The Balkans can thus also be a land within, a deep, dark overgrowth in the soul of impenetrable tree crowns, with wild beasts and unsentimental songbirds dwelling underneath. That which endows the term Balkan with meaning takes place within. First within each individual and then multiplied by all individuals and other living beings to the infinite unrecognisability of collective self-recognition drowning in the oceans of misconceptions, illusions, false expectations, despair, anguish, misunderstandings, bottomless images and so on (does Evil exist as such and not as a divergence of Good or as a still unattained Good?). When talking about openness, we have in mind first of all the openness in its basic sense, the openness of infinity without an end, symbolised by the undulating hills and mountains, overgrown with impenetrable forests. However, that which moves into the foreground in the false representation of the Balkans is something that does not fit. The Balkans as a misfit. Thus something that should be different from us who are, hmm, good. Who do not belong to the Balkans. There is a place that is already emerging in us, calling attention to itself with pain, a place where the record player needle is skipping and returning the already played musical fragment to the unfinished melody without a sequel. If we transfer this image into the sphere of practice, we find ourselves in the area of the famous Chinese proverb, which brings into question well-intentioned help: Is it better to simply give fish to the fishermen and their families or should they be taught how to catch them? In the case of the Balkans, we are dealing with donations and not with lessons on how to catch fish (except in the case of fishing in troubled waters). The donation of fish is a blind alley, a dead end, an endless cycle, jumping up and down on the spot, and for this reason this place can never be constituted as a beginning of an independent movement, development and reconstitution. For the Balkans material assistance alone does not mean progress and a return to original conditions, but rather, a suspension in midair, the falling into emptiness. But what can be done? We have already said that things are set up within. It is not enough to concentrate on finding facts and reasons for the actual state of affairs or on interpreting the past. We must find something new, a clean cut; we must transcend it and painfully reach into the fabric of discord that traverses the space of coexistence. That which does not fit is the disorder of empty existence, the existence of waiting and vegetating until things take care of themselves. It is suspension in midair, letting events take their own course, running without head or tail and in this way, without reflection, counting on a kind of natural regulation, a kind of Darwinian evolutionary principle which will spontaneously restore order. Here as well the West plays a decisive role, since it is precisely the intervention of the West that will determine the turn specific events will take. Of course, the West has no idea what to do. And the intermediaries of the entire world are at loss as well. The Balkans are a region of idle run where the regressive course of events has been frozen, but nothing has been done to eliminate the current situation. Which is understandable. Except for a handful of folkloric images of typical Balkan cynicism (e.g. Kusturica and other film makers who dealt with the reality of recent wars in the Balkans), showing people how to grab onto relatively bearable mirror images of themselves, in the face of horrible conditions and unbelievable waves of pain and continue with black humour to infinity, no one seriously tried to think hard and creatively resolve the Balkan riddle. On the contrary. The West babbles about tribal primitivism of the Balkan people (as if, only recently, the Americans in Vietnam, the British and the French in their respective colonies and the Germans and Italians in World War II, for example, did not commit even more disgusting acts).
The knot is expanding like a black hole, swallowing up more and more people and nations, embroiling them in a tangle of conflicts and radical hatred, due to which even in the most tolerant environments, where a multinational population once lived in harmony, this is no longer possible. Like the crystallizing of water into ice, which occurs instantly throughout the entire volume, as water temperature reaches a critical point, the border between multinational states was suddenly shaped into an infinite network of inner, fractured borderlines, reaching from the fragmented regions and divided cities to the bottom of every individual’s soul. Borders are no longer meant to separate specific, nationally pure (cleansed), territories, but rather, represent a fundamental split in each individual, turning him into a kind of “political psychotic”; This is a matter of an acute and dangerous pathology, if not regressive schizophrenia; of the business-as-usual attitude, which eventually turns a person, by jumping up and down on the spot, into his own enemy. The fundamental feature that makes the Balkans “Balkan” is distinction par excellence – limitation as a line of separation in general. The basic tendency is therefore distinction, the fundamental force that dominates and is a centrifugal, destructive line of separation. The field of skipping – before the end of the “melody” – back to some senseless place, which is not the beginning but marks the return loop which, in the process of reconciliation, acts as two approaching magnetic polarities of the same charge – repulsively. At work here is a kind of repelling original pressure that prevents approaching in its very essence. First in the minds and hearts of the people. The reasons for this may not always be known but they are universal in the spirit of already presented Balkanisation, which increasingly applies also to the West as a whole, of which the Balkans are also a part.
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The essential concept that turns the matter upside down is peaceful coexistence. And a favourable “offer-content” of the Balkans reveals itself in peaceful coexistence. We have in mind the precious treasure of multiculturalism that enriches a person who works and creates outside the field of repulsive skipping in emptiness. The kingdom of differences fragments the violent Only True Image of the world and ennobles it to become a moving crystal of the ever-changing view of the world, a dynamic treasure of different perspectives and contents. This is what enriches a human being as an individual as well as a social being. The multi-perspective aspect is not a way of thinking and being that only rationally recognises the two-dimensional form of co-existence of different social groups or even nations; it in fact creatively builds on the intertwining of all differences within a more comprehensive conglomerate of diverse populations, encompassing different subgroups and reshaping their mutual differences into a more complete origin of each individual or a kind of transcended mutual creative inter-space. It is therefore a nurtured ability that separates human beings as a species from other hominids, for a highly developed culture. This of course does not mean that human beings are worth more than other creatures. In terms of evolution, culture represents a crucial progressive form which does not constitute man as the most powerful beast on this planet, but rather, as an ethical creature – capable of transcending the momentary, selfishly and narrowly understood conditions of his immediate environment. Ethical does not mean moral. I have no intention of waxing philosophical in the conditional tense to refer to happiness. Or to refer to ideal utopias on the basis of which we could formulate a set of conditions to which a future society would submit. Ethical means much more; it is what is already here and exists; it works and distinguishes in practice. Ethical is what makes a human being a social creature who has been, for several million years, successfully coping with the intricate social dynamics of constructive relations that distinguish a civilised society. It is therefore that internal coincidence of the Law and personal freedom, of contentment and happiness, if you will. The acknowledgement of the other’s freedom and thereby of one’s own freedom. The ethical is thereby that which enables the acknowledgement of the other as a profound personal threshold of individual self-realisation. Because only by allowing the other his personal happiness, can a person achieve self-realisation in the peace of acceptance (also of himself by others). This is called coexistence. In the field of an incessant current of differences, outside the supreme and unified substantive equality. It is the field and not the content that is structured; the law sets up a network of equitable conditions for everyone, regardless of their particular personal, tribal or national stories. The law which is structured on ethical principles of a civilised community and not on a network of privileges, on a single, dominant circle of existence, imposed by the strongest fraction.