Scaling the Balkans: Essays on Eastern European Entanglements 9789004382305, 9004382305

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations, Tables, Figures and Maps
Introduction
Part 1 Concepts
Section 1 Modernism, Backwardness and Legacy
Chapter 1 The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism
Chapter 2 Modernism
Chapter 3 Historical Legacies between Europe and the Near East
Section 2 Balkanism, Postcolonialism and Orientalism
Chapter 4 Balkan
Chapter 5 Balkanism and Postcolonialism or On the Beauty of the Airplane View
Chapter 6 The Balkans: from Discovery to Invention
Chapter 7 The Balkans: from Invention to Intervention
Chapter 8 Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul? A Contribution to the Debate between Nathaniel Knight and Adeeb Khalid
Section 3 Nationalism, Identity and Alterity
Chapter 9 Is There Weak Nationalism and Is It a Useful Category?
Chapter 10 Is “the Other” a Useful Cross-cultural Concept? Some Thoughts on Its Implementation to the Balkan Region
Chapter 11 Isn’t Central Europe Dead? Comments on Iver Neumann’s “Forgetting the Central Europe of the 1980s”
Chapter 12 What Is or Is There a Balkan Culture, and Do or Should the Balkans Have a Regional Identity?
Part 2 Structures, Processes and Events
Section 1 Demography and Social Structure
Chapter 13 European Population History: the Balkans
Chapter 14 Situating the Family of Ottoman Bulgaria within the European Pattern
Chapter 15 On the Epistemological Value of Family Models: the Balkans within the European Pattern
Chapter 16 Historical Tradition and Transformation in Bulgaria: Women’s Issues, Feminist Issues
Section 2 Nation- and Society-Building
Chapter 17 The Course and Discourses of Bulgarian Nationalism
Chapter 18 Language as a Cultural Unifier in a Multilingual Setting: the Bulgarian Case during the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 19 Identity (Trans)formation among Bulgarian Muslims
Chapter 20 Midhat Pasha and the Bulgarians
Chapter 21 Improbable Maverick or Typical Conformist? Seven Thoughts on the New Bulgaria
Section 3 Historiography and Memory
Chapter 22 East European Studies in the US: Thematic and Methodological Problems
Chapter 23 The Ottoman Menace in Post-Habsburg Historiography
Chapter 25 The Balkan Wars in Memory: the Carnegie Report and Trotsky’s War Correspondence
Section 4 Socialism and Communism in Memory
Chapter 26 Shared or Contested Heritage? Commemorating Socialism and Communism in Europe
Chapter 27 1917 in the Balkans: Divergent “Horizons of Expectation”
Chapter 28 Was there Civil Society and a Public Sphere under Socialism? The Debates around Vasil Levski’s Alleged Reburial in Bulgaria
Chapter 29 Blowing Up the Past: the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov as Lieu de Mémoire
Chapter 30 Remembering Communism: Similar Trajectories, Different Memories
Index

Citation preview

Scaling the Balkans

Balkan Studies Library Series Editors Zoran Milutinovic (University College London) Alex Drace-Francis (University of Amsterdam) Advisory Board Gordon N. Bardos (SEERECON) Marie-Janine Calic (University of Munich) Lenard J. Cohen (Simon Fraser University) Jasna Dragovic-Soso (Goldsmiths, University of London) Radmila Gorup (Columbia University) Robert M. Hayden (University of Pittsburgh) Robert Hodel (Hamburg University) Anna Krasteva (New Bulgarian University) Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University of London) Maria Todorova (University of Illinois) Christian Voss (Humboldt University, Berlin) Andrew Wachtel (Northwestern University)

volume 24

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsl

Scaling the Balkans Essays on Eastern European Entanglements By

Maria Todorova

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Photograph of the Balkan mountains near Svoge, Bulgaria. Photographer unknown. Under the lens: photograph of socialists in Geneva, 1900 (Stoyan Nokov, Christian Rakovski and Elisaveta Riabova), Bulgarian State Archives, C-IV-433. Cover illustration design by Anna Toshkova. Cover design by Celine van Hoek. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Todorova, Maria Nikolaeva, author. Title: Scaling the Balkans : essays on Eastern European entanglements / By  Maria Todorova. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, c2019. | Series: Balkan studies library; 24 |  Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018036401 (print) | LCCN 2018037721 (ebook) |  ISBN 9789004382305 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004358898 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Balkan Peninsula—Historiography. | Balkan  Peninsula—Relations. | Nationalism—Balkan Peninsula. |  Bulgaria—Historiography. | Nationalism—Bulgaria. Classification: LCC DR34 (ebook) | LCC DR34 .T64 2019 (print) |  DDC 949.60072—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036401

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1877-6272 isbn 978-90-04-35889-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-38230-5 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Illustrations, Tables, Figures and Maps ix Introduction 1

PART 1 Concepts Section 1 Modernism, Backwardness and Legacy 1

The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism 13

2 Modernism 42 3

Historical Legacies between Europe and the Near East 60

Section 2 Balkanism, Postcolonialism and Orientalism 4 Balkan 83 5

Balkanism and Postcolonialism or On the Beauty of the Airplane View 93

6

The Balkans: from Discovery to Invention 115

7

The Balkans: from Invention to Intervention 150

8

Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul? A Contribution to the Debate between Nathaniel Knight and Adeeb Khalid 162

vi

Contents

Section 3 Nationalism, Identity and Alterity 9

Is There Weak Nationalism and Is It a Useful Category? 175

10

Is “the Other” a Useful Cross-cultural Concept? Some Thoughts on Its Implementation to the Balkan Region 197

11

Isn’t Central Europe Dead? Comments on Iver Neumann’s “Forgetting the Central Europe of the 1980s” 208

12

What Is or Is There a Balkan Culture, and Do or Should the Balkans Have a Regional Identity? 221

part 2 Structures, Processes and Events Section 1 Demography and Social Structure 13

European Population History: the Balkans 237

14

Situating the Family of Ottoman Bulgaria within the European Pattern 262

15

On the Epistemological Value of Family Models: the Balkans within the European Pattern 284

16

Historical Tradition and Transformation in Bulgaria: Women’s Issues, Feminist Issues 300

Section 2 Nation- and Society-Building 17

The Course and Discourses of Bulgarian Nationalism 319

18

Language as a Cultural Unifier in a Multilingual Setting: the Bulgarian Case during the Nineteenth Century 366

Contents

19

vii

Identity (Trans)formation among Bulgarian Muslims 386

20 Midhat Pasha and the Bulgarians 420 21

Improbable Maverick or Typical Conformist? Seven Thoughts on the New Bulgaria 435

Section 3 Historiography and Memory 22

East European Studies in the US: Thematic and Methodological Problems 459

23

The Ottoman Menace in Post-Habsburg Historiography 474

24 Conversion to Islam as a Trope in Bulgarian Historiography, Fiction and Film 483 25 The Balkan Wars in Memory: the Carnegie Report and Trotsky’s War Correspondence 510

Section 4 Socialism and Communism in Memory 26 Shared or Contested Heritage? Commemorating Socialism and Communism in Europe 537 27

1917 in the Balkans: Divergent “Horizons of Expectation” 558

28 Was there Civil Society and a Public Sphere under Socialism? The Debates around Vasil Levski’s Alleged Reburial in Bulgaria 579 29 Blowing Up the Past: the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov as Lieu de Mémoire 594 30 Remembering Communism: Similar Trajectories, Different Memories 641 Index 663

Illustrations, Tables, Figures and Maps Illustrations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

The bronze spire of the Stephansdom 476 The University of Sofia with the statues of the brothers Georgievi 595 The funeral demonstration 605 Final respects 605 Cover pages of Gergov’s book 608 After the second explosion 610 Family photo, March 1957 615 Duma, 19 August 1999 623 Monument to the victims of communism 627 Vienna, Flackturm 629 Havana, Cuba, January 2003 631

Tables 1 The territory of the Balkan states (in km2) 239 2 Population in the Balkans at censuses (in thousands) 243 3 Growth rates, 1840–1910 (per thousand) 244 4 Population growth 1880–1920 246 5 Age structure of the Balkan populations as part of total population 247 6 Crude birth rates (per 1000 inhabitants) 249 7 Crude mortality rates (per 1000 inhabitants) 251 8 Proportions of never-married females (per thousand) 255 9 Sex ratio by ethnic groups, c. 1860 265 10 Age at first marriage 266 11 Distribution of households by categories (percentages) 268 12A–B Tendencies in domestic group organization in traditional Europe: Four regions and Bulgaria 271–272 13 Average household size 275 14 Number and proportion of borrowers according to the size of the loan 424 15 Proportion of borrowers and allotted loans in Guruş (Hacioğlu Pazarcik) 425

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Illustrations, Tables, Figures and Maps

Figures 1 Population growth of selected Balkan and other European countries, 1880–1920 244 2 Age pyramid of the Bulgarian and Turkish populations, c. 1860 265 3 Distribution of households according to size, Bulgaria 275 4 Correlation between demographic events, social structure, and ecological system 280

Maps 1 2

Map of the Balkans 238 Distribution of zadrugas in the Balkans 274

Introduction To be invited by an attentive editor to publish one’s published and a few unpublished essays in a separate volume is as tempting as it is challenging. The temptation is obvious, but also mechanical: to collect articles, otherwise scattered in different journals and volumes, and make them available to the reader, with the author’s imprimatur. The challenge is more serious: what to select, how much, how to create a seamless whole? I made two preliminary decisions. As a rule, I would avoid articles or chapters that were directly derived from my major monographs. Secondly, I would subscribe to a stare decisis position on published work and avoid retroactive editing, in order to preserve the historical accuracy of illustrating the author’s development of ideas. Besides, pieces that need much revision are not worth reprinting.1 There are also obvious drawbacks to this decision, chief among them that at times there are repetitions of argument and even phrase. I have not edited these, not only because this is a matter of principle, but also because this is a collection of essays and will be read as a collection, not as a monograph. The majority of the articles have been published in the last two decades (roughly one third in recent years), with a few going back to the early 1990s. With a few exceptions, where some have been published in German or French, these pieces came out in English. Initially I hesitated but finally decided to exclude my work published in the 1970s and 1980s in Bulgarian, Russian, but also English, German, or Dutch, not because I disown this part of my scholarship, but because this would have introduced completely different themes (like the Ottoman Tanzimat, the Eastern Questions and great power policies, alongside respective historiographical essays), that would make the volume unreasonably large and unwieldy. I have been also extremely fortunate with my internal readers who suggested improvements in the organization of the volume. My gratitude goes especially to one of these anonymous readers who saved me from my previous ponderous and contrived (even buzzwordy) title and suggested the present one. The overall concept that I had chosen to put these articles together was “scale,” but I had missed the wordplay about “scaling,” in its various meanings of ascending, measuring, and looking at from different perspectives. In my youth I had literally and passionately climbed mountains; now I am trying to ascend the 1  I have, however, cleaned typos and other orthographic errors and added bibliographical data in cases where something had been forthcoming. I have also standardized references in footnotes and tables that were often in different formats. In a few cases I have preserved the anthropological citation, specifically in Chapters 9, 13, 14 and 15.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_002

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Introduction

metaphorical one, practicing theoretical alpinism. Binoculars are a favorite toy for mountain climbers and sitting on the top of the mountain you feel like a bird that has the whole world below within reach. But binoculars miss details that can be seen close-by with the naked eye. And the naked eye misses the whole complex world under the microscope. Scale has become an important category in the present debate about the meaning of the historical profession. When explored analytically by Jacques Revel some twenty years ago in Jeux d’échelles, it dealt mostly with microhistory and the gains we acquire from the intensive study of limited objects. Recognizing the crisis in the classical paradigms with which we analyze the social, it explored the relative significance of the big versus the small, of detail versus the whole, of the local versus the global, of the value of exception versus generalization.2 But by 2013, when the American Historical Review housed a debate on the question of scale in history, it dealt almost exclusively with macrohistory, although with some nostalgic nods in the direction of the assaulted area studies.3 One is tempted to ascribe this to a European versus an American debate, reflecting the scale of the geo-political ambitions and practices of the spaces that these respective academics inhabit. Yet, a more careful scrutiny belies this dichotomy. It is true that area studies are especially challenged in the United States where the trend in historical thinking is geographically on the scale of the world and temporally in large periods, from the human (200,000 to 4 million years) to the planetary (Gaian), and the cosmological, as illustrated in the work of its chief practitioner David Christian, who borrowed Revel’s title to use as a foil: “Macrohistory: The Play of Scales.”4 However, only some area studies are affected (East European in particular) whereas others are booming (Islam and the Middle East, or Asian studies). European historians, on the other hand, are equally engaged in the global turn, both with individual contributions and in transatlantic publications.5 And, in both the American and European cases, the focus on macrohistory 2  Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles. La microanalyse à l’éxperience (Paris: Seuil, 1998). See also Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History,” Size Matters: Scales and Spaces in Transnational and Comparative History, Special Issue, International History Review, 33, no. 4, 2011, 573–584. 3  Sebouh David Aslanian, Joyce E. Chaplin, Ann McGrath, Kristin Mann, “How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History,” American Historical Review, 118, 5, December 2013, 1431–1472. 4  David G. Christian, “Macrohistory: The Play of Scales,” Social Evolution & History, 4, 1, March 2005, 22–59. See also David G. Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (University of California Press, 2004). 5  Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2014, German original, 2009); Emily Rosenberg, ed.,

Introduction

3

can easily slip into the marketing of world history teaching and a happily celebrated monolingualism (often bordering on monoglossia) but, at the same time and constructively, also in the new and deserved interest in environmental studies, and several stimulating big turns: the Atlantic, the oceanic and so on, even as much of this was prefigured by the Annales school, specifically the work of Fernand Braudel, and especially by the pioneering scholarship and journalism of C. L. R. James.6 Despite the appearance that global is taking over, smaller scale initiatives and interesting work continues to be generated on the micro—and intermediate levels. Inconveniently, specificity does not want to disappear.7 European historiography has gone methodologically through several turns in the past decades—from comparative history and transfer studies to an emphasis on histoire croisée, entangled history, or connected histories.8 But both the American and European endeavors have been equally inspired by the striving to supersede the nation-state, to shed the swaddling bands in which modern historiography was born in the nineteenth century, and which nowadays are perceived as its original sin. To what extent they succeed in this endeavor is still open: it is a work-in-process with contradictory results and with serious side-effects. Throughout, I want to argue for the crucial importance of scale. The category of scale here has to be distinguished from scalability, which has a different meaning, despite the same etymological roots. As Anna Tsing has insightfully A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). 6  Braudel (1902–1985) and James (1901–1989) were contemporaries, and even their major and most influential works were conceived in the late 1930s. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution was first published in London by Secker & Warburg, 1938. Its revised edition came out in New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1963. Braudel began research on the Mediterranean in 1937 but the war delayed his doctorate, and La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l’époque de Philippe II, appeared in Paris: Colin, 1949. 7  For a perceptive overview of the shifting historiographical fashions, see Bernard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History,” The International History Review, 33, 4, December 2011, 573–584. 8  Michel Espagne, Les transfers culturels franco-allemand (Paris: PUF, 1999); Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, eds. Transfers. Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIII e et XIX e siècle) (Paris: Editions recherches sur les civilisations, 1988); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt und Jürgen Kocka, eds., Geschichte und Vergleich. Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1996); Matthias Middell, Kulturtransfer und Vergleich (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitäts Verlag, 2000); Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory, 45, N.1, February 2006.

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Introduction

argued, scalability blocks the ability to notice the heterogeneity of the world, whereas the change of scale helps precisely to highlight this heterogeneity.9 I do not posit that there exists a privileged scale. In the end what counts is the variation and the discrete questions that different scales can answer. However, changing the scale is not an innocent exercise: it alters radically the narrative that emanates from it. What I would like to offer in this volume is a variety of essays ranging from a broad panoramic or bird’s eye approach to engagements with detailed empirical analysis. A combination between the two can hopefully shed new or at least stronger light on the societies we study. The articles are organized in two large parts under the rubrics of “Concepts” and “Structures, Processes, and Events.” Of course, the parts are porous, and each study inevitably is dealing with categories and concepts, but still the essays in Part One are on a metalevel that deals directly with the meaning of the concepts and how we construct them, whereas the ones in Part Two more often directly apply them to a concrete and detailed analysis. Using different lenses, in Part 1 I explore the different concepts that have served or should serve in making sense of the history of the Balkans in a global comparative framework. I have grouped them under four subtitles, starting with the most encompassing ones. Thus, Modernism, Backwardness and Legacy gathers concepts that envelop regions far beyond the Balkans, be it Eastern Europe as a whole, or the Near East within the temporal slice of global modernity. Chapter 1 focuses on the category of “backwardness,” a central predicament of these regions; Chapter 2 deals with the difference between modernity, modernism and modernization; Chapter 3 argues for the heuristic value of approaching “regions,” “regional identities,” and “culture” through the concept of “historical legacy” as an analytical tool with a broad and transferable applicability. Throughout, I am using “concept” and “category” without going into the history of their different philosophical employment but in their broadest meaning as applied nowadays by cognitive scientists and philosophers. Thus “a concept is a mental representation that picks out a set of entities: categories.”10 9  Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales,” Common Knowledge, 18:3, 2012, 505. 10  L. J. Rips, E. E. Smith & D. L. Medin, “Concepts and categories: Memory, meaning, and metaphysics,” in Keith J. Holyoak & Robert G. Morrison, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (Oxford University Press, 2012), 177. In a different definition, a concept is “an abstraction or general notion that may serve as a unit of a theory,” and they

Introduction

5

The next rubric of Part 1 Balkanism, Postcolonialism and Orientalism includes four articles which are dealing with the relationship of postcolonialism and orientalism to regions that are not normally covered by them. Chapter 4 introduces the category “Balkan.” Chapter 5 argues for a new concept, balkanism, that is semantically linked to orientalism but can better describe the mental maps within which the Balkans are approached. Chapters 6 and 7 look at the history and evolution of the concept of balkanism and its political implications. Chapter 8 analyzes the applicability of orientalism to Russia. As already mentioned, since these articles (and others in different rubrics) were published at different times and are often drawing on each other, there are inevitably some repetitions which I have preserved for the sake of not meddling with the published texts. The third rubric of Part 1 Nationalism, Identity and Alterity deals with one of the most complex concepts, nationalism, but is concerned with its specifics: first, whether the category of “weak nationalism” can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the overall concept in a global framework by drawing from examples from the Balkans (Chapter 9); secondly, in what ways does the category of “otherness” (Chapter 10) help us make sense of Balkan identity or identities (Chapter 12) vis-à-vis others, specifically a Central European one (Chapter 11). Part 2 focuses more closely on the East European “periphery,” and specifically on the “periphery within the periphery,” the Balkans. This is the place to tackle the notions of core and periphery. Introduced in the 1950s in the vocabulary of the United Nations, specifically the Economic Commission on Latin America, they were theorized by Immanuel Wallerstein in several works.11 Wallerstein and other proponents of world-system theory stressed the processual character of these concepts: “In world-system analysis, core-periphery is a relational concept, not a pair of terms that are reifies, that is, have separate essential meanings.”12 Standing on but critically complicating dependency theory, world-system theory was mostly used to describe the international division of labor and its repercussions on the social system. Within this framework, Christopher Chase-Dunn has developed a comparative theory of the refer to categories (Richard L. Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Oxford University Press, 1987, 157.) 11  The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974); The Capitalist WorldEconomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; “World System Analysis: Theoretical and Interpretative Issues,” in Terence Hopkins, Immanuel Wallerstein and associates, World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1982). 12  Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 17.

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Introduction

semi-periphery, to which Eastern Europe is often (but not always) added.13 While criticized for its excessive economism and neglect of social class and culture, the influence of world-systems analysis is undisputed, and the notions core and periphery have entered everyday use, so much so that a “peripheral” status is accorded to all aspects of life in economically peripheral territories. But, as Osterhammel has argued, “[p]olitical geography does not coincide with economic geography, and the global distribution of cultural cores is different from that of the concentrations of military power.”14 Likewise, Susan Gal has warned that a number of cultural categories, among them center-periphery, alongside East-West or public-private, are “indexical signs that are always relative: dependent for part of their referential meaning on the interactional context in which they are used.”15 I am employing “periphery” and “peripheral” in quotation marks to indicate that I am using them in their common sense (and questionable) usage, and to differentiate them from the strict meaning that they have in world-systems theory, even as I concede that the concept continues to have salience “as both critical concept and media shorthand for (relative) backwardness.”16 The chapters in Part 2 deal with structures, processes and events, and are grouped in four clusters. The first, Demography and social structure, assembles articles that deal with different aspects of historical demography. Some are more quantitative and descriptive, others use historical demographic analysis to challenge deep-seated stereotypes and models. Chapter 13 presents a synthesis of population trends in the Balkans in a comparative European framework. Chapters 14 and 15 address, by eventually questioning its epistemological value, the concept of a European (demographic and family) Pattern and the

13  Christopher Chase-Dunn, “Comparing World-Systems: Toward a Theory of Semiperipheral Development,” The Comparative Civilizations Review 18, 1988, 29–66. See also Anna Klobucka, “Theorizing the European Periphery,” symplokē, 5, N.1/2, 1997, 119–135. 14  Osterhammel, op. cit., 78. 15  Susan Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13, 1, 2002, 80. 16  Pamela Ballinger, “Whatever Happened to Eastern Europe? Revisiting Europe’s Eastern Peripheries,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 31, 1, February 2017, 61. Ballinger emphasizes that peripheriality is an important concept in its various meanings and deployments, particularly the economic. She adds: “Likewise, the asymmetries of power inherent in the notion of periphery underscore the various forms of political, economic, and legal control, exercised by the EU over its borderlands. The periphery concept thus offers a particularly powerful lens through which to consider the recombinations and intersections of old distinctions—North versus South, East versus Wets—shaping the landscape of contemporary Europe.”

Introduction

7

place of the Balkans, and specifically Bulgaria within it. Chapter 16 introduces gender aspects in the analysis. The next cluster deals with issues of nation- and society-building, specifically in the Bulgarian case: the evolution and articulations of Bulgarian nationalism since its inception to the end of the twentieth century (chapter 17), the significance of language as a cultural unifier (chapter 18), the interwoven history of Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, seen through the lens of the fate of Bulgarian Muslims (chapter 19) and Midhat Pasha’s governorship (chapter 20). It also includes an early assessment of the transformations of 1989 (chapter 21). The following two rubrics each deal with issues of memory. The first, how­ ever, is explicitly concerned with historiography (a specific type of official memory), whereas the second deals with the memory of communism or socialism. Historiography and Memory begins with a piece (Chapter 22), which summarizes the main thematic and methodological concerns of North American East European historiography. It is followed by two chapters (23 and 24) that are concerned with the stubborn presence of Islam and the Ottomans in postHabsburg and Balkan historiography. Chapter 25 looks at how the Balkan Wars were shaped in the perception of contemporaries, how this memory was used during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, and what the recent centenary of the wars can tells us about the workings of memory. The last rubric groups articles devoted to the memory of socialism and communism. Like in the other rubrics, the lens changes from broad views to closeups. Chapter 26 is devoted to an event—the Zimmmerwald conference—but looks at it broadest geographical and chronological reception. It also intro­ duces a discussion on the concepts of socialism and communism that inform the subsequent chapters. Chapter 27 looks comparatively at the role of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in the Balkans, analyzing why the outcomes in the separate countries were so different. These two chapters are part of my ongoing work on early socialism in the Balkans, with a special focus on the Bulgarian case. In some ways, chapter 28 should belong to Part One as it seeks to revise two important concepts—civil society and the public sphere—as they pertain to Eastern Europe, but both the Bulgarian topic and its execution made its presence more appropriate in this rubric. The last two chapters are devoted both to the workings of memory during post-communism. Chapter 29 focuses on the demolition of the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov, and what this tells us about the ways the communist past is dealt with. Chapter 30 again takes a broad view and provides an introduction to a broad comparative study of postcommunist memory. All acknowledgements for the published articles are given at the beginning of each chapter. I have also provided a brief summary to each chapter that

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Introduction

locates it in my overall work. My specific gratitude goes to an individual and an institution. Zoran Milutinović, the editor-in-chief of the Balkan Studies Library at Brill, initiated this volume. The History Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign continues to provide a most hospitable and friendly environment. Champaign, April 2018

PART 1 Concepts

⸪

Section 1 Modernism, Backwardness and Legacy

⸪

CHAPTER 1

The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism This text focuses on the discourse of backwardness in a cultural milieu. Through a survey of East European historiographies, it demonstrates how different notions of temporality are employed. Eastern Europe as a whole, and the particular problem of East European nationalism, have been constituted as historical objects of study very much on the pattern of anthropological objects, employing structural models of ‘timeless’ theory and method, and bracketing out Time as a dimension of intercultural study. The text also attempts to propose a way to circumvent the trap of origins by introducing the idea of relative synchronicity within a longue durée framework, which allows us to describe a period in terms of linear consecutive developments but also as a dialogical process without overlooking important aspects of short-term historical analysis involving sequential development, transmission, and diffusion. Published first in Slavic Review 64, no 1, Spring 2005, 140–164 and reproduced here with the permission of the journal.

With very few exceptions, the most notable being Fernand Braudel’s threepartite treatment of histoire evenmentielle, conjoncture and longue durée, i.e. events, conjunctures of medium duration and long cycles, as well as Reinhart Koselleck’s studies of temporality, especially his notion of temporal layers or strata (Zeitschichten), time has rarely been a specific object of research interest for historians.1 This is maybe because time is such a basic notion of historical thinking; it is so much assumed as to be completely naturalized. Until recently historians dealt with time solely by following their centuries old vocation of “recording chronological change, of measuring, registering the rhythms, the 1  Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vols. 1–2 (New York, 1975); Ibidem, On History (Chicago, 1980). Paul Ricoeur maintains that in order to escape the clutch of events, French history of the Annales tradition had to ally itself with disciplines that are not preoccupied by time, like geography, economy and anthropology (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, Chicago, 1984, 95–111). Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1985, German original Vergangene Zukunft, Frankfurt am Main, 1979); Ibidem, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt am Main, 2000); Ibidem, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concept, transl. T. S. Presner and others (Stanford, 2002).

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metamorphosis, the cycles, the synchronies, etc., in a word, of utilizing the traces of time in order to paint the always renewable picture of the historical narrative.”2 In contrast, philosophers have long been concerned with time but in a manner too fundamental and rarified for the concrete purposes of the historian.3 The closest they have come to historical specificity is Zygmunt Bauman’s postulate that “the history of time began with modernity,” modernity being “more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time when time has a history.” For Bauman, modernity emancipated time from space because unlike space, time could be changed and manipulated through technical innovation. “Whoever traveled faster, could claim more territory—and, having done that, could control it, map it and supervise it … Modernity was born under the stars of acceleration and land conquest.”4 Important as they are, still Bauman’s insights are more valuable for the understanding of imperialism rather than of nationalism. Anthropologists too have lately reflected on time in several groundbreaking works, both implicitly (as in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities) or explicitly (as in Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other), and their contributions speak perhaps more directly to the historical imagination.5 Benedict Anderson, in linking nationalism to modernity, explains that a new secular and historical understanding of time was central to the formation of nationalist consciousness. This came about through representation of simultaneity in novels and through the ceremonial experience of simultaneity with newspapers, both a result of what he aptly called print capitalism. Borrowing Walter Benjamin’s notion of “homogeneous and empty time,” he maintained that the historical consciousness of time saw humankind moving through this homogeneous time of clocks, calendars and temporal coincidence. For 2  Alexandru Zub, ed., Temps et changement dans l’espace roumain ( fragments d’une histoire des conduits temporelles (Iaşi, 1991), V. 3  Ricoeur, Time and Narrative; also his essays “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” “Narrated Time,” “Time Traversed: Remembrance of Things Past,” and “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” in Mario J. Valdés, A Ricoeur Reader; Reflection and Imagination (Toronto and Buffalo, 1991); on Husserl’s treatment of time, see Krysztof Michalski, Logic and Time. An Essay on Husserl’s Theory of Meaning. Dordrecht (Boston, 1997); George Nadel, ed., History and the Concept of Time, Beiheft 6 of History and Theory (Middletown, Conn, 1966); Hellekson, Karen, The Alternate History. Refiguring Historical Time (Kent, 2001). 4  Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 110, 112. 5  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, New York, 1991); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983). See also Henry Rutz, ed., The Politics of Time. American Ethnological Society Monograph Series, N. 4 (Washington, D.G., 1992). The only article in the latter volume, dealing with Eastern Europe, is Katherine Verdery’s “The ‘Etatization’ of Time in Ceauşescu’s Romania,” op. cit., 37–61.

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Anderson, the nation—this imagined community forged through specific technologies of communication and transportation—is premised on new republican modalities that establish horizontal relations among people inhabiting demarcated territories but also on a new consciousness of time. Creating what is in effect a theory of the nation as a traveling modular form, Anderson proposed Creole nationalism in the Americas as the primary form which was then copied and pirated since, according to him, “the ‘nation’ proved an invention on which it was impossible to secure a patent.”6 He thus sees a series of successive waves of nationalism, starting with the territorial nationalisms of the Creoles in the Americas, then moving to Europe where it assumes a vernacular form, followed by the official nationalisms of imperial powers, and then finally the last emancipatory wave in the so called Third World. In this process of diffusion and transmission, the different geographic and historical contexts produced different emplotments of national consciousness resulting in different modalities. Thus, when nationalism spread to Europe in the nineteenth century, history as a discipline had been formally constituted, and the secular and sequential notion of time produced by it made it impossible to experience the nation as new. Instead, it was reinterpreted or rather reinscribed as ancient or as eternal. Hence the anthropomorphic metaphor of the nation being awakened from a slumber, revived, reborn. It is this characteristic of nationalism—to narrate and legitimize itself through history—that can explain, on the one hand, the persistence of essentializing the nation as a perennial biological entity and, on the other hand, the resistance to see the nation as a part of and product of modernity. In this respect Peter Osborne’s analysis of a hierarchical relationship between the categories of modernity and nationalism as categories of analysis is helpful in that it offers a possible way to inscribe nationalism in its numerous concrete historical hypostases within a single explanatory framework, that of modernity. According to Osborne, the problem is “not how to rethink the notion of modernism from the standpoint of national cultures (modernism as national allegory, for example). It is, rather, how the problematic of the modern, concretely applied, can help replace the problematic of ‘national cultures’, with a broader conception of the temporal-cultural dimensions of social relations—social relations through which ‘the nation’ is itself produced as a cultural-ideological effect of various forms of state power.”7 Applying his very broad understanding of modernism as “a particular temporal logic of negation (the new)” together with the metaphor and theory of translation, Osborne succeeds in dissolving 6  Anderson, Imagined Communities, 67. 7  Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (New York, 2000), 61.

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the discreteness of separate nationalisms and their cultures.8 We see them floating, with their different sized and shaped ships, and colorful crews, which are often in conflict or fleeting alliances, in the common sea of modernity. Yet, Osborne himself, like Anderson and a multitude of other scholars, for all his universal modeling, sees the need to point to origins, where the concept of modernism as an initially “Western cultural form subsequently generalized” to and transformed in non-Western contexts, “nonetheless retains a certain highly abstract but still recognizable shape.”9 The link between modernity and nationalism seems to be a consensual point among most scholars of nationalism today.10 Even the ones who insist on the medieval and sometimes ancient roots of nationalism—like John Armstrong, Anthony Smith and Josep Llobera—agree that modern nationalism is a sui generis phenomenon.11 As Llobera, a sociologist, puts it, “the nation, 8  Ibid., 59. 9  Ibid., 54. This is not the place to dispose lightly of a fruitful and passionate debate, yet I would like to emphasize that my phrase “universal modeling” is not used here in any derogatory or ironic sense. Quite to the contrary: I believe that the concept of the modern as a universal category is powerful precisely because of its global extent. I do not think that it intrinsically implies a normative European model and a rigid sameness in its concrete regional and historical variations, despite the fact that many studies have erred in this respect and despite justified critique that has been heaped on them (and by extension, on the concept). While rightly arguing against the dangers of a Eurocentric paradigm, in which European history is sold as universal history, the now fashionable notions of alternative or multiple modernities come with their own caveats, chief among them a slip into easy pluralism and cultural relativism. Stacy Pigg, in particular, has argued against the concept of the modern as universal, proposing instead to attribute its influence to its cosmopolitan nature, as if modifying an adjective from the Latin to the Greek would suddenly purify its subject (Stacey Pigg, “The Credible and the Credulous: The Question of Villagers’ Beliefs in Nepal,” Cultural Anthropology, 11, 2, 1996, 160–201, cited in Christine J. Walley, “Our Ancestors Used to Bury their ‘Development’ in the Ground: Modernity and the Meanings of Development within a Tanzanian Marine Park,” Anthropological Quarterly 76.1, 2003, 33–54). 10  The literature on the question is enormous. See Charles Taylor, “Nationalism and Modernity” in Beiner, Ronald, ed., Theorizing Nationalism (Albany, NY, 1999). For a general overview, see Özkirimli, Umut, Theories of nationalism: a critical introduction (New York, 2000). For a specific East European take, see Maria Todorova, “Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Communist Legacy in Eastern Europe,” East European Politics and Societies, vol. 7, # 1, 1993, 135–154. 11  John Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1982; Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge, Eng., 1981); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986); Josep Llobera, The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe (Oxford, 1994). Curiously, while in the past it was historians who mostly kept the flame of the “deep roots” of the nation alive, it is now sociologists who are arguing the thesis. Medieval historians, conversely, have been increasingly skeptical about

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as a culturally defined community, is the highest symbolic value of modernity; it has been endowed with a quasi-sacred character equaled only by religion.”12 Nationalism, as we know it, is, in this view, a product of modernity, both in its sociological make-up (it is, from the point of view of size, an unprecedented form of group identity made possible only within a modern regime with all its paraphernalia—spread of printing, growth of literacy, rise of mass politics) and in its critical response to the futuristic tunnel-vision of modernity. Nationalism, contrary to modernity with its obsession with change and newness, insists on the need for roots and tradition, hence the obsession with genealogy and continuity, On the other hand, I would define this response as quasi-critical, because effectively, despite its past-oriented rhetoric, nationalism in its practice was an equally radical futuristic project. This was, of course, well understood by the conservative establishments of the day, and in nineteenth century Europe of the Holy Alliance, nationalism was condemned as a revolutionary virus, alongside liberalism, republicanism and later, socialism. Its slow domestication and eventual transformation into the most powerful establishment tool came only in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and as a legitimizing state principle—national self-determination—it was adopted only at Versailles in the wake of the First World War. Practically without exception, all treatments of nationalism assume the pioneering character of West European nationalism. They may differ in their assessment of causal relations between industrialization and nationalism, modernity and nationalism, capitalism and nationalism, state and religion and nationalism, and the like, but they are quite unanimous about the space of origins. For Llobera this is “the birthplace and lieu classique of nationalism” with “no equivalents in other parts of the world in spite of superficial similarities to the contrary.”13 Llobera’s analysis of Western European nationalism is based on five cases, which even in his choice of names, are supposed to point at deeper roots: Britannia, Gallia, Germania, Italia and Hispania. Were one to assault the consistency of the base (i.e. Western Europe as an entity and a separate unit of analysis), the whole structure collapses. Indeed, where Britain and Gallia show some structural similarities, most notably long existing statehood, Italy and Germany are in many ways more “East European” than some authentically East European examples. Balkan nationalism, in particular, in many ways this: see, for example, Otto Dann, ed., Nationalismus in vorindustrieller Zeit (München, 1986), and most recently, Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002). 12  Llobera. The God of Modernity, IX. 13  Ibid., IX, XIII.

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preceded or was contemporaneous with Italy and Germany. In at least two cases—Greece and Serbia—it achieved statehood roughly a generation or two before Italy and Germany, and Romania’s unification and Bulgaria’s sovereignty were achieved at practically the same time. Ernest Gellner, in a response to objections about his theory of nationalism, particularly his trouble explaining the rise of nationalism in preindustrial contexts, notably Eastern Europe or later Africa, acknowledged that Balkan nationalism actually did present difficulties to his theory.14 He had in mind his insistence that it is modernity which creates nationalism and not the reverse. What is baffling about Gellner’s bafflement is not that he singled out Balkan nationalism, but that he did not see the exact same paradox for Western Europe: Italy’s mid-nineteenth century or Spain’s early nineteenth-century national outbursts in traditionally very “backward” areas. Had he not constructed Eastern Europe and the Balkans in particular (and by the same token Western Europe) as discrete spaces with their own, separate flow of time, his puzzlement would have been conveniently resolved.15 Anderson’s claim for the primacy of the Americas, especially of South America, can and has been contested but it was a refreshing breach in the orthodoxy of exclusive (West) European inventions. Yet, his preoccupation 14  The most complete exposition of his understanding of nationalism is in Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, 1983). Several authors, among them Minogue and Kedourie, accost Gellner’s posited correlation between industrialization and nationalism. Minogue asserts that Britain industrialized without any nationalism at all, while Kedourie emphasized the spread of nationalism in the Balkans, particularly Greece, long before the advent of industrialization. (Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford, 1994); K. Minogue, “Ernest Gellner and the Dangers of Theorising Nationalism,” in J. A. Hall and I. Jarvie, eds. The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner (Atlanta and Amsterdam, 1996), 113–128. It is in his specific response to Kedourie that Gellner registers the point that the Balkans obstruct the smooth logic of his theory (Gellner, “Reply to Critics”, in Hall and Jarvie, eds. The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, op. cit., 630. 15  This comes as even a greater surprise, given that on similar other counts, Gellner responds by pointing out that “industrialism cast a long shadow” before its actual reality and that it was only intellectuals who were nationalists (BBS radio discussion with Kedourie, cited in Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism, op. cit., 140). But in the end, at least Gellner was puzzled. Hagen Schulze, on the other hand, brushes aside any potential criticism that he is not even dealing with Eastern Europe or only dealing with it in a subordinated (stief­ mütterlich) way, by reproducing the clichés about two millennia of totally separate civilizational development after the division of the Roman Empire, in which the eastern part of the continent bypassed important phases like the Renaissance and Enlightenment, in whose wake national sovereignty and democracy followed. While he points to three distinct European regions for the rise of nations—the West, the East and a central area, i.e. Germany and Italy—the latter is actually subsumed in the western model. (Staat und Nation in der europäischen Geschichte, München, 1994, 16–17, 148–150).

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with the origins and transmission of nationalism cannot forgo an inbuilt flaw, namely the notion of a temporal lag, although of course, he tried to reverse the sequence of originators and recipients (copyists and pirates). I will come back to this simile. The notion of a temporal lag is ubiquitous both in western representations of nationalism outside the West European space, and in self-representations of the non-Western world. The latter’s nationalisms are “later” and therefore less mature, young, uncontrollable or else, they emulate forms that are not organically appropriate for the context to which they are transplanted, and as a result they most often degenerate. In a word, they postulate a chronic allochronism in which the non-Western world lives in another time, always “behind” the West. As the anthropologist Akhil Gupta puts it: “[I]n the Third World, the utopian time of the nation is profoundly shaped by a sense of lag and a historical consciousness of lack. Visions of the future are predicated on this sense of belated arrival, of being born into a world of nations competing against each other, but in which the new arrivals are positioned in the starting block of a race already underway.”16 This sense of lag and lack, analytically subsumed in the notion of backwardness, has been a dominant trope not only in non-European historiographies. For long decades, for example, it had been painfully present in German selfperceptions.17 It continues to be present in Spanish and Italian discourses, although no longer with the painful overtones. It is still ubiquitous in Eastern Europe.18 In the East European context, more so than in other non-Western contexts, the literature on backwardness is dominated by economic historians 16  Akhil Gupta, “Rethinking the Temporalities of Nationalism in the Era of Liberalization,” seminar paper at the National Humanities Center, April 2001, 11 (cited with the permission of the author). He quotes Jawaharlal Nehru who in the 1950s spoke of the catchingup imperative for India in which it had to achieve in two or three decades what “the advanced nations of the West” had accomplished in a century or two. The same was, of course, one of the most obstinately persisting refrains in the ideology of state socialism, which boasted the achievements of an accelerated and catching-up development. 17  See Reinhart Koselleck, “Deutschland—eine verspätete Nation,” in Koselleck, Zeitsch­ ichten, op. cit., 359–380. 18  For the purposes of this text, Eastern Europe will be treated as a loose and conventional historic-geographic space, encompassing both Southeastern Europe (the Balkans) and East-Central Europe. While Russia definitely is part of Eastern Europe, its exclusion from this coverage is merely a matter of convenience: its sheer size presupposes the mastery of a huge historiography with somewhat different emphases and nuances. At the same time, I believe that the general parameters of the argument can be easily and successfully applied also to the broad Russian context. Yet, I would like to shy away from easy generalizations about Russia in a systemic way; in a word, I don’t want to commit upon Russia the reverse vindictiveness toward the Cold war academic practice to subsume Eastern Europe (itself a very diverse entity) into the Russian model.

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and political scientists. In fact, some authors have argued that the subdiscipline of economic development in the 1940s was created mostly by East Europeans who employed the cases of Eastern Europe as their original empirical base.19 If cultural aspects are discussed, it is only insofar as weighing cultural traditions as impediments or promoters of development. Questions like “Why did the Industrial Revolution take place in the West?” and what causes economic growth are the ones that frame the discussion and while there are different explanatory systems—the dominant among them Marxism, even when unacknowledged, world systems theory, especially center-periphery relations, modernization theory, geographic determinism, cultural determinism (in this order)—there is an overall consensus that Eastern Europe has been lagging economically at least since the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries and maybe as far back as the eleventh-twelfth centuries, but in any case long before it was absorbed into the wider western world market.20 As far as the explanations 19  Joseph L. Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil (Stanford, 1996), 6 evokes the names of Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Ragnar Nurske, Kurt Martin, Hans Singer, Alexander Gerschenkron, Peter Bauer, Paul Baran, Michal Kalecki and others. Love argues that “[i]n the interwar period … the newly independent and newly configured nations of East Central Europe constituted a ‘proto’-Third World in which the problems of economic and social backwardness were first confronted and formally theorized, against a range of development options, which included Soviet socialism” (214). 20  See the important collective volume of Daniel Chirot, ed., The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe. Economics & Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley, 1989), which was the result of a conference at Bellagio in 1985, with the firstclass articles of Chirot, Robert Brenner, Peter Gunst, Jacek Kochanowicz, Fikret Adanir, John Lampe and Gale Stokes. This approach has produced important research, and at least a few other works are worth mentioning, even if not necessarily reaching identical conclusions: John Lampe and Marvin R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950 (Bloomington, 1982); John Lampe, “Modernization and Social Structure,” Southeastern Europe, 5, Pt.2, 1979, 11–32; Ivan Berend and György Ránki, The European Periphery and Industrialization, 1780–1914 (Cambridge, Eng., 1982); Berend and Ránki, “Underdevelopment in Europe in the Context of East-West Relations in the Nineteenth Century,” Studia his­ torica, 158, 1980; Michael Palairet, The Balkan Economies 1800–1914: Evolution without Development (New York, 1997); Holm Sundhaussen, “Zur Wechselbeziehung zwischen frühneuzeitlichem Außenhandel und ökonomischer Rückständigkeit in Osteuropa: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der ‘Kolonialthese’ ”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 9, 1983, 544– 563; Sundhausen, “Der Wandel der osteuropäischen Agrarverfassung während der frühen Neuzeit. Ein Beitrag zur Divergenz der Entwicklungswege von Ost—und Westeuropa”, Südost-Forschungen, 42, 1983, 169–181; Sundhausen, “Die ‘Peripherisierungstheorie’ zur Erklärung Südosteuropäischer Geschichte”, in Uwe Hinrichs, Helmut Jachnow, Reinhard Lauer, Gabriella Schubert, eds., Sprache in der Slavia und auf dem Balkan. Slavistische und balkanologische Aufsätze. Norbert Reiter zum 65. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden, 1993), 277– 288; R. Schönfeld, ed., Industrialisierung und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Südosteuropa

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for this economic backwardness go, the consensus, if any, is far more brittle. These explanations range from social-structural ones of a historical longue durée (Jenö Szücs) to reversing the premises of the debate: it is rapid growth rather than a tendency to stagnation that is exceptional and Eastern Europe, from this point of view, is normalized with the rest of the world where Western Europe is seen as the exception that ought to be explained.21 This text is focusing on the discourse of backwardness in a cultural milieu that has been undoubtedly recognized as the dominant trope in East European historiography until the end of the twentieth century (and in Europe in general at least until the middle of the twentieth century), namely nationalism, the “god of modernity” as aptly named by Llobera. In doing so, it attempts to propose a way to circumvent the trap of origins by introducing the idea of relative synchronicity within a longue durée framework. Let us begin by using the example of the historiography of East European nationalism, especially the one written by outsiders. Although articulated at different levels of sophistication, among its practitioners the national movements are taken at best to be exports of a western ideology and at worst products of great power manipulation and incitement.22 Interestingly, a great number of works whose main object of study are the East European societies themselves and not simply contextualizations in a pan-European or global comparative context, tend to err in the same direction although for a completely different reason: it is rooted in the general understanding of nationalism as an “organic” western phenomenon which was exported, transplanted and modified in an ostensibly “alien” soil. In historiography, this process is traditionally treated as the influence of ideas conceived in and for the West, and then adopted, adapted and accordingly metamorphosed in the new environment.23 Thus, the study of East European n ­ ationalism is (München, 1989); Zwetana Todorova, ed., Probleme der Modernisierung Bulgariens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Sofia, 1994). 21  Jenö Szücs, “Three Historical Regions of Europe,” in John Keane, Civil Society and the State. New European Perspectives (London, New York, 1988), 291–331; Daniel Chirot, “Causes and Consequences of Backwardness,” in Chirot, op. cit., 1–14. The latter way of thinking was inspired by the significant impact of the work of Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge, Eng., 1981). 22  This latter has been the dominant assessment in a majority of general accounts of the Ottoman Empire whose primary attention is focused on the workings of the empire from the center. They usually give Balkan nationalisms the short shrift, explaining them off as primarily generated by the manipulations of Russia and, to a lesser extent, of the Habsburgs and of France. 23  For general accounts of East European nationalism, see Peter F. Sugar and Ivo John Lederer, eds. Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle & London, 1969, 3rd printing 1994);

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subjected to the same evolutionary paradigm like industrialization, modernization, etc. The late-comers are laggards resorting to mimicry without “organic” roots. An additional characteristic of western historiographical studies of nationalism in Eastern Europe is the continuing dominance of a paradigm which otherwise has been heftily criticized and is being gradually overcome in the general literature on nationalism. It is the post-Second World War paradigm of West European liberals (stemming from Hans Kohn et al., and to whom the late Peter Sugar also belonged) who were struggling to come to terms with the German aberration of the interwar period, and postulated a binary model of Western (civic) versus Eastern (organic) nationalism.24 Peter Sugar, ed., Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C., 1995); Emil Niederhauser, The Rise of Nationality in Eastern Europe (Budapest, 1981); Andrew György, Nationalism in Eastern Europe (McLean, VA, 1970); Ronald Sussex and L. C. Eade, Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe (Columbus, 1985); Richard Plaschka, Nationalismus, Staatsgewalt, Widerstand: Aspekte nationaler und sozialer Entwicklung in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa (München, 1985); Augustinos, Gerasimos, ed., The National Idea in Eastern Europe (Boston & New York, 1996). See also the specific coverage of Southeastern Europe in Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920 (Seattle & London, 1977); Edgar Hösch, “Die Entstehung des Nationalismus in Südosteuropa,” Südosteuropa. Zeitschrift für Gegenwartsforschung, 42, 10, 1993, 551–563; Norbert Reiter, ed. Nationalbewegungen auf dem Balkan (Berlin, 1983); Dimitrije Djordjevic and Stephen Fischer-Galati, The Balkan Revolutionary Tradition (New York, 1981); Veselin Traikov, Ideologicheski techeniya i pro­ grami v natsionalno-osvoboditelnite dvizheniya na Balkanite do 1878 godina (Sofia, 1978); Dimitrije Djordjevic, Révolutions nationales des peuples balkaniques, 1804–1914 (Belgrade, 1964); Stokes, Gale, Nationalism in the Balkans. An Annotated Bibliography (New York & London, 1984). Worth mentioning are also some major collective works on European nationalism in general, in which Eastern Europe again assumes the role of recipient of ideas: Mikulás Teich and Roy Porter. The National Question in Europe in historical context (Cambridge, Eng., 1993); Louk Hagendom, European Nations and Nationalism: theoretical and historical perspectives (Aldeshot, 2000). For a first-class recent comparative attempt in a general European framework, which can serve as the rare example of a balanced rendition, see Ulrike v. Hirschhausen and Jörn Leonhard, Nationalismen in Europa. West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich (Göttingen, 2001). 24  For a recent critique of the Kohn model, see Miroslav Hroch, “Ethnonationalismus—eine ostmitteleuropäsiche Erfindung,” Oskar-Halecki Vorlesung 2002, Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas, Leipzig (forthcoming). For a particularly poignant example of how hardwired these ideas are, see the otherwise excellent recent study of Mary Neuburger, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, 2004). The author first pronounces the cabbalistic formulae of modern political correctness which are supposed to somehow exempt the ensuing narrative: “[In] emphasizing the similarities and appropriations between European and Bulgarian nationalist ideas, I do not want to imply that Bulgarian nationalism was a mere facsimile or distortion (as many scholars argue) of West European nationalisms. Instead, I agree with Parta Chatterjee’s assertion that ‘latecomer nationalisms’

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East European historiographies, on the other hand, consider nationalism as the central trope of the modern period, and focus almost exclusively on the emergence, maturation and victory of national-liberation struggles, a grand narrative in which other processes and events figure only as a background or side-effects that favored or hampered the ongoing progression of the national movements. While they reject the treatment of East European nationalism as the export of a contagious disease by the great powers, they practically all share (explicitly or implicitly) in the premise that the major ideological currents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the Enlightenment, romanticism, nationalism, republicanism, socialism, etc.—are “western” ideas transplanted (although not necessarily deformed) on East European soil. This goes, of course, hand in hand with unreconstructed treatments of the organic nation from times immemorial in which nationalism serves as the wake-up call.25 There are two levels at which the problem of temporality can be introduced here. One is at the level of the discourse of nationalism itself. It is characterized by a certain atemporality, treating the nation as ever present, as eternal. This has been a characteristic of practically all nationalisms and national are not just following a ‘script already written’ but are inherently creative projects of individual national imaginations” (p. 7). Yet, this proleptic entry does not deter the author from asserting that it was “the politically charged observations and ethnographic ‘discoveries’ of European scholars and travelers in the region [that] ignited Balkan national visions and ambitions” (p. 18), completely neglecting volumes of empirical work on the genesis of Balkan nationalism. She further maintains that “Bulgarian thinkers pulled devices for understanding their past from the European conceptual toolbox” (p. 24—a rather crude literal instrumentalism), or that even their visions of their plight within the Ottoman Empire was “supplemented, if not invented by European notions of Ottoman, and more generally, ‘Asiatic’ depravity and barbarism” (p. 24), all the while positing a hypothetical dichotomy between “European” and “Bulgarian” and thoroughly dismissing native Orthodox traditions of stereotyping the Ottoman. Having started out by magnanimously conceding that “as with any child, Bulgarian nationalism also had its own genetic code” (p. 7), this puerile metaphor is enforced in the concluding chapter of the book, where the two infants—Bulgarians and Muslims—are, in the end, helpless objects of adult ideas like European nationalism: “Throughout its modern history, the BulgarianMuslim encounter has unfolded in the shadow of European influence. Bulgarians were caught up in the irrepressible current of European ideas, such as nationalism, which ultimately drove a wedge between Bulgarian and Muslim.” (p. 201). 25  It is impossible to even begin to cite the enormous literature, which in the past centuries has been at the center of the historiographical efforts and focus in and about Eastern Europe. Even mentioning a few important works would be a disservice to the many other unmentioned but still important ones. A good way to start is to look up the literature cited in the country by country treatments in the two aforementioned collections: Nationalism in Eastern Europe (1969,1994) and Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (1995).

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historiographies: it is not a particularity of East European nationalism. The fact that it is still more present in treatments by East European historians than in similar analyses of West European and other nationalisms is more an illustration of the sociology of scholarship than of the character of East European nationalism itself. There is a lag of probably no more than a generation between West and East European scholarship before the modernist analysis of the nation, as opposed to the organic, became the dominant interpretation after the Second World War. The other and more important level, already evoked here as the sense of lag and the consciousness of lack, is the explication of uneven development in historiography, as well as the interpreting of precedence, derivativeness, and generally the traveling of ideas. What does it mean to be first in calendrical time? How are diffusion and transmission rendered, and more significantly how are they evaluated? In assessing the nationalist phenomenon in a global framework, the great puzzle is, of course, the remarkable similarity of both the institutional forms of nationalism and of the national imaginary. Anderson’s response to this puzzle is that models of nationalism are easy to copy, and in his account “European nationalisms appear to take the form of simulacra, since they were copies of a form of nationalism that did not exist in any one American nation, but was instead an amalgam of North and South American ideas. The nationalism that was pirated from the Creole pioneers in the Americas did not belong to any one nation, but to a continent of nations.”26 Quite apart from whether one accepts the copying sequence proposed by Anderson, the more important question that should be posed is why necessarily construct a model looking for a basic genealogy and patterns of transmission based on the copying metaphor. An alternative way to understand the basic similarity of nationalisms is to start from the idea of the basic similarity of human societies, even when they are not in immediate contact, which for the premodern period was more often than not the rule. Then nationalism could be approached as an almost synchronous rearrangement of group solidarities in human society, as a global social process which is itself a by-product of urbanization, bureaucratization, the revolution in communications, etc., in a word, it is intimately linked to modernity. I am not using synchronous in a rigorous sense as concurrent, pertaining to the strictly calendrical or clock time, but in terms of a general longue durée framework (in the Braudelian understanding) of a historical period in which the separate developments can be treated as relatively synchronous. It is thus used more in the geological sense as coetaneous, belonging to the same period. This does not contradict 26  Gupta, “Rethinking the Temporalities of Nationalism in the Era of Liberalization,” 10.

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the theory of modularity of the national form, nor does it deny the sequential transmission of ideas but it dispenses with notions like “pirating” and “copying” which, strangely enough, Anderson deploys in his very commercial allegory of the “invention” of the nation, and the impossibility to put a “patent” on it and thus collect copy rights. To take Peter Sugar’s influential model of the “arrival of nationalism” in Eastern Europe (he does not even use the word “birth” but insists on “arrival”), even though it is articulated in a prose much less sophisticated than Anderson’s or Osborne’s, structurally it makes essentially the identical argument. Nationalism was a “Western concept” which “penetrated into Eastern Europe” or “was imported into Eastern Europe” where it emerged in many variations, “as it was adapted by the people living in Eastern Europe.” With time, these variations disappeared and East European nationalism “began to take on the features of the most aggressive and chauvinistic variants evident in Western Europe”, to turn into a homogeneous “integral nationalism.”27 Since this view is reproduced in most any coverage of nationalism, it deserves a full quote: In Central and Eastern Europe the character of nationalism changed according to local conditions: the farther an area was from the lands in which nationalism developed, the less its nationalism resembled the original model. Even such basic expressions of nationalism such as constitution, freedom, or republic acquired different meanings in more eastern areas of Europe. This is anything but surprising. People who grew up in the Orthodox world and were not affected by the major cultural, religious, and political movements that transformed the Western Christian world—such as the scientific revolution, Renaissance, Reformation, or Enlightenment—or by the drastic economic and societal changes that accompanied them, were bound to attach different meanings to the concepts of nationalism. This was particularly the case for people in the Balkans who had lived under Muslim rule for centuries.28 27  Highlights mine. See Sugar, ed. Eastern European Nationalism, 20 and Sugar, Lederer, eds. Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 8–9. The notion of integral nationalism is adopted from Louis L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of Nationalism (New York, 1990) via Carlton Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Nationalism (New York, 1931). 28  Sugar, ed. Eastern European Nationalism, 8. Such thinking inevitably leads him to facile conclusions of the kind like “The roots of today’s problems—the inability of the various nations living in the Balkans to cooperate and the so-called historical hatred that separates them—can be found in the arrival of nationalism and in modern interpretations of historical events.” For a replication of this line of thought see, among numerous others, the aforementioned works of Hagen Schulze, Jenö Szücs, as well as Gale Stokes, Three Eras of Political Change in Eastern Europe (New York, 1997).

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Sugar then goes on to express his surprise at the remarkable accomplishment of Father Paisii, an eighteenth-century Bulgarian monk, who in 1762 wrote his subsequently hugely influential Slavo-Bulgarian History. Given that new concepts and ideas can be discovered and transmitted only by literate people, and that most people in the Balkans at that time read neither French nor English, Sugar writes that they “got their knowledge secondhand through German or Russian.” In the case of Father Paissii circumstances were even more unfavorable. He worked in a monastery on Mount Athos and had no access to any of the major western authors, either in the original or in translation. Besides, he didn’t really know the languages. So the fact that he wrote a work that “shows him to be a nationalist in the modern sense” leaves Sugar astonished, yet he never attempts to explain either his puzzlement or the phenomenon itself.29 Had he seen the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ world in terms of the unifying structure of modernity and had he measured it with a clock attuned to relative synchronicity, he would have surely been less surprised. Nor is the non-Orthodox East European world exempt in this account. True, it is admitted that the Poles developed a modern nationalism by stressing ethnic identity fairly early, primarily as a response to outside attack and the partitions. However, their non-Westernness is introduced by classifying them, alongside the Hungarians, as bearers of an aristocratic nationalism, which “being basically a contradiction in terms, produced the least constructive results.”30 To complete Sugar’s classification, he ordered the rest of Eastern European nationalisms under the rubrics of popular nationalism, which reminded him of Jacksonian democracy (the Serb and Bulgarian case); of bureaucratic nationalism reminiscent of the nationalism of the newly emerging countries of Africa and Asia of the twentieth century (Romania, Greece and Turkey), and bourgeois, which most resembled but was not identical to its western model (the Czech case). What is amazing is that Sugar, in order to make the point of a complete cleavage between East and West, effectively introduces the class principle, and the fact of the “missing bourgeoisie” becomes the litmus test in his classification. It is amazing because, for all his professed non- and even anti-Marxist approach, this is essentially a replication of the most vulgar economism. Conversely, although both his volumes were written or reprinted nearly a decade after the publication of Miroslav Hroch’s 29  Sugar, ed. Eastern European Nationalism, 8. The German intermediacy is seen as a facilitating agent for the adoption of western ideas, “[b]y the time they became operating forces east of Germany they were at least twice removed from their western models.” (Sugar, Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 13). 30  Sugar, Lederer, eds., Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 46.

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Marxist analysis, Sugar never adopted Hroch’s sophisticated shift of attention to the role of the intelligentsia rather than the bourgeoisie as the original motor of nationalism.31 The Czechs too, were not exempt from their non-Westernness. Their lack of state “made it imperative for Czechs to champion outdated rights and institutions (Staatsrecht, and so on) to justify their other demands. Consequently, their outlook became less realistic and more historical-traditional than the bourgeois nationalism of western Europe. They looked to the West, sharing its traditions and development, but geography and political realities forced their nationalism into an eastern world.”32 This time, the mental map on which this conclusion is based comes directly from Hans Kohn. Kohn had posited a fundamental difference between western and eastern nationalism: Nationalism in the West arose in an effort to build a nation in the political reality and struggle of the present without too much sentimental regard for the past; nationalists in Central and Eastern Europe created, often out of myths of the past and the dreams of the future, an ideal fatherland, closely linked with the past, devoid of any immediate connection with the present, and expected to become sometime a political reality. Thus, they were at liberty to adorn it with traits for the realization of which they had no immediate responsibility, but which influenced the nascent nation’s wishful image of itself and its mission …33 This neat mechanical bifurcation of the European space into specialized production areas—a West European one, ostensibly based on reality and characterized in terms of producing modern principles (like self-determination) and the East European one which, in contrast, is characterized by its obsession in producing historical myths, was taken up by Kohn’s followers and continues to be reproduced, having become one of the most persistent tropes in East European studies. Here is Sugar again, for whom East European nationalism’s 31  Miroslav Hroch. The Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups Among the Smaller European Nations. (Cambridge, Eng., 1985). For a critique of the essentializing link between the bourgeoisie and nationalism, see Llobera. The God of Modernty, 123–133, 220. This is all the more astounding as the majority of the individual contributions to Sugar’s collection actually demonstrate (sometimes explicitly insisting on) the indigenous roots of nationalism and refuse to employ the importing metaphor. 32  Sugar, Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 47–48. 33  Hans Kohn. The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background, cited in Sugar, Lederer, eds., Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 9–10.

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defensive character and its populist myths have no parallel in the West European space: “This rather pessimistic nationalism produced national holidays or historical benchmarks tied to military or political defeats: the Battle of Kosovo (1389) for the Serbs, the battle of Mohács (1526) for the Hungarians, the Battle of the White Mountain (1620) for the Czechs, the three partitions (1772, 1793, 1795) for the Poles, and the Treaty of Berlin (1878) for the Bulgarians.”34 Apart from the fact that, with the exception of Serbia, none of the other defeats are part of the national celebratory ritual, in the Bulgarian case the error seems to be deliberately flagrant: after all, any good historian is well aware that Bulgarians celebrate as their national day the Treaty of San-Stefano and not Berlin, a chimera, to be sure, but one of achievement, not of defeat. Needless to say, not only is this a reductionist dichotomy which fails to account for the incredible West European investment in and production of foundation myths, studies of ethnogenesis, historical literary fakes, etc., but it forgets that the compulsive attempts at historical legitimation by the new East European states were a response precisely to West European obsessions with the rights (or lack thereof) of “historic” and “non-historic” peoples. The Balkans in particular have been singled out as having a special propensity for myths. These myths, according to yet another model by the German historian Holm Sundhaussen, include the “golden” pre-Ottoman period, the myth of the “Turkish yoke,” the myth of the pure and organic nation, the myth of national rebirth, the Kosovo-myth, the haiduk-myth and the victimization myths.35 In a word, this model posits the existence of a Balkan identity characterized by a myth-producing propensity. However, I would submit that it is very difficult to distinguish these myths structurally from the “golden” myth of antiquity, the myth of the Dark Ages, the myth (and practice) of the Nüremberg laws of the 1930s and ius sanguinis, the myth of Rome (as in Italian national ideology, with the myth of the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, and the Papacy), the myth of the battle of Poitiers (both the one in the eighth, and the one in the fourteenth centuries), the myth of the Walküren, and the myth of a fortress besieged by enemies (both as in the Masada as well as in the German military doctrine in the First World War). While the model acknowledges that many of these characteristics are not specific only to the Balkans, it posits that what makes up the Balkan specificity is the cluster of these characteristics that unmistakably defines it. However, positing a diachronically stable evolution which produces a cluster of characteristics leads to a static analysis that 34  Sugar, ed. Eastern European Nationalism, 417. 35  Holm Sundhaussen, “Europa balcanica: Der Balkan als historischer Raum Europas,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 25, 1999, Heft 4, 626–653, characteristic 7.

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pays no attention to the fact that these myths, while existing and undergoing a continuous transmission through education or other cultural and political channels, are inflamed and get operative only at certain periods. In recent years, this was the case in Yugoslavia, a country disintegrating and caught up in a civil war. Characteristics of the extraordinary Yugoslav situation were externalized and, in a totally unwarranted fashion, were rhetorically sold to the political class and to the broad public as Balkan. Let me give another example, again involving the Balkans. It juxtaposes the two above mentioned different approaches to the same historical phenomenon: one utilizing the longue durée framework and the notion of historical legacies; the other an essentially structuralist approach to the Balkans as a discrete space with its own characteristics (albeit the result of historical evolution). One of the longest standing legacies of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans has been the demographic one. The interpenetration of different ethnic groups in the course of several centuries made their disentanglement under the regime of the newly created nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exceedingly difficult. As a result, minority problems have plagued practically all Balkan nation-states, and they have resorted to similar solutions: emigration and assimilation. Altogether, several major “cleansing waves” have occurred in the Balkans, from the consecutive secessions from the Ottoman Empire until today. This would be a consensual point among historians, from which dissent can hardly be expected. Yet, there are different ways of articulating this consensus, and different interpretational frameworks in which it is inscribed. The interpretation which approaches the Balkans as a historical space, seeking to establish its defining characteristics, expresses the demographic legacy as “the instability of population relations and ethnic mixture in a very small space,” and posits that, in contrast to Western Europe, the population relations in the Balkan peninsula were never consolidated.36 This is certainly not an unacceptable way to phrase it, but the same point could have been made differently. Instead of speaking of the contrasting features of population characteristics of two discrete spaces— stability for the western space, and instability for the Balkan space—the same fact can have the following articulation: A process of consolidation of homogeneous dynastic, religious and ethnic states has been taking place in Europe 36  Sundhaussen, “Europa balcanica,” 639. The following polemical argumentation was formulated first and published in Maria Todorova, “Der Balkan als Analysekategorie: Grenzen, Raum, Zeit”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Heft 3, 2002, 470–492. See the latest response of Sundhaussen, “Der Balkan. Ein Plädoyer für Differenz,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 29, 2003, 608–624.

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at least since the fifteenth century. The same process may be described less euphemistically as ethnic and religious cleansing. Nation-building and consolidation is a dynamic process which in Europe has taken several centuries and is not yet completed. If we have to map it geographically and chronologically, it begins in the European West, and moves gradually to the north, the center, the south and the east, the southeast (or the Balkans) presenting its youngest version. So, what we call stability in the West, may be rephrased as the somewhat earlier (although also ambivalent) completion of this process. Practically all of the authors taken up in this text share in the widely spread conventional assumption that ideas like the Enlightenment, national selfdetermination, individual liberties etc. were/are organic to the West whereas in the East they are transplanted on alien soil. These botanical metaphors tend to overlook the gradual and uneven process by which these ideas took hold also in the West. After all, as Eugene Weber has shown brilliantly, peasants were turned not only into Greeks, Serbs, or Bulgarians but also into Frenchmen. Even today, when a Frenchman is socialized to Voltaire, he has to learn him anew, not in his blood. What makes this socialization process different for a Pole or for a Hungarian today? Some time ago, at a concert at which a black conductor was conducting a Gustav Mahler symphony, I heard the comment of one of my Balkan escorts who found it somehow abnormal for a black man to interpret what he thought of as essentially European music. He was indulgent enough and had no objection to the qualifications of the musician (after all, this particular individual had been “westernized”) but the scene seemed too eclectic to him, it somehow offended his sense of aesthetic purity. This would be normally defined as racism. It never occurred to him that to most West Europeans or North Americans, Balkan or other East European individuals (with the possible exceptions of the ones anointed by Habsburg rule) listening to the music of Mahler or espousing “Western ideas” like liberalism, individualism, democracy, etc. probably present a similar paradox (with the additional indulgent exception, of course, of particular individuals who have been “westernized”). It would be indeed surprising to see a peasant with a kalpak at a Mahler concert. But I personally would be as surprised to see the organic attire of Lederhosen and Dirndl amidst a Mahler audience. In any case, I am offering this example because it neatly illustrates, among others, the notion of chronic allochronism: the non-Westerner is always living in another time, even when he is our contemporary; on the other hand Mahler or whomever we like from another time is appropriated, brought into our own time period in a manner which we can call isochronism. The reformulation that I suggested previously about nationalism as a longterm process is not for the sake of political correctness, or diplomacy but in

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order to make a methodological point with it. While the first description presupposes two distinct geographic and historical spaces, the second involves the Balkans in a common long-term process. It, thus, redefines the Balkans as part of a common space (European or global) which evolves, and one of whose characteristics is the homogenization (or, rather, imagined homogenization) of polities. It also allows us to deconstruct the category “West” from a modellike entity into a dynamic one which itself underwent the process unevenly and over a long period of time. There are two serious methodological caveats here. One concerns the treatment of long-term processes, the other the problem of agency. By describing a longue-durée process from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, one can be accused of postulating a deterministic, teleological evolutionary development culminating with “cleansed” nation-states. Of course, the “late-comers” are not simply late-comers, replicating the experience of the “pioneers” in an ideal laboratory setting. The end of the twentieth century is different from the end of the fifteenth century, among others because the “pioneers” (who represent today’s most influential economically and politically part of humanity) deem as unacceptable the types of behavior which had been accepted or imposed as normal several centuries ago. There are, I think, two ways to respond to this challenge. The first addresses the question of longue-durée processes and the adequacy of subsuming them within the same category. If we take another concept— industrialization—it faces a similar challenge. Not only did it happen in the course of several centuries over Europe; even in its core space—England— it took several centuries for its accomplishment and penetration in different areas of the country and in different branches of the industry (the eighteenth and nineteenth, or, according to a different interpretation, the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries). Surely, the mechanisms of the process and the social price at different junctures of this development were different (with pioneers and laggards in each case) but still nobody questions the epistemological adequacy of describing them within the same overall process (and the respective category). One could play with a more grandiose example: the spread of farming from the Fertile Crescent throughout Europe over many thousands of years. As is well known, farming arose in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 years ago. As Luigi Cavalli Sforza in his Genes, Peoples, and Languages has shown, farming spread from Southwest Asia across the Balkans and from there toward the European northwest at a speed of 1 kilometer per year, i.e. it took 4,000 years for farming to reach the British Isles. Should we not describe this as a long-term process lest it displays the dangers of a telos-driven activity? And on the other

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hand, once the process is completed, does it matter where it originated and by whom? Just imagine Saddam Hussein commenting on the derivative character of agriculture on the British Isles … In a word, overarching and long-term categories implicitly carry in themselves the danger of essentialism, or teleology, or determinism. We can go around this by providing detailed and sensitive area—and time specific studies. But as scholars we owe our readers at least consistency. We either apply these categories (with all due qualifications and consciously taking all the risks) to everyone (to the Balkans, or any other region which seems to be undergoing similar processes which are spatially and temporally linked); or else, purge these categories altogether, proclaim the inevitable solipcism, and lapse into an epistemological nirvana. The other response addresses the charge of determinism and the problem of agency. Does my argument implicitly assert that Eastern Europe was swept by a preordained process of nation formation and ethnic homogenization from which there was no alternative? In theory, I do not subscribe to reductive determinism, and welcome the exploration of alternative developments at each historical juncture. In practice, I would maintain that the maneuverability of small nations and states in a hierarchical configuration is very limited, and that they are constrained in their choices down to the finest details. It suffices to recall the hegemonic discourses (and accordingly practical imposition) of legitimate monarchies during the era of the Congress of Vienna; the consideration of empires as anomalies, and the subsequent imposition of the nation-states as the normative template; the present straightjacket freemarket democracies advocated (without alternative room for choice) by the IMF, the World Bank, and the leading economic powers. The more difficult and serious problem to address is whether by emphasizing the constraints on the agency of local players, this does not alleviate their responsibility for their actions. Let me, in this connection, introduce another example. In 1913, the Serbian prime-minister, writer, and scholar Vladan Djordjević wrote the most explicit racist abuse against the Albanians. The obvious link has been made with the racist anti-Albanian insults in the 1980s and 1990s Serbia under president Slobodan Milošević.37 This is a diachronic approach illustrating the continuity of Serbia’s discourse. It is a distinct choice of a mental map. It is a legitimate choice. But it is not the only option. For myself, I prefer to extend the space of the analysis over the intellectual map of Europe at the time. In the discrete chronological period of the latter half of the 19th and the beginning of the twentieth century Vladan Djordjević can be 37  Sundhaussen, “Europa balcanica,” 552–653.

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seen in the company of Joseph de Gobineau, Houston Chamberlain, Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler, and the like, i.e. in the common space of European racism.38 This does not make Djordjević less disgusting for his views. What it does, however, is include Eastern Europe (in this particular instance Southeastern Europe) in a common European or global space, and in the proper comparative perspective, rather than ghettoize them in a diachronic spatial Balkans continuity. It ought to be stressed again that when employing the notion of a “common European space” this is not the result of some kind of ontological Angst to “decenter” Europe. I am in no way essentializing Europe, nor is this methodological assertion to be politically translated into the aspiration to be included in the “common European house” of Gorbachev. It simply reflects the physical fact that Europe (in a very elastic understanding) is the natural geographic and historical background against which developments in one of its sub-regions in the particular time period under discussion can be most adequately projected. Let me reintroduce the idea of relative synchronicity within a longue durée framework. What it allows us to do is not simply describe a period in terms of linear consecutive developments but as a process that emphasizes its dialogical nature. This is how Gupta sees it for the Third World: As far as the Third World is concerned, the story of the nation as a traveling, modular form is one that reinstates the temporal lag of the great EuroAmerican-centric narratives of modernity. Understanding nationalism as a process, however, allows us to turn this story around: thus, we could narrate the tale of American nationalism by demonstrating how the rise of historical consciousness in Europe altered nationalist ideologies and practices in the Americas; how the official nationalism of imperial powers fundamentally reshaped nationalism in Europe and the Americas; how Third World nationalisms that constituted the last wave infused democratic and dissident currents in the nationalisms hegemonic in the First World. The crisis in U.S. nationalism created by movements against imperialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia that are now indexed by the term ‘The Sixties’ would be unthinkable without Third World national liberation struggles: how could one write the story of the movement led by Martin Luther King without Gandhi or the independence of new

38  Among the plentiful literature on this problem, see the recent work of Uli Linke, Blood and Nation: The European Aesthetics of Race (Philadelphia 1999).

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nation-states in Africa, or of the anti-war movement without Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh?39 In a similar intra-European dialogue much of the romantic passions of George Byron and Alexander Pushkin cannot be understood outside of the influence of Greek nationalism; the Polish partitions and the subsequent mobilization of Polish nationalism created waves, which inspired a variety of responses, from philosophers and writers beginning with Rousseau to the crystallization of a specific Russophobia in nineteenth-century Europe that goes long ways in explaining the specificity of European international relations; the German preoccupations with folklore without the Serb connection; the introduction of the moral principle (although not necessarily morality) in British Gladstonian politics without the impetus of Bulgarian nationalism and the retaliation it invoked, and I don’t even want to touch upon the connections between the Balkans and the new world order with its warrior pacifying conduct. Thus, “a Gramscian perspective that treated nationalism not as an achievement but a fragile, always-contested, hegemony that was formed within a larger context of global geopolitical, capitalist, and ideological changes would give us a very different picture of the time of the nation than that of homogeneous, empty time.’ ”40 The idea of relative synchronicity within the same time period (i.e. of coetaneous phenomena) does not exclude the existence of asynchronic developments in the strict calendrical sense of the word. This can be aptly illustrated by the general survey of the rise and evolution of Balkan nationalisms until the advent of their nation states. I am narrowing it down to Balkan nationalism not only because of considerations of expertise but also because of the relatively earlier emergence of the Balkan nation states from the previous imperial formation (i.e. the Ottoman Empire), compared to their other East European counterparts under Habsburg or Russian rule, as well as their posited relative backwardness even vis-à-vis East-Central Europe. The Balkan case thus illustrates most poignantly the argument I want to advance.41 39  Gupta, “Rethinking the Temporalities of Nationalism in the Era of Liberalization,” 15–16. 40  Ibid., 16. 41  There are very few, if any, genuine comparative studies of the rise and development of nationalism in the two imperial regions of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. Most general historical accounts of Eastern Europe simply enumerate the separate cases, without analyzing the existence or not of regional characteristics. On the other hand, the studies that posit fundamental differences between East Central and Southeastern Europe (the majority of them belonging to political scientists) do so without any empirical analysis but imposing models. The famous essay by Jenö Szücs, “Three Historical Regions

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Miroslav Hroch’s influential model of nation formation as it was developed for the smaller nations of Central and Eastern Europe provides a very useful template for comparative analysis.42 Hroch outlined three phases of development: Phase A, termed the scholarly phase, when a small elite of activists begins the study of language, culture and history; Phase B, when patriots beyond the elites are mobilized and seek to “awaken” national consciousness among the ethnic group, the national agitation phase; Phase C, the era of mass national

of Europe”, in John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State. New European Perspectives (London, New York, 1988), does not even deal with Southeastern Europe, presuming, not proving its absolute difference as conventional knowledge. A recent rare attempt at comparison is Miroslav Hroch, “Die nationalen Formierungsprozesse in Mittel- und Südosteuropa. Ein Vergleich,” in Elitenwandel und Modernisierung in Osteuropa. Berliner Jahrbuch für osteuropäische Geschichte, 1995, 2, 7–16. It makes for embarrassing reading by an otherwise great historian who attempts to impose a comparative analysis based on rather scanty knowledge of southeast European developments. It is probably not worth mentioning were it not for its rarity, and for the fact that it illustrates the profound difficulties of genuine comparisons when undertaking without the appropriate expertise. On the other hand, some valuable intra-regional comparisons are beginning to appear. See, for example, Diana Mishkova, Prisposobiavane na svobodata. Modernost-legitimnost v Sîrbiia i Rumîniia prez XIX v. (Sofia, 2001), or Kollektive Identitäten in Ostmitteleuropa: Polen und die Tschechoslovakei (Bremen, 1994). Although uneven in terms of quality, also worth mentioning is the collective volume of Jolanta Sijecka, ed. The National Idea as a Research Problem (Warzcawa, 2002), which was the outcome of an international conference at the Polish Academy of sciences. While the introduction misses the opportunity to address the comparative potential of the separate studies, the very fact that they range naturally across the posited divide, including Poles, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Czechs, Kashubians and Buriats, is already quite a positive development. 42  Hroch distinguishes between two distinct stages in the process of nation-building: one beginning in the Middle Ages, the other accompanying the transition to a capitalist economy, i.e. the formation of the modern nation per se. The first stage produced two different outcomes. One was the development of the early modern state, absolutist or with a representative estates system, under the domination of one ethnic culture. In this case, the old regime was transformed, by reform or revolution, “into a modern civil society in parallel with the construction of a nation-state as a community of equal citizens.” The second outcome occurred in cases when “an ‘exogenous’ ruling class dominated ethnic groups which occupied a compact territory but lacked ‘their own’ nobility, political unit or continuous literary tradition.” While Hroch is cautious enough to show transitional cases and exceptions, as a whole the first outcome prevailed in Western Europe, whereas the second was typical for Eastern Europe. (Miroslav Hroch, “From National Movement to the Fully-formed Nation: The Nation Building Process in Europe,” in Gopal Balakrishnan, ed. Mapping the Nation (London, 1996, 79–80.)

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movements, when a full social structure came into being, and the movements differentiated into rival wings with their own national programs.43 All Balkan national movements went through the consecutive phases of the development of their national idea as outlined by Hroch throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but this development had an asynchronic character, and the different phases had a longer or shorter time-span in the particular cases. If Greek nationalism, being the earliest, is accorded the status of a standard against which the other nationalisms can be compared, one could observe a contraction of phases B and C for the Serbian case before autonomy and independence, a protracted phase B for the Bulgarians, and almost coincidental phases A and B for the Albanians before they were propelled into independence even before the onset of phase C. This asynchronic character of the separate national movements also explains the idiosyncracy of their mutual relations. Greek nationalism, presiding over the first, however weak, Balkan nation state and with a strongly articulated and ambitious national irredenta, became the hegemonic nationalism in the peninsula throughout the nineteenth century until the demise of its program in the aftermath of First World War, and especially the Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922. Likewise, although on a more modest scale, Serbian nationalism developed messianic features as the unifier and leader of the South Slavs. In contrast, Bulgarian nationalism displayed a singularly defensive quality. Defensiveness vis à vis Europe is a common trait of all East European nationalisms (although not from the outset), but in the Bulgarian case it was particularly aggravated because it had to operate against the earlier formed nationalisms and earlier articulated irredentist programs of its neighbors. In the Albanian case, a similar defensiveness and apprehension actually transformed what was essentially and simply a bid for cultural autonomy into one for independence. If we were to compare the particularities of the sense of lag and the consciousness of lack between the so-called Third World nations of the twentieth 43  Miroslav Hroch. The Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. In his 1996 publication, “From National Movement,” 81, Hroch characterized Phase C as a period when “the major part of the population came to set special store by their national identity.” This can be disputed in light of the significant literature on the protracted process of nation formation, most radical and successful after the triumph of nationalism and the erection of a nation-state, even in the West European zone (the classical work being that of Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (London, 1979). Apart from the quibble over “the major part” of the population, one can still accept the mass phase by reducing the support to a substantial part of the population or to a part forming a critical mass, without in any way constituting a majority.

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century, such as India, Pakistan or the African ones, in a word the postcolonial nations that emerged after the Second World War, and the ones in Eastern Europe, a curious, although not necessarily fundamental, trait will stand out. Granted, all the discursive characteristics of the relationship of the new nation-states to the West are shared, and they are all based on the premise that Europe/the West is the model of imitation, and that modernizing is articulated in terms of catching up, in which time will be accelerated: “We have to accomplish in a decade or two what others achieved in a century or two.” Accordingly, the main categories of analysis of the past are ones that pertain to emptiness: lack, absences, i.e. what one is not, incompleteness, backwardness, catching up, failure, self-exclusion, negative consciousness, etc. And in both cases the reasons for the backwardness are external. Yet, while in the Third World the agent of backwardness is the West itself, this is not so for Eastern Europe where the culprits are, alternatively, the Habsburg, the Ottoman and the Russian cum Soviet Empires (and for the latter the Turko-Mongol yoke). The one exception is Turkey where a whole interpretive trend exists which treats the Ottoman Empire in the last century of its existence as a quasi colony of the West, describing the relations as semi-colonial, and where, accordingly, dependency theory, world systems theory and postcolonial studies have found fertile ground. For the rest of the Eastern Europe, it is Ottoman or Russian rule or communism, as imposed by the Soviet Union, that has severed what is being described as the evolution of Eastern Europe within its own larger organic space: Europe. Thus the lag is an artificial one, having delayed what is depicted as one’s own evolution. In a word, the catching up, the acceleration of time in the future is with one’s own “what might have been.” Europe’s past is Eastern Europe’s organic, not emulative future. To be sure, this is only one in many different historiographic assessments, but I would maintain that it is the dominant one for most East European nationalisms. There are certainly also analyses that strive to outline Central Europe’s or the Balkan’s uniqueness, their “otherness” from both West and East but they have never reached the level of significance or influence that the Slavophile ideology or the Eurasian idea, for example, have played in Russia. The Central European idea, which was quite powerful as an emancipatory and legitimizing device in the 1980s and 1990s, has for practical purposes disappeared. Maybe because of this, and also because the Balkan national idea began developing relatively early among the majority of the ethnic groups of the region—from the second half of the eighteenth century on—the defensiveness vis-à-vis Europe is not encountered during the constitutive stages of these nationalisms. After all, some of the Balkan national movements developed earlier by at least a generation compared to many other East European

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nationalisms under the Habsburg or the Romanov empires: Finnish and the other Baltic nationalisms, Slovak, Ruthenian, etc. As a whole, they were coeval to the German and Italian movements, and in the Greek and Serbian case achieved earlier, though truncated, statehood. One can see the defensiveness full-blown only after the establishment of the independent Balkan nation-states, and continuing until the present, when the lack of wealth, institutional expertise and human capital of these societies has been felt as a painful deficiency. However, this was not the case in the formative stages of Balkan nationalism. When the first ethnic group in the Balkans to develop an enlightened network of educational establishments—the Greeks—began to advocate the national idea, it was looking for an inspirational model not so much to Western Europe but to its own glorious past, which was serving at the same time as the inspirational model for enlightened Western Europeans.44 In the peculiar nationalist rhetoric, it was not a matter of borrowing ideas from an alien neighbor (the West) but overcoming the degenerative and retarding effects of an alien oppression of another neighbor (the Ottomans), and joining one’s natural family (Christian Europe). Likewise, the Bulgarians in the midnineteenth century struggled against what was perceived as a double alien oppression (the political of the Ottomans, and the religious of the Greeks) but their national ideology was seen on a par and not emulative of the most advanced ideas in Europe at the time: Mazzinian nationalism, republican ideas, even early socialist stirrings. As for the temporal aspect that is expressed in the notion of precedence, epistemologically it makes sense only insofar as direct influence can be established, and patterns of transmission demonstrated, like in the undoubted 44  Sensitized both to the classicizing spirit predominant in the West, and to the ideas of liberal nationalism prevailing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Adamantios Koraïs worked tirelessly to imbue his fellow Greeks with pride in their glorious past. Praising “the illustrious city of Paris, the home of all arts and sciences, the new Athens,” he concluded that while it “would amaze anyone, but for a Greek, who knows that two thousand years ago in Athens his ancestors achieved a similar (perhaps higher) level of wisdom, this amazement must be mingled with melancholy, when he reflects that such virtues are not only absent from the Greece of today, but they have been replaced by a thousand evils” (Richard Clogg, ed. The Movement for Greek Independence, 1770–1821: A Collection of Documents (New York, 1976, 45). This is thus an apt example of the dialogical principle evoked above, where a mutually enriching dialogue is going on between the West European Enlightenment inspired by Greek classical thought and the Greek Enlightenment in the person of one of its main exponents—Koraïs—who himself was one of the principle and pioneering channels for the transmission of Greek authors to the intellectual audience in Paris and was, at the same time, inspired by the spirit reigning there.

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influence of Czech education and culture in general upon Slovak society, or that of Greek upon Bulgarian society. Otherwise, temporal primacy is quite immaterial. Rather different is the question of how precedence is evaluated, especially by the ones who boast to be the first and insist on a copy right. It is meaningless once a longue durée process is completed, as I previously tried to suggest with the example of farming, or even when it is globally still incomplete with the example of industrialization. The otherwise powerful historiography on the English Industrial Revolution looks pathetic whenever it deserts analytical discourse and ventures on psychological and moral explanations for English priority and uniqueness, especially now that Britain has dropped severely down the range of industrial/financial powers. However, while the process is ongoing, it is a very strong and effective ideological argument, deftly exploited and manipulated by the powerful. So far, the problem of time between separate East European nationalisms or between East European nationalism as a whole and the West has been addressed. But the problem can be posed, although it has not been treated explicitly, about different temporal modes within the individual nationalisms. To my knowledge, no East European society has been studied from such an angle, namely how different social groups (classes, professional groups, religious denominations, different age strata, according to the gender divide, etc.) with their own time rhythms and understandings of change, and some even with temporal philosophies, react to and prove more or less receptive to the new time (or, rather, times) of the nation.45 I am also not aware of similar studies for the areas outside of Eastern Europe as far as nationalism is concerned, although it has been touched upon implicitly in other contexts. Such for example, was the debate over the transition from feudalism to capitalism which produced an important historiography, especially in Germany, from the 1960s to the 1980s. In it, although not always explicitly touching on the category of time, 45  I have since come across a happy exception, although it is an exception: the excellent article by Kristina Popova “Khramît ‘Sv. Dimitîr’ i boiat pri Port Artur. Sîbitiia i vreme v pripiskite vîrkhu tsîrkovnite knigi v selo Teshovo 1849–1927 g.,” (The ‘Sv. Dimitîr’church and the battle at Port Arthur. Events and time in the marginalia of sacred books in the village of Teshovo 1849–1927) Balkanistic Forum, III, 2, 1994, 76–106. It demonstrates the gradual change of mentality and perception of time among the clergy, and the substitution of cyclical with linear time in the course of half a century. See also Tsvetana Georgieva, “Istoricheskoto sîznanie i otchitaneto na vremeto,” Istoriya, 1992, 1, 12–16. A couple of articles in the aforementioned edited volume by Alexandru Zub also touch on similar problems for Romania: Mihai Dorin, “Interférence temporelles dans la révolte de Horea (1784)” and Liviu Antonesei, “Interprétations du temps populaire dans la culture roumaine de l’entre-deux-guerres”, in Alexandru Zub, ed. Temps et changement dans l’espace roumain, op. cit., 85–97, 167–186.

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questions about unequal economic development were raised alongside specific cultural and behavioral modes.46 These have been later subsumed under the evocative notion of “simultaneity of the non-contemporaneous.”47 Yet, as Alf Lüdtke shows in his survey of Marxist perspectives in historiography, most of these works were inspired by a general belief that in the end society will be subsumed in a singular and common history. The groundbreaking work in this respect belongs to Ernst Bloch who developed the idea of a “multi-temporal and multi-spatial dialectics” yet posited that this was only a temporary phenomenon. The perspective was progress as the great homogenizer.48 It seems that, as Lüdtke has suggested, this is a result of the fact that historians have only relatively recently begun to pay the proper attention to the significance of everyday activities for understanding the specific response to processes that are both global and local. He accordingly calls upon analyses that would pluralize historical time mostly for the sake of approaching “the other” as constitutive of the historical process, and not simply as a passive bystander.49 To reiterate, I have been trying to show that Eastern Europe as a whole, and the particular problem of East European nationalism in historiography, have been constituted as historical objects of study very much on the pattern of anthropological objects. Johannes Fabian has provided us with a splendid critique of the “original sin,” as it were, of his own discipline: “Anthropology emerged and established itself as an allochronic discourse; it is a science of other men in another Time. It is a discourse whose referent has been removed from the present of the speaking/writing object. This ‘petrified relation’ is a scandal. Anthropology’s Other is ultimately, other people who are our contemporaries.”50 Upon an optimistic and superficial impulse it might seem 46  For example, Hans Medick’s work on plebeian culture and economy, in particular the experience and behavior of the poor and the propertyless in the transition to capitalism: “Plebejische Kultur, plebejische Öffentlichkeit, plebejische Ökonomie. Über Erfahrungen und Verhaltensweisen Besitzarmer und Besitzloser in der Übergangsphase zum Kapitalismus,” in Robert Berdahl, Alf Lüdtke, Hans Medick. Klassen und Kultur. Sozialanthropologische Perspektiven in der Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt am Main, 1982). 47  See in particular, Koselleck’s treatment of historical acceleration: Reinhart Koselleck, “Gibt es eine Beschleunigung der Geschichte?” and “Zeitverkürzung und Beschleunigung: Eine Studie zur Sekularisation”, in Koselleck, Zeitschichten, op. cit., 150–176, 177–202, esp. pp. 165, 175, as well as, in general methodological essays 9, 101, 307. 48  Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1962, first 1935), cited in Alf Lüdtke, ed., Was bleibt von marxistischen Perspektiven in der Geschichtsschreibung? (Göttingen, 1997, 15–16. 49  Lüdtke, 18–19. 50  Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983, 143.

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that historiography is exempt from this sin: after all, it is by definition an allochronic discourse, truly about other people in another time. However, a closer look will disabuse us of any optimism; it only makes the task more difficult to expose. Western historical writing (of which East European historiography is a local branch) has been characterized from its beginnings by presentism. This tendency to interpret the past in presentist terms took, according to Lynn Hunt “a more problematic turn when the notion of ‘the modern’ began to take root in the seventeenth century. Over time, modernity became the standard of judgment against which most of the past, even the Western past, could be found wanting.”51 It produced a kind of moral complacency, a temporal feeling of superiority. This kind of writing, based on evolutionism and the belief in progress, unites great explanatory telos-driven accounts, whether inspired by Hegel’s supreme achievement of the state, or the striving toward the Volksgeist, or of revolution and social equality, etc. In it, the genuine and principally correct allochronism vis-à-vis one’s (western) predecessors may have been imbued with a judgmental superiority, but the attitude toward their non-Western contemporaries displayed all the underpinnings of anthropological allochronism: these people were desperately behind in time even vis-à-vis their own less than perfect western predecessors. Fabian laments that even as evolutionism was “all but discarded as the reigning paradigm in anthropology, the temporal conceptions it had helped to establish remained unchanged.”52 I tried to demonstrate how this operates in historical analysis which employs structural models of “ ‘timeless’ theory and method” and brackets out Time as a dimension of intercultural study.53 I also tried to argue that there are ways to circumvent this fallacy, of which the idea of relative synchronicity within a longue durée development seems to be particularly fruitful without overlooking important aspects of short-term historical analysis involving sequential development, transmission, diffusion, etc. To conclude with Fabian’s own effective ending, there “are ways to meet the Other on the same ground, in the same Time.”

51  Lynn Hunt, “Against Presentism,” Perspectives in History, vol. 40, No. 5, May 2002, 7. She observes that, ironically, the intolerance toward the forebears who fail to live up to present standards applies more readily to Western interpretations of the Western than to the nonWestern past. With the advent of cultural relativism and political correctness, “we more easily accept the existence and tolerate the moral ambiguities of eunuchs and harems, for example, than of witches.” 52  Fabian, 147. 53  Fabian, 41.

CHAPTER 2

Modernism Published as the introduction to volume three—Vol. III/1 Modernism: The Creation of Nation States. Eds. Ahmet Ersoy, Maciej Górny, Vangelis Kechriotis. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2010, 4–22—of the four-volume publication Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945. Eds. Ahmet Ersoy, Maciej Gorny, Vangelis Kechriotis, Michal Kopecek, Boyan Manchev, Diana Mishkova, Balázs Trencsényi, Marius Turda. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2006–2014, this text deals with the theoretical concepts of modernism, modernity and modernization and their application to the East European space. Reproduced with the permission of the publisher.

Like culture and civilization, imperialism and orientalism, or nations and nationalism, modernity and modernism are concepts that suffer from overuse. Some scholars despair about the impossibility to reach a consensus about their meaning and use, and call on entirely abandoning them. Yet, they are with us to stay, among others because they have long ago left specialized scholarly discussion (or entered it too late) to become part of the everyday speech of many competing discourses. This volume, the third in a series covering the cultures of the coveted, emerging, flourishing and humiliated nation-states of the region of Central and Southeast Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, boldly takes on the challenge. Writing this introduction entails a double bind. On the one hand, I was asked and agreed to provide a preface to a volume I did not help conceive. In a way, the resulting introduction is not merely a comment on the material compiled by several younger scholars and respected colleagues; it is inevitably an exegesis of its conceptualization. On the other hand, given the voluminous and controversial literature around the concept of modernism and its derivatives, this preface tentatively tries to provide some similitude of order, if only for the easier orientation though the ensuing material. Several questions will be asked in the course of this chapter: What is the difference between modernity, modernism and modernization? When and where was/is modernity, and when and where was/is modernism? Is it modernity or modernities? What is the comparative value of the East European region? Why, then, is this volume encompassed under the rubric of modernism and not of modernity? Modernism may be the least problematic term, even if

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_004

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slightly differing interpretations exist. Henri Lefebvre distinguishes between the two by positing that modernism is a sociological and ideological fact, the consciousness that epochs, periods, successive generations have of themselves; it consists of images and projections of the self. Modernity, on the other hand, is the attempt at knowledge, the beginning of reflection. “Modernity differs from modernism, as a concept formed about society differs from social phenomena, as reflection differs from facts.”1 This is, arguably, one of the more sophisticated approaches to modernity and modernism, treating the two as different but intertwined takes on reality mediated by the human agent. Most other authors consider modernism as the cultural response to the challenges of the modern condition, defined loosely as the compendium of traits such as industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of a marketindustrial economy; the growth of centralizing and unifying state institutions with the accompanying development of specialized occupations tied to them, i.e. bureaucratization; the development of the modern political party system with mass participation, the secularization of political and social authority and different models of popular rule. Modernism in this view, as expressed for example by Anthony Giddens, who insists on its difference from modernity, is often seen mostly in its aesthetic dimension, and applied to styles or trends in literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music.2 In a broader handling, modernism is seen as the state of mind expressed in opposition to tradition, or as the culture of modernity. In a narrower sense, it is treated as the aesthetic and negative reaction to technological modernity (in this sense conflating modernity with modernization).3 An interesting twist 1  Henri Lefebvre, Introduction à la modernité, Paris: Ed, de Minuit, 1962, 10, cited in Alexis Nouss, La modernité (Paris: Jacques Granchet, 1991), 21. 2  Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, 1990); Charles Taylor, “Nationalism and Modernity” in Beiner, Ronald, ed., Theorizing Nationalism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999); Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Jonathan Spencer, “Modernism, Modernity and Modernisation,” In: Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, ed. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer, London: Routledge, 1996. It is symptomatic that, as a whole, “modernism” rarely finds a place in social sciences, which abound in theories about modernity and modernization, but its relatively prominent place in the humanities is assured. There is no entry on “modernism” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. 3  Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Duke UP, 1987), actually speaks of “two distinct and bitterly conflicting modernities,” one as a stage in the history of Western civilization (scientific and technological progress, industrial revolution, the sweeping economic and social changes of capitalism); the other, as an aesthetic concept opposed to the first (41).

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in the thinking about modernism is offered by the view that while modernity was born in the West (even if authors differ on whether it is a universal or an entirely western phenomenon), modernism was the product of the periphery. If “modernity” as a term seems to have been created by Chataubriand in 1833, “modernism” was coined by a Nicaraguan poet in 1890: “the critique of European modernity, like so much of the modern itself, seems continually to have emerged from Europe’s borders.”4 Some authors even posit that modernism is not in the core, but always in the periphery, and they speak of the modernism of underdevelopment, where culture is one form through which one can belong if one is excluded from modernity. This certainly is very relevant to Eastern Europe, the first and closest periphery to the core of modernity. In a way, the whole four-volume project is an illustration of the particular cultural and political responses—defined by the editors as enlightenment, romanticism, modernism and anti-modernism—to the social transformations that occurred with the advent of modernity. Of course, one could claim that modernism in a very broad sense encompasses all these responses: it is the general expression and style of the modern times, the state of mind expressed in opposition to tradition, or the culture of modernity. From this point of view, since the general consensus is that modernity starts with the Enlightenment and, despite all the theorizing about post-modernism, we still seem to be within its longue durée, it includes chronologically the whole period covered by the project. Yet, the editors have chosen to use it in a stricter sense, giving it a very definite place between romanticism and anti-modernism and an approximate chronological span from the 1860s until the decade following the First World War. For them the answer to the question “When was modernism?” is unambiguous. One could say that it coincides with the period of the powerful and unimpeded ascendancy of industrialism and the nation-state, and one can read in its expressions the unabashed triumphalism of the notion of progress. Indeed, practically all parts of this volume illustrate one or another aspect of the ambitious and optimistic construction and consolidation of the nationstate: the major ideologies that shaped this process, the projects and programs dealing with institution building and the challenges posed by imperial legacies and minority problems, and the reflection of these processes in the sciences and the arts. 4  Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Timothy Mitchell, ed. Questions of Modernity, Minneapolis (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 6. In this Mitchell follows Perry Anderson. See also B. Valade, “Modernity,” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser, Paul B. Baltes (Amsterdam, New York: Elsevier, 2001), 9940.

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This poses the question whether modernity is synonymous with capitalism. It is a question overwhelmingly answered in the positive by theorists of modernity, from Karl Polanyi to Anthony Giddens. For Polanyi the defining characteristic of modern society is the self-regulating market, which as an institutional structure is typical only for our times. It is the extension of commodification to the three basic elements of industry—labor, land, and money—which was the inevitable consequence of the introduction of the factory system in a commercial society and which constituted the crucial difference from preceding economic systems. Giddens sees modernity as modes of organization of social life which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence. He thus defines modernity as inherently characterized by globalization, whose main traits are the international division of labor, the global capitalist economy, the system of nation-states, and the global military order,5 This stress on the economic aspects of modern society inevitably raises the question of modernization and its place in the overall theorizing of modernity. More recent theorizing emphasizes the Janus-like character of modernity in the west which is characterized by two intersecting visions of modernity: the Weberian societal/cultural modernity and the Baudelairian cultural/ aesthetic modernity, where culture is the capricious middle term. In the Weberian vision, societal modernization fragments cultural meaning and unity. The Baudelairian vision, equally alert to the effects of modernization, seeks to redeem modern culture by aestheticizing it. Each has their bright and dark sides. Societal modernization was anticipated by Enlightenment philosophers as the improvement of material conditions, economic prosperity and political emancipation, technological mastery, and the general growth of specialized knowledge) but it also brought the existential experience of alienation and despair in a disenchanted world of deadening and meaningless routine. The bright side of the Baudelairian vision found aesthetic pleasure in the creative excitement of searching for a meaning and portrayed modernization as a spectacle of speed, novelty, and effervescence. Its darks side stressed the absence of moral constraints where the aesthetic pursuit could deteriorate from disciplined Nietzschean self-assertion against an absurd world into selfabsorption and hedonism.6

5  Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, op. cit.; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston (Beacon Press, 1964, first published 1944), 43–57, 68–75, 163. 6  Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” in Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 8–9.

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Modernity may not be explicitly addressed in this volume, but it is implicitly present in its overall conception both as a sociological reality, i.e. the ensemble of traits defining the modern condition, as well as a discursive construct. There have been numerous attempts to define modernity, even though one of its analysts desists from treating it as a concept: “If it is true that a notion is intuitive knowledge, synthetic and inaccurate enough about one thing, then modernity belongs to this type of mental representation which, as opposed to concept, does not offer clearly defined contours of the abstract object to which it refers.”7 We know intuitively that modern is what appears, exists and belongs to the present era, and modernism expresses a preference against tradition. Even before the emergence of modernity as a category, the understanding about what was modern was based on a dichotomy between “ancients” and “moderns” (the famous querelle des anciens et des moderns at the end of the seventeenth century), between authority and progress, between tradition and innovation. Indeed, Bruno Latour argues that the division of tradition from modernity is the central characteristic of the modernist project, where division and classification entail the work of purification.8 Jon Mitchell goes as far as attributing this tendency to dichotomize to a common Euroamerican epistemology which divides the world into ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’, or Western and non-Western, and ultimately into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Following Niklas Luhmann, he shows that, rather than being a homogenizing process producing a unified social whole, modernity constantly creates otherness; it is not a fixed and stable but has differentiation at its core. He also amply demonstrates that ambivalence is common to all manifestations of modernity. In particular, the hierarchizing axis of tradition and modernity can be reversible, so that each side can be valorized at different moments. This ambivalence and anxiety is especially acute at the edges of Europe, where the stakes higher.9 Similarly, stressing the ambivalence between what is modern and what traditional, Diana Mishkova shows that the distinction between nineteenthcentury modernizers in Serbia and Romania (the radicals and the liberals) 7  Valade, “Modernity,” International Encyclopedia of the Social &Behavioral Sciences, 9939. 8  Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Since division entails a prior assumption of unity—each proposition of difference must begin with an assumption of sameness—dividing the world into traditional and modern must begin with the assumption of a shared historical trajectory. This, in the end, makes Latour question the utility of the concept “modern.” 9  Jon P. Mitchell, Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta (London and New York, Routledge, 2002), 12, 241–242. For example, accession to EU in Malta is seen as both promise (security, affluence, democracy, modernity) and threat (to family, morality, community, tradition). See also Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity, transl. W. Whobrey (Stanford University Press, 1998).

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and traditionalists (the conservatives) is not so sharp. In actuality, all used the modern legitimizing norms and rhetoric; all had an organicist conception of the nation; all had a paternalistic attitude to the peasant, both economically and politically; all had the consciousness of backwardness; and all were ardent nationalists.10 One can follow this in many of the entries in this volume. Despite nuances of difference, the common denominator of most theories that analyze the modern era, i.e. modernity, is to describe the process of capitalist expansion, development and globalization through which the nonWestern becomes Western. This is based on the presumption that increased globalization of the world economy necessarily entails the homogenization of socio-cultural forms. This trend was most explicitly present in the modernization theories of 1950s–60s, where the successful accomplishment of industrialization and democratization were seen as the apogee of modernization.11 The severe critique to which modernization theory was subjected in the late 1970s and 1980s led to a broader critical theorization of capitalism. It prompted its theoretical reconceptualization with the emergence and introduction of a new category: modernity. Modernity was taken by the social sciences to unite, or mediate, modernization and capitalism, and define and describe the properties of the modern, “present social configuration.” It thus came to define a way of life or mode of being, raising the question whether people who don’t live this way are modern or not.12 10  Diana Mishkova, Prisposobiavane an svobodata: Modernost—legitimnost v Sîrbiia i Rumîniia prez XIX vek (Sofia: Paradigma, 2001). 11  The quintessence of this trend is Walt Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: a NonCommunits Manifesto, Cambridge UP: 1960; See also N. Smelser, “Mechanisms of and Adjustments to Change,” In: Industrial Man, ed. T. Burns (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Modernisierungstheorie und Geschichte (Goettingen, 1975); P. Nolte, “Modernization and Modernity in History,” International Encyclopedia of the Social &Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser, Paul B. Baltes (Amsterdam, New York: Elsevier 2001), 9954–61. 12  Peter Wagner, “Modernity: History of the Concept,” International Encyclopedia of the Social &Behavioral Sciences, op. cit., 9949–54; Peter Wagner, “Modernity, Capitalism and Critique,” Thesis Eleven, 66, 2001, 1–31; Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge, 1994); Peter Wagner, Theorizing Modernity. Inescapability and Attainability in Social Theory (London: Sage, 2001); Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Juergen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987); Daniel Miller, Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford: Berg, 1994); Jonathan Spencer, “Modernism, Modernity and Modernisation,” Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, ed. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (London: Routledge, 1996).

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Chronologically, the consensus that modernity started in Western Europe after the seventeenth century (in a few readings even earlier) has not been broken; its link to capitalism has not been questioned. Yet the stress is no longer exclusively on its economic performance. Sociologists are emphasizing the unparalleled degree of structural-functional differentiation in modern societies, especially the infrastructural powers of the nation-state. Building on Talcott Parsons, Juergen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, Nikos Mouzelis understands modernity as “a type of social organization which, from a social-integration point of view, is characterized by an unprecedented level of social mobilization/incorporation into the center; and from the point of view of system integration, by an equally unprecedented level of institutional differentiation.” This leads to the destruction of segmented localism and the creation of broader, highly differentiated economic, political, social, and cultural arenas where the practices of individuated subjects are constituted and regulated by institutional complexes such as the nation-state, national markets and/or national planning agencies, national systems of welfare and population surveillance/management, mass literacy and nationalist ideologies.13 Similarly, but with a stronger emphasis on mentalité, Zygmunt Bauman locates the defining feature of modernity in its concern with order, not so much industrialism or capitalism, because “the preoccupation with orderly, manageable society, is a common denominator of other modern undertakings … to make human affairs regular and amenable to planning and control was high up in the mind of the principle advocates and actors of industrialism, democracy, and capitalism.”14 For Bauman modernity and the awareness of the artificiality of social order are synonymic, and the characteristically modern obsession with ordering is the outcome of that awareness. As he points out, “from its inception, ‘modernity’ was known in one form only: that of ‘managerial’ modernity, an order-designing and order-administering modernity.”15 Bauman is also the one who unequivocally links modernity not merely to capitalism but specifically to imperialism in the era of the nation-state. This comes with a new perception of time; indeed, Bauman postulates that “the history of time began with modernity,” modernity being “more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time when time has a history.” Modernity emancipated time from space because, unlike space, time could be changed 13   Nikos Mouzelis, “Modernity: a non-European conceptualization,” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 50, N. 1, March 1999, 143–144, 156–157. 14  Zygmunt Bauman & Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 78. 15  Ibid., 74.

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and manipulated through technical innovation. “Whoever traveled faster, could claim more territory—and, having done that, could control it, map it and supervise it … Modernity was born under the stars of acceleration and land conquest.”16 Peter Osborne’s provides another analysis of the explicit link and hierarchical relationship between modernity and nationalism. According to him, the problem is “not how to rethink the notion of modernism from the standpoint of national cultures (modernism as national allegory, for example). It is, rather, how the problematic of the modern, concretely applied, can help replace the problematic of ‘national cultures’, with a broader conception of the temporalcultural dimensions of social relations—social relations through which ‘the nation’ is itself produced as a cultural-ideological effect of various forms of state power.” Applying his very broad understanding of modernism as “a particular temporal logic of negation (the new)” together with the metaphor and theory of translation, Osborne succeeds in dissolving the discreteness of separate nationalisms and their cultures.17 We see them floating, with their ships of different size and shape, and colorful crews, which are often in conflict or fleeting alliances, in the common sea of modernity. Thus the nation-state comes to the fore as the prototypical institutional embodiment of political modernity, nationalism in the apt expression of Josep Llobera is its god, and “the nation, as a culturally defined community, is the highest symbolic value of modernity; it has been endowed with a quasisacred character equaled only by religion.”18 Even a cursory look at the present volume will bear this out. From the different ideological approaches dealing with the imperial heritage and finessing projects of how to create the modern state—liberal, conservative, socialist and others—to the literary and scientific attempts at squaring the circle of individual and collective identities, the obsession with the nation, its territory and the institutions that would serve it best is obvious. It is a well-known fact that this period saw the gradual crumbling of the three empires that between themselves controlled much of what is designated as Central and Southeast Europe, or altogether Eastern Europe: the Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov Empire. In the course of less than a century, a multitude of small to medium-sized nation-states appeared in the east of Europe, beginning in the Balkans: Greece (independence 1830), Serbia (autonomy 1830, independence 1878), Montenegro (independence 1878), 16  Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 2000), 110, 112. 17  Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2000), 59, 61. 18  Josep R. Llobera, The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1994), ix.

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Romania (unification 1859, independence 1878), Bulgaria (autonomy 1878, independence 1908), Albania (independence 1913), Hungary (Ausgleich 1867, independence 1918), Poland (independence 1918), Czechoslovakia (indepen­ dence 1918), Lithuania (independence 1918), Latvia (independence 1918), Estonia (independence 1918), and finally, the two par excellence successor states Austria (1918), Turkey (1923). Russia alone preserved the similitude of empire (some would argue its essence) with the creation of the Soviet Union (1922). For Eastern Europe the nation-state proved to be the central of the pillars of stability. It was the nation-state that was to provide and guarantee all other aspects of modern social life: industrialization, universal education, political rights, etc. In all of the countries of Central and Southeast Europe, and arguably more so in the societies of the southeast that had embarked somewhat earlier on the road to national independence, nation building was linked to the victory of the centralizing state over traditional forms of decentralized communal self-rule. This, in the end, produced everywhere powerful antagonisms between the state and society, between the city and the countryside, between the peasants and the bureaucracy.19 Yet, at the beginning, before the achievement of sovereign statehood, the advent of mass society together with the spread of the ideals of social justice and equality were mostly subordinated to the idea of equality between nations. This powerful idea was channeled into equally powerful movements aimed at reform, different types of adjustment of ethnic minorities within the old imperial frameworks, most remarkable among them the different visions of federative arrangements, and ultimately independent nation-states. The vindication of the nation-state came with a price everywhere in Europe, not only in the east, and gradually transformed the liberal and altogether inclusive character of the early to mid-nineteenthcentury national doctrines by the conservative, exclusivist, and irredentist policies of the new political elites.20 19  Wolfgang Höpken, “Zentralstaat und kommunale Sebstverwaltung in Bulgarien 1880– 1910. Zur Anatomie eines Modernisierungskonfliktes,” in: Zwetana Todorova, ed. Probleme der Modernisierung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Sofia: Sofia University Kl.Okhrisdki, 1994), 24–39; H.-M. Böstfleisch, Modernisierungsprobleme und Entwicklungskrisen: Die Auseinandersetzingen um die Bürokratie in Serbien 1839–1958 (Frankfurt am Main, 1987); H.-M. Miedlig, Patriarchalische Mentalität als Hindernis für die staatliche und gesellschaftliche Modernisierung Serbien im 19 Jh., Südost-Forschungen 50, 1991, 163–190; V. Georgiadu, Griechenlands nicht-kapitalistische Entwicklungsaspekte im 19. Jh. (Frankfurt am Main, 1991); Dobrinka Parusheva, “Politicheska kultura i kultura v politikata. Balkanite v kraia na XIX i nachaloto na XX vek,” Istorichesko bîdeshte, 1998, 1, 111–124. 20  An apt illustration is Brian A. Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth Century Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For general

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What has held as a common verdict about the whole area (with the exception of the Czech territories and several other local pockets) was the overall insufficient development of capitalism (more flagrant the further one moved to the east), something that produced an East European specificity, namely the growth of the nation-state without sufficient industrialization and urbanization, the “lack of chronological correspondence between the two processes— first, creation of nation and nation-state; only after that, modernization as an economic and social process.”21 This has prompted one author to speak aptly about “politics as development” and another to posit that “modernity had its full impact in Central and Eastern Europe after 1920.”22 As already pointed out, the state was seen as a pioneering agent of industrialization and economic nationalism (protectionism), it was everywhere accounts of east European nationalism, see Peter F. Sugar and Ivo John Lederer, eds., Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle, 1994); Sugar, ed., Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, Md., 1995); Emil Niederhauser, The Rise of Nationality in Eastern Europe (Budapest, 1981); Andrew György, Nationalism in Eastern Europe (McLean, Va., 1970); Ronald Sussex and J. C. Eade, eds., Culture and Nationalism in NineteenthCentury Eastern Europe (Columbus, 1985); Richard Plaschka, Nationalismus, Staatsgewalt, Widerstand: Aspekte nationaler und sozialer Entwicklung in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa (Munich, 1985); Gerasimos Augustinos, ed., The National Idea in Eastern Europe: The Politics of Ethnic and Civic Community (Lexington, 1996); Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920 (Seattle, 1977); Gale Stokes, Nationalism in the Balkans: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1984); John C. Swanson, The remnants of the Habsburg monarchy: the shaping of modern Austria and Hungary, 1918–1922 (East European monographs no. 568, Boulder: East European Monographs; New York: Distributed by Columbia University Press, 2001). Worth mentioning are also some major collective works on European nationalism in general, in which East Europe assumes the role of recipient of ideas: Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter, eds., The National Question in Europe in Historical Context (Cambridge, Eng., 1993); Louk Hagendorn et al., eds., European Nations and Nationalism: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives (Aldershot, Eng., 2000). For a first-class, recent comparative attempt in a general European framework that can serve as the rare example of a balanced rendition, see Ulrike v. Hirschhausen and Jörn Leonhard, Nationalismen in Europa: West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich (Göttingen, 2001). 21  K.-D. Grothusen, “Modernisierung und Nationsbildung. Modelltheoretische Überlegungen und ihre Anwendung auf Serbien und die Türkei,” Südost-Forschungen, Band XLIII, 1981, 135–180; Rumen Daskalov, Holm Sundhaussen, “Modernisierungsansätze,” in Magarditsch Hatschikjan, Stefan Troebst, eds. Südosteuropa. Ein Handbuch: Gesellschaft, Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur, Muenchen (Beck, 1999). 22  Gale Stokes, Politics as Development: The Emergence of Political Parties in NineteenthCentury Serbia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990); Alan Dingsdale. Mapping Modernities. Geographies of Central and Eastern Europe, 1920–2000 (London and NY: Routledge, 2002), xxi. See also Gerasimos Augustinos, ed. Diverse Paths to Modernity in Southeastern Europe. Essays in National Development (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991).

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the predominant actor of modernity. Everywhere, even though seriously lagging behind the economic development of Western Europe, the half century leading to the First World War saw remarkable levels of economic resurgence, the flourishing of light industries, the beneficial effect on industries from high state expenditure on railway construction, the European arms’ race, the development of technologies, industrial concentration, protectionism and cartelization. Everywhere, modernization was seen as the prime instrument to close the temporal and spatial lag vis-à-vis the west, and everywhere the often debilitating consciousness of this gap was the primary motor of activity. It has to be added in parenthesis that probably because of this, modernization as a concept has had a much more favorable fate in Eastern Europe and was never entirely purged from its vocabulary. Modernization was always seen as the most potent catching-up device, “the process of long-term change that transforms a society resting on agriculture and its related political and social structures into an industrial society based on technological advancement, secularized culture, bureaucratic administration, and extensive (however shallow) forms of political participation.”23 Writing about Turkey, Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba welcome the emphasis on cultural identity, difference, and diversity over the homogenization and universalist claims and aspirations of modernization. Yet, they also point out the need to reclaim the universal and liberating potential of modernization as a world-historical liberating process that made it possible for people to pursue their individual interests while forming meaningful collectivities. This, they insist, has to be distinguished from social science texts describing modernization by confining the analysis of this rich and complex phenomenon to separate nation-states: “Just as we need to distinguish between modernity as a potentially liberating historical condition and its instrumentalization for a political project of domination, we also need to distinguish between the democratic implications of the recent post-modern critique, on the one hand, and its self-closure into a new form of orthodoxy.”24 All this raises two additional issues with extraordinary relevance for Eastern Europe: the notion and manifestations of backwardness, and the concept of alternative or multiple modernities. The sense of lag and lack, analytically subsumed in the notion of backwardness, has been a dominant trope not only in East European or, more broadly, in non-European perceptions. For long 23  Ian Kershaw and Moshe Levin, Stalinism and Nazism. Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 344–345. 24  Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba, Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1997), 6.

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decades, it had been painfully present in German self-perceptions.25 It continues to be present in Spanish and Italian discourses, although no longer with the painful overtones. In the East European context, more so than in other nonwestern contexts, the literature on backwardness is dominated by economic historians and political scientists. In fact, some authors have argued that the subdiscipline of economic development was created in the 1940s mostly by East Europeans who employed the cases of Eastern Europe as their original empirical base.26 If cultural aspects are discussed, it is only by way of weighing cultural traditions as impediments or promoters of development. Questions like “Why did the Industrial Revolution take place in the West?” and “What causes economic growth ?” are the ones that frame the discussion and while there are different explanatory systems—the dominant among them Marxism, even when unacknowledged; world systems theory, especially center-periphery relations; modernization theory; geographic determinism; and cultural determinism (in this order)—there is an overall consensus that Eastern Europe has been lagging economically at least since the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries and maybe as far back as the eleven–twelfth centuries, but in any case long before it was absorbed into the wider western world market.27 As far as the 25  Reinhart Koselleck, “Deutschland—eine verspätete Nation,” in Zeitschichten, 359–380. 26  Joseph L. Love evokes the names of Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Ragnar Nurske, Kurt Martin, Hans Singer, Alexander Gerschenkron, Peter Bauer, Paul Baran, Michal Kalecki and others. Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil (Stanford, 1996), 6. Love argues that “in the interwar period … the newly independent and newly configured nations of East Central Europe constituted a ‘proto’-Third World in which the problems of economic and social backwardness were first confronted and formally theorized, against a range of development options, which included Soviet socialism” (214). 27  See the important collective volume of Daniel Chirot, ed., The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley, 1989), which was the result of a conference at Bellagio in 1985 and includes the first-class articles of Chirot, Robert Brenner, Peter Gunst, Jacek Kochanowicz, Fikret Adanir, John Lampe and Gale Stokes. This approach has produced important research, and at least a few other works are worth mentioning, even if they do not necessarily reach identical conclusions: John Lampe and Marvin R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations (Bloomington, 1982); John Lampe, “Modernization and Social Structure: The Case of the pre-1914 Balkan Capitals,” Southeastern Europe/Europe du sud-est, 5, Pt.2, 1979, 11–32; T. Iván Berend and György Ránki, The European Periphery and Industrialization, 1780–1914 (Cambridge, Eng., 1982); Berend and Ránki, “Underdevelopment in Europe in the Context of East-West Relations in the Nineteenth Century,” Etudes Historiques Hongroises 1 (1980): 687–710; Michael Palairet, The Balkan Economies, 1800–1914: Evolution Without Development (Cambridge, Eng., 1997); Nikos Mouzelis, Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment, London: Macmillan, 1978; Paul Bödy, Joseph Eötvös and the Modernization of Hungary, 1840–1870:

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explanations for this economic backwardness go, the consensus, if any, is far more brittle. These explanations range from social-structural ones of a historical longue durée (Jenö Szücs) to reversing the premises of the debate: it is rapid growth rather than a tendency to stagnation that is exceptional and Eastern Europe, from this point of view, is normalized with the rest of the world where western Europe is seen as the exception that ought to be explained.28 Addressing the issue as “the trap of backwardness,” I suggested elsewhere that it should be approached through the concept of relative synchronicity within a longue durée framework, a perspective that circumvents the trap of origins, which carries backwardness as its corollary.29 While I focused mostly on the discourse of backwardness in a cultural milieu, especially the conceptualization of comparative nationalisms, the model can be applied more broadly. After all, industrialization faces a similar challenge as nationalism. Not only did it take place over the course of several centuries over Europe, even in its core space, England, it took several centuries for its accomplishment and penetration into different areas of the country and into different branches of the industry (the eighteenth and nineteenth, or, according to a different interpretation, the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries). Surely, the mechanisms of the process and the social price at different junctures of this development were different (with pioneers and laggards in each case) but still nobody questions the epistemological adequacy of describing them within the same overall A Study of Ideas of Individuality and Social Pluralism in Modern Politics (East European monographs no. 174, Boulder: East European Monographs; New York: distributed by Columbia University Press, 1985); Holm Sundhaussen, “Zur Wechselbeziehung zwischen frühneuzeitlichem Außenhandel und ökonomischer Rückständigkeit in Osteuropa: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der ‘Kolonialthese,’ ” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983): 544– 563; Sundhausen, “Der Wandel der osteuropäischen Agrarverfassung während der frühen Neuzeit: Ein Beitrag zur Divergenz der Entwicklungswege von Ost- und Westeuropa,” Südost Forschungen 42 (1983): 169–181; Sundhaussen, “Die ‘Peripherisierungstheorie’ zur Erklärung Südosteuropäischer Geschichte,” in Uwe Hinrichs, Helmut Jachnow, Reinhard Lauer, and Gabriella Schubert, eds., Sprache in der Slavia und auf dem Balkan: Slavistische und balkanologische Aufsätze; Norbert Reiter zum 65. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden, 1993), 277–288; Roland Schönfeld, ed., Industrialisierung und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Südosteuropa (Munich, 1989); Zwetana Todorova, ed., Probleme der Modernisierung Bulgariens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Sofia, 1994). 28  Jenö Szücs, “Three Historical Regions of Europe,” in John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London, 1988), 291–331; Daniel Chirot, “Causes and Consequences of Backwardness,” in Chirot, Origins of Backwardness, 1–14. The latter way of thinking was inspired by the significant impact of the work of Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge, Eng., 1981). 29  Maria Todorova, “The trap of backwardness: modernity, temporality and the study of Eastern European nationalism,” Slavic Review, 64, 1, Spring 2005, 140–164.

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process (and the respective category). Moreover, at the end of the day, when in particular places the process has reached some completion, and is considered successful or acceptable, no one is interested in the original and the possible deviations thereof. The reformulation I proposed is not undertaken for the sake of political correctness or diplomacy, but in order to make a methodological point. While the description that favors a distinct primary place and the transmission of the original pattern presupposes distinct geographic and historical spaces, usually clustered around the separate nation-states that were the habitus of modernity, the other involves Eastern Europe in a common long-term process. It, thus, redefines the region as part of a common space (European or global) which evolves, and one of whose characteristics is the homogenization (or, rather, imagined homogenization) of polities. It also allows us to deconstruct the category “West” and transform it from a model-like entity into a dynamic one which itself underwent the process unevenly and over a long period of time. Thus, the notion of relative synchronicity within the longue durée of modernity, even as it does not exclude the existence of asynchronic developments, allows us to describe them not simply in terms of linear consecutive phenomena, diffusion and one-way transmissions, but also, in some respects, as a process that emphasizes its dialogical nature.30 Still, no matter how we deal with this problematique today (and the materials in the volume abundantly bear out such an approach), it is a fact that in the time period covered by the readings (and, arguably, until the present if not in such dire degree), politicians and intellectuals in Eastern Europe had deeply internalized the sense of lack and lag, which either paralyzed them or prompted a volley of hectic reformist activities. In the Greek case, and this can be extended easily to the others, “Greek culture became ‘traditional’ only when it began to view itself as an inferior past living in the present—the European present. At that point, it emerged as a problem to be dealt with. It 30  For example, much of the romantic passion of George Byron and Alexander Pushkin cannot be understood outside the influence of Greek nationalism; the Polish partitions and the ensuing mobilization of Polish nationalism created waves that inspired a variety of responses, from philosophers beginning with Rousseau to the crystallization of a specific Russophobia in nineteenth-century Europe that goes a long way in explaining subsequent European international relations; the German preoccupations with folklore cannot be understood without the Serb connection, nor the introduction of the moral principle (although not necessarily morality) in British Gladstonian politics without the impetus of Bulgarian nationalism and the retaliation it invoked. In a larger context, Timothy Mitchell insists that putting empire back into the history of Europe enables the reversal of the narrative of modernization so as to see the West as the product of modernity (Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” op. cit., 15).

