Sketch 4: Of loops and of "creative destruction"
As Ana Peraica quotes a Croatian politician in her text "From Macro Plans to Micro-Solipsistic States // De-ideologisation of the Balkans — on Transformancy and Instability" as saying, "This century started out with Balkan wars and will end with Balkan wars." In trying to deconstruct ideologies, and thus to see through historical myths, Ana remains on the level of linguistic and philosophical distinctions and does not root her analysis in material history. In this way, it seems to me that she misses an important aspect of Balkan history, which is the notion of "interest", be it the interest of elites from outside the Balkans or the interests of Balkan elites or, more likely, the interplay of the two, enriched by the struggles of people excluded from the elite category against the elites’ plans and strategies. We can say that both WW I and the 1990ies wars in Yugoslavia were fostered and imposed by modernizing elites both in the Balkans and outside whose aim was to break through blockades of capital accumulation (cf. Detlef Hartmann, in: Materialien für einen neuen Antiimperialismus, to be published). As soon as we take into consideration the returning crises of capital accumulation regimes struggling against the sabotage of people who live and don’t fully subordinate to the impoverishment of perceptory experience the elites attempt to impose on them, the Balkania loop loses its mystery and becomes understandable in historical terms. We then can go on to see what specific situation made the Balkans such a contended place. To find out why this loop is better visible in the Balkans than in other places.