Nyasha to Dora:
I enjoyed reading very much your opening statement, Dora - partly because my background is film and media studies (my PhD was in film - specifically the Hollywood gaze on Africa in turn of the century films such as Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond and Last King of Scotland) but also because of the really interesting theoretical work you are doing on the tertium quid ('third thing') that is Bulgaria/Eastern Europe that seems not to fit the normative global south/global north binary. Your location of the origins of this tertium quid, via Chari and Verdery’s “Thinking Between the Posts”, in the Balkans/Cold War is also salient and intellectually very provocative. In my PhD, I sought to examine if the Hollywood gaze had changed since colonial and cold war times, now that all of Africa had by 2000 become - at least nominally - independent from European colonisation. I found that the more things change the more they remain the same. Many of the racist tropes in colonial films had been updated and recharged for 21st century audiences.
I am interested to find out from you if Bulgarian fandom reflects, refracts and/or resists the rather unique Cold war, post-Cold war and post-Communist histories that you highlight, how it does so, and in which forms of entertainment/genres such attitudes and practices are to be seen most saliently at play. Football? Movies? Music? What makes such genres especially liable to be affected by these histories and conditions? Also, is there a normative Bulgarian fandom or there are plural fandoms? If there is a plurality of fandoms, what explains such plurality? It would be nice if you could use specific illustrations, particularly contemporary ones, but also some seminal ones from the late 20th century.
Of some interest to me is that the Cold War, in Africa (and South America and Asia), was not “cold” at all. Wars, proxy wars and civil wars (for instance, in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Angola and the Congo etc.) were a key testament to the hotness of the Cold war, but also its constant shape-shifting to fit changing conditions.. Was there the same sort of hot, shape-shifting Cold war in Bulgaria/Eastern Europe? How hot was the Cold war in Bulgaria, and how would that fact affect the nature of the post-Communist terrain? Furthermore, the nature of the Cold war in Africa was that it effectively Balkanised many parts of the continent, partly through fomenting tribalism and “tribal war”, and the clearest effect of that Balkanisation today can be seen in the Congo and the Great Lakes region. The Cold war has, sadly, not ended in many parts of Africa. Anyhow, the reason I mention the Cold war in Africa and other places is to suggest that, perhaps, Bulgaria might share certain similarities with, say, Southern Africa - at least as far as Cold war histories are concerned. Firstly, the Cold war was an extension of colonialism and an element of its metamorphosis. Secondly, it thrived on division. Finally, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 had important ramifications for South Africa and other Southern African countries which had been used as Cold war proxies. In South Africa, for instance, historians maintain that the ANC was forced to come to the negotiating table because of this geopolitical shift to a unipolar world. Also, the apartheid regime could not use the Russian communist menace as an convenient excuse for its primitive violence. So how different/unique is Bulgaria/Eastern Europe, really, from this point of view?
Finally, could you comment briefly, if you can, on the place of the Roma in this non-binary/extra-binary lens/framework that you are advancing? Are the Roma, with their traditionally marginal identities, easily incorporated into Bulgarian fandoms? Why/why not?
In my feedback to your Opening Statement, Dora, I want to focus on augmenting your interest in formulating an “integrated analytical framework (of fandom)”and what I see as the relatable sites of such a framework. I like this focus of yours very much, and am excited by the fact that you are from the “Balkans” because I have always been fascinated by the history of this region and what it means and portends for truly international analytical frameworks of our modern times. So, I’m going to meander and loop a lot, and there will be gaps in my feedback. Nothing that I am going to say is gospel: I merely seek to open avenues for intellectual engagement. My initial engagement, also, is much broader than a narrower focus on “fandom” should allow. This is deliberate, because I expect to engage with you starting from a broad-based discourse on Bulgarian history/Bulgarian identity/Balkan history/Balkan identity, before narrowing further to a discussion of Bulgarian media work and the sites of fandom around it.
Note that I have not proof-read my response, and so there will be many typos and punctuation and grammatical errors, and many sentences that make no sense. I apologise in advance. I think I offered a similar apology in my response to Stelios! So this should become standard, I guess.
So, where to begin? I think that – and most people would probably agree – there is very little doubt that the Balkans is not only a salient part of modern international history, but plays an outsized role for a tiny “peninsula” in south-eastern Europe. Thus, I’ll begin by mentioning two bits of fact that link the present to the past, and then build my thinking about Bulgaria, Bulgarian/Balkan identity, and fandom on these thoughts.
First bit of fact: In 2007, Vasil Levski (Levski = Lionlike) was voted the all-time greatest Bulgarian in a nationwide television poll conducted as part of the Velikite Balgari (“The Great Bulgarians”) survey. This is a man been born 170 years before that television poll.
What links contemporary Bulgarians to such a long past? Indeed, several sites in Bulgaria such as the town of Levski, the Bulgarian national stadium, the Levski Sofia football club, and the Vasil Levski National Military University, are all named after Levski. The day when Levski’s was hanged is observed each year across Bulgaria on February 19, and several personal items – including some of his hair, a silver cross, copper water vessel, Gasser revolver, and the shackles from the episode of his imprisonment in Sofia – are on exhibit at the National Museum of Military History.