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became something either to be rejected, which is to say, modernized, or to be re-invented, re-interpreted, re-valued and used, after the European fashion, as a defense against the modern.”31 As Gregory Jusdanis puts it: “Belated modernization, especially in nonwestern societies necessarily remains ‘incomplete’ not because it deviates from the supposedly correct path but because it cannot culminate in a faithful duplication of western prototypes.” Favoring the concept of “many modernities,” he therefore concludes that peripheral societies “internalize the incongruity between western originals and local realities as a structural deficiency.”32 Yet how we deal with it today is more than relevant. After all it is “the problem of how to write of forms of modernity that deviate from the canonical understanding of the term.”33 Some still insist on the necessity of an idealtypical form, usually equated with and distilled from West European examples. Others speak of alternative, multiple or plural modernities. Still others deny modernity’s heuristic value by arguing that everything in the world is by definition modern, alternatively or not. The counter-stream to the homogenization theory of modernity is a fairly recent phenomenon of the last little over a decade and focuses on the heterogeneity of global modernity. Arguing that the modern was produced not within Europe alone, it pluralizes modernity and explores “alternative modernities” or “multiple capitalisms,” stressing local, regional and global forces that shape particular histories of capitalist modernity.34 31  Vasso Argyriou, “Tradition, Modernity and European Hegemony in the Mediterranean,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies, vol. 12, N. 1, 2002, 34. Augusta Dimou demonstrates how “belated” modernity inflected the response of socialists. While social democrats in western countries saw their principal task in exposing, analyzing, and mitigating the exigencies of the modernization process, the Bulgarian social democrats first tried to persuade public opinion and their adversaries that modernization was the desired, necessary and unavoidable path for the country (Augusta Dimou, Entangled Paths Toward Modernity: Contextualizing of Socialism and Nationalism in the Balkans, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009, 159–160). 32  Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xiii. 33  Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), xx. 34  On alternative modernities, see: M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Roberton, Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimension of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Peter Geschiere and Michael Rowlands, “The Domestication of Modernity: Different Trajectories,” Africa 66 (4) 1996, 552–54; L. Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Jean and John Comaroff, eds. Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago: The University

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Much of this was generalized and theorized by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt in a series of important works. Following Weber, Eisenstadt understands the core of modernity as the deconstruction of the God-ordained worldview of all axial civilizations. Since modern societies are no longer embedded in transcendental orders, they are open to continuous transformation and adaptation. For Eisenstadt, modernity is characterized by open political arenas and changing collective identities, autonomy of man in relation to authority, and multiplicity of competing visions of the public good. Traditions, instead of being dissolved by modernity, serve as its sources for perpetual constitution and reconstitution. Eisenstadt posited that the cultural and political program of modernity was first developed in Western and Central Europe when significant shifts occurred in the conception of human agency which allowed the conception of a future characterized by possibilities realizable through autonomous human agency. At the same time, various cultures undergoing modernization develop distinctive reaction patterns, institutions and ethical conceptions. There is, in this sense, a continual reinterpretation of the cultural program of modernity and, thus, the construction of multiple modernities, attempts by various groups and movements to re-appropriate and redefine the discourse of modernity in their own terms. Moreover, the forms of modernity that developed in North and Latin America are not fragments of the Old World, but crystallizations of new civilizations. All these civilizations share the central structural and ideational cores of modernity.35 While rightly arguing against the dangers of a Eurocentric paradigm, in which European history is sold as universal history, the now fashionable notions of alternative or multiple modernities come with their own liabilities,

of Chicago Press, 1999); Daedalus, Special Issue on ‘Multiple Modernities,” 129 (1) 2000; Timothy Mitchell, ed. Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001; Dorothy Hodgson, Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Perspectives (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Bruce M. Knauft, ed. Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 35   Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Some Observations on Multiple Modernities,” in Dominic Sachsenmaier and Jens Riedel with Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese and Other Interpretations (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 27–41; S. N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities”, Daedalus 129, 1, 2000, 1–29; S. N. Eisenstadt, ed, Patterns of Modernity. Volume II: Beyond the West (New York: New York University Press, 1987); S. N. Eisenstadt, The Great Revolutions and the Civilizations of Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 131–158.

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chief among them a possible slip into easy pluralism and cultural relativism.36 “The pluralizing of modernity appears to absolve analysts of the essentializing tendency inherent in a monolithic concept of modernity, yet it can risk reproducing it, in the same way the simplistic cultural relativism risks reifying difference whilst attempting to understand it.”37 Van der Veer in particular has been critical of the pluralizing move, maintaining that modernity should be seen as a singular phenomenon. He argues against using the term for a historical or social epoch, but for a political project linked to the development of the nationstate. The multiplicity of modernity, according to him, lies not in a plurality of modernities, but consists of a plurality of histories of the singular modernity, in which the emergence of the nation-state has differed.”38 Most sophisticated theorists, no matter what the preference, tend to reach some kind of a consensus. Dilip Gaonkar, who thinks in terms of alternative modernities, insists that it is impossible to abandon the western discourse on modernity. Modernity has traveled from the West to the rest of the world not only in term of cultural forms, social practices, and institutional arrangements, but also as a form of discourse that interrogates the present. Therefore, even if expressed in vernacular or cosmopolitan idioms, the legacy of the western discourse is inescapable. Wherever one is, one must think with and against the tradition and reflections from Marx to Weber through Baudelaire and Benjamin to Habermas and Foucault.39 At the other end, Jon Mitchell, following Van der Veer, builds his analysis on the premise that modernity is a singular process but one with different historical trajectories at different times and places.40 And James Ferguson who is altogether critical of the notion of alternative modernities, speaks of two types of modernity: a cultural modernity, where the idea of alternative modernities may be fecund, and an economic modernity, where it might be better to think in a more linear way.41 36  Stacy Pigg has argued against the concept of the modern as universal, proposing instead to attribute its influence on its cosmopolitan nature, as if modifying an adjective from the Latin to the Greek would suddenly purify its subject. Stacey Pigg, “The Credible and the Credulous: The Question of ‘Villagers’ Beliefs’ in Nepal,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 2 (1996): 160–201. Cited in Christine J. Walley, “Our Ancestors Used to Bury their ‘Development’ in the Ground: Modernity and the Meanings of Development within a Tanzanian Marine Park,” Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2003): 33–54. 37  Jon P. Mitchell, Ambivalent Europeans, op. cit., 13. 38  Van der Veer, “The Global History of ‘Modernity’,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 43, 3, 1998, 285–294. 39  Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” op. cit., 14–15. 40  Jon P. Mitchell, Ambivalent Europeans, op. cit., 241. 41  James Ferguson, “Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after Development,” in Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed Esty, eds., Postcolonial

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Finally, Timothy Mitchell contests both singular modernity and the easy pluralism of alternative modernities: “It is not that there are many different modernities, any more than there are many different capitalisms. Modernity, like capitalism, is defined by its claim to universality, to a uniqueness, unity, and universality that represents the end (in every sense) of history. Yet this always remains an impossible unity, an incomplete universal. Each staging of the modern must be arranged to produce the unified, global history of modernity, yet each requires those forms of difference that introduce the possibility of a discrepancy, that return to undermine its unity and identity. Modernity thus becomes the unsuitable yet unavoidable name for all these discrepant histories.”42 Without imposing or even suggesting an explicit preference, this volume offers ample material to explore some of these options. Do we approach Eastern Europe as part of a universal, if not entirely homogenizing and singular modernity? Is it the case that it can be better explained in terms of an alternative modernity or even multiple modernities? The richness and variety of texts, and the privileging of the thematic approach convincingly gesture in the direction of a successful transcendence of national boundaries which has been the organizing principle in the majority of regional surveys. Here, we can see the agents of modernity breathing the same air, thinking the same thoughts, even if they do not always converse with each other. True, the very fact that the comparative potential of the material is confined within the East European region comes with its own caveats. The East-West duality can be broken only by setting a general European or global framework, in which the East European presence is organically interwoven or “entangled” as the discursive fashion would have it today. Setting the East European experience apart risks inadvertently reifying it into a discrete phenomenon. Yet this in no way is a deficiency of the volume’s conceptualization. It must bear the burden of the existing state of historiographical accumulation and achievement, but it does so admirably. In the end, the appreciation of the universal choir can come only after one hears and learns to appreciate the distinct and original voices of the region’s soloists. Studies and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). This view tallies well with Taylor’s two theories of modernity, an “acultural” one that views transition as a set of culture-neutral operations transforming any traditional society, and a cultural theory which holds that modernity always unfolds within a specific cultural and civilizational context (Charles Taylor, “Two theories of Modernity,” in Dilip P. Gaonkar, ed, Alternative Modernities, op. cit.). 42  Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” op. cit., 24.

CHAPTER 3

Historical Legacies between Europe and the Near East In 2007 I was invited to deliver the First Carl-Heinrich Becker lecture of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung in Berlin. Carl-Heinrich Becker (1876–1933) was an Orientalist who is remembered as one of the founders of modern Islamic Studies in Germany. He was also cherished for his vision of entangled histories and cultures of Europe and the Muslim world. As Prussian Minister of Culture and Education he supported the study of foreign languages, histories and culture as part of the national education and as a means to avoid conflict. The lecture was published as a separate bilingual book in German and English: Historische Vermächtnisse zwischen Europa und dem Nahen Osten/ Historical Legacies Between Europe and the Near East. Berlin: Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wiisenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, 2007, 83 pp. The following text reproduces the English text, with the kind permission of the publisher. Starting with the impressive legacy of Becker, this chapter examines the regional concepts of Europe, the Middle or Near East, and the Balkans, and evaluates complex notions such as of Intermediacy/Indeterminacy, and path dependence and their appropriateness for the analysis of the Balkans.

It is an exceptional honor to be invited to deliver this first annual lecture of the Carl Heinrich Becker lecture series of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. I consider it a double intellectual honor: on the one hand, it connects me directly with the wonderful initiative of the research program “Europe in the Middle East— the Middle East in Europe” at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; on the other hand, it celebrates the legacy of a great scholar. I must admit that although I knew well Becker’s stature in German Islamic scholarship, I had never read him closely; and now this invitation has given me the wonderful opportunity of familiarizing myself with his ideas. When I started reading his Islamstudien, published in 1924, I was struck by the force and insights he brought to bear in fighting stereotypes about Islam. Becker shows the complexities of Islam, he refutes the attempts to depict it as a product of the desert, as being purely an outgrowth of Arab culture, and he gainsays those efforts to explain contemporary Islam exclusively through the Qur’an and Mohammed. He shows its genealogy from Christianity and Judaism, its

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_005

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Aramaic, Greek and Persian roots, and he is persuasive in arguing that “Islamic civilization” was possible only because it was grafted onto a pre-existing civilization: the Hellenistic Near East. 1

Becker’s Vision

My first thought on reading Becker was a rather depressing one. I mused on the futility of his prescience given where we now are with regard to cheap popular stereotypes. Maybe, I thought, the voice of reason is too subdued, and we are impotent to reach the “Other” with it. After all, it is only the ways of prejudice that succeed in being broad and straight; knowledge has to carve winding trails in a steep mountainside in order to achieve the summit. But while continuing to admire what I was reading, on several occasions I was forced to raise my eyebrows. The first time was when I read that “it is self-evident that the Roman Orient had a strong Western veneer, whereas in the East the Hellenistic cultural elements were increasingly transmuted into a kind of Asianism.” Then came the statement that in the centuries prior to Mohammed the “Near East became ever more Asianized.”1 What exactly did Becker mean by the concepts of Asianism and Asianization? I read further and they were never defined. As already mentioned, Becker was amenable to the notion of a unified Islamic civilization only insofar as it was grafted onto a previously existing civilization, the Hellenistic—even if it was a “mixed civilization.”2 His central idea was that Islam is not simply linked through a complex web of interrelationships with Europe. It is an integral part of the European cultural circle and plays a prominent role as mediator between Europe and Asia: Islam plays a marked mediating role. It is located exactly in the middle between Europe and Asia. Ethnographically, it belongs more to Asia; however, from the point of view of the decisive cultural issues that delineate cultural spheres, it has more in common with Europe…. If one were to distinguish between large developmental complexes, then the line would run not between Europe and Islam, but rather between Europe and Islam on the one hand, and Asia on the other.3 1  C. H. Becker, Vom Wer den und Wesen der islamischen Welt: Islamstudien vol. 1 (Leipzig: Verlag Quelle & Meyer 1924), 16, 18. 2  Ibid., 16–17. 3  Ibid., 31, 39.

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Here, then, were two more concepts it was apparently deemed unnecessary to define: Europe and Asia. Yet another conceptual pair that he took for granted was East and West, as when Becker—commenting on the constant clashes between Greece and Persia, and the subsequent conquests of Alexander the Great—stated that “the borders between East and West were becoming increasingly less defined.”4 The reason all these concepts were undefined was that they were based on a fundamental epistemological premise: Becker’s belief in the concept of cultural circles. He frankly admitted to taking this concept from Ernst Troeltsch’s theory of cultural history, which posited that modern scholarship cannot encompass humanity as a whole: “Since humanity as a whole is no longer a unified historical subject for modern scholarship, it is utterly inconceivable—and a horrible thought—that humanity should have had a common developmental history, let alone that one should be able to implement such a concept.” One can only entertain the “horrible thought” as to the reaction of Troeltsch or Becker to today’s discipline of world or global history. The reason why this was impossible for them was not because of humanity’s enormity but because it lacked a spiritual unity: “Humanity as a whole has no spiritual unity and consequently no unified development.” The concept which was to solve this aporia became Troeltsch’s “closed cultural spheres.” Each of these spheres had its own specific development and history. It must be admitted that his underlying motivation has something to be said for it, based as it was on the idea that any generalization coming from, say, a Western-based scholar would inevitably compare and reduce the others to the main developmental phases of the West, i.e. what we today call Eurocentrism. Others should be studied on their own terms. This is a dilemma that has persisted up until the present day: How should we articulate diversity versus unity? What are the pitfalls of both approaches? How can we best balance the two? Troeltsch himself identified several cultural spheres: Egyptian, Hindu, Chinese, and Mediterranean-European-American. He posited this latter sphere as a unified one, but he did not see the Orient in such terms because he felt that the need and capacity for historical self-examination and a critical approach to the past was almost unknown to non-European peoples.5 For Becker, painfully aware of the complex and dynamic history of the Near East, this view of the Orient was too extreme—although he did of course accept the uniqueness of the Western Christian sphere as forged by Hellenistic thought and “European willpower,” and he unquestioningly accepted the theoretical premises of closed cultural spheres. Rather he wished to “change 4  Ibid., 17. 5  Ibid., 24–25.

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somewhat the emphasis.” This for him meant taking into account the “true” historical record and—with some caveats—subsuming the Islamic world of the Near East into the European one.6 Islam for him became the link between Europe and essential Asia, and he quoted approvingly yet another philosopher enamored of civilizational theory—Graf Keyserling—for whom the Islamic world belonged to the European and not the Asian one.7 Becker, however, was too much of a scholar to rely on philosophical intuitions alone. He called on scientific criteria for this thesis and his chief criterion was the notion of cultural affinity. He defined three elemental forces underlying Islamic civilization: the ancient Orient with its Judaic, Persian and Babylonian elements; classical, chiefly Hellenistic antiquity; and Christianity. These three features differentiate Islam from all other Asian cultural spheres.8 Based on these criteria, he offered his view of Islam’s mediating role between Europe and Asia while simultaneously securing its position within Europe. Becker insisted that this was not only theoretically important but had also an “eminently practical significance”—though he was not precise about the practical side of it.9 So here was a correction that, from the political point of view—i.e. from the point of view of its repercussions on today’s European policies—sounds quite revolutionary; yet, from a theoretical, philosophical and ethical viewpoint, it is deeply conservative. Despite its qualified openness to the Near East, it is still based on a fundamentally bifurcated view and on a reified interpretation of civilizational spheres as self-contained monoliths. It is but a small step from here to the superiority syndrome and overt racism. In the opinion of a British resident of the Ottoman Empire in 1857, the Turk had good qualities but his misfortune was “that he does not possess the capacity of indefinite improvement which belongs to the European race. Like the Chinese, Hindoos and, in fact, all Asiatics, there is a degree, and not a high one, of civilization which he cannot surpass, or even long preserve.”10 Let me emphatically state that I do not accuse Troeltsch, let alone Becker, of racism. Moreover, while the affinity between Troeltsch’s, Oswald Spengler’s, Arnold Toynbee’s and, more recently, Samuel Huntington’s worldview is more than obvious, I do not accuse any of them of racism. All I am saying is that both racism and the idea of closed civilizational 6  Ibid., 26. 7  Ibid., 26–27. 8  Ibid., 28–29. 9  Ibid., 39. 10  Quoted in Roderic Davison, “The Image of Turkey in the West in Historical Perspective,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin, no. 1, 1981, 2.

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and cultural spheres (as exemplified by these authors) has a common theoretical foundation. Maybe this, after all, was the reason why the otherwise prescient and passionate (as well as beautiful) plea of Becker to take Islam seriously in all its complexity may have failed. He simply embraced this phenomenon; but his whole way of thinking was based on rigid binaries and antinomies centered around the concept of closed civilizations. Another idea of Becker’s which is at first glance very attractive and pioneering is his notion of the thousand threads entwining the Islamic and Euro-American worlds, a kind of histoire croisée avant la lettre—even if his similes may sometimes sound strange to our ears today, as when he speaks of the clash between the masculine European element and the feminine Near Eastern element.11 As behooves its complex texture, histoire croisée must be practiced with great circumspection. Simply looking for elements of one phenomenon in the other is insufficient because it is premised on the immanent separateness of the entities. Accordingly, the mantra of today’s political rhetoric—“dialogue between Islam and Christianity”—although certainly well-intended, remains hollow. This is also inadvertently implicit in the otherwise nicely symmetrical title of the project “Europe in the Near East—the Near East in Europe.” But what is Europe? And what is the Near East? 2

Europe and the Near East as Concepts

Europe, like the Holy Trinity, has three hypostases: the Name, the Place, and the Idea, and they all have their divine claims. They also all have “spaces” as one of their central attributes. The name “Europe” first belonged to a consort of the chief God, and she rode on his back (in his incarnation as a bull) from Asia Minor to Crete; it meant something beautiful, big-eyed, broad-faced and just plain broad. The place was first identified by the island Greeks, who designated as “Europe” the mainland stretching north from the Peloponnesus, the area we today call the Balkans, or that archeologists in their specialized language term Old Europe. In the course of several centuries it extended its space westward, encompassing the whole of the western Eurasian land mass, and then it contracted its space, to be finally expropriated by its westernmost 11  Becker, 31. In this respect, however, he actually has his latter-day trendy followers. Slavoj Žižek, for example, structures his essay on Europe and Islam on a Lacanian bifurcation between a masculine and feminine essence (“A Glance into the Archives of Islam,” http:// www.lacan.com/zizarchives.htm).

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part, the one some authors call Visigothic Europe. While this part of Europe, known also by the name of “European Union” or Europe for short, is not quite godlike, it certainly puts on regal airs. The idea of Europe or, rather, a certain ideal of Europe, undoubtedly has certain divine pretensions as a value system and has succeeded in creating itself as what it is not, or, to paraphrase Edward Said’s characterization of culture, it is constantly defining itself against what it believes to be its opposite.12 This is a widely disseminated view, although not one that is entirely uncontested. If historians timidly mention Europe’s dubious past or vehemently lambast Eurocentrism while post-colonialists attempt to “de-center” it, for all practical purposes Europe as an idea is proving too powerful and convenient even for the skeptics. Notoriously, there is no mandated consensus on just what constitutes Europe. A fine recent study on the teaching of Europe’s history in schools shows that for history instructors “Europe is mainly understood as a geographical concept [and its history] is mostly understood as the history of some large western European countries plus Russia.”13 Scandinavians, Celts and Eastern Europeans of every stripe lament the fact that their histories remain invisible. Students, by contrast (in a study by Bodo Von Borries), do not treat Europe as mere geography but are equally distributed among those who see it as the birthplace of democracy, enlightenment and progress; or as a club of rich white countries guilty of economic and ecological exploitation; or, contrastingly, as a force for peace. In another study of French students, Nicole TutiauxGuillon shows that perceptions of the European past include Christian tradition, a lack of cultural diversity and permanent conflict, whereas the European present is equated with peace, modernism, citizenship and cultural diversity.14 All these perceptions are, of course, ones that students have picked up and internalized from school, home, and the public arena. How about the Near East? This concept has a much briefer historical pedigree than Europe, but is no less murky for all that. Notwithstanding the different definitions of Europe, there does exist a reasonable consensus about its geography (differences of several hundred kilometers in the east also notwithstanding), whereas the borders of the Near East have shifted over 5000 km to the east or to the west.15 At first there was only East and West. For Europe, the East began where the Ottoman Empire began (although one would hear the 12  Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 11–12. 13  Joke van de Leeuw-Roord, ed., History for Today and Tomorrow: What Does Europe Mean for School History? (Hamburg: Körber-Stiftung, 2001), 14. 14  Ibid., 14–15. 15  Roderic H. Davison, “Where is the Middle East?” Foreign Affairs, July 1960, 665.

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occasional witty remark that it started at the Vienna Landstrasse, Prague or Belgrade). Accordingly, the central diplomatic problem from the late 18th and through the 19th centuries was the so-called Eastern Question. It denoted the contest of the great powers primarily over Ottoman territories in Europe, and only later in Asia Minor. By the 1890s, a shift in terms occurred. The age of exploration in the 19th century designated China, Japan and Malaysia as the Far East. With the competition for spheres of influence in China, there were now two Eastern Questions, a Near and a Far. As a result, “the label Near East elbowed its way into popular usage as a byproduct of the great decade of European imperialism.”16 More than any other term—certainly more than “Europe”— the term Near East developed as a consequence of the political and strategic interests of outside powers. Britain in particular was instrumental in contributing to a tripartite division and adopting and imposing a new term: the Middle East. This was officially sanctioned by Churchill in the 1920s, and the Royal Geographical Society decided that henceforth the Near East should denote only the Balkans, the lands from the Bosporus to India would be covered by the Middle East, and that beyond them lay the Far East.17 By the 1950s Churchill came to correct himself and reserved the term “Near East” for Egypt, the Levant, Syria and Turkey; Persia and Iraq were the Middle East; India, Burma, and Malaya the East; and China and Japan the Far East.18 By that time the term Near East had become almost obsolete in the Anglo-Saxon (i.e. English and American) vocabulary, and today Middle East is the dominant term in both political and academic usage, even if most of the languages of continental Europe (German, French, the Slavic tongues) stick with the Near East. This overlapping use of the terms Near or Middle East is understood most commonly as the ensemble of Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Iran, and all the Arab-speaking states of Asia.19 The point here is not to expose the arbitrariness of naming or to deplore the ascriptive power of dominant polities. After all, it is not only “the West” that clumps together distant lands. The Ottoman Empire used to refer to all of Western Europe as Frengistan, and the Arabs themselves refer to one of their own—Morocco—as the Far West (al-maghreb al-aksa). The point is to stress the role of positioning and power. This brief and far from exhaustive survey 16  Ibid., 666. 17  Ibid., 668. 18  Ibid., 670. 19  Sometimes it includes also the Arab-speaking countries of North Africa as well as Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Muslim majority countries of the former Soviet Union.

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of the two concepts—Europe and the Near East—demonstrates that, as used today, they are products of the modern era, specifically the last couple of centuries, even though within this time span they have undergone and continue to undergo significant modifications. But let me be clear: it is not that only the modern era has brought about some special misunderstanding, erroneous attribution, or artificial opposition. The two modern concepts, Europe and the Near East—one ancient in name but with a new modern meaning, the other one entirely a product of modernity—have been grafted onto a much earlier division, the one between East and West, Europe and Asia. If we follow the course of this division from antiquity onward, however, it displays a similarly flexible and shifting geographical nature.20 Categories in history are notoriously protean and malleable over the longue durée. Not only do the boundaries between concepts shift, these boundaries themselves are permeable, and there is always a grey zone, a no-man’s-land lying betwixt and between. So, what is it that lies between Europe and the Near East? To answer, there is an area that is supposed to link these two separate and opposing entities, an area marked by the characteristics of both, and one that allegedly has an intermediate character—the area we call alternatively the Balkans or Southeastern Europe. 3

The Balkans as Intermediary Space

I would like to illustrate these notions of intermediacy and changeability first with an example that comes from a period—the early 15th century—long before the concepts Europe and the Near East had crystallized into their present shape. Ulrich von Rifental, a Constance burgher, lived at the time and place of the great Catholic church council of 1414–1418, notorious for its burning of Jan Hus. Inspired by the elevated role played by his home city, Ulrich decided to commemorate the event and in the 1430s penned his Chronik des Constanzer Concils.21 It is a work that affords an interesting glimpse into the geographical and political ideas of the educated strata of German-speaking society in the 15th century. Let us take a closer look at how Ulrich von Rifental depicted what we define today as Southeastern Europe. He classified all the peoples attending the council under two rubrics, listing their ecclesiastical and lay rulers. For his ecclesiastical overview he started 20  For the classic exposition on the issue, see Edward Said, Orientalism. 21  Michael Richard Buck, ed., Chronik des Constanzer Concils, 1414 bis 1418 (Hildesheim-New York: Georg Olaus, 1971).

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first with Asia, since this was seen as composing the largest part of the world. It was now mostly Muslim, and contained 180 Muslim “churches” with more than 1500 “bishoprics.” This Asia extended from Alexandria in the west to India in the east, thus encompassing all those territories today defined as “embracing the Near to the Far East” inclusive North Africa. He then moved to the continent of Africa proper. According to Ulrich, “Africa is Greece, and has two empires in it, Constantinople and Athens.” Let us recall that he wrote at a time when Constantinople was still Byzantine, and he was thus alluding to Eastern/ Orthodox/Greek Christianity. To this Africa Ulrich also added “Wallachia and Turkey, and all the lands that are buttressed by the sea and lie athwart Jerusalem as well as those on the other side of the Danube.” This part of the world, according to Ulrich, was larger than Europe and people there “keep in the greater part the Greek Orthodox faith, but there are many in the faith of the infidels [i.e. pagans] and in the Mohammedan faith as well.” The Rascians (Serbs), he wrote, had something in common with the Jews and the Greeks, “but are neither Jews nor Greeks.” In a word, Ulrich’s Africa coincided with the Balkans. His sole exception were the Bulgarians, who he placed in Asia along with the Tartars, India, Ethiopia, Arabia and the Holy Land—probably because at that time the Bulgarians had just been conquered by the Ottomans or because it was an implicit allusion to their ancient roots. For Ulrich, Europe was in effect “the land where we live” and it stretched from the “White Russians and Smolensk right up to Turkey” and included the kings and kingdoms belonging to the Roman crown. It was inhabited by “Romans,” Slavs, Turks, Hungarians, Germans, and others.22 Ulrich von Rifental was no geographic dolt. His cosmography simply “subordinated topographic information to the religious denominations of its human subject matter.” This is most evident in the case of Bosnia. The subjects of the King of Bosnia came from Europe, whereas those of the Duke of Bosnia in Turkey came from Africa. We can see here echoes of the complex state of contending ecclesiastical hierarchies in Bosnia—the Franciscan order and others loyal to the Vatican, the Orthodox church, and the idiosyncratic Bosnian church—in a period when the mass conversion of Bosnians to Islam was still at least half a century away. Africa signified “infidel,” “pagan,” “savage.” Since in learned German treatises of the mid-15th century, black Africans were doomed by their nature to the Kingdom of Antichrist, it followed that the Antichrist ruled in Africa. Ulrich’s perceptions of the region were determined by the confusing and fluid situation in the Balkans, populated as it was by heretical 22  Kiril Petkov, Infidels, Turks, and Women: The South Slavs in the German Mind, ca.1400–1600 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997), 55–61.

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Orthodox believers and in the process of being conquered by the Ottomans at precisely this time—in addition to its complicated and changing political and religious allegiances and its double and shifting vassalages.23 All in all, German writers from the 15th century onward stuck to the geographic criterion of defining Europe. This was a revival of the notions of classical antiquity which had fixed Europe’s borders at Constantinople and along the river Tanais (Don).24 The person most instrumental in this was Eneas Silvius Piccolomini, Pope Pius II (1405–1464) whose cosmographic opinions and authority marked all subsequent scholarship. Piccolomini’s work was permeated by the notion of stark cultural differences between Europe and Asia, and he is believed to be “the man who coined the word ‘Europeans’ and bequeathed it to Christendom as a kind of self-identification.”25 He was harking back to the unified state of Christendom, and for him the Christians of the Balkans, despite being heretics, were still guardians of Christendom against its foes. We still live today with this legacy and it is small wonder that the Vatican is one of the main bulwarks against a watered-down and more inclusive conception of Europeanness. Let us not forget that the surprisingly successful (in the end) visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Turkey last November had as its primary and central aim not to repair relations with Muslims but to heal the 1000-year rift between the once united Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. The Balkans have thus undergone an evolution from the original “Europe” to “Africa” to “Asia in Europe” to a transitory zone between Europe and Asia to “savage Europe” and back to Europe again. In April 2004 the British statesman Chris Patten thus addressed the German Bundestag: It was Bismarck who said that the Balkans “was not worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier” (Speech to the Reichstag, 5 December 1876). I understand what he was trying to say, but obviously our views of what it is to be European have, to say the least, developed a great deal since his day. The people of the Western Balkans are our fellow Europeans.26

23  Ibid., 58–59. For the most detailed and authoritative account, see John Fine, Jr., The Early Medieval Balkans as well as his The Late Medieval Balkans (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press 1983 and 1987, respectively). 24  Ibid., 207. 25  Ibid., 221–22. 26  As cited in Dimitris Livanios, “The ‘sick man’ paradox: history, rhetoric and the ‘European character’ of Turkey,” Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, vol. 8, no. 3, December 2006, 299–311, here 309.

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The most symptomatic part of this quote is that Chris Patten “understands” what Bismarck “was trying to say.” And this describes perfectly the status of not only the new Balkan members of the European Union but, I am afraid, also those from the rest of Eastern Europe. They are “fellow Europeans” but entre nous and off the record, we know what a drag they are on the EU. And practice, especially political practice, usually follows one’s gut feelings and not what we think we are obliged to say in order to maintain decorum. 4

Intermediacy/Indeterminacy or Historical Legacy?

Practice was very much on Carl Becker’s mind when he argued for the mediating role of Islam between Europe and Asia—and as an integral part of Europe—not only on theoretical grounds but because it had an “eminently practical significance.” Despite my stated skepticism about his overall theoretical framework, I respect and admire his attempt to base his thesis on scientific criteria. My quibble is about the sort of criteria one employs. For Becker this was the concept of cultural affinity forming discrete cultural spheres, a concept that naturally breeds the auxiliary notion of in-betweenness, of an intermediate space between these cultural spheres or civilizations. I refuse to see the Balkans as an intermediate (and indeterminate) space between Europe and Asia. Granted, this is how it has been perceived by most of Western journalism and by much of Western scholarship in the past couple of centuries, and I have described this as a specific discourse: balkanism.27 It seems to me that a better way to approach the malleability of boundaries and to deconstruct the stark and reified opposition between “civilizations” is the concept of historical legacies. I will develop it briefly here based on the example I know best—the Balkans—but arguing that it can be applied fruitfully to other entities saddled with the characterization of intermediacy, such as Islam and the Near East. Civilizations, like most other entities (states, regions, cities, villages) are most easily defined by outlining their borders. Indeed, for a long time, borders have been a favored object of analysis, especially in examinations of identity. Since identity and alterity (Otherness) are clearly in a symbiotic relationship, their most sharply defined characteristics are best articulated at this border encounter.28 As a consequence, Otherness is a fundamental category not only 27  Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press 1997, second edition 2009). 28  Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, Boston 1969; Raymond Corbey and Joep Leersen, eds., Alterity, Identity, Image: Selves and Others in Society and Scholarship (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1991).

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of social experience but also of social analysis. Borders, however, turned out to be a problematic first choice, chiefly because the excessive attention lavished on them created an unhealthy obsession with distinction and difference— that is, with Otherness itself.29 Recently there has been a powerful shift away from border studies toward the now fashionable category of space. This approach allots more and due attention to the cohesive processes and structures within a given entity. It has produced valuable works but it also has it dangers, especially when it produces static and ahistoric structural analyses. It is against this background that I am introducing the notion of historical legacy. This notion has numerous advantages over more structural categories of analysis such as borders, space, territoriality, etc., insofar as it more clearly articulates the dynamism and fluidity of historical change. It therefore appears to be the most appropriate category for analyzing long-term regional developments, avoiding as it does the reification of contemporary, or latter-day, regions. It does not, in my opinion, displace the notion of space. Instead, it retains the valuable features of spatial analysis while simultaneously refining the vector of time and making it more historically specific Any region can be approached as the complex result of the interplay of numerous historical periods, traditions and legacies. While I cannot here enter into a detailed discussion of the categories of “historical period,” “tradition,” “heritage” and “legacy,”30 I have chosen to make the word “legacy,” in its syntagmatic relationship with “historical” (historical legacy) the receptacle of a meaning on which I will elaborate below. Painfully aware as I am of the fact that categories in the humanities have grown stale through overuse, I cannot do better than to explain the exact meaning with which I am trying to invest them. For purely cognitive purposes, I distinguish between legacy as continuity and legacy as perception. Legacy as continuity is the survival but also gradual waning of some of the characteristics of the entity immediately before its collapse. Legacy as perception, on the other hand, is the articulation and rearticulation of how the entity is seen at different time periods by different individuals or groups. These should not be interpreted as “real” versus “imagined” characteristics, as perhaps implied by the use of the terms “continuity” and “perception.” The characteristics of the continuity are themselves often 29  Werner Schiffauer, “Die Angst vor der Differenz,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde I (1996) 20–31; Maria Todorova, “Is the ‘Other’ a useful cross-cultural concept? Some thoughts on its application to the Balkan region,” Internationale Schulbuchforschung 21 (1999) 163–71. 30  See Maria Todorova, “Spacing Europe: What is a historical region?” East Central Europe/ ECE, 2006, vol. 32, nos. 1–2, 7–55 (German version “Wo liegt Europa? Von der Einteilung eines Kontinents und seinen historischen Regionen,” Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: Jahrbuch 2004–2005, Berlin 2006, 290–312).

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perceptual, and perceptions are no less a matter of continuous real social facts. The better way to define the distinction is to say that in both cases the categories designate social facts but that these are at different removes from experience. In the instance of perception, the social fact is removed yet a further step from immediate reality and one can perhaps juxtapose the natural versus the cultural or textual status of the social interaction. I will turn now to the concrete example of the Balkans (or Southeastern Europe) to show how the category is applied. If we look at the numerous historical periods, traditions and legacies that shape Southeastern Europe,31 some of these periods and legacies have been synchronic or overlapping, whereas others have been consecutive or completely separate;32 some have played themselves out in the same geographic space, whereas others have involved Southeastern Europe in terms of its different macroregions.33 They can also be classified according to their influence in different spheres of social life: political, economic, demographic, cultural, and so on. One can enumerate the more important political legacies: the Roman, the Byzantine, the Ottoman, and the Communist. In the religious sphere, one can single out the Christian, Muslim, and Judaic traditions with their numerous 31  Here I am using Southeastern Europe and the Balkans as synonyms. On the nuanced differences between the two, see my treatment in “Historische Vermächtnisse als Analysekategorie: Der Fall Südosteuropa,” in Karl Kaser, ed., Europa und die Grenzen im Kopf (Wieser Verlag, 2003), 221–246. 32  One could speak of synchronic and overlapping periods by taking the example of the late Roman, Byzantine and early Ottoman Empires, and the period of great migrations from Central Asia (with its numerous political legacies as well as the social legacy of seminomadism), which peaked circa 400 AD and whose spurts were felt until the 16th century. The same goes for the synchronic workings of a whole variety of different religious systems in the region, both as legacies and ongoing processes. An instance of caesura between periods and little if any overlap between legacies is the Hellenistic period and legacy and the Communist one. Otherwise, legacies fade in intensity with the passage of time; but in principle, and by definition, they would be overlapping. 33  An example of the first would be the Byzantine and the Ottoman periods and legacies. Until the 16th century, there was an almost complete spatial coincidence between the spheres of influence of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, both in Europe and in Asia Minor. After the early 16th century, the Ottoman Empire expanded its space in North Africa and elsewhere, but in Southeastern Europe both the space of the historical periods and that of the legacies are coincidental. For an example of the second sort, there is the period and legacy of the Roman Empire, which included Southeastern Europe, in a space stretching from the British Isles to the Caspian Sea and Mesopotamia (but excluding much of Northern and Central Europe), and the period and legacy of communism, which involved part of Southeastern Europe in a space encompassing the whole of Eastern Europe and stretching through the Eurasian land mass to Central Asia (and including even China in some accounts).

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sects and branches; in the sphere of art and culture, the legacies of the preGreeks, the Greeks, and the numerous ethnic groups that settled the peninsula; in social and demographic terms, the legacies of large and incessant migrations, ethnic diversity, semi-nomadism, a large and egalitarian agricultural sphere, and late urbanization alongside a constant continuity of urban life. Of the political legacies which have shaped Southeastern Europe as a whole (the period of Greek antiquity, Hellenism, Roman rule, etc.), two can be singled out as crucial up until the 19th century. One is the Byzantine millennium with its profound political, institutional, legal, religious and general cultural impact. The other is the half millennium of Ottoman rule that gave the peninsula its name and established the longest period of political unity it had ever experienced. Not only did part of Southeastern Europe acquire a new name during this period, it has been chiefly the Ottoman elements or the ones perceived as such which have formed the current stereotype of the Balkans. In the narrow sense of the word, then, one can argue that the Balkans are, in fact, the Ottoman legacy. The legacy as continuity is a notion different from the characteristics of the Ottoman polity or the Ottoman period in general. It is a process that began after the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist for those particular regions that shaped themselves into successor states, and it is the aggregate of characteristics resulting chiefly from the historical situation of the 18th and 19th centuries. I have attempted a systematic review of the workings of the Ottoman legacy as continuity in the political, cultural, social and economic spheres, where it persisted to varying degrees. In practically all spheres—except the demographic and popular culture spheres—the break was enacted almost immediately after the onset of political independence of the separate Balkan states and was on the whole completed by the end of World War I; thereafter it turned into legacy as perception. In the realm of demography, however, the Ottoman legacy continued for some time and, more importantly, became intertwined with and was gradually transformed into the influence of the Turkish nation-state. The Ottoman legacy as perception, on the other hand, is the process of interaction between an ever-evolving and accumulating past, and ever-evolving and accumulating perceptions of generations of people who are redefining their attitudes toward the past—in a word, the question not of reconstructing, but of actually constructing the past in works of historiography, fiction and journalism as well as in everyday discourse. Legacy as perception is one of the most important pillars in the discourse of Balkan nationalism and bears striking similarities in all Balkan countries. Precisely because it is at the center of securing present social arrangements, and above all in legitimizing the state, it is bound to be reproduced for some time to come.

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At the same time, the Ottoman legacy as continuity has been in a process of decline for the past century. The countries defined as Balkan (i.e. the ones which were part of the historical Ottoman sphere) have been moving steadily away from their Ottoman legacy and concomitantly away from their balkanness. I want to strongly emphasize here that this is a statement devoid of any valuejudgment. Likewise devoid of any value-judgment is my argument that what we are today witnessing in the geographic Balkans—namely the eradication of the final vestiges of an imperial legacy of ethnic multiplicity and co-existence, and its being substituted with institutionalized and ethnically homogeneous bodies—may well be an advanced stage of the final Europeanization of the region and the end of the historic Balkans—if such is constituted by, as I think it is, the Ottoman period and the Ottoman legacy. In fact, the British diplomat, who wrote the Balkan survey for the Carnegie Endowment in 1913, concluded that one “may boldly assert that the only basis of European culture and the only bias towards European civilization to be found in the Balkans, after centuries of subjection to Asiatic Byzantinism, is the consciousness of nationality.” Therefore, “wherever and whenever in the Balkans national feeling became conscious, then, to that extent, does civilization begin; and as such consciousness could best come through war, war in the Balkans was the only road to peace.”34 This was written a few months before the outbreak of World War I, yet it is ironic that Balkan nationalism, which in later years has been described as intrinsically alien to Western civic and supposedly civilized nationalism, was considered the only Balkan feature upon which the mantle of Europeanness could justifiably be conferred. Thinking in terms of historical legacies—with their simultaneity and overlap as well as their gradually waning effects—allows us to emphasize the complexity and plasticity of the historical process. In the particular case of Southeastern Europe, it allows us to rescue it from a debilitating diachronic as well as spatial ghettoization and permits us to insert it in multifarious cognitive frameworks over space and time. Europe, in this vision, emerges as a complex palimpsest of variegated entities—a palimpsest which not only reveals the porosity of its internal frontiers but questions the absolute stability of its external ones. I have played with the idea of trying to create a digital image which would illustrate the design of this palimpsest, an image where different legacies could be marked off in separate colors on a horizontal scale. Their superimposition, as well as their non-coincidental, phased borders would neatly illustrate the relativity of regional borders across long historical periods. At the same time, 34   Nationalism and War in the Near East (By a Diplomatist), Oxford 1915, 31.

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however, the very visual premise—namely marking a legacy in a single color— already essentializes and homogenizes any separate legacy. The interesting thing would be to also illustrate the structurally cognate elements in different legacies, for example property relations or family structure or state institutions, which should be rendered as shades of the same color on a vertical scale. This, however, would complicate the image to such an extent that, although more faithful to reality, it would be visually ineffective and fail to make the point. After all, as some contemporary philosophers have maintained, we are living in the “image society” rather than the “information society,” where we witness a struggle of images rather than a struggle of ideas, and what dominates is not a Zeitgeist but a Zeit-image, stereo-images rather than stereotypes, pre-images rather than prejudices, and new-image in the place of Orwell’s newspeech. In order to be recognizable and effective, the image ab definitio reduces reality in a much more powerful way than the logos. Therefore, at the price of not reaching a wider audience, I prefer to stay with the visually less perfect but more complicated verbal metaphor of the palimpsest. 5

Historical Legacies and “Path Dependence”

In conclusion, I wish to raise a question that was posed to me a couple of years ago, namely whether these thoughts on historical legacies are not tantamount to what in political science has been termed “path dependence.” The category of “path dependence” developed as the result of a shift in political science toward a greater appreciation of history and the temporal dimensions of phenomena as a whole, a move away from purely structural, functionalist and quantifying approaches. It involves the focus on a chain of events or processes stemming from an initial “critical” juncture. It emphasizes, in particular, the potentially self-enforcing effects of early outcomes, and has enriched the understanding of social and political outcomes by paying greater attention to long-term processes. Welcome as all this is, to an historian it’s no big deal. Historical causality is the lemma of the great historical theorem of the longue durée. It would be similar to historians discovering that property relations are important for social movements—and then trying to sell this notion to economists. To me, “path dependence” is a strictly internal disciplinarian development within political science. Moreover, I wish to insist on a basic distinction in its concept and function from my “historical legacies.” The coining of the term “path dependence” came about in order to better understand political choices, the chances for future institution-building, and so on. On the one hand, it was intended to caution against voluntarism, i.e. that

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any well implemented rational decision by elites will bring about the desired result. After all, as the formula would have it: “history matters,” or “culture matters.” On the other hand, by not having enough patience with the historical record and forcing through a “path” (sometimes even called “legacy”) with definite characteristics, it produces a kind of determinism or teleology that often verges on fatalism. (A few years ago at a lecture I was giving in France, I was asked by a young German journalist, “Do you think Albania has any chance of becoming democratic given its ‘path dependence’ on a highly patriarchal autocratic and tribal tradition?” I am afraid I was neither very patient nor polite, and told him that “path dependence” is one thing and precedence another; after all, the Germans learned very quickly how to be democratic, “path dependence” notwithstanding.) There is a curious if somewhat left-handed and inadvertent admittance of the deep-seated determinism of this approach by a couple of practitioners in the field. A recent study of the post-communist transition, using various sophisticated measures and methods, including coefficients and standard deviations, has proposed the “thesis that geographical proximity to the West has exercised positive influence on the transformation of communist states and that geographical isolation in the East has hindered this transformation.”35 The authors juxtapose cases where the policies of the elites have been deemed positive but the outcome was nevertheless negative. They conclude that geographical propinquity and contiguity has altered the context of politics in Central Europe no matter the politics, whereas further east, and especially in Central Asia, “even those that have tried to escape from their Leninist and pre-Leninist legacies, have been constrained by their isolation, their politically and economically undemocratic neighbors, and the absence of sustained outside sponsorship by economically powerful, democratic states.”36 I might be excused from thinking that such a conclusion can be reached without access 35  Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David A. Reilly, “Postcommunist Space: A Political Geography Approach to Explaining Postcommunist Outcomes,” in Grezegorz Ekiert and Stephen E. Hanson, eds., Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 148. For other works on path dependence, see Paul Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,” American Political Science Review 94 (2), 2000, 251–68; James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis: Achievements and Agendas (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Paul Pierson, “Big, Slow, and … Invisible: MacroSocial Processes and Contemporary Political Science,” in Mahoney and Rueschemeyer, op. cit.; James Mahoney, “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology,” Theory and Society, 29, 2000, 507–48. 36  Ibid., 149.

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to computers and sophisticated measurements, but what is significant is their subsequent admission: “We are keenly aware that the kind of research we have undertaken here itself contributes to the mental remapping of the postcommunist world. In social science the observer and the observed are never completely separable. If enough scholars characterize the Czech Republic as Western and portray Uzbekistan as Eastern, this may exercise a self-reinforcing dynamic of ‘orientalism.’ Still, the potential for orientalism is probably no worse in the study of spatial dependence than it is for temporal path dependence.”37 In my opinion this is not only a rather lame defense of this type of spatial approach but an unwitting condemnation of the determinism and potential “orientalism” of path dependence. My notion of “historical legacy” comes from a very different perspective and is impelled by a very different motive. It does not set itself the primary task of understanding how and why the present has emerged from the past and how it can shape the future. On the contrary, it demonstrates the complexity of the historical record and argues that it cannot serve as a straitjacket. Of course, I would never go so far as to say that history does not matter, but I think that the “path” or the “legacy” is so winding, flexible, changeable and permeable that it cannot be isolated like a bacillus. In a word, a legacy is not a thing but a process. Moreover, at least in my view, it makes clear many more commonalities than it does distinctions. Finally, I think that my “historical legacy” is much more empowering. It allows us to free ourselves from the shackles of a deterministic historical process; and for those who want obiter dicta from history, it is also disquietingly indeterminate. I will never forget a lecture on a similar topic I was giving to an audience of primarily legal historians, and the otherwise very positive reception culminated in the question: “This is highly sophisticated and compelling, but it seems inapplicable.” And this is precisely the point.38 37  Ibid., 150. 38  On the other hand, I have no wish to argue that legacies do not have the potential to be used as political tools. Ukrainians argue that they are “more European than Slavic” based on their having been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Joke van de Leeuw-Roord, ed., History for Today and Tomorrow, 17). I might add that I have heard comparable arguments emanating from the former Soviet Republic of Moldavia. Were we not, the argument goes, also once a part of the Ottoman Empire? Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and those countries formerly a part of Yugoslavia were all once part of the Ottoman Empire, and all of these countries as well as Turkey itself are or will eventually be part of the EU, so why not us? Although I am afraid that adducing the Ottoman Empire as a prime legitimator of European provenance and aspirations will produce ironic smiles, this argument is not entirely absurd.

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In the coming decade, the big discussion in the European Union will be Turkey. I am sure a lot of arguments will be based on “path dependence,” arguing both pro and con. After all, the beauty of history is that it can supply valid arguments for all kinds of propositions. But in the end, the decision will rest on extra-historical considerations, even if they are conveniently wrapped in historical legitimization. But let us imagine that in 2020 Turkey becomes an EU member. This is not implausible. And this will be neither Europe in the Near East nor the Near East in Europe. It will be Europe, period. Or the Near East, period, in the sense of the westernmost tip of the huge land mass usually called Eurasia but which is synonymous with the East or the Orient writ large. One can say that Europe and the Near East together have always been the indivisible and organic entity of Eurasia’s west. And incidentally, the long-term geological global forecast is that 50 million years from now Africa will have moved north into Europe and the Mediterranean Sea will have disappeared, replaced by the Mediterranean Mountains. Ditto for the Red Sea. 50 million years, we are told by geologists, is a safe forecast. If one year represents Earth’s past, 50 million years equal less than 4 days. The new continent, they say, will be called Afrasia.39 No mention of Europe by the geologists. If, on the other hand, Europe were to expand, the whole new land mass might be called the European Union. But we needn’t overstretch our imagination. Let us rather imagine that in 2070 (50 years after the hypothetical Turkish accession), the EU were to encompass those North African countries (at least the Maghreb) that have a special arrangement with Europe. As in the case of Turkey, this is not such a ludicrous proposition. And let us also imagine that in 2120 (100 years after) the EU is still a viable body and is considering whether it shouldn’t expand to embrace the whole of Russia. Also quite a logical development. And let us imagine that the world will still be inhabitable despite global warming and, hopefully, no big wars in the year 2222 (i.e. 200 years after) and that a student will then undertake research on the history of the European Union (since the subject is very topical, what with the heated debate swirling around possible accession of India to the EU) and he then may want to utilize the “path dependence” heuristic and write that, as far as Turkey, North Africa and Russia are concerned, their historical legacies have vindicated their accession … but let us be circumspect about India. By that time the European Union will have produced a 250-year-old history of “path dependence.” All I am saying is that “path dependence” is not only in the past—it can be created in the future. It is a 39  Frank Press, Understanding Earth, Freeman 2006, reviewed in the New York Times, 9 January 2007.

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matter of choice. Of course, the choices should be judicious and well prepared, but they are nonetheless human choices. And these choices are made—let us be clear about this—primarily in the chancelleries of “Old Europe.” But then, as the wise Ibn Khaldun once said of the West: “God knows what is going on there.”40 40  As cited in Dimitris Livanios, “The ‘sick man’ paradox: history, rhetoric and the ‘European character’ of Turkey,” Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, vol. 8, no. 3, December 2006, 299–311, here 311.

Section 2 Balkanism, Postcolonialism and Orientalism

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Balkan This is the English translation of a chapter published in German as “Der Balkan”, in: Europäische Erinnerungsorte, eds. Pim den Boer, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale, Muenchen: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012, 601–610. The translation is published with the permission of the publisher. The chapter introduces the complex notion of „Balkan“ and explores its different meanings and applications.

Like “bugger” and “Byzantine,” sobriquets coming from the same geographical area of Southeastern Europe, “Balkan” is a notion that was disassociated from its ontological base and began a life of its own in the realm of ideas. “Bugger,” a term for sodomite, as well as an offensive form of address, comes from the medieval heretics in Provence, the bougres, deriving their name from the Bulgarians, among whom the medieval Christian dualist Bogomil sect was first formed. By now, it is so far removed, both in name and in time, from its beginnings, that only an intrepid scholar would trace its geographic origins. “Byzantine,” a sixteenth-century neologism, first used to designate a specific art form and applied retrospectively to a historical entity—the (Eastern) Roman Empire—that never used the name, became a synonym for overly complicated, scheming, intriguing, and hypocritical. While clearly alluding to an existing entity within the historical knowledge of the educated public, it still refers to something that has gone down in history. “Balkan,” on the other hand, became a signifier that was not only “metaphorized” fairly recently (in the early twentieth century), but because of the continued and dynamic presence of its signified exerts an enormous and adverse pressure upon it. 1

The Concept

The term Balkan has a number of manifestations that can be grouped into three categories. At its simplest, it is a name: first, the name of a mountain, later the designation of a region, as well as the political entities within. It is also used as a personal name. Secondly, Balkan is employed as metaphor, mostly, but not exclusively, negative. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it became a pejorative, a symbol for the aggressive, intolerant, barbarian, savage, semi-developed, semi-civilized, semi-oriental. This array of stereotypes,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_006

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although of relatively recent origins, stepped on a deeper layer of oppositions between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Europe and Asia, West and East, and especially Christianity and Islam. Based on the metaphoric use of the notion, a specific power discourse developed in the twentieth century. Its utilization in the real world of politics—balkanism—shapes attitudes and actions toward the Balkans. Thirdly, the Balkans can be approached through a scholarly category of analysis, the notion of historical legacy, which is intimately intertwined with the character of the Balkans as a concrete historical region. As a concept, then, the Balkans have a modern provenance. 2

The Name

A Turkish word meaning “mountain,” “balkan” as a noun entered the peninsula with the arrival of the Ottoman Turks. Its earliest mention in the writings of the Italian humanist writer, poet and diplomat Filippo Buonaccorsi Callimaco in the late fifteenth century, designated as Balkan the ancient Haemus (the mountain range crossing Bulgaria from east to west). In 1577, the German priest Salomon Schweigger was the first traveler, after Callimaco, to communicate the Turkish name of the mountain, thus documenting its further spread. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Haemus and Balkan were used side by side or interchangeably, but exclusively for the mountain. Since the nineteenth century, Balkan was applied to the whole southeast European peninsula, becoming the name of a region. The first to coin and use the term “Balkan peninsula” (Balkanhalbeiland) was the German geographer August Zeune in his 1808 work “Goea,” who was looking for a name analogous to the Appenine and Pyrenean (Iberian) peninsulas. In this he replicated an over two millennia old erroneous geographical belief that the Haemus served as the peninsula’s northern border. At several points in the late nineteenth century it was correctly argued (by Johann Georg von Hahn and Theobald Fischer, among others) that the peninsula, which had until then been variably designated as “Hellenic,” “Illyrian”, “Dardanian,” “Roman,” “Byzantine,” “Thracian,” “South-Slavic,” “Greek,” “Slavo-Greek,” “European Turkey,” “European Levant,” “Peninsola Orientale,” and others, was erroneously called Balkan, and proposed instead Southeast Europe. By that time, however, the term had gained currency and ascendancy over the earlier used ones, and also began to be increasingly used with a political connotation. So widespread was the use of the name, that in 1918 the Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijić, perfectly aware of the incorrect employment of the term, used it in his seminal “La péninsule balkanique.” In the interwar period, there were

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attempts, both in Germany and the USA, to use Southeastern Europe as neutral, non-political and non-ideological, but this was discredited when it became an important concept in the geopolitical plans of the Nazis. In the postwar era, Southeastern Europe and the Balkans have been used interchangeably as geographic and historical designators. The exception, represented by a minority of German-language academic works, and building upon a purist geographical approach, argues that the lands southeast of the Carpathian range from the entity Southeastern Europe, of which the Balkans are but a geographic subregion. Thus, Hungary and occasionally Slovakia would be catalogued as southeast European, but they would not be considered Balkan within this matrix. The Balkans are usually confined to Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, the states of the former Yugoslavia, and European Turkey. The important thing to note is that the classificatory efforts of geographers and historians are closely related to the immediate physical characteristics of the region or to common historical and social characteristics. They are, thus, removed from the subsequent decontextualization of the notion. Finally, “Balkan” is also used as a personal name: a given name in Turkey, even if not very common, and a fairly common family name in Bulgaria (as in Balkanski, Balkanska). In both countries the nounal form “balkan” is a synonym for mountain mostly in the vernacular. In all Balkan languages, Balkan as an adjective can be used with an emotional ingredient varying from neutral to derogative. There are two exception to this rule: in Turkish, where Balkan does not have the pejorative component; and in Bulgarian, which has all the range from negative through neutral to positive. Thus, in the region itself “Balkan” has a deep-rooted and living presence as a name. This brief survey of the occurrence and different employments of the name “Balkan” is significant, because it illustrates its life and persistence quite outside and independent of its metaphoric use. 3

The Metaphor

During the nineteenth century, Balkans was increasingly employed with a political connotation rather than in a purely geographical sense, to designate the states which had emerged out of the Ottoman empire: Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, and Bulgaria. The nineteenth century saw a parallel process of disintegrating imperial formations in one part of Europe, and unification of large nation states, most notably Germany and Italy, in another part. Not only German nationalists were opposing the phenomenon of mini-states. Liberal political thought shared the disdain for small state formations. Likewise,

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the aversion of some early socialists against the “Völkerabfälle” (trash nations) in the Balkans can be explained not only in terms of their anti-peasant and anti-Slav bias, but also in terms of their derision against the “Kleinstaaterei” (small statehood). Ironically, this was not preserved in the tradition of the international communist movement in the twentieth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Balkans were acquiring a negative connotation, although this was only a gradual process, triggered by the events accompanying the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of small, weak, economically backward and dependent nation states, striving to modernize. The return of Macedonia to the direct rule of the Porte after the treaty of Berlin in 1878, opened the way for revolutionary action against the Ottoman Empire and, at the same time, guerilla warfare between contending factions from the neighboring countries. The birth of the Macedonian question enhanced the reputation of the peninsula as a turbulent region. However, violence as its Leitmotiv was a, strictly speaking, post-Balkan Wars phenomenon, when a thoroughly negative value was conclusively sealed to the Balkans. The cruelties of these wars, in a European climate which believed in the stability of the belle époque, gave rise to the stereotypical images of a particularly harsh and savage region. These persisted, no matter that European barbarities largely outnumbered and outdid Balkan atrocities only a few years later, during World War I. So enduring are these stereotypes, that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo is still often evoked as the principal reason for the global imperialistic conflagration despite definitive scholarly verdicts about the war’s causes. Accordingly, the sobriquet “powder keg of Europe,” coined at that time, can still be heard. In fact, all Balkan states tried to avoid the war. They never became a major theater of operation, although the war proved devastating for their populations and their economies. The term “balkanization”—the most important notion deriving from “Balkan”—came into being as a result of the Balkan wars and World War I. It is symptomatic that “balkanization,” most often used to denote the process of nationalist fragmentation of former geographic and political units into new and problematically viable small states, was not created in the course of the one hundred years when the Balkan nations gradually seceded from the Ottoman empire. When it was coined, at the end of World War I, only one Balkan nation was added to the already existing Balkan map: Albania. All others had been nineteenth-century formations. Rather, the great proliferation of small states as a result of the Great War was triggered by the disintegration of the Habsburg and the Romanov empires, and the emergence of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. To this postwar legacy should be added Yugoslavia whose creation was,

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technically speaking, the reverse of “balkanization.” The falling apart of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires resembled the previous disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the term “balkanization,” employed as a comparison, entered the political vocabulary after the system of treaties following World War I sealed the new divisions of Europe. Balkanization’s first extensive treatment came in 1921, when the American journalist Paul Scott Mowrer offered a definition of the term in his popular Balkanized Europe:1 This, then, we find to be the meaning of the word “Balkanization”: the creation, in a region of hopelessly mixed races, of a medley of small states with more or less backward populations, economically and financially weak, covetous, intriguing, afraid, a continual prey to the machinations of the great powers, and to the violent promptings of their own passions. It is the trope of the “hopelessly mixed races” that deserves special attention. The interwar period added yet another attitude which had seasoned as an integral part of nineteenth-century European thinking: the racial. A distinctive feature of modern racism was the continuous transition from science to aesthetics, where beauty was based on an immutable classical ideal, and became identical with the middle-class world of white Europeans. As a rule, it was based on racial purity. The Balkans, the classical territory of antiquity, were a double disappointment. Not only did they breathe havoc, but the classical archetype was nowhere to be seen. The racial verdict began with a more open rendering of the formerly subdued and non-judgmental motif of racial mixture. What in the nineteenth century were almost neutral renderings of the ethnic and religious complexity of the Balkans, evoking only an occasional characterization as “strange nationalities,” now produced feelings impurity and revulsion about the repellent “cross-breeds.” It could be argued that interwar racism was a fairly short-lived phenomenon, culminating in Nazi atrocities in Greece and Yugoslavia, but the ethnic diversity of the region has hardly achieved the status of celebrated multiculturality. After World War II, the Balkans were divided along Cold War lines. Even in this respect, they proved sui generis. Greece and Turkey, members of NATO, came several times to the brink of war. Tito’s Yugoslavia, at the helm of the Third World, maneuvered deftly between the First and the Second. Bulgaria, USSR’s most faithful ally, was more liberal than anti-Russian Ceausescu’s Romania. 1  Paul Scott Mowrer, Balkanized Europe. A Study in Political Analysis and Reconstruction (New York, 1921, VII.34).

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Albania broke with the Soviet bloc and found protection with China. Most remarkably, the designation Balkan, not to speak of the negative stereotypes, all but disappeared, submerged in the bi-polar Cold War rhetoric. They resurfaced again in the course of a twofold process after 1989. The first was the issue of EU expansion to the east. The strategy and costs of this expansion, and the potential competition between candidates, resulted in the differential treatment of Eastern Europe’s subregions. The Central European ideology of the 1980s (in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia), evoked the Balkans as its constituting other. Rhetorically successful, it all but disappeared after it achieved its goals. The second coinciding process was Yugoslavia’s bloody disintegration. None of the other Balkan countries was ever involved, yet the world insisted on naming this a “Balkan” conflict, even the “Third Balkan war.” To a great extent this was the result of an attempt not to get involved, to restrict the problems to Europe’s southeastern corner. Rhetorically, it was based on cultural arguments, particularly the “clash of civilizations” theory, positing that international conflicts would occur not so much between states and ideologies but along cultural, especially religious, fault-lines. It was the time of the blooming of balkanism, the discursive paradigm that described the region as essentially different from Europe and legitimized a policy of relative non-involvement and isolation. This ended with the unintended consequences from the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Its rhetorical legitimation as defence of universal human rights effectively pushed the Balkans back into the Western political sphere, and brought Europeans and Americans deep into the Balkans. They are running several protectorates in the newly devised area of the “Western Balkans.” The rest of the region is no more Balkan, but effectively part of Europe. There is the curious but predictable restraining of the balkanist rhetoric: it no longer serves power politics, although it is there, conveniently submerged but readily at hand. On the other hand, a second round in the use of “balkanization” emerged with the beginning of the decolonization process after World War II, when it entered the French political vocabulary with the secession of Black Africa. At about that time, “balkanization” began to be increasingly detached from the context of international relations, and became a synonym for unreliability, lethargy, corruption, irresponsibility, mismanagement. Still, even when used in a different context, the term was not entirely divorced from its geographic origins. This happened increasingly during the past couple of decades, especially in the American setting, where the reference to “balkanization” is paradigmatically related to a variety of problems. It is used as the antithesis to the melting pot ideal. It no longer means merely parcellization, the creation

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of small entities at war with each other on the political level, but is applied to any social splintering along ethnic, racial, even gender and sexual lines. Multiculturalism has been equated with balkanization, it is the name for excessive specialization, a metaphor for postmodernism and post-communism. It becomes synonymous with dehumanization, de-aesthetization, destruction of civilization. While these powerful negative outside ascriptions have been to a great extent internalized in the region as a self-ascription (what some define as self-colonization), there is also an opposite trend, albeit weaker. As already mentioned, Balkan has also served as a positive metaphor. This is the case especially in Bulgaria, where it denotes independence, love of freedom, resistance, courage, and dignity. Folk songs and literature abound in eulogies to the Balkan range, which figures as a pillar of Bulgarian liberty and a symbol of its nationhood even in the national hymn. In this case the metaphoric use is still closely related to its geographic signified, maybe because the Balkan range lies entirely within the confines of Bulgaria. In several other Balkan countries today, next to the disparaging use common to the one shared by outsiders, the notion can also have a positive connotation, signifying pride, defiance and a certain savoir vivre. The array of negative stereotypes that was formed gradually in the course of centuries, crystallized in a power discourse after World War I. In the next decades it gained additional features but these were mostly a matter of detail. In its broad outlines it continues to be handed down almost unalterable, having undergone what is defined as “discursive hardening.” In Imagining the Balkans. (New York, 1997, 2009), I argued that a specific discourse, balkanism, molds attitudes and actions toward the Balkans and can be treated as a most persistent “mental map” in which information about the region is placed, most notably in journalistic, political, and literary output. To put it succinctly, balkanism expresses the idea that explanatory approaches to phenomena in the Balkans rest upon a stable system of stereotypes that place the Balkans in a cognitive straightjacket. Balkanism was coined both as mirror and foil of orientalism, to both pay homage to Edward Said’s “Orientalism” and to argue for similarities but also substantive differences between the two categories. Practically all descriptions of the Balkans offer as a central characteristic their transitionary status. The West and the Orient are usually presented as incompatible entities, anti-worlds, but completed anti-worlds. The Balkans, on the other hand, have always evoked the image of a bridge or a crossroads. They have been compared to a bridge between East and West, Europe and Asia, but also between stages of growth, invoking labels as semi-developed, semi-colonial, semi-civilized, semi-oriental. Unlike orientalism, a discourse about an imputed opposition,

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balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity. The lack of a colonial predicament for the Balkans also distinguishes the two, as do questions of race, color, religion, language, and gender. Yet, the main difference between the two is the geographic and historical concreteness of the Balkans versus the mostly metaphorical and symbolic nature of the Orient, thus challenging the scholar to deal with its ontology, rather than simply with its metaphoric functions. 4

The Historical Legacy

This may allow us to reflect more calmly on the scholarly project of making sense of the Balkans, which is a sub-question of how to think about historical regions. It seems to me that a better way to approach the malleability of boundaries and to deconstruct the stark and reified opposition between “civilizations” is the concept of historical legacy. This notion has numerous advantages over more structural categories of analysis such as borders, space, territoriality, insofar as it more clearly articulates the dynamism and fluidity of historical change. It therefore appears to be the most appropriate category for analyzing long-term regional developments, avoiding the reification of contemporary, or latter-day, regions. It does not, in my opinion, displace the notion of space. Instead, it retains the valuable features of spatial analysis while simultaneously refining the vector of time and making it more historically specific. Any region can be approached as the complex result of the interplay of numerous historical periods, traditions and legacies. For purely cognitive purposes, I distinguish between legacy as continuity and legacy as perception. Legacy as continuity is the survival and gradual waning of some of the characteristics of the entity immediately before its collapse. Legacy as perception, on the other hand, is the articulation and re-articulation of how the entity is seen at different time periods by different individuals or groups. These should not be interpreted as “real” versus “imagined” characteristics: the characteristics of continuity are themselves often perceptual, and perceptions are no less a matter of continuous real social facts. In both cases, the categories designate social facts, which are at different removes from experience, but in the instance of perception, the social fact is removed yet a further step from immediate reality. If we look at the numerous historical periods, traditions and legacies that shape Southeastern Europe, some of these periods and legacies have been synchronic or overlapping, whereas others have been consecutive or completely separate; some have played themselves out in the same geographic space, whereas others have involved it in different macroregions. They can also be

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classified according to their influence in different spheres of social life: political, economic, demographic, cultural. In the religious sphere, one can single out the Christian, Muslim, and Judaic traditions with their numerous sects and branches; in the sphere of art and culture, the legacies of the pre-Greeks, the Greeks, and the numerous ethnic groups that settled the peninsula; in social and demographic terms, the legacies of large and incessant migrations, ethnic diversity, semi-nomadism, a large and egalitarian agricultural sphere, and late urbanization alongside a constant continuity of urban life. Of the political legacies which have shaped Southeastern Europe as a whole (the period of Greek antiquity, Hellenism, Roman rule, etc.), two can be singled out as crucial up until the nineteenth century. One is the Byzantine millennium with its profound political, institutional, legal, religious and general cultural impact. The other is the half millennium of Ottoman rule that gave the peninsula its name and established the longest period of political unity it had ever experienced. Not only did part of Southeastern Europe acquire a new name during this period, it has been chiefly the Ottoman elements or the ones perceived as such which have formed the current stereotype of the Balkans. This Ottoman legacy is different from the Ottoman polity as a whole; it is a process that began after the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and is the aggregate of characteristics handed down chiefly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A systematic review of the workings of the Ottoman legacy as continuity in the political, cultural, social, and economic spheres reveals different degrees of perseverance. In practically all spheres, the break began almost immediately after the onset of political independence in the separate Balkan states and, as a whole, was completed by the end of World War I; in the realms of demography and popular culture, the Ottoman legacy continued and was gradually transformed into the influence of the Turkish nation-state. After World War I, the Ottoman legacy as perception became the process of interaction between an ever-evolving and accumulating past, and ever-evolving and accumulating perceptions of generations of people redefining the past. This legacy is not a reconstruction, but rather a construction of the past in works of historiography, fiction, journalism, and everyday discourse. Being one of the most important pillars in the discourse of Balkan nationalism, and is bound to be reproduced for some time to come. In the narrow sense of the word, then, one can argue that the Balkans are, the Ottoman legacy. In the broad sense of the word, however, the Balkans as a synonym for Southeastern Europe emerge as a complex palimpsest of consecutive legacies, which have territorially included it in different mega-regions. Thus, the Roman Empire, which left an indelible imprint on the region, included Southeastern Europe in a space stretching from the British Isles to the Caspian

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Sea and Mesopotamia (but excluding much of Northern and Central Europe). The period and legacy of communism, on the other hand, involved part of Southeastern Europe in a space encompassing the whole of Eastern Europe, and stretching through the Eurasian landmass to Central Asia (or including even China in some counts). Thinking in terms of historical legacies—characterized by simultaneous, overlapping, and gradually waning effects—allows us to emphasize the complexity and plasticity of the historical process. In the case of the Balkans, it allows us to rescue the region from a debilitating diachronic and spatial ghettoization, and insert it into multifarious cognitive frameworks over space and time. Europe itself, in this vision, appears as a complex palimpsest of differently shaped entities, which not only exposes the porosity of internal frontiers, but also questions the absolute stability of external ones. In this respect, the task for balkanologists consists not so much of “provincializing” Europe but of “de-provincializing” Western Europe, which has heretofore expropriated the category of Europe with concrete political and moral consequences. If this project is successful, we will actually succeed in “provincializing” Europe effectively for the rest of the world, insofar as the European paradigm will have broadened to include not only a cleansed abstract ideal and version of power, but also one of dependency, subordination, and messy struggles.

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Balkanism and Postcolonialism or On the Beauty of the Airplane View Building on my earlier elaboration of the notion of historical legacies (see Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, 2009 and chapter 3 in this volume), this chapter weighs the pros and cons of applying postcolonialism as a new grand theory and voices a warning note of skepticism. In May 2004, I participated on a panel at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in New York. Together with Dušan Bjelić, Alexander Kiossev and Gayatri Spivak, the panel discussed the theoretical and methodological relations between balkanism and postcolonialism and, in a broader sense, the possible benefits that opening toward the paradigm of postcolonialism can bring upon East European studies in general. This chapter is the outcome of this debate. It was first published in Costica Bradatan and Serguei Oushakine, ed. In Marx’s Shadow, NY: Lexington Books, 2010, 175–195. Reproduced with the permission of the publisher.

A day before the death of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak wrote the preface to the Serbian translation of her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. She subsequently published this brief preface in English as In Memoriam dedicated to her “friend and ally, the founder of post-colonial studies, Edward Said.”1 Already the opening phrase of this preface establishes a powerful and uncanny link between balkanism and postcolonialism: “The translation of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason into Serbian is an instructive event for me. The relationship of postcolonial theory to the Balkan as metaphor is a critical task for our world.”2 In his response to Spivak, Obrad Savić, translator of her work and acting president of the Belgrade Circle, wrote that with the passing of Said, the “great ‘burden’ of spreading postcolonial theory has now fallen on your back. What I can promise at this moment is that you can always count on complete and unconditional support from your friends in and around the Belgrade Circle. We are small, but we never let go!”3 1  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “In Memoriam: Edward W. Said,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23: 1&2, 2003, 6–7. 2  Spivak, 6. 3  Ibid., 7.

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It was this emotional pledge and categorical assertion of a correlation between the two notions, as well as my earlier stated reluctance to link them together that prompted Dušan Bjelić, professor of criminology at the University of Southern Maine and another prominent member of the Belgrade Circle, to organize a panel at the annual convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in 2004, which was to address the relationship between these two categories. In the following text, which is an expanded and revised version of my talk at the panel, I would like to address two broad issues: first, the meeting points (if any) between the categories and phenomena of balkanism and postcolonialism; and second, the appropriateness or utility of approaching balkanism from a postcolonial perspective. Simply put: are there intersections between balkanism and postcolonialism and if so, are they productive? In a broader framework, the text addresses the problem (literally) of the insatiable hunger for a new grand social theory (even after the immediate demise of a previous one) that would supposedly provide the guidelines for a unified approach. In this sense it is a rejoinder to the challenge articulated in the introduction to the present volume—the call to take a closer look at the “collective efforts of self-reinvention and re-positioning in history” that have accompanied the post-communist era. When I started work on “Imagining the Balkans,” whose initial working title was “Balkanism,” I found to my surprise and delight that balkanism was an uninhabited category, something exceptionally rare in humanities. I have no claim to have coined it (so in that sense it is not a neologism) but the only person who had employed it before was an obscure early 20th-century author who had used it (in its plural form as balkanisms) as a synonym for the pejorative attributes of the Balkans as a region. Its sister derivative, on the other hand, balkanization, as a synonym for meaningless fragmentation, since it initial use in the 1920s, has become so much a byword that it was completely dissociated from its original context and we can hear it today, inter alia, as an explanation for the dysfunction of the American counterintelligence: it is because the CIA and the FBI, we are told, have been balkanized, that surprise attacks like 9/11 could be effectuated. This happy circumstance allowed me to use the designator balkanism, which rhymed neatly with orientalism, as both its mirror and foil, in a word, it allowed me at the same time to both pay homage to Edward Said and try to argue for a substantive difference between the two categories and phenomena.4 To put it succinctly, balkanism expresses the idea that explanatory 4  Although I very clearly stated my admiration for Said’s in the preface to Imagining the Balkans, because of numerous subsequent misunderstandings I will repeat it here: “Because

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approaches to phenomena in Southeastern Europe, i.e. the Balkans,5 often rest upon a discourse (in the Foucauldian sense) or a stable system of stereotypes (for the ones who shun the notion of ‘discourse’), which place the Balkans in a cognitive straightjacket. I also argued for the historicity of balkanism, which as a discourse was shaped only in the early decades of the 20th century, but whose genealogy steps on patterns of representation from the 16th century onward. I thus insisted on the historical grounding of balkanism in the Ottoman period, when the name Balkan entered the peninsula. Arguably, in some respects the balkanist discourse stepped on motives from previous centuries, but not much earlier than the 11th century schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople, and these were not specifically about the Balkan region, but about Orthodoxy and the Byzantine commonwealth, to use Obolensky’s apt phrase. There are thus obvious similarities between balkanism and orientalism. First and foremost, they belong to the same species: a discursive formation. Yet, the main difference between them that I posited was the geographic and historical concreteness of the Balkans unlike the traveling and mostly metaphorical and symbolic nature of the Orient. This is not to say that the Balkans cannot serve as a metaphor; quite to the contrary. The Balkans have a number of different incarnations or manifestations which can be roughly grouped into four I am situating myself within the rich and growing genre of the ‘invention of tradition’ and because of the obvious analogies between my endeavor and ‘orientalism,’ early on in my work I was advised to avoid direct intellectual alignment with Edward Said so as not to carry the baggage of the increasing criticism against his ideas. Not least because of an inborn anarchist streak, I wish at this point to acknowledge my intellectual indebtedness to Said. I would certainly not declare that his has been the single most stimulating and fruitful influence, but it has been undeniably important. I think I have distanced myself enough and have shown the basic distinctions (but also correspondences) in the treatment of my own concept of ‘balkanism’ from Said’s ‘orientalism.’ ” (Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, 1997, viii–ix). In her recent book The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Cornell University Press, 2004), which treats the Ottoman Empire as a colonial formation and employs postcolonial theory, Mary Neuburger maintains that I have posited that “Balkanism … is entirely distinct from and much more injurious than Orientalism” (p. 6). This is absurd. What I claimed was that balkanism is sufficiently distinct to warrant special treatment and its own framework. Besides, I would insist that my attributed vices be consistent. It is impossible to argue in the same breath that Balkanism “is entirely distinct from and much more injurious than Orientalism” (which I haven’t), and to assert that the “Bulgarian sensibility of victimization is much less acute,” in order to reject notions of Bulgarian postcoloniality (which I have). 5  For the purposes of this text, I am using Southeastern Europe and the Balkans as synonyms. On the nuanced differences between the two, see my treatment in “Historische Vermächtnisse als Analysekategorie. Der Fall Südosteuropa”, in Karl Kaser, ed., Europa und die Grenzen im Kopf (Wieser Verlag, 2003), 221–246.

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categories. At its simplest, Balkan is a name: initially, the name of a mountain, used increasingly since the 15th century when it first appeared. Then, since the 19th century, it began to be applied to the peninsula as a whole, and thus became the name of a region. Finally, it is used also as a personal name (a family name in Bulgaria, and a given name in Turkey). Secondly, Balkans is used as a metaphor and this is the function that makes it resonate with orientalism. By the beginning of the 20th century, it became a pejorative, although this was only a gradual process, triggered by the events accompanying the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of small, weak, economically backward and dependent nation states, striving to modernize. The difficulties of this modernization process and the accompanying excesses of nationalism created a situation in which the Balkans began to serve as a symbol for the aggressive, intolerant, barbarian, semi-developed, semi-civilized, semi-oriental. It is this metaphor and its present utilization in the real world of politics that I addressed and criticized in Imagining the Balkans, where I argued that a specific discourse which I called balkanism shapes attitudes and actions toward the Balkans. If there is a tentative connection to postcolonial theory, it is with this aspect of the Balkans, and Spivak is correct in carefully linking it only to the Balkan as metaphor.6 Thirdly, unlike the Orient, the Balkans can be addressed as a scholarly category of analysis—a concrete geographic region— and in this capacity, and in the present, it is most often used as a synonym of Southeastern Europe. Finally, the Balkans can be approached and interpreted through the notion of historical legacy, something to which I will come back. As already said, balkanism’s discursive character pairs it naturally with orientalism. One of the many distinctions on which I insisted (others being question of race, color, religion, language, gender, etc.) was the lack of a colonial predicament for the Balkans,7 something which will be at the center of my present argument too. The most important consequence of the above discussion, however, is what I perceive as the pull of the other—non-metaphoric— but essential aspects of the Balkans, which challenge the scholar to deal with the ontology of the Balkans, rather than simply with its metaphoric functions. In a way Said’s orientalism, too, was, at bottom, a very concrete historically inspired discussion: it was the Palestinian predicament in the era of late imperialism. However, it was clad in such a generalizing discourse that it proved 6   Spivak was alluding to the title of Balkan As Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. by Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2002). This collection of essays, written by philosophers and literary scholars, while accepting the difference between balkanism and orientalism, explicitly posits balkanism “as a critical study of colonial representation” (4). 7  Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 10–20, esp. 16–17.

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to be translatable and became metaphorically appropriate for designating the post-colonial as a whole. And I would submit that, among others, the circumstance that allowed Said to do so was the elastic nature of the Orient. Granted, one could also add the authors’ different approaches: “orientalism” exposed by a literary critic, “balkanism” analyzed by a historian. And here we can already see the first methodological distinction (albeit not necessarily incompatible): one, an essentially historical approach and interpretation; the other structuralist (or, rather, post-structuralist) theory.8 Post-colonial studies have an established epistemological pedigree in poststructuralist theory, as well as a very concrete provenance in the work of subalternist historians of South Asia which “has often overlapped with and contributed to what has become known as postcolonial studies.”9 The link to Orientalism has been identified by positing the lifespan of post-colonial studies from Said’s Orientalism (1978) to Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000). The postcolonial field has meant different things to different people: “it is housed in different disciplines yet widely associated with a few; it is viewed either as enormously radical or as the last ideological offspring of western capitalism; it is firmly entrenched in Anglo-US universities yet its disciplinary status remains in question; it seeks to address the non-Western world yet is often received with hostility there.”10 As a whole, one may generalize that what occurred in the quarter century after the appearance of Orientalism was a disciplinary shift in postcolonial/global/third world studies from sociological and economic analysis to cultural and theoretical/semiotic/discursive analysis. Simultaneously, postcolonial studies challenged the theoretical models and metanarratives built on the earlier dominant paradigms of modernization, development, and world systems theory.11 The problem is, of course, that in a way postcolonialism itself became a new metanarrative, although it is only fair to say that despite some conservative hysteria, it has never been really institutionalized. There are no departments, 8  It is symptomatic that there is not one single historian among the fifteen authors of Balkan As Metaphor. Seven are literary scholars, six philosophers, one anthropologist and one a feminist and antiwar activist. To my knowledge, the only historian who works on the premise that the Ottoman Empire was a colonial formation and the Balkans have a postcolonial predicament is Mary Neuburger in her book The Orient Within. 9   Partha Chatterjee, “Subaltern History,” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (IESBS). Ed. by Neil J. Smelser, Paul B. Bates. (Amsterdam, New York: Elsevier Science, 2001), 15240. 10  “Introduction,” in Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed Esty, eds., Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 2. The lifespan of postcolonial studies has been identified by Vilashini Cooppan in the same volume. 11  Ibid., 46.

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centers or programs in postcolonial studies, whereas incomparably more attention is paid to and means given for the study of globalization, for example, something that is an eloquent illustration on the different (perceived or real) ideological baggage of the two. Nonetheless, it has undoubtedly achieved an honorary status. What is very interesting to me is that at the time when some are positing the melancholic phase12 and even the end of postcolonial studies (either in a more polite way, with the mentioned chronology from Said to Hardt/Negri or bluntly, by saying that it is an exhausted paradigm), or at least are seriously scrutinizing where, if anywhere, postcolonial studies are heading, it is precisely at this same time that some East European intellectuals are posing the question of their relation to the postcolonial.13 Let us go back to the most general understanding of postcolonialism as a cultural discipline dedicated to the analysis of discourse, and a particular one at that. The question to be asked then is: can the interpretation (mine or someone else’s) of balkanism as a discourse be treated as a concrete historical/ geographic version of postcolonial studies? If some (as I do) maintain that this is difficult and not necessarily fortuitous, why the insistence on distinction? And conversely, for the ones who do accept it, what are the benefits (cognitive, political, etc.)? Here, I should bring in another distinction which David Spurr makes when referring to the postcolonial: firstly, as a historical situation marked by the dismantling of traditional institutions of colonial power; secondly, as a search for 12  The expression belongs to Kaplana Seshadri-Crooks, “At the Margins of Postcolonial Studies: Part 1,” in Fawzi Afzal-Khan and Kaplana Seshadri-Crooks, eds., The PreOccupation of Postcolonial Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 3–4. 13  The volume Balkan As Metaphor was already mentioned. In this particular case, there may be also another correlation at hand, which comes to explain the special predisposition for postcolonial theory in the case of the former Yugoslavia, even before and apart from the fact of the wars for the Yugoslav succession in the 1990s. Of the fourteen articles in the volume, nine have been written by ex-Yugoslavs of the generation which was socialized under Tito, who had distinct ambitions and successfully maneuvered for the leadership of the Third World, and where Yugoslavia harbored special relations with India. Many intellectuals, some in the above volume, either studied in India or visited, and in any case have kept open a tradition of intellectual contacts. Apart from this case, which makes an explicit link between balkanism and postcolonialism, the other examples of applying postcolonial theory by East Europeans refer mostly to the postsocialist period and the involvement of Eastern Europe in the process of globalization: József Böröcz, “Empire and Coloniality in the ‘Eastern Enlargement’ of the European Union,” in József Böröcz and Melinda Kovács, eds. Empire’s New Clothes: Unveiling EU Enlargement. Central Europe Review, 2001, 4–50 (http://www.ce-review.org); Henry F. Carey and Rafal Raciborski, “Postcolonialism: A Valid Paradigm for the Former Sovietized States and Yugoslavia?” in East European Politics and Societies, 18:2, 2004, 191–235.

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alternatives to the discourses of the colonial era. “While the first is the object of empirical knowledge, the second is both an intellectual project and a transnational condition that includes, along with new possibilities, certain crises of identity and representation.”14 I want to deal separately with these two hypostases: the historical and the discursive. Post-colonial studies are a critique of the condition in areas of the word that were colonies. While colonization is surprisingly difficult to define, Jean-Paul Sartre in 1956 produced an extremely lucid analysis in an essay called “Colonialism is a system.” He worked from Marx’s premise that colonialism presented capitalism in naked form, and for a philosopher proposed a surprisingly concrete and historicized definition: “It is a system which was put in place around the middle of the 19th century, began to bear fruit in about 1880, started to decline after the First World War, and is today [i.e. the 1950s] turning against the colonizing nation.”15 My objections to the application of postcolonialism to the Balkans refer mostly to the first way postcolonialism is understood. Why do I object? I don’t believe that the Ottoman, Habsburg or Romanov empires as they were placed in Eastern Europe can be treated as late colonial empires. Neither do I think can the Soviet Union in its relationship with Eastern Europe16 (its relationship with Central Asia or the Caucasus falls under a different rubric—that of colonial empire par excellence—although even this is not unanimously accepted). The argument can be made in two ways, inductively or deductively. In the case of the Ottoman Empire whose legacy, I have argued, has defined the Balkans for some time, I will suggest a number of features, which, according to me, do not allow us to describe it as a colonial empire. First, there is no abyss or institutional/legal distinction between metropole and dependencies. Secondly, there is no previous stable entity which colonizes. The Ottoman Empire became an elaborate state machine and an empire in the course of shaping itself as an expanding polity, which was an organic whole in all its territories. Thirdly, there was no amelioration complex, no civilizing mission 14  David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Duke University Press, 1993), 6. 15  Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism (New York: Routledge, 2001), 31. 16  This is not the opinion of Carey and Raciborski, “Postcolonialism: A Valid Paradigm for the Former Sovietized States and Yugoslavia?” They apply the postcolonial paradigm not only to the FSU but to all ex-Soviet satellites and even to Yugoslavia and Albania on the grounds that “the communist system was indirectly exported by the Soviets, even if they were expelled from much of the Balkans” (200). This forced argument can be twisted by saying that the Soviet Union itself may have been colonized by a western ideology like Marxism.

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obsession comparable to the French or the English colonial project. Fourthly, there is no hegemonic cultural residue from the Ottoman Empire comparable to the linguistic and general cultural hegemony of English in the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere, or of French in Africa and Indochina. These factors also apply as a whole to the Habsburgs. As far as the Romanov Empire goes, it was, as said, a par excellence case of a colonial empire in the East and in the South, but in its relations to the Balkans the above patterns mostly hold true. I would extend the same verdict about the relationship of the Soviet Union (a case of a possible, although historiographically contested empire)17 to its East European satellites. Despite the quibbles over the definition of colonization, one of its broadly accepted features is the transfer of control over social organization from the indigenous population to the colonial power. This did not obtain among the Soviet satellites. Eastern European polities retained a considerable control over the social processes, with persisting legal and religious institutions, and even elements of property relations. It seems to me that the historical evidence does not support the claim for Soviet colonization. I would go even further. In a recent article, Liam Conell examines the use of postcolonial theory in relation to Scotland, and finds strong and troubling similarities between the explanations offered by early twentieth-century nationalists and modern literary criticism which reproduces essentialists models of nationality.18 I hear the same congruent overtones between oldfashioned nationalism and ultra-fashionable postcolonialism when it comes to lament the colonial status of Eastern Europe either vis-à-vis the Ottomans or the Soviets. Should one be pedantic about that? Maybe not. For structuralists of any kind, the Spanish empire is not much different from the Roman, the Ottoman, the British, the Russian, etc. In a way, they are all empires and they are colonial. But I would be surprised if at any scholarly convention there would be a 17  On the imperial and colonial nature of Russia and the Soviet Union, see Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); Alexandre Benningsen, “Colonization and Decolonization in the Soviet Union,” Journal of Contemporary History, 4, 1969; Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations (London: Basic Books, 1994); Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Robert Strayer, “Decolonization, Democratization and Communist Reform: The Soviet Collapse in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of World History, 12, 2001. 18  Liam Conell, “Scottish nationalism and the colonial vision of Scotland”, Interventions, June 2004.

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panel on the postcolonial sensibilities of fifth-century Gaul or sixth-century Iberia after the collapse of the Roman Empire. After all, despite its universalist articulation, postcolonialism’s genealogy and continued development is very discernible in the Indian subcontinent and in Africa of the 19th and 20th centuries. Even the nature of Latin American postcolonialism is contested.19 The difference between the post-imperial and the post-colonial evidently bothers very few beyond the dedicated historian, as expressed succinctly in the following statement: “Whether Balkan nationalism is post-imperial or post-colonial, it is fair to say that it remains distinctly liminal.”20 The liminality of Balkan nationalism can be easily contested but what is striking is the cavalier attitude toward the distinction between imperial and colonial.21 After all, at stake is a very different theoretical framing in each case. In an otherwise positive review of my book, Gregory Jusdanis takes me to task for refusing to consider Balkan societies as postcolonial: “While it is true that the social, political and economic relationships between the European imperial powers and their overseas possessions differed from those between the Ottoman state and the Balkans, why could the wars of independence against this rule not be considered postcolonial?” He further points out that the attempts by nationalist historiographies to cleanse their traditions from the Ottoman legacy can be read as postcolonial endeavors to deny the cultural influence of the former ruler, and asks: “[I]s this not also the typical reaction of every nationalist movement—to distinguish itself from the polity against which it rebels?”22 Sure it is, but we land in the midst of a methodological conundrum: is every national movement necessarily anti-colonial, and does it always produce a postcolonial situation? Are the Kurds in Turkey or Iraq waging an anti-colonial struggle? Was the East European “velvet revolution” of 1989, among others, an anti-colonial revolution? Did Croatian, Slovenian, Muslim Bosnian or Kosovar Albanian nationalism culminate in an anticolonial war against the Serbian colonizer? Is ETA the postcolonial avant-garde of Basque nationalism? I plead professional deformation, but I think that timebound and place-bound specificity counts. It counts not only in order to avoid cognitive deformations, but it matters as well on ethical grounds. The emancipatory mantle of postcolonialism all too often serves as a cover for the perpetual lament of self-victimization. 19  See, in particular, L. Klor de Alva, “Colonialism and postcoloniality as (Latin)/American mirages,” in Colonial Latin American Review, 1, 1992, 3–23. 20  Dušan Bjelić, “Introduction: Blowing Up the ‘Bridge’,” in Balkan As Metaphor, 6. 21  There is reason to argue, for example, that the United States is an imperial enterprise without being a colonial empire. 22   Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 16:2, 1998, 376.

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Yet it is not only an argument following from how we define colonial empires, but also about self-perceptions. Subjectivity matters after all. None of the contemporaries in the Balkans under Ottoman rule felt they were in a colonial positionality. The only one, which insisted on its semi-colonial status, was the Ottoman Empire itself, as voiced by some of its intellectuals at the time, as well as during the period of Republican Turkey. Therefore, until today postcolonial studies have not really made a methodological inroad in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe as a whole, in contrast to Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, immensely popular in Greece and Turkey, and widely read in some East European countries even before 1989. Finally, any meaningful analysis has to do with the questions we are asking, and what is the most adequate framing of the responses. The question that had interested me and continues to interest me is the ontology of the Balkans. I developed the idea of the Balkans as the Ottoman legacy, in an effort to come with a reconstruction, after I had dealt at length with the deconstruction of the discourse. This produced, I am afraid, misunderstanding in some quarters who were impatient with close reading. I will not recapitulate my argument but rather rephrase it: the question boils down to one, which on the surface seems to be purely academic. Yet, I believe it has serious scholarly, political and moral implications, namely: How do we study a region? Regions, as most other entities (states, cities, villages) are defined easiest by outlining their borders. Indeed, for a long time, borders have been a preferred object of analysis, especially in examinations of identity. They are a natural first resort, because it is at the margins, at the edge that the differentiation or disentanglement of entities takes place. Since identity and alterity (otherness) are clearly in a symbiotic relationship, their most sharply defined characteristics are best articulated at this border encounter. Otherness became in consequence a fundamental category not only of social experience but also of social analysis, and in the past decade has made a powerful inroad in historical studies. Borders, however, turned out to be a problematic first choice. One reason is that they themselves are changing, or are subject to different criteria (geographic, political, ethnic, cultural, etc.). In the case of the Balkans, this difficulty is very clear when it comes to define its northern borders: is Romania part of the Balkans, is Slovenia, is Croatia, is Hungary? The eastern, southern and western borders are seemingly easy, since they are represented by seas, but is the Aegean really such a rigid border between Greece and the Anatolian coast; or the Adriatic between Italy and Dalmatia? More importantly, the excessive focus on borders imposed an unhealthy obsession with distinction, difference, with Otherness.

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Recently, there has been a powerful shift away from border studies toward the now fashionable category of space. This approach allots more and due attention to the cohesive processes and structures within the entity. It has produced valuable works, but it also has it dangers, the most important of which, creeping through the back door, is essentialism. This comes not from an inbuilt deficit of the theory which has been developed in a thoughtful and refined way primarily by geographers and anthropologists who have stressed the links between knowledge, power, and spatiality and have pointed out both the metaphorical and material resonance of “space.”23 Rather, it has to do with the sometimes hasty and unreflective application of the category in concrete historical studies. The category “space” is oftentimes uncritically linked to ethnicity or nation—thus, we read in the literature of the space of development of the English nation, or of the Greek, Albanian etc.—and this, in fact, replicates unintentionally statist and nationalist claims under the guise of a new scholarly jargon, or produces rather static and ahistoric structural analyses. It is against this background that I am introducing the notion of historical legacy. It does not, in my opinion, displace the notion of space. Instead, it retains the valuable features of the analysis of spatiality while, simultaneously, refining the vector of time, and making it more historically specific. After all, as observed in A Walk in the Woods, the popular play about the Cold War, “history is only geography stretched over time.”24 It is on the element of time within this equation that I would like to focus the attention. What is, then, in the light of this approach the answer to the misleadingly simple question: What is a region? Any region can be approached as the complex result of the interplay of numerous historical periods, traditions and legacies. Painfully aware as I am that categories in the humanities have long been occupied, I cannot do better than try to explain the exact meaning with which I am trying to inhabit them. 23  See Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, Cambridge, MA & Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994, 63, and especially chapters 1 and 6; idem, “Social Theory and Human Geography,” in Gregory, Martin, Smith, eds., Human Geography, op. cit.; D. Gregor and J. Urry, eds., Social Relations and Spatial Structure (London: Macmillan, 1985); L. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smithe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); R. Butlin, Historical Geography. Through the Gates of Time and Space (London: Edward Arnold, 1993); Dodgshon, Society in Time and Space. For an anthropological take on the notion of space, see Rudolf zur Lippe, “Raum,” in Christoph Wulf, Hrsg., Vom Menschen. Handbuch Historischer Antrhopologie (Weinheim und Basel: Beltz Verlag, 1997), 169–79. 24  Lee Blessing, A Walk in the Woods. A Play in Two Acts (1998), quoted in William Wallace, Central Europe. Core of the continent, or periphery of the West? (London: Eleni Nakou Foundation, 1999), 5.

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Of the three categories used above, historical periods are the most straightforward one. They delineate a length of time which can be described as having some internal consistency, based on different criteria, and a more or less well delineated beginning or end, based most often on (a cluster of) meaningful events. Historians would fiercely debate the legitimacy of the events used as criteria; they would question the chronology of the periods; some would object altogether to the application of periodization which splits up the organic historical process into seemingly coherent periods that are nothing else but artificial and arbitrary cognitive devices. Yet, by and large, they would generally concede that the above definition is more or less acceptable in abstract terms. Not so for the other two categories: tradition and legacy. Raymond Williams in his commentary on tradition observed that “tradition in its most general modern sense is a particularly difficult word.”25 Of the manifold meanings throughout the centuries, the general notion of handing down knowledge and ideas survived. Soon it was linked to the idea of respect and duty to the forebears. Given that only some of the many traditions or parts of them are selected for respect or duty, it is difficult, Williams further comments, to approach Tradition (in the singular) “in an abstract or exhortatory or, as so often, ratifying use.” As far as tradition’s antiquity is concerned, “it only takes two generations to make anything traditional: naturally enough, since that is the sense of tradition as active process.” Yet, Williams notes that “the word tends to move towards age-old and towards ceremony, duty and respect,” and he bemoans this as “both a betrayal and a surrender,” given the size and variety of what is handed down to us. He also points out that there is a parallel dismissive use of tradition, particularly with the rise of modernization theory, where it is used, especially in its adjectival form, to describe “habits or beliefs inconvenient to virtually any innovation.” Yet, this is not a mainstream use, and for the purposes of this analysis, I will adhere to its predominant sense: “Tradition survives in English as a description of a general process of handing down, but there is a very strong and often predominant sense of this entailing respect and duty.”26 We have, in this popular understanding of tradition several components: an active attitude, a conscious selection, an evaluative elevation of elements from a pool created in an accumulative process of handing down. Legacy is a commonly and broadly used word but it has not entered the specialized vocabulary of historians or other social scientists (bar the legal profession), and therefore it is not considered in different specialized dictionaries, 25  Raymond Williams, Keywords. Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 318. 26  Ibid., 319–20.

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Williams’s Keywords included. The standard English language dictionaries give it a double meaning: “1. Law. A gift or property, esp. personal property, as money, by will; a bequest. 2. Anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor.”27 As examples of the second use, different dictionaries offer “the legacy of ancient Rome” (The Random House) or “a legacy of religious freedom” (The American Heritage Dictionary). Thus, alongside its legal use, in its second meaning legacy is used very closely to the connotation of tradition. But the resemblance ends at the basic level: both designate the processes (and the artifacts) of handing down. Beyond that, there are significant differences. Legacy, unlike tradition, does not involve an active process of conscious selection of elements bequeathed from the past. It encompasses everything that is handed down from the past, whether one likes it or not. In this sense, it neither betrays the past nor surrenders to the agents’ active meddling. The legacy may be exalted or maligned by the successors, but this comes as a secondary process. Legacy per se as an abstract signifier is neutral. Heritage and inheritance are two other possible candidates. Used primarily as legal terms for both property and birthright, they can also be utilized to designate “something passed down from preceding generations; tradition.”28 In this sense, they are actually synonyms of legacy. There are, thus, no semantic reasons to privilege legacy over heritage or inheritance. The reason is merely aesthetic: a subjective impression that first, legacy is not used as often, and, secondly, that heritage and inheritance have a more legal ring about them. It is, then, my choice to make the word “legacy” in its syntagmatic relationship with “historical”—historical legacy—the receptacle of a meaning on which I will elaborate below. For purely cognitive purposes I distinguish between legacy as continuity and legacy as perception. Legacy as continuity is the survival but also gradual waning of some of the characteristics of the entity immediately before its collapse. The legacy as perception, on the other hand, is the articulation and re-articulation of how the entity is thought about at different time periods by different individuals or groups. These should not be interpreted as “real” versus “imagined” characteristics as the maybe unfortunate use of the terms “continuity” and “perception” implies. The characteristics of the continuity are themselves often perceptual, and perceptions are no less a matter of continuous real 27   The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd edition (New York: Random House, 1987), 1098. This detailed dictionary gives also a third, obsolete meaning as “office, function, or commission of a legate.” 28   The American Heritage Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982), 607. Inheritance has also the additional biological significance of genetic transmission of characteristics.

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social facts. The better way to define the distinction is to say that in both cases the categories designate social facts but that these are at different removes from experience. In the instance of perception, the social fact is removed yet a further step from immediate reality, and one can perhaps juxtapose the natural versus the cultural or textual status of the social interaction. Let me resort to two concrete examples within my scope of competence of how to apply the category: the Balkans and Eastern Europe. If we look at the numerous historical periods, traditions and legacies that shape Southeastern Europe, some of these periods and legacies have been synchronic or overlapping, others consecutive or completely segregated;29 some have played themselves out in the same geographic space, others have involved the southeast European area in different macroregions.30 They can be also classified according to their influence in different spheres of social life: political, economic, demographic, cultural, etc. One can enumerate many of them: the Roman, the Byzantine, the Ottoman, the communist, to mention some of the most important political legacies. In the religious sphere, one can single out the Christian, Muslim, and Judaic traditions with their numerous sects and branches; in the sphere of art and culture, the legacies of the pre-Greeks, the Greeks, the numerous ethnic groups that settled the peninsula etc.; in social and demographic terms, the legacies of large and incessant migrations, ethnic diversity,

29  One could speak of synchronic and overlapping periods, by taking the example of the late Roman, Byzantine, and early Ottoman empires, and the period of great migrations from Central Asia (with is numerous political legacies as well as the social legacy of seminomadism), which peaked in the 4th–5th centuries and whose spurts were felt until the 15–16th centuries. The same goes for the synchronic workings of the whole variety of different religious systems in the region, both as legacies and ongoing processes. An instance of ceasura between periods, and little if any overlap between legacies is, for example, the Hellenistic and communist period and legacy. Otherwise, legacies fade away in intensity with the passage of time but, in principle, they would be overlapping by definition. 30  An example of the first would be the Byzantine and the Ottoman period and legacy. Until the 16th century, there was an almost complete spatial coincidence between the spheres of influence of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, both in Europe and in Asia Minor. After the early 16th century, the Ottoman Empire expanded its space in North Africa and elsewhere, but in Southeastern Europe both the space of the historical periods and that of the legacies are coincidental. For an example of the second sort, one can point to another two period and legacies: the Roman Empire, which included Southeastern Europe in a space stretching from the British Isles to the Caspian and Mesopotamia (but excluding much of Northern and Central Europe), and the period and legacy of communism, which involved part of Southeastern Europe in a space encompassing the whole of Eastern Europe, and stretching through the Eurasian landmass to Central Asia (or including even China in some counts).

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semi-nomadism, a large and egalitarian agricultural sphere, late urbanization alongside a constant continuity of urban life, etc. Of the political legacies which have shaped the southeast European peninsula as a whole (the period of Greek antiquity, Hellenism, Roman rule, etc.), two can be singled out as crucial until the 19th century. One is the millennium of Byzantium with its profound political, institutional, legal, religious and general cultural impact. The other is the half millennium of Ottoman rule that gave the peninsula its name and established the longest period of political unity it had experienced. Not only did part of Southeastern Europe acquire a new name during this period, it has been chiefly the Ottoman elements or the ones perceived as such which have mostly invoked the current stereotype of the Balkans. In the narrow sense of the word, then, one can argue that the Balkans are, in fact, the Ottoman legacy. The legacy as continuity, as I already pointed out, is a notion different from the characteristics of the Ottoman polity or the Ottoman period in general. It is a process that begins after the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist for particular regions which shaped themselves into successor states and is the aggregate of characteristics handed down chiefly from the historical situation of the 18th and 19th centuries. I further attempted a systematic review of the workings of the Ottoman legacy as continuity in the political, cultural, social and economic spheres where it displayed different degrees of perseverance. In practically all spheres, except the demographic and the sphere of popular culture, the break was enacted almost immediately after the onset of political independence of the separate Balkan states and, as a whole, was completed by the end of World War I; thereafter it turned into legacy as perception. In the realm of demography, however, the Ottoman legacy continued for some time and, more importantly, became intertwined with and gradually transformed into the influence of the Turkish nation-state. The Ottoman legacy as perception, on the other hand, is the process of interaction between an ever-evolving and accumulating past, and ever-evolving and accumulating perceptions of generations of people who are redefining their evaluations of the past, in a word the question not of reconstructing, but of constructing the past in works of historiography, fiction, journalism, and everyday discourse. The legacy as perception is firmly built in the discourse of Balkan nationalism as one of its most important pillars and displays striking similarities in all Balkan countries. Precisely because it is at the center of securing present social arrangements, and above all legitimizing the state, it is bound to be reproduced for some time to come. The countries defined as Balkan (i.e. the ones which participated in the historical Ottoman sphere) have been moving steadily away from their Ottoman

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legacy, and with this also from their balkanness. I want to strongly emphasize here that this is a statement which is devoid of any evaluative element. It is also with this in mind that I argued that what we are witnessing today in the geographic Balkans—namely, the eradication of the final vestiges of an imperial legacy of ethnic multiplicity and co-existence,31 and its substitution with institutionalized ethnically homogeneous bodies—may well be an advanced stage of the final europeanization of the region, and the end of the historic Balkans, if they are, as I think they are, the Ottoman period and the Ottoman legacy. Let us now take the larger concept of Eastern Europe. In some ways— geographically—it encompasses the Balkans, yet in a politico-historical sense it actually divided the Balkans during the period of the Cold War. Again, if we look at the historical periods, traditions and legacies that shape what constitutes today Eastern Europe, we shall see that some of these periods and legacies have been synchronic or overlapping, others consecutive or completely segregated; some encompassed the whole region, while others involved only some of the area’s constituent parts in different macroregions. For example, the very strong imprint of the legacy of the Roman Empire included the whole of Southeastern Europe (the Balkans), but only small parts of Central Europe in a space stretching from the British Isles to the Caspian Sea and Mesopotamia (but excluding most of Northern and much of Central Europe). The cliché goes that the area of Western Christianity (both in its Catholic and Protestant versions) is the true and only heir of Roman traditions, esp. its legal system. Yet, one can hear the same claim (and arguably far more convincingly) that the imperium lived on through Byzantium, and as some distinguished historians have argued, also through the Ottomans. Likewise, communism involved Eastern Europe (with a significant part of the Balkans) in a space stretching through the Eurasian landmass to Central Asia (and including China in some counts). In fact, this most recent legacy, albeit the shortest, is usually neglected, precisely by the ones who insist on the permanence of the previous imperial legacies. Let me make a glib statement. It is preposterous to look for a socialist legacy in Eastern Europe. “Eastern Europe” as a political space today is the 31  I wish to state strongly that I am not idealizing the imperial experience but simply pointing out that it had different organizational base lines from the nation state. Any “imperial nostalgia” can be easily dispelled by a detailed knowledge of the forces that felt oppressed, fought and, finally, brought down the empires. This may seem obvious and trivial but I feel compelled to include this proleptic remark, in view of the recent and growing trend to romanticize past empires—the British, the Habsburg, the Ottoman, and not quite yet but going there, the Russian—which has permeated much even of the academic output.

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socialist legacy. After the Second World War its 19th-century meaning of an intermediary space balancing between two centers of political and economic expansion (Western Europe and Russia), which in the interwar period had given way to the function of a cordon sanitaire against bolshevism, had dramatically changed. Anyone who has lived in pre-1989 Eastern Europe would concur that the notion made sense only as a political synonym for Warsaw Pact Europe. Greece and Turkey were part of Western Europe in those days, and the joke was how Portugal of the carnation revolution might become East European. Like with other similar processes, the socialist period was a continuous and complex one. It ended around 1989; the moment it ended, it was turned into a legacy. Under the rubric of legacy as continuity, we can look at the workings of the socialist heritage in different spheres: the political, the economic, the social, the realm of mentalité, and they are strikingly similar in all postcommunist countries. Whether they like it or not, for most transitologists the preferred and logical sphere of reference is Eastern Europe. The socialist legacy as continuity displays different degrees of perseverance in separate spheres and in separate countries but, like any legacy, it is bound to subside; after which it will be relegated to the realm of perception. Once we approach Eastern Europe as a distinct historical legacy (and I believe it is the socialist/communist one), we are bound to postulate it is finite. Only, in history these things do not happen so abruptly, they are gradual. As a long-term process, Eastern Europe is slowly fading away. Integration with the European institutional framework may occur over the next 10-20-50-100 years. In the realm of perception, however, we are speaking of the discrete experience of two or three generations. Eastern Europe may and most likely is going to disappear as a category, but it will be more difficult to obliterate attitudes from the inside as well as from the outside. One of the reasons to invoke this concept and this legacy is that it is the most important medium in which the recent debate over Central Europe and the Balkans has to be historicized. Central Europe as the emancipatory ideology of the 1980s and the early 1990s, despite the rhetoric of pertaining to a quasi-Habsburg or West European space, belongs to the hermeneutic realm of Eastern Europe (to reiterate, Eastern Europe not as an eternal concept, but as the historical experience of the Cold War period). The state socialist (or communist) legacy is the latest in a sequence of legacies, and, as already pointed out, it became a legacy only after the completion of the socialist period in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Unlike the Ottoman legacy which, I have argued, bears the characteristics of only the last twocenturies-old Ottoman era, the socialist legacy, because of the relative brevity of the phenomenon, would reflect the characteristics of the whole 50

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(or 70)-year-old period. But the socialist period is itself a subcategory of a larger phenomenon which some would argue has also turned into a legacy, while others see it as a still ongoing process. I am referring, of course, to what came in the wake of the Ottoman period and what, depending on the preferred paradigm or terminology, has been defined as the capitalist world economy (Wallerstein), or the capitalist mode of production (Marx), or the “iron cage” of capitalist modernity (Max Weber), or the age of industrialism, or urbanism, or modernization, or globalization and its uneven impact, etc. For Zygmunt Bauman, it is modernity with its Enlightenment message where capitalism and socialism are “married forever in their attachment to modernity,” and where modernity itself is turning into a legacy.”32 Thinking in terms of historical legacies, with their simultaneity and overlapping, and their gradually waning effects, allows us to emphasize the complexity and plasticity of the historical process. In the particular case of the Balkans and Eastern Europe as a whole, it allows us to rescue them from a debilitating diachronic and spatial ghettoization, and insert them in multifarious cognitive frameworks over space and time. Europe, in this vision, emerges as a complex palimpsest of differently shaped entities, which not only expose the porosity of internal frontiers, but question the absolute stability of its external ones. I have played with the idea of trying to create a digital image, which would illustrate the design of the palimpsest, where different legacies could be marked by separate colors on a horizontal scale. Their superimposition, as well as their non-coincidental, phased borders would neatly illustrate the relativity of regional borders across long historical periods. At the same time, however, the very visual premise—namely, marking a legacy in one color—already essentializes and homogenizes any separate legacy. The interesting thing would be to also visualize the fact that structurally cognate elements in different legacies, for example property relations or family structure or state institutions, etc., should be rendered as shades of the same color on a vertical scale. This, however, would complicate the image to such an extent, that, although more loyal to reality, it would be visually ineffective and unable to make the point. After all, as some contemporary philosophers have maintained, we are living in the “image society” rather than the “information society,” where we witness a struggle of images, rather than a struggle of ideas, and what dominates is not a Zeitgeist but a Zeit-image, stereo-images rather than stereotypes, pre-images rather than prejudices, and new-image in the place of Orwell’s newspeech. In order to be recognizable and effective, the image ab definitio reduces reality much more strongly than the logos. I therefore prefer to stay with the visually 32  Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations with Postmodernity (New York, 1992), 222.

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imperfect but more complicated verbal metaphor of the palimpsest at the cost of reaching a much more limited audience. If, as I have argued, thinking in terms of historical legacies is an acceptable and fruitful answer to the question I pose, would framing it within the postcolonial paradigm or stance deliver some deeper insights? I believe not. While I am all for looking for alternative framing paradigms, and while I continue to be full of admiration for many postcolonial works, I do not think that changing one metanarrative for another grand theory is any solution. It all depends on the questions we are asking. And certainly, while one could rightly say that, in the end, it is all splitting hair over knowledge-power relations, I agree that an excessive “emphasis on abstract knowledge-power patterns may interfere with our ability to recognize and recover the more determinate, more concrete, and ultimately more messy activities” of history.33 Besides, I do not think that a kind of theoretically informed empiricism (or simply put, intelligent rigorous scholarship) is a counter or challenge to the theoretical array of studies. Although I admit to a historical and even empirical bias, I still prefer to view the world from a plane rather than from a train. But, at the same time, I prefer to view the world from a plane rather than from a rocket, which I leave to the intrepid theoreticians. This does not mean that I claim a kind of privileged, “objective” middle road. I just prefer (for aesthetic and disciplinarian reasons) the middle range and middle velocity view, but, as we know, no view is more true than the other. It just gazes and reflects from different angles and distances. Here I am simply arguing that the historian’s view can produce certain representations that can be missed from a gaze too close or too distant, and that I personally happen to consider these representations beautiful. At the same time, I said that my objections referred primarily to the way we assess postcoloniality as a historical phenomenon. Things get more complicated if we look at the second approach as defined by Spurr: the search for alternatives to the discourses of the colonial era, something that is both an intellectual project and a transnational condition that includes, along with new possibilities, certain crises of identity and representation. Here there is an interesting twist, particularly in the understanding of subjectivity. I already said that a self-understanding as colonials was absent in the Balkans, with some qualifications about the claim for a semi-colonial status for the Ottoman Empire. But contemporary East European intellectuals, i.e. intellectuals in the post-1989 world, increasingly see themselves in a subordinate position vis-à-vis the centers of knowledge production and dissemination in the West, 33  “Introduction,” in Loomba, Kaul, Bunzl, Burton and Esty, eds., Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, 43 (MS page).

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and some explicitly speak of intellectual neo-imperialism, neocolonialism, or self-colonization, whence the identification with postcoloniality. Outside observers also employ the term and a recent article by Steven Sampson is entitled “Weak States, Uncivil Societies and Thousands of NGOs: Benevolent Colonialism in the Balkans.”34 This is where, according to me, an opening is produced, through which postcolonial theory finds an attentive ear among a new intellectual clientele. Another is the pressing question of location. Critics of balkanism have been mostly located in Western universities or in the NGO sector, and these positions are very reminiscent of the agents of and adversaries of postcolonialism. Yet, this is nothing specific to the Balkans, but an overall East European phenomenon. There is, thus, at present an unquestionable link between a number of East European intellectuals and postcolonialism, and while I affirm that the link is not effectuated via balkanism, it still merits to be analyzed. Even this broadened understanding, however, is not entirely unproblematic. John Dunham Kelly has identified three powerful antinomies in postcolonial theory, some of which can be named by the work of their most influential theoreticians. One is the antinomy concerning the agency of dominated groups, Gayatri Spivak’s famous “Can the subaltern speak?” in which she raised the question of whether subalterns have the power to represent themselves, or whether it is precisely the lack of that power that constitutes them as subaltern. The second antinomy refers to the power and possible inevitability of western paradigms, the “provincializing Europe” of Dipesh Chakrabarty. The third is about when and how postcoloniality might end.35 The second antinomy poses particular difficulties for East European (Balkan inclusive) studies. It has been noted by some colleagues outside our field (mostly colleagues from Middle Eastern or South Asian studies) that among East Europeans there is a specific kind of ontological Angst to “decenter” Europe.36 That may be so, but I submit to a very materialist bias: it simply reflects the physical fact that Europe (in a very elastic but mostly geographic understanding) is the natural geographic and historical background against which developments in one of its sub-regions in particular time periods can be most adequately projected. So, the task for balkanists and East Europeanists 34  Sanimir Resic, Barbara Tornquist-Plewa, eds. The Balkans in Focus: Cultural Boundaries in Europe (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2002). 35   International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (IESBS). Ed. by Neil J. Smelser, Paul B. Bates. (Amsterdam, New York: Elsevier Science, 2001), 11845–8. 36  I never encountered this in writing, but it has happened too often at oral fora to warrant special notice.

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consists not so much of “provincializing Europe” but in “deprovincializing Western Europe.” Not only has Western Europe expropriated the category Europe with concrete political and moral consequences. In the academic sphere this translates as the mandatory necessity on the part of East Euro­ peanists to have a good grasp of the West European fields, and the sanctioned ignorance of West Europeanists about developments in the Eastern half of the continent. This project, if successful, will actually succeed in “provincializing” Europe effectively for the rest of the world, insofar as the European paradigm will have broadened to include not only a cleansed abstract ideal and a version of power, but also one of dependency, subordination, and messy struggles. And it is maybe at this juncture that there could be a genuine and fruitful confluence of aims between postcolonial theory and anti-balkanism. But for that, one can remain historically specific and continue to speak different conceptual languages. The third antinomy outlined by Kelly, centered on the boundary issues between postcoloniality and globalization, relates directly to the positionality of contemporary East European intellectuals. According to some authors, globalization is the successor of, and “the late capitalist liberator from postcoloniality, as the globe moves from Western modernity to modernity at large or to alternative modernities, negating all vestiges of asymmetric colonial relations.” The counter argument, expressed powerfully by Kelly, asserts that “postcoloniality and globalization can be seen as two sides of the same coin, the coin of American power.” In his vision, “postcoloniality could end only when American power is as thoroughly confronted as European power has been, and the limitations intrinsic to the formal symmetries of the political present are as fully overcome as have been the formal asymmetries of the colonial past.”37 It is within this context that Judit Bodnar has highlighted the new common East European experience of marginality and has argued persuasively about the similarities between postcolonial and postsocialist theory. Carefully drawing the line and avoiding the stretching of coloniality so that it would accommodate Eastern Europe, she nonetheless calls on opening up of categories that were hitherto used almost exclusively to conceptualize the non-Western 37   I ESBS, 11848. See also J. D. Kelly, “Time and the global: against the homogeneous, empty communities in contemporary social theory,” in Development and Change, 29, 1998, 839– 71. Likewise, Peter Hulme and Ali Behdad believe that postcolonial studies are finding their real critical vocation only in the age of globalization, by insisting on the structural links between the colonial and neocolonial forms of global hierarchy (“Introduction,” in Loomba, Kaul, Bunzl, Burton and Esty, eds., Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, 10 (MS page).

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experience.38 In this vision, the application of postcolonial studies serves largely emancipator goals; it seems to empower East European intellectuals by propelling them into a paradigm which by now pretends to be speaking a universal language. Indeed, Chatterjee has claimed as much: “Having traveled from Italy to India, the idea of subaltern history has now produced a generally available methodological and stylistic approach to modern historiography that could be used anywhere.”39 We are back under the spell of grand theory, but will the lure of a new metanarrative prove to be a panacea? 38  Judit Bodnar, “Shamed by Comparison: Eastern Europe and the ‘Rest’,” in Sorin Antohi and Larry Wolff, eds., Europe’s Symbolic Geographies, CEU Press (forthcoming). I am grateful to the author for allowing me to consult her chapter in advance. 39   Partha Chatterjee, “Subaltern Studies,” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001, 15241.

CHAPTER 6

The Balkans: from Discovery to Invention An early version of this text was presented as a paper in a panel at the (then) AAASS (American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, now ASEEES) in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1993. The whole panel was invited to publish its papers in Slavic Review. The full article thus came out in Slavic Review 53, no 2, Summer 1994, 453–482 and is reproduced here with the permission of the journal. It became the blueprint for my later book Imagining the Balkans, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1997, with a second, revised edition in 2009.

Beyond and below what was once Czechoslovakia lie the deep Balkans. They are, it has been said, a sort of hell paved with the bad intentions of the powers.1 By the beginning of the twentieth century Europe had added to its repertoire of Schimpfwörter, or disparagements, a new one which turned out to be more persistent than others with centuries old traditions. “Balkanization” not only had come to denote the parcelization of large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian. In its latest hypostasis, particularly in American academe, it has been completely decontextualized and paradigmatically related to a variety of problems.2 If European identity, as Agnes Heller has maintained, is characterized by “the recognition of the accomplishment of others”, then “the myth of Occident and Orient is not a juxtaposition of civilization with barbarism but rather of one civilization with another”, and “European (Western) cultural identity has been conceived as both-ethnocentric and anti-ethnocentric.”3 If 1  John Gunther, Inside Europe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), 437. 2  Thus, we read that “at the University of California at Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien broods over the Balkanization taking place throughout society” (Ellis Cose review of Divided We Fall: Gambling with History in the Nineties by Haynes Johnson, in “The New York Times Book Review,” 27 March 1994, 11.) Likewise, in a lively academic debate over multiculturalism at Rice University, Eva Thompson, a professor of German and Slavic studies saw the multiculturalism-curriculum not as a means of creating a shared identity, but as the Balkanization of the American people (Sallyport, December 1991, 33). 3   Agnes Heller, “Europe: An Epilogue?”, The Idea of Europe. Problems of National and Transnational Identity, ed. Brian Nelson, David Roberts and Walter Veit (New York: Berg, 1992), 14.

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Europe has produced not only racism but also anti-racism, not only misogyny but also feminism, not only anti-Semitism but also its repudiation, then what can be termed “Balkanism” has not yet been coupled with its complementing and ennobling antithesis. “Orientalism” was advanced by Edward Said to denote “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short Orientalism [can be discussed and analyzed] as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”4 Particularly inspired by Foucault, from whom he not only borrowed the term “discourse” but his focus on the relationship of knowledge to power,5 Said exposed the dangers of essentializing the “orient” as “other.” Less attention in this respect has been paid to the essentialization (or, rather, self-essentialization) of the “west,” as the hegemonic pair in the dichotomy. Predictably, the response to Said’s book was quite polarized: modernization theorists and classical liberals were severely critical;6 however, there was also serious and subtle epistemological critique, an attempt to avoid the extremes and go beyond Said, and beyond orientalism.7 Studies of power and representation have also progressed beyond Foucault.8 Yet, despite distinguished and undistinguished objections, the place of “orientalism” in academic dictionaries is secured. Its continuing resonance is 4  Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 3. 5  Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). 6  See, for example, David Kopf, “Hermeneutics Versus History,” Journal of Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (1980). The heated exchange with Bernard Lewis has been summarized recently in a collection of essays by Bernard Lewis, “The Question of Orientalism,” Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 99–118. For a survey of the reception of Said’s theory, see Robert A. Kapp, “Introduction: Review Symposium: Edward Said’s Orientalism,” Journal of Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (1980). 7  See, in particular, Jayant Lele, “Orientalism and the Social Sciences,” Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 45–75. Also see, the critique by Ernest Gellner of Said’s latest book, Culture and Imperialism in The Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 1993 as well as Said’s response in The Times Literary Supplement, 4 June 1993. 8  Stephen A. Marglin and Frederique Appfel Marglin, eds., Dominating Knowledge: Develop­ ment, Culture and Resistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); James Clifford, “On Orien­ talism”, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 255–276; S. P. Mohanty, “Us and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Political Criticism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 2 (1989): 10–31.

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perhaps best explained by the growing awareness of students of society and history “of the role of their academic disciplines in the reproduction of patterns of domination.”9 What has been recognized “is that the critiques of colonialism have not really led to a reflection on the evolution of knowledge that brings us into the postcolonial (or neocolonial) present.”10 Nor have critiques of domination and dependence outside the colonial context, as in the case of the Balkans. But “Balkanism” is not merely a sub-species of orientalism,11 an “orientalist variation on a Balkan theme”.12 The absence of a colonial legacy (despite the often exploited analogies) is not the only, not even the main difference. “Balkanism” evolved independently from “Orientalism” and, in certain aspects, against or despite it, partially because southeastern Europe (or the Balkans)13 has been considered geopolitically distinct from the near or the middle East. Its Christianity opposed it to Islam and fed the crusading potential of Western Christendom. Despite many depictions of its (Orthodox) Christianity as “oriental despotism”, inherently non-European or non-Western, still the boundary between Islam and Christianity continued to be perceived as the principal one. Moreover, Balkan self-identities constructed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were invariably opposed to “oriental others”: geographical neighbors, e.g. the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, as well as regions within the area itself and portions of one’s own historical past (usually the Ottoman

9   Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, “Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament,” 1. 10   Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, “Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament,” 2. This recognition has been made on the basis usually of studies on India and other colonial cases: Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), a translation of the French original La Rénaissance Orientale (Paris, 1950); Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989); Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 11  There is at least one existing different use and definition of Balkanism which I am aware of. In 1932 Konrad Berkovici published The Incredible Balkans (New York: Loring & Mussey, 1932), a popular historical pamphlet in which he treated Balkanism as the particular system of government fostered by the Austrians in their Eastern domains (217 ff.). 12  This is, of course, a paraphrase of the title of the excellent article by Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 1–15. 13  In this text the two terms “southeastern Europe” and “Balkans” are used as synonyms, although it is possible to look for nuanced differences in their usage.

