Both Orientalism and Balkanism are inventions, but the two terms differ insofar as Balkanism refers to a concrete historical and geographical entity and refers to the Byzantine and Ottoman legacies. What Todorova defines as Balkanism was formed over a period of two centuries mostly by Western travelers and crystallized in a specific discourse about the Balkans around at the time of the Balkan Wars and First World War. In the ensuing decades this discourse attained additional feature, and the rest was discursive hardening. Also, the war in former Yugoslavia was evidenced as confirming the idea of the Balkan being fundamentally different from Western Europe. Discussing the barbarity of the Balkans and the need for intervention helped create a sense of common identity and purpose in the European Union.
European identity is constructed through a negative principle.
It was based on a preconceived notion of Western Europe as civilized and the Balkans as savage. The division of Europe into a civilized West and uncivilized East continues to be hotly debated. Said s unawareness of the nature of the sexual implications of the unconsciousness site of Orientalism. While examining the concept of latent Orientalism as the real where unconscious desires, fantasies, dreams about Orient reside, she points out the importance of the ways in which representations of the Orient are interwoven by sexual images, desires and fantasies. The metaphor of the veil may be a good metaphor to deal with the issue of sexual fantasies of the West the veil as a metaphor in the construction of the reality of Orient, because the veil becomes a curtain which simultaneously conceals and reveals.