“Banal Balkanism?” – Rethinking Banal Nationalism and Regional Identity in the Post-Yugoslav Media Space

With the collapse of Yugoslavia, the supranational Yugoslav identity disappeared and was replaced by strengthened national identities. While some states of the former Yugoslavia have rediscovered their Europeanness, others have further strengthened their national identity. This paper answers the question of whether, three decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, a so-called “regional identity” still exists among the former Yugoslav states (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Kosovo). The authors set the initial hypothesis that belonging to a regional – in this case, Balkan – identity is more pronounced in the five candidate (Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia) and potential candidate countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and Kosovo) for European Union (EU) membership than in Slovenia and Croatia, which have become EU Member States. Hence, this article will provide insight into “regional identity” and the banality of “Balkanism” reproduced in state media. By examining articles on national online news portals


Introduction
As one of the newest approaches of modern theories of nationalism, banal nationalism is gaining in importance and accordingly, for certain countries and regions, the number of studies dealing with this topic is continuously increasing. In the post-Yugoslav region, there are very few studies that deal with the exploration of banal nationalism in everyday life and the examination of this phenomenon through the lens of national and regional media seems to have been left out. This paper holds that there is more to the region than geography. The word "Balkans" invokes such a variety of definitions that, despite all efforts from scholars on this topic, there is still no one single definition that delineates this geographical area. Still, in everyday life, all countries of the former Yugoslavia except for Slovenia and with the addition of Albania are most often taken as the definition of the Balkans. For this reason, in this research, the area of the Balkans is firstly identified with the geographical area of the former Yugoslav states.
Although there are already similar research studies on the subject which all focus primarily on the relationship between media and identity (such as "Banal nationalism in the Turkish press" (Yumul and Özkirimli, 2000), "Banal Europeanism" (Cram, 2001;, and "Banal Europeanism and Americanism in English and Bulgarian media" (Slavtcheva-Petkova, 2014)), so far a similar examination about banal nationalism in post-Yugoslav media and through the lens of regional identity seems to be missing. Since all the researched countries in this paper were once part of the same federation, have shared the same history, have similar languages, and have interconnected cultures, this paper aims to test whether regional identity is still featured in state media, and if so, to what extent. According to Baskar, strong ethnic nationalism is still quite relevant in the former Yugoslav countries and is embodied especially through "a strong hatred of regionalism, which is perceived as a threat to national unity" (2014, p. 11). For this investigation, we employ Michael Billig's theory of banal nationalism. Thus, we have an insight into how nationalism, as well as the potential regional identity, is implemented in state media coverage, as well as contributing to the growing body of research 3 in this area through the aforementioned approach.
In this paper, we understand the "Balkans" not only as a geographical concept but also as a cultural entity. The fact that a certain dose of regionalism or "banal Balkanism" already exists among former Yugoslav countries can be seen from a range of sources -from informative politics-focused television stations for the whole region such as Al Jazeera Balkans or N1 Television -all the way up to various television channels and entertainment programmes such as MTV Adria, X Factor Adria, regional Big Brother, etc. Clearly, there are a variety of names for this geographical place, such as the "Balkans", "Adria", the "region", etc. Accordingly, with so many different names and without clearly marked borders, the Balkans becomes an imaginary geographical and cultural area, or area of banality (see Billig, 1995;Todorova, 2015, etc.).

