How to Remain Human: What do Balkan People Think About America?
What I've learned by speaking to different Balkan people across the region
What do Balkan people think about the United States?
The question is funny because, if you are an American, you will instinctively recoil at its formulation.
What does “Balkan” even mean? Isn’t that grouping together a diverse scattering of people from different cultures and walks of life? Isn’t that stereotyping across an entire region?
Seems dicey.
But the question comes to me time and again as I travel the region and meet people from all walks of life. Everyone has an opinion, and they’ll give it to you, even if you never asked for it.
From Serbia to Albania to Montenegro to North Macedonia to Bosnia, Balkan people love to talk about America.
So I’ll tell you what, in my experience, they think about the USA.
It’s not an easy question to answer because, yes, there are too many people in this corner of the world to neatly package their responses into a single, coherent thought and figure out what entire countries think about the US.
I’ll try anyways.
Bosnians positively love America. They love that America came to the country’s aid during the Serbian massacres. The US ended the conflict that besieged Sarajevo and tore the country apart, though they weren’t necessarily happy with the peace agreement America brokered, which saw the country split into an uneasy, ethnicity-based federation.
But when I tell Bosnians that I am American, a small light glimmers in their eyes and a wide smile breaks out across their faces.
Kosovars - Albanians who live in Kosovo, that is - are similar. They appreciate that the US intervened in Bosnia to stop the genocide of their co-religionists and that America supported them in Kosovo against the Serbs, too.
It’s funny because Albanians, having lived under harsh, state-enforced atheism (in Albania) for so long, are generally irreligious and have no idea what religion even entails.
But when you try to massacre an entire population because “the time has come to take revenge on the Turks” over what they did to your country back in 1389, back when the Ottoman Empire tore through southern Europe and reached as high as Austria-Hungary and successfully established a Muslim stronghold on the European continent, you can get people to calcify, somehow, to harden their positions.
(This direct quote is how Serbian generals justified the massacre of Bosnian women and children in 1995 when they entered Srebrenica and other eastern Bosnian villages.)
Americans are not yet seen as imperialist capitalist pigs in this corner of the world. At least here, America retains its image as the city on the hill, spreader of democracy and savior of the weak against the ruthless and strong. It’s easy to feel good about your blue passport, the emblem of the star-spangled banner waving in the wind behind a stony-faced eagle.
Albanians - the ones who live in Albania - generally love America because they see it as a place to make a decent living. They cannot fathom the concept of an American abandoning his golden ticket, his access to the richest and most powerful country on the face of the planet, to live in this backwards, economically-lagging part of the world.
“Ti eja ketu? Ne shkojme atje!”
“You come here?” Albanians ask me incredulously. “We go there!”
Albanians love America, and the second you tell them you’re an American, they start telling you about their cousin who lives in Florida or New York or the year they lived in Chicago or how they really loved visiting Texas. They want you to know they’ve seen a small slice of your home, and that they’d go back in a heartbeat if they could.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about how Balkan people view the United States, however, is the young-old divide.
Older generations generally express this type of unalloyed admiration for the United States.
Younger Balkan people are less enthused with the U.S., unless they’re Albanian, in my experience. And even then - it’ll depend.
Most of my Albanian friends - around or younger than thirty - who have visited the United States wrinkle their noses at the prospect of living there.
“The food tastes weird.”
That’s a big one. The common stereotype that food in Europe is better holds true. I remember the first time I went back to California after my first six months in Albania.
Everything tasted extremely bland. Produce is airy, like you’re biting into nothing at all.
A tomato in Albania, on the other hand, is an explosion of flavor and acid in your mouth. Biting into a cucumber is like gulping water from a fierce river. The texture and sweetness of cold watermelon on a hot summer afternoon are better than candy.
Cheese is…strong here. Maybe too strong - sometimes I can’t handle white cheese because it tastes like biting into a barnyard. Like I’m eating a farm itself with the smell of manure wafting up into my nostrils and a goat chewing grass in front of me, fixing me with a beady stare.
In the United States, food is full of sugar, preservatives and thousands of chemically-altered ingredients that nobody can pronounce.
In the Balkans, food is simple, clean and flavorful. A salad is greens, a little bit of olive oil, salt and pepper.
But in America, the same salad has eighteen different ingredients. Somehow, sugar finds its way into the green mix of leaves.
Don’t ask how or why.
“People there are very lonely.”
This is what a group of young Serbian musicians I met in Kotor, Montenegro told me. Their attitudes towards the United States summed up what most young Balkan people I meet think about America.
“I feel like everyone there is always working.”
Fact-check: true.
“I feel like they are all working and so busy at their jobs and then go home and eat shitty food and don’t talk to each other.”
Also true.
“And the families are very far from each other. People are not connected to each other, and I think they are very sad because of that.”
Recent studies confirm that Americans are lonelier than ever. A trend that the pandemic only accelerated as government-mandated lockdowns forced us into our homes and to rely on screens to interact with the outside world.
