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Balkan immigrants in Turkey are quite proud of their heritage and identify as such.http://www.ce-review.org/99/23/cvijetic23.html
Indeed, there has hardly been a notion this century as burdened by negative connotation as "the Balkans" or "Balkanisation." What used to be a geographic toponym ("Balkan" comes from the Turkish word simply meaning "mountain" and is used to describe the Stara Planina mountain in Bulgaria), has become a means of defamation and a synonym for partition, tribal conflict and retrograde political agendas - that is, an incarnation of everything that is negative or backward.
The term is used, of course, in a very reductionist way and is a convenient tool for differentiating between "us" and "them," between the "civilised world" and "those down there." Even such horrifying, deeply uncivilised and inhuman political programmes as Nazism and Fascism have not completely lost their appeal in the eyes of some (hopefully irrelevant) political forces in modern Europe. The Balkans (and the type of politics it represents), however, remains an unwanted child, whom absolutely no one wants to accept as his own, left in front of the door of the wealthy nations, who are unwillingly forced to take care of it.
Not surprisingly, the nations unfortunate enough to be located in the Balkans have accepted this reductionist approach. Not to be a part of the Balkans has become a matter of self-esteem and national identification. Virtually every nation that geographically belongs to the Balkan peninsula (Turkey, Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia) claims that it by no means belongs to the Balkans and attempts to impose geo-political re-definitions that would, once and for all, remove it from the infamous list.
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