The Balkan Warning Europe Ignored | Prof. Višeslav Simić

## Slavs erased from European history The conversation raises a blunt, unsettling claim: large swathes of European history have been written as if the Slavic peoples barely existed. That erasure is not merely an academic quibble but a sustained process with geopolitical consequences. From public exhibitions to university classrooms, narratives about Europe are selectively constructed in ways that downplay the presence, continuity, and cultural achievements of Slavic societies. The implication is profound: when a people are written out of mainstream histories, their claims to agency, territory, and dignity are easier to delegitimize in the present. Professor Višeslav Simić describes episodes that make this claim concrete. He recalls visiting a major museum exhibition during the 1990s sanctions against Serbia to find Serbian contributions to Roman and Byzantine legacies either minimized or omitted. Chronologies and labels that treat “Byzantium” as merely a Greek cultural space, or that present medieval polities through the lens of Western European historiography, effectively exclude Slavic rulers, texts, and institutions from the story of Europe’s past. These are not isolated oversights; they reflect scholarly traditions shaped by powerful metropolitan centers in Vienna, Berlin, and London that historically sponsored specific national narratives. This selective canonization has ripple effects inside the regions concerned. Simić points out that modern educational systems, influenced by external models and political pressure, sometimes teach versions of national history that are at odds with local archival evidence. He recounts how medieval Serbian chronicles and royal documents explicitly identified themselves in national terms—records that, if taken seriously, contradict narratives suggesting Slavs were late or derivative arrivals on the European stage. The broader consequence is psychological: generations internalize narratives of inferiority or marginality, reinforcing geopolitical hierarchies in which Western Europe is the center and everything to the east is a marginal blank. Erasure also plays out in how identities are policed and rewritten. Birth certificates, to take one visceral example from the conversation, can be instrumentally reissued to change a deceased person’s declared nationality, a bureaucratic gesture that signals how malleable “official” history can be under the influence of political agendas. When museum labels, school curricula, and state records converge to diminish a people’s historical continuity, they do more than obscure facts; they delegitimize present-day claims about language, culture, and sovereignty. ## Yugoslavia as a testing ground 00: 33:59 Racism against Slavs in the West The Balkan wars of the 1990s were more than a tragic breakdown of a multiethnic federation; the conversation frames Yugoslavia as an “experimental stage” where new methods of foreign pressure, information warfare, and selective intervention were tested. Yugoslavia’s disintegration provided a laboratory for external powers to trial legal instruments, sanctions, and media strategies that could be used elsewhere. That experimentation occurred against a backdrop of cultural and racial biases directed at Slavic peoples in Western political and intellectual circles. Simić’s account of his exile personalizes this point. He left Yugoslavia amid rising nationalist politics and experienced the paradox of Western policy: leaders could be praised as allies one day and prosecuted as pariahs the next, depending on shifting strategic interests. That fluidity, he argues, exposes the instrumental way foreign powers engage with weaker states—endorsing, manipulating, or abandoning them as convenience dictates. In Yugoslavia’s case, the international community’s selective interventions and post-hoc narratives reshaped who was presented as victim and who as perpetrator, often guided by geopolitical aims rather than a dispassionate reading of facts. Racism against Slavs in the West underpins these interventions. The conversation details how Western academic and media discourses historically framed Slavs as primitive, derivative, or intellectually inferior—tropes that made it easier to justify intervention and moral condemnation. This pattern echoes earlier imperial logics that moralize domination: if the “other” is backward, then external tutelage—or coercion—can be recast as civilizing. In the Yugoslav context, that translated into policies and public narratives that ignored local complexities and assigned collective guilt or victimhood based on reductive ethnicized categories. Yugoslavia thus became a double-edged precedent. It validated a method of foreign interference calibrated through legal, economic, and information tools, while simultaneously revealing the limits of moralistic narratives that ignore historical depth and local agency. The Balkan case warns that when external actors treat complex societies as test beds, they risk unleashing cascades of violence and long-term instability—outcomes that persist long after immediate interests have moved on. ## Western superiority and empire A recurring theme in the conversation is the persistence of a Western teleology: a belief in the centrality and exceptionalism of Western political forms and histories. This is not just pride; it operates as an intellectual machinery that defines what counts as “European,” who is deemed civilized, and which historical trajectories are worthy of study. Through the lens of empire, Western superiority becomes institutionalized—in museums, in universities, and in diplomatic practice. Simić traces how nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship emanating from Vienna, Berlin, and elsewhere prescribed historical narratives that subordinated Eastern and Southern European experiences to Western templates. The result was a historiography that naturalized Western institutions and left Slavic polities as anomalies in need of explanation. That intellectual scaffolding dovetailed with the political project of empire: to organize Europe into spheres of influence, to legitimize intervention, and to consolidate narratives that supported these aims. This dynamic also shows up in contemporary diplomacy. The readiness to treat certain leaders as allies or villains depending on their alignment with Western strategies reveals an informal imperial practice: power exercised through conditional recognition, sanctions, and rhetorical delegitimization. In effect, empire here is not just the formal rule of colonies but a persistent structure that shapes global order through cultural authority, legal norms, and media framing. The conversation insists that recognizing this pattern is crucial for understanding both past missteps and present tensions, particularly between Western institutions and nations perceived as outside their normative orbit. ## Selective reality and media bias If empire furnishes the ideology, media practices supply the instruments. The conversation stresses how contemporary media, often together with academic opinion, creates a selective reality—stories chosen and framed so that complex histories simplify into moral dramas with clear heroes and villains. The mechanics are familiar: emphasis, omission, and narrative closure. Less familiar is how intentional and systematic those choices can be when they meet geopolitical objectives. Simić points to concrete examples where media coverage and museum curation translated historical uncertainties into firm, often self-serving narratives. Exhibitions that fail to acknowledge Slavic contributions, classroom materials that minimize local literatures, and journalistic frames that present wars as simple ethnic hatreds are not mere mistakes. They are part of a pattern by which audiences in powerful countries are fed digestible, moralized stories that absolve distant policymakers of responsibility or hide inconvenient continuities.

