[from Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss] draft prepared for Goldsmiths Centre for Architecture Research, London, 2006/03/24 http://roundtable.kein.org/node/397

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“Balkanisation is a geopolitical term originally used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a region into smaller regions that are often hostile or non-cooperative with each other. Recently the term has been used in American urban planning to describe the process of how gated communities are created. There are also attempts to use the term Balkanization in a positive way equating Balkanization with the need for sustenance of a group or society. It used to be hostile, but recent usages of the term show the potential of Balkanization vis‐à‐vis democratic processes.”
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As the republics in former Yugoslavia split from each other in the ‘90s [more separation is likely to come in 2006-7…], many displaced people marched in desperation from unprotected enclaves in the direction of homeland states. There, life had to be started anew. Supported by relatives and used by war profiteers many were prompted to built their own homes and businesses rather than wait for the nationalist systems to help out. Buildings grew on top of roofs, in the middle of parks, floating in rivers and in the middle of streets, capturing street lamps and signs. Rooms popped-up over alleys, enormous terraces grabbed for space, roofs stretched up higher than allowed. Their architecture appeared random and free, unexpected, often unfinished, but highly decorated.
Buildings started to speak about where they were coming from, but many, illegal ones, just tried to conceal an apparent and sudden desire for more space. Some buildings would say: here I am, while others would whisper: please don’t look.
As an unplanned result, separated cities in the Western Balkans after the fall of Yugoslavia felt free to choose their own way and their own look. For example, Zagreb has allowed extensive proliferation of an “urban villa,” mixed-style houses for the upcoming ex-village class in the city. Priština tripled, and gave the name of William Jefferson Clinton to its main street decorated by a mini-copy of the Statue of Liberty, all in thanks for his military support against Milošević. Belgrade grew its extensive roof-top additions, two-level cute mushroom houses, one-level massive new Orthodox shrine and a glitzy field of Turbo architecture, mix between high-tech and neo-Byzantium styles. In contrast, Sarajevo, renovated by Europeans and Americans, fell into a forgotten town that is sinking into apathy. But, Mostar has renovated its famous bridge and built a sculpture of Bruce Lee, as the only historical figure who has not harm all three sides in the recent war. Novi Sad, doubled in population, emerged with the new rich Valley of Thieves, privatised coastline on the river Danube. Skopje’s new fluorescent cross on the hill peak overlooking the city adds to the vibrant mix of Roman, Byzantium, Ottoman and Communist and New Orthodox Christian monuments. Simultaneously, a tiny blue-metal Orthodox Christian church was transported by army helicopter from a shipyard in Bar, Montenegro to an allegedly sacred hilltop, a disputed border between Montenegro and Serbia. In Tirana, the artist mayor paints both illegal and legal buildings in bright colours and abstract patterns... then in Ljubljana, leading architecture firms copy Tirana’s mix of colours for façade design. The only true nomads in the Balkans, the Gypsies, keep building poor shanties out of cardboard they find which they sell or recycle for miserable rates.
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It is the elusive, if not illusive nature of “Balkanisation” that we should thank for this Ocean of small, inventive and funny architecture, hilarious new villas of random styles, the parade of dream-come-true houses, cities in fragments, creative borders, proliferation of fences and innovations. We ‘love’ those examples because they are ugly-beautiful, self-made, optimistic and full of energy. We also respect them because they are against the corrupted system; they are an ‘alternative’ system, system imbedded in overall corruption taken seriously by legalization processes. They are more organised than the system itself. In November 2003 Rem Koolhaas and two researchers from AMO said that the Balkans should “capitalize on lowering standards” of Europe to help their integration within Europe. In their mind, Europe would benefit from lowering its own standards and the Balkans shows how to do it. Perhaps they are not even the best at it, but at least the funniest. Coincidentally [?!] messiah Winy Maas proposes that Balkanising will also be helpful to improve identity, say of Switzerland, with its complex confederation of cantons and total distribution of the similar...
The issue comes down to a very simple question: does Europe want to be homogeneous, with sameness everywhere we go…or a singular Europe with difference everywhere we go? And beyond, the World? With both politics of multiculturalism and localisation failing to perform, Balkanisation may be seen as a loaded new phenomenon, that can unload its energy of self-differentiation to wider realms than its own, both virtual and actual.