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period and the Ottoman legacy).14 Here, I will focus exclusively on the first of these two sides of Balkanism: its construction from the outside. Geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as “the other”, the Balkans became, in time, the object of a number of externalized political, ideological and cultural frustrations and have served as a repository of negative characteristics against which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the “European” and “the west” has been constructed. Balkanism conveniently exempted “the west” from charges of racism, colonialism, Eurocentrism and Christian intolerance: the Balkans, after all, are in Europe, they are white, and they are predominantly Christian. The “civilized world” (as Europe outside the Balkans and North America have proclaimed themselves)15 was first distressed not simply by events in the area but by the area itself during the Balkan wars (1912–1913). News of the barbarities committed on this distant European peninsula came flooding in and challenged the peace movements which were gaining strength and becoming institutionalized. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace established a commission (eight well-known politicians, professors and journalists from France, the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary) “to inquire into the causes and conduct of the Balkan wars.”16 Their report, published in 1914,17 considers in detail the historical roots of the Balkan conflict, presents the points of view and aspirations of the different 14  On internal orientalism, see Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’.” About the historical dimension, see Maria Todorova, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans”, Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East, ed. by L. Carl Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 15  It is symptomatic that politically correct expressions are not applied to the dichotomy “civilized-uncivilized” in geographic terms, especially with developments in Africa or in the Balkans, where it is either the response of the “civilized West” or of the “civilized world” which is evoked. (For the first, see Secretary of State Laurence Eagleburger on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Friday, April 29 commenting on Rwanda; for the second there are numerous examples, among them the recent Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 1, 1994 on the implementation of the no-fly resolution in Bosnia). 16  The members of the commission were for France: Baron d’Estournelle de Constant, a senator, and Justin Godart, a lawyer and member of the Chamber of Deputies; for the United States: Samuel Hutton, a professor at Columbia University; for Great Britain: Francis Hirst, the editor of The Economist and the journalist H. N. Brailsford; for Russia: Pavel Milyukov, a professor of history and member of the Duma; for Germany: Walther Schücking, a professor of law; and for Austria-Hungary: Joseph Redlich, a professor of public law. 17  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of Intercourse and Education, Report of the International Commission To Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, Publication No. 4 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment, 1914).

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belligerents, as well as the economic, social and moral consequences of the wars, and their relation to international law. It includes an introduction by Baron d’Estournelle de Constant reiterating the main principles of the peace movement: “Let us repeat, for the benefit of those who accuse us of ‘bleating for peace at any price,’ what we have always maintained: War rather than slavery; Arbitration rather than war; Conciliation rather than arbitration.”18 D’Estournelle also differentiated between the first and the second Balkan wars: the first was defensive and a war of independence, “the supreme protest against violence, and generally the protest of the weak against the strong … and for this reason it was glorious and popular throughout the civilized world.”19 The second, however, was a predatory war in which “both victor and vanquished lose morally and materially.” But both “finally sacrificed treasures of riches, lives, and heroism. We cannot authenticate these sacrifices without protesting, without denouncing their cost and their danger for the future.”20 While not optimistic about the immediate political future of the region, the commission concluded: What then is the duty of the civilized world in the Balkans? … It is clear in the first place that they should cease to exploit these nations for gain. They should encourage them to make arbitration treaties and insist upon their keeping them. They should set a good example by seeking a judicial settlement of all international disputes.21 D’Estournelle himself reiterated: The real culprits in this long list of executions, assassinations, drownings, burnings, massacres and atrocities furnished by our report, are not, we repeat, the Balkan peoples. Here pity must conquer indignation. Do not let us condemn the victims … The real culprits are those who by interest or inclination, declaring that war is inevitable, end by making it so, asserting that they are powerless to prevent it.22 In 1993, instead of launching a fact-finding mission, the Carnegie Endowment satisfied itself with reprinting the “Report of the International Commission To 18  Ibid., 1. 19  Ibid., 4. 20  Ibid., 4–5. 21  Ibid., 273. 22  Ibid., 19.

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Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars,” preceding that title with a gratuitous caption, “The Other Balkan Wars”.23 Also added is an introduction by George Kennan, Ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and to Yugoslavia in the 1960s, best known as the padre padrone of the US policy of containment vis-à-vis the USSR. Entitled “The Balkan Crises: 1913 and 1993,”24 this introduction is in turn preceded by a two-page preface by the President of the Carnegie Endowment, Morton Abramowitz, which recounts his almost serendipitous idea to reopen the 80-year-old report. It convinced him “that others should also have the opportunity to read it. It is a document with many stories to tell us in this twilight decade of the twentieth century, when yet again a conflict in the Balkans torments Europe and the conscience of the international community.”25 Abramowitz considers Kennan the person to best bridge the two events and instruct the conscience of the international community (which seems to have been tormented primarily by the Balkans throughout the twentieth century). We “all now benefit from his insight, his sure sense of history, and his felicitous style”.26 Kennan’s introduction/article begins with praise of peace movements in the United States, England and northern Europe which sought to create new legal codes of international behavior. Although the initiative for an international conference on disarmament came from the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, it was “immature dilettantism, … elaborated by the characteristic confusions of the Russian governmental establishment of the time, … not a serious one.”27 And although it was not serious, it was “seized upon with enthusiasm” by the proponents of peace who convoked the two Hague Peace Conferences and other international initiatives. Having separated the serious men from the dilettante boys, thus retrospectively essentializing cold war dichotomies, the introduction describes the historical context of the turn of the century, the outbreak of the Balkan wars and the report of the Carnegie commission which follows. The importance of this report for the world of 1993 lies primarily in the light it casts on the excruciating situation prevailing today in the same Balkan world with which it dealt. The greatest value of the report is to 23   The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with A New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993). 24  The introduction was also published separately as an article in The New York Review of Books which in many ways aspires to record, if not to set intellectual fashions in the US. New York Review of Books XL, no.13, 15 July 1993. 25   The Other Balkan Wars, 1. 26   Ibid. 27  Ibid., 3.

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reveal to people of this age how much of today’s problem has deep roots and how much does not.28 Confirming thus his belief in the maxim “Historia est magistra vitae,” the second part of Kennan’s introduction analyzes analogies with the past and the lessons of these analogies, its approach indicated by the slip “the same Balkan world.”29 The newly created Balkan states are summed up as monarchies whose leaders were “as a rule, somewhat more moderate and thoughtful than their subjects. Their powers were usually disputed by inexperienced and unruly parliamentary bodies”30 leaving one to wonder which was the rule and who were the exceptions. The Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand, “Foxy Ferdinand,” plunged his country into the second Balkan war, despite better advice, to achieve his wild ambitions (not Balkan, but central European, more particularly SaxeCoburg-Gotha) to enter Constantinople as victor; he accomplished the loss of his crown and the unruly parliamentary body ruled that he was never to set foot in Bulgaria again. The “moderate” Milan Obrenović involved in and humiliated Serbia in a war with Bulgaria in 1885;31 and Kennan could have used the bloody assassination of the last pathetic Obrenović, Alexander, in 1903, to 28  Ibid., 9. 29  Historians with a less “sure sense of history” will be somewhat skeptical of such a frozen historical image; others, with a pedantic attention to historical detail, will be annoyed by seemingly insignificant inaccuracies. Thus, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania are all said to have sprung up as new states at the beginning of the twentieth century. Serbia began its road to autonomy in 1804, was granted full autonomy in 1830 and full independence in 1878, together with Montenegro. Romania was united in 1859 and shortly afterward received international recognition. Bulgaria was created in 1878 and declared its de facto independence in 1908, thus being the only country to which Kennan’s assertion technically applies. Since Greece is not even mentioned among the four states (Kennan obviously knows that it was created in 1830), the statement cannot be interpreted as a generalization that by the beginning of the twentieth century there were a number of independent Balkan states (4). Further, Greece is again omitted from the description of the outbreak of the Balkan wars, although it is well known that it played a crucial role in the Balkan alliance system. Instead, we read the assertion that “the hostilities had been inaugurated in the first war by the Balkan Slavs” (6). To speak of a Byzantine penetration of the Balkans is an absurdity both historically and conceptually. Southeastern Europe was the realm of the Byzantine Empire, and it is the Byzantine state which was penetrated by different tribes, most prominently by the Slavs, who at one point or other created their independent medieval states. To speak of the “Balkans” as a pre-Ottoman construction displays an anachronistic attitude which is pardonable for a journalist but usually is considered ignorance in a historian (13). 30   The Other Balkan Wars, 4. 31  This event was used by George Bernard Shaw to produce his own “peacenik” variation on a Balkan theme.

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illustrate typical Balkan violence had he not been of royal birth.32 Finally, the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen dynasty of Romania was moderation incarnate, especially the soap-opera Carol II, whose mother was the beautiful Queen Marie, a “regular, regular, regular, regular royal queen” according to a caption in a 1924 Time,33 the favorite grand-daughter of Victoria and an intimate friend of the Waldorf Astors.34 On the other hand, the explanation for the Balkan irredenta, for dreams of glory and territorial expansion, is summarized in one sentence: “It was hard for people who had recently achieved so much, to know where to stop.”35 No mention that recent Balkan upstarts, under the “moderate” guidance of mostly German princelings, were emulating the “frugal” imperial behavior of their western European models. Critical of the original report in that “there was no attempt to analyze the political motivations of the various governments participating in the wars,”36 Kennan’s introduction nonetheless sums up his view of the reasons for the Balkan wars: The strongest motivating factor involved in the Balkan wars was not religion but aggressive nationalism. But that nationalism, as it manifested itself on the field of battle, drew on deeper traits of character inherited, presumably, from a distant tribal past … And so it remains today … What we are up against is the sad fact that developments of those earlier ages, not only those of the Turkish domination but of earlier ones as well, had the effect of thrusting into the southeastern reaches of the European continent a salient of non-European civilization which has continued to the present day to preserve many of its non-European characteristics.37

32  Z. A. B. Zeman (“The Balkans and the Coming War,” The Coming of the First World War, ed. by R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) has not missed the point. Zeman flatly asserts that it was not the annexation of BosniaHerzegovina in 1908 but the brutal military coup in Belgrade in 1903, five years earlier, which was the turning point in the relations between Austria and Serbia, impressing the idea that it was the particular distastefulness of the deed to which civilized Austrians objected, and not some esoteric economic frictions, nationalism and raison d’etat. 33   Time, 4 August 1924. 34  As befits a soap-opera performance, Simon & Schuster recently published a soap-opera biography of Queen Marie: Hannah Pakula, The Last Romantic. A Biography of Queen Marie of Romania (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984). 35  The Other Balkan Wars, 4. 36  Ibid., 6. 37  Ibid., 11, 13.

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Had Kennan’s essay introduced the original report, written a whole year before the outbreak of World War I, one could empathize with its moral outrage even while overlooking its conceptual inaccuracies: at the time, it seemed that with little effort the belle époque would endure forever. Kennan, on the other hand, had full knowledge of the butcheries of two world wars. And although at least technically it is indisputable that the spark for the powder-keg came from the Balkans, very few serious historians would claim that they were the cause of World War I.38 Perhaps because the Balkans were comparatively late and reluctantly involved in World War II, Kennan does not even mention it: “Well, here we are in 1993. Eighty years of tremendous change in the remainder of Europe and of further internecine strife in the Balkans themselves have done little to alter the problem this geographic region presents for Europe.”39 Indeed, there is something distinctly non-European in the dimensions of Balkan slaughters. After World War II, it is ethnocentric at least to state that “these states of mind [animosities] are not peculiar to the Balkan people, … they can be encountered among other European peoples as well … But all these distinctions are relative ones. It is the undue predominance among the Balkan peoples of these particular qualities, and others that might have been mentioned.40 One is tempted to ask whether the Holocaust resulted from a “due” or “undue” predominance of barbarity. Certainly the Holocaust occurred fifty years ago, but the two Balkan wars were even earlier; besides, Kennan wrote his essay only a year after the “neat and clean” Gulf War operation during which there were twice the number of casualties than those incurred by all sides during the two Balkan wars.41 Whether the Balkans are non-European or not may be a matter of academic and political debate, but the area certainly has no monopoly on barbarity. 38  One of the last attempts in this direction was Joachim Remak, “1914—The Third Balkan War: Origins Reconsidered”, Journal of Modern History 43 (1971): 364–65. Recently it has been taken up again by Z. A. B. Zeman, “The Balkans and the Coming War”. 39   The Other Balkan Wars, 12–13. 40  Ibid. 41  For war losses of the Balkan belligerents, see the same Carnegie report, 395, 243. This does not take into account the losses from disease, misplacement of civilian population, etc. The same criterion, however, is applied to the Gulf War casualties, which do not include the losses of the Kurdish population, the effects on the infra-structure of Iraq, the hunger, child-war trauma, etc. Of course, an official number for the Gulf War was never released and it is curious that American mass media have forgotten this story. The only attempt to calculate the Iraqi losses was quickly squelched. For a review of the Gulf War and some of the relevant literature, see Theodore Draper, “The Gulf War Reconsidered”, The New York Review of Books, 16 January 1992, and “The True History of the Gulf War”, The New York Review of Books, 30 January 1992.

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It is not my intention merely to express moral outrage at somebody else’s moral outrage. My question is: how does one explain the persistence of such a frozen image of the Balkans? While historians are well aware that dramatic changes have occurred on the peninsula, their discourse on the Balkans as a geographic/cultural entity is overwhelmed by a discourse utilizing the construct as a powerful symbol conveniently located outside historical time. And this usage itself is the product of nearly two centuries of evolution. How could a geographical appellation be transformed into one of the most powerful pejorative designations in history, international relations, political science and, nowadays, general intellectual discourse? There seem to be three reasons which I will discuss in turns: first, innocent inaccuracies have resulted from imperfect geographical knowledge, transmitted by tradition. Second, this purely geographical appellation was later saturated with political, social, cultural and ideological overtones so that by the turn of the century “Balkan” had pejorative implications. Third, the complete dissociation of the designation from its object occurred, and a further evolution of pejorative usage resulted. Commensurately there occurred the reverse and retroactive ascription of the pejorative designation to the geographical area (particularly after 1989). Only during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did west Europeans become aware that the European possessions of the Ottoman Empire had a distinct physiognomy of their own and merited attention other than as mere Ottoman provinces, or as archeological sites. On the one hand, commerce between western Europe, primarily Great Britain and France, was increasing; there was continuing interest in the monuments of classical antiquity; and the Napoleonic wars had deterred travelers from visiting western Europe and the western Mediterranean (especially in the case of the Grand Tour) and induced them to visit “the east”. On the other hand, the intensifying activities of the Balkan populations for political sovereignty during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attracted attention to populations which had been hitherto subsumed under the undifferentiated title of Ottoman or Turkish Christians. Views of the area were colored by romanticism and/or Realpolitik, resulting in polarized advocacy or demonization of these populations. Philhellenism swept Europe in the 1820s, followed by disillusionment with realities; Turkophilia and Slavophobia were in vogue, together with the mirror-image phenomena of Turkophobia (or rather Islamophobia) and Slavophilism as direct functions of great power politics, and specifically nineteenth century attitudes towards Russia. While travel literature was a fashionable genre throughout eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europe, there is no doubt that travelers’ accounts were

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the preferred reading after novels in Britain. They represented an important portion of English literature and, “although the literature of travel is not the highest kind, and indeed cannot be called a distinct branch of literature, yet a history of English literature rightly assigns a space apart to such books, because this kind of writing, perhaps more than any other, both expresses and influences national predilections and national character.”42 Obviously, geographical discovery was going hand in hand with a simultaneous invention of the region and the two processes are, in fact, inseparable. In 1794 the “wrecks of ancient grandeur” led John Morritt, then freshly out of Cambridge, across Europe to Constantinople, and from there to Troy, Mount Athos and Athens. After going through the Shipka Pass, he described his feelings in a letter to his sister: “we were approaching classic ground. We slept at the foot of a mountain, which we crossed the next day, which separates Bulgaria from Romania (the ancient Thrace), and which, though now debased by the name of Bal.Kan, is no less a personage than the ancient Haemus.”43 Certainly this “Levant lunatic” and future prominent member of the Society of Dilettanti must have been irritated by any reminder of the present on “classic ground”; yet the later accretions were duly recorded. This was one of the very first times that the mountain chain dividing Bulgaria from east to west and running parallel to the Danube, was called “Balkan”, Turkish for “wooded mountain.” Practically all previous travelers, including Edward Brown, who published his popular and influential “Brief Account of Some Travels in Diverse Parts of Europe” in 1669, had used only the ancient term Haemus.44 Brown 42   The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: The University Press, 1922), XIV, 255. 43  John B. S. Morritt of Rokeby, A Grand Tour. Letters and Journeys 1794–96, ed. G. E. Marindin (London: Century Publishing, 1985), 65. 44   A Relation of a Journey of the Right Honourable My Lord Henry Howard, From London to Vienna, and thence to Constantinople; In the Company of his Excellency Count Lesley, Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, Councellor of State to his Imperial Majesty, etc. And Extraordinary Ambassadour from Leopoldus Emperour of Germany to the Grand Signior, Sultan Mahomet Han the Forthe. Written by John Burbury Gent (London: T. Collins, I. Ford, and S. Hickman, 1671); Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant. II. Extracts from the Diaries of Dr. John Covel, 1670–1679 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893); Travels in Turkey and back to England. By the late Reverend learned Edmund Chishull (London: W. Boyer, 1747); “An Itinerary from London to Constantinople in Sixty Days; Taken in the Suite of His Excellency, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte in the Year 1794”, A Collection of Modern and Contemporary Voyages and Travels: Containing, I. Translations from foreign languages, of voyages and travels never before translated. II. Original voyages and travels never before published. III. Analyses of new voyages and travels published in England (London: R. Phillips, 1805–1809); Travels through some parts of Germany, Poland, Moldavia

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­ aintained, following ancient authors, that the mountain chain continued m to the west, separating Serbia from Macedonia, and that, under different names, the Haemus stretched between Pontus Euxinus (the Black Sea) and the Adriatic.45 From the early nineteenth century on, “Haemus” and “Balkan” were used interchangeably;46 after the 1820s “Balkan” became the preferred although not yet exclusive term.47 In 1827 Robert Walsh repeated the earlier error that the Haemus stretched for over 500 miles, beginning at the Bay of Venice and reaching the Black Sea; now, he added, this chain was called “Balkan”, which meant “difficult mountain.”48 Not until 1827 was “Balkan” used to refer to the whole peninsula, when Walsh mentioned that the bishops in and Turkey. By Adam Neale, M.D. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818); W. M. Leake, Travels in Northern Greece (London: J. Rodwell, 1835). 45  Edward Brown, M.D., A Brief Account of Some Travels in divers Parts of Europe, Viz. Hungaria, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and Friuli. Through a great part of Germany, and The Low Countries. Through Marca Trevisana, and Lombardy on both sides of the Po. With some observations on the Gold, Silver, Copper, Quick-Silver Mines, and the Baths and Mineral Waters in Those Parts. As also, the Description of many Antiquities, Habits, Fortifications and Remarkable Places. The Second Edition with many Additions (London: Benj. Tooke, 1685). 46  John Galt, Voyages and Travels, in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811; containing Statistical, Commercial, and Miscellaneous Observations on Gibraltar, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Serigo, and Turkey (London: X. T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1812); William Macmichael. Journey from Moscow to Constantinople: In the Years 1817, 1818. (London: J. Murray, 1819); Capt. Charles Colville Frankland, Royal Navy, Travels to and from Constantinople, in the years 1827 and 1828: or Personal Narrative of a Journey from Vienna, through Hungary, Transylvania, Wallachia, Bulgaria, and Roumelia, to Constantinople; and from that city to the capital of Austria, by the Dardanelles, Tenedos, the Plains of Troy, Smyrna, Napoli di Romania, Athens, Egina, Poros, Cyprus, Syria, Alexandria, Malta, Sicily, Italy, Istria, Carniola, and Styria. (London: H. Colburn, 1829). 47  Robert Walsh, Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople to England (London: F. Westley and A. H. Davis, 1828); Travels from India to England; comprehending a visit to the Burman Empire, and a journey through Persia, Asia Minor, European Turkey, &c. In the years 1825– 26. Containing a chronological epitome of the late military operations in Ava; an account of the proceedings of the present mission of the Supreme Government of India to the Court of Tehran, and a summary of the causes and events of the existing war between Russia and Persia; with sketches of natural history, manners and customs, and illustrated with maps and plates (London: Purbury, Allen and co, 1827); Captain James Edward Alexander, Travels to the Seat of War in the East, through Russia and the Crimea, in 1829. With Sketches of the Imperial Fleet and Army, Personal Adventures, and Characteristic Anecdotes (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830); Major, the Honorable George Keppel, Narrative of a Journey across the Balkans, by the Two Passes of Selimno and Pravadi; also of a Visit to Azani, and other Newly Discovered Ruins in Asia Minor, in the Years 1829–1830 (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1831). 48  Robert Walsh, Narrative of a Journey, 104–5.

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this region were always Greeks who used Greek as the liturgical language exclusively in the southern parts and predominantly in the northern parts of the Balkans.49 Still, the region was commonly called the “Hellenic peninsula,” “Greek peninsula,” “Illyrian peninsula,” “Roman peninsula,” “Byzantine peninsula,” “Thrace”, etc., evoking its ancient or medieval past. Until the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the increasingly frequent designations were “European Turkey,” “Turkey-in-Europe,” “Ottoman Empire in Europe”, “(European) Levant” and, after the turn of the century, “South-Slavic peninsula,” “Southeasteuropean peninsula,” (part of) “Mediterranean Europe,” (part of) “Danubian Europe,” (part of) “Eastern Europe,” “Southeastern Europe.” For the Ottoman rulers the region was “Rum-eli,”—Rumelia—literally “the land of the Romans”, i.e., of the Greeks.50 Although Morritt’s classically conditioned ears had been offended by the sound of “Balkan,” the descriptions of the area dating from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century are non-judgmental and matter-of-fact. The reason why Balkan became one of the most often used designations (alongside Southeastern Europe) has little to do with precise geography.51 The German geographer August Zeune was the first to use the term “Balkan peninsula” (Balkanhalbeiland) in 1809: “In the north this Balkan peninsula is divided from the rest of Europe by the long mountain chain of the Balkans, or the former Albanus, Scardus, Haemus, which, to the northwest, joins the Alps in the small Istrian peninsula, and to the east fades away into the Black Sea in two branches.”52 In the 1830s, as a result of his expeditions, the French geologist and geographer Ami Boué authoritatively and definitively corrected this perception.53 However, by the turn of the century “Balkan peninsula” or simply “Balkans” was increasingly used and had established itself with a political rather than a geographical connotation.54 In 1922 the Serbian geographer 49  Ibid., 112–14. 50  Karl Kaser, Südosteuropäische Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 1990), 91–92. 51  For a useful survey of the evolution of geographical ideas about the Balkan mountain, see Karl Kaser, Südosteuropäische Geschichte, 94–95. 52  August Zeune, Goea: Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Erdbeschreibung (Berlin: Wittich, 1808). The quote is from the second edition (Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler, 1811), 11. 53  Ami Boué, La Turquie d’Europe ou observations sur la géographie, la géologie, l’histoire naturelle, la statistique, les moeurs, les coutumes, l’archéeologie, l’agriculture, l’industrie, le commerce, les gouvernements divers, le clergé, l’histoire et l’état politique de cet empire (Paris: Arthus Bartrand, 1840). 54  Karl Kaser, Südosteuropäische Geschichte, 96.

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Jovan Cvijić, much as he was aware of the incorrect employment of the term, used it himself in his important work on the peninsula.55 An early work which purported to objectively describe the culture of the area was Henry Blount’s “Voyage into the Levant,” published in 1636 and describing his travel of two years earlier.56 Blount, the son of one of the founders of Oxford’s Trinity College and himself a highly educated lawyer, was in many ways the practical embodiment of Bacon’s empiricist philosophy which postulated that knowledge could be reached only through experience and that generalizations can be based only on observation. True to this commitment, Blount decided to observe the Religion, Manners, and Policie of the Turkes, not perfectly, (which were a taske for an inhabitant rather then a passenger,) but so farre forth, as might satisfie this scruple, (to wit) whether to an unpartiall conceit, the Turkish way appeare absolutely barbarous, as we are given to understand, or rather an other kinde of civilitie, different from ours, but no lesse pretending.57 Not only was Blount unprejudiced concerning Islam, he even admired the Ottomans58 because the Turkes, who are the only moderne people, great in action, and whose Empire hath so suddenly invaded the World, and fixt it selfe such firme foundations as no other ever did; I was of the opinion, that he who would behold these times in their greatest glory, could not finde a better scene the Turky.59

55  The original was published in French: Jovan Cvijić, La péninsule balkanique: géographie humaine (Paris: A. Colin, 1918); the Serbian translation followed in 1922: Balkansko poluostrvo i juznoslovenske zemlje (Beograd, 1922). 56   A Voyage into the Levant. A Breife relation of a Journey, lately performed by Master H.B. Gentleman, from England by the way of Venice, into Dalmatia, Sclavonia, Bosnah, Hungary, Macedonia, Thessaly, Thrace, Rhodes and Egypt, unto Gran Cairo: with particular observations concerning the moderne condition of the Turkes, and other people under that Empire (London: Andrew Crooke, 1636). 57   A Voyage into the Levant, 2. 58  Like most other travelers, Blount called them Turks. 59   A Voyage into the Levant, 2.

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According to Blount: if ever any race of men were borne with Spirits able to beare downe the world before them, I thinke it to be the Turke … The magnanimous are apt to be corrupt with an haughty insolency, though in some sort generous: this is the Turkish way, remorcelesse to those who beare up, and therefore mistaken for beastly; but such it is not; for it constantly receives humiliation with much sweetnesse: This to their honor, and my satisfaction, I ever found.60 Despite his constant fear that the Turks might sell him as a slave, he concluded that this excepted, the Turkish disposition is generous, loving, and honest; so farre from falsefying his promise, as if he doe but lay his hand on his breast, beard, or head, as they use, or chiefly breake bread with me, if I had an hundred lives, I durst venture them upon his word, especially if he be a naturall Turke, no More, Arab, or Egyptian.61 However, although Blount saw as his first task the unprejudiced observation of “Turkes,” other statements reveal other motivations. His second great task, he wrote in his introduction, was in some measure to acquaint my selfe with those other sects which live under the Turkes, as Greekes, Armenians, Freinks, and Zinganes, but especially the Iewes; a race from all others so averse both in nature and institution, as glorifying to single it selfe out of the rest of mankinde, remains obstinate, contemptible, and famous.62 The empire that Blount sought and described was a master nation with which he could empathize; he had left a master nation in the making to pay homage to an established one. This theme was common to British travel literature, and later to western journalistic accounts. While such works often manifest a tension between empathy for the Ottoman rulers and opposition to Islam, the former usually predominates. 60  Ibid., 97. 61  Ibid., 103–4. 62  Ibid., 2.

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The encounter with the subject races of the Ottoman Empire also produced ambiguous responses. Steeped as they were in classical learning, many visitors sought living illustrations of museum archetypes. They were usually disappointed, partly by the lack of striking physical resemblance but mostly by the absence of what was perceived as classical manners. Nowhere is the cry of thwarted philhellenism63 more desperate than in Morritt who, upon observing laughing, dancing and wrestling Greeks in the Peloponnesus in 1796, exclaimed, “Good God! if a free ancient Greek could for one moment be brought to such a scene, unless his fate was very hard in the other world I am sure he would beg to go back again.”64 Only young women were graciously spared these inclement verdicts. Instead, they were described as astoundingly beautiful, even by the same Morritt who otherwise had despaired of the Greek race: You will, of course, ask me if the praise travellers generally favour Greek beauties with are deserved. Indeed they are; and if you had been present with us, you would, I think, have allowed that the faces of our village belles exceeded by far any collection in any ball-room you had ever seen. They have all good eyes and teeth, but their chief beauty is that of countenance … It is an expression of sweetness and of intelligence that I hardly ever saw, and varies with a delicacy and quickness that no painter can give … Besides this, their appearance in their elegant dress did not give us the least ideas of peasants and joined to the gracefulness of their attitudes and manners, we began to think ourselves among gentlewomen in disguise.65 These statements are naturally more revealing about the phantasms of English aristocrats with classical educations during the transition between enlightenment and romanticism than about the merits of Greek female physique, these statements are, however, a very clear illustration of the distinct class attitude evinced by most accounts. Gentility “in disguise” is the qualifying feature of Greek females; the absence of gentility is the primary complaint about Greek men. In Athens Morritt lodged with the British consul “who is poor and Greek, two circumstances which together always make a man a scoundrel.”66 And while Greeks are invariably described as cheaters and thieves, the only actual 63  Frustrated philhellenism has been the object of many studies illustrating either the lack of continuity between ancient Greece and the degenerate situation of its modern heiress or else, the abyss between ball-room expectations and stark reality. 64  John B. S. Morritt of Rokeby, A Grand Tour, 245. 65  Ibid., 109. 66  Ibid., 171.

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mention of theft is the report of British acquisition of ancient marbles: “Some we steal, some we buy, and our court is much adorned with them.”67 In stark contrast to the Greeks is Morritt’s description of their Turkish masters: I begin to think there are gentlemen in all nations. These Agas live very comfortably. Their houses are large, good, and well adapted to the climate … They have many horses, are fond of shooting and hawking, and have often, with their agricultural servants, not less than three or four hundred attendants.68 In Thessaly and Boeotia, Morritt found the Greeks and Jews repugnant, and “inquired after Turks as eagerly as we should elsewhere after Englishmen … I assure you the Turks are so much more honourable a race that I believe, if ever this country was in the hands of the Greeks and Russians, it would hardly be livable.”69 This view was repeated a year later: We are very well with the Turks here, and particularly with the governor of the town, who has called on us, sent us game, made coursing parties for us, offered us dogs, horses, etc., and is a very jolly, hearty fellow. We often go and smoke a pipe there and are on the best of terms. I shall really grow a Mussulman. If they are ignorant it is the fault of their government and religion, but I shall always say I never saw a better disposed and manlier people. Their air, from the highest to the lowest, is that of lords and masters, as they are, and their civility has something dignified and hearty in it, as from man to man; while I really have English blood enough in me almost to kick a Greek for the fawning servility he thinks politeness.70 What in Blount’s case may have been the unconscious recognition of a master race by one in the making, here is consciously and openly asserted. The nineteenth century brought more intensive and more regular contacts with the Balkan populations through commerce and increased political, military, religious and educational activities. Accordingly, travelers’ accounts displayed

67  Ibid., 179. 68  Ibid., 136. 69  Ibid., 156. 70  Ibid., 180.

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a much more competent knowledge and were often marked by deep insights and genuine human empathy.71 It is possible to draw a correlation between the tone of travelers’ reports and the main trends in foreign policy. Until the middle of the eighteenth century relations between England and the Ottoman empire were mainly commercial, and only toward the end of that century did diplomatic ties gradually take precedence.72 By that time Great Britain had undoubtedly become the leading industrial and commercial nation on the globe. After Napoleon’s defeat and the expansion of its overseas territories, Britain was also the greatest colonial power and its foreign policy was directed at maintaining and increasing “Pax Britannica.” In Europe this policy was implemented in maintaining the system of “balance of power”, one of whose decisive links the Ottoman empire had become in the course of the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, with the emergence of Russia as a central figure in Europe and its territorial success against the Ottomans, Britain adopted the preservation of the integrity and inviolability of the Ottoman Empire as a major element of its foreign policy.73 From this time on, travelers’ accounts were strongly tainted with the political views of their authors which usually reflected the official government line. Except for zealots like the prominent Turkophile and obsessed Russophobe David Urquhart,74 British travelers in the nineteenth century described, as Barbara Jelavich has aptly put it, “what was generally accepted as true.”75 But the interplay of foreign policy, travelers’ discourse and public opinion, was complex. Travelers’ accounts occasionally shaped public opinion to differ from the official foreign policy and thus contributed to important, though temporary, shifts in that policy. One example of such influence was the popular “Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe” by Georgina Mackenzie and Adelina Irby, written following their extensive tours of the Balkans, and especially Bulgaria, between 1861 and 1863. Included in their report76 was a 71  W. M. Leake, Travels in Northern Greece; Richard Clogg, “Benjamin Barker’s Journal of a Tour in Thrace (1823)”, The University of Birmingham Historical Journal XII, no. 2 (1971): 247–260; Robert Walsh, Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople; George Keppel, Narrative of a Journey across the Balkans. 72  Sarah Searight, The British in the Middle East (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), 16–20. 73  Maria Todorova, Angliya, Rossiya i Tanzimat (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka”, 1983), 48–51. 74  David Urquhart, Turkey and Its Resources (London: Saunders and Oatley, 1833). 75  Barbara Jelavich, “The British Traveller in the Balkans: The Abuses of Ottoman Admin­ istration in the Slavonic Provinces”, The South-East European Review XXXIII, no 81 (June 1955): 412. 76   Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe by Miss Muir Mackenzie and Miss Irby (London: Bell & Daldy, 1867).

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conversation that they had had with the abbot of the Rila Monastery, Neophyt Rilski, a renowned educator and linguist, prolific writer and the author of the first Bulgarian grammar. Assured by his visitors that France would not allow the Montenegrin Cetigne monastery to be burned by Muslims, he exclaimed: “France, perhaps; but England!” The women responded that “the want of interest displayed by England in the Slavonic Christians arose in great part from her ignorance respecting them—that one really never heard their name.”77 Neophyt’s reaction revealed his awareness of the intricacies of great power politics: “It is, however, a pity that so great a country, whose children are free to travel where they please, and publish what they please, should remain in such profound ignorance of the Christians in a country where she is on such intimate terms with the Turks.”78 So influential was Mackenzie and Irby’s work that William Gladstone prefaced the second edition in 1877: “very nearly all, whether freely or reluctantly, now confess that in treating the question of the Ottoman Empire we cannot refuse to look at the condition of the subject races.”79 Criticizing the press for “systematically suppress[ing] the too copious evidence of continuing Turkish outrages in Bulgaria,” Gladstone concluded that it had “become generally known that the reign of terror is still prolonged in that unhappy Province.”80 He also decried the desolation of Bosnia and Herzegovina where more than a third of the population are exiled or homeless; the mass of these (as we now learn) reduced to an allowance of a penny a day, but rather preferring to travel, and that rapidly, the road to famine and to pestilence, than to descend, by returning, into the abyss of a suffering which is also shame; and with this, the constant and harrowing recurrence of the cruel outrages, which are more and more fastening themselves, as if inseparable adjuncts, upon the Turkish name.81 While Gladstone’s stand did not involve Britain in Bulgaria or Bosnia, it did influence the 1880 Midlothian election campaign which brought to power his 77  G. Muir Mackenzie and A. P. Irby. With a Preface by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe. Second ed. rev. (London: Daldy, Isbister & Co., 1877), 154. 78  Ibid. 79  Ibid., VIII. 80  Ibid., XI. The reference was to the bloody suppression of the April uprising in Bulgaria in 1876 which provoked an outcry all over Europe and precipitated the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878. 81  Ibid., XII.

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Liberal party. Gladstone recognized the importance and power of newspaper reports of political speeches, and deftly exploited the Balkan question (while at the same time genuinely empathizing with the remote populations), focusing on the necessity for a moral foreign policy.82 If there is any lesson to be drawn from the Balkan past, it certainly concerns the domestic imperatives in great power foreign policy more than “ancient enmities.” Apart from political expediency, it is clear that perceptions of the Balkans evolved while also contradicting one another. Yet, despite the influence of people like Gladstone, the dominant stereotypical discourse persisted. Having established the dominant discourse, the question of how deeply it was diffused into the public, although important and interesting, is not central. What is important at this point is that this discourse, with its distinct political and class bias, was transmitted. This transmission calls for study by discourse analysis and in the framework of the disposition of power. Two patterns are discernible: one is the aristocratic lens through which developments in the Ottoman empire and the Balkans were evaluated; the other is what may be loosely termed bourgeois. Aristocratic bias had been evident in early respect for Ottoman might and behind later display of contempt for the downfall of the empire. This contempt was regret at the betrayal of greatness and manifested a deep seated acceptance of empire and authority: despite anti-Islamic, fundamentalist Christian (mainly Puritan) rhetoric, for the ruling elites in nineteenth century Europe (particularly Britain) it was easier to identify (and they, in fact, did) with the Ottoman rulers, than with the Balkan upstarts.83 Many western Europeans, in fact, shared the general attitude of the Ottoman government toward the peasantry: it was to be protected and preserved. The second pattern in descriptions of the Balkans evolved during the nineteenth century. Based on linear, evolutionary thinking, and on dichotomies like progressive/reactionary, advanced/backward, urban/rural, industrialized/agricultural, rational/irrational, historic/non-historic, etc., this motif was summarized by Rebecca West: The nineteenth-century English traveller tended to form an unfavourable opinion of the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire on the grounds that they were dirty and illiterate and grasping (as poor people, oddly 82  See Richard Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1976 (Hamden: Nelson 1975); Richard Millman, Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875–1878 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). 83  On the early perceptions, see Brandon H. Beck, From the Rising of the Sun. English Images of the Ottoman Empire to 1715 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987).

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enough, often are) and cringing and inhospitable and ill-mannered (as frightened people, oddly enough, often are). He condemned them as he condemned the inhabitants of the new industrial hells in Lankashire and Yorkshire, who insisted on smelling offensively, drinking gin to excess, and being rough and rude. Even as he felt glad when these unfortunate fellow-countrymen of his were the objects of missionary efforts by philanthropists drawn from the upper and middle classes, he felt glad because the Christian Slavs were in the custody of the Turks, who were exquisite in their personal habits, cultivated, generous, dignified, hospitable, and extremely polite.84 While empire was rejected as a basic hindrance to progress,85 general contempt for the peasantry was not mitigated. It was altered, however: no longer coupled with the almost benign patronage of the aristocrat, it considered the peasantry a remnant of a past economic and social order, a curio and repository for archaic customs and beliefs. The aristocratic prejudice toward egalitarian peasant societies, ambiguous as it was, was transformed by rational urban culture into a complete rejection of what was perceived to be a superstitious, irrational and backward rural tradition. In its most extreme form, e.g. among nineteenth century socialists, this deprecation flatly predicted the disappearance of the peasant and denied the rights to national existence of these “Völkerabfälle.”86 The disdain for the peasantry, however, did not preclude an immensely influential obsession with folk songs, folk tales and folk ways in general, and with Balkan ones in particular. A powerful by-product of Herderian philosophy and nineteenth century romanticism, ethnography preserved an enormous wealth of information about village life; it did so, however, not for the sake of the peasant but for the sake of the Volk. Folklore enthusiasts tended to be admirers of knowledge about peasants, not of peasants themselves. Shaped as it was in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, academic research on the Balkans was influenced heavily both by romanticism and evolutionism. Romanticism bequeathed a fascination with folklore and language, very much at the center of German academic tradition dealing with the Balkans;

84  Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 1095. 85  In the testimony of Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 1089), “I became newly doubtful of empires. Since childhood I had been consciously and unconsciously debating their value, because I was born a citizen of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen and grew up as its exasperated critic.” 86  Roman Szporluk, Communism & Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 169–192.

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Darwinist taxonomy grounded the Balkans firmly in the dawn of civilization, especially in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Sometimes these legacies are most obvious in discussions in which the Balkans are marginal to the main problems. On 21 April 1894 the Avenue Theatre in London presented the first of George Bernard Shaw’s Plays Pleasant. On its initial program, the play Arms and the Man was subtitled “A Romantic Comedy”; perhaps because the audience took the subtitle too literally, subsequent programs identified it as “An Anti-Romantic Comedy.”87 Shaw had asked Sidney Webb to find a good war for his scenario. Webb had “spent about two minutes in a rapid survey of every war that has ever been waged, and then told me that the Servo-Bulgarian was what I wanted.”88 Initially placed in Serbia, Shaw had changed the characters to Bulgarians an admiral residing in London who had commanded the Bulgarian fleet could supply him with descriptions of Bulgarian life and ideas.89 A week before the premier Shaw had published an interview with himself in The Star. Responding to the imaginary question whether Arms and the Man was a skit on Adelphi melodrama, he had explained: Bulgaria is like the Adelphi Theatre in one respect. Romantic dreams and Quixotic ideals flourish luxuriantly in the rosevalleys of that country. They play their due part in “Arms and the Man”; and I have not represented them as standing the test of reality any better or any worse than they do in actual life.90 To the question “Who is to be the hero?” he had responded: Everybody is a hero in Bulgaria. Mr. Gould will embody the chivalry of the Balkans;—you know what Mr. Gould can do with parts which have a touch of the fantastic. The audience can choose, for their pet hero, between him and Mr. Yorke Stephens, who will be the incarnation of the comparative coolness, good sense, efficiency, and social training of the higher civilisation of Western Europe. Then there is Mr. Welch … On him will fall the duty of expounding the ethnology of Bulgaria, the peculiar customs and prejudices of the native races, and the eccentricities of their 87  Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theatre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 186. 88  “Ten minutes with Mr. Bernard Shaw” (A questionnaire in To-day, 28 April 1894), Bernard Shaw, Collected Plays with their Prefaces (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1975), I, 481. 89  Ibid., 481–82. 90  Bernard Shaw, Collected Plays, I: 475–76.

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military system. He will thus supply a grave scientific background for the lighter scenes in which the other characters participate.”91 Mr. Welch was to expound a custom to which critics would later object: PETKOFF [over his coffee and cigaret] I don’t believe in going too far with these modern customs. All this washing cant be good for the health: it’s not natural. There was an Englishman at Philippopolis who used to wet himself all over with cold water every morning when he got up. Disgusting! It all comes from the English: their climate makes them so dirty that they have to be perpetually washing themselves. Look at my father! he never had a bath in his life; and he lived to be ninety-eight, the healthiest man in Bulgaria. I dont mind a good wash once a week to keep my position; but once a day is carrying the thing to a ridiculous extreme.92 Dismissive as Shaw was of his critics, he went to great lengths to rebut the accusations of cynicism and vulgarity evoked by “certain references to soap and water in Bulgaria.” What he wanted to achieve, he said, was to bring home to the audience the stage of civilisation in which the Bulgarians were in 1885, when, having clean air and clean clothes, which made them much cleaner than any frequency of ablution can make us in the dirty air of London, they were adopting the washing habits of big western cities as pure ceremonies of culture and civilisation, and not on hygienic grounds.93 He regretted that this “piece of realism should have been construed as an insult to the Bulgarian nation.”94 There is no doubt that Shaw was little concerned with the Bulgarian issue per se but with the broad philosophical questions of the encounter between romantic follies and bare reality. But, lest the audience not distinguish between his “real world” and “the stage world of the critics,” Shaw introduced a brief summary of the historical moment of 1885 when the Bulgarians, after having achieved the union of their country, fought

91  Ibid., I: 477. 92  Ibid., I: 417. 93  “A Dramatic Realist to His Critics”, The New Review, July 1894. Reprinted in Bernard Shaw, Collected Plays, I: 506. 94  Ibid., I: 507.

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an unexpectedly victorious war against the invading Serbs. This “made the Bulgarians for six months a nation of heroes.” But as they had only just been redeemed from centuries of miserable bondage to the Turks, and were, therefore, but beginning to work out their redemption from barbarism—or, if you prefer it, beginning to contract the disease of civilisation—they were very ignorant heroes … And their attempts at Western civilisation were much the same as their attempts at war—instructive, romantic, ignorant.95 Into the stage world is introduced “a professional soldier from the high democratic civilisation of Switzerland … the comedy arises, of course, from the collision of the knowledge of the Swiss with the illusions of the Bulgarians.”96 The allegory of romanticism versus reality is steeped in a further allegory: realistic knowledge versus theatrical preconceptions: “In this dramatic scheme Bulgaria may be taken as symbolic of the stalls on the first night of a play. The Bulgarians are dramatic critics; the Swiss is the realist playwright invading their realm; and the comedy is the comedy of the collision of the realities represented by the realist playwright with the preconceptions of stageland.97 Shaw framed Arms and the Man to ridicule that political and religious idealism “which had inspired Gladstone to call for the rescue of these Balkan principalities from the despotism of the Turk, and converted miserably enslaved provinces into hopeful and gallant little States.” As far as Shaw was concerned, the sooner this would happen, the better, “for idealism, which is only a flattering name for romance in politics and morals, is as obnoxious to me as romance in ethics and religion.”98 In a scathing diatribe against the hypocrisy of “a Liberal Revolution or two”, Shaw declared: I can no longer be satisfied with fictitious morals and fictitious good conduct, shedding fictitious glory on robbery, starvation, disease, crime, drink, wars, cruelty, cupidity, and all the other commonplaces of civilisation which drive men to the theatre to make foolish pretenses that such things are progress, science, morals, religion, patriotism, imperial supremacy, national greatness and all the other names the newspapers call them.99 95  Ibid., I: 490. 96  Ibid., I: 490. 97  Ibid., I: 490–91. 98  Ibid., I: 385. 99  Ibid., I: 385.

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Doubtlessly, Shaw never intended to specifically offend Bulgarian sensitivities. But, four years later, in the preface to the first publication of his plays in 1898, he could not resist evoking the particularly gruesome assassination of the Bulgarian premier Stambolov as “a sufficiently sensational confirmation of the accuracy of my sketch of the theatrical nature of the first apings of western civilisation by spirited races just emerging from slavery.”100 His message was clearly understood in Bulgaria: Arms and the Man was never a favored item of the Shaw repertoire in the country; in the 1920s in the town of Petrich a performance was disrupted by members of the Macedonian revolutionary organization.101 It was not, however, trifles like soap and water which upset his Balkan audience. Shaw had accurately derided the irrational courage and the ignorance of the Bulgarian soldiers. Yet, on the real battlefield, unlike the stage, it was precisely their reckless determination and intense devotion which had turned a hopeless cause into a brilliant victory.102 Balkan states were all products of a nineteenth-century passionate and reckless nationalism. Shaw’s rationalism had no patience for this quintessentially romantic ideology, his “anti-romantic comedy” was a frontal attack on the very essence of the Balkans. Bulgaria of the 1880s inspired at least one more literary/ theatrical attempt in Europe. In 1887 in Leipzig was published “Would You Care for a Bulgarian Crown? To All Those Who Would Like to Say ‘Yes’, Dedicated as a Warning”103 ostensibly to Ferdinand von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha who became ruler of Bulgaria for the next 31 years. Julius Stettenheim’s work consists of four parts: a fifteenminute opera, “The trumpeter of Säkkingen or the solution of the Bulgarian question”; a series of burlesque letters written in Berliner dialect to Prince Ferdinand, “Muckenich and Bulgaria”; and two short pieces, “To the solution of the burning question” and “Bulgarian miscellanea.” The book has a straightforward political message: the southeast is a backward and disorderly place manipulated by Russians, civilized German princelings had best take care: “Take to Bulgaria only the most essential. Deposit all your valuables at the Coburg bank. Pack, at the very most, three suits, underwear, your shaving things, several loaded guns, a cookbook, several pounds of insecticide, and a used scepter. Once you arrive, make them pay you the advance for the first quarter.104 While Shaw’s perspective was that of enlightened rationality and 100  Ibid., I: 384. 101  Richard J. Crampton, A Short History of Bulgaria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 103. 102  For a short historical background of the 1885 events and war, see Richard J. Crampton, A Short History of Bulgaria, 28–31. 103  Julius Stettenheim, Bulgarische Krone gefällig? Allen denen, welche Ja sagen wollen, als Warnung gewidmet, Zweite Auflage (Leipzig: L. Freund, Buch- und Kunst-Verlag, 1888). 104  Julius Stettenhelm, Bulgarische Krone gefällig?, 22.

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socialist impatience, it is clear that Stettenheim was ridiculing lack of order and comfort. One hesitates to mention Stettenheim in the same breath as Shaw, yet both evinced the same linear evolutionism; neither, however, resorted to the vituperative disdain of some twenty years later. Thus, by the close of the nineteenth century there were in place two patterns of perception of the Balkans which, for lack of a better definition, can be termed loosely the aristocratic and the bourgeois.105 They were transmitted throughout the following periods and perpetuated, sometimes literally, sometimes in a modified form, often intertwined, by consecutive generations. While the Macedonian question had contributed to the reputation of the peninsula as a turbulent region, it was during the Balkan wars and World War I that “balkanization” was coined, conclusively sealing a negative image for the area. A new feature, however, was added to this image: violence. Western Europeans had always proclaimed horror at apparently “eastern” barbarities, especially impaling. This punishment was reported by practically all travelers;106 and its exoticism fired morose western imagination—as a result of which Vlad Tepeş107 was transformed into the immortal figure of Dracula. Yet, early descriptions did not reflect a self-perceived moral superiority and never attributed atrocities in the region to inherent genetic defects. Violence as the Leitmotiv of the Balkans is a, strictly speaking, post-Balkan wars phenomenon. According to Rebecca West: Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans: all I knew of the South Slavs. I derived the knowledge from memories of my earliest interest in Liberalism, of leaves fallen from this jungle of pamphlets, tied up with string in the dustiest corners of junk-shops, and later from the prejudices of the French, who use the word “Balkan” as a term of abuse, meaning a rastaquouère type of barbarian.108 Another facet which had seasoned in nineteenth century thinking was added to “Balkan” during the interwar period: the racial. An apprentice of Gobineau 105  It is an irony, of course, to subsume socialists under this heading, but bourgeois here is understood in its broadest meaning of urban, rational, industrialized, etc. 106   Impalings are described by Thomas Glover, Fynes Moryson, Peter Mundy, Henry Blount, etc. 107  See Radu Florescu, Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989) and Dracula, a biography of Vlad the Impaler, 1431–1476 (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973); see also Kurt W. Treptow, ed., Dracula: Essays on the Life and Times of Vlad Tepes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 108  Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 21.

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and Chamberlain, to mention but a few of the founding-fathers of racism, Hermann, Graf von Keyserling, was an influential figure in the philosophy of self-knowledge and cultural psychology, around who a school was formed (Schule der Weisheit) in Darmstadt in the 1920s aimed at bringing people through creative knowledge to self-attainment. In 1928 he published “Das Spektrum Europa” which was published in translation as “Europe” in the United States;109 of his twelve chapters, one is devoted to the Balkans: What is the significance of the Balkans to us who live in other lands? … Why is it that the word ‘Balkanization’ is almost always rightly understood and rightly applied? … As far as I can see, its symbolic sense may best be apprehended from two starting-points; the first is the generally accepted statement that the Balkans are the powder-magazine of Europe. The second is the fact of a peculiarly elemental and irreconcilable racial enmity.110 Having provided lengthy descriptions of the Greeks, the Romanians and the Turks (the Serbs, Bulgarians and Albanians were “primitive warrior and robber races” not worthy of attention), Keyserling summarized the Balkans: The Balkans of today are nothing but a caricature of the Balkans of ancient times. The spirit of the Balkans as such is the spirit of eternal strife. Inhabited as they are by primitive races, they present the primal picture of the primal struggle between the one and the all. In the case of the highly gifted and highly educated nations and individuals, this picture emerges as the spirit of the agon. But the earth-spirit of the Balkans as such is the primal formative power.111 The same year, 1928, saw the American translation of a Swedish book which had appeared in Stockholm in 1927.112 Perhaps the forerunner of an, as yet, indistinct “Balkanism”, the author, Marcus Ehrenpreis, who traversed the Balkans, Egypt and the Holy Land in quest of “the soul of the East,” was critical of his co-passengers who had “learnt nothing” and had brought back only “their precious possessions, photographs and big hotel bills … This is not the 109  Count Hermann Keyserling, Europe, trans. Maurice Samuel (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1928). 110  Ibid., 319. 111  Ibid., 321–22. 112  Marcus Ehrenpreis, The Soul of the East. Experience and Reflections, trans. Alfhild Huebsch (New York: The Viking Press, 1928). The original was published in Stockholm: Hugo Gebers Förlag, 1927.

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way to visit the Orient! If you would win something of the soul of the east do not approach it as you would a strange country but as if you were returning home—to yourself … Do not go condescending as a bringer of civilization, but as a disciple, humbly and receptively.”113 This spirit was conspicuously absent from his first chapter, “Across the New Balkans”: The Orient is already in evidence at the Mesaryk railway station in Prague. Not the real Orient of the Azhar at Cairo or the one of Haifa’s street cafes, but that variant of the East known as Levantinism; a something, elusive of definition—the body of the East but without its spirit. It is a crumbling Orient, a traitorous deserter from itself, without fez, without veil, without Koran: it is an artificial, trumpery New Orient which has deliberately broken with its past and renounced its ancient heritage.114 The description of the inhabitants of this Levant (as contrasted to the “true East”) bears witness to their racial degeneration: There is something eccentric in their conduct, they are overloud, too sudden, too eager … Oddish, incredible individuals appear on all sides—low foreheads, sodden eyes, protruding ears, thick underlips … The Levantine type in the areas between the Balkans and the Mediterranean is, psychologically and socially, truly a “wavering form”, a composite of Easterner and Westerner, multilingual, cunning, superficial, unreliable, materialistic and, above all, without tradition. This absence of tradition seems to account for the low intellectual and, to a certain extent moral, quality of the Levantines … In a spiritual sense these creatures are homeless; they are no longer Orientals nor yet Europeans. They have not freed themselves from the vices of the East nor acquired any of the virtues of the West.115 In both Keyserling’s and Ehrenpreis’s works the former dichotomy between gentlemanly overlords and cringing subjects has found a theoretical rationalization: the inhabitants of the Balkans as “crossbreeds” are racially and culturally inferior, not only to western Europeans but also to the oriental other.

113  Ibid., 208–209. 114  Ibid., 11. 115  Ibid., 12–13.

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Of course, the shots of Gavrilo Princip, which signaled the outbreak of the World War I, have left an indelible mark on practically all assessments of the region. John Gunther’s immensely popular “Inside Europe” thus summarized American feelings: It is an intolerable affront to human and political nature that these wretched and unhappy little countries in the Balkan peninsula can, and do, have quarrels that cause world wars. Some hundred and fifty thousand young Americans died because of an event in 1914 in a mud-caked primitive village, Sarajevo. Loathsome and almost obscene snarls in Balkan politics, hardly intelligible to a Western reader, are still vital to the peace of Europe, and perhaps the world.116 This section of the book was reprinted even after the outbreak of the World War II. Is it possible that Hitler’ snarls in German politics were more intelligible to readers because they were western? Admittedly, it would be a difficult step to take to assert that even the World War II can be blamed on the Balkans. But, after fifty years, someone finally took that step: Robert Kaplan, who openly aspires to become the Dame Rebecca West of the 1990s, maintained in “Balkan Ghosts” that “Nazism, for instance, can claim Balkan origins. Among the flophouses of Vienna, a breeding ground of ethnic resentments close to the southern Slavic world, Hitler learned how to hate so infectiously.”117 During the interwar period there was significant academic research on the Balkans, primarily in Germany, and several Balkan institutes were founded in the region.118 After 1918, however, usage of the designation “Balkan peninsula,” became less common because of its geographic inadequacy and because it was value laden. According to Mathias Bernath, “Southeastern Europe” was to become the “neutral, non-political and non-ideological concept which, moreover, abolished the standing historical-political dichotomy between the

116  John Gunther, Inside Europe, 437. 117  Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts. A Journey Through History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), XXIII. Kaplan’s unfortunate and pretentious book has received a devastating (and excellently written) review by Henry R. Cooper, Jr. in Slavic Review 52, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 592–593. See also the serious objections by Noel Malcolm, “Seeing Ghosts,” The National Interest, no 32 (Summer 1993), and the heated exchange between Kaplan and Malcolm in The National Interest, no. 33 (Fall 1993). 118  See Petnadeset godini institut za balkanistiska, 1964–1978. Istoricheska spravka i bibliografiya (Sofia: CIBAL, 1979); Nikolay Todorov, Razvitie, postizheniya i zadachi na balkanistikata v Bîlgariya (Sofia: CIBAL, 1977).

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Danubian monarchy and the Ottoman Balkans that had become irrelevant.”119 During the 1930s and 1940s, however, “Südosteuropa” was adopted by the nazis to become Wirtschaftsraum Grossdeutschland Südost in their new world order.120 And finally, a new facet of the image of the Balkans was added after World War II when a new demon, a new other, communism, was grafted onto it, one which exempted two of the most important representatives of the Balkan Kulturraum, Greece and Turkey. Since the 1970s discussions on the identity of (east) central Europe, have increased and have become increasingly vociferous.121 Ideologists seeking to rationalize and legitimize emancipatory breaks from the tutelage of the Soviet Union have viewed the region in terms of opposites, e.g. between Catholic and Orthodox, Byzantium and the west. East central Europe has been relegated to the nebulous realm of “Western values” while the Balkans with Russia are, if not strictly Asian, then semi-Asian, “HalbAsien,” “Savage Europe,” “The Other Europe”122 or the newly coined and ostensibly neutral “Eurasia”. In his present incarnation as a politician, Vaclav Havel argued for a non-inclusive policy on the part of NATO using the terminology of civilizational fault lines:

119  Mathias Bernath, “Südosteuropäische Geschichte als gesonderte Disziplin”, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1973), 142. 120  Karl Kaser, Südosteuropäische Geschichte, 106. With the exception of this brief but very valuable overview by Kaser, there has not appeared anything comparable to the extremely important Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards. A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Most likely its use by the Nazis rendered the designation “Southeastern Europe” undesirable despite appeals for its reintroduction, e.g. the Yugoslav geographer Josip Roglic’s call to use “Southeast European Peninsula” (quoted in George W. Hoffman, The Balkans in Transition, [Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1963], 11–12). On the other hand, when, at the annual convention of the AAASS in Phoenix in 1992 a panel was entitled “Can the Balkans become Southeastern Europe? A Current Assessment,” this provoked the question whether this was not an already déjà vu scenario from the interwar period. 121  For a theory of central European identity, see Jenö Szücs, “Three Historical Regions of Europe,” John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State. New European Perspectives (New York: Verso, 1988); Timothy Garton Ash, “Does Central Europe Exist?”, The New York Review of Books, 9 October 1986; Ferenc Feher, “On Making Central Europe,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 3, no. 3 (Fall, 1989); and especially the collection of essays edited by George Schöpflin and Nancy Wood: In Search of Central Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989) which has the references on all pertinent titles published until then. 122  See, for example, Karl-Emil Franzos, Aus Halb-Asien (Leipzig: Verlag von Knopf und Härtel, 1878); Harry de Vindt, F.R.G.S., Through Savage Europe, Being a Narrative of a Journey (undertaken as Special Correspondent of the “Westminster Gazette”, Throughout the Balkan States and European Russia (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1907); E. Garrison Walters, The Other Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988).

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If … NATO is to remain functional, it cannot suddenly open its doors to anyone at all … The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia— and Austria and Slovenia as well—clearly belong to the western sphere of European civilization. They espouse its values and draw on the same traditions. Moreover, the contiguous and stable Central European belt borders both on the traditionally agitated Balkans and the great Eurasian area, where democracy and market economies are only slowly and painfully breaking away toward their fulfillment.123 Former Secretary of State Laurence Eagleburger, who does not have a previous incarnation as an intellectual, made the same point: addressing the responsibilities and credibility of NATO in connection with the Bosnian crisis, he stated that the organization should be very much alive, and should include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic (apparently not Slovakia) “so that there is a clear message who should be in and who out.”124 Current discourse on the Balkans when the overexpansion of European institutions endangers the exclusiveness of the privileged club, is thus perfectly clear. To come full circle, and link the Kennan prelude with a Kennan coda, his piece becomes intelligible only in the light of this “clear message”. What one can hear in it are motives of a distinct and well-known melody of an earlier period with some fresh improvisations. It is an American patrician version of the old aristocratic European paradigm garnished with nineteenth century Victorian righteousness. It manifests an evolutionary belief in the superiority of orderly civilization over barbarity, archaic predispositions, backwardness, petty squabbles, unconforming and unpredictable behavior, i.e. “tribalism”. Kennan’s use of “tribal” relegates the Balkans to a lower civilizational category, one to which Africans are usually relegated, to whom the term is usually applied. Africa and Asia have been classified by Elie Kedourie, according to their alleged political tradition, as the legacy of tribal rule and the legacy of Oriental despotism.125 Tribal society’s central feature is its primitiveness, lack of complexity and, implicitly, weakness. When confronted “with the demand of modernization for a sophisticated system of law and political representation, it merely collapses into tyranny”;126 moreover, this is an “ori123  Vaclav Havel, “New Democracies for Old Europe,” The New York Times, 17 October 1994, E 17. 124  The MacNeill-Lehrer News Hour, 7 February 1994. 125  Elie Kedourie in the New Republic, 17 December 1984. Cited in David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire. Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 71. 126  David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 72.

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ental” tyranny which entails intrinsic passivity, incompatible with initiative and enterprise. Such classification of peoples according to notions of (social and technological) complexity and activity is a fundamental principle of an imperial discourse which has been inherited primarily by the press.127 It also precludes any responsibility or simply empathy which the “civilized world” might otherwise bestow on more “reasonable” people. Thus, responding to the question “What is to be done?” Kennan’s introduction concludes that “no one—no particular country and no group of countries—wants, or should be expected to occupy the entire distracted Balkan region, to subdue its excited peoples, and to hold them in order until they calm down and begin to look at their problems in a more orderly way.”128 Current discourse on the Balkans also reflects a shift in western policy toward Turkey. Before the twentieth century, there was an ambiguous attitude toward the Turks: while there was a perhaps unconscious empathy with the ruler, there was also sympathy for fellow-Christians, although this was not necessarily reflected in official policies, at least in Britain. Britain in particular was anti-Russian and considered itself compelled to uphold the Ottoman empire as an ally and as a barrier against further southern and eastern Russian expansion. This geopolitical configuration was in many ways inherited by the United States, and Turkey became an important element in the cold war anti-Soviet alliance. But there was no longer any ambiguity: the Balkans were no longer Christian but communist. Additionally, since World War II it has become illegitimate to criticize any society, including Turkey, for being non-white, nonChristian or non-European. Kennan’s introduction accordingly downplays the role of the Ottoman Empire and the Turks in the Balkans: current problems stem from their “distant tribal past,” and have roots that “reach back, clearly, not only into the centuries of Turkish domination” but are “developments of those earlier ages, not only those of the Turkish domination but of earlier ones as well.” Finally, “one must not be too hard on the Turks”; after all, “in a sense, there was more peace when [the Balkans] were still under Turkish rule than there was after they gained their independence. (That is not to say that the Turkish rule was in all other respects superior to what came after.)”129 It is valid to re-assess empires, including the last multi-national empire, the Soviet.130 Epithets such as “anomalous” for empires will probably fall into 127  Ibid., 61–68, 73. 128   The Other Balkan Wars, 14. 129  Ibid., 14–15. 130  See, for example, William Pfaff, “The Absence of Empire (Eastern and Balkan Europe),” The New Yorker 68, no. 25 (10 August 1992).

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disuse in academic writing.131 And it is certainly not valid for Balkan politicians and intellectuals to use the Ottoman Empire and Turkey as a scapegoat for all their misfortunes and misconduct, to attempt to define themselves against a demonized other, in this case very literally to resort to orientalism.132 But Kennan has essentialized the Balkans: he has transformed Herder’s Balkan “Volksgeist” into Kaplan’s “Balkan ghosts.” Roland Barthes remarked that collective representations and mentalities can be frozen, kept stagnant by power, the press and reigning values.133 David Spurr has shown, in the case of the third world, that while the press continues to cling to normative views of civilization formed during the colonial era, anthropology and cultural criticism have questioned the consequences of such views.134 Such questioning has not been directed at the Balkans, possibly because their non-colonial status has left them out of the sphere of interest of postcolonial critique and cultural criticism, and because Balkan, and in general European anthropology, has been somewhat marginal to the field.135 If Kennan is contextualized in what I have described as an imperial geopolitical continuity, he will not be seen (or, at least, not seen only) as a hostage of a tradition of stereotypes. Certainly, he is in the same relationship with “Balkanist” texts that all readers, according to Wolfgang Iser, are with all written texts. A text, in his formulation, is bracketed off from the world it represents and “what is within the brackets is separated from the reality in which it is normally embedded.” There is a continual oscillation between both worlds that produces a two-fold doubling—one affecting the recipient, the other the world of the text itself.136 While this duality serves to aestheticize fictionality in literature because it is an essentially staged discourse, fiction in p ­ hilosophical 131  “Anomaly” was used rather indiscriminately, for example, by Laurence Lafore in The Long Fuse. An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I (New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1971), to explain the Austrian paradigm as the central cause for the war, next to Serbian nationalism: the second chapter of the book even was entitled “The Austrian Anomaly.” 132  This merits a separate study and has been the object of some of my own work. See Maria Todorova, “Die Osmanenzeit in der Bulgarischen Geschichtsschreibung seit der Unabhängigkeit”, Die Staaten Südosteuropas und die Osmanen, Hrsg. Hans Georg Majer (München, 1989), 127–161; Maria Todorova, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans”, Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East, ed. by L. Carl Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 133  Roland Barthes, “Bichon chez les nègres”, Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957), 72–73. 134  David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 73. 135  Still, academic research of the Balkans, although certainly not immune from the affliction of Balkanism, has by and large resisted its symptoms. 136  Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 238–39.

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(or other) discourse remains veiled and, therefore, can be subject to rules of practical application, can be designed for a specific purpose, in a word, can be falsified.137 Indeed, “the challenge of orientalism is precisely the challenge of a discursive formation that has complicated extratextual and nondiscursive implications and consequences.”138 One might also add, sources. From this perspective Kennan is an important architect as well as porte-parole of powerpolitics. Authority and authorities may consciously and deliberately shape representation or appropriate existing types of representation for political expediency. In Iser’s terms, this is an “intention-led mobilization” on the part of the activator.139 Kennan is thus an example of one at an intersection, or in the midst of a complex and dialectical chain reaction, between knowledge as power, of “discourse as a violence we do to things or, at all events, as a practice that we impose on them”.140 This is also a configuration where (political) power yields knowledge, for the two are “rigorously indivisible”.141 In the field of social psychology, John French and Bertram Raven have differentiated six bases of social power: coercive, reward, legitimate, reference, expert and informational power.142 Expert power is based on the perception, on the part of the target, i.e., audience and readership, that the agent possesses superior power and ability; informational power depends entirely on the quality of the message, its persuasiveness and the logic of its argumentation. The expert power and informational power that a person such as Kennan exerts is enhanced by, and at the same time bears a double responsibility because of, the dual target of his agency: policy-makers and the public. Faced with stark political realities and working within the confines and with the modest means of academe, one can hope only to subvert the informative power of expert authority. The Balkans have been ill served by discovery and invention. Balkanism and its subject are imprisoned in a field of discourse in which “Balkans” is paired 137  Ibid., 240–41. 138   Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, “Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament”, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, 5. 139  Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary. Chartering Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), XVII. 140  Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du Discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 55. English translation by A. M. Sheridan Smith: Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New York, Pantheon Books, 1972), 229. 141  Michel Foucault, “Space, Power and Knowledge,” The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993), 169. 142  It is the latter two, and particularly the distinction between them, which are most useful for this analysis. See J. Richard Eiser, Social Psychology. Attitudes, Cognition and Social Behavior (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 39; Alice H. Eagly, Shelly Chaiken, The Psychology of Attitudes (Orlando: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich), 1993, 635–36.

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in opposition to “West” and “Europe,” while “Balkanism” is the dark other of “western civilization.” When the Balkans were part of the scatter pattern of invective aimed at the east and “Orientalism” was the other necessary for the self-essentializing “West and “Europe,” there existed the prospect of their rediscovery in a positive fashion. With the rediscovery of the east and orientalism as independent semantic values, the Balkans are left in Europe’s thrall, anti-civilization, alter ego, the dark side within.

CHAPTER 7

The Balkans: from Invention to Intervention The following essay was presented at a Forum on the Kosovo war at Columbia University in New York on May 11, 1999, at the height of NATO’s bombing campaign. It was not meant to be an elaborate scholarly meditation on the roots and character of the conflict but was rather an ad hoc critical human reaction to the simplistic righteousness of the political discourse and to the deplorable unanimity of conformist journalism. In order to preserve this primary function and, thus, the authenticity of the text, I have edited its main body minimally and almost exclusively stylistically. Any subsequent comments, refinements, and explanations aimed at updating the essay after the end of the war have been included in footnotes. The text was first published in William J. Buckley, ed. Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions Grand Rapids/London: Eerdmans, 2000, 159–169, reproduces here with the kind permission of the publisher.

In 1989 a funny joke was being recycled in some East European countries. Frustrated with the failure of communism (as a shortcut to modernity), two politicians were discussing strategies of how to bring their country into capitalism (as a shortcut to modernity). I think the best way is to become the 51st state of the US. Excellent. But how do we do that? We declare war on the US. And then? Then, they take us seriously; they invade us; they occupy us; they set us straight. Brilliant. And what if we win? Ten years later, this is not funny, and it doesn’t seem to be a joke. As a specialist in Balkan history, I have refrained from making brief pronouncements about the present affairs in the Balkans (2 or 10 minutes long depending on the news program; 600–800 words depending on the paper or journal). After all, my profession is about arguing complex issues and avoiding simplified recipes, and I happen to believe in this professional ethos. However, what is happening now, is not merely, and definitely not primarily a Balkan problem: it is a global international problem. And since I am not a specialist in international

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_009

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relations and the new world order, I think I can summarize my views in a comparatively short statement. Let me begin with a brief survey concerning the history and character of the conflict. The situation of the Albanians in Kosovo represents a grave case of human rights abuses. An autonomous region of Serbia since 1946, Kosovo was elevated to the status of autonomous province like the Vojvodina in 1963, and both were given extensive rights in 1974 which de facto gave them privileges close to a republican status short of the name. A considerable number among the Kosovar Albanian elites since the late 1960s lobbied for republican status within the Yugoslav federation, culminating in the riots in 1981, a year after Tito’s death. Repressed but not suppressed, in the subsequent years the Kosovar leaders operated within a particularly unfavorable climate. The demographic boom of the Albanian population resulted in a tremendous increase of their absolute numbers, and a shift of the population ratio: from circa 65% in 1948 the Albanian majority had reached close to 90% by the end of the 1990s.1 In the general economic crisis which swept Yugoslavia in the 1980s, this was coupled with an increase in the unemployment rate from an endemic 20% to over 70% in the last decade. While the two enlightened republics of Slovenia and Croatia were openly and justly sympathetic to the aspirations of the Kosovo Albanians and bemoaned the heavy-handed and intransigent treatment they suffered at the hands of the Serbs, they also consistently boycotted the traditional Yugoslavist policy of Belgrade to redistribute funds from the wealthier republics to the poor regions of Yugoslavia. Bosnia, Macedonia, and especially Kosovo, were referred to as the “dirty southerners”, the Timbuktoo in the civilized space of Ljubljana and Zagreb. By the second half of the 1980s, the situation became particularly tense with the consistent flow of Serb population leaving Kosovo. Most of this outflow was due to the dire economic situation exacerbated by group claims along ethnic lines for control over limited resources. While there were undoubtedly cases of harassment on the part of the Albanians against the Serbian minority, they did not correspond to the horrendous stories circulated among Serbs of a systematic ethnic cleansing, rapes, etc. Nonetheless, this was a strong and 1  This demographic shift which to me constitutes the single most significant development and precluded the “loss” of Kosovo even before its political loss, was due primarily to an enormous natural population growth. The very high birth rate was commensurate with the one in Albania proper (the highest in Europe) and in Turkey (for both places: 23 per thousand). It was coupled with the falling mortality rate of the post-1945 period due to the modern medical system. This accounts for the drastic increase in absolute numbers of the Kosovo Albanian population. Additionally, but to a lesser extent, the shift of the ratio between Albanians and Serbs was due also to the outflow of the Serbian population.

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growing perception among the Serbs which was not allowed any official verbal outlet in the dominant Yugoslav policy of trying to harmonize, downplay, and control ethnic conflict. It was on the wave of this perception that Milošević made his career after 1987. One thing should be clear: Milošević did not create Serbian nationalism. What he did do was to legitimize its most extreme articulation and use it as a means to curb the Titoist (or Yugoslavist) faction in the Serbian/Yugoslav leadership which was trying against all odds to work against the growing centrifugal momentum in Croatia and Slovenia. On March 8, 1989 the autonomy of Kososo and Vojvodina was revoked; on July 5, 1990, Kosovo’s regional parliament was dismissed, and a state of emergency was introduced. In September of the same year, Albanian deputies proclaimed the constitution of the Kosovo phantom republic at a clandestine meeting at Kačanik; a year late, in September of 1991, they organized a secrete plebiscite in Kosovo which gave a return of over 90 % in favor of independence. This intifada like, extremely precarious situation continued for nearly a decade and may have continued further had it not been for an unpredictable event: the collapse of the pyramid scheme in Albania, presided over by the great democrat and friend of the United States, Sali Berisha. The subsequent complete disintegration of the state institutions and the brief civil war with the disappearance of the army and the opening of the arms depots, created a free cheap market for Kalashnikovs ($ 10 a piece) and hand grenades. With funds from the diasporic Kososo community in Germany, Switzerland, Britain, Belgium, the United States and elsewhere, the increasingly radicalized youth in Kosovo was armed to form what was claimed last year to be a 40,000 strong and turned out to be a 15,000 weak armed force of the UČK (KLA-Kosovo Liberation Army). These are the facts that I think would generate a more or less broad consensus. What follows is a series of statements, summarizing my views on the present conflict. I have arranged and balanced them so that by the end I will have offended most everyone. Statement 1. Serb nationalism at the end of the 20th century is a particularly extreme type of nationalism in the Balkans, rivaled and at times surpassed only by its twin brother, Croatian nationalism. What makes Serb nationalism unique in the Balkan space is that since its inception at the of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, this has been the only Balkan nationalism which has never been effectively humiliated or defeated.2 It has paid very 2  This does not mean that the nationalist elites have not perceived it as humiliated. This is particularly true of the World War Two era where one has to look for the roots of Serb defensiveness which was further incensed with the passing of the virtually confederative constitution of 1974. It was this defensiveness which provided the feeding ground for the political

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heavy prices, as have all the others but, psychologically, it has always been victorious. Had it not been for the Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922, i.e. the defeat of the Greek invasion of Asia Minor of 1919 by the Turkish army of Atatürk, and the subsequent flight and expulsion of over one million Greeks from their ancestral homelands, Greek nationalism would have vied for the dubious honor to be first in displaying its superiority complex. But, as it is, defeat is always instructive and sobering and, in the long run, often beneficial. Serb nationalism was particularly ugly in the mirror of the Albanian question. Until 1998, Serbian bravado was still precariously balanced on the side of the bearable as far as actions went but was increasingly speaking with hysterical and racist overtones. With a few extremely honorable individual exceptions (some of them friends over whose heads NATO bombs are raining), the Serb opposition never seriously dealt with the Albanian question as a national question in the past decade. In this light, the accusations of the Serbian opposition that, by boycotting the parliamentary elections in Yugoslavia, the Albanians did not give it a hand in overthrowing the Milošević regime, ring hollow. Statement 2. Serbian nationalism is an extreme nationalism, but it is not a genocidal nationalism. Milošević is no Hitler. This has been so apparent to me that I would not have even addressed it as a separate statement were it not for the fact that I encounter lots of respected intellectuals, even friends, who have genuinely bought into the Holocaust analogy. No case can be made about Milošević as a threat to world peace, to European peace, even to Balkan peace.3 The expansionism argument is quite lame even considering the previous cases framing him as an aggressor against “sovereign independent states” which were hastily and precipitously recognized by the EU and the US after the fait accompli German initiative for the recognition of Slovenia, Croatia and other former Yugoslav applicants, without explicit guarantees for the numerous Serb minorities, especially in Croatia. In the case of Kosovo this clearly doesn’t wash. mobilization of the 1990s. Yet, much as perception has been posited to be real and to create reality, it nonetheless stayed in the realm of perception. Only after the mass expulsion of the Serbs from the Kraijna, Bosnia and now from Kosovo, and thus the contraction of the Serbian demographic space, would I speak of effective humiliation and defeat. It remains to be seen how the next generation of Serbs is going to digest this defeat: turn it into victory like the Kosovo battle of old or accept it as a sobering fait accompli. Interesting, although very preliminary sounds of the latter can be heard in Dobrica Čosić’s essay in this volume. 3  The only case that could be made was that he proved to be a threat to the peaceful dissolution of Yugoslavia. After all, what makes the difference between the peaceful dissolution of the USSR compared to the bloody Yugoslav one is, among other factors, the fact that Milošević is no Gorbachev. Yet, the international community abundantly helped his intransigence by taking sides from the outset instead of trying to arbitrate patiently.

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The more serious accusation and the one which needs to be addressed is that in the past decade there has been a Serb pattern of ethnic cleansing: there is the lesson of Bosnia, and behind it looming the shadow of the Holocaust. On Bosnia: the Serb record is dismal. But I would go only thus far. I despise the exercise of comparing and measuring evil, but I am forced to resort to it because it has been imposed by the Hitler and Holocaust analogy. (Some intellectuals who, judiciously and, I think, correctly, did not endorse Goldhagen’s thesis about Hitler’s willing executioners, now are willing to accept the thesis of Milošević’s willing executioners). Ethnic cleansing, i.e. the forceful displacement of populations from a given territory, although not under this name, has been the historical accompaniment of most wars, and reached astronomic figures during World War II, at the end of which the ethnically cleansed Germans alone reached 13 million. The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia pales in comparison to that and to later world events of a similar nature. In Bosnia, there was a severe case of ethnic cleansing whose main perpetrators at the beginning were the Serbs. But let us also not forget that the Serbs, ironically, ended up being the greatest casualty of this policy, with 650,000 or 700,000 Serb refugees in today’s Yugoslavia, and the single biggest ethnic cleansing during the war: the expulsion of the Krajna Serbs from Croatia, with the tacit approval of the West.4 I do not think that the allegation about genocide is sustainable. Aside from the Holocaust which stands as the indisputable metagenocide, the international community has not come to an agreement about genocidal events. It has not recognized even the 1915 Armenian massacres as a genocide and is splitting hairs over numbers and intentions. The extermination of millions of Poles, Belorussians and Russians during World War II has not been officially termed genocide, nor has the extermination of the Serbs at the hands of the Ustaša, the fascist party of Independent Croatia during the Second World War. It is perfectly fine by me if Arkan or Karadžić or whoever are tried individually as war criminals but when analyzing phenomena which have (or ought to have) legal repercussions, we ought to be careful.5 4  These were the pre-Kosovo war figures. The number of Serb refugees has swelled, and Kosovo is the last in line of ethnically cleansed monoethnic territories, a circumstance very clearly expected by all but the most naive of observers. It is symptomatic that today the mantra like refrain of the multicultural nature of de facto partitioned Bosnia is not even repeated for Kosovo. 5  The defenders of the genocide hypothesis object on the basis that the reduction of all genocides to the Holocaust is harmful because, according to them, it means that there is no genocide without the reoccurrence of the Holocaust. Thus, they maintain, genocidal violence other than the Holocaust is trivialized and minimized. However, the much flaunted definition of genocide in the 1948 Geneva Conventions—a systematic effort to destroy—in whole or in part—a people based on ethnic, religious, or racial identity, and involved in organized

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As far as Kosovo goes, the case is even flimsier. We hear about the satanic genocidal plan of Milošević, but the record is that in the course of the last 10 years there was a state within a state in Yugoslavia which was practicing internal exile, and there was no existential crackdown until 1998. The crackdown began last summer when the secessionist guerilla force came to control 40% of the territory of Kosovo. Belgrade responded in the way any central government (authoritarian or democratic) does: with an attempt to suppress it. Since then, in the course of a year, 2000 casualties on all sides have been reported by the Western press, among them many civilians. In a guerilla war, where the fighters operate within a very tight familial network, these casualties were to be expected.6 To return to the Holocaust card, if Milošević is Hitler, the reverse must also be true: then Hitler is Milošević. If the plight of the Bosnian Muslims or the Kosovo Albanians is comparable to the Holocaust, then the Holocaust can be reduced to it. For the ones who don’t care about the dangers of rhetorical excesses to whip up public opinion, maybe the dangers of normalizing and trivializing the Holocaust would sound more menacing. Statement 3. What is the UČK? There have been accusations (mostly hurled by the Serbs but interestingly corroborated in the NATO rhetoric) that this is a terrorist organization, funded by drug money, resorting to murder not only against the Serb police force, but also assassinations against moderate Albanians, practicing extortions, forced recruitment, and espousing a dubious mix of ideologies: from hard-nosed right-wing nationalism to Maoist tactics. mass-killings, annihilation of cultural heritage, attack on procreative future potential, etc.— is so unspecific, unquantifiable and elastic that it easily dissolves into a synonym for any great war violence and renders the notion of genocide simply metaphysical (and thus trivial). If genocide, conversely, is to bring about legal repercussions, it ought to have a very concrete definition. As far as the prosecution of war criminals go, I have no objection to Milošević’s being held responsible before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for the death of some estimated 200,000 people from Bosnia, and another 10,000 from Kosovo. But if legality is consistent (at least this is the claim it makes) the same measure ought to be applied to the leaders of the United States (several presidents) for the extermination of over three million Vietnamese (McNamara’s estimates). 6  There are no final figures for the war casualties yet, although the most often cited ones are 10,000 in Kosovo and 1,600 in Serbia. Tim Judah speaks cautiously that “the final total of innocent civilians murdered during the two and a half months of NATO’s bombing campaign … will certainly be in the thousands” (The New York Review of Books, August 12, 1999, p. 24). This is horrendous, and the atrocities of the Serb paramilitaries are being slowly documented (just as, one expects, the retaliation against the Serbs) but what exactly makes them genocide? The cavalier use of the term “genocide” by Western politicians and the press matches only its equally cavalier use by the Serbian propaganda machine.

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All of this may be true (it is, in fact, true). But which national liberation movement has not resorted to dubious tactics from the point of view of the status quo powers, and has not been branded as terrorist at the beginning? Let me make here two other analogies which, I think, are much more pertinent to the Kosovo case. In doing so, I am adding to the list of offended sensitivities that I am consciously challenging today: a) the first one is Palestine. This is how the Kosovo problem was increasingly referred to in Belgrade. Self-perception and historical emulation is important. As is well known, Hitler was inspired, and accordingly instructed, the governor of Poland to act towards the Slavs as the Americans had toward the “red-footed Indians.” The Serbs have not been inspired by Hitler. But they see themselves in their relations to Kosovo and the Albanians, as Israel in its relations to Jerusalem and the Palestinian problem. There is no need to go further into details and compare the number of casualties in each case. What would be more instructive is to compare the reactions of the outside world which has been incredibly patient and, because of that, constructive in this several decades old Israeli-Palestinian conflict while displaying none of these attitudes to the junior Albanian-Serb conflict. The sheer comparison with Serbia I know, alienates many Jewish intellectuals who don’t even acknowledge accusations of Hitlerite behavior hurled by Palestinian activists. b) the second analogy is the Kurdish problem in Turkey. Despite attempts to argue the incomparability of the two cases based on a legalistic argument (and, to my disappointment, launched even by liberal Turkish intellectuals), there are, to my mind, only two basic differences: a) Turkey is a NATO member, and has not lost its geo-strategic significance for the United States; and b) while the PKK has failed to sell its separatism to the West (conversely, the West, i.e. the CIA, sold Öcalan to the Turkish security forces), the KLA succeeded in doing so. Again, I am not going into a detailed comparison about casualties (37,000 in the Kurdish case) or military operations on the territory of a sovereign state (Iraq) or a civil war in one’s own territory. The analogy again has incensed many Turks who focus on the differences between the two cases. But, of course, all cases are different. As Tolstoy pointed out long ago, only happy families look alike. The point I wish to make is a more general one. Historical analogies are rarely appropriate if their purpose is to facilitate the analytical understanding of an event or phenomenon. Most often the purpose of historical analogies is to evoke and manipulate predictable emotional responses. Statement 4. What do we do in the circumstances of a situation which, according to me, before March 24, could be described as a severe case of human

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rights abuses but not a humanitarian crisis, and certainly not a genocide. The humanitarian disaster was provoked as a response and, at the same time, is the side effect of the actions of NATO. There were three possible responses to the crisis in Kosovo. Two are based on the legitimate but incompatible principles of sovereignty and self-determination. Much can be said in favor of both, but I shall be extremely brief: a) if staying with the principle of sovereignty, one would have had to stand aside and not act for fear of upsetting an extremely precarious balance and producing a destabilizing, and possibly, a domino effect. How can the sovereignty of Bosnia be upheld if the one of Yugoslavia is abused? If the principle of sovereignty is abused, this is a dangerous message for all secessionist movements who can hold governments hostage. On the other hand, this is a distinctly uncomfortable morally option, one that makes one feel helpless and guilty, one that makes the appeasement argument easy to accept. It is offset only by the feeling that often inaction creates the lesser of two evils. The defense of this principle of sovereignty, as defined by the hitherto existing international system, has been the basis of the argumentation coming from critics of the NATO action, notably from Moscow and Beijing. b) however, one could argue equally convincingly that the principle of selfdetermination be embraced. After all, haven’t most countries in the region, and in Europe as a whole, in the past century and a half, been created first by this principle? But then, if one were to choose this principle, one must see it through, and prepare for the foreseeable repercussions. c) the third option was to persist with diplomatic means, to exert pressure through coordinated international channels, to insist on negotiations, and above all, accord this case the same patience and tact that has been accorded for decades to equally serious cases all over the world: Tibet, Palestine, Kurdistan, to mention the obvious. This last option was not taken, Rambouillet was a non-starter, not acceptable to either side. Its second version, signed by the Albanians, and the one which then served as the ultimatum against Serbia, actually provided for a referendum for independence within 3 years, was creating a NATO protectorate on Yugoslav territory and provided for privileges for NATO which effectively abrogated any semblance of Yugoslav sovereignty. Should one make the inappropriate historical analogy to the 1914 ultimatum which sparked off the First World War when Austria-Hungary deliberately sent an unacceptable ultimatum to the Serbs? Statement 5. The West effectively embraced the second of the three options (i.e. the principle of self-determination) despite protestations to the contrary. I personally have no problems with this but the West: a) did not

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see it through, and b) did not provide a safety net for the repercussions. Not only that, but at the time of the NATO summit Clinton was constantly repeating that there will be no change of international borders. In fact, despite de facto choosing version b), the pitfalls were so obvious that the bombing was formulated as an intervention on behalf of human rights. Let me add quickly that I do not question for a moment the sincerity of the disgust of Western leaders (Clinton, Blair, Solana, Chirac, Schroeder, etc.) over the reprehensible behavior of Milošević and the murderers on the ground, a disgust which was, of course, coupled with the hypocrisy over double standards. I will go even further and disappoint some analysts in the Balkans who are now devising and recycling the most intricate of conspiracy theories. (The wildest one circulating is that Kosovo is one of richest uranium and gold sites of the world, that there is an ongoing conflict between British and German firms over control of the region, and there is the macabre plan to depopulate the territory in order to exploit it more efficiently. Another links NATO’s desire to be in the Balkans with the pipeline from Kazakhstan, and the need of NATO to control the Caspian and Black Sea regions). Unfortunately, I don’t believe in conspiracy theories and I don’t think the West has immediate, let alone territorial, geo-strategic interests in the Balkans. I could even buy the argument that at moments the normal human outrage that “something should be done” might have been the main motive in the behavior of the more ideological (or messianic, or crusading) leaders of the alliance, like Albright, for example, but hardly for the majority of the less romantic ones for whom “the credibility” of NATO and the West was the primary argument. Finally, within this rubrique I would add that I understand the logic behind and I would support a vision that reconsiders the philosophical basis of international relations, and seeks to create a new international system in which human rights figure prominently. But before this has been well thought through and has received international support, I refuse to agree that the populations of the Balkans be guinea pigs in an aborted experiment.7 Statement 6. Lest it would seem that the West in this scheme of reasoning looks less of a villain but simply an ignoramus sucked into an impossible

7  In a self-congratulatory coda to her piece in the International Herald Tribune, July 3–4, 1999, p. 6, Tina Rosenberg concludes that “the last 50 years have seen the rise of universally endorsed principles of conduct. The extent to which the world chooses to respect them, even when they conflict with sovereignty, is a good measure of civilization’s progress.” There is a slight logical inconsistency here. If universal principles are not universally applied, what makes them universal? As long as they are only universally claimed, this makes them only universal rhetoric.

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situation against its good will and despite its good intentions, I wish to be explicit: my biggest, unreserved and unconditional wrath is directed against its leaders: a) they severely and consistently mishandled the situation in Yugoslavia in the past decade, and instead of contributing to an accommodating and compromising spirit, in fact exacerbated (but, of course, did not create) the process of the ugly disintegration of Yugoslavia. b) in the concrete recent crisis they came in unprepared to handle a humanitarian disaster which, according to their own protestations, they knew was going on or was inevitably coming. In fact, they actually created it. When the refugees began pouring in, Emma Bonino, EU Commissioner on Humanitarian Aid, suggested that Romania and Bulgaria should take the bulk of the refugees as this was a regional, i.e. their problem. This is a division of labor in good faith: the rich bomb, the poor feed. Most have followed the undignified preliminary plans to herd in 20,000 refugees in Guantanamo bay. Even with the change of strategy it took a month and a half to fly in the first 400 people to the U.S. In the meantime, dozens and dozens of American journalists were flown in the opposite direction to photograph the plight of the Albanian refugees and explain to the American public the intricacies of Balkan history (Charlie Gibbson and Peter Jennings, for example, enlightened American viewers that Macedonians hated and feared Albanians because they were, in fact, Serbs). Even with the 40,000 promised to be taken care by Germany, 20,000 by Turkey, and 5,000 each by Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and some other small countries, this is still 1/6 or 1/7 of this tragic human wave. The West also came in unprepared (not physically but psychologically) to see through its mission. It actually firmly stated its conviction up front that they are not jeopardizing the life of a single one of their civilized citizens for any Balkanite (implicitly in the line of Bismarck’s 19th century pronouncement about the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier but not explicitly articulated true to late 20th century politically correct discourse.) Let me remind in parenthesis that, for all its ulterior motives, Russia fought a war with the Ottoman empire for Bulgaria’s independence in which tens of thousands of Russian officers and soldiers died on Bulgarian territory alone (the overall toll on all fronts being 220,000). Are there 220 Americans or West Europeans who are ready to die for the cause of the Kosovar Albanians? But there are surely more than 220, ready to play “Arcade games” with B2 bombers and other billion-dollar worth toys.8 8  The more sinister side of this equation is the ease with which the enemy side is being degraded and dehumanized, and there is no attempt to even remotely justify the death of

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c) as a result, the West has severely destabilized the Balkans achieving what it professed it wanted to avoid: Albania is on the verge of a civil war between north and south; Macedonia is in an extremely explosive situation; and I am not even mentioning the long-term destabilizing effects on the immediate neighbors—Bulgaria and Romania, the severe economic crisis into which they are being plunged deeper and deeper. Greece and Hungary are also casualties but, as members of the club, with much less severe repercussions. All throughout, after 1989, the West consistently refused to pay any attention to the Balkans as a region, and has been consistent only in its policy to lock the region out into a ghetto by erecting prohibitive economic and administrative barriers, not to speak of the cultural abuse which was heaped on the area in line with the Huntingtonian division along civilizational fault lines between Western (Catholic and Protestant) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity: region of ancient hatreds, organic anti-democratic and authoritarian spirit, primitivism, tribalism, barbarity, ceasaropapism, Orthodoxy, and so on and so forth, and, of course, the Cyrillic script.9 Statement 7. In the meantime, there was never a Balkan war in the 1990s. Neither Greece, nor Bulgaria, Albania, Romania or Turkey have been at war despite the constant insinuations in the Western press. All of them have been careful to avoid any temptation to get involved. The war in the 1990s was a war for the Yugoslav succession. But now let us be very clear. It is no longer a Yugoslav war. There is now an undeclared European, no, a world war, of 19 nations against one Balkan country, and this has enormous and frightening implications not only for the region but for the world. During the past decade, the United States has consistently and consciously undermined and effectively compromised international organizations like the thousands of civilian victims (“collateral damage”). We see this on an even larger scale in Iraq. As a friend put it, Tom Clancy’s books and movies tell us more about the Kosovo intervention than volumes of scholarly analysis. 9  This verdict is not significantly changed after the end of the bombings except for the diffusing of the immediate incendiary situation in Albania and Macedonia with the retreat of the refugee population. Yet, potentially Macedonia continues to be explosive, especially after the precedent with Kosovo. In Kosovo itself, NATO effectively sanctioned a monoethnic protectorate. The much trumpeted about Pact for Stability in the Balkans is only words thus far. The U.S. refuses to contribute based on the argument that it paid the largest part of the war bill. The Europeans are good at procrastination until the inevitable “Balkan war fatigue” sets in. By refusing to include Serbia in any reconstruction project with its present leadership, the West is dooming the rest of the region, given Serbia’s central location. It also creates fertile ground for revanchism, anti-Westernism, and the perpetuation of a victim mentality. If analogies are of any help, the difference between the treatment of Germany after the First World War, and then after the Second World War, should give some food for thought.

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United Nations, OSCE, etc. and, instead, has promoted NATO as the only global arbiter and policeman.10 The latest Kosovo blunder is only the last in a chain of such policies. It is, of course, morally unacceptable, as Clinton pointed out, to enter the new millennium with the terrible 20th century legacy of ethnic cleansing. It is also frightening to enter the new millennium with a legacy of unchecked erratic arbitrary behavior on the part of a power that claims to be the arbiter. It can be a short millennium. Back to my opening joke: the ongoing war has created a situation in which whoever wins, everyone will lose. But isn’t this the case with all wars? 10  For a harrowing indictment of U.S. policies, see the latest memoir by Boutros BoutrosGhali, Unvanquished: A US-UN Saga (Random House, 1999).

CHAPTER 8

Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul? A Contribution to the Debate between Nathaniel Knight and Adeeb Khalid This piece was the third in a forum published in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1(4), Fall 2000, 717–727 and reproduced here with the permission of the journal. My contribution was supposed to adjudicate between Adeeb Khalid who applies the notion of orientalism to Russian history and Nathaniel Knight who strongly objects to it. I believe it can stand on its own, because it highlights my own position vis-à-vis orientalism. In contrast to Chapter Five on balkanism and postcolonialism, this text defends the fundamental insights of Edward Said and the value of the orientalist paradigm.

The big question looming behind the polemic exchange between Adeeb Khalid and Nathaniel Knight is the timeless question of Russian history: How unique is Russia? How applicable are general historical categories and models (especially when universalized on the basis of West European experience) to the Russian case? Khalid’s response to this question is unequivocal: Russia’s uniqueness is a myth which imposes severe limitations on its historiography. It is only by engaging in “approaches that dilute Russia’s historical specificity” that this parochialism can be overcome. In Said’s Orientalism he finds the methodological possibility for one such approach. Knight, on the other hand, while careful to discard the trope of Russia’s uniqueness, premises his approach on the idea of Russia’s “distinctiveness,” presenting this as a moderating position between the Scylla of uniqueness and the Charybdis of generic Europeanness or universalism. Quite apart from Said, here lies the basic difference in optics (or philosophy) between the two positions. The different interpretations of Said and the different understandings of whether/ how his message should be applied is then superimposed onto this fundamental distinction. I will therefore comment separately on the two issues. 1

Distinctiveness versus Universalism

Let us remember that epistemology is, in practice, about heuristic devices which offer explanatory schemata that order the world in order to comprehend © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_010

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it. From this point of view, there is nothing immanent privileging either the universalist or the distinguishing approach. The function and adequacy of these devices are judging relation to an object of study, as well as the explanatory trend they want to promote. Khalid is very clear about his motives: only within a universalist approach is it possible to engage with a vibrant body of interdisciplinary work, attaining truly meaningful cross-regional comparisons which would allow us to overcome “the self-imposed limitations of Russian historiography.” Knight’s niche of distinctiveness is closer than he would allow to the approach of uniqueness; yet, he raises a classic and fundamental epistemological problem facing universalizing discourses. Are they not, in the end, a discreet way of imposing hegemonic categories and models, and reducing the objects of study to variants of the primary case elevated to a normative model? He calls the danger of rejecting cultural difference “an insidious form of neo-imperialism.” He is, of course, to a great extent right, although there is some irony in hearing him describe imperialism which can be subsumed precisely under the general category of orientalism, after having pleaded against its ubiquitous application. But the problem he raises is real. In one way or another, it is a problem that practically all non-West European historiographies have faced at some moment in their development. To draw on my own knowledge of Eastern European and Ottoman studies, a standing discussion that falls under this rubric is the one about periodization. Another asks whether feudalism, as developed mostly on the basis of French material, is an appropriate general category to encompass structures and relationships in the Byzantine or Ottoman Empires, as well as the medieval Balkan societies. Especially with the imposition of official Marxism (in itself both a universalizing and, at the same time, a Eurocentric idiom) there was a tendency to subsume everything within a standard model and mention local “deviations” on the side. There was also a natural tendency to resist, and somehow focus on specificity. In a curious but predictable way, these efforts coincided with the search for authenticity by nationalist historiographies. The problem was, of course, how to articulate difference, and in most cases this was done by employing specific local historical categories, insisting on their nontranslatability. The result of this understandable heuristic shift was a hermetic, often arcane and self-referential analysis which contributed much to the further marginalization of these historiographies. At the same time, once these historiographies were pulled into the sphere of international exchange of historical knowledge, primarily as a result of the generalizing projects stemming, as a rule, from western academia, the untranslatable categories were assumed to indicate untranslatable phenomena or institutions. This contributed further to the exoticizing of the non-Western European space, and to the essentializing of differences as incompatibilities.

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One example in this respects and coming from my own research is the effort to map the diversity of family forms in Europe. The 19th-century tendency to look for uniqueness in the ethnographic descriptions of the multiple family form of the so called zadruga in the European southeast resulted in overall schemata in which all other local European versions of multiple families (Grossfamilie, frérèche, fratellanza) were deemed to be reducible to the generic scholarly description of multiple or extended families whereas the zadruga continued to be treated as a unique (and exaggerated) specificity of the region, impossible to accommodate within a general scholarly discourse. The same applies for the category of the Russian mir. How such constructions of scholarly discourse can then easily sweep into the political arena is not difficult to imagine.1 There is no easy solution and, I am afraid, there is no third way. At each intersection one should carefully weigh the losses and the tradeoffs. The universal idiom does, indeed, open the field, it serves as a necessary and welcome stimulant, and it is the only medium for genuine comparative research. But it comes with its price. This price is what Lotman has called semiotic inequality, or what Gramsci has described as cultural hegemony. The perils of the uniqueness or distinctiveness approach have equally been emphasized. Its awards are the embedding of a greater cognitive value in the object of study but this intellectual autarchy comes at the price of isolation and parochialism. It is inevitable that methodological excesses in one direction will engender a reactive pull in the other direction. Much as I am trying to be evenhanded, my own predilection is in favor of the universalist idiom (tempered, of course, by a strong groundedness in historical specificity). This is prompted mostly by the state of the art in my own field, and I think the same is true for Russian studies, where historiography has more often erred on the side of the specific. But it may be also an optical inclination to discern more similarities than differences, to indulge in painting large and complex comparative pictures rather than introspective portraits. Finally, the discipline in and of itself will not resolve this oscillation between the two heuristic approaches. It is the political conjuncture that is the breeding ground for this dichotomy. The Sonderweg discussion in German historiography which was raging for a long time accompanied the unresolved problem of Germany’s acceptance and accommodation within the European 1  Maria Todorova, Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern. Demographic Devel­ opments in Ottoman Bulgaria (Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1993); idem, “Zum erkenntnishistorischen Wert von Familienmodellen. Der Balkan und die ‘europäische Familie’,” in Historische Familienforschung. Ergebnisse und Kontroversen, ed. Josef Ehmer, Tamara K. Hareven, Richard Wall (Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, 1997), 283–300.

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framework since the 19th century. Once this was achieved in practice, the matrix of German history seized to be explained in terms of the Sonderweg. Rather, the recent dominant interpretations approach German history not as a deviation from but as a version of the general current of European history, pointing out common features, in a word normalizing it.2 As long as Russia’s place and relationship with the European and world institutions remain an unresolved, unstable or, at least, ambivalent problem, this methodological problem is bound to persist. 2

Said’s Orientalism versus Russia’s Orientalism

It is through this lens, then, that Said’s oeuvre and its applicability to Russia is refracted by the two discussants. For Khalid it is a useful tool among many others to develop a more adequate understanding of Russia both in its relationship to the outside world as well as to its empire. He does not delve too much into some of the deficiencies of Said’s approach nor should he. For Khalid, Said’s work is a strong critique of how power uses knowledge to advance itself, and he sees Said as an inspiration rather than as a model constructor. I totally subscribe to this view. Nonetheless, I do not agree, when Khalid writes, that “the dichotomization of the (Old) World into Europe/the West versus Asia/the Orient dates back to the Greeks, and that the Orient has always functioned as the ‘Other’ against which Europe has defined its own identity.” There has been abundant and convincing critique against stretching the notion back to the Greeks, and a European identity has been in the making only very gradually and tentatively in the past couple of centuries. For reasons laid out above (i.e. factors outside the discipline), I also do not share the optimism expressed by Khalid that “once we acknowledge the artifice ‘Europe’ and ‘the West,’ as well as of ‘Asia’ and ‘the Orient,’ we can move on to the politics of their deployment, and lay to rest the myths of Russia’s uniqueness.” Just exposing the artifice of categories does not do away with the reality of their impact and, more important, with the reality that breeds these categories (even if they are exposed). We as scholars should, of course, make the effort, but that alone will not do it. Agency is a nice and welcome corrective to the all-encompassing determinism 2  Deutscher Sonderweg. Mythos oder Realität (München: R. Oldenburg, 1982); David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Helga Grebing, Der “deutsche Sonderweg” in Europa 1806–1945: eine Kritik (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1986); Rewriting the German Past: History and Identity in the New Germany, ed. Reinhard Alter and Peter Monteath (N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997).

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bordering on predestination but it cries for some humility. The world poses much more difficult problems than can be dealt with by intelligence or goodwill. However, these are minor points of refining the argument. Basically, I agree with Khalid that Orientalism is definitely relevant for Russia insofar as it describes power relations in a concrete imperial/colonial context, and that, furthermore, it helps elucidate the specific ambivalence of Russia as both the subject and object of orientalism. Nor do I think Nathaniel Knight would disagree with this. What bothers him is that Said may be adopted as a “universal model,” “general theory” or “totalizing framework,” and he insists that he be read in the context of subsequent critiques. But one cannot dictate the terms in which one is being read, and Said cannot be held responsible for the fact that some take him to have offered a “universal model,” not least Knight himself. As Said remarks in the 1994 afterword to Orientalism, his “is a partisan book, not a theoretical machine.”3 Despite excesses of generalization which, I think, are more a matter of style than of essence, it was clear from the outset that Said’s was a concrete, powerful political polemic against essentialism and the discourse of authenticity as it was produced during the imperial encounter of Britain and France in the last two centuries with the Arabs, predominantly in the Eastern Mediterranean. Yet again, it is Knight who raises the important and difficult problem about the relationship between scholarship and politics, between the producers of knowledge about the Orient, and the mechanisms and terms of the orientalist discourse. His initial article in the Slavic Review, which initiated this discussion, summarizes his views. In turn, Adeeb Khalid has a very promising insight on Sovietology as orientalism but does not develop it which, beyond the argument of space, makes one ruminate precisely on the lines of institutional power, discursive hegemonies, etc. In a word, after the end of the Cold War and its defeated rhetorics, are we ready to discuss the implication of Sovietology as a body of scholarship, when most of its practitioners are still alive or well placed, and the overall political climate has downgraded Russia merely from an “evil empire” to a “late evil empire.” Khalid’s measured silence on this question is already telling. Knight remains troubled by the fundamental issues of the possible intersections and often posited identification between scholarship and political power. He views Said’s Orientalism as an example of unjustly universalized 3  Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 339. It is surprising that Knight and Khalid, both historians, are citing solely from the first1978 and 1979 editions. Given the response Said provides to his critics in the 1994 edition, this is a serious omission, particularly for Knight.

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accusatory polemic against inevitably implicated scholarship. I am sympathetic to Knight’s concerns in this regard, and to his overall ethos. Yet, some questions beg for more complex answers, and in the following lines I will look more closely at the way Knight interprets Said by following his own five-fold commentary: 1) It is by all means correct that Orientalist discourse must be historicized, and as I have tried to show, Said himself, following the release of the book’s first edition, has been careful enough to speak only of the Arab/Muslim case in the imperial context of the last two centuries. But, let historical evidence speak for itself. Here is Said’s testimony about how he thought about his work before it was published: “It was far from clear whether such a study of the ways in which the power, scholarship, and imagination of a two-hundred-year-old tradition in Europe and America viewed the Middle East, the Arabs, and Islam, might interest a general audience.”4 I may be overinterpreting Said but Knight certainly errs in the direction of underinterpretation. One may be (and should be) critical of Said but to accuse him of proposing a “model of stable and cohesive discourse” is to underestimate the remarkable plasticity of his thought. This is not to quibble over what Said may or may not have intended. But it does necessarily occasion our closer reading of Said’s own texts, against the wider field into which his ideas have entered. The voluminous work done on different periods and different areas in the two decades since Said’s work was published attests to the fact that, first and foremost, Orientalism has served as an inspiration to be further developed and refined; in this way he can be understood as having met his goal. This is actually true for Russian studies themselves as evidenced by some excellent works.5 In fact, it is in these works that one can already find a template of how to interpret Russia within a universal framework and, at the same time, point out its specific features. Thus, Bruce Grant in a sophisticated analysis of the making of Russian/Soviet ethnography on Siberia demonstrates the incredible diversity of ethnographic pioneers which convincingly “challenges our expectations of ideological homogeneity in colonial societies and asks whether nineteenthcentury Russian ethnography may indeed have been less statist than is often 4  Ibid., 329. 5  It is only my not extensive knowledge of the field that limits me in mentioning only a few works that I know and admire. I am sure there are more: Russia’s Orient. Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 100–1917, ed. Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997); Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

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presumed.” In a felicitous and elegant turn of phrase he opens “the possibility of a borderland history that is perhaps less empirical, but also less imperial.”6 This, however, does not disprove the existence of the overarching discursive domination of evolutionism, a medium in which all contending ideological approaches were immersed, and whose nomos-building activity imposed order on the existing anomie or, as Yuri Slezkine put it on the “state of nonpossession known as [that] was known as ‘savagery’.”7 2) Orientalist discourse should not be generically equated with Oriental studies. This is Knight’s second suggestion. Quite apart from Said, it raises the difficult issue of the relations between scholarly and other types of knowledge. Again, Said is more sophisticated than Knight gives him credit for. As Said wrote, “Nowhere do I argue that Orientalism is evil, or sloppy, or uniformly the same in the work of each Orientalist. But I do say that the guild of Orientalists has a specific history of complicity with imperial power, which it would be Panglossian to call irrelevant,” and he adds about the orientalists who “despite attempts to draw subtle distinctions between orientalism as an innocent scholarly endeavor and Orientalism as an accomplice of empire, can never unilaterally be detached from the general imperial context that begins its modern global phase with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.”8 Knight nonetheless gestures in the right direction by reminding us that Said does not propose a convincing understanding of the intricate relationship between orientalism as a state of mind, and as scholarly practice. In Imagining the Balkans I therefore purposely stayed away from indicting scholarship. I didn’t want to replicate Said’s stance and maintain that orientalism (or my balkanism) was an all-encompassing and inevitable discourse. I continue to believe that the production of scientific knowledge moves along a line that only occasionally intersects with the production of popular mythology (including journalism). I also pointed out that this does not mean that a great number of scholarly practitioners of Balkan (or Oriental or any other field of) studies do not share a staggering number of prejudices in private; but that the rules of scholarly discourse restrict their open articulation, and I think that these rules, as well as what and how we articulate them, matters. 3) Said would be the first to agree with the proposition that Orientalist discourse should not be viewed as the single determinant of identity. In fact, 6  Bruce Grant, “Empire and Savagery: The Politics of Primitivism in Late Imperial Russia,” in Russia’s Orient, 307. 7  Yuri Slezkine, “Naturalists versus Nations: Eighteenth-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity,” in Russia’s Orient, 43. 8  Said, Orientalism, 333, 341.

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his critique of The Cambridge History of Islam (1970) as an orientalist text, hinges precisely on the fact that it is constructed on this exclusive dichotomy. Here his voice again: “The fundamental question raised by such contemporary Orientalist texts as The Cambridge History of Islam is whether ethnic origins and religion are the best, or at least the most useful, basic, and clear, definitions of human experience. Does it matter more in understanding contemporary politics to know that X and Y are disadvantaged in certain very concrete ways, or that they are Muslims or Jews? This is of course a debatable question, and we are very likely in rational terms to insist on both the religious-ethnic and the socio-economic descriptions; Orientalism, however, clearly posits the Islamic category as the dominant one, and this is the main consideration about its retrograde intellectual tactics.”9 4) Knight proposes that “Orientalization” should not be viewed as an exclusively Western practice. This depends on how it is defined. If one takes the narrow and historically specific context of Said (as outlined in 1), then it is an exclusively western practice. Even if orientalization is taking place between groups and societies one would not conventionally consider “western,” the point is the psychological identification on the part of the orientalizer with an idealized or desired western identity. Said may be accused of unacceptable diachronic escapades but, to my knowledge, he is not making a claim for a theory of cognition. Moreover, he might have, but I do not think he set himself the task to contribute theoretically to the field of alterity. My own argument that balkanism is a distinct discourse from orientalism is based on just such a reading of Said. While both cases can be subsumed under the rubric of power discourses emanating from the West, there are fundamental structural differences generated from the different geographic location, historical traditions, and ethnic and religious character. I therefore proposed that while orientalism was dealing with difference between (imputed) types, balkanism treats the differences within one type. I am in total agreement with Knight that one should look “beyond the overarching East/West dichotomy … to see how binary thinking functions to define identity in a broader range of cultural settings.” 5) According to Knight, the concept of Orientalism as developed by Said precludes the possibility of verifiable knowledge and meaningful cross-cultural communication. He even ascribes to Said “a dark and nihilistic view of the scholarly vocation” and squarely accuses him of “epistemological nihilism.” This goes far too far. If anything, Said has been criticized for “residual humanism” and a romantic treatment of agency, something which is quite contrary to 9  Ibid., 305.

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the epistemological nihilism of Nietzsche or Foucault. Aijaz Ahmad has produced one of the most powerful and well-informed critiques of Said but he is exaggerating when he ascribes to Said the statement that “Europeans were ontologically incapable of producing any true knowledge about non-Europe.” Said is not speaking of (or at least does not mean) non-Europe in general but the non-Europe of the Arab Muslims of the Near East in the last two centuries. Even there he prudently distinguished between orientalists, something that the ones who felt a personal affront were careful not to mention. Already in his 1978 work Said would note significant nuances even among orientalists implicated in orientalism like, for example, Philip Hitti at Princeton and Gustave von Grunebaum at UCLA. But he went even further and not only did not deny the production of legitimate knowledge but even named the ones he thought were producing it: Anwar Abdel Malek, the Hull group on Middle Eastern studies, Jacques Berque, Maxime Rodinson, Roger Owen, etc. What, according to him, distinguished these authors and invigorated their research was opening up oriental studies to the broad field of all the human sciences but, above all, their methodological self-consciousness: “For, if orientalism has historically been too smug, too insulated, too positivistically confident in its ways and its premises, then one way of opening oneself to what one studies in or about the Orient is reflexively to submit one’s method to critical scrutiny.”10 In fact, quite contrary to what Knight ascribes to him—the notion that genuine knowledge is a mere illusion, that scholarship is reduced to a cynical game—Said has been quite explicit about his optimism: “If we no longer think of the relationship between cultures and their adherents as perfectly contiguous, totally synchronous, wholly correspondent, and if we think of cultures as permeable and, on the whole, defensive boundaries between polities, a more promising situation appears. Thus to see Others not as ontologically given but as historically constituted would be to erode the exclusivist biases we so often ascribe to cultures, our own not least. Cultures may then be represented as zones of control and of abandonment, of recollection and of forgetting, of force or of dependence, of exclusiveness and of sharing, all taking place in the global history that is our element.”11 But enough of defending Said through Said. The study of alterity, moving well past Said’s initial spur, has since become a full-fledged academic subfield, passing through its moments of triumph, and even reaching the stage where it can question its own premises. Most philosophers until recently have 10  Ibid., 326–327. 11  Eduard Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15:2 (Winter 1989) 225.

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addressed the problem of alterity in a Hegelian framework. In Hegel’s thought, the Geist, the universal spirit gradually apprehends (Aufhebung, conquest through absorption) both itself and reality in the course of gaining insight into itself and the world. This results in a system of increasing expansion and incorporation, where all otherness is assimilated or at least harmonized in terms of an expanding identity. Contrast, plurality and difference, in the Hegelian framework, are moments in a movement towards reconciliation, unity and harmony. There is a dialectical relationship between “self” and “other,” in which the expanding self accommodates, domesticates, as it were, “the other.”12 At the same time, one has to add in the face of such a triumphant and optimistic humanist approach, that what it tells us is also that even when depicting the strange, “the other,” we do it on our terms, with the known categories and methods of expression at our disposal. “The other” is apprehended, added to an expanding self, domesticated, as it were, but not on its own terms. It is not understood for what it is, therefore it is not understood at all; there is an unsurmountable cognitive block, even as there is a harmonizing tolerance at work.13 Against the Hegelian dialectic of apprehension (conquest), a host of philosophers dealing with difference and division postulate the basic irreducibility of the “other” to the “self” (Bataille, Sartre, Lyotard, Lévinas, and above all Foucault). To them, instead of gradual inclusion, there is a forceful mechanism of exclusion and exorcism of what is constructed as “other,” and this process altogether constitutes an act of identity formation. Thus, for example, the historical “exclusion of unreason and madness is part of the self-definition of the rational humanistic ideal, which thereby suppresses and denies part of the human personality.”14 I view my own effort at exploring the discourse of othering the Balkans, which I defined as balkanism, in this light, insofar as it is a by-product of the process of constructing the category and identity of Europe. Said’s orientalism can also be understood in this theoretical schema. When Knight feels threatened by Said’s framework because, according to him, it “cuts across many of the fundamental values underlying our endeavor,” and affirms almost incantatorily that “as scholars dedicated to the study of Russia and its empire, we proceed from the basic assumption that we can 12  Raymond Corbey and Joep Leersen, “Studying Alterity: Backgrounds and Perspectives,” in Alterity, Identity, Image. Selves and Others in Society and Scholarship, ed. Raymond Corbey & Joep Leersen (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1991). 13  For the full development of this argument, see Maria Todorova, “Is ‘the Other’ a useful cross-cultural concept? Some thoughts on its implementation to the Balkan region,” Internationale Schulbuchforschung, 21, 1999, 163–171. 14  Corbey & Leersen, “Studying Alterity,” XII.

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know ‘the other’,” one inevitably is bound to raise an eyebrow. It is not knowledge per se that is being questioned but the type of knowledge. On what terms do we approach “the other”? What are the means at our disposal with which we articulate the attained knowledge? The categories we utilize are not mere innocent linguistic tools; they carry over meanings from discourses in which they have been previously employed. When Knight asserts that we can produce “meaningful and verifiable knowledge,” it is not the production of “knowledge” that is in question but the qualifiers “meaningful” and “verifiable.” Of course, a body of knowledge can be meaningful but to whom? What and who makes it meaningful? What are the criteria? Likewise, one has to ask what are the tools of verifiability, how are they employed and by whom? This is not relativism, nor cynicism, not even the skepticism of despair. It is precisely the deep respect for knowledge propelling one to be cognizant of the hazards in the process of accumulating knowledge that brings in a measure of humility and another of stoicism. We may resign ourselves to the fact that otherness is a categorical fact of life; it will not go away whatever our efforts. We may also share the skepticism that “the other” cannot become known on its own terms. But the whole process of acquaintance, of an effort on the part of the subject to know the object, transforms the subject itself; thus what we actually have is a fundamentally explanatory, hermeneutic relationship. While this view may be a negation of the Hegelian possibility of harmonization through unification, it nonetheless grants us a dignified possibility: dealing “on the basis of respect for the separateness between the Other and oneself, and a willingness to let the Other change one.”15 We are left, productively so, with this dialogical principle of attaining knowledge. Its purpose is not to reach a resolution but that, in listening to “the other” we inevitably, if imperceptibly, may change our own positions. That such a vigorous debate over these matters is taking place, therefore, augurs well as a measure of the maturity of the field. 15  Corbey & Leersen, “Studying Alterity,” XVIII.

Section 3 Nationalism, Identity and Alterity

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Is There Weak Nationalism and Is It a Useful Category?* Introducing the category “weak nationalism,” this chapter emphasizes the scales of intensity and the different operational modes of nationalism across time and space, as well as within the same space. It refuses to create a model or another dichotomy— strong/weak—on a par with earlier ones like organic/civic, Eastern/Western, bad/ good. Rather, it approaches nationalism as a binary variable on a scale from weak/low to strong/high. It argues to extend the research focus beyond the fixation on extreme cases to so-called weak or weaker manifestations that remain subordinate and underresearched, all the time stressing the changeability of nationalisms in their local context and in the course of time. The article was first published in Nations and Nationalism, 2015, 21(4), 2015, 681–699, and reproduced with permission by the publisher.

On 1 February 1998, the Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, signed three years earlier, entered into force. This is considered the first legally binding international instrument devoted to the rights of national minorities. The Framework Convention has been an accession obligation for states applying to join the European Union. It has been criticized for its weak wording, packed with escape clauses (Hillin 2010:6, Troebst 1999: 19–27) Nevertheless, by 2012, out of 47 member states, 43 had signed the convention and 39 had ratified it (Belgium, Greece, Iceland and Luxemburg have yet to ratify). Only four countries have refused to either sign or ratify: France, Turkey, Monaco and Andorra. While the two latter ones, practically city-states, have no (problems with) minorities, France and Turkey are notorious for their difficulties with theirs. France’s prime minister at the time, Edouard Balladur, at whose behest the Stability pact (otherwise known as the Balladur Plan) was signed in 1995 in order to provide a framework for “lasting good neighborliness” in Central and Eastern Europe, said that the Framework

*  My thanks go to Mark Steinberg, Venat Mani, Bob Hayden, Ethan Larson, Veneta Ivanova, Deirdre Ruscitti and especially Alex Toshkov for inspiring exchanges on this topic. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for Nations and Nationalism, whose comments helped me to clarify a number of points.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_011

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was irrelevant for France, which does not recognize collective rights for persons belonging to minorities but only individual rights. This was based on the famous definition of France as a unitary nation, and its Constitutional Court considered the Convention a breach of the “unity” of the French nation. Turkey extended the same logic, but when other East European states advanced the same argument, they were rebuffed on account of their poor performance in securing their ethnic minorities and the character of their nationalism, and the signing was made a condition for accession. Is this the arrogance of two relatively big states or simply a claim for exceptional status of the Grande Nation and its emulators? Americans, in particular, fulminate against French pretensions and arrogance but the feeling is reciprocated. Nor are the Americans coy about their feelings. The Fort St. George on Lake George in the Adirondacks features a re-enactment of life in the fortress during the times of the French and Indian wars 1745–1763. The young man playing the courageous and dashing British captain shows how the army recruited their soldiers, their daily routine, and demonstrates how to shoot with a musket. At the very end, the young members of the audience are invited to borrow uniforms and take a toy gun. They are then drilled (to the appreciative laughter of their parents) and receive the command: ‘Now shoot the French. Fire!’ No one takes this seriously, since everyone is fed up with political correctness. But just imagine the righteous denunciations in the European and American press and NGOs, if a young Romanian tourist guide is caught shouting: ‘Shoot the Hungarians or the Russians’ and his Bulgarian counterpart calling: ‘Fire on the Greeks and the Turks.’ It is thus a difference not between the rhetoric of nationalism but about the presumed difference in its content. Romania and Bulgaria, after all, constitute part of the “lethality of Balkan nationalism” (Clark 2012: xxvi), the alleged bloody subspecies of the unsavory and organic Eastern European ethnic nationalism, while the American and the French belong to a noble, civic and moderate variety. This is not a straw man. While one would assume that after long discussions and critiques of the West-East dichotomy, the characterization of whole nations as civic or ethnic would be abolished, this in reality persists not only in political and journalistic parlance but also in academic writings (Jaskułowki 2010: 289–303; Shulman 2002: 554–8). Most of the classical texts on nationalism have perpetuated this dichotomy (Denitch 1994; Gellner 1983; Greenfeld 1992; Hobsbawm 1991; Ignatieff 1993; Kupchan, 1995; Kymlicka 1995, 2001; Sugar and Lederer 1971; Sugar 1995; Yael 1993). Moreover, the civic variety is perceived as an internal antidote to excessive nationalism: it is patriotism, and western nations are presumed to be practically nations without nationalism (Bar-Tal and Staub 1997; Samuel 1989). In his 9 November 2000 speech to the Bundestag

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the then German president, Johannes Rau, defined the differences between nationalism and patriotism thus: “Patriotism can flourish only where racism and nationalism are given no quarter. We should never mistake patriotism for nationalism. A patriot is one who loves his homeland. A nationalist is one who scorns the homelands of others” (cited in Barenboim 2001). This is nice but naïve. The line between love and hate is very thin as even neuroscience demonstrates, not to mention the intimate link in psychoanalysis (Sternberg and Sternberg 2008; Zeki and Romanya 2008). Love and hate do not exist in a vacuum; they are relational, often interchangeable and socially determined. Yet the distinction is embraced by most Europeans, since in almost all European languages nationalism has, as a rule, a pejorative tinge. The exception is the Anglo-American realm, where the difference would be roughly translated as the one between “good” and “evil” nationalism. I have yet to see a convincing argument that differentiates between nationalism and patriotism, aside from using the latter as a euphemistic substitute for the former. This article argues that we need to pay more attention to the scales of intensity and to the different operational modes of nationalism. It does this by arguing for the usefulness of the category weak nationalism, insofar as it introduces a needed sensitivity to the different intensities of nationalism across time and space, as well as within the same space. In doing so, it does not create yet another dichotomy—strong/weak—on a par with earlier ones like organic/ civic (voluntarist), Eastern/Western, bad/good. While striving to overcome the dualistic opposition “strong/weak” it does not abolish the productive tension produced by this pair but approaches nationalism as a binary variable on a scale from weak/low to strong/high. It also argues for broadening the research agenda by paying more attention to “non-strong” nationalisms (to use facetiously a secondary description) that have remained subaltern in the exclusive focus on strong nationalism, all the time stressing the changeability of nationalisms in their local context and in the course of time. The article intervenes both on the theoretical and empirical level. In its first part, it locates its argument within a critical survey of the historiography and especially the typology of nationalism. Accepting the centrality of the nationstate as an object of analysis, it deals primarily with state-sponsored nationalism, and proposes “weak nationalism” as a crucial analytical category. The second part offers a few empirical examples, and applies this more refined and sensitive instrument to several case studies, notably Bulgaria and secondarily Macedonia within the larger Balkan, European and global contexts. Finally, the last part emphasizes the emotive aspects of nationalism, especially feelings of pride and humiliation as central vectors of the mobilizing ability of nationalism.