Now, on to the second bit of fact: East Thrace, which is Turkish to this day, once belonged to Bulgaria but was appropriated by Turkey in the Second Balkans War. East Thrace is significant in this discussion because it is the European part of Turkey (the one where Istanbul province is). What is the role of the “Oriental” in the Bulgarian (and Balkan) imaginary? What is the meaning of this contest over the European part of the Orient?
Perhaps a third thing I can add is a personal note – that before I read about the Balkans in school, I had had prior introduction to Bulgaria in the larger-than-life sporting figure of footballer Hristo Stoichkov at the 1994 FIFA football world cup in America. Which footballing fan who was watching football at the time can forget Stoichkov? Stoichkov also played for Barcelona FC in Spain.
When I read your introductory note, Dora, and then thought back to my high school and undergraduate history, I have to say that I find the move you make in utilising Todorova’s conception of “Balkanism”-as-a-discourse to be quite salient and productive. I cannot help but add to this by framing my feedback to you in the form of an additional proposition: that the “Balkans” is as much a “discourse” as a “paradigm” (if we want, we may say “discursive paradigm”), and that this paradigm shapes not only the identity and perception of being Bulgarian, but the also the outcomes of being Bulgarian in a contemporary world (and Europe) that is in a flux and is undergoing uncertain (economic, social, and political) reconfiguration.
It is important – and serendipitous – that you happen to come from Bulgaria because, when you mention Bulgaria, there is already a default association with the Balkans since the name Bulgaria itself is drawn from the Balkan Mountains that stretch throughout the whole of Bulgaria (i.e., the Balkan Mountains are mostly located in Northern Bulgaria). Perhaps Bulgaria is the original seat of what Zizek calls the “spectre of Balkan”. I think that the account of fandom that I read in your submission is one that is shaped by the specific notion of Balkans as “discourse” and/or “paradigm”, a paradigm that simultaneously competes with, restricts, constrains, and complements yet another paradigm that you focus on quite saliently: the “(post)Cold War” paradigm.
I am drawn to your remark that your contemporary lived experience in the U.S., as a Bulgarian woman and scholar, “has been mediated through U.S. perceptions (and misperceptions) of Soviet and Eastern European communism and post-communism.” The history we did in high school (if I recall correctly) was that, during the Cold War the Balkans were split between the two blocs of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Bulgaria and Romania belonged to the Warsaw Pact, while Greece and Turkey were members of NATO. Yugoslavia belonged to a “third way” as a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Since Bulgaria, along with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia, are all former communist states, this could explain why the “communist” tag in the US is probably unescapable.
However, to limit the historical splay of Balkans history (and narrative) to communism seems to be a reflection of the limited historical imaginations of the Americans themselves. The joke is on them! So, I would perhaps like to start with the contemporary frame of Bulgaria-as-communism’s-left-overs, and then lead back (and forth) to the “Balkans” (as paradigm), because there is a sense in which being-Bulgarian appears to be constituted in the productive tensions of pasts that refuse to be properly past. The past not only competes with the present for salience, but even opens a portal or revolving door through which the past sends the present back to the past.
In my indigenous language (Karanga from Zimbabwe), there is a saying that “Kare haagari ari kare” (The past does not stay past). For some people this means that the past gives way to the present, in linear, progressive fashion, but this is a weak reading of this idiom – or at least there is another compelling re-reading that I have always preferred. This alternative reading is that, in reality, “Kare haagari ari kare” means that the past has no interest in being or staying (as) the past. Rather, the past is always updating itself, largely by raiding and invading the present and the resources of the present.
In the reading that I do below, I find that the Balkan “past” has not stayed past at any point, but is constantly reconnoitring and updating itself in the present. I thus agree with your long-held/deeply felt skepticism about the efficacy of frameworks that rely on the geographical separation of the world between a Global North and a Global South in order to read not just the ensuing world order but the everyday lives and identities of local populations. Perhaps looking at the Balkans as paradigm might, at least in part, shed newer light on the problem and perhaps even bear out your (and Chari & Verdery’s) framing of the limitations of the Three-World Model Nawal El Saadawi, the Egyptian novelist and philosopher, has innovatively rejected the idea of either the Three-World or Two-World Model, saying:
Why do we have inequality and poverty in the world? I notice that some people still use the phrase ‘Third World’ to name us, to name the people who live in Africa, Asia and South America. This term is no longer used by many people, including myself, because we live in one world (not three) and we are dominated or governed by one global system which is now called the New World Order. However, we know that in fact it is an old world order which uses new methods of exploitation and domination, both economic and intellectual. Language and the media have become more efficient at obscuring the real aims of those international institutions or groups that speak about peace, development, justice, equality, human rights and democracy, but whose agreements and decisions lead to the opposite – that is, to war, poverty, inequality and dictatorship. (Newson-Horst (2010), The Essential Nawal El Saadawi, London: Zed, 78.)
Considering these critiques, we can be broadly agreed that the normative tendency to see the world through the two or even three world split (as well as the East/West, Communism/Capitalism binary) is mostly unfeasible.
