropology. She used to work as a research associate at the Ethnographic
Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her research inte­
rest is a history of feminism in former Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav
societies, as well as construction of gender identities in popular music in
post-Yugoslav societies. She published several articles in scientific journals.

Nermina Mujagić
holds PhD in political sciences, she is Associate professor at the Faculty of
Political Science, University of Sarajevo. Her scientific interest includes
research into theories of political conflicts, political communication, theories
of political culture, political ideology of political parties, media and conflict.
She is the autor of three books: Politička de/re socijalizacija i mediji (Political
De/Resocialization and Media), Izvan politike (Beyond Politics), and
Tihi govor Bosne (The Silent Talk of Bosnia), as well as of several articles
published in academic journals.

Orlanda Obad
is research associate at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in
Zagreb. Her research interests include Balkanism studies, postcolonial theory
and symbolic geography. In the past several years, she has conducted exten-
sive research on social perception of Europe and EU in Croatia, and she
participated in a couple of international projects on this topic, while also
notes on contributors xi

publishing articles and chapters in edited volumes. Recently, her research

interest focused on the implementation of EU agricultural policy in new
member states.

Tanja Petrović
is a linguist and anthropologist. She is a Senior Research Associate at the
Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana
and head of Center’s Department for Interdisciplinary Research. Her research
interest lies at the interface of linguistic, social, and cultural phenomena
in the former Yugoslav societies, with an emphasis on ideology and
remembering. She published articles and chapters in edited volumes on
linguistic and cultural identities and processes in the former Yugoslavia and
four monographs, most recently Yuropa: Yugoslav legacy and politics of the
future in post-Yugoslav societies (Belgrade, Fabrika knjiga 2012).
 part 1
De-Provincializing Western Europe

∵
 chapter 1

Introduction: Europeanization and the Balkans

Tanja Petrović

From the Balkans to the Western Balkans

“With us to Europe” or “We take you to Europe” are the mottoes found in adver-
tisements for bus companies operating between Balkan and Western European
cities as well as in the campaigns of political parties across the region. While in
the case of buses traveling across the continent, this is a metaphor with a his-
tory, related to decades and centuries of physical movement westward moti-
vated by a promise of a better and more stable life, education and modernization,
the Europe promised by politicians in the Balkan countries is a different kind:
going to this Europe does not require physical but rather ideological move-
ment. It refers to accession to the European Union, by which “Europe” should
come to these countries (fulfilling all the promises for which people used to go
to “Europe” in past centuries—and still do), and simultaneously they should
become “Europe” by transforming themselves. The latter aspect—the one of
transformation and adjustment in the domains of legislatures, institutions and
public policies—is a characteristic of EU accession also in the case of “already
European” countries in the continent’s West: in political theory, this process is
termed Europeanization and usually refers to the “domestic impact of the
European Union” (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005, 1). While there is,
particularly in anthropology, a body of research that discusses Europeanization
within a framework much wider than that of EU-related processes and policies
(for an early review, see Borneman and Fowler 1997), this concept is becoming
increasingly EU-bound, just as in political discourses Europe itself is increas-
ingly becoming a metonymy for the European Union (Velikonja 2005).1

1 The term Europeanization today refers almost exclusively to EU-related policies and prac-
tices in political science, although many political scientists admit its inadequacy (cf.
Schimmelfennig and Sledelmeier 2005: 1, note 3). In parallel, the equation between Europe
and the European Union goes so far that it affects purely geographical notions that should be
neutral. After Bulgaria joined the European Union, the Austrian daily Der Standard wrote that
Europe had acquired a new sea (Markus Bernath, “Das Neue Meer Europas” [Europe’s New
Sea], Der Standard, January 5–6, 2006). In spring 2009, the Slovenian Tourist Organization’s
billboards in Belgrade advertising holidays in Slovenia featured a photo of Portorož and the
slogan “The nearest European sea.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/9789004275089_002

4 petrović

The notion of the Western Balkans is likewise intrinsically connected with

the process of Europeanization understood in terms of accession to the EU: it
encompasses countries of the Balkans that are still in the process of accession.
Once a country is granted full membership in the EU, it ceases to be part of the
Western Balkans. The moment all the countries located between Croatia in the
west, Hungary in the north, Romania and Bulgaria in the east, and Greece in
the south join the EU, the political term Western Balkans will disappear.
In political discourse, the term Western Balkans has replaced the term
Southeastern Europe, which was used during the 1990s to denote the countries
plagued by ethnic conflicts. The latter actually functioned as a euphemism for
the Balkans, a name that carried a historical burden and one with which most
new countries founded after the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia did
not want to identify. However, the history of the term Southeastern Europe as a
neutral alternative for the Balkans goes back much further than the last decade
of the 20th century. Todorova (1997, 28) states, “after 1918, the term ‘Balkan
Peninsula,’ under attack for some time because of its geographical inadequacy
and its value-ridden nature, began to fade away but not disappear, notably in
the German language literature.” In the words of Mathias Bernath (1973, 142),
Südosteuropa was to become a “neutral, non-political and non-ideological con-
cept which, moreover, abolished the standing historical-political dichotomy
between the Danubian monarchy and the Ottoman Balkans that had become
irrelevant.” During the 1930s and 1940s, the term was taken over by the Nazis, so
it acquired negative connotations, and with a long-lasting effect: “Südosteuropa
became an important concept in the geopolitical views of the Nazis, and had
its defined place in their world order as Wirtschaftsraum Grossdeutschland
Südost, ‘the naturally determined economic and political completion’ of the
German Reich in the southeast” (Todorova 1997, 28).2
As a term to denote the southeast region of Europe with its complex histori-
cal trajectories and its own imaginations of Europe and Europeanness, the
Western Balkans proves to be inappropriate and difficult to identify with. The
scholarly literature provides countless definitions of the region, but their com-
mon denominator is the description of a region as a territory or an area that is
delimited or defined in some way (Johansson 1999, 4, quoted in Todorova 2005,
83). Some scholars emphasize that a region must have its internal characteris-

2 The interdisciplinary academic tradition of “Südostforschung” should be treated along the

same lines. As Promitzer (2003, 184) argues, Südostforschung was transformed “from a disci-
pline of Austro-German national revisionism into a tool of National Socialist geopolitics.” For
more on Südostforschung in Germany and Austria, see Kaser 1990, Burleigh 1988, and
Promitzer 2003.
Introduction 5

tics and must be characterized by cohesion if it is to be distinguished from its

environment (Ibid.). In the case of the Western Balkans, it would be difficult to
argue that it is a region in the traditional sense of the word. It is not that the
countries of the Western Balkans do not have anything in common, but there
is nothing that sets them apart from the neighboring countries, except that
they are not EU members. If we adhere to Maria Todorova and take historical
legacy as an important factor that defines a region culturally, historically, and
politically, then again it is difficult to define the Western Balkans as a unit,
since the countries occupying this region share a common historical legacy
with other countries in their neighborhood, be it the legacy of the Habsburg
Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or the Yugoslav or socialist legacy. The question
of what the Western Balkans are can be answered only if we invert it and ask
instead what the Western Balkans are not. The answer is then self-evident: they
are not the EU. For this reason, we try to avoid the Western Balkans as a geo-
graphical category: the authors in this volume address processes of
Europeanization and ideas of Europe that escape rigid political protocols of
division and classification. Their focus is largely on the ways the people in the
Balkans imagine, negotiate, and make use of the idea of Europe; these images,
negotiations, and uses are importantly influenced by the post-socialist condi-
tion (and by the legacy of socialism) and are inevitably created through a dia-
logue with images and ideas dominating in Europe’s West.
But before I discuss in more detail the aspects of this alternative, multidirec-
tional and multivocal, culturally based Europeanization as it is negotiated in
the Balkan societies, it is necessary to point out two important consequences
of the predominant political discourses and practices that significantly condi-
tion the (self-) perception of these societies in contemporary Europe. The first
concerns the link between the Balkans, on the one hand, and colonialism and
postcolonial discourses and metaphors, on the other, which becomes increas-
ingly relevant in the context of the EU accession of the Balkan societies. The
second is related to the socialist legacy of the Balkan societies, which they
share with Eastern Europe, and the tensions and problems post-socialist soci-
eties face within the common political and cultural space of united Europe
after the end of the Cold War.

The Balkans and the Third World: Balkanism and Colonialism

As Milica Bakić-Hayden and Robert Hayden argue, “in the post-colonial world,
the language of Orientalism still maintains its rhetorical force as a powerful set
of categories with which to stigmatize societies that are not ‘western-style
6 petrović

democracies’” (Bakić-Hayden and Hayden 1992, 2). In the same vein, many
scholars place the mechanisms of the discursive shaping of the Balkan Other
within the analytical frame of Orientalism (see Aronson 2007, Bakić-Hayden
and Hayden 1992, Bakić-Hayden 1995, Hammond 2004, 2006, Miškova 2006,
Močnik 1998, Skopotea 1991). Milica Bakić-Hayden treats Balkan-related dis-
course as a variant of Orientalism because “it is the manner of perpetuation of
the underlying logic (. . .) that makes Balkanism and Orientalism variant forms
of the same kind” (Todorova 1997, 11; cf. Bakić-Hayden 1995). In her book
Imagining the Balkans, the historian Maria Todorova acknowledges the impor-
tant place of Said’s concept in the academic criticism of the discursive shaping
of the Other and otherness, emphasizing that “there is overlap and comple-
mentarity” between rhetoric about the Orient and the Balkans (Todorova 1997,
11). She nevertheless introduced a separate term for discourse on the relation-
ship between the Balkans and the West—Balkanism—and argued “for a sub-
stantive difference between the two categories and phenomena” (Todorova
2010, 176). While the Orient is historically and geographically elusive and unde-
fined, the Balkans are a firmly defined entity. The elusive nature of the Orient
gives rise to the perception of it as a dream country, a symbol of freedom and
wealth, and to the idea of flight from civilization. “The Balkans, on the other
hand, with their unimaginative concreteness, and almost total lack of wealth,
induced a straightforward attitude, usually negative, but rarely nuanced”
(Todorova 1997, 14). In Todorova’s opinion, the decisive difference lies in the
fact that the Orient is the unambiguous Other, while “the Balkans are Europe,
are part of Europe, although, admittedly, for the past several centuries its pro-
vincial part or periphery. (. . .) Unlike orientalism, which is a discourse about
an imputed opposition, balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity”
(Ibid., 17).
The publication and reception of Imagining the Balkans secured for the con-
cept of Balkanism an important place in debates dealing with the relationship
between the Balkans and the West and influenced the shaping of a new, critical
academic tradition within Balkan Studies, although the concept of Orientalism
did not quite disappear from scholarly works dealing with Balkan societies.
The historian Diana Mishkova hence concludes that a dialogue with Edward
Said’s approach to Orientalism is very productive for Balkan historiography
(Miškova 2006). The anthropologist Elissa Helms emphasizes the difference
between Balkanism and Orientalism in relation to techniques of subordina-
tion: “while Said’s orientalism was tied to (histories of) direct western coloni-
zation, balkanism was built on much more diffuse and indirect relationships of
domination and subordination vis-à-vis ‘the west’” (Helms 2008, 90). She also
argues that in the case of the Balkans, “western dominance has been evoked
Introduction 7

and constructed in relation to the Balkans through the language of oriental-

ism” (Ibid., 90–91; see also Bakić-Hayden and Hayden 1992, 3; Fleming 2000).
Andrew Hammond draws attention to the similarities between the discourse
of nineteenth-century British travel writers writing about the Balkans and the
discourse in Great Britain on its colonies, and he exposes the obvious continu-
ity with the discourse accompanying European Union enlargement—all these
discourses “share a sense of the Balkans as a borderland that requires Western
supervision” (Hammond 2006, 8). In her study of the representations of the
Balkans in British literature, Vesna Goldsworthy argues that “the process of
literary colonisation, in its stages and consequences, is not unlike real coloni-
zation” (Golsworthy 1998, 2) and that the images of the Balkans in English-
speaking countries contributed significantly to the perception of this part
of Europe elsewhere around the world. “The current, predominantly right-
wing perception is of the Balkans as a contagious disease, an infectious sore in
the soft underbelly of Europe, best left to fester in isolation. The opposing,
mainly left-wing—but unconsciously neo-colonial—notion is of Balkan con-
flicts as revolting departures from the ideal of cosmopolitanism which could
and should—to everyone’s benefit—be solved by mature and responsible
powers wielding a big stick and a few small carrots” (Ibid., xi). Alexander
Kiossev writes on the peripheral societies of the Balkans as self-colonizing
(Kiossev 1999).3
In the post-1989 (1991) Europe, however, colonial patterns and (post-) colo-
nial discourses obtained new meanings and acquired new forms. After the end
of socialism, the process of Europeanization, understood in Todorova’s terms
as getting rid of the Ottoman legacy, was accelerated in the Balkans. This pro-
cess was followed by another kind of Europeanization, namely the process of
accession to the European Union. This is happening in a political context in
which Western Europe expropriated the category of Europe with concrete
political and moral consequences (Todorova 2010, 190). The Balkan countries’
increasing self-perception as being colonized is doubtlessly the same senti-
ment shared by all Eastern Europeans in the process of European Union acce­
ssion, frequently disqualified by those from “core Europe” as self-marginalization
(since, politically speaking, the accession process is the same for all and ends
as soon as well-defined criteria are fulfilled). Merje Kuus also sees a reason to
observe political accession discourses from the perspective of postcolonial

3 For a detailed review of authors who have been trying to critically analyze the relationship
between Eastern and Western Europe or between Europe and the countries that have not yet
become European Union members, relying on concepts borrowed from postcolonial theory,
see Obad 2008.
8 petrović

theory in the fact that the countries that want to join the European Union are
treated as “essentially different from Europe” (Kuus 2004, 483). József Böröcz
(2001) discusses the colonial background of the eastward enlargement of
European Union in a similar vein.
In this new context defined by European Union membership, the well-
established discourse of Balkanism promotes several specific colonial traits in
the sphere of politics and the economy that frequently exceed mere metaphor-
ical usage of colonization discourse.
First, colonization as self-perception goes beyond intellectual debates in the
Balkans and takes on more tangible forms. One of the more obvious forms is
the presence of the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina and
Kosovo (and police units in Albania and Macedonia), whose institutions, dis-
courses, and political practices show many explicit neo-colonial traits (see
Majstorović 2007, Tatlić 2007/2008). The idea that some kind of colonial
administration in the Balkans is indispensable for maintaining peace and
enabling the development of the entire European continent was frequently
echoed in journal articles, essays, and pseudo-academic literature dating from
the 1990s. Andrew Hammond gives a number of examples of such discourse
(Hammond 2006, 20). For Robert Carver, the only solution for endless unrest in
Albania is “European-enforced order and industry” and a reinvigoration of “the
centres of ultimate power” that pertained “in the old colonial days” (Carver
1998, 133, 169). Robert Kaplan, the author of Balkan Ghosts, which is today cited
as an example par excellence of Balkanism, claimed during the NATO air cam-
paign against Yugoslavia in 1999 that “[o]nly western imperialism—though
few will like calling it that—can now unite the European continent and save
the Balkans from chaos” (Kaplan 1999). Writing during the early 1990s, Michael
Ignatieff, a Canadian, saw the absence of any great powers as the reason for
conflict in the Balkans, saying that in the “Balkans—populations find them-
selves without an imperial arbiter to appeal to. Small wonder then, that, unre-
strained by stronger hands, they have set upon each other for that final settling
of scores so long deferred by the presence of empire” (Ignatieff 1993, 12–13). In
an article written for the Guardian, Julian Borger stated that a “‘benign colonial
regime’ was necessary for democratic development in Bosnia” (Borger 1996,
19). As Rajko Muršič pointed out, the idea that the supervision of the Balkans
is necessary is related to its image as a

“crossroads” or “contact zone.” Only such places produce not clearly

defined notions for building of the well-defined discourse of hegemony.
Yes, if somewhere is the place where things are not yet settled, then ‘our’
way of organisation is worth defending and Our order (or, simply Our
Introduction 9

way) has to be developed further and strengthened. It is easy, because the

border zone of instability has always been understood as the bridge or a
crossroads (Muršič 2007, 91; see also Todorova 1997, 15).

Second, and more generally, numerous scholars concur with the view that the
“representation of the Balkans as the ‘European third world zone’ helped cre-
ate the impression of so urgently needed collective identity and the sense of
the European Union” (Erjavec and Volčič 2007, 124; see also Mastnak 1998).
European Union accession for the Balkan states, although it should mean mov-
ing closer to “Europe,” pushes them into the “third world zone.” This is done by
means of a set of security-related discourses—about organized crime sup-
ported by corrupted political elites, drug smuggling, illegal immigrants, terror-
ism (because the Muslim population is “autochthonous”, both in the Balkans
and in North Africa, this area can be associated with Al Qaeda and “global
terrorism”) etc.
Third, economic control of the Balkans is certainly a part of the global pro-
cess of “spreading world capitalism.” Here, foreign (European Union mem-
bers’) economic presence and “mastering of the Balkan markets” go hand in
hand with two characteristic sets of discourses that inevitably recall postcolo-
nial relations, namely discourses of aid and expertise, on the one hand, and
discourses of administration, on the other.

The Balkans and the Eastern Europe: The Socialist Legacy

According to Maria Todorova, in the post-1989 condition, “contemporary East

European intellectuals (. . .) increasingly see themselves in a subordinate posi-
tion vis-à-vis the centers of knowledge production and dissemination in the
West, and some explicitly speak of intellectual neoimperialism, neocolonial-
ism or self-colonization, whence the identification with postcoloniality”
(Todorova 2010, 177). In this intellectual domain, Todorova sees a potential
for “a genuine and fruitful confluence of aims between postcolonial theory
and anti-balkanism”, while maintaining that “this is nothing specific to the
Balkans, but an overall East European phenomenon” related to its socialist
legacy (Ibid., 190).
The socialist legacy, therefore, unites most of the Balkans and Eastern
Europe4 into a common area in the post-1989 symbolic geography of Europe,

4 Eastern Europe, just like the Balkans, is a category perceived as problematic to identify with:
Todorova (2005, 94) writes that in 1997 the US State Department issued an official directive
10 petrović

making it less European then the continent’s West. In this framework, socialism
is regarded as an essentially non-European legacy that hinders Eastern
European societies from fully integrating into “democratic Europe”. The social-
ist past of these societies accounts for their paternalistic treatment by “core
Europe”, even in cases where they are members of the EU.5
Such perception of post-socialist Europe poses serious problems not only in
regard to the regimes of knowledge production and dissemination mentioned
by Todorova (see also Obad, this volume), but also to political legitimacy and
agency both within post-socialist societies and in the international arena.
“Eastern Europeans” (including citizens of post-socialist Balkan societies) are
treated as children who cannot be fully responsible for their own behavior;
therefore, they are irrational and urgently need assistance, supervision, and
education. This is a recognizable image of Eastern Europeans in post-socialism
to which Boris Buden points, stressing that the expression “children of com-
munism” is not a metaphor, but a symptom of imagination in which transition
to democracy as a radical reconstruction starts from scratch: “Eastern Europe
after 1989 resembles a landscape of historical ruins that is inhabited only by
children, immature people unable to organize their lives democratically with-
out guidance from another” (Buden 2009).
The wars on the territory of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s made such
treatment even more radical; the international community approached these
postwar societies with the presumption that they need to be built from scratch
and was generally uninterested in what was before (Helms 2003). The logic of
post-socialist transition also hugely contributed to the erasure of the socialist
past and inability of post-socialist subjects to refer to their experiences of
socialism in a politically legitimate way. Within this logic, transition is per-
ceived as not only a necessary, but also as a well-defined, clearly directed pro-
cess at whose end the former socialist societies should fully implement

instructing its embassies to drop the term Eastern Europe and refer only to Central Europe,
since the new democratic states could find the former offensive. Todorova emphasizes that
this created an interesting situation: there is Central Europe and then comes Russia. “So we
have an interesting situation: there is a continent whose name is Europe, which has a center
which is not quite Europe, and therefore it’s called Central Europe (since we are on the topic
of names, we might as well call it Untereuropa); its West is actually Europe, and it has no East”
(Todorova 2005, 75).
5 For example, the President of the European Parliament, speaking in 2008 at a conference
held in Ljubljana in the framework of Slovenia’s EU presidency, said, “The current Slovenian
presidency of the EU is the best testament to the fundamental change that has taken place in
this region over the past two decades. This is an extraordinary achievement, when you con-
sider that less than 20 years ago Slovenia was part of communist Yugoslavia.”
Introduction 11

ready-made models coming from the West. The same is true for the process of
accession to the EU, which is largely equated to Europeanization when it
comes to the countries of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. All this has impor-
tant consequences for several domains of public, political, and cultural life in
Europe. The socialist legacy is largely absent from dominant cultural memory
and heritage narratives (see Petrović, this volume), while in the field of
memory politics, such Europeanization oddly contributes to the process of
historical revisionism and the reinterpretation of events and involvements in
World War II, since in post-socialist societies the antifascist legacy cannot be
separated from the succeeding decades of socialism. Rejection of the socialist
legacy combined with revisionist reinterpretations of the history of World War
II have significantly contributed to strengthening of nationalism in Eastern
Europe (Petrović 2013).

From a One-Way Street to a Room of Mirrors

As Héritier (2005, 199–200) stresses, there are three notions of Europeanization

used in the political sciences: according to the first, Europeanization is equiva-
lent to European integration; under the second notion, “Europeanization is
defined in a more restrictive sense, conceived of as an impact of clearly defined,
individual EU policy measures on the existing policies, political and adminis-
trative processes, and structures of member states” (Ibid., 200); and the third
notion defines Europeanization in terms of the influence of EU policies and
values on the “rest of the world,” i.e., non-member states. Focusing on the sec-
ond notion and discussing the difference between Europeanization East and
Europeanization West, the author outlines profound differences among them,
stressing that in case of Western European countries “Europeanization is a
two-way street when it comes to shaping EU policy measures, whereas
Europeanization East, at this stage, seems to be more of a one-way street”
(Ibid., 207). This one-directionality is even more salient in the case of those
countries of the Balkan Peninsula that are still striving for EU membership—
in the part of Europe called the Western Balkans in political discourses.
Research already done on discourses and images related to EU expansion to
this part of Europe has persuasively shown that these processes are perceived
as oriented from the center toward periphery, with the “degree of civilization
and Europeanness” decreasing in this direction: peripheral societies are per-
ceived as mere passive receivers of patterns and values coming from the center
(cf. Hammond 2006, Majstorović 2007, Obad 2009, Petrović 2009). These dis-
courses and the political practices that they accompany also suggest a clear
12 petrović

and stable division between East and West, “Europe” (EU) and “still-not-
Europe” (candidate countries), “old” and “new” Europe, where Western Europe
perceives itself as a model for Europeanness and simultaneously a normative
arbiter deciding who and what are European.
Such one-directionality, of course, is not limited to political discourses, nor
is it a recent phenomenon. It also concerns interpretations of historical pro-
cesses and notions such as modernization and democracy, whereby Balkan
and Eastern European societies are interpreted as mere (and often unsuccess-
ful) receivers of ready-made models from the West. Within the last two decades,
historians have articulated a strong and well-argued critique of such percep-
tions and have highlighted their political consequences (Wolf 1994, Todorova
1997, 2005, 2010, Bugge 2002, Melegh 2006). In this regard, Diana Mishkova
indicates that “Balkan visions of Europe cannot be understood as simply mir-
roring the imagination of the Western hegemonic discourse about the Balkans.
To understand these visions, more attention needs to be paid to local dynamics
in the production of ideologies and self-narrations” (Miškova 2006). Discussing
historiographical trends that have shaped the image of Eastern Europe, Tara
Zahra (2011, 787) stresses the need to “think more how Eastern Europe and
Eastern Europeans have shaped the political culture of Europe in general, as
well as international institutions and norms” and outlines several fields in
which Eastern Europe conceptually contributed to European and global
developments.
The historically fixed perception of the Balkans as a semi-European periph-
ery, an area in need of supervision, guidance, and training provided by the
West, was additionally solidified after 1989/1991. In the newly shaped symbolic
geography of Europe, the former socialist part of the continent was firmly asso-
ciated with violence, nationalism, and backwardness. It could become Europe
only by getting rid of its socialist past and by exposure to normative, one-direc-
tional processes, which should profoundly transform them and their citizens.
It is this post-socialist context that urged scholars of the Balkans and Eastern
Europe to call for the de-provincialization of Western Europe (Yurchak 2006,
Todorova 2010). Maria Todorova (2012, 74) argues that

the task for balkanists and East Europeanists consists not so much of
“provincialising” Europe but of “de-provincialising” Western Europe,
which has heretofore expropriated the category of Europe with concrete
political and moral consequences. If this project is successful, we will
actually succeed in taking up the challenge posited by Dipesh Chakabarty
by “provincialising” Europe effectively for the rest of the world, insofar as
the European paradigm will have broadened to include not only a
Introduction 13

cleansed abstract version of power, but also one of dependency, subordi-

nation, and messy struggles. And with this, we will have succeeded in re-
imagining Eastern Europe in a dignified way.

