What Is in Balkan History. Spaces and Scales in The Tradition of Southeast-European Studies PDF

Southeastern Europe 34 (2010) 55–86 brill.
nl/seeu
What is in Balkan History? Spaces and Scales

in the Tradition of Southeast-European
Studies
Diana Mishkova
Centre for Advanced Study Sofia
Abstract
This article takes a distance from the debate about ‘symbolic geographies’ and struc-
tural definitions of historical spaces as well as from surveying discrete disciplinary
traditions or political agendas of regionalist scholarship in and on Southeastern
Europe. Its purpose instead has been two-fold. On the one hand, to bring to light a
preexistent but largely suppressed and un-reflected tradition of regionalist scholarship
with the hope that this could help us fine tune the way we conceptualize, contemplate
and evaluate regionalism as politics and transnationalism as a scholarly project. In
epistemological terms, on the other hand, it proposes a theoretical perspective to
regionalist scholarship involving rigorous engagement with the scales of observation,
and scale shifts, in the interpretation of history. The hypothesis the article seeks to test
maintains that the national and the (meso)regional perspectives to history chart
differentiated ‘spaces of experience’ — i.e. the same occurrences are reported
and judged in a different manner on the different scales — by way of displacing the
valency of past processes, events, actors, and institutions and creating divergent tem-
poralities — different national and regional historical times. Different objects (i.e.
spaces) of enquiry are therefore coextensive with different temporal layers, each of
which demands a different methodological approach. Drawing on texts of regional
scholars, in which the historical reality of the Balkans/Southeastern Europe is articu-
lated explicitly or implicitly, the article discusses also the relationship between different
spaces and scales at the backdrop of the Braudelian and the microhistorical
perspectives.
Keywords
spatializing, regionalization, scales of observation, Southeast-European studies,
epistemology
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI 10.1163/187633309X12563839996621

56 D. Mishkova / Southeastern Europe 34 (2010) 55–86
Regional history has spawned considerable theoretical interest in recent years,

and claim to be partaking in new trends in historical writing.1 That regions as
frameworks of historical representation challenging nation-centered history
have moved to this position is, arguably, a consequence of their becoming an
active site of convergence for several critical lines of enquiry at the intersection
of scholarship and politics. The growth of interest in transnational (and global)
history approaches—and in their associates (transfer, relational, entangled
history)— stirred up by the developments towards ‘globalization’ in the
last twenty years is perhaps the most obvious one. This in turn has led to
interrogation of the premises of comparative history more generally, and
spurred heated, if somewhat scholastic, polemics between comparativists (and
structuralists) and transnationalists (or constructivists) — most notably and
vociferously in the German academic milieu (Cohen and O’Connor 2004;
Middell 2005).
All of this has been evolving against the backdrop of the spectacular ‘spatial
turn’ in social and human sciences of late — more properly, the reincorpora-
tion of space into social and cultural theory. An interesting corollary of the
collapse of the two-block system is worth noting in this regard. Categories
previously grounded in the geopolitical system are now being replaced by
those derived from historical-structural characteristics of space. The notion of
‘historical (meso-) region’ arguably rebuts essentialism, or even geographical
and political determinants of its boundaries, and is being described as “an
artistic device and heuristic concept for comparative analysis in order to iden-
tify transnational structures common to a constructed meta-region” (Troebst
2003: 177; cp. Bracewell and Drace-Francis 1999: 61). However, the notion
of region tout court has been questioned by some as having been prescribed by
pre-existent political divisions that became obsolete after 1989, and by others,
resonating postcolonial concerns, as power– and ideologically driven sym-
bolic constructions.
Needless to say, there is no obvious or unanimous answer to the question of
the scholarly (“heuristic”) definition of regions. The question ultimately boils
down to identifying, or rather proposing, what might lend an underlying or
1)
This article is part of an on-going survey of the history of Southeast-European studies carried
out in the framework of the ERC Advanced Grant project “Balkan Histories: Shared, Connected,
Entangled” (2008-2012). It owes a lot to the research and discussions within the “Regimes of
Historicity and Discourses of Modernity and Identity in East-Central, Southeastern and
Northern Europe” project (2008-2010) of the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia. I wish to thank
the participants in both projects for their valuable comments on an initial, more elaborate
version of this essay.
D. Mishkova / Southeastern Europe 34 (2010) 55–86 57
overarching coherence to the political, religious and linguistic diversity char-

acterizing these areas. Different disciplines and scientific criteria are likely to
provide different and occasionally discordant answers.2 The one common
characteristic that all seem to share is their self-conscious, constructivist
method. Indeed, it has been the convergence of the constructivist turn in his-
toriography and the cultural turn in geography that has created the epistemo-
logical condition for questioning the ‘natural boundaries’ of space.
This article does not aspire to partake in the debate about ‘symbolic geog-
raphies’ and structural definitions of historical spaces (and of the implicit poli-
tics of each),3 nor would it seek to survey the achievements and pitfalls of
different disciplinary traditions of regionalist scholarship. Its epistemological
contention is of a different order in that it proposes a theoretical perspective
to regionalist scholarship involving rigorous engagement with the scales of
observation, and scale shifts, in the interpretation of history. My starting point
is Reinhart Koselleck’s observation that the way we impart and interpret a past
phenomenon depends crucially on the temporal perspective in which we
observe it. Koselleck’s theory of historical time is centrally concerned with
“different passages of time, each according to the chosen thematic, which
reveal different tempos of change.” His concept of Zeitschichten “gestures, like
its geological model, towards several levels of time [Zeitebenen] of different
duration and differentiable origin, which are nonetheless present and effectual
at the same time.” Koselleck maintained that, “[t]here are different layers of
the tempos of change that we must theoretically distinguish in order to be able
to measure uniqueness and persistence with regard to each other” (Koselleck
2002: 9; 207). With the dawn of the ‘new time,’ or the Sattelzeit, this vertical
(“geological”) multi-layeredness of historical time became compounded with
a diachronic one — with the retrospective structuring of the past, or what
Koselleck calls the “temporalization” of historical perspective: “History was
temporalized in the sense that, thanks to the passing of time, it altered accord-
ing to the given present, and with growing distance the nature of the past also
altered;” historians, then, “did not merely report, they ‘created’ history”
(Koselleck 1985: 250; 144).
Time then assumes a constitutive, creative role with respect to the content
and interpretation of history. It “becomes a dynamic and historical force in its
2)
See, for example, the special issue of Balkanologie 3/2, 1999, examining the definitions of
Southeastern Europe from various disciplinary perspectives. Cp. Drace-Francis (2003).
3)
As far as the Balkan region is concerned, the divergent positions came out in the dabate
between Holm Sundhaussen (1999) and Maria Todorova (2002).
own right, […] acquir[es] a quality of generating experience, which, retro-

spectively applied, permit[s] the past to be seen anew” (Koselleck 1985:
246; 141).
This seems, or so it did to me, to invite the question: can we presume a
similar constitutive function or capacity of space? Is our historical interpretation
of a phenomenon as crucially dependent on the territorial scale, or ‘measure,’
within which we posit and approach it? (In another way this is to suggest that
once we opt for a certain scale we also have to be aware of the constraints our
choice imposes on our understanding). Rather than bringing preconceived
theoretical models onto their supposed subjects and thus spatialize historical
reality into, for instance, nation-states, centre-periphery or the ‘three worlds’
of the cold-war period —to mention just a few powerful models— this ques-
tion reverses the perspective by asking “just what happens when one thinks
and describes historical events in spatial terms” (Schlögel 2003: 9). This is to
endow space, and scale as its analytical counterpart, with the ‘agency’ of com-
prising historical events and of revealing diverse aspects of reality or, in the
words of Koselleck, to take the “space-time constitution of empirical stories”
seriously (Koselleck 2002: 81).
Obviously, the question is not, and cannot be, one of the epistemological
consequences of spacing alone; it concerns the connection between the tem-
poral and the spatial multi-layeredness of historical experience. The hypothesis
about the creative force of spacing implicates both dimensions: the recogni-
tion for the precedence of the historian’s point of view —for the localization
of historical statement, that is to say— is synonymous to the idea that perspec-
tive should be both temporally and spatially determined, “and that this would
result in diverse but equally valid texts on the same substantial matter”
(Koselleck 1985:141). Compared to time, however, space has remained under-
historicized and under-theorized in an overall theory of history.
Let me make this clear: by raising the above question I do not mean to
endow time and space with an essentialized capacity to wreak change. But nor
do I take them as empty categories to be filled with empirical content. What
I have in mind are the inherent temporal and spatial dimensions and distinc-
tions of any social interaction and activity. Addressing Southeast-European
studies as a particular ‘regime of spatiality’ —a task that can only partially be
undertaken here— has a twofold purpose. It seeks to discover why —that is,
in conjunction with what methodological paradigms, political strategies, aca-
demic/disciplinary environments and interactions, social or geopolitical
experiments, performative acts of underscoring distances or reciprocity— this
form of spatializing historical experience is and has been seen to be appropriate.
In doing this, it seeks to partake in an ongoing reflection on the flexibilization

