East European Studies

Whither Eastern Europe? The question that prompted this series of research notes has forced me to reflect upon my ambivalent relationship with East European Studies. I do not—and I should probably state that upfront—fit comfortably within the field. My knowledge of the region is the result of an accident of birth, not academic training. I spent most of my time in graduate school actively avoiding scholars of my own country or my own region. I could not relate to studies of communism that focused on the role of the party and the elite; I found Western triumphalism—at the end of the Cold War and at the onset of the Yugoslav dissolution—myopic; and I was often brought to tears by the ignorance and arrogance of knowledge that framed the Yugoslav wars as “ethnic conflict.” Straddling the worlds of comparative politics and international relations, I followed with great interest debates about the relationship between area studies and U.S. foreign policy which flared up in the 1990s and found the science built upon the premise of geo-political interests highly suspect. ¹ And so, if it had not been for another accident of fate—a chance to attend an interdisciplinary Mellon-Sawyer seminar about democratization in Europe and Latin America organized at Cornell in 1998–1999 ² —I would have probably continued to stay away from East European Studies until today.

And I would have missed a lot. Over the past two decades, some of the most interesting and engaging work in comparative politics and international relations has been focused on Eastern Europe. Transitions, democratization, political protests, cultural transformations, NATO expansion, Europeanization—have provided a plethora of opportunities to probe, question, and re-examine previously unchallenged concepts—from private property, market economy, and democracy to nostalgia, memory, and the politics of everyday life. The more recent disappointments—the return of authoritarianism, violent discrimination against minorities, the rise of right-wing political parties—which may be even more worthy of political attention than the previous moments of democratic exuberance—will most certainly lead to new rounds of attentive scholarship that can resonate far beyond Eastern Europe. Thanks to the work that has already been done, Eastern Europe is no longer a black box (or, as our African colleagues often say about their continent, “a country”) and the variety of its polities and layers of historical legacies are much more readily acknowledged. ³ Looking East, as the contributions to this special issue attest, can help us see the rest very differently, especially in areas such as norms and policy diffusion, transitional justice, political economy, and studies of political violence and mobilization. And while stereotypes and Orientalizing tendencies in the portrayal of Eastern Europe have not entirely vanished, it is easier to recognize them and confront them than in 1997 when Maria Todorova published Imagining the Balkans. ⁴

Given this introduction, it will probably not come as a surprise that my work in political science has a critical slant, as it stands at the intersection of international political economy, cultural studies, and security studies. My intellectual interests primarily focus on cultural manifestations of political and economic power. The questions that I have been consistently interested in are the relationship between violence and its visual or narrative representations, the way in which power obfuscates its brutality and normalizes its workings in the eyes of those who are subjected to it, and the academically sanctioned gap between centers of power and places on their margins. Methodologically agnostic, I tend to gravitate towards historically informed explorations of politics that go beyond analysis of formal political institutions and organized interests, and towards studies of politics self-reflective of their own role in the production and reproduction of state power. Thus, I find myself drawn to issues that can broaden our notion of the political and illuminate the workings of power from unexpected angles—whether it is popular culture, art, or illicit trade.

In 2000/2001, a Research and Writing Grant of the John D. and Catherine C. MacArthur Foundation. and subsequently IREX, Soros, and Fulbright grants—enabled me to return to the study of the former Yugoslavia in the context of contemporary world politics. Re-examining the Balkans after the Yugoslav wars but amidst zealous ethno-nationalism emboldened by international interventions, I found myself attracted to the scholarship on the Ottoman Empire and its legacy. I became particularly interested in the ways in which late nineteenth-century history—and transition from Ottoman to Austro-Hungarian rule—affected trade patterns and state-building processes in Southeastern Europe. ⁵ Integration of the region into Europe after the Congress of Berlin in 1878 marked the end of the Balkan trade routes and of its merchant classes, who had previously thrived on the region’s pivotal status as the “dual periphery” of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The consequences of this geo-political transition were particularly severe in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which in 1879, following Austrian occupation, became a part of the customs territory of Austro-Hungarian Empire. This meant that Habsburg laws on customs and monopolies—and state monopolies in the Austro-Hungarian Empire included gunpowder, salt, and tobacco, while excise taxes were put on brandy and sugar—were extended onto Bosnia. The law literally ruined Bosnian merchants, whose major wholesaling business had previously been precisely in salt and tobacco. In addition, the customs provisions of the law cut them off from their main trading partner, the Ottoman Empire. The combination of monopolies and customs, coupled with railway construction which advanced Austrian and Hungarian interests in the province but totally neglected those of the Bosnians, practically disconnected Bosnia and Herzegovina from any of its possible export markets while making it hostage to the needs of the Habsburg Empire.

