Romance of the Balkans

For the past 23 years I have wandered in central Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia and the Caucasus – spending an average of 2 years in some eleven countries and having about 30 different homes. Verily I am a nomad  - although, for the past 5 years, with bases in the Carpathian Mountains, Bucharest and Sofia. Hardly surprising therefore that I am drawn to travel literature – the scribbles of those who seek to give us a sense of life in other places. 

Jan Morris is one of my favourites (the link gives a marvellous interview with her by the indominatable Paris Review) – but I have been overwhelmed in recent days by a post-modernist account of this genre which I found on the internet – about British travel in the Balkans in the last century - complete with about 500 bibliographical references……The version I have is a PhD thesis - The Debated Lands which looks first at the motifs of discord, savagery, backwardness and obfuscation which characterise the 19^th century books on the area. In the approach to the First World War all of at changed; specific countries were embraced by economic and military alliances and some countries acquired what has been called a "pet state" status -

Todorova sums up as the pet state approach to south-east Europe: the choosing from amongst the Balkan states a people whose predicaments to abhor, whose history and indigenous leaders to commend, whose political grievances to air, and whose national aspirations to advocate. Along with challenging the discourse's imperialist tendencies, national advocacy would undercut both the denigratory format of dominant balkanism and its racialist codifications of the Balkan peninsula as a homogenised zone of misfortune and degeneracy with writers retaining the denigratory approach even as they delineated - without any awareness of the paradox -a people that apparently broke with the imputed essence. In this way, Trevor's valorisation of the Montenegrins, Vivian's romanticisation of the Serbs, Upward's endorsement of the Greeks, or Peacock's and Durham’s clear preference for the Albanians, are all based on contrasting the positive attributes of their chosen peoples with the thoroughly negative qualities of the Balkan ethnicities surrounding them; a source of genuine confusion for the general reader, no doubt, who might find the Serbians, say, lauded against the Bulgarians in one text, and then the very opposite in the next…….

Until reading the book, I had not realised, for example, how many British women volunteered for duty in the Serbian field hospitals and how media and literary coverage of this phenomenon brought that country into the British consciousness - and how positively. That was followed by a strand of writing in the late 1920s which took the romanticisation into deeper territory – with a revolt against western modernity and mass society -

By the 1920s, Foster Fraser's misgivings about western society had not only become a prevailing feature of British travel writing on the Balkans, but gained widespread expression within intellectual circles of the day. The pace of modernisation had already been alarming such influential commentators as Arnold, Ruskin and Tennyson in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The economic rate of growth of Britain, France and Germany had reached unprecedented levels, industrial development and exports were greater than ever, producing via rapidly burgeoning empires, a global network of commercial and financial influence. Urbanisation had been radically altering the forms and values of national life, as well as eroding England's enduringly pastoral self-image and technology was achieving bewildering levels of progress.
In the place of Victorian certainty came a sudden surge in scepticism, as Freud and Bergson challenged rationality and objectivity, feminism challenged patriarchal assumptions, working class radicalism increasingly threatened middle class security, and science asked ever more pertinent questions of Christianity. During the second decade of that century, even those who had put their faith in science and progress were to find that faith severely tested.

From the end of the First World War until the outbreak of the Second, travellers were finding in this previously depraved corner of Europe…. " a peace, harmony, vivacity and pastoral beauty in utmost contrast to the perceived barrenness of the West, and which produced benefits for those weary of modernity that ranged from personal rejuvenation to outright revelation. According to this alternative balkanism, violence had disappeared from the region, savagery became tamed, obfuscation turned to honesty and clarity, and the extreme backwardness that had formerly been the gauge of Balkan shortcoming was now the very measure by which it was extolled. For many travellers, any mystery that did remain around the geographical object became less the marker of a befuddled and dishonest culture than a vital indication of spiritual depth…….
When placed in the context of the extreme denigration of earlier periods, the speed with which an established representational paradigm, its accumulated motifs and evaluations becoming rapidly outmoded, could be rejected, dismantled, and utterly brushed aside in written record was remarkable in the extreme. 
Trickling out in 1915, and reaching a flood by 1916, the textual sources of knowledge on Serbia elevated it into a complex, reliant, independent, `plucky little nation'' far more germane to the modern requirements of power. ……