In a similar vein, Tara Zahra argues that “integrating of the history of Eastern
Europe into broader European histories may help to complicate or nuance
established narratives of difference” (Zahra 2011: 787).
Making a call for the de-provincialization of Western Europe and pointing
to globally relevant consequences of this task, the scholars of the Balkans and
Eastern Europe highlight the fact that formation of ideas of European moder-
nity was not an exclusive property of Western Europe, but a process character-
ized by simultaneous occurrence in different parts of the continent, by mutual
influence, inspiration, and dialogue. In a similar manner, we try in this volume
to destabilize the opposition between (Western) Europe and the (Western)
Balkans by focusing on processes, discourses, and practices of negotiating
Europe and Europeanness in the specific context of accession to the European
Union, but essentially from the post-socialist perspective of the societies we
are dealing with. The contributions to this volume not only show that subjects
from the Balkans also act as active participants in the processes of negotiating
Europeanness, they also highlight the fact that images, discourses, and prac-
tices of imagining and negotiating Europe on various positions on this “civili-
sational slope” (Melegh 2006) are characterized by simultaneous occurrences,
mutuality, and equivalence in function and nature, and very often by unin-
tended consequences. Contributions to the volume will thus not only bring to
readers’ attention the so far largely overlooked visions of Europe from its
southeastern part, but will also provide insight into the formation and negotia-
tion of ideas of Europe as dynamic, multidirectional, and contested, and not
necessarily future-oriented, as current political discourses of the EU accession
suggest. In this respect, as an alternative to the one-way street metaphor for
Europeanization in the Western Balkans, we opt not for a two-way street, but
for a room of mirrors. The metaphor of the mirror already has a prominent
position in discourses on the Balkans vis-à-vis (Western) Europe. It is employed
by authors involved in the discussion on modernity and modernization in the
Balkans (cf. Miškova 2006). It is also in the foundations of discourses on other-
ness and stereotyping. As Corinne Kratz (2002, 90) stresses, “‘other’ may be an
opposition to which their neighbors define their own ideal selves, what Michael
Kenny (1981) calls a ‘mirror in the forest’”. The image of the Balkans as the
European (half-) other easily resonates in these words: as Maria Todorova puts
it, “that the Balkans have been described as the ‘other’ of Europe does not need
special proof” (Todorova 1997: 3). In this volume, however, we opted for the
14 petrović

metaphor of a room of mirrors instead of a single mirror, because we wanted

to emphasize the multiplicity of reflections and temporalities in negotiations
of Europe and Europeanness in domains as diverse as politics, the everyday,
cultural practices, policies and memory, and through discursive, visual, musi-
cal, spatial, and ritual means of expression. We also wanted to stress that the
West was looking at the Balkans as (and for) Europe, too, as well as that ideas
of Europe that emerge in the Balkans offer important and new insights about
Europe as a whole. In addition, we wanted to draw attention to the fact that the
ideas of Europe and Europeanization are often “hijacked” by local political
elites in the Balkans, so those who try to resist nationalism and corruption and
look for an alternative for transitional reality in this area have to invest a lot of
creative energy to reclaim these ideas for their own goals. And finally, multiple
mirrored images, ideas, discourses, and power relations, and the complex ways
they are being reappropriated, modified, and reorganized to fit one’s needs and
self-perceptions, reveal several levels of negotiation that indicate a need to
look beyond the usual binary Europe vs. the Balkans and take into account
both global processes and very local historical trajectories.

The Structure of the Volume

The volume consists of this introduction and eight chapters and is divided into
four parts. The introductory chapter and Chapter 2 by Orlanda Obad both
focus on discursive flows in which notions of the Balkans and Europe occupy
prominent space and reflect upon the academic tradition of Balkan Studies
and the ways it contributed to questioning and reframing the notions of hier-
archy, dominance, normativity, and power implied in the relationship between
center and periphery. Orlanda Obad highlights the dynamic between center
and periphery as a key force that shapes both the relationship between
“Europe” and “the Balkans” and scholarship about it. Simultaneously, she
emphasizes a need to move beyond well-established dichotomies that tradi-
tionally shape the political imagination of “the Balkans” vis-à-vis “Europe”:
analyzing ideas of Europe within specific social groups in pre-accession
Croatia, she highlights that “there is a wide array of social perspectives that do
not necessarily conflict or contradict the dominant political discourse.”
The second part of the volume addresses the ways Europe is imagined and
appropriated in the Balkan societies through performative practices and other
forms of cultural production. Building her discussion of the Balkan Music
Awards, “a Balkan version” of the Eurovision Song Contest, in Chapter 3 Ana
Hofman points to the music industry’s and popular culture’s long history in the
Introduction 15

Balkans of fostering regional cooperation beyond the context of European

integration. Discussing strategies chosen by organizers and performers at the
Balkan Music Awards in Sofia, she shows that negotiations of modernity,
agency, and cosmopolitanism are taking place in three different frameworks:
regional, European, and global. Focusing on performances of Europeanness by
two opposed political formations—those participating in the realization of
the Skopje 2014 plan of urban renewal and those opposing it, Fabio Mattioli in
Chapter 4 shows that they share the common language of “the Dream of
Europe,” but in a conflicting way, giving voice to different articulations of the
past and the present through aesthetic experiences. The principal difference
lies in their attitudes toward the socialist legacy of Macedonia: while the
government tries to erase any visual trace of the socialist past in the Skopje of
2014, young protesters insist on incorporating that past into the envisioned
European future.
This aspect links Mattioli’s text with the set of articles in the third part,
which all highlight the ways negotiation of Europeanness as not so much
future-oriented, but strongly linked to the Yugoslav socialist past. From this
perspective, Europe is essentially revealed as a metaphor of belonging. Through
the analysis of memory practices related to industrial labor in socialist
Yugoslavia, in Chapter 5 Tanja Petrović sheds light on post-socialist nostalgia as
a narrative tool that insists on including socialist experience in European cul-
tural memory. In Chapter 6, Ildiko Erdei elaborates on an ongoing debate
about opening an Ikea store in Serbia, showing that the widespread longing for
Ikea’s return is a longing for confirmation that Serbia belongs to the world (and
to Europe/the EU, for that matter), but also pointing to a strand of thought that
addresses Yugoslav socialist modernity and belonging to Europe long before
the current EU-related integration processes. In a similar way, in Chapter 7,
Marijana Mitrović presents memories of a series of feminist conferences held
in Dubrovnik in the 1980s that gathered former Yugoslav and Western femi-
nists, elucidating former Yugoslav participants’ nostalgic accounts as an
expression of being “always—already European” and as a demand “to be recog-
nized as ‘equal but unique.’” As Mitrović stresses, the participants share a leftist
utopia among themselves and with “Western” feminists, which enables them
to feel “the sense of belonging to a wider world, and participation in wider
movements, leftist feminist movements.”
The last section of the volume looks at the ways Europe is imagined and
negotiated in political discourses and the sphere of the political in general.
Discussing two points of dispute in contemporary Montenegro—the stan-
dardization of the Montenegrin language and the recognition of minority sex-
ualities, in chapter 8 Čarna Brković shows that they are heavily informed by the
16 petrović

imagination of “Europe” and the European Union as the location in the future
to which Montenegro is progressing. The normative prism of “lagging behind
Europe” through which these issues are observed “closes off an opportunity to
envision novel grounds in which political legitimacy of language and sexual
practices could be pursued.” In Chapter 9, Nermina Mujagić discusses the dis-
pute between Slovenia and Croatia over the sea border, showing the mecha-
nism by which European integration in the region is being transformed into a
spectacle capable of generating new conflicts and reinforcing nationalist ide-
ology. She also shows how the lifting of borders in one part of Europe may
cause their solidifying in another part. In addition, Mujagić’s text reveals bor-
ders not as fixed, stable, historical, and unquestionable lines that divide politi-
cal collectives, but rather as highly politicized and relative objects that are
subject to negotiation, shifting, ignoring, or reinventing.

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―――. 2012. “Nostalgia—the Reverse Side of Balkanism.” In: Europa und Sein Osten:
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Puttkamer (eds.). Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 61–74.
Velikonja, Mitja. 2005. Eurosis—A Critique of the New Eurocentrism. Ljubljana: Peace
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Yurchak, Alexei. 2006. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet
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Zahra, Tara. 2011. “Going West.” East European Politics and Societies 25(4): 785–791.
 chapter 2

On the Privilege of the Peripheral Point of View:

A Beginner’s Guide to the Study and Practice of
Balkanism
Orlanda Obad

One of the central questions I pursued in my three-year long research into the
notion of the European Union in Croatia1 related specifically to an analysis of
the perspective from which the asymmetry of power in the relation between
the center and the periphery of the continent is viewed in the region, replete
with names that evoke differing contextual interpretations and geographical
delimitations such as the Balkans, the Western Balkans, Southeastern Europe, or
simply the Region. Investigations of intertwining symbolic and political power
relations between the West and the Balkans have, over the last twenty years
been spearheaded by a group of authors in an area of study that may, in the
absence of a fixed syntagm, be called a critique of Balkanism.2 This critique was
constituted in the 1990s on the basis of a series of works, among which the
most prominent—in the territory of states that emerged from the disinte-
grated Yugoslavia—seem to be, both in terms of influence and citation, the
pivotal book “Imagining the Balkans” by Maria Todorova and the articles of
Milica Bakić-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden in which the concept of “nesting
Orientalisms” is discussed (Bakić-Hayden and Hayden 1992, Bakić-Hayden
1995, Todorova 1999).
In my opinion, the emancipatory potential of this critique has so far most
clearly manifested itself in descriptions and designations of discourse mecha-
nisms that translate differences, both in the region and the entire continent,

Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank all those who offered valuable comments
and suggestions on this text, and especially Ines Prica and Tatjana Jukić, whose help far
exceeded professional courtesy.
1 The series of semi-structured interviews with the three groups of interviewees variously
linked with the European Union was conducted between the end of 2007 and mid-2010.
Croatia joined the EU on July 1, 2013.
2 Cf. Patterson 2003. Certain authors (cf. Blažević 2010) use the term Balkanism to denote both
an essentializing discourse akin to Orientalism, and the academic field which critically
researches that discourse. I argue that using a separate term, which solely denotes the critical
approach to Balkanist discourse, diminishes terminological overlaps and indistinctness.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/9789004275089_003

On the Privilege of the Peripheral Point of View 21

into inequalities.3 The collapse of the social order after the fall of socialism and
the wars which ensued in the territory of the former Yugoslavia contributed to
the long-term “generalized crisis of social identities” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001,
136), and some of the most important works critiquing Balkanism were pro-
duced at a time when a set of social meanings was being displaced and re-
placed in rapid succession. These works opposed both the dehumanizing
Western stereotypes employed to politically ghettoize the Balkan region (cf.
Todorova 2009), as well as local discourses of the new elites that fused conti-
nental patterns of representation with picturesque nationalist folklore. Within
this body of writings, “the Balkans” were established as the central notion of
regional symbolic geography.
As a term already laden with derogatory meanings, “the Balkans” once again
accompanied the “news of the barbarities” (Todorova 2009, 3) in the then war
context, and facilitated the fixing of an understanding of the entire region as
an amorphous, pre-modern entity vis-à-vis the Western world where every
country has its own name and clearly defined borders, and fosters civilized
relations based on the rules of international law.4 Thus framed, the Balkan
countries could be viewed as “more or less interchangeable with and indistin-
guishable from one another” (Fleming 2000, 1218); they were small, annoying
and convoluted Herzoslovakias and Syldavias. Some of them recognized, and
others waiting to become recognized states.
Through a scholarly rearticulation from the 1990s and its clear political
implications, the Balkans as a notion began to shed the essentialized charac-
teristics previously inscribed onto it by enlarging, simultaneously, its interpre-
tational capacity. Rather than representing the culture and history of the
region, the Balkans were articulated as a theoretical reservoir into which vari-
ous seemingly unrelated social practices and their artifacts—from speeches of
high-ranking representatives of international institutions to caricatures fea-
tured in high-profile newspapers—were poured and then interpreted in ways
as to disclose the systemic effects in the relationship between the continental
(and global) centers and the periphery. Thanks to this nodal point, which may
be called the “asymmetry of power” and which reveals a universal pattern in a
set of particularities, the critique of Balkanism reasserted its interpretational
power in the ensuing decade when political discourses in the region were con-
fronted with an empty signifier—“Europe,” to which the European Union is
metonymically linked. In my opinion, one of the basic contributions of this
theoretical approach is that, through it, the symbolic subordination—which

3 Cf. Melegh 2006, 29.

4 Cf. Todorova 2009, 186.
22 obad

came to be justified in a number of Western as well as local elite discourses of

the 1990s through the essentialized and generalized notions of the culture and
history of nations in this region—began to be defined as a form of oppression,
allowing the common subjection to the “decisions of another” to be gradually
transformed into “sites of antagonisms” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 153–154).
Namely, a certain power relation that is, for instance, expressed by categorizing
the “Balkan” nations as barbaric or backward, cannot be understood as a
manifestation of oppression without “the presence of a discursive ‘exterior’
from which the discourse of subordination can be interrupted” (Laclau
and Mouffe 2001, 154). I believe that the critique of Balkanism fulfills that dis-
cursive function.
At the same time, the theoretical centering of relations between “the
Balkans” and “Europe” in the social contexts of some of the “post-Yugoslav”
states on which this analysis intends to focus, appeared imposed, as if in an
attempt to draw more mileage out of the Balkanist theoretical reservoir than is
really warranted. This is perhaps true of Serbia, where “the Balkanist thread of
public narratives has never featured too prominently, except in the period of
Serbia’s most explicit confrontation with the international community at the
very end of the century” (Radović 2009, 50),5 and where the insistence on the
deconstruction of Balkanist notions and stereotypes even elicits suspicions
that researchers may be transferring responsibility for the unpleasant “image”
of the country and the region “outside the reference points of the research field
itself” (Đerić 2006, 216). It may also be true of Croatia, where the Balkanist
discourse, although intensely present in mainstream media and political dis-
courses in the 1990s, never assumed a totalizing effect which would subsume
the key elements of the transition discourse.6 Hence, Balkanist motifs were

5 Radović refers to Stef Jansen’s (2001) research on “everyday Orientalism” from the second half
of the 1990s, conducted both in Zagreb and Belgrade. In it, Jansen depicts a wide range of
notions of “Europe” and “the Balkans” in Serbia, such as those articulated within nationalist
discourses or the alternative and antinationalist ones. It was a fruitful subject of research,
which proved to be very important in the interpretation of processes of national identifica-
tion. At the same time, the author asserts that “most people in Serbia and Croatia did not
have a problem with the ‘Balkan’/‘Europe’ dualism, let alone felt burdened by it. For most of
them, it was something they were aware of, it pertained to the place and time in which they
lived, a more or less insignificant element of their biography” (p. 64).
6 In comparison, in research conducted on Slovenian elites’ discourses in the last half of the
1980s and the early 1990s, Patterson (2003, 112) asserts that while it took “no great effort to
unearth Balkanism in Slovenian cultural and political discourse, to assert that Balkanist rhet-
oric dominated and pervaded that discourse would push the evidence too far”. Still, “[w]hile
On the Privilege of the Peripheral Point of View 23

also a fixture in interviews I conducted throughout my research into notions of

the EU in Croatia. Even so, I thought it was wrong, or at least too simplistic, to
interpret the interviewees’ perceptions by drawing solely on this critical
perspective.
I intend to elucidate my approach by taking a circuitous path, defining the
political context that has, in my opinion, influenced my respondents’ concep-
tions of symbolic geography.

