I suspect, however, that certain elements have remained all but constant. This means that the decision to become a member of the EU is a political commitment and a radical realignment with long-term repercussions, not least of which is the pressure to comply with behavioural codes relating to minorities. On the other hand the decision to send combat troops to Iraq as part of the USA ‘alliance’ and then to recalibrate the mission to one third of its size and designate it as non-combatant support seems to carry a mixed message—to Russia and the USA as well as to the EU, perhaps—and is speaking a language that is not just dependent on domestic politics.

Last night I read the first chapter and a bit of the Todorova book and am still trying to grapple with the ins and outs of the various attempts to apply Said’s explication of Orientalism to the Balkans or, more precisely, to Balkanism. As I understand it, the central postulate of Orientalism relates to the fact that the West’s view of the Orient is a Western cultural construct based on colonial power expressed in, and supported by, an academic discipline with a long history. That means that it is not about a geographical area but a mental territory. Within that constructed domain certain adjectives and attitudes have been ascribed to the people, cultures and political structures—such as unbridled vs. controlled sensuality, the irrational vs. the rational, cruelty vs. justified punishment, undisciplined vs. disciplined, despotic vs. freedom-loving and so on right down to simple racist slurs—said to be located in the imagined Orient. These designate them as essentially different to the Occident. This attribution of Otherness has also become a part of Western identity, either by implication or assertion. In other words we are dealing with what Said termed ‘systems of representation’ and not with ‘objective’ knowledge.

Todorova takes issue with a number of writers who seek to map the Orientalist model directly onto the phenomena of Balkanism as an overlay and believes that it is inappropriate for a number of reasons, including the fact that the area was never subject to colonialism in the Western European sense. At most they were subject to the Ottoman or Hapsburg empires which had more in common with the Roman Empire than with, for example, British or French extension of territorial colonial power.

The other aspect of the issue concerns scholarship. As against a tradition of writing about the Orient that stretches back to the 18th century, an Amazon/Google search yesterday for books concerned with the Balkans in general, and Bulgaria in particular, turned up a host of tourist guides and a plethora of works for general readers explaining the ‘current’ Balkan Crisis/War/Revolution, depending on which one was current when they were originally published. Because, as a defining element of Balkanism, turmoil and war are expected, attributable to ‘Balkan mentality’ or some tortuous piece of political intrigue that mysteriously borders on the inexplicable (to outsiders).