Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe

Pål Kolstø

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317049357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Essays in Politik & Internationale Beziehungen

After the conflagration of Tito's Yugoslavia a medley of new and not-so-new states rose from the ashes. Some of the Yugoslav successor states have joined, or are about to enter, the European Union, while others are still struggling to define their national borders, symbols, and relationships with neighbouring states. Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe expands upon the existing body of nationalism studies and explores how successful these nation-building strategies have been in the last two decades. Relying on new quantitative research results, the contributors offer interdisciplinary analyses of symbolic nation-building in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia to show that whereas the citizens of some states have reached a consensus about the nation-building project other states remain fragmented and uncertain of when the process will end. A must-read not only for scholars of the region but policy makers and others interested in understanding the complex interplay of history, symbolic politics, and post-conflict transition.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Pål Kolstø

The disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) in the 1990s led to the establishment of seven new states; the final one, Kosovo, fell in place as late as in 2008.¹ These states have had to cope with a wide array of challenges, of which establishing state structures was perhaps the smallest problem. All seven had previously been federal units in the SFRJ and had inherited a complete set of political institutions – a parliament, various departments, a supreme court – and so on. Originally intended for substate units, these institutions could easily be elevated to the status of state structures. A far more pressing issue has been the need to rebuild the economy. In the first decade after the death of Tito, Yugoslavia had experienced runaway inflation that swept away whatever savings its citizens might have been able to accumulate. And no sooner had prices been brought under control than war broke out in several of the former republics, leading to the bloodiest carnage in Europe since the Second World War. Populations were decimated, infrastructure ruined, homes and even entire villages demolished. All this had to be repaired at the same time as the economic system was being transformed from plan-based to market-based. The new state leaders certainly had their work cut out for them.

Just across the border, Albania was undergoing many of the same convulsions. Together with Yugoslavia, this was the only Communist state in Europe which had stood outside the Soviet bloc. It had to fend for itself when its specific kind of Maoism was discredited and dismantled. In the 1990s Albania went through prolonged fits of anarchy and virtual societal collapse before the situation was eventually stabilized on a new footing.

Whereas the political and economic challenges of transition from Communism in the new states have received the most attention, this book focuses on a third crucial task that has confronted the leaders of the West Balkan states: the question of political identity. Margaret Canovan (1966) has convincingly argued that a state needs the support of its population in order to survive in the long term. Polities must be able to maintain some degree of unity. ‘A polity which cannot successfully command the loyalty of its members, will sooner or later be replaced by one that can’ (Canovan 1996: 22) This claim, in its strictest sense at least, is probably somewhat overstated: in every state, however benign and successful, there will be some disgruntled citizens who do not accept its legitimacy – but all modern states do need the loyalty of the (overwhelming) majority of the population. In the new post-Communist states, such loyalty could not be taken for granted.

Processes and strategies leading up to the establishment of a nation-state are often referred to as nation-building. The concept of nation-building came into vogue in the 1960s among historically-oriented social scientists who studied processes of state construction in now-established states on the Atlantic rim (see for example Deutsch and Foltz 1966). In these states, the subjects of the monarch had been gradually and imperceptibly turned into citizens who came to constitute ‘the nation’. Ever-larger sectors of the masses were brought into the state structures through conscription into the army, compulsory schooling, and so on. Through enlargement of the franchise, new groups began to participate in the political system. These processes led to greater identification with the state among its citizens, who now constituted ‘the nation’ (Rokkan et al. 1999, Kolstø 2000: 16–18).

Today, the nation-state has become the only game in town, in the sense that all states present themselves as such and take their legitimacy from the People or the Nation. Political leaders pursue policies designed to bring about the nation-state, at least on the rhetorical level. (Kymlicka 2001, 23–6; Gat 2013) In reality, however, the symbols of the nation may draw one-sidedly upon one particular cultural or ethnic group in the country, to the extent that minorities feel excluded from ‘the nation’, despite the rhetoric.

Three Waves of Nation-building

It was no coincidence that the study of nation-building commenced precisely in the 1960s. That was the decade when decolonization in Africa and Asia led to the creation of dozens of new states. In three years alone, between 1960 and 1962, the organization called the United Nations gained 28 new members. Many observers, however, felt that when speaking of these recently admitted states the term ‘nation’ was in many cases a misnomer. The new states were held to be ‘artificial’: their populations consisted of many disparate ethnic groups speaking different languages and lacking any sense of common identity (see for example Emerson 1963). No, they were not ‘nation-states’ in any reasonable sense of the word – at best, they still had decades of nation-building ahead of them. The study of ‘nation-building’ aimed at highlighting the crucial difference between these wannabe nation-states and the ‘real’ ones. Thus, from its very inception, the study of nation-building involved a strong element of comparison between ‘old’ and new states (Deutsch and Foltz 1963, Rustow 1967).