1.
Banal nationalism and regional identity Banal Nationalism, by Michael Billig (1995), can be considered the first study to provide a systematic analysis of the reproduction of nationalism (Özkirimli, 2000, p. 199). In his work, Billig shows that in every country there is a continuous marking or reminder of nationality, which means that established nations are simply those states that have confidence in their continuity. He states that it is precisely nationality that provides "a continuous basis for political discourses, cultural products, and even for the structuring of newspapers" (Billig, 1995, p. 8).
Billig's thesis emphasises the influence of politics and the mass media, which every day, through the use of certain symbols and deixes, flag "the nationhood in the eyes of the citizenry in established Western democracies. Exactly these deixes, which are described as short words such as "we", "our", "this", "here", "nation", are "continually pointing to the national homeland as the home of the readers" (ibid, p. 11). Furthermore, belonging to a territory defined by external boundaries that divides those who belong ("us") from those who do not belong (Skey, 2011) is an integral part of constructing a national identity. Following Hudson (2006, p. 627) "places are complex entities that unite material objects, people, and systems of social relations and are in a constant process of emergence." Since places are always closely related to identity, the relationship between space and national identity is diverse, creating complex geography made up of borders, symbolic areas, and localities (Edensor, 2002, p. 37).
And where does regional identity stand here? Even though the meaning of regional identity may differ to some extent from the definition above, there still exists an invisible border placed in opposition to the border of the nation-state -a border that is marked and therefore "visible" (Baskar, 2014, p. 13), having a "symbolic shape" that can be manifested in different practices 4 such as, for example in culture or media, and can also be used in the construction of identity narratives which include the name of the region and various other symbols (Paasi, 2002, p. 140).
Regional identity, therefore, is what people, politicians, and states make out of it; it is how they interpret history and culture (Bechev, 2006, p. 9). Hence, one must demonstrate that the region's outer limits are more important than the multiple dividing lines inside it (ibid, p. 8). Even nostalgia for past times or historical connections can be the reason for creating regional identity (Chromý and Janů, 2003, p. 108). In European terms, following the processes of Europeanisation, regional identity has become an important category and one that is often taken as self-evident in the relations between a group of people and a bounded region (Paasi, 2002, p. 137). Since the Balkans is a Western construct, this region serves as an "other", and becomes the semi-periphery of Europe, being located at the external boundaries of the EU.
Alternatively, following Stuart Hall's (2018) definition of "The West and the Rest", it highlights how Western nations are defined opposed to non-Western ones, and how European nations need to find their sense of self precisely through the differences which separate them from non-European nations. In brief, there can be no "us" without "them" (Billig, 1995, p. 78), where "they" in academic literature indicates the groups most often described as "others" (see Petersoo, 2007;Luketić, 2013).

"Balkan" as identity marker and the media
Among many authors (see Todorova, 2015;Bakić-Hayden, 1995), the term "Balkans" has acquired a specific and distinctly non-geographical meaning. Moreover, the term "Balkanac" (Balkanite) in South Slavic languages has a negative connotation, and therefore, a problem facing the people living in the territory of the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans itself is that their identity is built on a negative self-image. This means that their self-perception is in line with the beliefs established by the Western value system, and thus becomes the denominator of the "other". Apart from Bulgaria, which views the term Balkans in a very neutral and even positive context (see Todorova, 2015;Šarić, 2009), all of the other countries want to distance themselves from the term, especially Slovenia and Croatia. According to multiple researchers, the judgments of Slovenes and Croats towards the term "Balkans" became stronger especially after independence and their desire to join the EU (see Ceglar, 1999;Velikonja, 2002;Stankovič, 2002;Bechev, 2006;Vezovnik, 2009;Zupančič, 2015). Furthermore, as Todorova highlights, there has never been a common Balkan identity, but merely "the occasionally 5 romantic and occasionally reluctant recognition of cultural similarities accumulated over the centuries which, at times, assume the form of a defensive common response to an ascriptive identity from the outside" (Todorova, 2004, p. 12).
In the terms of the researched area, the banality of regional identity in former Yugoslav media and the question of nation and homeland were particularly prominent in both Slovenian and Croatian national narratives after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. At the same time, both countries had the same dichotomous relationship regarding national identity -i.e. strengthening one's own national identity through daily practices and routines using both "bottom-up" and "top-down" approaches, while constructing and reawakening their historical (Central) European identity by abandoning and denying all the characteristics of "Balkanness" (Vezovnik, 2009; see also Bechev, 2006;Velikonja, 2005). In her study, Šarić (2009) researches the connotations of the'term "Balkans" in post-Yugoslav media articles and shows how much both Slovenia and Croatia have distanced themselves from this term. While Todorova (2004; claims there is no common "Balkan identity", Bechev (2006) for example argues that it is precisely the shared identity that has played a crucial role in regionalisation projects in South-Eastern Europe (Bechev, 2006). "They either accept the stigma of being Balkan or project it onto their neighbours in order to assert their own 'Europeanness'" (ibid, p. 10). Therefore, we wanted to see how this potential "regional identity" is produced in the media. As Šarić shows, "the use of the term the Balkans in the selfimages of the former Yugoslavia was extremely rare, if not non-existent. Thus, the spread of the name the Balkans in the media in the south Slavic territory is a new phenomenon" (2009, p. 390).