Your gravitation towards Chari and Verdery’s view that “an integrated analytical field ought to explore intertwined histories of capital and empire…. but also the ongoing effects of the Cold War’s Three-Worlds ideology” is to my mind well-founded, if only because it allows your study of Bulgarian fandoms to be much richer than it would have been had you merely followed the contours of received Cold War binaries (or “three-naries”?). I certainly agree with you that there is an “odd fit”, which your opening statement does well to refract and disrupt, although I would still argue that there is scope to see coloniality and post-coloniality in the broader account of the “Balkans” itself.
Certainly, coloniality and post-coloniality, as frames with which to see our modern times, seem to me to have more utility than the framing of communism and post-communism. I will explin myself. In fact, I do not broadly agree with the claim that “Balkan people…were not colonized” if by colonialism we mean a specific practice of mutation of empire. Bulgaria (and the Balkans) are certainly marked by so-called “great power” politics, stretching for hundreds of years, including a genealogy that leads back to the heritage of the Roman empire (i.e., during the Middle Ages, the Balkans was the arena of a succession of conflicts and wars between the Byzantine Roman and the Bulgarian Empires) and, more importantly (for our current discussion) of the Ottoman empire, the perennial tension between the Ottoman empire and “the West”, between (feudal/Tsarist) Russia and “the West”, between, during and after the two World Wars, and between the Communist Soviet Union and “the West”, and so on.
Where the Bulgarians never colonised? There is a sense in which one can say that, historically, the Bulgarians have been colonised by, and been (framed as) the victims of the Turks/Ottoman Empire, whether in terms of the almost five centuries of Ottoman rule, or (singular incidents such as) the April Uprising of the 1870s which resulted in Bulgarian massacres by the Turks, the Liberation struggle of 1878, or the First and Second Balkan Wars. More precisely they have been victims of great power machinations and competing empires, through WWI and WWII, through the Cold War and post-Cold War, and now through gradual absorption into EU and NATO. Whether or not we see the play and splay of (Ottoman, and, later, Soviet) imperialism in Bulgaria as constituting colonialism is worth a technical (perhaps more than a technical) discussion.
Yet, also, interestingly, Bulgaria itself may have had colonising impulses, and could even be considered a “sub”-coloniser. Consider, for instance, that so-called Greater Bulgaria in the 19th century had irredentist claims, with claims on Macedonia and, later, in terms of the loss of East Thrace to Turkey. The Treaty of San Stefano in 1878, for example, had indicated that Macedonia was part of Greater Bulgaria, yet Macedonia in practice remained part of Ottoman Empire. That is, in the early 20th century, control over Macedonia was a key point of contention between the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, all of whom fought in both the First Balkan War of 1912–1913 and the Second Balkan War of 1913. Bulgaria, at the same time, has historical claims to parts of the Western borders of Turkey, including the area where Istanbul today is located.
Even the claim that you make, Dora, that “Balkan people are…Christian (albeit Orthodox Christian)” appears to elide and efface several interesting historical strands of the sorts of religions and religious cultures of the region: e.g., the history of the influx of “pagan” Bulgars and Slavs into the area (i.e., the confluence of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity came a little later) or even the more interesting theme of the Balkans as the meeting point between Islam and Christianity. After all, the Ottoman heritage in the Balkans expresses both the exchange of “far eastern” culture and religion in the form of Islam. Ottoman society, we have heard, was multi-ethnic and multi-religious, with confessional groups divided on the basis of the “millet system” in which Orthodox Christians (Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, etc.) constituted the Rum Millet while, in Islamic jurisprudence, the Christians had dhimmi status, which entailed certain taxes and lesser rights.
Through Islamization, communities of Slavic Muslims emerged, which survive until today in Bosnia, south Serbia, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria. It would also seem that there have always been many/plural strands of “Slav”, including Eastern Orthodox Slav, Hellenised Slav, the Muslim/Turkic Slav, and so on. More notably, the tension between Islam and Christianity has proved durable, though always differentiable, and has joined other nested tensions coalescing around identities, belonging, politics, (allocation of) resources (who gets what?), class, gender, nationality, and so on. If you consider the language situation in contemporary Bulgaria, for instance, most people (nearly 80%?) speak Bulgarian, but some speaking Turkish (nearly 10%), others Romani (4%), and so on. I dare say that the Ottoman/oriental factor is still present even in the languages of Bulgaria. So, I want to think that the “Balkans” is not just nested – Milica Bakic-Hayden conceptualisation of “nesting orientalisms” – but also involves exchanges (and even transfusions) between past and present, amongst cultures, across itineraries of power (Ottoman, Russian, Soviet, “Western” etc.) and across modes of domination and influence.
So, what kinds of epistemic itineraries would “an integrated analytical framework” (to use your succinct phrase) of fandom in Bulgaria trace and re-trace? If, as you suggest, the literal bodies of contemporary fans in Bulgaria have been “invoiced” (to use a term from Apartheid Studies) the gaps (and costs) of the Balkan-with-Cold War past that does not want to be past, what should be the scope of our (re)search of such integrated analytical frameworks?
