Now let's turn to 1993 – less than five years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The West is, once again, rifling a new world order for hidden opportunities, and also straining to overcome the perplexities brought abnout by their victory. In the summer of that year, 1993, the American journal Foreign Affairs published an essay by the noted political scientist Samuel Huntington entitled The Clash of Civilisations. The article summarises the results of his research into the transformations that have taken place in the American national security interests.

At first glance, the only ground common between Seton-Watson's almost forgotten lecture and Huntington's near-hysterically debated paper would appear to be that both were written in English. The first is British, the second American, the first history, the second political strategy, Seton-Watson's audience is the post-war London establishment, Huntington's work is printed in the pages of a paper which proclaims the triumph of the Cold War as an imperative event.

The two texts can be read in parallel because, apart from the English, they are linked by the fact that both authors are faced with an identical problem: how is it possible – if it is indeed possible – to construct a new world order following the precepts of universal humanism rather than those of "balance of power" or "sphere of influence". In the twenties, the question was whether the Wilsonian world order, embodied in the League of Nations, was viable; in the nineties it asked what the prospects were for the kind of committed "ideal politik" sketched by the Americans. To answer this fiendishly difficult question both Seton-Watson and Huntington were driven the "Balkan key". In the seventy years seperating the two authors countless events had utterly shaken contemporary "reality", yet the question remained essentially the same. In both the twenties and the nineties the only possible interpretation of the Balkan conflict was the paradigm of the post-war condition: the Balkans are the "patient" whose symptoms illustrate the life expectancy of peace.

In his study, Russia as the Subconscious of the West, the Russian philosopher and art-historian Boris Groys suggests that the reason psychoanalysis never took root in Russia was that Russia itself had taken on the role of subconscious to the West. In the “Underground” Kusturica's celluloid cellar, where the war continues forever, situates the Balkans as the repressed subconscious of European peace. The world order is constructed on a subterranean cavity: the formation of a Balkan strategy must be the key to a new world order. In Seton-Watson's Eurocentric vision, the Balkans are the only such tension point, whereas in Huntington's global picture they are just one of many, but for both of them strategy is the issue: strategy for the future.

Huntington differs from the majority of other Western post-Cold War analysts in that he lacks any sense of triumphalism. In his analytical mind the end of one conflict marks the start of a new altercation, and in that understanding the end of the Cold War is no more than a sorry pretext for the events which it brings in its train. If we were curious enough to try and locate the "inspiration" for The Clash of Civilisations, we'd have to conclude that the West, and the US in particular, didn't know what to do with their "victory". When Huntington writes about the Bosnian conflict, it is not the ethnic cleansing that horrifies him but the decision of the US government to intervene in order to try and carve a "multicultural" state out of Bosnia. In Huntington's eyes, this would amount to an experimental second Yugoslavia, even more grotesque than the first.

In essence, the debate on Huntington’s essay, as well as afterwords on his book, turned into an intellectual and political problem not because his ideas are new or revolutionary, but because in reality “The Clash of Civilizations” is not an academic book but a policy paper, a strategy for outlining the limits of the American involvement in the post-Cold War world. Read as a “policy document” , “The Clash” presents a repudiation of the Wilsonian project for an international order beyond the sphere of influence politics. Huntington civilizations are simply the new spheres of influence in which the key states will exercise the control and bare the the responsibility of their own. In this reformulation of the 19th century Realpolitik the spheres of influence are defined not on the language of power, but on the language of risk. The risk which the only superpower United States is reluctant to take.

We can read Huntington's Clash this way because one of his hidden starting points is that the "other" is not knowable, much less alterable. The US ought to retreat and begin defending its own civilisation, the Muslims and Serbs being "civilisationally other".have to be left to themselves. US’s retreat is not politically but philosophically motivated.

The Seton-Watson Project

Seton-Watson was not afraid of “civilizations”, he was coming from the 19th century, while Huntington was coming from US’s experience in Vietnam. Seton-Watson's is a strategy of recognition of the "other". In the distant year of 1922, when the utopia of a regulated and ordered world was just struggling to stand up out of the terror of the chaotic war years, the London professor decided that regional studies would be the very thing to bring peace and keep the League of Nations turning over. The creation of a chair of Central-European History, and regional studies generally, are not as scientific as, say, a political bill. "Regional studies-resting as they do upon a combination of history, language, literature, and economics, have a definately political no less than academic value, and belong to the borderland where history and politics intermingle.”

