Europe, Le Corbusier and the Balkans

The Balkans have been mythologized as the “non-European part of Europe,” their edge geography exploited as a barbaric outpost against Europe’s foundational myth as “civilization.” Balkanism as a synonym for backward, tribal, and uncivilized reappears in the tragedy of Yugoslavia, generalized by the West as a brutal Balkan War.1 Narratives of industrialization, modernization, and urbanization have defined twentieth-century Europe, but in Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova reminds us that modern Europe’s political model—the nation state—depends on processes of homogenization and practices of ethnic cleansing.2 Her point, and it is also the first ground-clearing premise of this essay: the Balkans do not have a monopoly on brutality.