If state creation in the ‘old’ nation-states of Western Europe can be called a first wave of nation-building, and decolonization in the 1960 led to a second wave, then the nation-building that followed after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia – the two multiethnic Communist states of Europe/Eurasia – may be described as a third wave.² All of them had a former existence as a substate unit, a republic or province in the now-disintegrated state. Within the confines of the Communist political system they had undergone a nation-building process of sorts (Bunce 1999, Roeder 2007). They had their own institutions, symbols and other paraphernalia; even so, the identities and loyalties of their respective populations were often highly contested, and in several instances led to the outbreak of civil wars. The leaders of these states, in various ways and with differing strength, have sought to foster a sense of common identity among the people and to link this identity to the state. It is these state-initiated identity-building strategies in post-Communist states of the West Balkans that constitute the topic of this book.

In contemporary political science and journalism the term ‘nation-building’ is used in many different ways, often leading to considerable confusion. To some authors it denotes processes of identity consolidation and ‘national awakening’ among ethnic groups with no state of their own (see for instance Connor 1994). Others use it as a term for institutional construction and reconstruction in failed states, usually in the wake of war, such as the US-led ‘nation-building’ in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq (see for example Fukuyama 2006). Our usage of the term in this book differs from both these definitions. We reserve ‘nation-building’ for strategies of identity consolidation within states and distinguish it from ‘state-building’. The latter term, as we use it, pertains to the administrative, economic and military groundwork of functional states – the ‘hard’ aspects of state construction. Nation-building, in contrast, concerns only the ‘softer’ aspects of state consolidation, such as the construction of a shared identity and a sense of unity among the population. This distinction, if not universally accepted, has at least become fairly common in political science literature (see Birch 1989: 40, Brubaker 1996: 80–83).

To be sure, the issues of state-building and nation-building are closely interconnected. In the modern world, a state – any state – is expected to provide its citizens with distinct services and benefits, such as external and internal security. Increasingly, the state is also expected to provide welfare and various amenities of life. Before people attach their identity and loyalty to the state, they tend to ask ‘what do I get in return?’ If the state cannot deliver, it might be assumed that the people will withhold their allegiance, or at least that the bond between the state and the populace will be weakened. However, there is no necessary or inherent connection between nation-building and state-building. As we shall see, some Balkan states that have failed in socioeconomic terms may still to a surprising degree command the loyalty of their citizens.

Nation-building on the Ashes of Multinational Communist States

Nation-building in the new, post-Communist nations has certain preconditions that distinguish these cases from the two preceding waves. In the ‘old’ European nation-states, nation-building was a protracted process that spanned centuries. With regard to England and France, it may have started already in the late Middle Ages (Hastings 1997). By contrast, in the states created after the Cold War, these developments are being compressed into much shorter timespans. Moreover, in the first and second waves, nation-building was closely linked to socioeconomic and political modernization. In fact, as used by many researchers, nation-building was simply an aspect of modernization processes (Bendix 1964, Rustow 1967). The Communist states in Europe, however, had already become basically modern when they collapsed. The leaders of both the USSR and the SFRJ had been active modernizers – indeed, to a large extent they had built their legitimacy on their ability to lift their populations out of poverty and ignorance, and into the industrialized world. The ways and means employed had often been disastrously inefficient and wasteful, but it was modernization nevertheless. By the late twentieth century the citizens of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, as well as those of other Communist states in Eastern Europe, to an increasing degree were living in cities and working in industrial plants and factories. They were literate, and each new generation climbed higher up the education ladder. In other words, when nation-building in the Communist successor states commenced, the process was decoupled from modernization.

Thirdly, ‘classic’ first-wave nation-building generally came about as a result of unintended socioeconomic processes – such as industrialization – or as a side-effect of policies that did not have as their primary aim to build a nation or foster a common identity among the population. One example of the latter is the extension of the franchise: it was not motivated primarily by nation-building, but was driven by concerns for democratization and demands from the lower classes for a rightful share of power and influence in society. When their struggle for democratic rights succeeded, the workers could, as an important side-effect, also more readily identify with the state, which now recognized them as fully-fledged members of the polity. In the recent third wave of nation-creation, however, the unintended and indirect means of nation-building have been less prominent. The entire population had received formal voting rights already under Communism. Not that this necessarily mattered much as long as the Communist Party (or ‘the League of Communists’ as it was called in Yugoslavia) was in control – but it has meant that, just as the case with modernization, democratization is not the main arena of nation-building in post-Communist Europe today.

As a combined effect of all these circumstances – no linkage to modernization or democratization, together with the sharply compressed timespans – direct and deliberate methods of nation-building have been more prominent in the third wave than in the first one. In fact, it can be argued that the very term ‘nation-building’ has now become more apposite than when it was first introduced. After all, ‘building’ is an architectural metaphor, with undertones of architects and artisans actively at work. In the third wave, state leaders do indeed to a large extent design deliberate and active strategies aimed at building a sense of solidarity and common identity among the population. This means that the construction and manipulation of symbols and rituals – what Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983) called ‘the invention of tradition’ – play increasingly crucial roles.