The more career-oriented people my age whom I meet want to leave the Balkans. They dream of moving to Italy or Germany for higher salaries as doctors or lawyers or to have greater access to capital to start their own businesses.
But they express fear about moving to the United States. It’s a step too far.
There’s a fear lurking behind their eyes: they will become too American.
Too polite.
Too fake.
Working too much.
Never seeing their families or friends.
That they’ll become a cog in the machine.
Every American I have met traveling or living in the Balkans is here for much the same reason that Balkan people stay put in their home countries.
The desire for slower, simpler living.
The idea that life isn’t all about a career, work and money.
I don’t need Amazon.
I will be okay without the latest technological gadgets.
My life is much better with a smaller bank account yet more friends and family surrounding me.
I’d rather be able to visit six different countries that border my own, offering different cultures and cuisines and landscapes and languages, than be stuck on a continent where everyone speaks English, works at least forty hours a week and eats the same gross food.
And sports that glazed-over, fake, polite smile.
To be a successful typical American is to be a cog in a hyper-materialistic and capitalistic system that has produced the highest number of patents and technological breakthroughs on the face of this planet. It’s a system that has helped Europe maintain relative stability and peace for some seven decades. It’s a competitive ecosystem that creates innovative products at low prices that the rest of the world happily consumes.
But it also produces lifeless automatons that report the highest rates of depression and anxiety worldwide. America’s people are sick - whether it’s because we eat synthetic crap, spend virtually no time with family, friends and loved ones, because we are glued to screens that suck every ounce of productivity and attention out of us or because we are addicted to work and hustle culture, there is no denying that Americans are a sick people.
The ease with which Americans talk about their mental health scares me; if you spend enough time with Balkan people, you can forget that some of these complexes and conditions even exist. Speaking to an American about their depression and anxiety feels familiar yet disturbing since realizing things don’t have to be that way.
And I don’t see how things will get any better for Americans any time soon as the world only becomes more integrated, we compete with the Chinese for technological and economic prowess and technology creeps ever deeper into every private corner of our lives.
The Balkans provides a refreshing breath of fresh air. People here are not depressed or anxious, for the most part, even though many of them have experienced tremendous trauma and pain that the average American cannot fathom. Imagine your family members being massacred because they are Muslim, or a communist government ‘disappearing’ your parents for expressing the wrong political opinion. Imagine growing up in a house where ‘dinner’ consisted of a bottle of watered-down yogurt passed around a table of ten people and, if you were lucky, a loaf of bread.
Yet these people report little to no anxiety or depression. Speak to the typical American millennial, however…and the litany of complaints about passive-aggressive microaggressions they experienced at work, the loneliness, the difficult time they have with “getting my parents to understand me” never ends.
Young people in this corner of the world understand exactly what is going on in the industrialized world, which the United States leads.
And, for the most part, want nothing to do with it.
But we are all steadily marching forward into this brave new world. Even in Albania, everyone is tethered to Instagram and TikTok. Governments around the world spy on our every move and interaction and corporations ruthlessly squeeze pennies out of our wallets by creating synthetic and chemically-altered food on an industrial scale that is probably poisoning us and removing all the joy out of the simple process of eating.
I wonder how long it’ll take before it reaches this quaint corner of the world where strangers can spontaneously meet and enjoy an afternoon together on a placid lake in North Macedonia. Where neighbors stay put and trust each other, not locking their front doors and cars at night, where children can still run around the neighborhood barefoot, kicking around soccer balls made of rags and streaming home once dusk falls, greeted by apron-clad mothers cooking dinner.
That’s the Albania my friends grew up in. Hell, that’s the France a friend tells me she grew up in. Where kids could run around freely and parents didn’t hover, nobody had cell phones and children came home at dark. Before mass migration meant your neighbor could be anyone from any part of the world, so, of course, you couldn’t just leave your front door unlocked.
A hilarious, tongue-in-cheek song by a popular Bosnian ensemble encapsulates the Balkan desire to move to the “promised land.” When the singer arrives in America, he learns just how difficult life there can be and craves to return back home:
One day when you reach the end
One day you will understand
One day back to roots, my friend
No place like a motherland
Balkan people (perhaps not Serbs and their allied minorities scattered across former Yugoslavia) mostly love and respect America. They appreciate what the United States has done to stabilize the region, even if, at times, they quibble at its overly-masculine interventions in local politics.
And they wish they could have the relative economic stability and comfort that Americans enjoy.
They just don’t want to become fifty-first states full of neurotic, chemical-fed robots taking marching orders from corporate overlords. They prefer to remain imperfect, poorer and perhaps less connected to the entire world.
In a word: human.
Lovely writing Harel. I really enjoyed this American insight into this area of the world and their opinion of America. Your descriptions of tomatoes and cucumbers in Albania had my salivary glands pumping.