of space, and to link it to the debate on the scales of observation in the social
sciences, particularly in history.4
In the perspective of this author, two positions seem especially relevant to
be distinguished in this sense. The first was suggested by Fernand Braudel
when discussing the connection between the various durées stratifying the
social world. While Braudel accepted that to each temporality there
corresponded a particular dimension of social reality, that dimension for him
was statistical rather than ‘ontological.’ Social laws are, fundamentally, insensi-
tive to variations of scale, and observations on a micro-sociological level
allow us “to perceive the more general structural laws, just like the physicist
detects the proper laws of physics at an infra-molecular level.” The various
durées — accordingly the various spaces and scales— “interconnect” and
“conjoin each other [s’emboîtent] with ease”: they are invariant of the encom-
passing and homogeneous flow of history, of the “imperious world time”
(Braudel 1958).
A different perspective has been encapsulated in Jacques Revel’s notion of
scale shifts, jeux d’échelles, whereby each scale of observation throws into relief
(‘constructs’) aspects of social reality, which remain inaccessible or invisible at
any other. Contrary to the Braudelian conception of emboîtement, the results
achieved through the articulation of scales are neither compatible nor cumula-
tive: “the social reality is not the same on the different levels of analysis from
which it is observed.” Even if cumulative in its combined effects and duration,
the phenomenon appears as a multilayered process, which obeys discontinued
and non-superimposable logic, according to the level of analysis at which one
is situated. This “discontinuity” and heterogeneity of historical reality is cogni-
tive: it makes possible the constructions of complex objects which take into
account the multi-layeredness of the social, and discloses previously ‘locked’
aspects of the historical world. At the end of the day, it is not the privileging
of one scale over the other but “their correlation, which provides the strongest
analytical benefit.” That correlation is not re-creative of a ‘total’ world how-
ever, indeed the main culprit in all of this is precisely the “old mirage of an
‘integral resurrection of the past’,” “the idea that between the parts and the
whole there exist quasi-organic homological relations” (Revel 1996, 2008;
Ginzburg 2001: 147-164).
4)
On the latter debate from other disciplinary perspectives see, for example, Verdier (2004).
I will formulate my own position in advance: the national and the (meso)
regional perspectives to history chart differentiated ‘spaces of experience’ —i.e.
the same occurrences are reported and judged in a different manner on the dif-
ferent scales— by way of displacing the valency of past processes, events, actors,
and institutions and creating divergent temporalities — different national and
regional historical times. The ‘testing ground’ is in texts of regional scholars,
primarily but not only historians, in which the historical reality of the Balkans/
Southeastern Europe is articulated explicitly or implicitly.5
If corroborated, the historicized spatial relativity of historical judgment,
namely that different objects (i.e. spaces) of enquiry are coextensive with dif-
ferent temporal layers each of which demanding a different methodological
approach, would necessarily entail the formulation of another hypothesis –
one concerned with the relationship between different spaces and scales
(e.g., emboîtement vs. discontinuity). At several points in this essay I shall
return to this question, and sum up my conclusions at the end.
Interplays of universal, regional and national spaces: Ivan Shishmanov

and Nicolae Iorga
Institutionalization of historical studies in the second half of the nineteenth

century concurred with the general drive towards the ‘nationalization of sci-
ences,’ carving out retrospective national narratives from the multi-ethnic
frameworks in which peoples actually lived, and using a positivist toolkit to
sustain the romantic topoi of historical continuity. In the European Southeast
as elsewhere in Europe the period was marked by the systematic accumulation
of ‘positive,’ ‘fragmented’ knowledge and a boom in the publication of
‘sources.’ In a situation characterized by the making of new states and identi-
ties and absence of usable historiographic traditions, the task of producing
‘national syntheses’ ranked high. Altogether there was a certain fear of and
reluctance towards generalizations however, a prudence that was characteristic
5)
The history of Southeast-European studies, more properly the ways various generations and
academic sub-cultures defined the object of their enquiries in such terms, across a field which
brings together (geo)politics, historiographical and methodological currents, disciplinary and
institutional venues, provides the broader research canvas of this essay. For the history of
regionalist historiography on the example of Central, Southeastern and Northern Europe, see
the respective chapter in Middell (2010) co-authored by this writer (on Southeastern Europe),
Bo Stråth (on Northern) and Balazs Trencsényi (on Central Europe).
of the age and cultivated by the positivist method. As a rule historians remained
confined to a vision of contributing bricks to an edifice of national history that
would be erected in the distant future. Remarkably, external scholarly interest
in the region was compartmentalized in a similar way. The Czech Konstantin
Jireček’s Geschichte der Bulgaren (1876), celebrated as laying the beginning of
the modern Bulgarian historiography, was followed by the no less fundamental
Geschichte der Serben (1911). The English historian William Miller wrote his
Southeast-European collection in 1896, tellingly entitled The Balkans:
Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia and Montenegro (reedited in 1899 and 1908),
while publishing a separate volume on the “History of the Ottoman Empire”
in the Cambridge World History series.
The period around the turn of the century witnessed the rise of comparativ-
ist methodologies constructing a sort of Southeast-European (Balkan) unit of
analysis. Although the term ‘Southeastern Europe’ appeared at the beginning
of the century, it seems to have been initially used mainly by scholars inter-
ested in comparative linguistics, especially in common elements discovered in
the languages of the region (Drace-Francis 2003: 277).6 The first regionalist
scholarly schemes originated with practitioners of neighboring human and
social sciences —particularly linguists, literary scholars, and ethnographers—
while historiography, to the extent it ever ventured beyond the national frame-
work of history prior to the Great War, largely followed and emulated their
methods. Some of the prominent historians in the region, such as Nicolae
Iorga, sought more comprehensive frameworks of explanation and were open
to new tendencies in historiography at the turn of the twentieth century.
However, even Iorga did not frame his ‘revisionism’ in opposition to Ranke
but rather sought to reach a compromise between the Lamprechtian and neo-
Rankean approaches. Until after the large-scale transformations wrought by
the war, local academic studies on Southeastern Europe mostly gravitated
toward cultural studies in a broader sense, not history. Awareness of, and
research into, Balkan linguistic community and folklore/ethnography were
the first, and for quite some time the only, areas in which the idea of a Balkan
historical commonality thrived. The notion of a Southeastern Europe, as far as
it surfaced in academic discourse, stood for a cultural koine rather than a his-
torical region.
The central role of German educational and research institutions —with
Leipzig (comparative linguistics, folklore and ethnography —Weigand and
6)
For more recent studies on the Balkan linguistic unity, see Асенова (1989); Sawicka (1997);
Lindstedt (2000).
Leskien, Lamprecht, Wundt), Berlin (Archiv für slavische Philologie), and

Munich (Byzantine studies, Byzantinische Zeitschrift) at the forefront—
deserves mention. One of Leskien’s students in Leipzig, the Bulgarian ethnog-
rapher and literary scholar Ivan D. Shishmanov (1862-1928), considerably
expanded on the assumption of crisscrossing Balkan (poetic) cultures that was
originally developed in Leskien’s “Fairytales from the Balkan lands” (Leskien
1925). Shishmanov was among the first to talk about les savants balkaniques
and of the need for communication among them. In the spirit of the critical
post-Romantic method he dispelled the notion of the autochthonous roots
and the uniqueness of “national folklore” (as propagated by what he dubbed
“patriotic romanticism”), as well as the “popular” origin of much folklore, and
instead charted a vast global network of exchange —‘internationality’— of
beliefs, tales, epic traditions and popular lore. He came to what were then the
unconventional conclusions that
The existent researches suffice to persuade us that we should stop regarding the
popular lore of any single people as its totally original creation. There had been
borrowings since time immemorial. […] This new view about the origins and
diffusion of popular lore may not please some of our collectors, but it is the only
scientific one […] and it will cure them of searching in each and every song for
historical or mythological reminiscences. […] With intended or naïve forgeries,
such as the ones that had been fashionable until recently not only among the
Slavs but also among the other European peoples, nothing can be achieved any-
more (Шишманов 1966a: 17-18).
Shishmanov’s major methodical breakthrough was his cogent refutation of the

