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Sowohl die Zeitgenossen wie die Forscher späterer Tage neigen dazu, die Vielfalt der Positionen zur Problematik der Übersetzung des westlichen Liberalismus durch die Modernisierer des Balkans unter zwei monolithische Gegenpositionen zu subsumieren, die je nachdem mit dem Etikett Modernisten gegen Traditionalisten, Westler gegen Autochthone oder Proeuropäer gegen Nationalisten versehen worden sind. Diese ideologischen Gegenpositionen wurden überlagert von künstlich polarisierten politischen Kategorisierungen wie die zwischen Progressiven, Liberalen und zukunftsgerichteten Linken einerseits und Reaktionären, Konservativen und traditionalistischen Rechten andererseits. Dichotomien wie diese sind wenig geeignet, die verschiedenartigen, häufig vermischten und ambivalenten Positionen der Modernisierungsepoche historisch zu rekonstruieren. Liberale Modernisierer und Proeuropäer waren nicht notwendigerweise für rücksichtslose Importe oder Verwestlichung, und Antiwestler waren häufig genauso eifrige Modernisierer wie ihre proeuropäischen Gegner. Der "Gebrauch der Tradition" durch die Liberalen zeigt, dass wir die politischen Debatten der Zeit besser verstehen, wenn man sie als ein Kontinuum von Positionen betrachtet, in dem die Extremfälle unkritischer Nachahmung oder radikaler kultureller und politischer Autarkie die Ausnahme waren und marginal blieben. (ICB2)

The article sets off from a discussion of some methodological and theoretical issues pertinent to the study of ideological and institutional transfer between "centre" and "periphery" in nineteenth-century Europe. While taking into account the asymmetry in radiation and reception, it probes into the (Balkan) periphery's political and cultural agency in reformulating and re-institutionalizing the "western model." Rather than simply tracing movements, flows and circulation – the conventional concern of the transnational approach – the focus is on studying the transformations which occur in the process. This makes it possible to highlight the dynamics and versatility of ideational and institutional selection, interpretation, adaptation and transformation (or subversion) – in brief, the process of re-signification of ideas and institutions. The article then proceeds by exemplifying this approach in two directions. First, it examines several main channels and agents of transfer to and within the Balkan periphery illuminative of the ways ideas, practices and institutions traveled and mutated in the course of their journey; second, it surveys several characteristic instances of transfer of liberal ideas and institutions in the Balkans focusing on their legitimization and "domestication" which underscore the semantic and functional reinterpretations of modernity and tradition in the process.

The article looks into the various scholarly (and disciplinary) conceptualizations of the Balkans/Southeastern Europe, which were spawned within the region itself prior to World War II. These regionalist schemes drew heavily on political values and relied on political support, while at the same time seeking to spearhead and legitimize political decisions or reformulate (geo)political visions. The article discusses the political implications of this scholarship with the idea to underscore notions of the Balkans which differed considerably from the one summarily and, in recent years, persistently conceptualized as mirroring the Western (discourse of) Balkanism. Not only were those notions more subtle and differentiated than an 'orientalizing perspective' would make us expect; a remarkable feature of the academic projects discussed here was their counterhegemonic thrust and the assertion that the Balkans are and should be treated as a subject.

AbstractThis article takes a distance from the debate about 'symbolic geographies' and structural definitions of historical spaces as well as from surveying discrete disciplinary traditions or political agendas of regionalist scholarship in and on Southeastern Europe. Its purpose instead has been two-fold. On the one hand, to bring to light a preexistent but largely suppressed and un-reflected tradition of regionalist scholarship with the hope that this could help us fine tune the way we conceptualize, contemplate and evaluate regionalism as politics and transnationalism as a scholarly project. In epistemological terms, on the other hand, it proposes a theoretical perspective to regionalist scholarship involving rigorous engagement with the scales of observation, and scale shifts, in the interpretation of history. The hypothesis the article seeks to test maintains that the national and the (meso)regional perspectives to history chart differentiated 'spaces of experience' — i.e. the same occurrences are reported and judged in a different manner on the different scales — by way of displacing the valency of past processes, events, actors, and institutions and creating divergent temporalities — different national and regional historical times. Different objects (i.e. spaces) of enquiry are therefore coextensive with different temporal layers, each of which demands a different methodological approach. Drawing on texts of regional scholars, in which the historical reality of the Balkans/Southeastern Europe is articulated explicitly or implicitly, the article discusses also the relationship between different spaces and scales at the backdrop of the Braudelian and the microhistorical perspectives.

Introduction -- Approaching anti-modernism / Balázs Trencsenyi and Sorin Antohi -- Integral nationalism -- The crisis of the European conscience -- In search of a national ontology -- Conservative redefinitions of tradition and modernity -- The anti-modernist revolution -- Basic secondary literature on identity discourses in Central and Southeast Europe -- Glossary

The last volume of the Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770-1945 series presents 46 texts under the heading of 'antimodernism'. In a dynamic relationship with modernism, from the 1880s to the 1940s, and especially during the interwar period, the antimodernist political discourse in the region offered complex ideological constructions of national identification. These texts rejected the linear vision of progress and instead offered alternative models of temporality, such as the cyclical one as well as various narratives of decline. This shift was closely connected to the rejection of liberal democratic institutionalism, and the preference for organicist models of social existence, emphasizing the role of the elites (and charismatic leaders) shaping the whole body politic. Along these lines, antimodernist authors also formulated alternative visions of symbolic geography: rejecting the symbolic hierarchies that focused on the normativity of Western European models, they stressed the cultural and political autarchy of their own national community, which in some cases was also coupled with the reevaluation of the Orient. At the same time, this antimodernist turn should not be confused with rightwing radicalism - in fact, the dialogue with the modernist tradition was often very subtle and the anthology also contains texts which offered a criticism of 'modern' totalitarianism in an antimodernist key.