Consequences

Unfortunately, the nations of the Balkans never managed to connect into a single geo(political) block. They did not succeed in making a customs union, let alone a stable political alliance. Such

state of affairs was onone hand caused by the interests of the great powers and on the other hand by the tendency of the Balkan states to, in accordance with the Western national romanticism, prove and defend their cultural and political supremacy over their neighbours in this small peninsula.

After all, although close, some nations in the Balkans had developed within different cultural and political frameworks, and it seems that this fact permanently disabled any attempts at unifying the Balkans as a whole. In that respect, many nations in the Balkans have been lost for it for a very long time. Saying that, we have in mind principally those nations that run away from the Balkans, that despise it, that are ashamed of their Eurasian cultural heritage. Clearly, the Croats are such a nation most of all, since they have tried throughout the course of their history to prove their being an integral part of the Western Europe, both in (geo)political and cultural respect. To the Croats, the Balkans is something humiliating, «Turkish», «Byzantine», a geographical and political term that, according to Mladen Svarc, leader of the «New Croatian Rightists», reminds them of communism and Yugoslavia from which the Croats «took only harrowing experience».

Along with the Croats, Islamic Balkan nations belong to this group as well. Unlike the Croats, these nations know that they cannot count on Central or Western Europe, that for them the Balkans (for now) is the greatest achievement. They are not ashamed of their Balkan name, yet they do not think of the Balkans as their ultimate goal. To them, basically, the Balkans was just a transition that gained on importance only when this transit to Europe's inland became endangered.

The reasons for such (geo)political viewpoint are, above all, ethnic and linguistic in nature, at least when we talk about the Roman Catholics and Muslims of Slavic origin. Namely, the greatest part of the modern Croats and Bosnian Muslims ethnically belongs to Serbian national core, from which they were separated owing to a variety of factors at a speciic point in time. They still speak the Serbian language, and many of them keep the memory of their Orthodox ancestors.

By converting to Roman Catholicism, one part of the Serbian people detached itself from the Eurasian Orthodox idea. Merging into the Western cultural background that imposed the name of the Croats on them, those Serbs inally forsook their Orthodox Eurasian heritage. To them, the Balkans became just a «shameful name».

On the other hand, the Muslims of Slavic origin (composed mainly of Serbs that converted to Islam), who inhabit mostly parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, took a different course, as we have already mentioned, sharing the fate of the Turkish Empire. Namely, after Turkish retreat from the major part of the Balkans, owing to their sense of defeat, these Slavs felt endangered. On the other hand, logically, they could not convert back to Orthodoxy, which resulted in a rather rigid attitude of the Serbs (from whose core they separated) towards them.

This comes as a conirmation of Jovan Cvijic's remark that the Byzantine idea of supremacy of religion over nationality was and still is the most rooted trait of Byzantine cultural and political inheritance. In the Byzantine Empire this cultural and political trait enabled the empire to prosper, whereas in Balkan politics it left extremely negative consequences that, as it has been already mentioned, manifest themselves in the rejection of the members of the same people belonging to different religions.

However, it should be pointed out here that, apart from paganism, Orthodox Christianity is an authentic Balkan religion. Islam and Catholicism are, in essence, religions coming from the outside which, owing to Arabian or Roman cultural and political activities became widely present on this area.

While Catholicism spread simultaneously with the political inluence irst of Rome, and later of Venice and Hungary, almost without exceptionkeeping to the Adriatic coast and the banks of the Sava and the Danube, Islam spread over smaller oases all over the Balkans, especially in towns.