Retribution and Reconciliation.....an ongoing process

What do we – what can we – really know about one another? We all exist in worlds defined by strongly-protected boundaries of nation, gender, age, class, education and a variety of more deliberative affiliations (of friendships, clubs, channels of viewing and readership etc) which help create and sustain our particular “world view” – be that optimistic or pessimistic, authoritarian or libertarian., about ourselves or about others

The world is so complex that we seem to need “simplifying devices” which help cocoon us from uncomfortable realities. Age and experience should, however, let us see these devices as crutches – which can and should be thrown away.

I often think that the greatest service a writer can do is to challenge these preconceptions we have of other systems and countries and their ways of thinking and behaving.

I have blogged before about the rarity of authors who offer real insight into the culture and societies of individual European countries – such as Theodor Zeldin for France; Simon Winder and (more at the ideas level) Peter Watson for Germany.

I am currently reading a 1996 book - Dinner with Persephone - by a young American woman poet with an undefined background in Greek (there is a nice classification for you) who immersed herself in Greece for a year and has produced a scintillating "historologue" - my word for an account of conversations, myths and impresssions based on an impressive grasp of words and meanings. Having been reading recently (as a Scot!) about historical Bulgarian attitudes to the Greeks, I find this account from the other side doubly satisfying - particularly on the vexed issue of Macedonia.
The Balkans have been a killing field over the past century and more (used arguably in the Balkan Wars of a hundred years ago as a surrogate field for the jostling which was going on amongst developed economies of north- west Europe) and the imagined communities of this area still need therapy.......

Conventional academic histories focus too much on political events – but social histories of the British sort I referred to recently can be too detailed and miss the essence. Historian Jeremy Treglow has just published Franco’s Crypt – Spanish culture and memory since 1936 which seems to offer a wonderful prism with which to view events which are still (just) within living memory - vengeance and retribution.

In a 2007 article in the Dublin Review of Books, the author puts it very succinctly

Given the sheer volume, then, as well as the quality of narratives – historical, fictional, cinematic – examining Francoism which appeared either during the caudillo’s lifetime or in the decade following his death, why should ‘historical memory’ be an issue in Spain, all these decades on?
It’s a global phenomenon, of course: one which the American social scientist John Torpey argues is a substitute for the utopian politics in which we have lost faith. No longer able to dream of a better future, we put such moral energy as we have into trying to repair the past. The historian Roy Foster has written with valuable firmness about the inadequacy, as well as the selectiveness, of reparations politics in the case of Ireland, situating the topic both in its historiographical context (the influence of Pierre Nora’s workLieux de Mémoire, 1984) and its current cultural one: Christians in Jerusalem in 1999 apologizing for the Crusades, Queen Elizabeth II apologizing to the Maoris, and so on. Like Santos Juliá, Foster sees the impulse as essentially psychological, an attempt to assuage guilt. ‘After the oversimplifications and illogical pieties that surround the business of “memory” these days,’ he writes, ‘it is hard to disagree with a suggestion from the Irish literary critic Edna Longley …: “for politicians, the next step should be to erect a monument to Amnesia and forget where they put it”.’

IN memory of Rayko Aleksiev

On this day in 1944 Rayko Nikolov Aleksiev- a  Bulgarian painter and caricaturist who established Shturets, a hugely successful satirical newspaper in 1932. - was battered to death in a Bulgarian prison after his arrest by communists in their 1944 putsch.

Known for his uncompromising satire, Aleksiev was especially unloved by Bulgarian  communists due to his famous caricatures of Joseph Stalin. After the Bulgarian coup d'état of 1944 he was, like many other intellectuals, arrested by the newly formed people's militia. While under arrest, he was severely beaten over the course of several days, resulting in his death. 

Alekseiv studied literature at Sofia University and painting at the Art Academy in Sofia. With the release of his first landscape in the "Exhibition of Young" in 1913 Bulgarian Queen Eleanor became one of his biggest fans. The same year, the artist had five solo exhibitions.

In 1932, he founded the weekly newspaper "Cricket", painting all the cartoons, writing articles and humorous miniatures and handled the distribution. "Cricket" was written in the artist's home - the last issue being that of September 8, 1944. Its circulation of 50,000 made it the forefront native print media. Cartoonists Ilyia Beshkov and S toyan Venev were regular contributors. 

As a longtime chairman of the Union of Artists Associations Rayko Alexiev organized help for destitute colleagues left homeless after the bombing of the cit in 1944. He managed to get from the Treasury the sum of 2 million levs for the starving families of the many freelance artists evacuated to various villages of the country.

With his success Rayko Alexiev made many enemies. In the last days before the Ninth of September coup,he was repeatedly warned by his family to leave the country and was indeed supplied with diplomatic passports. Alexiev refused to believe he was in danger and said:

I am not a politician. I have shown the errors of politicians, I toiled with my cartoons to deride what they do and that some politicians are bad. I have no money abroad. I paid regular taxes. I lend to anyone and I have given with both hands. I'm not a rat, leaving a sinking ship.

"

In 2002 the National Literary Award for humour and satire was started by the Municipality of Pazardzhik. It is awarded every three years, on March 7 to Bulgarian writers for their contribution in the field of humour and satire. The award may also be given to foreign authors for special contributions to Bulgarian studies popularization, personal creativity in the field of humour and satire, analysis and publications thematically related to Bulgaria. 

Sticks and stones; wine and water

I love these “European etymology maps” which show you how countries divide on lines of ….basic words such as water or onion. “Wine” is one of the few words which is fairly similar throughout Europe – with, interestingly, Hungary and Greece being the 2 outriders, using instead the terms “bor” and “krasi” respectively. They seem at the moment to share two other (rather uglier) features at well – something on which it’s not quite so easy to pin a term. I deleted “inclination to fascism “as meaningless - and resisted the temptation to write the banal “populism” for the same reason. But something nasty has been stirring in these two countries for the past few years which the European media coverage does not adequately cover with its headlines of “unconstitutionality” in the former’s case and “neo-nazist thugs” in the Greek case.

Take the case of a Hungarian writer, 80 year-old Akos Kertesz, who has just received political asylum in Canada - being driven out by a hate campaign launched against him not only in the City Council of Budapest but also in Parliament. I learn this from an amazing blog - Hungarian Spectrum - written by a Hungarian now a retired American academic.

At the insistence of Jobbik, the anti-Semite Hungarian Nazi party, the City Council’s pro-government majority deprived him of his Freedom of Budapest award. The pro-government media openly incited the extremists against him. As a result he was exposed to constant physical harassment and threats. He was physically attacked in public. He felt that his life was in danger.
He was born in 1932 and finished high school in 1950 but because of his “bourgeois” origin couldn’t enter university. So, he worked on the bodies of Ikarus buses for twelve solid years. On the side he managed to finish university at night. Between 1966 and 1992 he worked at Mafilm where he was a screenplay writer. On the side he wrote several novels which were translated into multiple languages. Between 1994 and 1997 he was editor-in-chief of Élet és Irodalom. He received several prestigious prizes, including the much coveted Kossuth Prize. He was also given the freedom of Budapest
bitter words about Hungarians who don’t seem to be yearning for freedom and dignity but who let themselves be enslaved by a party and a government Kertész finds abhorrent, 

Bulgaria and Romania seem untouched so far by this sort of vindictiveness. The Bulgarian protests continue and the Romanian bloodsucking elites remain untroubled.........

A year ago I was writing about..... Privatisation

Lessons from Somewhere

The Brits pride themselves on being “pragmatic” if not insular – impervious to how they do things in other countries – but there is a strong case for suggesting that the British system of government has in fact, in the past 50 years or so, been swamped by the copying of (largely American) models and theorising - while inattentive to (if not insolent about) the experience of European countries such as France, Germany or Scandinavia. The entire English health system, for example, has been “re-engineered” thanks basically to a long article in The Economist in the mid-1980s by an American economist.

And the care taken by US Foundations to develop policy and social networks with Europeans but particularly the Brits is a much neglected feature of social and political history.

We are, of course, as George Bernard Shaw memorably put it, “two nations separated by a common language” – as I realised when I made presentations, all of 26 years ago in places such as Washington, Pittsburgh and Denver, of the essential features of our regional system of (big) government. Our conceptions (let alone expectations) when we used words such as "community" and "government" were just so fundamentally different.

My work in central Europe (and Asia) of the past 22 years has made me even more painfully aware of how words and phrases carry such different meanings. With English now being the lingua franca, the wonder is that we are not all at one another’s throats – as this wonderful bit of British-EU translation shows 

Despite (or perhaps because of) that, the field of “policy learning” or “policy transfer” has become in the last 20 years very influential. I can claim to have been in at the beginning since Richard Rose –the doyen of the field at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow (and still going strong at 80) – interviewed me immediately after my trip to the States in 1987 as part of the major venture he was then getting underway - with his first publication on the subject I think in 1991. A recent book documents the field.
Despite my interest in it all at the time, I can't help thinking now that it is all a lot of verbiage......and that the never-ending apparent policy changes don't amount to a row of beans - and benefit only the scribblers and those who seek new reputations. Our political system is even more short-term oriented now than ever before and has no patience with the need for systems to bed down......"Action" has become a substitute for thought.....and is sexier anyway!

I had gone to the States in 1987 with some scepticism – while recognising that, in my 40s, it was a neglected part of my education. Martin Amis’ then recently published The Moronic Inferno was one of the main bits of preparatory reading I did! 

In the places I visited, I was impressed with the energy and openness. For the record, I identified nine features of the American system and community economic development process "worthy of study and replication" -

• more pluralistic sources of Local Funding (the scale of corporate and tax-free grants to Foundations)
• networking of people from the private and public sectors (eg Community Leadership scheme)
• scanning for strategic work : the active, participative role played by the private sector in the process of setting the regional agenda in places like Chicago was impressive
• coaching : the way community economic development skills were encouraged
• marketing : of voluntary organisations
• affirming : affirmative action in Chicago Council was handled very systematically in areas such as hiring and sub-contracting
• negotiating : the flexibility of the planning system allowed local councils to strike deals with developers to the direct advantage of poorer areas.
• persevering : the realism about timescale of change
• parcelling into manageable units of action: the British mentality seemed to prefer administrative neatness to permit a "coordinated" approach. American "messiness" seemed to produce more dynamism.

Looking back, I am intrigued by the way I selected and emphasised these terms. A few years ago I did a small guide to the vocabulary so-called experts used in the consultancy field. I entitled it Just Words - a Sceptic's Guide and discovered there was an entire book devoted to this sort of debunking - which we need even more than ever.

POSSLQs - now and then

25 years ago or so, I made my first (of three) trip(s) to the United States – the initial purpose being to explore what lessons their experience of community economic development (particularly in the traditional industrial areas of Pittsburgh and Chicago) might offer for us in West Central Scotland. For that first 6 week trip I was indebted to the German Marshall Foundation in general – and Willie Roe in particular.

Sadly the subsequent report I did detailing the various organisations I visited (including the South Shore Chicago Bank where Obama was active as a community lawyer) is no longer available although I do have a record of the key lessons I took from the visit – which I will share in my next post

I have three vivid recollections of those visits – first the sheer incredulity I encountered when I tried to present our government system in Scotland to the people in places such as Washington and Denver (Colorado) “Wow – you are BIG” was the main reaction (we did, after all, then employ 100,000 professional staff – mainly teachers, police, firemen and social workers). I slaved over a powerful slide presentation in Denver of the Glasgow efforts to transform the city and will never forget the response that “your accent is so beautiful you could have read the telephone book!” So much for content!

The second recollection is the sheer theatre of New York streets (on a later visit as I undertook a mission in the early 1990s at the United Nations) where I rented an amazing flat (with saluting commissar!) right on Central Park.

The final memory is at a Pittsburgh academic party – at which I came across (in 1987) the acronym POSSLQ – "persons of the opposite sex sharing living quarters" for use to describe one's "partner" or "bidie-in" as we Scots used to say!. Those were the days when marriage was just beginning to go off the boil.
I had been toying for some time with the idea of a post on the modern phenomenon of single living and an article on Open Democracy about the reaction of Turkish officialdom to some male and female students sharing their living quarters has given me the cue

On 3 November 2013, in his address to his deputies at an annual meeting closed to the public, the Turkish Prime Minister hinted at his ambition to take legal measures against unmarried male and female students sharing houses. He made the following statement:
“Nobody knows what takes places in those houses [where male and female students live together]. All kinds of dubious things may happen [in those houses]. ... Anything can happen. Then, parents cry out, saying, ‘Where is the state?' These steps are being taken in order to show that the state is there. As a conservative, democratic government, we need to intervene.”
Although the full extent of Erdoğan’s surveillance ambitions is yet to be defined, one thing is clear in his follow up on the issue: opposite sexes sharing housing is disapproved of. Not only does such house-sharing grate against the “conservative democrat” [muhafazakar demokrat] values of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), but it also contradicts the AKP’s strong stance on many other claims with regards to how social life needs to be ordered and governed in line with a conservative vision of public morality.
The following conversation took place between the Prime Minister and a journalist during a press conference en route to Finland. The excerpt reveals the kinds of boundaries that the Prime Minister draws on in conceptualizing social life.
Journalist: Sir, what power do the mayors have in supervising this [new regulation on house sharing/cohabitation]…
PM Erdoğan: They’ll be given the necessary authority after the new regulation.
Journalist: These are private houses right?
PM Erdoğan: Yes.
Journalist: People’s private houses?
PM Erdoğan: Yes… How appropriate is it for a young man and woman to stay in one’s private home?
Journalist: It depends on the person.
PM Erdoğan: Would you be fine with/would you tolerate your daughter or son undertaking such an act… When you’re a Mum one day, or maybe you already are, I do not know… if you find something like this appropriate for your daughter or son, well then good for you! [hayırlı olsun]

So the Prime Minister has assigned himself the sober task of ensuring that in these “houses”, citizens live “in accordance to” conservative (and one could argue, Islamic) values that the government holds dear. But cohabitation in Turkey is not a habitual practice. Nor is it widely accepted. And although the nature of the practice is in flux, only a small minority within Turkish society share housing. So, why all this debate, all of a sudden over the state of the living arrangements in Turkey? 

Persons of the opposite sex sharing living quarters is now becoming distinctly unpopular in Western Europe. Single households, I was stunned to learn about Paris, accounted in the late 1990s for almost half of all households.

Single living was not a social aberration but an inevitable outgrowth of mainstream liberal values. Women’s liberation, widespread urbanization, communications technology, and increased longevity—these four trends lend our era its cultural contours, and each gives rise to solo living. Women facing less pressure to stick to child care and housework can pursue careers, marry and conceive when they please, and divorce if they’re unhappy. The “communications revolution” that began with the telephone and continues with Facebook helps dissolve the boundary between social life and isolation. Urban culture caters heavily to autonomous singles, both in its social diversity and in its amenities: gyms, coffee shops, food deliveries, laundromats, and the like ease solo subsistence. Age, thanks to the uneven advances of modern medicine, makes loners of people who have not previously lived by themselves. By 2000, sixty-two per cent of the widowed elderly were living by themselves, a figure that’s unlikely to fall anytime soon. Most people who were brought up in the past half century have been taught to live this way, by their own rules, building the world they want. That belief—Klinenberg calls it “the cult of the individual”—may be the closest thing American culture has to a common ideal, and it’s the premise on which a lot of single people base their lives. If you’re ambitious and you’ve had to navigate a tough job market, alone can seem the best way to approach adulthood. Those who live by themselves are light on their feet (they’re able to move as the work demands) and flexible with their time (they have no meals to come home for). They tend to be financially resilient, too, since no one else is relying on their income. They are free to climb.