Methodology
In the last century, newspapers have been the main source for most media content research and research about nationalism. Thus, they can flag nationhood in more than one way. One prominent way is through their structure, presenting a world composed of nations. A further mode depends on the use of deixes, such as "we", "us", "here" etc. This presents a sort of mutual recognition between the readers and gives them the imaginary feeling of a national homeland (Billig, 1995;Yumul and Özkirimli, 2000).
A survey of fifty-six online information portals in total -eight national portals from each of the seven former Yugoslav countries (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and North Macedonia) -was conducted in October and November 6 2020. In this investigation, we opted for online information portals, because according to given indicators and statistics (see Mills, 2002;Diamandaki, 2003), internet portals have nowadays replaced the role that newspapers previously held for readers. Additionally, they offer discussions, dialogues, and connections to be shaped between different territorially-separated individuals who, on this basis, form imaginary groups and are adapted to their diasporic positions and interests (Appadurai, 1996, p. 195).
Over the course of the survey of the above-mentioned representative sample of portals, we wanted to gain an insight into how and to what extent "Balkanism" and regional identity are represented in national media. Due to the large number of researched online portals, which mainly focus on news portal subheadings, it should be highlighted that the object of the research is a much more widespread form of banal nationalism, as related to a comprehensive regional construction of the "Balkans". Moreover, this claim is underlined by the fact that the operationalization of "Balkanism" in the study itself is very broad, including the former Yugoslavia, the region, the Balkans, etc.
For purposes of this research, media content analysis was used. The main focus was on spatial references (toponyms/geonyms, adverbs, and names of the area, such as "region", "ExYu", "Balkan", "Home", "Homeland", "Nation") (De Cillia et al., 1999;Edensor, 2002;Skey, 2011), and the symbols and deictic expression (Billig, 1995) of nationhood as opposed to the region. The starting hypothesis was that regional identity is non-existent in Slovenian and Croatian online information portals, as opposed to in other former Yugoslav countries where this regional identity is quite visible.
Through a media analysis of the discourse of banal nationalism, and the role of regional toponyms on internet portals, we explored the following categories and quantitative indicators of Billig's banal nationalism: The online portals we selected (see Appendix I) are, according to different internet sources and statistics 1 , considered to be the most read in each of the countries analysed. We also tried to determine the political spectrum of the online portals under analysis, but in some countries it was not possible to determine this because of the lack of information. For this reason, it was not selected as one of the criteria in the analysis of internet portals.
With the indicator "region", we wanted to investigate the extent to which regional affiliation is highlighted in each country and its media: i.e., whether there are special sections and categories on the internet portals intended strictly for former Yugoslav states and how they are titled. The second indicator, "Neighbouring countries", will show us if and in what measure these countries are connected with their neighbours, especially if some of the country's ethnic minorities form a majority in the neighbouring state(s) or if both states share cultural and historical relations. Language is also a common denominator of banal nationalism, because writing in one language can imaginarily connect a community of people belonging to the same language and nation (Billig, 1995;Yumul and Özkirimli, 2000). In this research, the focus was also on European themes or the so-called "banal Europeanism", so the indicator "EU" will show us if any of the portals have a special rubric dedicated to topics from the European Union.
The indicator "Nationhood" will show how much focus and space the portals give to national and local topics, while the indicator "Other" will highlight observations made during the research. Through these indicators, we will try to see the way in which, primarily through geographical toponyms, the Balkans as an imaginary area is woven into the media of the former Yugoslav states.

