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Culture,
communication - regional needs
 "Let's
repeat, for those who accuse us that we 'bleat for peace at any
price' the attitudes that we always stand for: better war than
slavery, better arbitration than war, better reconciliation than
arbitration."
These words by Desturnel de Konstand, which served as an
introduction into the famous report of the Karnegi commission,
published in 1914, are still of big importance for us, which surpass
their primary context. Let's remind that the Karnegi foundation for
peace among the nation was established in 1910, and the report tried
to find the reasons for the Balkans' wars and about the way they
were conducted. Although it were the Balkans' wars which gave the
word "Balkanasitation" a bad meaning, in between it were
the "highly civilised" nations those which caused two
world wars and countless cruel blodsheds with colonial motives. Some
of the people from the Balkans region surely had reasons to be
ashamed by certain aspects of their past (especially with the newest
wars in the nineties), but also there are many reasons to be proud
with our position of a borderline of cultures and civilizations, one
of the most interesting border spots on the whole planet.
We start from those positions - of reaffirmation of the integrative
principles in the region - and in the first place in the fields of
culture and communication.
In that context, we see the culture, same as the education, as a
strong developement source; the reconstruction of the broken
communicational ties and the creation of new ones we also concider
as developemental and civilizational imperative, that could have
much wider implication then being only regional, just because of the
specific cultural and geo-political positioning of our region. In
doing that, we would try to escape from the "comparative
trivilization", as Peter Gay puts it, i.e. we would try not to
save the balkans nations from their responsibility for the
irresponsibillity with which the world has treated the region: we
also do not want to support the shallow ideas that "there are
no protagonists but only those who pull the strings".
In the concept of culture we stand for there should be clear
evaluation of the destructive effects from the ethnic nationalism
(without a dogmatic judgement of the nationalism, in general) and of
the poverty it makes. As one of the best Balkans intelectuals,
Marija Todorova, puts it, we do not want to promote any nostalgia
for the imperial formations, be it from Ottoman or the recent
Balkans' past, but from that past we would try to extract those
possibilities for alternative developement that will enrich our
common human culture.
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