The term itself is still largely perceived only as negative; a synonym for little and fierce wars and bloody divisions between multiethnic communities. The danger in this view is a birth of a belief system that views Balkanisation as fate and that war and destruction are natural to the Balkans.
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Let’s go back to the first time Balkanisation was used as a term. Fragmentation of the Byzantine Empire into emerging ethnic kingdoms marked the entire 14th century on the Balkan Peninsula. The coining of the term itself had to wait five centuries for the time of the emergence of Modern Balkan States in the 19th‐century and the retreat of the Ottoman Turks. Balkanisation was increasingly used by the rising Western powers during Romanticism, allegedly first used by British diplomacy forced to revert its support of the Ottomans. Thus Balkanisation is hand-in-hand with modernisation, if not early modernism, coming out as its casualty. Today it would be called: collateral damage. The next Balkanisation emerged in 1875-76 with the squeezing and the thinning of the Ottoman remains in the region. This caused the rapid change of multiple borders as the two competing treaties were held almost simultaneously. Trying to consolidate the borders for at least one quick generation, one was held by Russia in San Stefano and the other by Otto van Bismarck in Berlin.
The following Balkanisation had to wait until the Balkan Wars and the Fall of Austro-Hungarian Empire. More specifically: two “Balkan Wars” occurred. In the first in 1912, small new nation states, which had gathered together against the long domination by the Ottoman Empire, cooperated in ethnical cleansing of Slavic Muslims from the Balkan territory. The “Balkan War II” occurred just a year after in 1913 when the same Balkan nation states went against each other in the race to win as much land for any given national territory. Bosnia was special because of its earlier annexation by the declining Austrian-Hungarian Empire, which produced the first safe heaven for European Muslims. It was only when post-WWI diplomacy consolidated these small Balkan nations into the compound kingdoms of Romania and Yugoslavia that the term was laid to rest. This lull even continued after WWII through the second Yugoslavia granted to Tito by the Western sponsors, Churchill and Roosevelt, to keep them all safe from Stalin. Allegedly, some sporadic usage of Balkanisation to criticise this politics of nation making and the collage projects of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia remained during the Cold War in the US, both by its supporters and by the oppressed left. Quiet for a long peaceful generation, Balkanisation surfaced again finally during the “Third Balkan War” and the Fall of Yugoslavia throughout the ‘90s. This time, the term came back with much more strength and sophistication. Furthermore, it became gradually freed from its original connection to the actual territory and its original branding from the start.
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The term entered the realm of speculative philosophy and novel trends in liberal capitalism seeking to a healing from global collectivism. Global Balkanisation by Ayn Rand from 1977 is a lecture taped and transcribed which promoted an extreme form of individualism as the only way to heal from Balkanisation. Today this text is sold under the following motto: [Global Balkanisation is] “a probing examination of the rise of modern tribalism in the West. Again, Balkanisation equals modernity! Rand’s text “identifies the irrationalism from which the anti-concept of ethnicity springs.” Modernism equals Irrationality? Even Playboy magazine published an interview with Ayn Rand under the title: “Global Balkanisation and The Moral Factor”. Today’s normalised definition of Rand’s affair with Balkanisation reads: “On the topic of non-governmental discrimination, Rand's defenders argue that her support for its legality was motivated by holding property rights above civil or human rights (as she did not believe that human rights were distinct from property rights) so it did not constitute an endorsement of the morality of the prejudice itself. In support of this, they cite Rand's opposition to some prejudices — though not homophobia — on moral grounds, in essays like 'Racism' and 'Global Balkanization', while still arguing for the right of individuals and businesses to act on such prejudice without government intervention.”
A quote from Rand’s Global Balkanisation reads: “As to the stagnation under tribal rule--take a look at the Balkans. At the start of this century, the Balkans was regarded as the disgrace of Europe. Six or eight tribes, plus a number of sub-tribes with unpronounceable names, were crowded on the Balkan Peninsula, engaging in endless wars among themselves or being conquered by stronger neighbours or practicing violence for the sake of violence over some microscopic language differences. "Balkanization"--the break-up of larger nations into ethnic tribes--was used as a pejorative term by European intellectuals of the time. Those same intellectuals were pathetically proud when they managed, after World War I, to glue most of the Balkan tribes together into two larger countries: Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. But the tribes never vanished; they have been popping up in minor explosions all along, and a major one is possible at any time.”
