New Old Times in the Balkans: The Search for a Cultural Identity

I stood on a hill and I saw the Old approaching, but it came as the New.

"Parade of the old new," Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956

In the spring of 1992, Yugoslavia as I knew it, a truly multiethnic and multicultural country at the heart of the Balkans, ceased to exist and disap-peared from the European map. In a very short period of time Yugoslavia was ravaged by wars. As a consequence the unique Yugoslav multicultural entity and identity was annihilated and the braided intercultural space was divided into many small national cultures. Idealism, humanism, and ethical values disappeared, while pragmatism and scrupulousness, a world greedy for money and fast profit, appeared on the war-torn map. The civil and the urban were forced into exile, while everything rural, primitive, and brutal became the standard. Religious and political dogmatism took over people's minds, knowledge was disregarded, ignorance was celebrated. The open borders were closed, the rich and vigorous artistic and intellectual life was wiped out, the dissident voices were silenced, and towns changed their names. The world was divided in two camps: traitors and heroes. The "turbo folk"¹ won in the "Balkan bar."² The man again became wolf to a man.

In that process of transition to new democratic values, what was truth was proclaimed to be a lie, what was right became wrong, the villains and criminals proclaimed themselves victims, what was once history—ah, history is palimpsest anyway—was obliterated and became part of people's individual memory and personal mythology. As Bosnian playwright Dzevad Karahasan wrote in his book Sarajevo Exodus of a City "our life was removed from the real into the ideal," and became a fixed image from the time gone forever.³

Time Behind the Wall

For all those lined up along the ethnic and nationalistic lines, the process of disintegration of Yugoslavia—a common home to many Slavic and non-Slavic nations—was seen as a liberation. For them Yugoslavia was considered "a dungeon for the nations." In that way the fascinating words "liberation" and "freedom" in the small new countries—Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovenia—that appeared after the death of Yugoslavia received a very special place. They became the most used and abused expressions.

During the last decade of the twentieth century, when the removal of the Berlin Wall was bringing new life and real freedom to many Eastern European countries, unfortunately many did not see the new invisible walls that were being put up on European soil. They were raised for the ordinary people of an already vanished Yugoslavia. On the one hand there were the walls on the south side of Europe built by the nationalistic and repressive elites of the newly-formed countries who shaped the new reality and separated the people of the former Yugoslavia from each other. On the other hand there was, and still is, a wall built all over that part of Europe by the European Union and the Western democracies, one that separates the people of the former Yugoslavia from the rest of Europe and the rest of the world.

This new wall, invisible to many, is in fact so visible and so high for the ordinary people who come from the former Yugoslavia and who attempt to travel to any of the Western European countries. From the very moment these people apply for a visa at the foreign embassies and consulates, to the moment their planes land in Vienna or Amsterdam, in Frankfurt or Paris, in Prague or London, or to the moment when they are treated as if they have a deadly disease, or to the moment when they are subjected to the humiliation of customs and immigration officers, the tall and well guarded wall of the "New Old Europe" is there. United Europe without boundaries, where there...