romantic notion of national uniqueness and exceptionality that precluded the
quest for resemblances in the development of nations (Дановa 2005). For
him, all these interactions and mutual borrowing were possibly due to the
similarities in the evolution of individual nations.7 “The originality of a cul-
ture,” Shishmanov argued, “often lies in nothing other but its more or less
self-reliant remaking of the borrowed foreign elements. Peoples —small and
big— are great plagiarists” (Шишманов 1965: 373).
These ‘transfers’ and ‘entanglements,’ to put it in the present-day transna-
tionalist vocabulary, riveted the very fabric of a people’s wisdom and were
paralleled by those characterizing what Shishmanov defined as, the “patriotic
7)
Shishmanov pressed home his arguments about the fundamental similarities in the
development of all nations in his study on “The song about the deceased brother in the epic of
the Balkan peoples” (Шишманов 1966: 207-215).
period” in the study of the folk, when forged claims to national authenticity
appeared as “some kind of vital law that implacably displays itself at the begin-
ning of each scientific revival (sic)”. He also illuminated the mutual mirroring
of over-inflated national self-narrations across Europe. Shishmanov consid-
ered a similar “exchange of the cultural concepts and achievements of various
peoples” to be formative of his own scholarly environment, indeed of the very
notions of scientificity, which he saw as embedded in a constant cross-national
flow and communication of “new outlooks” and “new methods” (Шишманов
1966: 7-22). The same ‘positive approach’ led him also to challenge a funda-
mental contention in the master narrative of Bulgarian history: that of the
destructive role of the Greeks in terms of culture and education for the
Bulgarian identity. Instead, he insisted on —and corroborated via critical
reading of sources— the pivotal edifying role of Greek culture, schooling and
literature in the formation of the first generation of Bulgarian “national awak-
eners” and cultural leaders, thus underscoring the importance of what con-
temporary scholarship would describe as cultural transfer in the history of
nationalism and collective identity. In all that transpired Shishmanov’s convic-
tion that the Bulgarians could not gain a proper understanding of their
national history unless they perceived of their culture in its connectedness
with other national cultures in the region — a conviction which he continued
to uphold as Minister of Education by insisting that Bulgarian schools “should
put an end to this culpable ignorance [of neighbors] by inculcating knowledge
of the history and literature of at least the closest neighboring peoples”
(Шишманов 1894; 1965: 48-59; 186-93).
When the scale and vantage moved to the level of the national however,
quite different aspects of the above phenomena became visible. Folklore,
Shishmanov tells us, is the “people’s science,” the “science of the poor in spirit”
which allows us to “probe deeply into the soul of the folk, to get to know its
outlooks and the ideas driving it, the notions it had generated or inherited or
borrowed, and the ways in which all these had been transformed in its con-
sciousness: how they had changed, which particular form they had taken in
contrast to the notions of other peoples, etc.” (Шишманов 1966: 23).
Ultimately, the important question appeared to be “what influence all those
numerous races, which had been in contact with us in the course of history,
had exerted on our national type, on our culture, our customs, our language.
That means to examine all foreign components of our nationality, culture,
language, etc.” (Шишманов 1966: 268). Shishmanov was aware of the great
challenge this posed in a region as ethnographically and historically ravaged as
the Balkans: “The ethnographer’s task is anything but an easy one where the
ethnographic tempest hadn’t had the time to abate.” But precisely in such
zones the science of history —“which in this case is a dangerous and biased
advocate, who doesn’t forget the smallest offence and constantly foments his
client’s passions” — was of little avail. It befell ethnography8 to perform what
he saw as “a cardinal political task,” for “folkloric studies are the sole instru-
ment for defining the ethnographic boundaries of the various Balkan peoples”
(Шишманов 1966: 30-31).9 Thus, while conceding that national isolation
did not exist and that each culture evolved in a process of continuous exchange
with other cultures, Shishmanov’s ‘comparativism’ pursued above all the iden-
tification of the “foreign elements” and borrowing in the national make-up.
The organizing agency and the key reference remained the nation.
Both his proficiency in various academic cultures and the contemporary
state-of-the-art in ethnography induced Shishmanov to position his field of
enquiry on a global and, more frequently, meso-regional scale. On this level,
his analysis dealt with processes of mutual borrowing and interaction, the
nation’s self-containment and purity were unmade, and the national ‘dissolved’
into the international. Shishmanov thus exemplified the intrinsic potential
of comparativistics to undermine the national canon of history, “render
the invisible visible and question our own generalizations” (Green 2004: 42).
The political implications of this scholarly framework were not to be
underestimated:
In general, folklore and politics are two spheres not alien to each other. The
awareness that well-nigh all nations possess the same or similar legends, that they
are alike in customs, morals, beliefs, in their views on nature and on life, this
awareness could not but affect beneficially the political views of folklorists, many
of whom are among the most fervent preachers of the brotherhood and concord
between nations and among the most ardent champions of the nations’ rights
against tyrants and usurpers (Шишманов 1966: 30).
The shift of perspective —from within the national framework— reformu-

lated that same problématique and threw into relief a different register of his-
torical existence: on the level of the national, folklore stood out as key to the
soul and the mind of the community. Shishmanov never identified that which
ultimately defined a nation’s individuality (and its “ethnographic boundaries”)
8)
As a “systematic enquiry” of folklore, ethnography, according to Shishmanov, involved
“literary history, on the one hand, and ethnology and popular psychology, on the other, that is
the natural and the cultural history of a people” (Шишманов 1966: 23-24).
9)
Corroborating the Bulgarian nationality of the Macedonians was a key target of this research
programme (ibidem).
so that it could participate in an exchange with other nations, the ‘core’ that
lay beneath all the “foreign” impacts and proved able to assimilate them while
remaining the ‘same’ national individuality. But it was clear that such an ethno-
cultural hub did exist, that it represented the actual agency of history, and that
its thorough exploration was the scholar’s chief duty — “in order to under-
stand the direction in which the nation had evolved and to chart the direction
of its future development in the best possible sense” (Шишманов 1966: 23).
These two levels, and the different ‘spaces of experience’ which they charted,
coexisted side by side, without apparent conflict. The operations of entangling
and disentangling historical experience thus alternated or proceeded in paral-
lel, and there was little sign of an awareness of tension.
It might be argued that the modes in which the historical unit of Southeastern
Europe was originally conceptualized was strongly influenced by the preemi-
nence of linguistic and folkloric comparativism in that commonalities on the
level of grammar, syntax, belief, and popular lore seemed to imply an underly-
ing primeval unity in the way of thinking and the unconscious. This trend and
the call for non-national historical methodology radiating from Leipzig —
especially from Karl Lamprecht— converged on the oeuvre of Nicolae Iorga
(1871-1940), perhaps the most outstanding (and prolific) Romanian histo-
rian before World War II, and a contemporary of Shishmanov. Iorga was most
inclined to build his synthesis on the basis of collective psychology and a belief
in culture as a binding force and a principal instrument of any ecumenicity,
whose vision of the area’s specificity and mission reflected a distinctive rela-
tionship of national, regional and global scales of historical experience.
Already at the 1913 World Historical Congress in London, Iorga had for-
mulated a plea for history writing beyond the national frame (Iorga 1913a),
although he himself at that point was also busy creating a new Romanian
‘ethno-democratic’ nationalist narrative both in politics and history. That same
year, right after the conclusion of the war between the former Balkan allies
against the Ottoman Empire, he founded the Institute for Southeast-European
Studies in Bucharest and a specialized journal, the Bulletin de l’Institut pour
l’Etude de l’Europe sud-orientale. Shishmanov’s appeals of previous years for
‘institutionalizing’ the studies of the region in the form of “Congrés des savants
balkaniques” were thus realized, albeit not quite in the spirit of his intentions.10
10)
As Iorga bluntly put it, the establishment of such an institute in Bucharest was a legitimate
“affirmation of Romania’s rights” as a major regional player (Iorga 1911: 20). On Shishmanov’s
correspondence with a number of Romanian scholars stressing the need for some form of regular
exchange between the students of the area, see Siupiur (1968); Pippidi (1978).
By that time Iorga had already published his first synthetic works as advocated
(in fact inspired) by Lamprecht: Geschichte des Rumänischen Volkes (2 Vols.,
1905) and, heralding his regionalist syntheses, Geschichte des Osmanischen
Reiches nach den Quellen dargestellt (5 vols.,1908-13), in which he exposed the
emotional nature of conceiving of the Turks and their empire as an historical
anomaly detrimental to civilization, proposed the study of Ottoman history as
an integral part of world history.
Iorga’s historiographic discourse both before 1918 and during the
1920s-1930s, can be considered a key example of the fusion of regional and
national canons; of using different paradigms for different ‘branches’ of his-
tory (e.g. cultural vs. political history), and of re-cycling both the national and
the regional through his ‘sămănătorist’ (agrarian/ethno-populist) politico-ide-
ological code. His syntheses and regional histories thus provide a synoptic list
of the different definitions of regionalist historical approaches.
Iorga was no doubt the first regional historian to grasp the significance of a
common heritage and to plead for the study of the “great territorial entities”
defined by specific historical evolution, life forms and culture. This specificity,
drawing upon the great Thraco-Illyrian-Roman tradition and epitomized by
Byzantium, was taken over by the Ottoman Empire and constituted the heri-
tage that the Balkan peoples shared. All of them —Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs,
Romanians, Albanians, and Turks— had been subject to the same great
Western, Eastern, racial, and religious influences. It was this heritage, the com-
monalities of experience and the “fatalities of geography,” Iorga implored, that
made imperative the study of national history on a broader basis that would
view the various common Balkan traditions as one whole (Iorga 1935; 1940). In
several of his programmatic texts he emphasized the necessity of the compara-
tive approach for the study of history and civilization. He did not hesitate to
openly challenge all those for whom “each nationality appears as individuality
clearly separated from the others” and to counteract “the prejudice that there
is too little common ground between the nations in this region of Europe.”
Against “the habit that everyone should confine oneself to one limited domain”
he asserted the historian’s duty “to consider this whole in its totality and gen-
eral lines which are more or less uniform” (cit. in Cândea 1972: 189).
In the same stroke, it was precisely this broader regional canvas, the com-
monality underlying the particularities and the history of “the great territorial
entity” that, in Iorga’s reading, provided the context wherein the pivotal place
of Romania and the Romanians’ historical mission in world history could
stand out. The insistence on the notion of “Southeastern Europe,” in outspo-
ken opposition to the Balkans and the Balkan Peninsula, was, in Iorga’s
historiographical perspective, intended to capture the integral space of “Eastern

