Body of Europe and Malignant Nationalism: A Pathology of the Balkans in European Security Discourse

Abstract

The war in the former Yugoslavia provided a political context for the social construction of Europe as a political entity and the European Union as its political subject after the Cold War. The break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991 which ignited what was dubbed 'the Balkan war' by a number of leading strategists was identified not merely as a problem confined to the Balkan region, but one which had implications for the fate of Europe as a whole. There existed an argument in European security discourse claiming that the nationalist conflict in the Balkans posed an existential threat to European security. This argument was structured with help from a set of socio-medical metaphors, one of which identified Europe as a territorial political organism which can be healthy, ill, or even terminal; and another which recognised a belligerent form of nationalism as a political disease that threatened the health, and even the life, of this political organism. The rhetorical use of the organic metaphors of body and disease h...