Yugoslavia Was the "Experimental Stage" for Modern Conflict | Prof. Višeslav Simić Why did Yugoslavia have to die? And what exactly happened in Europe to the Slaves? Why is eastern Europe routinely left out in popular histories of the continent? Dr. Višeslav Simić is a professor from Mexico and former Yugoslav emigré. We speak about how Slavs have beeb erased from Western history, Yugoslavia as a test case for foreign pressure, and deep Russophobia in Europe and the US. Simić argues that media, academia, and empire use selective history, racism, and divide and conquer politics, while calling for stronger unity and better political action. Links: Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Merch: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Donation: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Timestamps: 00:00:00 Guest background and exile from Yugoslavia 00:08:00 Slavs erased from European history 00:18:00 Yugoslavia as a testing ground 00: 33:59 Racism against Slavs in the West 00:44:40 Western superiority and empire 00:52:03 Selective reality and media bias 00:59:19 Solutions and final thoughts #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies. Today we have Dr. Vyacheslav Simic, a professor of state strategy and governance based in Mexico. Vyacheslav, welcome. #Viseslav Simic Thank you, Pascal. It's an honor to be on your show. #Pascal It's great having you, and thank you very much for reaching out. You've worked a lot, actually, on the Balkan region, where you're originally from, and on the question of what the Slavs are and how they exist within the kind of European framework of international relations. And maybe we can start there. But before that, give us a little bit more background on your work and how you came to now teach also in Mexico. #Viseslav Simic Thank you. Yes, I had to leave what used to be Yugoslavia before it was destroyed in 1988, early 1988, just at the time when Milosevic was taking over. And I got my political asylum in the United States, where I eventually ended up in Boulder, Colorado, where I went to school. Before that, I was in school in London, here on the Hill, in England, in Great Britain. And I got political asylum after -- 1 of 19 -- actually having to explain a couple of times why I had to leave and why it would be dangerous to go back, because they were at that time convinced—and I have letters to prove that—claiming that Milosevic was the greatest ally and asset and friend of the United States, and the most progressive leader and all of that stuff. And we know how it ended. They killed him in The Hague in the end because they couldn't prove any of the charges against him, so they eliminated him from the game. And then we all now believe, at least in the West, that he was a war criminal and everything. I was the first, actually, who warned that he was going to be a disaster, although I will emphasize even now, he did not cause the destruction of Yugoslavia. He was one of the evil forces there—an old-fashioned, kind of stupid, limited, intellectually and geopolitically old-fashioned communist who just got lost in the big game and, in the end, tried to play a game with the U.S., and he lost. So, in the end, I ended up in the United States, went to school there, and then my professors recommended me to go to Washington, D.C., to live and work there, which I did. I had some letters of introduction and had a very good career in front of me, but soon I realized that it would cost me my soul and a public declaration that Serbs are evil and the cause of all the bad stuff in the Balkans, and basically have always been the devil's instrument on this earth. So I refused that, and then I ended up doing some kind of secondary jobs for a while until I found a place as a consultant and interpreter for top-level officials in the U.S., because they claimed that I was very good and educated, and I could actually translate and interpret all of these top-level negotiations and threats and blackmails and everything else that goes for U.S. diplomacy, you know, in quotes, over the last couple of centuries, basically. Anyway, I didn't cry about it. I was very happy, actually, to be like the fly—the proverbial fly on the wall—because I could sit there and become another piece of furniture for these, you know, princes of the earth, of this world, who decide the fate of millions of people. And nobody can lie to me about what happened and how it happened and who sold what to whom and who was threatened and everything else. I can tell you stories about these things. They're very interesting and entertaining. Sometimes I have to, like, entertain lots of friends, telling them stories all over again about the famous people who did this and that. Anyway. And after basically 25 years of working in America, I finally had a revelation, let's say, or a logical conclusion that that world is collapsing and disappearing. So since I cannot go back to Serbia and have a productive and happy life there unless I visit as a tourist, I came to Mexico, which I always liked because of its culture and lifestyle and climate and everything. I really enjoy living here and got a job—again, a very interesting story how I ended up getting a job at probably the best private university in Latin America, south of the border, as they like to say in the U.S. And I was there since 2010. And people were saying in D.C. when I left, you are jumping from the horse's back onto a donkey's back. -- 2 of 19 -- And now they're sending me emails saying, how can we move to Mexico? You know, so. In the meantime, I became a Mexican citizen and have a nice life here and everything. And now they cannot afford to, actually, even though they have really good jobs, they're struggling to make ends meet. And I have lots of emails, you know, and calls and visits—how can we move to Mexico? But it's now a little bit too late. Anyway, I studied, I