Romanity”: the “Carpatho-Balkanic” or “Carpatho-Danubian” realm incor-
porating the Romanians with the once Romanized inhabitants (the Vlachs) to
the south of the Danube, i.e. in “the Balkans” proper (Iorga 1999: 122-25;
135-37). In this, as in the general semantics of what he called “our people’s
balkanism,” Iorga presented “a historiographical perspective attuned to the
imperative to form and maintain an integral Romania” (Duţu 1996: 15).
It would nevertheless be misleading to presume that these interlocking
national and regional projections were only scholarly variations on a political
tune. They were no doubt that as well, but both conceptually and as historical
schemata they were more complex and elaborate than those of the bulk of
nation-building historians at the time. To understand their actual meaning the
introduction of a third ‘scale’ —that of universal history— is necessary.
Aligning himself, in the vein of Lamprecht’s global vision of historical phe-
nomenology, with the new cultural history which concerned itself above all
with what was “deep, fundamental, and vital” in human life, Iorga upheld an
emphatically organicist conception of the historical evolution of humankind.
In the perspective of the latter, the understanding of the history of an indi-
vidual nation, which itself encapsulated the organic and unitary character of
history both synchronically (across all its manifestations) and diachronically
(across time)11 could not be achieved by studying it independently. The peo-
ples, being “necessary, permanent and, in a certain sense, eternal creations,”
encroached on, transferred to, borrowed from, conquered and were subdued
by each other. Resonating Shishmanov’s views, Iorga asserted that this process
of continuous interaction had totally changed the understanding of the notion
of people. It was not the pure and self-contained entity of the Romantic peri-
od anymore, but a natural whole with its own organic life, similar to the life
of individuals: it grew by what it gained from outside, it got cleansed and
rejuvenated by what it gave up after a certain time, it died and resurrected.
What ultimately defined a people’s power and value in the world was “that
inherent, elemental energy, which determines its potential to assimilate and to
radiate, and the proportion in which it abandons its worn-out elements”
(Iorga 1911: 14-15).
A striking consequence of all that was the “disappearance of the distinction
between world history and national history,” since
11)
“Today the past, which is only another life, is represented not through scattered elements […]
but through a unitary conception of history, through an attempt to resurrect in spirit the overall
vision of what had once happened” (Iorga 1999: 115).
The life of a people is continuously enmeshed with the lives of other peoples,
depending on and continuously influencing them. Each nation is an energy with
its own sources and particular circumstances, its special character and mission.
But none of these energies can be absolutely isolated for study and must not be
isolated in this way. All these intersecting streams function in the same atmos-
phere and flow on the same earth […]. The history of a people, thus, touches the
history of others, not through fleeting mentions or short chapters about recipro-
cal influences, but is established and preserved in the natural medium of human
universality, to which it belongs in its highest essence. And universal history, in
turn, is not anymore (just) a collection of national histories, clustered by geo-
graphic or cultural criteria, but the study of those connections of cultures, politi-
cal ideas, expansions and conquests on all terrains, transfers, transformations,
reinforcements and enfeeblements, which should alone be its domain — one that
is sufficiently ‘scientific’ and ‘philosophic’ as to leave no space for any other sci-
ence or philosophy of history (Iorga 1911: 17).
So, as a Lamprechtianist and participant in Lamprecht’s project of

Weltgeschichte, Iorga was most concerned with situating Romanian history
into universal history. The regional in this spectacular scheme was assigned a
key role as it came to stand as a mediating zone and a condition for global
integration. His Byzance après Byzance (Iorga 1935) brilliantly exemplifies the
synthesis of universal and national history by underwriting “the universal
vocation of Southeastern Europe and the role of the Romanians in the fulfill-
ment of this vocation” (Cândea 2000: 8). On the one hand, it postulates the
belonging of the peoples of Southeastern Europe to a universal civilization
bridging the East and the West yet being neither of the two, possessing a
unique ecumenical role and a unique contribution to world history. On the
other hand, it stresses the idea of Byzantium’s spiritual and institutional con-
tinuity through the Romanians once it had ceased to exist politically — an idea
also expressed in his “History of the Balkan States in the Modern Age” (1913).
“There was a time,” Iorga contended in the introduction to that book,
when it appeared that the entire Byzantine, Balkan legacy should be inherited by
our [Romanian] princes who […] showed that they wanted to preserve it and that
they were capable of sacrificing themselves for it. […] For five hundred years we
had given asylum to the whole higher religious life, to the whole cultural life of
the peoples from across the Danube. The Greek Byzantium and the Slav
Byzantium, which derived from it, had thus lived for another half millennium
among us and through us, if not for us […] (Iorga 1913b: 8, 11).
It was the wreaking of a place for the Romanité orientale in the world
history —an effort crowned by his monumental La place des Roumains dans
l’histoire universelle (3 Vols., 1935-36)— that led Iorga to elaborate on the

historical continuity and cohesion of Southeastern Europe. If that “formă de
universalitate” which Byzantium presented,12 could survive until the nineteenth
century, it was due to the Ottomans (“not […] the destructors of the Byzantine
empire, but its continuers”) and, above all, to the Romanians. Confronting
the nationalist convention of the time, Iorga thus came to vindicate both the
Byzantine and the Ottoman legacy. The peace, local autonomy and opportu-
nities for the small nations, which these two empires had ensured, made pos-
sible the endurance of that “unity in diversity” that came to distinguish the
region (Iorga 2000: 71-88; Iorga 1940: 14). But no less crucial in this whole
process was Romania’s role as the ‘real’ Byzance après Byzance, a role that
guaranteed its place in the history of mankind.
Taking into account the political conjuncture is also important to interpret
Iorga’s regionalist frame. Both the institutionalization of Southeast-European
studies in Bucharest and the regional re-positioning of the Romanian past
were meant to underwrite Romania’s growing political weight in the area after
the Balkan wars (1912-13).13 Special mention in this direction is due to his
ethno-populist narrative of the Balkan peasantry and the “spiritual life of the
village” as the ultimate repository of a nation’s distinctive culture — of its
“ideas.” The latter was one of the three “historical permanencies” —the other
two being “soil” and “race”— which, in contrast to the constant flux of events,
traversed time and space and determined “all ‘pragmatic’ history” (Iorga 1999:
271-282). Permanencies, once again, manifested themselves on two scales: in
Iorga’s phenomenological perspective they underlay the unity and the conti-
nuity of a Southeast-European “form of civilization,” but in their specific
blends transformed into the mainstay of national authenticity.
Recapitulating Iorga’s ‘regimes’ of spatiality after all that is anything but an
easy task. In many ways his regionalist projections turned out to be founda-
tional. But they also fused a series of contradictory dimensions concerning the
theory and practice of history, scholarship and political visions, evolutionary
and presentist perspectives, methodical subjectivity and positivism, ‘nostalgia
for totality’ and obsession with Romanianism. Yet, in some important respects
12)
Defined “as a complex of institutions, a political system, a religious formation, a type of
civilization, comprising the Hellenic intellectual legacy, Roman law, the Orthodox religion, and
everything it created and preserved in terms of art” (Iorga 2000: 25).
13)
See for example Iorga 1913a: III. On the way Iorga’s system of political values had construed
his historical knowledge through strictly scientific researches, see Pearton (1983: 157); Pippidi
(1991: 646-647).
one can discern the contours of a system, or logic, of ‘spatiality’ reminiscent in