Finally, the states of the Western Balkans today have an important factor in common with the African and Asian states that were created in the ‘second wave’: also the peoples of the Balkan states have retained strong ethnic and national cultures that remain politically relevant. The first generation of nation-building theorists who studied developments in West European states had been remarkably unconcerned with ethnic issues, even if ethnic identities did persist in several Western states and had shown a potential for becoming politicized. Instead, socioeconomic cleavages along estate and class lines, as well as periphery–centre conflicts, were seen as the major hurdles to be overcome on the path towards achieving the nation-state (Tilly 1975, Rokkan 1975). In Africa, by contrast, ethnic and cultural identities were regarded as the main obstacle to nation-building. In the 1960s, Rupert Emerson noted:

the extended family, the clan, and the tribe are the communities in which Africans have lived their lives and which continue to play a very large role today … [It] is more plausible to think that tribalism will be a force to be reckoned with in Africa than that it will succumb to the attacks of the nationalists. (1966: 97)

Similar claims about the centrifugal power of traditional group identities at the substate level have been made about West Balkan nations as well.

To be sure, we should exercise caution in applying the Western concept of ‘ethnicity’ to Balkan societies. The standard term in the former Yugoslavia is narod, which corresponds neither to ‘an ethnic group’ nor to ‘a nation’ as these concepts are used in the West.³ In Western parlance, ‘ethnic group’ is a non-political concept, with no inherent relation to the population of a state, whereas ‘nation’ is a political concept, simply shorthand for ‘the entire population of the state’. Narod, on the other hand, in the traditional meaning of the word, is simultaneously a cultural and a political concept, as it denotes a cultural group which possesses a political identity linked to a state but is not identical with the entire population of that state.⁴ The narod is rooted in history, although certainly not as old as often claimed (its genealogy is frequently traced back into the Middle Ages, to times long before ethnic culture was politicized). Still, the ethnopolitical narodi are clearly older than today’s Yugoslav successor states, and also considerably older than the non-defunct multinational state of Yugoslavia. With the exception of Bosnia, each successor state is eponymous with its dominant narod, and this cultural-cum-political group claims the state as ‘its’ nation-state in an exclusive sense (Brubaker 1996).

To complicate matters further, the concept of the narod is today increasingly being used in the Balkans also in the Western understanding of an entity that embraces the total population of the state. This is made possible by the fact that narod covers meanings that in English are conveyed by two separate words, ‘nation’ and ‘people’. As a result, we can find expressions such as ‘the Croatian narod’ and ‘the narod of Croatia’ side by side in the same text, with different meanings. The traditional cultural-political concept and the newer territorially-bounded concept exist in a somewhat uneasy cohabitation.

In addition to having separate myths of origin and historical memories, the Balkan narodi are often but not always constituted through and distinguished from one another by their traditional adherence to different religious beliefs and confessions. As a result, not only ethnic culture, but also religious culture is politicized. In a few instances – the Albanians being the most prominent case – religious differences cut across narod boundaries, but they generally coincide with and reinforce them. Indeed, in some instances, when other diacritica are weak or virtually absent, religion functions as the main pillar of identity differentiation. This is the case in the Serbian-Bosnian-Croatian triangle, where language differences are clearly insufficient to sustain separate narod identities – but religion sustains that function. Or, to be more precise, religious practices or beliefs have become largely irrelevant, and what now matters is the traditional or historical religion of the group. As Ernest Gellner once remarked (1983/1990: 71–2), having different narod identities carried the implication of having been Orthodox or Catholic or Muslim.

A leading theorist of multiculturalism, Bikhu Parekh, maintains that a multicultural society, no less than a culturally homogeneous society, needs a strong sense of unity and belonging among its citizens. In fact, the demand for unity and belonging is even more pronounced in societies where there are marked cultural differences among groups: ‘The greater and deeper the diversity in a society, the greater the unity and cohesion it requires to hold itself together and nurture its diversity. A less cohesive society feels threatened by differences and lacks the confidence and the willingness to welcome and live with them (Parekh 2006: 196).

As Parekh sees it, there is no contradiction here, since cultural diversity manifests itself on the level of society and, in theory at least, does not interfere with national consolidation at the state level. A person may well harbour a range of different identities in different relationships and at different levels. As this book will show, however, culture and politics are not always easily compartmentalized.

This study deals with all Yugoslav successor states with the exception of Slovenia, plus Albania. These are the states that in EU terminology are included in the category of ‘Western Balkans’ (see for example ‘Western Balkans’ 2008). While there are no intrinsic reasons wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Fulfilling the Thousand-Year-Old Dream: Strategies of Symbolic Nation-Building in Croatia
• 3 Jaws of the Nation and Weak Embraces of the State: The Lines of Division, Indifference and Loyalty in Bosnia-Herzegovina
• 4 Serbia and the Symbolic (Re)Construction of the Nation
• 5 When Two Hands Rock the Cradle: Symbolic Dimensions of the Divide Over Statehood and Identity in Montenegro
• 6 Kosovo: Topography of the Construction of the Nation
• 7 Strategies for Creating the Macedonian State and Nation and Rival Projects Between 1991 and 2012
• 8 Status Report Albania 100 Years: Symbolic Nation-Building Completed?
• 9 Conclusions: Success and Failure of Nation-building, Structural vs. Political Factors
• Bibliography
• Index