The Macedonian Conflict

Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World

Loring M. Danforth

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691221717
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Greeks and Macedonians are presently engaged in an often heated dispute involving competing claims to a single identity. Each group asserts that they, and they alone, have the right to identify themselves as Macedonians. The Greek government denies the existence of a Macedonian nation and insists that all Macedonians are Greeks, while Macedonians vehemently assert their existence as a unique people. Here Loring Danforth examines the Macedonian conflict in light of contemporary theoretical work on ethnic nationalism, the construction of national identities and cultures, the invention of tradition, and the role of the state in the process of building a nation. The conflict is set in the broader context of Balkan history and in the more narrow context of the recent disintegration of Yugoslavia.
Danforth focuses on the transnational dimension of the "global cultural war" taking place between Greeks and Macedonians both in the Balkans and in the diaspora. He analyzes two issues in particular: the struggle for human rights of the Macedonian minority in northern Greece and the campaign for international recognition of the newly independent Republic of Macedonia. The book concludes with a detailed analysis of the construction of identity at an individual level among immigrants from northern Greece who have settled in Australia, where multiculturalism is an official policy. People from the same villages, members of the same families, living in the northern suburbs of Melbourne have adopted different national identities.

CHAPTER I

Ethnic Nationalism: The Construction of National Identities and Cultures

WHILE many people hoped that the early 1990s would be celebrated as the time when long-cherished dreams of European integration and unification were finally realized, it seems more likely now that these years will be remembered as a period of dramatic, and often violent, disintegration and fragmentation. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the break up of Yugoslavia, in addition to the separatist movements of western Europe and the ethnic politics of the United States, Canada, and Australia, testify to the fact that ethnic nationalism continues to be a major political force in the Western world in the final decade of the twentieth century. What Anthony Smith (1981) has called “the ethnic revival”—the surge of support for ethnic minorities demanding cultural freedoms, human rights, political autonomy, and even national independence—shows every sign of increasing in both intensity and scope.

Various reasons are cited to explain this resurgence of ethnic nationalism. Although the power of nationalist ideologies themselves has tended to seduce us with the myth that European states are ethnically homogeneous, closer examination clearly reveals the existence of many politically mobilized ethnic groups that pose a range of threats to the stability of the states in which they live. The contradiction between the widespread theoretical acceptance of the right to national self-determination and the equally widespread practical refusal of states to tolerate their own dismemberment has been a major cause of this resurgence. Other contributing factors include the recent wave of democratization that has spread through eastern Europe; alienation from increasingly impersonal, bureaucratic, and centralized states; and the declining importance of class-based political parties and movements. Uneven economic development has often frustrated the desires of regionally based ethnic groups for educational and occupational mobility and an improved standard of living. Finally, improvements in mass communication have enabled states to impose dominant national cultures and symbols more effectively on the private lives of members of minority groups. Ethnic nationalism can therefore be seen as an attempt to maintain or to recreate a sense of identity and community in the face of the threat of cultural assimilation or annihilation.¹

Although in many ways the recent wave of ethnic nationalism is a continuation of a process that began in the late eighteenth century, Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out one important difference. Nineteenth-century national movements, which were often directed against huge multinational empires, were engaged in the building of nations; their goal was seen to be national unification and expansion. Furthermore, they were governed by what Hobsbawm (1990:31) has called a “threshold principle”—the principle that the right to national self-determination applied only to nations that were of sufficient size to form viable political and economic units. More recent national movements, however, which are often directed against the very states that came into being as a result of earlier national movements, are frequently accused of destroying nations; their goal is seen to be separatist and divisive. The threshold principle has been abandoned; there seems to be no limit to how small new nations can be.

Macedonia provides a tragically apt example of what Clifford Geertz (1973d:276) has described as the “self-reinforcing whirlpools of primordial discontent” that swirl around newly emerging states. After the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, the Republic of Macedonia declared its independence on September 8, 1991. Almost immediately, however, the survival of Macedonia as a sovereign and independent state was seriously threatened both on the domestic and the international fronts by a variety of nationalist ideologies and movements. In January 1992, the Albanian minority in Macedonia, which makes up over one-fifth of the republic’s population, held a referendum and voted overwhelmingly in favor of “the political and territorial autonomy of the Albanians in Macedonia” and the formation of their own state, the Republic of Ilirida.

Even more ominous, however, has been the response of Macedonia’s Balkan neighbors. Bulgaria, while it recognizes the existence of a Macedonian state, refuses to recognize the existence of a Macedonian nation on the grounds that Macedonians are really Bulgarians. Serbia, where some nationalists refer to Macedonia as “South Serbia,” has refused to recognize the Republic of Macedonia. Finally, Greece refuses to recognize either a Macedonian state or a Macedonian nation on the grounds that everything Macedonian—the name, the people, the history, and the territory—is exclusively Greek. From a Greek perspective international recognition of the Republic of Macedonia constitutes a threat to the cultural heritage of the Greek nation as well as the territorial integrity of the Greek state.

