*** LAURENT GESLIN, JEAN-ARNAULT DÉRENS: Là où se mêlent les eaux. Des Balkans au Caucase dans l’Europe des confins. Editions La Découverte (9 bis rue Abel-Hovelacque, F-75013 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 44088401 – Email: ladecouverte@editionsladecouverte.com – Internet: http://www.editionsladecouverte.fr ). 2018, 380 pp, €22.90. ISBN 978-2-3480-3605-7
The European Union, whose member states already find it difficult to close ranks, no longer has an appetite for enlargement – to put it mildly. This has not escaped the Western Balkans countries, which see their prospects of accession dwindling, while Russian populism and rhetoric is quietly filling the vacuum left by the absence of the European Union. For a short while now, the Commission has been trying (in vain) to make the Balkans the flavour of the moment by putting it back on the European agenda and proposing last April to begin accession negotiations with Albania and Macedonia. Courted and then snubbed, this region, a tinderbox on the EU's doorstep, is brimming with history and mystery that the EU28 find it difficult to fathom. In this connection, the road trip of journalists Jean-Arnault Dérens and Laurent Geslin makes it possible to lift a corner of the veil over this part of ‘the Europe of the edges,’ in other words, ‘at the meeting of the waters,’ sometimes of borders and always of religions, cultures, forgotten minorities and communities disillusioned in the face of stranded economies and emptying villages.
In 2010, ‘the two little Ulysses,’ as they are nicknamed by a certain Katerina from the island of Syros – once a ‘new Babylon,’ but now a mirror of the ravages of the Greek crisis – set sail from the shores of Croton, where refugees constantly in transit live in the belly of a rusty ship, to the coasts of the Balkans and the Caucasus. Venturing into the ‘winey waters of the Adriatic,’ ‘where the heroes returning from the siege of Troy were lost,’ the journalists of Courrier des Balkans sail close to the island of Vis, strategic historically, to evoke the clash between the Italian and Austrian navies or the place where Marshal Tito took refuge in 1943, the historic leader of Yugoslavia. They stop off at Trieste, which ‘stinks of secrecy and prudishness,’ to recall the existence of a Slovenian minority, victim of fascist repression, which lives even today ‘hidden so it can live happily.’ They sail via Pula to describe the fate of the Uljanik shipyards, inseparable from the identity of Istria, now condemned by the European Union to open up to competition and, therefore, to their disappearance.
Each stop is a return to history in order to better understand the present of a complex region, perpetually in ‘transit,’ which still bears the stigmata of its wars. There are injuries in this Europe of the edges that even accession to Europe has not healed. For example, Greece may well have joined the EU in 1981, but the village of Kotomini is still divided between two worlds that cross each other’s paths ‘without speaking’: that of ‘Greek society of officials and the indigenous,’ and ‘the Muslim minority with singularly curtailed rights.’ And then, do you know Makronissos, that now-forgotten Greek island that once housed ‘once of the most terrible prisons of the twentieth century’? Did you know that in Croatia there is a village called Rasa, built by Mussolini in 1936, that still doesn’t have a cemetery?
This voyage extends beyond travelling in space. It plays with Time’s pendulums whether for recalling the époque when t he Italian boot was attached to the Balkans, some ten thousand years ago, or for drinking a toast ‘to the children who will make new wars’ in Zougdidi’s ‘land of unhappiness’ near Abkhaziz, the separatist region of Georgia. After all, ‘the train of History is a crszy machine that is always about to derail,’ comment the authors.
Maria Udrescu
*** GEORGIOS DOUDOUMIS: L'échiquier balkanique. Éditions Infognomon (14 rue Filellinon, GR-10557 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3316036 – Fax: 3250421 – Email: info@infognomon.gr – Internet: http://www.infognomon.gr ). 2018, 214 pp, €14. ISBN 978-618-5219-46-8.
Beginning with a brief introduction and a reference to memories from history and the recent past, this book enlightens readers about the current injuries of the Balkans region (demography-migration-corruption-crime) – all of which are injuries that hold back its development and plunge it into uncertainty about its future –and the geopolitical developments that dominate the great powers, which use the various minorities as pawns on the Balkan chessboard. Diplomat for a long time specialising in economic issues (he has been posted to Munich, Belgrade, The Hague, Tirana, Sofia, Madrid and Berlin), Georgios Doudoumis provides some clarity here for an environment where formal alliances, hostile allies and friendly enemies reign, all competing in the Balkans for the energy corridor that should provide energy for Western European countries but which, under the leadership of the United States, also aims at minimising Russia’s sovereignty in the Balkans. The author also looks at the desires of the ‘bad Turks,’ and the new role taken up by the Eastern Balkans with the Romania-Bulgaria duo going back over the acquis of the fall of the Wall. Finally, there are the Western Balkans that are a full geopolitical minefield in and of themselves, notably with the integration of Albania, which will have a direct impact on the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia Herzegovina, the entire geopolitical playing field of the Balkans risking finding itself modified. This geopolitical overview covers all the region’s problems and also suggests some ways forward. (AKa)
*** MICHALIS CHARALAMBIDIS: Le problème macédonien, l’hellénisme, l’œcuménisme: la démocratie des Balkans centraux. Editions Stravon (31 rue Sophokleous, GR-16674 Glifada. Tel: (30-210) 8982811 – Internet: http://www.polis-agora.blogspot.com ). 2018, 80 pp, €18. ISBN 978-618-80247-5-5.
