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Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai
historical role of defending “Europeanness” against alien cultures. This
discourse was often the underlying theme in the refugees’ complaints of
their present marginalization and exclusion from Europe. Further, because
of Serbia’s historically consistent protection of Christian values (which
some Serbs felt their country has preserved better than other nations), the
Serb IDPs felt that they belonged to the European cultural universe.
According to this particular set of discourses, just as Serbia protected
Europe from the Ottoman Empire’s threat of “Islamization”, Serbia is now
trying to do the same once more, at a time when the new “Islamization”
danger would arise from the Albanians and (American sponsored) foreign
intrusion. In some interviews Serbia was portrayed as a martyr, having
constantly sacrificed herself for Europe in the name of her own morally
superior Christian “Europeanness”, a myth which further holds Orthodox
Christianity superior to other Christian religions. It is because the continuity
of this sacrificial identity went unacknowledged by Europe and the
West that most Serbs actually feel betrayed by the very geopolitical environment
to which they turn for their identitary geopolitical positioning.
These considerations are worth analysing in detail. They show how, at the
crossroad of narratives of hetero-definition, framing “Serbhood” both in
relation to and as opposed to Europeanness/Christianity, Islam, America
and of narratives defining a Serbo-Yugoslav identity through myths of
self-victimization, sacrifice and conspiracy. There is still a need to sustain
and re-produce a collectivist homogeneous identity supported by a narcissist
libidinal economy.
The fact that the answer to the question of what it means to be Serb-
Yugoslav today is often a narrative of unacknowledged sacrifice borne in
the name of Serbia’s supposed westerness should be analysed in light of
the continuity of dynamics of hetero-definition of Yugoslav identity, with
reference to the potential internalization of the in-betweenness condition
posed by the “Balkanism” discourse. “Balkanism” was defined by Maria
Teodorova (based on Edward Said’s seminal work on Orientalism), as a
Western European discourse on South Eastern Europe, which was constructed
gradually in the course of two centuries and consolidated at the
time of the first Balkan wars and World War I. According to Teodorova,
“what practically all descriptions of the Balkans offered as a central
characteristic was their transitionary status” (Teodorova 1997: 11). In
other words, whereas the West and the Orient are usually presented as
incompatible entities and anti-worlds, but completed anti-worlds: “(…) the
Balkans (…) have always evoked the image of a bridge or a crossroads”
(Teodorova 1997: 11) In the western European imaginary, the Balkans are
seen as a historical, social and cultural area located between East and West,
Europe and Asia, and suspended between “stages of growth” invoking
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