Whereas before the war, history had been concerned with the recognition of the empire (Great Britain) or the spirit of the body politic (Germany), what transpired afterwards was the possiblity of a certain historical knowledge which could support the League of Nations. In the interpretation of Seton-Watson the great war was caused by the dominant historical discourse and the peace can be secured through the reform of historical knowledge. “And in this age of darkness illuminated by the great ideal of a Leage of Nations, the historians cannot surely be convicted of propagandism if he frankly accepts the whole as greater than the part, and there for who logically the international higher than than the national.”

It was through adopting this precise perspective that the English historian came up with the notion of founding a non-nationalist history. Historical recognition would perform the role of peace-keeping forces. Denationalization of history can give flash to the idea of a League of Nations.

From the point of view of devising and introducing such an historical approach, the Balkans, taken together with the entire area of Central-Europe, appeared exceptionally challenging. And not because the history of the Balkans would have been ominous or different,but because in the Balkans politics and history were more irretrievably intertwined than anywhere else. "The past is the key to the present", wrote Seton-Watson, "this is true in every country and in every era. That the present is the key to the past holds true in Central and Southern Europe."

The Balkans is the ultimate challenge because politics is possible only through re-writing the history and the non-nationalist historian is impossible. The only solution is to ban Central Europeans from writing their own history.

The Failure

The crisis of the late Twentieth Century Western political imagination is traceable to the lack of a discourse capable of acting on what it considers to be the interdependence of politics and and history in the Balkans. The Balkans lives with its own history in much the same way that Marko, one of the heroes of the film Underground, descends to his cellar. Historians are politicians in the Balkans, the patients (Karadzic), on the other hand, are psychiatrists. And Huntington's civilisational ghetto is reminiscent of Kusturica's cellar in one salient aspect: neither of them has any space for universal values. The inseperability of politics and history, past and present serves as an explanation for that peculiar Balkan habit of bestowing particular esteem on those places which have suffered defeat rather than those which have experienced victory. Defeat alone bears witness to the fact that the war is never over. Defeat can be celebrated only by those who do not separate history and politics. The Balkan “otherness” put the constrains on the universal/imperial discourse. Huntington does not want American troops in Bosna, the regional studies promoted by Seton-Watson failed to become peace-keeping force. But when both troops and knowledge are ready to withdraw from the Balkans, who will keep the peace?

Arranging the Balkans

In the last five years three films have emerged attempting to explain the Balkans to the outside word: Odysseus' Gaze, Underground and Before the Rain. The problem is that when people talk about the Balkans they never mean the same thing by the same referents. A film about the Balkans, on the other hand always turns out to be not a film but a metaphor – an explanatory pictorial contribution to some sort of narrative constructed around the Balkans: in the jargon of television documentary makers this is known as "composition" – stitching clipped sections over edited cuts in order that the story hangs together.

In Odysseus' Gaze the Traveller sets off to track down the undeveloped reels of film of an early 20th Century documentary maker, Manukiyas. The protagonist travels all the Balkan countries until he finally reaches a besieged Sarajevo, where he manages to develop the reels, but when they're screened there is nothing to see. Naturally it is a boring film, three hours of standard Balkan stereotypes, wherein the audience is required to deduce that the region was a cultural mine up until the Greeks were chased out; unsurpassable chaos follows, and all life suffocates in barbarity, but these are just the most obvious weaknesses. And the moral of the story, children, is that the "key" to unlock the secrets of the one-time peace and multiculturalism of the Balkans was destroyed forever along with the reels of film: the idyll can never again be reconstructed.