In this book I am concerned with precisely this aspect of the Macedonian conflict—the dispute between Greeks and Macedonians over which group has the right to identify itself as Macedonian.

ETHNIC NATIONALISM

A great deal of ambiguity and confusion surrounds the use of terms like “ethnic group,” “nation,” “state,” and “nationalism.” Because they are employed with a variety of related but different meanings in scholarly articles, nationalist rhetoric, and everyday language, it seems appropriate to introduce this discussion of ethnic nationalism with some general definitions and brief explanatory comments.

Before the pioneering work of Fredrik Barth ethnic groups were generally understood to be social groups that shared a common origin, history, language, and culture. Barth’s contribution to the study of ethnicity was to reject this reifying and essentializing approach, which suggests an equivalence between a race, a culture, a society, and an ethnic group, and offer an alternative approach in which ethnic groups are defined as “categories of ascription and identification” that people use to classify both themselves and others (1969:10). Barth’s aproach allows us to understand how ethnic boundaries are defined and maintained even in situations where there are no “objective” cultural criteria distinguishing between groups, as well as in situations where individuals are able to change their identity by crossing ethnic boundaries and passing from one group to another.²

Nations, like ethnic groups, have traditionally been defined in terms of what they share. Hugh Seton-Watson, for example, defines a nation as “a community of people, whose members are bound together by a sense of solidarity, a commmon culture, a national consciousness” (1977:1). Images of common origin, descent, and history also serve to unite people who define themselves as members of the same nation. Ernest Gellner (1983:7) offers two definitions of a nation. The first— “two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture”—suffers from the same reifying tendencies as traditional definitions of ethnicity. The second—”two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation”— is sensitive to the issues of self-ascription and ascription by others emphasized by Barth. Anderson’s well-known definition of a nation as “an imagined political community” (1983:15) also stresses the fact that nations are socially and culturally constructed through complex historical and political processes.

In spite of the similarities that exist between the concept of the ethnic group and that of the nation, several important differences between the two should be noted as well. These differences generally involve size, degree of politicization, and relationship to a specific territory. Nations are large, politicized ethnic groups associated with specific territories over which they seek some degree of autonomy. Nations, as opposed to ethnic groups, in other words, are people who exercise, or hope one day to exercise, sovereignty over a given territory.

The distinction between a “nation” and a “state” is extremely important. This is particularly true given the misleading way the word “nation” is used in such common expressions as “the United Nations” and “international affairs.” Strictly speaking, in both these phrases the word “state,” rather than “nation,” would be more appropriate. While a nation is, or perhaps more accurately, claims to be a culturally homogeneous social group, a state is “a legal and political organization with the power to require obedience and loyalty from its citizens” (Seton-Wat-son 1977:1); it is “the major political subdivision of the globe” (Connor 1978:379). While states (like the former Soviet Union or the former Yugoslavia) may contain more than one nation, nations (like the Kurds or the Palestinians) may live in several states, none of which are their own.

Nationalism is the political principle according to which “the political and the national unit should be congruent” (Gellner 1983:1). Nations, in other words, should have the right of self-determination, the right to exist as sovereign and independent states. Nationalist ideologies, as Handler (1988:154) points out, are based on assumptions concerning “the existence of a geographically, historically, and culturally unique nation,” which “is believed to be ‘born of and indissolubly linked to a bounded territory and a particular history.” The goal of nationalist movements is to “turn the ethnic group into that more abstract and politicised category, the ‘nation/ and then to establish the latter as the sole criterion of statehood” (Smith 1981 :xii). Their goal, in other words, is to create a territorially bounded political unit, a state, out of a homogeneous cultural community, a nation. A state that emerges from a successful nationalist movement is known as a nation-state—a state, that is, whose political boundaries are the same as those of the nation, a state whose population is homogeneous, whose inhabitants are all members of the same nation.

It is important to remember, as Smith (1981) and Connor (1978) point out, that this ideal-typical nation-state is nowhere nearly as common as successful nationalist ideologies have led us to believe. Many countries that are usually considered to be nation-states, such as France or Spain, in actuality contain one or more ethnic or national minorities. It is a testament to the power of nationalist ideologies that such countries can continue to see themselves, and be seen by others, as ethnically homogeneous nation-states, in spite of the internal nationalist movements that occasionally challenge their legitimacy and at times even threaten their stability.³

The power of nationalist ideologies also poses one of the greatest challenges to the anthropological analysis of nationalism. From a nationalist perspective nations are regarded as natural phenomena of great antiquity, whereas from an anthropological perspective nations are human constructions, cultural products of relatively recent historical processes. In Gellner’s words, “Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality” (1983:48).