a way of the Braudelian model of the conjoining (emboîtement) of different
scales which ultimately converge on “universal history” or “économie-monde,”
respectively. The spatial and the temporal discontinuity is, on the one hand,
obvious: the organic characteristics of the bigger regional entity, the processes
chosen to define it —above all the succession and superimposition of Roman,
Byzantine and Ottoman imperial traditions— and the tempos of change
which they implied differed fundamentally from those characterizing the eth-
nocultural make-up and the historical trajectory of the nation. So did the
respective valorization of the national and the regional at either scale. Embodied
in and transmitted by peasant’s culture, the “permanencies,” on the other
hand, brought together these parallel spaces and times. Rather than leaving
historical representations on different levels and discontinuing the ‘totality’ of
historical reality, as Shishmanov essentially did, Iorga thus came up with a
chart of interlocking circles of the national, the regional, and the universal,
where the smaller circle encapsulated the inherent characteristics of the bigger
one. At a certain juncture in his historiology, the polymorphism of the
Southeast-European region succumbed to a deeper common factor — the
popular rural institutions (Iorga 1929), while geography (“soil”) ever imposed
itself. However, the structural and explanatory conceptual tool for him was
neither ‘law’ nor ‘structure’ but supra-institutional culture — the persistence
of collective ideas, ways of thinking and instinctive behavior that furnished
the continuity and the organic unity of history across space and time.
The new science of Balkanology between regionalism and

autochthonism: Milan Budimir, Petar Skok and Victor Papacostea
In many ways Iorga’s regionalist discourse, saddling different historical epochs

and paradigms, prefigured those crystallizing after the Great War. In the inter-
war period, once again, one can observe a duality of autarchic nationalist proj-
ects in the historical sciences and some efforts at creating a trans-national
comparative agenda. On the whole, the national framework retained its pow-
erful position. By the outbreak of the war, many individual problems and
particular periods of the national Balkan histories had been studied by native
scholars in a thorough and ‘critical’ fashion. Much less was accomplished in
terms of great ‘national synthesis.’ With very few notable exceptions, the bulk
of scholarly synthetic works covered only the Middle-Ages. The special inter-
est in the medieval period by the most prominent Balkan historians since the
late nineteenth century was closely (although not solely) related to the devel-
opment of Byzantine studies in the latter part of the century. Many of the
leading Balkan historians were trained as Byzantinologists in Western European
or Russian universities. Between 1927 and 1934 international Byzantine stud-
ies congresses and conferences were held in Belgrade, Athens, Bucharest and
Sofia. The result was bifurcated. Whilst the scholarly methods and sources
thereby accumulated prompted a general ‘medievalization’ of national histories,
at the same time it created a basis for looking upon the region as a unit with
a common heritage. Practically all avowed ‘Balkanologists’ of that period, most
notably linguists, historians and literary scholars, were Middle-Age experts.
As in the initial period, political circumstances and engagements strongly
marked the institutionalization of Southeast-European studies. A Balkan
Institute was founded in Belgrade in 1934 under the auspices of the King of
Yugoslavia with the aim of furnishing regionalist geopolitics with the support
of Balkan solidarity. A Balkan Near-Eastern Institute, inaugurated in Sofia in
1920, offered advanced courses in Balkan languages, international law and the
modern history of the Balkan peoples. Regionally oriented historical research
in Bucharest after the establishment of the first Institute of Southeast-European
Studies in 1913 proceeded at the Institute of Byzantine Studies established by
Iorga and at the Institute of Balkan Studies and Research (Institutul de Studii
şi Cercetări Balcanice), founded in 1937 by medieval historian Victor
Papacostea. The institutionalization of Balkan studies also meant the emer-
gence of a series of academic publications framing their scope in explicitly
regional terms, such as the Romanian Revue historique de sud-est européen (23
Vols., 1924-1946, a successor of the Bulletin de l’Institut pour l’étude de l’Europe
sud-orientale) and Balcania (8 Vols., 1938-1945). Finally, Revue internationale
des études balkaniques (6 Vols., 1935-1938) was an ambitious Yugoslav journal
that sought to add a scholarly facet to Balkan cooperation following the estab-
lishment of the Balkan Pact in 1934.
All in all, the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s saw the crystallization
of a more rigorous and systematic research programme for the region of
Southeastern Europe. The initial attempt at defining the new “science of
Balkanology,” aimed at elucidating regional commonalities while “drawing
upon the comparative method of the nineteenth century,” belongs to the two
editors of the Belgrade-based Revue internationale des études balkaniques: the
Croat Petar Skok (1881-1956) and the Serb Milan Budimir (1891-1975),
both linguists. In many ways both the object and the methods of this new sci-
ence, as they developed them, mark a radical departure from the national
paradigm.
Starting from the observation of the “estrangement of the Balkan sciences

into national compartments,” which had led to “duplication of state particu-
larism with scientific particularism,” Budimir and Skok pleaded that
The time has come to contemplate the coordinating of the national academic
Balkan studies, giving them cohesion and, above all, orienting them towards the
study of a Balkan organism that had constituted one whole since the most
distanced times […]. This is the principal goal of the science which we have
called Balkanology and to which our journal is devoted (Budimir and Skok
1934: 2-3).
The phenomena marking the history of this “Balkan organism” set an interpre-
tative frame which discontinued the national and the regional in a much more
thorough way than Iorga and even Shishmanov ever contemplated. Two his-
torical tendencies —unification and particularism— are said to have crystal-
ized into “a unique law of the Balkans [loi balkanique] guiding the vicissitudes
of the total of their history.” Since antiquity these tendencies had alternated
and defined the peculiar evolution of the region, the major forces of “Balkan
aggregation” being the Macedonian dynasty, the Romans, the Byzantine
Empire, and the Ottoman Empire.
Significantly in terms of its utterly divergent national-historiographic
valency, the role of the “Turks” in imposing social and cultural cohesion on
the region was seen to be the most salient. Modern science very often misin-
terpreted the results of the aggregation which their empire had achieved, and
refused to see what was beneficial in a regime which had never implemented
the denationalizing policy characteristic of many European states. The roots of
this defective interpretation of the facts lay in nineteenth-century Balkan
romanticism: Balkan intellectuals, eager to deliver their peoples from Ottoman
rule, used to see in it solely the degradation of all that represented the ancient
independence of those peoples. The new national sciences echoed that atti-
tude, which was why they focused on the study of the periods preceding the
coming of the Turks while almost completely ignoring the study of national
life under Turkish domination.
The spheres where the two Balkanologists found the unifying impact of the
Ottomans to have been most consequential for the future “regional aggrega-
tion,” which they considered impending, are worth noting. First, by imposing
the same political and social conditions, the Turks had effectively amalgam-
ated the mentality of the Balkan peoples. By favoring, at the same time, the
mixture of Balkan races, they had to some extent effaced the mental differ-
ences that the previous particularist medieval states had induced. Another
unifying factor was the introduction of “Oriental urbanism” — the Balkan

city created by the Turks which was “totally different from the ancient and the
European” and whose strong impact made itself felt in the Balkan vocabulary
of everyday life. Remarkably, even folklore and popular literature more
generally were found to be the product of the Turkish unification: “Among all
those peoples, the period of Turkish domination had stimulated the blossom-
ing of national epopees [which are] major sources of pride for these peoples.”
Popular poetry, furthermore, traveled freely across the Turkish realm creating
common themes and vocabularies. It was to the Turkish regime, again, that
the Romantic literary movement, the “Balkan Romanticism,” owed its special
complexion, so different from those of European romanticisms. Finally, it was
utterly erroneous to consider the Turks hostile to the civilization created in the
Balkans before them since their empire had maintained a number of Byzantine
institutions (Budimir and Skok 1934: 5-6; 12).
Here we can see some of the central arguments of the preexistent Balkanist
scholarship, as developed by Shishmanov and Iorga, being brought to their
logical completion. Individual Balkan renascences, and quite nearly national
‘individualities’ themselves, became conceivable only in the framework of the
Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the entire Romantic structure of nation-
hood in its eurocentric mold was turned on its head without subverting the
state-building project as such.
Skok’s and Budimir’s programmatic statement presents the first attempt
I know of formulating the methodology of a “new science” intended “to define
and explain the parallel facts that make themselves manifest in the different
domains of human activity in the Balkans.” To this end they suggested a divi-
sion of labor corresponding to the different scales of observation: the study of
only what is specific to a given people should be left to the specialists in the
national sciences. This did not imply a rift between regional and national
scholars as it was from the latter that regionalists would extract information
about particular aspects, their work presenting a “superior interconnected-
ness” by means of inter-Balkan comparisons. A series of examples were adduced
in support of the contention that a Balkanological perspective alone was capa-
ble of shedding proper light on major historical processes which, when being
placed in a strictly national framework, remained incomprehensible. It is quite
significant that the advocacy of transnational comparison as a method of the
proper historical explanation actually led them to transcend the confines of
the region and advocate a cross-regional comparison of the Ottoman legacy in
the Balkans with that of the Arabs in the Iberian Peninsula (Budimir and Skok
1934: 7-12).
The coherence of this remarkable agenda was rounded off with a map of the
“domains of Balkanology” where comparativism was deemed particularly per-
tinent: above all history (especially political, cultural and religious), linguistics
(which had to deal with not just mutual influences but also with “establishing
the Balkan particularity” of the Balkan linguistic union) and folklore, but also
economic development, law, “the written or ‘high’ literature,” arts, architec-
ture, and especially those sciences whose object was “the Balkan man” —
anthropology, demography, statistics, human geography (Budimir, Skok 1934:
13-19). In sum,
Balkanology appears as an immanently comparative science. In essence it repre-

