The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention

Beyond and below what was once Czechoslovakia lie the deep Balkans. They are, it has been said, a sort of hell paved with the bad intentions of the powers By the beginning of the twentieth century Europe had added to its repertoire of Schimpfwörter , or disparagements, a new one which turned out to be more persistent than others with centuries old traditions. "Balkanization" not only had come to denote the parcelization of large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian. In its latest hypostasis, particularly in American academe, it has been completely decontextualized and paradigmatically related to a variety of problems.