"Our hope is that we can work with Europeans on a global framework, a global infrastructure which has appropriate global oversight, so we don't have a balkanized system at the global level, like we had at the national level," Mr. Geithner said.
Interesting use of ‘balkanized’... Brings to mind near / far away argument, that somehow we all understand the what the term “balkanized” implies, without actually knowing what it is. As K.E. Fleming argued, “the Balkans are both fully known and wholly unknowable... To Balkanize after all, means to divide; or fragment, along absurdly minute and definitionally obscure grounds.”
Balkans has truly become a metaphor for collapse, dysfunction and chaos when it is being used to such an absurd degree: as an explanation that the US financial system was in a mess he alludes to the collapse of the Former Yugoslavia. Incredibly derogatory towards the region in question, yet totally acceptable in mass media. In the language he uses, he suggests that the US and Europe (i.e. EU) work together to stop the ‘Balkans’ syndrome from harming the civilized order. Yet, is it not the ‘civilized’ (i.e. Non-balkanized) people which in fact created this “balkanized system”? How fitting is this as its own metaphor for the actual attitude of the West towards the Balkans, both historically and now?
The full article where I found the quote is in the Herald Tribune:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/26/business/regulate.php
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