Her “objectivist” critique was clearly addressing the US/British soft politics with Josip Broz Tito to keep water running in temporary Yugoslavia. But this was as temporary as Tito’s life span. His death sparked a new wave of political multiplication all across the territory of Yugoslavia. It is remarkable that Tito himself abolished national fragmentation per se, but he instituted a multi-nation state. For instance a Muslim living anywhere in Yugoslavia could claim “Muslim” as a constitutional nationality. This granular politics of managed fragmentation gave birth to an international Non-Aligned Movement. NAM was basically comprised of third world countries or countries that clearly were not part of the West-East camp. This included the entire Middle East, Arab countries and even Israel in its beginnings as a nation state as well as forgotten countries of Latin America and central and South Africa. The death of Tito not only sparked the dissolution of Yugoslavia, but also disillusionment with the Non-Aligned-Movement as a viable economic and political shield of the Third World Countries from globalisation.
The interpretations of Global Balkanisation went as far as to claim that because Capitalism is an enclosed system on the basis of individual rights, it is therefore the only working solution to Racism. Capitalism is seen as a force that self-corrects the havoc created by the failing politics of multiculturalism. Compare this to Hardt and Negri’s analysis of Marxism splintered into five main strains. The five emerging stars instead of one. Multiplicity and not monolithicism create a potential of the network of differentiated small ideological nodes to combat the Empire.
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Two decades later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Balkanisation of the Soviet Union is the term used for the dissolution into 16 countries, Russia remaining the largest.
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Balkanisation is both opposed to and shares the same failures as the process of Devolution. Where Balkanisation should result in a new independent state, “Devolutionary pressures result in increased autonomy for a region. If strong enough, these devolutionary pressures may result in complete Balkanisation.” Both examples of Balkanisation and Devolution are quoted as “unsuccessful attempts to Balkanise a country”: Quebec, Indian Reservations in the U.S., Dayton Agreement on Bosnia, Scotland, Kurds in Iraq, Chechnya in Russia in the devolutionary camp and Bosnia, Kashmir, Nigeria, Kurdistan and Iraq in the balkanising camp. Blurred is the status of Sri Lanka, which remains listed in both processes.
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Balkanisation of Human Languages is the practice of identifying one language with one nation-- differentiating this official language of the nation state from other human languages. A recent example of this occurred in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. As the emerging nation-states of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia claimed political and territorial identity, the former official Serbo-Croatian national language became Balkanised. Some of them received immediate recognition, like Croatian, thanks to international recognition of the Croatian state. But some like Bosnian, with a recognized state, did not have a singular recognized national language. Recognition of all of these languages is made possible by the granularity of the Internet. The difference is probably best shown by the language set-up tools in Microsoft Windows XP. It lists no less than eight languages across the two main alphabets: Latin and Cyrillic, often used simultaneously: Serbian Cyrillic, Serbian Latin, Croatian Latin, Bosnian Latin, Bosnian Cyrillic, Montenegrin Latin, Montenegrin Cyrillic, Macedonian Cyrillic. But take a look at consolidated fragmentation of Spanish or even English language (which has 12 setups) in this software setting, and it will be clear that the trend of separation is naturalised by the Balkanised software. The difference between geo-political fragmentation of Spanish, which takes over two-thirds of the world, is precisely the density and this proximity of fragmentation which occurs in the Balkans. This can lead us beyond just vertical division of empiric languages especially within territories where there is no ethnic majority. What would happen within the map of no language majority?
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Balkanisation of America is used by extreme conservatives. BoA is generally presented as a call against US immigrant rights to keep ethnic and religious origin intact. Largely responding to the growing Latin population in Northern America which succeeds in keeping its language autonomy, those calls echo racist calls for forced assimilation by spreading fear from emerging claim for difference: “America Balkanized is now a reality in southern California, southern Florida, and in other places all across the continental United States. The politics of Balkanization -- a recurrent cycle of polarization, confrontation, and violence -- is already emerging in Los Angeles and Miami. But even where one would least expect to find it there is evidence of the coming Balkanization of America. “ Balkanisation here is particularly aimed as an accusation against Mexicans, who in the minds of racist movements do not belong to “Whites, Yellows and Blacks” and are thus subdividing perceived monolith of the Caucasian race. The argument is backed by a story about a labour town in Northern America which has changed demographics thanks to the influx of Mexican labour. A somewhat less direct, but equally disturbing hegemonising tendency to keep diversity enclosed and thinned out within the domination of the American “dream” follows: “The ideologically-based ethnic balkanization of America may have begun during Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” during the 1960s…some people who didn’t know they were poor were gerrymandered below the poverty level and made to feel poor.” The extreme conservatives invoke Balkanisation as a condemnation and thus spread fear of being part of any group identity other than the nation state identity.