Angelopoulos - Aestheticised History

In fact it was never really possible for the spools in that room to spin, because they could never have existed – or they could only have been screened for a Western audience. The Balkans remain – as, among others, Maria Todorova's Imagining the Balkans, grounded in her historical work, also turns out to be – a Western construct, which merely serves to render the differences all the more palpable. In the local languages, the word "Balkan" has no particular meaning other than the slight nuances of creating a community, exciting solidarity. The inhabitants of the area do not consider themselves in the least "Balkan", or if they do it is in the same sense as "European": an outsider's way of referring to them, meaning simply "others". They have, in part, taken on this image projected from the exterior, they regard it as a kind of expectation, and even conform to it to some extent. The idea of screening a film such as this for a "Balkan Gaze", providing a key to recent Balkan history, is unthinkable, since that would imply that those inside had swapped places with those on the outside – an absurd situation would arise, whereby the insiders would consciously paint their own portraits through comparison with the "others" on the outside. However the question doesn't even arise: there was nothing to see on the reels of film because there are no Balkan self-portraits.

Theo Angelopuolos lived in the West long enough that his tellable Balkan story was whatever could be "composed" from his memories. When we look at Odysseus' Gaze we see a metaphor which falls outside the true-false (liar) value system: this is his Balkans, he reckons its about the Greeks, he believes the place to have been originally peaceable – it is enough to aestheticise history, in order for a new story to be born. Let's assume that the essence of his standpoint rhymes with Seton-Watson's honourable project: seeking a historical-cultural interpretation of the events, imagining that some kind of key lies within them, the same that was lost – but should it be found things can still – theoretically – turn out for the best. This amounts to a supranational idea: historical recognition fulfils the role of the peacekeeping forces, the present of Central and South-Eastern Europe is, as the British scholar put it, the key to the past.

Manchevski and Kusturica - aestheticised anthropology

The other two important Balkan directors, Emir Kusturica (Underground) and Milcho Manchevski (Before The Rain), both live sufficiently far from their countries of origin – Bosnia and Macedonia respectively – that they can compose their stories without inhibition. They both address the same subject: Manchevski cleverly and obliquely, Kusturica brutally, assuming a frankly dubious stance. Both of them demonstrate that the Balkans are different: mystiques, traditions, and rites, which nobody – those living there excepted – can hope to understand, much less alter, and therefore it would be better if all these incompetent intruders just went back home and left them alone. And this is Huntington, almost word for word.

Manchevski is careful to adopt a politically correct tone. There is good and bad on both sides of the - to him - impending Albanian-Macedonian ethnic conflict, only that - the director alleges - in this region violence is like a natural force: everything recurs in cycles - when the season comes around men cut one another’s throats. And time behaves fairly craftily throughout his film: time progresses linearly in the West but stumbles across the Macedonian terrain, and indisputable events happen after photos of them appear on the table of a London apartment. These are just details, of course, which can be registered if you look back over the scene a few times on video, but there it is, just like the London graffiti which says: "Time never dies: the circle is not round". The peace-keeping forces are more concrete here - the occasional blue-helmet appears on screen, and either stares profoundly at the vultures circling in the skies, or keeps himself occupied clearing up corpses.

The world simply marvelled at Manchevski's film, while Kusturica was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes – although in Central Europe his film received a critical hammering for the director's pro-Serbian sympathies, and in South-Eastern Europe it was applauded by whole classes of people given another chance to marvel at the countless stereotypes in their own self-portrait. Underground is remarkable for the thick, gluey mess the director concocts from the sub- and supra-consciousnesses he borrows from psychoanalysis, the two-levelled mythical terrain of Balkan folklore (allegedly of Bogumil-gnostic origin), and a Baudrillard-type notion of the simulacrum. This apparently oversophisticated vision doesn't hold the director back for a moment from presenting the Slovenians, Croats, and, to some extent, the Muslims as fascist.

The ancestry of Kusturica's thinking is of somewhat questionable stock - in his interviews he constantly emphasises that this is his own subjective world, which operates according to "human biological time", and therefore has no place for points of view alien to the spirit of the region, such as (for example) political correctness. It is much more important to get the outside world to believe in the metaphor of a multy-levelled world which produces simulated realities at every level. The people in the subterranean world live outside time, in peace and harmony, believing all the while that the war is still raging above their heads - the classless surface world of simulated happiness above, meanwhile, sponges off the memories of the war. When the two spaces become mutually accessible due to an accidental explosion, those above are in the process of shooting a film about the heroic feats of those underneath: the meeting of the two simulated worlds ends in grotesque and incomprehensible blood-spilling.