Serbia
Using

Croatia
Using the internet site "HR Portali -Svi hrvatski portali na jednom mjestu (HR Portals -All Croatian portals in one place)" for the media analysis of the topic, the following online information portals were selected: Večernji list, Jutarnji list, 24sata, Index, Dnevno, Direktno, 7dnevno, Telegram. While Index, Jutarnji list, and Telegram are considered to be left-oriented, the Dnevno and 7dnevno are considered by the Croatian public to be right-oriented sensationalist multimedia portals. Direktno is held to be an information portal intended for a conservative audience, while 24sata is a left-populist tabloid (HR portals, 2020).
For the sample of eight selected Croatian online information portals, research has shown us that only two of them (Index and Dnevno) meet the criteria of the indicator "region".
Following the indicator "Neighbouring countries", only Večernji list has a section called "Večernji BiH", which leads to a separate page for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The indicator "language" shows that all of the portals only have news in the official national language, Croatian, whilst only Index and Direktno have an "EU" section where they write about news and topics from the European Union. When it comes to the national and local level, the indicator "nationhood" shows that Večernji list leads here, with sections such as: "Domovina (Homeland)", "Hrvatska (Croatia)", "Hrvatska kakvu trebamo (Croatia as we need it)", " Digitalna Hrvatska (Digital Croatia)", which are also examples of deixes. The second portal focusing on local and national topics is Jutarnji list, containing the categories "Zagreb", "Potres (Earthquake)" and "Vir". While the rubric "Earthquake" focuses on the then recent earthquakes in Zagreb, Petrinja and surrounding places, the section "Vir" reports on occasional events from the Croatian island which bears that name. On other portals, the news is mostly divided into the following categories: "Homeland/Croatia" and "Zagreb". The last selected indicator, "Other", shows that of the eight portals, three of them (Dnevno, Direktno and 7dnevno) have a section called "Vjera (Religion)", dedicated to the Catholic community in Croatia. Furthermore, the tabloid 24sata additionally contains a section called "Nestali u domovinskom ratu (Missing in the Homeland War)", dedicated to the soldiers and locals who went missing during the Croatian War of Independence. Additionally, Večernji list also contains a page "Moja Hrvatska (My Croatia)", dedicated to Croatian emigrants, while the portal Telegram is not subject to any given indicator except "Other", where one can find sections such as "Politika i criminal (Politics and Crime)".

Slovenia
According to the results from the "MOSS -merjenje obiskanosti spletnih strani" web page Source: The authors' own representation.

Montenegro
The portals selected for analysis in Montenegro are based on the page "Crnogorski portali na jednom mjestu -Montenegrin portals in one place", which were compared with the portals that had the most followers on social media. This selection was made due to the lack of statistics and information on which sections are the most read. The Montenegrin media space is quite liberal and enables the free access and use of both local and foreign sources and information.
However, for some of the portals (Cafe del Montenegro, Analitika, Crnogorski Portal, and Borba), the political ideology remains unclear. Vijesti and Pobjeda are considered to be centre to centre-left, Aktuelno.me is a left-wing portal and Dan is a centre-right to right-wing online portal.
From the eight examined Montenegrin portals, only Crnogorski Portal does not contain any of the selected indicators, while Pobjeda has only one dedicated to its own country ("Crnom Gorom"). The rest of the six portals examined contain the indicator "region", under the 12 synonyms "Region" or "Balkan" (Vijesti and Dan). Three of them (Dan, Borba, and Analitika) also contain the indicator "Neighbouring countries". Analitika, however, lists each post-Yugoslav country separately. The indicators "Republic" and "EU" were not found in the investigated portals. They also do not report in other languages, and thus no minority languages are represented.