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I Throughout the nineteenth century, the century of its triumphant rise until its peak in 1914, the idea of nationalism was closely linked to the universalist claims of the French and the Americans. Nationalism has been compared and contrasted to socialism, anarchism, and other ideologies that transcended the state. But it is easy to forget that almost until the 1870s, especially in Mazzini’s ideology, nationalism was a universal, as well as international desideratum, not to speak of its being ranked alongside other subversive revolutionary movements, like republicanism, radicalism and socialism. Up until the last quarter of the nineteenth century nationalists were fighting in each other’s revolutionary armies to support what was seen as a just and universal cause. Only after nationalism was “tamed” after the 1870s and became one of the staunchest pillars of state building were the ranks of nationalists closed behind their state territories. It was only after the carnage of the First World War and the beginning of serious scholarly analyses of the phenomenon, but especially after the Second World War, that nationalism acquired a plethora of attributes meant to give it precision and specificity, and render it analytically useful. Today, the use of “nationalism” rarely goes without a qualifier. These qualifiers can be grouped in several rubrics: 1. Diachronic ones, such as modern, pre-modern, ancient, communist, postcommunist, anti-colonial, post-colonial, neo-nationalism, proto-nationalism. Many of these are secondary descriptions, derivative of the primary one and, as a result, very often of little heuristic use. Others, like ‘ancient,’ open the window for organic, primordial treatments. 2. Geographic/territorial ones, like East, West, as well as the different nationalisms attributed to the separate nation states (Chinese, Algerian, Mexican) or regions (Balkan, Arab, Middle Eastern, Latin American). In the nineteenth century, when nationalisms’ designations were following the state (or future state) lines, like German, Italian, French, Polish, Spanish, Japanese, these were merely geographic attributes without any qualitative differentiations. Today, the geographic qualifier carries an unconcealed normative component, because of the implicit hierarchies that have colored the geographical markers. 3. Typological ones (structural or ideological) like civic, organic, bureaucratic, democratic, aristocratic, popular, populist, separatist, unification, irre­ dentist, colonial, anti-colonial, reform, liberal, romantic, cultural, linguistic religious, left-wing, feminist, gender, queer and sexual nationalism. Some of these have an evaluative tinge, while others are neutrally descriptive. To this category one can add also qualifiers like banal, surrogate, transverstite,

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diasporic, long-distance, e-mail and internet. Imperialism and nationalism have usually been seen as antagonistic. However, in certain contexts—Great Britain, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the Habsburg Empire and the late Ottoman Empire, as well as China and Japan—the two notions can be brought together to form what has been defined as imperial nationalism. 4. A tentative fourth rubric might be set apart for non-adjectival qualifiers such as anti-nationalism, internationalism, anationalism (as in the Esperanto movement), and transnationalism, all of which are derivative of nationalism, and which together with others like socialism, anarchism, cosmopolitanism, and universalism, consciously and actively opposed it. It is also useful to note a recent body of scholarship, subsumed under the common denominator of “national indifference.” Coming out of the Central European historiography, it was used first to describe rural attitudes toward nationalist activists in the complex linguistic imperial borderlands of the Habsburg Empire (Judson 2006). The notion was thoroughly apposite for denoting a premodern artifact or the gradual socialization of children (Bjork 2008; King 2005; Stergar 2010; Zahra 2008). It was later generalized theoretically in a laudable but ultimately quixotic effort to dethrone the nation state by claiming that national indifference was produced and reinforced by modern politics (Zahra 2010). In the era of the pervasive nation-state a more felicitous way is to speak of flexible, ambivalent, ambiguous, opportunistic and contingent nationalism, rather than indifference toward a ubiquitous phenomenon (Dragostinova 2011). These rubrics are permeable. Most of the typological qualifiers are linked implicitly to a historico-geographic space and ultimately to the state (Breuilly 1985; Penrose; Schnapper 2002). There is thus the danger that many of these categories may treat nationalism as more monolithic than it is and reify their object of analysis. A way to overcome this is to follow Roger Brubaker’s admonition to study identity, nation, ethnicity, race not as things (ontological categories), but as negotiated practice (categories of practice) (Brubaker 2004; Brubaker and Cooper 2002; Brubaker, Loveman, Stamatov 2004). Inspired by E. P. Thompson’s work on class, Brubaker shifted his attention from groups to groupness and argued that the latter is ‘variable and contingent rather than fixed and given’ and should be treated as an event (Brubaker 2002: 168). He illustrated this with a micro study on the sub-national level, by focusing on the workings of ethnicity in the Transylvanian town of Cluj (Brubaker, Feischmidt, Fox, Grancea 2006). When working on the national level, however, these admonitions are harder to put into practice, and Brubaker himself has been taken to task for perpetuating the civic-West/ethnic-East pattern in his other work (Brubaker 1992, 1996; Shulman 2002: 556, 559).

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While deeply in favor of a fragmentary and contextual, non-totalizing approach to nationalism, i.e. one that takes into account the way different groups at different times within the national space negotiate their attitudes and actions toward the nation, this text is primarily dealing with statesponsored nationalism, the one that usually is being taken to represent the nationalism of the whole nation. Because nationalism is a political project, its success is often measured by military victory and territorial conquest. Strong nationalism is the clearest and simplest way this is achieved. Yet, characterizing whole polities in this cavalier way obscures not only the internal divisions within the national body. It also shifts attention from the habitual state of the nation-building project, the one centered on education, science, culture, the economy, and the environment. These efforts are likewise inspired by the national ideology and most often propelled by national pride and even national rivalries, especially in sports. But because of their non-lethal character they escape attention and at times are even considered outside the perimeter of nationalism. I then propose that “weak nationalism” may be actually the regular state of nationalism. If “weak nationalism” (with all its shades of weakness) is used as an analytical category, as an attribute of nationalism complementing the notion of strong nationalism, it should be similarly able to qualify nationalism in general. Arguably, it is a category more recognizable in a common sense approach than in a strictly methodical and quantifiable one, but I would suggest that it can be identified and comparatively evaluated by the mobilizing ability of the nationalist message in the public sphere. Proposing “weak nationalism” as a category is not offering it as the binary opposite to strong nationalism; rather, I hope that by positing its existence, this would raise the awareness of the range and gradual scales between strength and weakness, and will shift the almost exclusive attention away from extreme expressions. Applying a more sophisticated and sensitive instrument will allow us also to more fruitfully and effectively compare different nationalisms. While conscious of the trappings of “methodological nationalism,” the goal is not to sidetrack and go “beyond” it (Chernilo 2007; Wimmer and Schiller 2002). On the contrary, instead of moving to another theoretical or conceptual plane, the argument is addressed head on in the plane where nationalism is politicized, and where it has immediate and broad practical political consequences. Nationalism is, after all, a political project. In a purist and ideal analytical discourse, there would be only nationalism with different intensities at different moments. Clearly in this discourse there would also be displays of strength (with all its shades) and weakness (with equally as many shades). But since it does not attach the attributes in a holistic way and insists on the

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constant flexibility and complexity of the phenomenon, it would not have the pernicious effects that a discourse produced in the political field has. Moreover, such a sophisticated discourse can rarely compete with the hegemony of blunt and unnuanced categories. In the classificatory attempt outlined above it is obvious that missing are qualifiers ranging nationalisms according to their intensity, with the exception of the highest register: extreme, expansionist, messianic, integral, radical, exclusive. Indeed, the impressive literature on nationalism has rightly emphasized its emotive power, extraordinary intensity, passion and conviction in general. It is only natural that most research has chosen to concentrate on the cases of particularly forceful and persistent nationalisms, looking for correlations with religious myth, or belief in the mission of “chosen peoples.” It is these powerful cases that have determined and defined the study of nationalism: ‘the history of nationalism is not necessarily written by the winners, but it is almost always written about them’ (King 2010: 38). German and Irish nationalism provide much of the focus for such studies for Western Europe. For Eastern Europe this has meant a concentration on Poland, Serbia, Greece, and Russia. The Middle East has been dominated by the Israeli-Palestinian issue, a classical case of territorial nationalism. And for Asia, which has contributed the influential alternative literature on nationalism, the concentration is India and China (Guha 2010; Chatterjee 1993, 2010; Duara 1995; Goswami, 2002, 2004). Although this seems obvious, with one admirable exception (Hroch 1985), no qualitative distinction has been made between “big” and “small” nationalisms, i.e. the nationalism of a large population and state versus that of a smaller group and territory. In his celebrated book on banal nationalism, Michael Billig is dealing exclusively with cases of “big” nationalisms, although he does not emphasize this circumstance (Billig 1995). He has been rightly praised for showing the degree to which nationalism has been internalized, becoming the unconscious and unrecognized arbiter of meaning in structuring our worldview. Pace prophesies in the soon-to-be passing nature of nationalism, we continue to inhabit a world structured around its main tenets—nation-states and the international law governing their relations— even as notions of sovereignty are modified. From sports to weather reports, from art to tourist trinkets, nationalism is innocently and unreflectively flagged, further reaffirming one’s own nation-state as natural and normative, while condemning the others as intolerant or aggressive. “Banal nationalism” is omnipresent and universal; it is neither harmless, nor typical of only some nationalisms. It is also a characteristic of mature (not in the sense of more responsible, but simply older) nationalism, one that is already established, has a history behind it which allows it a more relaxed attitude. It is thus a later

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stage in the development of this ideology. Without making a point about it, Billig illustrates his universal case of “banal nationalism” by examples from three large and leading nations—Britain, France and the USA. Not that every­ body else is not flagging their nationalism equally passionately and equally unconsciously (even as the symbols employed by different nationalisms might vary). What Billig demonstrated was that it was not only “they” who ought to be reprimanded and held accountable for it, but nationalism is part and parcel also of Western “civilized” societies, the ones who think of themselves as “nations without nationalism,” the most flagrant case being the present messianic exceptionalism of the United States. Does it follow that it is predominantly “big” nations that have bouts of strong and/or strongly “banalized” nationalism? Not necessarily, although the extent to which territorial extent and demographic size and density add to the sense of security and vigor of a nation are hard to underestimate. There are enough instances of strong “small” nationalisms and weak “large” ones. To take Germany as a counter-example, after what has been arguably the strongest eruption of virulent nationalism in world history, after 1945 it has displayed one of the weakest nationalisms on record. True, this followed a drastic humiliation and was managed by strong overseeing institutions (allied occupation, de-nazification, even as it was controversial and applied half-heartedly, followed in the 1960s by the unique Vergangenheitsbewältigung built into German culture and education). True, after the success of re-unification in 1990, these breaks have been weakened and although present-day German nationalism still is placed on the lower scale of intensity, it is on an ascending trajectory (Pearce 2008: 106–18). A “small” nationalism, like the Israeli, on the other hand, defensive as it was at the beginning, has been enormously buttressed by the triumph of the 1967 war and by the uncritical patronage of the largest (and single) superpower. A careful analysis will discover an implicit correlation, not exclusively with large and small, but with triumphant and defensive. Indeed, more successful polities rely on strength, which often comes from size and wealth, among other variables. The notion of “weak nationalism” contributes to a more refined evaluation of nationalism’s manifestation. I am strictly aware that this analysis brackets the complex and constant (re)negotiation that produces nations and nationalism, and tacitly, for the purposes of the present argument, accepts the centrality of the nation-state as the primary object of analysis. To reiterate, I am intervening in a particular debate that revolves around the nation-state, and seeks to enrich and complicate it.

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II In what follows, I illustrate the usefulness of the category through a few empirical examples. I first concentrate on a relatively “weak” instance I know in detail, where I hope to provide a historical explanation for its causes and manifestations. Examples are important, but a caveat needs to be added. At times the flow of the argument will seem to undermine itself. I realize that when examples are given that fix reality as an illustration, there arises the temptation to move to a model. Thus, each time I speak of weak nationalism, the example in some ways reifies the attribute, and it may seem as if I actually think that the polity that at this point displays weak nationalism is permanently characterized by it. In some ways, giving examples sacrifices the lucidity of the theoretical argument, which is making the case that fixing nationalisms with attributes is wrong. Still, my justification is that illustrations given with a constant reminder of the theoretical premise will eventually strengthen the argument. By proposing the category of weak nationalism, I most emphatically stress that I am not building a typology, let alone a model with totalizing and predictive pretensions. Bulgaria—the Balkan country par excellence—displays characteristics of what can be called weak nationalism. Compared to its neighbors—Greece, Serbia, or the semi-independent Romanian principalities, Bulgarian nationalism developed chronologically later by at least a generation, and peaked in the 1840s–1870s. This complicated its articulation and practical program not only by functioning in an already hotly contested space but also by developing a number of ideologically differentiated alternatives. As a result, at the time of independence in 1878 and the ensuing decades, there existed contesting visions of the national idea—liberal, conservative, populist, republican, royalist, federative, agrarian and socialist—that could not be harmonized, nor did any one emerge as an exclusive hegemon. The lack of a messianic claim was coupled by the absence of a strong international patron or movement comparable to philhellenism for the Greeks, the appeal of the Piedmontese analogy for Serbia, the imperial aura of the Turks despite the decline of the Ottoman Empire, or the “Latin” kinship of the Romanians. The proverbial Bulgarian link to Russia has been exaggerated: in reality, the political relationship has been ambivalent, even if a strong popular cultural affinity persisted. Above all, this was a nationalism whose irredentist program was humiliated very early in its attempts at realization, and the consecutive defeats sealed its character of a status quo nationalism. To take as an example the Treaty of SanStefano which has been adopted as Bulgaria’s National Day (Liberation Day) since 1990, the date of the signing of the treaty had been feted as the National

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Day since 1888, but was demoted from its central place to only one of a series of national days to downplay the implicit irredentist message between 1944 and 1989, when 9 September 1944 became the National Day (now abolished altogether). Some have seen in the re-adoption after the fall of communism of the fictitious San-Stefano Bulgaria a provocation to its neighbors. The elevation of 3 March actually proves the point about weak nationalism. Pursuing the San-Stefano chimera ended up with national catastrophes, after which Bulgarian nationalism acquired a strongly defensive character. The signing of San Stefano is celebrated today by all Bulgarians (in a symbolic return to the pre-communist practice) as “Liberation Day” without any explicit territorial allusions (again, some arch-nationalists excepted). It is the one important event that was euphoric and optimistic at the time but lasted only four months. How is this a greater provocation than that of the Greeks, who celebrate not their formal independence (1830), but 25 March 1821, the beginning of their uprising, which for some eight years had a dubious outcome and whose vision was the resurrection of Greece in the realms of the Byzantine Empire (i.e. the Balkans and Anatolia with Constantinople as capital). Looking at the list of national days in the world, a majority celebrates independence (from someone) and thus is an affront or reproach to the entity from which it has seceded. In 1885, Eastern Rumelia was unified with the Bulgarian principality, and this is arguably the only high point and achievement of Bulgarian nationalism after 1878. It was not supported by Russia and the other great powers with the exception of the United Kingdom, while Austria-Hungary even backed a Serbian attack on Bulgaria. The elated patriotic spirit and high morale, mass recruiting, the volunteer units, the formation and assertion of the national army in an unexpectedly victorious war were an enormous catalyst for the construction of a unified national loyalty, and responsible for the successful outcome of the unification. However, the loss of Macedonia in 1878 triggered a bloody irredenta—the Macedonian Question—that became the obsessive focus of Bulgaria’s foreign policy. It is the Macedonian Question that determined Bulgaria’s participation in the Balkan wars, as well as its entry in the world war on the side of the Central powers. The effects of humiliation were discernible already after the First World War but the Macedonian irredenta (and mass emigration to Bulgaria) continued to fuel passions and actions that resulted in a final catastrophic revisionist spurt during the Second World War. As a rule, all European nationalisms after the Second World War have been nationalisms of the status quo kind. But there is a psychological difference between, in the end, victorious and humiliated projects, as some postwar comparisons demonstrate: completely devastated Poland versus an also (but less

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so) devastated Germany; Romania versus Hungary; Serbia versus Croatia; Italy versus Yugoslavia. Especially striking in this sense is the Serbian feeling that they have consistently been on the “right side of history,” despite the fact that Serbia had the highest death toll in the First World War (16.1 per cent as against 3.8 per cent for Germany, 3.4 per cent for Bulgaria, and 3 per cent for AustriaHungary) and one of the highest in the Second World War. This also helps explain the Serbian dismay at the NATO bombing in 1999. In the Bulgarian case, the “two national catastrophes” as they came to be designated within the time-span of a single generation secured a gloomy and introspective mood in the interwar period. While the nationalism of the governing elites was irredentist (but with the notable exceptions of the Stamboliiski government in the 1920s and the Zveno group in the 1930s), it was on a descending trajectory. After the Second World War nationalism was marked by self-mockery and the employment of humor in what is usually a tradition of solemnity in the articulation of the nationalist discourse. All of this reflects on the symbolic paraphernalia of nationalism, in particular on the metaphoric glue (shorthand for cohesive processes or ideologies) that keeps nations together. Why is one type of glue preferred over another, and what can this tell us about the specific characteristics of separate nationalisms? National heroes have emerged as a recognized cornerstone of the symbolic repertoire of nationalism and nationalists have allotted a colossal weight to the heroes of the nation as the tangible embodiment of its soul, next to language as its intangible quintessence (Eriksonas 2003: 83; Smith 1999: 65). At the same time, they are not necessarily the central pillar of its symbolic order. In a Balkan context—the first larger comparative circle in which Bulgarian nationalism can be understood—the national imaginary has diverse foci. In the Serbian national imagination, alongside the attention to heroes, the special focus is on an epic and a battle; in the Greek, on the classical past and the notion of direct continuity; in the Romanian, for all the controversies over “the ideal prince”, it is on events and their commemoration (Boia 2001; Brown and Hamilakis 2003; Gourgouris 1996; Hitchins 2003; Vucinich and Emmert 1991). In the Bulgarian case, however, there is a clear orientation to national heroes. What emerges is not only the centrality of heroic figures in general but the ubiquity of one particular national hero: Vasil Levski (1837–1873) (Todorova 2009). One can thus posit a distinct particularity of Bulgarian nationalism (that itself underscores Bulgarian history in the past two centuries): an unusual concentration of competing and contesting discourses and appropriations of the same figure. If analogous instances are to be found, they point out mostly in the direction of Joan of Arc, Guiseppe Garibaldi and Abraham Lincoln, all

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chronological, factual, and structural differences notwithstanding. Still, while there is nothing exceptional about the veneration of Levski—it is typical of any nationalism—there is something unprecedented in his solitary elevation. Despite the broadly held historiographical, let alone popular, consensus, that Levski became the foremost hero immediately upon his martyr’s death in 1873, a careful survey of the sources indicates that for many decades he was only one of many, and definitely not the preferred figure. His exclusive march to the top was neither an ontological given, nor a foregone conclusion. Instead, it was the result of a gradual historical process that secured his place at the pinnacle of the Bulgarian heroic pantheon only after the First World War and continues to the present day. He was elevated to his exalted place only in the 1920s after the series of humiliating defeats that served as a sobering shock to the jingoistic irredentist nationalism. This was the result of a confluence of factors, of which the political impasse was only one, but there is little doubt about the correlation. The principal “victims,” as far as the shaping of the heroic pantheon was concerned, were the medieval kings who, up until then, symbolically led the drive toward territorial expansion during the phase of rising and optimistic irredentist nationalism. Now they had to share the lofty position with and even yield to the critical nineteenth-century national revolutionaries, who were perceived as opponents to the power elites. This was reinforced, after the Second World War, both by the political fiasco during the war, as well as by the imposition of an official anti-nationalist rhetoric. All of this coincided with a general “democratization” of hero-worship, when heroes of humble origins not only began to be increasingly accepted but even started to be preferred. That Levski’s cult grew in a relatively egalitarian and anti-intellectual society additionally propelled him to the top. What makes him stand out from among comparable “commoners” in the heroic pantheon of other nations is his truly broad national appeal (in terms of all citizens, not only of the majority ethnic nation). For someone who gave his life for a specific ethnic cause—the Bulgarian—he is paradoxically the most popular personality among non-Bulgarian minorities, specifically among ethnic Turks. His unflinching appeal today is not simply a matter of inertia. The Levski myth is at the heart of the political covenant, and in a country that is suffering the syndrome of a “weak society in a weak state,” he is both the legitimizing armor of the ones in power, and the protest banner of the powerless. Aggressive nationalism has been posited to stem from a lack of healthy national self-confidence (Glassheim 2005: 113). The caveat of “healthy” notwithstanding, historical practice hardly supports this view. Where is the line between healthy and excessive? In the Bulgarian case, one can speculate that a lack of self-confidence after the two world wars guaranteed what has been

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termed as non-aggressive, status quo or weak nationalism. This does not mean that the verbal expressions of Bulgarian nationalists are weaker or more measured. Quite to the contrary, a list of the harshest and most poisonous invectives can be assembled that can compete (and possibly surpass) the verbal expressions of many a strong nationalism. The point is that the extreme message never managed to effectively mobilize the majority of the population after the 1920s. The brief outburst over Macedonia during the Second World War, when Bulgaria served as an occupation force, has to be seen in the context of an interwar policy that was trying to avoid foreign policy commitments but, in the end, caved in to German pressure and promise. In an unpopular war, the Macedonian venture was the only poplar move that can be compared, more properly, to national unification or reunification, something that can be scrutinized and criticized from a variety of viewpoints, but is not usually attributed to extreme nationalism. Special mention should be given, however, to the so-called “Revival process” (1984–1989) that, at first glance, starkly belies the claim for weak nationalism. In the late fall of 1984, Bulgarian Turks and other Muslims (Pomaks and Roma) were forced to change their names to non-Muslim ones. This was not a new practice: previous episodes include renamings during the two world wars and the 1970s. Without trying to give short shrift to this egregious encroachment of the individual rights of ethnic minorities, I want to emphasize that this nationalistic episode was the result of a defensive foreign policy; it never enjoyed popular support, but was a dirigiste measure, executed in surprising secrecy by the authoritarian regime of Todor Zhivkov. While I do think that, in the Bulgarian case, there exists a correlation between national humiliation, the type of hero worship, and weak nationalism, I do not believe that this correlation can be generalized, or that it renders itself to typological conjectures. I propose neither that whenever a singular, nonaristocratic hero is elevated, weak nationalism takes hold, nor that, wherever we notice signs of weak nationalism, this would result in a steep heroic pyramid with an exclusive commoner at the top. Nor do I believe that in all cases of national humiliation, sobriety and weak nationalism is the effect, although I wish this were so. All I maintain is that, in the particular case of Bulgaria, there is a conflation of factors that explains the specific phenomenon. However, I would go further with typological disclaimers. While there is now a nearly century-long tradition of what I call weak nationalism, I would stay away from the now fashionable, in political science circles, category of path dependence. Weak nationalism is not an immanent characteristic of any polity, and there is no guarantee that the most aggressive form would not burgeon in its womb.

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Another, counterintuitive example of “weakness” is the present-day situation in Macedonia. The architectural building spree in the capital Skopje in styles ranging from faux classical antiquity to what has been termed as Macedonian baroque has all the trappings of a high-pitch nationalism gone berserk. The country’s independence begins only from 1991 after it moved out of the Yugoslav federation. One would expect the strength, enthusiasm and intensity of at least a first generation of nationalists after independence. And yet this is hardly the case. Macedonia is a state with a population of slightly over two million, of which over a quarter are ethnic Albanians, 64 per cent are (Slav) Macedonians, and the rest over 10 per cent are Turks, Roma, Serbs and “others.” It was close to civil war after the Albanian insurgency of 2001, and relations with its neighbors are precarious. While it is untrue (despite broadly held beliefs) that Macedonia’s territorial integrity is threatened or that Macedonia itself harbors irredentist dreams, there is a pervasive feeling of insecurity among Macedonians. As a result, the articulations of Macedonian nationalism are extremely defensive and the hectic “antiquization” efforts have been rightly interpreted as desperate attempts at national-branding in the framework of contemporary neoliberal statecraft (Graan 2013; Vangeli 2011). It is thus the combination between demographic precariousness, institutional weakness, lack of external support and cultural insecurity that feeds what to an unpracticed and insensitive eye might seem a display of extreme nationalism. If I may be permitted the frivolity, the Macedonian nation (in terms of citizenship, as a civic concept) is still a work-in-progress with unforeseeable results, while the self-described Macedonian titular ethnic nation of Slavic speakers which by definition excludes the Albanian and other minorities is metaphorically an Ausbau nation, to borrow an analogy from linguistic terminology. And yet, all these factors do not point to a model. As a contrast, a counterintuitive example of “strong nationalism” is Kosovo. A recent study of seven nations in the Western Balkans compared the process and relative success of nation-building efforts in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia (Kolstø 2014). Kosovo emerges as the country with the lowest GDP per capita, the lowest life expectancy, the highest unemployment rate, and scores lowest on the Human Development Index. Yet it outstripped everyone else in its ability to muster the loyalty of its citizens and displayed the highest loyalty score, measuring successful nation-building (the lowest being Bosnia-Herzegovina, trailing far behind and barely above the neutrality point). It has been plausibly hypothesized that there is a correlation with ethnic homogeneity, comparable only to Albania, which also displays a high loyalty index and came second after Kosovo in popular support. On the

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other hand, a seemingly logical structural explanation that young nationalisms and newly independent states muster enthusiastic support (Kosovo) cannot be sustained in the face of the comparison between Albania (which celebrated its centennial) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (independent only since 1991). Serbia, after the humiliation of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, understandably did less well on the loyalty test, but was still ahead of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro, and not drastically behind Macedonia and Croatia. Despite the “fatigue” that people express nowadays in the face of mobilizing great national ideas, on a comparative scale of weakness to strength I would still place Serbia today as one of the strongest among Balkan nationalisms alongside Greece, although definitely on a descending trajectory. Until 1922—the Asia Minor catastrophe—Greece loomed as the bearer of the strongest nationalism in the Balkans, boosted by the nineteenth-century Western European obsession with classicism and philhellenism. A series of political setbacks and economic woes checked the expression of its nationalism in the last century, but it continues to draw pride from its deep resource of ancient history, which has status and prime value as the “birthplace of Western civilization.” Most recently, another series of political setbacks and economic woes is making room for another wave of rising nationalism. Still, weakness is comparative and situational. Within a broader framework—European or global—both these “strong” Balkan nationalisms do not seem exceptional at all, when juxtaposed to Irish, Scottish, Flemish, Catalan, not to speak of the nationalisms of the Middle East, India, Japan, China and elsewhere. III Two key notions emerge from these examples: pride and humiliation. Pride, although incessantly evoked in patriotic speeches, textbooks, journalism and fiction, has rarely been the subject of systemic academic scrutiny in the historical discipline. This is not surprising: it is difficult to determine its extent from the historical record and disengage it from its rhetorical use. This may change with the “affective” or “emotional turn” in the last couple of decades, which emphasizes that ‘emotion discourse helps produce experience and constitute reality’ (Steinberg and Sobol 2011: 5). What is surprising is that pride features prominently in contemporary political science, a discipline that prides itself on its scientificity. From the 1980s pride entered as a vector in public opinion research, in conjunction with studies on migration, social linguistics, and economic disparities (Evans 2002; Smith and Kim 2006). One of the first surveys concluded that national

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pride—‘the psychological hinge that joins self-fulfillment with public purposes of government’—was pervasive and normal both in the literal and statistical sense (Rose 1985: 85). It is not only the norm to which individuals and groups are expected to conform, but reflects the fact that statistically the median respondent of any group, differences of age, gender, education and religion notwithstanding, displays pride in her country (Rose 1985: 90). Even though there are more proud and less proud nations, a majority in 1981 displayed pride, the range between the two poles being 96 per cent for the United States, followed by Ireland and Iceland (91 and 89 per cent), to 59, 60 and 62 per cent for West Germany, the Netherlands and Japan. People who were not proud of their nation ranged from 32 per cent for the Netherlands, 31 per cent for Japan, and 29 per cent for West Germany to only 2 per cent for the USA and Iceland, and 3 per cent for Ireland (Rose 1985: 86). This survey discovered little correlation between national pride and national wealth but a high correlation with religious faith and a negative one with education. A few decades later, other surveys confirmed the premier rank of the United States tied in first place with Venezuela. The first ten countries were dominated by settlement offshoots of Britain and Spain (USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Venezuela, Chile, the Philippines), and included Israel, South Africa, and only one European state (Austria). The bottom third was occupied by the ex-socialist states and reflected the depressed status of their national pride (with East Germany occupying the bottom), with the sole exception of Hungary, which tied with Ireland and Denmark, ranking immediately after Israel. The rest of the European states occupy the middle range, with higher figures for Portugal, Finland and Spain, and lower ones for Britain and Russia. Curiously, Switzerland, France and especially Sweden rank among the third tier with the ex-socialist states (Smith and Kim 2006: 129). While these surveys indicate a relative consistency, they also show fluctuations as a result of extraordinary events or processes. These snapshots, suggestive as they are, do not license retrospective longue durée extrapolations. Manifold individual explanations are needed, even if some patterns offer themselves (such as the ex-colonial and the ex-socialist countries). Pride can be derived from political tradition, economic success, even genetic heritage. The power of culture (history, symbols, myths, memories), above all the hegemonic culture of a dominant ethnic group, has been specially favored as a consolidating factor for national identity (Smith 1986, 2008, 2009). Again, we should carefully scrutinize each particular case and allow for the specific interplay between different factors. Looking at the differences between Chile and Argentina, Nicola Miller concludes that culture can ‘produce creative visions,

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implausible illusions or destructive delusions’ but one cannot predict the outcome, only attempt to explain it retrospectively (Miller 2001: 211–12). The obverse of pride is shame and humiliation. Sometimes military humiliation can be accompanied by shame or decrease in pride (Germany and Japan after the Second World War) or it can build up pride for unacknowledged merits and strengthen nationalism (Versailles for Germany after the First World War). In some cases, like contemporary China, historical humiliation consolidates identities and becomes a tool for political legitimation and national mobilization (Wang 2014). Neither pride nor humiliation, despite their centrality in the nationalistic discourse, can be considered exclusive attributes of strong or weak nationalism respectively. True, national pride may be correspondingly stronger with strong nationalism, but the important conclusion to derive from the above illustrations is that it is an omnipresent quality of any nationalism, including weak nationalism. Ronald Suny usefully distinguishes emotions as short-term ‘feelings that are motivational and have an object’ from long-term ‘moods that are not object related and lack clear goals’ (Suny 2011: 105). Pride and humiliation, in this pattern, are moods, not directly motivating action, but providing the habitus for emotions in strong and week nationalism, respectively. “Weak nationalism” is a syntagm that is part and parcel of the vocabulary of any but especially of strong nationalists. It is usually an accusation or lament for insufficient patriotic feeling, absence of readiness for self-sacrifice or even for banal material sacrifice. The absence or weakness of a strong national feeling deplored by writers, scholars, and politicians is a trivial lament: it is typical of any nationalism, at some time or other, in every corner of the earth. Weak nationalism in this sense is a burdened category of practice. As a category of practice, moreover, it carries a strong medicinal allusion. Weakness, in this framework, is a disease, and its symptoms are a departure from normal development. In trying to avoid the medical insinuation, I strictly shun the notion of symptom and prefer the notion of feature or sign, not because they do not have a specific medical meaning but are utilized more broadly in everyday speech. Brubaker has perceptively warned us that ‘we may have no good alternative to using analytical categories that are heavily loaded and deeply contested categories of practice; but as scholars we can and should adopt a critical and selfreflexive stance towards our categories’ (Brubaker 2013: 6). We should also distinguish between the intensity of the mobilizing message and its ability to mobilize. The message of any extreme nationalist (and they exist in all societies) is by definition extreme, but we should not take the temperature of a given nationalism by measuring only the fever of the nationalist

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message. The whole gamut of nationalisms, from strong to weak, is based primarily on structural vectors of long duration (cultural, social, economic, and institutional in all their different manifestations, combinations and complexity). The mode in which they operate—we can define it as the range between hot and cold (Ehala 2011)—is usually triggered by events with huge mobilizing power. We can speak of the hot mode of operation of a strong nationalism in the case of the United States after 11 September 2001 or of a strengthened Russian nationalism after 22 June 1941 but this will tell us nothing about its duration: in some instances it can be brief, in others long lasting. It is typically the strong nationalisms operating in a hot mode that have been described as extreme, exclusive or messianic. Weak nationalisms operating in a hot mode would be ones where the nationalist message lacks mobilizing power. It is easy to follow this exercise and identify at different times and different places strong or weak nationalisms operating in a cold mode. One can further nuance this, by distinguishing between the ability to mobilize and the ability to define objectives, something that will render strong and mobilizing nationalism respectively successful or unsuccessful. Yet, the point I have been stressing throughout and which bears reiteration is that none of these are permanent attributes of any given nationalism. This article has been arguing for the usefulness of the category weak nationalism, insofar as it introduces a missing and needed sensitivity to the different intensities of nationalism across time and space, as well as within the same space. It consistently refuses to create a model, and avoids the trap of creating yet another dichotomy—strong/weak or hot/cold—as the previous and still persisting ones like organic/civic, Eastern/Western, bad/good. Instead, by paying attention to the scales of intensity as well as to different operation modes, it strives to liberate the category nationalism from an overgeneralized as well as one-sided approach. It argues to extend the research focus beyond the fixation on extreme cases to so called weak or weaker manifestations of the same phenomenon that remain subordinate and underresearched, all the time stressing the contextual and negotiated character of nationalism. References Barenboim, D. 2001. ‘Germans, Jews, and Music,’ The New York Review of Books, 48, 5. Bar-Tal, D. and Staub, E. eds. 1997. Patriotism in the Lives of Individuals and Nations. Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers. Billig, M. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.

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Bjork, J. E. 2008. Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Boia, L. 2001. History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness, Budapest: Central European University Press. Breuilly, J. 1985. Nationalism and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, K. and Hamilakis, Y. 2003. The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories. Lanham: Lexington Books. Brubaker, R. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brubaker, R. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Brubaker, R. 2002. ‘Ethnicity without Groups.’ Archives Europénnes de Sociologie, European Journal of Sociology, Europäisches Archiv für Soziologie, XLIII, 2: 163–89. Brubaker, R. 2004. Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brubaker, R. 2013. ‘Categories of analysis and categories of practice: a note on the study of Muslims in European countries of immigration,’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36, 1: 1–8. Brubaker, R. and Cooper, F. 2000. ‘Beyond “identity”,’ Theory and Society 29: 1–47. Brubaker, R., Feischmidt, M., Fox, J., Grancea, L. 2006. National Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brubaker, R., Loveman, M. and Peter Stamatov, P. 2004. ‘Ethnicity as Cognition,’ Theory and Society 33: 31–64. Chatterjee, P. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, P. 2010. Empire and Nation: Selected Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Chernilo, D. 2007. A Social Theory of the Nation-State: The Political Forms of Modernity beyond Methodological Nationalism. London: Routledge. Clark, C. 2012. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. London: Allen Lane. Denitch, B. 1994. Ethnic Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dragostinova, Th. 2011. Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1949. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Duara, P. 1995. Rescuing History From the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eriksonas, L. 2003. ‘The National Hero: A Scottish Contribution,’ Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, XXX, 1–2: 83–101. Ehala, M. 2011. ‘Hot and cold ethnicities: modes of ethnolinguistic vitality,’ Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 32 (2): 187–200. Evans, M. D. R. 2002. ‘National Pride in the Developed World: Survey Data from 24 Nations,’ International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 14, 3: 303–38.

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Gellner, E. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Glassheim, E. 2005. Noble Nationalists. The Transformation of the Bohemian Aristocracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Goswami, M. 2002. ‘Rethinking the Modular Nation Form’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 44, 4. Goswami, M. 2004. Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gourgouris, S. 1996. Dream Nation. Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Graan, A. 2013. ‘Counterfeiting the Nation? Skopje 2014 and the Politics of Nation Branding in Macedonia,’ Cultural Anthropology 28, 1: 161–179. Greenfeld, L. 1992. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Guha, R. 2010. Small Voice of History: Collected Essays, Hyderabad: Permanent Black. Hitchins, K. 2003. The Identity of Romania. Bucharest: Encyclopaedic Publishing House. Hillin, C. 2010. The Creeping Nationalisation of the EU Enlargement Policy. Stockholm: SIEP. Hobsbawm, E. 1991. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hroch, M. 1985. Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ignatieff, M. 1993. Blood and Belonging. Journeys into the New Nationalism. London: BBC Books. Jaskułowki, K. 2010. ‘Western (civic) versus Eastern (ethnic) Nationalism. The Origins and Critique of the Dichotomy,’ Polish Sociological Review, 3 (171): 289–303. Judson, P. 2006. Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. King, C. 2010. Extreme Politics: Nationalism, Violence, and the End of Eastern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press. King, J. Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848– 1948. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kolstø, P. ed. 2014. Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe, Burlington: Ashgate. Kupchan, C. A. ed. 1995. Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kymlicka, W. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, W. 2001. Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, N. 2006. ‘The historiography of nationalism and national identity in Latin America,’ Nations and Nationalism 12 (2): 201–222.

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CHAPTER 10

Is “the Other” a Useful Cross-cultural Concept? Some Thoughts on Its Implementation to the Balkan Region This text goes in a different direction from the previous chapters, in trying to explore the adequateness, for the specific needs of Balkan studies, of a paradigm that had become extraordinarily fashionable in the past decades, namely the notion of alterity (otherness). While this is no longer the case, the literature on “otherness” is enormous and continues to grow. The piece was published in Internationale Schulbuchforschung 21, 1999, 163–171, and is reprinted here with the permission of the journal.

During the past two decades, the inventedness of cultures and traditions, particularly in relation to nationalist and ethnic politics, has become the focus of attention of scholars from the social sciences and the humanities. A whole genre has appeared under the rubrique “invented traditions.” It was a justified assault on the tendency to employ reifying conceptions of nation, ethnic group, culture, tradition, etc. As a result, “cultures and social groups—taken at any level of analysis (local, regional, national, transnational)—are now conceptualized in terms of ongoing processes of ‘construction’ and ‘negotiation’.” Unfortunately, reification has reentered through the back-door, and while notions like “nation” and “tradition” are duly deconstructed, they fall comfortably back into an essentialist mode by landing on newly accepted notions like “identity.” Reification, it seems, “pervades the rhetorical and conceptual apparatus of our scientific world view”.1 The notion of identity is, of course, crucial, since “alterity” is simply another aspect or way of speaking (and constructing) identity. Articulating any cultural identity (ethnic, sexual, professional, class etc.) inevitably silhouettes itself against a contrastive background of otherness, and this otherness is both created by, and provides the cognitive background to this articulation.

1  Richard Handler, “Is ‘identity’ a useful cross-cultural concept?,” in John Gillis, ed., Com­ memorations. The Politics of National Identity (Princeton University Press, 1994), 27.

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Alterity as an Academic Sub-field

The notion of otherness has become a fundamental category, not only of social experience, but also of social analysis: it is central for fields as diverse as psychology, philosophy, literary studies, women’s studies, race studies, anthropology, history. In fact, the main theme of the 16th International Congress of Historical Studies in Stuttgart, Germany in 1985 was “Image of the Other. Foreigners. Minorities. Marginals.” The question is whether this was sort of a Zeitgeist that coincidentally influenced all social fields, or whether it was a fashion bug that spread from one field to the other. There is no doubt that the last 15–20 years coincide with a profound period of flux accompanied with abrupt social and political transformations on the global scene: the beginning terminal crisis of the socialist system in the 1970s; the end of the cold war in the 1980s; the breakdown of one of the two super powers, the rearrangement of political space in Europe, the profound transformations in social structure accompanying the uncontrolled advent of the free market with all the concomitant challenges to accepted categories: self-determination of nations, territorial status quo, the disintegration of traditional frustrated collective identities and the rise of new ones, etc. Still, twenty years ago, the topic of “the other” was fresh, new, underworked, avant-garde, intellectually chic. Today it is relatively well explored, theoretically well underpinned, interdisciplinary and widely accepted; at the point when it has almost assumed the status of cliché, it is beginning to become controversial. Why has this occurred? First and foremost, it is the general epistemological shift to a constructivist understanding of social and cultural phenomena which has gradually replaced the structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s.2 It is not enough to invoke the underlying structures and analyze their characteristics and their relations. The awareness that we “invent” our discourse has made us attentive to how we construct our categories. We clearly choose to group together different phenomena under a heading, and while there are valid criteria for doing so, the category begins a quasi-autonomous life. It is reified in a way, and we subsequently analyze the constructed categories as if they correspond to reality. One of the most fundamental concepts with which we operate in the Balkan area is the dichotomy between Christianity and Islam. While scholars of both Christianity and Islam have offered sophisticated analyses of the internal divisions and diachronic developments of the two religions, to the point where in many cases it is difficult to distinguish between deviations of both, not to 2  Werner Schiffauer, “Die Angst vor der Differenz,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 1996, I, 20–31.

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speak of the cases of syncretism, the overall framework postulates the fundamental incompatibility between two civilizational models (a case of essentialist structuralism). But once we begin to deconstruct the tools of the discourse, the problems come into the open: how do we define civilization? what are the parameters of incompatibility, and what is so incompatible about the models if their boundaries are porous. Conversion has been usually interpreted, described, i.e. textually articulated, as the most drastic instance of “othering,” when the individual crosses the boundary between two incompatible worlds and is totally lost for one community. But even within a structural approach this same individual partakes in a myriad more social activities, and even if he/she is a member of a different entity from an axiological viewpoint, this individual can be part of the same group in a praxeological perspective (the example of Mehmed Sokollu or Sokolović comes to mind, but also of hundreds of craftsmen and merchants on the çarsi, etc.). All the more complex it becomes when taking into account changes over time when the attitude toward conversion may be transformed, or when the rigidity of the dichotomical entities is exploded. What does it mean to be a Muslim or a Christian in general, and specifically in a secular setting? How do we analyze recent census results about the Bulgarian population (1992) with 87 % Christians and 13 % Muslims, when 40 to 50 % (according to polls) are non-believers? Do we have the right to analyze them apart from an analysis of census policy, overall ethnic policy, definitions of categories, etc. Granted, the Christian today is defined not in terms of religiosity but of the traditional religion and way of life of his/her forefathers, but then this category of Christian (and of Muslim) is very different from the one used centuries earlier which makes the diachronic employment of categories problematic. Likewise, the theory of the continuity of the Greek ethnos from antiquity, which has been the centerpiece of Greek historiography (and, of course, that is the case with all other Balkan historiographies), flies in the face of new approaches to nation-making stressing constructedness. Again, this is not to say that what we have come to accept as “imagined communities” are invented out of the blue, but that we ought to be much more circumspect about what exactly the notion of continuity implies, and how certain aspects of it, taken uncritically, are responsible for validating such notions as racial or ethnic purity i.e., we have to deconstruct our epistemological tools first before we are sure we are not creating artifacts. In a word, we have become conscious of our responsibility for our explanatory models and how they are utilized. Secondly, there is a change in the legitimization of research on otherness. At the beginning, there was a strong strain of emancipatory enthusiasm, a belief that in describing “the other” and exposing power, that will relieve the

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subjugated groups from their status of underdogs. With the increasing realization of the polycentric and even diffuse character of power, added to the knowledge that difference is constructed, this belief has come to be naive. In West European and American works on alterity, the focus is beginning to shift, and from an exclusive preoccupation with marginalized groups, scholarly interest is turning also to the mainstream ones which hitherto were been invisible, because they were the standard against which “others” were constructed. This has not yet occurred in area studies of the Balkans, and not only in the scholarship coming out of the Balkans, but also in western scholarship on the Balkans. There is a preoccupation with marginal or marginalized ethnic or religious groups (Gypsies, Pomaks, Torbesh, Vlachs, Karakachans, etc. etc.) and with minorities. This is certainly warranted given the fact that they have been long neglected. Yet, it is more than clear that an exclusive focus tends to magnify difference; difference is constructed out of proportion. Interestingly enough, and this is to be explained with the specific political developments in several Balkan countries in the post-war era, realms of otherness which have reached a sophisticated level elsewhere, are practically untouched: such as gender as signifier of alterity. Others, like class, are the casualty of long years of dogmatic imposition. Thirdly, the philosophical basis of alterity as the discourse on the otherness of people poses problems. Most philosophers until recently have addressed the problem of alterity in a Hegelian framework. In Hegel’s thought, the Geist, the universal spirit gradually apprehends (Aufhebung, conquest) both itself and reality in the course of gaining insight into itself and the world. This results in a system of increasing expansion and incorporation, where all otherness is assimilated or at least harmonized in terms of an expanding identity. Contrast, plurality and difference, in the Hegelian framework, are moments in a movement towards reconciliation, unity and harmony. There is a dialectical relationship between “self” and “other,” in which the expanding self accommodates, domesticates, as it were, “the other.”3 There is a very apt illustration of the Hegelian treatment of otherness from the Balkan region, in visual not textual terms. In the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna, among the other trophies captured from the retreating Ottoman army after the unsuccessful siege of 1683, there is an Ottoman map of the city: it depicts the fortified walls and the main buildings with brief explanatory descriptions. The central place is occupied by the metropolitan 3   Raymond Corbey & Joep Leersen, “Studying Alterity: Backgrounds and Perspectives,” Raymond Corbey & Joep Leersen, eds., Alterity, Identity, Image. Selves and Others in Society and Scholarship (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi), 1991.

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cathedral—the Stephansdom—but … it is rendered in the shape of a mosque. This is not a dream map of the Ottoman high command, depicting the transformation of the main architectural sites after the capture of the city; it is a very utilitarian orientation map. It is possible to interpret it as an illustration of the fundamental oneness of human creation, of the essential insight that “the other” is not really other but that there is always something in common: after all, a church and a mosque are temples; “self” and “other” as belligerents are still human; adversity is present only if there is common ground for contestation, and this presupposes commonality, not only difference. Thus, one cannot but see oneself in “the other.” The Ottomans, then, appear as the ultimate Hegelians, showing the possibility of harmonization through unification. At the same time, one has to add in the face of such a triumphant and optimistic humanist approach, that what it tells us is also that even when depicting the strange, “the other,” we do it on our terms, with the known categories and methods of expression at our disposal. “The other” is apprehended, added to an expanding self, domesticated, as it were, but not on its own terms. It is not understood for what it is, therefore it is not understood at all; there is an unsurmountable cognitive block, even as there is a harmonizing tolerance at work. 2

Approaches to Alterity

One can distinguish between two types of discourse that deal with alterity. One is intellectual, i.e. how scholars from different disciplines, writers, journalists represent “the other.” It operates with a multiplicity of goals in view but the stated one is knowledge. The other one is instrumental: how education represents otherness in order to achieve a certain socialization of the population. There is general agreement that it is knowledge about one’s (national or ethnic) neighbor that can overcome the dire consequences of ignorant stereotypes, and lead to mutual understanding, and that education, especially history education, is the best means of achieving this. No doubt, one of the most important and, at the same time, most difficult problems to deal with in the Balkans is the profound mutual ignorance about each other coupled with passionate negative mutual stereotypes (on the level of nations, separate ethnic groups, state officials, intellectuals, business elites, etc.). There should be also no doubt that this is the greatest challenge, and should be the primary focus of efforts to transform the region. Not that regional cooperation in the Balkans is something entirely new; there has been an honorable, though largely unsuccessful in the long term, historical tradition, both in the nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries, attempting to counter the reverse powerful legacy

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of uncompromising rivalry and suspicious hostility. There have always been far-sighted intellectual, political and business leaders in the Balkans who have promoted mutual understanding and cooperation but they have not been allowed to reach a critical mass. Unfortunately for the region, the opposite kind of leaders has more often dictated the day, and has manipulated a population which has not been afflicted with the disease of “ancient hatreds,” despite the habitually offered diagnosis of western political/journalistic medicine. History—at the center of legitimizing and reproducing political and social relations in the Balkan region—has to be approached in a new way. The only way to overcome the predicament of the region that has been said to produce more history that it can consume, is to intimately know it. One should, however, put to rest the excessive hopes and expectations on negotiating difference, the attempt to approach an universal or, at least, widely accepted truth. There have been many noble and useful initiatives premised on this belief, among them foremost the great textbook project institutionalized in the “Georg Eckert Institute for the International Study of Textbooks” in Braunschweig, under the auspices of UNESCO. Its stated noble goal and practical efforts is the overcoming of intolerance and xenophobia, and permeating the socialized person with the values of democracy and human rights. This project is certainly inspiring much of the ongoing effort to improve the quality of history education and history texts in the Balkans. But let us also not forget that this initiative operates in the real world of the system of nation states where national education, while not necessarily opposed to the values of tolerance, has as its dominant goal the cultivation of national identity and national loyalty. Let me illustrate this with a brief quote from a project on the image of ‘the other’ in Balkan textbooks. The author says: “The analysis of history textbooks reveals how important a task we historians have. Efforts should be made to compile textbooks that would suggest the principles of democracy and tolerance of ‘the other’ to the children. This does not imply renunciation of one’s history or oblivion for personalities and events that have evolved into national symbols.”4 The insurmountable epistemological difficulty, if not outright logical fallacy, is easy to grasp. One’s history and national symbols have become what they are precisely because of the accompanying process of constructing “the other.” They are impossible to 4  Nadya Danova, “The Image of the ‘other’ in Bulgarian Textbooks during the National Revival,” Relations of Compatibility and Incompatibility between Christians and Muslims in Bulgaria (Sofia: “International Centre for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations” Foundation, 1994), 258 (Bulgarian edition, p. 238).

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salvage except in a system of thought where “the other” is assimilated into the expanding “self.” If, on the other hand, they themselves are deconstructed (which is the natural following step), that explodes all the project of national education and socialization, and it actually validates the fierce opposition of extreme (and, in the end, any nationalists) to such attempts. This is nor meant to belittle the enormous value of the textbook project. Even if many of the results it achieves after herculean efforts seem to be only cosmetic, it is still a gigantic improvement over the old xenophobic stereotypes. What should be clear, however, is that we are dealing here with two distinctive types of discourse that are following their own rules, and the cognitive goal is not central to the instrumentalist approach. By co-opting “the other” in a civilized manner, the textbook project nonetheless reproduces and even rigidifies otherness. After all, by definition, “the other” should not be necessarily denigrated; occasionally, it can and has been viewed with admiration and appreciation, although in practice the dominant tone is one of defensiveness. It is therefore imperative to shift the attention from the product to the producers of difference. Wonderful achievement as a negotiated or collaborative textbook may be as an end result, it lays the premise on the prescriptive principle. The real accomplishment would be to introduce subtle, gradual, but profound changes on the level of difference-producing elites. It is, thus, the dialogical principle, the movement, the process itself (and not necessarily the end result) that produces awareness of and practical respect for the other. To return to the intellectual approach, against the Hegelian dialectic of apprehension (conquest), a host of philosophers dealing with difference and division postulate the basic irreducibility of the “other” to the “self” (Bataille, Sartre, Lyotard, Lévinas, and above all Foucault). To them, instead of gradual inclusion, there is a forceful mechanism of exclusion and exorcism of what is constructed as “other,” and this process altogether constitutes an act of identity formation. Thus, for example, the historical “exclusion of unreason and madness is part of the self-definition of the rational humanistic ideal, which thereby suppresses and denies part of the human personality.”5 I view my own effort at exploring the discourse of othering the Balkans, which I have defined as “balkanism,” in this light, insofar as it is a by-product of the process of constructing the category and identity of Europe.

5  Corbey & Leersen, “Studying Alterity,” XII.

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Balkanism as the Rhetoric of Otherness

The unsatisfactory state of mutual relations in the Balkans is not occurring in a bubble. What has been aptly named the process of “nesting orientalisms” in the Balkans, the disgusting habit of portraying one’s neighbor as more “oriental” than oneself, floats in a medium of a broader attitude, one that I have called “balkanism.” The explicit humiliation produced by this discourse and felt most acutely by intellectuals, further aggravates the demoralized atmosphere in the region by giving weight to two opposing trends: on the one hand, a feeling of abdication and complete alienation from its problems; on the other hand, the further exacerbation of traditionalist isolationism and the cultivation of a persecution syndrome. One has to be extremely subtle and delicate for fear that the promotion of the idea of Southeast European cooperation under the slogan that the Balkans should finally take their fate into their own hands will not be seen as an attempt to impose orderly behavior in the ghetto. Paul Valéry had commented that historical identity is crucified between the delirium of grandeur and the delusion of persecution. When we stricture the Balkans for their delusion of persecution, let us not forget that their affliction is only one part of an inseparable European dyad. It exists next to but also because of the delirium of grandeur of Europe’s better half. What I defined as balkanism was formed only gradually in the course of approximately two centuries.6 The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the time of the discovery of the Balkans and their simultaneous invention, witnessed the emergence of distinct patterns of perceptions. They crystallized in a specific discourse (in the sense of Foucault) about the Balkans only around the time of the Balkan wars and World War I. In the next decades it gained some additional features but these accretions were mostly a matter of detail, not of essence. In its broad outlines it was handed down and continues to be handed down almost unalterable. I argued further that unlike Orientalism which is a discourse about an imputed opposition, Balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity. The in-betweenness of the Balkans, their transitionary character, could have made them simply an incomplete other; instead, they are constructed as an incomplete self. The reasons for this are two: religion and race. By being geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as “the other” within, the Balkans have been able to absorb conveniently a number of externalized political, ideological and cultural frustrations 6  The argument is developed in detail in Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 1997, 2nd edition, 2009).

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stemming from tensions and contradictions inherent to the regions and societies outside the Balkans. Balkanism became, in time, a convenient substitute for the emotional discharge that orientalism provided, exempting the West from charges of racism, colonialism, eurocentrism and Christian intolerance against Islam. After all, the Balkans are in Europe; they are white; they are predominantly Christian, and therefore the externalization of frustrations upon them can circumvent the usual racial or religious bias allegations. As in the case of the Orient, the Balkans have served as a repository of negative characteristics against which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the “European” and the “West” has been constructed. With the reemergence of East and orientalism as independent semantic values, the Balkans are left in Europe’s thrall, anti-civilization, alter ego, the dark side within. The whole exercise of analyzing images and representation is not merely academic. It has immediate relevance for practice because representations are instrumentalized in politics while, at the same time, being shaped by it.7 Besides, they have an averse effect on the targeted societies, since they are literally internalized and reproduced by the local elites. At the same time, and this brings me to the last reason for the change in focus in alterity studies over the last 20 years, there is the phenomenon of globalization, the emergence of a critical mass of cultural hybrids, of people who can read what is written about them, about the groups to which they belong, or about their societies. These people, as a rule intellectuals from the targeted societies, can respond to what is written or said, because they are able to participate in the dominant discourse, and by virtue of that they are in a position to influence and sometimes even transform the discourse. A new dialogical principle in the representation of the other is created which imposes also a new scholarly ethic. Nor is the rhetoric of otherness reproduced only with negative images. While, as a whole, the attention toward the Balkan region seems to have been motivated by the fear of contagion and the accompanying quarantine policies, as well as by the whole negative spectrum from devastating but at least passive derision to high-minded but activist punitive impulses, there have been also efforts to mark out the Southeast European (or Balkan) region as an object of genuine concern and compassion. But marking out is not an innocent act. Complex notions (like region, nation, race, gender, etc.) are socially constructed systems of marked and unmarked categories, to borrow some intricate terminology from linguistics. The complex notion of Europe comprises both marked categories such as Southeast Europe (the Balkans), East Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and unmarked categories, e.g. Northwest 7  Patrick Wolfe, “History and Imperialism,” American Historical Review, v. 102, N. 2, April, 1997.

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Europe, Southwest Europe, West Central Europe. What happens is that the marked categories become marked as different while the unmarked categories retain their power as the standard against which the rest have to position themselves. And it is the unmarked categories which actually dominate and are discretely at the center of the general notion. It has been demonstrated that the need to define as well as to define oneself is born from a sense of marginality. While there is no question that attention is better than neglect (except in the cases of extreme stigmatization), and that if the Balkans are not marked out, they will not be an unmarked but an inexistent category, one has to be careful lest an excessively marked attention not result in constructing Southeast Europe as fundamentally different and hopelessly marginal to the rest of Europe even in an overall benign discourse. 4

Is “The Other” a Useful Cross-cultural Concept?

Let us come back to the initial question posed in the title. Where do we (or should we) go from here? It appears that at this point, and the statement is being made not in general but for the Balkan region within the sub-field of alterity, we could effect a certain shift of perspective without refusing to acknowledge and to deal with ontological otherness. Where it would be fruitful to concentrate on is not simply on deconstructing the image(s) of “the other,” but on how (self)-identity is created. Identity formation is, after all, an inseparable aspect of “othering.” We should pay particular attention on how boundaries are defined. There is already a substantial and distinguished body of literature that has stressed the extraordinary salience of the study of boundaries for a more subtle understanding of identity, from Fredrik Barth to Prasenjit Duara with his important emphasis not only on the mobility of boundaries but with the introduction of a distinction between soft and hard boundaries.8 This will allow us to reflect in our representations of history more on the movement, the fluidity, the flux between what at one moment is “other,” and the next becomes “self,” and vice versa. That is what we need, at least for the moment. This turn, if it occurs, will inevitably engender its own epistemological problems. What is also needed is a diversifying of the research, reaching

8  Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Culture Differ­ ence (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969); Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (University Chicago Press, 1995). See also, Deborra Battaglia, ed., Rhetorics of SelfMaking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

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out from the exclusive realm of ethnic and national othering to other aspects such as politics, class, professions, gender. We may resign ourselves to the fact that otherness is a categorical fact of life; it will not go away whatever our efforts. We may also share the skepticism that “the other” cannot become known on its own terms. But the whole process of acquaintance, of an effort on the part of the subject to know the object, transforms the subject itself; thus what we actually have is a fundamentally explanatory, hermeneutic relationship. And while this view, as already said, is a negation of the Hegelian possibility of harmonization through unification, it nonetheless gives a dignified possibility: dealing with a relationship “on the basis of respect for the separateness between the Other and oneself, and a willingness to let the Other change one.”9 9  Raymond Corbey & Joep Leersen, “Studying Alterity,” XVIII.

CHAPTER 11

Isn’t Central Europe Dead?

Comments on Iver Neumann’s “Forgetting the Central Europe of the 1980s” This chapter elaborates on of my position on the Central European ideology and the alleged abyss between Central Europe and the Balkans that I had developed in chapter 6 of “Imagining the Balkans” (1997’2009) and in a number of smaller essays. In 1998, I participated at a conference in Prague on “Central Europe: Core or Periphery” as a respondent to Iver Neumann’s paper on the transformation of the Central European idea after 1989. While this piece thus organically belongs to a duet, it can stand on its own, because it summarizes the main points of Neumann and offers a different and independent analysis. It was published in Cristopher Lord, ed. Central Europe: Core or Periphery? Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2000, 219–231, reprinted here with the permission of the publisher.

It is a pleasure to agree with most of the preceding analysis of the notion of Central Europe. It is an even greater pleasure and challenge to disagree with some of the basic premises of this intelligent interpretation. One of these differences concerns the fundamental approach to the concept of Central Europe. Iver Neumann treats it very much as a nomen nudum, the taxonomical category (usually reserved for the worlds of botany and zoology) that has not been validated by full description and can therefore be utilized to label new species. Thus, the central thesis posits that Prague, Warsaw and Budapest have lost their Central European soul but the soul seems to be in search of a body, and is expected to be reincarnated in two hypostases: an aspiring new Central Europe shifted geographically to the east and encompassing the belt from the Baltics to the Balkans; and an established one, situated directly and “bequem”ly in the German Raum of Mitteleuropa. The first part of this statement is utterly convincing. The recent Central European discourse is, indeed, a phenomenon of the 1980s, but I would be more historically pedantic than Iver Neumann and would insist on precise dating. It is not that “after the Second World War, the term Central Europe was used by Hungarian and Polish intellectuals such as Czeslaw Milosz as a cultural term.” This usage and the ensuing discourse were exclusively confined to the 1980s. To be more precise, the Central Europe idea came into vogue in the early 1980s with the almost simultaneous publication of three works by well known authors representing the voices of the three countries claiming partnership

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in the idea—Poland, Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia: Jenö Szücs’s “The Three Historic Regions of Europe,” Czeslaw Milosz’s The Witness of Poetry, and Milan Kundera’s “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” In their articulation of the Central European idea, Kundera and Milosz defined the region in cultural terms, and Szücs stuck to a more historical approach, while all described it in opposition to Russia. Russia was becoming Central Europe’s constituting other. At this stage, however, membership in Central Europe was not circumscribed to the former Habsburg realm: it implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, subsumed all of non-Soviet Eastern Europe. In fact, the Central European idea of the 1980s was an emancipatory idea, “a metaphor of protest” in the words of Claudio Magris, which in itself was a sub-species of a genre dealing with “Europeanness” in general that has been represented in different periods and with different intensity in virtually all European countries. The main issues addressed were the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of Europe as a phenomenon and as a concept, and since much more was at stake in this discussion than merely intellectual prowess, it was conducted passionately.1 In the second round of the development of the Central European idea prior to 1989—the Eastern European annus mirabilis—its followers elaborated on different aspects of it, without moving out of the purported cultural parameters of the idea, and generally replicated the perspectives of the founding fathers. It has been suggested that Central Europe should be interpreted as a case of region-building, “which is itself a subgroup of what may be called identity politics, that is, the struggle to form the social field in the image of one particular political project.”2 Being undoubtedly a search for identity, “Traum oder Trauma,” the debate over Central Europe was hardly a region-building attempt, precisely because it never came up with a particular concrete political project for the region qua region, outside of the general urge for liberation from the Soviets. Why the 1980s? The rise of Solidarity and the imposition of martial law in Poland without a Soviet invasion was a clear signal that Moscow’s tactics had changed from the ecumenical worries about the unity of “the socialist camp” which had motivated the invasion of 1968 to a more differentiated approach. Moscow was ready to consider alternatives to direct interference, it was already openly treating its satellites differently, and this prompted attempts at piecemeal emancipation. Thus, while we have no difference in reading the rhetorics 1  For a detailed textual analysis of the three master narratives of Kundera, Milosz and Szücs, see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford University Press, 1997), 141–148. 2  Iver B. Neumann, “Russia as Central Europe’s Constituting Other,” East European Politics and Societies, vol. 7, N. 2, Spring 1993, 350.

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of the 1980s as a primarily emancipatory discourse, I maintain that there is a basic analogy but no continuity between the emancipatory ideas immediately following World War II until the 1970s, on the one hand, and the Central European idea of the 1980s, on the other hand. As I have attempted to show, until the 1980s the preferred term was Eastern Europe but even when East Central Europe was employed, it referred to all the small states of what once was considered the cordon sanitaire against bolshevism, and what after World War II became a quasi-independent cordon sanitaire against capitalism.3 To go farther back, the Central Europe of the 1980s was not a new term but it was an entirely new concept, fundamentally different from its nominal counterparts of the interwar period. Mitteleuropa, as most explicitly developed by Joseph Partsch and Friedrich Naumann, had always had Germany at its core. Even before the war, Partsch had conceived of a Mitteleuropa with Germany and Austria-Hungary as the nucleus, around which would be revolving Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. Greece and Turkey were excluded from his vision.4 Naumann, the most famous proponent of Mitteleuropa, foresaw an enormous political body from the North Sea to the Alps, and then down to the Adriatic and the Danube valley. In the first version of his plan he excluded Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece, but also Switzerland and the Netherlands; in his second version, only one year later, Bulgaria was deemed ripe to be included.5 While Mitteleuropa had been a German idea, the interwar Central Europe was an East European idea, and implicitly anti-German idea. The Central Europe of this era existed in different varieties and competing visions. Strední Evropa was essentially an expression of Czech political thought. For Thomas Masaryk it was a “peculiar zone of small nations extending from the North Cape to Cape Matapan” and including Laplanders, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Finns, Estonians, Letts, Lithuanians, Poles, Lusatians, Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Serbo-Croats and Slovenes, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Turks and Greeks, but no Germans or Austrians.6 In this period Poland was more 3  See, in particular, Oscar Halecki, The Limits and Divisions of European History (London and New York: Sheed & Ward, 1950); Oscar Halecki, The Millennium of Europe, Notre Dame (Notre dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963). 4  Joseph Partsch, Mitteleuropa (Gotha: J. Perthes, 1904). 5  Friedrich Naumann, Mitteleuropa (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1915); Bulgarien und Mitteleuropa (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1916). On Mitteleuropa, the most solid study remains Henry Cord Meyer, Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1815–1945 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955). 6  Quoted after T. G. Ash, “Does Central Europe Exist”, In Search of Central Europe, 196. On Masaryk’s relentless critique of Austro-Hungarian policy in the Balkans, and on his views on the South-Slav question in particular, see H. Gordon Skilling, “T. G. Masaryk, Arch-Critic of Austro-Hungarian Foreign Policy,” Cross Currents, No. 11, 1992, 213–233.

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concerned with Polish matters than with Central European political geography and the Hungarians clung to their “fanatic revisionism; at best they envisioned a Danubian Europe revolving around their own nation.”7 Eastern Europe in acta ceased to exist after 1990, but its demise inaugurated a third round in the development of the Central European idea of the 1980s— one in which it became a political reality. Now, one could begin exploring the Central European idea not only in thought but also in action. The post1989 world gave the Central European idea the chance to actualize itself as a region-building opportunity; but, despite the Višegrad fanfare and the series of summit meetings, concrete cooperation failed to materialize. As Kristian Gerner observed, “the liberation from Pax Sovietica 1989–1990 revealed that there did not exist any ‘Central Europe’.”8 The ideal of intellectual solidarity in the region all but disappeared. It is also remarkable how the transformation of the Central European concept from an emancipatory idea to a politically expedient tool was accompanied by a parallel transformation of the concept of Europe from a cultural definition identified with liberalism and democracy into “the international solidarity of capital against poverty.” Why do I insist so much on these seemingly insignificant distinctions between the different utilizations of Central Europe? After all, hasn’t Iver Neumann pointed out that Central Europe “has meant different things at different times, having as its reference points different human collectives, different spaces and different political practices,” and that therefore “there is every reason to believe that its referents may change again”? But it is precisely the universalizing nature of this statement that I object to. It is not simply “different things” at “different times”; it is, to be precise, three concrete things at two discreet times, the 1920s and the 1980s. Central Europe did not exist as a term before this century, and I would argue that the long-term quest for the heart or the Mittel of Europe is different from Mitteleuropa. Therefore, I do not see an urgent reason to believe that it will stay suspended in the air and wait for new referents to employ it. After all, as Iver Neumann himself convincingly shows, Central Europe as a notion is the function of an European configuration in which the space between Western Europe and Russia was seen as a stabilizing region within a system of balance-of-power. This is elaborated in more detail and properly 7  Henry Cord Meyer, “Mitteleuropa in German Political Geography”, Collected Works, vol. I (Irvine, CA: Charles Schlacks, Jr., 1986), 123–124. On the other hand, the Hungarian politician Elemér von Hantos was trying to promote closer ties between Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia, although he also considered Central European Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. 8  Quoted in Neumann, “Russia,” 364.

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historicized in the contribution of Miroslaw Hroch.9 He demonstrates that at the Congress of Vienna, in Metternich’s conception of the “concert of powers,” the political balance between the Western powers (France and Britain) and the Eastern power (Russia) was to be guaranteed by the intermediary space, coinciding in his particular vision with the Habsburg empire. According to Hroch, Central Europe was not only a macroregion but a “construct assigned with a mission in the general interest of all Europe.” He further shows that this system reached a crisis point with the unification of Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century when the area between two centers of political and economic expansion became itself an expanding center. Today, however, the political conjuncture is fundamentally different. First and foremost, the notion of balance-of-power is totally dissipated. Already in the post-World War II bipolar era, while the notion was still used, it had a completely different connotation: the precarious equilibrium between two opposing systems, two poles which did not tolerate an intermediate neutral arbitrating or balancing zone. In the last decade, while, formally, the primary units in the international power game are still the nation states, the real play is launched at the supranational level, with multinational or global military and financial organizations. The fear of Russia today is mere rhetorical inertia; the real one is fear for Russia, i.e. the danger from its further disintegration and the appearance of a multitude of unstable states and parastates.10 For the states of Eastern Europe, on the other hand, who are aspirants to join NATO, despite the rhetorical argument for security from future Russian expansion, the alliance is primarily seen as the only side door leading to the coveted courtyard of the European Union. It is worth recalling that immediately after 1989, Eastern European governments joined Germany in a call for a pan-European collective security system; there were also various Polish and Czech initiatives, all in the framework of the CSCE (now OSCE). As convincingly argued by Daniel Nelson, it was primarily the “NATO-first” position of the United States which severely limited CSCE’s structure, staff and budget, and forced the East Europeans “to back away from pan-European solutions, recognizing that the only path compatible with USA views was NATO.” This prompted a frantic activity among the East Europeans to look for “new bilateral and regional alliances and associational ties with 9  I was invited as a panel discussant and had the pleasure to comment on Prof. Hroch’s paper “‘Central Europe’: the Rise and Fall of a Historic Region” at the same conference “Central Europe: Core or Periphery” in Prague, 17–21 June 1998. 10  On the notion of the parastate, see P. H. Liotta, “Balkan Fragmentation and the Rise of the Parastate,” Mediterranean Quarterly, vol. 9, n. 3, Summer 1998, 61–81.

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every existing ‘Western’ institution, while simultaneously turning up the heat for NATO membership.”11 It is within this specific context of strongly competitive individual attempts at integration with the West that one can see the newly acquired anti-Balkan edge of the Central European rhetoric which was conspicuously absent in the pre-1991 period. The argumentation for Central Europe’s special status is based on two pillars: the affinity of the region to the European system of values, and the exploitation of the ominous threat of a possible takeover in Russia by imperialist, chauvinist, anti-democratic and anti-market forces. In this context, Central Europeanness became a device entitling its participants to a share of privileges. The Balkans were evoked for the first time as the constituting other to Central Europe alongside Russia. The reason for this was the annoying proclivity thus far to treat Eastern Europe as an inseparable entity. Scholars who wanted to trace structural changes in the newly emerging democracies of the former Warsaw pact, preferred to pursue their analyses in the framework of the whole of Eastern Europe. Scholars’ blunders may be annoying, but more painful was the early European Union’s decision to treat the emerging democracies in a package deal: as of 1 February 1995, the association agreements of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria (which joined the earlier admitted Poland and Hungary) with the European Union went into effect. This en groupe treatment annoyed the Czechs, and in an interview published in Der Spiegel on 13 February 1995, Havel said that for the Czech Republic admission to NATO was more urgent than joining the EU. If the West accepts that certain, particularly Central European, countries belong to the Russian sphere of influence and thus should not be allowed to join NATO, Europe is heading to a “new Yalta,” Havel warned. One would suppose that the logical alternative to this is that if these “particular Central European countries” were admitted to NATO, but the rest were relegated to the Russian sphere of influence, a “new Yalta” would be avoided. If the notion of a limes between the civilized west and “les nouveau barbares” is accepted as unavoidable, the question is where exactly the limes should run. For someone like Kapuscinski, there is no hesitation: “the limes normally drawn in Eastern Europe is the frontier between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet.”12 It is a rule that any social perception (of an out-group by an in-group) tends to construct differences along dichotomic lines. But it is only the degree of 11  Daniel N. Nelson, “America and Collective Security,” Medunarodni problemi, vol. XLVIII, N. 4 (Beograd, 1996), 459, 461–462. 12   The New York Review of Books, 17 November 1994.

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institutionalization of these perceptions, or their relative importance and strength for the collective whole which perpetuates them and makes them potentially explosive. The exclusivist rhetoric of NATO expansion and the practical politics following from it is a concrete step in the direction of institutionalizing perceptions. The July 1997 Madrid decision to expand NATO to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic made these countries viable candidates for second-class European status while firmly excluding the rest of Eastern Europe and relegating it to third and lower classes. This was enhanced, when in December 1997, the EU disclosed its Luxembourg decision to open accession talks with the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, and Cyprus, and, in an open snub to Turkey, which it did not include even on the waiting list, formulated a booby prize category for long-distance aspirants, comprising Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and Slovakia. It is symptomatic also that once NATO accession of the three was secured, the antiBalkan edge of their Central European rhetoric subsided, to remain shrill only in the overtures of Croatia which has not yet secured its place even on the waiting lists.13 On the Western side, while there are two philosophies behind the pro- and con-argument, based on different assessments of the balance of power and different final goals, it is symptomatic that they come from across ideological and political party lines.14 It is essentially a debate between Realpolitikers (concerned with the prospects of alienating Russia, about the costs of expansion, as well as the danger of institutionalizing exclusiveness) versus a brand of moralizers (arguing that NATO expansion is a small price to pay for the strong desire of countries for which the West was harboring feelings of guilt because 13  It is entirely absent, for example, from Havel’s latest emotional plea for “The Charms of NATO” on receiving the Fulbright Prize in October 1997. Instead, Havel, confines his sardonic incomprehension at “a certain large Euro-Asian state, which for some reason is afraid of the alliance.” (The New York Review of Books, January 15, 1998, 24). On EU membership, see Craig R. Whitney, “European Union Taps 5 for Talks on Membership,” The New York Times, December 14, 1997. 14  The best fora to follow the discussion have been The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and European Security. For a review of opinions, see Ronald Steel, “Instead of NATO,” The New York Review of Books, January 15, 1998, 21–24. See also the latest reactions by Igor Maslov, “Russia and NATO: A Critical Period,” Ivan Eland, “Enlargement or Largesse? NATO Expansion Will Be More Expensive than Clinton Admits,” and Ted Galen and Barbara Conry, “Time Bomb for an Expanded NATO: Hungary and Its Neighbors,” Mediterranean Quarterly, vol. 9, N. 1, Winter 1998, 1–53; Richard F. Staar, “Why NATO should expand,” Mediterranean Quarterly, vol. 9, N. 3, Summer 1998, 25–33; Senator D. P. Moynihan, “NATO Expansion and the Nuclear War,” ACE (Analysis of Current Events), vol. 10, N. 7–8, July 5–August 1998, 5–6.

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of 1938, 1956 and 1968, guilt feelings which were also deftly cultivated by the Central Europeans themselves). Skeptics would argue that the moralizers are actually Realpolitikers since, at least in the American case, “NATO is understood to be the sine qua non of American presence in Europe” and the most important lever for keeping Germany in check.15 In addition, a considerable part was played by the internal Polish vote, and, finally, expanding to only three countries is a fair price to fend off criticisms of exclusion and to still look good. Let me go back to this part of Iver Neumann’s statement that we agree upon: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic utilized the culturally expressed idea of Central Europe for political purposes: accession to NATO and the front seats in the line for the EU. As Iver Neumann aptly expresses it, it is “a selfrepresentation which has been recognized by Western Europe.” But the whole point about the Central European representation was to argue that it was an organic part of Western Europe (Europe) taken temporarily hostage by the East, by “a different civilization.” It is useful in this respect to recall that complex notions (like nation, race, gender, continent, etc.) are socially constructed systems of marked and unmarked categories. The complex notion of Europe comprises both marked categories and unmarked categories. “Eastern Europe” is a marked category. It is being taught at Western European and American universities as a subfield of European history. “Central European” or rather “East Central European,” and “Southeast European” history and literatures occasionally emerge as marked subcategories within this subfield. The rest of Europe is not represented by the categories “Northeast European” or “Southwest European,” not even by “Western European,” but simply by “European.” These are, then, unmarked categories. But marking out is not an innocent act. What happens is that the marked categories become marked as different while the unmarked categories retain their power as the standard against which the rest have to position themselves. And it is the unmarked categories which actually dominate and are discretely at the center of the general notion. It has been demonstrated that the need to define as well as to define oneself is born from a sense of marginality. While Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic made ultimate use of the marked category of “Central Europe,” i.e. in their case it became a “politically successful representation” in the words of Neumann, the whole pathos of the Central European idea at this time was aimed at dissolving itself as soon as possible into the unmarked category of (Western) Europe. So, the next question is whether (as Neumann wants us to believe) the strategy of this “politically successful representation” is going to be mimicked 15  Nelson, 463, 465, 469; Jane Perez, “Blunt reason for Enlarging NATO: Curbs on Germany,” The New York Times, December 7, 1997.

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by the outer belt from the Baltics to the Balkans, in an attempt to duplicate the success of the first tier. I dare doubt it. In at least one case, this certainly seems to be the case. In his latest performance on the same theme, President Tudjman reiterated recently his main stance about the Central Europeannes of his country. He is averse to any kind of participation in Southeastern European (or Balkan) region building, and he views Western counsels in this respect as treacherous. At the opening session of the Central Committee of his governing party (the HDZ) on December 7, 1998 in Zagreb, he firmly rejected unwarranted demands by unnamed centers abroad to encroach on “the sovereignty of the Croatian state” and warned other countries to mind their own business. He stated that he will allow no one to establish a Croatia serving “outside interests” and regarding itself as part of the Balkans, instead of a Central European country.16 Of the numerous states forming the outer belt (at least 15 of them),17 though, this is the only one to entirely conform to the stated expectation. Neither Estonia, nor Slovenia got into the first bandwagon because they utilized the rhetoric but because of their manageable size and good economic performance. Cyprus certainly didn’t because it couldn’t, but the point is that it needn’t. The Baltic countries are following a much more practical strategy to forge direct links with northern Europe. Slovakia had been downgraded from the Višegrad group, and the objections against it concerned its internal policy, but there had been no question that it did not belong to the “Western values” club.18 Extending a protective arm around the old centers of the Habsburg empire, the West, motivated in part by sentiment, followed neatly the new trench lines outlined by Huntington. According to Tony Judt, this will create “a sort of depressed Eurosuburb beyond which ‘Byzantine Europe’ would be made to fend for itself, too close to Russia and Russian interests for it to be prudent for 16   R FE/RL Newsline, vol. 2, N.235, Pt. II, 8 December 1998. 17   Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Bosna-Hercegovina, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Yugoslavia. 18  To the frustration of its critics, the Slovak economy was doing surprisingly well, and its past tradition of rabid Catholicism put it firmly in the camp of Western values. Its minority problem with the Hungarians has been handled relatively well, so Meciar’s heavy-handed rule seemed to be the only hurdle to acceptance by the West. Lately, moreover, even before the last elections which removed Meciar from power, there was a strong chorus of voices against the exclusion of Slovakia, led by Austria, and supported by Hungary and Poland. At the summit meeting in Levoca, Slovakia, Austria’s President Thomas Klestil announced that “We cannot imagine Europe without Slovakia,” and in Hungary’s President Arpad Goncz’s words “Slovakia has its place in Europe.” (RFE/RL Newsline, vol. 2, N. 18, Pt. II, 28 January 1998).

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the West to make an aggressive show of absorption and engagement.”19 Of the former non-Soviet members of the Warsaw pact, this left two Balkan states: Romania and Bulgaria.20 Even the exclusion of the Balkans was not consistently observed, however, because it employed a cultural argument which is always arbitrary. Romania, if not in practice, at least on paper got temporarily off the hook of its Balkanness. France argued strongly for Romanian admission on linguistic grounds. Even if one might argue that this was a tactical move on the part of France to clean its hands subsequently from responsibility toward the Višegrad troika, the significant issue is the employment of a completely irrational, not to say silly, argument for Romanian participation: its so called Latin heritage. In the aftermath of Madrid, Clinton found it expedient to assuage Romanian, but not Bulgarian disappointment. Meeting Clinton in Bucharest, Romania’s Prime Minister Victor Ciorbea assured him that “Historically and culturally, we believe we belong in the West” and the International Herald Tribune had the nerve to add that Romania had a “Latin heritage which contrasts with that of the neighboring Slavic countries.”21 This malapropism in the best case shows ignorance about Romania’s Orthodoxy or about the Slavic character of neighboring Poland, and in the worst case is a demonstration of unabashed oldfashioned ethnic racism. The most interesting part of the exchange was, however, the rhetoric employed by the Romanian leaders. Throughout, it was a direct link to the West, an organic partaking in the European experience, but not via Central Europe. To be sure, the Central European argument is also exploited in Romania but not nearly reminiscent of the exclusive and shrill notes of the Croatian discourse. Romanian politicians have been careful to actively participate in all Balkan initiatives while, at the same time, cultivating their Central European neighbors. 19  Tony Judt, A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe, quoted in New York Times, January 24, 1997, A2. 20  The former Soviet republics were not considered at this point, because their proximity to Russia makes the anti-Russian edge of NATO expansion too obvious, but at least rhetorically, the ground is being prepared for overtures to the Baltic republics, again based on their partaking in the “Western value system.” Criteria like minority treatment, especially in the case of Estonia, are not voiced, apparently because countries of the “Latin heritage” are judged by a different standard than countries of the “Greek” (“Asian,” “Byzantine,” “Oriental”?) heritage. For a summary, see Paul Goble “From the Unthinkable to the Inevitable,” RFE/RL Newsline, vol. 2, N.12, Pt. II, 20 January 1998, Alexander Shtromas, “To Expand Beyond Enlargement,” ACE (Analysis of Current Events), vol. 9, N. 12, December 1997, 5–9; for a strong reaction, Igor Maslov, “Russia and NATO: A Critical Period,” Mediterranean Quarterly, vol. 9, N. 1, Winter 1998, 1–15. 21   International Herald Tribune, No. 35, 571, July 12–13, 1997, p. 4.

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Bulgaria, on the other hand, has never resorted to the Central European argument, and I see no symptoms that it ever will. As I have argued elsewhere, Bulgaria is the only Balkan country which gives serious consideration to its balkanness (which is, ipso facto, exclusionary to a claim of Central Europeanness). There are geographical and historical reasons for this, among them the fact that the Balkan range lies entirely within Bulgarian territory, and that the mountain and the name have become a symbol for nationhood. Being Balkan is a Bulgarian predicament, from which Bulgarians not only cannot escape but have found a way to aestheticize. Yet, even while accepted, the Balkan identity is ambiguous and subordinated to the claim of Europeanness. This was clearly reflected in the attitudes toward NATO membership in the country. Despite the polarized political life after 1989, there was complete consensus from the start on the desire for integration into the European institutional framework. This was not the case with NATO, and not for the reasons which abound in the Western press: that Bulgaria is traditionally pro-Russian, or that it is congenitally undemocratic, illiberal, un-Western and so on, since it is on the wrong side of the Huntingtonian cultural border (Orthodox cum Slavic). While the promoters of NATO saw it as a back door to the EU (exactly as their counterparts in Central Europe did), the opponents pointed out several aspects, among them the following with direct bearing on Turkey, based on the United States’ global strategy in which Turkey figures as a main strategic partner, and Macedonia as the key to Balkan peace: “in the case of ethnic problems in Bulgaria, a NATO solution would be imposed, in line with the American position favoring Turkey and Macedonia.”22 There were two different and opposed visions of the direction Bulgaria should take in its search to fill the great power vacuum: one with more pronounced European, and particularly German leanings, which in the Balkans wants to promote especially good relations with Athens; the other with stronger American leanings, and a greater openness toward Turkey. Yet, at the height of the romantic love affair of Bulgaria with the United States, the former American ambassador to Bulgaria, William Montgomery, was asked during an officers’ course at the Bulgarian Defense Ministry what guarantees Bulgaria would receive in case of an eventual attack by a NATO country. The response was: “A peaceful policy will give no reason to a neighboring country to attack Bulgaria, but if that happens, Bulgaria can expect the sympathy of the whole world. There are no other guarantees.” For the record, the Bulgarians have no oil; instead they have Turks. The candid answer cannot fail to strike one as 22   Vînshnata politika na Bîlgariya sled 10.IX.1989 (Sofia: Natsionalen institut za mezhdunarodni izsledvaniya, Fondatsiya “Friedrich Ebert,” 1997), 127.

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very different from the rhetoric of emotional concern for the sovereignty of the Central European states were they to be threatened by the as yet non-existent Russian danger. Today, the Bulgarians have joined the supplicants for NATO accession, and have been granted second wave status.23 The remarkable thing about the longwinded accompanying rhetoric is that it never once employed the Central European motif. Instead, the aspiration to join NATO was fashioned as “our civilizational choice.” President Peter Stoyanov, during his visit to Washington in February 1998 told reporters at the National Press Club that this was not just to go along with the “fashionable infatuation of Eastern [sic! not Central: M.T.] Europe lately of ‘let us go and join NATO’. For us, it is a strongly motivated choice, a cultural choice, a choice of civilization and a strong wish to return to where we belonged 45 years ago and from where we were cut off by force.” Everything in this rhetoric is in place: the cultural argument, the motif of violence or rape, the “return” to the fold. Yet, not even a mention of Central Europe. The plunge is direct: “We share the Atlantic values and we are determined to participate in their development and defense.”24 “Civilizational choice” has become a byword with mantra-like qualities, and the president, with matchless perseverance and invincible faith in the power of words, keeps on repeating it at every possible occasion.25 The developments at the latest EU summit meeting at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna (December 1998) seem to bear out this skepticism about the effectiveness of the Central European strategy. No firm dates for entry were set; most likely dates will have to be postponed until the union has transformed its own finances. The year 2000 which had been circulated by some members of the first group as a possible beginning of the accession process will be postponed, most likely to 2005 but very possibly even later. This pushes the secondwave countries to at least a decade further down the road. As commentators 23  Parliament had adopted a declaration on Bulgaria’s desire to join NATO in 1993, but this was blocked by the socialist government which came to power in 1994. On February 1998, a declaration was issued by the President, Parliament and government of Bulgaria asking for full membership. 24  Robert Lyle, “Bulgaria: President Presses for NATO Membership,” Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, 12 February 1998. 25  Robert D. Kaplan, “Hoods Against Democrats,” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1998, 36. In an interview with Kaplan, Stoyanov resorted to his latest supplication: “Now we badly need encouragement from the West, for we have made a civilizational choice to be part of NATO.” Bulgaria’s application to NATO is already referred to euphemistically and ironically in the Bulgarian press as “the so called civilizational choice of our country” (Karmelita Deneva, “Petîr Stoyanov na otchayan shturm za NATO,” 168 chasa, 4–10 December 1998, 10).

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have put it, “Brussels may well have calculated that enlargement later, rather than sooner, is the least painful course to follow.”26 The cultural rhetoric notwithstanding, in the end economic calculations are setting the practical developments.27 And while the final historical verdict may still be that the Central European strategy was a “politically successful representation” with qualified achievements for three particular countries in the decade after the end of the Cold war, it seems to me that the present diagnosis is valid: Central Europe is dead. 26  Christopher Walker, “EU Enlargement: ‘Hurry Up and Wait’,” RFE/RL Newsline, vol. 2, n. 238, Pt. II, 11 December 1998; Craig Whitney, “European Union Delays Decisions on Ex-Communist Countries,” The New York Times, 13 December 1998, 11. 27  The Bulgarian press (the case I know in detail) is remarkably level-headed about this. With the exception of the unfortunate presidential phrase about the “civilizational choice,” which is handled with a chuckle as a diplomatic ploy, there are serious and realistic analyses about the significant and increasing economic differences between the countries of Central Europe and the rest of Eastern Europe, the Balkans in particular. The chances for Bulgaria’s accession are measured exclusively in economic and, to a much lesser extent, geopolitical, terms. See kiril Kirilov, “Novata zhelyazna zavesa minava iztochno ot Praga” and Borislav Dermendzhiev, “Ponyatieto Iztochna Evropa zagubi ikonomicheskoto si znachenie,” Kapital, 5–11 December 1998, 31–34.

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What Is or Is There a Balkan Culture, and Do or Should the Balkans Have a Regional Identity? This chapter was delivered as a keynote speech to the First Conference of the Balkan Political Club, held in Istanbul in 2002. The Balkan Political Club was inaugurated in 2001 in Sofia as a meeting ground for former presidents, prime ministers, ministers, MP’s, entrepreneurs and intellectuals from the Balkans with the objective “to serve for the establishment of peace and cooperation in the Balkans.” The speech was subsequently published in the Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, vol. 4, No. 1, January 2004, 175–185. Reproduced here with the permission of the publisher.

I feel very privileged to have been asked to speak to such an illustrious group about culture. This is perhaps because I am not quite used to the idea that politicians would come together and devote a whole conference to issues of culture. This may be just a prejudice: we all know that politicians and intellectuals are in a complex love-hate relationship. Politicians prefer that intellectuals be confined at best to academia, at worst behind bars. Intellectuals are actually worse: they prefer politicians not to exist at all. And if, rarely, intellectuals do become politicians, they are either soon kicked out or really become politicians. But I feel even doubly privileged. Among the forty-one honorable members of the Balkan Political Club that I counted, there are only two women. I will not make the predictable and hasty conclusion about Old Boys Clubs and exclusively male professions. I assume this is out of chivalry and honesty: after all, the burden of Balkan political culture, which up to now has suffered (often justly) a very bad name, should not be shouldered by women. At least women have not performed it. I do, therefore, appreciate this tact, and I am delighted to participate in this first session on cultural heritage and regional identity. I have titled my talk “What is or is there a Balkan culture, and do or should the Balkans have a regional identity?” I guess I could set a record for the briefest keynote speech by giving a straightforward answer to all questions: and it is “NO” in all cases. Yet this is not why I have been asked to speak, and I will oblige and make the argument. I also would like to challenge the categories we use and reproduce, and I feel very lucky to be able to speak first, because then

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we could have a fruitful discussion. And I would like to share where, according to my modest opinion, the role of politicians would be indispensable. I am essentially arguing four propositions: 1. There is no single Balkan culture but there are many Balkan cultures, and they are not confined merely to the national. 2. The same is true for Balkan identities. 3. Not only are a single Balkan culture and a single Balkan identity historically non-existent; positing their desirability is not only utopian but rather dubious and suspicious, given the concrete and averse immediate political implications that this can have. 4. Politicians have a crucial and responsible role to play not simply in the effort to improve the culture of the political class and society at large (i.e. the political culture), but in contributing to elevate the culture of every single member of each Balkan society, because, in the end, culture is not a collective entity, but a notably individual process. So, let me begin with this famously nebulous term “culture.” There are endless tomes devoted to contending definitions. This is itself no reason to purge the notion and, moreover, it cannot be purged: it is firmly embedded in the human vocabulary despite its ambiguousness. It also is a central category of political discourse, which makes it, I guess, impregnable. The Commission of the European Communities, for example, defines itself in terms of culture: “The uniqueness of European culture, which emerges from the history of the diversity of regional and national cultures, constitutes the basic prerequisite for European union.” Not a word about such prosaic measurements as GDP, foreign debt, average salary, unemployment, minorities etc. basic prerequisites for European accession. Academics, on the other hand, are divided and quite ambivalent over the notion. In anthropology departments there are even courses offered arguing against the employment of the category. I hope you will bear with me for a moment, since I would like to give you a brief survey of the over 2000-year old history of culture. I cannot help it—I teach history, after all—but I promise it will be brief, and there are conclusions to be made. When it was first used in Latin, culture meant tending to something, protecting it, cultivating it. It was used primarily for crops and animals but, what is important, in all its early uses it was a notion delineating a process: the tending, assisting of natural growth, development. And in this sense the category persisted over many centuries. We are making now a really drastic plunge forward because it was only from the 16th century on that the notion was extended, by metaphor, to humanity. Thus, one began speaking of “the culture and profit of the mind.” But culture as an independent noun, signifying an abstract process began to be used only with the 18th century and it became common only in

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the 19th. It is, in fact, a category of modernity, a period I believe we are still inhabiting, despite the loud fanfares announcing the advent of postmodernity. And, most importantly, it was used then as a synonym for civilization, equally denoting the process of human development or the historical self-development of humanity. It is with the Romantic movement, and principally with Herder, that a juxtaposition between the two categories occurred. Herder introduced a decided innovation when he refused to speak of one universal and unilinear culture (understandably European at the time) but insisted on the specificity and variability of cultures (in the plural) around the globe and in different historical periods, but also between different social and economic groups within the nation. And this spiritual term he opposed to the dominant and mechanical process of linear material development, captured by civilization. This, while clearly not a generally accepted vision, became quite widespread and influential. To simplify a very long and complex development, we are facing today two broad usages. One describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, of which the concrete practices of intellectuals, and especially artistic activity are the most important subcategory. These, in their institutionalized form, are overseen and sometimes helped by Ministries of Culture. (I wonder why I didn’t spot one single minister of culture as a member of the club). The second describes a particular way of life, nowadays the most common usage in anthropology and among academics in the social sciences and humanities. There is one detail here which is significant: whereas anthropology and archaeology use culture to refer mostly to material production, in history and cultural studies the category is applied usually to signifying or symbolic systems, although material and symbolic production is intertwined. I myself use culture in everyday speech in its classical meaning of education and high-brow culture. In writing, I pedantically stick to the very broad use of culture as a way of life, and particularly the Geertzian definition of culture as the webs of significance which man has spun himself and in which he has suspended himself. Culture should not be bounded to physical location and territory; instead it is fluid and flexible, and is part of a complex grid where class, gender, race, age, sexuality, etc. come in. Indeed, what is the common “culture” of a fisherman from Trabzon and a nurse in Cluj? Or what, if anything, makes it more common than the common culture of a nurse in Bremen, Breslau and Breznik (especially when the latter is easily hired in Britain)? And an opera diva from Sofia, Athens or Tirana will be more culturally at home with her counterpart from Covent Garden or La Scala, than with her own pop music compatriots. But it is not only on a horizontal level that one can expose the absurdity of

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homogeneous all-encompassing cultures. The same is true for vertical, chronological depth. Except in national discourse which flattens historical time and makes the heroes of antiquity or the medieval knight our contemporaries and role models, we have less in common with our forefathers than with our neighbors. If I care about Pericles, it is because I have been socialized and happen to have embraced the values of nineteenth- and twentieth-century democracy, as they come principally from radical left-wing sources now summarily dismissed with a frightening legerdemain by the new neo-conservative (or neo-liberal) gurus, and not because one of my grandmothers (the Greek one) was telling me that I should never forget I was a daughter of Pericles, and ancient Greek culture flowed in my veins. There are many cultures in the Balkans, and they are not following merely national and ethnic lines. They are professional, generational, gendered; some are reaching deep back in historical time, others are short-lived (after all, it takes only two generations to make something “traditional”). And most of them are not confined to the region but envelop it in numerous different macroregions, some of them consecutive in time, others overlapping. The imprint of the cultural legacy of the Roman Empire included the whole of Southeastern Europe in a space stretching from the British Isles to the Caspian Sea and Mesopotamia (but excluding most of Northern and much of Central Europe). The cliché goes that the area of Western Christianity (both in its Catholic and Protestant hypostasis) is the true and only heir of Roman traditions, esp. of its legal system. Yet, you can hear the same claim (and to me far more convin­ cingly) that the imperium lived on through Byzantium, and as some distinguished historians have argued, also through the Ottomans. Likewise, communism as a way of life (and therefore culture, totally devoid of the evaluative component) involved part of the Balkans as part of Eastern Europe in a space stretching through the Eurasian landmass to Central Asia (and including even China in some counts); and as an alternative vision it involved it in a much broader space, covering much of Europe, the Americas, especially Latin America, and different sites in Africa and Asia. But the important thing to stress yet again is that there is not one single culture. The beauty of the Balkans is precisely in its excessive richness of manifold cultures. And I purposely insist on this very subjective word beauty: someone whose aesthetic tastes prefer simplicity obviously will not appreciate Balkan complexity. It is hard for a minimalist to depict the Balkans. We need a broad and spirited baroque brush. I think I have made the point about the multiplicity and variety of Balkan cultures, not of one Balkan culture, following empirical evidence and logic. But I want to make the argument also from a different angle, one of utility. The whole thoroughly deplorable exercise in stereotyping, marginalizing and

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ghettoizing the Balkans, which occasionally erupts and was so ubiquitous in the past decade, has been based precisely on a mechanical, structural and unitary understanding of culture. The dynamic vision of culture, of which I spoke, has regrettably not spilled over outside academe. Least so has it affected political discourse where the boundedness of culture and cultural differences has gained new prominence in the context of European integration, and globalization in general. In fact, culture has emerged as “the key semantic terrain” in political discussions. The contemporary cultural fundamentalism is based on two conflated but unproven and unprovable assumptions: that cultures are incommensurable, and that they are naturally hostile, because humans are supposed to be inherently ethnocentric. One of its few differences from racism is that instead of ordering cultures hierarchically, it segregates them spatially. It is also a very structural concept of culture, one that is fundamentally hostile to what I have tried to outline as its most important characteristic: dynamics, fluidity, changeability, internal diversity. The idea of structurally definable or characterizable cultures is at the center of the (in)famous Huntingtonian civilizational theory. The clash is between civilizations (used as a synonym to cultures) because these are understood as having a set of characteristics that pitch them against each other, and these characteristics (if one has gone through the intellectual genealogy of Huntington’s thought) are based on Toynbean and Spenglerian classifications, arguing essentially about an organicist hereditary model of culture that produces clearly definable entities. Huntington’s theory was, tellingly, totally dismissed from any serious academic discussions but has secured a prominent, if controversial, life in politics. If you allow me to play with the etymology of the verb develop (which comes from dis-velop as opposed to en-velop), what we in the Balkans should be striving for is to develop, i.e. cultivate all our different cultures, and disvelop ourselves from the way we have been enveloped in a cultural straightjacket and the fog of prejudice. How do we achieve this? Some have argued that the proper strategy is to create a regional Balkan identity. Others think it exists anyway, and the task is simply to refine it. In any case, the notion of a Balkan identity has become lately a cornerstone and panacea in both academic and political fora. In the past decade memory and its manipulation have been posited to be one of the central aspects of Balkan identity and consequently of Balkan conflicts. In a less analytical vein, one of the popular and ongoing, if cheap, stereotypes about the Balkans conceives of it as a region cursed with too much history per square mile, with an excess of historical memory and, as a result, with unmasterable ancient hatreds, and a proliferation of intractable and incompatible ethnic and

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religious identities. The notion of “historical memory” has been conventionally and widely used both in academic circles as well as in popularizing educated discourse in an essentialist fashion, as one of the “objective” attributes of the ethnic group and the nation, alongside language, territory, state, economy and social structure, as well as culture. It has been traditionally treated as the repository of ideas about common origins and the past, creating a deep feeling of group solidarity, i.e. of identity. The usual object of study is the memory constructed by politicians and intellectuals, while the memory in the private spheres of family, workplace, neighborhood, friends may be very different, and this poses not only the problem of studying popular memories but also the important and difficult issue of reception. Let me use as an illustration a largely untapped source for scholarly use, the otherwise well known and celebrated East European political anecdote. In the late 1980s, at the height of the so-called “revival process,” the euphemistic label for the forceful change of names of the Muslim population in Bulgaria, a joke was circulating, telling the story of two policemen on the main route that Turkish Gastarbeiters would take to reach Germany: the ViennaBelgrade-Sofia-Istanbul road. The policemen stop a Turkish car for exceeding the speed limit, and one of them beats up the driver. “Why are you doing that?” the other one asks, “He’ll pay his fine; just let him go.” “But weren’t we under their yoke for 500 years?” “Sure, we were, but didn’t you know that?” “No, I just learned it,” responds the first policeman. The idea of the joke is much subtler than the message about the constructedness and manipulability of memory and of identity. Of course, everyone knows about the 500 years of “Turkish yoke.” Even when it is translated into the neutral “Ottoman rule,” it still is the inevitable cornerstone of the historical and literary education of the modern independent state both in Bulgaria and elsewhere in the Balkans. The question to be posed is: when is this knowledge informed with an emotive component which makes it inflammable? It is naive to think that this happens when crafty and nasty politicians decide to manipulate the “innocent” and “simple-minded,” i.e. implicitly, stupid people. After all, the message of the horror of the yoke has always been there, and in any society there always exists an extreme interpretation as well as an extreme call for action. The real question is not that memory and identity can be manipulated (of course they can), but why does the person hear the message at a particular moment, so that s/he can then say that s/he learned what s/he has always known, and moreover insist that this is part of a collective memory and a collective identity. Can we really speak of a collective Balkan mentality and, thus, of Balkan memory and of Balkan identity? “Balkan mentality” has been one of the most

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abused mythologemes in journalistic and, generally, in popular discourse. It is supposed to hint at an analytical explanation of events in the Balkans when real analyses seem to be too difficult or time consuming, or not worth embarking on. The tradition was started in the interwar period when, after two centuries of gestation, the distinct patterns of perceptions that characterized attitudes toward the Balkans finally crystallized in a specific discourse about the region after the Balkan wars and World War I. In the next decades this discourse that I have called balkanism gained additional features, but its main characteristics were already in place, and in its broad outlines it continues to be handed down, acquiring a dominant explanatory status whenever the Balkans come into the news. In this period “Balkan mentality” entered even many scholarly studies as an operative term. This was part of the dubious academic vogue over national psychology or what the Germans called Volkscharakterologie. Even after the demise of this pseudo-scientific discipline, most research on “Balkan mentality” continued to be done on ethnic lines. There have been even attempts to postulate the linguistic basis of a specific “Balkan mentality” and the existence of a homo balcaninus. In a thoughtful analysis of the methodological dimensions of the problem, Paschalis Kitromilides concluded that all anthropological and social psychological arguments in favor of the existence of a shared Balkan ‘mentality’ turn into sociological metaphysics unless they convincingly demonstrate what is specifically Balkan about it. Despite this unequivocal rejection of the category, it continues to be used in attempts to define the characteristics of the Balkan region, especially when juxstaposed to the broader entity Europe. Recently, it was utilized in a model of the Balkan region as a historical space to describe what was believed to be a particularly Balkan propensity for myths. These myths, according to the model, include the “golden” pre-Ottoman period, the myth of the “Turkish yoke,” the myth of the pure and organic nation, the myth of national rebirth, the Kosovo-myth, the haiduk-myth and the victimization myths. In a word, this model posits the existence of a Balkan identity characterized by a myth-producing propensity. However, I would submit that it is very difficult to distinguish these myths structurally from the “golden” myth of antiquity, the myth of the Dark Ages, the myth (and practice) of the Nüremberg laws of the 1930s and ius sanguinis, the myth of Rome (as in Italian national ideology, with the myth of the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, and the Papacy), the myth of the battle of Poitiers (both the one in the eighth, and the one in the fourteenth centuries), the myth of the Walküren, and the myth of a fortress besieged by enemies (both as in the Masada as well as in the German military doctrine in World War I). While the model acknowledges that many of these characteristics are not specific only to the Balkans, it posits that

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what makes up the Balkan specificity is the cluster of these characteristics that unmistakably defines it. However, positing a diachronically stable evolution which produces a cluster of characteristics leads to a static analysis that pays no attention to the fact that these myths, while existing and undergoing a continuous transmission through education or other cultural and political channels, are inflamed and get operative only at certain periods. In recent years, this was the case in Yugoslavia, a country disintegrating and caught up in a civil war. Characteristics of the extraordinary Yugoslav situation were externalized and, in a totally unwarranted fashion, were rhetorically sold to the political class and to the broad public as Balkan. “Balkan mentality” and “Balkan memory” are chimeric and fruitless notions. There are varieties of individual and group memories in the Balkans, but no single “Balkan memory.” There are, likewise, instances of collective mentality, and at times one can speak of national mentality. At specific time periods and in specific social groups (like the Orthodox clergy in the 18th century) one can find even something like a Balkan-wide mentality, but these should be carefully contextualized and historicized. This is equally true of the putative Balkan identity. In the past couple of centuries, the largest group that has managed to command a kind of collective identity has been the nation. Supranational identities (like, for example, the European one) are still a social experiment, at best a work-in-progress. National identities in the Balkans, like elsewhere, have been defined and have operated in opposition to each other. There has never been, however, a common Balkan identity. At best, there has been the occasionally romantic, occasionally reluctant recognition of cultural similarities accumulated over the centuries which, at times, assume the form of a defensive common response to an ascriptive identity from the outside. After all, the Balkans is a more unified concept in the mind of outside observers. One may very carefully speak of the existence of tentative Balkan identities (in the plural) as part of the multiple identifications of the separate Balkan national identities. As I have tried to show, even dealing with the name Balkan has been a problematic issue in identity politics in the region. It has varied from complete rejection of the name as self-identification (as in most cases) to an ambivalent and even positive usage only in the case of the Bulgarians, and for specific geographic and historical reasons. As a whole, whenever a Balkan identity is discussed in the Balkans, it usually has had to do with different ways to cope with stigma but also with self-stigmatization. On the other hand, the attempts to hypostatize a Balkan identity have historically been noble but utopian political exercises, like the movement toward a Balkan federation, doomed from the outset both by internal opposition but, more significantly,

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by outside forces. It is therefore imperative, when assessing the unprecedented present-day rhetoric, especially in the aftermath of the NATO bombing over Yugoslavia, calling on constructing a positive Southeast European identity, to look carefully into the political motivations behind these calls, as well as the political and cultural costs of the project. After all, identity politics is as much a form of social control and political mobilization as any other kind of politics. I am not preaching against a regional Balkan identity. All I am saying is that up until now it has not really existed except in alternative projects, and certainly not in political practice. On the other hand, regional identities, as the word presupposes, are necessarily juxtaposed to each other, even if not in a hostile relationship. So, what would be the relationship of a putative Balkan identity as a project to another putative European identity, widely accepted and desired in the Balkans as a more distant project? And what does it mean when the Balkan accession is made conditional on the creation of a Balkan identity, or at least this is posited as a desirable goal? Did we have similar conditions for the creation of Mediterranean, or Iberian, or Scandinavian, or Baltic identities? What I question is the uncritical belief that this could be a panacea, and what I call on is a more critical attitude toward the recipe. Where do I see what I have already characterized as the indispensable and central role of politicians? Not, in what you would expect, namely in creating and promoting a new political culture, although this is, of course, very desirable. But I believe that it is impossible to sever political culture from the general process of societal cultivation. Let me be more concrete and give an example with what has been lately happening in Eastern Europe. I hope I am not unduly caricaturing but my impression is that most of the support channeled in the past decades toward NGOs in Eastern Europe was meant to teach and promote the culture of democracy; and to teach and promote the culture of tolerance toward minorities in regions where this culture was considered to be lacking, minimal or inorganic. Within the last rubric, a real cottage industry developed, namely that of textbook writing, specifically history textbooks. This was premised on the idea that a new cultural paradigm disbursed through textbooks would socialize the new generation in new values. I actually don’t object to the fact that a lot of funds were allocated to textbook writing: it gave an honorable means of support to a number of underpaid academics; it also created a number of useful intellectual networks. But I think it was premised on a wrong intellectual assumption: it doesn’t need much theoretical savvy to know that even the best textbook in the hands of a bad, not to speak of a hungry, teacher is helpless, as well as the reverse: a good teacher can produce miracles even without a textbook, let alone with a bad one which can serve as a wonderful example for what not to do. It is a

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public secret (and in a country like Bulgaria which I know best, a public scandal) that the educational system has all but collapsed. Teachers are not simply severely underpaid; they virtually cannot survive; and I am not even speaking of the retired ones where one can really speak of gerontocide. Last summer I witnessed an occasion where an old schoolteacher was rummaging through the garbage, and several others where former students are collecting alms, as it were, to help out their former teachers. And I am not even addressing issues of dignity. I am talking plain hunger. On the other hand, and this I heard quite often, were conspiracy theories of the sort: “They, i.e. the West, want to reduce us to a stage where we can only count and distinguish signs so that we wouldn’t be in the way of the Nordic race, or the Germans, or the Scandinavians.” This is, of course, the mirror image of the same cultural fundamentalism which has been applied to the East but in reverse. And I believe I am not overdramatizing or overgeneralizing. Basically, where I want to lead this is to call for more investment in the basic human capital of the region not only through occasional and directed infusions in NGO’s and research projects, or through concerted efforts at rapprochement at the highest political and intellectual levels. All of this is very good, but we need serious infusions in the basic educational infrastructure. In this sense it would be building upon a tradition of education, which was also very strong under communism (an element of the legacy even its greatest critics find difficult to ignore). I don’t want to be misunderstood. This should in no way dissipate the very useful support that has been flowing in, at the academic, artistic and journalistic level, and which does create wonderful networks of excellence that stimulate intellectual and cultural exchange. But it should go further and deeper at the bottom of what constitutes the present crisis in education in the region. In my own wishful thinking I dream of the time when a minister of education or of culture would carry more political clout than a minister of interior, or war, or even a foreign minister (and if that were the case, they might be even deemed worthy of becoming members of the club). To reiterate, I am not arguing either against culture or against identity. What I am arguing against is the reduction of such complex, voluminous and capacious notions, which accommodate very different, often contradictory elements, to territorially bound, unidimensional and simple, not to say simplistic projects. I would also like to emphasize that both of these notions— culture and identity—despite the great pronouncements of their collective and even totalizing character, are in the end an individual endeavor. Culture is acquired and resides within the individual, not with groups or territories. Here I would quote a distinguished linguist and anthropologist, Edward Sapir: “In spite of the oft asserted impersonality of culture, a humble truth remains that

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vast reaches of culture, far from being ‘carried’ by a community or group … are discoverable only as the peculiar property of certain individuals, who cannot but give these cultural goods the impress of their own personality.”1 That being so, allow me to conclude on a simple note of appeal. A single Balkan culture, in my reading, may not exist, and a unified Balkan identity may not necessarily be the most felicitous project, but politicians in particular should be doing everything in their power to help and raise the culture (in the most conventional sense of the word) and an identity of self-respect of the individuals who inhabit the large space of what is conditionally designated as the Balkans.

1  Edward Sapir, “The Emergence of the Concept of Personality in a Study of Cultures,” Journal of Social Psychology 5 (1934), 412, cited in Victor Turner, “Social Dramas and Stories about Them,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1980), 144.

part 2 Structures, Processes and Events

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Section 1 Demography and Social Structure

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European Population History: the Balkans As part of a major multivolume collective endeavor to write a comparative population history of Europe, this chapter aims at a synthesis of the population trends characterizing the Balkan area during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It deals with the character of the existing statistical and other source material, and surveys the tendencies in population growth, birth rates, mortality, marriage patterns, and migrations, as well as the changes affecting family structure. The chapter was published as Chapitre XV: Les Balkans, in Jean-Pierre Bardet et Jacques Dupâquier, eds. Histoire des populations de l’Europe, tome II. La révolution démographique 1750–1914. Paris: Fayard, 1998, 463–486. This text, in an English translation, appears here for the first time.

1 Introduction To some extent this chapter belongs to the first volume of this series. Although chronologically it fits as part of a general overview of the history of the European population during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from a demographic standpoint the bulk of this period still represents the demographic ancien régime in the Balkans. Indeed, as a whole, the beginning of the demographic transition in the Balkans fell on the turn and the first decades of the twentieth century, thus relegating the nineteenth century and particularly its last decades to the status of the eve of the demographic transition. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are of particular importance for the southeast European region. They have been rightly labelled the centuries of Balkan national revival and national revolutions after the prolonged, nearly five centuries Ottoman domination. The nineteenth was also the century of the establishment of the Balkan national states, otherwise referred to by exasperated Western politicians as the “Balkanization” of the Ottoman Empire: Serbia in 1830 as an autonomous principality, recognized as independent in 1878; Montenegro as an independent state in 1878; the independent kingdom of Greece in 1830; the unification of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859, and Romanian independence by 1878; Bulgarian autonomy in 1878, and independence in 1908; the creation of the Albanian state in 1913. During the nineteenth century the territory of the Balkan states was in continuous flux, and it can be safely maintained that the present configuration of the frontiers was more

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or less established only in the aftermath of the First World War (map of the Balkans and Table 1). At the same time the accompanying or underlying social changes such as urbanization, industrialization, intensified social differentiation, bureaucratization after the creation of the independent nation states, and growth of literacy saw their modest beginnings during the nineteenth century, but were in full swing only during the next century. The very intensive and turbulent political development of the Balkans during the two centuries under review has at least two implications for the study of the population in this European region. The first concerns the great ethnic complexity, and consequently the complexities of nation formation. This process can be considered as completed in general

map 1

Map of the Balkans

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European Population History: the Balkans table 1

The territory of the Balkan states (in km2)

Before 1878

After 1878

Before 1912

After 1918

Albania Ottoman BosniaAustriaHercegovina Hungary

Ottoman AustriaHungary

28,748 51,199

Bulgaria Croatia

63,978 AustriaHungary 63,606 (1881)

Ottoman AustriaHungary 51,028 (1895) 96,346 (1885) AustriaHungary 63,211 (1897)

127,000 (1923)

Ottoman Ottoman 8,655 (1878) 130,177

Ottoman Ottoman 11,315 (1883) 130,177

Serbia Serbia 13,461 295,049

AustriaHungary 220,765

AustriaHungary 175,391

24,011

Ottoman

Ottoman

Ottoman AustriaHungary Greece 47,516 (1830) 50,211 (1864) Kosovo Ottoman Macedonia Ottoman Montenegro 4,405 (1859) Romania 130,177 (1859) Serbia 37,500 (1833) Slovenia AustriaHungary Turkey in 304,392 Europe Voijvodina Ottoman Yugoslavia

103,146

Serbia 247,542

Sources: Berxholi and Quiriazi, Albania; Annuaire statistique du Royaume de Bulgarie, 1940; Statistical Yearbook of Greece, 1971; Kolodny, La population des Ties de la Grece; Anuarul statistic al Romaniei, 1939/40; Annuaire statistique du Royaume de Serbie, 1907/08; Istoriya Yugoslavii; Jackson, “Comparing the Balkan Demographic Experience.”

lines by the end of the nineteenth century although for some Balkan regions it continued throughout the twentieth. It left an indelible mark on contemporary population surveys, and the subsequent demographic literature, which were often evoked for the legitimation of national policies, and displayed an obsession with what can be termed as ethno-demography. The second affects the character and quality of the sources on population history, to be discussed in the next section. In the following survey the use of the general term Balkan population for the different southeast European peoples is meant not to consciously overlook

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their ethnic distinctions but rather to lay the main stress on the common features which distinguish the population of this historic subregion of Europe, with well-defined geographical, historical, economic, social and cultural characteristics. On the other hand, if the Balkans are broadly defined as the European subregion which was formerly under the domination or suzerainty of the Ottoman empire, then some territories and populations should not be included stricto senso in this overview, for example Slovenia, the Ionian islands, and partly Croatia and Transylvania. For purposes of clarity, however, the criterion accepted here are today’s boundaries, i.e. the territories and peoples in the confines of contemporary Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and the former Yugoslavia. 2

The Sources

As a whole, the Balkans entered their modern “statistical” period only in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first independent Balkan state Greece had its first population count in 1828. There were yearly counts from 1838 to 1845, 1848, 1853, 1856. However, the first complete census in the real sense of the word was held in 1861, followed by five censuses before the First World War: 1870, 1879, 1889, 1896 and 1907. Census-taking was resumed in 1920. The registration of vital events started in 1860, and continued with some interruptions until 1890, to be resumed only in 1921. This registration, however, is regarded as substantially incomplete. Serbia held thirteen censuses in the nineteenth century beginning in 1834 (1840, 1843, 1846, 1850, 1854, 1859, 1863, 1866, 1874, 1884, 1890, and 1895). Only the last two are considered to be really contemporary censuses; taken at five-year intervals, before the Balkan wars three more were completed (1900, 1905, and 1910). The next census covering the territory of the future Yugoslavia was taken in 1921. Vital statistics began in 1862, and ran uninterrupted until the wars. The first Bulgarian census was of 1881, covering only the territory of the autonomous principality. It was followed by a rather incomplete count of Eastern Rumelia in 1884. The four censuses taken before the wars (1893, 1900, 1905 and 1910) are considered to be the most precise and complete in the Balkans in this period. The same can be said for the registration of vital events which continued even throughout the war period until the next general census of 1921. A contemporary census system was set up in Romania which produced two censuses before the wars (1899 and 1912). The next general census of Greater Romania was taken only in 1930. There were, however, regular fiscal counts of the population which permit population estimates as far back as the 1840s,

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and vital statistics, which first appeared in 1859, were held until 1915, and then resumed in 1919. Statistics are considered incomplete at least until 1878. Finally, Albania produced its first national census in 1930. For the pre-nation state period in the Balkans it is obvious that one has to rely chiefly on the data from the Ottoman population records, whose raison d’être were fiscal and military considerations, and which were never performed as population censuses per se. The first known general population count was taken in 1831, and subsequent population changes were recorded, to be presented in generalized census reports in 1835, 1838, 1844, and 1857. After the Crimean war interest in the census was revived as a basis for the modernization pf the empire. A partial census, but of good quality, was taken for the Danube province in 1866. As the principal aim of these records was conscription and taxation, the registration of males formed the basis of all Ottoman censuses until 1881/82, when women were included for the first time. In fact, the 1881/82 census completed in 1893 is the most comprehensive and complete count within Ottoman territories, with varying quality for different provinces of the empire, the Balkans representing the most reliable figures. It was followed by a census in 1905/06 and, finally, by the last Ottoman census in 1914, which was an updated version of the 1906 survey. For all their drawbacks and proven incompleteness, the Ottoman population records are the most important comprehensive quantitative source for population estimates for the “prestatistical” period. One has also to add the census data taken by the Austrian (and AustroHungarian) administration in Croatia, Slovenia, Transylvania, and the other southeast European regions under the domination of the Habsburg Empire. There is a series of censuses taken in Croatia/Slavonia and in Slovenia beginning in 1785 (and followed by counts in 1805, 1850, 1857, 1869, 1880, 1890, 1900, 1910) which makes them the best documented from a demographic point of view over a prolonged period of time. Population counts administered by temporary occupiers of different Balkan regions (Venetian, Russian, and French) in different periods of the eighteenth and nineteenth century are also of importance. There are some population statistics undertaken by the local ecclesiastical authorities. The practice of keeping parish registers was never introduced as an obligatory rule by the Greek Orthodox Church, which comprised the majority of the Balkan population. Although registering baptisms, marriages and burials for accounting purposes, the Orthodox Church did that on a sporadic basis and, consequently, has not left a heritage of methodically maintained and complete registers on par with the parish registers of the Catholic and Protestant churches. Hence, the techniques applied to the analysis of parish

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registers in Western Europe are possible only in microstudies within limited areas, especially of the Catholic communities. Aside from the parish registers, church authorities and leaders of local communities collected data on the population under their respective jurisdiction. This information has to be approached with particular criticism, as the patriotic bias of these ecclesiastical and lay community leaders is often apparent. Finally, given the dearth of statistical information, consular reports and travelers’ accounts are an additional and, sometimes, unique source. 3

Population Growth

Table 2 presents census data on the Balkan population for the period 1830– 1920. Although the figures are not adjusted to the present borders, they give a general idea of the growth of the Balkan population throughout a nearly century-long period. The population of the Balkans (as defined from the outset) can be estimated to have numbered approximately 22 million people by the 1840s. Overlooking the territorial changes and the massive population shifts, as well as the huge war losses (estimated at about two million for the Balkan wars and the First World War), the Balkan population seems to have almost doubled over an eighty-year period. (Figure 1) Accordingly, the population density in the course of a century rose intensively, in some less-populated regions like Serbia as much as four times. Throughout the Ottoman period the Balkans seem to have been one of the thinly populated regions of Europe. If by the mid-eighteenth century countries like Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium had a population density of over 46 persons per km2, while Great Britain, Spain and Central Europe fell in a group of 16–45 persons per km2, the whole of southeastern Europe had a population of less than 15 persons per km2. (The figure for the whole continent is 16.6 for 1780). Even during the first half of the nineteenth century the average density of the Ottoman Balkans was 13.4 persons per km2. The population density of Serbia rose from 18.1 in 1834 to 37.5 in 1880, and to 55.7 in 1905; that of Greece from 15.9 in 1828 to 33.5 in 1879, and to 41.6 in 1907. Moldavia had a density of 14.3 in 1803, 36.1 in 1859, and 48.4 in 1899. For the whole Romania (Wallachia and Moldavia) the figures rose from 27.4 in 1844 to 45.4 in 1899. Bulgaria’s population density increased from 31.4 in 1880 to 45.0 in 1910, that of Bosnia and Hercegovina from 22.6 in 1880 to 37.2 in 1910. The most densely populated regions were Croatia (44.1 in 1880 and 60.6 in 1921) and Transylvania (40.4 in 1860 and 51.5 in 1910). The least populated areas were and

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Population in the Balkans at censuses (in thousands) 1830

Albania Bulgaria Greece 753 Romania Transylvania Serbia only 678 Serbia, Kosovo, Voijvodina Montenegro Croatia & Slavonia Slovenia 940 BosniaHercegovina Turkey in Europe* TOTAL

1840

1850

1860

1870

1880

1890

1895

2 008 3 154 3 311 915 1 036 1 097 1 458 1 679 2 187 3 578 3 865 4 289 4 545 5 316 5 643 4 174 4 019 830 957 1 078 1 216 2 312 3 323

1900

1905

3 744 4 036 2 434 5 957 4 889 2 494 2 689

1910

1 003 4 338 4 847 2 632 5 017 7 957 18 057 5 296 2 912 11 985 5 148

196 2 181 2 550 2 661 3 301

370 3 340

3 652

1 025 1 077 1 085 1 129 1 182 1 234 1 000 1 123 1 158 1 360 1 568

1 268 1 898

1 321 1 898

10 500

1920

4 986 5 301

1 541 42 450

* These figures include the population of Istanbul; the first figure does not cover autonomous Serbia (close to 1 million), as well as Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania (together about 7 million). Figures before 1899 are estimates. Sources: Mitchell, B. R., European Historical Statistics, 29–34; Karpat, Kemal, Ottoman Population, 1930–1914, 116, 190; Korencic, Mirko, Naselja i stanovnistvo SR Hrvatske, p. XX; Gelo, Jakov, Demografske promenje u Hrvatskoj, 244–245; Vasile, Radu, “L’évolution démographique en Roumanie”, Revue roumaine d’histoire, XIX, 2–3, 336; Adam, Iosif, “La structure de la population de la Transylvanie”, 99; The Population of Yugoslavia, 11; Istorija Jugoslavije, 289.

persisted to be Montenegro (15.0 in 1880 and 22.5 in 1921), and Macedonia (20.5 in 1880 and 31.4 in 1921). Incomplete as the information before the turn of the century was, it is still possible to follow up the evolution of the growth rates between 1840 and 1910 (Table 3). As a whole, southeastern Europe experienced high to very high growth rates although there were interregional variations, and one can discern areas of higher and lower population growth. Of the regions with a high growth rate in the first period, Serbia and Bosnia-Hercegovina (with the exception of the politically turbulent 1870s) sustained it throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, while in Greece, reaching a peak in the second period, it slowly began to decrease at the turn of the century. In Romania,

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table 3

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Population growth of selected Balkan and other European countries, 1880–1920 Growth rates, 1840–1910 (per thousand)

1841–1860 Bulgaria Greece Romania Transylvania Serbia Croatia Dalmatia Slovenia Bosnia-Hercegovina

1861–1880

10.1 5.2

21.5 7.5

12.7 0.9 2.5

16.7 6.5 5.9 1.8 –0.3

10.6

1881–1900

1901–1910

13.1 13.5 13.6 8.7 17.1 12.6 11.1 3.1 17.8

14.8 7.7 15.1 7 15.6 8.2 3.5 12.4

Source: Adapted from Jackson, Marvin, “Comparing the Balkan Demographic Experience,” 228

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several sub-periods are discernible: a phase of depression before 1875, followed by a gradual rise of the growth rates after 1875, and a phase of “explosion” in 1880–1885. Thereafter, lower but still significantly high rates were preserved. Bulgaria’s relatively high growth rates were sustained from the 1880s until the wars, while the Croatian (and Dalmatian) ones began to fall after 1900. Slovenia consistently maintained its low population growth throughout the nineteenth century, representing the only exception in southeastern Europe, alongside Transylvania and Macedonia for whom figures only for the period after 1880 are available. To a great extent the highest growth fell on the last two decades of the nineteenth century. This process is especially striking when contrasted to the population growth in other European countries during the same period. Table 4 presents the population growth of selected Balkan and other European countries for the period 1880–1920. Most of the Balkan countries had growth rates above or about the European average. On the other hand, the low Slovenian growth rate approximates rather that of France. The explanation for these growth rates lies in the analysis of the vital statistics as well as in the emigration data, to be discussed in later paragraphs. 4

Population Structure

Until 1914 all Balkan territories without exception displayed an age structure characteristic for the progressive population type, with a broad base of the age pyramid typical for pre-transitional populations with high birth and death rates. This is an assumption easy to accept for the whole eighteenth and nineteenth centuries although the relevant information (except the Croatian one from the 1780s) comes only from the last quarter of the nineteenth century (Table 5). There was, however, a clear but slow trend, more pronounced in the northwestern corner of the peninsula, towards the stationary population type, attained at different degrees only in the decades following the Second World War. Another phenomenon, concerning the gender structure and typical in different degrees for all Balkan countries, was the numerical preponderance of males over females. Results from the Ottoman census for Northern Bulgaria in 1865 showed a gender ratio of over 104. The gender ratio from the 1888 Bulgarian census amounted to over 103, and the 1990 and 1910 censuses had again ratios of 104. In fact, until the late 1940s Bulgarian censuses (with the exception of 1920, following the world war) showed a male predominance, although clearly there was a steady narrowing of the male majority.

