Abstract
Instead of marking the Balkans through the negative, and viewing the region as "incomplete self" of Europe and as the region permanently short of modernization, this paper suggests a different, more balanced perspective. It intends to explore the creative or at least revelatory dimensions of recent cultural and political history of the Balkans, summed up in the notion of productive periphery.
The Balkans are defined by its peripheric situation; by a distant, yet tight relation to a center; by a clearly subaltern, yet somehow decisive position. While being peripheral to historical trends, Balkans nations were also paradoxically very close to the political and educational centers (Istanbul, Vienna) but still relatively free from other historically weighty centers (Berlin, Cairo, Moscow).
Several developments have played out in which Balkan states have taken a belated, imitative route towards modernity - nationalism, Islamic modernism and communism. Yet, during the unfolding and (according to this analysis) also thanks to its position of a liminal periphery, those routes have developed into hybrid and original phenomena attesting to the fact that the periphery may be a productive space and that productiveness of periphery should be studied.