Bosnia and Herzegovina
The online portals for Bosnia and Herzegovina were selected from "Internet Portali BiH as a subsection, as well as one "Moja BiH" (My BiH). Nezavisne Novine has "BiH" and "Gradovi" (Cities). Klix has "BiH" and "Republika Srpska". None of these has the indicator "Republik". Glas Srpske lists "Serbia" as a "neighbouring country", while only Dnevni Avaz also reports in "English". Dnevni List is the only portal in the group with a special indicator devoted to the "EU".
Source: The authors' own representation.

Kosovo
Based on the number of followers, the portals for analysis from Kosovo were selected from many different sources such as scientific papers as well as social media. Given that the media outlets in such a small country are numerous and very diverse due to the extended rights for minority communities that comprise seven percent of the population, we only chose the portals that report at the national level: Kosova Press, Koha Ditore, Gazeta Express, Bota Sot, Epoka e RE, Kosova Sot, Telegrafi, and Lajmi.net. However, the political alignment of all of these portals remains undetermined.
In this analysis, Kosovo represents a somewhat unique case. Although the indicator "Region" can only be found in two portals, Kosova Press and Lajmi.net, it turns out that the definition of the region has a slightly different meaning. Kosova Press reports about the 14 countries in the region apart from BiH; at the time this research was carried out, Serbia comes up only in relation to Kosovo. In the section "Region" on Lajmi.net, there are also reports on activities in Greece. In Koha Ditore, however, the activities in and related to Kosovo are found under the section "Arberi", an old name for Albania until around the eighteenth century (Frashëri, 1964).

North Macedonia
As with the case of Kosovo, the portals of North Macedonia were selected from many different sources. Information-gathering research was carried out using scientific articles, on social media, and through consulting local journalists. However, assessment of the respective political spectrum remains incomplete.

Conclusion
This paper examines the connection of "banal nationalism" and regional toponyms through the lens of national online media portals in all post-Yugoslav countries. It is based on the assumption that "Balkan" identity is not as pronounced in Slovenia and Croatia as it is in the other five post-Yugoslav countries; this seems to be due to the first two countries being full members of the EU. The EU candidate (Montenegro, Serbia and North Macedonia) and potential candidate countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo) identify strongly with the term "Balkans", even though they are different from each other.
For this research, we examined fifty-six online portals in total, namely eight online portals in each country. We looked at sections containing the indicators "Region" (with synonyms "Balkans" and "EX-YU"); "Neighbouring countries"; "Language"; "EU"; "Republic"; and "Own Country"; and we noticed further details which were summarised in "Other". From the results obtained, it can be concluded that Croatia and Slovenia are clearly trying to erase the connotations of Balkan identity. In Kosovo, the news there shows that the concept of nationhood is more related to Albanian identity, linked to the so-called "Greater Albania" and this can be noticed under the indicator "Arberi", where items from Montenegro and North Macedonia are listed. The two latter countries both have Albanian minorities and the region populated by Albanians is considered to still bear that name. Table 9 below shows the final results obtained for each researched state and category. In Slovenian online portals, the indicator "Region" was not found, while in Croatia it comes up only in two subheadings. From the rest of the indicators, Slovenia reports only about its "own country". Only one Croatian online portal reports on its "own country"; while the two report on "EU" topics. The indicator "Region" appears in all of the online portals in Bosnia and Bosnia and Herzegovina has six portals, and Montenegro and Kosovo only three online portals with this information. Thus, this analysis confirms the initial hypothesis that the Balkan regional identity, at least in terms of geographical toponyms associated with the identification of space, is not expressed in Slovenia and Croatia which are EU member states. Although this article does not cover the broader area of banal nationalism in the Balkans or the successor states of Yugoslavia, it analyses details regarding the existence of regional identity in Western Balkan media, opening up additional space for the study of regional identification through the prism of national media.