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table 4 Population growth 1880–1920 (estimated population in thousands in present country borders)

Bulgaria growth index Romania growth index Serbia growth index Croatia growth index Slovenia growth index Bosnia-Hercegovina growth index Montenegro growth index Germany growth index England and Wales growth index France growth index Italy growth index Ireland growth index Europe growth index

1880

1890

1900

1910

3 155 100 8 600 100 1 980 100 2 506 100 1 182 100 1 158 100 207 100 45 093 100 25 974 100 39 239 100 28 460 100 5 157 100 345 000 100

3 762 119 10 000 116 2 380 120 2 855 114 1 234 104

4 315 137 11 168 130 2 740 138 3 162 126 1 268 107

49 239 109 29 003 112 39910 102 30 395 107

56 046 124 32 528 125 40 000 102 32 475 114

4 980 158 12 898 150 3 151 159 3 461 138 1 321 112 1 898 164 344 166 64 568 143 36 070 139 40 800 104 34 671 122 4 400 85 498 000 144

423 000 123

1920 5 038 160 12 419 144 2 843 144 3 443 137 1 288 109 1 890 163 311 150 62 411 138 37 887 146 39 000 99 37 974 133

487 000 141

Sources: Naoumov, La population de la Bulgarie, 8; Trebici, Romania’s Population, 27; Gelo, Demografske promenje, 244–246; The Population of Yugoslavia, II; Mitchell, European Historical Statistics

Another phenomenon, concerning the gender structure and typical in different degrees for all Balkan countries, was the numerical preponderance of males over females. Results from the Ottoman census for Northern Bulgaria in 1865 showed a gender ratio of over 104. The gender ratio from the 1888 Bulgarian

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European Population History: the Balkans table 5

1780 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920

Age structure of the Balkan populations as part of total population

Bulgaria

Greece

Romania

Croatia

0–14 15–49 50 +

0–14 15–49 50 +

0–14 15–49 50 +

0–14 15–49 50 +

431 420 414 402 397 362

436 462 430 445 453 484

133 118 156 153 150 154

463 381 405 393

427 502 394 500

110 117 101 107

383 343

491 492

126 165

401 373 343

482 480 522

117 147 135

390 349

510 546

100 105

420 414 402 397 362

462 430 445 453 484

125 154 158 163 171

Bulgaria: figures for 1872, 1881, 1888, 1900, 1910, 1920; 1872 are partial data from Ottoman registers for Northeastern Bulgaria; from 1881 to 1910 the first age group is 0–15. Greece: figures for 1861, 1870, 1879, 1889, 1907, 1920. Romania: figures for 1899, 1912, 1930. Croatia: figures for 1780, 1857, 1880, 1890, 1900, 1910, 1920. Sources: Mitchell European Historical Statistics, 41–57; Gelo, Demografske promenje u Hrvatskoj, 200–213; Draganova, Materiali za Dunavskiya vilaet, 329–439

census amounted to over 103, and the 1990 and 1910 censuses had again ratios of 104. In fact, until the late 1940s Bulgarian censuses (with the exception of 1920, following the world war) showed a male predominance, although clearly there was a steady narrowing of the male majority. Greek censuses until 1907 demonstrated gender ratios between 104 and 114, after which they fell to under 100. Romania, too, had gender ratios of just over 103 in 1899, and over 102 for 1912, the last census with a male majority before 1930. The Serbian gender ratio amounted to 106 in 1866 and to 105.5 in 1890. Croatia, on the other hand, had a very slight male preponderance throughout the nineteenth century (100.5 for 1857, 100.7 for 1880, 100.4 for 1890), to begin steadily falling after 1900. A partial enumeration of Southern Albania in 1900 shows a gender ratio of 104, confirmed by the subsequent censuses after 1930. Different factors have been pointed out as accounting for this gender ratio in the nineteenth century, the most widespread being the underenumeration of women. While this can be easily proven in some cases, as for example Greece, it often tends to outright dismiss the phenomenon as a simple artefact. However, the persistence of the higher gender ratio for some areas well into the twentieth century when the otherwise justified skepticism about statistics

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would not apply, as well as the critical evaluation of some statistical data of remarkable quality from the pre-census period clearly requires alternative or additional explanations: the higher mortality of women (both maternal and neonatal female mortality), due to the lack or little medical care, and comparative neglect of women’s health; a demographic regime of high fertility and high mortality, with a consequent preponderance of the younger age groups, where the population does not attain the advanced ages at which women have a biological superiority; the comparatively limited emigration, which did not sever considerable strata from the male population; conversely, in cases of immigration, males forming the majority of the immigrants. Finally, a few words on the urban/rural structure of the Balkan population. The nineteenth century witnessed a slow urbanization process which did not drastically change the urban/rural ratio and the overall agricultural physiognomy of the peninsula. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the urban population of the Balkans as a whole was less than 10 %. By the end of the century it had risen for different areas to between 15 and 20 %. Although comprehensive demographic data on the urban and rural milieu existed separately, with few exceptions, only after the turn of the twentieth century, the differential demographic behavior of the urban and rural populations can be safely assumed, a relatively stable urban demographic regime crystallizing only after the beginning of the twentieth century. 5 Fertility As already stated, although partial vital statistics existed for some Balkan territories throughout the nineteenth century, they are generally considered unreliable for the period before the 1880s, and often until the wars. Reported birth rates in Greece fluctuated at levels lower than 30 per thousand in the second half of the nineteenth century but, taking into account the underregistration of vital events, they are estimated at about 40 per thousand until the end of the century. (Table 6) Aggregate Bulgarian birth rates began to fall after the First World War, and specifically after 1925. However, urban birth rates, separately registered after 1900, were already around 30 per thousand, suggesting that the fertility transition in the urban setting had set in some 2 to 3 decades earlier. The Romanian case followed, more or less, the same pattern. In the Yugoslav territories one can observe a great variability. Birth rates began to fall in Serbia and Vojvodina as well as in Croatia in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The secular

42,1 38,6 33,1

36,8 36 37,6 41 40,7

30,5

33,6

39,8

41,8 40,9 41 40,2 39,4 40,3 42,1 34,5 35,2

45,7 43,2 42,4 39,2 38 38,5 25,1

45 43,7 41,7 39,9 39,9 39,4 43,2

45 45 45 43 43 43 43,1

45 45 45 43 43 43 37,3

45 45 45 43 43 43 44,3

45 45 45 44 44 44

32,6

42,9 42,9 41,9 40,7 39,3 39,6

27,8

34 31,3

35,1 35,1 34,8 34,8

Bulgaria Greece Romania Serbia Voijvodina Kosovo Macedonia Montenegro BosniaCroatia Slovenia only Hercegovina

Crude birth rates (per 1000 inhabitants)

The Greek figures are estimates for 1870, 1907 and 1928; the 43.0,44.0 and 45.0 per thousand figures for some of the Yugoslav territories are estimates based on the situation after the First World War. Sources: Donkov, “Osnovni cherti”, 37; Kolodny, La population des Ties de la Grece, 613; Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, I 18–126; The Population of Yugoslavia, 14.

1780 1881–1885 1886–1890 1891–1895 1896–1900 1901–1905 1906–1910 1911–1915 1926–1930

table 6

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decline of Montenegrin fertility had most probably begun after the First World War, while Bosnian and Macedonian rates stayed very high until the mid-1930s, and the ones in Kosovo until the 1960s. The only Balkan territories whose fertility can be followed up throughout nearly the whole nineteenth century, and estimated even from the 1780s on, are Croatia and Slovenia. In the course of well over a century, from 1780 to 1914, Croatian birth rates preserved their high level (an average of 42.5 per thousand without drastic fluctuations) with rather strong interregional variations: from areas with comparatively low but stable birth rates like Dalmatia (an average of 34 per thousand), to areas like the Military Frontier with high rates (an average of 47 per thousand) and occasional peaks (of 53 and 54 per thousand in the early 1840s and late 1850s). While Dalmatia preserved its birth rates well until the wars, in the rest of Croatia they began slowly to decline after the 1890, falling under the 40 per thousand margin after the turn of the century. The Slovenian figures preserved a stable low level like Dalmatia (of 34 per thousand) from 1800 until 1910. Local studies based on parish registers from Croatia/Slavonia reveal an even greater intervillage variability suggesting the practice of conscious fertility control for some periods and some areas as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century, as a response to deteriorating economic conditions and a specific inheritance system. Sources permitting, microstudies of the above type are yet to be undertaken for the other Balkan regions. At present, generalizations are possible only at the aggregate level, and they lead to the conclusion that, as a whole, fertility in the Balkan region remained unlimited until the beginning of the twentieth century. 6 Mortality Trends in mortality are as difficult to follow before the 1880s as in fertility. Again, only the northwestern part of the peninsula, under the domination of the Habsburgs, has an adequate documentary basis for the whole of the nineteenth century. Between 1780 and 1880 the overall death rate in Croatia was over 37 per thousand with strong interregional variations, Dalmatia having the lowest (an average of 25 per thousand), and the Military Border the highest (an average of 42.7 per thousand) death rates. The level of death rates for Greece in the second half of the nineteenth century is estimated to have fluctuated at about 25 per thousand. Table 7 presents the crude death rates for different

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European Population History: the Balkans table 7

Crude mortality rates (per 1000 inhabitants)

Bulgaria Greece Romania Serbia Montenegro Croatia- Dalmatia Slovenia Slavonia 1871–1875 1876–1880 1881–1885 1886–1890 1891–1895 1896–1900 1901–1905 1906–1910 1911–1915 1926–1930

24,4 17,1 19 27,8 23,9 22,5 23,8 23,3 17,9

20,3 17

33,3 30,3 28,5 28,9 31,2 28,1 25,6 25,9 24,5 20,8

32,9 35,6 24,5 25,9 28,9 24,8 22,5 24,5 18

29 27,9 25,2 18,9

47,5 36,1 31,4 20,4 33,7 29,7 27,4 26,1 25,2 21,1

27,4 31 23,9 26,9 25,1 25,6 26,4 22,7 22 22,4

27 26 23,5 17,6

Bulgarian figures until 1890 are incomplete. The Greek figures for 1870, 1907 and 1928 are estimates. The Serbian figure for 1926–1930 is for all of Yugoslavia for 1931–1935. All Montenegrin figures are estimates. Sources: Donkov, “Osnovni cherti na demografskiya prekhod v BTIgaria”, 33; Kolodny, La population des Ties de la Grece, 613; Radovic, Smrtnost stanovnistva Crna Gora, 104; Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, I 18–126.

Balkan countries after 1870, although until 1890 registration ­(especially for Romania and Bulgaria) is considered incomplete. Clearly the high growth rates following the 1880s, and typical for almost all Balkan countries, are to be explained primarily by falling mortality, in the presence of continuing high fertility rates. In fact, in the absence of significant population shifts until the wars, the growth rates almost coincided with the natural increase, with the exception of territories of traditional emigration (e.g. Greece). The continuing trend of decrease of the Bulgarian death rates at least after 1890, but possibly also in the previous decade, define the period from 1880 until the wars as one of “demographic explosion”, the peak rates of natural increase being reached between 1905 and 1910 (from 1904 to 1907 they are over 21 per thousand). The Serbian case follows the same pattern with the highest peaks of natural increase reached in the 1885–1890 period, and then again, at a somewhat lower level, between 1896 and 1905. Likewise, Croatian mortality dropped significantly in the second half of the 1880s. Romanian death rates, on the other hand, decreased more slowly and gradually. Altogether, it can be safely maintained that, as a whole, the transition to a new mortality regime in

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the Balkans set in after the 1880s and was completed by the Second world war. For some regions, this process began somewhat later (e.g. Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia after the turn of the century). The fall in mortality rates came chiefly at the expense of the fall in infant mortality, observably diminishing in most regions after the 1880s. Bulgarian infant mortality rates, which can be estimated from partial data at about 230 per thousand for the 1830–1870 period, had fallen to just above 130 per thousand for 1900, and somewhat risen to 146 per thousand by 1920. They seem to have been among the lowest for the region in this period. Croatian and Romanian infant mortality rates, while gradually decreasing, entered the twentieth century with rates well above the 200 per thousand margin. The general trend during this period is the gradual levelling of the death rates for different areas, i.e. the fading away of the significant interregional variations, as well as the ones between rural and urban populations. The great interregional differences were caused chiefly by external factors (epidemics, famine, wars), as well as by the different developmental levels. As far as epidemics are concerned, while Western Europe had rid itself of the plague by the end of the seventeenth century, and Central Europe during the first decades of the eighteenth century, the disease persisted in the Balkans for another century. According to the apt comparison of an author, the plague in the Ottoman Empire was like an enormous and deadly relay race, which practically never ceased, and in which virtually all inhabitants were forced to take part. There were three temporary seats of the disease in the Balkans: the mountains of Hercegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Epyros and Macedonia; Wallachia-Moldavia; and, finally, the capital Istanbul. By the middle of the nineteenth century the plague in the Balkans had disappeared. Although this coincided with the establishment of a sanitary network, and was certainly influenced by its measures, it seems that there was at work also a natural recession in the temporary seats of the disease. As the plague was receding, a new epidemic made its way: the cholera. In fact, the first effective measures against the spread of epidemics, and the installment of quarantines in the Ottoman Empire, were triggered off by the appearance of the cholera in the Balkans in 1830. The disease receded in the Balkans after the 1920s. There were other threatening diseases whose death toll was very high although they did not have the character of the plague and cholera epidemics: the smallpox, carbuncle, diphtheria. Among the factors forwarded to explain the decline in mortality is the generally more favorable economic conjuncture after the middle of the nineteenth century which, despite occasional fluctuations, would have diminished the effects of the subsistence crises. Also, these decades saw the disappearance

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or successful struggle against some of the most lethal epidemics (the plague and the cholera). On the other hand, the fall in morbidity should in no way be overestimated. There was practically no medical system until almost the close of the nineteenth century, and the reports of the officials of the sanitary services installed in the newly liberated countries attest to the fact that until the end of the 1920s the rural population systematically avoided any contact with the official medical establishment. It is no wonder that although there was a slow continuous decrease in the mortality rate for several decades, the drastic drop occurred only towards the end of the 1920s. 7 Migrations Statistical data on migrations before the Balkan wars and the First World War are even more uncertain than those on natural increase. While it is difficult to define population movements in the Balkans during the eighteenth and nineteenth century in quantitative terms, there is the additional problem of making the fine distinction between mobility and migration, the movement within and across boundaries (geographical, ethnic, social, etc.). In this broader sense migrational patterns in the Balkans would include the typical oscillation between mountain and plain, between semi-nomadic and settled populations, a process which was carried well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They would include also the gradual flow of the rural populace into the urban framework. The bulk of the par excellence migrations were caused by political unrest, revolts and wars. During the eighteenth century the wars of the Ottoman Empire with Venice and the Habsburgs usually ended with substantial outmigrations of the borderland Balkan populations to adjacent territories, affecting mostly Serbs, Greeks and Albanians. This was true even on a larger scale with the series of Russo-Turkish wars, especially during the nineteenth century. In the latter case, especially after the Crimean war, there was not only a large scale outmigration, primarily of Bulgarians, but also a substantial immigration into the Balkans of Muslim tribes from the Crimea. The turmoil accompanying the formation of the independent Balkan states during the nineteenth century accounted for massive population shifts from one region to another, but until the last quarter of the nineteenth century these movements were confined altogether within the territory of the Balkans. These migrations followed mostly ethnic and religious lines, the most substantial ones occurring after the eruption of the Eastern crisis of 1875/78, and the Russo-Turkish war of 1877/78, when over a million Christians and over a

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million Muslims changed their residence. The culmination of this process were obviously the population movements during, and following, the two Balkan wars and the First world war, when over 2,300,000 people were shifted from their original places, and relocated, including the exchanges to and from Asia Minor. As far as economic migration is concerned, the Balkans were the first Ottoman territories to be gradually integrated into the European world economy. In the course of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries a fairly strong stratum of local merchants and entrepreneurs was formed, which was responsible in part for an intensified population movement both within and outside the Ottoman territories. There were numerous and prospering Balkan merchant colonies in practically all major European commercial centers. While they were predominantly Greek, and were perceived as such, they contained important numbers of all other Orthodox Balkan nations: Serbs, Bulgarians, Vlachs, Albanians. Overseas migration from the Balkans, prompted mostly by economic causes, started probably only in the 1880s and intensified about the turn of the century, almost exclusively from the Habsburg territories (Croatia, Slovenia and Transylvania). In the first decade of the twentieth century, and especially between 1910 and 1915, the other Balkan regions were also involved on a larger scale. These five years witnessed an emigration of over a quarter million people from the Balkan Habsburg territories, and about 130 thousand from Greece, the two areas of most intensive outmigration. A common trend of the Balkan overseas emigration before the First world war was its almost exclusively male character (up to 96 % for the Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, 85 % for the Croats and Slovenes), and the high return rates (close to 90 % for the Serbs, Bulgarians and Montenegrins, about 50 % for Croats and Slovenes, 30 % for Dalmatians; there are no data to estimate the Greek net migration). 8 Nuptiality The Balkans are on the “non-European” side of the great divide between the two basic marriage patterns, which follows the Trieste-Leningrad line: one distinguished by late marriages and high celibacy, the other by early and practically universal marriages. In fact, the Balkans provide the most striking instances of persistent and continuous early and universal marriage in Europe. The first reliable aggregate data come from after 1880, the period which marked the onset of the demographic transition. While in Western Europe at the turn of the century over 75 % of the women aged 20–24 were single, and the celibacy rate

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(non-married women at age 45–49) exceeded 10 %, the corresponding figures for the Balkans were lower than 25 % and 3 % (with the exception of Greece). Greece presented an “intermediary” case between the two marriage patterns, close to some other countries of the Mediterranean (Table 8). Unlike Western Europe, where late marriages and celibacy served as a check on the natural population increase, the reaction in the Balkans towards the new social, economic and demographic conditions was different: the marked decrease in fertility did not occur at the expense of a change in the marriage pattern. On the contrary, the trend towards early and almost universal marriage was preserved during the interwar period, and until the present. The average age at marriage for women in the closing decades of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century was below 21 years (with the possible exception of Greece which had a recorded average age at marriage for women of 23.9 for 1928). Serbia had the lowest marriage age (18.4 years in 1890, 18.7 years in 1900); Romania’s was 20.3 years in 1899, and 21.7 years in 1912; Bulgaria was in between with 19.8 years in 1892, and 20.8 years in 1900. In the case of Bulgaria one can discern a slightly rising trend of the marriage age from two sample populations, in northeastern and in southern Bulgaria in the 1860s, whose average age was 18. However, it is most likely that the legislative regulation of the marriage age after 1878 (replacing customary law) played an essential part in this trend. Leaving the level of aggregate statistics, one can observe great local differences, documented in the sources (among them ethnological materials), which makes overall generalizations quite relative. Still, these sources also suggest table 8

Proportions of never-married females (per thousand) Bulgaria

Greece

Romania

Serbia

20–24 25–29 45–49 20–24 25–29 45–49 20–24 25–29 45–49 20–24 25–29 45–49 1880 1890 1900 1905 1910 1920

195 197 241 249 244 355

26 27 33 42 42 96

7 7 8 9 8 11

440

130

40

558

255

38

203

79

28

339

98

28

150 160

17 18

7 8

350

149

47

The 1880 and 1890 figures for Bulgaria are from 1887 and 1892; the 1905 and 1920 figures for Greece are from 1907 and 1928; the 1900 and 1910 figures for Romania are from 1899 and 1912; the 1920 figures for Serbia are reflecting the whole of Yugoslavia in 1931. Source: Botev, “Nuptiality in the Course of the Demographic Transition”, 108

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common features which can be summarized in a distinctive marriage pattern. As far as the seasonal patterns are concerned, the agricultural character of the majority of the Balkan population, irrespective of its ethnic or religious differences, proved decisive. The seasonal patterns of marriage were destroyed only gradually with the slow changes in the traditional social structure following the urbanization and the industrialization in the twentieth century. The marriage age undoubtedly characterizes the marriage pattern as “traditional”, known for its early and almost universal marriages. There were, however, distinct differences between the urban and the rural marriage pattern, the main being the small age difference between spouses in the village as contrasted to a significant difference in the city. One specific trait of the urban marriage pattern throughout the nineteenth century was the high marriage age of men which, in many cases, was higher than that in Western Europe. This feature, although without immediate demographic consequences, is a replica of the “Mediterranean pattern”. Another marked characteristic is the wide-spread occurrence of remarriages among the rural population in some areas (e.g. samples from Bulgaria for the nineteenth century). While in the towns second marriages were mostly a prerogative for men, they were typical for both men and women in the villages. In this respect quite remarkable is the contrast with a number of Mediterranean societies, where second marriages for widows were rare and widowhood became an institutionalized model of behavior. The value system also played an important role. The idea that marriage entailed economic independence, and was contingent on a socially approved living standard for marriage, so central for the (northwest) European marriage pattern, was missing in the Balkans, as in Southern Europe. 9

Family-Household Structure

In the model of the European family, which has been elaborated over the past decades, the Balkan area is consistently depicted as having a persistent propensity towards household complexity, the par excellence region of large multiple families, whose best known example is the South Slav zadruga. This stereotype, hardly based on any quantitative research but primarily on nineteenth century ethnographic accounts, serves the attempt to correlate the type of family and the marriage behavior. Big extended co-residing families with common property, labor and livelihood are hypothesized to favor early marriages with the ensuing consequences on the fertility regime.

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However, different samples of Balkan populations during the eighteenth and nineteenth century show the undoubted preponderance of simple family households (close to 70 %), alongside a substantial proportion of households of the extended and multiple type. Compared to other European populations, they differ from the English (and, to a lesser extent, the French) data, which clearly stand apart with their high proportion of solitaries and the practical absence of multiple family households. At the same time, the Balkan data stand in sharp contrast to the ones from other parts of Eastern Europe (e.g. Estonia and Russia), with their huge predominance of complex family households. In fact, the distribution of the Balkan households according to categories is mostly in agreement with the data for Central and Southern Europe (Germany and Italy). The frequency of multiple families in the Balkans, in particular, is higher than in the Northwest European region, but close to their respective occurrence in Central and Southern Europe and certainly much lower than in Eastern Europe. It is only populations from typical zadruga regions which are more in agreement with the Eastern model. As for an assessment of the relative share of the specifically Balkan institution, the zadruga, in the existing household and family structure, a question of prime importance is the geographical distribution of the different family forms. Simple family households were predominant in the narrow Adriatic littoral. Immediately to the east, in the adjacent Dinaric region between the valleys of the Sava and the Morava, there was a prevalence of big family households of the extended and multiple type. This was the mountainous stockbreeding zone, running throughout the mountain systems of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Northern and Central Macedonia and Central Albania. Another similar region of a probable (though not computed) high frequency of complex families was the northwestern part of the Balkan range, the mountainous territories between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and the Rhodope region. The tribal region of Montenegro and Northern Albania could be added as a separate entity. There is a valley belt of zadruga presence. The bulk of it was confined to the territories of Croatia, Slavonia and Vojvodina, i.e. to regions with the specific statute of the Military Frontier and characterized by serfdom. In these areas the second half of the nineteenth century produced also specific codes regulating legal relations of the zadrugas and encouraging the formation of large households. Zadrugas were encountered also, though in a much lesser degree, in some of the valleys of Serbia, western and central Bulgaria, southern Macedonia and southern Albania. To the east and to the south of these regions (i.e. Bulgaria and Greece) there were again areas where the simple family was the predominant form. In Romania, although outside the zadrugal zone, it was

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the communal village as a whole which performed the functions of the communal family. The evidence testifies to the existence of the zadruga in some parts of the Balkans during the nineteenth century. By the end of the century and the beginning of the twentieth, when they were mostly studied, the zadrugas were in an advanced stage of disintegration, and disappeared altogether after the Second World War. Being defined by a set of criteria—legal, economic, temporal (as a developmental stage in the family life-course), the zadruga cannot be reduced to, although it is commensurate with the complex family types. Given the fact that these types were not statistically predominant in the Balkans, the prevalence of the zadruga in the region can be safely dismissed. At the same time, this refutation should not obscure the existence and importance in the Balkans of a whole set of kinship, labor and other structures which characterize the joint system. On the other hand, the comparison with the sets of tendencies in domestic group organization in the fourfold regional European model also indicates the Balkans as closest to the Southern type. This is especially true with such criteria as the occasion and method of domestic group formation, as well as the procreational and demographic behavior. In the case of kin composition of groups, the interregional variation of the Balkan data point to parallels with the West/central, the Mediterranean (Southern) and the East European pattern. 10 Conclusion Despite the lack, the scarcity or unreliability of sources before the end of the nineteenth century, it can be safely assumed that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the demographic regime in the Balkans was characterized by high birth and death rates. The demographic transition in the region commenced with a gradual fall in the mortality rates around 1880 for most of the peninsula, and accounted for the very high levels of natural increase in the latter decades of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century. The beginning of the fertility transition followed with a lag of approximately two to three decades (less for the urban areas), and can be said to have set in, in general, after the First World War. At the two opposite poles in the Balkans are Slovenia (and parts of Croatia), where the beginnings of fertility control can be traced back tentatively to the eighteenth century, and Albania, where the secular decline in fertility started only in the 1960s. Of course, these generalizations are on the aggregate level, and do not take into account the significant

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interregional and intraregional variations in the Balkans, caused by the great diversity in levels of development, types of economy, historical tradition, and the complex social, ethnic, religious and cultural differences. A remarkable feature of the Balkans is that the demographic transition began and was carried out within a marriage pattern that did not significantly change throughout this period. The response of the Balkan population to the sustained population growth following the beginnings of the demographic transition, in conditions of big pressures on limited, chiefly agricultural, resources, with few and restricted economic alternatives and possibilities for outmigration, resulted in a series of adjustments, the most important of which was the rapid transition to voluntary birth control within the existing marriage pattern. However, until the First World War one can witness simply the modest beginnings of this trend whose real unfolding came in the interwar period and was completed only after the Second World War. Bibliography Adam, Iosif. “La structure de la population de la Transylvanie du point du vue des recensements hongrois de 1900 et 1910”, Populaţie şi societate. vol. IV, Cluj-Napoca, 1980. Annuaire statistique du Royaume de Bulgarie. 1940. Annuaire statistique du Royaume de Serbie. 1907/08. Anuarul statistic al României. 1939/40. Bërxholi, Arquile and Perikli Quiriazi. Albania. A Geographical View. Tirana, 1986. Botev, Nikolai. “Nuptiality in the Course of the Demographic Transition: The Experience of the Balkan Countries”, Population Studies, vol. 44, 1990. Botev. Nikolai. “Features of the fertility decline in the Balkan countries since the end of XIX century”, Etudes balkaniques, vol. 24, # 4, 1988. Communal Families in the Balkans: The Zadruga. Essays by Philip E. Mosely and Essays in His Honor. University of Notre Dame Press, 1976. Donkov, Kiril. “Osnovni cherti na demografskiya prekhod v Bîlgaria”, Statistika, 26 (2), 1979. Draganova, Slavka. Materiali za Dunavskiya vilaet (Rusenska, Silisternska Shumensha i Tutrakanska kaza) prez 50-te–70-te godini na XIX vek. Sofia, 1980. Ekmecic, M. “Internacionalni i interkontinentalni migracioni pokreti iz jugoslovenskih zemalja od kraja XVIII vijeka do 1941”, Godisnjak drustva istoricara Bosne i Hercegovine, 20, 1972–1973. Gelo, Jakov. Demografske promenje u Hrvatskoj od 1780. do 1981. godine. Zagreb, 1987.

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Halpern, Joel M. and Barbara Kerewski-Halpern. A Serbian Village in Historical Perspective. New York: Waveland Press, 1972. Halpern, Joel M. “Some Perspectives on Balkan Migration Patterns (with Particular Reference to Yugoslavia)”, Migration and Urbanization. Models and Adaptive Strategies. Eds. Brian M. Du Tot and Helen I. Safa. The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1975. Halpern, Joel M., ed. Microstudies in Yugoslav (Serbian) Social Structure and Demography. Program in Soviet and East European Studies. Occasional Papers Series No. 8. University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1982. Hammel, Eugene A. “Early Fertility Decline in Croatia”, Paper delivered at the symposium: In honor of Bela Maday: Politics and Symbolism in European Anthropology. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 1989. Hammel, Eugene A. “Short-term demographic fluctuations in the Croatian Military Border of Austria, 1830–1847”, European Journal of Population, vol. 1, nos. 2/3, 1985. Istorija Jugoslavije. Beograd: Prosveta, 1972. Istoriya Yugoslavii. Tom 1. Moskva, 1963. Jackson, Marvin. “Comparing the Balkan Demographic Experience 1860 to 1970, The Journal of European Economic History, vol. 14, # 2, Fall, 1985. Karpat, Kemal. Ottoman Population, 1930–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Kolodny, Emile Y. La population des îles de la Grèce. Essai de géographie insulaire en Mediterranéee orientale. Aix-en-Provence, 1974. Korencic, Mirko. Naselja i stanovnistvo SR Hrvatske 1857–1971. Zagreb, 1979. Lampe, John R. and Marvin R. Jackson. Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. McCarthy, Justin. The Arab World, Turkey and the Balkans (1878–1914): A Handbook of Historical Statistics. Boston, 1982. Mitchell, B. R. European Historical Statistics. 1750–1925. Second revised edition. New York: Facts on File, 1981. Naoumov, Nicolas, Ivan Stefanov et Zdravko Sougarev. La population de la Bulgarie. Sofia, 1974. Negruti, Ecaterina. “Situatia demografica a Moldovei în secolul al XIX-lea”, Revista de istorie, tom 34, nr.2, 1981. Panzac, Daniel. La peste dans l’empire ottoman, 1700–1850. Louvain, 1985. Pascu, Stefan. “Les remariages chez les orthodox”, Marriage and Remarriage in Populations of the Past. London-New York, 1981. Pascu, Stefan, ed. Populaţie şi societate. Vol. I–IV. Cluj-Napoca, 1980. Radovic, Ljubica. Smrtnost stanovnistva Crna Gora, 1878–1978. Cetinje, 1984. Samardžić, Radovan and Dimitrije Djordjević, eds. Migrations in Balkan History. Belgrade, 1989.

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Serelea, Gariphalea. Reconstitution des caractéristiques démographiques de la population féminine en Grèce pendant la seconde moitié du 19e siècle. Louvain-la-Neuve, 1977. Shaw, Stanford J. “The Ottoman census system and population, 1831–1914”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 9, 1978. Sklar, June L. “The Role of Marriage Behavior in the Demographic transition: the Case of Eastern Europe Around 1900”, Population Studies, 28, 2, July 1974. Stahl, Paul H. Household, village and village confederation in Southeastern Europe. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Statistical Yearbook of Greece. 1971. Stoianovich, Traian. “Family and Household in the Western Balkans”, Mémorial Ömer Lûtfi Barkan. Paris, 1980. The Population of Yugoslavia. Belgrade, 1974. Todorov, Nilolai. The Balkan City, 1400–1900. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1983. Todorova, Maria. “Myth-Making in European Family History: the Zadruga Revisited”, Eastern European Politics and Societies, vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 1990. Todorova, Maria. “Population structure, marriage patterns, family and household (according to Ottoman documentary material from north-eastern Bulgaria in the 1860s)”, Etudes balkaniques, vol. 19, # 1, 1983. Trebici, Vladimir. “Nuptiality and the Demographic Transition in Roumania”, Demographic Transition. Ed.by Parviz Khalatbari. Beiträge zur Demographie Nr.7. Berlin, 1983. Trebici, Vladimir. Romania’s Population and Demographic trends. Bucharest, 1976. Trichopoulos, Dimitrios, George Papaevangelou with the collaboration of John Danezis and Victoria Kalapothaki. The Population of Greece. Paris, 1974. Valaoras, V. “A Reconstruction of the Demographic History of Modern Greece”, The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, vol. 38, 1960. Vasile, Radu. “L’évolution démographique en Roumanie au cours des trois dernières décennies du XIX e siècle”, Revue roumaine d’histoire, XIX, 2–3, 1980; XX, 1, 1981.

chapter 14

Situating the Family of Ottoman Bulgaria within the European Pattern This chapter seeks to reassess the traditional stereotype of the complex Balkan family on the basis of published and unpublished materials. It was first published in The History of the Family. An International Quarterly, vol. 1, N. 4, 1996, 443–460, and reprinted here with the permission of the publisher. It is essentially a summarized version of my monograph Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria. Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1993, which was published in a revised and expanded edition by Central European University Press in 2006. It appeared also in a Bulgarian translation as Balkanskoto semeistvo: Istoricheska demografiya na Bîlgariya prez osmanskiya period. Sofia: Amiticia, 2002.

1 Introduction The Balkan area has been regarded, in practically every general overview of the European family, as a region with a persistent tendency toward household complexity, the par excellence zone of large families along with Russia and the Baltic region (Burguiere, Klapisch­-Zuber, Segalen, and Zonabend 1986, 88; Plakans 1986, 9; Mitterauer and Sieder 1982, 29). The only institution which has been extensively investigated—the large communal family of the South Slav zadruga—has been held to represent the dominant type of family structure. Despite the fact that there has been comparatively little research along statistical lines, this traditional view is constantly reproduced in the endeavor to map the European family. It is difficult to decide whether the Balkans have suffered more from neglect or from the perils of over-generalization. In an effort to reassess the traditional stereotype, this article has relied somewhat on existing research but for the most part on a set of unpublished materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in different archival collections in Bulgaria. The following sections summarize some results of empirical research dealing with population structure, marriage patterns, fertility and mortality rates, family and house­hold size and structure, and inheritance patterns in a historical perspective (Todorova 1993). They attempt to approach the material in a comparative European framework and seek to place the Balkans within

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_016

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the model of the European family. The problem of the South Slav zadruga, and its development and distribution in the Balkans, is specially dealt with. 2

The Sources

The chief problem with historical demographic studies of the Balkans in the period before the twentieth century is the comparatively meager documentary base. Despite the expectation that a great amount of quantitative material would emerge from the records of the Ottoman bureaucracy, one could speak of the relative deficiency of Ottoman material: relative in so far as the sheer number of materials kept is staggering. This is, unfortunately, only a seeming abundance, because most often there is an accumulation of documents of one type for several periods only. Still, some of the available Ottoman registers, chiefly fiscal, have constituted an important source for this study, serving as a basis for the reconstruction of age and gender structure, marriage age, as well as family and household size and structure.1 A second group of sources, mostly used for reconstituting families and establishing patterns of fertility, nuptiality, and mortality, are the parish registers of several Catholic villages in Bulgaria during the nineteenth century. The practice of keeping parish registers was never introduced as an obligatory rule by the Greek Orthodox church and there is no heritage of methodically maintained and complete registers. Given the history of Catholicism in Bulgaria (its later spread and even later affirmation among heretical groups that had seceded from the Orthodox church), as well as its ethnographic characteristics, the small Catholic community can be safely assumed to be representative of the larger population.2 Lastly, a third group of sources are ethnographic questionnaires compiled between the 1930s and the 1970s. Their information can be considered authentic at least from the mid-nineteenth century. While having no statistical value, these sources represent valuable illustrative material. In addition, for regions

1  Unpublished niifus and cizye registers from the Oriental department of the “Cyril and Methodius” National Library in Sofia (CMNL), 1850s to 1870s, have been used, as well as published volumes from the same collection, covering the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries (Todorova 1993, 175–176). 2  Parish registers come from the collections of the City and District Archive (CDA-Plovdiv), the National Historical Museum (Sofia), the Chief Management of the Archives (Sofia), and some local parish churches (Todorova 1993, 176, 178–180).

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where statistical information of any kind is lacking, these data can be unique.3 Needless to say, from a purely statistical and demographic point of view, the representativeness of the material is rather questionable, its stochastic nature being too great. From the perspective of the social and demographic historian, however, who is sadly aware of the dearth of sources in the Balkan context, this material is indeed unique. 3

Population Structure, Fertility, Mortality, Marriage Patterns

Predictably, the population of Ottoman Bulgaria around the middle of the nineteenth century had a progressive age structure, typical for European preindustrial societies before the demographic transition and characterized by high fertility and high mortality rates.4 Despite minor differences among ethnic groups (Bulgarians, Turks, Moldavians, Cossacks, Circassians), they all belonged to the same type of population structure, which was especially pronounced among the Christian Bulgarians, both in urban and in rural areas. The preponderance of men over women in the Balkans, a phenomenon quite unique in the European context, which for some countries of the region continued well into the twentieth century, has been well documented by this set of data. Although it was not unnoticed by scholars in the field, this fact had been largely held to be the result of imperfect statistics (Trichopoulos 1974, 44). A critical look at the Ottoman data from the 1860s proves convincingly that we are not dealing with an artefact, but rather with a real demographic event (Todorova 1993, 21–22) (Table 9). The really interesting and unexpected result of the analysis is the substantial difference between the age pyramids of urban Bulgarian and Turkish women, attesting to a higher mortality for Bulgarian women in their fertile period. Technical flaws in the source material ruled out, an explanation has been attempted based on social and cultural considerations (Figure 2).5 3  Archives of the Ethnographical Institute and Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia (Todorova, 76–77). 4  While birth rates cannot be calculated, the sources available attest to a population with a comparatively high crude death rate (a tentative calculation of about 2 per thousand), and a particularly high infant mortality (about 227 per thousand). However high, the crude death is far from reaching the range of 35–40 per thousand), and above typical, in general, of countries before the onset of the demographic transition. 5  A tentative explanation is the active involvement of Bulgarian women in economic life, both in home industry and in farming, given the semi-agrarian character of the town economies. This is in stark contrast to Muslim urban women who were confined to their homes. It is also possible that differences in clothing, sexual hygiene, or other sanitary practices have

265

Situating the Family of Ottoman Bulgaria table 9

Sex ratio by ethnic groups, c. 1860

Age groups

Bulgarians

Turks

Moldavians

Cossack Circassians Crimenians Total immigrants

0–4 5–14 0–14 15–49 15–39 50+

113.5 85.0 94.6 129.9 141.5 105.8

90.4 105.3 99.3 98.0 95.0 120.3

141.6 135.2 137.9 100.0 107.1 64.2

157.1 50.0 89.4 142.8 158.8 154.5

103.4 89.2 96.5 140.0 159.0 144.0

105.1 139.4 120.7 105.0 100.0 130.0

105.8 102.3 103.7 112.0 115.0 118.0

Total

111

102

106

125

121

116

110

Source: Todorova 1993, 23

figure 2

Age pyramid of the Bulgarian and Turkish populations, c. 1860

266 table 10

chapter 14 Age at first marriage

Tîrnovo Bulgarians

Average age Median Mode

H.Pazardzhik Bulgarians

Silistra Turks

H.Pazardzhik Turks

Male Female Male Female

Male

Female Male Female

29.6 29 30

27.5 25 25

18.5 17 15/16

18.2 18 18

28.8 28 28

18.4 18 18

29.8 28 22

19.5 19 20

Source: Todorova 1993, 40

While overall generalizations are difficult, given the great local differences of marriage behavior, they still suggest a few common features that can be summarized as a distinctive marriage pattern. Seasonal patterns of marriage correspond to the agricultural character of the majority of the Bulgarian population at the time, irrespective of ethnic or religious differences. These differences disappeared only gradually with the transformations of traditional social structure following the urbanization and industrialization of the twentieth century. Marriage age characterized the marriage pattern as “traditional,” in view of the early and almost universal marriages. There were, however, distinct differences between urban and rural marriage patterns in Bulgaria, the main one being the small age difference between rural spouses, as opposed to a significant one in the cities. A specific trait of the urban marriage pattern in Bulgaria was the advanced marriage age of men which, in many cases, was higher than that in Western Europe (Table 10). A marked characteristic was the widespread occurrence of remarriages. While second marriages in towns were mostly a male prerogative, they were typical for both sexes in the villages where economic considerations were predominant. In this respect, a remarkable comparison can be made with a number of Mediterranean societies where second marriages for widows were rare and widowhood became an institutionalized model of behavior. Neolocality, although encountered, was not the rule. The ethnographic materials suggest that after the wedding the young couple would usually live at least a year or two as part of the husband’s father’s household. If there were more married sons in the family, an extended- or multiple family would emerge. In some regions extended families were more stable and contributed to this differential ethnic female mortality. At the same time, given the involvement of Muslim women in agricultural life, this contrast is not expected in villages, but such a hypothesis cannot be verified because of lack of data.

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continuous, in others the phases of their existence were shorter, and a simple family household would appear a year or two after the wedding. The value system played an important role. A major difference between the Bulgarian and the northwest European marriage pattern was the latter’s assumption that marriage entailed economic independence. The idea of “socially approved minimum living standards for marriage … below which individuals were loath to descend when marrying and forming new households” (Smith 1981, 619) was missing in Bulgaria and in the Balkans, as in southern Europe. 4

Family and Household Size and Structure

The types proposed in the classification system proposed by Laslett (Laslett and Wall 1972), to which most scholars of the European family adhere, are identifiable in the Balkan sources and are comparable to the evidence from other European regions.6 Table 11 compares households according to structure. The data on England (115 households), Germany (142 households), Italy (353 households), and Russia (45 households) have served as the factual basis illustrating the four sets of tendencies in domestic group organization in the fourfold model of the European family. The data from the Balkans come from three areas: Serbia (106 households), northeastern Bulgaria (522 households) and a village in southern Bulgaria (45 households).7 If the data from Serbia and northeastern Bulgaria are considered representative for the region, the distribution of the Balkan households according to categories is mostly in agreement with the data for Germany and Italy, with a predominance of simple family households, alongside a substantial proportion of extended and ­multiple-family households. The English (and, to a lesser extent, the French) data clearly stand apart with their comparatively high proportion of solitaries and no-family households, on one hand, and, on the other, the practical absence of multiple family households. These Balkan data stand in sharp contrast to the ones chosen to illustrate other parts of Eastern Europe (Estonia and Russia), with their huge predominance of complex family households.

6  This certainly should not be taken to mean that such classification is the only point of departure in comparative studies: there are many other kinds of culturally valid structures, such as age at marriage, age at birth of first and last child, and frequency of remarriage. However, for purposes of comparison based on household size and structure, Laslett’s typology seems to be the most useful and widely accepted to date. 7  The Bulgarian archival data is in CMNK, Oriental Department: TL 15/5: SI 30/4; f.179, a.e. 3369; BD 9/5; City and District Archives (Plovdiv: Fond# 398 k, op. l, a.e.12, 1818–1838. The rest is in Laslett 1983, 213, 293, 518–24.

268 table 11

Category 1 2 3 4 5 6

Category 1 2 3 4 5 6

chapter 14 Distribution of households by categories (percentages)

CATEGORIES:

1. Solitaries 2. No Family

3. Extended Family Households 4. Simple Family Households

Elmdon, England, 1861

Ealing, England, 1861

Longuenesse, France, 1778

Grossenmeer, Germany, 1785

1 6 76 14 3

1.4 0.7 68.3 19.7 9.9

6.1 7.0 73.0 12.2 1.7 100

Kolked, Hungary, 1816

47 13 36 4 100

6 5 67 19 2 1 100

Perbal, Hungary, 1747 1 1 85 6 5 2 100

100

100

Belgrade, Serbia, 1733

Northeastern Bulgaria, 1860’s

2 2 67 15 14

4 1 67 16 12

100

100

Sources: Data on Ealing, 1861; Longuenesse, 1778; Belgrade, 1733 from Laslett and Wall 1972, 85. Data on Elm-don, 1861; Krasnoe Sobakino, 1849; Grossenmeer, 1785; Bologna, 1853; Fagagna, 1870; Perbal, 1747; Kolked, 1816 from Wall, Robin, and Laslett 1983, 213, 293, 518–524. Data on Bulgaria, 1860s from Todorova 1983, 70–71. Data on Seldzhikovo, 1836–1838 from CDA-Plovdiv: Fond 398 k (181–1838)

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Situating the Family of Ottoman Bulgaria

5. Multiple Family Households 6. Undetermined Colorno, Italy, 1782

Bologna area, 1853 all      mezzadri

8

2.6

72 9 11

61.0 12.7 22.1 1.6 100

100

Seldzhikovo, Bulgaria 1836        1838

22.3 13.3 64.4 100

2.3 27.3 20.4 50.0 100

41.6 11.9 46.2 0.3 100

Karuse, Estonia, 1782

48.0 13.2 38.8 100

Fagagna, Trieste region, 1870 5.9 2.6 48.4 15.0 28.1 100

Krasnoe Sobakino, Russia, 1849

13.3 6.7 80.0 100

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Judging by the existing data from Serbia and northeastern Bulgaria, it appears that the southeastern European area belongs to the larger European region with a predominance of nuclear family households. The frequency of multiple families is higher than in the northwest European regions, but close to their occurrence in central and southern Europe and much lower than in Eastern Europe. One should beware of sweeping conclusions, however. If, instead, we take for comparison the data from the village of Seldzhikovo (Tables 12 and 13), it is clear that with great number of extended and especially multiple families, they are closer to the data representing eastern Europe (Estonia and Russia), but also to the data from the mezzadri in Italy or from Kolked in Hungary. The Seldzhikovo data also illustrate another phenomenon. Of the 45 households, there are seven pairs of in households and a group of three households which are obviously closely related. Moreover, they apparently live close to each other, since, with one single exception, the households bear consecutive numbers. Clearly, what we have here is a kinship network outside the house, a phenomenon which has aptly been labeled a “modified extended family structure,” and is to be found in many parts of the world (Demos 1970; Greven 1970; Smith 1979). Also, the data from a typical zadruga settlement are more in agreement with the Estonian and Russian figures. Although not elaborated in detail along the lines of the Laslett typology, the figures for Orašac in Central Serbia in 1863 show that nuclear households represented a total of 3 percent, while extended and multiple families, taken together, accounted for 64 percent. Among the latter, fraternal family units of the frérèche type constituted 13 percent (Halpern and Kerewski­Halpern 1972, 28). At best, Table 13 is a good illustration of the fair amount of interregional variation in Europe. On the other hand, the comparison with the sets of tendencies in domestic group organization in the fourfold regional European model (Table 12) indicates Bulgaria as closest to the “southern” type, especially on such criteria as the occasion for and methods of domestic group formation. In this case, there is agreement also between the data from the different Bulgarian regions. The Bulgarian pattern is also congruent with the second set of criteria: procreational and demographic behavior. In the latter case, however, there are two important nuances in the Bulgarian case: low age at marriage of the male rural population, which is more typical for the eastern European model; and the comparatively high proportion of rural widows remarrying, a fact which distinguishes the Balkan pattern from both the Mediterranean and the east European regions. In the case of kin composition of groups, the interregional variation of the Bulgarian data points to parallels with the West­ Central or Middle, the Mediterranean and the East European pattern. The high proportion of resident kin and of multi-generational households, and the

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Situating the Family of Ottoman Bulgaria table 12A Tendencies in domestic group organization in traditional Europe: Four regions and Bulgaria

Northern & Western

Southern & Eastern

1 West

2 3 West-Central Krasnoe

4 East

Elmdon

Grossenmeer Fagagna

Krasnoe Sobakino

NE Seldzhikovo

Never

Seldom

Always

Frequently

Never

Seldom

Usual

Frequent

Low

Low

Low

High

Low

High

High

Low (urban) High (rural) High

Wide

Narrow

Narrow (rural) Wide (urban)

Low

High

Low

Very Low

Very Low

High (urban) Low (rural)

Occasions and methods of domestic group organization Formed at marriage Always Usually Seldom of household head Sometimes Frequently Formed by fission Never or fusion of existing household(s) Always Usually Seldom Marriage important to household formation Frequent Takeover of existing Occasional Frequent household by new head Procreational and demographic criteria Age at female High High marriage High High Age at male marriage Low Low Proportions marrying Age gap between Narrow Narrow spouses at first marriage High Very High Proportion of wives older than husbands High Very High Proportion of widows remarrying

Bulgaria

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table 12b Tendencies in domestic group organization in traditional Europe: Four regions and Bulgaria

Northern & Western

Southern & Eastern

1 West

2 3 West-Central Krasnoe

4 East

Elmdon

Grossenmeer Fagagna

Krasnoe NE Sobakino Seldzhikovo

Criteria of kin composition of groups Proportion of resident kin Always Never Proportion of multigenerational households Proportion of households Always headed by never-married women Proportion of solitaries Occasional Proportion of no-family Always households Proportion of simpleNever family households Proportion of extended- Always family households (A) Proportion of multipleNever family households (B) Always Proportion of complexfamily households (A+B) Proportion of frereches Never Proportion of stem-family Always households Proportion of joint-family Never households

Bulgaria

Usually Sometimes

Seldom Never Frequently Always

Seldom Frequently

Usually

Seldom

Never

Seldom

Frequent Usually

Frequent Seldom

Usual Never

Frequent Seldom

Sometimes

Frequently Always

Frequently

Usually

Seldom

Seldom

Sometimes

Frequently Always

Frequently

Usually

Seldom

Seldom

Sometimes Usually

Frequently Always Seldom Never

Frequently Seldom

Sometimes

Frequently Always

Frequently

Never

Never

Sources: Adapted from Laslett, “Family and household as workgroup and kin group,” in Richard Wall (ed.), Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983), pp. 526–527.

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low proportion of solitaries or no-family households is shared with both the Mediterranean and the East European models. The proportion of the different household type and, in particular, the combination between a high frequency of simple and extended family households, and a comparatively high frequency of stem-family households, makes the data from northeast Bulgaria (both urban and rural households) closest to the West-Central or Middle pattern. The Seldzhikovo data, on the other hand, follow mostly the East European pattern with several important nuances: a reverse frequency of frérèches and stem-family households, and a higher frequency of extended family households in the Bulgarian case. Household size is another criterion used to characterize the type of households. For a long time, the dominant stereotype for traditional societies was large household. Quantitative research, however, especially in the case of aggregate data for large regions, indicated a small average household size, usually of the order of five persons per household (Hajnal 1983, 65). This conclusion has been corroborated by much of the Balkan data (Kondov 1965, 78–79; Hammel 1980, 260–261; Hammel 1975, 148; Stoianovich 1980, 191; Panayotopoulos 1983, 7). The incidence of complex family forms was highest in nineteenth-century data from the interior of the South Slav territories: Montenegrin households of over nine members, or average households of twelve members in parts of Bosnia and Hercegovina (Stoianovich 1980, 91–193). Similarly, the first Hungarian census of 1787 indicated the average Croatian household as 8.33 persons, rising to 10.6 for some counties (Hajnal 1983, 91–92). These data probably gave rise to the assumption that the big and complex households were characteristic not only of the above regions but could be extrapolated for the whole of the Balkans, particularly its Slavic area. The Bulgarian material from the nineteenth century, as illustrated by Map 2, Figure 3, and Table 13 indicate five­member households as most representative.8 5

The South Slav Zadruga

Practically all authors dealing with the zadruga are categorical in asserting that it has characterized the Balkan region from time immemorial (Filipovic 1976, 8  This is also confirmed by Karpat 1987, 137–145; Göyunç 1979, 339–345; Güran 1980, 9–11. The one exception is the Catholic village of Seldzhikovo which, as with the household structure, is more in accordance with Russian data or from other Balkan regions with big households, even the much-publicized large family households in Bulgaria at the end of the nineteenth century comprised less than eight percent of the rural population (Etnografiya 1980, 294).

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map 2

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Distribution of zadrugas in the Balkans

275

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figure 3

Distribution of households according to size, Bulgaria

table 13

Average household size

Population Size # of Households Average Household Size Dispersion Median Mode Range

Muslim towns

Christian towns

Muslim villages

870 186 4.68 5.40 5 5 1–14

900 205 4.39 4.20 4 3 1–10

682 138 4.94 5.58 5 5 1–13

Source: Todorova 1993, 122

p. 268; Vucinich 1976, p. 162; Mosely 1976, p. 31). Although it is said that the South-Slav zadruga is mentioned in written sources as early as the twelfth century (Filipovic 1976, p. 269), this is an interpretative assertion. The term was unknown until the nineteenth century, and what was accepted as zadruga was the interpretation of certain kinds evidence as proof for the existence of complex families. To assess the relative share of the zadruga in the existing household and family structures in the Balkans, a question of prime importance is the geographical distribution of different family forms. Simple family households were

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predominant in the narrow Adriatic littoral. Immediately to the east, in the adjacent Dinaric region between the valleys of the Sava and the Morava, there was a prevalence of large family households of the extended and multiple type. This was the stockbreeding zone, running throughout the mountain systems of Bosnia, Hercegovina, northern and central Macedonia and central Albania. Another similar region of a probable (though not computed) high frequency of complex families was the northwestern part of the Balkan rage, the mountainous territories between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and the Rhodope region. The tribal region of Montenegro and northern Albania could be added as a separate entity (Boehm 1983; Whitaker 1968, 1976). There is a valley belt of zadruga presence, confined to the territories of Croatia, Slavonia, and Vojvodina, i.e. to regions impacted by the statute creating the Military Frontier, and characterized by serfdom. In these areas the second half of the nineteenth century produced specific codes regulating legal relations of the zadrugas and encouraging the formation of large households. Zadrugas were encountered also, though in a much lesser degree, in some of the valleys of Serbia, western and central Bulgaria, southern Macedonia and southern Albania. To the east and to the south of these regions there were again areas where the simple family was the predominant form. The geographical frequency of zadrugas unequivocally follows the curve of the mountain terrain in the Balkans, without fitting into ethnic boundaries. Also, judging by the Bulgarian material, it can be safely assumed that the majority of extended and multiple families of the zadruga type were engaged in animal farming or in a mixed stockbreeding/crop growing economy.9 Although the zadruga has been most often treated as a specific type of household of relatives, it should be viewed as both a complex structure and a process, possessing a number of diverse aspects such as kinship, property, inheritance, residence, labor organization, distribution, and consumption (Hammel 1972, 1975; Halpern and Wagner 1984, 229–244). It is information on these latter aspects that is a conditio sine qua non for the description of a zadruga, but nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographic data on the zadruga are descriptive and for the most part do not lend themselves to any kind of quantitative analysis. Thus, strictly speaking, it is impossible to identify the zadruga completely with one or more of the proposed family types in the Laslett classification. Still, the zadruga can be made analyzable at least in qualitative terms. It can be safely assumed that, in representations of domestic

9  A different explanation based on the historical experience of the Serbs but stressing the ecological context belongs to Halpern and Hammel 1977, 31.

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groups by reference to kin structure, the zadruga can be used as an example of the extended or multiple family type. This poses the question of how useful it is to employ the term “zadruga,” especially in comparative studies. It can be successfully argued that the term should be dismissed altogether from quantitative historical-demographic analyses, though not from anthropological ones. If the South-Slav zadruga were to remain an operational term, so should terms like the French frérèche, the Italian fratellanza or the German Grossfamilie. Moreover, the latter terms should be attributed to some singular Romance or Germanic characteristic. This does not mean that the existence of zadrugas is denied, nor that it is impossible to have an approximate idea of their relative share and distribution. As already suggested, the zadruga is qualitatively commensurate with the extended and multiple family. These family forms, for their part, can be used not as substitutes for the zadruga but as existing forms comparable to similar forms in other European regions. Since the size of the family is an important element, all zadrugas can be safely said to have been extended or multiple families. At the same time, treating the zadruga as a complex phenomenon, defined from the point of view of a cluster of different criteria, and set in a concrete historical context, makes it clear that not all extended and multiple families were zadrugas. This obviously diminishes even further the relative share of the zadruga in the overall typology of the Balkan family, given the fact that complex household forms (extended and multiple families) were not statistically predominant. Consequently, all attempts to argue for the predominance of the zadruga in southeastern Europe (and in Bulgaria in particular) are, to say the least, presumptuous. An alternative explanation for the existence of the zadruga can be put forward in place of the theory of its permanent presence and linear development. It could be suggested that the zadruga known historically and described by scholars was a phenomenon of only the period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and that its appearance (or recurrence) and decline should be explained by factors typical of this period only (e.g. the decentralization of the Ottoman empire, a possible correlation between the çiftlik economy and the rise and spread of zadrugas, etc.). A most promising area of exploration seems to be the possible connection between a stockbreeding economy and multiple families of the zadruga type. Indeed, the agricultural history of the Balkans in the medieval period and under the Ottomans can be described to a great extent in terms of periodic vacillations between stockbreeding and crop agriculture (Adanir 1989, 134). By the twelfth century, conjunction of factors (demographic and economic decline, internal strife and warfare) had brought about a contraction of arable land and an expansion of the pastoral

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zone. The early Ottomans inherited this pattern, and the extensive application of the jus valachicum in the western Balkan regions can be seen in this light. The Ottomans themselves added to this pattern with the re-settlement of peasants and nomads from Anatolia. Circumstantial evidence and persuasive interpretations lend credence to the idea that during the late fifteenth, and especially during the sixteenth century, there was an advanced sedentation process among the nomads. This was coupled with a conscious policy on the part of the state to encourage “revivification” of wastelands. By the end of the sixteenth century, when the rate of population increase peaked, a new set of contradictions had developed which led to the “crisis” of the seventeenth century. Undoubtedly, during this period the Balkans saw considerable population movements, different degrees of population decrease, changes in land use and the re­nomadization of large territories. The eighteenth century witnessed considerable growth and diversification in all sectors of the Ottoman economy. In farming there was an increase in cereal production as well as in intensive cultures, and new crops were introduced. By the end of the century, however, the disorders accompanying the rebellions of the ayans and the irregular troops resulted in serious dislocations of both rural and urban populations. It is in these particular circumstances that in some regions a trend toward stockbreeding, with the ensuing changes in household organization, might have set in. The suggestion that the zadruga can be viewed not as an archaic survival, but as a new (or cyclical) response to challenges created by new conditions could be proposed as an alternative hypothesis in place of the theory of the long-term existence of the zadruga. What is argued here is solely that this possibility has as many, if not more, valid points, than the generally accepted explanation. This alternative hypothesis places greater emphasis on environmental constraints without disregarding cultural and ideological factors. 6 Conclusion It is obvious that in seeking to refute certain myths, family history paves the way for the introduction of others. Thus, the myth of the extended family in Western Europe now having been abandoned, two others have since become popular: the myth of the small, nuclear family; and the myth of the individualistic European (also English, or Western) Sonderweg. In attempting to rectify an overdrawn generalization concerning the Balkans, and especially Bulgaria, I should certainly not like to fall into the trap at the other extreme and postulate

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a victory of the nuclear family theory for this area. As I have tried to suggest— and this needs to be elaborated at greater length and in an anthropological frame­work—in the Balkans there is a set of kinship, labor, and other structures, which characterize the joint family system, but remain invisible because they are not reflected in the written sources (Stahl 1986, 78–80; Etnografiya 1980, 318, 437; Halpern and Wagner 1984, 229–244). This raises the important questions of what the sources do reflect and how should such information be interpreted: as social fact or artifact? The answer is not simple and requires concrete investigations in each particular case. For the purposes of the present argument, this problem does not seem to be a major hindrance. After all, family history itself lies on the intersection between social fact and meaning. What seems to be more significant is that there is at our disposal a set of data of generally the same type, covering all European areas. The biases and deviations are common to all sources. Regardless of the final verdict on the issue of whether we are dealing with facts or artifacts, the central question is whether the data are comparable. The ensuing typology of the European family, based on similar sources and using a common terminology, would have, for all its draw­backs, at least one merit: it would give a valid basis for comparison between historic and geographic regions of the continent. Of course, there have not been, for the Balkans, comprehensively elaborated models of household structure, comparable to the ones existing for other European regions. Yet insofar as there have been attempts at theorizing, the difference is based on the relative emphasis assigned to a variety of factors and their treatment as central or dependent variables: social structure and culture (especially the social value system), economy, and environmental constraints. The following model (Figure 4) attempts to describe the interplay between vital events (fertility, nuptiality, and mortality), inheritance patterns (partible and impartible systems), methods of domestic group formation (neolocality or its absence), and their ensuing effects on family household size and complexity. In the Balkans, there existed a combination of two sets of factors that affected family size and structure in opposite ways. On the one hand, partible inheritance worked in the direction of simplifying family structure and favoring smaller family units. On the other hand, the absence of neolocality as a precondition for marriage tended to produce bigger and more complex family households of different durations, depending on the timing of fission. Both partibility and the absence of neolocality exert a positive influence on nuptiality, resulting in an increased number of marriages or, as in the case of Bulgaria and the Balkans in general, in practically universal nuptiality and an early marriage age. At the same time, the model is not one of simple one-way relationships.

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figure 4

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Correlation between demographic events, social structure, and ecological system

When nuptiality is viewed not merely as a vital event but as an important ingredient in the system of societal values, it is seen to exert a reverse influence. Also, different inheritance systems affect, via their influence on nuptiality and migration, overall population growth. Partible inheritance, by enhancing nuptiality and slowing down migration, obviously favors population growth, while impartible inheritance, by restricting the number of marriages and promoting migration, limits it. Further, population growth and hence the demographic pressure exercised on a society with finite resources (chiefly land) would, on its part, play a relaxing or rigidifying role on the systems of inheritance. The partible inheritance system in the Balkans should not be interpreted as merely a functional reflection of communal relations. A very important element working in this direction was the low population density and the consequent relative abundance of land due to a more relaxed demographic regime at least until the end of the nineteenth century (Todorova 1993, 124–131). Two final issues need to be addressed. It has been remarked, a propos family history research in Italy and Iberia, that “perhaps inevitably, many of the methods and the conceptual framework guiding these southern European studies were borrowed from the earlier family history tradition” (Kertzer and Brettel 1987, 112). This observation is even more pertinent for Eastern European studies in general, and for Balkan ones in particular, where the methodological

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time-lag is more significant. The field of family history has been steadily moving in the direction of exploring the wider dimensions of kinship, the family life-course, and mentalités. In many ways, the present article reflects the concerns of a phase in European family history, since I emphasize household typology and demographic processes which in the past decade have almost departed from center stage. This is not meant merely as a proleptic remark, attempting to justify a demodé, or, at least, a less refined approach. It is, ultimately, the amount and type of available sources, as well as the existing scholarship on the region, which determines the character of the methodology. The second issue has to do with ideology. Clearly, though not explicitly, family history has had specific and strong ideological ramifications, quite apart from the intentions of some of its practitioners.10 On the one hand, scholarly research on the historical demography of Eastern Europe, and the Balkans in particular, is still so meager that it is impossible to draw valid general conclusions for the region, let alone embark on broad comparative ventures. At the same time, historical demographers, particularly in their modelling and classificatory ventures, have demonstrated an absence of self-awareness and clear under­standing of the ideological implications of their endeavors, and for the most part function under the illusion of an ostensibly value-free social-science approach. It has become some­thing of a compulsion for demographic historians of or from the regions on the margins of the “European marriage pattern” to demonstrate that their areas bear if not all, at least a majority of characteristics which allow them to be squeezed into the “European” rubric. Given the use of “Europe” in the analytical discourse of contemporary human and social sciences, the epistemological value of European family models becomes problematic, and particularly the posited divide between so called “European” and “non-European” societies in geopolitics, “Europe” is increasingly and effectively defined by politicians, and scholars should be at least aware of this and of how their research can and is being used. References Adanir, Fikret. 1989. “Tradition and Rural Change in Southeastern Europe During Ottoman Rule” in The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe. Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages Until the Early Twentieth Century, edited by Daniel Chirot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 131–176. Boehm, Christopher. 1983. Montenegrin Social Organization and Values. AMS Press.

10  On the ideological implications of the zadruga discussion, see Todorova 1993, 159–170.

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Burgiere, Andre, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Martine Segalen, and Françoise Zonabend, eds. 1986. Histoire de la famille, Vol. 2. Paris: Armand Colin. Demos, J. 1970. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. New York: Oxford University Press. Etnografiya na Bîlgariya, Vol. 1. 1980. Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Filipovic, Milenko S. 1976. “Zadruga (kucna zadruga)” in Communal Families in the Balkans: The Zadruga, Essays by Philip E. Mosely and Essays in His Honor. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 268–280. Göyunç, Neşat. 1979. ‘Hane deyimi hakkinda” in Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Tarih Dergisi, 32, Istanbul, 331–348. Güran, Tevfik. 1980. Structure economique et sociale d’une region de campagne dans l’Empire Ottoman vers le milieu du XIX e siecle. Sofia: BAN. Greven, P. 1970. Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hajnal, John. 1983. “Two Kinds of Pre-Industrial Household Formation System” in Family Forms in Historic Europe, edited by Richard Wall, Jean Robin, and Peter Las1ett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 65–103. Halpern, Joel M., and Eugene A. Hammel. 1977. “Serbian Society in Karadjordje’s Serbia: An Anthropological View.” Selected Papers on a Serbian Village: Social Structure as Reflected by History, Demography and Oral Tradition. Research Report No. 17. Amherst, MA: Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Halpern, Joel M., and B. Kerewski-Halpern. 1972. A Serbian Village in Historical Perspective. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Halpern, Joel M. and R. A. Wagner. 1984. “Tim and Social Structure: A Yugoslav Case Study,” Journal of Family History 9(3): 229–244. Hammel, Eugene. 1972. “The Zadruga as Process” in Household and Family in Past Time, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 335–373. Hammel, Eugene. 1975. “Reflectionson the Zadruga” in Ethnologia slavica, Zbornik filozofickej fakulty univerzitety Komenskeho, 7, Bratislava, 141–151. Hammel, Eugene. 1980. “Household Structure in Fourteenth-Century Macedonia.” Journal of Family History 5(3): 242–273. Karpat, Kemal. 1987. “The Ottoman Family: Documents Pertaining to Its Size.” International Journal of Turkish Studies 4(1): 137–145. Kertzer, David I., and Caroline Brettel. 1987. “Advances in Italian and Iberian Family History” in Family History at the Crossroads, edited by Tamara Hareven and Andrejs Plakans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 87–120. Kondov, Nikola. 1965. “Za pirvichnata obshtestvena edinitsa pri selskoto naseleniye v Sredovekovna Bilgariya.” lstoricheski pregled 21(1): 70–83.

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Laslett, Peter. 1983. “Family and Household as Work Group and Kin Group.” Pp. 513–564 in Family Forms in Historic Europe, edited by Richard Wall, Jean Robin, and Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laslett, Peter, and Richard Wall, eds. 1972. Household and Family in Past Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitterauer, Michael, and R. Sieder. 1982. The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford: Blackwell. Mosely, Philip. 1976. “Adaptation for Survival: The Varzic Zadruga” in Communal Families in the Balkans: The Zadruga. Essay by Philip E. Mosely and Essays in His Honor. Notre Dame-London: University of Notre Dame Press, 31–57. Panayotopoulos, Vasilis. 1983. “Megethos kai synthesi tis oikogenias stin Peloponniso giro sta 1700.” Ta istorika, I (1): 5–18. Plakans, Andrejs. 1986. “The Emergence of a Field: Twenty Years of European Family History.” The Wilson Center. West European Program. Occasional Paper #I. Washington, DC. Smith, D. S. 1979. “Life Course, Norms, and Family System of Older Americans in 1900” Journal of Family History 4:285–298. Smith, Richard M. 1981. “Fertility, Economy and Household Formation in England over Three Centuries” Population and Development Review 7(4): 595–622. Stahl, Paul H. 1986. Household, Village and Village Confederation in Southeastern Europe. East European Monographs. New York: Columbia University Press. Stoianovich, Trajan. 1980. “Family and Household in the Western Balkans 1500–1870” in Memorial Omer Lutfi Barkan. Paris, 189–203. Todorova, Maria. 1993. Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern. Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria. Washington, DC: The American University Press. Trichopolous, Dimitrios and George Papaevangelou. 1947. The Population of Greece. Paris: CICRED. Vucinich, Wayne. 1976. “A Zadruga in Bileca Rudine.” Pp. 162–186 in Communal Families in the Balkans: The Zadruga. Essay by Philip E. Mosely and Essays in His Honor. Notre Dame­London: University of Notre Dame Press. Whitaker, Ian. 1976. “Familial Roles in the Extended Patrilineal Kin-Groups in Northern Albania” in Mediterranean Family Structures, edited by J. G. Peristiany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 195–203. Whitaker, Ian. 1968. “Tribal Structure and National Politics in Albania 1910–1950” in History and Social Anthropology, edited by I. M. Lewis. London: Tavistock, 253–293.

chapter 15

On the Epistemological Value of Family Models: the Balkans within the European Pattern This article is an extension of my work in Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern (1993/2006) in that it squarely deals with the famous Hajnal line: the symbolic demarcation line proposed by the British demographer John Hajnal which divided the geographic Europe into an area running from St. Petersburg to Trieste, and characterizing the region to its west as the zone of the European marriage pattern, and the one to the east as non-European. It argues that it is naïve to expect European family models to be confined to demography or history; instead their explanatory potential is usually harnessed for different purposes in the realms of culture, ideology and politics. The text was published in Richard Wall, Tamara K. Hareven, and Josef Ehmer with the assistance of Marcus Cerman. Family History Revisited. Comparative Aspects. Newark: University of Delaware Press, London: Associated University Presses, 2001, 242–256, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. The volume had been published earlier in German: Josef Ehmer, Tamara K. Hareven, Richard Wall (Hg.), Historische Familienforschung. Ergebnisse und Kontroversen, Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, 1997, 283–300.

The attempt to create a model of the historic European family was a response to the complexity and richness of material that was difficult to frame in a single grand theory of the family. Already during the nineteenth century, following the practice in the natural sciences, efforts were made to classify existing knowledge about the family and create models based on typological differences. One of the first taxonomical approaches to family history was that of Le Play, a par excellence moralistic taxonomist (Recueil 1956; Brooke 1970). According to Le Play, there were three types of families: the patriarchal, the stem and the unstable. The first was common among Eastern nomads, Russian peasants and the Slavs of Central Europe. The unstable family was supposed to prevail among the working-class populations subject to the new manufacturing system of Western Europe. The stem-family, typical of the French countryside, Germany, and Western Europe in general, was a social organization in which only one married child remained with the parents, whereas the rest received a dowry. Le Play postulated a direct relationship between the type of family and social stability, and openly championed the stem family as successfully reconciling

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tradition and innovation (Le Play 1982). While refuted or surpassed in the particulars.1 Le Play’s approach has influenced generations of sociologists and family historians, and many of his ideas show up in unexpected quarters. In the past decades a model was proposed by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure which described a fourfold tendency in household composition. This model came to substitute (or rather elaborate on) the previously accepted one of two regions with the symbolic demarcation line running roughly from St. Petersburg to Trieste (Laslett, Wall 1972; Wall, Robin, Laslett 1983). The zone to the north and west of this boundary had been depicted as the region of a unique marriage pattern (defined by high marriage ages for both sexes and a high degree of celibacy) and ergo, a unique family, a unique household and all following unique consequences. The rest of Europe (as well as the rest of the world) was characterized by a marriage pattern typical for the low age at marriage of both partners and practically universal marriages. John Hajnal, who made this statistical discovery based on turn-of-the-century data, named the first of these two configurations the “European pattern”: The marriage pattern of most of Europe as it existed for at least two ­centuries up to 1940 was, as far as we can tell, unique or almost unique in the world. There is no known example of a population of non-European civilization which has had a similar pattern. The distinctive marks of the ‘European pattern’ are (1) a high age at marriage and (2) a high proportion of people who never marry at all. The ‘European’ pattern pervaded the whole of Europe except for the eastern and south-eastern portion. Hajnal 1965: 101

The other pattern began immediately to be described as “non-European” and subsequent discussions led to the extrapolation of the marriage pattern as a fundamental European characteristic.2 There is absolutely no doubt that as far as Hajnal was concerned, he was simply looking for a working label; he himself lamented in a footnote that:

1  See, in particular, the refinements to the notion of the stem-family, as for example by Berkner 1972, Mitterauer 1981, Fauve-Chamoux 1995. 2  It is only proper to mention here the few exceptions to the rule, the ones who carefully chose their categories and did not succumb to the temptation of using overarching labels: Laslett 1977, Mitterauer 1981, Mitterauer and Kagan 1982.

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it was most inconvenient not to have a term for the area where the European pattern obtained and I have felt free (when there is no possibility of misunderstanding) to use ‘Europe’ to denote this area. It is awkward to exclude Eastern Europe from Europe and it might be thought more accurate to use terms like ‘Western Europe’, and ‘Western European pattern.’ However, since these concepts had to be referred to so frequently, brevity was a great advantage. Europe in our restricted sense is in fact the area dealt with in many a history of Europe. Ibid.: 101, n. 2

While brevity is an understandable motivation, the last sentence betrays an uncritical acceptance of the structure of “many a history of Europe.” After all, most histories of “Europe” have been based on specific political, cultural or ideological commitments to the notion and have delineated it according to more encompassing or narrower criteria: the Europe of Christianity or, most often, of Western Christianity in its Catholic and Protestant variety; Europe of the Latin/Roman legacy; Europe of the predominantly Germanic and Latin peoples; Europe of the “Free World” west of the Leningrad-Trieste line, etc. Hajnal himself neither expected nor foresaw that the results of his naming practices would have serious implications, otherwise he would have surely displayed the same circumspection he demonstrated in utilizing other categories. A close reading of his text shows that he was inconsistent and casual about the name of the phenomenon: what he was interested in as a scholar was the phenomenon itself. Describing several of the Slav countries as displaying “quite a different marriage pattern from the European one,” he suggested: “Let us call theirs the Eastern European one.” So, in what seemed to be an innocent exercise in labelling, Eastern Europe appeared as an opposite not to Western Europe but to “Europe” as a whole. Again, it has to be stressed that Hajnal most certainly did not do this on purpose. On the other hand, there is little to indicate that he was otherwise careless of style. (In an aesthetic aside, he defended his comparison of Belgium and Sweden to Bulgaria and Serbia on the grounds that alliteration is as good a principle as any other) (Ibid.: 102). Further in his text, Hajnal completely dropped the notion “Eastern European pattern” and began referring only to the European and the non-European one. In order to illustrate “the marriage pattern [that] was non-European”, he offered data from Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia (Ibid.: 119). Likewise, throughout the text European and non-European were used both with and without inverted commas, not following any obvious rule. Hajnal attributed the European marriage pattern to what Le Play’s had called the stem family: “A system of large estates with large households as in Eastern Europe might thus be conducive to

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a non-European marriage pattern, while small holdings occupied by a single family and passed on to a single heir would result in a European pattern. If this reasoning has substance, the uniqueness of the European marriage pattern must be ascribed to the European ‘stem family’” (Ibid.: 133). Again, it should be pointed out that Hajnal did not anticipate the political implications of his classification. Innocent within the context of his paper, especially after his explicit insistence that he was utilizing them “when there is no possibility of misunderstanding,” the labels European and non-European in fact have a life of their own, and Hajnal is neither responsible for that, nor could he have any control over their extratextual implications. What this example, however, clearly illustrates is how much, in our choice of proper categories, we all are trapped within existing discourses, even if we do not wish to participate in them, and may sometimes even not be aware of them. As far as Hajnal was concerned, he had discovered an interesting trend, and was eager to follow it retrospectively in time and muse about its beginnings and its origins. The naming of the fact was for him a detail of secondary interest and significance. Commenting on a recent study of parish registers for three Hungarian villages in the eighteenth century, he concluded that “This population is not in ‘Europe’ as defined in this paper” (Ibid.: 131). His nonchalance was obviously not shared by his East European colleagues. In his opening speech to the 1994 conference on family history entitled “Where does Europe end?,” the rector of the Budapest University of Economics Rudolf Andorka, himself a renowned historical demographer, declared that the structure of families in the Middle Ages may be of some, though marginal, interest to some people, but whether Hungary belonged to Europe was of paramount importance.3 It has become a pathetic compulsion for demographic historians of or from the regions on the margins of the “European marriage pattern” to demonstrate that their areas bear if not all, at least a majority of characteristics which allows them to be squeezed into the “European” rubric. The more elaborate four-region hypothesis of household typology can be summarized briefly as follows: It subdivides the European region into a “west and north-west”, a “west/central or middle”, a “southern or Mediterranean” and an “eastern” zone. Geographically the zones have not been and cannot be meticulously defined. The material used to typify each region is fairly abundant and representative as far as the first two regions are concerned but only

3   “Where does Europe end?,” An International Conference on Household Structures, Demographic Patterns and Cultural Identities in Central and Eastern Europe, 6–9 April 1994, Budapest, Hungary.

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illustrative and questionably representative in the case of the southern and the eastern areas. The fourfold model does not explicitly position the Balkans in any one of the four (or, as is to be expected, in one of the two latter) regions, since there had been comparatively little research on statistical lines. But whenever overall accounts or conclusions are presented, traditional stereotypes are attributed to the region. Almost every general overview of the European family depicts the Balkan area as having “a very persistent tendency towards household complexity … [where] the joint patrilineal household still holds pride of place” (Plakans 1986: 9), an area of “strong propensity for multiple households” (Burguière, Klapisch-Zuber, Segalen, Zonabend 1986: 38), the par excellence region of large families along with Russia and the Baltic region. As summarized by Mitterauer and Sieder, “the best known and most intensively investigated example of the large family is the so-called zadruga in the Balkans.” Locating it in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria, the authors characterized it as “the dominant type of family in large areas” in historic times (Mitterauer, Sieder 1982: 29). Thus, the South Slav zadruga has been traditionally the focus of attention in studies of the Balkans, with all ensuing generalizing conclusions about the social, cultural and psychological proclivities of the region. A few years ago, I published a study on the nineteenth-century demography of Ottoman Bulgaria in which I questioned the received wisdom about the zadruga (Todorova 1993a). Briefly, the argument can be summarized as follows. Despite categorical assertions that this was an institution which has characterized the region from times immemorial (Filipovic, 1976: 268; Vucinich, 1976: 162, Mosely, 1976: 31), the term was unknown until the nineteenth century, and what was retrospectively termed zadruga was the interpretation of certain evidence as proof for the existence of complex families. The historically known institution of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, showed an uneven geographical distribution. There was a prevalence of big family households of the extended and multiple type in the stockbreeding zone, running throughout the mountain systems of Bosnia, Hercegovina, Northern and Central Macedonia and Central Albania. Another similar region of a probable (though not computed) high frequency of complex families was the northwestern part of the Balkan range, the mountainous territories between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and the Rhodope region. The tribal region of Montenegro and Northern Albania could be added as a separate entity (Boehm, 1983; Whitaker, 1968 and 1976). There was a valley belt of zadruga presence, confined to the territories of Croatia, Slavonia and Vojvodina, i.e. to regions with the specific

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statute of the Military Frontier and characterized by serfdom. In these areas the second half of the nineteenth century produced also specific codes regulating legal relations of the zadrugas and encouraging the formation of large households. Zadrugas were encountered also, though in a much lesser degree, in some of the valleys of Serbia, western and central Bulgaria, southern Macedonia and southern Albania. The geographical frequency of zadrugas unequivocally follows the curve of the mountain terrain in the Balkans overlooking ethnic boundaries. Also, at least on the basis of the Bulgarian material, it can be safely assumed that the majority of the extended and multiple families of the zadruga type were engaged in animal farming or mixed stockbreedingcrop growing economy. Although the zadruga has been most often treated as a specific type of household of relatives, it should be viewed as a complex structure and process alike, possessing a number of diverse aspects like kinship, property, inheritance, residence, labor organization, distribution, consumption, etc. (Hammel 1972 and 1975, Halpern and Wagner, 1984: 229–244). It is precisely information on these latter aspects that is a conditio sine qua non for the description of a zadruga, but nineteenth and twentieth century ethnographical data on the zadruga are descriptive and for the most part do not render themselves to any kind of quantitative analysis. Thus, strictly speaking, it is impossible to identify it completely with one or more of the proposed family types in the Laslett classification. Still, the zadruga can be made commensurable at least in qualitative terms. It can be safely assumed that in a representation based on kin structure, zadrugas can be exemplified by extended or multiple family types. I argued further that the term zadruga should be dismissed from quantitative historical-demographic analyses, though not from anthropological ones. This means that neither is the existence of zadrugas denied, nor that it is impossible to have an approximate idea of their relative share and distribution. The zadruga is qualitatively commensurate with the extended and multiple family. These family forms, for their part, can be used not as substitutes for the zadruga but as existing forms comparable to respective forms in other European regions. Since the size of the family is an important element, all zadrugas can be safely said to have been extended or multiple families. At the same time, treating the zadruga as a complex phenomenon, defined from the point of view of a cluster of different criteria, and set in a concrete historical context, it is apparent that not all extended and multiple families were zadrugas. This obviously diminishes even further the relative share of the zadruga in the overall typology of the Balkan family, given the fact that the complex household forms (the extended and multiple families) were not statistically

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predominant. Consequently, I concluded that all attempts to maintain the predominance of the zadruga in Southeastern Europe (and in Bulgaria in particular) are, to say the least, presumptuous. An alternative explanation for the existence of the zadruga was put forward in place of the theory of its permanent (or very early) presence and linear development. I suggested that the historically known and scholarly described zadruga could have been only a phenomenon of the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, whose appearance (or recurrence) and decline is to be explained by different factors typical of this period only (e.g. the decentralization of the Ottoman empire, a possible correlation between the çiftlik economy and the rise and spread of zadrugas, etc.). A most promising area of exploration seemed to be the possible connection between stockbreeding economy and multiple families of the zadruga type. The suggestion that the zadruga can be viewed not necessarily or only as an archaic survival, but possibly also as a new (or cyclical) response to challenges created by new conditions was put forward merely as a viable possibility, which could be proposed as an alternative hypothesis in place of the theory of the long-term existence of the zadruga. What was argued was solely that this possibility had as many, if not more, valid points, than the generally accepted one. This alternative hypothesis placed greater emphasis on environmental constraints without disregarding cultural and ideological factors. In a recently published article, Michael Mitterauer entered the discussion about the Balkan family by comparing two works (Kaser 1992a, Todorova 1993a) which had arrived at seemingly very different conclusions about the overall character of the Balkan family (Mitterauer 1994a). He rightly pointed out that the opposing conclusions stemmed partly from different regional perspectives (Kaser’s being mostly centered on the pastoral societies of the western Balkans, Todorova’s sources covering mostly the territories of today’s Bulgaria), partly from methodological differences (cultural-anthropological versus historical-demographic approaches). According to Mitterauer, “the centerpiece of the discussion is the age of the widely spread complex form of family life, denoted with the nineteenth-century term ‘zadruga’” (Mitterauer 1994a: 16). Having thus equated the zadruga with complex families, Mitterauer, like Kaser, looked into the origins of these formations in patrilocality, patrilineality and patricentrism, and especially in the ancestor worship and the celebration of the household patron saint, a relic of tribal relations. Mitterauer clearly endorsed Kaser’s emphasis on patrilineality as a founding cultural principle in the creation and reproduction of social relations (Kaser 1993). The relevance of his interesting and detailed discussion on the role of ancestor worship to the problem of the zadruga was summarized thus:

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What do the origins of the celebration of the household patron saint tell us about the age of the zadruga? If in the zadruga we see something more than a mere constellation of households comprising many family couples and their children, namely such a form of family life, which is characterized by structural principles like patrilineality, the principle of seniority, male priority, strong group identity, strongly diversified functions which comprise also the sphere of cult, then the answer to the problem about its age would be completely different from the answer which depends on historical-demographic sources (and the sources which have reached us are limited only to the modern period). Mitterauer 1994a: 29

Based on this, he concluded that “in such a structural approach the computation of exact percentages for the complex families in the researched populations is meaningless” (Ibid.). There are two misunderstandings in the juxtaposition of the two works. The first one concerns the “centerpiece of the discussion” which to me is not the age of the zadruga but rather the question of its predominance. In that case, it is difficult to accept the stricture about the meaninglessness of quantitative analysis whenever sources make it possible. As far as I am concerned, the zadruga per se is a clear-cut nineteenthcentury neologism which was coined and used to denote structures which had sprung up for very different reasons: some were the product, indeed, of archaic forms (and here I entirely agree with Kaser’s and Mitterauer’s excellent and elaborate analysis of the celebration of the patron saint); others, however, appeared or reappeared due to economic, ecological and demographic constraints, most likely, but not only, having to do with the pastoral economy; still others were products not of a patrilineal tradition but of a centralized legislation (here the striking example of zadruga structures among Germans in the Military Border). My essential objection had been against the retrospective use of a nineteenth-century term, not negating the phenomenon. In a word, I am not implying that forms which bear striking resemblance (or are identical) to the historically known zadruga have not existed in previous centuries, but it is also not to be denied that some forms have not existed earlier (like their artificial appearance in some areas thanks to codification, or their probable cyclical nature which has to do more with ecological and economic than with cultural constraints). The retrospective use of the term leads, according to me, to an ahistorical approach and a nominalism which attributes to the zadruga a structural permanency and the characteristics of a pillar of the Balkan family. Still in the same line of reasoning, I think that complex families are often, but not always, coterminous with the zadruga. Now, if the argument was about

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the age and origins of complex families, I do not believe there would have been an argument at all; I have never denied the existence of multiple families in earlier centuries: there is ample proof for that. Neither would I ever assert that ancestor worship can be a late eighteenth-century invention. On the other hand, linking the zadruga so directly to this cult poses the question of the spread of zadrugas in regions where the patron saint and ancestor worship had not the central importance it had for the regions described by Kaser (Todorova 1993b: 123–129). Vera Stein Erlich has described in her work three variants of the patriarchal system which she distinguished in interwar Yugoslavia. One of them, the tribal type, is identified by her in the Dinaric mountains and on its fringes, and is characterized by overvaluation of the male line and ancestor worship (Stein Erlich, 1971, 366–373). It seems that often this type is extrapolated and presented as the typical “Balkan pattern.” While the zadruga might seem a unique regional characteristic for the Balkans,4 the question is how typical it was. Introduced as an object for ethnographic and legal research in the second half of the nineteenth century, it soon became a focus of theorizing efforts. Although the various theories which came into being stemmed from different, often basically contrasting motives, their converging effect was identical: the eternalization of the myth. Indigenous scholars had a polarized emotional attitude toward the zadruga. Most of its champions (and they comprised the majority of local scholars) acclaimed its existence for one of two opposing reasons. Traditionalists (or indigenists, autochtonists, protochronists or simply conservative nationalists) saw in it the unique local institution that would save the peculiarity and cultural identity of the peoples vis à vis the disruptive modernizing influence of the West by promoting virtues such as solidarity, mutual aid, etc. Others, accentuating what they saw as the eternal democratic and cooperative spirit of the zadruga, hoped that this would provide the natural road to a new social order. Thus, Svetozar Marković, one of the founders of socialism in Serbia, considered the zadruga “the purest form of collectivism”, which would “elevate society from egoism to altruism, from exploitation to justice” (Halpern, Kerewski-Halpern 1972: 18). The attacks on the zadruga, though mild and much less considerable in number, came precisely from the opposite viewpoint: it was regarded as perpetuating a conservative traditional structure which would not give way to the new modernizing social currents but instead curbed individual initiative, cultivated a slave mentality, provincialism, and xenophobic attitudes (Ivsic 1926; 4  Its uniqueness should likewise not be exaggerated. There are ample parallels with the French frérèche or the Italian fratellanza.

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Ivsic 1933; Ivsic 1937–1938; Gavazzi 1934; Bicanic 1936; Stein Erlich 1966; Blagoev 1891; Blagoev 1985: 209–219; Penev, 1976: 143–145). For all their diverse motives, the partisans of the different approaches invariably overstated their argumentation and consequently helped promote an exaggerated view of the place and role of the zadruga in the social life of the Balkans and specifically of the South Slavs. Evaluations stemming from non-Balkan scholars also contributed to this tendency. The Balkans were treated as “the Volksmuseum of Europe”, to borrow Hammel’s apt dictum: “The social organization and culture of the Balkans [was] regarded as a still-living example of what life must have been like in the misty past of the Indo-European peoples”(Hammel 1980: 242). Studying the zadruga as the chef d’oeuvre of this museum through a magnifying glass certainly left its imprint on the proportions of the general picture. Speaking about the notion of conceptual essentialism, James Carrier points out how “by defining what is significant, and hence worthy of attention, these concepts shape the ways that anthropologists approach and think about the societies they study.” Carrier gives the example of how scholars have dichotomically divided societies into gift and commodity societies and have tended not to see things that resemble commodity transactions in gift societies and vice versa (Carrier 1992: 204). By emphasizing differences rather than similarities, anthropologists may end up creating a representation which leads the readers to misrecognize the ethnographic descriptions and, in consequence, perceive the society as resulting from ethnographic evidence rather than from the theoretical framework which has shaped the presentation of the evidence: The reification of dialectical definition, then, poses problems. What had been only a distinguishing characteristic, albeit an important one, becomes a defining characteristic. And this in turn generates a key problem identified by the critics of anthropological orientalism: a distorted, exaggerated model of an alien society … The selectivity that had made sense in the original dialectical formulation became distortion; the model that had focused on difference between us and them, ignoring similarity, became a definition that denied or elided similarity. Carrier 1992: 204

The second misunderstanding in the comparison of the two assessments about the family in the Balkan region concerns the fact that the difference between them has more to it than just dealing with different geographic regions or using distinct methodological approaches. While both works use the

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notion of “the Balkan family,” it is far from correct to assert that “both authors have the same aim: to find generally valid conclusions about the Balkan family” (Mitterauer 1994a: 16). My main effort was immeasurably more modest: to show that the interregional variations in the Balkans were so substantive that any generalizations at this stage of our empirical knowledge are suspect and most often render themselves to myth-making. I therefore warned that “even putting aside the methodological critique of the European family model, one point should be made clear. Sound and therefore also time-consuming scholarly research on Eastern Europe, and the Balkans in particular, is still so meager that it is impossible to draw valid general conclusions for the region, let alone embark on a broad comparativistic venture” (Todorova 1993a: 169–170). “Balkan family” to me is a notion which covers the rich variety of family forms in the Balkan region, just as “European family” in my understanding is no more than the constellation of diverse family forms in the European sub-continent, the Balkans inclusive. In fact, this is precisely what Michael Mitterauer has achieved, according to me, in all his nuanced and very carefully worded writings about the European family. This is fundamentally different from the categorical assertion that a Balkan family pattern existed, and that it was “in clear opposition to the European pattern” and “strictly non-European” (Kaser 1994: 1, 10). Moreover, the emphasis on the stability and formative power of long-term cultural characteristics which assume almost the nature of “traits”, led to the statement that one can describe the constituting elements of this Balkan family pattern, as well as “the deep seated tendency toward violence” (Ibid.: 1). It is this fundamental difference (no value judgment intended) in epistemological perspective which has to be explored, and because the two approaches have specific political and social meanings, they have to be compared both in regard to their heuristic power as well as to their consequences. The direct link made between what has been described as the Balkan patriarchal system and its endemic violent propensity is not isolated, and with the war in Yugoslavia has reached troublesome proportions, rekindled old stereotypes and licensed indiscriminate generalizations about the region (Todorova 1994). History and anthropology, in particular, have been harnessed to provide a scholarly interpretation for the events in Yugoslavia in a Balkan context and give a credible explanation for the violence. The standard argument attributes the violent propensities to the military ethos of the inhabitants of the Military Frontier (Vojna Krajina), in conjunction with their pastoral activities, and the extended families organized as clans and tribes (Donia, Fine, 1994: 26–28, 38; Miedlig 1991, 1992, 1994). It seems as if the mountaineers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have

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reentered the political stage of the late twentieth century unmarked by any change. On the surface of it, this argument seemingly takes into account environmental factors (mountainous terrain), economy (sheep and horse raising), social arrangements (extended families, clans, tribes) to explain the creation of a cultural pattern. The flaw of the argument, however, is that once the cultural pattern is created, it begins an autonomous life as a reified, unchangeable structure and no account is taken of the drastic changes that have occurred in the social environment of the Balkans in the subsequent periods. All this is premised on the supposition of, and apparent conviction in, unconscious motors of behavior driven by cultural tradition. But one could approach the phenomenon from a different standpoint, acknowledging rational calculations and behavior on the part of the agents and not explaining them in terms of driving passions and mentalities formed throughout centuries and millennia. In such a view the terror will be interpreted not simply as the externalization of a warrior side, but as adopting rational tactics. In a word, one would look at an underlying logic explicable in terms of rationally set aims, rather than irrational (or subconscious) urges. As Hannes Grandits and Joel Halpern point out, after World War II and the Holocaust, one is bound to be extremely cautious in extending simplistic statements about the characteristics of a society, especially its relations to violence. This short proleptic declaration, however, does not deter the authors from writing a lengthy article about the patriarchal, pastoral, rural and communal background of the system of values in ex-Yugoslavia, which alongside the heroic tradition and historical war mentality, are seen as basic elements of the catastrophe (Grandits, Halpern 1994: 91–102). Criticizing this argument, and particularly the thesis of gendered violence as stemming from the patriarchal system, Jasna Čapo Žmegač has shown that it is not the patriarchal order per se but its violent rupture which engenders violence, especially against women and the elderly (_apo _mega_ 1995: 10–13). This alternative interpretation, based on the work of Stein Erlich, has been also endorsed by Michael Mitterauer in his thoughtful remarks about the specifics of patriarchal culture in the Balkans (Mitterauer, 1994b, 82–83). Similarly, the reporting of incidents of rape in the Yugoslav war has coincided with a heightened consciousness and sensitivity to the fate of women in general. It has led to a view of the Serbs as particularly heinous rapists, indeed as originators of a rationally conceived and systematically executed policy of using rape as a war tool. It has further proclaimed that the use of rape in the former Yugoslavia can be understood only in the framework of the cultural values unique in the region, and stemming from communal family life and particular ideas about shame and virginity. To question all this does not mean

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in any way to trivialize the abhorrent deeds committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. What is in question are two tendencies: to elevate (or descend) the Yugoslav event to a unique occurrence seemingly without precedent in history; and to explain it by means of pseudo-scientific interpretations. In the case of the rape question, some anthropologists stepped in to offer opinions on the specific character of rapes in Yugoslavia. In their view, the rapes could be understood only in the context of the specific code of shame typical for Yugoslavia and the Balkans, stemming from the pattern of communal life and in particular the acculturation of individuals in the climate and values of the extended and multiple families held to be predominant (or hegemonic) in the region: The rape is meant to collectively humiliate the enemy. What do the raped women think of first? Of something different than the Austrian, American or English women. The latter would ask themselves: Why precisely me? They would receive support from their families, but they would think primarily in individual terms. These (i.e. the raped Yugoslav women—M. T.) women think first of their husband, of the children, of the parents, of the relatives—of shame. This is how the many rapes can be explained. They are symbolic acts, which are supposed to reach the opponent in his political entirety. Töten 1994: 106

This categorical statement about what raped women are likely to think about is not based on any kind of sociological survey or interviews. Quite apart from the fact that it does not differentiate between groups of Yugoslav women, based on education, occupation and other criteria, it lumps together all Yugoslav women and constructs them as a cultural species quite apart from the similarly homogeneously constructed group of Austrian, American or English, i.e. Western women. But this is typical of the ease and irresponsibility with which overgeneralized categories are used in academic discourse, despite numerous evidence to the dubious repercussions in the extra-academic settings. European family models have not been confined to demography or history, and their explanatory ambitions attempt (or are used) to cover and elucidate many more areas: those of culture, ideology and politics, among others. For the past two centuries the designation “Europe” has been used not simply as a neutral geographical entity but as a qualifier, a synonym for the normative side in a number of dichotomies. This poses the problem of self-awareness and self-evaluation in the field of historical demography, particularly in its modelling and classificatory endeavors. To what extent has it been shaped by

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pre-existing dichotomies of Europeanness and non-Europeanness? To what extent did it (consciously or involuntary) contribute to the perpetuation of these dichotomies? Needless to say, the frustrations about one’s European allegiance are based on the different territorial span between the geographic, economic, political and cultural Europe, but it would be offensive to the general knowledge of European family model makers to claim that they have been blissfully ignorant about this long-standing discourse. Seen in such a light (and this is inevitable given the use of “Europe” in any present analytical discourse in the human and social sciences), the epistemological value of European family models, and particularly the posited divide between so called “European” and “non-European” societies within the geographical entity Europe, becomes ­extremely problematic. References Berkner, Lutz K. “The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Households: An Eighteenth Century Austrian Example” in: American Historical Review, 77, 1972, 398–418. Bićanić, Rudolf. Kako živi narod. Zagreb 1936. Blagoev, Dimitîr. “Razlagane na starite osnovi v narodniya zhivot” in: Izbrani istoricheski sîchineniya, vol. 2, Sofia 1985, 209–219. Blagoev, Dimitîr. Shto e sotsializîm i ima li toi pochva u nas? Tîrnovo 1891. Brooke, Michael. Le Play, Engineer and Social Scientist: The Life and Work of Frédéric Le Play. Harlow 1970. Burguière, André, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Martine Segalen, Françoise Zonabend (eds.). Histoire de la famille. Vol. 2, Paris 1986. Čapo Žmegač, Jasna. “Pogled izvana: Hrvatska i “balkanski” model obitelji,” Zagreb 1995, manuscript, 14 pp. Donia, Robert, John Fine, Jr. Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed. New York 1994. Fauve-Chamoux, Antoinette. “The Stem Family, Demography and Inheritance: The Social Frontiers of Auto-Regulation” in: Richard L. Rudolph, ed., The European Peasant Family and Society. Historical Studies, Liverpool 1995, 86–113. Gavazzi, Milovan. Selja ka zadru na obitelj kao cinjenica i kao problem. Sarajevo 1934. Grandits, Hannes, Joel Halpern. “Traditionelle Wertmuster und der Krieg in ExJugoslavien” in: Beiträge zur historischen Sozialkunde 3, 1994, 91–102. Hajnal, John. “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in: D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley. Population in History. Essays in Historical Demography. London 1965, 101–143.

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Halpern, Joel M., Barbara Kerewski-Halpern. A Serbian Village in Historical Perspective. Prospect Heights, 1972. Hammel, Eugene. “Household Structure in Fourteenth-Century Macedonia” in: Journal of Family History 5(3), 1980, 242–273. Ivšić, Milan. Les problèmes agraires en Yougoslavie. Paris 1926. Ivšić, Milan. Seljačka politika. Zagreb 1937–1938. Ivšić, Milan. Temelji selja_koga zakonika. Zagreb 1933. Kaser, Karl. “Ahnenkult und Patriarchalismus auf dem Balkan,” in: Historische Anthropologie 1, 1993, 93–122. Kaser, Karl. “The Balkan Family Pattern,” Paper presented at the conference “Where does Europe end?”, Budapest 1994, manuscript, 13 pp. Kaser, Karl Kaser. Hirten, Helden, Stammeskämpfer. Ursprung und Gegenwart des balkanischen Patriarchats. Wien-Köln-Weimar 1992a. Kaser, Karl Kaser. “The Origins of Balkan Patriarchy” in: Modern Greek Studies Yearbook, 8, 1992b, 1–39. Laslett, Peter. “Characteristics of the Western Family over Time” in: Journal of Family History, 2, 1977, 89–116. Laslett, Peter, Richard Wall (eds). Household and Family in Past Time. Cambridge 1972. Le Play, Frédéric. On Family, Work and Social Change. Chicago 1982. Miedlig, Hans-Michael. “Patriarchalische Mentalität als Hindernis für die staatliche und gesellschaftliche Modernisierung in Serbien im 19. Jahrhundert” in: SüdostForschungen, 50, 1991, 163–190. Miedlig, Hans-Michael. “Gründe und Hintergründe der aktuellen Nationalitätenkonflikte in den jugoslawischen Ländern,” in: Südosteuropa, 41, 2, 1992, 116–130. Miedlig, Hans-Michael. “Probleme der Mentalität bei Kroaten und Serben” in: Septième Congrès International d’Etudes du Sud-Est Européen (Thessalonique, 29 août-4 septembre). Rapports, Athènes 1994, 393–424. Mitterauer, Michael. “Komplexe Familienformen in sozialhistorischer Sicht” in: Ethnologia Europaea, XII, 1 (1981), 47–87. Mitterauer, Michael. “Edin arkhaichen relikt? “Balkanskoto semeistvo” v diskusiya” in: Balkanistic Forum 4, 1994a, 15–32. Mitterauer, Michael. “Eine Patriarchale Kultur? Funktionen und Formen der Familie auf dem Balkan” in: Beiträge zur historischen Sozialkunde 3, 1994b, 72–83. Mitterauer, Michael, Alexander Kagan, “Russian and Central European Family Structures: A Comparative View” in: Journal of Family History, Spring 1982, 103–131. Mitterauer, Michael, Reinhard Sieder. The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford 1982. Plakans, Andrejs. “The Emergence of a field: twenty years of European family history” in The Wilson Center. West European Program. Occasional paper 1, Washington, D.C. 1986.

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Penev, Boyan. Istoriya na novata bîlgarska literatura, vol. I. Sofia 1976. Recueil d’études sociales publié à la mémoire de Frédéric Le Play. Paris 1956. Stein Erlich, Vera. Family in Transition. A Study of 300 Yugoslav Villages. Princeton 1966. Stein Erlich, Vera. Jugoslavenska porodica u transformacii. Zagreb 1971. Todorova, Maria. Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern, Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria. Washington, D.C. 1993a. Todorova, Maria. “Slava und Zadruga” in: Historische Anthropologie 1, 1993b, 123–129. Todorova, Maria. “The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention” in: Slavic Review 53 (2), 1994, 453–482. Töten mit Messer, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, Heft 1, 1994, 100–106. Wall, Richard, Jean Robin, Peter Laslett (eds.). Family Forms in Historic Europe. Cambridge 1983.

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Historical Tradition and Transformation in Bulgaria: Women’s Issues, Feminist Issues The present chapter focuses on the historical record of the women’s movement in Bulgaria, in order to highlight areas of comparison and divergence from the broadly accepted models describing the evolution of female role and status. By emphasizing social structure and the specificities of the work force in rural Bulgaria, it argues that historical traditions are to a large extent responsible for the continuity of certain cultural models. As an article it was published in Journal of Women’s History, vol. 5, N. 3, Winter 1994, 129–143, and reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. An earlier version—“The Bulgarian case: Women’s Issues or Feminist Issues?”—was included in Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller, Gender Politics and Post-Communism. Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, New York, London: Routledge, 1993, 30–38. The collection was looking broadly at the reception of feminism in the post-1989 countries of Eastern Europe.

Elena Bonner, an outstanding leader of the radical democratic movement in the USSR, spelled out in her typically categorical fashion and without a trace of irony the beliefs and illusions which are, in many ways, characteristic for the mind-set of the vast majority of women and men in the USSR and the other countries of Eastern Europe. When asked, after delivering an address to the University of California, Berkeley, in March 1990, what role women and women’s organizations have played in the struggle for freedom and equality in the Soviet Union, she replied, “You know, our country is on such a low socio-­ economic level that at the moment we cannot afford to divide ourselves into ‘us women’ and ‘us men’. We share a common struggle for democracy, a struggle to feed the country.”1 This paradigmatic statement precludes any discussion about the problems of feminism and of its place and contribution to social life in Eastern Europe.2 1  The New York Review of Books, May 17, 1990. 2  Whenever Eastern Europe is used in the text, it refers to both the European part of the USSR and the former people’s republics of Eastern Europe. In the debate about the “Europeanness” of the region, the author shares the view that Russia (as well as the Baltics, the Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Caucasus), belong to Europe. The central European myth which had important emancipatory functions until the collapse of the Soviet international system after

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_018

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The first illusion contained in Bonner’s statement was the postulate that feminism is a luxury of economic and social stability. This has indeed been, in relative terms, the case in Western Europe and the United States. However, to subscribe to it means to follow the dogma that the rest of the world is bound to emulate the course and shapes of social development in the “model” countries. It is also ironic that Bonner’s dictum was spelled out in the particular jargon of Marxist revolutionary discourse, against which, allegedly, she was waging her struggle. Although ironic, it was not unexpected, given the fact that social democratic, and particularly Marxist, discourse has had an organic tradition in most East European countries, despite the recent rhetoric of foreign imposition. There is, of course, nothing wrong with any discourse (Marxist included) as long as it is consistent. But if we assume that conditions are not “ripe” for a feminist movement because of the low socio-economic level, what makes them “ripe” for democracy? After all, it is a truism that democracy, too, is a luxury of stability. Bonner’s synonymous use of “struggle for democracy, struggle to feed the country” was not simply a lapsus linguae. It was a shared unconscious regional vulgarization of “democracy,” seeing it first and foremost as an economic panacea. The second illusion was about the priority of different types of struggle. Feminism, in this hierarchy is divorced (or stands apart) from democracy and is certainly far lower on the value scale. The illusion is that once democracy is achieved for all, it will automatically benefit also women as part of the body politic. This framework recalls classical socialist theory: once socialism is installed, women will be automatically emancipated. Exposing the fallacies of this argument, I am not trying to imply that it is totally wrong. After all, despite the double burden imposed on women in socialism, they were, indeed, emancipated in many respects. The changes of 1989 in Bulgaria, which elsewhere were called more grandiloquently revolutions, released many suppressed voices and many ghosts from beneath the tight and uniform cover of communism. The most notorious among them is undoubtedly nationalism, but there is an abundance of other -isms: monarchism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism, fascism, pacifism, environmentalism, post-modernism. However, feminism did not seem to be one of them. Indeed, there has been no feminist discourse (in the sense of the ideology of the second wave feminism in Western Europe and the United States during the 1960s, 1970s and later) in Bulgaria either before, or 1989, will hardly survive a careful intellectual scrutiny. In fact, it will be curious to see where the more or less europeanized Asian republics of the Soviet Union will be classified in the future.

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after 1989. Today, a quarter century after 1989, there are women’s and gender studies departments opened at the main universities, but feminist discourse remains confined almost exclusively to academia. Moreover, the potential leaders of women’s movements have not and/or refuse to adopt the ideology and discourse of feminism. Feminism is, as a matter of fact, one of those notions which, at best, evokes a sneer, and is being avoided even by individual women who are, otherwise, well versed in feminist language and theory, and who would describe themselves as feminists only off the record. This article examines some of the specific characteristics of the Bulgarian case, primarily to what extent the historical context has influenced both women’s positions and women’s attitudes. In a model of multistage evolution of equality, which is independent of the political regimes (communism or capitalism) but a function of the industrialization of society, Barbara Jancar proposes four consecutive phases shaping women’s status.3 In traditional society the roles of women and men are complimentary, but women have inferior status. In industrializing societies women attain male roles by being integrated into the industrial paradigm but still retain their traditional female roles. In industrialized societies women are primarily concerned with consumer satisfaction and their attention is focused on the nuclear family. This increases the sex-role differentiation but still women make some advance towards equality during this phase. Finally, in the postindustrial societies, exemplified today by the United States and some countries in Western Europe, women have leisure time to consider personal fulfillment, demanding androgyny: the disappearance of sex-role differentiation. Using Jancar’s model as a framework, this article also attempts to put the Bulgarian case in a comparative context. It has been widely asserted that socialism imposed a double burden on women, throwing them, on one hand, into the labor market which, by definition, was supposed to have emancipatory functions and, on the other hand, not relieving them of the traditional load of being housewives. The problem with this is not to deny the result but to question whether, indeed, the period after 1945 in Bulgaria has been such a drastic transformation and deterioration in the position of women, i.e. do we blame the system for what it has done, or for what it has not achieved. On the eve of the Second World War Bulgaria was a country with an agricultural population of over 85 percent. The sociological, statistical, agricultural and ethnographical literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century until the Second World War is unanimous that women took an active part in the 3  Barbara Wolfe Jancar, Women under communism (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 208–211.

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mainstream of agricultural labor.4 In the interwar period 90 percent of agricultural farms in Bulgaria have been classified as small (70 percent) and medium (20 percent), the criterion being that they could not afford to hire agricultural laborers but used the available working force of the family.5 In fact, the statistics of the period give a 50 percent share to women as agricultural laborers.6 The Descriptions of village women by agronomists, sociologists, ethnographers, folklorists attest to the fact that the role and status of these women was a function of being perceived first and foremost as producers, partners in the labor process.7 Male and female roles were not, in fact, so markedly segregated. This tradition of the Bulgarian village had been noticed and described by many foreign observers already during the nineteenth century. They contrasted these relations to other Balkan regions, where the role of women was much more subordinate, and where they were confined almost exclusively to the house. Lucy Garnet, among many others, in her famous Balkan Home-Life stressed the relative freedom of Bulgarian country women as compared to their Greek counterparts: The Bulgarian women of the peasant class, however, having no opportunities for copying the manners of more “civilized” neighbours, adhere rigidly to their own national costumes, and circumstances combine to give them more independent position and freer life, not only than that led by the Bulgarian townswomen, but by the generality of Greek peasant women. For the Bulgarian peasant women, taking, as they do, an equal share with the men of the family in field and farm work, are naturally accorded a co-equality with their husbands and brothers. Added to this, the women marry comparatively much later in life than the generality of Orientals, and, subject to the approval of their fathers, themselves select their husbands. For a Bulgarian peasant is in no hurry to get rid of the daughters who take such an active part in all that concerns the welfare of the home.8

4  Maria Dinkova, Sotsialen portret na bîlgarskata zhena (Sofia: Profizdat, 1980). 5  Lyuben Berov, “Sotsialna struktura na seloto v balkanskite strani prez perioda mezhdu dvete svetovni voini”, Trudove na V.I.I. “Karl Marx”, IV, 1977, 43–76. 6  T. Stanchev, “Statisticheska kharakteristika na bîlgarskoto zemedelsko stopanstvo, chast 2: Trudît v zemedelskoto stopanstvo”, Zemedelsko-stopanski vîprosi, 2 (1940). 7  Irwin T. Sanders. Balkan village (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1948). 8  Lucy Garnett. Balkan Home-Life. (New York, 1917), 177–178.

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This specifically Bulgarian tradition of the role of women in the countryside should be ascribed, in my view, primarily to strategies of survival in a rural milieu characterized by small and poor land holdings, where women’s participation in the labor process was indispensable, and where, besides, there was no influence by a hegemonic urban culture. This, without any doubt, doomed Bulgarian peasant women to a double burden which had its repercussions on their life, characterized by a very high mortality and low life expectancy.9 At the same time, however, it secured women a particularly respectful place in their immediate nuclear family, in the extended family, in the kinship network, and in the labor process. Of course, this perception of a relative independence and freedom of action for women both in the labor process outside the home, and in the ­decision-making process in the family, does not imply that the village civilization had superseded an, as a whole, male-oriented and male-dominated society. It is important, however, to underline these traditions of the Bulgarian village, given the fact of the recent numerical preponderance and importance of the peasantry in the overall social structure, and the consequent rootedness of the other social strata in the village culture. For all the specific manifestations of male domination, for all the attributes of “Oriental” patriarchy which one can encounter even today, and which are the product of a distinctive and complex historical development with a variety of overlapping cultural influences, it would be difficult to describe Bulgaria in terms of what one author has aptly put as “the belt of classic patriarchy”, stretching from North Africa to North India.10 In more than one way the description of women’s life in the Bulgarian village is reminiscent of what Martine Segalen had to say about nineteenth century women in rural France. Discussing the nature of relationships of labor, authority and respect, she successfully defied the old cliché of the absolute authority of the “patriarchal” male, showing that by sharing the functions of production men and women, to a great extent, integrated their activities.11 It was only the disappearance of women’s productive functions that finally relocated and confined them to the home. The role of the bourgeois wife in Western Europe, and her Victorian counterpart in England and the United States became increasingly identified with that of the mother and produced 9  Maria Todorova, “Population structure, marriage patterns, family and household (according to Ottoman documentary material from north-east Bulgaria in the 1860s)”, Etudes balkaniques 19, no. 1, 1983, 59–72. 10  Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with patriarchy”, Gender and Society, 2, Sept., 1988, 274–290. 11  Martine Segalen. Love and Power in the Peasant Family. Rural France in the Nineteenth Century. (The University of Chicago Press, 1983).

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the influential and oppressive role model. Professional activity was not needed to establish feminine status. On the contrary, it was considered diverting women from their primary functions and fulfillment. This ideal was emulated by the bourgeoisie in Bulgaria but, given its very recent formation as a class and its relative weakness, it did not and could not become the hegemonic role model for other social strata. Still, with the secession of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Bulgarian state after 1978 modelled, as it was, on the pattern of Western Europe, some of the basic functions of women (their socializing roles, their roles as keepers and transmitters of tradition) began to be lost by being transferred to the state. Moreover, the new legal code which superseded customary law institutionalized and legitimized the secondary and subordinate position of women. What is more significant, given the exclusive and influential role of the intelligentsia in East European societies, and particularly in Bulgaria, is that women represented a significant share of this social group. The intelligentsia12 during this period was recruited, unlike its West European counterpart, not from the middle class or aristocratic elites, but from the lower middle class, well-todo peasants, and quite often from the poor peasantry and the working class.13 This was only natural in view of the specific social structure of the country characterized by the numerous peasantry, the lack of aristocracy, as well as emerging bourgeoisie and working class. What was quite unique, however, was the active role of women who transposed the existing traditions to their new social milieu. For a country which at the turn of the century had less than 14 percent of literate women, their share by 1934 having risen to 57 percent, the evolution is quite remarkable. Moreover, in 1937 22.7 percent of the students in higher education were women which compared favorably to the somewhat lower percentage in Czechoslovakia (17.3 percent) and Hungary (14.7 percent), and was close to the figures for the other East European countries: Yugoslavia (23.3 percent), Romania (26.0 percent), Poland (28.3 percent). By 1946 21 percent among the specialists with higher education (16 percent being economically active), and close to 40 percent among the specialists with high-school ­education were women.14

12  By intelligentsia in the prewar context is understood the specialists with higher university or high school education. 13  Dinkova, Sotsialen portret, 59. 14  Ibid., 59–60; Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe. Ed. by Sharon L.Wolchik and Alfred G. Meyer. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 33–34.

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Most women were represented in the so-called feminized professions (teachers, pharmacists, dentists), and their position was incomparably less stable than that of males, that their salaries were lower. Nonetheless it attests to the fact of a continuous perception of women as active participants in the labor process. This perception was equally shared by the families who provided education for their daughters, as well as by their husbands, who preferred to keep (and/or could not afford keeping out) their wives from the labor force. The industrial revolution of the 1950s and 1960s was accompanied by demographic and social shifts, some with expected, others with unforeseeable results. The dramatic flow of the labor force from the countryside to the cities was a common characteristic for all East European countries, yet nowhere did it reach the dimensions and the quick pace of the transformation as it did in Bulgaria. The combined effects of the extremely rapid industrialization and the miserable overpopulation in the countryside in the interwar period, alongside the administrative push through the collectivization program, resulted in a drastic change of the rural/urban ratio of the country: from 24.7 percent in 1946, the urban population almost doubled by 1965 (46.5 percent), to reach 66.4 percent in 1987.15 Translated in terms of social structure and labor force, this meant that the depletion of the number of agricultural workers resulted in an automatic swell of the ranks of industrial, construction and transportation workers.16 Women formed an important part of the industrial working force from the outset and their numbers grew throughout the first half of the century, comprising 22 percent of the industrial labor in 1909, and 36 percent in 1944. In the postwar period their place as industrial laborers was not only stabilized but they entered en masse industries which before had been either non-existent or reserved exclusively for men, like machine construction and metallurgy. It is difficult to speculate to what extent this was the result of the drastic and massive migration from the villages and the industrialization process, and to what extent it was also boosted by the doctrine of emancipation through participation in the work process, especially joining the ranks of the proletariat. In any case, the plight of the new first-generation working class, and especially its female part in the new urban setting, was quite different from that experienced by their West European counterparts:

15  Robert N.Taafe, “Population Structure”, in Bulgarien. Südosteuropa-Handbuch. Vol. VI, ed. K.-D. Grothusen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 445. 16  Roger Whitaker, “Social Structure”, in Bulgaria, 463–464.

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After half a century of rootlessness in which they were torn between a forgotten peasant culture and a bourgeois culture that they had not yet acquired, the working classes began to settle. Seen from the outside, their situation became more normal, their fertility fell, and they began to aspire for an education for their children. The working-class woman, however, lost her status and with the growth of the consumer society finally withdrew from the labor market.17 As noted above, the Bulgarian working-class woman transferred many aspects of her peasant culture to the city, without encountering, at least not to that extent, the competition and denigration of a hegemonic bourgeois culture in the period before the war; after the war this culture was, for all practical purposes, eradicated. The hegemonic role-modelling, if any, was supplied by active women from the intelligentsia. It is important to keep in mind that throughout this period, as well as later, Bulgarian society has preserved one of its most important demographic characteristics: that of a practically complete nuptiality. The relatively high degree of a celibate population so characteristic for the north-west European marriage pattern, has been and is practically absent. This has to be explained in terms of a complex interplay between social and population structure, demographic regime, inheritance patterns, and so on., where the resulting and, at the same time independently functioning cultural tradition has come out to be one of the most stable factors.18 In 1975, for example, 93 percent of women in the labor force were married, and only 7.4 percent had no children. The opposition between career and motherhood does exist in Bulgaria and it often is seen and is felt to be an unbearable combination, but a combination nonetheless. It does not carry the irreconcilability, and often, mutual exclusiveness, as it did in many West European countries prior to the Second World War. Thus, the “double burden” has to be approached more realistically, it seems to me, from the point of view of a cultural tradition, deeply embedded in rural life, where women did carry out this double function, and where an alternative viable role model was, for all practical purposes, non-existent. Bulgarian women have not had the time or opportunity to experience as a group whole periods like the Cult of Domesticity, the Feminine Mystique or the Beauty Myth. 17  Martine Segalen. Historical Anthropology of the Family. (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 217. 18  See on this question Maria Todorova. Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006.

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For them, these have primarily been part of ideological constructs, desired by some, shunned by others. As for the other epiphenomena of urbanization and industrialization, like the growth of consumer society and the withdrawal of women from the labor market, a certain standard of living, although meager and laughable in West European and American terms, has been attained only during the last four decades. Ironically, the relatively massive embourgeoisement of Bulgarian society which had not been completed during its bourgeois period, took place in its so-called socialist period. The interesting question, then, is how many women, if conditions permit, will shed voluntarily the double burden, and step into the imagined domesticity paradise, promised to them lavishly by the yellow press, and how many will have internalized the idea (or the myth) of the emancipatory functions of labor? It is a question which permits a number of scenarios, depending on the interplay of a whole variety of variables which are going to be shaped in one way or another in the near future. So far, the active involvement of Bulgarian women in the labor process has been stressed, a role which has had a long historical tradition, and which facilitated the timely legal and economic recognition of women. I am perfectly aware that this recognition is not equivalent to and should not be identified with equal status, a trap into which much of Marxist feminist falls.19 Yet, in the specific circumstances of the Bulgarian social structure and political tradition, it shaped the character of the women’s movement and the feminist discourse. Women’s organizations were first established in Bulgaria in the last decades of Ottoman rule during the 1860s and 1870s. This was a period which marked the end of an era widely known as the National Revival and left its imprint on the character of women’s associations.20 One of the central aspects of the National Revival during the nineteenth century (alongside, and chronologically before the struggle for church independence and political liberation) was the movement for secular education. This resulted in the formation of a thin layer of educated males which, by the 1870s, comprised hardly even half percent of the total population of about 4.5 million. Although education was extended to 19  On this point see the important contribution of Barbara Wolfe Jancar. Women under communism. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 20  On women’s organizations in this period see Virdzhinia Paskaleva. Bîlgarkata prez Vîzrazhdaneto. Sofia, 1964; In English, see Linda Nelson, “Transitional Institutions: Bulgarian Women’s Associations from 1856 to 1878”, Paper Presented at the Annual Conference of the American Association of Slavic Studies, Washington, D.C., October 1990, which is part of the author’s dissertation: “National Identification and Gender Identity: The Bulgarian National Revival, Women’s Consciousness, Women’s Activism, 1840–1878”.

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women only a few years after the establishment of modern secular schools, it produced even more modest results in terms of educated numbers of women; it is rather a tribute to the modernizing consciousness of the new educators, and their awareness and consideration of the so-called “woman question”. On the other hand, the few women who were the pioneers and driving force of the women’s organizations made contributions disproportionate to their numbers to the cause of national liberation. Their associations which set themselves educational and benevolent tasks were inspired first and foremost by the passionate nationalism which was the characteristic of the epoch. It has to be pointed out that these women active in the women’s groups were almost exclusively the wives, daughters, or mothers of educated men who were political and cultural activists. Thus, the initiative for the women’s organizations came from the thin crust of educated women from the new middle class in a, usually, small-town setting. This social background and the character of the “modern”, “europeanized” education determined the main goals of these organizations: the education and enlightenment of women for the sake of attaining the highest goal of women’s predestination, motherhood, and the extension of maternal duties to the public sphere. This argumentation is clearly reminiscent of the “republican motherhood” discourse. After the country attained its de facto independence in 1878, women’s organizations proliferated, especially after the foundation and under the auspices of the Bîlgarski Zhenski Sîyuz (Bulgarian Women’s Union). This national association was founded in 1901, at a time when, according to one of the contemporary activists “the economic transformations dragged our woman out of the domestic hearth in pursuit of living for herself and her family and when, on the other hand, laws began to be passed, which hampered the free application of feminine labor and the attainment of higher education for women.”21 It is significant to remember here that the laws coined in this period were emulating West European legislation and were being introduced in a milieu governed until recently (and specifically in the sphere of family relations and what could be termed as women’s issues) solely by customary and canon law which, although perpetuating certain traditions had not introduced comparable prohibitions. These two problems, the limitation of women’s labor and education, focused women’s efforts in the 1890s and culminated in the creation of a national organization which, by 1931 had 77 local units and a membership of close to 8400. It is significant that the founders of this organization, although recognizing the 21   Bulgarski Zhenski Suyuz (po sluchay 30-godishninata ot negovoto osnovavane, 1901–1931. Sofia, 1931, 1.

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role and achievements of their predecessors from the National Revival period, clearly distinguished their activities from the first women’s associations, and would not consider them as part of the women’s (feminist) movement.22 At the same time it ought to be stressed that this second phase in the development of women’s organizations was again almost exclusively an urban phenomenon. Of the seventy-seven constituent associations in 1931 only 10 were located in some of the more developed and enlightened villages, and they comprised only slightly over 300 members. It is no surprise that one of the important goals of the organization was to extend its activities among peasant women. The public debate about the goals of the national women’s organization concentrated much of its efforts in 1902–1903. There were two main currents in the movement which a contemporary defined as “social-democratic” and “purely feminist”.23 The first argued that the social development of the country was leading to the proletarianization of the vast majority of the population (both men and women). Consequently, the aims of the organization should stress class issues and its class character. This trend insisted also on the adoption of the formula of “complete equality of rights” with men. The other trend insisted that the organization should have a purely feminist, and not a class character. Its aim would be not to concentrate on the consciousness of members of particular classes but to enlighten “the members of this army which is called the female sex, and which has been subjugated throughout the centuries.” Realizing that “complete equality of rights” was still not a need internalized by the majority of their followers, and that it was interpreted as a social-democratic slogan, the leaders of this trend formulated and managed to pass as the dominant resolution of the women’s congress that its central goal was “to work for the intellectual and moral enlightenment of woman and the improvement of her situation in all respects.” It took another almost two decades to transform the “improvement” to “equal rights” in 1921 while still insisting on the purely feminist “supra-party” and “supra-class” character of the organization. Whereas it never reached the terminological and theoretical sophistication of the controversy between ­socialist-feminism and liberal-feminism in the post-war United States, the debate between these two currents of the Bulgarian women’s movement at the 22  There is an interesting difference between Bulgarian women historians who insist on viewing the women’s organizations of the National Revival period in a purely national context and deny them any feminist intentions; and on the other hand, their American researcher Linda Nelson who sees in some of their manifestations a demonstration of awareness of gender specific issues which transcended nationality. 23   Bulgarski Zhenski Suyuz, 15–17.

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beginning of the twentieth century is quite reminiscent of it.24 This debate also explains why, once the social-democratic view became the dominant one after the Second World War, and with its inability to recognize the autonomy of gender issues from class, there was a deep suspicion of “pure feminism” as a conservative and opportunist bourgeois ideology. It should not be forgotten also that Bulgarian women were enfranchised only in 1946, after the communist takeover.25 After 1944 the women’s movement, like other broad social organizations, became an extension of the Communist party. The Committee of Bulgarian Women which operated unrivalled until 1990 as the sole women’s organization was supposed to perpetuate the socialist view of feminism and women’s issues. While it certainly postured as the official organization it was expected to be and was using a, by then, marasmic vocabulary, and while it was completely redundant and helpless as an organization of women operating in a totalitarian one-party regime, its organ, the journal Zhenata Dnes (Woman Today) displayed some refreshing qualities and enjoyed tremendous popularity among women and men alike. The reasons for this were twofold: on one hand the party leadership with a typically patriarchal condescension tolerated a publication which addressed everyday issues in an everyday language; on the other hand, the public saturated by overideologized discourse basked in the light of what were considered to be the “real” issues of life. This also comes to explain why a journal written in a popular and unpretentious manner, and intellectually on the midway between romance and a cook-book, could for a considerable period of time maintain the reputation of being liberal. Already in the last few years before 1989 attempts at the construction of the desirable image of the post-socialist woman were initiated by sociologists, philosophers and journalists (almost exclusively male) who received considerable presentation in the mass media, especially on television. Many of those males are now in the forefront of the struggle for political power called euphemistically the democratic process. The image they strove to promulgate, modern paraphernalia like clothes and manners notwithstanding, was strongly bound to the traditional and even to the archaic with its stress on domestic virtues, mother role, submissiveness, an idiosyncratic interpretation of “femininity.” In the aftermath of the 1989 changes a new organization was set up in March 1990 as a splinter group from the old Committee: the Women’s Democratic Union. Its language displayed a strong commitment to the new democratic 24   Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Socialist-Feminist American Women’s History”, Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 3 (winter 1990): 181–210. 25   Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe, 34.