Balkanism and “The Greater Evil” at Home

In fact, a number of authors have already ascertained that the Balkanist stereo-
types were prominent both in the dominant, nationalist and various opposing,
anti-regime discourses in Croatia in the 1990s (cf. Jansen 2001, Razsa and
Lindstrom 2004, Rihtman-Auguštin 1997).7 Through their various political
appearances, representatives of the ruling party, the oppositional parties, as
well as certain public intellectuals and commentators established similar dis-
tinctions between the European and the Balkan. Nevertheless, the then refer-
ence to “European values” by the heterogeneous opposition to the authoritarian
HDZ (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica—Croatian Democratic Union) regime
should be interpreted by taking into consideration the social context in which
every criticism coming from the “international community”—be it the EU, the
US Embassy in Croatia, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE), or the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY)—was a welcome alliance.
On a symbolic level this alliance, indeed, drew its strength from the
“Westernness” of these political entities, organizations and institutions.
However, without understanding the context, it would be difficult to ­determine
whether such discursive alliances in the said period were due to the espousal
of continental symbolic geography or to pragmatic maneuvering against the
“greater evil” at home. In Croatia, it was only the change in government in

Balkanism may not have been as powerful and pervasive as the critique of it might suggest, it
has had real political consequences in and for Slovenia” (Ibid., 121).
7 Jansen (2001, 42) states that “Croatian nationalism in the 1990s can not be comprehended at
all without the notion of ‘the Balkans.’ It played the central role in almost all variations on the
Croatian nationalistic theme, and that role was a consequence of its position of the supreme,
negative Other.” The author claims that the notion of “the Balkans” encompassed a wide
range of “otherings. ” Thus, “Balkan” were, for example, Islam, the Ottoman Empire, the com-
munist regime of Yugoslavia, and, above all, the Serbs.
24 obad

January 2000 that spelled the end (or at least a declared condemnation) of the
violation of fundamental human rights in the country. The end of broad oppo-
sition to the regime of HDZ also signaled the end of the aforementioned dis-
cursive alliance. Thus, for instance, some of the same media and political
actors who protested during the 1990s about uninvestigated war crimes com-
mitted by members of the Croatian armed forces, in the next decade ques-
tioned the problematic actions of the ICTY’s prosecutors. It was not until the
state finally positioned itself on what Melegh (2006) calls the “civilizational
slope”8 and, in the first decade of the 21st century, undertook an expeditious
adoption and implementation of policies inherent to liberal democracies that
the democratic struggles, such as the rights of ethnic, sexual and other minori-
ties or the protection of women and children from domestic violence, entered
the political space. Also, towards the end of that decade and alongside the
deepening economic crisis, new fronts were opened in battles over issues that
were previously largely ignored, or were simplistically subsumed into ideas
such as the nature of capitalism and entrepreneurial spirit. The protection of
public interest in urban development, the right to free higher education as well
as the fight for the rights of bank clients, more transparency and better regula-
tion of the banking sector are but some of the examples of such fronts.
Some inquiries into the notions of Europe, the EU and the Balkans in coun-
tries such as Serbia or Croatia (cf. Obad 2011; Radović 2009) have led me to
conclude that determining Balkanist motifs without taking into account their
multiple meanings and social context, may undermine the intent and emanci-
patory potential of a “Balkanist” critique. In Croatia, for instance, a critique of
the “imperial” manners of major European powers existed even during the
1990s, but as a form of nationalist expression which stressed the importance of
obsolete geopolitical designations dividing the world into Croatia’s allies and
foes. On such an interpretation, the country’s isolation from the international
community, of course, had nothing to do with the undemocratic and criminal
acts of the government. It was only after fundamental democratic values such
as the equality of citizens and the rule of law were established—at least as part
of the political imaginary—that the possibility for a subtler critical analysis

8 Melegh (2006, 5) asserts that the present, dominant discourse of a civilizational or East-West
slope “. . . prescribes the gradual Westernization of different areas of the world and a drive to
climb higher on the East-West slope. This upward emancipation leads to a mechanism desig-
nated in this book as movement on the slope or perspectives on the slope, which invites a
grotesque chain of racisms or Orientalisms between different public actors, depending on
the position and perspective they adopt on the above slope.”
On the Privilege of the Peripheral Point of View 25

of the colonialist discourse of Western countries arose, not with the aim of
­protecting the “national interests” at any price, but to warn against the disas-
trous consequences of degrading and dehumanizing stereotypes and political
practices. In neighboring Slovenia Petrović (2009) sympathetically describes in
her study of the representations of the Western Balkans in political and media
discourses, the brutal situation of disenfranchised temporary workers in the
said EU member state, who by and large come from other, more southeasterly
countries, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, to work mainly in construction.
She concludes that their situation is strongly reminiscent of the “exploitation
mechanisms used during the colonial era in Western Europe” (p. 68). Such a
critique is directed not only at double standards, according to which profess-
edly universal rights do not apply to all in the EU territory, but also at Balkanist
discourse, which may be used to legitimize the deliberate blind spots of official
politics. On the other hand, in his Belgrade research into notions of Europe,
which was less determined by studies of Balkanist discourse, Radović (2009)
tries to emphasize that there “truly are certain differences in social values
between the countries that made their great entrance into the postindustrial
era and the Balkan (as well as transitional) societies which are characterized
by a certain lagging behind as concerns modernization processes” (p. 49). In
my opinion, we should not necessarily focus on whether this claim exhibits
“Balkanist” traits, but, instead, on different histories of national maladies in a
region in which it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the evils of the
protectorate and nationalism/patriarchy. Radović (2009) describes Serbian
society, where, regardless of the shifts of meanings inscribed into it, Europe is
not “an essential symbolic marker,” and the “predominant public discourse
about ‘us’ barely notices ‘others’” (p. 68), which, the author concludes, “points
to a significant identity ‘autarchy’ of the social system and its leading ranks”
(p. 68). Accordingly, we should also bear in mind that an “idealized” concep-
tion of Europe may be subsumed into or equated with the values that under-
mine or oppose the dominant political discourses and that only by determining
the nature and context of such oppositions will we be able to decide whether
such “idealization” is tactical or rather a passive acceptance of regional or con-
tinental symbolic subordination.
A similar assessment may apply to a strand of analysis that views the dis-
course of the EU enlargement process through the prism of relations of power.
Over the recent decade this strand of analysis has often cited authors who, in
the 1990s, criticized the newly established symbolic geography of the Balkans.
One of the blind spots of this body of work is the failure to acknowledge the
possibilities offered to societies in the “Western Balkans” due to their state’s
positioning on the civilizational slope and espousal of a “liberal humanitarian”
26 obad

utopia. Bhabha (1994), among others, informs us about the profound

­consequences that attempts to introduce partial rights for colonized subjects
had on the authority of colonial discourse: torn “between the desire for reli-
gious reform and the fear that the Indians might become turbulent for liberty”
(p. 87), the colonizers, for instance, came up with uses of Christian doctrines
that undermined the premises on which their authority rested. In a different
political context, but with similarly devastating consequences, some of those
in power in Croatian society have experienced the adverse effects of their own
feigned civility at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Every instruc-
tion to set up transparent mechanisms of governance, establish the rule of law
and improve institutional capacities in the fight against corruption, albeit in
terms of formal compliance with the EU requirements, has, through a series of
contingencies ultimately also become binding for local mediators and execu-
tors. In Croatia as a small candidate country subjected to conditions imposed
by the EU, perhaps even more so than in some core EU member states.

Research Overview

The dominant political and media discourses in the first decade of the
21st century in Croatia presented EU accession as the most important and self-
evident objective of the state’s foreign policy.9 Still under the strong influence
of the mobilizing call for a return to Europe from the 1980s, the reasons for
Croatia’s EU accession have been rarely called into question in public debates.
Throughout most of the accession process, negotiations on membership were
much more often framed as a series of political and bureaucratic obstacles
on Croatia’s road to the EU—e.g. the question of the country’s cooperation
with the ICTY or the reluctance of the government(s) to deal with high-level
corruption—than as a series of criteria, conditions and adjustments which
were only negotiated in terms of when and how they were to be achieved
or fulfilled.
My first impression, which also spurred the research at hand, was that the
unequal relationship on a political-bureaucratic level, in which one side had a
normative role and the other adopted the imposed models without much dis-
cussion or resistance, in a self-colonizing manner (cf. Kiossev 1999), was merely

9 In her study of “Europeanization through conditionality” in Central and Eastern Europe,

Heather Grabbe (2006, 96) claims that “every government in every applicant state claimed
that membership was its first foreign policy priority,” which was in itself a source of EU’s
“enormous potential influence in CEE.”
On the Privilege of the Peripheral Point of View 27

a symptom of an underlying and unspoken disproportion of power. This led

me to examine the symbolic geography of the European continent and the
Balkan region, in relation to which some authors (cf. Todorova 1999; Wolff
1994) had already demonstrated that “the divisions and linkages that history,
culture, religion, politics, and empire have drawn for Europe are still forces at
play today in the mental maps that decision makers bring to their analyses and
their policies” (Liotta 2005, 69). In the disciplinarily diverse critical approaches
to EU enlargement it is precisely the asymmetry of power that has led many
authors to invoke colonial metaphors. Some have directly linked the enlarge-
ment policy to the imperial past of the central EU member states (Böröcz
2001), while others interpreted it through the prism of the neocolonialist pre-
tensions of western European corporations in the eastern part of the continent
(cf. Daskalovski 2000). My approach in this piece of research was strongly
influenced by authors who place an emphasis on discursive mechanisms in
which enlargement processes are embedded and who conclude, just like
Melegh (2006), that this is, primarily, about the colonization of consciousness
and about translating local, national or regional differences into inequalities.
This research focused on the notions of Europe and the EU among three
groups of interviewees that are in one way or another connected with the EU.
Of these, the interviewees that were most directly related to the EU were mem-
bers of the Negotiating Team for the Accession of the Republic of Croatia to
the EU. Through these interviews I examined how the discourse in which the
EU enlargement process is submerged has affected the negotiators’ concep-
tions. In so doing, I have focused, among other things, on whether or how dis-
cursive mechanisms of gradation of Europeanness (Kuus 2004) or nesting
Orientalisms (Bakić-Hayden 1995) featured in the conducted interviews.
The main part of the interviews with negotiators dealt with their everyday
work and the course of negotiations. This is also the part that revealed the
greatest diversity in my respondents’ answers. Whereas some argued that the
Croatian negotiating teams were discordant and lacking in communication
skills, others maintained that the efforts of Croatian teams in Brussels were
exceptionally well prepared and concerted. Some were very satisfied with their
cooperation with state institutions, while others complained about the amount
of time it took institutions to which they were referred to stop considering
them as a foreign body. The symbolic asymmetry of power reflected in the
establishment of the continental civilizational slope only became evident
once my interviewees tried to explain national identities, regional belonging or
a connection to a European identity on the basis of historical and cultural dif-
ferences. It was only in these segments of the interviews that moments—which
Laclau and Mouffe (2001) define as discursively articulated differences to be
28 obad

­distinguished from elements that stand for any difference in the social sphere
(p. 105)—emerged. This was completely in line with Shore’s (2000) belief that
a “critical anthropology of European integration” should deal with precisely
the questions that were formulated by Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon, such
as: “What culture shall be regarded as worthy of display and which shall be hid-
den? Whose history shall be remembered and whose forgotten?” (quoted in
Shore 2000, 24). My further research will, among other things, show that these
are not the only types of questions we should pose in such studies.
Negotiators predominantly sought to affirm Croatian identity as belonging
to Central Europe, a region with borders far more porous than the well-secured
Schengen Area. In most cases, the interviewees spoke proudly about the traces
of the Habsburg legacy in Croatia that still bear witness to the historical period
in which the present-day territories of certain countries and EU members,
such as Hungary, and an EU candidate country such as Croatia, were united
within a larger, imperial framework. One of my respondents even expressed
an expectation that the EU accession would “in some way” bring closure to
the chapter of Croatia’s history that had already begun with the disintegration
of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. In many statements belonging to Central
Europe was interpreted as a possible shortcut on the road to the EU. It was
also equated with belonging to “Western culture or civilization,” which
suggests that this regional affiliation was still placed very high on the civiliza-
tional slope.
Whereas Croatia’s belonging to the Balkans has often been challenged in
geographical terms, “the Balkanness” has been used as an “instrument of inter-
nal differentiation”10 pointing to backwardness and negativity, everything the
country and its citizens should distance themselves from on the course towards
Europe. Nevertheless, notions which pertain to the Balkanist discourse of the
1990s and reproduce the traditional myths according to which “non-Europe”
begins where the eastern state border ends (cf. Busch and Krzyżanowski 2007,
118) were superseded in the interviews by more recent notions of Croatia as a
potential “good teacher” and “purveyor of knowledge” in the region, which
I interpret as an imprint of the newer, EU enlargement discourse. An impor-
tant nodal point in such discourse is the “authorized interpretation” of the EU
policy of conditionality or, rather, understanding membership as a symbolic
attestation entitling the country to spread its enlightening knowledge and
experience, once again, in a (south)eastwardly direction. The basic relation of
power therefore remains unchanged, with the difference that the reproduction
of Orientalism laden with nationalist outbursts has been replaced by the repro-