Ironically, the end of the Cold War, the Yugoslav wars, and the uneven process of EU accession have re-created conditions both within the Balkans and between the Balkans, Europe, and Turkey, that were exceptionally conducive to informal and illicit (contraband) trade—and to the emergence of a new merchant class. The Yugoslav wars, in particular, not only spread destruction and installed warlords throughout the territories of the new states but have also reconstructed the image of the region as a dangerous, non-navigable space for outsiders. The presence of the legions of peacekeepers and representatives of various international communities in the aftermath of the wars did not alter this picture. On the contrary, the foreigners have created their own islands of sovereignty and tax-exemption around which informal and illicit commerce can flourish, while their dependence on local interpreters (linguistic and otherwise) generates yet another layer of intermediaries between formal and informal economies. Thus, the emerging merchant classes act as interlocutors not just between geographic locations otherwise inaccessible to global merchants but also between different legal and cultural environments, capitalizing on the danger associated with their trade. The outcome is a complex web of roads and territories, various forms of sovereignty, multiple (and overlapping) state and private protection forces, and a merchant elite utterly uninterested in joining the EU.

Contrasts and parallels between the processes of European integration in the late nineteenth century and now seem striking, and pose important questions about the relationship between merchant capital and industrialization, imperial rule and state formation. Eventually, they have led me to the current book project on cigarette smuggling and state-building (or state transformations) in the former Yugoslavia that I expect to complete this year. The book project takes off from two high-profile murders that took place in Zagreb in the fall of 2008. The assassinations of Ivana Hodak, daughter of one of Croatia’s most prominent political families, and Ivo Pukanić, the well-known journalist and publisher of a political weekly Nacional, shattered a carefully constructed image of the Croatian state as the model-reformer on a steady path towards democratization and Europeanization. Both murders have allegedly been resolved and the killers placed in jail. However, neither a possible link between them nor the political motivations behind them have been appropriately addressed. Thus, while it is tempting to write the book as a “whodunit” story, wrapped in the mystery genre that lends itself so well to political fantasies, my narrative is really driven by the spider web of regional (and global) connections that these murders have exposed: between organized crime and security services; among the tobacco industry giants, cigarette smuggling, and the media; and among international banking, money laundering, tourism, and real estate investments.

The purpose of the book is to both draw attention to the state (with a nod to extremely important works by Anna Grzymała-Busse and Pauline Luong, and by Conor O’Dwyer and Venelin Ganev ⁶ ) and to destabilize its usual portrayal as the principal provider of order in the post-communist/post-conflict world. There are three interrelated arguments that I advance through the analysis of cigarette smuggling and its connections with the state in the former Yugoslavia. First, I underscore the enduring relevance of the interplay between merchant capital, political borders, and economic geography, thus challenging the territorial nation-state as an assumed—stable—framework of analysis. Second, and following Peter Andreas’s work on illicit political economy, ⁷ I stress the symbiotic relationship between the state and crime but also propose an understanding of crime as the currency of political power. Crime, I argue, is fungible and fluid; one crime easily folds into another (guns into cigarettes into war crimes into real estate swindling and then into drugs and cigarettes again); it is an instrument used for trading favors and blackmail in intra-elite struggles, a source of narratives blown up into media scandals to eliminate enemies or cover up other issues, and a glue that holds institutions together via secrets/threats of exposures. Crime, to use Peter Katzenstein’s recent term, is an excellent illustration of “circulatory power.” ⁸ As it moves through body politic, crime makes and unmakes fortunes, re-positions actors, creates and undermines institutions, crosses and transgresses borders—while, at the same time, producing and affirming hierarchies, the quest for authority, stability, and therefore, the state. Finally, I want to emphasize the continuity of the state, especially of its repressive apparatus, over regime change. Many years ago, Stanley Hoffmann wrote a wonderful essay, “Paradoxes of the French Political Community,” which highlighted the endurance of French state institutions through three Republics, the dissolution of the French Empire, and the Algerian War. ⁹ Hoffmann’s chapter, in my opinion, still resonates in the opaque corners of state institutions throughout the post-communist world.

