Representations of the ‘Balkans’ in the Foreign Policy Discourses of Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina
The build-up of nationalism in Yugoslavia and its successor states was accompanied by a seismic shift in public discourse, as the national political elites mobilised the rhetoric of Othering in order to distinguish their respective nations from ‘the Balkans’, to construct and reinforce a new national identity, and to endorse European integration. This paper investigates how the discourses of Balkanism and Othering functioned in international relations by examining how the Balkans were represented in the foreign policy articulations of Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during and after the Yugoslav conflicts. By analysing speeches delivered at the UN General Assembly between 1993 and 2003, this paper investigates how Southeast European states constructed their identities on the international stage and capitalised on “Balkan” identity for foreign policy objectives. It finds that representations of the Balkans were part of foreign policy discourses, but that their use was conditioned by identity considerations and the foreign policy objectives of each country. The paper concludes that both Croatia and Macedonia employed distinct forms of Balkanist rhetoric in order to construct identity and legitimise European integration, while Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the 1992-1995 conflict, adopted a counter-discourse refuting various stereotypical representations of the Balkans to which the country had been initially subjected by Western policy-makers and observers.
2. What factors could explain the significant discrepancy between the Balkans-related discourses between Croatia and Macedonia in the United Nations?
3. What methodological approaches could be adopted in the future to study the efficacy of such identity constructs and discourses in the field of IR?
Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wachtel, Andrew. 1998. Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mitjo Vaulasvirta
Mitjo Vaulasvirta is a DPhil candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, where he writes a doctoral dissertation about the effects of war memorial visits on adolescent attitudes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Prior to doctoral studies, he completed an MSc in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford and a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki.