Spain imagines the Balkans. Building bridges to the “European Other” in Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The region of the Balkans has been represented as a “European periphery” and a “European Other” in traditional Western discourses particularly since the 18th century in texts elaborated by different Western European travel writers, administrators and scientists who had direct or indirect experience in the Balkans. This discourse was re-emphasised during the 1990s when the disintegration of Yugoslavia occurred, presenting this situation of war and violence as something “typical Balkan”.

In this research I aim to analyse Spanish representations of the Balkans throughout Spanish history and literature since the 16th century to verify the specificity or not of Spanish understandings of this region by (travel) writers, diplomats, political strategists, the military and scientists. Because the particularity of this theme is that old images of the Balkans were rearticulated in the West during the 1990s, I attempt to contrast Spanish discourses about the disintegration of Yugoslavia and armed conflict in Bosnia and Hercegovina (BiH) with the main assumptions that conform the “Balkan stereotype”.