As already indicated, my reading of your opening statement revolves around, and is specifically drawn to, your interest in formulating an integrated analytical framework (of fandom) and what I see as the relatable sites of such a framework. I think that such an analytical framework, if it is to be properly integrated, needs an additional dimension that you seem to have silenced or at least glossed over. Certainly, there is a gap. So, when you mention Orientalism in your opening statement, you do not include it as part of the integrated analytical framework. Why not? The fact that the provinces of the Ottoman Empire in Southeast Europe existed from 1500 until 1928 indicates the longevity of the “Oriental” in the Balkans landscape. I think/strongly suggest that you must consider including it in the integrated analytical framework because of the major role that the “Ottoman factor” plays in the whole Balkans imaginary.
That is, Orientalism = East/Ottoman. Balkan nationalism in the 19th century was, clearly, anti-Ottoman both in spirit and letter. It is, in the same vein, difficult to speak of the birth of the Bulgarian nation, and of Bulgarian nationalism, and of being Bulgarian, while excluding the anti-Ottoman/Oriental factor in shaping the foundations of Bulgarian identity. Consider the fact that Ivan Vazov’s 1888 novel Under the Yoke, (a novel which is celebrated in Bulgarian accounts of the rise of Bulgarian national identity), is centred on the depiction of Ottoman oppression of Bulgaria. Bulgaria is chafing under the Ottoman “yoke”. Bulgaria’s Liberation Day, March 3 (1878), represents liberation from the Ottomans and the agreements of the Treaty of San Stefano. The Bulgarian “revival” itself coincided with (and exploited) Ottoman decline since the Crimean War and eventual disintegration of Ottoman rule following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. Indeed, Bulgaria as an independent nation arises after almost five centuries of Ottoman domination (1386–1878), with the help and military intervention of Russia. It is safe to say that Ottoman glue held Bulgaria together and shaped it, for better or for worse.
At the same time, the successful quest for independence from Ottoman rule suggests the presence of a strong strand of Bulgarian identity that sought an autonomous existence from the fraught identities conferred by Empire. The international rivals of the Ottomans, for their part, supported and promoted the rise of an independent Bulgaria, further complicating the picture of competing interests. Pre-Communist/Tsarist Russia supported the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Balkan nationalism not so much for the benefit of the people of the Balkans but for its own strategic reasons. One of those reasons was the Orthodox/Pan Slavic idea that all Slavs should be united under Russian leadership. I read somewhere that Slavophiles, including Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, regarded the impending Russo-Turkish war in Bulgaria in the late 19th century as a once-in-a-life-time opportunity to unite all Orthodox nations under Russia’s helm, thus fulfilling what they believed was a/the historic mission of Russia.
The rest of Great powers (such as Britain, Austria and France) sought to use Balkan nationalism to erode and counter their rivals’ power and reconfigure the international order in their favour, when and if it suited them. That is, all the great powers used the Balkans as a sandbox and training ground where they would “proxy” and “offshore” their conflicts. Indeed, all the Great Powers were rivals in the Balkans such that the expansion into Balkans by other Great Powers was itself an anti-Ottoman move.
In the main, the Great Powers operated typically by parcelling out the Balkans amongst themselves. We can see the opaqueness of great power machinations in the fact that the Paris Peace Treaty included guarantees of Ottoman territorial integrity by Great Britain, France and Austria. The Great Powers never wanted the creation of a large new united Slavic state. Hence the Congress of Berlin modified the Treat of San Stefano. There was to be no Greater Bulgaria, for instance. In a kind of slow-motion Truman Doctrine, the Balkans remains to this day a proprietary playground and sandbox of the “big boys” (the so-called great powers).
On the other hand, as intimated, the Balkan nationalists themselves had their own separate intentions, and sought to use the tensions amongst the Great Powers to their own advantage, with varying results. But even if we do not go back beyond the 20th century, we may still find elements of Balkan paradigm at play in the time before the Cold War. Consider, for instance, the fact that Bulgaria had entered WWII on the so-called Axis side. It was rewarded with territory by Hitler, but this was reversed by the so-called Allies in 1947 at the Paris Peace Conference. In fact, with the start of the Second World War, all Balkan countries, with the exception of Greece, were allies of Nazi Germany, having bilateral military agreements or being part of the Axis Pact. Thus, Bulgaria and the other Balkan states, in the geopolitical space since the end of WWII, must be seen as part of the defeated “axis” that included Japan, Italy, and Germany, but – unlike the other three – Bulgaria (and the other war-ravaged Balkan states) did not benefit from American post-war support such as the Marshall Plan or American support for Japanese economic reconstruction.
It is the Orientalist/Ottoman factor that, for me, is largely responsible for the thread of the past that is no longer past. Indeed, it has been said that the origins of the word Balkan itself might be Persian or Turkish, further indicating a debt to the “Oriental factor”. Whatever the word’s origin, it is hard to separate any conception of Balkan-as-paradigm from the “Ottoman pivot”. In one sense, we could actually talk about the Balkans as anti-Ottoman, or as an anti-Ottoman paradigm. If the term “Balkan Peninsula” was once a synonym for the so-called “European Turkey” (that is, the political borders of former Ottoman Empire provinces) the term later morphed into an affirmation of anti-Ottoman nationalism with South Slavs as its spear-head (“Yugoslavia” = Serbs, Croats, Slovenes). The Orientalist/Ottoman/anti-Ottoman factor can (even) explain not just the genealogy of NATO but also the utility of the Balkans as “buffer”. That is, if we look at NATO, as a “defence concept”, it seems to go back to the conception of military frontier and cordon sanitaire against the Ottomans.
