The Balkans: Europe's Cesspool

In Michael Ignatieff's book The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (1998), there is an account of the author's interview with a Serb soldier who has been fighting his Croat neighbors for two years. The conversation takes place in eastern Croatia in the village of Mirkovci ("place of peace"). Attempting to engage the soldier in a multicultural debate, Ignatieff asks him how he is different from a Croat. To the author's evident satisfaction, the answer corroborates Freud's theory of the "narcissism of small differences," and Ignatieff's own view that this is, in fact, the moving force behind the Balkan fratricide. The soldier lists many irreconcilable differences between Serbs and Croats and accuses foreigners of not understanding why they are so different, even though they look alike. Then, obviously becoming irritated by the inquiry and wanting to end it, he suddenly reverses his position, saying "Look, here's how it is. Those Croats, they think they're better than us. They want to be gentlemen. They think they're fancy Europeans. I'll tell you something. We're all just Balkan shit" (Ignatieff 1998, 36).

Before the Serb-Croat war, Jovan Rašković, a well-known Serbian psychiatrist from Croatia, used the same Freudian theory to legitimize ethnic conflict between Serbs and Croats. Oedipal Serbs and castrational Croats are, he argued, very much alike in that both have a strong antagonism to any authority—so much so that their "narcissism of small differences" would inevitably lead them to a "clash of characters."¹ The rest is the well-known history of "Balkan violence." Used by Rašković to legitimize ethnic violence, Freud's theory of character comes full circle when invoked by Ignatieff as an explanation for the Serb-Croat conflict. The interview with the Serb soldier reveals the extent to which Balkan identity has been discursively constructed and also how much that process has been influenced by psychoanalytic theory. Since the inception of psychoanalysis, the Balkans, perhaps more than any other place, has been dramatically affected by it. Not only was the Balkans the Other of Europe for Sigmund Freud (whom I discuss later in this essay), but it also became a place where the use of his concepts for political ends was instrumental in fomenting ethnic conflict.

During the Marxist era in the Balkans, intellectuals tended to fall into one of two fairly homogeneous groups: Stalinists and Marxist humanists. The decline of Marxism created an ideological void, and psychoanalytic theory—in conjunction with nationalist ideology—came to fill the need on the part of some Balkan intellectuals for a total discourse. In the postcommunist ideological climate, psychoanalytic discourse proliferated, and during the ethnic wars of the 1990s politically inspired psychoanalytic rhetoric emanated from all sides. The aim of such rhetoric was to construct the enemy as "mad" and the source of the rhetoric as the standard of normality.²

Other work, such as that of Bulgarian native Julia Kristeva (perhaps the best-known Eastern European intellectual in the West today), has stigmatized the region in an erudite register that is, because not easily discredited, perhaps more harmful in the long run than "theory" such as Rašković's, which is designed to justify ethnic violence. In Kristeva's work we encounter a paradoxical situation created by psychoanalytic discourse on the Balkans. First, such discourse constructs the region according to certain theoretical tenets; it then attempts to disidentify with its own construction as if it were an "essential" Balkan identity.

Kristeva, in the name of French cleanliness, French "taste," and French "cosmopolitanism,"³ abjects the Balkans as the filth of Europe. To do so she invokes her "theory of the abject" (Kristeva 1982), psychoanalytic theories of character, civilization, and sexuality, as well as the logic of exclusion, to define a symbolic space and civic subjectivity. First she asks, rhetorically, "When did God die in the Balkans?" She then apostrophizes her abject with these words:

You suffer from chaos...