10 Cf. Rihtman-Auguštin 1997.

On the Privilege of the Peripheral Point of View 29

duction of Europeanness with its refined, civilized policies of reconciliation

and regional cooperation.
That the interviews with negotiators were not analytically demanding only
occurred to me later on when, in order to investigate the plurality of EU-related
discourses in Croatia, I selected a different group of interviewees and thus
moved away from the elite political and media discourses, which are most
often subject to critical studies on this theme. The problem of critical
approaches which are directed solely towards elite discourses has—in a some-
what different context—already been discussed by Merje Kuus (2010), who
describes the traditional understanding of geopolitics as too important and
highly specialized in terms of required knowledge for “ordinary people”.
Geopolitics is the domain of those considered to be from higher social strata—
people such as politicians, scholars, journalists or government officials.
Subsequently, even a strand of analysis like critical geopolitics, as Kuus (2010)
informs us, in the beginning focused its empirical studies on the discourses of
intellectuals of statecraft. However, regardless of their different positions in the
political spectrum, members of elite circles tend to invoke a “loosely coherent
set of myths about human nature and culture” (Gusterson and Besteman 2005,
2). On the other hand, “[a]pproaching the so-called average people as political
subjects,” researching “the geopolitical practices of those located outside the
top echelons of the state apparatus” (Kuus 2010) and insisting on the embodied
and gendered political practices of everyday life, which is, for instance, of
interest to feminist geopolitics, contributes to the quality and subtlety of
research insights. Throughout this research, I have hoped that a shift away
from the elite discourses would bring “into focus the institutional structure
through which the illusory division between political and ‘nonpolitical’ spheres
[. . .] is constructed” (Ibid.).
Moreover, the inclusion of voices “from below” draws an even sharper pic-
ture of elitism and the tendency to essentialize within scholarly discourse
itself, which may, despite its declared critical stance, reproduce “the view from
the center that it critiques” (Ibid.), for instance, by offering a “disembodied
‘spectator’ theory of knowledge” (Ibid.). Some now classic texts within critique
of Balkanism detected the fusion of nationalist and Orientalist discourse in the
context of the breakup of Yugoslavia. This fusion functioned in a way which is
similar across a number of discursive “otherings”: it exhibited the “tendency to
essentialize, to isolate features of a group or of a society’s thought and prac-
tice” (Bakić-Hayden 1995, 918) and then metonymically present them as the
essence of backwardness, the uncivilized or other negative traits. At the same
time, similarly generalized “Croats,” “Serbs” or “Slovenes” appeared in some
critical scholarly texts as well, where they acted as an unlikely collective. They
30 obad

reproduced Orientalist stereotypes, took pride in their Habsburg legacy, or

reacted with paranoia when identified with the Balkans.
Some of the most influential works in the critique of Balkanism were given
global prominence by the wars that took place in the territory of the former
Yugoslavia: as Moranjak-Bamburać (2004) observed with a dash of irony,
Balkan intellectuals finally joined the “global discursive community” (p. 88)
through the field of study which developed around that approach. On the bor-
derline between this scholarly discourse and the nationalist discourses, which
prevailed in the majority of emerging states, cultural and historical issues con-
stituted important nodal points. So, while the nationalist discourse hegemon-
ized the interpretation of national history and culture, critical approaches to
Balkanism established a relation towards the Balkans as one of the central
points of contention. Thus framed, the notion of the Balkans pointed to the
harmfulness of the new elites’ discourses, was reminiscent of Yugoslavia’s mul-
tinational and multiconfessional past, and also offered an opportunity for an
alternative, supranational identity.
The prevailing discourse of the 1990s affected the understanding of
European and regional symbolic geographies of the second group of
­interviewees—students of the Faculty of Law in Zagreb.11 They mostly agreed
that geographically, Croatia was not a Balkan country and at the center of their
predominantly negative perception of the European Union12 there often was a
concern for the protection of national interests. As a geographic region, the
Balkans were understood as an immediate but still backward region. In some
interviews, it was a place that produced bizarre yet amusing news that reached
Croatia, a place that inspired simultaneously envy and sympathy, and, finally, a
place that could even impress on occasions, when its “progressiveness” resisted
the dominant negative stereotypes assigned to it. Occasionally, in my respon-
dents’ answers one could detect echos of official policies of self-exoticizing
branding which depicted a country like Serbia as a land of “rafts, ‘leisure,’ ajvar
and fun-loving ‘Balkan folk’ ” (Radović 2009, 148). In terms of internal differen-
tiation, all sorts of practices and behaviors could be labeled “Balkan” and be
therefore expelled as undesirable: from spitting in the street and spending
many hours in cafés, all the way to high-level corruption.

11 Between February and May 2009, I interviewed 15 students of the Faculty of Law in
Zagreb, who attendeded the course “European Public Law.” The subject of the course is EU
law, but it also offers an introduction to how EU institutions function and a brief overview
of the history of European integration.
12 On euroscepticism among young people and students in Croatia, see: Čulig, Kufrin and
Landripet 2007; Ilišin and Mendeš 2005; Kersan-Škabić and Tomić 2009.
On the Privilege of the Peripheral Point of View 31

While some Balkanist discursive mechanisms remained the same as they

were in the predominant discourses of the 1990s, the interviews revealed
important shifts and disturbances, which pointed to new interpretative direc-
tions. One of the most interesting differences in comparison to the interviews
with the negotiators, who eagerly discussed the historically and culturally
determined differences in the country and within the region, was that students
often answered such questions reluctantly. The same respondents who repro-
duced certain Balkanist stereotypes in one part of the interview would later
claim they found a common image of Western, Eastern and Central Europe or
the Balkans fictitious, too simplistic or, even more importantly, useless. Some
went further in explaining that this was due to habit, that “people usually talk
about” these notions without thinking about it more thoroughly, and that
“Balkan” is a mere synonym for “primitive” or “uncivilized.” By rejecting essen-
tialized notions of the Balkans and refusing to embrace solid, set identities
laden with historical and cultural “evidence” employed to define the region
and people living in it, my interviewees unburdened the notion of the Balkans.
And in its reduced, lightened meaning, this notion was more easily projected
back to a higher position on the civilizational slope—closer to Western
European countries. Uncultured and boorish people, as some of the interview-
ees maintained, live in all places, and still Austrian, Spanish or French national
identities are not defined by them.
The students’ attitudes towards the EU ranged from pragmatic support
marked by the tension between usefulness and the inevitability of accession to
explicit skepticism, which prevailed and, at times, even bore traces of nativist
rhetoric concerning jeopardized identity and heritage. But only much broader,
non-EU related discussions with students led me to the conclusion that the
question, “Why are students against Europe?” based on certain quantitative
studies, may be framed incorrectly. Students’ critique was not directed at the
process of Eurointegration, but to the incapability of local political elites to
prepare the country for competition with richer and more developed EU mem-
bers. It also referred to the uneasy gap between the reality of accession and its
media and political representations, which packaged the process as a self-
evident and uncontestable foreign policy goal. In direct opposition to such an
outlook, “choice” was an important nodal point in students’ discourse. Since
they belonged to the generation of “millennials,” they did not feel the lure of
the “return-to-Europe” call from the 1980s. The students rather perceived
the accession to the EU as a matter of choice, something that should be open
to discussion. This was even more so within the global context of “virtual extra-
territoriality” (Bauman 2009), through which students practiced integration
into a broader European space on a daily basis, beyond the official policies in
which negotiations on EU membership were embedded.
32 obad

The last group of respondents was composed of agricultural entrepreneurs

who were successful in applying for pre-accession EU funds for agriculture
and rural development,13 such as SAPARD and IPARD, and who have found
themselves in a somewhat paradoxical position. On the one hand, they engaged
in an activity that in Croatian society, and especially within the context of EU
accession (cf. Ilišin and Mendeš 2005), was perceived as being on the losing
end of the spectrum. On the other hand, they were among the few citizens who
had, through the rigorous application process, already harmonized their busi-
nesses to EU standards. Given that my respondents’ financial status and some-
times even formal education was above the Croatian average, their marginality
was primarily associated with living in the countryside, which placed them in a
position of a double periphery vis-à-vis both central European metropolises
and the Croatian capital.
In the last group of interviews, the European Union was primarily perceived
through a pragmatic, rather than symbolic prism. Because of the problematic
business practices to which they were often subjected throughout their entre-
preneurial careers, the interviewees mostly agreed that the present system was
not good and needed to be changed, and since the domestic political elites
appeared incapable of fulfilling that task, “intervention” from outside might be
a welcome alliance and not necessarily posing as a threat. It was only in these
interviews that I realized the extent to which mere conversations about sym-
bolic geography, through abstract categories such as Eastern and Western
Europe, the Balkans or Central Europe, were only possible due to a particular
social status and resources, such as time, that allow one to contemplate ideas
that maybe seen as not having a direct correlation to everyday life. Overbur-
dened by the demands of agribusiness, they perceived themselves as peasants
only a couple of hours a day, while the rest of the time they engaged in activi-
ties such as handling paperwork, fulfilling requirements for loans and meeting
various deadlines. Rather than dissecting notions and perceptions, the agricul-
tural entrepreneurs were much more interested in conversations about practi-
cal issues that would help them survive the overstrained regime of their
everyday life.
My respondents were suspicious towards the EU: they maintained that the
accession process and its consequences were not transparent or comprehen-
sible even to them, who kept up with current events, especially in agriculture.
At the same time, some of them believed that, beneath the official policies of

13 In the first half of 2010, I interviewed ten agricultural entrepreneurs.

On the Privilege of the Peripheral Point of View 33

accession a hidden agenda existed, consisting of a plan on the part of some

powerful EU members to put their own products on the Croatian market,
which would eventually damage domestic agriculture. Nevertheless, my inter-
viewees were not necessarily concerned about themselves. Such scenarios, as
some of them explained, would primarily affect so-called ordinary peasants,
those who owned “two cows and a barn,” which was built without the neces-
sary permits, or those who were either not hardworking enough or resourceful
enough to adjust to the requirements of accession. They perceived themselves
more often as winners, who succeeded on their own, and carved out their own
way despite the sluggish bureaucracy, an indifferent government and the cor-
ruptive local alliances. If the procedures required by the EU pre-accession
funds for agriculture seemed strict and hyper-regulated, or, at times, downright
pointless, the agricultural entrepreneurs considered it to be an improvement
in comparison to the chaos of domestic business practices, “where the behav-
ior of state representatives, the interpretation of laws, and the level of taxes are
highly unpredictable” (Yurchak 2002, 313). It may not be surprising, then, that
from the entrepreneurial perspective the disputed domestic “mentality,” which
is often used as a “repository of negative characteristics” (Todorova 1994, 455),
was more often tied to socialism than to the Balkans.
The discourse of agricultural entrepreneurs has revealed yet another char-
acteristic of the critique of Balkanism that pertains to its applicability. In
Croatia, for instance, such a critique is easily applied to the discourse of politi-
cal elites that, in the 1990s, invented traditions from which the period of social-
ism was excluded. Climbing the civilizational slope required that the new
discourse made the country as similar to Western Europe as possible and as
different from the Balkans as possible. Consequently, new “forms of subordina-
tion” emerged “under the impact of certain social transformations” (Laclau
and Mouffe 2001, 159), and communism, as the “ideological ‘other,’” was sup-
plemented by the “geographical/cultural ‘other’ of the Orient,” whereas the
“symbolic geography of eastern inferiority” (Bakić-Hayden and Hayden 1992, 4)
once again remained unchanged. However, even alternative interpretations
and the uncovering of how “cultural ‘facts’” were manipulated (Bakić-Hayden
and Hayden 1992, 14) may contain “certain conservatism inherent in all opposi-
tion,” precisely because “opposition to certain forms of power requires identi-
fication with the very places from which the opposition takes place” (Laclau
2007, 30). The mere positioning in the struggle over nodal points in the fields
of culture and history has affected the scholarly discourse of “Balkanist” cri-
tique, which in the changing social context demonstrated the limited ability of
34 obad

interpretational absorption concerning some other forms of subordination,

such are those determined principally by the economic domain.

The Privilege of the Peripheral Point of View

My concluding discussion is concerned with the applicability of theory, and it

will be presented as an echo of Prica’s (2004) considerations on the translat-
ability of theory or, more accurately, her argument that “given their strictly
research requirements, regional studies can hardly refrain from reproducing
the model of central ‘panoramic view’ over the status of a peripheral object,
which is ascertained in the field, in the very ‘region,’ by means of classical par-
ticipant observation” (p. 20). The central problem of critical research into per-
ceptions of the Balkans and Europe in the “region” is not the result of conflicting
insider and outsider approaches but of the fact that in recent years critical
theoretical strands in the “region” and the “center” have gradually been fused
into an approach which, so it seems, refuses to consider perspectives that are
not consistent with its postulates. As Blažević (2010) already suggested, an
important issue for the critique of Balkanism and its practitioners is to refrain
from turning into “intellectual parasites whose utmost interest is in extracting
symbolic and economic profit from their exotic but culturally accurately ‘trans-
lated’ and theoretically adequately founded ‘knowledge’” (p. 435). In line with
that argument I find it important to point to the suspiciously suitable perfor-
mances found in critiques of EU enlargement discourses, as theoretical inquiry
into “patterns of representation” in the Balkans remains relevant in the coming
period, in which several countries in the region continue to linger in the EU’s
waiting room.
The problem is about wearing blinders, which involves finding convenient
objects of research while dismissing everything that extends beyond the
boundaries of one’s own academic field as redundant. Therefore, quantitative
studies which divide stances on the EU into two camps, “pro” and “contra,” do
not differ substantially from the discourse analyses that reduce the spectrum
of positions on Europe and the EU to recording transformations of dehuman-
izing, stigmatizing and other negative Western conceptions of the Balkans. In
my research such an approach would have excluded some interesting results,
such as the students’ “unburdening” of the central concepts of regional sym-
bolic geography of the various negative cultural and historic connotations
inscribed into them and also the entrepreneurs’ orientation towards the
economy of day-to-day survival and an inclination to pragmatic alliances.
On the Privilege of the Peripheral Point of View 35

Besides the EU enlargement discourse and its imprints, most clearly delin-
eated in the statements of intellectuals of statecraft, there is a wide array of
social perspectives that do not necessarily conflict or contradict the dominant
political discourse, that “prefer tactics of evasion and obfuscation over those of
repudiation and confrontation, and seek a loose or vague or superficial rather
than definitive, weighty or substantial identity” (Bennett quoted in Kuus 2010)
which is more suitable for analysis and further classification.
On the other hand, the relation of power between the center and the periph-
ery reveals itself in the academic field as well. One of the intrinsic paradoxes in
the critique of Balkanism is that some of its key texts were first published in
English and outside the region whose many academic communities were redi-
rected in the 1990s towards international conferences and informal exchanges
of their published work. The (re)assessment of knowledge produced by and
circulating from the influential Western universities (cf. Blažević 2010) could
direct us towards a questioning of the symbolic validation and enhanced visibil-
ity that were granted to certain concepts and ideas developed within this field
of study by those in academically prominent positions. Another question is
how this affected knowledge production in a region in which many renowned
scholars still do not perceive themselves as “real and not just imaginary
partner[s] in the marketplace of ideas” (Moranjak-Bamburać 2004: 89). Instead
of becoming a point of controversy, the question of knowledge flow between
center and periphery should be viewed as a potentially new research focus for
this field of study.
Finally, I want to draw attention to a point of view that could clearly
delineate the systemic effects produced by the asymmetry of power between
the center and the periphery, without simultaneously obscuring any non-
oppressive, enriching, unexpected and equal relationship that may emerge
from the endless intertwining between the center and the periphery. Bhabha’s
(1994) work teaches us that the dehumanizing view of the colonized does not
necessarily leave the colonizer with a feeling of triumphant superiority, but
also with specific mental conditions, such as anxiety, fear and paranoia. The
precise establishment and description of these maladies is very important,
since the very act of giving them a name diminishes their power. In my opin-
ion, this is precisely the mode of empowerment catered to by the “outsideness”
in many critical discourses.
The periphery should have no reason not to acknowledge that the center,
too, suffers from various forms of oppression or that living on the margins of
power has its own privileges. I also believe that instability, deprivation and
constant change on the margins of power should provide no reason for
36 obad

celebration: it is not the result of a choice but rather of restraints that some-
times have disastrous consequences. However, power is also evident in that the
post-socialist subject, in this area, wiser by the experience of the collapse of a
social system, the ensuing war as well as corruption scandals that brought an
end to the period of transitional naïveté, is now more inclined to doubt that
there is a big, self-evident, symbolic story behind the EU accession. Having also
become wiser about the implications of capitalism, the post-socialist subject
is, unlike in 1989, more inclined to ask: What’s in it for me?
Finally, for the sake of exhibiting a privilege of the peripheral point of view,
could we say that one of the strategic advantages is that we, in this area, do not
need any theoretical expertise to believe that the system can change? Or,
rather, that not even the system that is being offered to us now is deemed to
last forever.

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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
qwych be waged be oder men, and nouth be hym, beyng in the
said shep. Qwerfor in as moch as I have but few sowdeors in
myn levery her, to strenketh me in that qwych is the Kynges
commandement, I kepe with me yowr too men, Dawbenney and
Calle, qwich I purpose shall seyle with me to Yermeth; for I
have purveyed harneyse for hem. And ye shall well
understande, be the grace of God, that the said Mayster of
Carbroke shall have non rewle in the sheppes, as I had purposid
he shuld have had, because of his besynesse, and for this is on
of the specyall causes I kepe yowr said men with me, besechyng
you ye takyt to non dysplesur of ther taryng with me. Nat
withstanding, ther herden 42.1 at Wyggenalle shall be don this
day be the grace of God, Whoo have you in kepyng.
Wreten at Leynn, the morow after my departyng from you.
Item, as far such tydynges as be here, Th. shall in forme you.
John Paston.
41.1 [From Fenn, iv. 100.] On the 29th May 1462 a commission was
granted to Sir John Howard and Sir Thomas Walgrave to arrest the
ships, the Mary Talbot and the Mary Thomson, both of Lynn, and
other vessels in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, for a fleet which the
King was fitting out (see Patent Roll, 2 Edw. IV., p. 1, m. 14, in
dorso). Sir Thomas Walgrave may perhaps have been the person
designated in this letter as the Master of Carbrooke. At all events,
the date is clearly about this time.
41.2 At Carbrooke, in Norfolk, was a commandry formerly belonging
to the Knights Templars, which, like most of the possessions of the
order, when it was suppressed in Edward II.’s time, was given to the
Knights of St. John.
42.1 I do not understand the meaning of the word ‘herden.’—F.

519
ABSTRACT 42.2
 1462
JUNE 6

Inventory of household stuff remaining at Castre, 6 June 2

Edward IV., viz. of robes, jewels, arras, etc.
42.2 [From MS. Phillipps, 9735, No. 354.]

520
NOTE

1462
Among some MSS., which seem formerly to have belonged to the
Paston Collection in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, is one
endorsed— ‘A Pedigree showing how the manor of Caister was
divided,’ tracing its descent from earlier owners to Sir John
Fastolf.

521
J. DAUBENEY TO JOHN PASTON 42.3

To my most reverent and worchepfull maister, John

Paston, dwellyng at Heylysdon, be this delyveryd.
Ih’s.
1462
JULY 3
M
OST reverent and worchepfull master, I recommaund me
onto your god masterchep. Please you to have
knowlage, on the Fryday at afternoon next after Seynt
Peter, there was at the taveran in London old Debnam and
young Debnam, Thomas Edmonds, and I; and ther the seyd
Thomas Edmonds fell in communicacion with old Debnam, and
seyd that my Lord Tresorer 43.1 had put hym to a gret charge for
the vetelyng of Mary Talbot, 43.2 seyyng to old Debnam that he
hard sey that he had a C. bulloks to selle, the wyche the seyd
Edmonds wolle bey so that they may a cord of the price. Than
the seyd old Debnam answerd ageyn, and seyd he wold, so that
he myght have good payment, or elles the seyd Edmonds to be
bound in abligacion to pay hym at suche dayys as they myght a
cord. And noon upon thys same langwage, yong Debnam spake
to hys fader, ‘Sir, I pray you that ye wolle take avisment of this
mater tille to morowe, for I trost to your good faderhod that ye
wolle late me have a serteyn of your bulloks for the vetelyng of
the Barge of Yermothe, and I shall fynd you sufficiant suerte for
the payment therof for Edmonds. I wolle that ye knowe I have
be ther, and spoke with the owner and with the maister of the
seyd barge, and they knowyn myn oppoyntment.’
Than the seyd Edmonds answered to yong Debnam, and told
hym that the sety of Norwic and Yermothe hathe grauntyd, and
send wrytyng to the Kynge and to the Lords that they wolle
manne and veteylle the seyd barge of her owne cost fro the tym
of hyr goyng owt tylle hyr comyng home; and thus the seyd
Edmonds told hym that my Lord Tresorer and all the Lords that
be at London thynk they do ryght well her devyer, and be
worthey moche thanke of the Kyng. ‘Well,’ quod yong Debnam,
‘I had in commaundment for to have the rewle of the seyd
barge, and I wolle be at Yermothe as thys day iiij. dayys, and
man hyr and bryng hyr downne to the Gylys of Hulle, for that ys
my chype.’
Also he seyd mor, with out that he myght have the seyd barge,
he wolle note goo to see but hym self and hys xxiiij. men. And
thus, yf please your maisterchep, he departyd from the taveran;
and at hys departyng, he told the seyd Thomas Edmonds, ‘Thys
ys Paston labor.’ Than the seyd Edmonds answerd hym ageyn,
and seyd playnly he was to blame for to reporte so of your
masterchep, for he knoythe veryly he seyd on trewly of you and
of my master your son bothe, and ther on he wold take a hothe.
And so, yf it please your good masterchep, late the cety of
Norwic and Yermothe have knowlage of hys gret crakyng and
bost, and let hym of hys purpose by the autorite that they have.
Item, my master your son wolle have to hys jakets murry 44.1 and
tany [tawny], and that it please yow sum of my felachep may
spek to on of the drapers for to ordeyn yt ageyns hys comyng
hom, for I trowe it shall be thys day sevenyght ar he comithe
home.
Item, sir, if please you, Skrowpe hathe sent to you to London be
Byngham for the mony that ye knowe of, zit I spake not with
hym; but I shall telle hym that I suppose ye shall be here in the
last end of the terme, and I shall send your masterchep word
what answer I have of hym.
Item, sir, if pleese suche tydyngs as I her of, I send you word.
My Lord of Warwek hathe be in Skotlond, an take a castell of
the Skoots; and upon thys ther came the Quene of Skoots 44.2
with other Lords of her contre, as ye shall her the namys, in
basetry [embassy] to my seyd Lord of Werwek, and a trews is
take betwyx thys and Seynt Bertylmew Day in Auguste. Thes is
the last tydyngs that I knowe. No mor to your god masterchep
at this tyme, but Jesu have [you] in kepyng.
Wretyn on the Saturday next after Seynt Peter.
By your por servaunt,
J. Daubeney.
42.3[From Fenn, iv. 138.] The date of this letter is shown by an
entry on the Patent Roll, 2 Edw. IV., p. 1, m. 7, in dorso. On the 27th
June 1462 a commission was given to Gilbert Debenham, Jun.,
Esquire, Walter Alderiche, master of the George of Yarmouth, and
John Childe, to arrest for the King’s service a ship called The Barge
 of Yarmouth, alias The George, with victuals, masters, and mariners
for the same.
43.1 John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester. He was beheaded in October
1470.—F.
43.2 See Preliminary Note to No. 518, p. 41, Note 1.
44.1 Dark red or purple and yellowish colour.—F.

44.2 Mary, daughter of Arnold, Duke of Gelders, and mother to

James III., King of Scotland.

522
RICHARD CALLE TO JOHN PASTON, JUNIOR 45.1

To my maistre, John Paston the yonger, be this

delyvered.
1462

S
ERE, I have receyved your lettre, wherin I undrestand that
my maistre desired that my maistre your brother myght
have the gidyng and governaunce of the Barge of
Yermouthe. As to that, and men of Yermouthe had knowen my
maistre entend a fornyght a goo, he had ben swer of it, but
nough it is so that Debenham hathe a comyscion of the Kyng
expressed oonly for that schip named in hes comyscion; and he
hathe ben here at Yermouthe, and spoken with the balyffs and
with the owners of the seide schip, and takyn suche a direccion
that they may graunted it ne man but hym. And moreover he
hathe endented with the owners of the schip what daye it
schulbe redy as well vetaylled as manned; and also he hathe
brought downe letters from my Lord Tresorer to all priours and
gentlemen in this contre to helpe hym and assiste hym to
vetayle and manne the seide schip, and hes men is here dayle,
and gothe abought and gathereth whete, malt, money, and
what so ever any man woll geve, &c.
The blissed Trinyte preserve you. Wreten at Castre, the Friday
next aftre I receyved your lettre.
Item, is talked here that my maistre your brother and
Debenham were at words at London, and that Debenham shuld
have streken hym, had nought Howard a’ beene, &c., wherof I
am ryght sory, &c. Neverthelesse I trust to God all schul be
weell. Your servaunt,
Ric. Calle.
45.1[From Fenn, iv. 144.] This and the next letter were evidently
written not very long after the last.