There are, however, also many reasons why I am worried about this work and its implications, the potential for Orientalism being just one of them. I am particularly concerned that the project may simply reaffirm the view of the former Yugoslav states as infinitely corrupt, criminalized, and weak. In order to counter these stereotypes, I rely on historical comparisons, trace processes of narrative constructions of crime, and place the Yugoslav case within the broader context of illicit activities in the global political economy. The aim is to approximate the requirements of contextual holism, elaborated by Jan Kubik in this issue. ¹⁰ Even if not always explicitly, my analysis is informed by work on other regions—whether it is the U.S.-Mexican Border, the “triple frontier” between Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil; West Africa; or my own state of Florida. The constant back and forth between the history of the longue durée and the contemporary economy, regional focus, and global perspective seem to me like necessary precautions against area studies’ blindspots and comparative overreach. But, I must add, such precautions may not always be either sufficient or successful to tame the objectifying gaze of American social science.

And this brings me back to the initial question: Whither Eastern Europe? There is no doubt that concerns about the future of East European studies once again originate outside of academe—in the shrinking federal funding for area studies, in the U.S. budget deficits exacerbated by the financial crisis and (in)actions of the gridlocked U.S. Congress, and in the real or imagined declining relevance of Europe in the U.S. foreign policy orbit. To such concerns, I would respond—the searchlight of the U.S. foreign policy moves fast and its establishment has a tremendous propensity for amnesia. As our colleagues trained as Sovietologists learned in the early 1990s, regions and countries tend to appear and disappear on Washington’s maps. And while social sciences and funding agencies may have the ability to name and rename regions (witness Western Balkans), scholarly attempts to follow the American searchlight will always be a day late and a dollar short. The research—and the training—must be driven by big questions, not political buzzwords, whether those buzzwords come from within the Beltway or from academe itself. I tend to advise foreign graduate students to eschew convenience of birth and use the opportunities presented by American graduate school education to learn about other parts of the world. I tend to advise American students interested in international relations or comparative politics to learn languages and remain vigilant about the assumptions of American exceptionalism often built into our understandings of political dynamics elsewhere in the world. Few, of course, heed the advice but, I feel obliged to remind them: unlikely as it may seem, a year from now Moldova may appear to be just as important as Mali, Myanmar, or China. Who is to tell?

Besides, as the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine reminds us, it is highly unlikely that Eastern Europe will lose its strategic importance anytime soon. These days, it seems particularly easy to agree with Andrew Janos that what makes the region distinct is not just its communist past. ¹¹ Rather, there are few other places in the world where geopolitics continues to play as great a role as in Eastern Europe. Squeezed between the European and Eurasian great powers and always a periphery to someone, these borderlands and bloodlands seem to invite continuous meddling by outsiders, which reflects both on the level of high power politics (currently over resources) and in everyday lives of individuals (as, for instance, in conflicting imaginaries of belonging). Sadly, this is also what makes the region so fascinating to scholars. Communism, as Bernhard and Kopstein argue in this issue ¹² , may have been a great class leveler, but the dybbuks associated with the history of fluid borders and endless migrations still roam these lands. Nazi collaborators, revolutionaries, pogromists, kulaks, urbanites, dissidents, appartichiks, émigrés, and returnees: scratch the surface of party politics in any of the post-communist countries, and they will all be there. Thus, while wary of historical determinism, I am constantly amazed by the layers of “usable histories” in Eastern Europe and by politicians’ readiness to search for them in hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of years past. ¹³ And so, because of its immanent liminality and malleability, Eastern Europe remains important—as a privileged site for renditions and annexations, and for continued research into imperial legacies and pathologies/perversions of nation-states.

For all these reasons, the most important dimension of East European continued relevance might be the normative one. Whither to/for whom? Who are the audiences that we are addressing and what is our responsibility to them? Perhaps each one of us has a different answer to these questions. But they determine our relationship with Eastern Europe, the way we write, what we have set out to achieve. Regarding the ambivalence I mentioned in the beginning—I tend to be painfully aware of my insider/outsider—native/expat status in the field of East European Studies and in the region that I originally come from. Somewhere in the back of my mind are always the friends I left behind, the day-to-day battles that they are engaged in and the horizons that may be open or closed for their children. And whenever I start worrying about the future of area studies, I remind myself that it is my writing—never the area itself—that may soon be deemed irrelevant.