The Orientalist/Ottoman factor, to my mind, inaugurates the Balkans-as-Buffer concept, expressed, in large part, in the notion of the Military Frontier established in the 16th century (following the election of Ferdinand I as King), with the primary aim of keeping out the Ottomans. The Military Frontier formed both a special system of military organisation, military border and even land ownership that served Habsburg aims of anti-Ottoman war. Indeed, the anti-Ottoman and anti-Islamic nature of the Balkans-as-buffer cannot be overemphasised. If we note that, for more than two centuries (1553-1881), the Croatian Military Frontier and the Slavonian Military Frontier (both conceived as the Militärgrenze, Vojna krajina/Vojna granica or cordon sanitaire against the Ottomans), was in place, exercising and retaining complete civilian and military authority over the area until abolition of the Military Frontier in 1881, we can even start to see the outlines of NATO not just as a “defence concept” but as a defence concept against the Ottoman/the East. Note, also, that the dominant religion within the Militärgrenze cordon sanitaire itself would be either Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, while Islam was meant to be outside. Today, the Militärgrenze countries would be Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Hungary, and Romania. Interestingly, some of the Militärgrenze countries (in the Western Balkans) generally belong in a “marginal EU” and, even, “pre-EU” where they are subjected to a waiting period of “growing up” before they can “graduate” into full EU members. Bulgaria itself was in the vetting/waiting programme known as CEFTA – the Central European Free Trade Agreement – before it could fully join the EU.
For me, when I hear “Balkans”, some of what I hear is “shared history”, although I do not know to what extent the shared history is shared, or even to measure how much is shared and why. I can only speculate. At the same time, I hear displacement, and then assimilation. If the Balkans normatively comprise Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia (Do we even call these countries the countries of South Eastern Europe or Balkans?), then there is scope to engage, at least at the beginning, in a move that reads back (way back) to the framing of the Balkans as a site, locus and crossroads of cultures (with the emphasis on crossroads), from the Latin and Greek extensions of the Roman Empire (note, for instance, that, in the 19th century, the concept of the Balkan Peninsula was a synonym for Rumelia, which etymologically means “Land of the Romans”), before being the locus (as already mentioned) of demographic shifts (and reorientations) caused by the sustained influx of “pagan” Bulgars and Slavs, and being the meeting place (and crossroads) of religions (Orthodox Christianity, Catholic Christianity and Islam) and cultures, ways of seeing, and ways of being.
Indeed, in the long, long past, there was a point in history where there was a Slavic invasion of the Balkans itself, before the Slav’s became indigenous to the Balkans region. That is, even the Balkan Slavs themselves came from elsewhere. The historical narrative indicates that, in the long past (in 681, to be precise), Bulgaria became the first South Slavic polity and regional power, formed in 681 as a union between the more populous Slavic tribes and the bulgars of Khan Asparuh, before the First Bulgarian Empire was conquered by the Byzantine Empire in 1018. The Second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1396) defeated and replaced the Byzantine Empire in the Balkans, becoming the dominant empire in the Balkans until 1256, followed by decline under constant invasions by Mongols, Byzantines, Hungarians, and Serbs, as well as internal unrest and revolts, in the late 13th century. Interestingly, the 14th century saw temporary recovery and stability, but also the peak of Balkan feudalism as central authorities gradually lost power in many regions, such that Bulgaria was divided into three parts on the eve of the Ottoman invasion. By the time the Ottomans came the Bulgarian Empire was already in decline; already dismembered.
The European shift to the Atlantic (and thus turning Europe’s back on the Balkans as a pivot of European strategic power) starts just as the Bulgarian Empire is about to be defeated and absorbed into the Ottoman Empire. Hence, much of the Balkans was under Ottoman rule throughout the early modern period, with Ottoman rule lasting from the 14th into the early 20th century in some territories. The fact that the Balkans existed, for the longest time, as provinces of Turkey/Ottoman Empire, means that Balkan culture and society (and by extension the Balkan “paradigm”) were also shaped, for better or worse, by the notion of the “Oriental”. The point I am trying to make is that looking at coloniality and postcoloniality, on the one hand, and the “Orientalism” aspect, can add to the integrated analytical framework you wish to privilege in your study of the contours of Bulgarian fandoms.
Because I watch football frequently, I know of a Bulgarian football team known as Sofia Levsky which sometimes competes in European football competitions (UEFA champions league and Europa league) and which hails from the Bulgarian city of Sofia. The link is the idea of Bulgaria and the historical figure of Vasil Levski. There are, not surprisingly, and as already intimated, many monuments to Levski in Bulgaria (and across Southeastern Europe and even in western Europe); many streets in Bulgaria carry his name.