A sociologist by training, Michalis Charalambidis is a member of the executive committee of the 'Union internationale pour les droits et la libération des peoples, an NGO recognised by the United Nations. As a writer, he notes in this book that historic ignorance and a strange bookkeeping mindset combine in cynicism about giving a particular name to a country no matter what it costs. History won’t tolerate book-keepers, brutes and ignoramuses, he warns, foreseeing that a time of punishment always arrives for them. The problem is that erroneous approaches now live in international and national institutions. Skopje’s problem is not only a local question, but has a local, universal, global and regional dimension as well. This is why the book’s two documents, universality and the periphery, precede the local, which should allow future meetings between the peoples of the Aimos peninsula (the Southern Balkans), which represents a peaceful future and its stability and sustainable prosperity. Many other themes exposed today due to the world’s polycentric transition after the geopolitical upheavals of 1989-90 are also addressed, along with the questions raised by them. (AKa)
*** Südosteuropa Mitteilungen. Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft (49 Widenmayerstrasse, D-80538 Munich. Tel: (49-89) 212154-0 – Fax: 2289469 – Email: info@sogde.org – Internet: http://www.sogde.org ). 2017, 114 pp, €12. Annual subscription: €60.
This rich issue of the respected Südosteuropa Mitteilungen review contains a special report on the twenty-fifty anniversary of the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the balance sheet – mixed – that can be drawn for its action in Serbia and the region. Among other things, it is pointed out that the Serbian nation is still lively and the European Union has a role to play to bring Serbia to change its value system in the perspective of possibly joining the EU. Another contribution specifically analyses the practical results achieved by the Tribunal, which ceased operating in December last year, how the European Union deals with transitional justice in the region being another subject of analysis. Other themes addressed include the political situation in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia since a new government came to power in May 2017, Victor Orban’s trajectory as a symbol of a decline in the values of Europe that the European Union should oppose by imposing stronger sanctions, and how Greece is coping with the refugee crisis on behalf of the EU. (MT)
*** CONSTANTINOS FILIS: Turquie, Islam, Erdogan. Editions Papadopoulos (9 Kapodistriou,GR-14452 Metamorphosi. Tel: (30-210) 2846074 – Fax: 2817127 – Email: info@epbooks.gr – Internet: http://www.epbooks.gr ). ‘Petites introductions’ series. 2018, 112 pp, €10.99. ΙSBN 978-960-569-781-5.
This book is dedicated to Turkey’s new identity being constructed by Tayyip Recep Erdogan. Its author, director of research at the Institute of International Relations and professor of geopolitics at Pantheon University in Athens, analyses and gauges the essential aspects of the substantial transformation of the country imposed by the Turkish president and his country, namely the religious and conservative evolution of Turkey, which naturally influences behaviour in regional and international affairs. Domestically, the system is based on one person and is characterised by the absence of veritable institutional counterweights, the Turkish president being active in marrying religion with nationalism. The author comments that the worlds seventeenth biggest economy has arrhythmia and that its relations with the West is being severely tested, nobody wanting to sever links at this stage however. The author does end up, nevertheless, asking whether Ankara would be capable of revising its strategic orientation. How, he asks, will Turkey deal with the multiple fronts that are opening up, both domestically and overseas? What are the dangers of the current transformation of Turkey for Greece? At the end of the day, what will Turkey be in five years’ time? All questions to which Constantinos Filis provides answers, discerning three conflicts that threaten Turkey’s survival and analysing the potential consequences that the politicised Islam favoured by Ankara could have on the country’s traditional Western orientation. The book is enriched with explanatory notes and a bibliography. (AKa)
*** NIKOLAOS PAPANASTASSOPOULOS: Le système politique de l'Union européenne. Le contenu de l'européanisation dans politique étrangère grecque et l'Union européenne en tant que stratège actif. Editions Sideris (116 rue Solonos, Gr-10681 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3833434 – Fax: 3832294 – Email: contact@isideris.gr). 2018, 232 pp, €10. ISBN 978-960-08-0671-7.
For the author, a professor of the philosophy of law at Thessla University in central Greece, the European Union is in a ‘transition process’ whose direction is not clear. He says that in terms of strategy, for example the primacy of the United States and NATO condemned it (or condemned it at least until the arrival of Donald Trump) to atrophy of the EU's action. Borrowing the terminology of chemistry, the author argues that Europe is like an atom whereas some countries are the basic nucleus of history (the ‘hard’ core). Other countries act as protons and neutrons; and there are others which rotate like electron around this nucleus. The succession of centuries, depending on each country, has preserved the nucleus at the centre, along with the position of protons and neutrons or electrons. For the author, the challenge for the Greek State, whose past values allowed Greek culture to be the ‘quarks of the European atom,’ … – is now whether it will continue to be an active member state in the European family and, if so, in what form, since the European Union is called upon, in his view, to play a new role in the world in the future, for which it will propose a new political analysis. (AKa)