«No religion in the Balkans was completely compact at the time of the Turkish rule. They were all scattered and dislocated. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and Bulgaria, represent real mosaic in

this respect. The fact that some Balkan states, such as Serbia and Greece, became compact Orthodox countries is a consequence of their national revival, departure of the Muslims and the change in the structure of the populace»¹According to the majority of Balkanologists, Religious intolerance, that is so fully at work in the Balkans today, is not naturally related to the Balkans. What we deal with is actually a phenomenon «that Venetian and Austrian authorities allowed themselves to stir, spreading prejudice and slurs about Byzantine corruption and working diligently on proselytism (Catholicizing and Uniating)»¹⁴. Thus religious intolerance, for which the Balkans is nowadays famous worldwide, is the result of Western and Middle European cultural inluence, not Eurasian, on which the peninsula was founded.

The Balkans gave the world its first cultural, i.e. literary language. «That was the old Greek language, which belongs to the eastern family of languages along with the other old and new languages in the Balkans»¹⁵. Owing to Alexander of Macedon, this language became the language of culture of the whole East, from the Balkans, over Asia Minor and India, all the way to Egypt. «Christ's teachings increased its significance even more: it became the language of religious, spiritual life. The Romans took some expressions from it. As the language of science and church, it became a model not just for every other literary language in Europe, but world's science draws its terminology from it»¹⁶The irst Balkan written codes are Greek and Slavic (Cyrilic) alphabet that is nowadays used in Macedonia, Bulgaria and partially in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. These codes can be regarded as originally Balkan. «The Latin code was spread in the Balkans owing to three factors. In the irst place it

was national conceit. The Romanians remembered the Latin origin of their language in the middle of the nineteenth century so that through the Latin code they could connect themselves irmer with the Western Roman world. Orthodoxy could not preserve the Cyrilic code among them. National interests prompted the spread of the Latin code among the Romanians. The acceptance of the Latin code partially among the Albanians, and fully among the Croats, is completely to be attributed to the Catholic Church. The Western Apennine Catholicism, aided by proliic literature, destroyed the Balkan «glagoljica» and «bosancica». The Turks completely, and Albanians only partially introduced the Latin code for practical and international reasons»

¹ And although, as we have seen, the Latin code in its present-day form is a code that is used outside the Balkans, it is undisputable that this code as well is based on the Balkan culture, all the more due to the fact that it originates from an adaptation of the Greek written code.

The inluence of linguistic (geo)politics is noticeable in four Balkan areas, the western, where the Serbian corpus bordered on Croatian, the southern, in Macedonia, where Serbian and Bulgarian interests were in conlict, and only recently in the southwestern area, in Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Striving to suppress the Serbian element that was related to Russia, Austria endeavoured to Catholicize and thus alter the cultural identity of those orthodox Serbs that lived to the West from the River Drina — they were about four million in number. In this sense, linguistics was turned into an instrument of Austrian geopolitical interests.

Generally speaking, in Western (geo)political idea, the Drina plays an extremely signiicant role. As the Western Europeans see it, this river represents a «natural border» that divides the West and the East in the Balkans. It is a point at which, according to the Western theoreticians, Byzantine and German cultural and political inluences came into contact. Hence there is no place on the western

bank of the Drina for the Orthodox and, in general, all the other people whose aspirations are turned to the East. In this light we should consider the activities of Austria-Hungary, and later of the Croats, as well as the interference of the European Union and the USA into the issue of the internal organization of modern Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the Muslims, unfortunately, have for a long time been an instrument of the West.

The Balkan languages were, through Serbian, dragged from the darkness of monastery cells into the light of the day by the Serbian scholar Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic. Loved and despised at the same time, respected by the Grimm brothers, the great Goethe, Paul Schaffarik, Nikola Tomazeo and many other authors and linguists of the Balkans and the world, he collected and published not just Serbian, but also Romanian, Albanian and Bulgarian folk literature.

At the time when Vuk was working, a great number of Orthodox Serbs in the areas of today's Croatia had already been Catholicized, but only a smaller number was ready to renounce their Serbian origin. Therefore Vienna thought that through Croatian linguists their language should be altered because it differed from the language of the original Croats. Since that was not possible, because the Croats were several times outnumbered, there was an idea to rename the Serbian language into Croatian.