sents a system of inter-Balkan comparison whose main objective is to reveal,
understand and define the Balkan reality such as it has manifested itself, across time
and space, in the various spheres of human activity. To get to know what was and
is typical of the Balkans, such is the object it envisages for itself (Budimir and Skok
1934: 23-24; italics added)
This had two facets — theoretical and practical. “As a theoretical science
[Balkanology] is called to deepen our knowledge about the relations between
the Balkan peoples and throw light on the intrinsic laws which had governed
and continue to govern their development and their life.” As a practical sci-
ence, it had moral importance in that it was “entitled to influence the Balkan
mentality” by giving the Balkan statesmen the opportunity to know the Balkan
man, his natural and social environment, way of thinking and feeling, and at
the same time by teaching the Balkan communities the necessity to know,
understand, and cooperate with each other (ibidem, 24-25).
I deliberately dwelt at some length upon this Balkanological manifesto not
only because it is the first of its kind. Later-day Balkanistics would have, as it
turned out, little to add to the theoretical and methodological conceptualiza-
tion of the field. Balkan comparativism, as conceived here, was not just a
multi-disciplinary and problem-oriented exercise. It evolved in two interde-
pendent directions — two analytical scales: as a study of “mutual influences”
and exchange between national entities (what we would call today ‘transfer
history’) and of “common Balkan traits” or “Balkan peculiarity” (‘transnational
history’). Balkanology was meant to deal with the general, the syncretic —
the “Balkan reality,” the “Balkan man,” the “Balkan organism,” and “intrinsic
laws”— not with the nationally specific. It came up with a research agenda
and a method aimed at a regional “synthesis drawing on the elements of Balkan
interdependence and unity” (Papacostea 1938: vi). This, at the same time, did
not undermine ethnic and national frameworks: the actual historical actors
were, invariably and self-evidently, the Balkan peoples, if not always the Balkan
states. The proposed division and scale shift seemed to imply two parallel his-
torical existences, interrelated yet distinct, each subordinated to its own “laws,”
agencies and rhythm.
Proceeding from the notion of ‘Balkan organicity’ and the Balkanological
‘curriculum’ of his Yugoslav predecessors, the founder of the Bucharest-based
Institute for Balkan Studies and Research in 1937, Romanian medievalist
Victor Papacostea (1900-1962), left us perhaps the most radical assertion of
what he called the “impossibility of studying the life of any Balkan people
separately” and of the imperative for a transnational and multidisciplinary
approach to the past of this part of Europe (Papacostea 1996; 1938; 1943).
“Determined in its investigations by the frontiers fixed by geography and his-
tory, Balkanology,” Papacostea re-affirmed, “aims at revealing the characteristic
laws and circumstances, under whose operation there has developed, century
after century, the life of the Balkan peoples, in its whole and for each of them.”
More radically however, Papacostea considered the adoption or forced imposi-
tion of the very idea of the nation-state, one that was “created in the West and
for the West,” to have had catastrophic consequences in the Balkans — a
region that, unlike Western Europe, was marked by a unity of economic geog-
raphy, by “the same community of culture and civilization born by long coex-
istence,” and by being “in the main subordinated to the same political systems
and influenced by the same currents of ideas.” Above all it was the “common
ethnic base” and the “millennia-long mixture of races that has resulted, ever
since antiquity, in the strongly relative value of the idea of nationality in the
Balkans.”
Papacostea spoke instead of a “Balkan nationality” and “Balkan society” as
well as of a “homo balcanicus” — a syncretic type defined by complex ethno-
genesis, mental and spiritual structures and linked to, above and beyond his
native and linguistic group, “the great Balkan community through organic
links coming from a complex and lengthy ancestry.” Under such conditions
the idea of nationality remained precarious and uncertain, “in reality a notion,
not ethnic, but mostly political and cultural,” whereas one realized “how
intensive the exchange of influences among these peoples was and how easily
important elements of culture and civilization passed from the one to the
other. But above all: how misplaced and ridiculous appear the exaltation of
national particularisms.” The inference that a serious scholar should draw
from all that was clear: “Scientific research in the Balkans —in linguistics,
historiography, ethnography, folklore, economics, arts, literature, etc— can-
not be chained in national compartments but become unified through close
intellectual cooperation and through persistent application of the comparative