These contemporary sites and naming(s) have deep pasts in the Bulgarian imaginary, linking the idea of being-Bulgarian with independence-seeking but also with nation building in the context of resisting empire and exploiting possibilities and tensions of/within the international order. That is, I seem to find that the idea of Bulgaria itself, in its originary sense, might have been shaped (in part) by the construct of Bulgaria as anti-Ottoman/buffer construct, and by (playing off) the tension between two “Easts” of the Ottomans and Russia. Hence, Bulgarian heroes, such as Levsky, came to be national heroes in the war of liberation from the Ottomans in the 1870s and the Balgarsko natsionalno vazrazhdane, a period of Bulgarian “national awakening”, renaissance, socio-economic development and national cohesiveness emerged among oppressed Bulgarians living under Ottoman rule (1762/1820s), and reached its zenith with the Liberation of Bulgaria in 1878 (as a result of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78). Levski himself, regarded as the one responsible for the original act of imagining a Bulgarian republic based on ethnic and religious equality, seems to have drawn on liberal ideas reflected, for instance, in the French Revolution, among other sources. Levski is quoted as saying, “We will be free in complete liberty where the Bulgarian lives: in Bulgaria, Thrace, Macedonia; people of whatever ethnicity live in this heaven of ours, they will be equal in rights to the Bulgarian in everything.” Being Bulgarian today, as it was in the past, thus seems to be a pluralistic identity that draws from many sources, histories, and influences, as well as tensions and contradictions.
That is, if I were to represent the Balkans, it would first have to be seen as a melting pot, and then as an equation: displacement + assimilation + more displacement and more assimilation = Balkans. If we throw in all these influences, then we may have to say that there is more in the mix here than just the claim that Bulgarians are white, Orthodox Christian, and non-colonised. There seems to me to be more than meets the eye once we accept the “Balkan-ness” of Bulgaria. What does it mean to be Balkan? I thus read with interest you reference to the notion of the Balkans as “incomplete self”, not so much one that has yet to reach enlightenment, as you say, but as one that has yet to become itself. Your reference to Slavoj Zizek’s description of the Balkans as a region “caught in another’s dream” is especially relevant to thinking of the Balkans (and by extension countries like Bulgaria) as loophole in the world order. There is an irresolvable tension (and ongoing “incompleteness” [undecidability?]) at the heart of the concept of the Balkans – one that is a bit like the one that we see, for instance, with the perennially irresolvable question of “European Turkey” (can such a thing exist?) and “Muslim Europe” (can Europe be Islamic?), but now with an even longer, much longer, history, genealogy, heritage and itinerary preceding the Ottoman Empire. When Zizek writes of “The Spectre of Balkan”, he appears to be framing the Balkans as an ever-present ungovernable.
The elusive, constantly shifting and even illusory Balkans can be seen in the fact that the concept of the “Balkan Peninsula” itself was created in error by a German geographer who, in 1808, mistakenly considered the Balkan Mountains to be the dominant mountain system of Southeast Europe, or if one considers that the Balkan Peninsula, as Rumelia, had a geopolitical rather than a geographical definition. At any rate, the so-called peninsula itself is also, technically, not a peninsula – because in a peninsula the water border must be longer than land, with the land side being the shortest in the triangle. This is not the case with the Balkan Peninsula.
What is the Balkan and how does it emerge in relation to the East and the West? Note, for instance, that a country like Greece is “Western” rather than “Balkan” not so much by geography but by – among other things – having been pro-Western and non-communist during the Cold War. In one sense, one can see that the “West’s” geopolitical moves in its eternal power struggles against the Ottoman empire shaped the Balkans, first as buffer, and then later as forgotten backwater, and, finally, as a sandbox for experimenting with new modes of configuring international power, capitalism, and world order. As an example, we can see that Europe’s shift to the Atlantic (at the dawn of “modernity”), done largely to isolate “the Ottoman pivot”, had the (unintended) consequence of isolating the once central Balkans. This isolation (and marginality) has marked the Balkans ever since, and shaped its interactions with local and global power. The European shift to the Atlantic is best indicated in the countries that participated in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Neither Turkey nor the Balkans participated in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, showing their marginality to European modernity, since European modernity was forged by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. I think that, had the Balkans participated in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, they would certainly have been a part of the “West”.
The marginality of the Balkans was on show, again, in the 20th century in the fact (already mentioned) that there was no Marshall Plan for South Eastern Europe. Why? Why was there no Marshall Plan for South Eastern Europe? This aspect could be crucial in thinking about the separate and differentiated trajectory that the Cold War took within the Balkans. The latest iterations are seen in the moves around which Balkan countries get into NATO and the EU, when they do (i.e., how long before they join), and how they do so (i.e., the conditions for joining). Indeed, a consideration of the differentiated manner in which the access of the countries of the Balkans to NATO and the EU could be instructive in thinking about the Balkans as paradigm. Bulgaria joined NATO in 2004 (joining in the same year as Romania and Slovenia). Albania and Croatia had to wait until 2009 to become members. Montenegro was only let in 2017, and North Macedonia only in 2020. The NATO memberships of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia are paused and pending for a whole range of reasons. Since 2000, all Balkan countries are friendly towards the EU and the US, and want to join NATO and the EU or have already joined or are in the process of joining. An interesting question, in light of Brexit, is what happens if the EU breaks up? Or why some are desperate to get into the EU while some want out.