The single life is inherently self-interested: it calls for vigilance on matters of self-preservation both large (financial autonomy) and small (dish detergent), and, in many cases, it frees the solitary from the sorts of daily interaction that help craft a sense of shared responsibility.
For one person, that may be a good deal. But, multiplied across a population, it becomes problematic. In a landmark study, “Bowling Alone” (2000), the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam noted a puzzling three-decade decline in what he called “social capital”: the networks of support and reciprocity that bind people together and help things get done collectively. His work considered the waning of everything from P.T.A. enrollment to dinner parties and card games, but the core of his argument was declining civic participation. Between 1973 and 1994, the number of people who held a leadership role in any local organization fell by more than half. Newspaper readership among people under thirty-five dropped during a similar period, as did voting rates. Why? Putnam pointed to cultural shifts among the post-Second World War generation; the privatization of leisure (for example, TV); and, to a smaller extent, the growth of a commuting culture and the time constraints of two-career, or single-parent, family life. “Older strands of social connection were being abraded—even destroyed—by technological and economic and social change,” he wrote.

Putnam, in other words, saw public institutions as a casualty of the same forces of individuation driving modern aloneness. And, unlike Klinenberg, who’s optimistic about solo life largely because he’s optimistic about the socializing effects of technology, Putnam believed that digital communication offers too weak a connection to reverse the loss of community skills. Good socialization is a prerequisite for life online, not an effect of it, he pointed out; without a real-world counterpart—the possibility of running into Web friends “at the grocery store”—Internet contact gets ranty, dishonest, and weird. What’s more, “real-world interactions often force us to deal with diversity, whereas the virtual world may be more homogeneous.” People lose the habit of reaching out to build bridges when they’re most needed. Technology may help us to feel less lonely, but it doesn’t really make us any less alone.
“Bowling Alone” appeared more than a decade ago—an eternity in technology years. And yet the intervening time has, if anything, intensified Putnam’s concerns. A couple of recent books re-articulate them for the Facebook age. One of these, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” (2011), by the M.I.T. psychologist Sherry Turkle, takes issue with the basic promises of digital connection. She thinks that togetherness, far from being strengthened by technology, has been crowded out by “the half-light of virtual community.”

1970s Bulgaria

It was apt that my last post was about the current British intellectual craze for recent decades of social history - since I visited last night the opening of an exhibition – spread over three large floors of the Bulgarian Union of Artists’ building on Shipka St – focusing on Bulgarian Art of the 1970s and marking the 50th anniversary of the Art Gallery in Dobrich with works from the 1970s held by the gallery and a few from the City Art Gallery in Sofia.

Bulgarian art has been celebrating 120 years – on the basis of the first general art exhibition here having apparently taken place in 1892 and the first Association of Bulgarian artists being founded in 1893. I referred recently to a marvellous book which the Union of Artists published last year to mark the period.

There is an agit prop air to this particular exhibition – with the huge posters of text and black and white photographs hanging from the ceilings and gigantic, generally sombre if not brutalist, paintings on the walls. There are also drawings and sculpture and the aim is to restore the appearance of the exhibition as it was in 1972 – with no concessions to present-day judgements or tastes. Thus, for example, Svetlin Russev, the doyen of Bulgarian art who still graces exhibitions here, is simply described on one of the posters as “People’s Artist”. I was lucky enough to get a personal tour of the Dobrich gallery last year from its Director and recorded then my conversation with her

The exhibition gives a vivid snapshot picture of one part of life 50 years ago here in Bulgaria and deserves support and comment. I, for one, felt it powerfully gloomy – and find it interesting that a large book I have of Bulgarian art of the 1980s (from an exhibition at the National Gallery in Sofia in 2002) shows a completely different zest and colour, Does this, I wonder, reflect differences in those decades – I shall have to ask my older Bulgarian friends…..

As I left the Union building, I was excited to notice a poster for a nearby exhibition of a painter Slavi Genev – born 120 years ago - one of whose Samokov works has pride of place in my collection (alongside Dobre Dobrev, Alex Moutafov, Alexandra Mechkuevska, Gregor Naidenov and Kolyo Kolev)