[Gerrymandering is a term that describes the deliberate rearrangement of the boundaries of congressional districts to influence the outcome of elections. The original gerrymander was created in 1812 by Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, who crafted a district for political purposes that looked like a salamander. The purpose of gerrymandering is to either concentrate opposition votes into a few districts to gain more seats for the majority in surrounding districts (called packing), or to diffuse minority strength across many districts (called dilution). In 1967, Congress passed a law requiring all U.S. representatives to be elected from single member districts the system we use today. Congress in 1982 amended the Voting Rights Act to protect the voting rights of protected racial minorities in redistricting. Within those laws, states have great leeway to draw districts, which often leads to gerrymandering. There are two principal strategies behind gerrymandering: maximizing the effective votes of supporters, and minimizing the effective votes of opponents. One form of gerrymandering, packing is to place as many voters of one type into a single district to reduce their influence in other districts. A second form, cracking, involves spreading out voters of a particular type among many districts in order to reduce their representation by denying them a sufficiently large voting block in any particular district. The methods are typically combined, creating a few "forfeit" seats for packed voters of one type in order to secure even greater representation for voters of another type.]
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Balkanisation of Iraq is the most recent US “strategy” for composing “democracy” after invasion.
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Balkanisation of Law is about perceptions of emerging gender enclaves in a traditionally male profession. In 1965, only 4 percent of all law students in the entire nation were women. To be a male law student in the 1960s was to be "unmarked"--or to put it another way, "normal!" If few women gathered together to have lunch, they would be noticed as a self-segregating clan. By 1995, women constituted 44 percent of the law students. Because some men now experience the loss of their previous domination of law school admissions, when women gather, they too may be perceived as balkanized gender enclaves of activists mobilizing to sustain their gains.
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Balkanisation of International Law on the other hand, refers to the problem of many different countries’ interpretations of laws that are supposed to be applied internationally. Further, this is seen as emancipatory for smaller countries to exercise their own interpretation.
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There are fewer studies on the positive aspects of emerging group identities and Balkanisation of Cities: For example in this quote: “Examining a range of economic variables for the eighty-five largest U.S. cities over the period 1980–1994, it was found that those cities with heavy concentrations of immigrants outperformed cities with few immigrants. Compared with low-immigrant cities, high-immigrant cities had double the job creation rate, higher per capita incomes, lower poverty rates, and 20 percent less crime. Unemployment rates, however, were unusually large in high-immigrant cities. These findings…refute the assertion that the economic decline of cities is caused by immigration; that assertion cannot be true because…the U.S. cities in greatest despair today--Detroit, Saint Louis, Buffalo, Rochester, Gary--have virtually no immigrants.” Another essay goes even further, still within the conservative view of international politics that Balkanisation is positive: “Balkanization is a geopolitical shibboleth conjured up to ward off vague dangers to all that are good in the world. The term was used incessantly during the post-war years, and as often by Cold Warriors…as by people on the political left. Now it seems that Balkanization is seldom bad and often very good. The alignment of nations and peoples serves mankind best when it encourages the diffusion of power.” Finally, there are also views branded as “beyond normative” which criticize equally normative shortcomings of multiculturalism as ''…the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African-Americans, in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups.''
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In Balkanisation and Gated Communities the discourse freezes relations between lifestyle, social profile and territory. Ethnicity and race here are invisible subsets of social status in exchange for an internal desire for governance. For example in this critique of gated communities, “It is argued that the gate serves a double function of social inclusion and social exclusion. Social inequality is both the cause of and caused by the rise of gated communities. By allowing some part of society to exclude itself spatially, social fragmentation processes will begin to show fault lines and social inequality will in effect become social exclusion. It is an excellent example of 'dual closure'. Indeed, the power to exclude them spatially is the power to exclude others in many other ways. Exclusiveness is only possible for the socially included. Having the possibility to exclude oneself is very different from being excluded by lack of choice or by lack of possibilities. Gates function as a symbol of the inequalities between the power that controls the gates and those excluded by them. Not the gate by itself, but the social exclusion it provokes is the reason why more and more people have grown to see the rise of gated communities as a bad one. The rise of gated communities itself is not an unwanted development, but by eliminating social contact, they might be threatening the social contract that is on the basis of every society.