In every European country, the population consists of elements who are EU-philes and those who are anti-EU, and the reasons tend to be complex, as we saw with Brexit. We saw how Levski’s ideas followed a liberal path, and it might not be an exaggeration that had he lived in contemporary Europe he might have advocated for Bulgaria to be in the EU and to stay in the EU, and to retain a “European” identity as far as such a thing can be said to exist. Were this to be the case, and considering the national poll in 2007 that identified Levski as the greatest Bulgarian in history, could one say that many/most Bulgarians are of a liberal (and pro-EU) persuasion? However, as we noted, things are not that simple in reality.
Levski and other early Balkan patriots were not pawns of great power but, instead, sought to retain independence of thought and action, within the bounds allowed the “subaltern”. As their shifting historical alliances show (allying with Tsarist Russia against the Ottomans; allying with other Balkan nations against Turkey (in the First Balkan War); allying with other Balkan nations against other Balkan nations (in the Second Balkan War); being monarchical during WWI and before WWII; being republican after WWII; allying with Hitler against the “Allies”; being part of the Soviet Union and Communism post-1945; being non-aligned (in the case of Yugoslavia since the Tito-Stalin split of 1948); being fragmented after the fall of the Soviet union; and currently being EU-aligned, WTO-aligned, and NATO-aligned), we can see that being-Balkan resists generalisation.
Does absorption into the EU represent the end of Balkan shape-shifting? Have we seen the end of the shifting alliances? Could one say that Bulgarians, in general, are traditionally freedom and independence loving and therefore their relationship with Europe is ambiguous? Or is the general desire to be non-aligned? Or to have the freedom to choose one’s friends? As Levski is quoted as saying, “We will be free in complete liberty where the Bulgarian lives”. What does freedom and independence have to do with it. Can “Yugoslavia” return in the future (say, if the EU at some point disintegrates)? Where is pan-(Southern) Slavic identity today? Being-in-the-EU, and how each Balkan nation gets to be in the EU, has also had significant influence on hierarchies of nations, with some having higher incomes and rates of economic development while others are poor (the most unequal Balkan nation by Gini coefficient is Bosnia. Bulgaria is one of the comparatively well off, but with demographics of the poor internally, such as the Roma). Anyhow, the phenomenon of “Balkanism” is an ongoing complicated relationship with Europe, and of the Balkan countries with each other.
A further interesting aspect that shows how intertwined with global power the reconfigurations in the Balkans are, for instance, would be that the countries of the Balkans were monarchies up to WWII, but became republics since that time, with the end of WWII marking a watershed between “monarchical Balkans” and “Republican Balkans”. What did this shift mean? What did it imply? What did the Balkans positioning in WWII mean for the shift to republicanism? Was this the logical culmination, for instance, of Levski’s espousing of liberal ideas from the French Revolution? The same watershed-like reconfiguration happened with the fall of the Soviet Union, which saw the Balkans absorbed into the orbit of NATO and the EU (and of capitalism), with differentiated vetting and conditions of entry. Today all the Balkan states have open market economies, instead of the “planned economies” of some of the states from the former Eastern Bloc. Qualification criteria (such as World Trade Organisation membership and any European Union Association Agreement) and the gradual induction into the EU function to draw the Balkan countries into a very specific form of US and EU-mediated capitalism and versions of democracy and territorial sovereignty. For instance, the EU pledged to include the Western Balkan states after “their” civil wars (in fact, two states, Slovenia – in 2004 – and Croatia – in 2013 – have already been absorbed, four are candidates, and the remaining two have pre-accession agreements). While Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Romania and Slovenia are now part of the EU, Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia are negotiating for EU membership. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo are “potential candidates” for EU membership. (Footnote: The curious case of Turkey, which applied to get into the EU in 1987, and has been stalled since 2016, continues). There are other dimensions, too. For instance, Bulgaria (with Croatia and Romania) is legally bound to join the Schengen Area (which Greece and Slovenia are already part of), thus initiating the country into a specific form of border control and trade criteria. The outsized influence of George Soros in the Balkans and former Soviet bloc since the fall of the Soviet Union may also require mention if one is to make sense of the shift to privatisation and neoliberal capitalism in the former Soviet Union.
Question for Dora: Does the sense still persist that the Balkans is still framed as Europe’s buffer (and also proxy and playground) against whatever existential threat that might come from the “East”, as well as a sandbox in which to test and experiment new modes of power, sovereignty, violence and socio-economic ordering? If this sense no longer persists, what has replaced it?
Question for Dora: Do you think that Balkans identity would have been different if the region had been part (instead of being left out) of the shift by Europe to the Atlantic? Is the current move to absorb the Balkans into the EU (including “cultural inclusion” into European sporting and singing competitions etc.) signalling another shift away from the Atlantic, or at least a post-Atlantic reconfiguration of the European international order?
