America is having a Balkan Moment
I thought we were a rational people, but clearly I was mistaken.
Chances are you don’t know much about the Balkans—and why would you?
The Balkans are that ethnic hodgepodge of peoples living in Europe’s lower-right-hand corner, where Christendom decisively beat back an Islamic invasion more than three centuries ago.
It’s a complicated place. Sometimes violent.
Maybe you recall Yugoslavia? That was a little country that blew apart in the early ’90s, setting off the first armed conflicts fought on European soil since World War Two.
Ethnic cleansing? That was Yugoslavia, too. And don’t forget that Austrian archduke who got himself shot up in Sarajevo, setting off World War One.
This corner of the world is so much trouble, we even made it into a verb:
1. To divide (a region or territory) into small, often hostile units.
2. To divide (an organization or system) into small, incompatible units.
Welcome to the Ozarks of Europe
The Balkans are about as far away from the United States as you can possibly imagine without stepping into a time machine.
From an American perspective, the region is a failed melting pot. These are your classic mountain people: isolated, superstitious and suspicious.
Let’s see … Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Albanians, Magyars, Turks, Greeks, Vlachs, Romani … Did I forget anybody?
Kick me out of a plane over the Balkans with a parachute, blindfolded, and I could pinpoint my location by asking the locals whom they hate the most.
Serbs and Bulgarians, you say? This must be northwest Macedonia!
Oddly enough, the word ‘Balkan’ can be used as an insult or a compliment, depending on how far south you travel down the Balkan Peninsula.
Do you really want to piss off a Hungarian? Tell him his country is Balkan. How do you flatter a Serb? Tell him the exact same thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I find the place charming.
Sure, the Balkans are a political and economic backwater, but that’s part of what attracted me to the region in the first place. In contrast, the United States always seemed so stable, settled and (dare I say it?) even boring.
At least, that’s what I thought until we elected Donald Trump.
“It’s complicated”
I have a complicated relationship with Yugoslavia—or as we say these days, ‘the former Yugoslavia’—and with the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula.
As a young man, 30 years ago, I left the United States for a student exchange program in Skopje, Macedonia, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
In those Cold War years, the university I attended in Chico, California, offered a one-to-one exchange program with the University of Cyril and Methodius in Skopje.
Why did I go? Because it was so different from everything I knew.
As crazy as this might sound, I decided to immerse myself in Upside-Down-Land to see what I was made of, and how well I could adapt.
Years later at a tech conference in Zagreb, when the former Yugoslavia was already a distant memory fading into nostalgia, a Croatian friend asked me how I felt about my time in Skopje.
There’s no simple answer, I told him. I loved it, and I hated it.
“This is the Balkans,” he agreed, slowly nodding his head. Then he pressed his two index fingers together and held them up to show me.
“In the Balkans, love and hate are like this!”
My friend was right.
I reveled in a society where friends always had time for one another. Simple people lived their lives with passion. Friends and strangers were glad to extend a helping hand. People remembered their traditions.
And yet I desperately hated the Balkans for all the same reasons.
My friends disrespected each other’s time; they were always late, and rarely got things done. Simple people made no attempt to disguise their violent hatreds. Friends and strangers did favors with the expectation of receiving in return. Tradition was a millstone, and history a noose.
Traveling to the Balkans was like visiting a parallel universe, where life was vivid and dramatic, slightly dangerous, but somehow more authentic.
America through the looking glass
Living in Skopje, Macedonia, in the late ’80s I was an instant celebrity, whether I liked it or not. People were eager to meet a real American, provided I met their expectations of what that meant.
To the good people of Yugoslavia—including Macedonians—the United States of America represented everything wonderful and unattainable.
America was that glamorous world of TV, Hollywood and pop music videos. America was McDonalds, Coca Cola, Marlboro and Levis, all wrapped up in a package and tied with a big red bow.
Whereas to me, America represented the boring conformity of the suburbs, the mindless stupidity of television sitcoms, and the angry alienation of the shopping mall punk. America was everything I wanted to escape by running away to Eastern Europe.
What we could all agree—at least at some level—was that the United States of America was the so-called Real World.
The Yugoslavs fancied themselves the Americans of Eastern Europe. Thanks to Tito’s non-aligned policy, they could travel freely. They also enjoyed a higher standard of living than their East Bloc neighbors.
America was everything my Yugoslav friends aspired to be.
Whereas to me, the United States was that serious world of finding a job, committing myself to a career, and becoming a responsible adult.
In the Balkans, I had discovered a parallel reality where I could live and love and breathe and cultivate an authentic zest for life.
But I also understood I could never call the Balkans my home.
What it means to share a Balkan Moment
The peoples of the Balkans surprised me in so many ways.
I don’t want to give you the wrong impression by talking about their wars and hatreds. Of course there is that. But there is so much more.
Never in my life have I met such warm and generous people.
In Skopje, strangers would pull me off the street to buy me a drink when they spotted I was a foreigner. (In those days foreigners were rare.)
I don’t recall that my Macedonian friends ever allowed me to buy a round—and believe me I did try. With a conspiratorial wink to his compatriots, the Macedonian bartender would refuse my money.
Traveling around the region I never had to stay in a hotel. I received an instant invitation from a friend of a friend in every city, town or village.
I knew so little about them when I arrived, but my Balkan friends seemed to know everything about my world. They quizzed me about obscure West Coast punk bands I had never heard of.
Friends who had never visited an English-speaking country demonstrated an easy mastery of our language’s idioms and grammar.
It was so obvious we were all on the same wavelength.
Until we weren’t.
Here’s an example.
It’s late o’clock in Belgrade and my Serbian friends have just popped the third bottle of hearty red wine. My good friend Zoran throws his arm around my neck and leans in close to catch my eye.
“What you don’t understand my friend is that in the Second World War, those Croatian bastards lined the border of their fascist country with the bodies of Serb patriots. They slit their throats and lined them up head to toe!”
Ghk! (That’s the sound of me choking on my wine.)
To me, the Balkan Moment was a dissonant chord, crashing down to remind me that my friends were reading from a different sheet of music.
But that’s not how they saw it.
To my friends, the Balkan Moment was an intimate confession. It was about sharing a tribal truth. It also meant they were including me in their sense of belonging. It was a way of saying ‘you are one of us.’
Another example.
In Bucharest, an acquaintance asked me to give him an expensive camera lens. He and I both owned the same camera. These products were impossible to find in Communist Romania, at any price.
“C’mon, you can do this for me,” he pleaded. “I’m white, just like you.”
That statement struck me as openly racist, which offended me deeply. Looking back, though, I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way.
Our tribal truths are irrational. These beliefs aren’t open to examination. These are truths that we imbibe with our mothers milk.
Time and again, the Balkan Moment shocked me because it revealed the deep, tectonic hatreds that simmered just below the surface.
It came as no surprise to me—or any of my friends—when Yugoslavia exploded into brutal warfare just a few years later.
All it took was a thin-skinned demagogue with a wild haircut, spewing ethnic hatred and promising to Make Serbia Great Again.
I always thought the Balkan Moment was proof of how that world was so very different from ours in the West. We are rational; they are not.
How naive I was.