Thus in the fourth decade of the eighteenth century the «Iliric Movement» was formed with a declarative aim to gather all the Austrian Slavs. In reality, it was a well-organized (geo)political movement, through which Austria wanted to reach the Drina, an intention that was discussed by the most prominent Croatian geopolitician Ivo Pilar.

In his lifetime, Vuk Karadzic succeeded in preserving the Serbian language, but soon after the death of this great man (in 1867), his followers started retreating before the attacks of Austro-Croatian lingistic geopolitics. Namely, according to the postulates of the 1850 Vienna Literary Agreement, Croatian men of letters accepted Serbian as their literary language. Soon after that this language was

called «Serbian or Croatian», in WWII it was called «Croatian», and after the war the term was turned into «Serbo-Croatian». Today, this language is again called «Croatian». Thus the task of eliminating Eurasia from what are today Croatian areas was inally completed at the end of the twentieth century.

But, since the West has not yet seized the Drina, this usurpation of the Serbian language and its written code was continued in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the Croats and the Bosniacs speak the «Bosniac» language, that does not differ in the slightest from the language of the Bosnian Serbs.

The most recent theft of the Serbian language has been committed in Montenegro, where, for the irst time in history, a «Montenegrin» language was created, completely linguistically unfounded, a language that, just like those examples mentioned above, does not differ from Serbian at all. Yet, since modern Montenegro was created by the West to prevent the access of Serbia, i.e. Eurasia, to the sea, such contradictions are not too surprising, because anything that drives Eurasia from the Balkans is completely legitimate.

Certainly the most confusing phenomena are the conlicts of those authentic Balkan nations originating from the same cultural heritage — Orthodox Eurasian. We have in mind principally the Greeks, the Serbs, the Bulgarians and the Romanians, who, along with the Russians, all belong to what is colloquially referred to as «the Byzantine Commonwealth».

The reasons for the conlicts among these nations should not be sought in medieval rivalry, since that was completely forgotten owing to the centuries of servitude under the Turks. The cause should be looked for in the Western way of thinking, which, as it has already been mentioned, the Balkan nations started adopting during the nineteenth century.

The creation of new independent states in the Balkans after Turkish withdrawal did not only mean that some peoples in the Balkans made national states, but also that they re-directed their

cultural history. While the Balkans was, during the entire period of Turkish rule, in a constant connection with Eurasian civilization iltered through Islam, the Balkan Risorgimento — so we may call the whole period of the newer Balkan history from the Serbian and Greek Uprisings until the end of the world war — means taking a new cultural course.

Unlike Italian and German Risorgimento that continued the old traditions of these states, the Balkan Risorgimento meant a real cultural revolution. The Eurasian course of the Balkans was immediately upon liberation from the Turks slowly replaced by the Western technicism and scientism, followed by liberalism, both in politics and economics. This gambit can be considered as the greatest mistake of the modern Balkans, since such individualistic, falsely spiritual and falsely humanistic social and cultural philosophy could not provide the peninsula with internal cohesion, national and inter­national equanimity and good relations, in a word — identity and unity.

Thus, instead of solidarity that existed at the time when the Eurasian ideology, merged with Orthodoxy, moulded the Balkan peoples, the Western idea of politics, nation, national state, religion and spirituality emerged in its entirety.

During the nineteenth and the irst half on the twentieth century, the only light in the horizon were Balkan socialists, admirers of Russian socialist idea. Those were, above all, Svetozar Markovic, Ljuben Karavelov, and their later followers andinheritors of their ideas in both left and right sections of socialism, who thought that the Balkans will not be united by the courts and salons but by cultural unity related to the «folk system» that would lift this unity to the level of the Balkan idea.

Therefore we can freely state that socialism (both national and international) was (and still is) the main pillar of modern Eurasianism in the Balkans.

Relationships between Serbia and Bulgaria, the key to the