Question for Dora: Do we see the same cleavages in contemporary Bulgaria about being pro-EU and anti-EU as those we saw with Brexit? What does being-in-the-EU mean for Bulgarian identity? Does being in the EU mean the same thing as being-of-Europe and being-European? Do you see the possibility of a post-EU and post-NATO Balkans? Why or why not? The First Balkan war, and later the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, could be said to have showed the traditional independence and non-alignment (and tendency towards decentralisation-centralisation-disintegration) of the South-Slavs coming to the fore. Could the idea of “Yugoslavia” ever return in the future? Or is the move towards a reconfigured pan-European, EU-based, identity irreversible and permanent? Is the idea of an EU-based identity too hubristic to be feasible? Is it too big/too centralised to be feasible? Or, in fact, is an EU-centred identity too big to fail?
Question for Dora: Bulgaria is generally excluded from the pan-Slavic idea which saw the birth, in the 20th century, of Yugoslavia (meaning “South Slavia” or “Southern Slavland”), uniting all South Slavic peoples (Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) under a single state. The fact that Bulgaria was not part of the Yuzhni Slavyani (South Slavia/Yugoslavia) is an important exception. It means that Bulgaria is intersected by, but falls outside of, the Pan-Slavic idea. Bulgaria’s place and identity in the Balkan paradigm, therefore, carries an asterisk. How does being-Bulgarian/Bulgarian identity relate to Southern Slavic identity, seeing that Bulgarian traditionally stands outside the “Yugoslav” grouping?
Question for Dora: when Levski says, “We will be free in complete liberty where the Bulgarian lives: in Bulgaria, Thrace, Macedonia; people of whatever ethnicity live in this heaven of ours, they will be equal in rights to the Bulgarian in everything,” is he not – somehow – also setting up the idea of Bulgarian exceptionalism? Do you ever get a sense that, within the Balkans, Bulgaria is exceptions/Bulgarians are exceptional? Is the idea of a Greater Bulgaria feasible? Think of the Greek irredentist Enosis and Megali idea (mythologies about resurrecting the Byzantine Empire) that continue to cause problems in Cyprus (and problems with Turkey in Cyprus).
Question for Dora: Is there such a thing as pan-Balkan folklore? For instance, I read somewhere that the Pan-Slavic colours are blue, white and red. Balkan cuisine? Is there a genre of music that we can call Balkan music?
Question for Dora: There is normative tendency to associate the word “Balkan” with disintegration and constantly shifting, unstable alliance. So, for instance, in 1912–1913 the First Balkan War broke out when Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro united in an alliance against the Ottoman Empire, meaning that 1912 was the moment when the Ottoman Empire was dismembered. The glue of the oppressor that had held the Balkans together also fell away, and the disintegration was to continue after the expulsion of the Ottoman Empire. In the Second Balkan War, the former allies Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro turned against each other. (The Second Balkan War amongst the allies actually helped to solidify the Western borders of Turkey). Fast forward to 1989: the moment when the Soviet Empire is dismembered, and the glue of the oppressor falls away again, and disintegration appears to have continued apace. In June 1991, Slovenia became the first republic that split from Yugoslavia and became an independent sovereign state. There have been seemingly endless splits then, and “civil wars”, and the EU has appeared to wait until the end of Balkan “civil wars” before integrating the South eastern European states into the EU. My question is: how has the association of “Balkanisation” with disintegration and fragmentation framed Balkan (and Bulgarian) identity? How wary should we be of such a stereotype? What place should such an association have in your integrated analytical framework?
Question for Dora: What role has the U.S. “system” (of overreaching power) (basically the U.S. Empire and the so-called Truman Doctrine) played in the current and ongoing configurations of Balkan (and Bulgarian) identity?
Question for Dora: Bulgaria seeking independence and self-determination in the late 19th century was constantly caught in-between two empires that were in trouble: the Ottoman Empire (the so-called “Sick man of Europe”) and the Russian Empire facing revolution at home. It has found itself constantly caught in between competing power in the First and Second Balkan wars, in WWI and WWII, in the Cold War and the post-Cold War, and in the current shifts heavily influenced by the EU, the U.S., and NATO power plays. How much has Bulgarian identity (and by extension, fandom) been altered by all these forms of “being-caught-in-between” and reacting to/and negotiating “being-caught-in-between”?
Question for Dora: The book Istoriya Slavyanobolgarskaya by Paisius of Hilendar (1762) is celebrated in Bulgaria as having laid the outlines Bulgarian national identity. How much has Bulgarian identity stayed within/moved beyond these originary frames, particularly in the context of the sharp (and also gradual) shifts of the 20th century and early 21st century?
Discussion point for Dora: When you mention “the Cold War roots [of these concepts”, Dora, it seems clear to me that you could easily go beyond the Cold War if you wanted. In my feedback I’ll try to emphasise this “largeness” (and “incompleteness” and “undecidability”) of Balkan history and Balkan identity that may be of utility in a discussion of the interstices of fandom in contemporary Bulgaria. If the integrated analytical framework that you seek to build is to be truly integrated, I feel that there are areas where you can go further than the post-Soviet, post-socialist construct.
For now, I’ll end here, and look forward to learning and engaging.
