Found this yesterday:
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Slavoj Žižek is close to the truth- Balkan-that’s the Others.
“This very alibi confronts us with the first of many paradoxes concerning Balkan: its geographic delimitation was never precise. It is as if one can never receive a definitive answer to the question, "Where does it begin?"
For Serbs, it begins down there in Kosovo or Bosnia, and they defend the Christian civilization against this Europe's Other.
For Croats, it begins with the Orthodox, despotic, Byzantine Serbia, against which Croatia defends the values of democratic Western civilization.
For Slovenes, it begins with Croatia, and we Slovenes are the last outpost of the peaceful Mitteleuropa.
For Italians and Austrians, it begins with Slovenia, where the reign of the Slavic hordes starts.
For Germans, Austria itself, on account of its historic connections, is already tainted by the Balkanic corruption and inefficiency.
For some arrogant Frenchmen, Germany is associated with the Balkanian Eastern savagery—up to the extreme case of some conservative anti-European-Union Englishmen for whom, in an implicit way, it is ultimately the whole of continental Europe itself that functions as a kind of Balkan Turkish global empire with Brussels as the new Constantinople, the capricious despotic center threatening English freedom and sovereignty.
So Balkan is always the Other: it lies somewhere else, always a little bit more to the southeast, with the paradox that, when we reach the very bottom of the Balkan peninsula, we again magically escape Balkan.
Greece is no longer Balkan proper, but the cradle of our Western civilization.”
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