Dilemmas of Teaching Post-1989 Southeast European Politics in Comparative Perspective

Teaching post-1989 Southeast European politics has run a 35-year long course from being a limited area study of global interest, owing to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, to becoming a laboratory of studying the rise and fall of illiberal regimes, a contentious topic in today’s comparative politics. Along the way, instructors of relevant topics have had to address many dilemmas. Five examples of dilemmas are 1) how to avoid the diffusion of stereotypes about Southeastern Europe among students, while highlighting the particular aspects of politics in Southeastern Europe in comparison with Central Eastern and Southern Europe, in which comparable political transformations also took place in the last quarter of the 20th century; 2) how to explain ongoing political changes in Southeastern Europe by referring back to the legacy of tumultuous nation-building of late 19th and early 29th century in the region, without underplaying the significance of more recent developments such as the mode of extrication from state socialist regimes, ethnic conflict and the fate of minorities, the variety of capitalism and the current relations between economic and political power in the region; 3) how to navigate the existing transnational data bases, surveys, and assessments of democracy and political culture to place Southeast European politics in comparative perspective, without foregoing local and regional sources of qualitative and quantitative political and economic data; 4) how to integrate external factors (globalization, EU’s impact) and domestic factors (ethnic relations, leading political personalities, types of political party systems) to explain the meanders of Southeast European politics; and 5) how to apply ideal typical constructs (“illiberalism”, “competitive authoritarianism”, “authoritarian populism”) to analyze 21st century politics in Southeastern Europe, without lumping together the cases of the wide variety of national political regimes of the region. The paper is based on research on course curricula of political science courses on Southeastern Europe from different university programmes and on personal experience of teaching the comparative politics of Southeastern Europe over a quarter of a century (since 1999) at the post-graduate level.