Nobody wants to be balkan

they can retire here but we cant

Good stereotypes about the Balkans: happy, cheerful people, great cuisine, nice music, eternal sun, beautiful beaches

Good stereotypes about Eastern Europe: ???

*tugs on shirt* plastic penis dildo *sniff* and so on *applause from the audience*

He's a wierdo and I usually don't agree with him, but I admit the dude is really smart.

I've never even been to that part of the world and Instantly understood what Zizek was saying. He's saying people in the Balkans acknowledge that it's a shithole, they just like to pretend that their country doesn't count as part of the Balkans.

But you're all very tall at least, that's something

more like that "shithole" is an abstract idea, and everyone wants to distance themselves from it.

it'd be like calling "flyover states" only the ones you hate.

>happy, cheerful people
ahh yes, balkans, known for civil wars and ethnic cleansing and mass graves, so happy and cheerful
>cuisine
2nd rate copy-paste food from neighbors, name 1 original balkan food pro tip you cant
>sun, beaches
90% of us here are landlocked

ok but in the end is slovenia balkans or not?

I also got this video recommend lol

understandable unfortunately they all settle down here

I mean if we mean geographically yes, that's kinda undeniable. The southern pierce of Slovenia is the Balkans are all in. Culturally is a stickier situation because outside of the Yugoslavia situation and Tito being half-Slovenian thanks to his mother, Slovenia has always tried to connect itself culturally more to western Europe than to its own neighbors.

It makes more sense what he's getting at when you read his written version instead of him just going off the cuff in the video

“This very alibi confronts us with the first of many paradoxes concerning Balkan: its geographic delimitation was never precise. It is as if one can never receive a definitive answer to the question, "Where does it begin?"

For Serbs, it begins down there in Kosovo or Bosnia, and they defend the Christian civilization against this Europe's Other.

For Croats, it begins with the Orthodox, despotic, Byzantine Serbia, against which Croatia defends the values of democratic Western civilization.

For Slovenes, it begins with Croatia, and we Slovenes are the last outpost of the peaceful Mitteleuropa.

For Italians and Austrians, it begins with Slovenia, where the reign of the Slavic hordes starts.

For Germans, Austria itself, on account of its historic connections, is already tainted by the Balkanic corruption and inefficiency.

For some arrogant Frenchmen, Germany is associated with the Balkanian Eastern savagery—up to the extreme case of some conservative anti-European-Union Englishmen for whom, in an implicit way, it is ultimately the whole of continental Europe itself that functions as a kind of Balkan Turkish global empire with Brussels as the new Constantinople, the capricious despotic center threatening English freedom and sovereignty.

So Balkan is always the Other: it lies somewhere else, always a little bit more to the southeast, with the paradox that, when we reach the very bottom of the Balkan peninsula, we again magically escape Balkan.

Greece is no longer Balkan proper, but the cradle of our Western civilization.”

but it works the same with eastern Europe, it's always east to the place you live in, you're the last outpost of the western civilization while the neighbor you have a rivalry with is already the part of that eastern European Turkic-Mongol impoverished chaotic barbaricum.

in Poland we even have internal divisions like that, people in western Poland have a saying "east of Konin Asia begins".