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ideals, something which is typical for practically all political and mass organizations: the “democratic” discourse has become the new sermon in the public sphere. Amidst the generalities which it shares with its mother organization, like improving the position of women and the family, raising women’s awareness, championing advanced legislation for women, and so on, and amidst the specific rhetoric of doing away with the communist aberrations, contributing to the peaceful transformation to democracy and building up of a pluralist society, there are also some specific and original messages, chief among them being the emphasis on motherhood, the home, the family, the personal world of women. This rebirth of the “domesticity” syndrome clearly indicates at least an attempt at continuity with the middle class “pure feminism” of the prewar period. This is even more pronounced in the activities and the discourse of another new women’s organization, the Christian women’s movement which insists on tradition and Christian virtues, on love of the fatherland and family values. The chair of this organization, Elisaveta Milenova, who became an MP in the newly elected parliament in September 1991, summarized her views on the present political situation: “I am convinced that there are strong men who are able to rescue Bulgaria from the devastation.”26 This is all the more unjustifiable since, unlike English (or French) where man (homme) has assumed the encompassing meaning of mankind (humankind), Bulgarian, like German, keeps the strict distinction between chovek (sing.), khora (pl.) (Mensch, human being), and mîzh (Mann, man). In the present political process women are rather the exception but at least they physically co-exist with men, albeit as a minority. For example, of the 200 members of parliament elected in September 1991, 28 are women (17 from the Bulgarian Socialist Party, 10 from the Union of Democratic Forces, and 1 from the Movement for Rights and Freedoms). In the political discourse, however, women are completely absent. Except for a few articles by women which publicized the creation of the new splinter Women’s Democratic Union in 1990, women’s issues are not mentioned in the press, in the other mass-media, or in political forums even in most traditional terms. The political language is lopsidedly male gender-specific. Headlines like: “What we need is professional political men”, “The country is in need of honest men”, etc. proliferate in the papers. The short period of organizational life of the women’s organizations in conditions close to chaos, and in the framework of a very tense male political life, which hardly allows any mention, let alone priority, to women’s issues, does 26   Duma, no. 149, 11 June 1991; see also the interview in Duma, no. 147, 8 June 1991.

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not permit to pass verdicts. It is yet to be seen how the existing or future women’s groups are going to cope with newly emerging problems like, for example, the unemployment which already disproportionately affects women: 62 percent of the 178,000 registered unemployed in the spring of 1991 were women. This is before the expected drastic reductions in the labor force which will accompany the privatization of the industry.27 On the other hand, although this is a trend and a pattern which might persist for some time, it is highly unlikely that the economy, at this particular stage of its development, will be able to afford only male labor once it stabilizes. It is also highly unlikely that there will be a serious legal reversal in women’s rights. On the contrary, it can be safely expected that, at least in words, the democratic discourse will reaffirm these rights as part of the basic human and minority rights. As far as some specific issues as the right to abortion are concerned, Bulgaria is not even remotely facing the problems of a Catholic Poland. For the moment, the country does not even have a problem with the church and religion. A recent poll maintained that 27 percent of the population was Orthodox, 8 percent were Muslim, and 65 percent described themselves as atheist.28 Although these figures are not final (previous polls showed about 40 % professing Orthodoxy), it clearly indicates that the Orthodox (or any other) church can hardly be expected to be a decisive political force. This does not imply necessarily the strength of the secular tradition, because at this moment there is a frightening explosion of interest in esoteric phenomena and mysticism. In general, appearances indicate a clear trend towards neo-conservatism. The euphoria over the market goes hand in hand and is explicitly articulated in terms of happy middle class visions of well-earning men and well-coiffed women meeting them at the porches of their suburban houses. For the consumer somewhat lower on the social ladder there is blunt pornography. All this, of course, was in many ways expected, although hardly hoped for; it is the normal reaction of the pendulum switching to the other extreme after the, at least on the surface, ascetic and predictable daily life of the communist decades. The question to be asked is whether the observed neo-conservative trend is of a short-term, or of a longer duration. The ideology and discourse of feminism as developed in Western Europe and the United States after the Second World War, scarcely exists. The natural explanation that this was the result of the total isolation, the intellectual in particular, of the so called Second (communist) world falls short in the face 27   Duma, no. 121, 9 May 1991. 28   Los Angeles Times, 19 May 1991.

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of numerous counterexamples in many other fields, particularly philosophy, literary criticism, etc. Rather, it was a particular combination of the fluid social structure and the imposed isolation, where a critical mass of women (intellectuals) was not formed ready and eager to overcome the intellectual taboo and ignorance on feminism, not least because of the inertia of suspicion towards feminism inherited from the interwar period. Issues like the differentiation between gender and class, between sex and gender have not been raised; in fact, the proper terminology for sex-gender problems will have yet to be coined and introduced. The old Marxist-feminism has made strong and lasting contributions, but in the absence of a fruitful debate has shown no signs of overcoming the tendency to prioritize other issues like class, revolution, peace, legal and economic struggle, and even democracy over the general problems of sex and gender. The only, to my knowledge, real up-to-date feminist piece with a profound and erudite awareness of western feminist critique that has been published, is an impressionistic literary essay that, in the main, deplores the complete misunderstanding and misrepresentation of feminism in Bulgaria: The Bulgarian woman in her overwhelming majority has been untouched by feminism … Why do I always forget that I live in Bulgaria where such petty matters [feminism] do not evoke a response, because we all are obsessed with the great political issues; where radical negativism is fashionable even when it doesn’t know what it is talking about; where the Bulgarian woman is proud of saying: “I am not a feminist and never will be one. I am simply a woman.”29 As far as the attitude of men towards the problems of women in general, and feminism in particular, is concerned, the same prerequisites which were instrumental for naturally bearing the “double burden” by women, namely the rural tradition, makes its acceptance by men as normal. In their majority, men are ready to accept women as partners in the working place as long as the latter conform to the traditional image. When it comes to the toleration, not even acceptance, of feminist ideas, at work is not merely gender discrimination, but the typical suspicion of everything radical and intellectual by first generation urbanites. To summarize, the Bulgarian case agrees with many of the characteristics of Jancar’s model, and diverges from some. The main difference concerns 29  Ameliya Licheva, “Feminizmît, ideologiya na drugostta?” (Feminism, ideology of the otherness?), Kultura, N. 50, 13 December 1991.

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traditional society where Bulgarian rural women had gone beyond the complementary role and had assumed the “double burden”, the usual attribute of industrializing societies. This, as already pointed out, is to be explained chiefly by the particular historical evolution of the country which made Bulgaria, well until the Second World War, primarily a rural egalitarian society characterized by small holdings. The cultural model thus attained was transferred into the next stage of development, and into another, urban, setting. On the other hand, the communist period in Bulgarian history (1944–1989) saw the drastic transformation of the country into an industrialized society. What I have called the “embourgeoisement” of Bulgarian society in the last few years fits well with Jancar’s “revolution of rising expectations” whose main objective becomes better living conditions. The postindustrial stage which has not been reached by any of the ex-communist countries and which has produced the present variety of feminism, is what I have called “the luxury of stability”. Although models certainly make it easier to explain history, their predictive capacity has usually proven to be of limited value. Coming out of 1989 does not place Bulgaria, as well as the rest of Eastern Europe, into the dreamed of postindustrial bliss. A lot will depend on where and how the East European economies will develop in the next few years. The prospects for a “Mexicanization” are open and, it seems, quite probable. A lot will also depend on whether these societies will be able to achieve (and to afford) a real pluralism, another important precondition for a successful feminist movement. Historical traditions will also play, as I have been trying to insist, an important role.

Section 2 Nation- and Society-Building

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The Course and Discourses of Bulgarian Nationalism In the early 1990s, Peter Sugar had the idea of assembling in one volume representative texts of nationalism on Albania, Bulgaria, Czech and Slovak nationalism, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia, together with scholarly commentaries. This article is the result of this initiative and was published as a chapter in Peter Sugar, ed., Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1995, 55–102. Based on my general theoretical views about nationalism, it provides a survey of the evolution of Bulgarian nationalism and its dominant tropes in the course of the twentieth century (until the mid-1990s).



Document 1



Preface to The Bulgarians in Their Historical, Ethnographical and Political Frontiers by D. Rizoff (1917)1 For many years the Balkan peninsula has been the principal source of strife between the Great Powers of Europe. […] And after the Balkan states commenced to live their own political lives, the Balkans became a new arena of discord among these nations themselves. This became particularly the case after Bulgaria was liberated (in 1878) and, through an unfortunate decision of the Congress of Berlin, whole provinces were torn away from her and handed around to her neighbors: Macedonia to Turkey, the Nish province to Serbia, and the Dobrudzha to Romania. […] Wronged and rent asunder at the Congress of Berlin, the Bulgarians perceived early the danger which threatened not only their national unity but 1  Excerpts from the preface to D. Rizoff. Die Bulgaren in ihren historischen, ethnographischen und politischen Grenzen (Atlas mit 40 Landkarten). Berlin: Königliche Hoflithographie, HofBuch- und Steindruckerei Wilhelm Greve, 1917. The author (1860–1918) was a revolutionary, journalist and diplomat and Bulgarian minister plenipotentiary in Berlin during the war. The long tetralingual preface (German, French, English and Bulgarian) is, in fact, an independent pamphlet which summarizes the national aspirations of the Bulgarians until the catastrophic outcome of the war. Although, as a whole, all three translations from the Bulgarian into German, English and French are professional and of high quality, there are some discrepancies and mistakes. The present text is a revised English translation compared against and corrected with the original Bulgarian text of the author, so as to meticulously reflect all possible nuances. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_019

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even their political existence. They made haste to declare, in September 1885, the union of the two dissevered Bulgarias—north and south—in order also to be better able to defend their frontiers towards Romania and Serbia, and to occupy themselves more seriously with the fate of Macedonia. But so natural a union as this, which did not make even Turkey, whose interests were infringed by it, indignant, was not to the liking of Serbia and, in the name of the “equilibrium in the Balkans”, she attempted to frustrate it by attacking Bulgaria in the night of 1/13 November of the same year. To her misfortune, she was defeated in 13 days and compelled to seek peace. But the Bulgarians were not intoxicated with their victory over Serbia. In their constant striving to live in peace with other nations—particularly with their neighbors—they made peace with Serbia “without annexations and indemnities”. And soon afterwards they brought forward the most equitable and practical solution for an agreement regarding Macedonia among the Balkan states interested in her. That solution was the autonomy of Macedonia, guaranteed and applied under the protectorate of the Great Powers. But Serbia and Greece declared themselves opposed to autonomy. They did this because they knew that Macedonia is populated by a Bulgarian majority which, under an autonomous government, would give the whole of Macedonia a Bulgarian physiognomy, and would not wait long before it united her to the Bulgarian Principality—as occurred with Southern Bulgaria in 1885. In the face of this opposition of Serbs and Greeks to the autonomy of Macedonia, the Macedonian Bulgarians decided to achieve it themselves, arms in hand. […] From this instructive history, narrated here in its chief episodes, I think that I can deduce the following propositions and conclusions: That the Balkan Peninsula has been for many years the principal hearth wherefrom have come the sparks which have kindled most of the wars in Europe, and which kindled the present great war. That the Balkan Peninsula could have been such a hearth because it has not been crystallized nationally, politically and economically. Turkey, to whom it belonged for more than five centuries ruled it only thanks to her military force; while, after the liberation of Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria, a large part of the Balkan peninsula remained in Turkish hands and became an object of conquest for the Balkan states and of rivalry among the Great Powers. That all attempts at the pacification of the Balkans during the last forty years have been made by Bulgaria alone—the only Balkan state which has striven for an agreement with her neighbors (preferably with Serbia), and which has made three formal attempts2 to bring about this agreement. 2  In 1897, 1904, and 1911.

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That for the realization of this aim Bulgaria has been ready even to sacrifice her union with Macedonia, consenting to have an autonomous state formed out of her, which would serve as a unifying link between the Balkan states, and as an independent political unit would enter into a future Balkan confederation. That for the same purpose Bulgaria even consented, in 1912, to suffer a living member of her national organism to be severed by agreeing to have a part of the Bulgarian lands in Northern Macedonia ceded to Serbia. That, all for the same purpose, Bulgaria has never raised any question regarding her lands in the Dobrudzha and the Nish province […]. That Bulgaria has always nourished aspirations only for lands which have belonged to her in the past, with which she has shared the Turkish yoke for centuries and which have been recognized as Bulgarian by all authoritative travelers in European Turkey, as well as by Turkey itself and the Great Powers at their Constantinople Conference in 1876–77.3 And finally, that the legend regarding some sort of ambition on the part of Bulgaria to impose its hegemony upon the Balkan peninsula—a legend concocted by the Greeks and the Serbs in 1913—is one of the most groundless and perfidious libels ever cast on a nation. […] The pacification of the Balkan peninsula is possible only if the Balkan states crystallize nationally, politically and economically. Such a crystallization is possible only when these states settle in their final frontiers. The fixing of these frontiers has to be based upon the following fundamental principles: that they be as natural as possible; that they enclose the respective nations in their national constitutive parts; that they safeguard the economic independence of these nations; that they correspond to their historical traditions and do not conflict with the right of each nation to self-determination. […] A crystallization of the Balkan peninsula on the basis of the enunciated principle will result in the following political frontiers for the Balkan states: Turkey will have to retain in Europe her present frontier with Bulgaria fixed by the Turko-Bulgarian Boundary Convention of Aug. 24/Sept. 6, 1915. […] Romania shall have to renounce formally and irrevocably possession of the old Dobrudzha presented to her in 1878 as well as of the new Dobrudzha seized by her in 1913, and to withdraw to her old frontier behind the Danube. 3  At the Constantinople conference which convened in December 1876 an agreement was reached between the European powers that, as far as Bulgaria was concerned, it should be divided into an eastern and into a western autonomous province (whose overall territory anticipated the future frontiers of San-Stefano Bulgaria). The conference failed as the Sultan rejected its provisions and promulgated the first Ottoman constitution.

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This must be done not only because Dobrudzha is the cradle of the Bulgarian people4 and for twelve whole centuries has been a Bulgarian province; not only because Romania in 1878 considered Dobrudzha a Bulgarian province and was indignant that Russia should deprive her of Bessarabia in exchange for it; not only because the whole of Dobrudzha has already been taken from Romania by force of arms; but also because Romania has never belonged to the Balkan peninsula and must not encroach on it any further if peace between her and Bulgaria be desired and, in general, if the peace of the Balkans should not be disturbed. Romania must quit Dobrudzha also for another reason: the mouth of an international river such as the Danube should not be held by any one state alone. […] Bulgaria would have to reunite to herself all her provinces which were torn from her by force in 1878 and distributed to her neighbors, namely Macedonia, the Dobrudzha and the Nish province. Bulgaria has national, moral, historical and geographical rights to them, acknowledged by the former rulers of these provinces themselves, by nearly all the authoritative geographers and travelers to the Balkans, and by all the Great Powers. It is true that in the course of the forty years’ possession of Dobrudzha by Romania and of the Nish province by Serbia these two states succeeded in imposing upon them, by the power of their rule, their national imprint. But it is no less true that the Bulgarian rights to these provinces are so inalterable and incontestable that they can be defended both by the French formula of désannexion enunciated by the French prime-minister Ribot, and by the German formula of réannexion, advanced by the German professor and economist Adolf Wagner. […] It is scarcely necessary to prove that Bulgaria must also take back this Macedonia which even her enemies have recognized in the past as Bulgarian, and to reunite all her parts which have a Bulgarian majority. As for the capital Thessalonika, her only port, it must either be neutralized as a free city, or else become a joint possession (“condominium”) of Greece and Bulgaria, as it was between the two Balkan wars 1912–1913. […] Serbia must be restored in the boundaries which remain to her (after the restitution to Bulgaria of the provinces taken from her in the past), annexing, on the other hand, the whole of Montenegro and the whole of north-eastern Albania, i.e Metohia and the famous, for its history and fertility, Kossovo Pole.

4  The proto-Bulgars of the seventh century settled in the Danube delta, and the newly created Bulgarian state which was recognized by the Byzantines in 681 (considered the birthdate of Bulgaria) was centered in north-east Bulgaria (the Dobrudzha included).

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In this manner, Serbia will obtain an outlet to the sea, so much dreamt of and so necessary to her, on the Adriatic [which …] will ensure the economic independence of the Serbian people. One indispensable condition for the guaranteeing of the peace is that Serbia once and for all renounce Macedonia. Montenegro as said, must be annexed to Serbia: because it is a purely Serbian country; because the entire Montenegrin people ardently desires this union with Serbia; because Montenegro does not possess the necessary conditions for a modern independent state […] Albania, like all other Balkan countries, has a right to an independent political existence. But the experiment with her independence in 1913–1915 showed that she does not possess the qualification required for a politically sovereign state. She would be even less viable after Metohia and Kossovo Pole are given to Serbia—for without them the union of Serbia and Montenegro is virtually impossible. Albania might still be set as an autonomous state under the protectorate of one of the great Adriatic powers: Austria or Italy. But in such a case she would only be a foreign colony and, what is worse, would become a new source of rivalries and dissensions in the Balkans. Therefore, for all the sympathy one should feel for the political independence of this original nation […], I think that it would be preferable for both the Albanians themselves and the pacification of the peninsula if Albania were to enter as a component part of the neighboring Balkan states—with a guarantee, by an international act, of course, for religious and national-educational liberties for the Albanian nation. […] Greece, so generously expanded by the accession of the upper Epirus and of southern Albania, should restore to Bulgaria those Macedonian segments which she seized in 1913, and to whose cession to Bulgaria Venizelos himself had consented before the second Balkan war. […] When the above frontiers of the Balkan states crystallize at an international congress, and the great humanitarian principle of international arbitration becomes compulsory for them, no further doubt could arise about the attainment of a pacification of the Balkan peninsula. […] Bulgaria is a small country. She can neither afford to dream of any imperialism or hegemony in the Balkan peninsula, nor to strive to achieve her national political unification merely by force. Neither can she cover her war aims with the lofty phrase of fighting “for the liberty and civilization of the whole world”. For Bulgaria the moral element in policy is obligatory. Therefore, Bulgaria must bring proof of her inalienable rights over the provinces she considers Bulgarian and, in this manner, gain the moral sanction of the whole world for her unification.

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Document 2



Essay “The psychology of the Bulgarian” by Constantine Gîlîbov (1934)5 […] The psychology of today’s Bulgarian is to a considerable degree the psychology of a person in a transition period when his life very rapidly changes from one set of structures to another. There are many dislocated elements in his psyche. Our quick uprooting from the rural and semi-rural life, our fast integration into the culture of Western Europe made us turn a hundred and eighty degrees around our own axis, with the result that we were disoriented. To what extent we are confused is evident, for example, from the fact that we held it for necessary to build one of the most modern and expensive theatres in Europe before providing Plovdiv with a drainage system; to boast of one of the most luxurious university halls in the world, of which even Herriot was astonished and, at the same time, to locate our faculty of physics and mathematics in a building which we are ashamed to show to foreigners; to build prisons more hygienic than sanatoria but to keep our peasant children and a good part of our urban children in schools stinking worse than stables. Our individual and social lives seem to be obsessed by a practical spirit; yet, we are extremely unpractical: we tend to satisfy the less pressing needs first, putting aside the urgent ones. To what extent we are confused is evident further from our politics. Reared in the spirit of freedom which rages in our revolutionary songs and which exploded like a volcano during the great April uprising and later during two revolts of Macedonians and Thracians, we managed to drive away the centuries-old and much stronger enemy during the Balkan war with our indomitable zeal to win. Immediately, however, we became victims of our own proclivity towards disorientation: we imagined that we could achieve the reunification of the Bulgarian people at once, instead of at separate stages. We were given a lot, but we wanted all, and therefore we received nothing. It is a great delusion to claim that the Bulgarians have a practical spirit. After all, is it practical to believe that after having fought months on end, while your allies have been resting behind your back, you would be able to defeat them all at a time, assuming

5  Excerpts from Ornamenti (Filosofski i literaturni eseta), (Sofia, 1934). Reissued in M. Draganov (ed.), Narodopsikhologiia na bulgarite. Antologiia (Sofia: Otechestven front, 1984), 567–569. The author (1892–1980) was a prominent Germanist, literary critic and writer. Translation by M. Todorova.

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at the same time that Turks and Romanians would let the grass grow under their feet? This is much more than being impractical: it is sheer stupidity. Our individual and social lives seem to be obsessed by a practical spirit; yet, we are extremely unpractical: in 1913 we lost our self-assessment, we lost our sense of reality, we took on ourselves a task far beyond our powers and unattainable at the moment, only to become even more confused in 1915! The reunification of the Bulgarians is a complicated political task of an European order and our politicians recognized this well, but in their attempts to come closer to its solution they became confused even before the Balkan war, and twice as confused once they got to solving it. Our politicians did what they could because they were not fit to do more. May God forgive their sins; the people will never forgive them … The psychology of today’s Bulgarian is determined to a great extent by his way of life. What is this way of life? It is the way of life of a country which is under the continuous influence of the closely located and closely related civilized states of Europe; of a country gripped with the desire to catch up with their development; of a country which is swiftly incorporating the cultural requirements of these states but, at the same time, of a country which is poor, with limited opportunities for economic development and, therefore, impotent to satisfy these needs. The Bulgarian wants to have everything that people in the civilized European states have: a proper dress, electricity, radio and what not, but his means are few and what follows is a ferocious struggle of each against everybody to accumulate money, and the ensuing roughening of the souls. And since the europeanization of our poor country will continue to be as difficult, the struggle of each against everybody and the roughening of the souls will continue for a long time. What the Bulgarian is today has its deep roots in the peculiar cultural-historical stage which our people is living through, and it is impossible to eliminate these roots. The Bulgarian will be tomorrow what he is today—as long as his will for cultural progress is alive and as long as he continues to be so poor.

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Document 3



Speeches by Todor Zhivkov and by Lyudmila Zhivkova on the Occasion of the 1300th Anniversary of the Bulgarian State6 Address on Bulgaria (1981)7



[…] What are the qualities and traditions which characterize our people? First and foremost, this is the fighting spirit, the democratic and revolutionary traditions. Our history is a sequence of countless protest movements, rebellions, conspiracies and uprisings, a perpetual struggle by the people against foreign and domestic plunderers and oppressors, for justice and liberty, for a decent human life, for social progress. The revolutionary traditions found a logical continuation in the struggle of the working class against capitalism. They have been one of the main motive forces of our progress, of our struggle to construct a mature socialist society and to build communism. A striking characteristic of our people is its thirst for knowledge, for education, its receptivity to all which is good and progressive in other peoples and, at the same time, its readiness to share with others its own cultural achievements, its social experience. […] Another valuable feature which we, as a people, should continue to foster and cultivate within ourselves is industry. Our people hates plunderers and dispises idlers. Its ideal of man is the laborer, the creator and producer of material and spiritual values. […] Ardent patriotism is one of our people’s outstanding qualities. For centuries forced to defend the freedom and independence of the fatherland, it knows how to love and sacrifice itself for it. But love for the fatherland is typical of 6  Todor Zhivkov (1911–1998) was First (General) Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party from 1954 to 1989; his daughter Lyudmila Zhivkova (1942–1981) held the post of minister of culture since 1975 and was Politburo member since 1979. 7  Excerpts from Todor Zhivkov’s address to the nation delivered at the ceremonial assembly dedicated to the 1300-years’ anniversary of the Bulgarian state. Slovo za Bîlgariia, proizneseno na turzhestvenoto zasedanie na CK na Bulgarskata Komunisticheska Partiia, Narodnoto subranie, Durzhavniia i ministerskiia suvet na NR Bîlgariia, US na Bîlgarskiia Zemedelski Naroden Suyuz, NS na Otechestveniia Front, CK na Bulgarskite Profesionalni Sîiuzi, CK na Dimitrovskiia komunisticheski mladezhki sîiuz i Obshtonarodniia iubileen komitet, posveteno na 1300-godishninata ot osnovavaneto na bulgarskata durzhava. 20 oktomvri 1981 (Sofia: Partizdat, 1981. Reprint in Todor Zhivkov, Izbrani suchineniia, v. 32, Sofia: Partizdat, 1984, 223–246). There has been an English translation in Todor Zhivkov. Statesman and Builder of New Bulgaria, Second revised edition (Pergamon Press, 1985). The present is a translation from the Bulgarian original by M. Todorova.

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every people. A distinctive feature of the Bulgarian people is the combination between patriotism and internationalism. Good and bad peoples do not exist. What does exist are bad oppressors—both foreign and domestic. […] In fighting against the Ottoman oppressors, our haiduts and insurgents were not at war with the Turkish people. Hundreds of Bulgaria’s sons fought valiantly for the freedom and independence of neighboring peoples just as they fought for the freedom and independence of their own people. Thousands of Armenians found refuge, home and motherland in Bulgaria. At the time when the German fascists and their Bulgarian puppets committed outrages in the country, the Bulgarian Jews escaped the fate of the Jews in most other European states thanks to the struggle of our people. None other than the great Lenin himself called the Bulgarian “narrow” socialists8 internationalists in deed. None other than the first party and state leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, defined Bulgarian-Soviet friendship as a model of socialist internationalism in action. […] Respect for the rights and freedoms of other peoples, friendliness, love of peace, an inner conviction that there is nothing more precious than peace, mutual understanding and good neighboring relations is another characteristic feature of our people, directly linked to internationalism. […] Filled with respects towards Bulgaria’s past, we do not forget that her history is the history of class societies, of class struggle. This past has also had dark periods of reactionary domination; there have been harrowing tragedies for the people and for the nation. But no single oppressor, whether foreigner or domestic, has ever been able to boast of having subdued the Bulgarian people. History remembers the powerful movement of the Bogomils; the vanquishing sword of the peasant king Ivailo glows in it. For five long centuries of slavery the clattering hooves of King Ivan Shishman’s legendary cavalry resounded across the Bulgarian lands. Ceaseless class battles have marked also the century since the country’s liberation from foreign yoke. If one word is to express the quintessence of our history, this word should be struggle. And always, in the front ranks of this struggle were Mother Bulgaria’s dearest children, her brightest minds: men of letters and enlighteners, haiduts and voevods, rebels and revolutionaries, and, during the last nine decades, our own Communist party. This is what we glorify. This is what gives us legitimate right to high national self-esteem.

8  Following the congress of 1903, the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party split into “narrows” and “broads”, similar to the division between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

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Our people has respect for itself, for its achievements and history. We are proud of having been able to also “contribute something to the world”. However, national conceit, national arrogance are alien to us. We respect the order of other households; we are grateful to everyone from whom we have received something. We have no need to appropriate other people’s merits and history; we are satisfied with our own. As for those who attempt to humiliate and slander us, to distort and rob us of our past, to them we shall repeat the words of the passionate Father Paisii: “Read the history!” […] The lasting grandeur of the accomplishment of our ancestors lies in the fact that the Bulgarian state—unlike the other then existing states on our continent—was being built on the nationality9 principle, as a state of one people—the Bulgarian people. It originated on the basis of three main ethnic components—Protobulgarians, Slavs and Thracians—which formed one nationality, the Bulgarian. This was the first Slav state, which heralded the political and spiritual awakening of the world of millions of Slavs, which helped this world to join the civilization of the day and propelled it to take its place in the vanguard of that civilization. Glory be to the great prime builders, under whose leadership the Bulgarian people created their own centralized state: the khans Asparukh, Krum and Omurtag, prince Boris I, the tsars Simeon, Samuil, Assen and Peter, Kaloian and Ivan-Assen II! […] Bulgaria is the home of the Slavic alphabet, of the Slavic script and culture. […] Glory be to the brothers Cyril and Methodius, who in the darkness of the early Middle Ages gave our people and all of Slavdom the inextinguishable torch of education and progress! [..] Our people survived two yokes which lasted for centuries and slowed down its natural development. It was deprived of a state, of land, of rights, of its Orthodox faith; it was deprived of everything, except of hope. It was denied all, but to obey. One could say that these were sorrowful, disgraceful centuries in our history, had they not been illuminated by the continuous struggles for freedom and independence. The legendary haiduts never left the enslavers in peace, and the people began singing songs to their valor […] Uprisings broke out. Then came our ­resurrection—the National Revival. Great ideologists and leaders of the national-democratic revolution emerged: Georgi Rakovski, Lyuben Karavelov, Vassil Levski, Hristo Botev, Georgi Benkovski, Gotse Deltchev, Iane Sandanski. Hundreds of clandestine revolutionary committees laid the beginning of an 9  The term used in the original is narodnost.

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original popular organization for struggle, unknown at the time anywhere else in the world. […] Let us give homage to the shining memory and the exalted deeds of the enlighteners, martyrs and heroes, known and unknown, of our National Revival and our national-democratic revolution! Eternal glory be to them! […] After the Liberation, the Bulgarian bourgeoisie betrayed the ideals of our National Revival, the ideals of our revolutionary democrats, the ideal of a pure and sacred republic.10 However, only thirteen years after the liberation of Bulgaria, which was centuries behind in its social and economic development, it was there again, in the proud Balkans on Mount Buzludzha, that the foundations were laid of a revolutionary Marxist party of the young Bulgarian proletariat, of our working people. Our people nurtured great revolutionaries during the past hundred years. […] And then came the great day One, the Ninth of September 1944. With the decisive assistance of the Soviet Army our people accomplished the socialist revolution which opened a new page in the immortal book of Bulgarian history. […] Today we can declare proudly: the people of socialist Bulgaria has proven worthy of its glorious past, both distant and more recent. […] Unity of the past, the present and the future (1978)11 […] Every single nation, every single country has its own historical past, its own cultural and spiritual destiny. […] And we must find the place of the Bulgarian nation in this vast human, international, planetary cultural, spiritual and historical process. We must find the place of Bulgaria not only in respect to the past but also in order to outline the role the Bulgarian nation plays in the contemporary international processes, its participation in the construction of the future historical, cultural and spiritual destiny of mankind. […] I should like to reflect on the magnificent national prospects presented to the Bulgarian people through the idea of aesthetic education, of incorporating the human individual into the Realm of Beauty. For the first time in the historical development of Bulgaria the great aim of the complete and harmonious development of the human individual has been promoted to the status 10  “Pure and sacred republic” was the ideal for the future liberated state as formulated by Vasil Levski. 11  Excerpts from L. Zhivkova’s speech made to the National coordination commission “1300 Years Bulgaria”, printed in the daily Otechestven front, 13 October 1978. Translation by M. Todorova. For an English translation of the whole speech see Lyudmila Zhivkova. Perfecting Man and Society (Sofia Press, 1980), 309–316.

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of party and state policy. The ideal of developing man according to the laws of Beauty has become a high social ideal. We ourselves must defend this idea, the high perspective and aim which man has now before him, by creating the public and social atmosphere essential for the continual discovery and development of the creative abilities inherent in each human individual, by creating the conditions which would allow each person to be able to defend his sacred evolutionary right to form himself as a complete personality, to perfect himself and to harmonize his relations with other human individuals and with the reality he lives in, to globalize and universalize his consciousness. This idea is directed towards the future, it is built on the evolutionary basis of the unlimited utilization of creative and spiritual abilities. May the preparations for the celebration of the 1300th anniversary focus on the great national ideas, purposes and tasks, and may they mobilize the efforts of every citizen of our socialist society, of every Bulgarian, so that he should take a worthy part in the struggle to raise the material, cultural and spiritual level of our nation!

Document 4

Article “Alarm for the nation’s unity” by Ilcho Dimitrov (1990)12 The Bulgarian nation is dangerously divided. Mistrust is becoming the predominant state in social relations. Personal ambitions hide behind common ideals. Authoritarian personalities raise the banner of democracy. Violence is being promoted as a remedy against violence. Narrow partisan interests are prevailing over the national ones. Never has the state authority been so powerless. What is most disturbing and frightening in today’s overemotional atmosphere is that, completely engrossed in the drive to power, public feeling does not pay attention to events which are indicating dark prospects for our future as a nation, for the future of our state. For the first time since 1886 is foreign intervention in our nation’s sovereign rights to elect its supreme legislative body so overt.13 At that time the Third Grand National Assembly was being elected. The emissary of Alexander III, the Russian general with the German name Kaulbars,14 had launched a 12  Published in the daily Duma, N. 74, 16 June 1990. Translation by M. Todorova. The author (1931–2002), a university professor of history, was cabinet minister in the government of Georgi Atanasov (1986–1989). 13  The first post-communist democratic elections were held on June 10 and 17, 1990, seven months after the overthrow of the Zhivkov regime. 14  General Nikolai Kaulbars was the emperor’s special commissioner to Bulgaria whose heavy-handed treatment caused the rupture of relations between the two countries for nearly a decade (1886–1896).

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propaganda campaign to threaten the Bulgarians that the country would be lost if it did not elect Russophiles. Now foreigners are speaking at rallies, and a Western diplomat with a Slavic name15 seems to have been lured into assuming Kaulbars’s role. We shouldn’t wonder at the foreigners: after all, even while raising the most humane slogans, they are following their own interests. But is it that Bulgarian politicians have learned nothing from history? Both before and after 1944 our troubles were caused, among others, by the violation of national sovereignty. Are we going to miss the present opportunity to fully restore the independence, to raise our national dignity? I am neither an Anglo-American, nor a Russophobe, but I am a son of Bulgaria, and it hurts to see how resigned we are to the idea that our existence is impossible without being somebody’s satellite—some time ago of Germany, yesterday of the Soviet Union, tomorrow of America. Our history, both recent and past, has been rich in deplorable examples. We have gone through a lot of disgrace; let us not stand more of it. Our land has been mutilated, living parts of our nation’s body have been torn away. […] I would not hesitate to qualify as a crime the registration, under the pressure of the street, of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms as a political party. It already has born its first bitter fruits: in the Grand National Assembly the illegal party comes in third according to the number of its deputies.16 The assertion that the registration is only for the electoral period, and after that the Movement would again assume its character of a social and cultural organization, is meant to mislead public opinion. This is an unworthy play upon words. As if the label can cover up the essence. During the 1930s the fascist party of Prof. Alexander Tsankov was bearing the name “National Social Movement”.

15  Alluding to the emotional American ambassador Saul Polanski who passionately declared his parti pris in the pre-election campaign. The fact that he is really Jewish is irrelevant in the absence of traditional anti-Semitism in Bulgaria, a feature quite distinct from the Polish or other East European scenes. On American policies in Bulgaria in 1989– 90 see, among others, Misha Glenny, The Rebirth of History: Eastern Europe in the Age of Democracy (Penguin Books, 1990), 175–177. 16  Of the 400 deputies in the grand national assembly 211 were socialists (52.75 %), 144 (36 %) were representing the Union of Democratic forces, 23 (5.75 %) the MRF, 16 (4 %) the Agrarian Union, and 6 (1.5 % represented four tiny parties. The MRF was founded on January 4, 1990 at the height of the nationalist demonstrations organized against the government’s decision at the end of December 1989 to revoke the assimilation policies of the previous years. It claims to be a supra-party organization dedicated to human and ethnoreligious rights, and not to be confined to any given minority, despite its mostly Muslim electorate. According to the constitution there should be no parties based on ethnic or religious criteria.

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We have all grounds to accuse the main political parties (the BSP, the UDF and the BANU)17 that they put up with the creation of a pro-Turkish and proMuslim party; moreover, they facilitated it. Thus, following an olden tradition of ours, short-term partisan interests prevailed over the common national ones. There are all reasons to believe that in the Grand National Assembly they will not resist the temptation to collaborate with the movement-party, again pursuing narrow partisan interests, and underestimating and neglecting the common national ones. Public opinion, engaged in the pre-election contest for power, does not perceive the growing dangers to the nation’s future. The process of eroding the Bulgarian nation on the basis of Islam and Macedonism18 is being renewed without encountering any opposition. What is being propagated is the setting apart, and against the majority, of a part of the nation. This propaganda is covering up separatist tendencies. We, Bulgarians, have the habit of not seeing the consequences in time and of bewailing our lot after things get out of hand. Fairly or not, we accuse our predecessors of having betrayed our national ideals. But do we realize the responsibility which we ourselves are now assuming? Future generations might curse us for not having preserved even what we inherited. We listened to the first radio and T.V. appearance of Mr. Doganov19 as a party leader. How cunningly he avoided any critical word on Turkish politics: the pan-Turkic ambitions, the attempts at interfering in our internal affairs, the Armenian genocide, the aggression against the Republic of Cyprus, the exterminating war against the Kurds … How are we to believe that his movement is based on the international agreements on individual and community rights? I have examined the platforms of some of the candidates for deputies from the Movement, and I have wondered which parliament they wish to enter: the Sofia or the Ankara national assembly? Mr. Doganov declares himself a guarantor for Bulgaria before Europe. According to him the road to Europe passes through the Bosphorus, Turkey and the Muslim world.20 It should be clear to him that Bulgaria has appeared 17  BSP (Bulgarian Socialist Party); UDF (Union of Democratic Forces); BANU (Bulgarian Agrarian National Union). 18  The author alludes to the curbed attempt to register a Macedonian organization “Ilinden” whose goal was the recognition of a Macedonian minority in Bulgaria. 19  The author insists on calling Ahmed Dogan, the leader of the MRF, Doganov, as he was known before 1989, and under which name he was first registered in the electoral lists. 20  This ill-suited metaphor was used by Ahmed Dogan in a speech in which he realistically tried to point out that in the future Bulgaria’s economy will be oriented to a great extent to the markets of the Middle East. However, the unfortunate and rather tactless wording taken out of the context produced the predictable outcry.

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thirteen centuries ago in this part of the continent which is the cradle of European civilization, that our centuries-old state is Bulgarian in its history, language and tradition. Europe has its geographic boundaries: the Ural to the east, the Straits to the south-east. Beyond the Straits begins Asia. This route, through Turkey, we have already tried, and we have paid for it with a lot of blood and centuries-long backwardness. History has a tragic example of a party created on an ethnic basis: the Sudetendeutsche in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period. Its contribution to the dismemberment of the Czechoslovak state and also to the fate of the very Sudeten Germans has been sinister. My appeal is to the Bulgarian Turks themselves: the Movement for Rights and Freedoms is not your defender; it is a threat to your interests. Ambitious candidates for leaders are deceiving you by pushing you on the road of separation and opposition, of animosity and conflicts. Your legal interests can be safeguarded by a united national policy, only with confidence, mutual understanding and unity with the majority of the nation. I would remind the entire Bulgarian people: democracy does not mean that we should entrust the parliament, the parties and the governments with all our hopes. We, the people, are the main factor. We always have to be on the alert, to react, to articulate our will, to compel the political forces and authorities to follow the common national interest in all their activities. Let us insist that the national assembly take a stand towards the deputies elected on an ethnic and religious basis. The three parties represented in parliament should pledge not to seek parliamentary support from such deputies. 1 Analysis This chapter is concerned with the articulation of Bulgarian nationalism during the twentieth century: its main ideas, its goals, its style, its code-words. I am perfectly aware that even the cautious replacement of “nationalism” with “national discourse” is not sufficient. After all, just as the nation is not a monolithic and homogeneous entity, nationalism as such does not exist, and the national discourse is, in fact, the arena of competing views of nationalism. My choice of the four texts as representative of the respective periods reflects, therefore, what seems to me to be the dominant, but by no means the only or the uncontested of possible views. I have, therefore, purposely abstained from crass examples of extreme and vituperative nationalism which can be found in all periods but, in larger numbers, particularly in the period between the two world wars. Nationalism has not and, I believe, cannot produce a sophisticated discourse. Even when at its best, as attested by examples of the nineteenth

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century emancipatory ideology, it offers honest and emotional, but intellectually one-dimensional constructs. The aim here, however, is not to expose the nationalist discourse—this task is far too easy. It is, rather, to analyze, on the basis of its typical, moderate and, as far as this is possible, more sophisticated proponents, the problems of continuity and discontinuity in ideas, language, conceptual apparatus.21 This, obviously, raises the question of the creators of the discourse. In all the above cases, it has been articulated by either politicians or intellectuals, or most often by the hybrid phenomenon, so typical of Eastern Europe, the ­politician-intellectual. I have not dwelt on the articulation of mass nationalism, a problem which merits separate research. In this particular case the masses are rather the object of the above discourses, which are meant to influence, to shape a definite national identity, as well as to mobilize public opinion (domestic and foreign) behind a particular program or standing. Thus, the texts chosen are as much a reflection of the dominant views of the political and intellectual elites of the moments, as a representation of national political propaganda. Although all four texts belong to what can be termed simply as prose, they attempt to cover different genres. The first document is, in fact, the preface to a historical-geographical atlas of some 40 maps. The use of maps, and especially national atlases, as political propaganda tools in modern Europe has long been recognized, but maps have been much more than that: as political icons, they have been “symbols of power, authority, and national unity”, indeed, “the perfect symbol of the state”.22 The first text, thus, is the verbal concomitant of the map; the others represent the literary essay, the public speech, and the newspaper article and are, as will be argued later, particularly representative as genres for the different periods. In utilizing concepts like ethnicity and nationalism, I subscribe to a liberal rendition of the modernist approach, which treats both phenomena as essentially by-products (although in particular circumstances they can also act as builders) of such developments as the crisis in religion and secularization, the revolutionizing and intensification of communication and mass education, 21  It is only proper to define here the relation of this article to its predecessor: Marin Pundeff, “Bulgarian Nationalism”, in Nationalism in Eastern Europe, Ed. by Peter Sugar and Ivo Lederer (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1969). I regard Pundeff’s study as an excellent and thorough account of the type of histoire evenementielle, and consider the present more analytical piece a complimentary, rather than substitutive work. It is an attempt to give a somewhat different reading in a different manner of writing. 22  Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 88.

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economic growth and industrialization, the rise of the modern secular state and its bureaucracy. Whether they give precedence to the social, economic, political or cultural factors in their line of interpretation, these views converge in treating nations and nationalism as phenomena which are essentially connected to the modern world (regardless of whether they are treated as contingent or deterministic). I would define ethnicity as one side of the self-definition and self-designation of a person, a commitment, ideology or faith (often secular), based on a sense of (most often invented) kinship and common historical experience and, as a rule, a community of language, religion and customs. One important element of this definition is that unlike language, territory, religion, race etc., which are essentially “dividers” along one criterion (although this does not imply that they cannot be very complex or ambiguous dividers), ethnicity is a complicated sum-total, a particular combination, aggregate of different qualifiers which are used for the demarcation of the ethnic boundary. Although this particular sum-total can be recognized and analyzed in concrete historical cases, and despite the fact that we can describe the process of constructing an ethnicity and analytically define all its components, we cannot “discover” an ethnicity as the resultant of the synthesis of these components. This means that ethnicity cannot exist in the eye of the beholder unless it is explicitly stated in a conscious act of self-definition. In such a context the crucial criterion would not be the potential presence in the human psyche of the characteristics which identify an ethnicity, but the proof that the combination of these characteristics was dominant as a form of group identification (i.e. ethnicity) over other forms of group identification (religion, caste, kin, localism, etc.) at any given point of historical time. It seems that we do not possess enough historical evidence to claim this for any other period before the modern.23 Nationalism, on the other hand, I will define, in a formula perhaps reductionist, as the merger of ethnicity and statehood. There have been two distinct, although sometimes parallel or coinciding processes all over modern Europe. One is the gradual formation of a distinct group consciousness defined by different authors as national revival, cultural revival or rebirth, and which I have termed ethnicity, and have explicitly linked with modernity. This process has had an uneven chronological development paralleling the uneven process of

23  For an expanded treatment of these theoretical problems, see Maria Todorova, “Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Communist Legacy in Eastern Europe,” The Social Legacy of Communism, eds. James Millar and Sharon Wolchik, Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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modernization but, as a whole, has flowered in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with some earlier and some later manifestations. The other is the merger of this consciousness with statehood, and the creation and development of a new consciousness and ideology: nationalism. Ethnicity and nationalism are not coterminous although, at least in the European experience, nationalism, as a rule, seems to have evolved around an ethnic nucleus and, most often, assumes the hypostasis of ethnonationalism. In parts of Western Europe, because of the continuous existence of dynastic states and later absolutist monarchies, these processes are blurred and, because they run parallel to each other, are, for practical purposes, indistinguishable. In great parts of Central, Southern and Eastern Europe, on the other hand, this “construction” of ethnicity and nationalism, as understood and defined here, can be traced as distinct historical processes. I shall attempt, in what follows, to apply these theoretical observations to the Bulgarian case. The development of the Bulgarian national idea can be seen as having undergone two general phases, both with their internal sub-phases: the formation and manifestation of a Kulturnation (from approximately the middle of the eighteenth century to 1878), and the formation and manifestation of a Staatsnation after 1878. In an influential work on the social preconditions of national revival in Europe Miroslaw Hroch distinguished between three phases of national development: 1. A small elite begins the study of language, culture and history, which Hroch termed the scholarly phase; 2. Patriots beyond the elites are mobilized, the national agitation phase; 3. Mass movements occur, i.e. the era of mass national movements.24 In the Bulgarian case this can be translated as follows: 1. A period from approximately the middle of the eighteenth century (with some signs of earlier eighteenth century manifestations) until the 1820s which is characterized by the appearance of several histories of the Bulgarian people, the most famous and influential being the one by Father Paisii. This period also witnessed the appearance of the first printed works in the Bulgarian vernacular. By the 1820s there had been a distinct impulse to establish Bulgarian secular schools instead of the existing Helleno-Bulgarian (with a bilingual education in Greek and Bulgarian) schools of the turn and the first decade of the nineteenth century. 2. With this we enter the second phase when patriots beyond the elites were mobilized. This phase coincides with a distinct period of another, traditional 24  Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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Bulgarian periodization of the national awakening and revolutionary struggles which follows a threefold classification: a movement for educational emancipation; a movement for religious independence or church autonomy; and a movement for political or national independence.25 The second phase of mobilizing patriots beyond the elites coincided, as said, with the movement for educational emancipation and the beginning of the church conflict, and lasted approximately until the Crimean war (1853–1856). 3. After that, during the 1860s and 1870s one can speak of the gradual formation of a mass movement, manifested in the Bulgarian case in two spheres: the church struggle and the struggle for political emancipation. The church struggle of the Bulgarians did not spring from any kind of doctrinal issues but was essentially a political movement for a separate church following the conflict between Greeks and Bulgarians. This conflict in itself was triggered by the contradictions between a developing ethnic consciousness and the national program of an emerging nation-state. It ended with the official recognition in 1870 by the Ottoman Porte of the Bulgarian exarchate as separate from the Constantinople patriarchate and, thus, in fact, added the religious divider as an important, though not dominant, constitutive element of ethnicity. As for the political movement, there were two main views and programs for the political future of the Bulgarians: one, conservative or moderate, centered in Constantinople, stressed enlightenment and education, which were considered the means for a gradual emancipation; the other, revolutionary or radical, centered in Bucharest, envisaged the achievement of political independence by means of a revolutionary organization and network, resulting in revolution and eventually in war, which would involve some of the great powers. Bulgarian independence was achieved (although at first only as autonomy) in 1878 as the result of the outbreak of the April uprising two years earlier, the subsequent Russo-Turkish war and the treaties of San-Stefano and Berlin in March and June/July of 1878. The first was perceived by the Bulgarians as the true and just recreation of their nation state, following the frontiers of the Bulgarian exarchate and, thus, encompassing the whole nation. The second which, following European great power considerations, divided the country, has been viewed ever since as a predatory arrangement which incited future Bulgarian irredentist feelings.

25  For a detailed factological survey of this periodization see the three volume Istoriia na Bîlgariia, vol. 1 (Sofia: BAN, 1961), as well as the multivolume Istoriia na Bîlgariia, Sofia: BAN, vol. 4 (1983), v. 5 (1985), v. 6 (1989). For an English language account, see Richard Crampton, A Short History of Bulgaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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Clearly, if this short account of the development of Bulgarian nationalism is to be redefined and coordinated with the above definitions, one would be speaking of the construction of Bulgarian ethnicity until 1878. This does not mean that there were no nationalists prior to 1878. In the political struggle for independence and for the creation of a nation state promoted above all by the revolutionary circles one can see more than just elements of nationalism. However, the construction of a nation as well as the development of nationalism as a full-fledged movement and ideology can be traced only after the late 1870s. Still, several elements of the pre-state legacy have left a permanent mark on the character of nationalism in the post-1878 period. One was the essentially defensive quality of the Bulgarian national idea. Defensiveness vis à vis Europe is a common trait of all Balkan nationalisms, but in the Bulgarian case it was particularly aggravated because it had to operate against the earlier formed nationalisms and earlier articulated irredentist programs of its neighbors. The Bulgarian national idea was defensive from the very moment it was first articulated by Paisii in what has since become the code-text for Bulgarian nationalism (or, as I would argue, of Bulgarian ethnicity):26 So I wrote down for you what was known about your race and language. Read and know so that you would not be ridiculed and reproached by other tribes and peoples … I wrote it for you who love your people and Bulgarian fatherland, and who like to know about your people and language … But there are those who do not care to know about their own Bulgarian people and turn to foreign ways and foreign tongue; and they do not care for their own Bulgarian language but learn to read and speak Greek and are ashamed to call themselves Bulgarians. O, you senseless fool! Why are you ashamed to call yourself Bulgarian and do not read and speak your own language? Or had the Bulgarians no kingdom and state?… In the entire Slavic race the Bulgarians have had the greatest glory, they first called themselves tsars, they first had a patriarch, they first became Christians, and they ruled over the largest territory … But why, stupid, should you be ashamed of your people and linger after a foreign tongue? Here, you say, the Greeks are wiser and more cultivated, and the Bulgarians are simple and stupid, and have no refined speech; therefore, it is better to become part of the Greeks. But look, you senseless, there are many more people wiser and more glorious than the Greeks. Has any Greek abandoned his tongue and learning and people?… You, Bulgarian, do not be fooled, but know your people and language, and learn your language! 26  Petîr Dinekov, ed. Slavianobîlgarska istoriia (Sofia: Bîlgarski pisatel, 1972), 41–44.

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Here one can trace this intensive defensiveness, the feeling of humiliation, the struggle against the inferiority complex; at the same time this is accompanied by a not less acute counter-offensive, based on an intensive pride in the glorious past. The other fundamental characteristic, which can be deduced also from the above quotation, was the centrality of language. The crucial role of language as an agent of unification has been recognized by practically all European cultural and national figures, to be elevated in the Herderian vision to the status of an ethno-linguistic sanctity. In Bulgaria, because of the double opposition against Greeks and Turks, the linguistic divider was evoked earlier and remained stronger than, for example, the religious one. With the unfolding of an educational movement in the second quarter of the nineteenth century three literary schools with distinct visions of how to create a literary national language emerged: the Modern Bulgarian school with a stress on the vernacular; the Slavo-Bulgarian school insisting on the medieval linguistic legacy; and the Church Slavonic school based on the language used by the church. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Modern Bulgarian school acquired an unconditional preponderance. This can be explained by the major influence of the merchant and artisan circles in the organization of the modern Bulgarian educational network, as well as by the passionate interest in folklore, especially intensive during the 1840s, and influenced by developments both in Germany and in Russia. However, until 1878 when an autonomous Bulgarian principality was created, despite the obvious aspirations of Bulgarian writers towards a united literary practice, a linguistic diversity was retained, to be explained mostly by the absence of a single political and cultural center, as well as of common and obligatory norms.27 In a periodization of nationalism in Bulgaria after 1878 one can distinguish between four consecutive phases whose essence can be defined as: 1. The program of state nationalism: unification (1878–1918) 2. Nationalism in crisis: revisionism (1918–1944) 3. Communism and “communist” nationalism (1944–1989) 4. “Post-totalitarian” nationalism (1989–) This periodization needs to be further refined by adding a subdivision for the first phase, roughly coinciding with the turn of the century; and by carving out about a decade in the fourth phase (1944–1956) which would represent the relatively brief caesura of a non-national communist experiment in what

27  Maria Todorova, “Language as Cultural Unifier in a Multilingual Setting: The Bulgarian Case During the Nineteenth Century”, East European Politics and Societies, vol. 4, No. 3, Fall 1990.

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I am calling otherwise a nationalist continuum of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the popular self-perception the twentieth century has been considered the nadir of Bulgarian nationalism, just as the nineteenth century has been depicted as its zenith. Yet, like the “long European nineteenth century” which stretched from 1789 to 1914, twentieth-century Bulgarian nationalism began in 1878, the year of its greatest triumph and defeat. With the Treaty of SanStefano signed by the Russian and Ottoman armies on 3 March 1878 a great autonomous Bulgarian principality was created extending from the Black sea to Lake Okhrid, and from the Danube to the Aegean. It followed the frontiers of the dioceses of the Bulgarian exarchate and was considered, therefore, to conform most closely to the natural ethnic (i.e. linguistic and religious) boundaries of the Bulgarian nation. Opposition on the part of the great powers and the other Balkan countries against the creation of a huge Balkan state which was perceived as a future Russian satellite led to the revision of the San-Stefano treaty at the Congress of Berlin where, on 13 July 1878, the recently established principality was divided: Bulgaria proper, with a territory of only one third of the former state, was to be an autonomous principality squeezed between the Danube and the Balkan range; Eastern Rumelia was handed back to the Ottoman empire but with a Christian governor; and Macedonia was altogether returned to Constantinople. The treaty of San-Stefano became the sui generis metahistorical event in the development of Bulgarian nationalism, a dream almost come true, and an idée fixe for decades to come.28 The first decisive moment in shaping Bulgarian nationalism after 1878 was the unification of the Bulgarian principality with Eastern Rumelia in 1885, and the subsequent Serbo-Bulgarian war. The mass recruiting, the volunteer units, the formation and assertion of the national army in an unexpectedly victorious war were an enormous catalyst in the construction of a unified national loyalty. However, the undoubted primacy in the construction of a national consciousness goes to the creation of a standard and obligatory national language and education. It was only after Bulgaria’s liberation that the lack of a normative language system was overcome, with the gradual elaboration of orthographical, grammatical and phonetic norms. This process was completed by the end of the century with the introduction of the Drinov-Ivanchev orthography in 1899.29 28  For a good English language treatment of Bulgarian history in this first period of Bulgarian nationalism see Richard Crampton, Bîlgaria 1878–1918: a history (Boulder, Colo., East European Monographs, No. 138, 1983). 29  Rusin Rusinov, Bîlgarskiiat knizhoven ezik sled Osvobozhdenieto (1878–1944) (Veliko Tîrnovo, 1985), 2.

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What seems important to be emphasized here is the decisive role of the state with its different institutions, and particularly a unified modern educational system, for the final formation and acceptance of the literary language.30 The introduction of a secularized, centralized, uniform education along with other state institutions, proved to be instrumental in the final elaboration of a normative standard language by the end of the century. No less important was the role of the army which, alongside the uniform centralized educational system, proved to be the most powerful instrument for socializing the masses into their new role of citizens. The Bulgarian case is a particularly favorable illustration for the idea of the crucial presence of the state in the formation of a national consciousness, and the strengthening (or sometimes also creating) of an ethnic consciousness. Thus, after the turn of the century, it can be maintained that, overall, the process of turning “peasants into Bulgarians” had been accomplished. When in 1912 Stamboliiski, faced with a mass movement in favor of war against Turkey, complained that the whole nation seemed to have lost its mind,31 he was recognizing precisely this fact: nationalism had become the dominant type of group consciousness. Rizoff (Document 1) wrote his piece in the aftermath of the Balkan wars and while World War I was still raging, in fact, in the twilight of the first period, which saw two of the three “national catastrophes” of the first half of the twentieth century. Despite the timing, his essay had not yet internalized the defeat and the resignation to it, so typical of the subsequent period. Instead, it reflects the prevailing optimistic mood of the Bulgarian irredenta, which was full of resentment against the provisions of the treaty of Berlin, but in a spirit of defiance, not of despair. In fact, Rizoff’s preface is a succinct summary of the program of Bulgarian state nationalism as it was formulated and pursued in the four decades after 1878. Because of the programmatic character of its argument, it merits closer analysis. Already the opening statement unambiguously focuses on the pivotal problem in the Bulgarian national question: the correlation between nation and 30  On the role of the ministry of education, see Roy E. Heath, The Establishment of the Bulgarian Ministry of Public Instruction and its Role in the Development of Modern Bulgaria, 1878–1885 (unpublished PhD thesis), University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1979. An interesting conclusion reached by the author is that in the effort to rebuild the destroyed school network of the former period, and with the shortage of qualified personnel (as intellectuals tended to fill the newly opened political and bureaucratic jobs), the Ministry in this initial period until the reunification with Eastern Rumelia did not take as its priority the definition and creation of a Bulgarian national identity (427–429). 31  V. A. Zhebokritskii, Bolgariia nakanune balkanskih voin 1912–1913 gg. (Kiev, 1960), cited in Marin Pundeff, “Bulgarian Nationalism”, 134.

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territory, or, in other terms, between ethnicity and the state. “Bulgaria” is used both as a synonym for the Bulgarian people, and as designating the territory of the state. The national ideal, as befits the development of other nineteenth century European nationalisms, held that a nation could develop fully and adequately only within independent national borders which would encompass all members of the nation. In Rizoff’s language this desirable equilibrium was called national, political and economic “crystallization” which he unhesitatingly linked with the process when “states settle in their final frontiers”. The crux of the matter lay in defining this “finality” which was supposed to rest on four fundamental principles: “naturalness” as far as possible, in terms of geographic unity; economic viability; correspondence between ethnic and state frontiers; and conformity to historical tradition and the principle of self-determination. None of the above principles are unambiguous in themselves, let alone in combination. This is most obvious in the case of the fourth criterion: that frontiers “correspond to historic tradition and do not conflict with the right of each nation to self-determination”. Historical tradition was evoked because it had been the dominant criterion in legitimizing the claims of the “historic nations” of Europe, and was based on the existence of dynastic states. As for the Balkans, each of the medieval Balkan states (Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia) had at one time or other, and to a greater or lesser extent, incorporated a significant part or all of the territory of the Balkan peninsula. Logically, as each newly created nation-state in the Balkans was looking for its medieval or ancient stateprecedent, it evoked the period of grandeur and maximal territorial extension, thus rendering the co-existence of the different historical traditions at the same time virtually impossible. As an accomplished diplomat whose atlas was aimed primarily at a foreign audience, Rizoff was careful and cautious in the verbal part of his work to spell out only a moderate and realistic version based on the “historic” claims of the Bulgarian state. However, the maps which followed, together with the additional comments, very clearly defined the whole “historical tradition”, giving a pictorial proof for all possible territorial claims, while at the same time avoiding possible accusations of expansionism and aggressiveness, and conveying the impression of modesty and moderation. The first fourteen maps cover the period from the seventh to the fourteenth century, i.e. the two Bulgarian medieval kingdoms. As is to be expected, they fix moments of greatest political expansion of the Bulgarian state when, in different periods, it incorporated parts or all of Serbia, parts or all of Wallachia, Bessarabia and even Transylvania, parts or all of Albania, considerable parts of Greece, but at all times the Dobrudzha and Macedonia. There is no doubt that the whole historic argument was focused on these latter two regions, and

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particularly on Macedonia, the perpetual wound in the Bulgarian national psyche. The only map from the nearly two centuries of Byzantine domination, when Bulgaria had disappeared from the political map of the Balkans, presents the extent of the Okhrid Patriarchate, which is supposed to testify to the unity of Bulgaria and Macedonia (notwithstanding the obvious counter argument, that the presence of Serbia within the bounds of the patriarchate could likewise testify to the unity of Serbia with Macedonia). The interesting point however is that, although at least four maps can support strong “historic” claims on the territories north of the Danube, these (except for the Dobrudzha) are never raised against Romania. Rather, they are neutralized implicitly by the operation of the first two criteria: that frontiers be “as natural as possible”, and that they should “safeguard the economic independence” of the nations. As the river Danube is taken to be the natural frontier of the Balkans, in a revealing twist of the argument Romania is pronounced never to have belonged to the Balkan Peninsula despite all the historical record, and therefore has to withdraw entirely behind the Danube. The claim on the Dobrudzha thus is very strong as it meets the requirements of all criteria: it is the cradle of the Bulgarian nation; it always has been part of the medieval Bulgarian state (as the maps show); it is within the Balkan peninsula and the mouth of an international river like the Danube should preferably not be controlled by one single state. It is obvious that the “historic claim” argument could rest only on the medieval Bulgarian state. The nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule were, in fact, a denial of this claim, or more precisely, a shift of this claim to the Ottomans. It is for this reason that the bulk of the material in the atlas (the next 16 maps) are all nineteenth century ethnographic maps designed by different European authorities: French, Austrian, German, English, Russian, Serbian and Greek geographers and ethnographers, and among them only two Bulgarian maps. This section was expected to support the second part of the fourth criterion: the right to self-determination. The main concern of these maps was to prove, on the basis of unbiased evidence, the Bulgarian character of the population inhabiting the regions severed from Bulgaria proper after 1878. The chief focus, however, was Macedonia, and the accompanying comments argued strongly against the existing Greek, but especially against the Serbian claims. Since all these maps (with an additional two of the Bulgarian exarchate and Bulgaria according to the Constantinople conference of 1876) chronologically preceded 1878, they quite successfully argued the case for the objective foundations of San-Stefano Bulgaria, and the artificial division following Berlin. The final group of 8 political maps between 1878 and 1915 illustrates the attempts to rectify the unjust provisions of the Berlin treaty.

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At first glance, it would seem strange that historic claims and self-determination are invoked in combination. After all, as European history has shown (and is showing) only too well, these two principles are basically incompatible. It was precisely the conflict between the new idea of self-determination of the nation and the older legitimate historic claims of the imperial idea which produced the proliferation of small nation-states in the Balkans, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe.32 Why, then, summon a contradictory argument, of which Rizoff could not but have been well aware? The explanation seems to lie in what has been disclosed as one of the main characteristics of Bulgarian nationalism: its defensiveness. Operating in an immediate Balkan, and in a larger European context, the relative lateness of Bulgarian nationalism forced it to mobilize all possible arguments in defense of its existence. As the great debate over “historic” and “unhistoric” nations was raging in Europe, and the Balkan peoples, with the exception of the Greeks, were ranged at the bottom of the hierarchical order of nations, the Bulgarians were at great pains to show that they qualified even according to this criterion. The historic claim argument was without any doubt targeted primarily to the attention of the European governments, who were expected to arbitrate the future arrangements in the Balkans. In Rizoff’s essay the Balkans represented an inextricable part of Europe, but there is no trace that they might or could manage their affairs on their own. That great power interests actively shaped the fate of the region was recognized (and often manipulated) but no less actively resented in the Balkans. The lessons of Berlin and of the following decades until the outbreak of the First World War had clearly demonstrated that the small states of the Balkans were objects rather than subjects of international politics, and that they had to live within a system of patronage-clientele relations. This explains, among others, the immediate opening of the text whose aim was to draw the favorable attention of Europe even at the expense of Balkan “reputation”. Whenever European affairs at large were discussed, and particularly relations with the Balkans, Rizoff entirely, but obviously consciously uncritically, employed the then orthodox European discourse with all the elements of existing mythology: that the Balkans were the powder keg of Europe; that the reasons for this was their backwardness, underdevelopment, or immaturity (in Rizoff’s euphemism the lack of national, political and economic “crystallization”); and that international arbitration would undoubtedly be beneficial to the Balkans and would pacify them. 32  As already indicated in the theoretical part, the fact that Western Europe had renounced the imperial idea much earlier and developed in the framework of smaller dynastic states which “created” their nations within their frontiers, blurred this implicit conflict, and gave the superficial impression that both processes were, essentially complimentary.

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Aside from this, for all practical purposes Bulgarian nationalism had followed principally along the line of self-determination. All pre-1878 revolutionary propaganda which had as its ideal the political independence of the Bulgarians, based its argument almost exclusively on national, not on historic, rights. Even when Rizoff clearly defined the territorial aspirations of Bulgaria invoking historic rights (“lands which have belonged to her in the past”), he was not concerned with all lands which had belonged to Bulgaria in the past but only the ones which “have been recognized as Bulgarian by all authoritative travelers in European Turkey, as well as by Turkey itself and the Great Powers at their Constantinople conference”. For Rizoff, as for all Bulgarians, there was no question of how to determine what was meant by Bulgarian, i.e. the “nation”. It was, first and foremost, the linguistic unity which defined it. Although it was the official recognition of a separate Bulgarian millet under the jurisdiction of the Bulgarian exarchate in 1870 which specified the extent of the Bulgarian nation and became a significant step towards further political independence, this traditional division along religious lines was only conforming to the existing practice in the Ottoman empire. In fact, it recognized a group (the Bulgarians) within the same religious entity (Orthodoxy) which had developed an ethnic consciousness in opposition to the Greeks primarily revolving around a linguistic unity. This linguistic primacy remained dominant and operative also in all subsequent periods as witnessed, for example, by the claims on the Pomaks (Bulgarian Muslims) after 1878 as being Bulgarian because of their linguistic identity with the Orthodox population, or the obstinacy with which, in the communist and post-communist period, even in the face of a concession to the existence of a Macedonian state, the existence of a separate Macedonian nation was denied because, allegedly, it did not have its own, separate language. Having insisted on the sanctity of the “inalterable and incontestable” national, moral, historical and geographical rights of the Bulgarians, Rizoff stressed that, in practice, the Bulgarians were pursuing a realistic and even minimalist policy, to the point of sacrificing their union with Macedonia for the sake of a future Balkan confederation, in which Macedonia as an independent political unit would serve as a unifying link. Of course, in this particular case Rizoff presented only one of the existing alternatives of Bulgarian foreign policy as the sole and uncontested one. In reality, the Bulgarian cabinet entered the Balkan wars having renounced the “autonomy” principle for Macedonia, and opting for partition, as attested by the secret annex of the Bulgarian-Serbian treaty of February/March 1912.33 33   Istoriia na Bîlgariia, v. 2 (Sofia, 1962), 250–252.

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The appeal to the moral element in policy was not merely a propaganda device. Rizoff and his contemporaries were acutely aware of the limitations of power politics for a small country, and this awareness was handed down as a permanent trait of Bulgarian nationalism. This made the reliance upon legalisms “necessary to ward off the brute pressures of the great powers and also to have a case for the record in the event of a catastrophe”,34 as well as upon other arguments not based on sheer military strength all the more essential. In the face of this insistence on the moral criterion, the lengthy argumentation against an independent Albania, and in favor of partitioning the lands inhabited by Albanians, was all the more flagrant. It, allegedly logically, rested on Realpolitik, and Rizoff, as well as practically all Bulgarian and other Balkan politicians of the time, did not seem to have been bothered by the double standard. It was, of course, precisely the revenge of real power politics, if not Realpolitik, which sealed the defeat of the program of Bulgarian state nationalism in the aftermath of World War I. Rizoff’s text is by no means a unique document but, rather, a typical representative of a genre which has always been utilized in the Balkans but proliferated at an incredible rate especially in the first decades of the twentieth century. These were for the most part historical-political pamphlets, lavishly illustrated with historical and ethnographic maps, implicitly and, most often, explicitly, arguing the case of the Bulgarian irredenta. The authors of these books and brochures were almost exclusively university professors and scholars of repute, as well as diplomats (like Rizoff). Their works were published both in Bulgaria in Bulgarian, and also abroad, as part of a virtual propaganda industry: mostly in France and Switzerland, and in French, the diplomatic language of Europe.35 34  Henry L. Roberts, Eastern Europe: Politics, Revolution and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970), 188. 35  The following is not an exhaustive list of publications of the said genre (it is arranged alphabetically and lists first books published abroad, and then works published in Bulgaria): Brancoff D. M., La Macédoine et sa population chrétienne. (Avec 2 carte ethnographiques), (Paris, 1905); Guéchoff I. E., L’Alliance Balcanique (Paris, 1915); Ischirkoff A., La Macédoine et la constitution de l’Exarchat bulgare (1830 à 1897) avec une carte hors texte (Lausanne, 1918); Ischirkoff A. Le nom de la Bulgarie; éclaircissement d’histoire et d’ethnographie (Lausanne, 1918); Ischirkoff A., Les Bulgares en Dobrudja; aperçu historique et ethnographique (Berne, 1919); Ischirkoff A., Les confines occidetaux des terres bulgares; notes et documents; onze cartes (Lausanne, 1915); Ivanoff I., Les bulgares et leurs manifestations nationales: documents historiques, ethnographiques et diplomatiques, avec trois cartes en couleurs (Berne, 1919); Mikoff D., Pour le droit et la paix dans les Balkans (Geneve, 1919); Mintschew I., La Serbie et le mouvement national bulgare (Lausanne, 1918); Mishew D., America and Bulgaria and their moral bonds (Berne, 1918); Stephanove C., The Bulgarians

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Rizoff’s preface, as already stated, was a programmatic piece not only because it presented a summary of the unification program of San-Stefano Bulgaria, as it was formulated and pursued in the four decades after 1878 until the First world war. This program, whether as a blueprint for practical political action, or merely as an unattainable but justified ideal, continued to be the main inspiration of Bulgarian nationalism throughout the next period. The two national catastrophes, following each other within the short span of five years (1913 and 1918), produced a profound public frustration which has been carefully handed down from generation to generation, and whose effects can be felt even today. The refugee problem, while in the long run contracting the Bulgarian claimed territories and, thus, limiting the span of the Bulgarian irredenta, in the short run intensified to an unprecedented degree the tensions in Bulgaria proper. This, coupled with a severe economic crisis and raging social problems, could not but make of the Neuilly treaty of 1919 the counterpart of Versailles for Germany. The response was the outcry of a bitter and humiliated nationalism. Unlike the period immediately preceding the Balkan wars, however, nationalism had lost its mass appeal; now “it survived in numerically small pockets such as the officers’ corps, segments of the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie and, of course, the refugees’ organizations.”36 Even more telling, nationalism had lost its almost unanimous voice and was being articulated in different pitches and varying degrees of intensity. From moderate to extreme right-wing, small nationalist organizations proliferated which voiced the resentment against the post-war arrangements, and propagandized the program of revisionism.37 and Anglo-Saxondom, Berne, 1919; Tchilingirov St., Le pays de la Morava, suivant des témognages serbes; études d’histoire et d’ethnographie, avec une carte hors texte, Berne, 1917; Tsanoff R. A., Bulgaria’s case, (s.l.), 1918; Ethnographie de la Macédoine, Philippopoli, 1881; Chilingirov S., Pomoraviia po srîbski svidetelstva, Sofia, 1917; Chilingirov S., Dobrodzha i nasheto vîzrazhdane, Sofia, 1917; Ishirkov A., Prinos kîm etnografiiata na makedonskite slaviani, Sofia, 1907; Ishirkov A., Zapadnite kraishta na bîlgarskata zemia. Belezhki i materiali. S 11 karti., Sofia, 1915; Ivanov Y., Severna Makedoniia (Sofia, 1902); Ivanov Y., Bîlgarski starini iz Makedoniia (Sofia, 1908); Ivanov Y., Bîlgarite v Makedoniia, Izdirvaniia i dokumenti za tiakhnoto poteklo, ezik i narodnost. S etnografska karts i statistika (Sofia, 1917); Kînchov V., Makedoniia. Etnografiia i statistika. 11 karti (Sofia, 1911); Markov M., Istoricheskite prava na Bîlgariia vîrkhu Dobrodzha (Sofia, 1917); Mavrodiev M., Dobrodzha (Sofia, 1917); Mishev D., Bîlgariia v minaloto (Sofia, 1916); Ofeicoff, La Macédoine au point de vue ethnographique, historique et littéraire (Sofia, 1889); La verité sur les accusations contre la Bulgarie (Sofia, 1919); Zanetov G., Zapadnite bîlgarski zemi i Sîrbiia. Istoriia i etnografiia (Sofia, 1917). 36  Marin Pundeff, “Bulgarian Nationalism”, 145. 37  The most notorious of these were: “Narodno sotstialno dvizhenie” (National social movement) of Prof. Tsankov, “Sîyuz na bîlgarskite natsionalni legion” (Union of Bulgarian

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Some of these organizations espoused radical ideologies with unmistakable racist, fascist, and even Nazi overtones. It is from these quarters that the most virulent examples of the extreme type of exclusive Bulgarian nationalism stemmed. These were based on a reassessment of Bulgarian history, in which the proto-Bulgarian element was emphasized, with its state organizing potentialities, its military element, strong kin (tribal) relations, and centralized leadership (all a perfect legitimation of authoritarian rule). At the same time this, so-called, Hunnic theory was vehemently opposed to the Slavic theory of Bulgarian ethnogenesis and clearly (as its Slavic counterpart after the war) was serving, among others, the foreign political orientation of Bulgaria on the eve of the Second world war. All this was garnished with an overdose of social darwinism and racism.38 Although, undoubtedly the most vociferous and some of the most active among the nationalist propaganda, exemplars of this discourse have not been considered representative of the overall scene of Bulgarian nationalism in this period. After all, only one or two of the abovementioned nationalistic organizations counted over a few thousand members, and the one which produced the most vituperative texts, at no time reached even 100 members.39 The overriding genre of this period, with claims for a separate and legitimate academic standing, was what can be termed as folk psychology. There had been early attempts at a psychological self-portrait of the Bulgarians dating as far back as the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, but they were always marginal to the main theme of the Legions) of Ivan Dochev (the “Legionnaires”), “Vsebîlgarski sîyuz Otets Paisii”, (Father Paisii All-Bulgarian Union), and especially its more radical and activist off-spring “Bîlgarski mladezhki sîyuz Otets Paisii,” (Father Paisii Union of the Bulgarian Youth), “Ratnitsi za napredîka na bîlgarshtinata” (Champions for the Advancement of Bulgariandom) of Assen Kantardzhiev (the “Ratniks”), “Sîyuz na Bîlgarska rodna zashtita” (Union of Bulgarian National Defense), “Bîlgarska natsionalsotsialisticheska rabotnicheska partiia” (Bulgarian National-Socialist Workers Party), “Natsionalna zadruga—fashisti” (National Union— Fascists), “Bîlgarsi fashist” (Bulgarian Fascist), “Bîlgarska orda” (Bulgarian Horde) of D. Sîsîlov, “Mlada Bîlgariia,” (Young Bulgaria), the “Union of Bulgarian Scholars, Writers and Artists”. For an overview of the political scene in the interwar period see Velichko Georgiev, “Razvitieto na politicheskata sistema v Bîlgariia. 1918–1944”, Bîlgariia 1300 Institutsii i dîrzhavna traditsiia, v.1, Sofia, 1981; Velichko Georgiev, Burzhoaznite i drebnoburzhoznite partii v Bîlgariia. 1934–1939 (Sofia, 1971); Plamen Tsvetkov and Nikolay Poppetrov, “Kîm tipologiiata na politicheskoto razvitie na Bîlgariia prez 30-te godini”, Istoricheski pregled, 46, 2, 1990; Nikolay Poppetrov, “Organizatsiite Otets Paisii i Bîlgarska orda prez vtorata svetovna voina”, Istoricheski pregled, 43, 9, 1987. 38  D. D. Sîsîlov, Pîtiat na Bîlgariia, Sofia, 1936; See also Bîlgarska orda: osnovni nachala (Sofia, 1938); Izvestiia na bîlgarska orda. 39  Nikolay Poppetrov, “Organizatsiite”, 42, n. 52.

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discourse, which was focused on the emancipation of Bulgaria in the educational, religious and political fields. There was a certain shift in the development of folk psychology after the liberation of the country in 1878 until the first decade of the twentieth century. In place of the revolutionaries, journalists, poets and public figures of the previous period, it became the domain chiefly of ethnographers. However, it was only during the third stage (the interwar period), when the discipline indeed became an independent sphere of research with its own particular subject and methods. In the annals of the field this is considered the stage of its “scientific” development. This is the period not only of the most profuse outpouring of folk psychology writings, but also of its greatest achievements.40 Clearly, the aftermath of the fiasco of the national unification program produced the proper social and political climate for the introspective mood which infected the intelligentsia en masse. An apt illustration of the change in spirit between the two periods is the work of the military historian Petîr Dîrvingov who exerted a powerful influence over generations of Bulgarian officers. His first book was published in 1903 and was essentially a comparative study of the psychology of the Bulgarian

40  Anton Strashimirov, Kniga za bîlgarite (On the Bulgarians), Sofia, 1918; Anton Strashimirov, Narod i poet (The People and the Poet), Sofia, 1922; Anton Strashimirov, Nashiiat narod (Our People) (Sofia, 1923); Nikola Krîstnikov, Opit za psikhologicheski analiz na nashiia obshtestven zhivot (An attempt at psychological analysis of our social life), (Sofia, 1922); Boyan Penev, Istoriia na novata bîlgarska literatura (History of the Modern Bulgarian Literature), v. 1–4, Sofia, 1976–1978 (reprint); Boyan Penev, Izkustvoto e nashata pamet (Art is our Memory), (Varna, 1978) (a collection of essays published in the interwar period); Konstantin Petkanov, “Kharakterni cherti na bîlgarina” (Characteristic traits of the Bulgarian), Filosofski pregled, 1930,4; Konstantin Petkanov, “Dushata na bîlgarkata” (The Soul of the Bulgarian Woman), Filosofski pregled, 1933, 5; Konstantin Gîlîbov, Zovît na rodinata (Kulturniiat pît na bîlgarina. Literaturni opiti) (The Call of the Fatherland: The Cultural Course of the Bulgarian. Literary Endeavors), (Sofia, 1930); Ornamenti (Filosofski i literaturni eseta), (Sofia, 1934); Stefan Gidikov, “Polovata svitost na bîlgarina kato osnova na negoviia kharakter” (The Sexual Reticence of the Bulgarian as the Basis of his Character), Filosofski pregled, 1934, 2; Spiridon Kazandzhiev, Pred izvora na zhivota (At the Source of Life), (Sofia, 1937); Ivan Khadzhiiski, Optimistichna teoriia za nashiia narod (An Optimistic Theory of our Nation), In: Sîchineniia (Selected works), vol. 1, Sofia, 1974; Ivan Khadzhiiski, Bit i dushevnost na nashiia narod (Life and Ethos of our People), In: Sîchineniia (Selected works), vol. 2, Sofia, 1974 (Khadzhiiski, who was killed during the Second world war, wrote most of his works in the latter half of the 1930s and early 1940s); Although published immediately before and after the strict chronological boundaries of the second period (1918–1944) the following two influential works belong to the same intellectual tradition: Todor Panov, Psikhologiia na bîlgarskiia narod (Psychology of the Bulgarian Nation), (Sofia, 1914); Stoian Kosturkov, Vîrkhu psikhologiiata na bîlgarina (On the Psychology of the Bulgarian), (Sofia, 1949).

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and Turkish armed forces and, in broader terms, of the two nations.41 His second important work (alongside a number of widely read military treatises) of 1911 was, likewise, an example of the intimate link between the military institution and the construction of Bulgarian nationalism in its “optimistic” period.42 After the war, Dîrvingov turned to more speculative philosophical themes and published his major work in folk psychology, in which he espoused the ideas of geographical determinism in order to legitimize the territorial claims of the Bulgarian state.43 This work secured him election to the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.44 The self-image of the Bulgarian, which emerged from practically all works on folk psychology (with the exception of Dîrvingov who even in the 1930s retained some of the disciplined uptight military spirit), was based on a martyrological approach, painting a victimized nation, isolated and on the sidelines of world attention, a peculiar combination of inert collectivism with anarchic individualism, a social egalitarianism which breeds democratism and, at the same time, a lack of civic discipline and responsibility, which breeds its negation. The interesting question, of course, is how far this self-image of the Bulgarians affected other strata of society besides the considerable part of the Bulgarian intelligentsia (itself only a small group of Bulgarian society) which produced it. The social structure of Bulgarian society, with its overwhelmingly egalitarian peasant majority, a growing but still weak urban middle class, and the absence of a nobility, accounted, in general, for the immense and disproportionate influence of the educated class which, on its part, had direct social roots in the mass of the population. Although it is difficult at this point to prove the extent of the social diffusion of these ideas, their continuity among large parts of the following generations of intelligentsia is undisputed, adding yet another distinctive feature to the complicated character of Bulgarian nationalism. Document 2 (Gîlîbov) in many ways captures and exemplifies the typical introspective temper of the times. Yet, with its depth of vision and crisp analytical prose, the essay clearly surpasses intellectually the average representative of the genre. In fact, of all the four texts, illustrating the history of Bulgarian 41   Ot Plovdiv i Sofia kîm Tsarigrad i Skopie (Paralel na voennite sili) (From Plovdiv and Sofia to Constantinople and Skopye: A Comparison of the Armed Forces), (Sofia, 1903). 42   Voenna Bîlgariia. Sotsiologicheski etyud na bîlgarskata deystvitelnost (Military Bulgaria. A Sociological Essay of Bulgarian Realities), (Sofia, 1911). 43   Dukhît na istoriiata na bîlgarskiia narod (The Spirit of the History of the Bulgarian Nation), (Sofia, 1932). 44  Marin Pundeff, “Bulgarian Nationalism”, 146, n. 81.

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nationalism in the twentieth century, Gîlîbov’s is undoubtedly the most sophisticated. It might be even argued that, with its subdued passions and cultivated language, it may not be so typical for the nationalism of the period. Yet, what transpires from the text, is not a denunciation of the national idea; on the contrary, there is no question that the national ideal is justified and worth fighting for. What is attacked, are the ways and manner of achieving it: “we imagined that we could achieve the reunification of the Bulgarian people at once, instead of at separate stages”. It is the unpractical maximalism which is the object of scorn, not the aim which is set. Without any doubt, here is a person and a discourse operating within the framework of the national idea but with the realism and wisdom following the lessons of defeat, and with a sobriety of manner quite distinct from the elevated prose of the previous period. Without explicitly defining it in detail, Gîlîbov obviously embraces the goal of unification as formulated in the prewar era. The very fact that he several times employs the word “reunification” instead of “unification” clearly indicates the looming presence of San-Stefano behind the scenes. He also, like Rizoff, accepts as a conditio sine qua non the European tutelage although he words this recognition very cautiously: “the reunification of the Bulgarians is a complicated political task of an European order”. The real value of this piece, however, lies in the broader approach it takes to the Bulgarian problem. Gîlîbov situated the Bulgarian case not only within the more general political context of Europe but focused primarily on the social and economic aspects of the country’s integration into the larger framework of the continent. It is not merely, and what is more important not primarily, the defeat in the wars which was responsible for the frustration and disorientation of Bulgarian society; rather, it was the rapid structural shifts in the society (chiefly the urbanization process), accompanied by a fast adaptation to the new cultural patterns brought in from Europe. The disparity between the quick cultural reorientation and internalization of European values and expectations, and the limited material resources of the country made and would continue to make, according to Gîlîbov the process of europeanization extremely tortuous. Gîlîbov’s concluding remark sounds today like a prophecy fulfilled: “The Bulgarian will be tomorrow what he is today—as long as his will for cultural progress is alive and as long as he continues to be so poor.” The Second world war became a watershed in the development of Bulgarian nationalism. At first glance this is usually attributed to the fact that a communist dictatorship was imposed espousing an ideology which was anti- or supranationalist. During the interwar period it was by far the only serious adversary and alternative to nationalism. It will be argued in this paper that the hegemony of the classical Marxist doctrine in the immediate post-Second world

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war period in Bulgaria (and in Eastern Europe in general) was only a brief, and certainly not uncontested, caesura to be quickly replaced by the practice of state communism, and which left its mark only on the articulation of the national idea. In using communism, it is important to make a distinction between the ideology of pre-state communism or classical Marxism and the communist state praxis with its own discourse. The crucial distinction between communism as ideology and practice, indeed with a litmus-like quality, is the attitude towards the state. Whereas the state is the raison d’être as well as the modus vivendi of both nationalism and of practical communism, classical Marxism has an ambiguous attitude towards the state (although not always explicitly anti-state). With the Bolshevik revolution and the building of “real socialism” or communism, we see the appropriation of some elements of the Marxist doctrine: namely, its ideas of social equality and justice, but primarily its modernizing potential, especially in the drive for industrialization. From the outset the variety of communism in Russia, and as it was exported especially after the Second World War, was, among others, an ideology of modernization, an attempt to produce a unique way to meet the challenge of a hegemonic West. Both nationalism and state communism responded to the same challenge, becoming tools of modernization. Just as the nation-state was imposed as the gold standard of “civilized” international organization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so also industrialization became the standard for economic progress. Together with liberalism Marxism shares in underestimating, indeed in discounting, the political significance of ethnicity and nationalism. The huge blow dealt to the central idea of Marxism with the rejection of proletarian solidarity in favor of ethnonationalism during the First world war prompted an attempt at adaptation on the part of Lenin and other communist leaders in favoring the principle of self-determination, including the right to secession. This principle was endorsed by the Communist International, and after 1924 all communist parties had to adopt it.45 It became one of the important strategies to appeal to broad segments of the population, but it remained only a strategy. In the end, Lenin failed to develop a general theory of nationalism and “left open the question of the nature and role of nationalism in its relationship with socialism”.46 That Marxism failed to develop an adequate theory of nationalism has become a truism. But the fact that “Marxists have failed in their efforts at incorporat45  John F. Stack, Jr., “Ethnic Mobilization in World Politics: The Primordial Perspective”, The Primordial Challenge. Ethnicity in the Contemporary World, John F. Stacj (ed.) (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 6–7. 46  Shlomo Avineri, “Toward a Socialist Theory of Nationalism”, Dissent, Fall 1990, 451.

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ing the reality of nationalism into their theoretical understanding … is deeply rooted in the nature of Marxist thought itself.”47 The incompatibility between a cosmopolitan universalist ideology, and a particularist romantic creed precludes their theoretical syncretism.48 In Bulgaria, it was only the “narrow” social-democrats who later became communists, and partly the agrarians, who distanced themselves from the widespread support of all political parties for the First world war. The quite interesting ideas of the social-democrats for a solution of the national problem centered around the concept of a Balkan federation. These ideas (especially the ones about Macedonia) underwent serious evolution and vacillations conforming, as a whole, to the general policy of the Moscow based Communist International, but with significant dissent and discussions within the party.49 However, in the interwar period these views were hardly seriously considered outside the narrow scope of their immediate followers. The considerable attention which these ideas have received in the post-war period is certainly disproportionate to their real social impact; it is, rather, a direct product of the monopoly and the dictatorship of the Communist party. Likewise naive, and overestimating its strength, are the attempts to depict the standing of the Communist party as a national treachery which proved decisive and fatal for the final loss of Macedonia. The about a decade long communist caesura has to be analyzed not exclusively in the context of the dominant ideology with its supranational stance and the variety of doctrinal considerations (primacy of class struggle over national issues, subordination of national interests to the cause of the world proletarian revolution, adherence to the proletarian international discipline, etc.).50 Very significant and, it seems to me, of much more immediate importance, were foreign policy considerations: the shift of Stalin’s support from the 47  John Ehrenreich, “Socialism, Nationalism and Capitalist Development”, Review of Radical Political Economists, 15, 1, 1983; Ephraim Nimni, Marxism and Nationalism. Origins of a Political Crisis (London, Concord, MA: Pluto Press, 1991). 48  For a more extensive argument against the theory of an ideological symbiosis between communism and nationalism, see Maria Todorova, “Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Communist Legacy,” op. cit. 49  On the different positions within the Communist party in the interwar and immediate postwar period see Marin Pundeff, Nationalism and Communism in Bulgaria”, SüdostForschungen, Bd.XXIX, 1970; Vasil Vasilev, “The Bulgarian Communist Party and the Macedonian Question between the Two World Wars”, Bulgarian Historical Review, XVII, 1989, No. 1; Dimitîr Sirkov, “Bulgaria’s National Territorial Problem during the Second World War, Bulgarian Historical Review, XIX, 1991, No. 3. 50  It seems that only in the case of the “affirmative” action towards the Turkish population in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when it enjoyed rights and privileges which it had never had

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Bulgarian to the Yugoslav communists during and immediately after the war, as well as the general treatment of the country on the international arena as an ally of Germany and a loser in the war, a legacy that ironically was handed over to the communists.51 The proverbial servility of the Bulgarian communists towards Moscow can be seen, among others, as a consciously (although not always well) calculated price for acquiring a great power patron (one of the persistent characteristics of Bulgarian nationalism). By the time of Stalin’s death, and especially after the famous April Plenum of the BCP in 1956, Bulgarian communism had acquired all the characteristics of étatist communism.52 As already stated, étatist communism appropriated important elements of the Marxist doctrine, and above all its self-designation, thus legitimizing its claims on the basis of the Marxist discourse (a perfect example of ideological nominalism used for legitimation). The so called “communist nationalism” was nothing else but a transvestite “ordinary” nationalism. The domination of the communist discourse (or the language of MarxismLeninism) reflected primarily power politics, and was a tribute to the Cold War division of the world. The “genuine” Marxist discourse was very soon replaced by the imagery of nationalism translated into an idiosyncratic Marxist slang. It was precisely the nation-state which subverted earlier and short-lived utopian attempts to build society on the premise of the priority of class-consciousness. The ongoing conflict between the two discourses, as well as between different articulations of the nationalist discourse, reflected a power struggle within the intellectual elite for hegemony. It was precisely in this period that a renewed interest in the interwar heritage could be legitimately displayed. In this particular case, it took about two decades after the Second World War for the procrustean vulgar variety of Marxism thriving in the country to begin to accept the legitimate presence of a different discourse. This was true even for a prewar Marxist like Ivan Khadzhiiski whose collected works were reissued only in the 1970s. The 1970s and 1980s saw a wide effort at reissuing many of the prewar works of the folk psychology genre.53 In this period also some original works before or since, can one possibly speak of an attempt at a local transposition of Lenin’s theory of self-determination. 51  See, in this respect, the “undoctrinal” standing the Bulgarian communists took towards Western Thrace. As Pundeff has pointed out, “it took the personal intervention of Churchill to reverse the first nationalist move of the Bulgarian Communists” (Marin Pundeff, “Nationalism and Communism in Bulgaria”, 152). 52  For pre-1956 manifestations of state considerations submerging the doctrinal ideological approach, see Marin Pundeff, “Nationalism and Communism in Bulgaria”, 153–159. 53  See Mincho Draganov (ed.), Narodopsikhologiia na bîlgarite. Antologiia (Folk psychology of the Bulgarians. An Anthology) (Sofia, 1984). This lengthy anthology, which encompasses

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of contemporary authors were published but the zenith of the genre was obviously in the past: these were, for the most part, emulations of past models.54 As for “communist nationalism” per se, the widely accepted view is that the national ideology was adopted in order to be overcome.55 I would argue, rather, that it was the national ideology which adopted the language of Marxism in order to secure legitimacy. In Bulgaria, where the official policy was (or was given out as) one of complete consent with the center (Moscow), the majority of the Party leadership and the ruling elite shared the national ideology, but articulated it in a more cautious way, using the hegemonic Marxist discourse for clearly legitimizing purposes. Seen in this context Todor Zhivkov’s “Address on Bulgaria” (Document 3) is a wonderful example of nationalist discourse employing communist clichés. In addition, it is a remarkable symbiosis between a typically employed genre during the communist period (the political speech or address) and a typical nationalist ritual (anniversaries of historical events). Increasingly, for example, after the 1960s the anniversary of the San-Stefano treaty (3 March) was commemorated in public meetings, concerts and other ceremonies, yet only the first non-communist government after 1990 dared make it an official national holiday. For all its unsophisticated plainness, Zhivkov’s speech displays an ingenious combination of the elements of two completely different discourses. On one hand, there is the tribute to all constitutive elements of the communist doctrine; on the other, they are tempered by an interpretation which clearly indicates another intellectual foundation. For example, the class struggle of the proletariat is only an element and is subsumed into the much more important “perpetual struggle by the people against foreign and domestic plunderers”, and the order of enumerating of “foreign” and “domestic” is not by chance. Central to this discussion is the interpretation of “the combination between patriotism and internationalism”. On the score of the latter fall such events as the fact that while fighting their Ottoman oppressors, the Bulgarians were not at war with the Turkish people; their solidarity and help to the Armenian texts from the ninth to the twentieth century, offers excerpts of practically all works cited in note 40, many of which underwent new editions in the 1970s. 54  Marko Semov, Dushevnost i otseliavane (Ethos and Survival), Plovdiv, 1982; Mincho Draganov, “Za izuchavaneto na natsionalniia kharakter” (About the study of the national character), Filosofska misîl, 1982, 11; Mincho Draganov, Sotsialnata psikhologiia v Bîlgariia (Social Psychology in Bulgaria) (Sofia, 1971); Efrem Karanfilov, Nai-bîlgarskoto vreme (The most Bulgarian Time) (Sofia, 1979). 55  Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism. Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 314.

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refugees after their massacres in the Ottoman empire; the saving of the Bulgarian Jews during the Second world war; and, above all, of course, the friendship between Bulgaria and the Soviet Union. A key phrase of the text is “that there is nothing more precious than peace, mutual understanding and good neighboring relations … directly linked to internationalism”. In one respect, at least, the Second World War was, indeed, a watershed in the development of Bulgarian nationalism. Passive or active, the nationalism of the prewar period can be generally defined as irredentist, while the nationalism of the postwar period is unambiguously a status quo nationalism. This can be illustrated also by comparing two of the most popular poems known by heart by practically every Bulgarian.56 One belongs to the patriarch of Bulgarian literature, Ivan Vazov, who wrote it in 1872 before the liberation of his country, and in which he gave a poetic expression of the territorial program of Bulgarian unification:57 If men ask me where the sunrise Warmed me first when I was small, If men ask me where the land is That I cherish most of all, This will be my simple answer: Where the mighty Danube flows, Where the Black Sea brightly dances In the East and stormy grows; Where the Balkan raises nobly To the sky its mountain chain, Where the broad Maritsa slowly Wanders through the Thracian plain; Where the turbid river Vardar Through green fields and meadows roars, Where mount Rila’s summit sparkles Where lake waves lap Okhrid’s shores; 56  Both of these poems were part of the obligatory school curricula of the postwar period, and were also often chanted as they were musically arranged to popular melodies. Vazov’s poem, in particular, was sung on all occasions, official or unofficial, and was perhaps more popular than the national anthem. 57   Anthology of Bulgarian Poetry, Transl. by Peter Tempest (Sofia, 1980), 93–94.

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Where the people suffer anguish And in bondage pine today, Who in one and the same language Voice their sorrow, weep and pray. The other poem dates from some hundred years later, and belongs to Georgi Dzhagarov. An undoubtedly talented poet, Dzhagarov was one of the “court” poets, a member of the immediate Zhivkov entourage, and a fierce nationalist who was personally implicated in the anti-Turkish propaganda at the time of the “renaming” process during the 1980s. His poem displays the same intensity of feeling but alongside a deeply internalized recognition of reality:58 A land just like a human palm … A bigger land I don’t require. I’m glad your mountains are flint-hard And that your blood has Southern fire. A land just like a human palm … But tougher, able to withstand The poison of Byzantium, The bloody Turkish iatagan. Traders in blood and in tobacco Who parcelled out your earth for sale Fell to the ground with broken backs For you, though small, were never frail. A land just like a human palm … To me you are the world entire. I measure you not by the yard But by the love that you inspire. On the other side of the “indissoluble combination” of socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism is the interpretation of patriotism. Its legitimacy should rest not on historic, geopolitical, linguistic or other rights, but on “high national esteem”, on a healthy respect of one’s historical achievements, and the pride “of having been able to also contribute something to the world”. It is quite symptomatic that in this latter phrase which had become somewhat 58  The excerpt is from Anthology of Bulgarian Poetry, 443.

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of a Stichwort in Bulgarian, Zhivkov was, in fact, reviving the title of a popular book on folk psychology from 1941 which was a collection of the most fantastic claims of greatness that Bulgarian nationalism had invented thus far.59 At the same time, it is emphasized that this patriotism had nothing to do with the exclusive and aggressive nationalism of the prewar era. In the only ­passage which was obviously aimed at Macedonia without explicitly mentioning it, Zhivkov referred to the long-lasting virulent dispute between Bulgarian and Macedonian historians who had claims on the same history: “We have no need to appropriate other people’s merits and history; we are satisfied with our own.”60 This is a long shot from the prewar irredenta: clearly, at least abroad, Bulgarian nationalism was being pursued only as cultural nationalism. At the same time, the intensity of nationalism was turned to the internal scene. For at least two decades, in the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, there was a continuous escalation in the national feelings of all groups within the intelligentsia but primarily among the liberal arts, and particularly acute among historians and writers. Given the significant degree of symbiosis between intelligentsia and party in Bulgaria (compared to some of the other East European countries, where the “divorce” had occurred earlier),61 it would be unfair to say that these feelings were only well monitored and manipulated by the party authorities; they were, in fact, sometimes cautiously, most often overtly, supported and directly inspired by the political elites. The historical profession, in particular, took upon itself the voluntary task of protecting and promoting the “national interests” and the “national cause”, espousing the false, but self-satisfying, illusion that it took a dissident position. The rehabilitation and glorification of the great leadership figures of the medieval past—the scores 59  Stilian Chilingirov, Kakvo e dal bîlgarinît na drugite narodi (What the Bulgarian has given to the other nations) (Sofia, 1941). Among the many contributions are: the Bogomil heresy which, via the Hussites and Protestantism, brought the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to Europe; that Princess Olga who converted Russia to Christianity in the tenth century was, in fact, the granddaughter of King Boris I who converted Bulgaria a century earlier; that Russian was only an offshoot of medieval Bulgarian; that a variety of great figures in European history had Bulgarian blood flowing in their veins, the most notorious among them being Napoleon. 60  The other instance in the text which, again only implicitly, touches on the Macedonian question, is when seven of the leaders of the Bulgarian national-democratic revolution are called by name, among them two active in the Macedonian movement, Gotse Delchev and Iane Sandanski, hotly claimed by both Bulgarian and Macedonian historians as belonging exclusively to their respective nation’s pantheon. 61  On the peculiar position of the Bulgarian intelligentsia within the political context, see Maria Todorova, “Improbable Maverick or Typical Conformist? Seven Thoughts on the New Bulgaria”, Eastern Europe in Revolution, ed. Ivo Banac (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 160–163.

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of khans and tsars, who had created a strong Bulgarian state—was seen by the historians and writers as a way to counter the pernicious effects of what was defined as “national nihilism”, and to overcome, what seemed to them, the anonymous, anti-individual, deterministic and too schematic methodological approach of socio-economic Marxist history. Not only was this acceptable to the political leadership but it saw in it the ideal legitimation of its authoritarian and, often, totalitarian, ambitions. It was the centralized state of the past with its strong individual leadership, which appealed to them as a model to emulate, and Zhivkov explicitly stated this in his: “Glory be to the great prime builders, under whose leadership the Bulgarian people created their own centralized state: the khans Asparukh, Krum and Omurtag, prince Boris I, the tsars Simeon, Samuil, Assen and Peter, Kaloian and Ivan-Assen II!”62 The triunine theory of Bulgarian ethnogenesis (Thracian, Protobulgarian and Slavic) which postulated that the Bulgarian nationality had assumed its final shape and unity by the ninth century, was warmly welcomed and officially endorsed. In Zhivkov’s speech this assumed the absolutely fantastic assertion that the Bulgarian state has followed a unique course in European history, “unlike the other then existing states on our continent”, in being built on the “nationality principle as a state of one people”. That this was scholarly insupportable and logically untenable was of no importance. In the context of the genre, an oral speech which would be broadcast by the media to the entire nation, and in the context of a political culture, which was looking for the blueprint of the current political course between the lines, the reading meant that the principle of the unitary state was being endorsed with no accommodations for ethnic or other minorities. Such a reading of Zhivkov’s speech obviously gives priority to its nationalistic contents over the form of articulation which carefully (although often not very successfully) tried to conform to the orthodox communist cliches.63 In many 62  It was widely circulated, by what can be termed as the “oral culture” of the intelligentsia, that in Lyudmila Zhivkova’s spiritualists soirees her father was considered to be the incarnation of the early ninth century khan Krum who strove to establish the absolute power of the ruler. 63  One of the “sensations” of the post-1989 era was the discovery that Zhivkov in the 1960s had offered Moscow to turn Bulgaria into a sixteenth republic of the Soviet Union. This has been widely interpreted as a proof of the treacherous, anti-national nature of communism which is willing to sacrifice national interests for the sake of communist imperialism, etc. This particular move of Zhivkov still awaits its careful historian who has to meticulously weigh motivations versus reception, but as a preliminary guess I would suggest that it was a very well calculated personal affidavit of political loyalty which was not expected to produce any practical results. The last thing Moscow would have wanted

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ways, the nationalist policies of the Zhivkov administration culminated in the esoteric and messianic patriotic frenzies of his irrational daughter Lyudmila Zhivkova who became a Politburo member and headed cultural policies until her early death in 1981 (the year of the lavishly and expensively prepared festivities commemorating the 1300 anniversary of the Bulgarian state which was supposed to be the consummation of her long efforts to raise Bulgaria’s selfesteem and international reputation). Although she was precisely the embodiment of the rising nationalism, there occurred an important shift in the articulation of the discourse, which shed almost all, but an obligatory minimum, of communist formulae. This can be seen in one of the tamer examples of Zhivkova’s idiosyncratic prose (Document 3) which on one single page focuses on concepts like “spiritual destiny”, “spiritual tasks”, “spiritual abilities”, “spiritual level”, “spiritual processes”, “the Realm of Beauty”, “the laws of Beauty”, “sacred evolutionary rights” of the human individual, “the place of the Bulgarian nation”, “the role of the Bulgarian nation”, “national prospects”, “great national ideas”, etc., whereas “socialist” is used once, as an attribute, inter alia, of contemporary Bulgarian society. It was, apparently, this shift of discourse, and not a thorough analysis of the underlying ideas, which prompted an almost unanimous appraisal in the West of her policies as a manifestation of independence and a window to the West.64 On the other hand, the resistance which she and her entourage incurred among the so-called hard-liners, although clad in accusations of deviation from the orthodoxy, displayed simply the reluctance of the old entrenched party functionaries to yield to a new generation of party bureaucrats, a process which was naturally under way. Undoubtedly, the policy of “renaming” the Turks in Bulgaria, launched in late 1984 and which reached its crisis in the summer of 1989, can be assessed as the culmination (and biggest miscalculation) of a long-term nationalist line

to do in the 1960s was a change in the territorial status quo, especially at the expense of its most loyal satellite, which would anyway have raised an international pandemonium of accusations in expansionism. 64  Given the nature of her thought, an in-depth analysis would find kindred intellectual analogues in astrology, numerology, a variety of esoteric thought and specifically, as an immediate national predecessor, in the teachings of the founder of an original Bulgarian esoteric movement in the interwar period Petîr Dînov (Beinsa Duno). On the other hand, given the Ceauşescu precedent, the acclaim she was given in the West was hardly surprising. See, among others, her assessment in Richard Crampton, A Short History of Bulgaria, and Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II, New York, 1989.

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of the Zhivkov regime.65 It had an important cumulative effect on the whole range of international and domestic events which led to the series of “velvet” revolutions in Eastern Europe, which in Bulgaria was called much more ­soberly and modestly “the changes of November 10”. What happened after 1989 in Eastern Europe was not the release of the genie of nationalism out of a tightly screwed bottle but essentially three things. Firstly, to elaborate on my earlier metaphor about “communist nationalism” being an “ordinary” transvestite nationalism, after 1989 it gloats in its newly acquired nudity: it no longer has to pay lip-service to the formerly dominant jargon. Secondly, and much more importantly, the international status quo has drastically changed: in the existing great power vacuum in the area attempts can be made nowadays (or, at least, have been perceived as possible to make without grave risks) to practically realize the claims articulated in the discourse. Thirdly, and perhaps most significant, nationalism (and ethnicity) prove to have the strongest psychological mass appeal in times of frustration and deep economic, social and cultural transformations. As for Bulgaria, all signs at the time being indicate that there is no reversal in the status quo nature of nationalism, no matter by whom and how it is being articulated. The two potentially sensitive spots of Bulgarian nationalism are the Macedonian question and the Turkish problem. As far as the first is concerned, despite the creation of several “Macedonian” organizations, it has not left, and does not seem to be leaving, the confines of cultural nationalism. Even in its most outspoken and even shrill articulations, the irredenta is absent.66 The “Turkish problem”, on the other hand, presents much more serious challenges. It cannot be reduced to a problem within the context of Bulgarian nationalism; it involves many more independent issues outside its scope: problems of regional security, of global security, of ethnic minority status, of rights to protect ethnic minorities, of rights to intervene in the domestic affairs of a neighboring nation, etc., all tantalizing issues which have not yet received a 65  On the Communist party policies toward the “Turkish question” and the change of course after 1956, see Stefan Troebst, “Zum Verhältnis von Partei, Staat und türkischer Minderheit in Bulgarien 1956–1958”, Nationalitätenprobleme in Südosteuropa, Hrsg. R. Schönfeld (München, 1987), 231–256; Wolfgang Höpken, “Türkische Minderheiten in Südosteuropa. Adpekte ihrer politischen and sozialen Entwicklung in Bulgarien und Jugoslawien”, Die Staaten Südosreuropas und die Osmanen, Hrsg. Hans Georg Majer (Südosteuropa Jahrbuch 19), (München, 1989); Maria Todorova, “Improbable Maverick or Typical Conformist? Seven Thoughts on the New Bulgaria”, 148–167. 66  The hasty recognition of Macedonian and Bosnian state independence (but not of the Macedonian nation) by Bulgaria, which preceded any other country, the European community and the U.S. inclusive, should be seen precisely in these terms: the public statement that there are no territorial claims.

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uniform and unanimous interpretation in global international law and politics, let alone in the Balkans.67 Still, it can be safely argued that in many respects the national discourses of nowadays revolve around the “Turkish problem”. Questions about the study of Turkish at school, about the scope and character of the Turkish and Muslim propaganda, are often discussed in terms reminiscent of the multiculturalism debate in the United States. The central issue, however, is the existence of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (otherwise known as the Turkish Party). The Bulgarian Socialist Party (the former Communist Party) argues that the presence of the Movement (the third political force) in Parliament is unconstitutional, since according to the constitution parties based on religious or ethnic principle are forbidden. Ironically, the Socialist party has dropped any ideological argumentation from its arsenal of legitimization, resorting exclusively to legalistic considerations. This particular position of the BSP reflects, but not merely, the expediency of playing the nationalist card in the power struggle (the usually advanced explanation or accusation). There is, however, also the legacy of the period when the party was identical with the state, and considerations of raison d’état were an immediate priority. Conversely, the former democratic opposition, now in power, increasingly appropriates ideological arguments. Until now, in the overall euphoria, the anti-communist card has worked, but with the inevitable subsiding of this argumentation, the government finds the justification of an electoral alliance with the “Turkish party” increasingly uncomfortable in the pervading atmosphere of openly expressed nationalism. This “openness” of expression of the national idea has taken shape, as already mentioned, in the formation of several groups defending the “national cause”, but primarily in the press. One of the few and greatest achievements on the thorny road to pluralism and the building of civil society is the creation of a free press. In this respect, not only the great power vacuum but also the “authority vacuum”68 have benefited principally the media, although there are already unmistakable signs that this period might be remembered in the near future as the sweet short honeymoon of the free press. The newspaper article has become, for the first time in many decades, a powerful and effective tool 67  Inflated though it might sometimes appear to the outside observer, in Bulgaria there is a real concern over the often aggressive standing of a strong (50 million) highly militarized Turkey, which has open U.S. support. This concern is further fed on the Cyprus precedent and the character of the Greek-Turkish relations. Though obviously often blown up, additional anxieties include the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Albanian Kosovo problem, the example of the Bosnian tragedy. 68  Susan L. Woodward, “The Tyranny of Time”, The Brookings Review, Winter 1992.

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and numerically, at least, represents the dominant genre of any discourse (the national inclusive). In this respect Ilcho Dimitrov’s article (Document 4) should be approached and interpreted not merely as an example of the discourse of nationalism within the context of the Socialist party, but quite representative of the overall considerations of Bulgarian nationalism(s). As a journalistic piece it is an effective pamphlet with some apt and successfully phrased remarks. As an intellectual essay it has nothing new to offer but functions essentially in the framework of the legacy of the past national discourses, as they have been outlined heretofore. The central idea defended in the article, as reflected already in the title, is the importance of the “nation’s unity”. The whole argument is based on the widely held and central notion of nationalism in general that there exist “common national interests”, “common national ideals”, “united national policy”. The only interesting difference from the past discourses is the appeal for political independence from great power tutelage, that Bulgaria should not be “resigned to the idea that our existence is impossible without being somebody’s satellite”. As already said, the articulation of this appeal is possible only at this point of an unprecedented great power vacuum in the Balkans. In a much less sophisticated way than the discourse of the East Central European ideologues this article also replicates the argument of Bulgaria being a natural and inalienable part of European civilization. At the same time, just as the proponents of the East Central European idea attempted to sub-­ghettoize Southeastern Europe (the Balkans) within Eastern Europe, and totally oust Russia from belonging to the region, Ilcho Dimitrov performs the same operation on Turkey: “Europe has its geographic boundaries … Beyond the Straits begins Asia.” Finally, as a recipe for political action, the article is a manifest example of authoritarian power politics. Qualifying the registration of the “Turkish party” as a crime which should be resolved by its ban and isolation should come as no surprise from a cabinet minister of the Zhivkov regime at the time of the most virulent campaign against the Turks. What is surprising and very interesting is the subtle shift in the discourse. Instead of employing the usual (long used and abused) formula “in the name of the people”, the author has deftly accommodated his language to Jeffersonian democracy and, in appealing to public opinion to counter parliament, parties and government, utilizes the powerful “We, the people”. It is one of the earliest examples of, what I see as a future process of, appropriating the cliches of the democratic discourse for the purposes of nationalism. What this analysis of the different discourses of Bulgarian nationalism throughout the past century shows is, essentially, a continuum but with some

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significant differences between the separate sub-periods. Until the Second World War Bulgarian nationalism can be generally characterized as an irredentist nationalism, although the strong and dominant optimism of the period until the First World War was transformed into the gloomy introspection of the interwar period. After 1945 the irredenta was basically dropped from the political agenda and Bulgarian nationalism has adjusted to reality turning into a status quo nationalism. The defense of the “national cause” outside the country’s borders was relegated to academia and different public educational/ cultural societies whose passionate, and sometimes overburdened, discourse is, for all practical purposes, harmless, because it has had no serious influence on government policy. Thus, the greatest discontinuity in the development of Bulgarian nationalism is in the realm of political aims, the Second World War being the important watershed. From a purely gnoseological point of view this brought about an additional tension to the interpretation of “nation” which has not been explicitly addressed but is clearly present in the postwar texts. This is, on one hand, the continued treatment of the nation as a historic entity centered around a linguistic, religious and cultural unity. On the other hand, it is the increased acceptance of the nation as being formed by the citizens of the state (a direct illustration of the latter case is I. Dimitrov’s statement that Islam and Macedonism are “setting apart, and against the majority, a part of the nation”). That the two claims—that the Turks in Bulgaria are part of the Bulgarian nation (according to the second criterion), and so are the Macedonians and others outside Bulgaria (according to the first criterion)—are logically incompatible is an issue which is carefully avoided. In all other aspects, the articulation of nationalism has demonstrated a remarkable continuity of ideas and feelings. Having inherited both the fierce defensiveness and the centrality of the linguistic criterion as a pre-1878 legacy, the subsequent periods added the almost fatalistic resignation to great power interference. An important addition, which has persisted unchanged after the First World War, is the self-image of the Bulgarian which, to paraphrase Lacan, displays an “imaginary rape” syndrome. The greatest continuity, however, can be traced in the language of the discourses. Anthropomorphism is a basic attribute of nationalism in general, which treats the nation as a living organism. The sacred formula “living parts/members of the nation’s body/organism are torn away” can be followed up unchanged from Rizoff to Dimitrov. This also presupposes the undifferentiated treatment of the nation as one, with common ideals and interests; therefore, divisions along any lines are considered aberrant. The same is true about the nation’s evolution in time: it is treated as a perennial (or, at least, very ancient)

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entity where, seemingly, no changes have occurred in character or ideals. There is a whole series of code-words and phrases which, as has been demonstrated have been employed throughout all periods. In this respect, only the language of Gîlîbov stands out as being immune to this simplistic imagery. Instead, by locating Bulgaria in a relational European framework, he evokes at present feelings of déjà vu. At the same time, there have been important additions and shifts in the separate discourses. National ideology, which is a fundamental product and indispensable attribute of the nation-state, has not only created more than one discourse of its own but has displayed a remarkable ability to appropriate the discourses of often opposing ideologies for legitimizing purposes. This was the case during the period of communist rule. This seems to be already occurring in the attempts to adapt the language of the hegemonic discourse of democracy to the needs of the national ideology.

chapter 18

Language as a Cultural Unifier in a Multilingual Setting: the Bulgarian Case during the Nineteenth Century Language was perceived by national and cultural leaders as the mightiest agent of unification. While it is one of the most important components of the ethnic cluster, common language was neither absolutely necessary nor sufficient to distinguish ethnicity. This chapter looks at the formation of the Bulgarian literary language during the nineteenth century and explores the parallel fate of bi- and multilingualism among the Bulgarian population. It was first written as a working paper for the project, “Nation, National Identity, Nationalism,” at the Center for German and European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Working paper, 5.5, 1992. Revised portions of it were published in East European Politics and Societies, vol. 4, No. 3, Fall 1990, 439– 450, for which permission has been received. It appeared also in Polish as “Language in the Construction of Ethnicity and Nationalism: the Bulgarian Case,” in Sprawy Narodowosciowe, Seria Nowa, 2006, 27, 7–30.

1

Language, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Some Theoretical Observations

In his famous “Le Séminaire” Jacques Lacan mused about whether In principio erat verbum should be translated by means of language (langue), i.e. “the world of signs to which we are strangers”1 or by means of speech (parole), i.e. “the sense of the individual faculty of speech and the speaker’s actual words”.2 For Lacan “the question of meaning comes with speech” but his own unequivocal

1  Delivered during the academic year 1954/1955 Lacan’s seminar was first published in French as Le Séminaire. Livre II. Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, 1954–1955 (Paris: Les Editions du Seuil, 1978). The English translation which is cited further as The Seminar was published in 1988: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955. The Seminar (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988). 285. 2  Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), XVI.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_020

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verdict, even in the face of erudite scholarly opposition, was that: “In principio erat verbum, that is undeniably language, not speech”.3 The vast majority of historians belonging to both the pre-Lacanian and the post-Lacanian discourse have disregarded this intricate distinction. For all practical purposes they have been probably right in doing so (although this is not a hint for an argumentum ad ignorantiam). Instead, the ones who have been involved in language have treated it as, simply and straightforwardly, speech, and have concentrated their polemical efforts elsewhere. In the great debate about the problem of the origins of ethnicity and nationalism which is, essentially, the great debate between primordialists or perennialists, on the one hand, and modernists or instrumentalists, on the other hand, language has figured prominently as one of the central attributes of ethnie (ethnic groups) and nations.4 Emphasizing the importance of ties based on kinship, race, territory, language, religion, the primordial argument views ethnic communities and nations as essential and natural elements of the historical experience of humanity. According to some proponents of this view ethnicity and nationalism are a simple expansion of kinship ties (real or fictive) as a genetic mechanism of group solidarity in the struggle for survival.5 In a similar kind of reasoning other scholars point out the genetic character of the territorial nature of man where a formation like the nation-state would be interpreted simply as a historical invention to indicate the territory of the in-group.6 A more sociological approach considers language, territory, race, ethnicity as fundamental social links which predate any complex historical social organization, and are immanent characteristics which have always divided humankind.7 These approaches converge in treating ethnicity and nationalism as, essentially, stages of the same perennial phenomenon. In fact, there are significant nuances between the more moderate perennial and the more radical primordial p ­ osition 3  The Seminar, 286, 291. 4  For a useful summary of the two approaches, see Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 7–13. 5  P. Van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York: Elsevier, 1979). 6  The L.A.M. thesis developed by Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris: Komrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York, 1966); R. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origin of Property and Nations (New York, 1966); D. Morris, The Naked Ape (New York, 1968). 7  Joshua A. Fishman, “Social Theory and Ethnography: Language and Ethnicity in Eastern Europe”, Ethnic Diversity and Conflict in Eastern Europe, Ed. Peter Sugar (Santa Barbara: ABCClio, 1980); Clifford Geertz (ed.), Old Societies and New States (New York: Free Press, 1963); Edward Shils, “Primordial, personal, sacred and civil ties”, British Journal of Sociology, 7, 1957, 113–145.

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but in the long run they present a universalist, and even a fundamentalist interpretation.8 It what is one of the most explicit treatments of language in the primordial vein Joshua Fishman calls on intellectuals “that we recognize Herder and the social, cultural, anthropological tradition derived from his seminal contributions”: Just as ethnicity is a bodily and directly experienced reality, language is also a bodily experience. Language and speech are elements of identity experienced in the self and issued from the self. Speech is fashioned by the tongue and teeth and the bodily organs. Language is assumed to be inherited in the same way as other physical gifts and capacities. language and ethnicity are tangible features of identity related to the other perceived bodily attributes: sex, intelligence, skill, strength, wit and temperament. Individuals belonging to a given ethnic aggregate supposedly differ in physical appearance (although not only on that basis). That difference together with differences in language, temperament, and intellect (all features related to physical attributes), mark and keep them members of their group.9 On the other side, in what is perhaps the best expressed modernist and instrumentalist approach, Ernest Gellner insists that while “patriotism is a perennial part of human life … nationalism is a very distinctive species of patriotism, and one which becomes pervasive and dominant only under certain social conditions, which in fact prevail in the modern world, and nowhere else …”.10 And he continues: The great but valid, paradox, is this: nations can be defined only in terms of the age of nationalism, rather than, as you might expect, the other way round. It is not the case that “the age of nationalism” is a mere summation of the awakening and political self-assertion of this, that, or the other nation. Rather, when general social conditions make for standardized, homogeneous, centrally sustained high cultures, pervading entire populations and not just élite minorities, a situation arises in which well-defined 8  The latest work in this line of reasoning belongs to James G. Kellas, The Politics of Nationalism and Ethnicity (London: Macmillan, 1991), which aims at presenting one integrated theory of the politics of nationalism and contends that such a theory must begin with human nature (160). 9  Fishman, “Social Theory and Ethnography”, 84. 10  Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 1983, 138.

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educationally sanctioned and unified cultures constitute very nearly the only kind of unit with which men willingly and often ardently identify … Under these conditions, though under these conditions only, nations can indeed be defined in terms both of will and of culture, and indeed in terms of the convergence of them both with political units.”11 In fact, even most perennialists do not deny the historians’ consensus that nationalism as an ideology as well as the nation-state as a specific type of political organization came into being from the last decades of the eighteenth century although the presence of some kind of national sentiments can be traced among educated elites a century before. The divide occurs in the treatment of nationalism as the last in the line of similar manifestations versus the view of it as a unique attribute of modernity. Without entering the discussion about ethnic communities as primordial groups, suffice it to say that the primordial approach tends to trivialize the problem in its search for essentials, like the innate desire to belong, the reduction to regional and kin connections.12 While this is essentially true, it makes the definitions redundant and inoperative. By depriving ethnicity of its historical context and describing it in terms of ahistorical characteristics, this approach tends to obscure the historical evolution of the phenomenon.13 In utilizing concepts like ethnicity and nationalism, I subscribe to a liberal rendition of the modernist approach, which treats both phenomena as essentially by-products (although in particular circumstances they act also as builders) of such developments as the crisis in religion and secularization, the revolutionizing and intensification of communication and mass education, economic growth and industrialization, the rise of the modern secular state and its bureaucracy. Whether they give precedence to the social, economic, political or cultural factors in their line of interpretation, these views converge 11  Gellner, Op. cit., 55. 12  The idea of belonging as the critical element in nationalism is developed especially in the works of Boyd C. Shafer: Nationalism: Myth and Reality (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955); Faces of Nationalism: New Realities and Old Myths (New York, 1972); Nationalism: Its Nature and Interpretation (Washington, 1976, 4th ed.); Nationalism and Internationalism: Belonging in Human Experience (Malabar, Fla., 1982). 13  For an expanded treatment of these theoretical problems, and particularly a critique of the perennialist approach and the compromise position most explicitly articulated by Anthony D. Smith, see Maria Todorova, “Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Communist Legacy in Eastern Europe,” The Social Legacy of Communism, eds. James Millar and Sharon Wolchik (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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in treating nations and nationalism as phenomena which are essentially connected to the modern world. I define ethnicity as one side of the self-definition and self-designation of a person, a commitment, ideology or faith (often secular), based on a sense of (most often invented) kinship and common historical experience and, as a rule, a community of language, religion and customs. One important element of this definition is that unlike language, territory, religion, and race that are essentially “dividers” along one criterion (although this does not imply that they cannot be very complex or ambiguous dividers), ethnicity is a complicated sum-total, a particular combination, aggregate of different qualifiers used for the demarcation of the ethnic boundary.14 Although this particular sum-total can be recognized and analyzed in concrete historical cases, and despite the fact that we can describe the process of constructing an ethnicity and analytically define all its components, we cannot “discover” an ethnicity as the resultant of the synthesis of these components. This means that ethnicity cannot exist in the eye of the beholder unless it is explicitly stated in a conscious act of self-definition. In such a context the crucial criterion would not be the potential presence in the human psyche of the characteristics which identify an ethnicity, but the proof that the combination of these characteristics was dominant as a form of group identification (i.e. ethnicity) over other forms of group identification (religion, caste, kin, localism, etc.) at any given point of historical time. It seems that we do not possess enough historical evidence to claim this for any other period before the modern. Nationalism, on the other hand, I will define, in a formula perhaps reductionist, as the merger of ethnicity and statehood. There have been two distinct, although sometimes parallel or coinciding processes all over modern Europe. One is the gradual formation of a distinct group consciousness defined by different authors as national revival, cultural revival or rebirth, and which I have termed ethnicity, and have explicitly linked with modernity. This process has 14  Such a definition owes much to Barth’s interpretation of ethnic groups as “categories of ascription and identification”. Barth had intended this new approach to ethnicity as a way to overcome the limitations of the score of external or objective theories related to economic, demographic and other factors, and principally the definition of ethnicity as the essential bearing group of culture (in the broad anthropological sense). Without denying the relevance of cultural differences, the Barthian interpretation of ethnicity revolves around the important and useful concept of boundaries: it is the construction, the delineation of boundaries which define the ethnic groups rather than their cultural content. These ethnic boundaries are social in character although they might coincide with territorial or other boundaries. See Fredrik Barth, “Introduction”, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Culture Difference, F.Barth (ed.) (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969).