523
RICHARD CALLE TO JOHN PASTON 46.1

To my maistre, John Paston.

P
LESITH your maisterschip to wit that I whas at Scole, and
spake with Alblastre, John Sadeler, and with other good
yomen of the contre to undrestonde how they were gided
for the vetelyng of the Barge of Yermouth. And I undrestonde
be them that there [their] hundred have payed; nevertheles it is
but litell. Ther was gatherd in that hundred xviijs. and certein
corn, and some other hundred vj. marc and corne, and so they
have payed in all the hundreds and townys here a boute, that is
to sey, Est Flegge and West Flegge and up to Blofeld, Tunsted
and up to Stalom, I undrestand, be the comiscion that
Debenham hath. It is more large thanne master John is, as ye
schal undrestand, wherof I send you a copy, weche causeth me
that I labour no ferther therin. Notwithstandyng your
maisterschip schal have knowleche what every hundred geve,
and Yermeth bothe.
Wreten at Wynterton, the morwe aftre I departed from your
maisterschip. Youre poore bedman,
Ric. Calle.
46.1 [From Fenn, iii. 430.]

524
ABSTRACT 46.2

Richard Calle to John Paston

1462(?)
[JULY 5]

Cannot inform him how much malt he has at Castre, ‘for the
malters have not moten all up yet,’—probably 400 quarters new
and 160 comb old malt of Castre and Mauteby, of which 40
quarters will be spent in the household by Hallowmas. At
Yarmouth it is now 2s. 2d. a bushel—it was 2s. 6d. But London
is a better market. Thinks the price will fall here, as the fields
are reasonably fair in Flegge, and so up to Norwich. The
carriage from Yarmouth to London will be 6d. per quarter, ‘and I
understand j. quartre of Yermothe mette makethe at London but
vij. busschell.’
Norwich, Monday after St. Peter’s Day.
[As John Paston does not seem to have been in undisturbed
possession of Caister before 1462, and we have evidence of Richard
Calle having been there in that year about the time of year when this
letter was written, we may with great probability refer it to that year.]

46.2 [From Paston MSS., B.M.]

 525
JOHN RUSSE TO JOHN PASTON 47.1

To the right worshypful my right honourabyl mayster,

John Paston.
1462
JULY 15

R
IGHT worshipfull sir, and my right honourabill maister, I
recomaund me to you in my most humble wyse, and
please your maistirship to wete that her is on Thomas
Chapman, an evyl disposyd man al wey ayens you, as I have
informyd youre maistirship many tymes, and now he hathe
labouryd to my Lord Tresorer to subplante me, and brought
down wryghting from the Kyng and my Lord Tresorer; but or
hise wryting cam, Wydwell fond the meanys, be the
supportacion of Maistir Feen, that we had a discharge for hym
out of the Chauncery; wherfor the seyd Chapman proposyth to
be at London in all haste, and to avertise the Kyng and my Lord
Tresorer ageyn me to the grettest hurt he can imagyne. Wherfor
I beseke youre maystirship, consedryng is evyl disposecion to
yow, and also the rather at my pore instaunce, that ye lyke that
my Lord Tresorer myght undyrstonde that the seyd Chapman is
of no reputacion, but evyl disposyd to brybory of straungers,
and be colour of hise office of supervisor of the searche shal
gretly hurte the port. The seyd Chapman supportors is Blakeney,
clerk of the sygnet, and Avery Cornburght, yoman of the Kynges
chaumbre. He hathe here of Avereyes xxiiij. tune wyn, whereof
at the long wey he shal make the seyd Averey a lewd rekenyng.
The seyd Chapman lovyth not you, nor no man to yow wards,
&c.
Sir, I prey God brynge you onys to regne amongs youre cuntre
men in love, and to be dred. The lenger ye contynwe there the
more hurt growyth to you. Men sey ye will neyther folwe the
avyse of youre owyn kynred, nor of youre counsell, but
contynwe your owyn wylfullnesse, whiche, but grace be, shal be
youre distrucion. It is my part to enfourme youre maistirshyp as
the comown voyse is, God betir it, and graunt yow onys herts
ease; for it is half a deth to me to here the generall voyse of the
pepyll, whiche dayli encreassyth, &c.
Sir, I beseke youre maistirshyp to remembre my maystresse for
the lytil sylvir, whiche for serteyn thyngs delyverid to youre use
is dewe to me. I have nede of it now. I have bought salt and
other thyngs, whiche hathe brought me out of myche sylvir.
I wold trust, and I nedyd to borwe xxli., your maistirshyp wold
ease me for a tyme, but thys that I desyre is myn owyn dute.
And Jesu graunt yow ever yowr herts desyre to youre worshyp
and profyt, and preserve yow my right honourabyll maister from
all adversyte.
Wretyn at Jernemuthe, the xv. day of July. Here is a kervyl
[carvel] of Cane in Normandy, and he takyth Duchemen, and
raunsumyth hem grevously.
Yore servaunt and bedman,
John Russe.
47.1[From Fenn, iv. 120.] The precise year in which this letter was
written is a little uncertain, but from the date and contents it would
appear that Russe was now in possession of the office which in No.
515 he had asked Paston to procure for him; so that it cannot be
earlier than 1462.

526
WILLIAM PASTON TO JOHN PASTON 48.1

To myn wurchipfull broder, Jon Paston.

 1462
JULY

R
YTHTHE wurchipfull broder, I recomand [me] to zow. Lekit
it zow to wethe [wit], Jon of Dam is come to towne, and
purposit hym to tary here a day ar ij. ar longar, I can
thynk, and he be desyryd. Were fore I pray zow, and as I have
afore this tyme desiryd zow the same, that suche materis as
hathe be comunyd now lathe be twyx myn moder, zow and hym,
may take some good conclucyon be twyx owre selff here at
hom. And in myn consayt, savyng zow better avyse, it were so
most convenyent and wurchipfull for us all, and comforthe to all
owre fryndis. And for this ententhe I wold tary here the lengar;
for I wold be as glad as any man a lyve that suche an ende
mythe be take be twix us that iche off us all schuld inyoy the
wylleffar off odyr, qweche I trust with zowr good help schall be
rythe wyll, and I dowthe nat myn mastyr Markam wyll be will
plesyd thus.
I have tydynges from London, and a monge odyr tydynges I
have knowlage that Cirstofre Hanson is passid to God on
Saterday last past, at ij. of clok after mydnythe. It is good to
take hede there to, &c.
Item, I sent to zow to have had zowre avyse qwat menys were
best to make for the mater towchyng the Lord Scrop, qwere in I
had an answer, but me thowthe it was not to the poynthe.
I sopose, and I purposyd to make the labore that ze sent me
word I schuld do towchyng me, I can thynk I schuld sone be
answerid, meche sonar than he. I must send some answer to
hym, were in I wold have zowr consayll; for he desirid the same,
and I wold not he schold thynk that he were forgotyn be us.
Be zowr pore broder,
William Paston.
I can thynk and he were here he wold be a feythfull frynd to
zow; but and so were that ze thowthe that it were for to labore
for any oder man, me thynkit it were for zow to remembre myn
nevew. That were somewat lykly, and there to wold I be glad to
help and lene to the toder. For as for me, I know so moche that
sche will none have but iff he have, ar be leke to have, meche
more lond than I have; and iff I knewe the contrary, it schuld
nat be left for the labore, but I wold not be in a folis paradyce,
and ze be myn good brodir. I trust thow to do rythe will, &c.
48.1[From Paston MSS., B.M.] The reference to the death of
Christopher Hanson proves this letter to have been written in July
1462, as the precise date of his death is given in Letter 528.

I have knowlage that Cirstofre Hanson is passid

text unchanged: error for “Cristofre”?

527
THOMAS PLAYTER TO JOHN PASTON 50.1

To my rigth good maister, John Paston the oldest,

beyng at Heylesdon, besyde Norwiche, in hast.
1462
JULY

P
LEASE your maistership wete that Christofer Hanson is ded
and beryed; and as for executor or testament, he mad
non.
As for tydyngs, the Erles of Warrewyk, of Essex, Lord Wenlok,
Bysshop of Dereham, and other go in to Scotland of inbassat.
And as for the sege of Kaleys, we here no mor ther of, blyssed
be God, ho have you in His kepying.
Item, as for Christofers papers that longeth to your tenants,
I have goten of William Worcester; and as for all the remnaunt
of Christofer good, William Worcester hath the reule as hym
semeth most convenient. Your,
Thoms Playter.
50.1 [From Fenn, iv. 124.] This letter, like the last, is dated by the
letter following.

528
PLAYTER TO JOHN PASTON 50.2

To my maister, John Paston, at Heylesdon.

1462
JULY

I
TEM, plese you wete of other tytyngs. These Lords in your
other letter, 50.3 with Lord Hastyngs and other, ben to
Karlyle to resseve in the Qwen of Scotts; 50.4 and uppon this
appoyntement, Erle Duglas 50.5 is comaunded to come thens, and
as a sorwefull and a sore rebuked man lyth in the Abbey of
Seynt Albons; and by the said appoyntement schall not be
reputed, nor taken, but as an Englyssheman, and if he come in
the daunger of Scotts, they to sle hym.
Item, Kyng Harry and his Aderents in Scotland schall be
delyvered; and Lord Dakres of the Northe is wonne and yelden,
and the seid Lord, Sir Richard Tunstall, and on Byllyngham in
the said Castell ben taken and heded.
Item, the Qwen and Prince ben in Fraunce and ha mad moche
weyes and gret peple to com to Scotland and ther trust to have
socour, and thens to com in to Inglond: what schall falle I can
not sey, but I herd that these appoyntements were take by the
yong Lords of Scotland, but not by the old.
Your,
 Plaiter.
Christofer dyed on the Satarday next be for Seynt Margret, 51.1
Anno. E. ijdo.
 50.2 [From Fenn, i. 270.] This letter seems to have been penned
immediately after the last was sent off.
50.3 i.e. the other letter to you—meaning No. 527.
50.4 Mary of Gueldres, widow of James II.

50.5 James, Earl of Douglas, who had been banished from Scotland,
but was made by Edward IV. a Knight of the Garter.
51.1 St. Margaret’s Day was the 20th July. The Saturday before it in
1462 was the 17th.

1462 / JULY
sidenote missing, but see first footnote

529
JOHN RUSSE TO JOHN PASTON 51.2

To my right honorabil and worshypfull maister, my

Maister Paston.
1462
SEPT.

P
LEASE it youre worshipfull maistyrshyp to wete, that it is
informyd me thys day scretly, that there is dyrected out a
commyssion to mayster Yelwyrton and maister Jenney,
which shall tomorwyr syttyn be vertu of the same at Seynt
Oleffes; 51.3 and the substaunce of jentilmen and yemen of
Lodyngland be assygned to be afore the seyd commesyoners;
and it is supposed it is for my maisters londs, for as the seyd
persone informyd me, the seyd comesyoners have been at
Cotton, and there entred, and holdyn a court. I can not informe
youre maystyrship that it is thus in serteyn, but thus it was told
me, and desyryd me to kepe it secret; but be cause I conseyve
it is ageyn your maistyrship, it is my part to geve you relacion
thereof.
I sende you a letter which cometh from Worcestyr 52.1 to my
maister youre brothyr. I wold ye undyrstod the intente of it, for
as for Worcester, I knowe well he is not good. Sum men ar besy
to make werre, for p’ 52.2 the absentyng of my maister, the
parson comyth not of hyse owyn mocyon, but I wold youre
maistyrship knewe be whom it is mevyd. I herd you never calle
hym false pryst, be my trouth, nor other language that is
rehersyd hym, but Gode sende a good accord, for of varyaunce
comyth gret hurt of tyn tyme, and I beseche Jesu sende youre
maistyrship youre herts desyre, and amende hem that wold the
contrary.
Sir, yesterevyn a man came from London, and he seyth, the
Kyng cam to London on Satyrday, and there dede make a
proclamacion that all men that were be twyx lx. and xvj. shuld
be redy to wayte upon hym whan so ever they were callyd; and
it is seyd, that my Lord Warwyk had sent to the Kyng, and
informyd hyse Hyghnesse that the Lord Summyrset had wretyn
to hym to come to grace; but of the fleet of shyppis there is no
tydings in serteyn at London on Monday last past.
Youre bedman and servaunt,
John Russe.
51.2[From Fenn, i. 260.] This letter must have been written in the
year 1462 before the Duke of Somerset was received into favour.
Proclamations similar to those mentioned in this letter were issued
on the 6th March 1461 and the 11th May 1464; but neither of these
can be the case referred to. The coming of the King to London must
have been in the beginning of September 1462. He was in London
on the 14th of that month, and had been at Fotheringay on the 1st,
as the dates of Privy Seals inform us.
 51.3 St. Olave’s, in Suffolk.
52.1 William Worcester.
52.2 p’.—So in Fenn’s left-hand copy. The word seems to have been
ambiguous in the original MS., and is rendered ‘by’ (in italics) in the
modern version.

530
JOHN PASTON TO THE LORD CHANCELLOR 53.1

1462(?)