The anthropology of nationalism must avoid being taken in or co-opted by the persuasiveness of nationalist myths. The anthropologist’s task is to dereify the nation, to deconstruct and expose nationalist myths of the nation waiting, Sleeping Beauty-like, to be awakened from its slumber.⁴ This can be done by analyzing the process of nation formation, the process by which nations, as well as national ideologies, cultures, and identities, are constructed from preexisting cultural forms. These preexisting cultural forms include conceptions of shared blood, race, language, place of origin, and religion. They are what Geertz (1973d:259) has called “primordial attachments . . . the ‘givens’—or more precisely, as culture is inevitably involved in such matters, the assumed ‘givens’—of social existence.” As Geertz’s qualification duly notes, and as the anthropology of nationalism must constantly stress, the idea that the preexisting cultural forms from which nations are built are in fact “primordial” or “naturally given” is itself one of nationalism’s most powerful and most insidious constructions.

When exposing these widespread and popularly accepted nationalist myths anthropologists must be careful not to go to the opposite extreme and imply that nations are created anew from absolutely nothing. To say that “nationalism invents nations where they do not exist,” as Gellner does (1964:169), fails to take into account the many regional, ethnic, religious, and class identities that existed well before the age of nationalism.⁵ If nations were totally new phenomena, if national traditions were completely discontinuous with the past, then they would not exert such power over people’s lives. Any successful analysis of nationalism must, therefore, balance an emphasis on the obvious modernity of nationalism as a political principle with the equally obvious préexistence of the identities, traditions, and cultures from which it draws. Nationalism’s strength lies in its ability to draw on these preexisting cultural forms, to reshape them, and to fashion from them new identities, new communities, which are nonetheless perceived to be continuous with the past. As Steven Kemper (1991:7) suggests, “nationalism needs to be seen as a conversation the present holds with the past,” a conversation that “includes several voices in the present arguing about exactly what kind of past actually existed.”

How then are nation-states produced? What is the relationship between nation formation and state formation? And how precisely is a national community imagined?

In its early stages a national movement must construct “an imagined community” (Anderson 1983) from a diversity of ethnic groups, social classes, and regional cultures in what is often a self-conscious and deliberate political process. It must also construct a viable state that will be able to play a part on the stage of world affairs. These two processes exist in a dialectical relationship to one another. While it is important to point out that contrary to many nationalist ideologies it is not nations that make states, it is equally important not to reverse the argument and simply claim the opposite—that states make nations. Hobsbawm, for example, falls into this trap when he states that “nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round,” and again when he cites with approval the slogan “It is the state which makes the nation and not the nation the state” (1990:10,44–45). In fact, both are at least partially true. The state clearly participates in the process of building the nation, but the nation, as a reality and an ideal, plays an equally important part in the process of creating the state.⁶

The successful end result of this dialectical process is the emergence of a new nation-state in which the bonds of race, ethnicity, language, and religion, which together define the nation, are raised to the level of political principles that define the state. These bonds are domesticated, reconciled with the new civil order, and placed at the service of the new state. The result is the integration of the personally meaningful and emotionally powerful nation with the impersonal, distant, but politically powerful state. If, however, the tensions between these “primordial sentiments” and civil politics are not satisfactorily resolved in what Clifford Geertz calls the “integrative revolution,” if the leaders of newly formed nation-states are not able to “construct a civil politics of primordial compromise” (1973d:308), then these new states will quickly be destroyed by the very forces that brought them into being.

Once an ethnic group has been politicized and comes to define itself as a nation, it may embark on a quest for self-determination by seeking some degree of autonomy or even outright sovereignty over a national homeland. When this goal is achieved and the nation has aquired political status as an independent state, then the entire range of organizations, institutions, and bureaucratic techniques at the disposal of the state becomes available for the further consolidation and homogenization of the nation. The creation of a state, which is the ultimate goal of a nationalist movement, contributes, therefore, in a dialectical manner to the creation of the nation, which is seen from within the nationalist movement as having created the state.

The state is created by means of an appeal to the right of national self-determination. State power is then used to complete the process of constructing the nation. The goal of such a process, which is often based on a racist or xenophobic nationalist ideology, is the assimilation and homogenization of the population of the new state so that all its citizens are also by definition members of the nation that the state embodies. Since the state is equated with the nation, being a citizen of the state is equated with being a member of the nation.

There are a variety of tools available to a newly formed state with which to create, or at least consolidate, the desired nation. Anderson (1983) points out the decisive role played by print-capitalism and the development of standardized national languages, both of which create national communities of people who read the same print language. Improved systems of transportation, modern forms of mass communication, and the implementation of large-scale programs of public works are other means by which states engage in the process of nation building. In addition state bureaucracies, particuarly in the fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• Chapter I: Ethnic Nationalism: The Construction of National Identities and Cultures
• Chapter II: Conflicting Claims to Macedonian Identity and History
• Chapter III: The Construction of a Macedonian National Identity
• Chapter IV: Transnational National Communities
• Chapter V: The Macedonian Human Rights Movement
• Chapter VI: National Symbols and the International Recognition of the Republic of Macedonia
• Chapter VII: Ted Yannas: A Macedonian in Australia
• Chapter VIII: The Construction of National Identity among Immigrants to Australia from Northern Greece
• Bibliography
• Index