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had an uneven chronological development paralleling the uneven process of modernization but, as a whole, has flowered in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with some earlier and some later manifestations. It is linked to the ideology of what has come to be termed as Romanticism: the search for the uniqueness, for the original sources of the differences between peoples, mostly constructed around language, religion and folklore. In this context it is particularly associated with the philosophy of Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose significance and influence transcends das Deutsche Kulturgebiet, and who has been called one of the first, if not the first, writer of Europe to develop a comprehensive philosophy of nationalism.15 It should be added that in the present classification he appears to be, in fact, the first philosopher of ethnicity, and with his approach to nationality as a cultural organism in search of its Volksgeist he is also one of the first primordialists. For all his crucial contributions to the development of nationalism he should not be described as a nationalist, however. The other process is the merger of this consciousness with statehood, and the creation and development of a new consciousness and ideology: nationalism. Ethnicity and nationalism are not coterminous although, at least in the European experience, nationalism, as a rule, seems to have evolved around an ethnic nucleus and, most often, assumes the hypostasis of ethnonationalism. In parts of Western Europe, because of the continuous existence of dynastic states and later absolutist monarchies, these processes are blurred and, because they run parallel to each other, are, for practical purposes, indistinguishable. In great parts of Central, Southern and Eastern Europe, on the other hand, this “construction” of ethnicity and nationalism, as understood and defined here, can be traced as distinct historical processes. In what follows, these theoretical observations are applied to one particular historical case and explore the place and role of language as a unifying or disuniting factor. The language problem in the Bulgarian case has, to a great extent, been overlooked. There are two main reasons for this. One is that, compared to Serbia, Romania and especially to Greece, the language discussion, although considered pivotal, never acquired the centrality in the public debate as it did in the other Balkan countries. The other reason is that, in the context of the Bulgarian revival itself, the language question was overshadowed by 15  Robert R. Ergang, Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism (New York, 1931); Grete Eichler, Der nationale Gedanke bei Herder (Emsdetten: Dissertations-Druckerei H. & J. Lechte, 1934); Hans Georg Gadamer, Volk und Geschichte im Denken Herders (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1942); F. M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought from the Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford, 1965); Ulrich Gaier, Herders Sprachphilosophie und Erkenntniskritik (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1988).

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the more vigorous and intensive struggles for a national church and political emancipation, because it coincided with them in time. In tracing the role of language in the construction of ethnicity and nationalism in this particular example, two separate approaches to language are employed: one, following the traditional treatment of language as ethnically defined speech; the other, analyzing language as the discourse of ethnicity/ nationalism. 2

Language as Ethnically Defined Speech

The development of the Bulgarian national idea can be seen as having undergone two general phases, both with their internal sub-phases: the formation and manifestation of a Kulturnation (from approximately the middle of the eighteenth century to 1878), and the formation and manifestation of a Staatsnation after 1878. In an influential work on the social preconditions of national revival in Europe Miroslaw Hroch distinguished between three phases of national development: 1. A small elite begins the study of language, culture and history, which Hroch termed the scholarly phase; 2. Patriots beyond the elites are mobilized, the national agitation phase; 3. Mass movements occur, i.e. the era of mass national movements.16 In the Bulgarian case this can be translated as follows: 1. A period from approximately the middle of the eighteenth century (with some signs of earlier eighteenth century manifestations) until the 1820s which is characterized by the appearance of several histories of the Bulgarian people, the most famous and influential being the one by Father Paisii. This period also witnessed the appearance of the first printed works in the Bulgarian vernacular. By the 1820s there had been a distinct impulse to establish Bulgarian secular schools instead of the existing Helleno-Bulgarian (with a bilingual education in Greek and Bulgarian) schools of the turn and the first decade of the nineteenth century. 2. With this we enter the second phase when patriots beyond the elites were mobilized. This phase coincides with a distinct period of another, traditional Bulgarian periodization of the national awakening and revolutionary struggles which follows a threefold classification: a movement for educational 16  Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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emancipation; a movement for religious independence or church autonomy; and a movement for political or national independence.17 The second phase of mobilizing patriots beyond the elites coincided, as said, with the movement for educational emancipation and the beginning of the church conflict, and lasted approximately until the Crimean war (1853–1856). 3. After that, during the 1860s and 1870s one can speak of the gradual formation of a mass movement, manifested in the Bulgarian case in two spheres: the church struggle and the struggle for political emancipation. The church struggle of the Bulgarians did not spring from any kind of doctrinal issues but was essentially a political movement for a separate church following the conflict between Greeks and Bulgarians. This conflict in itself was triggered by the contradictions between a developing ethnic consciousness (the Bulgarians) and the national program of an emerging nation-state (the Greeks). It ended with the official recognition in 1870 by the Ottoman Porte of the Bulgarian exarchate as separate from the Constantinople patriarchate and, thus, in fact, added the religious divider as an important, though not dominant, constitutive element of ethnicity. As for the political movement, there were two main views and programs for the political future of the Bulgarians: one, conservative or moderate, centered in Constantinople, stressed enlightenment and education, which were considered the means for a gradual emancipation; the other, revolutionary or radical, centered in Bucharest, envisaged the achievement of political independence by means of a revolutionary organization and network, resulting in revolution and eventually in war, which would involve some of the great powers. Bulgarian independence was achieved (although at first only as autonomy) in 1878 as the result of the outbreak of the April uprising two years earlier, the subsequent Russo-Turkish war and the treaties of San-Stefano and Berlin in March and June/July of 1878. The first was perceived by the Bulgarians as the true and just recreation of their nation state, following the frontiers of the Bulgarian exarchate and, thus, encompassing all the nation. The second which, following European great power considerations, divided the country, has been viewed ever since as a predatory arrangement which incited future Bulgarian irredentist feelings. Clearly, if this short account of the development of Bulgarian nationalism is to be redefined and coordinated with the above definitions, one would be 17  For a detailed factological survey of this periodization see the three volume Istoriya na Bîlgariya, vol. 1, Sofia: BAN, 1961, as well as the multivolume Istoriya na Bîlgariya, Sofia: BAN, vol. 4 (1983), v. 5 (1985), v. 6 (1989). For an English language account, see Richard Crampton, A Short History of Bulgaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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speaking of the construction of Bulgarian ethnicity until 1878. This does not mean that there were no nationalists prior to 1878. In the political struggle for independence and for the creation of a nation state promoted above all by the revolutionary circles one can see more than just elements of nationalism. However, the construction of a nation as well as the development of nationalism as a full-fledged movement and ideology can be traced only after the late 1870s. Still, several elements of the pre-state legacy have left a permanent mark on the character of nationalism in the post-1878 period. One was the essentially defensive quality of the Bulgarian national idea. Defensiveness vis à vis Europe is a common trait of all Balkan nationalisms, but in the Bulgarian case it was particularly aggravated because it had to operate against the earlier formed nationalisms and earlier articulated irredentist programs of its neighbors. The Bulgarian national idea was defensive from the very moment it was first articulated by Father Paisii in what has since become the code-text for Bulgarian nationalism (or, as I would argue, of Bulgarian ethnicity):18 So I wrote down for you what was known about your race and language. Read and know so that you would not be ridiculed and reproached by other tribes and peoples … I wrote it for you who love your people and Bulgarian fatherland, and who like to know about your people and language … But there are those who do not care to know about their own Bulgarian people and turn to foreign ways and foreign tongue; and they do not care for their own Bulgarian language but learn to read and speak Greek and are ashamed to call themselves Bulgarians. O, you senseless fool! Why are you ashamed to call yourself Bulgarian and do not read and speak your own language? Or had the Bulgarians no kingdom and state?… In the entire Slavic race the Bulgarians have had the greatest glory, they first called themselves tsars, they first had a patriarch, they first became Christians, and they ruled over the largest territory … But why, stupid, should you be ashamed of your people and linger after a foreign tongue? Here, you say, the Greeks are wiser and more cultivated, and the Bulgarians are simple and stupid, and have no refined speech; therefore, it is better to become part of the Greeks. But look, you senseless, there are many more people wiser and more glorious than the Greeks. Has any Greek abandoned his tongue and learning and people?… You, Bulgarian, do not be fooled, but know your people and language, and learn your language! 18   Istoriya slavenobolgarskaya, pod.red. na Petîr Dinekov (Sofia, 1972), 41–44.

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The overwhelming feeling is certainly one of intensive defensiveness, of humiliation, the struggle against the inferiority complex; at the same time this is accompanied by a not less acute counter-offensive, based on an intensive pride in the glorious past. But the real fundamental characteristic, which can be deduced from the above quotation, is the centrality of language. The crucial role of language as an agent of unification has been recognized by practically all European cultural and national figures, to be elevated in the Herderian vision to the status of an ethno-linguistic sanctity. In Bulgaria, because of the double opposition against Greeks and Turks, the linguistic divider was evoked earlier and remained stronger than, for example, the religious one.19 Although linguists still argue about the initial period in the formation of the Modern Bulgarian language, placing it alternatively in the so-called literature of the damaskines, written in the vernacular from the late sixteenth-early seventeenth century on; in the famous “Slavo-Bulgarian history” of Father Paisii of Khilendar of the 1760s (the most wide-spread opinion); or in the “Riben bukvar” (“The Fish Primer”) of Peter Beron in the 1820s, for our purposes the important fact is that during the nineteenth century the Modern Bulgarian literary language was in the making.20 From the point of view of typology, an almost complete parallel existed between the development of the Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian literary languages, i.e. the alternative possibilities of developing a literary language on the basis of an ancient or early medieval language (Ancient Greek, Old Bulgarian or Slavo-Serbian); on the basis of a medieval language and the language used by the church (Byzantine and Church Slavonic); and lastly, on the basis of the vernaculars.21 With the unfolding of an educational movement in the second quarter of the nineteenth century three literary schools with distinct visions of how to create a literary national language emerged: the Modern Bulgarian school with a stress on the vernacular, and with Peter Beron, Ivan Bogorov, Vasil Aprilov as its main representatives; the Slavo-Bulgarian school insisting on the medieval linguistic legacy, whose chief proponents were Neofit Rilski and Neofit Bozveli;

19  The extended version of the argument which follows is presented in Maria Todorova, “Language as Cultural Unifier in a Multilingual Setting: The Bulgarian Case During the Nineteenth Century”, East European Politics and Societies, vol. 4, No. 3, Fall, 1990. 20  Samuil B. Bernstein, “Misli za nachalniya period ot istoriyata na bîlgarskiya literaturen ezik”, Izsledvaniya iz istoriyata na bîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik ot minaliya vek (Sofia, 1979), 29. 21  Svetomir Ivanchev, “Po nyakoi vîprosi na istoriyata na bîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik”, Izsledvaniya iz istoriyata na bîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik ot minaliya vek (Sofia, 1979), 38.

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and the Church Slavonic school based on the language used by the church, and advocated by Khristaki Pavlovich, Constantine Fotinov and others.22 By the middle of the nineteenth century the Modern Bulgarian school acquired an unconditional preponderance. This can be explained by the major influence of the merchant and artisan circles in the organization of the modern Bulgarian educational network, as well as by the passionate interest in folklore, especially intensive during the 1840s, and influenced by developments both in Germany and in Russia.23 In view of this, the next important question on the agenda of the 1850s–1860s was the overcoming of the dialectal differences. In a certain sense it could be argued that, although the outcome of the struggle between the three literary schools followed obviously the most democratic solution (the legitimization of the vernacular), it nonetheless represented also the most difficult solution.24 It is pertinent in this context to raise the question of diglossia, a state which is often described as the bilingualism of the monoglot.25 The classical Balkan example would be the existence of katharevousa and demotiki, or, in the realm of 22  Lyubomir Andreichin, “Rolyata na cherkovnoslavyanskiya ezik za izgrazhdane na sîvremenniya bîlgarski knizhoven ezik”, Pomagalo po istoriya na bîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik (Sofia, 1979), 33. 23  Thomas Henninger, Balkanische Lexik im Schrifttum der Bulgarischen Wiedergeburt (Neuried: Hieronymus, 1987), 49. For a comprehensive survey of the Bulgarian cultural revival and the influence of European enlightenment ideas on it, see Iliya Konev, Bîlgarskoto vîzrazhdane i Prosveshtenieto (Istoriya, istorichesko sîznanie, vzaimodeistviya), (Sofia: BAN, 1983). Although not dealing directly with the Bulgarians but confined to the population of the Habsburg Empire, the work of Holm Sundhaussen, Der Einfluss der Herderschen Ideen auf die Nationsbildung bei den Völkern der Habsburger Monarchie (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1973) is the best study on the influence of Herder’s ideas on the formation of an ethnic and national consciousness among the Slavs. It recognizes the immense influence of Herder’s philosophy but warns that this influence should not be treated as a formative element outside the historical context, but rather as a model adapted to the needs and interests of the rising national ideologies. 24  Stoian Zherev, “Teoretichnite vîzgledi na Raiko Zhinzifov za bîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik”, Izsledvaniya iz istoriyata na bîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik ot minaliya vek (Sofia, 1979), 141. 25  Max K. Adler, Collective and individual bilingualism. A sociolinguistic study. (Helmut Buske Verlag, Hamburg, 1977), 24. For the sake of clarity, I will quote the definition of diglossia by Charles A. Ferguson, who in fact introduced the term: “Diglossia is a relatively stable language situation, in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal purposes, but is not used by any other sector of the community for ordinary conversations” (“Diglossia”, Word, 1959, 15, 336).

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the Ottoman Empire the existence of the artificial Ottoman Turkish, alongside different spoken Turkic dialects. It would seem that, in the Bulgarian case, the problem of diglossia was avoided, once the option of creating the literary language on the basis of Church Slavonic (the more conservative solution), or on the basis of Old Slavo-Bulgarian (the more compromise solution) was rejected, and a standard language, based on the vernacular, was created. The Bulgarian press of the 1850s and 1860s is extremely interesting on account of, among others, the lively discussion on how dialectal differences could and should be overcome. Roughly speaking, two major viewpoints emerged: one, for the creation of the Bulgarian literary language on a polidialectal basis, i.e. the formation of a common language, which would include characteristics of all possible dialects; and the second, which was shared by the greater part of the contemporary literary figures, for the creation of the Bulgarian literary language on a monodialectal basis.26 Naturally, this introduced an important and dubious element: the criteria to be used for the choice of the basic dialect. Without going into detail, suffice it to say that there was no contradiction as to what these criteria would entail; the discussion was rather on which dialect would conform best to them.27 And the main criterion was the purity of the language. Purity was perceived by everyone as the lack of foreign words and other linguistic elements (chiefly Turkish and Greek) in the language. The very notion of purity of the language was based on the idea that the dialectal diversity was a result of an aberration, i.e. the development of Bulgarians and Bulgarian culture under a double repressive influence: the Turkish and the Greek. It is most probable that this notion coincided with the first attempts at formalizing the language during the 1820s and 1830s.28 Two quotes illustrate aptly the then existing views towards bilingualism in particular, and consequently, towards the role of the “pure” or “purified” language, in general. Many writers and other public figures considered the peasant language less contaminated with loan-words, and Vassil Aprilov, a prominent exponent of the Modern Bulgarian school, thus articulated this belief: “According to me, our language would be spoken in a purer form, where 26  Valentin Stankov, “Za nyakoi obshti tendencii v ezikovata praktika na bîlgarskite vîzrozhdenski knizhovnici”, Izsledvaniya iz istoriyata na bîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik ot minaliya vek (Sofia, 1979), 9–10. 27  For an exhaustive treatment of this problem, see Grigorii K. Venediktov, “Za kriteriite na vîzrozhdenskata knizhnina pri izbora na konkretna dialektna osnova za bîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik”, Izsledvaniya iz istoriyata na bîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik ot minaliya vek. (Sofia, 1979). 28  Ibid., 15.

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it is less mixed with other languages. By the way, it is purer in the villages, than in the towns, because the former are inhabited only by Bulgarians, whereas the latter have Ottomans and Greeks.29 A wide-spread notion was the alleged purity of the language spoken by the Bulgarian Muslims (the Pomaks), because, as Emmanuil Vaskidovich, a respected educator of the period, wrote: “The Pomaks know neither Turkish, nor Serbian, nor Russian, nor Wallachian, nor Greek.”30 Here one can follow up the whole repertoire of possible linguistic intrusions. It is curious that, although the notion of the special purity of the Pomak language has been repudiated long ago, it still persists as a cultural stereotype. These quotes point out an important aspect of the formation of the Modern Bulgarian literary language—the attitude towards loan-words, and particularly towards Turkish and Greek ones. Already Paisii and the writers of the turn of the nineteenth century tried to “purify” the language by substituting Turkish and Greek loan-words with words from the vernacular and from Church Slavonic. At that time they were forced to resort to double forms (synonyms), i.e. while introducing a Slavic word, they would have to explain it in brackets by its known Turkish or Greek version. By mid-century the Church Slavonic as a lexical pool gave way to Russian, which exerted the strongest lexical influence in the immediate pre- and post-liberation period. As far as the dialectal basis of Modern Bulgarian is concerned, it clearly shifted according to the prominence of one or another region in the cultural and social life of the nation. The first literary figures (Paisii of Khilendar, Neofit Rilski, Joakim Kîrchovski, Khristaki Pavlovich and others) came from the Western Bulgarian territories and, clearly, introduced characteristics of their local vernaculars. After the middle of the nineteenth century, the Central and Eastern Bulgarian territories came to be leading, both economically and from the point of view of the quantity of cultural figures, coming from these regions, like Vasil Aprilov, Iliya Blîskov, Vasil Drumev, Dobri Voinikov, Georgi Rakovski, Dobri Chintulov, Petko R. Slaveikov, Lyuben Karavelov, Khristo Botev, Ivan Vazov).31 However, until 1878, despite the obvious aspirations of Bulgarian writers towards a united literary practice, diversity was retained, to be explained mostly by the absence of a single political and cultural center, as well as of common and obligatory norms. With the Treaty of San-Stefano signed by the Russian and Ottoman armies on 3 March 1878 a great autonomous Bulgarian 29  Ibid., 16. 30  Ibidem. 31  V. Stankov. Op. cit., 7.

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principality was created extending from the Black sea to Lake Okhrid, and from the Danube to the Aegean. It followed the frontiers of the dioceses of the Bulgarian exarchate and was considered, therefore, to conform most closely to the natural ethnic (i.e. linguistic and religious) boundaries of the Bulgarian nation. Opposition on the part of the great powers and the other Balkan countries against the creation of a huge Balkan state which was perceived as a future Russian satellite led to the revision of the San-Stefano treaty at the Congress of Berlin where, on 13 July 1878, the recently established principality was divided: Bulgaria proper, with a territory of only one third of the former state, was to be an autonomous principality squeezed between the Danube and the Balkan range; Eastern Rumelia was handed back to the Ottoman empire but with a Christian governor; and Macedonia was altogether returned to Constantinople. The treaty of San-Stefano became the sui generis metahistorical event in the development of Bulgarian nationalism, a dream almost come true, and an idée fixe for decades to come.32 The first decisive moment in shaping Bulgarian nationalism after 1878 was the unification of the Bulgarian principality with Eastern Rumelia in 1885, and the subsequent Serbo-Bulgarian war. The mass recruiting, the volunteer units, the formation and assertion of the national army in an unexpectedly victorious war were an enormous catalyst in the construction of a unified national loyalty. However, the undoubted primacy in the construction of a national consciousness goes to the creation of a standard and obligatory national language and education. It was only after Bulgaria’s de facto independence that the lack of a normative language system was overcome, with the gradual elaboration of orthographical, grammatical and phonetic norms. This process was completed by the end of the century with the introduction of the DrinovIvanchev orthography in 1899.33 Thus the Modern Bulgarian literary language, whose formation began on the basis of the Western Bulgarian dialects, underwent a gradual transformation towards the Central and Eastern Bulgarian dialects, and finally emerged in its normative form as a national and supradialectal language only by the end of the nineteenth century.34 What seems important to be emphasized here is the decisive role of the state with its different institutions, and particularly a 32  For a good English language treatment of Bulgarian history in this first period of Bulgarian nationalism see Richard Crampton, Bîlgaria 1878–1918: A History (Boulder, Colo., East European Monographs, No. 138, 1983). 33  Rusin Rusinov and V. Vutov, Istoriya na novobîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik (Veliko Tîrnovo, 1979), 15; Rusin Rusinov, Bîlgarskiyat knizhoven ezik sled Osvobozhdenieto (1878–1944), (Veliko Tîrnovo, 1985), 2. 34  Rusin Rusinov and V. Vutov, 17.

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unified modern educational system, for the final formation and acceptance of the literary language.35 No less important was the role of the army which, alongside the uniform centralized educational system, proved to be the most powerful instrument for socializing the masses into their new role of citizens. The Bulgarian case is a particularly favorable illustration for the idea of the crucial presence of the state in the formation of a national consciousness, and the strengthening (or sometimes also creating) of an ethnic consciousness. Thus, after the turn of the century, it can be maintained that, overall, the process of turning “peasants into Bulgarians” had been accomplished. When in 1912 Stamboliiski, faced with a mass movement in favor of war against Turkey, complained that the whole nation seemed to have lost its mind,36 he was recognizing precisely this fact: nationalism had become the dominant type of group consciousness, although its mass appeal declined dramatically after the war. The other interesting problem to be raised in this section is bilingualism. Bilingualism and digraphia are being used here to designate the phenomenon of multilingualism and multigraphia as it is accepted in the linguistic literature, i.e the knowledge and use of two or more languages or scripts.37 There are numerous individual cases, drawn from narrative and documentary sources, illustrating the existence of this phenomenon, both in Bulgaria and all over the Balkans. However, there is one indirect proof, which seems to be the most serious, for the existence of bilingualism in the Balkans, namely, the fact of the Balkan linguistic union, a notion which describes the common structural characteristics of the Balkan languages, and which is the result of the contact between the spoken languages of the area.38 It is practically impos35  On the role of the ministry of education, see Roy E. Heath, The Establishment of the Bulgarian Ministry of Public Instruction and its Role in the Development of Modern Bulgaria, 1878–1885 (unpublished PhD thesis), University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1979. An interesting conclusion reached by the author is that in the effort to rebuild the destroyed school network of the former period, and with the shortage of qualified personnel (as intellectuals tended to fill the newly opened political and bureaucratic jobs), the Ministry in this initial period until the reunification with Eastern Rumelia did not take as its priority the definition and creation of a Bulgarian national identity (427–429). 36  V. A. Zhebokritskii, Bolgariya nakanune balkanskih voin 1912–1913 gg. (Kiev, 1960), cited in Marin Pundeff, “Bulgarian Nationalism”, 134. 37  Max K. Adler, Op. cit., 2. 38   As members of the Balkan linguistic union are considered Romanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian nowadays, Modern Greek and Albanian. Serbo-Croatian is added to this group only conditionally. Likewise, Turkish, Slovenian and Hungarian are excluded, although often they bear some isoglossal characteristics (Henrik Birnbaum, “Slavyanskie yaziki na Balkanah i ponyatie tak nazivaemih yazikovih soyuzov”, Glossa, vol. 2:1, 1968, 73). Of the several theories, explaining the formation of the Balkan linguistic union, only one seems to be seriously considered and widely accepted nowadays. This is the hypothesis of

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sible to make an even approximate quantitative assessment of the degree and extent of bilingualism in nineteenth century Bulgarian society. However, one would be probably on the safer side to maintain that bilingualism was not an all-pervasive phenomenon. In an analysis trying to trace down bilingualism, one would necessarily end up with several divisions. First, the gender division: bilingualism would be encountered much more often among men than among women. The explanation is obvious: women were confined largely to the household, they were more isolated and, consequently, more prone to be monolingual. Their role as “preservers of language” has been incessantly stressed from antiquity to modern times. Plato wrote that “it is women who retain the old forms of speech”, and a Romanian author of the late nineteenth–early twentieth century exclaimed on account of the Vlachs, some of whom were Hellenized: “If ever this people should escape from servitude, if ever it should possess a cultivated language, a literature, a history—in a word, a name—it will owe it to the women.”39 This was a verdict applicable also to the Bulgarian case and shared by many contemporaries. Still, overgeneralizations would be dangerous. Lucy Garnett, in her famous “Balkan Home-Life” describes a Bulgarian woman in Thessaloniki, who was the domestic servant of her hosts. This woman, Kyra Maria, could, according to Garnett: “neither read nor write, she spoke Bulgarian and Turkish equally well, but her broken Greek was chiefly exercised for my benefit.”40 Clearly, linguistically mixed regions would bring about a greater exposure to outside influences. This would add a different dimension and a further division: town and village. It is obvious, and the Bulgarian cultural leaders of the nineteenth century were quite aware of it, as came out clear at the time of the discussions about a “pure” vernacular, that townspeople were more exposed to foreign influence. In the countryside, there were more isolated or less isolated regions with an almost exclusively Bulgarian population. At the same time, however, there were vast regions of a lasting Turkish colonization, where, alongside the linguistic symbiosis and the ensuing composite and/or bilingualism (Birnbaum, 89). The other two theories are the substratum hypothesis, explaining the Balkan linguistic union with the influence of Thracian and Illyrian, and the superstratum hypothesis, looking for Byzantine and Turkish influences. While the first theory has been rejected today, the second is being considered, but only as an additional factor for the formation of the Balkan linguistic union. For an updated synthesis of Balkan historical linguistics see Brian D. Joseph, The Diachrony and Synchrony of the Balkan Infinitive: A Study in Areal, General and Historical Linguistics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). I am grateful to Ronelle Alexander for drawing my attention to this work. 39  Cited in: Lucy M. J. Garnett. Balkan Home-Life. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1917), 163–164. 40  Lucy Garnett, Balkan Home Life (London: Methuen & co., 1917), 187.

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(linguistically) purely Bulgarian or purely Turkish villages, some mixed villages would exist, with the predominance of one or the other element. There were also instances of mixed Bulgarian-Greek villages (along the southern Black Sea coast and in Southern Macedonia) and Bulgarian-Albanian villages (in Western Macedonia). Again, more refined distinctions should be introduced, as between mountain towns, like the artisan centers of the Balkan range, which were almost exclusively Bulgarian, and larger, more or less cosmopolitan centers, like Plovdiv, Varna, etc., with a strong Greek population and influence, or even Constantinople, with a substantial Bulgarian colony, amounting to several ten thousand. In a town like Shumen, whose Muslim population was twice its Christian inhabitants, Bulgarians allegedly all spoke Turkish.41 All these cases, however, are purely speculative—they assess the possibility and the probability for bilingualism to occur, rather than ascertain the reality of its occurrence. Moreover, there is another major problem: how to distinguish (with the meager sources at our disposal) between bilingualism per se, and the mere existence, no matter how heavy, of foreign borrowings. The terminology, covering the administrative and commercial life in the urban centers, was entirely Turkish (in fact, mostly Arabic and Persian loanwords, entering with Ottoman Turkish). So was the artisan terminology. Turkisms were extremely wide-spread in the denomination of the flora and fauna, clothing, food etc.42 The “purification” of Bulgarian from Turkish loanwords was a conscious and gradual process, which affected first and foremost the written literary language, much slower—the vernacular, and extremely slowly—the dialects.43 Obviously, the turning point in this process was the creation of an independent state, when the formation and the development of Bulgarian legal, administrative, military, financial and other institutions introduced a new Bulgarian terminology, with extensive Russian borrowings. This natural shift in terminology was accompanied also by a real cultural crusade against Turkisms, which were perceived as perpetuating Ottomanism and Orientalism, identified with backwardness. This is a fairly well documented and researched process. It does not help, however, to elucidate the above-mentioned dilemma: bilingualism or linguistic 41  Kina Vachkova, “Vîzgledite na Dobri Voinikov za formiraneto na sîvremenniya bîlgarski knizhoven ezik”, Izsledvaniya iz istoriyata na bîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik ot minaliya vek (Sofia, 1979), 149. 42  Kiril Mirchev, Istoricheska gramatika na bîlgarskiya ezik (Sofia, 1978), 84–95; Kiril Mirchev, “Sîprotivata na bîlgarskiya ezik sreshtu nasilstvenata turska asimilaciya”, Pomagalo po istoriya na bîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik (Sofia, 1979), 258. 43  Thomas Henninger, 95.

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borrowing? It is important to define bilingualism precisely, and as some scholars have emphasized, there is no point asking whether somebody is bilingual, but how bilingual he is.44 There are different classifications of bilingualism, serving various purposes. Here, a useful distinction is the one between co-­ ordinate bilingualism and incipient bilingualism. The first occurs when a language is spoken perfectly in addition to the mother tongue, the second—when the language is being spoken poorly. There is a third category—subordinate bilingualism, comprising all those who do not fall under the first two categories, and who have some knowledge of a language, in addition to their mother tongue.45 According to this classification, it would be plausible to assert that the majority of the Bulgarian population during the nineteenth century would conform to the third category. A significant portion would be bearers of the so-called incipient bilingualism. They would include all those, primarily in the merchant and artisan strata, who had to acquire some fluency in Greek and/ or Turkish, for professional reasons. Only a minority might represent what are known as co-ordinate bilinguals. Clearly, notions like “majority”, “significant portion” and “minority” are but very approximate and, at this stage, impossible to define in qualitative terms. The last category, of the co-ordinate bilinguals, apart from cases like intermarriage or mixed ethnic cohabitation, would include mostly the educated class.46 This introduces one final division: educated and non-educated. We have a significant example in the person of Georgi Sava Rakovski, one of the main revolutionary figures of the Bulgarian national struggles, and himself an ardent proponent of the development of the literary language, chiefly on the basis of Old Bulgarian and Church Slavonic. He received his primary education in Greek and Bulgarian, and during the 1830s entered the elitist Kurucheshme College in Istanbul. There he further studied Greek alongside French, Arabic and Persian. During his nearly two years of exile in Marseilles, he deepened his knowledge of French and, likewise, his exile and revolutionary activities in Serbia and Romania gave him a good knowledge of those two languages. It is

44  Max K. Adler, 10. 45  Evangelos Afendras, “Sociolinguistic history, sociolinguistic geography and bilingualism”, International Days in Sociolinguistics (Rome, 1969). 46  Other authors distinguish between ascribed bilingualism, i.e. acquired in early childhood, which they design as co-ordinate, and achieved bilingualism, acquired later in life, denoted as compound bilingualism. In this paper this more refined distinction is not pursued. Rather co-ordinate bilingualism would encompass all the above cases of a perfect or nearly perfect knowledge of a second language. See Max K. Adler, 6.

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known that he was fluent in Turkish, although as the result of practice, rather than of formal education, and he used Russian and German.47 Clearly, his was the case of a polyglot. Only in the case of Greek, however, can a complete, co-ordinate bilingualism be assumed. Rakovski was passionately involved in developing the Bulgarian literary language and his own writing is an eloquent illustration of his efforts. It is significant to bear in mind that, especially in the earlier stages of his literary career, he was more proficient in written Greek, and his first works in Bulgarian testify to an undoubted influence from this language. There are numerous examples along these lines. Many educated Bulgarians would speak Bulgarian but would prefer to write in Greek. Suffice it just to mention figures like Nikola Pikolo, Grigor Pîrlichev, Ivan Seliminski and many others. What seems to be of utmost importance in the above-mentioned examples is that those educated bilinguals referred to were all ardent nationalists. Their bilingualism and even preference for Greek (which had become the educated language and to a great degree also a status symbol in Bulgaria, especially during the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century), by no means interfered with an unambiguous national consciousness. It would seem that the apprehensive voice of Father Paisii, warning against those who tended to forget their language, and, consequently, their origins, was somewhat overdrawn. Rather, it testifies to the deeply implanted belief in an almost identifying link between language and ethnicity. In their absolute emphasis on language as a cultural unifier the Bulgarian Enlightenment figures, and for that matter, the Balkan Enlightenment figures, shared the Herderian vision of an ethno-linguistic sanctity, where Language was viewed as the key to unlocking ethnic greatness and the subsequent development of dynamic solutions to all the problems of the modern era. The ethnic vernaculars were claimed to be great, liberating, unifying and authenticizing phenomena and the validity of these claims was real and moving despite externalist-objectivist ideals to the contrary. The link between language and ethnicity was experienced most in Eastern Europe.48 Language was perceived by practically all nineteenth century national and cultural leaders as the mightiest agent of unification. While common language is 47  Mikhail Vîglenov, “Ezik i grafichna praktika u G.S.Rakovski”, Izsledvaniya iz istoriyata na bîlgarskiya knizhoven ezik ot minaliya vek (Sofia, 1979), 25 ff. 48  Joshua A. Fishman, “Social Theory and Ethnicity”, 76.

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an important and typical component of an ethnic cluster, it has been shown that it is neither necessary, nor sufficient to distinguish ethnicity.49 In the Bulgarian case two distinct patterns are discernible. One is, as we have seen, the gradual formation of the Modern Bulgarian literary language; the other is the evolution of bilingualism in Bulgarian nineteenth century society. In both cases 1878 proved to be a watershed, with important, although not instantaneous consequences. The introduction of a secularized, centralized, uniform education along with other state institutions, proved to be instrumental in the final elaboration of a normative standard language by the end of the century. On the other hand, bilingualism, without having been in fact an impediment to the unifying process, gradually receded, thanks to a variety of political, economic and demographic reasons.

49  Cynthia H. Enloe, “Religion and Ethnicity”, Ethnic Diversity and Conflict in Eastern Europe, Ed. Peter Sugar (Santa Barbara/Oxford, 1986), 350.

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Identity (Trans)formation among Bulgarian Muslims Published as Working Paper 6.5, March 1994 by the Center for German and European Studies of the University of California at Berkeley, this text was prepared as part of the Project on Global Security and Ethnic Conflict, co-sponsored by the Institute of International Studies. An abridged version came out as “Identity (Trans)formation Among Pomaks in Bulgaria,” in Laszlo Kürti & Juliet Langman, eds., Beyond Borders, Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1997, 63–82. Reprinted by permission of Westview Press an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The chapter looks at the ways in which a Bulgarian Muslim identity has been shaped by economic, social and political forces. The empirical material on which the study was based reaches until 1993, but I believe that the general analytical context remains valid.

In the framework of the larger theoretical problem investigating the formation and transformation of identities and interests, as well as the tensions between them, this chapter seeks to analyze identity formation among Bulgarian Muslims and specifically the shifts occurring after 1989. The use of the term Muslim in the Bulgarian context needs precise elaboration. It is used as an ascriptive concept, comprising both religious Muslims as well as the large group of secular individuals recognizable as “Muslim” through names, kinship ties, rituals, etc. In terms of ethno-linguistic groups, the largest among them is the group of the ethnic Turks followed by Bulgarian speaking Muslims and Muslim Gypsies. There are also some confessional nuances between the dominant Sunni majority and a small Shiite (Kizilbaş) minority. This text will confine itself to the Bulgarian speaking Muslims, further referred to as Bulgarian Muslims or Pomaks. The first part discusses the historical background of identity formation in the larger Balkan setting, and gives an outline of the development of the Bulgarian Muslim (Pomak) population until the end of the 1980s. This is essential for understanding the particular mechanisms of (national) identity formation in the region as well as the articulation of claims and interests which invariably evoke historical precedents or arguments. To elaborate on Churchill’s dictum that the Balkans are a region which “produces more history than it can consume,” it also consumes more (written) history than it can digest. The

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_021

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other sections analyze the different factors for the present shifts in identity in Bulgaria, both internal and external. The internal ones comprise economic considerations: the direct repercussions of the cataclysmic transformations in the overall economy on the different ethnic/confessional groups and the possible link between perceived economic interests and individual identity, group identity and loyalty; political elements: the influence of political parties and organizations in articulating interests and charging group identities; cultural and psychological ingredients: the role of language, religion and education in affirming or transforming identities; the workings of ethnic hierarchies and stereotypes. The external ones comprise, on the one hand, aspects of regional and global security, as well as foreign political pressures. On the other hand, the liberalization of the economy and the prospects for regional economic integration (particularly in relation to Turkey) directly affect political formations and group interests and, indirectly, identities. This also poses the question of the economy as part of national security as it has been increasingly interpreted today. In this general framework the concrete case of the Bulgarian Muslims (Pomaks) as an intermediate group caught half-way between and claimed by both opposing poles is explored. 1

The Historical Background

The existence of Muslim enclaves in the Balkans is the direct legacy of five centuries of Ottoman rule over the peninsula. The fundamental consequence of the establishment of the Pax Ottomana in the Balkans was the abolishment of state and feudal frontiers which facilitated or enhanced population movements and the interpenetration of different population groups within a vast territory. Although there are no reliable aggregate figures on population shifts before the nineteenth century, attempts have been made to assess their character and effects. The chief historiographical controversy centers on the explanations for the sizeable Muslim population in the Balkans: colonization versus conversion theory.1

1  On this historiographical dispute see: Ömer Lûtfi Barkan, “Osmanli imparatorlugunda bir iskân ve kolonizasyon metodu olarak sürgünler”, Istanbul Üniversitesi Iktisat Fakültesi Mecmuasi, 11, 13, 15, 1949–1951; Ömer Lûtfi Barkan, “Rumeli’nin iskâni için yapilan sürgünler”, Istanbul Üniversitesi Iktisat Fakültesi Mecmuasi, 13, 1950; Elena Grozdanova, Bîlgarskata narodnost prez XVII vek. Demografsko izsledvane (Sofia, 1989); Antonina Zhelyazkova, Razprostranenie na islyama v zapadnobîlgarskite zemi pod osmanska vlast, XV–XVIII vek (Sofia: BAN, 1990); Sami Pulaha, Aspects de démographie historique des contrées albanais

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Between the fourteenth and sixteenth, but especially during the fifteenth century there were population transfers from Anatolia to the Balkans, population shifts within the peninsula, and also some transfers from the Balkans to Anatolia. These comprised both nomads, as well as settled groups of peasants and urban dwellers. The rationale behind these transfers was based on both strategic (political and military) and economic considerations, and although it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to give a numerical value to these deportations, most of the Muslim colonization in the Balkans shows a concentration in strategic locations: along military roads and around fortified places.2 The sixteenth century did not witness significant colonization and, in fact, by the end of the century population moves from Anatolia to the Balkans had stopped. At the same time, even during the period of the highest concentration of Turkish settlers in the Balkans, which also coincided with the temporary withdrawal of the local population in less accessible or outlying regions, the ratio between Muslims and non-Muslims showed the significant numerical preponderance of the non-Muslims in practically all provinces.3 Yet, the first reliable statistical data from the nineteenth century demonstrated considerable changes in the ratio between Muslims and non-Muslims although the predominance of the non-Muslims was preserved. This had occurred despite the fact that the flow of colonizers had stopped and despite the significant losses both in the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and from the plague epidemics which had affected mostly the Muslim population. The only way that the growth of the Muslim population in these circumstances can be credibly explained is by the process of conversions to Islam. These conversions were most numerous during the seventeenth century. It is widely accepted nowadays that the vast majority of the Balkan conversions were individual ones. The non-enforced or so-called voluntary conversions can be viewed as the result of indirect pressure or coercion (economic and social, pendant les XV e–XVIe siècles (Tirana, 1984); M. Sokoloski, “Islamizatsija u Makedonija u XV i XVI veku”, Istorijski Časopis, 1975, 22. 2  Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Marie Mathilde Alexandresku-Derska Bulgaru, “La politique démographique des sultans à Istanbul (1453–1496)”, Revue des études sud-est européennes, XXVIII, 1–4, 1990, 45–56; M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, Rumeli’de Yürükler, Tatarlar ve Evlâdi Fatihan (Istanbul, 1957); Strashimir Dimitrov, “Za yurushkata organizatsiya i rolyata ï v etnoasimilatsionnite protsesi,” Vekove, 1982, 1–2; Antonijevic D., “Prilog proucavanju stocarskih migracija na Balkanu,” Balcanica, 1976. 3  Nikolay Todorov, Asparukh Velkov, Situation démographique de la péninsule balkanique ( fin du XVe s. début du XVIe s.) (Sofia, 1988); Ömer Lûtfi Barkan, “Osmanli imparatorlugunda bir iskân ve kolonizasyon metodu olarak sürgünler.”

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but not necessarily administrative) with the goal of attaining social re-categorization. It is moreover the individual and predominantly single character of these conversions which explains the fact that the integration in the new religious (and social) milieu was accompanied with the subsequent loss of the native tongue. The exceptions are the cases where these conversions occurred en masse in larger or smaller groups, irrespective of whether they were voluntary or enforced: Bosnia, Albania, the Rhodopes, Macedonia, etc. The outcome of the debate between the colonization and the conversion theories, as well as about the mechanisms of conversion, would have been of merely academic significance were it not for the fact that practically all recent attempts at dealing with minority problems (assimilation, emigration, resistance to these policies, propaganda, etc.) are being legitimized by means of this historical ­experience. It also serves as a base for the opposing claims advanced by different political actors at present.4 The most substantial changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occurred as a result of the secession of the Balkan nation-states from the Ottoman Empire. The massive emigrations triggered by political circumstances were untypical for the rest of Europe at the time, to be surpassed only by the events of the Second World War.5 Despite these drastic population shifts, not a single one among the Balkan countries achieved the cherished ideal characteristics of the modern European nation-state: ethnic and religious 4  This is not only the case with obvious converts from Islam, like the Pomaks. During the 1984–1989 campaign aimed at changing the names of the Turks in Bulgaria, the legitimation behind it was the belief that the Turks, too, had been converts who had additionally forgotten their mother-tongue. A subtler, and for some regions plausible, version of this theory claimed that today’s Turks, particularly the compact mass in northeastern Bulgaria, were ethnically linked to the proto-Bulgars, a Turkic tribe which, after the demise of the Great Volga Bulgaria in the steppes north of the Black sea, founded the Bulgarian state in the Balkan peninsula in the 7th century AD. The dominant account in Bulgarian historiography has it that the comparatively few, if ruling, proto-Bulgars were completely slavicized by the ninth century, especially with the conversion of the state to Christianity, and that the population of the two medieval Bulgarian empires, having acquired the Bulgarian self-designation, was espousing a consolidated Slavic Christian identity and using the Slavic language. Against this opinion a theory was advanced, based mostly on linguistic, archaeological and ethnographic data, that a substantial group of the proto-Bulgars were never linguistically assimilated into the Slavic majority. With the arrival of the Ottoman Turks in the fourteenth century, these groups either retained their status as Turkic speaking Christians (the Gagauz) or converted to Islam, the religion brought by the (maybe) linguistically related Ottomans. As already said, this is merely one in the line of many theories, but it problematizes the uncritical use of the term ethnic Turks (unless one sticks to the generic use of the term as espoused by pan-Turcism). 5  Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830–1914 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Dimitrije Djordjevic, “Migrations during the 1912–1913 Balkan wars and World War One”, Migrations in Balkan History (Belgrade: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1989), 115–129.

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homogeneity. All Balkan countries (Turkey inclusive) have resorted to similar solutions in trying to solve their minority problems in the new context: emigration and assimilation. The unresolved minority issues are, essentially, the existing and potential crisis points in the Balkans: Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Transylvania, Thrace. The Bulgarian speaking Muslims (Pomaks) inhabit several regions of Bulgaria but are concentrated as a compact mass almost entirely in the Rhodope mountains where they have practiced their traditional occupations—mostly animal husbandry but also agriculture—for centuries.6 The process of their conversions to Islam has been gradual and protracted and, despite some excellent research, impossible to reconstruct in all its details and historical depth. Most convincing scholarly is the historiography which traces the gradual process of islamization of the local Christian inhabitants from Ottoman registers of the sixteenth century.7 Its conclusions are well corroborated by the daily and active co-existence between Bulgarian Christians and Muslims who, in some cases, keep memories of their kinship alive.8 At the same time, there is a whole body of journalistic and partly academic literature which has built on folk legends and insists on the abrupt, violent mass conversion of the population in the second half of the seventeenth century. Despite the profound intellectual and ideological strain between these two explanations, they interface in one point: that the converts were part of the already consolidated Bulgarian ethnic 6  For general studies on the Bulgarian Pomaks, see Stoyu Shishkov, Bîlgaromohamedanite. (Pomatsi). Istoriko-zemepisen i narodonauchen pregled v obrazi (Plovdiv, 1936); Stoyu Shishkov, Pomatsite v trite bîlgarski oblasti: Trakiya, Makedoniya i Miziya (Plovdiv, 1914); A. Primovski, Bîlgarite-mohamedani v nashata narodnostna obshtnost (Sofia, 1940); R. Solakov, Bîlgaritemohamedani v minaloto i dnes (Sofia, 1940); N. Vranchev, Bîlgari-mohamedani (pomaci) (Sofia, 1948); Lyubomir Miletich, Lovchanskite pomatsi, Sofia, 1889; Kiril Vasilev, Rodopskite bîlgari-mohamedani (Plovdiv, 1961); Kompleksna nauchna rodopska ekspeditsiya prez 1953 godina. Dokladi i materiali (Sofia, 1955); Tsvetana Romanska et al., eds., Narodnostna i bitova obshtnost na rodopskite bîlgari (Sofia, 1969); Rodopite v bîlgarskata istoriya (Sofia, 1974). 7  See, for example Strashimir Dimitrov, “Demografski otnosheniya i pronikvane na islyama v Zapadnite Rodopi i dolinata na Mesta prez XV–XVII v.”, Rodopski sbornik, I, Sofia, 1965; Starishimir Dimitrov, “Pronikvane na mohamedanstrvoto sred bîlgarite v Zapadnite Rodopi prez XV–XVII vek”, Rodopi, 1972, N. 6 & No. 7; Elena Grozdanova, Bulgarskata narodnost, op.cit; Antonina Zhelyazkova, Razprostranenie na islyama, op. cit. 8  Boryana Panayotova, “Bîlgari-mohamedani i khristiyani v Tsentralnite Rodopi—pogled vîrkhu tekhnite vzaimootnosheniya”, Aspekti na etnokulturnata situatsiya v Bîlgariya i na Balkanite, vol. 2 (Sofia: Tsentîr za izsledvane na demokratsiyata, Fondatsiya “Friedrich Naumann”, 1992), 36; for a recent illustration of the relations between Christian and Bulgarian Muslims in Yakoruda, and the tradition to keep up kinship ties between them see Bozhidar Kardalev, “Zabîrkva se porednata gorchiva chasha za bîlgarite mohamedani”, Duma, 9 June 1993.

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group and that, by converting to Islam, their conscious Bulgarian ethnicity was weakened or completely obliterated. Against this, Greek historiography, having to deal with a Pomak presence in its own part of the Rhodopes, has promoted a theory that they are Slavic speaking Muslims of Greek (or Hellenized Thracian) origins.9 Finally, some Turkish works (clearly on the outside margins of scholarship but widely used as political propaganda) advance the thesis, already dominant in the Kurdish case, that the Pomaks are “mountain Turks”.10 Again, all these theories could be simply treated as illustrations of ideological or historiographic trends were it not for their immediate role in legitimizing identity claims. As a whole, the literature dealing with relations between Bulgarian Christians and Bulgarian Muslims in the Ottoman period is unanimous that there had been a remarkably well-developed modus vivendi of co-existence, something which was preserved in the subsequent period on the local level and in everyday life. It seems that beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the economic advance and cultural revival of the Bulgarian 9  This complicated theory clearly tries to disregard religious and linguistic boundaries by emphasizing blood/kinship ties. Interestingly enough, it was not exploited so as to integrate the Pomaks living in the Greek Rhodopes to the Greek majority community. Having put a premise on the “Bulgarian danger” during the Cold war period, Greek authorities were principally concerned to obliterate the potential Slavic, i.e. Bulgarian allegience of the Pomaks. Instead, they treated them as Turks, a decision they bitterly regret nowadays when facing problems with their Turkish/Muslim majority. On the Pomaks in Greece, see Emmanuel Sarides, Ethnische Minderheit und zwischenstaatliches Streitobject: Die Pomaken in Nordgriechenland (Berlin, 1987). See also a critique of the Greek theses: Tatjana Seypell, “Das Interesse an der muslimischen Minderheit in Westthrakien (Griechenland) 1945–1990”, Minderheitenfragen in Südosteuropa, Gerhard Schwamm, ed. (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1992), 377–392. 10  See, for example, the book of Hüseyin Memisoglu, Pages of the History of Pomak Turks (Ankara 1991). This work was published both in Turkish and in Bulgarian, and presents the thesis that the Pomaks were descendants of Kuman Turks of the eleventh century, that their language is a Turkic dialect, that Christians entered the Rhodopes for the first time after 1912, etc. The author, a former graduate of the Sofia Communist Academy of Political Science (AONSU), subsequently taught the history of the Bulgarian Communist Party to engineers under his previous name Memishev. In 1988, he left for Turkey (Ilcho Dimitrov, “Disertant na AONSU izdava divotii v Ankara”, Duma, 15 April 1993). A previous brochure published in Istanbul in 1976 under the title “The essence of the Tragedy of the Rhodope Turks in Bulgaria” offers similar theories and is still distributed in large quantities among the Bulgarian Muslims in the Rhodopes (see Paunka Gocheva, “Koi vkara vîlka v Balkanskata koshara”, Duma 12 May 1993). As a whole, the 1980s saw a proliferation of propaganda literature on both sides of the Bulgarian-Turkish border and, quite often, the Turkish works managed to outdo their Bulgarian counterparts in their zealous and phantasmagorical claims.

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Christians and the development of a national consciousness among them, the latent opposition between the two confessional groups was gradually transformed into open hostility.11 The culmination of this antagonism came with the secession of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire, as a result of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877/78. The Bulgarian uprising of April 1876 was ruthlessly suppressed provoking European public opinion to deal with the Bulgarian horrors. This aspect of the Eastern crisis is well known and researched in the historical literature. What is less known, and reluctantly dealt with, is the fact that Bulgarian speaking Muslims took an active part in the squelching of the uprising and committed unspeakable brutalities. This provoked the retaliation of the Christians in 1878 with the advance of the Russian armies, and a substantial part of the Pomaks emigrated to the confines of the Ottoman empire refusing to live under the rule of “giaurs”. Many took part in the so called “Rhodope mutiny”, an organized counterattack of the Ottoman armed forces and the Muslim population of the Rhodopes (Turks and Pomaks), headed by the former British consul in Varna and Burgas, and volunteer officer in the Ottoman army Saint Clair, with the active support of the British embassy in Constantinople. With the dismemberment of San-Stefano Bulgaria, the Rhodope region was included in the province of Eastern Rumelia which was to be ruled by a Christian dignitary. About twenty Pomak villages refused to recognize this authority forming the so-called “Pomak republic”. This lasted for about eight years until 1886 when, one year after the unification of the Bulgarian principality with Eastern Rumelia the frontier with the Ottoman empire was finally demarcated, and these villages were included in the Ottoman empire until the Balkan wars.12 The alienation of the Bulgarian speaking Muslim population was compounded by the fact that the newly created Bulgarian nation-state did not attempt to integrate it but treated it as indistinguishable from the larger Muslim group. Thus, in all late nineteenth century censuses (1880, 1885, 1888) the Bulgarian speaking Muslims were entered under the heading “Turks”. It was 11  Panayotova, “Bîlgari-mohamedani, 37. 12  On the “Rhodope mutiny” and the “Pomak republic” see Khristo Popkonstantinov, Nepokornite sela v Rodopskite planini, kn.I (1878–1879) (Tîrnovo, 1887), kn.II (1878–1886) (Sofia, 1886); Vassil Dechov, Minaloto na Chepelare, I (Sofia, 1928); Khristo Khristov, “Polozhenieto na rodopskoto naseleniye sled Osvobozhdenieto i za t.nar. “nepokorni” bîlgaromokhamedanski sela, Is minaloto na bîlgarskite mohamedani v Rodopite (Sofia, 1958). It is symptomatic that with the exception of the previously cited works, practically no scholarly research was undertaken on this interesting problem. The multivolume History of Bulgaria, whose 559-page volume 7 covers the period 1878–1903, has two pages on the mutiny, no allusion to the “republic”, and only mentions the Pomak villages as referred to in the clauses of the 1886 treaty: Istoriya na Bîlgariya, vol. 7 (Sofia, 1991), 39–40, 193.

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only in the 1905 census that a separate group—“Pomaks”—appeared.13 During the 1920s and especially during the 1930s a sustained campaign in the press urged public opinion to discriminate between religious and ethnic allegiance, and to accept the Pomaks as part of the Bulgarian nation. This idea was most intensely espoused by the small educated elite among the Pomaks (principally teachers) who strove to elevate the economic and cultural level of their group, and to rescue it from its ever growing marginalization. In 1937 the organization “Rodina” (“Motherland”) was formed whose principal aim was to foster a Bulgarian ethnic consciousness among the Bulgarian Muslims. Its activities covered mostly the Central and Western Rhodopes; it proved unsuccessful in the Eastern Rhodopes. In the course of seven years the organization introduced Bulgarian language worship in the mosques, translated the Qur’an into Bulgarian, created a Bulgarian-Muslim establishment separate from the Turkish, promoted the creation of a local elite by enrolling Bulgarian Muslims in secondary and higher education establishments. It also attempted to reform everyday life by casting away the traditional costume, by improving the lot of women, by ceasing the practice of circumcision.14 Most importantly, in 1942 it embarked on a campaign to change the names of the Bulgarian Muslims by acquiring Bulgarian, although not Christian, names. It has been estimated that by September 1944, two thirds of the Pomak population in the Central Rhodopes had changes their names.15 Immediately after the war, the “Rodina” organization was dissolved, on the grounds of being a nationalistic Bulgarian, reactionary and racist formation. The Muslim names of the population were restored by 1945.16 The “Rodina” movement of the 1930s and 1940s was regarded as a revival (vîzrazhdane) of the lost ethnic/national consciousness of the Bulgarian Muslim converts. This very concept and the accompanying discourse, as well as the geographic span and the character of its activities is extremely important when considering the obvious continuities with later assimilation campaigns 13  Panayotova, “Bîlgari-mohamedani,” 38. 14  Tinka Alexandrova, “Rodopskite bîlgari i islyamskiyat ‘dzhihad,’” Vecherni novini, N. 37, 1992, 21/23 February 1992, 6. 15  This had not been the first time the names of the Bulgarian Muslims had been changed. During the Balkan wars, in 1912–1913, there was a coercive campaign which was reversed in 1914, but at the price of the further alienation of the Pomaks. 16  Panayotova, “Bîlgari-mohamedani, 39–40. For a detailed account on the activities and goals of “Rodina”, see the contemporary periodicals “Rodina” and “Rodopa”. For a recent analysis of the organization, see Alexander Karamandzhukov, “Dokumenti po vîznikvane i deynostta na druzhbite “Rodina”, Rodopski sbornik, vol. V (Sofia, 1983); Alexander Karamandzhukov, “Dokumenti za rodinskoto vîzrozhdensko dvizhenie sred bîlgarite mohamedani v Zapadnite Rodopi”, Rodopski sbornik, vol. VI (Sofia, 1987).

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directed at the Pomaks (in the 1960s and the 1970s),17 and the internationally much publicized campaign directed at the Turks in the latter half of the 1980s. Although the activities of “Rodina” are less than controversial, and its assessments even more so, ranging from limitless idealization to complete repudiation,18 the substance of its efforts, the evaluative element aside, can be seen as an attempt to bridge existing religious boundaries through linguistic unity, and to replace or at least subordinate the heretofore dominant religious identity by ethnic/national consciousness. At least in its initial conception it was essentially a grassroots effort (despite the utilization sometimes of questionable methods, and although it soon came to be used by the authorities) to blend with the dominant majority and thus acquire the mechanisms of social vertical mobility. Insofar as the complex ethnic and religious diversity is a continuity from the Ottoman period, it would seem at first glance that we are faced simply with the workings of the Ottoman legacy (both in its specifics and as an imperial legacy, in general). Yet, the issue becomes more complex when taking into account the question of different and competing ways of shaping group consciousness in general, and ethnic and national consciousness in particular. Nationalism in the Balkans in the nineteenth century has been constructed primarily around linguistic and religious identities. Language was perceived by practically all national and cultural leaders as the mightiest agent of unification. The efforts of the new states centered on the creation of secularized, centralized and uniform educational systems as one of the most powerful agents of nationalism, alongside the army and other institutions. Yet this very emphasis on the unifying potential of language stressed at the same time its exclusiveness and the rigidity of the ethnic boundaries it delineated. This precluded the integration (except in the cases of assimilation) of different linguistic groups into a single nation. Moreover, not only groups of different linguistic background from the dominant ethnic group in the nation-state proved impossible to integrate; so did also groups of identical ethnic background and speakers of the same (or dialects of the same) language, like the Bulgarian speaking Muslims (Pomaks), the Slavic Bosnian Muslims, the Torbeshi in Macedonia, etc. These latter cases invoke the general problem of religion as ethnic boundary, and that of the 17  For a survey of the consecutive renaming campaigns among the Pomaks throughout the twentieth century, see Yulian Konstantinov, “An Account of Pomak Conversions in Bulgaria (1912–1990),” Minderheitenfragen in Südosteuropa, 343–357. 18  For an idea about the high emotional degree of discussion on “Rodina”, see among others the discussion in Aspekti na etnokulturnata situatsiya v Bîlgariya i na Balkanite, 42–46; see also Vladimir Ardenski, “Koi vkara vîlka v kosharata,” Trud, 26 December 1991.

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Balkan Muslims in particular. Despite the fact that language, indeed, had become the nucleus of different ethnic and national identities among the Balkan Christians (Orthodox for the most part), it could not raze the fundamental boundary between Muslims and Christians which had been established during the centuries of Ottoman rule. The reason for this was not, as the great bulk of Balkan and foreign historiography maintains, the fact that Orthodoxy played a major and crucial role in nation-building.19 In fact, “religion came last in the struggle to forge new national identities” and in some cases “did not become a functional element in national definition until the nation-states had nationalized their churches”.20 It never could be a sufficient component of national self-identity, and even in the national struggles, its primary contribution was to strengthen the opposition to the Muslim rulers.21 Within the Orthodox oecumene, the process of nation-building demonstrated “the essential incompatibility between the imagined community of religion and the imagined community of the nation”.22 This does not mean that the religious boundary between Christianity and Islam was the only divider. Clearly, the different Christian denominations, and particularly the opposition between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, presented additional frontiers of tension. Yet, these frontiers did not prove as unsurmountable.23 Ironically, Balkan nationalism which irrevocably destroyed the imagined community of Orthodox Christianity, managed to preserve a 19  For a general exposition defending this view and based mostly on the Greek case, see George G. Arnakis, “The Role of Religion in the Development of Balkan Nationalism”, The Balkans in Transition. Essays on the Development of Balkan Life and Politics Since the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Charles and Barbara Jelavich, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963, 115–144. 20  Paschalis Kitromilides, “Imagined Communities and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans,” European History Quarterly, vol. 19, N. 2, April 1989, 184. 21  The exception is the Albanian case, possibly because nationalist ideas developed simultaneously among its different religious components of which the Muslims were the majority, and because the perceived danger from without came from Christian quarters (Greeks and Serbs) rather than from the Muslim center. 22  Paschalis Kitromilides, “Imagined Communities”, 177. 23  See, for example, the co-existence and co-operation between the Romanian Uniate and Orthodox churches where Romanianness became the dominant link. Despite the antiCatholic prejudice in Bulgaria, the small Bulgarian Catholic community (as well as the even smaller group of Bulgarian Protestants) were considered and perceived themselves an organic part of the Bulgarian nation. The unbridgeable division between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs can be explained, rather than only by irreconcilable religious differences, by the fact that the two communities had for a long period developed within different historical traditions, the Croats essentially outside the Ottoman sphere. During the nineteenth century the notion of separateness, although not irreversible, had become internalized by significant groups of the respective populations who were cherishing

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f­ rozen, unchangeable and stultifyingly uniform image of the Muslim community, and consistently dealt with it in millet terms. In other words, the Christian populations of the Balkans began speaking, among themselves, the language of nationalism, whereas their attitudes towards the Muslims remained in the realm of the undifferentiated religious communities discourse. A manifestation of this Christian attitude was the continuous and indiscriminate use of the name Turk to refer to Muslims in general, a practice still alive in many parts of the Balkans.24 On the other hand, it could be maintained that, as a whole, the Balkan Muslims, because they could not adapt to the national mode and were practically excluded from the process of nation formation in the Balkans, retained a fluid consciousness which for a longer time displayed the characteristics of a millet mentality, and thus the bearing of the Ottoman legacy. This does not mean that Islam, or for that matter religion, became an alternative form of national consciousness.25 In the reality of an independent Bulgarian nation-state after 1878 with Orthodox Christianity as the official religion it meant, however, that Muslims were marginalized in the face of a sphere which proved to be exclusionary to them. The Turks within the Muslim sphere were the first to shed the millet identity and, to a great extent under the influence of the development of Turkish nationalism in neighboring Turkey but also favored by the significant degree of cultural autonomy in the first decades after the Second World War, develop an ethnic consciousness. This did not happen with the Pomaks. There had never been homogeneity within the Muslim sphere. The Bulgarian Muslims had been viewed as an inferior category not only by the Bulgarian Christians but, because of the lack of Turkish as their language, also by the Turks, and intermarriages between the two Muslim groups had and have been extremely rare. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that the articulation of the inferior status of the Pomaks (in the first case because they allegedly espoused an “inferior” religion, in the second because they did not master a “superior” separate state-building ideals, despite and alongside the substantial appeal and support for the Yugoslav idea. 24  Eran Fraenkel, “Urban Muslim Identity in Macedonia: The Interplay of Ottomanism and Multilingual Nationalism”, Language Contact—Language Conflict, eds. Eran Fraenkel and Chrisina Kramer (New York: Peter Lang, Publ., 1993), 29–44. 25  The only case where, at least theoretically, a “Muslim nation” has emerged is the case of the highly secularized group of the Bosnian Muslims, under the specific administrative arrangement of Tito. The type of political nationalism which they seem (at least officially) to espouse is of a distinctly different variety from the organic nationalism of other groups in the region.

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language) is to a great extent the rationalization of a social opposition, a reflection of the antagonisms between mountain and valley populations, between a mostly pastoral versus a mostly sedentary agrarian culture, and later of the isolation of a particularly confined agricultural group within a rapidly industrializing society. 2

Ascriptive Identity and Self-Identity

The current terms used both in the scholarly literature and in the press to denote the Bulgarian speaking Muslims in Bulgaria, “pomatsi” or “bîlgaromohamedani” (i.e. Pomaks or. Bulgarian Muslims), are both ascriptive and are, as a whole, avoided by the group they designate.26 It seems that the term Pomak attracted for the first time the attention of Vassil Aprilov, a wealthy Bulgarian merchant and important figure of the Bulgarian cultural revival during the nineteenth century. In his Odessa based newspaper Denitsa na novobîlgarskoto obrazovanie (“The morning star of modern Bulgarian education”) Aprilov wrote in 1841 about “Bulgarians who profess the Mohammedan faith … In their family circle and with the other Bulgarians they speak the Bulgarian language, and Turkish with the Greeks and with the Turks. Their personal names are also Turkish … All of their turkified brethren the Bulgarians call Pomaks, the meaning of which I have not found out yet.”27 This is not only one of the earliest documentations of the term but also an apt illustration of an important element which has remained persistent ever since: the conjunction of Turks with Muslims (e.g. the islamicized Bulgarians are turkified, they have Turkish not Muslim names). Three decades later Felix Kanitz, the famous author of “Donau-Bulgarien und der Balkan”, not only gave a valuable description of the “moslemisch-­ bulgarishen Pomaci” but offered an etymology of the term. It derived, according to him, from the verb “pomoci” (to help) as they were considered helper of the Turks.28 The folk etymologies of the local Christians proposed other 26  As a self-designation, Pomak has been internalized only by small groups in the Lovech area, and in some regions of the Rhodopes and Macedonia: Alexei Kalionski, “The Pomak Dilemma”, La transmission du savoir dans le monde musulman périphérique, Programme de recherches interdisciplinaires sur le monde musulman périphérique, Lettre d’information, No 13, mars 1993, 122. 27  Cited in Stoyan Raychevski, “Bîlgarite mohamedani”, Rodopi, N. 7, July 1993, 5. 28   F. Kanitz, Die moslemisch-bulgarischen Pomaci und Zigeuner im Nördlichen Balkangebiete”, Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien, Bd.VI (Wien, 1876), 75.

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meanings alongside the most commonly accepted “Turkish helpers’. They derived from “pomamvam, pomamil se” (being cheated, duped), “pometnal se” (having betrayed, abandoned), and even “pomiya” (garbage), but all were without any exception pejorative.29 Pomak was not the only, and not even the main, designation. More common as an outside designation was the term “akhryani”. Its etymology is deduced either from the Greek for worthless, awkward, rough, wicked or else, from a bastardized version of Agarenes, descendants of Hagar, a common pejorative for the Muslims in the Middle Ages but reserved for the Bulgarian Muslims in the later period. In the case of the Greek etymology, an interesting attempt has been made to stress its ancient origins pointing not at an ethnic, but at a socio-economic antagonism: the binary opposition mountain—valley paralleling the ancient opposition barbarity—civilization.30 The second term—Bulgaro-Mohammedans—is a literary appellative which today is the one almost exclusively utilized by academics and by journalists. Its origins can be traced to the end of the nineteenth century when it appeared in scholarly works emphasizing the Bulgarian ethnic character of this population.31 By the 1930s and 1940s, it was accepted by many educated Pomaks as a neutral term which was to replace the existing pejoratives. As expressed in the letter of one of the leaders of “Rodina”—Svetoslav Dukhovnikov, at that time müfti of Smolyan, at present müfti of Plovdiv—reporting on the activities of his organization: “We stopped calling ourselves “pomaks”, “akhryans”, etc., and adopted the designation “Bulgaro-Mohammedans” which was accepted in the administration and in scholarship.32 Another young imam, Mehmet Dervishev, declared at the time: “By religion, we are Muslims, but this does not prevent us at all to be Bulgarians. Religion should not divide nations because what distinguishes nations from one another is language and blood.33 Arif Beyski, another activist of the “Rodina” movement, thus summarized the relationship between ethnicity and religion:

29  Recently, in an interview, a Bulgarian Muslim teacher from Krumovgrad exclaimed: “Pomak means pomîchen (tortured) Bulgarian”. See “Bîlgaromohamedani priemat khristiyanstvoto ot … papata,” Bîlgarski dnevnik, N. 1, 14 June 1991, 18. 30  Bozhidar Alexiev, “Ekologichna sreda—istoricheska traditsiya (myusulmanskite obshtnosti v Iztochnite Rodopi”), Aspekti na etnokulturnata situatsiya v Bîlgariya, 161–162. 31  Alexei Kalionski, “The Pomak Dilemma”, 122. 32  Tinka Alexandrova, “Rodopskite bîlgari i islyamskiyat ‘dzhihad’,”Vecherni novini, N. 37, 21/23 February 1992, 6. 33   Sbornik Rodina, vol. I (1937–1938) (Plovdiv: Izdanie na bîlgaro-mohamedanskata kulturno-posvetna i blagotvoritelna druzhba “Rodina” v gr.Smolyan, 1939).

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The Muslim religion which we profess does not prevent us to feel Bulgarians in the least … We are Bulgarians according to ethnicity34 and Muslims according to religion!… Being Muslims does not mean at all that we are Turks. For, if we are to judge about ethnicity by the faith, then we would have to be called Arabs, because Mohammed, our prophet and the founder of the Muslim religion, was not a Turk but an Arab … However, we are not Arabs, but we are whites and of the Slavic race. It is clear to us as daylight that religion cannot determine ethnicity. One religion can comprise many ethnicities, and there can be many faiths within one nation. It is the language which determines ethnicity and collects nations in separate states. It is language which draws boundaries between nations. Examples are abounding. Here Greece and Romania profess the same religion as Bulgaria but it is language which distinguishes them, although their religion is completely identical. How can it be otherwise when there are only five main religions in the world but there are over 70 different nations and states … So I am asking those of my coreligionists Bulgarian Mohammedans who by an inexcusable delusion call themselves Turks simply because they have received their faith from the Turks, what is the reason for that?35 This is a pertinent illustration of the attempt to redefine self-identity by appropriating the mechanism of identity formation of the dominant group, i.e. a national consciousness constructed primarily around linguistic identity. It is not merely a document of the 1940s which presents the ideas of the “Rodina” ideologues but the quintessence of the official argument claiming the Bulgarian Muslims as part of the Bulgarian (ethnic) nation. It is also espoused today by adherents of an integration process with the mainstream Bulgarian population (i.e. Christian by religion or names) among the Bulgarian Muslims. In the words of the present chairman of the Rhodope Union Branko Davidov: “I consider myself Bulgarian. Some circles do not want to see the BulgaroMohammedans as Bulgarians and do all they can to detach them from their ethnic roots. If the Turks harbor the illusion for salvation in their fatherland, our fatherland is here. Our mother tongue is Bulgarian … The boundary of a nation is its language. Why should the Bulgarian Mohammedans feel emigrant in their own fatherland?36 34  The term used in the original is “narodnost”, usually translated as “nationality”. 35  Cited in Tinka Alexandrova, “Rodopskite bîlgari i islyamskiyat ‘dzhihad’”, Vecherni novini, N. 22, 31 January/1 February 1992. 36  “Bîlgarite mohamedani sa otvorenata rana na Bîlgariya”, Duma, N. 131, 9 June 1993.

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This feeling is particularly strong in the Central Rhodopes (especially the Smolyan district). According to the observations of local leaders and intellectuals, the majority of the local Pomaks in the town of Smolyan feel Bulgarians. This feeling seems especially intensive among Pomak women who categorically refuse to change back to Muslim names, an opportunity provided by the reversal of the assimilatory politics at the end of 1989. These women fear that a change to Muslim names will mean a concomitant encroachment on their position.37 It is symptomatic that this position is most strongly espoused in the regions where the traditions of the “Rodina” movement were most powerful. Again, it is in these regions that the appellative Bulgaro-Mohammedans has been partly internalized, and often appears as a self-designation, although there are no reliable quantitative sociological data. The ones who aim at a real and effective social recategorization, however, understand that this is possible only by a complete blending with the dominant group, i.e. by erasing the existing religious boundary. This may explain the success of a grass-roots christianizing campaign in the Rhodopes led by father Boyan Sarîev, himself a professed “descendant of Bulgarian Mohammedans” and leader of the Movement for Christianity and Progress “Ioan Predtecha”.38 According to Sarîev the new religious identity is the only solution for the split identity of the Bulgarian Muslims which he calls “national hermaphrodism”:39 There is no other difference but the religious between the Bulgarians and the descendants of the islamicized Bulgarians. Only Islam stands like a Chinese wall between them. Besides, the religion is a very strong [element] in defining one’s national identity. On the basis of religion this population will join the Christian brotherhood which is its historical place.40 During the past three years the movement claims to have converted 50,000 “Bulgarian Mohammedans who secretly and gradually came to the natural

37  Oral interviews in Smolyan, Chepelare and Mogilitsa in August 1993. 38   This movement was officially established on 18 April 1990 in Kîrdzhali. See “Bîlgaromohamedani priemat khristiyanstvoto ot … papata”, Bîlgarski dnevnik, N. 1, 14 June 1991, 17–18. 39  Radka Petrova, “Svetoto krîshtenie sa prieli okolo 50 khilyadi mohamedani”, Duma, 12 June 1993. 40  Interview with Boyan Sarîev “Vizhdam Rodopite kato ogromen khram na Khristos,” Standart, 21 July 1993.

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yearning to feel part and parcel of the Bulgarian population.”41 Most of these people, about 37,000, live in the Central and Eastern Rhodopes and are, according to the father, members of the younger and middle generation. The ambition of the movement is to convert 75 to 80 % of the Bulgarian Muslims by the end of the century. Thus far, its main success is in the same areas where the “Rodina” movement had received support. The reaction of the rest of the Christian Bulgarian population is still unclear, although the Orthodox church has reacted frantically to the movement’s endeavor to enlist the financial and political support of the Vatican in its missionary activities, despite the assurances of Sarîev that this would not open the door to Catholic propaganda.42 As a whole, the name Bulgaro-Mohammedans has not fared so well as a selfdesignation despite its aura of a politically correct term, not least because of its clumsiness. At one of the local censuses during the communist period three options were offered: “Turks”, “Bulgarians”, “Bulgaro-Mohammedans”. One of the interviewees chose to be entered under the title “Bulgaro-Mohammedans” but exclaimed turning to the mayor: “Why don’t you drop this Bulgarian. After all, I am a Mohammedan.”43 In fact, the most wide-spread self-identification among the Bulgarian Muslims has been and is simply “Mohammedan”, a nominal tribute to the resilience of millet consciousness. In some cases, it really shows a genuine intellectual resistance to the attempts to impose a definite ethnic (Bulgarian or Turkish) identity to the Pomaks. When inhabitants of Padina (a completely Pomak village in the Eastern Rhodopes) exclaim: “What we are, who we are, what we believe is our own destiny, don’t meddle with our souls!”,44 this is not simply exhaustion in the face of pressure. It is an authentic indifference to a kind of identity which asserts itself not only as the norm

41   Filipa Serafimova, “Dukhovniyat monopolizîm v Iztochnite Rodopi e razrushen”, Demokratsiya, 12 June 1993; Radka Petrova, “Svetoto krshtenie sa prieli okolo 50 khilyadi mohamedani,” Duma, 12 June 1993. 42  Sarîev’s movement, if successful, will, in fact, establish a Unionist church in Bulgaria: an Orthodox church which recognizes the supremacy of the Pope. For more on his motives, see in the section on identity and interest. 43   Oral interview with Stoyan Raychevski (August 1993), depute from the Union of Democratic Forces, whose father had been the mayor of a village in the Rhodopes. 44  Cited in Radka Petrova, “Gryakh li e da se otîrvesh of Allaha, se pitat v selo Padina,” Duma, 9 July 1992. When a few people of the village converted to Christianity, this was viewed by the rest of the villagers as an unpardonable act of apostasy. The Christian pastor who visits the village weekly is met by open hostility. At the same time, the attempts of the Movement of Rights and Freedoms to win the political support of the village, are a total failure. The claims of the movement that the population consists of Rhodope Turks are considered unserious and laughable.

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in the conditions of the nation-state but claims the exclusive loyalties of the population. Very interesting in this respect is the protest letter signed by 924 inhabitants of the small frontier village of Kochan in the Satovcha municipality in southwestern Bulgaria. The letter is a declaration against the accusations of the Macedonian organization in the region that a coercive process of Turkification has been taking place. The authors of the letter always refer to themselves as Muslims: “We, the Muslim believers from the village of Kochan …”; “We are proud that all inhabitants of the village of Kochan are Muslims, and this was confirmed by the last census”; “… the industrious Muslim population of the municipality and of our village”, etc. None of the appellatives used by the outgroup are accepted as self-identity: “Notwithstanding how you call us: Bulgarians, Mohammedans, Bulgarian Muslims, Pomaks, even Macedonians, we declare that we are a reality which, much as you would it like not to exist, is a fact, and you have to accept us such as we are.45 At the same time as “Mohammedan” or “Muslim” reflects belonging to a religious group, the grip of religion on the Muslim population is quite problematic although certainly growing. It is primarily among the generation over 50–60 years of age that fervent believers can be encountered. The adult generation (between the ages of 20 and 50) does not possess religious habits nor does it have clear religious ideas. Their attachment to Islam is mostly a way to demonstrate their opposition to the previous constraints and prohibitions. Among the very young, however, under the influence of family and the new public sphere, there is a renewed interest for the teachings of Islam. This, according to specialists, creates an important bridge between the youngest and the oldest generation which most likely will contribute to a rise of religiosity and religious knowledge.46 Still, in a poll taken in the Eastern Rhodopes, only 29 % among the Muslims responded to the question “What do you know about Mohammed?” with answers like “Allah’s prophet” or “something like Jesus Christ.” The rest declared that they knew nothing.47 The knowledge of the dogma is not to be mixed up with religiosity. The question “Do you believe

45  The whole text of the letter was published in the newspaper of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms: Prava i Svobodi, N. 16, 16 April 1993. 46  Goran Blagoev, “Sîvremennite religiozni izmereniya b zhivota na myusulmanskoto naselenie ot Iztochnite i Zapadnite Rodopi,” Etnicheskata kartina v Bîlgariya (Sofia: Izdatelstvo “Klub ‘90”, 1993), 85–86. See also Iordan Peev, “L’islam et les musulmans en Bulgarie”, Lecture series delivered at the Academie française in Paris, 1993 (manuscript, cited with the permission of the author), p. 44. 47  Ibidem.

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in God?” was answered in the affirmative by 73 % of the Turks, 66 % of the Pomaks, 59 % of the Gypsies and 37 % of the Bulgarians.48 Besides the term Bulgaro-Mohammedan, there is also a host of other competing designations, practically all of them literary appellatives. Most of them are only ascriptive terms with very limited circulation. A group of them insists on the Turkish character of the Bulgarian Muslims, calling them “Pomak Turks”, “Rhodope Turks”, “Kuman Turks” or simply subsuming them under the title of “ethnic Turks”, who had ostensibly forgotten their mother tongue and adopted Bulgarian after 1912. Despite the somewhat histrionic attention this propaganda and the explosive issue of the “Turkification” of the Bulgarian Muslims has received in the Bulgarian press, its success has been relatively limited and geographically confined to the region of the Southwestern Rhodopes. There is one new element in the self-identification of the Bulgarian Muslims which, despite its very restricted influence, merits attention. It asserts that the Pomaks are, in fact, descendants of the first Muslims in the Balkans, who had arrived on the peninsula shortly after the birth of Islam, and gradually adopted the language and customs of their Bulgarian neighbors. This theory of an alleged “Arabic” origin of the Bulgarian Muslims comes directly from Muslim missionaries sent from Saudi Arabia, Lybia and Pakistan.49 It is exclusively with their financial support that the Qur’an has been published in Bulgarian in new editions and is circulating in enormous numbers.50 Lastly, there is also an attempt to emancipate the designation “Pomak” from its derogatory connotations and declare the existence of a Pomak ethnic minority. In April 1993 a new party was registered, the Democratic Labor Party which had been founded at the end of 1992.51 Its leader, Kamen Burov, is the mayor of the village Zhîltusha in the Eastern Rhodopes, himself of Bulgarian Muslim descent.52 Despite Burov’s expectations for support from the majority 48  These results come from a poll conducted among a representative sample of 3,227 people in the municipalities of Gotse Delchev, Yakoruda, Satovcha, Velingrad, Gîrmen and Madan: Yasen Borislavov, “Gergyovden i Trifon Zarezan sblizhavat khristiyani i myusulmani,” Duma, 12 May 1993. 49  For details, see Tsvetana B. Georgieva, “Struktura na vlastta v traditsionnata obshtnost na pomatsite v rayona na Chech (Zapadni Rodopi)”, Etnicheskata kartina v Bîlgariya, Sofia: Izdatelstvo “Klub ‘90”, 1993, 73–74. 50  Iordan Peev, “L’islam et les musulmans en Bulgarie”, 47–48. One translation was published in London with the support of the Ahmadiyah sect; the other is the work of the former Bulgarian Grand müfti and is published in Saudi Arabia. Its first edition numbered 4,000 copies. The second edition of 200,000 copies was expected to arrive in Bulgaria by the end of 1993, Trud, 3 September 1993. 51   Kontinent, 28 April 1993; Duma, 29 April 1993. 52  The village is part of the Ardino municipality, Kîrzhali district.

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of the Pomaks, the status of the party is still unclear. It received, however, considerable press attention, not least because of the specter of (real or perceived) American involvement. Burov had been sent to the United States to attend a seminar on ethnic diversity. It is there that he was apparently converted to the idea of a Pomak minority and, according to him, received the assurances of American and United Nations administrators to help him with the recognition of a Pomak ethnic minority, something considered to be an important step in the democratization of the country:53 People in the United States were surprised when all of us introduced themselves as Bulgarians. They openly asked us how Bulgaria has managed to create a country only of Bulgarians. I introduced myself as a Bulgarian citizen of Muslim descent. The Americans were interested in how our origins differ from those of the Turks, and so we the question of the Pomaks arose. In America nobody is irritated at somebody else’s selfidentification. The Bulgarian parliament should not tell me who I am. I have a soul and it cannot be obliterated. I feel a Pomak and nobody can frown on me for my ethnic self-identity.54 Upon his return to Bulgaria Burov founded his party, and immediately sought American backing: As a leader of the Democratic Labor Party I have already sought the official support of the American Secretary of State Warren Christopher and of the American Ambassador in Bulgaria Hugh Kennet Hill to insist that the category “Pomak” be included in the next census … The West does not like to be deceived. It wants a clear message: in Bulgaria there are Turks, Bulgarians, Pomaks, Gypsies, Jews, Armenians.55 The coverage of this event would have been much more modest were it not for the general, often close to paranoiac, concern with outside pressure, coupled with the somewhat clumsy manner in which American diplomats in Bulgaria have been trying to pontificate about democracy in general, and ethnic relations in particular. Burov himself based the need for a separate party on the 53  In Standart, 29 April 1993 Burov mentions that he has received the support of Ahmed Sandikcioglu, chairman of a United Nations organization for the defense of human rights in Eastern Europe; see also Duma, 29 April 1993. 54  An extensive interview with Kamen Burov was published in the newspaper Standart, 25 May 1993. 55  Standart, 25 May 1993.

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premise that the Pomaks were a separate ethnic group.56 He actually proposed his own definition of ethnicity: “This population has its customs, culture, and folklore, which means that it is an independent ethnic group”. When asked about the language, he conceded that the Pomaks were speaking Bulgarian but that this did not hamper their recognition as a Pomak ethnic group. Opposing interpretations of what defines an ethnic group lie at the basis of different approaches to the Pomak problem by different political actors. Practically all Bulgarian parties stress “objective” characteristics. In this they are not different from Burov’s approach, except that their logical conclusion is that a separate Pomak (or Bulgarian Muslim) ethnic group cannot exist because ethnically these people are part and parcel of the Bulgarian ethnic community. They often cite the decision of the Constitutional court from 1992: “The categories race, nationality, ethnic belonging, gender and origin57 are determined from the time of birth and cannot be acquired or changed in the process of the social realization of the citizen in society.”58 Against this treatment, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms advocates an essentially voluntaristic approach, putting an exclusive theoretical premise on self-determination: “Most certainly the ethnic problem can be the object of scholarly research, but to look for a direct link between ethnic consciousness and ethnic origins is an ethnobiological treatment of the question … Let everyone be considered as they feel themselves.”59 At the same time, in a slip of tongue, the same leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, who made the above statement, responded to a question concerning the rejection of the historically formed status of the Bulgarian Muslims, and the adoption of an ethnic Turkish consciousness, in the following way: “We do not care about the genetic origins of people. Let this be the domain of historians and other scholars. We approach this question politically.60 (italics M.T.)”

56  Burov maintains that the Pomaks number half a million people. Asked about his sources of information, he responded: “I know the Rhodopes thoroughly and I have an idea about the population” (Standart, 25 May 1993). 57  This is a category which has been usually used to indicate social background. 58  Decision N. 14 of the Constitutional court, published in Dîrzhaven vestnik, N. 93 of 1992. Cited in Duma, 16 June 1993. 59  Ibrahim Tatarli, “Pravoto na samoopredelenie e beleg za zrelostta na demokratsiyata”, Prava i Svobodi, N. 22, 28 May 1993, 4. 60  Cited in Slavcho Vodenicharov, “Istinskoto litse na DPS v Rodopite”, Duma, 25 November 1991.

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Interests and Identity

In December 1992, seven years after the last national census of 1985 which did not supply data on the ethnic composition of the population, a new census was conducted. This census reestablished criteria which were hoped to provide relatively reliable information about the ethnic breakdown of the Bulgarian population. Three measures were used to denote ethnodemographic characteristics: ethnicity, mother tongue, and religion. The results in the first category showed 7,272,000 (85.8 %) declaring Bulgarian ethnicity; 822,000 (9.7 %) claiming Turkish ethnicity; 288,000 (3.4 %) describing themselves as Gypsies; and 91,000 (1.1 %) comprising all other ethnic groups. The second criterion, mother tongue, provided the following results: 7,311,000 (86.3 %) speakers of Bulgarian; 829,000 (9.8 %) speakers of Turkish; 257,000 (3.0 %) speakers of Gypsy (sic! in the census). Lastly, the third criterion, religious allegiance,61 showed 7,373,000 (87,0 %) as Christian (7,303,000 Orthodox, 51,000 Catholics and 19,000 Protestants) and 1,078,000 (12,7 %) as Muslim (1,002,000 Sunis and 76,000 Shi’a).62 The accuracy of these results was contested by a number of specialists on the ground, among others, of having prompted considerable numbers of Pomaks to declare themselves Turks (and some even Arabs) by failing to provide a separate category for the Bulgarian Muslims.63 It was also clear that a considerable number of Muslim Gypsies had declared themselves Turks, both according to ethnicity and to mother tongue.64 Altogether, about 143,000 Muslims declared themselves part of the Bulgarian ethnic group. It is difficult to establish the number of Pomaks among the group with Turkish self-identification, but preliminary research conducted in June 61  Religion, according to the instructions for the census, was defined as “a historically determined affiliation of the person or its parents or predecessors to a group with a defined religious outlook.” This was an obvious attempt to account for the sizeable part of the population which was indicating that they were non-believers, atheists, etc., particularly among the strongly secularized and urban Bulgarian majority. 62   Petko Bozhkov, “Etnodemografska kharakteristika na naselenieto v Bîlgariya”, Demokratsiya, N. 977, 21 April 1993. For the detailed data, see Demografska kharakteristika na Bîlgariya (rezultati ot 2 % izvadka), (Natsionalen statisticheski institut, Sofia, 1993). 63  See, for example, the critique by Rumyana Modeva, “Natsionalna stabilnost ili etnicheska konfrontatsiya ni ochakva”, Duma, N. 180, 5 August 1993. This article, as well as another by Milko Boyadzhiev in Standart, 29 April 1993, attacked the organizers of the census for having included the criteria on ethnicity and religion as especially disintegrating and destabilizing. 64  Among the contingent of emigrating Bulgarian Turks to Turkey, Gypsies are consistently turned back by the Turkish authorities. The latest claim to Turkish ethnic and linguistic allegiance, beside common religion, is probably an attempt to overcome this differentiation.

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1992 showed that about 18 to 20 % of the Bulgarian Muslims in the southwestern Rhodopes preferred Turkish identity.65 It is impossible to come up with reliable aggregate figures about the numbers of persons of Bulgarian Muslim (Pomak) origins who have identified themselves completely as either Turks or Bulgarians according to all three criteria: by ethnicity, language and Muslim or Orthodox Christian religion, accordingly, but in unofficial sources the total number of Pomaks is reckoned to be around 250,000.66 Already at the time of the census taking, but especially following the publication of the census results, one particular issue inflamed public opinion and has served as a rallying point behind opposing opinions. It concerned the ethnic self-determination of the population in some of the ethnically mixed municipalities in southwestern Bulgaria, and more concretely the results coming out of two of them: Gotse Delchev and Yakoruda. Details of the latter case virtually flooded the daily press and exacerbated political passions to the extent that a parliamentary commission was set up to investigate into the alleged accusations of manipulation and pressure on the population, and to established whether there had been violations of the principle of voluntary self-determination. Of the total population of the Yakoruda municipality of (12,000 in 7 villages) only about 2,500 declared themselves to be Bulgarians, a symmetrical reversal of the results of two decades ago, when Muslims constituted about the same minority.67 The rest declared themselves as ethnic Turks. In this particular municipality the Muslims are Pomaks who have no practical knowledge of Turkish; therefore, their self-identification as Turks gave rise to bitter accusations of Turkification. For the same reason, the question of the optional study of Turkish in schools, which kindled a flaming discussion all over the country, was especially bitter in this region. Of the 1721 students in the municipality, 1174 65  Ilona Tomova, Press conference on the ethnocultural situation in Bulgaria, Duma, 6 May 1993. See also more detailed results published in Yasen Borislavov, “Gergyovden i Trifon Zarezan sblizhavat khristiyani i myusulmani”, Duma, 12 May 1993. 66  In a publication in Duma of 27 April 1993, Paunka Gocheva disclosed that in 1970–1972, at the time of the name-changing campaign against the Bulgarian Muslims, they numbered about 220,000. Taking into account their growth rate, she puts their present number at 280,000. According to an article in another daily, of the 822,000 self-defined members of the Turkish ethnic group 100,000 are Pomaks, and 200,000 Gypsies. See Elena Trifonova, “Yakoruda—golyamoto chakane za edna istins”, Standart, 20 April 1993. Yulian Konstantinov, “An Account of Pomak Conversions in Bulgaria (1912–1990), 344/n. 3 cites 270,000 Pomaks as an official figure of the Ministry of Interior by May 1989 but does not disclose his exact source. 67  Yanora Grigorova, Yasen Borislavov, “Bîlgarite v Yakoruda styagat neshto kato vîstanie,” Duma, 15 May 1993.

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were entered as Turks. As a reaction to that, many Bulgarian parents recorded their children under the age of 1668 as Americans, Japanese, Germans, and even Eskimos, arguing that their children were parts of these ethnic groups as much as their Muslim counterparts were Turks.69 The “Japanese” and the “Eskimos”, in particular, indicated Chinese as their mother tongue. This 400-strong “Chinese” speaking group pointed out that it would look for the defense of its human rights in the Chinese embassy in Sofia.70 The ethnic tension reached a high degree of intensity by the middle of 1992 when local imams refused to bury deceased who had not changed their names back to Muslim ones after 1989.71 At the same time, this region was the object of active attention on the part of emissaries of the World Islamic League. A number of mosques have been built in the region with the financial support of the League.72 The theory of the Turkish ethnic origins of the Pomaks, who had allegedly forgotten their language under the stressful events of 1912, has gained ground precisely in this region. This theory is espoused by the Movement of Rights and Freedoms whose representatives are at present leaders of the municipality.73 It has to be kept in mind that these are the regions where the forceful change of names in the 1970s campaign was particularly gruesome, where the “Rodina” movement of the 1940s had had no success, and where the followers of the reconstituted extremely nationalist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization are especially active.74 The parliamentary commission finished its report at the end of January 1993. It was signed by 4 of the 5 deputies of the commission, members of the feuding Bulgarian Socialist Party and the Union of Democratic Forces: one of their rare moments of consensus. The fifth deputy, a member of the Movement 68  According to the census rules, children over 16 determine their ethnic characteristics themselves; under this age, this is the prerogative of their parents. 69  Boika Asiova, “Yakoruda se poturchva spokoino”, Duma, 27 November 1992. 70  Grigorova, Borislavov, “Bîlgarite v Yakoruda” and Elena Trifonova, “Yakoruda—golyamoto chakane za edna istina”, Standart, 20 April 1993. 71  Trifonova, “Yakoruda”. 72  Grigorova, Borislavov, “Bîlgarite v Yakoruda”. 73  Trifonova, “Yakoruda”. 74  The IMRO, which had enjoyed a state within the state status in Bulgaria following the First World War and had terrorized the political life of the country in the interwar period, was banned after the military coup of 1934. It was revived after the fall of communism in 1989. Despite its shrill and vociferous nationalism, and its great wealth, the organization has not thus far engaged in any extralegal activities. The mayor of Yakoruda, Mrs. Naile Salikh, blames the inflated reports of ethnic tensions in the municipality and the whole inflamed public debate exclusively on the leaders of the local branch of the IMRO, Nov Pirinskli vestnik, N. 60, 8–14 December 1992.

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for Rights and Freedoms, refrained from signing. The commission stated that the principle of voluntariness had not been apparently violated, and that there were no cases of direct physical violence (section 7).75 Still, it concluded that “With the active participation of representatives of the local authorities and administration a turkification of the Bulgarian Muslims is taking place. At the same time the Bulgarian Christians are the object of pressure and are feeling insecure …” (section 13).76 The report was discussed in parliament in May 1993 and a declaration was sent over to the Legislative commission.77 Finally, after another tour of heated exchanges, on 17 September 1993 a parliamentary majority voted to annul the census results on ethnic criteria for the two municipalities.78 Although the issue of the “Turkification” of the Bulgarian Muslims is undoubtedly exaggerated, there obviously is in place a process attracting members of the Pomak community in particular geographic areas to the Turkish ethnic group. The mechanism of this attraction is complicated: it involves economic, social, political, cultural and psychological issues which are analyzed further in the text. Parallel to the national census, the National Statistical Institute ran a research program to establish the number of unemployed in the country at the time of the census (4 December 1992).79 Although the data on unemployment are not ethnically specific, there is no question that the economic crisis accompanying the social and economic transformation after 1989 has particularly severely hit areas of high Muslim concentration. In general, the economic reform has resulted in higher unemployment rates in the agricultural sector (18.0 % as to 13 % in the cities).80 The rural population is disproportionately exposed to a higher risk of unemployment resulting both from problems accompanying the reorganization of agriculture as well as the fact that some villages are completely devoid of means of livelihood (the latter comprise the former tobacco-growers and workers in small industrial enterprises located in villages). 75   Prava i Svobodi, N. 22, 28 May 1993, p. 3. 76   Prava i svobodi, N. 24, 11 June 1993, 3. 77  Mariana Kirova, “Turtsizirat se Yakoruda i gr. Gotse Delchev”, Demokratsiya, 22 May 1993. A protest against the report of the parliamentary commission was filed by the mayor of Yakoruda, Mrs. Naila Salikh, and was published in Prava i Svobodi, N. 26, 25 June 1993. 78  For different reactions to the parliamentary decision, see Zora, 30 September 1993; 168 chasa, 26 September 1993; Duma, 29 September 1993. 79  The information was gathered on a special card at the same time with the census data. The pollsters interviewed all males between the ages of 16 and 59, and all females between 16 and 54. The results were published in: Bezrabotni v republika Bîlgariya kîm 4.12.1992 godina (predvaritelni danni), (Sofia: Natsionalen statisticheski institut, 1993). 80   Bezrabotni v republika Bîlgariya, 7.

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A considerable number of the rural population was also employed in nearby towns (the type of daily labor migration) and has been left unemployed following the cuts in the urban industrial sector (especially the mining industry).81 The laws voted by Parliament about the restitution of land to former owners, although not yet implemented on a large scale, will leave considerable portions of the Muslim population in the plains practically landless. This is not the case in the mountain areas but there it is the collapse of the tobacco industry, especially in southwestern Bulgaria and the Central Rhodopes which has affected Bulgarian Muslims and Turks disproportionately, since this hard and time-consuming occupation was almost entirely in their hands.82 Likewise, it is the mining industry in the far southeast, with a heavy concentration of Turks and Bulgarian Muslims, which is in total disarray. Finally, there was a special state policy of economic incentives, the so called “border benefits” which were poured into the border regions of the Rhodopes, and thanks to which “the border population attained a standard of living during the years of totalitarian rule which by far surpassed the traditional standards of the region.”83 The great demographic shifts accompanying the industrial revolution in Bulgaria after the Second World War, and particularly the drastic urbanization, left the Muslim population aside. The figures from the last census of 1993 show a mere 17% of the Turkish ethnic group living in cities.84 Although there are no comparable data for the Bulgarian Muslims (since they were not identified as a separate group) it can be safely maintained that the share of urban dwellers among them is statistically insignificant. Taking into account the reasons for unemployment, the National Statistical Institute has differentiated between two groups of unemployed: those who had been previously employed (about 75 %) and those who had never before entered the work force (about 25 %: these are school and college graduates as well as released military recruits). Further, municipalities have been divided into three groups, according to the nature of unemployment. The two districts with the highest percentage of unemployed who were laid off are Blagoevgrad 81  Ibid., 11–12. 82  After 1989 Bulgaria has lost its traditional tobacco markets in Eastern Europe, especially the large market of the former Soviet Union, but also the markets of Poland and Hungary. At the same time, the local consumer market for Bulgarian cigarettes has shrunk forefold, because of the low tariffs imposed on imported cigarettes. (“OSD komentira tjutjunevata promishlenost”, INFB BIP, N. 13, 29 September 1993. 83  Yulian Konstantinov, “‘Nation-State’ and ‘Minority’ Types of Discourse—Problems of Communication between the Majority and the Islamic Minorities in Contemporary Bulgaria”, Innovation in Social Sciences Research, vol. 5, No. 3, 1992, 85–86. 84   Petko Bozhkov, “Etnodemografska kharakteristika na naselenieto v Bîlgariya”, Demokratsiya, N. 977, 21 April 1993.

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(63.7 %) and Smolyan (66.1 %), well over the national average of about 50 %.85 These are the two districts where the Bulgarian Muslims almost exclusively reside. Within these districts, which are also characterized by a very low share of voluntary quits, the percentage rises to 85 % for some localities. If one uses the aggregate data for both types of unemployed (laid off and having never worked), several municipalities (all in the Blagoevgrad and Smolyan districts) come out as practically doomed, with an unemployment rate of over 90.0 %:86 Borino (96.4 %), Gîrmen (95.4 %), Satovcha (95.1 %), Dospat (95.0 %0, Bregovo (94.2 %), Strumyani (94.2 %), Khadzhidimovo (94.2 %), Razlog (94.0 %), Yakoruda (93.7 %), Sandanski (92.1 %), Gotse Delchev (91.9 %), Kirkovo (91.9 %), Devin (91.7 %), Kresna (91.0 %), Nedelino (90.3 %).87 It certainly should come as no surprise that it is precisely in these ethnically mixed regions that tensions have become exacerbated, and where different types of ethnic and religious propaganda have had the greatest success. In the by now famous municipality of Yakoruda unemployment has reached nearly 94 %. As summarized by Mrs. Sabriye Sapundzhieva, the former director of the Youth Center in the little town, and one of the 140 college graduates in this municipality of 12,000: The problem does not consist in whether we are going to have Bulgarian family names or not, but in the fact that the municipality is in a total economic and managerial impasse. Here a host of incompetent people were removed from power by another host of incompetent people … And in order to divert attention from their own ineptitude, they constantly invent ethnic conflicts, and religious wars. It sounds as if here everyone goes around with an axe, a rifle or a knife. Now then, if our municipality was flourishing and each of us was getting a salary of 5 to 6,000 levs, if the enterprises were not deliberately ruined, if our forests were not exported to Greece and to Turkey for pennies—would anyone have made 85   Bezrabotni v republika Bîlgariya, 12. 86  Michael Wyzan has noted that the definition of unemployed has been especially inclusive in this census. It was therefore the subject of official criticism claiming that anyone who was not paid was considered to be unemployed. See Michael L. Wyzan, “Economic Transformation and Regional Inequality in Bulgaria: In Search of a Meaningful Unit of Analysis”, Paper presented at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Honolulu, November 1993. 87   Bezrabotni v republika Bîlgariya, 13. For a particularly moving narrative of the plight of one concrete Bulgarian Muslim village—Barutin with its central square nicknamed “Parliament of the unemployed” —see the lengthy information in Demokratsiya, 5 June 1993.

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an international problem out of Yakoruda? It seems that only the United Nations, the Security Council and NATO have not dealt with us.”88 The municipality of Dzhebel in the district of Kîrdzhali (another heavily affected district in southeast Bulgaria) has responded to the severe economic pressure by mass emigration. About two thirds of its population (almost exclusively ethnic Turks) have left for Turkey since 1989.89 Emigration to Turkey is also the response of some Bulgarian Muslims. Their exact numbers cannot be established because the ones among them who emigrate officially are claiming ethnic Turkish identity so that they could fall within the provisions of the emigration convention with Turkey. Still others attempt to cross the border illegally facing the risk of extradition.90 While the Bulgarian press of all political colorings unanimously accuses the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (the so called Turkish party) of an intentional and forcible campaign to “Turkify” the Bulgarian Muslims, it cannot conceal the fact that the movement bases its appeal on the economic argument. The Movement has clearly set its priorities. In the words of its leader, Ahmed Dogan: “Our party is faced with a fundamental problem which is social in principle: unemployment.”91 Its emissaries assure the population that Turkey as their fatherland will look out for them, and will save them from the economic crisis.92 It is quite symptomatic that economic emmigration to Turkey had been practiced by the Bulgarian Muslims also before the war. According to a poll taken by local Christians in 1934 and kept in police archives, Pomaks were leaving the country driven out by the utmost misery of their situation. This was the primary reason behind their alienation from Bulgaria and the motive for their Turkification.93 It is not coincidental that one of the primary motives for the creation of the Pomak party (the Democratic Labor Party) is articulated in terms of economic needs: “to defend the people from these regions from unemployment and to assist private businessmen.”94 “These regions” are the mountainous and semi-mountainous areas. In fact, its leader Kamen Burov specifically emphasized the primarily social and economic rather than ethnic aspect of his party, despite his insistence on the recognition of a Pomak ethnic minority. Asked how he would handle the active presence and aspirations of the Movement 88  Interview with Sabrie Sapundzhieva in Nedelen Standart, 6 June 1993, 6. 89  Radka Petrova, “V Dzhebel he si shtat kmeta, toi se pravi na glukh”, Duma, 23 January 1991. 90   Demokratsiya, 19 July 1993. 91   Otechestven vestnik, 14 October 1993. 92  “Za bîlgarskiya koren turskiyat ezik ne e maichin”, Duma, 9 October 1991. 93   Aspekti na etnokulturnata situatsiya v Bîlgariya, 274. 94  Interview with Kamen Burov, Standart, 25 May 1993.

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of Rights and Freedoms in these same mountain areas, Burov responded in an undisguised discourse of interests: We do not make claims against any political power and we consider it natural that there should be political struggle. If the MRF manages to improve the life of our people, it might be able to win them over. Whoever helps economically the population in the mountainous and semi-mountainous regions, his will be the winning card, because people will know who has provided for them.95 Interests have been articulated not simply through economic concerns. As already mentioned above, members of the Bulgarian Muslim community who react against the subordinated status of their group in the existing ethnic/religious hierarchies, and who strive to achieve a genuine social recategorization, see the only way to attain this goal by a complete merger with one of the opposing groups which lay claims on them while looking down on them: Turks and Bulgarians. In a revealing interview the leader of the newly founded Movement for Christianity and Progress Father Boyan Sarîev recalls his days as a student in the police academy, and his subsequent service in the Ministry of Interior before he was fired as politically unreliable in 1987: at school, in the academy, and especially at work my fellow-workers would set me apart, they would put me down simply because I was … a Pomak. Circumcised! I was haunted by a morbid feeling, I was accumulating dissatisfaction … What I was bearing before as anguish was channeled into an idea, and the idea urged me to action … By language, by origins and mentality, by customs we are Bulgarians. It is unnatural to feel foreigners in our own fatherland. Only Christianity will return us to the Bulgarian roots.96 Others are even more outspoken about their motives. According to a Bulgarian Muslim veterinarian: “we are ready to convert to Christianity on the condition that we are not going to be treated as second-class Christians just as we were treated as second-class Bulgarians.”97 Similar motives apply to some of the 95  Ibidem. 96  “Bîlgaromohamedani priemat khristiyanstvoto ot … papata”, Bîlgarski dnevnik, N. 1, 14 June 1991, 18. 97  Ibidem.

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ones who look to the Muslim sphere as an acceptable assimilative alternative. Khadzhi Arif Karaibrahimov, at present district müfti for Smolyan, declines that there is a process of Turkification: This is not correct. There is no Turkification, there is attraction. Because, if a family terrorizes its children, but the neighbor embraces them, it is only natural that they would be attracted to him. If our country, which all Muslims consider their fatherland, treated everyone equally as a fair mother, believe me, I would strongly contend that nobody would look at the neighbor …98 Likewise, the mayor of Gotse Delchev, Khenrikh Mikhailov, comments on the ambiguous position of the Bulgarian Muslims: “This population occupies an intermediate position between the Bulgarians and the Turks. Neither fish nor flesh. And now it prefers to join the Turks because the Bulgarians devastated it, they battered it, didn’t give it a chance to exist.”99 These same motives have given some acceptance to the message of the Arab missionaries mentioned above. Laughable as it may seem, their argumentation have received some attention for at least two reasons: firstly, because it confers to the exponents of this belief a proper identity in the face of both Bulgarians and Turks who look down upon them even when they try to blend in their communities; and secondly, because it furnishes them with “their own” protectors from the Muslim world.100 This last element—the presence of a strong outside protector—is a very important component, present in practically all efforts of self-identification. The Bulgarian Muslims who wish to enter the Turkish ethnic group look to Turkey for economic and social salvation; Burov’s Pomak party very definitely wants to enlist American patronage; even Sarîev’s endeavor to bring the Pomaks back to their “Bulgarian roots” looks to the Vatican for support. Although his religious movement converts Bulgarian Muslims to Orthodoxy, it recognizes the supremacy of the Pope, not of the Bulgarian Patriarch. The reason, according to Sarîev, is that this is the only way to alert foreign public opinion about the problems of the Bulgarian Muslims: in the course of a century no one in Bulgaria either managed, or really wished to solve it. The authority of

98  “Unizhava ne tova, koeto vliza v ushite, a koeto izliza ot ustata”, Pogled, 13 September 1992. 99  Boyka Asiova, Kipra Dobreva, “Gorchivi plodove po lîkatushnata pîteka”, Duma, 14 December 1991. 100  Iordan Peev, “L’islam et les musulmans en Bulgarie”, 47–48.

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the Vatican would stand as a strong guarantee that this process of grass-roots conversion to Christianity would remain irreversible.101 The involvement of the foreign policy factor serves as a specially aggravating influence on the ethnic question. As a small and weak country which reappeared on the European scene only during the past century, Bulgaria has always felt extremely vulnerable to outside pressures. Particularly strong has been the “by-now stereotyped sense of threat from Turkey from the outside, and that of the Islamic minorities on the inside.”102 This is exacerbated at the present moment by a multitude of additional causes: first and foremost, the collapse of the Warsaw pact as a guarantee for Bulgarian security, and the attempt of the country to find its place in the European security system free from the status of a Soviet/Russian client state; the increased tendency to marginalize Southeastern Europe within the European framework following a double standard approach to East Central Europe and the Balkans; the simultaneous increased armament of Greece and Turkey after 1989 in the face of a total collapse of the Bulgarian military industry and military potential; the central role Turkey has set itself to play in the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, and its ambitions as protector of Muslim minorities in the Balkans; even more aggravating in this respect is the obvious backing Turkey is receiving from the United States and the perception that it is one of the favored client states of the only global super power; the chaos in the former Yugoslavia and the very controversial messages that the international community is sending.103 Some publications display close to paranoiac overtones: The loss of these 200,000 Bulgarians104 is not only yet another amputation on the body of the nation—a body already drained of its blood—but is also turning the Rhodopes where they predominantly live, in a true Turkish fortress. This creates favorable conditions for the emergence of a new Cyprus and for Turkey’s securing a bridgehead for an advance into Europe and, at first, into the Mohammedan regions of the disintegrating Yugoslavia: into the Sandzhak, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.105 101  “Bîlgaromohamedani priemat khristiyanstvoto ot … papata”, Bîlgarski dnevnik, N. 1, 14 June 1991, 17. 102  Konstantinov, “‘Nation-State’ and ‘Minority’ Types of Discourse”, 81. 103  For a very strong statement on the position of Bulgaria, its military potential and its security, see the interview with defense minister Valentin Alexandrov published in 168 chasa, N. 48, 29 November 1993, 21. 104  I.e. Pomaks. 105  The quote is from one of the ultra-nationalist newspapers Zora, 28 January 1992. Cited from Konstantinov, “‘Nation-State’ and ‘Minority’ Types of Discourse”, 77.

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The publication of a map with the geographic distribution of ethnic Turks in Bulgaria in a 1990 issue of “The International Herald Tribune” made room for apocalyptic comments. The map showed the whole Black sea coast as a region inhabited by ethnic Turks, and was seen as a proof that “the ethno-religious problems will be linked to territorial and separatist claims.”106 Leaving aside the debate on whether the threat to Bulgarian security is a real or perceived one, it is at least possible to argue the “to a certain extent, the removal of that feeling of threat lies beyond the competence of the Bulgarian state.”107 Indeed, as Henry Kissinger well realizes, the global approach to security issues in gives ample ground for anxiety: “The Partnership for Peace runs the risk of creating two sets of borders in Europe—those that are protected by security guarantees, and others where such guarantees have been refused—a state of affairs bound to prove tempting to potential aggressors and demoralizing to potential victims.”108 This feeling of threat is further aggravated by the uncertainty of what constitutes a national minority by international standards, and what would be the precise implications of its legal recognition.109 Among a variety of different and controversial opinions, the main difficulty in reaching a common interpretation seems to lie in the opposing approach to minority rights as collective or as individual rights. While not denying the multiethnic character of the Bulgarian nation, the fears expressed by the Bulgarian side about the recognition of national minorities are based on the danger of secessionism. Farfetched as these fears might seem at first sight, the ambiguous and controversial approach of the international organizations to the questions of self-determination versus territorial integrity in general,110 and in the Yugoslav case, in particular, 106  Rumyana Modeva, “Natsionalna stabilnost ili etnicheska konfrontatsiya ni ochakva”, Duma, N. 180, 5 August 1993. 107  Konstantinov, “‘Nation-State’ and ‘Minority’ Types of Discourse”, 81. 108  Excerpt from Henry Kissinger’s book Diplomacy, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994, published in Time, March 14, 1994, 76. 109  For an account of the work of European institutions in the postwar period on the problem of ethnic minorities, see Rudolf Kern, “Europäische Institutionen und Minderheiten”, Minderheitenfragen in Südosteuropa, 61–77. 110  See, in this respect, the ill-begotten initiative of French Prime Minister Edouard Baladur for signing a pact on European stability. This project, initiated in June 1993, although pro forma pan-European with the participation of the United States and Canada, was actually supposed to deal only with East Central and Eastern Europe, “the countries whose relations are not yet stabilized by their association with one of the great European political formations”. While verbally committed to the inviolability of frontiers, the plan, in fact, envisaged the possibility of border changes. It also clearly showed a switch to the collective interpretation of minority rights. Preliminary discussions with all East European representatives who objected vehemently to the double standart, virtually have invalidated

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compounds these concerns. Even the latest developments, with creating first a federation in Bosnia between Croats and Muslims, and then a confederation with Croatia, laudable as they are as a concrete attempt at solving the crisis, set precedents, which are observed with apprehension.111 The issue is conceptually unclear also among exponents of the idea of increased rights for the ethnic minorities. While some members of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms request the recognition of national minorities as the only guarantee for their survival,112 the leader of the party Ahmed Dogan warned that Europe was delaying the decision on the issue of ethnic minorities because of its explosiveness. At a municipal conference, he offered an award of 1,000 to any of the deputies who would define the preconditions for a national minority.113 It is naive to attribute the denial of minority existence to a typically Balkan syndrome. Rather, given the extremely complex demographic and geopolitical picture of the region, it would be utopian to expect that Bulgaria, the other Balkan states and, as a matter of fact, all other East European countries as well, would adopt recognition of national minorities before international criteria are agreed upon. 4 Conclusions To summarize the argument, in dealing with the intermediate position of the Bulgarian Muslims (the Pomaks) in the framework of the Bulgarian nationstate, and especially with the process of formation and transformation of their group identities, it is imperative to recall both the historical legacy of the Ottoman empire with its millet system, aa well as the mechanisms of ethnic/ nation formation in the Balkans and specifically in Bulgaria, with its linguistic and religious centrality. This effectively excluded members of the majority the initiative. It is significant to remember, however, that while France advocates collective rights of minorities as applied to Central and Eastern Europe, it has opposed this approach for the whole continent (see, France’s stand at the Kopenhagen conference of 1990, described in Rudolf Kern, “Europäische Institutionen und Minderheiten”, 68). 111  Questions arise about the future of the Serbs in Bosnia. Are they going to be allowed to step into a confederation (even if not seen as a possible step for unification) with Serbia proper, as the latest information from the White House seems to indicate? What will the attitude toward the Kosovo Albanians be were they to demand a confederative status with Tirana at a later date? And the Albanians in Macedonia? And if the same happens to the Hungarians in Slovakia or in Romania? And all the Russians living in the former republics of the USSR? 112   168 chasa, 26 September 1993. 113   Standart, 18 October 1993.

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of different confessional and linguistic groups from the process of national integration (except in the cases of assimilation). For a long time after independence, the Muslim community was consistently dealt with in millet terms. With the gradual exception of the Turks, the Balkan Muslims did not adapt to the national mode and retained a fluid consciousness which for a longer time displayed the characteristics of a millet mentality. While the Turks were the first to shed the millet identity within the Muslim sphere, they did so to a great extent influenced by the development of Turkish nationalism in neighboring Turkey. The Bulgarian Muslims (the Pomaks), on their part, persevered in their refusal to conform to a definite type of ethnic/national identity. Throughout this century, the several drastic attempts to forcefully assimilate them into the Bulgarian community have been superficial, despite the degree of violence and humiliation involved in them. They were merely semiotic changes, affecting names, religion, costume, rituals, without in any way touching on the wider issues of their social and economic integration. As a group, the Bulgarian Muslims remained almost completely isolated. Only during the communist period were some efforts initiated for the economic development of these regions, but they remained sporadic, inconsistent and insufficient. After 1989, the areas inhabited by the Bulgarian Muslims have been the ones most severely hit by the economic crisis with all the ensuing repercussions on social, ethnic and political actions and mobilization. Among the many variables described or mentioned in this paper, the economy has been assigned a crucial role. It has been shown that the end of the centralized economy and the liberalization of economic efforts have resulted in a further marginalization of the Pomaks territories, where political mobilizers successfully exploit the economic issue. Economists and policy makers are well aware of this correlation, and a variety of views has been advanced to handle the problem.114 Yet, even if some improvement is achieved, something extremely problematic if not impossible in the short run, it is clear that it would produce not a solution but a deterrent; it would appease, mellow the conflict, but cannot on its own, remove the real or perceived boundaries. In addition, “at all times, and not only at moments of economic crisis, collective political actors emerge who may help to determine political outcomes.”115 Political parties and other groups exert strong pressure on the 114  See, in this respect the articles in the section “Ethnic relations and the economy” in Aspekti na etnokulturnata situatsiya v Bîlgariya, 197–279. 115  John Rex, “Ethnic Mobilization in a Multicultural Society”, Innovation in Social Sciences Research, vol. 5, No. 3, 1992, 72.

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Pomak population. Their success in acquiring loyalties and in shaping identities obviously depends on how far they are able to meet group interests. In their intricate maneuvering between what they wish to offer and what they are able to deliver, they are caught up in a complex game within the state political sphere which imposes on them a set of different limitations. Among these factors foreign policy constraints are of prime importance. As already indicated, the precarious geopolitical situation of the country, the new interpretations of national security that include also the economy, the explosive issue of ethnic minorities in the new international context further compound the struggle between political groups and the search for efficient solutions. The quest for group self-identification in the pursuit of group interests is a defining feature in the development of the Bulgarian Muslim (Pomak) population. As one researcher has put it, they are “well aware of their group distinction, and are now looking for ways to explain it.”116 This statement, however, needs some elaboration. Despite the fact that the Bulgarian Muslims (the Pomaks) are usually seen and described as a compact entity by the out-groups, their presumed uniformity is far from real. Precisely because they were not caught in the homogenizing efforts of the nation-state, regionalism among them is even more pronounced than among other groups. Therefore, their response to the challenges of the new economic and political climate after 1989 takes the form of a variety of group identities, rather than of a single one. In this process, the link between self-identification and interest is direct, although they are involved in a complex dialectical process, not a one-way causal deterministic relationship. What we are witnessing, in fact, is the deconstruction of an imagined community (in the sense of Benedict Anderson117), but a community imagined by the out-groups, not by the in-group. As a result, although there still is a part which displays characteristics of identity diffusion (uncertainty as to who they are), the majority increasingly adopts identity foreclosure (commitment to one identity at the expense of all others).118 As a whole, it is forced to identify along the lines of the divide between Bulgarians and Turks. It remains to be seen whether the competing attempts to create a distinct group self-identity will have any chance of success in the future.

116  Tsvetana B. Georgieva, “Struktura na vlastta v traditsionnata obshtnost na pomatsite v rayona na Chech (Zapadni Rodopi)”, Etnicheskata kartina v Bîlgariya, 74. 117  See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 118  On identity diffusion and foreclosure, see John Rex, “Ethnic Mobilization in a Multicultural Society”, 66.

chapter 20

Midhat Pasha and the Bulgarians This chapter is based on a paper given at the Eighth Symposium of the Comité International des Études Pré-Ottomanes et Ottomanes (CIEPO), held in Minnesota in 1988, and published as “Midhat Paşa’s Governorship of the Danube Province,” in Ceasar E. Farah, ed. Decision Making and Change in the Ottoman Empire, Kirksville: The Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1993, 115–128. One of the highpoints of Midhat’s career, his governorship of the Danube province in the 1860s, coincided with the height of the Bulgarian educational and national-liberation movement. Thus, the topic gives an interesting insight on the juncture between modernizing efforts and nationalism. The idea that the newly formed Danube province in Bulgaria in the 1860’s (Tuna vilayeti) served as an experimental ground for Midhat Pasha’s reform ideas and later reform policy on an all-Ottoman scale is widely accepted. In fact, under the new Provincial regulation aiming at extending the Tanzimat reforms and especially with the promulgation of the Reform law of 1864 which followed the example of the centralized French provincial administration, four “model” vilayets were organized where the new ideas could be implemented and experimented.1 With Midhat Pasha in the lead of the reform movement and first governor (vali) of the Danube province, Bulgaria became the test case for his ideas and policy.

It is not the main purpose of this chapter to make a comprehensive outline of Midhat’s activities in the legal, administrative, financial, cultural and other spheres. Rather, two questions will be asked which aim at an overall assessment of Midhat’s reform policy in the provinces: What was the reaction among the Bulgarian population to his reforms? How propitious for the success of his ideas was the choice of Bulgaria as the experimental field? No doubt Midhat’s governorship of the eyalet of Nish from 1861 to 1864 made him the singular best choice for the post of vali of the Danube province. In fact, the new province comprised three former eyalets—Nish, Vidin and Silistra— and was subsequently divided into seven sancaks (Nish, Vidin, Sofia, Tulcha, 1  H. J. Kornrumpf, Die Territorialverwaltung im östlichen Teil der europäischen Täürkei vom Erlass der Vilayetsordnung (1864) bis zum Berliner Kongress (1878) nach amtlichen osmanischen Veröffentlichungen (Freiburg, 1976), 22–23; St. S. Shaw & E. K. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Vol. II (Cambridge University Press, 1977, 88–90). Carter V. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire. The Sublime Porte, 1789–1922 (Princeton, NJ, 1980), 181–182.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_022

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Varna, Russe and Tîrnovo).2 After 1864 Midhat continued on a broader scale the reform activities he had already started in Nish. The Danube province, with its strategic location on the northern borders of the empire, with its mixed non-Muslim and Muslim population of about two millions, with a comparatively lively and expanding economy, seemed ideally suited to fulfil the ambitions of the Reform law of 1864.3 Being one of its authors, Midhat envisaged Bulgaria as “the key area in which to try out a system designed to hold the empire together.”4 Midhat’s reforms comprised several spheres: administration, jurisdiction, as well as a range of economic, cultural and educational activities. At the center of his administrative reform were the administrative councils, consultative bodies, where elected representatives of both the Muslim and the non-Muslim population took part alongside with appointed government officials. The councils were intended to put an end to the arbitrariness of local authorities. The very mechanism of the electoral system however allowed authorities to wholly nominate only convenient persons. Judged from the point of view of practical results, the administrative reform with its strict electoral qualifications, based on property, education and age, had hardly any effect on the broader mass of the local population, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. It was intended to create support among the Christian oligarchy and as a first step to the gradual integration of the non-Muslim population in the administration. In practice, even in regions with a predominantly Christian population a Muslim majority was secured.5 However, viewed in the context of the Tanzimat reforms, the administrative changes in the Tuna vilayeti were the first ones to introduce the principles of electiveness and representation. There are enough reasons to believe

2  Eyalet (province) is a smaller administrative unit than the vilayet. Sancak is a subdivision of a province. 3  On the population of the Tuna vilayeti see Nikolay Todorov, The Balkan City, 1400–1900 (University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 1983), 309–326; Kemal Karpat, Ottoman population, 1830–1914. Demographic and Social Characteristics (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 116–117. 4  R. H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire. 1856–1876 (Princeton, 1963), 151. 5  Ibid., 149. Ilber Ortayli, “Midhat Paşa’nın Vilayet Yönetimindeki Kadroları ve Politikası” in: Uluslararasi Midhat Pasa Semineri. Bildiriler ve Tartismalar. Edirne, 8–10 Mayis 1984. (Ankara, 1986), 227–233. Ortayli maintains that Midhat intentionally hampered the introduction of the project of nahiye administration which was envisaged by the Vienna protocol of 1855. The nahiye councils were to be elected by a majority vote and their number would be over one hundred. Given the preponderance of Christians in the vilayet, Midhat never went along with the implementation of the project, and the number of places with the statute of a nahiye was kept down to 15. (Op. cit., 230).

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that the administrative councils were conceived as a pioneering step towards the introduction of parliamentary rule in the Ottoman Empire.6 Courts were reorganized on a similar basis, including a certain number of elective members from the Muslims and the millets. Being predominantly Muslim and not accepting Christian evidence against a Muslim, even in their reformed version they were viewed with suspicion or indifference by the non-Muslim population. Still, the slightest modifications in the legal sphere encountered the fierce opposition of many representatives of the old judicial order, something which compelled Midhat to substitute them with newly appointed officials from Constantinople. Rumors were spread that the sharia courts were being abolished and that the Sharia was to be abrogated.7 It could be argued that this was a sphere in which Midhat’s efforts met little if any practical success, but were important for challenging traditional stereotypes and vested interests. Certainly, the most successful of Midhat’s undertakings were his measures aimed at increasing the welfare of the population. Among these a significant part was occupied by his activities in road construction and a general improvement in conditions and means of transportation. During his four years in office more than 3000 km (about 1240 miles) of road and 1420 bridges were reputed to have been built.8 During his governorship the construction of one of the first railroads in the Ottoman Empire was completed, connecting Russe and Varna. In this latter case, strategic considerations, beside the economic, were also instrumental. To this range of activities belonged also Midhat’s attempts to promote entrepreneurial initiatives. He himself was the founder of a company for the transportation of travelers with coaches as well as of a steamer service on the Danube. To serve the latter, enterprises for the construction and repair of vehicles were created.9 Reconstruction of the port of Russe was undertaken. Midhat created a weaving mill to serve the needs of the army but nothing is known of its further development.10 Handicraft schools in Russe, Nish and Sofia were opened to teach Muslim and Christian youths alike. Orphanages (islâhhane) were installed in Nish, Russe and Tulcha for children of all religious and ethnic backgrounds, where a variety of handicrafts and especially tanning were being taught. Agricultural machines were imported with the aim to propagate machine cultivation of 6  Ali Haydar Midhat Bey, Midhat Paşa: hayat-ı siyasiyesi, hidemat, menfa hayatı (Istanbul: Hilâl Matbaası), 1909, 23. 7  I. E. Fadeeva, Midhat pasha. Zhizn’ i deyatel’nost’ (Moskva, 1977), 23–24. 8  Ibid., 28. 9  Ibid., 32–33. 10  Enver Ziya.Karal, Osmanli tarihi. Cilt 7 (Ankara, 1956), 211.

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land. An exemplary farm was set up near Russe: the famous Numune Çiftliği.11 Although there is no indication of a special policy for the promotion of industrial development, the fact that Midhat himself was wearing homespun clothes (şayak) indicated indirectly his favorable attitude towards local industries, something that was widely appraised at the time.12 Probably the most important and lasting achievement in Midhat’s series of economic reforms was the organization of agricultural credit by the so-called “menafi umumi sandiklari.” The creation of the agricultural banks was not only a pioneering initiative in the most important sphere of production, but also one of the few truly successful and effective reforms. This in itself justifies a closer look at the activities of the banks. The agricultural banks can be looked upon not only as a first attempt to organize agricultural credit in the Ottoman Empire but also as one of the first attempts in the field in Europe. In Germany from 1849 on, the agricultural banks of Reifeisen were introduced, but their wide spread occurred only in the latter half of the 1870’s.13 In France, the Agricultural Bank of Paris was founded in 1852. By the end of the 1850’s it began to distribute loans for agricultural ameliorations. The activities of the Agricultural Credit society, founded in 1860, failed and it was dissolved in 1876.14 Other European counties did not have special agricultural organizations, although during the 1860’s and 1870’s several banks granted individual agricultural credit.15 It is very probable that Midhat was acquainted with the existing European credit institutions during his six-months visit to Western Europe in 1858. There is also every ground to believe that Midhat was familiar with the local forms of public credit during his governorship of the eyalet of Nish.16 It is not our task here to deal with the formation, structure and functioning of the banks. Rather, an attempt is made to assess their effectiveness, i.e.