S
HEWYTH and lowly compleynith on to your good Lordship
John Paston, the older, Squier, that where Sir John Fastolf,
Knyght, cosyn to your seid besecher, was seasid of diveris
maners, londs, and tenements in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Norwich,
the xxvij. yere of Kyng Herre that was, and therof infeffid diveris
persones to execute and performe his will, and mad his will in
especiall that a college of vij. monks shuld be stabilisshed,
founded, and indewed withinne a plase late be the seid Sir John
edified at Caster be the see in Norfolk, and certeyn livelode to
be immortesid 53.2 therto, to prey for his sowle, his faders and
moders, in forme and maner as in his will mad at that tyme
more pleynly specifyth; whech will and feffment continued till
the xxxv. yere of the seid late Kyng. And aftir, upon divers
communicacions had be divers personis with the seid Sir John
Fastolff, and upon divers consideracions mevid to hym, the seid
Sir John Fastolff conceyvid that such be monkys hym there to be
indewed shuld not be of power to susteyne and kepe the seid
plase edified, or the lond that shuld be immortesid ther to,
acordyng to his seid entent and will; wherfore, and for good will
that the seid Sir John Fastolff had to the proferryng of your seid
besecher mevyd hym to have the seid plase and certeyn of his
livelode of gretter valew than the charge of the seid college
schuld drawe, and to found the seid college and to bere the
reparacion and defens therof. Upon whech mocion the seid Sir
John Fastolff and your seid besecher apoynted be word withowt
writyng at that tyme mad that your seid besecher shuld, aftir
the decese of the seid Sir John Fastolff, have the seid plase in
Caster, and all the maners that were the seid Sir John Fastolffs
or any other to his use in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Norwich, up trust
that the same John Paston shuld founde there a college of vij.
monkes or prestes havyng a certeyn pension for her
sustentacion payid clerly in mony withowt any charge, cost,
reparacion, or joperde of defens of the seid plase or of any
other livelode to be bore be the seyd collegians, and more over
to paye a certeyn somme of mony of the revenews of the seid
maners, londes and tenementes to be disposid yerly be certeyn
yeres for the sowle of the seid Sir John Fastolff till the summe of
v.ml. [5000] mark were so disposed. Upon wech apoyntement it
was acordyd be thwyx the seid Sir John and your seid besecher,
for as moch as your seid besecher had non astate in the seid
maners and londes and tenementes, that for his more suerte,
and upon trust that the seid Sir John had to your seid besecher
in this behalfe that a newe feffement shuld be mad of the seid
plase and of the maner of Caster, and all the seid maners, londs
and tenements to your seid besecher, and divers other personys
to the use of the seid Sir 54.1 John, terme of his lif, and aftir his
decese to the use of your seid besecher. And moreover, for as
moch as your seid besecher was in dowte whedir God wold send
hym tyme of life to execute the seid apoyntement, intendyng
that th’effect of the old purpose of the seid Sir John Fastolff
schuld not be all voyded, thow it so fortuned your seid besecher
cowd not performe the seid apoyntement, mevid the seid Sir
John Fastolff that, not withstandyng the seid apoyntement, that
he aftir the seid feffement mad shuld make his will for the seid
college, to be mad in all maner wise as thow the seid Sir John
Fastolff and your seid besecher shuld not make 54.2 the seid
apoyntement; and that aftir that, the seid apoyntement to be
ingrosid and made so that the seid college shuld hold be the
same apoyntement of your seid besecher, and ellis this seid will
of the seid Sir John Fastolff to stand in effect for executyng of
his seid purpose. And sone aftir this comunicacion and
apoyntement the seid feffement was mad acordynge, and
season deliverid to your seid besecher at the seid plase edified
in Caster, as well as at the seid maners, londs, and tenements,
the seid Sir John Fastolff beyng present at delivery of season
mad to your seid besecher of the seid plase and maner of
Caster, where the seid Sir John, more largely expressyng the
seid will and entent, deliverid your seid besecher possession
with his owne hands, declaryng to notabill personys there the
same feffement to be made to the use of the seid Sir John as for
terme of his lif only, and aftir his decese to the use of your seid
besecher and his heyrs; and divers tymes in divers yeres aftir
declared his entent in like wise to divers personys. And aftir, be
gret deliberacion and oft communicacion of the seid mater, the
seid Sir John Fastolff and your seid besecher comenauntyd 55.1
and apoynted be writyng thoroughly for the seid mater so that
your seid besecher shuld have the seid plase and all the seid
maners, londs, and tenements in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Norwich,
to hym and to his heyrs; and that he shuld found a college of
vij. monkes or prestes withinne the seid plase perpetually as is
before seid, and to pay iiij.ml. [4000] mark to be disposed in
certeyn yers for the sowle of the seid Sir John Fastolff; the
whech apoyntement declarid and red before the seid Sir John
Fastolff, be good deliberacion was be the seid Sir John fully
concludid, agreyd and stabilisshid for his last will in that
behalve.
And also the seid comenauntes and apoyntementes eftsonis
callid to remembraunce be the seid Sir John Fastolff, the same
Sir John, for certeyn consideracions movyng hym, be his word,
withowt writyng, dischargid your seid besecher of the seid
somme of iiij.ml. mark, desiryng hym so to ordeyne that ich of
the seid monkes or prestes shull yerly have as the prestes of the
chauntry of Heylesdon had, and that vij. pore men shull also be
founde yerly in the seid plase inperpetuite to pray for the sowles
above sayd.
[And aftir, that is to sey the Satirday, Sonday, and Monday next
before the decese of the seid Sir John, the same Sir John,
remembryng divers maters and intents in his mynd necessary
for the wele of his sowle, wheche were not expressid in the seid
will and apoyntement, nowther in his testament, and that he
wold have one will mad and wrete conteynyng the seid
apoyntements, as well as the seid other maters not declarid in
his intent and will acordyng, comaundid to have it so ingrosid
and wrete.] 56.1 And where your seid besecher hath don his part
acordyng to the will and apoyntements of the seid Sir John, as
well in fyndyng of the seid prestes and pore men as in all other
thyngs that to hym belongyth to do in that behalfe; and, this not
with standyng, William Yelverton, Knyght, and William Jenney,
whech be infeffid joyntly with your seid besecher in divers of the
seid maners, londs and tenements, have 56.2 mad a sympill entre
in all the seid maners in Suffolk, and chargid the baylifs,
fermors, and tenaunts of all the seid maners to pay hem the
profitez and revenews of the same maners, londs, and
tenements; and thus, contrary to th’entent of the seid
feffement, and contrary to the will of the seid Sir John Fastolff,
thei trobill and lette your seid besecher to take the profitez of
the seid maners, londs, and tenements; of whech your seid
besecher hath no remedy at the comen lawe. Wherfore please
your good and gracious Lordship to direct severall writts of
subpena to the seid William and William, chargyng hem
severally upon a peyne convenient to appere before your
Lordship in the Chauncery at a certeyn day be your Lordship to
be limityd, to answer to these premisses, and to do as right and
consiens requirith. And your seid besecher shall pray God for
yow.
 The following article is added in the first copy with many corrections:
—
And aftir, late before the discese of the seid Sir John Fastolff, he wold
and ordeynid that on wryting shuld be mad of the fundacion of the
seid college aftir the forme of the seid apoyntement mad with your
seid besecher, and of diverses othir articles conteynid in his seid
former willes, not conserning the seyd colegge and also of divers
maters wheche he remembrid necessary for the wele of his sowle, that
were nevir expressid in writyng before, joyntly to geder expressyng his
hole and inter and last will and intent in all.

53.1 [From Paston MSS., B.M.] This is a draft bill in Chancery

prepared by John Paston with a view to the commencement of a
suit against Yelverton and Jenney for their entry into the manor of
Cotton and other lands of Sir John Fastolf in Suffolk. The document
may have been drawn up in the latter part of the year 1461; but
from the contents of the preceding letter it is not unlikely to have
been a year later. Two copies of this document exist, with the very
same corrections and interlineations in both.
53.2 Amortized, or granted in mortmain.
54.1 ‘Sir.’—This word is omitted in the first copy.
54.2 ‘Shuld not make.’—These words are interlined in place of the
word ‘left,’ which is erased.
55.1 So spelt in both copies.
56.1 The clause between brackets is cancelled in the first copy.
56.2 This word is interlined in the second copy only.

531
JOHN RUSSE TO JOHN PASTON 57.1

To my right honourabyl and worshypfull maister, my

Maister John Paston.
1462
P
LESE your worshypfull maistership to wette, here is a ship
of Hith, wyche seith that John Cole cam from the west
cost on Wednysday last past; and he seyth that the fleet
of shippis of this londe met with lx. seile of Spanyards,
Brettenys, and Frenshemen, and there tok of hem l. [50],
wherof xij. shyppys were as gret as the Grace de Dewe; and
there is slayn on thys partyes the Lords Clynton 57.2 and
Dakyr, 57.3 and many jentilmen juve (?) 57.4 and othyr, the nombre
of iiij.ml. [4000]; and the seid Spanyards were purposyd with
marchaundise in to Flaundres. My Lord of Warwyks shyp, the
Mary Grace and the Trenyte, hadde the grettest hurt, for they
wer formost. God send grace, thys be trew. On Thursday last
past at London was no tydings in serteyn where the flet was,
nor what they had doon, and therfore I fere the tydings the
more.
Item, sir, as for tydings at London, ther were arystyd be the
tresorer xl. seyles lyeng in Temse, wherof many smale shyppis;
and it is seyd it is to carye men to Caleyse in all haste, for feer
of the Kyng of Fraunce for a sege. And it was told me secretly
there were CC. in Caleyse sworn contrary to the Kyngs well, and
for defaute of there wages; and that Qwen Marget was redy at
Boleyn with myche sylver to paye the soudyers, in cas they wold
geve here entresse. Many men be gretly aferd of thys mater,
and so the tresorer hath mych to do for thys cause.
Item, sir, as for tydings out of Ireland, ther wer many men at
London at the feyre of the contres next them of Ireland, and
they sey thys iij. wyks came there neythyr shyp nor boot out of
Irelond to bryng no tydings; and so it semyth there is myche to
doo there be the Erle of Pembrook. 58.1 And it is seyd that the
Kyng shuld be at London as on Satyrday or Sonday last past,
and men deme that he wold to Caleyse hym selfe; for the
soudyors are so wyld there, that they wyll not lette in ony man
but the Kynge or my Lord Warwyk.
Othyr tydings the were come to London, but they were not
publyshyd; but John Wellys shal abyde a day the lenger to know
what they are.
No mere un to you, my right honourable maister, at thys tyme,
but Jesu send yow youre herts desyre, and amende hem that
wold the contrary.
Your bedman and conty[n]wal servaunt,
John Russe.
57.1 [From Fenn, i. 262.] This letter was evidently written not very
long after No. 529. The fleet mentioned here and in that letter is
that referred to in the preliminary note to No. 518, p. 41, Note 1.
57.2 John, Lord Clinton. The rumour was false, as he was summoned
to Parliament in 1463. Nicolas supposes he died about 1465.
57.3 Richard Fynes, Lord Dacre of the South, who was Lord Clinton’s
father-in-law. He did not really die till 1484.
57.4 This word, Fenn says, is doubtful in the original MS.
58.1 Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, half-brother to Henry VI.

532
JOHN PASTON, JUNIOR, TO HIS FATHER 58.2

To my ryth reverent and worchepfull fadyr, John

Paston, be thys delyveryd in hast.
1462
NOV. 1

R
YTH reverent and worchepfull fadyr, I recomand me on to
yow, beseechyng yow lowly of your blyssyng. Plesyt you
to have knowlage that my Lord 58.3 is purposyd to send
for my Lady, and is lyke to kepe his Crystmas here in Walys, for
the Kyng hathe desyered hym to do the same. Wherfor I
beseche yow that [ye] 58.4 wole wychesave to send me sume
mony by the berer herof; for, in good feythe, as it is not on
knowyng to yow that I had but ij. noblys in my purse, whyche
that Rychard Call took me by your comandement, when I
departyd from yow owt of Norwyche. The berer herof schuld
bye me a gowne with pert of the mony, if it plese yow to delyver
hym as myche mony as he may bye it with; for I have but on
gowne at Framyngham and an other here, and that is my levere
gowne, and we must were hem every day for the mor part, and
one gowne withowt change wyll sone be done.
As for tydyngs, my Lord of Warwyk yed forward in to Scotland
as on Saterday 59.1 last past with xx.ml. [20,000] men; and Syr
Wylliam Tunstale is tak with the garyson of Bamborowth, and is
lyke to be hedyd, and by the menys of Sir Rychard Tunstale 59.2
is owne brodyr.
As sone as I here any more tydyngys, I schall send hem yow by
the grace of God, who have yow in Hys kepyng. Wretyn in hast,
at the Castle of the Holte, 59.3 upon Halowmas Daye.
Your sone and lowly servaunt,
J. Paston, Junior.
58.2 [From Fenn, i. 266.] In the month of October 1462, as we learn
from William Worcester, Margaret of Anjou came out of France,
whither she had fled in spring, with a force of 2000 men, landed on
the coast of Northumberland, and laid siege to Bamborough, which
she took and placed in the keeping of the Duke of Somerset.
58.3 The Duke of Norfolk.
58.4 Omitted in original.
59.1 30th October.
59.2 Sir Richard Tunstal was on Queen Margaret’s side, while his
brother William, it seems, was on that of King Edward.
59.3 In Denbighshire.
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