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How does an award-winning, talented film director from ethnic strife-ridden Sarajevo or, on an even higher level, the bestowal of the Nobel Prize in Literature on a writer from Istanbul relate to the new puzzle of conflicting interests in the regional energy market of Southeast Europe? A cursory look at the data would convince one that any attempt to connect the two would be pointless, even in bad taste.

However, a cool-headed, perspicacious observer would recognize the multiple political symbolisms that accompany these awards. Such a person would also fully connect them with the wider initiative to reconstruct the economic and business map of the broader SE Europe. These initiatives are aimed at turning the area into a highly distinctive center of development in the new competitive environment globalization is fashioning.

In this case, the political symbolism of awards ― which is open to multiple and multiply interesting readings ― could only be genuinely substantiated on the basis formed by the explosive rise in cross-border investment and business activities. And all this is taking place at a time when the area ― as officials of the European Investment Bank have ascertained ― is a region on the move.

The rapid increase in investment is causing not only the economic and business parameters to change, but mainly the social and political ones. The investments demand new approaches for both the significance of the role that this regional market is going to play in the future and for the distinctive prospects of the wider area of SE Europe in European and international affairs.

The demand for a change in outlook and approach becomes even more imperative if one considers the timing: The entry of two new members into the European Union, Bulgaria and Romania, coincides with the clarification of the procedure for the accession negotiations conducted with Turkey, while the rest of the countries of the Western Balkans are waiting to follow. And this at a time when the whole region is becoming the crossroads where (through convergence or even confrontation) powerful financial and business interests ― the origins of which lie beyond the avowed interest of the EU powers ― are going to meet.

The Swedish Academy, in justifying its decision to award the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature to Orhan Pamuk, points out a fact that has a special ― and not only literary ― value, the significance of which transcends the borders of the world of literature: The writer ‘in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.’ Yet Pamuk, as an active citizen of the world at large, is also on a quest (as suggested in an article of his published in The New Yorker, in December 2005) for answers regarding the limits and the relations between the powers which are promoting the integration of the local markets into the environment of the globalized economy and the powers of the most extreme fanaticism which consider actual democracy and freedom to be just ‘inventions of the Western civilization.’

When the film director Jasmila Zbanic, from Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina, received one of the four awards presented by the Thessaloniki International Film Festival’s Balkan Fund for 2003, she addressed the audience attending the special ceremony that had been organized in Thessaloniki with the following words: ‘I hope to do justice to the award.’ She did it more than justice, since her film Grbavica ― the script of which was financed by the Balkan Fund ― won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2006. Zbanic, in relating a traumatic experience (her heroine discovers that she is the product of a rape during the civil war period), lets her imagery compose a song in film, which transcends ethnic conflicts; a song based on the ordinary people’s account of truth and on real experience; that is to say, on that cosmic power which is essential to social progress.

Pamuk and Zbanic, being fully conscious of their origins, have achieved through their work the status of distinguished representatives of the Society of Citizens of SE Europe ― a society which strives to turn the developmental stock of the wider region into a peace dividend, a dividend on political stability and social prosperity.