methods in all above-mentioned disciplinary fields.” The system of research
that Papacostea promoted thus directly challenged the legitimacy of the
nation-state framework of reference and pled for locating the study of national
history within a transnational context — in “a new historical synthesis of the
Southeast[-European] humankind.”
All this sounds deeply at odds with the general autochthonist thrust and
nationalist historiographic mainstream of the time. Should we assume the
existence of a chasm —“theoretical and practical”— between the regionally
and the nationally oriented scholarship?
The “space-time constitution” of the national and the regional stories
diverged in many essential ways. National history and regional history them-
selves were said to rest on dissimilar objects and methods of study. The shift
of spatial perspective also entailed a shift in the manner in which the same
occurrences were described and judged. Next to the one concerning the impact
of the Ottoman rule, which was already mentioned, the contrast between the
regionalist and the nationalist historiographic valuation of the effects of the
Byzantine oikoumene can exemplify these discontinuities. When seeking to
explain what he saw as a deeply inconsistent and disrupted evolution of the
medieval Bulgarian states and society, marked by abrupt rises and falls, the
leading Bulgarian medievalist of the interwar period, Petar Mutafchiev, singled
out the “influence of Byzantinism” as its underlying source. The constant
political antagonism with, and heavy cultural and institutional borrowing
from, the Byzantine Empire were what, in Mutafchiev’s view, forced the
Bulgarians onto the road of inorganic development “in directions where
nothing healthy and stable could be created.” The political and moral decay
of the Bulgarian state was thus immanently linked to the predominance of
the Byzantine influence, whereas its temporary ascendancies and cultural
flowerings materialized from resistances to the corrosive impact of Byzan-
tinism and the resurrection of pagan traditions. Orthodox Christianity was
seen, not as promoting regional unity, but as part of Byzantium’s alien and
subversive culture, in opposition to which Bogomilism had emerged as a
major manifestation of “the people’s instinct for self-preservation and authen-
ticity.” This detrimental impact, however, was not evenly distributed across the
region, and the relative geographic distance from its centre accounted for the
different trajectories and “national specifics” of the Serbs and the Romanians
(Мутафчиев 1931).
The ‘space of experience’ which this interpretation of the role of Byzantinism
and Greek Orthodoxy described —as one blatantly disruptive of the Balkan
organics both inside the national body and between the individual nations
in the region— is at stark variance with that which Iorga defined as a
Byzantine longue durée, or the self-aware Balcanologists posited as generative
of Balkan diversity and “sense of independence.” It also stood out against the
post-Byzantine Orthodox historiographic discourses (as exemplified by the
Romanian Nichifor Crainic) which composed one of the favored forms of
regional syntheses after World War I.
However, the relationship between the different scales, regional and
national, was not just one of disjuncture, but of mutual conditioning. As it
happened, the same regionalist scholars operated, in parallel if not in the same
texts, on another ‘Balkanistic’ register, employing quasi-academic and meta-
historical arguments to underwrite a notion of ‘Balkanism’ closely replicating
national autochthonism. A common set of modernity dilemmas and identity-
related predicaments, typically thematized in terms of an encounter with
“Europe” and the “West,” appear to have set the fundament for these interac-
tions and exchange. Two telling imports from the then prevalent national-
autochthonist vision —the argument of profound cultural difference between
the countries of the region and the Occident, and the notion of a region-wide
renaissance— became hallmarks of interwar Balkanology.
Already in Papacostea’s analytical frame, summed up above, one can detect
the outlines of a political vision, at whose centre was the relationship between
the Balkans and Europe, more properly of their impact on the region. At the
very end of their programme, Budimir and Skok in fact stressed that that was
precisely the domain where the method of inter-Balkan comparison should be
applied most widely: “It is to Balkanology that befalls the ingrate task to com-
bat a prejudice which for centuries has been deeply rooted in the [European]
public opinion” — the assumption that the Balkans were lacking in civiliza-
tion and abounding in militancy, which ignored the great role the region had
played as a foyer of civilization and mediator in a vast cultural exchange. Thus
“a general misunderstanding of all things Balkan has become one of the char-
acteristics of the average intellectual in Europe.” But just as Byzantinology had
succeeded to redress such misunderstanding as regards Byzantine civilization
and medieval Balkan history, so the other Balkanistic disciplines must bring to
light the merits of the peninsula for global human civilization: not only what
Europe had done in the Balkans and the relations between Balkan and non-
Balkan states, “but also what the peninsula had meant, in the course of centu-
ries, for the formation of a common culture by exploring its role of an
intermediary between the East and the West, between the eastern and the
western Mediterranean, what it had transmitted from the ancient eastern
civilizations and what it had generated by its own forces in order to lay it at
the disposal of Europe” (Budimir and Skok 1934: 19).
This line of reasoning was later elaborated in detail and integrated into a
comprehensive narrative linking the Balkans’ past and future. In a strategic
text entitled “The Balkan destinies” (Skok and Budimir 1936: 601-612) the
Revue internationale des études balkaniques (RIEB) editors embarked on vindi-
cating the “strong and irreducible Balkan individuality” which they saw as a
token for the region’s “historic function.” The tendencies of unification and
particularism, which were previously posited as the differencia specifica of the
area, were now transfigured into “the two most precious elements” which “the
Balkan man” had granted to human progress: “the spirit of independence
[samosvojnost] (= individualism) and the spirit of association (= collectivism).”
The harmony of individualism and collectivism, they argued, had been the
hallmark of regional history since antiquity, which manifested itself in the
tolerance and mutual respect between individuals and nations. Unlike “Pax
Romana” with its “uniform unity,” the Balkans of both the Byzantine and the
Ottoman eras “tended towards a unity in variations, a diverse unity.” And, as
the numerous Slav, Albanian and Arumanian participants in the Greek war of
independence had testified, “the varied commonality is more efficient and
more durable than the uniform unity, the organized variety having, properly
speaking, bigger ‘biological’ value than the unity without variations.”
So, instead of treating it as a ‘European anomaly,’ as the conventional
Western wisdom had it, the Balkan ‘melting pot’ was revalorized as a source of
humanism and heroism, of fierce sense of independence and urge for
solidarity:
All in all, the Balkans is the genuine cradle of humanism [čojstvo] and heroism.
These are the principal characteristics of the Balkan mountaineer and also the
true ideas of a sincere humanism. They had preserved the Balkan people [Balkanci;
les Balkaniques] throughout all the centuries of grandeur and sufferance. According
to the Balkan conception, the cult of man and heroism cannot be realized but in
a community resting on independence (= individualism) and the spirit of associa-
tion (= collectivism).
Here the exertion to fuse national ideals and supranational agendas, liberal
concepts and autochthonist values is noteworthy. It was further impelled by
the diagnosis given to the impact of Western civilization.
The ‘immanent’ Balkan violence, that proverbial European indictment, was
asserted to be utterly alien to the local tradition and imposed from the outside.
It had made its inroads during the Balkan “Risorgimento,” the period of the
national struggles and the creation of the free Balkan states, when a major
“re-orientation of the Balkan civilization” took place: the Oriental culture in
its Islamic form gave way to the Western culture based on scientific and tech-
nological progress. All Balkan peoples, once liberated, aimed to develop in
accordance with Western concepts. “The Balkan men of letters and the schol-
ars of that time considered it to be their primary duty to approach as much as
possible the European spirit, to ‘Europeanize,’ to ‘Westernize’ themselves, to
imitate the ‘European taste’.”
It was at this juncture that the Balkan scholars saw the source of a major
historical regression: “the European civilization failed to give the Balkan peo-
ples internal cohesion, appeasement and good mutual relations, it failed to
develop among them the spirit of association or nourish the spirit of true
independence. […] Europe, which had suffered and continues to suffer from
lack of cohesion, was not in a position to bestow on the Balkans what itself
did not possess.” Hence the “evident paradox” that a Balkanologist came
to encounter: all previous civilizations —the Hellenistic, the Roman, the
Byzantine, the Ottoman— had brought unity to the region, “while modern
European culture during the Balkan Risorgimento, on the contrary, divided
politically and morally the inhabitants of the Peninsula at the same time as it
leveled them through its cultural influence.” The “curious result” was that the
only assets Europe readily acknowledged to the local peoples —their epic
poetry, music, painting, architecture— dated from the times prior to the
European penetration in the Balkans.
Where did this proto-Orientalist critique lead? The conceptual tool-kit of
the ‘ethno-ontologists’ and the Balkanologists when devising solutions were in
many ways similar, however their ‘horizons of expectation’ were different.
In the opinion of the RIEB editors, “the moment seems to have come when
the Balkans itself should define its proper cultural orientation on the new basis
of independent national states and upholding its ancient traditions of inde-
pendence (individualism) and mutuality (collectivism) in view of creating on
these bases a better common Balkan fatherland [patrie balkanique commune],
where humanism and heroism will reign freely.” Throughout all its great
epochs the peninsula had had its authentic spiritual orientation, which made
itself manifest in “a sort of homogeneity unique to the Peninsular.” Having
existed in the times of Hellenism, Rome, Byzantium and the Ottomans,
such spiritual homogeneity should be regained now, following the formation
of the Balkan states, on the basis of the principle of nationality. But, in order
to be able to foresee the quality of “this new homogeneity of the Balkan
future,” the Balkanologist should, first, define the very essence of the Balkan
Risorgimento14 and, second, give answer to the question of “what cultural

orientation, what cultural principle” was necessitated by the new conditions in
the Balkans marked by the triumph of independent national states.
The answer which the Balkanologists gave to the latter question, rather than
spontaneously springing from an ancient tradition, was made contingent on a
consistent and coordinated pedagogic effort: “The principle of Balkan spiri-
tual homogeneity” could only be “based on the unity of variations,” where
“the variations are represented by the particular cultures of the respective
Balkan peoples.” It must be the work of a special programme devised by Balkan
scholars (“who study scientifically the Balkan reality in the present and in the
past”) and implemented by Balkan statesmen and Balkan pedagogues. The
cultivation of a “Balkan spirit” among the peoples in the region was thus seen
as the special duty of the post-war generation:
This Balkan spirit demands first of all that the whole spiritual and material
civilization, such as it has emerged in the Balkans, should be envisaged, criticized
and organized not in view of Western Europe but, above all, in view of the needs
of the Balkan fatherland taken as one whole. Any foolish dashing after
Europe […] precludes the revival of the Balkan peoples and the resurrection of
the Balkan spirit.
So, a new authentic spirit, regenerated and elevated to a new level, a new sense
of an all-Balkan fatherland, a new Balkan culture based on a long-standing
tradition of unity in diversity, regional self-reliance and self-sufficiency —
these were the key concepts on which the politics of the “new Balkan science”
were made to rest.
All this appears as resonating intimately with the prevailing ‘nativist’ cur-
rents and autarchic thrusts in nationalist political and intellectual thought of
the late 1920s and the 1930s, captured by calls for resurgence of national
authenticity and self-sufficiency. The themes about the disruptive and degrad-
ing impact of Europe and inorganic Western imports on the texture of society,
the breach of tradition and the lack of cultural continuity, the call for libera-
tion from the tyranny of Western precedence and authority, the search for a
new identity and a new mission — these were topoi that transgressed the
14)
According to Skok and Budimir, that transition period for the Balkan peoples performed
three functions: 1) it created national states on a linguistic and national basis such as were created
by analogous movements in the rest of Europe; 2) it enacted a volte-face of civilization —a
genuine cultural revolution— by introducing the Western conception of the state in the Balkans;
3) it abolished the theocratic state of Byzantine and Islamic complexion (ibidem, 609).
boundaries of the national and the regional discourses. On both levels the
prevalent visions for the future, tellingly enough, were premised on the notion
of “rebirth,” “revival,” or “renaissance,” while attributing different regenerative
valencies to different epochs. Thus, for the generation of Mutafchiev, as for the
bulk of the Bulgarian nationalist intellectuals of the interwar years, the return
to the “spirit of the Risorgimento” —the same that Balkanologists disparaged
as having been marked by “maladies of childhood” such as “naïve historicism
and […] enthusiasm for the ‘glorious’ epoch of the national past”— was what
they deemed capable of redressing the dire state of the nation’s morale and
values, recuperating its social cohesion and mobilizing it for the fulfillment
of the “national ideal” (Мутафчиев 1940). In justifying the need for a
“thorough Revival” the Bulgarian philosopher and historian of culture Nayden
Sheytanov pled for the resurgence of “the ancient-Balkanic” and “the Thraco-
Balkanic,” as epitomized by Orpheus and Dionysius, and for the creation
thereby of “Thracianism as a culturally-regenerating direction” to the future
(Шейтанов 1937). For the Croatian philosopher and ethno-psychologist
Vladimir Dvorniković, the way out of what he defined as a deep cultural crisis
of the Yugoslav nations was in reconstituting the “old epic world” with “its
own religion, own wisdom, own esthetics and especially ethics” (Dvorniković
1930: 123).
The vision of the Balkans’ resuscitation and future (what Skok and Budimir
dubbed “the forth renaissance”), in comparison, explicitly dissociated itself
from reenactment of a particular era of the past, specifically —as that was the
largely canonized scenario— of that form of Balkan civilization which pre-
ceded the Ottoman invasion: “The dead form of a past life cannot be revived
by whatever élan of enthusiasm” (Skok and Budimir 1936: 609). It was instead
based on the reenactment of the accumulated, long-standing, but in modern
times and under Western impact, suppressed Balkan tradition of “fraternal
peace and mutual tolerance,” of “harmony between individualism and collec-
tivism” as it had first emerged during classical antiquity. The three previous
renaissances — the Latin-Christian of Charlemagne, the Romance of the 14th
century, and the German of the 18th century, could not fulfill this “Balkan
ideal.” In contrast to these,
The Balkanic renaissance, which should and could embrace the whole human-
kind, will not be limited to one race, one religion or one nation. […] It should be
supra-national and supra-confessional if it wants to lay the foundations of a cos-
mopolis where ‘humanitas renata’ will be living and where ‘litterae renatae’ will be
developing. Only in this way could be raised, in the spiritual sphere, that global
empire whose creation Alexander the Great was dreaming of. Only thus the
Balkan destinies […] will follow the route laid out by ancient humanism, which
can merge with modern Americanism (Skok and Budimir 1936: 610).
Thus envisioned, the Balkanic renaissance was not an obsolete utopia but the
inevitable consequence of the needs of the contemporary civilized world.
The empire of Americanism and technique cannot be maintained unless it con-

