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Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, xi, 257 pp. How the Balkans came to be viewed in the West as distinct from the rest of Europe and why the term "Balkan" came to have pejorative connotations are the two questions that lie at the heart of this provocative essay. Maria Todorova likens the treatment of the "Balkans" in the West to that accorded the "Orient," and she draws useful parallels between the resulting "Balkanism" and the "Orientalism" so sternly denounced by Edward Said. But her tone is less condemnatory, and she perceives fundamental differences between the Balkans and the Orient, notably, the historical and geographical concreteness of the first and the intangibleness of the second.
Todorova has organized her inquiry in a logical progression of chapters. After setting forth the dimensions of the problem she discusses the origins and use of the term "Balkan," how elites in the region saw themselves and their relation to "Europe," how Western travelers between the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century discovered the Balkans as a distinct social and cultural entity, how Western perceptions in the nineteenth century fluctuated between understanding and disdain, why in the early decades of the twentieth century the image of the Balkans in the West worsened, and how in the post-Cold War era the idea of Central Europe revived old stereotypes about the Balkans. In the...