The third part of the film is about the war itself, rather than the phoney war mentality. Here an almost mystical apparition of hell is finally unleashed: the characters run around in the abyss which gapes between the various worlds; just like in folk stories, veiled messages are transported between the various levels - one of the smallest boys (close to nature, pure and innocent) avenges himself on the brother of a mass-murderer turned arms dealer. In the meantime it transpires that a tunnel links the major Western cities, across which the world is conspiring against Yugoslavia. The appearance of the blue-helmets here serves as more than a warning – these are now the most sinister demons of the Western underworld, helping themselves to whatever money they can find on Bosnian tramps.

Kusturica too compares war to a natural force, wherein consciousness and space mill about on every level: in his story this is the natural order or - as Huntington puts it - one conflict stops only in order to let the next one start.

Huntington's Balkan story is "composed" by Manchevski and Kusturica by means of anthropological aestheticisation, primarily by introducing the area as a kind of spatial-temporal reservation. Clearly these are not mere films but metaphors conceived in order to manipulate, but even so extremely powerful, because - if the mythical chaff can be separated from the wheat - they are true in part, since everyday experience also identifies just these inter-cultural differences: this region has a different relationship to law (vendetta, mob- justice); a different concept of time (they’re late); agreements can only outline definable obligations (they’re untrustworthy); there is no loyalty to state institutions (they don't pay taxes); society is laced with familial and tribal ties (they’re corrupt); life has a different value (they kill each other at the drop of a hat). This is basically what the West sees, and its enough to make it shiver from the cold and choose the simplest solution withdrawal. Any campaign in the region will only stand a chance when it decides to inspect its own past in vivo, as those Anglo-Saxon travellers in Albania did at the turn of the Century, or as Kusturica did in the opening shots of Arizona Dreams, wandering over to the Eskimos to suggest the wild, spotless day-dreams of the true (untouched) human.  

The Reservation

Nothing would change, of course, if a Balkan reservation were to exist. What Huntington forgets is that the entire referential spectrum of that word owes its existence to the West. When he says that it is detrimental to enforce a liberal democratic agenda in a place where traditional forces oppose it so fundamentally, he forgets that these same "traditional forces" are the progeny of Western emigré ideas, born during the enlightenment period and arriving late and duly deformed to the region. The reason these societies oppose modernisation is not because "their liberation from foreign domination came late and they are mostly of poor peasant stock" as Aleksa Djilas reckons, but because ideas imported earlier from the West were imposed on the society by the local intelligentsia in the form of national doctrines and political programmes, and in doing so a Balkan self-image was formulated. Everything which came afterwards simply served to reinforce the influence of this class. The earlier projects of modernity remain the thorn in the side of the efforts at modernisation underway today.

The most extreme, and therefore best, example of this is Turkey, where Atatürk was so successful in convincing his empire of originally multi-ethnic inhabitants that they were all Turks living in their own nation-state, that to this day no single political force can convince the public to bring an end to the long-term civil-war on the basis of the notion that a minority living among them deserves its own fundamental rights. When, through the ballot and the bullet, Atatürk turned the country into a republic and nation of the world, saturated in democracy and nationalism, it must have looked sufficient for contemporary Turkey it could never have occurred to him that the criteria of Europeanness might one day shift.

What's dodgy about the metaphor of Balkans-as-reservation is that the long-expired ideas of European modernism are given back to the West as wrought-iron local traditions. This is the delusion under which Huntington writes his Balkan strategy, which Kusturica and Manchevski then convert into a knowing "composition", while the Belgrade and Skopje budgets finance the bias. Or: the Belgrade and Skopje budgets foot the bill for Kusturica and Manchevski to stage the reservation, and Huntington's strategy can then be the moral of the story. Or, but this is pure conjecture, no manner of world ordering strategy could ever come out of this. And nothing illustrates this better than the classic model of the Albanian pyramid game: it was profitable for those who invented it, those who publicised and those who monitored it the only people who wound up shooting one another were the participants.

Translated by Stephen Humphreys

Ivan Krastev - political scientist, director of Center for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, fellow at the Collegium Budapest - Institute for Advanced Studies

Péter Krasztev - Hungarian researcher in East-European Studies, fellow at the Collegium Budapest - Institute for Advanced Studies