taught here for years, since 2010, and now I'm kind of quite retired because I had lots of problems even at this kind of very open university because of other colleagues, mostly of European background—Western European, European Union—who came here. And then they clashed with me, or my teachings clashed. The students talk to each other. In the end, most of the students of these other professors come to my classes because they don't want to listen to the ideology propaganda. They come to learn, especially relating to Russia, and that was the biggest thing, you know, like since 2022, when I came out at the conference and said there is no invasion, this is a legitimate act of aid by one state to another. They exploded, they just started screaming and, you know, like all of that stuff. So I kind of, because I retired—which is also fine, I'm at that age when I can actually do that—and sometimes I give lectures and teach and privately kind of coach lots of students who continue their studies, master's degrees, and doctorates all over the place. And they're telling me now by email mostly, because I'm old-fashioned, I don't use these other things. They say Sima, as they call me, Sima, or they call me Moktesima, like Moctezuma, the emperor. They gave me a nickname, Moktesima. "Moktesima, you were right, everything is happening the way you said," you know, so they're scared, but... #Pascal Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I'm back, this can happen anytime again. So please consider subscribing not only here, but to my mailing list on Substack. That's pascallottaz.substack.com. The link's going to be in the description below. And now, back to the video. #Viseslav Simic Now, you know, this is quite important. #Pascal I mean, as soon as you have a different interpretation of what is currently going on, especially in Western Europe at the moment, you are immediately outcast. I mean, it happened to great scholars like Ulrike Guérot. Currently, also, the climate within academia, especially in Western Europe, is quite poisonous. And I'm very sad to hear that it extends all the way to Mexico. But then again, it also makes sense because it's a thing about how we view the world. Can we talk about how, I mean, you -- 3 of 19 -- pointed out to me that still today, you know, the way that Western Europe treats the Slavs, the Jews, the Eastern Europeans basically, and of course, Russians are also a good part of that — the Russians are Slavs. Of course, there are non-Slavic Russians, including the Kazakhs and so on, and others, and Khazars and other denominations. But what do you think, from your research, is important to understand about how the West treats the Slavs, the Southern Slavs, the Yugoslavs—I mean, Yugoslavia, it's really just Southern Slavic, right, Yugoslavia? You pointed out before the discussion that the Slavs in Eastern Europe are basically also today, even in international relations and history, often written out of history books or just not perceived, like anything east of East Germany is basically just a blank spot. Can you talk about this a bit? #Viseslav Simic Yes, as you were saying all of this, I remember in 1992 when the sanctions were imposed by the UN Security Council against Serbia, at that time Yugoslavia, which was then composed of Serbia and Montenegro. And there was a big exhibit on the so-called Byzantine Empire at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And a group of us went from D.C., Serbians, because we consider ourselves part of the Roman Empire. And some of the Roman emperors—not some, but a majority— came from what is today Spain and today Serbia. And if you include all the Serbian lands which were taken away from us, we actually gave most of the Roman emperors. And we never consider it Byzantine. It's just the Roman Empire for us. And they never called themselves Byzantines; they always called themselves Romanoi, you know, the so-called Greeks. And our Emperor Dušan, the soulful one, when he proclaimed his imperial constitution in the middle of the 14th century, which even today would be one of the most progressive constitutions in legal history, he called himself the Emperor of the Roman Empire, not the Serbian Empire. He was obviously Serbian, and he was the Serbian emperor by blood, but he was the Emperor of the Romans. And it's very funny to see these things when the West only considers themselves, and they were actually the ones who destroyed Rome and created all the barbarian kingdoms, which took more than a thousand years to come back to the Roman culture and traditions. But anyway, we went to this exhibit and we were shocked. Actually, I didn’t expect anything else but this that happened to us there. But my other friends were more artistic. They didn't know history or politics or anything, so they were really shocked and cried. Some of the ladies cried because Serbia was excluded. And then a couple of things that they actually, in the south, which is today Macedonia, they named either Greek or Albanian. Because at that time they did not recognize Macedonia as, you know, Northern Macedonia or separate from Serbia and all that stuff. So that's another interesting topic to talk about, because I have a family history with that. I'll tell you another time, because my father was actually born there in exile—the king exiled my -- 4 of 19 -- grandfather. And my father was born in the south of today's Macedonia, Northern Macedonia. And then when he died, we asked for a birth certificate to complete the process—you know how it goes when somebody dies—and we got it from today's Macedonia. It says that he was Bulgarian, changed our last name, said that he didn't have any citizenship, and that he was baptized in the Bulgarian church. You know, so they're rewriting history right as we talk, you know. But anyway, we were excluded. And then Russia had only, like, Kiev, and it said that it was ru