There are some instances in the United States in which communities have incorporated themselves into small municipalities – something that is not possible in any of the European countries. In California and some other Americans states, homeowner associations not only create their own social mix (or lack of it), but their own local government as well: the residents are no longer citizens, but shareholders of a private community: ‘buy your own government’. These gated communities are hollowing out local government. Some residents of gated communities stopped paying taxes because they don’t see themselves as part of the local community anymore – they have become their own local government. The difference with regular local governments is that these can’t shut people out. In this manner, gated communities are becoming the city-states – or better, enclave states – of the future:”
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Balkanisation goes virtual. With the rise of the Internet in the mid-‘90s Balkanisation is used to describe other forms of disintegration including, for instance, the Internet being divided into separate enclaves. The term is sometimes used to refer to the divergence over time of human languages, programming languages and data file formats (particularly language called XML). Breakdown of cooperative arrangements follow this separation of language because they all were written when meta-file exchange formats were developed.
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Balkanisation of the Internet is also used to describe disintegration and subdivision of the Internet’s actual locality of interaction. Intranets already divide global data into separate enclaves. The breakdowns of cooperative arrangements are due to the rise of independent competitive entities engaged in bidding wars for data management.
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Balkanisation of Software is about components of software realizing their autonomy from complex systems. If commercialised, the autonomy leads to the phenomenon of modules or modular components called up when needed as “services”. They are not only cheaper for the market, they are also more robust because they are self-standing and do not rely on complex and bloated software. However, Balkanisation in the virtual space is also used positively as a strategy, as it is put forward by the software managers or now already dated software packages of blogging like Blogdesk or Daypop. Consider this initiative that ultimately led to software like Druppal, that we use in “our little firm” here at the Goldsmiths College.
Here I want to note how the emphasis shifted. We are now speaking of “practicality” and “pragmatism.” From confrontational, Balkanisation has shifted to “pragmatic” The following quote found online proposes balkanisation as a strategy to improve communication software: “The problem comes when [blogging] aggregators don't have enough granularity.…the most practical way of approaching this problem is to find mechanisms which allow us to balkanise our aggregators - slice their responses - on the basis of metadata. There are many ways of geo-coding weblogs in such a way that aggregators could have a sense of your nationality, location, language, time-zone and the like. And above and beyond such meta-tagging there are dozens of directories that include information based around clumping weblogs around interest groups and/or site locations. So I'm putting out a call now for someone to balkanise Blogdex. I want to be able to see the most popular links generated by people in my country - wherever the links themselves are based. I want to be able to slice these links in different ways, to see popular links mentioned on all English language sites (for example) or just those within the European Union.”
With the rise of open-source software Balkanisation of the Internet, as a system network for public access gradually “fenced-off” by corporate and government Intranets has changed its meaning to positive. According to the accumulated history of open source software, the practice of sharing programs among users generated a powerful drive towards the creation of so–called "portable" software — programs that could easily be ported to different computer platforms. A major step in this direction was the development of the UNIX operating system and of the C programming language (by Dennis Ritchie) at Bell Labs in 1969. UNIX could be run a wide range of machines. Additionally, UNIX computers worked often together on networks. The creation of a community of interconnected UNIX users stimulated further the habit of sharing programs. This situation changed dramatically in the early 1980s. AT&T (not legally constrained by its role as a telephone company) began to sell licenses for UNIX. Furthermore, concomitant advances in computer technology (the widespread diffusion of the personal computer and workstation) reinforced the drive towards the increased commercialization of software products. Many talented programmers moved away from universities and research labs to private software firms, where they were bound by non–disclosure agreements. In the case of UNIX, the proliferation of different commercial versions proved to be disastrous, leading to a "Balkanisation" of users and progressive frustration in creating generalized cross–platform applications.
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After looking at all of these myriad definitions, I would offer a preliminary hypothesis that Balkanisation is neither negative nor positive. It depends on the situation. Balkanisation lingers between optimal and “the best of the worst” strategy. As such, contemporary usages of Balkanisation turn it into a tool for catalysing positive difference out of homogeneity. Balkanisation has turned around, and from a war project it becomes the granulary architecture of peace. The question is not how much the Balkans are going to capitalize on Europe. The question is to what extent Europe will be open to use the potential of Balkanisation.