cludes a durable union with the empire of humanism and the spirit, whose
thrones had been occupied by so many sons of the Balkan land, a mountainous
source of cosmic and human forces. One of the Balkan destinies resides, it seems,
in that these peoples could also lay down the conditions for a harmonic fusion of
Americanism and humanism, a harmony which the present-day humankind
clearly feels a need for (Skok and Budimir 1936: 612-13).
In many ways the regional here exhibits the features of methodical

nationalism — a sort of national autochthonism writ large. The national and
the regional operated with essentially the same stock of spatial determinants of
identity, encapsulated by the notion of catena mundi. There was also a clear
tendency of replicating the national ‘cyclical time,’ marked by spiritual rebirths
or returns to a preexistent authenticity, with a similarly structured regional
temporality. It reflected a drive to move away from the linear concept of
time —and from its metaphoric derivatives such as ‘primitivity,’ ‘belatedness,’
‘backwardness,’ ‘catching-up’— and assert the ‘space-time uniqueness’ of the
region (as an extrapolated nation) and, in the same stroke, its capacity to gen-
erate ‘universality.’ This double maneuver became possible through an identi-
cal operation of indigenizing the norms and the achievements of Western
civilization that characterized much of an interwar meta-political national dis-
course. Not only did the Balkans prove to be the birthplace of fundamental
Western values and ideals, thus stultifying the claim about belatedness and
backwardness — a favoured repositioning in most nationalist discourses. It
had actually preserved them in their pure, unspoiled form and could now
bring them back to Europe and the world: indeed, the Balkan renaissance
“should always keep its eye on the whole humankind and the whole humane-
ness” (Будимир 1939: 56).
Even so, the two scales and discursive registers signified different ‘spaces of
experience’ and charted different ‘horizons of expectation.’ The historical con-
tinuity and self-containment of the nation qua ethnic community was strongly
relativized by transposing it on the multinational, occasionally ‘supranational’
region. Balkanology sought the displacement of the nationalist semantic
framework, where the ethnic community was the locus of the authentic, so
that the proper understanding of one’s nationality and true patriotism would
involve awareness of their Balkan embedment. “Our patriotism, if it wants to
be real, should be a Balkan patriotism,” asserted the founders of the Belgrade
Institute (Parežanin and Spanaćević 1936: 321). Furthermore, what national
canons conventionally deplored as implacable contradictions, generated by
“foreign” (e.g. Byzantine, Ottoman, European) intervention or emulation,
Balkanology described as a precious synthesis endowed with a global mission:
the “empire of Americanism” and the “empire of humanism” — “biology-
ethics: an antithesis that will become a synthesis” (Dvorniković 1930: 103).
Last but not least, whilst national ‘revivalist’ visions were, as a rule, not just
anti-European but in most cases anti-modernist, interwar Balkanology com-
bined the positivist ideals of the ‘new critical school’ (where the critical method
also implied ideology critique and critique of romantic history myths) with
holism, organicism and progressivism in a liberal vein. The conceptualizations
of the Balkans discussed above projected a sort of neo-liberal vision of devel-
opment and identity seeking to achieve regional independence and progress,
autarchy and “Americanization” simultaneously, while backing away from
right-wing ideologies. It is with such orientation that interwar Balkanology
envisaged the “new and better destinies” of the region, “not as a utopia, an
unrealistic ideal, but as a consequence […] of the collaboration of all the fac-
tors which determine the course of history” (Skok and Budimir 1936: 613).
I cannot delve more deeply into the circumstances that made Southeast-
European regionalism seem a viable option here. That would involve discuss-
ing a wide range of problems —of state sovereignty and international
realignments, of development, of renegotiating the political community’s rela-
tionship to the trans-national economic, social and cultural processes— to
mention just a few. My purpose here has been two-fold. On the one hand,
to bring to light (even if not elaborate at length on) a preexistent but largely
suppressed and un-reflected tradition of regionalist scholarship with the
hope that this could help us fine tune the way we conceptualize, contem-
plate and evaluate regionalism as politics and transnationalism as a schol-
arly project. In epistemological terms, on the other hand, it should have
become clear that the rapports between the regional and the national histori-
cal frameworks give full support to neither the Braudelian nor the micro-
historical position. (One might evoke at this juncture Braudel’s scorn for
la petite histoire and l’histoire événementielle, matched only by that of
‘fundamentalist’ micro-historians, such as Giovanni Levi, for ‘structural his-
tory.’ Instead it points to a relationship of mutual conditioning without
merging.
There exists between the different scales a methodological aporia, which

does not allow their contamination: a hiatus, because their extension cannot
be forced into congruence, “neither in experience nor in scientific reflection.”
The interrelation between different levels should not be allowed to annihilate
their differences, if they are to retain their epistemological object of disclosing
the multiple strata of history.15 In this perspective the regional/transnational
and the national cannot be viewed as alternatives: albeit different, the ‘histo-
ries’ they render on the same matter are present and effectual at the same time.
Even if incompatible, they are equally valid. The disputes among social and
human sciences about the validity of one or the other scale are not likely to
subside on this admission. But, theoretically and empirically, there seems to be
much to gain from a consensus on the spatial determinacy (and limitations) of
our judgments and on the importance of taking the notion of Zeitraum —
‘time-space,’ as one structuring our historical knowledge, literally.
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Southeastern Europe 34 (2010) 55–86 brill.

What is in Balkan History? Spaces and Scales

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI 10.1163/187633309X12563839996621

Regional history has spawned considerable theoretical interest in recent years,

overarching coherence to the political, religious and linguistic diversity char-

own right, […] acquir[es] a quality of generating experience, which, retro-

In doing this, it seeks to partake in an ongoing reﬂection on the ﬂexibilization

Interplays of universal, regional and national spaces: Ivan Shishmanov

Institutionalization of historical studies in the second half of the nineteenth

Leskien, Lamprecht, Wundt), Berlin (Archiv für slavische Philologie), and

Shishmanov’s major methodical breakthrough was his cogent refutation of the

The shift of perspective —from within the national framework— reformu-

historiographical perspective, intended to capture the integral space of “Eastern

So, as a Lamprechtianist and participant in Lamprecht’s project of

l’histoire universelle (3 Vols., 1935-36)— that led Iorga to elaborate on the

one can discern the contours of a system, or logic, of ‘spatiality’ reminiscent in

The new science of Balkanology between regionalism and

In many ways Iorga’s regionalist discourse, saddling diﬀerent historical epochs

Starting from the observation of the “estrangement of the Balkan sciences

unifying factor was the introduction of “Oriental urbanism” — the Balkan

Balkanology appears as an immanently comparative science. In essence it repre-

intellectual cooperation and through persistent application of the comparative

Risorgimento14 and, second, give answer to the question of “what cultural

The empire of Americanism and technique cannot be maintained unless it con-

In many ways the regional here exhibits the features of methodical

There exists between the diﬀerent scales a methodological aporia, which

Асенова, П. 1989 Балканско езикознание. Основни проблеми на балканския езиков съюз

—— 1966a “Значението и задачите на нашата етнография,” в Димов, Избрани

Lindstedt, J. 2000 “Linguistic Balkanization: contact induced change by mutual reinforcement,”

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