11  Felix Kanitz, La Bulgarie danubienne et le Balkan; études de voyage (18609–1880) (Paris: Hachette, 1882), 21; The Life of Midhat Pasha by his son Ali Haydar Midhat (London, 1903); Islâm Ansiklopedisi, cilt 33 (Istanbul, 2007). 12   Istoriya na Bîlgaria, Vol. 1 (Sofia, 1961), 235. 13  D. Danailov, “Raifaizenovite spestovno-zaemni sdruzhavaniya” in Kooperativno delo, 1, 1939, 4–7; Dichev, “Reifeisen, Schulze-Delitsch, Haas. Idei i prinzipi” in Vzaimnost, 17, 1909, 273–279. 14  N. Ikonomov, Istoriya na pozemleniya kredit (Sofia,1927), 23–28. 15  A. Daskalov, Zemedelskiyat kredit v Bulgariya. Chast I (Sofia, 1912), 5–10; Ikonomov. Op. cit., 28–30. 16  D. Kalinov, “Zemedelskoto proizvodstvo i zemedelskiyat kredit v Bîlgariya predi i sled Osvobozhdeniyeto” in Periodichno spisaniye na Bulgarskoto knizhovno druzhestvo, 1910, 71, 755–780; Ami Boué. La Turquie d’Europe (Paris, 1840), vol. 3, 38.

424 table 14

Guruş 101–200 201–500 501–1000 1001–2000 over 2000 Total

chapter 20 Number and proportion of borrowers according to the size of the loan (Agricultural Bank of Hacioğlu Pazarcik for 1865–1866)

Muslims (#) 223 777 648 410 202 2260

non-Muslims (#) Muslims (%) 67 226 212 75 23 603

9.8 34.5 28.7 18.1 8.9 100

non-Muslims (%) 9.8 37.4 35.2 12.5 3.9 100

to show who they served and how.17 This was accomplished by analyzing several account books from Northeast Bulgaria, some of them unpublished defters (registers), preserved in the Oriental Department of the “Kiril i Metodii” National Library in Sofia;18 others published registers in the series “Turkish sources for Bulgarian history”.19 These comprise nearly 3500 individual cases of borrowing. According to the statute of the banks loans could vary between 100 and 100 000 guruş.20 In practice medium-sized loans prevailed, as can be seen from Table 14. The bulk of borrowers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, falls in the group of loans between 200 and 1000 guruş. There is however a certain disproportion as far as the big loans are concerned. Muslims are certainly predominant in the 1001–2000 guruş group and especially in the group of the biggest loans, over 2000 guruş. Trying to answer what part of the population actually made use of the banks, available data from 1870–1871 for the sancak of Hacioğlu Pazarcik was analyzed (Table 15). The number of borrowers compared to the size of the male population of the whole sancak shows that 11.3 % of the male population received loans, the credit allotted by the bank amounting to nearly 2.5 million guruş.21 Taking into account that this was one of the poorer sancaks, it could 17  Maria Todorova, “Obshtopoleznite kasi na Midhat pasha,” in Istoricheski pregled, 1972, 5, 56–76; Seçil Akgün, “Midhat Paşa’nin kurduğu memleket sandiklari: Ziraat bankasinin kökeni” in Uluslararasi Midhat Pasa Semineri. Bildiriler ve Tartişmalar. Edirne, 8–10 Mayis 1984. Ankara, 1986, 185–211; Tevfik Güran, “Osmanli Imparatorlugunda Ziraat Kredi Politikasinin Gelismesi, 1840–1910” in Uluslararasi Midhat Pasa Semineri, 95–126. 18  “Kiril i Metodii” National Library. Oriental Department, TR 6/3, inventory N. 3755. 19   Turski izvori za bîlgarskata istoriya (Sofia, 1960), 563–732. 20  The statute was published in Dunav/Tuna, I, 7, 14 April 1865, articles VIII and X. 21  Todorova, op. cit., 75.

425

Midhat Pasha and the Bulgarians table 15

Proportion of borrowers and allotted loans in Guruş (Hacioğlu Pazarcik)

Muslims Non-Muslims Total

# of Borrowers

% of Borrowers

2260 603 2863

78.6 21.4 100

Loan amount 1,952,578 374,545 2,327,123

Loan %

Average loan

83.9 16.1 100

863 621 805

be assumed that other sancaks would be able to gather and respectively grant greater capital to a greater number of borrowers. As for the religious affiliation of the borrowers, it can be maintained, on the basis of available data, that the banks generally served Muslims and nonMuslims proportionally. The ratio between Muslims and non-Muslims among the borrowers (78.6% to 21.4%) corresponded exactly to the respective ratio among the population of the kaza22 of Eski Cumaya (Tîrgovishte): 79% to 21%.23 A certain disproportion in favor of the Muslims could be traced in the case of the size of the loan: the Muslims received 83.9%, the non-Muslims 16.1% of the credit allotted. The average size of the loan was 530 guruş for the bank of Eski Cumaya (Tîrgovishte) for 1865–1866, and 805 guruş for the bank of Hacioğlu Pazarcik (Dobrich) for 1870–1871.24 Similar calculations for other towns reveal average loans for different periods of 421 guruş (Svishtov), 773 guruş (Tîrnovo), 1050 guruş (Nova Zagora), 3028 guruş (Aitos).25 The average loans equaled the average annual income of a master-craftsman or an independent farmer and exceeded that of a hired laborer.26 The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that the size of the loan and its purchasing power made the credit help effective. It is difficult to follow up whether this financial help was used for purposes of production or consumption. There is some fragmentary evidence that the loans were used to buy cattle.27 As for the intentions of the banks, they explicitly aimed at encouraging the peasants to introduce more advanced ways 22  A sub-unit of the sancak. 23  V. T. Hindalov. Dobrudzha v minaloto spored turski ofitsialni iztochnitsi (Iz godishnika na Sofiiskata narodna biblioteka, 1926–1928). (Sofia, 1931), 218–222. 24  Todorova, op. cit., 72–73. 25  Daskalov, op. cit., 87. 26  Nikolay Todorov, “The Balkan Town in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century” in Etudes balkaniques, 2, 1969, 48. 27   Dunav/ Tuna, I, N. 7, 14 April 1865.

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of cultivation. Even the import of agricultural machines from the income of the banks was organized, but no further information exists. The sphere in which Midhat encountered real and complete failure was education. The mixed schools he envisaged met the fierce opposition of Muslim and non-Muslim communities alike. Still, in 1865 he ordered the chief kadi (judge) Necip efendi to draw up a project for the creation of mixed schools. The existing Christian schools supported by the religious communities were to be closed down, and the communities’ revenues to be added to part of the tax returns in order to back the new school system. In fact, the project envisaged three levels of education: 1. Sabiyan (primary) schools for small children. These were to be found in villages and mahalles, and were separate for the two communities, Turks and Bulgarians. The program encompassed reading, writing, some arithmetic and ethics. The Bulgarian schools in the mahalles were to introduce additional reading and writing in Turkish. 2. Rüşdiye (high) schools. They would comprise a five year course, and were to be common for both Turks and Bulgarians, but only in the towns. The first two years all children would learn Turkish grammar, and the Turkish children would be introduced to Bulgarian. The next three years arithmetic, algebra, geography and all other sciences were to be taught in Turkish. Only classes in religion would be separate. Also the study of French was to be introduced from the first year. 3. Idadiye (senior high) schools were also mixed and were to be founded only in kaymakam28 centers, the first one in Russe. Their curriculum was three years and comprised Turkish classes in mathematics and other natural sciences, history, law, economy and others.29 The precedent was to be set up in the town of Tîrnovo but the attempt completely failed. Several other efforts proved abortive. Significantly enough, the Education law passed in 1869 did not contain even the slightest allusion to the idea of mixed schools propounded by Midhat.30 In trying to assess the Bulgarian reaction to Midhat’s activities, I decided to confine myself to the Bulgarian press at the time of his governorship. The main idea behind this approach was to avoid any retrospective evaluations in later publications, both in the press and in separate brochures and books, as these would be greatly influenced by the importance of Midhat’s subsequent career and, for the later period, by the political outcome of the struggle for national independence. Of the 28  Head official of a district. 29   Vremya, I, 28, 19 February 1866. 30  Fadeeva, op. cit., 30–32.

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96 Bulgarian newspapers and magazines published in the three decades before 1878, a dozen coincided with Midhat’s governorship of the Danube province. They covered the whole diverse spectrum of ideological and political opinion in Bulgarian society at the time. Certainly, the closest attention to Midhat’s reform activities was paid by the bilingual Turkish-Bulgarian official gazette of the vilayet, the Tuna or Dunav weekly newspaper. Its founder and editor-in-chief was Ismail Kemal, a close collaborator of Midhat, to be followed later by Ahmed Midhat efendi. The paper gave detailed accounts of all envisaged and realized reforms, published official decrees, as well as the full texts of Midhat’s speeches, addressed to the general assembly of the vilayet or on other occasions. There were two Bulgarians on the editorial board, Ivan Chorapchiev and Stoil Popov. Although both were designated as editors, they were merely the translators of the Turkish part of the paper into Bulgarian. In fact, a series of Popov’s articles on the Bulgarian exarchate, a central theme in Bulgarian public opinion, was published in other papers. So, it is only with great caution that Tuna can be regarded as an example of the Bulgarian press at the time. During the 1860’s the struggle for an independent Bulgarian church and further development of the autonomous educational system was the main concern of the Bulgarian press. Leaving out Tuna, Midhat’s governorship was not extensively discussed, except in the cases where it directly touched on problems of education. On the whole, Midhat’s activities in the administrative and economic spheres received a favorable assessment in the main papers of the then strong and influential Bulgarian community in Istanbul: the overtly pro-Turkish paper Turtsiya (Turkey), subsidized by the Porte, the middle-of-the-road Vremya (Time), the liberal Makedoniya (Macedonia) and Gayda (Bagpipe), the latter two edited by the well-known poet and public figure Petko R. Slaveikov.31 It can be assumed that these assessments were candid, although the editors must have been quite aware of all the risks entailed in even the mildest criticism. On August 17, 1868 Makedoniya published an unsigned letter from Russe, the capital of the Danube province. The letter praised the new administration for its achievements in reconstructing, renewing and embellishing the town. It specially stressed Midhat’s benevolent attitude towards the Bulgarians: the 31   Turtsiya, I, N. 29, 6 February 1865, N. 32, 27 February 1865, N. 35, 20 March 1865, N. 37, 3 April 1865, N. 43, 15 May 1865, N. 44, 22; May 1865; III, N. 39, 25 March 1867, N. 47, 17 June 1867; V, N. 11, 6 May 1869, N. 14, 24 May 1869; Vremya, I, N. 45,25 June 1866; Makedoniya, I, N. 23, 6 May 1867; II, N. 11, 10 February 1868; III, N. 1,28 June 1869; Gaida, II, add. to N. 16, N. 19, 15 March 1865.

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fact that many Bulgarians had been appointed as public officials and some in eminent positions. The only critical remark concerned the lavish expenditures given out to support both the regular and the secret police. Spying was described as the most serious societal canker, and the letter concluded that the government did not trust the population, but spying would alienate it still further. At the end of August Makedoniya was closed down by the official Turkish censorship and its publication was resumed only in November. It was widely believed that it was this letter that had caused such severe steps.32 This vehement reaction was curious and to a certain degree unexpected, as the laudatory part of the letter far outweighed the critical; the more so as Midhat had hardly promoted any Bulgarians and certainly did not have a single one in his immediate entourage. There is only scanty evidence of Bulgarians being involved in the new local government. In a letter sent from Russe and intended to praise Midhat’s achievements in integrating the Bulgarians, there is mention of two Bulgarians included in the administrative council of the vilayet: Hadji Ivancho Penchovich and Yurdan Hadji Nikolov. Two other Bulgarians, Atanas Hadji Petkov and Angel Pop Angelov were members of the kaymakam council. Another two, Ivan Mavridi and Angel Pop Glagolist, became members of the judicial council.33 Taking into account the purpose of the letter, it can be assumed that the information it gave was exhaustive. The assumption that at the time there were not enough educated Bulgarians is preposterous, especially when juxtaposed with Midhat’s policy in Baghdad a few years later, where he easily raised local Arabs to important positions. This fact has been given notice by some historians, and it has rightly been connected with Midhat’s awareness of Bulgarian nationalism.34 In a later conversation with a Bulgarian whom he had met while in exile in Naples, Midhat was quite explicit: “Among the Bulgarians I have seen only one intelligent person, Chomakov. All other Bulgarians are ready to become servants or slaves to Russia.”35 Midhat was certainly kept up in these fears by the Greek clergy and especially the bishop of Tîrnovo, Paisii, to whom he gave his unwavering support at the height of the Greek-Bulgarian church dispute.36 Even the more conservative Bulgarian press in Istanbul quite openly attacked the Greek clergy for its attempts to manipulate Midhat’s policy towards the

32  M. Radoev, Biografiya na Ivan Nikolov Momchilov (Sofia, 1912), 28. 33   Gayda, II, 1965. Supplement to N. 16. 34  Davison, op. cit., 154; Ortayli, op. cit., 230. 35   Stara planina, I, N. 56, 16 March 1877, 3. 36  Fadeeva, op. cit., 31–32.

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Bulgarians.37 Another similar influence should not be overlooked: a substantial part of Midhat’s cadre consisted of Polish and Hungarian émigrés, extremely sensitive against any kind of potential Russian influence.38 Significantly enough, it was the most radical Bulgarian newspaper Svoboda (Freedom), published by the revolutionary emigration in Bucharest, which summarized the irony of the situation a few years later: “The Turkish Europeans (Young Turkey), the foreigners, the Greeks and the Poles hope that Midhat is going to be useful to them; the Old Turks, the Bulgarians and all other Slavic races believe that Midhat will cause them great damage.”39 All this makes Midhat’s strong reaction against the dualistic program put forward by the Bucharest-based Secret Central Bulgarian Committee more understandable. In 1867, part of the moderate wing of the Bulgarian emigration in Bucharest, organized around the SCBC, submitted to Sultan Abdülaziz a project for a constitution comprising twenty one articles. This memorandum followed closely the Austro-Hungarian monarchical statute of Ferenz Deak and envisaged a dual, federative state, with Abdülaziz as both Ottoman sultan and Bulgarian tsar. It explicitly pointed as its model to the Ausgleich or to the position of Algeria vis-à-vis France. This “first constitutional project in the history of the Ottoman empire”, as it has been described by a Turkish scholar,40 was never given serious consideration by the Porte. At the same time the Secret Central Bulgarian Committee published a pamphlet, “Bulgaria in front of Europe”, expounding its dualistic views. Midhat issued a ban on the circulation of the pamphlet and conducted numerous house searches.41 Such reaction is quite symptomatic, the more so as the ideas of the committee never found strong footing among Bulgarian public opinion and were passionately criticized both from the left and from the right. The one issue, on which all Bulgarian papers completely agreed, was education. Their answer to Midhat’s efforts at introducing mixed Turkish-Bulgarian schools was to launch a massive and successful campaign against his policy. After the Crimean war the Bulgarians had managed to set up a network of 37   Makedoniya, II, N. 8, 20 January 1867; III, N. 3, 14 December 1868; similar moods could be also discerned in the otherwise exceedingly loyal Turtsiya, II, N. 43, 30 April 1866; III, N. 13, 17 September 1866. See also later attacks on the part of the revolutionary press Svoboda, III, N. 13, 23 September 1872. 38  Ortayli, op. cit., 227–228; Davison, op. cit., 155. 39   Svoboda, III, N. 19, 4 November 1872. 40  Ortayli, op. cit., 233. The author maintains that this project had been undoubtedly influenced by the success and experience of Midhat’s governorship. Given however the open criticism voiced by the Committee against Midhat such an assertion is difficult to accept. 41  Fadeeva, op. cit., 33–34.

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secular schools, supported by the local communities. Midhat’s attempt to use this network as a basis for the introduction of his educational project was viewed as an encroachment upon Bulgarian rights and a violation of the stipulations of the Hatt-i Humayun of 1856. The most conservative papers, like Turtsiya, published editorials explaining at length Midhat’ project and cautiously juxtaposed it to letters or oral opinions received from local communities.42 Vremya, published by the conservative, educationalist circles in Istanbul, with a strong stake in the church struggle and in the cultural evolution of the Bulgarians by means of education, went into lengthy comments. It emphasized that the present situation of the Bulgarian schools and their activities were in fact an implementation of the main ideas of the project. However, the paper argued strongly against the provision that all disciplines, like algebra, geometry etc. should be studied in Turkish. According to the paper, this would have at least two negative consequences: first, if they were not being taught in Bulgarian, those disciplines would not be properly mastered, and secondly, the Bulgarian language itself would not be adequately learned and acquired. It was stressed further that until recently Greek was an obligatory language in the school curriculum, and that required strenuous attempts, of at least 4 to 5 years, on the part of the students to master the language. The difficulties with Ottoman Turkish would be much greater.43 The newspaper also voiced the belief that no matter how noble Midhat’s aims were, they would hardly be achieved by depriving one of the races of its mother language. It also pointed out the relevant parts of the Hatt-i Humayun and stated that Midhat’s project contradicted the Hatt of 1856.44 The newspaper Makedoniya went even further in its attack. It published a letter from Shumen against the project and apparently sided with all its argumentation. The letter expressed bewilderment at the fact that the measures were confined only to the Bulgarian schools, but did not affect the Greek, Armenian or Jewish schools. It was further suggested that the government of the province would do better to open more Turkish schools and raise the educational level among the Turks, rather than infringe upon the rights of the Bulgarians.45 The emigrant press published in Romania was naturally more radical and overtly critical of Midhat. Dunavska zora (Danubian dawn), edited by Dobri Voinikov and Dimitîr Panichkov, two outstanding writers and educators of 42   Turtsiya, II, N. 32–33, 19–26 February 1866, N. 38–39, 12 April 1866; IV, N. 15, 25 November 1867. 43   Vremya, I, N. 28, 19 February 1866. 44   Vremya, I, N. 34, 9 April 1866. 45  Makedoniya, I, N. 47, 21 October 1867.

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their time, was published in Braila and was considered the organ of the liberal and democratic circles of the Bulgarian emigration north of the Danube. In several materials devoted to Midhat’s project it went so far as to unequivocally accuse him of turkifying attempts.46 Being well aware of the intensity of Bulgarian nationalism Midhat attempted to curb it in three ways.47 The first was to try impose good and efficient government and as a result win over the broad mass of the population. Although in the long run and retrospectively Midhat’s governorship in this respect came to be viewed favorably, it is far from certain that his immediate policies were welcomed as a relief. One example was his road construction activities. Both Christians and Muslims were highly dissatisfied with the fact that the construction funds were covered completely by the taxes and that they were obliged to work free of charge. In case they refused to work, they had to supply a substitute or pay the daily sum to hire a worker instead.48 When Midhat opened the first steam flourmill in Ruse, this caused the vehement protest of bakers who closed down their bakery shops.49 As already mentioned before, Bulgaria was the ideal ground for one, and in some respects the only one, of his reforms: the introduction of agricultural credit organizations. This is partly to be explained with the existing crediting traditions of the guilds and the church; it is no mere coincidence that the newly founded agricultural banks flourished in Bulgaria, whereas the same attempt in the Arab lands failed a few years later. His administrative and judicial reforms made him highly unpopular among the conservative Ottoman opposition. At the same time Midhat failed to attract and rely upon a layer of potential supporters among the Bulgarian population. In the 1860’s, the social structure of the Bulgarian society, overwhelmingly agrarian, was nevertheless quite differentiated, with a well-defined commercial and partly industrial elite and an influential educated class. With minor exceptions, Midhat pasha, obviously oversensitive to the rising Bulgarian nationalism, made no serious and

46   Dunavska zora, I, N. 5, 11 December 1867, N. 6, 18 December 1867; N. 50, 27 October 1868. In a later material from 22 January 1877, published in French, the Bucharest based liberal newspaper Stara planina (The Balkan mountain), N. 46 returned to Midhat’s educational project, whose essence was “de réunir nos écoles à celles de mahometanes et ceci sous le pretexte de donner une organization uniforme à l’instruction publique; les écoles turques sont excessivement rares et d’un ordre infime, les notres au contraire, nombreuses, mieux organisées et surtout mieux dotées par nos communautés”. 47  Davison, op. cit., 154. 48  Fadeeva, op. cit., 25. 49   Narodnost, I, N. 2, 27 October 1867.

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systematic attempt to win over and involve even the most loyal and conservative part of the Bulgarian elite. His second way of dealing with Bulgarian nationalism was to promote his ideas of Osmanlilik (Ottomanism) by creating a good educational system in mixed schools. This attempt, as we have seen, encountered the severe opposition of practically all educated strata of Bulgarian society. At the same time it made him highly unpopular among the Muslim communities too, and especially among the Muslim clergy, who feared an encroachment upon its prerogatives over education. Midhat’s third way of action was straightforward and severe repression of any revolutionary manifestations. During the 1860’s and the 1870’s the organized revolutionary struggle for national independence was at its height. In April and May of 1867 the Bulgarian revolutionary committee in Bucharest organized and sent over two revolutionary bands of over 300 men. They were led by Panayot Hitov and Philip Totyu, two legendary figures in the Bulgarian revolutionary pantheon. By August of the same year the activities of the bands were completely liquidated and harsh retaliations followed against real or potential sympathizers. The result was that in the broadest circles of the Bulgarian population Midhat pasha came to be perceived as an able but alien administrator, and as the chief foe of any manifestation of Bulgarian national emancipation, cultural or political. One additional source of discontent, among the Bulgarian population in particular, was the settlement of numerous Tatar and Circassian refugees from Russia as a result of the Crimean war. The Ottoman government followed a policy of planned colonization in North-Eastern Bulgaria and Dobrudzha which lasted well into the 1860’s, “with the idea that they would help to serve also as a countermeasure to separatist activities among the Bulgars.”50 On one hand, the authorities had to supply the new immigrants with land and housing, all the burdens of which fell on the local population through a system of state loans and forced labor.51 On the other hand, the new population, part of which had never been settled, resorted to brigandage and virtually pillaged the immediate neighborhood. It is clear from the numerous studies on the Bulgarian national movement and the development of Bulgarian society in the 1860’s and 1870’s that 50  Davison, op. cit., 151–152. 51  Mark Pinson, “Ottoman colonization of the Tatars in Bulgaria and Dobruja, 1854–1862,” VII. Türk Tarihi Kongresi, Ankara, Eylül 1970. Kongreye Sunulan Bildiriler.Vol. II, Ankara, 1973, 1040–1058; “Russian Policy and the Emigration of the Crimean Tatars, 1854–186,” Güney-Doğu Avrupa Araştirmalari Dergisi, I, 1972, 37–56.

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the colonization of Tatars and Circassians was to a great degree instrumental in the radicalization of Bulgarian public opinion in the decade preceding the Russo-Turkish war of 1877/1878. Although the resettlement of the immigrants begun before Midhat pasha assumed the post of vali of the Danube province, he gave his powerful endorsement to this policy, and as a result came to be identified with it. There is a curious passage in the memoirs of a Bulgarian, Georgi Katranov/ Katrancioğlu, who had been arrested in 1867 on suspicion of having been involved in revolutionary activities. In 1871 he published his memoirs in a series of several articles in Svoboda.52 Katranov was personally interrogated by Midhat pasha and although the charges against him were unconfirmed he was imprisoned. While in prison, he was kept with another sixteen of his fellow Bulgarians and twenty five Turks, charged with brigandage, in a common cell. He described his conversation with one of the Turks: This Turk looked at me in a way that expressed great sympathy and pity for my fate and said: “Such things, brother, should not be undertaken with 40, but with 40 000 people. If you were willing to act for both your good and ours, you should have raised everybody and shown this donkey Midhat pasha and the other bloodsuckers that it is a sin to drink the people’s blood like yoghurt. Do you think that we are going to raise against you and slaughter you, as we have done once upon a time? Today we fare even harder than you: we pay the padishah the same as you do, but we also fill the army and sacrifice our children for the donkey’s shadow. Not only are we not going to empty a single rifle against you; we are going to join you, and let us see then if something can be managed. Only, you should bear in mind one thing if you happen to take up arms again: you should fight the sultan and his army, but not kill the peaceful peasants, who are even unhappier than you are; you should slay the officials, the kadis, the zaptiyes, the efendis, the beys and the pashas, but not the poor who have done you no wrong. You should know that, except for the Circassians and the army, not a single Turk will stand out against you. You think we are blissfully happy in our homes? If we felt well, we wouldn’t have become robbers (kapisiz) and kill people.” Even if on close scrutiny this story can appear to be somewhat fictitious, embellished and idealized, or even a plain propaganda piece, it nevertheless 52   Svoboda, II, N. 38, 17 January–20 February 1871. The above-mentioned story is described in N. 7, 13 February 1871.

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accounts for at least one fact. In the revolutionary ideology of the day Midhat pasha was viewed not merely as the great opponent of the national struggle; he was pictured also as the common oppressor, the embodiment of a repressive government, which had alienated all strata of the population, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation. It is easy to pass retrospective judgement on Midhat’s reforms as being doomed from the outset. In a more cautious wording, however, it could be maintained that he tried to implement a program for the preservation of the Ottoman Empire at a time and in a setting which were singularly unfavorable to the achievement of his goals.

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Improbable Maverick or Typical Conformist? Seven Thoughts on the New Bulgaria In 1990, Ivo Banac organized a conference on “Eastern Europe in Revolution” at Yale University, and the papers from this meeting were published two years later in a volume under the same title. The conference aimed at an assessment on the annus mirabilis—the year 1989—in a comparative East European framework. Written at a time when the futuristic imagination of many political analysts was particularly inflamed, this article was arguing for more attention to the workings of historical factors of longue durée. The chapter came out in Ivo Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in Revolution, Cornell University Press, 1992, 148–167. I have added updated literature in notes 20 and 26.

1 Introduction If only we had your problems … The best thing about one of Timothy Garton Ash’s latest pieces, his “Ten Thoughts on the New Europe”,1 was his ending, i.e. His Tenth Thought: “We should keep things in proportion. Most of the rest of humankind will (rightly) say: “If only we had your problems …” Although T. G. Ash had not envisaged Bulgaria (he does not write about Bulgaria and Romania, and who writes about Albania?), this key-phrase of multi-ethnic East-European origin certainly sums up the attitude Bulgarians have vis à vis Europe. Now that I have borrowed Ash’s conclusion as a motto (itself borrowed from East European everyday jargon), and that it rightly or wrongly reflects the self-perception of Bulgarians about their own and Europe’s problems, it might not be thought too immodest to propose only seven thoughts on the new Bulgaria. What follows is an attempt to convey the general feeling about developments in Bulgaria immediately prior and after the autumn of 1989 from a Bulgarian perspective (or, rather, from one possible Bulgarian perspective). 1  T. G. Ash. “Ten Thoughts on the New Europe”, The New York Review of Books, XXXVII, N. 10, June 14, 1990, 22.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_023

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I would wish to believe that my approach is essentially Weberian, i.e. multifactor, and does not necessarily reflect a hierarchy of priorities, especially now that it is not bon ton to sound marxisante, let alone outright Marxist. Still, it must be the Freudian damn of a long-term brain-wash that has conditioned the order of problems to be outlined, beginning with the economy, although there is certain justification in the fact that, for all the euphoria over democratization, intellectuals’ revolution and so on., economic problems have been dominant throughout the public discourse. 2

The Economy Question to Radio Erevan: “Can shock-therapy help us accomplish in a shorter time what Sweden has achieved in 200 years?” Answer: “Certainly. It can be done in only 199.”

Bulgaria was one of the relatively late comers to the East European economic crisis. 1984 has been pointed out as the last year in a nearly fifteen-years period of comparatively stable foreign trade relations, although the deficit had been steadily rising from the beginning of the 1980s.2 What happened in the 5 or 6 years until the end of the 1980s was that Bulgaria lost all stabilizing elements which kept up the economy of the country, and with a foreign debt of over $10.3 billion is steadily creeping from a profound into a deeper economic crisis. Throughout its post-war existence Bulgaria’s exports were linked to the economy of the Soviet Union and the other Eastern bloc countries, i.e. to the non-hard currency markets, with over 80 per cent, more than any other of its COMECON counterparts. The rest was filled primarily with exports to the oilproducing countries of the Near and the Middle East. It has to be kept in mind that Bulgaria is one of the most dependent oil-importing states of Europe. The fall of the oil-prices in 1985–1986 was followed by the practical loss of the main dollar markets for Bulgaria, with a resulting indebtedness of those countries to Bulgaria with over $ 2.3 billion which can hardly be expected to be paid soon, especially with the present Middle East crisis. The debt falls mostly on Iraq, Libya, Nicaragua, Algeria, Syria, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Angola.3 At the

2  Demokratsiya, I, 9, 22 February 1990. The deficit in millions US $ has been: 919 (1982), 1125 (1983), 2111 (1984), 1456 (1985), 1727 (1986), 1947 (1987), 2003 (1988). 3  Duma, I, 111 & 112, 23 & 24 July 1990.

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same time, the cheap flow of Soviet oil drastically diminished, and as of 1991 even this further decreasing quantity goes on a dollar basis. The disintegration of the traditional East European and Soviet markets where Bulgaria had by far its only possibility to export the produce of its heavy, electronic, chemical and light industry became a major problem for the effectiveness and, indeed, the very existence of these industries. Over 70% of its COMECON exports were machinery and electronics.4 On the other hand, considering the structure of the foreign debt, it is indicative for the extreme dependence of Bulgarian industries on foreign imports that over 60% of the hard-currency expenditures during the last five years were used for the import of raw and other materials.5 There is practically no industrial branch whose hard-currency return is bigger than its hard-currency input. An additional blow were the continuous devaluations of the dollar. Bulgaria’s biggest debt is to Germany ($1.8 billion), Japan ($1.4 billion), Austria and England (about $1 billion each).6 On the whole, the country exports for dollars but imports for Deutsche Marks, Yens and Schillings. All of the above is meant not to explain the reasons for the economic crisis but solely its timing at the end of the 1980s. What is important here is that by the end of the 1980s the country’s economy was faced by a profound structural crisis, the result of the disintegration of its traditional foreign markets.7 The reasons for the specific market orientation of Bulgaria in the post-war period fall outside the framework of this analysis; besides, they are the outcome of a primarily political agenda (the Moscow-Yalta-Potsdam arrangements and the creation of the Stalinist “world order”) rather than of an economic choice. A lot has been written on the absurdity of the “socialist” economies, which can be characterized not as developed, nor as underdeveloped, but as erroneously developed economies. This systemic characteristic has also been accordingly applied to Bulgaria in the flood of the latest overall verdicts of the crumbling Bulgarian economy. However, relishing in tempting but simple explanations based on the irrationality of the system obscures a finer, nuanced, and concrete historical analysis. Stalinism has been described, among others, as a modernizing revolution, contradictory and even counterproductive, and 4  Financial Times. Newsletter. 4 May 1990. It goes without saying that most of the Bulgarian produce, as most East European produce, cannot compete on Western markets, due to lower quality goods based on antiquated technologies, despite the cheap labor force. 5  Duma, I, 122, 3 August 1990. 6  Duma, I, 111, 23 July 1990. 7  Bulgarian economic development has been characterized with a larger commitment to foreign trade than any other East European country or the USSR. See John R. Lampe. The Bulgarian Economy in the Twentieth Century. (London & Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986), 156.

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highly inappropriate for Eastern Europe.8 Yet, for Bulgaria, the verdict of an “ill-conceived attempt at modernization” is not so unambiguous. In many respects, at least in the first two decades, there was a boost in the economy of a backward agricultural country. To a great extent the development of “socialism” in Bulgaria immediately after 1944 and until the 1960s can be, and has been, seen in the light of modernization theory, as a gigantic and drastic attempt at industrialization, the rupture of the ties of the petty individual producer with his immediate economic basis: private property, both in the rural and in the urban milieu. It has been repeatedly shown that the extensive development of the planned economy within the framework of an overcentralized administrative structure, with an emphasis on heavy industry at the expense of all other sectors of the economy, and regardless of efficiency criteria to a high degree achieved its goal. By the early 1960s the country “had firmly established the basis of modern economic growth and structural change.”9 The period from the 1960s witnessed a gradual transition from extensive to intensive growth, i.e. with greater attention on productivity per input than on increased inputs. This was meant to be realized by a series of reform measures which fluctuated with the political developments in the block. On the whole, the set of reforms was meant to achieve greater efficiency rather than switch to a market economy, although introduction of market mechanisms and decentralization of ministerial controls were spelled out as its essence. The most important pressures for reform in Bulgaria, alongside the ones typical for the whole “socialist” system with the widening technological gap from the West especially after the 1970s, were the growing importance of foreign trade and the shortage of labor. The latter was the result of the sweeping economic shifts of the previous decades and the specific demographic development of the country.10 The disintegration of the first and the impasse reached by the second by the end of the 1980s contributed largely, though by no means determined, the 1989 course of events. The Communist episode in Bulgarian history is bound to be seen in terms of a specific response to the challenge of integrating peripheral and backward economies to the European mainstream. It has had some achievements to its credit and many more inadequacies but the basic challenge of longue durée is

8  George Schöpflin, “The Stalinist Experience in Eastern Europe”, Survey, 30, 3 (130), October 1988, 126. 9  John R. Lampe. The Bulgarian Economy, 9. 10  Ibid., 199.

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looming largely over Bulgaria just as it has been looming ever since the nineteenth century. 3

Demography and Social Structure Are we striving for the road to Europe, or for the road to the old people’s home? Newspaper Trud, 18 June 1990

The industrial revolution of the 1950s and 1960s was accompanied by demographic and social shifts, some with expected, others with unforeseeable results. The dramatic flow of labor force from the countryside to the cities was a common characteristic for all East European countries, yet nowhere did it reach the dimensions and the quick pace of the transformation as it did in Bulgaria. The combined effects of the extremely rapid industrialization and the miserable overpopulation in the countryside in the interwar period, alongside the administrative push through the collectivization program, resulted in a drastic change of the rural/urban ratio of the country: from 24.7% in 1946, the urban population almost doubled by 1965 (46.5%), to reach 66.4% in 1987.11 Translated in terms of social structure and labor force, this meant that the depletion of the number of agricultural workers resulted in an automatic swell of the ranks of industrial, construction and transportation workers.12 From a sociological-psychological viewpoint the adjustment of a first generation of urbanites and a first generation of industrial workers to the lifestyle of the city was accompanied by inevitable and deep reaching frustrations, and partial lumpenization. However deep, these frustrations were not enough to counterweigh an equally deep aversion to rural life as remembered from the interwar period, thus turning all hopes of a subsequent population shift to the village, based simply on nostalgia and a minimum of economic incentives, into a mere utopia. On the other hand, the strong opposition “town-village” typical for the interwar period was transformed into an inter-city opposition between “citizens” and “peasants”, groups with a rather undefinable social basis given the fluidity of the Bulgarian social structure. For a country with one of the

11  Robert N. Taafe, “Population Structure”, in Bulgarien. Südosteuropa-Handbuch. Vol. VI, ed. K.-D. Grothusen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 445. 12  Roger Whitaker, “Social Structure,” in Bulgarien. Südosteuropa-Handbuch, 463–464.

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stablest and most respected peasant traditions in Europe the extent to which the sobriquet “peasant” has acquired a pejorative meaning, is amazing. Yet, despite the undoubted levelling of the seemingly unsurmountable gap between village and city in the last four decades, the traditional conflict between town and village has been translated and exacerbated in another conflict: between the capital Sofia (about 1.2 million) and the countryside, the “province”. This became especially evident at the time of the free elections in June. The resentment against the real or perceived privileges of the capital found apt reflection in one of the popular anecdotes: “The Bulgarians consist of one million Sofioters and eight million vegetarians.” On the other hand, the cities in general remain dependent on food supplies from the village, especially on the family level. The second major transformation during the postwar period concerned the population growth. Bulgaria had entered its period of demographic transition by the turn of the century, and from the 1920s on there was an observable significant decline in both mortality and fertility, resulting in the lowest peak of natural increase during the 1980s (1.3 per thousand for 1985) second only to the DDR and Hungary.13 In fact, the Bulgarian population had stopped to reproduce itself. The massive dislocations accompanied by the continuing and intensifying change in the birth and death rates affected drastically the age structure of the population. At present, Bulgaria is demographically the oldest country in the Balkans, and close to the age level of Hungary and the DDR. This is to say that only about 42% of the population is under 30 years of age, whereas 31% is over 50, a classical example of a regressive population.14 The retired labor force is over 2.3 million, out of a total population of just over 9 million and, of 100 people of the labor active population 42 have reached the age of retirement, a share twice as large as that in the developed industrial countries.15 This fact was, and for some time is, to have a not insignificant effect on the political spectrum. Lastly, the third major change in postwar Bulgarian society affected the educational level of the population. The introduction of universal, compulsory education in relatively backward societies is one of the incontestable

13  Taafe, “Population Structure”, 443. 14  Taafe, “Population Structure”, 435. 15   Duma, 56, 29 May 1990. The retirement age is 60 for men and 55 for women; it is lower for some sectors of the economy (e.g. mining, nuclear energy), as well as for the military personnel.

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achievements of the East European regimes.16 The number of people with high education active in the labor force has increased from less than 10 000 in 1939 to more than 340 000 in 1989, of which about 120 000 are engineers.17 Here, however, I would like to stress only two aspects: on one hand, the creation of a relatively well educated working force and, on the other, the relative overproduction of an “intelligentsia”, looking for white-collar jobs. The latter aspect, alongside the fact of the rapid formation of an intelligentsia of the first generation altogether, and of the first generation in an urban setting, with immediate and inseparable roots in the rural milieu, would leave an indelible mark on the character and quality of the intellectual climate. There is one exception to the above outlined demographic and social structure. The ethnic/religious breakdown of the shift from village to city attests that, as a whole, the Muslim population remained primarily an agricultural population.18 As for the ethnic Turks, they are heavily concentrated (over 80%) in the northeastern and the southeastern parts of the country. As a social group they are engaged primarily in agriculture, especially in such a timeconsuming and specialized field as tobacco-growing. A growing number works in different industrial enterprises. There is also a crust of educated Turks in the urban centers (doctors, teachers, engineers) which has been formed in the last 40 years and, though comparatively not numerous, is highly influential. As is to be expected, among them are to be found the most ardent exponents of a distinct ethnic consciousness. The demographic development of the Turkish population in Bulgaria until 1965 followed a double trend: on one hand, a gradual decrease of their relative proportion in the overall ethnic structure of the Bulgarian population; on the other, an increase in their absolute numbers. Although 1965 was the last census which specified ethnic origin, in the next two decades there was an obvious increase in both aspects, given the age structure of the Turkish population, and its much higher birth rate. This, alongside a variety of other motives, seems to 16  The latest reviews are: Peter Bachmeier, “Schulsystem” and Milan Benes, “Hochschulen und Wissenschaft”, both published in Bulgarien. Südosteuropa-Handbuch. 17   Duma, I, 57, 30 May 1990. 18  About 69% of the Turks and 64% of the Pomaks live in villages: Kultura, 33, 17 August 1990. The Muslim population comprises Turks, Bulgarian speaking Muslims (Pomaks), Muslim Gypsies, Tatars and Muslim Albanians, the latter two numbering only several thousand people. In the absence of reliable statistics on the ethnic and religious background, the Turks by the mid-1980s are estimated at around 900 (between 830 and 960) thousand, i.e. over 10% of the total population. The Pomaks are about 150 000, and the Gypsies, hypothesized at around 450 000, are 75% Muslim, and 25% Orthodox Christians. See Stefan Troebst, “Nationale Minderheiten”, Bulgaria, 474–489; Hugh Poulton with MLIHRC. Minorities in the Balkans. Minority Rights Group. Report #82, October 1989.

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have had a decisive effect on the events of 1984/1985, unleashing a problem which came to be known, rightly or wrongly, as the “ethnic conflict”. 4

The Ethnic Conflict No matter how you turn, your past is always behind you. Proverb

In the winter of 1984/85 the Bulgarian authorities launched a mass campaign aimed at changing the names of the Turkish population with Slavic Bulgarian names. This was certainly not the first mass renaming of Muslims in Bulgaria (there had been previous ones in 1912/1913, 1941/1944, 1971) but it was the first one launched explicitly at the Turkish speaking Muslims. For a move of such scale and significance it was not preceded by any propaganda campaign, and the event, which took practically everybody by surprise, was reported in official statements only post factum. Even its ideological legitimization (the “restoration” of the original Bulgarian names and national consciousness to descendants of Islamisized Bulgarians who, through forceful or voluntary conversion, had lost their language and religion) was not original.19 However, it was implemented for the first time to ethnic Turks.20 During the renaming campaign there were reports of violence against attempts to resist it.21 Interestingly, the renaming, although an obvious ­violation 19  This ideology had been promoted in the interwar period by patriotically minded Bulgarian-Muslims who were looking for ways to integrate the Pomaks in the Bulgarian mainstream. 20  Since the publication of this article, the literature on the renaming process has proliferated. I am adding some of the most important titles in Bulgarian: Evgenia Ivanova. Otkhvîrlenite “priobshteni” ili protsesît, narechen “vîzroditelen” (1912–1989) (Sofia: IIEH, 2002); Mikhail Griev and Alexei Kalonski. Vîzroditeleniiat protses. Myusiulmanskite obshtnosti i komunisticheskiiat rezhim (Sofia: Siela, 2008); Iskra Baeva, and Evgenia Kalinova (eds.). “Vîzroditeleniiat protses.” Bîlgarskata dîrzhava i bîlgarskite turtsi (sredata na 30-te—nachaloto na 90-te godini na ХХ vek), vol. I (Sofia: Dîrzhavna agentsiia “Arkhivi,” 2009); Ali Adikov and Senem Konedareva (ed.). Gorchivi razkazi (Blagoevgrad: Fondatsia za regionalno razvitie “Rodopi XXI vek”, 2003); Liliana Aleksandrieva (ed.). Niakoga, v 89-a. (Intervyuta na zhurnalistkata ot Radio Svobodna Evropa Rumiana Uzunova), (Sofia: Fondatsia “Dr. Zhelyu Zhelev,” 2007); Vildan Bairiamova, “Istoriiata, vîzroditelniiat protses, goliamata ekskurziia,” www.segabg.com/online/article.asp?issueid=901§ion id=5&id=00007. 21  Estimates of the victims rest on rumors (between 300 and 1500). Amnesty International gives the number of just over 100 ethnic Turks killed by the security forces. Many more were detained in prison or labor camps.

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of human rights, and strongly opposed by the majority of the Turkish population, did not by itself become the center of the mounting resentment in the next years to come.22 It was rather the accompanying brutal measures against Islamic rituals and customs, as well as against the usage of the Turkish language, that radically mobilized the minority public opinion, and led to the protests of 1989. In the following four years there was practically no organized opposition on the part of the Turkish population. As a whole, with the exception of people directly implicated in the so-called “revival process” and some outright nationalists, the Bulgarian population empathized with the plight of their co-citizens. There was certainly the international pressure on Bulgaria, especially from the Muslim countries, but on the whole, it seemed as if the question was subsiding, until in the spring and summer of 1989, a special confluence of factors triggered of the mass exodus of Turks from the country. It still remains to be carefully weighed how much of it was a spontaneous act, the result of mass psychosis, and how much was induced emigration, mostly on the part of the security apparatus and of the Turkish propaganda.23 In the course of just over two months over 300 000 Turks had left Bulgaria, although the interesting figures are obviously the next two: by the end of 1989, i.e. even before the reversal of the anti-Turkish policies, over 130 000 had returned back to Bulgaria, and now this figure has reached close to 160 000. What was indicative, however, from a psychological point of view, was the reversal of the initially sympathetic attitude of the Bulgarian population after the mass exodus, followed by a growing resentment against the Turks which reached its culmination among considerable parts of the Bulgarians in the winter of 1990. The variety of motivation and expression is considerable. There is no doubt that the general frustration caused by the overall social, economic, political and moral crisis can be, and in many instances is being, manipulated in easily inflammable nationalist feelings, mostly on the part of the Bulgarian population. What has to be stressed here, however, is that there has not been a long standing organic ethnic conflict between the Turkish and Bulgarian populations (compared, for example, to the Serbian-Albanian, or the HungarianRomanian controversies). Despite the latest manifestations of nationalism, and the overblown attention it received in the mass media, this is essentially a 22  Part of the more educated urban dwellers, saw in the change of the names a means to obliterate the difference between itself and the Bulgarian “ruling” majority, and to be naturally integrated into it. 23  See the report of Helsinki Watch from October 1989: Destroying Ethnic Identity: The Expulsion of the Bulgarian Turks.

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conflict designed and created artificially by the political authorities, and thus with better prospects to be safely contained. The so called “Turkish problem” in Bulgaria dates from the last decades of the nineteenth century and is essentially a phenomenon of the same order as any other minority problem created by the disintegration of a huge multinational empire, in this case the Ottoman empire. With minor exceptions the minority problems in the Balkans have been solved through assimilation or emigration. The specific situation of the Turks in Bulgaria (representing the most backward social stratum, and isolated geographically, linguistically and religiously) coupled by an intensive emigration propaganda from the Ottoman Empire, and after 1923 from Turkey, precluded the possibility for a successful integration and/or assimilation. At the same time Turkey, despite the strong emigration propaganda, was always careful to limit the flow of immigrants thus, no matter what its motivation, perpetuating an explosive issue. The events of 1984/85 have been seen as the logical outcome and culmination of a three-decades long policy of pressure against the Turkish population. Already immediately after the ascendancy of Zhivkov in 1956 a new national policy was modelled which to a great extent was a deviation from, or even a reversal of the policy pursued in the first postwar decade. This latter policy had been based on the full recognition of national minorities, and was, in fact, an adaptation of the Soviet model, exported and imposed first via the Comintern, and later through the Cominform. The new policy postulated that Bulgaria was not a multinational state (which ipso facto forestalled a potential federative structure on the Yugoslav or Soviet model), that the Bulgarian Turks were an inextricable part of the Bulgarian socialist nation (based on the idea of the priority of citizenship over ethnic consciousness), and that a strong distinction should be drawn between confession and nationality. 1956 began a long-term policy towards the Turkish minority, with gradual and uneven encroachments on their cultural autonomy.24 Although retrospectively the interpretation of 1984 as the corollary of a long-term policy seems flawless, the neatness of this evolutionary construct can be challenged. First, nationalistic though Bulgarian policies during the Zhivkov administration might have been, culminating in the esoteric and messianic patriotic frenzies of his irrational daughter in the early 1980s just before 24  Like closing down of the separate Turkish schools, relegating the study of Turkish to the status of foreign language education, until it finally disappeared altogether from the school curricula, the pressure on Muslim religious institutions, etc. See Stefan Troebst, “Zum Verhältnis von Partei, Staat und türkischer Minderheit. in Bulgarien 1956–1986”, in Roland Schönfeld, ed., Untersuchungen zur Gegenwartskunde Südosteuropas. Bd.25. Nationalitätenprobleme in Südsoteuropa (München: Oldenburg Verlag, 1987).

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her early death,25 they did not inevitably lead to the forceful, and often violent, mass renaming of the Turkish Muslim population. Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s different political alternatives, all aiming at the gradual and peaceful integration of the Turkish and Muslim population had been discussed at the top government and party levels. Secondly, the whole operation of the renaming disclosed important frictions between three different echelons of power: the local party and administrative apparatus; the army; and, lastly, the ministry of interior. This became especially evident during the second act of the drama, during the summer of 1989. The exact history of the 1984 decision is still awaiting its meticulous historian but there is no doubt that, at least, it was not discussed (and accepted) at any party or government level, but is bound to be seen as a manifestation of personal politics (of Todor Zhivkov and his immediate entourage). The rationalization of the decision points to the specific demographic developments of the Turkish community, and its timing was speeded up by the forthcoming national census scheduled for December 1985. There were additional explanations spelled out or hinted at in the subsequent period: the fear of the Cyprus precedent, the Albanian Kosovo problem, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the influence of the Iranian revolution, the example of Lebanon—all quite close to Bulgaria. Doubtlessly, the relative economic stability until 1984 also prompted the self-confidence to embark on an adventurist policy on the ethnic question. All these considerations are important insofar as they help assess the relative influence of the “ethnic conflict” factor in the subsequent events, and especially the initial change of November 10.26

25  Ironically, though not surprisingly, given the Ceauşescu precedent, the career of Zhivkov’s daughter Lyudmila as head of Bulgarian cultural policies, has been almost unanimously hailed in the West as a manifestation of independence and a window to the West. See, among others, her assessment in Richard Crampton, A Short History of Bulgaria (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity. A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II (Oxford University Press, 1989). 26  An interesting, though hardly founded contention based on 1984 as the first year of the economic crisis and the beginning of the anti-Turkish campaign, was advanced by the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (commonly known as “the Turkish party”): namely, that it was the “Turkish” question which brought about the loss of Islamic markets, and thus became the basis for the enormous accumulation of the foreign debt. If nothing else, it is at least a proof of how much the economic argument dominates the present political discourse in the country. On the other hand, a freshly published book by one of the most careful economists has analyzed the literal “price” of the campaign: Roumen Avramov, Ikonomika na “Vîzroditelnia protses,” (Sofia: Tsentîr za akademichni izsledvania, 2016).

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The International Dimension What the U.S. can put aside, will go to Israel, to Turkey, to Pakistan, and a small part to the Catholic Lech Wałęsa. Newspaper Kultura, 23, 8 June 1990

It has been, rather pompously, suggested that the exodus of the Turks did to Bulgaria what the buoyant march of the East Germans to the West did to the Berlin wall. This is tempting because of the coincidence of dates (the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, and Zhivkov the next day) and the neatness of a simple explanation. As has already been pointed out, the very number of returnees from Turkey even before November 10 attests to the presumptuousness of such a contention. However, the international isolation of Bulgaria after 1985, which added to its image as the bogeyman of Eastern Europe, certainly had its more than significant share in the coup of November 10.27 There are however two other elements which deserve mention in this analysis of how far the international climate contributed to the Bulgarian autumn of 1989 and the subsequent developments. The first comprises the reverberations of the global crisis affecting the system of modern communism, and first and foremost among them what has come to be called “the Gorbachev syndrome”. The crucial influence of the new foreign policy of the Soviet Union on the events in Eastern Europe has been recognized, openly or reluctantly, by practically all participants in the drama. In the Bulgarian case, too, the influence of “perestroika” has been of immediate consequence, much more than the example with reform experimentation in Poland or Hungary.28 The unique standing of Bulgaria among the Soviet satellites as the most faithful and compliant ally has attracted attention and has been, more or less, adequately explained, in terms of the effects of a deeply internalized historical tradition29 alongside “a real complimentarity of economic interests and 27  The reformist president Peter Mladenov, who succeeded Zhivkov, had been his long-term foreign minister, and had to bear all the consequences of the international isolation of Bulgaria. 28  Although the speculation that Gorbachev gave the “green light” for the ousting of Zhivkov, while worth looking into, seems more to be the result of a conditioned spasmatic reflex on the part of old-fashioned Sovietologists to look for any explanation to the Kremlin. 29  This has to be understood primarily in terms of the role Russia has played in the liberation struggles of the Bulgarians against the Ottoman empire. It has to be added, next to the sentimental dimension, that Bulgaria has never had a common border with Russia and that, following the Second World War, Soviet troops have not been stationed in the country.

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developmental strategies”.30 This, among others, precluded the attempt, so eloquently and melodramatically spelled out in other East European countries, to depict the decades leading to 1989 as nothing short of a national liberation struggle against an alien ideology and Soviet imperialism. The second concerns the precarious geopolitical position of Bulgaria compounded by a nineteenth and twentieth century foreign political experience summarized in the notion of national catastrophes. The Balkan countries have for so long been pawns in the geopolitical game of the great powers that the feelings of resignation in “this wretched Bulgaria”, as Churchill acridly put it, concerning foreign political developments, are hardly surprising. An unfounded, but quite indicative epigram came out immediately after the BushGorbachev Mediterranean meeting: “Yalta—Malta”. Resignation, of course, does not imply complete passivity, and often breeds commendable realism. In the global euphoria over events in Eastern Europe Bulgaria has voiced strong concern that the deconcentration of armaments in Central Europe might bring about a concentration in the flanks, in a word, that the receding of the tensions in the center would be at the expense of rising tensions in the periphery.31 It helps to remind that, no matter how reluctantly, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact have come to be seen as the sole guarantors of national sovereignty.32 6

The Intellectual Climate There have been worse times, but there haven’t been meaner times. Nekrasov

And bad times set in: nobody reads and everybody writes … From an ancient Sanskrit manuscript

Inevitably, as the dominant discourse on East European intellectual developments has been shaped and conceptualized in the framework of the Polish, the Hungarian and the Czech paradigms, the respective evolution in the other East European countries tends to assume the character of a predictable aberration. 30  Joseph Rothschild. Return to Diversity, p. 212. 31   Rabotnichesko delo, 67, 8 March 1990. 32  Inflated though it may be, there is a real concern (a recent poll indicates close to 40% of the population seeing a national threat) emanating from the often-aggressive standing of a strong (56 million), highly militarized Turkey, which has U.S. support. It is further fed on the Cyprus precedent and the character of the Greek-Turkish relations.

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The emancipatory character of the Central European myth is widely recognized even by those who do not necessarily buy it; however, its discriminatory aspects vis à vis the ones stigmatized to be outside the privileged club have yet to be assessed. One of the results is that the explanations of the Bulgarian case, instead of analyzing the concrete historical and social circumstances, are reduced to the (lack of) paraphernalia set up to objectify the Central European idea. Thus, the non-Europeanness of the country, and the Balkans as a whole, are explained by historical stereotypes like the alleged character of Byzantine Orthodoxy, the lengthy “Asiatic” presence of the Ottomans with all ensuing economic, social and cultural repercussions, etc.33 The above would be inconsequential if it had not been internalized by a significant part of the Bulgarian intelligentsia producing a much more serious result: a severe and paralyzing case of a double inferiority complex. One is shared commonly with the rest of Eastern Europe vis à vis the West and is based on the relative isolation of East Europeans from the mainstream of intellectual developments, and their incomparably lower material possibilities, though not status. The other is internal, further marginalizing Bulgaria and the Balkans within the East European periphery. As with the first, it is based on an even greater isolation compounded, however, by a quasi-ghettoization. Thus, the objective isolation (based on geography, geopolitical factors, the practical absence of an intellectual emigration) is intensified by feelings of being overlooked and forsaken. In the Bulgarian context, even the illusion of Gyorgy Konrad’s pretentious appeal to the “international intellectual aristocracy” of Europe and the West is inconceivable.34 Isolation, naturally, breeds parochialism; but even in the cases where outstanding intellectual achievements are being produced, there is a certain incestuousness of the intellectual climate which is doomed not to participate in the international dialogue but only in internal exchange. 33  It is regretful but imperative to point out that even the most sophisticated exponents of the Central European idea, many of them historians, display an unashamed but selfconfident (and therefore aggressive and conducive to overgeneralizations) ignorance of the history of the Balkans. Strangely enough, this ignorance is even more profound than the one about Russia. For attempts to objectify the Central European idea not by literary but by historical arguments, see J. Szücs, “Three Historical Regions of Europe”, in J. Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State (London, New York: Verso, 1988); G. Schöpflin, “Cultural Identity, Political Identity, National Identity” in G. Schöpflin, N. Wood, eds. In Search of Central Europe (Political Press, 1989). For an important critique of the notion see F. Fehér, “On Making Central Europe”, Eastern European Politics and Societies, vol. 3, 3, Fall 1989. 34  Cited in T. G. Ash, “Does Central Europe Exist?,” The Uses of Adversity (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 202.

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On the other hand, because of the specific historical context in nation and state formation, the Bulgarian intelligentsia is still in the process of making. It does not have traditions common to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Russia where it developed in rather differentiated societies. In Bulgaria not only the postwar but also the prewar intelligentsia was mostly of the first generation with strong roots to its previous social background. Only in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s can one speak of the formation of a Klasse für sich, with separately articulated interests. Also, given the specific characteristics of the Bulgarian political scene, the intelligentsia had a peculiar standing. In the proliferation of labels about the East European regimes before the events of 1989 (totalitarianism, Stalinism, authoritarianism, communist dictatorship, imposition of alien ideological models, Soviet imperialism, etc.), the best fitted for the Bulgarian political and intellectual landscape seems to be paternalism. The party’s attitude towards the intelligentsia is a common phenomenon in Eastern Europe: it was partly the result of ideology, partly of the social background of the party leadership, which shared the traditional anti-intellectual suspicions of peasants and workers. In Bulgaria, where the socialist and communist ideas had strong indigenous roots unlike many of its East European counterparts, the Communist party had lost its character of a predominantly intellectual party already by the mid-1920s. However, in the peculiarly paternalistic scene of Bulgarian political life Zhivkov managed to implement a successful policy of dividing and/or corrupting the intelligentsia, but not creating martyrs and saints. Based on nepotism and regionalism, Zhivkov’s regime however did not reach the excesses of the clan dictatorship of Ceauşescu to whom he is usually compared. This had at least two side-effects. First, no tradition of “culture of protest” was created despite single manifestations.35 As a result the intellectuals either lapsed in the posture of what E. P. Thompson has called attentism (i.e. the waitand-see policy), or acted on the premises of the preferableness of compromise before passivity. Also, the use of the periphrastic36 was kept to the end, unlike the countries which developed a normal language in the Samizdat. Secondly, with immediate repercussions for the present moment, paternalism foreshadowed the proper and predictable response: in many ways, an infantile reaction against it, compounding the almost total lack of political culture in the country. In the present euphoria over words, the effects of a belated glasnost, there is a passionate discussion on the manifestations of what is perceived to be a 35  The first organized activities can be traced back to 1988. 36  T. G. Ash, “A Hungarian Lesson”, The Uses of Adversity, 147. Periphrastic is “the intellectual version of getting around the system rather than confronting it.”

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cultural crisis.37 It seems, however, that the strongest negative legacy of the past few decades is the deep demoralization of very significant societal strata. Outside the problems of the intelligentsia, but important for the overall intellectual climate is the coming into the open of the generational conflict. This, undoubtedly, is an eternal conflict, but at the moment it is exacerbated by the overall crisis and often assumes overt political dimensions. Finally, a word on the church and religion, especially in view of the central role they played in Poland, and the influential place they have in other East European societies, Russia included. The church in Bulgaria has had an eminent and respected history primarily as an educational and national organization. Although its activities have nowadays intensified and it has the appeal of a traditional institution at a time of total reassessment and nationalist upsurge, it is very unlikely that this pattern will be reversed.38 On the other hand, there is a, not entirely unexpected, proliferation of esoteric groups dealing with occult and extrasensory activities, this usual and predictable side-effect in times of crises and in times of chaos. 7

From the Coup d’état to the Elections We resign from Bulgaria: let the cowards live there. Opposition leader

All decent people are cowards. Dostoyevsky

The Bulgarian “perestroyka” (i.e the attempt at reform from above in the continuum of the Communist party domination) has been aptly described to have lasted from November 10 to December 14, 1990, i.e. from the downfall of Zhivkov to the first openly voiced anticommunist demonstrations. In the confluence of different crises “the crisis of the ruling elite” has an important place. In the light of developments which led to the coup of November 10, 1989 the suggested cleavage between the triangle of authorities (party bureaucracy, army and security apparatus) proved to be instrumental. The tension between 37  Mostly in the weekly papers Kultura and Literaturen front. 38  In a recent poll 43% of the interviewed have described themselves as believing in God (but not religiously active); in another poll this percentage is 50. This might be a substantial number in view of the recent past but compared to the respective numbers in other East European countries (Russia included), it is rather modest.

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these centers of power had apparently existed for some time, intensifying with the impending economic crisis, the ecological problems, the activation of the traditionally passive intelligentsia, the exacerbation of the Turkish problem, and the overall international climate. Sofia in the fall of 1989 for a short period reminded of Prague 1968 (in the overall atmosphere, in the initiative for changes coming from within the party, in one of the dominant discourses centered around democratic socialism, etc.). But there were fundamental differences— a radically transformed international conjuncture, as well as the hectic but steady formation of real opposition outside the party. In the futile discussion on whether November 10 should be seen as a revolution or a coup, one thing at least is clear: what followed was the legalization of alternative political thinking, expressed in the “round-table” talks and the proliferation of political parties, associations, movements and clubs which quickly saturated the deficient political market.39 In the several months spanning from the fall of 1989 to June 10, the date of the first election for a Grand National Assembly, the political spectrum was crucified between “Mister Democrat” versus “Comrade Reformer”. Psychologically, this was the time of the great catharsis: accumulated frustrations had to be, and were, finally articulated. 1989 has already received the striking definition of the “year of truth”.40 But in a country where there had been an absolute suppression of alternative truths, what followed was the intolerant proclamation of alternative absolute truths. In the heated pre-election campaign, the two basic opponents (the recently renamed Socialist, former Communist party—SP, and the Union of Democratic Forces—UDF, a coalition of 16 political parties and organizations) came out with practically identical programs, despite differences in wording and passionate claims for basic ideological incompatibility on both sides. Thus, a fact which is obvious in the present post-election period, transpired already before the elections: namely, that what was going on the political scene, was essentially a power struggle. The results of the first elections on June 10 (for 200 seats by proportional representation) and June 17 (for another 200 by a simple majority) were a shared surprise, posing the question of the improbable maverick or the typical conformist. Altogether 90.6% of the electorate (6, 990,372 registered electors, 6,333,334 voters) cast ballots. The SP received a 52.75% electoral victory (211 deputies); the UDF followed with 36% of the votes (144 deputies); the

39  On the proliferation of political organizations, well outnumbering 50, see Byuletin na BTA, February 1990. 40  T. G. Ash, “The Year of Truth”, The New York Review of Books, February 15, 1990.

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Movement for Rights and Freedoms41 carried the Muslim vote and won 5.75% (23 deputies), and the Agrarian National Union42 received 4% (16 deputies). The remaining 1.5% was carried by 4 tiny parties with 6 representatives.43 Despite the pre-election local and international polls forecasting a socialist victory, the SP was surprised (it had not hoped to get such a vote); the opposition, hastily formed only after the 10 of November events hoped (and was disillusioned) that events would follow the, by then, common East European paradigm. The world at large (i.e. vocal West European and American media), despite some occasional profound analysis, as a rule tried to find a predictable and trivial explanation, based usually on the side-effects of the by now internalized Central European myth: i.e. that the Orthodox Balkans were immanently conformist, not freedom-loving, non-democratic, etc. The internal explanations for the electoral outcome have been manifold and often contradictory: unfounded accusations of manipulation and intimidation,44 social and political inertia due to the aging electorate and an overall fear of abrupt change, a series of grave tactical mistakes on the part of the young and inexperienced opposition which staked heavily on a negative campaign, the absence of a figure of unabated innocence and uncontested intellectual appeal like Sakharov or Havel. It is important to keep in mind that in Bulgaria the communists were not directly (or not to that extent) identified with foreign political domination; moreover, rightly or not, the period of communist rule has been historically associated with rising living standards; despite the important role of the opposition in providing a political alternative it is an undisputed fact that the changes were initiated by the Communist party; in the ensuing internal shifts, the new Socialist party leadership came to be associated with a number of reformers with genuine social standing; finally, in the emphatically egalitarian social traditions of Bulgaria, the socialist discourse still holds appeal for a significant part of the population. 41  The MRF was founded on January 4, 1990 at the height of the nationalist demonstrations organized against the government’s decision to revoke the assimilation policies at the end of December 1989. It claims to be a supra-party organization dedicated to human and ethno-religious rights, and not to be confined to any given minority, despite its mostly Muslim electorate. 42  This centrist party is the heir to the former satellite Agrarian Union, to be distinguished from the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union “Nikola Petkov”, which is a member of the UDF, although the union of the two is expected. 43  Bulgaria. Parliamentary Chamber: Narodno Sobranie. Elections Held in 1990: http://­ archive.ipu.org/parline-e/reports/arc/2045_90.htm (last visited April 2018). 44  Aside from the positive verdict of international observers, these are the first Bulgarian elections without a single political murder.

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In the end, in a climate of extreme polarization between two political monsters, with no immediate hope for the formation of a political center, the population achieved what the parties couldn’t. It secured the necessary and only hopeful outcome: a balance between the political forces, in which no power (party or leader) would be able to dictate. 8

The First Steps Bad politicians promise a lot, and do nothing; good politicians likewise do nothing, but at least promise less. The Talmud

The trouble with making love in public is not the embarrassment; it’s that everyone gives you advice. Prime-minister Andrey Lukanov on economic policy in a multi-party system

The new Grand National Assembly convened in July, and after a serious impasse managed to reach a compromise on August 2, electing as president Zhelyu Zhelev. A figure of undoubted and primarily moral standing, Zhelev was a dissident philosopher who, after November 10, became the leader of the young opposition movement. By mid-September Andrey Lukanov, who had headed the post-November 10 government, was appointed as prime-minister. An economist and politician of experience, he came up at the beginning of October with an all socialist cabinet,45 despite his commitment and prolonged attempts at coalition. Understandably, the opposition did not want to share the responsibility for the unavoidable unpopular measures. Ironically, the socialist government’s program aiming at a quick and fundamental change is more radical than the program of the opposition: “Now, said Lukanov, neither the platform of the BSP nor of the UDF are applicable. As prime-minister I will not follow any party line but the logic of life and the market.”46 With a disastrous legacy in industry, agriculture, finance and the ecology, the pragmatic approach prioritizing economic issues seems to be the most commendable. It is estimated that the restructuring of the economy in the near 5 to 6 years will cost about 50 to 60 billion leva, and

45  Some cabinet members have no party allegiance. 46   Duma, I, #192, 12 October 1990.

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$ 10 to 15 billion.47 Accepted as member of the IMF since the end of September, Bulgaria shares less illusions for help from the West, although it is clear that the extremely complex task of the East European transition is hardly possible without a kind of “Marshall Plan”.48 Albeit slowly and with great difficulty, a political dialogue is taking shape in parliament among the intolerant monologues. The parliamentary commissions are preparing new laws on practically all issues with a strong priority on the privatization program which are expected to be passed in the immediate future. With the practical measures to follow it still is to be seen whether 1989 will not be assessed in the future as an episode which, among others, legitimized and emancipated from bureaucratic and ideological control the technocracy which was, in fact, established and strengthened throughout the two preceding decades. 9 Conclusion Is it necessary to be crazy in order to be a pessimist? This question tortured the minds of high school students in Tîrnovo on the eve of the Balkan wars in 1913. Eighty years later the question has spilled over from adolescent to adult minds. There are enough reasons for pessimism: the economic situation at the moment is catastrophic. On the agenda is shortterm survival through a harsh winter, with looming food and fuel shortages. This could easily inflame the polarized and explosive political scene, to which the manipulable ethnic conflict, although subsided for the moment, can be added. There are no immediate reasons for optimism, except that the process of change (though not its direction) is now clearly recognized by everybody at least as irreversible. There are some reasons for hope: despite the extreme and, more than often, uncivilized polarization, parliamentary life is a fact. In the long run, there are enough factors to support an activist (and implicitly optimistic) position against an equally understandable posture of passive resignation. Possible scenarios are looming, and are being spelled out by hyperactive and attention-starved political scientists and politicians: from rosy utopias of 47  Ibidem. 48  See John Kenneth Galbraith, “The Rush to Capitalism”, The New York Review of Books, October 25, 1990.

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a quick integration with the European community, or even a Balkan federation, to apocalyptic visions of a social explosion (the “Romanian syndrome”), of spilling over of the ethnic conflict (the “Yugoslav syndrome”), of military takeover, of quick pauperization in the orbit of a Germanized Europe, etc. In the rapidly changing political climate the borderline between inconceivable and plausible scenarios is feverishly shifting. For the ethos of a historian, however, science fiction (i.e. future scenarios) is as unacceptable as counterfactual history (the euphemism for the “what if” taboo). Therefore, to come back to the dominant psychological climate of the present: the high school students in Tîrnovo on the eve of the Balkan wars in 1913 concluded that one need not be crazy, in order to be temporarily desperate.

Section 3 Historiography and Memory

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East European Studies in the US: Thematic and Methodological Problems This chapter was first presented as a paper at the conference “Area Studies in a Globalizing World,” organized by the University of Graz in June 2010. It came out in Christian Promitzer, Siegfried Gruber, and Harald Heppner, eds. Southeast European Studies in a Globalizing World, Zürich, Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2015, 61–73, and is reprinted here with the permission of the publisher.

The first difficulty in undertaking this seemingly simple and straightforward survey is to define East European Studies in the shifting (and disappearing) sphere of area studies in the United States. Area studies—as the place of preparing specialists cognizant of the languages, histories, economies, societies and cultures of specific areas in the world—were the result of developments after the Second World War, when the United States became a superpower and its numerous international engagements required specialized expertise. East European area studies were the distinct product of the Cold War. Reflecting directly geopolitics, they were subsumed within the field of “Russia and Eastern Europe,” and had a comparable subordinate position to the East European satellites. The proliferation of Russian and East European Centers (REEC), attached to universities and supported by government funds reflected the strategic importance, but also the internal hierarchies, of the field. As a result, and with honorable exceptions, Russian studies (encompassing both Russian and Soviet history, literatures as well as the other social sciences and humanities) were staffed with sizable scholarly “cadres” and produced a large number of works, often of theoretical sophistication and methodological rigor, vastly surpassing the comparable produce on the East European field (broadly defined, in order of perceived importance, as studies on Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania). While many of them reflected Cold War exigencies, with time and the appearance of a new generation of scholars, a respectable quantity showed a remarkable degree of independence and lack of political bias. The other defining characteristic of these studies was their, on the whole, presentist orientation. Works on the medieval and even the early modern period were an exception, while the modern and especially the contemporary period resulted in a massive scholarly

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production. The contrast with comparable output in the national societies of Russia, Eastern Europe and the broader Soviet Union in this period cannot be greater. There, the emphasis lay, for reasons of nationalism as well as ideological safety, on the medieval and even on the ancient period. The Balkans, much like its geopolitical predicament straddling the Cold War line, which divided the peninsula, were distributed between two general area studies. On one side was Eastern Europe and Russia, with its annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). On the other side, the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA) covered broadly speaking Islamic studies and the respective countries. The history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey belonged to the latter, alongside the Arab world, Iranian studies and partly Israel. Even in this respect, the hostility of the two NATO members—Greece and Turkey—was accompanied by a separate Hellenic Studies field, which had its annual meetings, organized by the Modern Greek Studies Association. Occasionally and ironically, Greek topics were embraced by the field of Slavic studies. After 1989, the hectic reconfiguration of the geopolitical space made its inroads in academic divisions, even if the academy is notoriously slow in implementing these institutionally. Almost two decades after 1989, the AAASS renamed itself ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies), actually enacting a continuity in the territorial span of its activities, even as funding carved out spaces from the common area. The new European Union members are covered, if at all, by proliferating European (Union) Centers, in which they take the back seat as apportioned to them in real life. Some, like Romania and Bulgaria, are lingering still within the older REEC centers (now adding an extra E for Eurasia, hence REEEC), but the writing is on the wall. The region of Eastern Europe is no longer separate in reality, even if academically it is still segregated (chiefly because the institutional inertia lags behind realities), but the end is a matter of time. It is increasingly difficult to find jobs in Eastern Europe and offer courses on Eastern Europe, unless they are broadly comparative or conceived around a thematic topic. This is clearly not the case with Russia yet, on which classical type surveys continues to be offered. Balkan studies, while severely underrepresented in the United States, enjoy a certain degree of autonomy (of the poor and marginalized), because of the interest in their diversity and because, unlike the case of Eastern Europe, they were not the product of geopolitics and specifically the Cold war, but have an older and more stable pedigree as a historical region and a scholarly field. In what follows, I am confining myself mostly, though not exclusively, to the situation in my own discipline: history. I am also sticking—in a not entirely consistent way—to my sphere of geographic expertise, which in a broad sense

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is East European/Russian and Ottoman studies, and in narrow sense Balkan studies. The brief state-of-the-art survey is by no means comprehensive.1 It rather aims at identifying the dominant constellations that are the object of lively involvement and re-interpretation. Two issues stand out, and they are obviously intertwined: What is being debated, what is topical? and What are the methodological challenges? Very broadly, in the dynamic (maybe too dynamic) history of our region, the dominant questions seem to be: 1. The question of empire (the Ottoman, Habsburg, Romanov/Soviet legacies). 2. The question of the nation-state and nationalism itself (being made and unmade); to this can be added the late but massive entry of memory studies, mostly around the cluster of commemorations, as well a trend closely linked to it, but that has shaped into a separate powerful field: the history and memory of violence, and victimology as a cottage industry. 3. The question of ideologies and their practical systems (most notably fascism and communism). All these are constellations that have disappeared or are disappearing, and the exercise can be academically described as debates over the meaning of legacies or, to put it in a less academic but flashy brief phrase, examining the cadaver. One thematic circle that does not belong to the category of disappearing constellations and will be also discussed briefly, is gender history, but the methodological considerations are applicable to all. 1

The Question of Empire

This thematic circle is, of course, not novel per se but up until a couple of decades ago, it was dealt with within the larger and teleological paradigm of the inevitability of the nation-state system, and the anomaly of empire by the nineteenth century. This linear approach (paralleling the one “from authority to democracy”) was broken form several angles. One was the general intellectual weariness with evolutionary thinking; another was the bitter assessment of the performance of the much hailed nation-state during the twentieth 1  I am confining the review to English language monographs and edited volumes published primarily in the United States after 1989, although much new work is suggested in articles published in the main journals of the area. Wherever appropriate, I will compare American scholarship to its European counterpart, even as the distinction is becoming less meaningful with the internationalization of scholarship, especially when European scholars publish in the US, and American ones in Europe.

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century that prompted the reassessment of empire; a final one was the realization that empire is still present, even if in unorthodox forms—as informal empire (the United States, Russia or China) or huge supranational constructs (the European Union, described by Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, as a benevolent empire), etc. There was thus an increased interest in the practice of empires, often hailed as multiethnic and multinational entities whose experience could suggest alternative ways to the nation-state. While the excesses of condemning empires have long been overcome, there is at present a perceptible tendency to romanticize them. This is markedly the case with the Habsburg Empire, increasingly with the British and the Ottoman, and beginning even with the Russian cum Soviet. In some cases this romanticizing served instrumentalist purposes, like for example in the 1980s and 1990s when the idea of an ongoing Habsburg legacy forged the concept of Central Europe which became a political device for early accession. The idea of Central Europe has been forsaken now, yet the rather anachronistic reading of empire as a supranational, if not paradise, then certainly accommodation worth scrutiny, remains. After the fall of the Soviet Union, something similar happened with the great currency of the concept of Eurasianism which too is subsiding at this point. And while the Ottoman Empire does not elicit that amount of nostalgia outside the borders of Turkey, it clearly is no longer the bogeyman of national histories and a lot of work reassesses it in a positive light. The most interesting work around this problematique appears around several clusters. One is the assessment of imperial legacies. Another is the socalled new social history, especially research on social structure: the formation of imperial elites, their networks, the relations between center and periphery; the genesis and character of the middle class (and in their best exemplars these are cutting across ethno-religious borders, and are well informed by the latest theories on class, agency, spatiality), social banditism, communal life, historical demography, etc. Again, these are topics that are not entirely new. They have been present at least after the Second World War but are now creatively reframed in the sense that the monolithic social history of yesterday is breaking down; with the stress more on categories in flux, on how meaning is negotiated, as well as on its multiplicity. Still within this cluster falls the reassessment of the economic viability of empires as well as the emerging field of urban history in the region.2 2  Brown, L. Carl, ed., Imperial Legacy. The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East. (Columbia University Press, 1996); Barkey, Karen and Mark Von Hagen, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building. The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires (Westview Press, 1997); Miller, Alexei and Alfred Rieber, eds., Imperial Rule

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The Question of the Nation-State and Nationalism

One would have thought that the revived interest in empire would have rung the death knell on the dominant study of nations. This has not happened but the question of whether national history is relevant has its strong (and at this point more vocal) detractors but likewise its strong defenders. One thing is clear: the old-fashioned nationalistic history is passé, although the old-­ fashioned national political history is still dominant in terms of sheer output from the region itself, even as it is gradually losing its morally privileged position within the central dichotomies of modernity (empire/nation, tradition/­ modernity, center/periphery). When in the early 1990s, Eric Hobsbawm predicted the death of nationalism, he was pronounced wrong and, given subsequent d­ evelopments—the disintegration of several states in the east of (Central European University Press, 2004); Fleming, Katherine E. The Muslim Bonaparte. Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Paha’s Greece (Princeton University Press, 1999); Bracewell, Catherine Wendy, The Uskoks of Senj: piracy, banditry, and holy war in the sixteenth-­century Adriatic (Cornell University Press, 1992); Philliou, Christine, Biography of an Empire: Governing Otomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California Press, 2011); Blumi, Isa, Rethinking the Late Ottoman Empire. A Comparative Social and Political History of Albania and Yemen 1878–1918 (The ISIS Press, 2003); ibid., Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State (Routledge, 2011); ibid., Reinstating the Ottomans: Alternative Balkan Modernities, 1800–1912 (Palgrave, 2011); Chirot, Daniel, ed. The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 1989); Quataert, Donald, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1993); Todorova, Maria, Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (American University Press, 1993, CEU Press, 2006); Palairet, Michael, The Balkan Economies 1800–1914: Evolution without Development (Cambridge University Press, 1997; Frank, Alison, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia. Harvard University Press, 2005); Barkey, Karen, Empire of Difference: Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 2008; Malcolm Gee, Tim Kirk, and Jill Steward, eds. The City in Central Europe (Ashgate, 1999); Michael F Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait, 1800–1917 (Princeton University Press. 1993); Hanák, Péter, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton University Press, 1998); Gábor Gyán, Identity and the Urban Experience: Fin-desiècle Budapest (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs; 2004); Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002); Babejová, Eleonóra. Fin-de-siècle Pressburg: Conflict & Cultural Coexistence in Bratislava 1897–1914 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2003); Mazower, Mark, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (HarperCollins, 2004); Nemes, Robert, The Once and Future Budapest (Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); Robert J. Donia, Sarajevo: A Biography (London: Hurst & Co., 2006); Markian Prokopovych, Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772–1914 (Purdue University Press, 2009); Nathaniel D. Wood, Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow (Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).

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Europe, and the continuing struggle in the Middle East, to a great extent as a result of rising nationalism of the classical state-forming variety, the verdict seemed justified. Yet, the dismissal of Hobsbawm’s futuristic vision might have been premature. The apogee of nationalism has passed, although we still live under the regime of nation states. All attention today is given to supranational arrangements in which the sovereignty of nation-states is being eroded. The academic counterpart of this is the field of so-called “global history” or “world history” or “transnational history” which has become an established fact and a growing tendency not only within American curricula but increasingly also in European ones. It goes hand in hand with historians’ increased awareness of the institutional origins of their profession (mostly in the nineteenth century) and its complicity, not to say symbiosis, with the state in constructing national politics. The reaction to this state of affairs has been understandable and justified, if not necessarily for all its concomitant results. To give an example, one of the early casualties have been the so-called area studies, the umbrella term that covers the institutional nurturing of language, history, literature, anthropology and other area specialists, who are essentially national experts. That this had produced far from laudable results has already been acknowledged, although the trend has yet to be stopped, if possible at all. The other is the already mentioned nostalgic look at empires as positive alternatives to the nation-state. A major claim of global history is that it extends the “circle of we.” Yet, stepping back from the nation and moving forward to the world is not a guarantee of political virtue. War, colonialism, racism have all been transnational projects. Communism was an international project and so has been anti-communism, neither of which has an especially liberal pedigree. Just as writing national history has its complicities, there are complicities in writing world history. These remarks should not be seen as a dogmatic denunciation of the global studies approach. All they call for is to carefully and critically scrutinize it, to value it for the new openings it provides but also evaluate it for the limitations it sets. Within this circle, there is high quality work that follows in the footsteps of classical approaches to nationalism.3 The most innovative work, however, con3  Walicki, Andrzej, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (University of Notre Dame Press, 1994); Sugar, Peter, ed. Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (American University Press, 1995); Banac, Ivo and Katherine Verdery, eds. National character and national ideology in interwar Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1995); Snyder, Timothy, Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Kraus (1872–1905), (Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1997); Hitchins, Keith, A nation affirmed: the Romanian national

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cerns the revisiting of the formation of national identities with special attention to different social groups, mixed/cosmopolitan constellations, porousness of boundaries, ambivalent identities, memory and commemoration. Much of it uses new approaches, especially historical anthropology, historical sociology or cultural history that highlight the constant flux and complex dynamic of the nation as an essentially contingent formation.4 Interestingly, the analytical movement in Transylvania, 1860–1914 (Bucharest: The Encyclopaedic Publishing House, 1999); ibid., A nation discovered: Romanian intellectuals in Transylvania and the idea of nation, 1700–1848 (Bucharest: The Encyclopaedic Publishing House, 1999); Porter, Brian, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (Oxford University Press, 2000); Freifeld, Alice, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848– 1914 (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000); Lampe, John and Mark Mazower, eds. Ideologies and National Identities: the case of twentieth-century Southeastern Europe (Central European University Press, 2004); Snyder, Timothy, Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus (Yale University Press, 2004). 4  Gourgouris, Stathis, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford University Press, 1996); Karakasidou, Anastasia, Fields of wheat, hills of blood: passages to nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870–1990 (University of Chicago Press, 1997); Wachtel, Andrew, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford University Press, 1998); Verdery, Katherine, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (Columbia University Press, 1999); Stauter-Halsted, Keely, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1914 (Cornell University Press, 2001); Bucur, Maria and Nancy Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past:The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (Purdue University Press, 2001); Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton University Press, 2002); Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton University Press, 2003); Brown, Keith, The Past in Question:Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation (Princeton University Press, 2003); Neuburger, Mary, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Cornell University Press, 2004); Eagle Glassheim, Noble Nationalists: The Transformation of the Bohemian Aristocracy (Harvard University Press, 2005); Unowski, Daniel, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848–1916 (Purdue University Press, 2005); Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Harvard University Press, 2006); Brubaker, Rogers, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, Liana Grancea, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton University Press, 2006); Nancy M. Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Harvard University Press, 2007); Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Cornell University Press, 2008); Bucur, Maria, Heroes and Victims. Remembering War in Twentieth Century Romania (Indiana University Press, 2009); Todorova, Maria, Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria’s National Hero (Central European University Press, 2009, 2011); Case, Holly, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford University Press, 2009); Wolff, Larry, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford University Press, 2010);

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deconstruction not only of the national project but of the national paradigm in historiography has been pioneered and is being executed mainly by scholars form the region.5 Another subtheme that is at the forefront and has shaped already as a cottage industry is the aforementioned one on violence, ethnic cleansing, migration, expulsion, trauma and the ensuing litigation, healing, etc. It is not confined to Eastern Europe, but was very much triggered by developments there, especially the disintegration of Yugoslavia. When it is not strongly prescriptive and moralizing, it makes genuine contributions to comparative history.6 3

The Question of Ideologies and their Practical Systems

The authoritarian regimes of the interwar period, as well as the communist regimes after the Second World War, constituted a favorite topic for several generations of historians, as they were premised on the implicit contrast to western liberal democracy. This work still continues, but new themes and innovative approaches have appeared.7 The newest and arguably the most Dragostinova, Theodora. Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1949 (Cornell University Press, 2011). 5  Boia, Lucian, History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness (Central European University Press, 2001); Koulouri, Christina, Dimensions ideologique de l’historicité en Grèce, 1834–1914: Les manuel scolaires d’histoire et de géographie (Peter Lang, 1991); Idem., ed. Clio in the Balkans. The Politics of History Education (Thessaloniki: CDRSEE, 2002); Hoepken, Wolfgang, ed. Oil on Fire. Textbooks, Ethnic Stereotypes and Violence in South-Eastern Europe (Hanover 1997); Todorova, Maria, ed. Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (Hurst, London & New York University Press), 2004; Daskalov, Roumen, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival (Central European University Press, 2004). 6  Woodward, Susan, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War. The Brookings Institution, 1995; Ramet, Sabrina, Balkan Babel:The Disintegration Of Yugoslavia From The Death Of Tito To Ethnic War. Westview Press, 1996; Deak, Istvan, Jan Gross and Tony Judt, eds. The Politics of Retribution in Europe. Princeton University Press, 2000; Naimark, Norman, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in 20th-century Europe. Harvard University Press, 2001; Naimark, Norman and Holly Case, eds. Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Stanford University Press, 2003; Gross, Jan, Neighbors, Penguin. 2002; Gross. Jan, Fear. Random House, 2005; Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010. 7  Verdery, Katherine, National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s Romania. University of California Press, 1991; Tismaneanu, Vladimir, Reinventing politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel. The Free Press, 1992; Mazower, Mark, Inside Hitler’s Greece. The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993; Livezeanu, Irina, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995; Bell, John, The

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contentious (but also the most original) thematic circle is the study of the communist legacy and the post-communist period. Historians stepped into it fairly recently (only the last few years) and rather hesitantly. Before this the subject was dominated by political scientists, economists and partly sociologists, most of whom belonged to the (by now ephemeral) field of transitology, driven mostly by totalitarian theory (by now also almost supplanted) and dealing with questions of democracy, constitution, privatization, elections, dissidence, lustration etc. As a whole, this thematic circle was dominated until recently by the “two totalitarianisms” paradigm, essentially equating fascism and communism, but this is being already successfully complicated. Today, after a surge of pioneering anthropological research8 and a welcome wave of Soviet studies,9 there is a perceptible shift from the dominance of the Communist Party of Bulgaria from Blagoev to Zhivkov. Stanford University Press, 1996; Ibid., ed. Bulgaria in Transition, Westview Press, 1998; Kligman, Gail, The politics of duplicity: controlling reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania. University of California Press, 1998; Melissa K. Bokovoy, Peasants and Communists: Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941–53, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998; Naimark, Norman, Leonid Gibianskii, eds. The Establishment Of Communist Regimes In Eastern Europe, 1944–1949, Westview Press, 1998; Tismaneanu, Vladimir, ed. The Revolutions of 1989. Routledge, 1999; Tismaneanu, Vladimir, ed. The Revolutions of 1989. Routledge, 1999; Tismaneanu, Vladimir and Sorin Antohi, eds., Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (Central European University Press, 2000); Tucker, Aviezer, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000; Kenney, Padraic, Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989, Princeton University Press, 2002; Bucur, Maria, Eugenics and modernization in interwar Romania. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002; Bradley F. Adams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005; Shore, Marci, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968. Yale University Press, 2006; Dimou, Augusta, Entangled Paths Towards Modernity. Central European University Press, 2009. 8  Verdery, Katherine, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton University Press, 1996); Idem., The Vanishing Hectare (Cornell University Press, 2003); Burawoy, Michael and Katherine Verdery, eds., Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Hann, Chris and Elizabeth Dunn, eds. Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (Routledge, 1996); Dunn, Elizabeth, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Culture and Society After Socialism (Cornell University Press, 2004); Creed, Gerald, Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Idem., Masquerade and Postsocialism: Ritual and Cultural Dispossession in Bulgaria (Indiana University Press, 2011). 9  Some of this work dates back to the revisionist social history of the 1970s which questioned totalitarianism (Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stephen Cohen, Moshe Levin) to the new cultural history which started breaking down the exclusive debate about ideology and the Stalinist system (Alexei Yurchak, Stephen Kotkin, Jochen Hellbeck, Yuri Slezkine, Kate Brown, Peter Holquist, Michael David-Fox, Fred Corney).

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totalitarian paradigm (or its versions) to the one of modernization or others, like paternalism, elitism or state capitalism. There is an ongoing debate about continuity versus rupture, including a reassessment of what is revolution. New themes are emerging, like, for example, consumerism under socialism and, as a whole, attention to daily life, the history of mentalities and subjective experience, to the latest phenomenon of postcommunist nostalgia.10 One example, among an increasing number of others, is the Remembering Communism project funded by the VolkswagenStiftung (2006–2009), This was an international, interdisciplinary and comparative research project addressing how the communist experiment is remembered. It complicates the understanding of the communist system by introducing specificities between nation-states, as well as within societies, along categories such as region, class, gender, religion, generation or ethnicity. While paying due attention to institutional aspects of memory, the project’s primary focus is on subjectivity and how it can help pluralize the historical experience of socialism. How do recollection processes function? What are the memories of extraordinary situations and of everyday life? What accounts for postcommunist nostalgia and how is it articulated? How does individual memory relate to normative assessments designated as public memory?11 Much of this is infused by the huge interest in memory studies. In this respect, there is an interesting twist within memory studies that is worth mentioning. With the European Union expansion, East European historiography has been under pressure (if not explicit, certainly implicit, especially moral) to follow the paradigms of West European historiography. In the postwar period, the Holocaust was entrenched as the central, meta-event of European experience and the most powerful pillar of European collective memory, indeed its (negative) moral foundation. This was a slow process, and the universalization of the Holocaust from a German guilt to a European and global memory place took at least four decades, and more. The pressure on East European historians 10  Kenney, Padraic, The Burdens of Freedom: Eastern Europe since 1989 (Zed Books, 2006); Zubrzycki, Geneviève, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in PostCommunist Poland (University of Chicago Press, 2006); Ganev, Venelin, Preying on the State: The Transformation of Bulgaria After 1989 (Cornell University Press, 2007); Bren, Paulina, The Greengrocer and his TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Cornell University Press, 2010); Todorova, Maria, ed., Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation (SSRC, Columbia University Press, 2010); Todorova, Maria and Zsuzsa Gille, eds. Postcommunist nostalgia (Berghahn, 2010). 11  The project, under the leadership of Maria Todorova and Stefan Troebst, organized parallel research teams in Romania and Bulgaria, and is using research on the former German Democratic Republic and Poland as control groups. The results are being edited and are expected to appear in two volumes.

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(both within and outside the region) to deal with issues of collaboration, for a quick Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and especially the elevation of the Holocaust on an exclusive pedestal has produced resistance (most notably in Poland), but it should not be brushed off with easy explanations of endemic anti-Semitism, although this does exist, of course. Some of it is the priority of dealing with the legacy of the communist period and in specific cases with the legacy of direct Soviet control. Without going into detail; all that needs to be mentioned is that this produces a friction which, in the end, may hopefully be resolved not by the imposition of a prescriptive recipe, but by stressing legitimate differences of historical experience, and broadening the moral foundations. Finally, there is a fairly recent thematic circle focused on women’s and gender history, to which American scholars have made a unique, even if not exclusive contribution.12 Having identified these several thematic circles does not mean that they exhaust the field but, it seems to me, they are the ones that at this moment attract the most attention. I would not venture to predict how long this will last. The turnover seems to be rather high. Just a decade ago, one would have pointed to the study of alterity (the “Other”) and the research on stereotypes, as the cutting edge problematique, but this no longer obtains.13 12  Funk, Nanette and M. Mueller, eds., Gender Politics and Post-Communism. Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Routledge, 1993); Gal, Susan and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender After Socialism (Princeton University Press, 2000; Gal, Suan and Kligman, Gail, eds. Reproducing Gender. Princeton University Press, 2000); Crowley, David and Susan Reid, eds. Socialist Spaces: Sires of Everyday Life in the Eastern Block (Berg, 2002); Jolluck, Katherine, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during the Second World War (University of Pittsburg Press, 2002); Bucur, Maria, Nancy M. Wingfield, eds. Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Indiana University Press, 2006); Johnson, Janet Elise, Jean Robinson, eds. Living Gender after Communism (Indiana University Press, 2006); Feinberg, Melissa, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1950 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); Ghodsee, Kristen, “Red Riviera”: Gender, Tourism and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Duke University Press, 2005); ibid., Muslim Lives in Eastern Eaurope: Gender, Ethnicity and the Transformation of Islam in Postscocialist Bulgaria (Princeton University Press, 2009); Malgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also De Haan, Fransisca and Krassimira Daskalova, A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, 19th and 20th centuries (Central European University Press, 2006). To this should be added the international journal Aspasia, dedicated to women’s and gender history in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, which has been published annually since 2007. 13  The pioneering studies were Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 1994); Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford University Press, 1997, 2nd edition 2010); Goldsworthy, Vesna, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (Yale University Press, 1998). See also Wolff, Larry, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age

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Methodological Issues

What are the methodological challenges (some are even antinomies) that apply to all these thematic circles and, indeed, not only to them but to the whole field. Some of them have been briefly touched upon: macrohistory/­ microhistory, local/global, comparative history/histoire croisée, world/­ national history, continuity/rupture, reflexivity/objectivity and so on. The most prominent, according to me, is the language in which we write the history of the region and, as a matter of fact, any history. By language I mean first and foremost the conceptual apparatus. I would define this as the antinomy of distinctiveness or uniqueness versus universalism. There is nothing immanently privileging either the universalist or the distinguishing as the better heuristic approach. The universalist makes it possible to engage with a vibrant body of interdisciplinary work, attaining truly meaningful cross-regional comparisons that overcome the self-imposed limitations of national and even imperial historiography. Yet, there is a classic and fundamental epistemological problem facing universalizing discourses. Are they not, in the end, a discreet way of imposing hegemonic categories and models, and reducing the objects of study to variants of the primary case elevated to a normative model? This is a real problem. In one way or another, it is a problem that practically all non-West European historiographies have faced at some moment in their development. To draw upon my own knowledge of Eastern European and Ottoman studies, a standing discussion that falls under this rubric is the one about periodization. Another asks whether feudalism, as developed mostly on the basis of French material, is an appropriate general category to encompass structures and relationships in the Byzantine or Ottoman Empires, as well as the medieval Balkan societies. Especially with the imposition of official Marxism (in itself both a universalizing and, at the same time, a Eurocentric idiom) there was a tendency to subsume everything within a standard model and mention local “deviations” on the side. There was also a natural tendency to resist, and somehow focus on specificity. In a curious but predictable way, these efforts coincided with the search for authenticity by nationalist historiographies. The problem is, of course, how to articulate difference, and in most cases this is being done by employing specific local historical categories, insisting on their non-translatability. The result of this understandable heuristic

of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2001); Belic, Dusan and Obrad Savic, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (The MIT Press, 2002).

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shift was a hermetic, often arcane and self-referential analysis which contributed much to the further marginalization of these historiographies. At the same time, once these historiographies were pulled into the sphere of international exchange of historical knowledge, primarily as a result of the generalizing projects stemming, as a rule, from western academia, the untranslatable categories were assumed to indicate untranslatable phenomena or institutions. This contributed further to the exoticizing of the non-Western European space, and to the essentializing of differences as incompatibilities.14 Today, the big question is whether we approach Eastern Europe as part of a universal, if not entirely homogenizing and singular modernity, or is it the case that it can be better explained in terms of an alternative modernity or even multiple modernities? There is no easy solution and, I am afraid, there is no third way. At each intersection one should carefully weigh the losses and the tradeoffs. The universal idiom does, indeed, open the field, it serves as a necessary and welcome stimulant, and it is the only medium for genuine comparative research. But it comes with its price, and the price is what Lotman has called semiotic inequality. The perils of the uniqueness or distinctiveness approach have equally been emphasized. Its awards are the embedding of a greater cognitive value in the object of study, but this intellectual autarchy comes at the price of isolation and parochialism. It is inevitable that methodological excesses in one direction will engender a reactive pull in the other direction. My own predilection is in favor of the universalist idiom (tempered, of course, by a strong groundedness in historical specificity) but this is prompted exclusively by the state of the art in my own field, where historiography has more often erred on the side of the specific. I would be equally ready to endorse the other option if there is the opposite imbalance. Finally, the discipline in and of itself will not resolve this oscillation between the two heuristic approaches. It is the political conjuncture that is the 14  One example coming from my own research is the effort to map the diversity of family forms in Europe. The 19th-century tendency to look for uniqueness in the ethnographic descriptions of the multiple family form of the so called zadruga in the European southeast resulted in overall schemata in which all other local European versions of multiple families (Grossfamilie, frérèche, fratellanza) were deemed to be reducible to the generic scholarly description of multiple or extended families whereas the zadruga continued to be treated as a unique (and exaggerated) specificity of the region, impossible to accommodate within a general scholarly vocabulary and discourse. The same applies for the category of the Russian mir. How such constructions of scholarly discourse can then easily sweep into the political arena is not difficult to imagine (Todorova, Maria. Balkan Family Structure, op. cit.).

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breeding ground for this dichotomy. The Sonderweg discussion in German historiography that was raging for a long time accompanied the unresolved problem of Germany’s acceptance and accommodation within the European framework since the nineteenth century. Once this was achieved in practice, the matrix of German history seized to be explained in terms of the Sonderweg. The recent dominant interpretations approach German history not as a deviation from but as a version of the general current of European history, pointing out common features, in a word normalizing it. This is beginning slowly, but very slowly, for Eastern Europe. One positive step in this direction are projects that undertake comparisons across national borders, although the more ambitious and better executed ones are doing it solely within the East European realm, whereas the ones that venture across the East-West divide are still hesitant. Again, this is not entirely new. While it is true that non-national approaches are in a minority, they have not been entirely absent and have been employed, even if in varying quality and success. What is new is that the present endeavors are collective, they carry clout and are, as a rule, well funded. The latest initiatives are European based and initiated by a team of young scholars.15 They are warranted reactions to general “European” or “global” syntheses, which routinely neglect the eastern part of the continent, especially in the spheres of intellectual and, more broadly, cultural history. Both claim to set the ground for and then provide historical syntheses that would break the East-West duality and offer a theoretical contribution for a coherent pan-European perspective. One can remain less upbeat about the claims: these can be genuinely accomplished only if the real, institutional, economic and other inequalities between West and East European academia are minimized or, at least, decreased. 15  One is the four-volume anthology Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Eastern Europe (1770–1945) under the general editorship of Ahmet Ersoy, Maciej Gorny, Vangelis Kechriotis, Michal Kopecek, Boyan Manchev, Diana Mishkova, Balázs Trencsényi, and Marius Turda. Vol. I. Late Enlightenment—Emergence of the National Idea (2006); Vol. II. National Romanticism—the Formation of National Movements (2006); Vol. III/1. Modernism—the Creation of Nation-States (2010); Vol. III/2. Modernism—Representations of National Cultures; Vol. IV. Anti-Modernism—Radical Revisions of Collective Identities, Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2006–2014. The new project “Negotiating Modernity: History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe” is supported by the European Research Council and aims at producing a synthetic volume on the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. The first volume of a two-volume work has been published as Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janowski, Monika Baar, Maria Falina, Michal Kopecek. A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the ‘Long’ Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Absent this, so to speak, ontological inequality, the East-West duality can be broken not so much by offering East European analyses (even if they are cross-national), but by setting up a general European or global framework, in which the East European presence is organically interwoven or “entangled” as the discursive fashion would have it today. But nonetheless, it is the first and right step.16 16  On the other hand, things are more complex with the Russian/Soviet and Ottoman/ Turkish cases. As long as Russia’s and Turkey’s place and relationship with the European and world institutions remain an unresolved, unstable or, at least, ambivalent problem, this methodological problem is bound to persist.

chapter 23

The Ottoman Menace in Post-Habsburg Historiography This text was delivered as a commentary to three papers presented at a panel of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) in 2007. The panelists, Maureen Healy, Paul Hanebrink, and Patrick Patterson, together with the two commentators, Maria Todorova and Larry Wolff, were invited to submit their papers for a “FORUM: The Ottoman Menace,” which came out in Austrian History Yearbook, vol. 40 (April 2009), 141–147. Published with the permission of the journal.

Three very fine papers deal with the Ottoman menace as metaphor in what we now designate as the post-Habsburg period, that discreet time span between the closing decades of the nineteenth century and World War II, with some forays into the contemporary period. In all three papers, the Ottoman (or the Turk, as was the current usage) served as a foil for contemporary grievances. It is not really the “Ottoman menace” they are dealing with, but, accordingly, the Communist, Socialist, working-class, Jewish, Serbian, or other “menaces” that are additionally demonized by introducing the analogy to a well-known and popular symbol. In the apt observation of the Austrian playwright J. P. Ostland, quoted by Maureen Healy, this was the present packaged as the past. It needs to be stressed that even the phrase “Ottoman menace” is a neologism form the post-World War II period, when scholarly works insisted correctly on a distinction between “Ottoman” as an imperial designator and “Turk” as an ethnic and later a national one. Although this distinction is justified for analytical purposes, it introduces a tinge of anachronism that belies one of the primary goals of history writing. It is most appropriate, despite the interesting and revealing differences between the separate cases, that the common framework is the Habsburg domain. Further to the southeast, among the historiographies of the nationstates that seceded from the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, the catchphrase is not the “Turkish menace,” but the “Turkish yoke.”1 Further to the west, in 1  Denisa Kostovicova, “The Portrayal of the Yoke: The Ottomans and Their Rule in the Post-1990 Albanian-Language History Textbooks,” Internationale Schulbuchforschung 24, no. 3, 2002, 257–78; Marina Liakova, “Das Bild des Osmanischen Reiches und der Türken (1396–1878) in

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_025

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France or England, the “Turkish menace” is in use only in its literal sense, but the term does not carry metaphorical authority.2 Further to the north and east, in Poland or Russia, despite the greater proximity to the “Ottoman menace,” the term again does not have a similar metaphorical currency, which is played accordingly by the German and Russian thrust or the Tatar yoke. So what makes the “Turkish menace” such a powerful metaphor in Central Europe? I would argue that it is the intimacy with this historical symbol that makes its transposition so effective. It is worth going back a few centuries to the real Ottoman menace to make a couple of points about this intimacy. The City Museum of Vienna has a huge bronze spire from the steeple of the Stephansdom that adorned Vienna’s skyline from 1529 until 1683. This was the period from Suleyman the Magnificent’s (Kanuni) first unsuccessful siege of Vienna until the final fiasco of the Ottoman Central European ambitions with the defeat of the Ottoman army led by the grand vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha. This is the time when the citizens of Vienna felt the Ottoman menace immediately and intimately. The spire represents the cross victorious over the crescent. The inscription on the crescent reads: Hac Solimane, memoria sua. On the right is the date: 1529. On the left, there is a human hand. On closer scrutiny, it is clear that the fingers of the hand form the eloquent international sign that is verbally expressed by the phrase “giving someone the finger” (see Illustration 1). It is, of course, a spiteful sign, but you do not give the finger to a demon; you give it to a rascal you know intimately, someone who will recognize your sign for what it is. It is also directed not at some abstract entity—Islam or the Turk or the Ottoman—but has a concrete and personal addressee, the then-reigning sultan, arguably the most powerful sovereign in Europe at the time. No wonder this bulky artifact is not in the museum’s official album, nor are there any photographs on sale. Another object in the museum, but already included in the catalogue, is a lateseventeenth-­century Ottoman map of Vienna, which was captured along with other precious items when the disorganized Ottoman army fled to the east. It ausgewählten Schulbüchern für Geschichte,” Internationale Schulbuchforschung 23, no. 2, 2001, 243–58; Loris Koullapis, “The Presentation of the Period 1071–1923 in Greek and Turkish Textbooks between 1950–2000,” Internationale Schulbuchforschung 24, no. 3, 200, 279–304; “Die Osmanenzeit in der Bulgarischen Geschichtsschreibung seit der Unabhängigkeit,” Die Staaten Südosteuropas und die Osmanen, ed. Hans Georg Majer (Munich, 1989), 127–61; Fikret Adanir, “Balkan Historiography Related to the Ottoman Empire since 1945,” in Kemal Karpat, ed., Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey (Leiden, 2000), 236–52. 2  Hence, in a rare case of ever using the phrase, we read in a French textbook published in 1965 that “jusqu’au XVIIe siècle, la menace turque n’est pas un vain mot,” implying that after the seventeenth century, it did become an empty word (André Aubert, Paul Labal, François Durif, and Robert Lohrer, Histoire. Le monde de 1328 à 1715, Paris, 1965, 37).

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illustration 1 The bronze spire of the Stephansdom photograph by Maria Todorova

is a schematic map where one can recognize the main buildings at the time of the second siege. The Stephansdom looks like a mosque, except that there is a cross on top. This is not a wishful map; it simply depicts the religious temple of a well-known adversary through the means of one’s own artistic vernacular. Both these examples demonstrate that the real “Turkish menace,” though taken seriously as a threat, was nevertheless domesticated already at the time, whereas its symbolic counterpart continued to live a hyperbolic life and was appropriated in different settings. In addition to the famous Türkenlieder, these examples served multiple functions at the time. They were used as a propaganda tool in the hands of the ecclesiastical and secular rulers; they were an outlet for feelings of humiliation against the victorious Ottoman aggressor; they also served as a news item in current events; finally, they could be utilized even as nursery rhymes, like in the following one: Reit, Ferdl, reit! Tirk is nimma weit.3 In the Türkenlieder, the main lament is the disunity of Christendom, a lament 3  Ride, pony, ride! The Turk is never far away! This is reminiscent of a story reported in the Guardian by an Iraqi journalist who overheard a mother in the streets of Baghdad reprimanding her naughty son: “Hush, or I’ll tell Democracy!”

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that was present in all the popes’ missives: from Pope Nicholas V in 1453, Pope Innocent XI in 1683, and Pope Leo XIII in 1683, to Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI today. But this did not prevent Martin Luther, who believed that God had sent two punishments—the Turk and the plague—to bring back humility to Christianity, from equating the pope with the Turk, hence making use of the metaphoric meaning of the “Turkish menace” at the time of its real presence. Running through all three papers in the forum about the Ottoman menace is the worldview and role of the Catholic clerical elites in Hungary, Austria, and Croatia. Tellingly, we are dealing with three very Catholic countries, of which Hungary, with its strong Calvinist population, is the least emphatically Catholic. By the end of the nineteenth century, these clerical elites had embraced a universalist narrative when depicting the encounter with the Ottomans. In the words of Healy, the Catholic clergy had managed to “spin a universal siege story” about 1683 that had decided “the destiny of the entire Christian Occident”; Paul Hanebrink shows the appropriation of a universal “clash of civilizations” rhetoric avant la letter by Cardinal Mindszenty, in which Hungary and Western Christendom as a whole have survived Islam and will survive Islam’s new hypostasis, Communism; and Patrick Patterson documents the special claim that Croat history tellers lay on the role of antemurale christianitatis for Croatia, to the point of spinning a narrative of a triple victimization at the hands of an ungrateful West (both through Austrian and Hungarian domination) as much as by the Turks themselves. The notion that antemurale christianitatis has been a most powerful mental map is beyond reasonable doubt and has been amply demonstrated in scholarship. Although the United States increasingly played it in the wake of 9/11, antemurale christianitatis was, and continues to be, one of the most important European mental maps. In different periods, it has shifted from one to another European region or nation. Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Poland, Romania, Croatia, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Russia, the Balkans, Slavdom, Central Europe, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and so on, have all been saving Christianity and Europe. And it is here that it is worth distinguishing between the two claims: defense of Christianity and defense of Europe. Indeed, by 1883, there is a conflation between the two; and Austria, in Healy’s account, had carried on a successful mission as carrier of Christian culture that had brought the peoples of Europe to the apex of humanity; and the Vienna commemoration of 1683 celebrated Vienna as the bulwark of Europe, of Christianity, and of the West. This was not the case at the time. First and foremost, 1683 was not only far from an inevitable result, but it was also far from a foregone event. As late as 1683, the Habsburg Emperor Leopold I wanted to avoid a clash with the

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Ottoman Empire because of the danger looming from France, and he sent Conte Alberto Caprara as his envoy to Istanbul to negotiate a renewal of the favorable treaty of Vasvár (Eisenburg) that had regulated Habsburg-Ottoman relations since 1664. That the Ottoman side refused to do so and chose to go for war is not necessarily a symptom of a missionary zeal or widely shared expansionist program. The latest research has shown that the sultan himself and a number of his advisers had much more modest war aims. Both the Crimean Khan Mehmet Giray and the Vali of Buda opposed the march against Vienna. To a great extent, the 1683 Vienna siege was the making of a determined man, the grand vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha.4 And it is only in the aftermath of the siege that Vienna was transformed from a German border fortress into a Weltstadt of the continent. The notion of Europe itself underwent a very slow and gradual transformation in the centuries that witnessed the encounter with the Ottomans. It is worthwhile to take an early example from the early fifteenth century, long before the concept of Europe had crystallized into its present shape. Ulrich von Rifental, a Constance burgher, lived at the time and place of the great Catholic Church council of 1414–1418, notorious for its burning of Jan Hus. Inspired by the elevated role played by his home city, Ulrich decided to commemorate the event and in the 1430s penned his Chronik des Constanzer Concils.5 It is a work that affords an interesting glimpse into the geographical and political ideas of the educated strata of German-speaking society in the fifteenth century. Ulrich von Rifental classified all the peoples attending the council under two rubrics, listing their ecclesiastical and lay rulers. For his ecclesiastical overview, Ulrich started with Asia, the largest part of the world. It was now mostly Muslim and extended from Alexandria in the west to India in the east, hence encompassing all those territories today defined as “embracing the Near to the Far East,” inclusive North Africa. He then moved to the continent of Africa proper. According to Ulrich, “Africa is Greece, and has two empires in it, Constantinople and Athens.” Let us recall that Ulrich wrote at a time when Constantinople was still Byzantine, and he was hence alluding to Eastern/ Orthodox/Greek Christianity. To this Africa, Ulrich also added “Wallachia and Turkey, and all the lands that are buttressed by the sea and lie athwart Jerusalem as well as those on the other side of the Danube.” In a word, Ulrich’s 4  Mehmet Alpargu and Ilyas Öztürk, “Zur zweiten Belagerung Wiens in österreichischen und türkischen Geschichstsschulbüchern,” Internationale Schulbuchforschung 24, no. 3 (2002), 306. Some Turkish textbooks even forwarded the thesis that the French provoked Kara Mustafa to lay siege on Vienna: Ahmet Mumcu, Liseler için tarih (Istanbul, 1999), 130, quoted in Alpargu and Öztürk, op. cit., 311. 5  Chronik des Constanzer Concils, ed. Michael Richard Buck (Hildesheim-New York, 1971).

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Africa coincided with the Balkans. Europe was in effect “the land where we live,” and it stretched from the “White Russians and Smolensk right up to Turkey” and included the kings and kingdoms belonging to the Roman crown. It was inhabited by “Romans,” Slavs, Turks, Hungarians, Germans, and others.6 Ulrich von Rifental was no geographic dolt. His cosmography simply “subordinated topographic information to the religious denominations of its human subject matter.” This is most evident in the case of Bosnia. The subjects of the king of Bosnia came from Europe, whereas those of the duke of Bosnia in Turkey came from Africa. We can see in this echoes of the complex state of contending ecclesiastical hierarchies in Bosnia—the Franciscan order and others loyal to the Vatican, the Orthodox church, and the idiosyncratic Bosnian church—in a period when the mass conversion of Bosnians to Islam was still at least half a century away. Africa signified “infidel,” “pagan,” and “savage.” In learned German treatises of the mid fifteenth century, black Africans were doomed by their nature to the kingdom of Antichrist; it hence followed that the Antichrist ruled in Africa. Ulrich’s perceptions of the region were determined by the confusing and fluid situation in the Balkans, populated as it was by heretical Orthodox believers and in the process of being conquered by the Ottomans at precisely this time—in addition to its complicated and changing political and religious allegiances and its double and shifting vassalages.7 All in all, German writers from the fifteenth century onward stuck to the geographic criterion of defining Europe. This was a revival of the notions of classical antiquity that had fixed Europe’s borders at Constantinople and along the Tanais River (Don).8 The person most instrumental in this was Eneas Silvius Piccolomini, a Tuscan, who had studied at the universities of Siena and Florence before becoming Pope Pius II (1405–1464). His cosmographic opinions and authority marked all subsequent scholarship. Piccolomini’s work was permeated by the notion of stark cultural differences between Europe and Asia, and he is believed to be “the man who coined the word ‘Europeans’ and bequeathed it to Christendom as a kind of self-identification.”9 He was harkening back to the unified state of Christendom; and for Piccolomini the Christians of the Balkans, despite being heretics, were still guardians of Christendom against its foes. We still live today with this legacy, and it is small 6  Kiril Petkov, Infidels, Turks, and Women: The South Slavs in the German Mind, ca. 1400–1600 (Frankfurt, 1997), 55–61. 7  Ibid., 58–59. For the most detailed and authoritative account, see John Fine, Jr., The Early Medieval Balkans, as well as his The Late Medieval Balkans (Ann Arbor, 1983 and 1987, respectively). 8  Kiril Petkov, Infidels, Turks, and Women, 207. 9  Ibid., 221–22.

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wonder that the Vatican is one of the main bulwarks against a watered-down and more inclusive conception of European-ness. Let us not forget that the surprisingly successful visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Turkey a couple of years ago had as its primary and central aim not to repair relations with Muslims, but to heal the 1,000-year rift between the once-united Roman Catholic and Orthodox ­churches. Hence, if from the fifteenth century onward, the notion of Christianity was being increasingly suffused with a European character, today there is strong pressure to suffuse the notion of Europe with a Christian character. Back to the special rhetorical appeal of the “Turkish menace” in the Habsburg and post-Habsburg period: much of its continuous relevance can be understood with the help of the notion of intimacy, the fact that it continues to be a well-known popular referent even if the menace has disappeared, leaving only the Turk as a close neighbor. This also explains the specific differences between the three cases described in this forum. Some of the elements that Healy emphasized as typifying the Austrian case—especially the fear of the nascent workers’ movement, Socialism and Communism, and the spread of scientific materialism, as well as the traditional opposition to Islam as the archenemy of Christianity—are shared characteristics with the Hungarian and Croatian cases. Others, although seemingly different, display structural similarities. Such, for example, is the nationalists’ use of the symbol. For the Austrian nationalists, the pretentions of a Slavic people, the Poles, to the presiding position in the commemoration of the siege was unconscionable. Although they could not exactly deny Jan Sobieski’s crucial role, the nationalists tried to downplay it by questioning the sincerity of his motives or distinguishing him from “the treacherous Poles of today.” It is symptomatic that the Poles at this moment played a strong card by appealing directly to the pope. The Polish artist Jan Matejko produced his ­masterpiece—The Liberation of Vienna by Jan Sobieski—an enormous canvas, 458 cm by 894 cm, which today occupies the entire north wall of the Sobieski room, preceding the famous Stanze di Raffaello at the Vatican. Matejko waived the payment of 80,000 florins on condition that the painting be presented to Pope Leo XIII on the occasion of the bicentenary of the siege. And, indeed, the scene of the painting’s presentation is immortalized in a fresco on the vault of the second bay of the Gallery of the Candelabra at the Vatican. The other Slavic people with a claim to have actively fought the Ottomans (even if not directly in 1683), the Croats, were totally disregarded in Vienna. This produced the aforementioned identity of triple victimization at the hands of Turks, Germans (Austrians), and Hungarians as part of the grand narrative. Yet, for all practical purposes, as Patterson convincingly shows, the Croat history

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tellers constructed a “Turkish menace” inhabited by a Christian people, the Serbs, themselves with an identity as direct Turkish victims. What is interesting and unique in the Croatian case is that, with the new geopolitical realities in the twentieth century, this Turkish menace was gradually becoming more stereotypically Turkish and less particularly Muslim. Absent real Turks in their territory but present numerous Muslims (Slavic-speaking converts) in BosniaHerzegovina, whom they hoped to convert to a Croat identity, the Croat nationalists blunted the edge of their anti-Muslim rhetoric. The result was Radić’s idealization of the Bosnian Muslim as the idiosyncratic amalgam between Croat blood and language and the religion of the “enlightened Arabs, and by no means the barbarian [divljački] Ottoman Turks.” At the same time, these Turks bore no relation to the contemporary Turkish state; in a deeply Orientalizing overall framework, they were simply the rhetorical embodiment and synonym for the corrupt Serbian East, which was allegedly perpetuating the Eastern Asiatic barbarism and despotism of the Ottomans and of Byzantium. Still, even if only rhetorically, this demonization of the Turk is strikingly different from the Hungarian case. There, we witness quite the opposite process, one insisting on the radical difference between the Turks as a valiant people, indeed ethnic cousins, and their corrupting religion, Islam, for which there was no exemption. Already from the nineteenth century, as Hanebrink aptly demonstrates with the examples of Armin Vámbéry or Ignác Goldziher, there was a growing interest in the common Eastern, Central Asian roots of Hungarians and Turks (as well as Bulgarians), culminating in the establishment of the Turanian Society in 1910. Nor was this a Hungarian fantasy. The French school curriculum introduced the peoples of Eastern Europe under two rubrics: les slaves (Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Croats, etc.) and les peoples jaunes (Bulgarians, Magyars, and Turks).10 By the interwar period, radical right-wing nationalism and increasingly fascism embraced the Turanian idea, which played a formative role in Hungary’s foreign policy. The grand narrative predictably stressed the clash between Christianity and Islam and extolled Hungarian resistance as the savior of Europe. On the other hand, the trend emphasizing the Turkish legacy of conquest and state-building, as well as a common ethnogenesis, was used to legitimize domination over the Slavic and Romanian minorities. And this became the ideological garb of the political efforts to forge political cooperation between the revanchist victims of World War I—Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey—all the while stressing the common Turkic ethnic component. What all three papers amply and ably demonstrate is the malleability and multiplicity of the “Turkish menace” trope in the context of the late- and 10  Albert Malet, Le moyen age et le commencement des temps moderns (Paris, 1920), 347–57.

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post-Habsburg period. In the present climate of stalled European Union enlargement and efforts to construct a common European identity, in which the question of Turkey’s accession looms large and has produced polarized attitudes, it would be fascinating to continue this research to the present. Will the trend that insists on Christianity as the epicenter of Europe take the upper hand? Will the fear of taking on a large entity that would upset the existing power balance prevail? Conversely, can the emphasis on the entangled histories of Europe and the Near East, on the millennial ethnic and religious coexistence of Christians and Muslims, triumph in the end? All of this will require a new forum. In the meantime, we can be sure that while the Ottoman menace may be a page of the past, there still seems to be blood in the “Turkish menace.”

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Conversion to Islam as a Trope in Bulgarian Historiography, Fiction and Film Exploring the treatment of one of the most persistent tropes in Bulgarian ­historiography—conversions to Islam—this article demonstrates its functions over the time span of Bulgarian nationalism, and its employment in different genres. It focuses on a comparison between the chronicle of Metodi Draginov, and its later emplotment in Anton Donchev’s “Time of Parting” and the film “Time of Violence.” Originally prepared as a chapter published in Maria Todorova, ed., Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory, London: Hurst and New your University Press, 2004, 129–157, it appeared also in Ivaylo Znepolski, Koprinka Tchervenkova, Alexander Kiossev, Penser la Transition/ Rethinking the Transition. Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, 2002, 181–205, as well as in Bulgarian in Varban Todorov, ed. Izsledvaniya v chest na chlen-korespondent Strashimir Dimitrov, Studia Balkanica, 23, Pt.1, Sofia: Izdatelestvo na BAN, 2001, 369–391, and an abbreviated version in Kritika i khumanizîm, vol. 12, N. 3, 2001, 7–30.

A personal note frames this paper. In the spring of 1999, while teaching a course on Balkan history at Harvard University, I was invited by Anastasia Karakasidou to introduce a Bulgarian film in the series of Balkan historical films she had organized at Wellesley College. For lack of any other, but also because I thought it would provide a good basis for discussion on both national interpretations of an imperial past as well as lead us to contemporary issues (it was the beginning of the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia with the news and pictures of refugees streaming out of Kosovo), I showed the film “Time of Violence.” Set in the seventeenth century, it portrays the alleged mass conversion of Bulgarians in one part of the Rhodope mountains. The show itself went well but a few days later the student newspaper published the vehement and denunciatory protest of a young woman, a Turk from Bulgaria, who felt deeply offended by the display of what she thought a hyper-nationalist film. Sensitive as I am to both excesses of nationalism in general, and to the plight of the Bulgarian Turks in the 1980s in particular, I admit that I did not expect such a reaction and was genuinely surprised at what seemed to me to be an emotional though understandable overreaction. Part of it was that I had introduced the show with what I believed was the proper historicizing and contextualization, and this proleptic act on my part kept me from apprehending the coming reaction.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_026

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I should have known better. Of course, much as we would like to be understood for what we say (when we are the authors) or for how we interpret (when we are the mediators), the process of reception has its own laws, described with fancy terms like intertextuality, the dialogical principle etc., or with less fancy ones, like that a reader simply comes to the text with one’s own existential and intellectual baggage. And yet, is there something immanent in the text (whether verbal or visual), that always elicits or unleashes a certain reaction (even though the degree might be different)? Is this something locked and frozen within a discursive system that gives it meaning, in this case the system being nationalism? If memory is the interplay between repetition and recollection, and history, in the words of Patrick Hutton, is an art of memory, what are the identifiable markers that constitute the ensemble of collective memory? More significantly, how are they transmitted, and how are they received? Historians of commemoration have concluded that the latter is “a form of mnemonics for the modern age, self-consciously designed by leaders of the nation-state to prompt the desired recall, and so to rouse latent emotional energies.”1 But do the intentions correspond to the result, in a word, does it make us “remember” in the same way? I would like to analyze some of this on the basis of Bulgarian material by looking into a trope which seems to provide an unbroken continuity over time and over genres: conversions to Islam. In different sections of my paper, I am looking at the academic narrative and its functions, at fiction, and, finally, at film. There are two major points that are valid for all of these three types of narrative. One (and it concerns primarily but not exclusively the academic output) is how different sources become subordinated to the same goal, how Ottoman tax registers, sicil entries, petitions, fetvas, lists of categories of population groups, or Orthodox hagiography, chronicles, marginalia, folklore, or foreign diplomatic and travel accounts, are all made to speak the same language. The other, and it is the one that here interests me most, is how one source, and the same trope, even when functioning in the same discursive longue durée of nationalism, does not necessarily bear the same meaning and the same message. The meaning and, by extension, the memory as I hope to show, is produced in the space between authorial intention and reception. The narrative line of the movie “Time of Violence” revolves around the story of a priest who, faced with a bloody and systematic attempt on the part of the Ottoman authorities to force the population into Islam, in the end leads part of his flock to voluntary conversion in order to survive. The film is based on the 1  Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993), XV.

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novel “Time of Parting,” which itself is based partly on a chronicle describing the seventeenth century islamization of the Rhodope Bulgarians, the predecessors of today’s Pomaks. Let me, therefore, first turn to this very important source and its interpretation. 1

The Source

The so called “chronicle of Metodi Draginov” is a brief witness story, written by one local priest from the village of Korova, of the forceful mass Islamization of Bulgarians in the Chepino region of the Western Rhodope mountains in the seventeenth century. It was first published in 1870 in Vienna, in Bulgarian, by Stefan Zakhariev, a patriotic writer, scholar, collector of manuscripts, and journalist as part of his “Geographic-historical-statistical description of the TatarPazardhik kaza.”2 He had finished the manuscript in 1866 and died shortly after its publication. In his brief introductory annotation to the story, Zakhariev explained that he had found it as an entry at the end of a half-preserved prayerbook written on vellum. The original prayer-book has not survived. It was considered to have disappeared at the time of the arrest of Stefan Zakhariev’s son—Khristo—in Istanbul in 1874, although clearly not all items of the collections were lost, and some later found their way into the collection of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.3 The contents of the story are pretty straightforward: during the rule of Sultan Mehmed IV, his troops passed through the Rhodope mountains. The Greek Orthodox metropolitan of Plovdiv, Gavriil, angry at the Bulgarians for refusing to pay their church tax, reported on them to the sultan, maintaining that they were organizing a rising against the sultan’s authority. As a result, a punitive expedition, headed by one Mehmet pasha, was sent to the Chepino villages. The population was threatened, and then converted, and the chronicle has preserved the names of the islamicized priests and some local leaders; there was violence, and numerous churches and monasteries were ruined. The whole operation took place between St. George’s Day and the Feast of the Assumption, i.e. between May and August. The year given in the story is 1600 (a date that historians analyzing the chronicle corrected to refer to the time of the Venetian-Ottoman war of 1660–1669 over the island of Crete). 2  Stefan Zakhariev, Geografsko-istoriko-statistichesko opisanie na Tatarpazardzhishkata kaaza (Viena, 1870, phototype edition and commentary, Sofia, 1973). 3  Iliya Todorov, “Letopisniyat razkaz na pop Metodi Draginov,” Starobîlgarska literatura, 16, 1984, 67.

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In general surveys of Bulgarian literary history, this chronicle has been considered an important monument, one of the very few original texts from the seventeenth century. While already contemporaries of Zakhariev’s publication (among them distinguished scholars like Marin Drinov, Konstantin Jireček, Romeo Cholakov) recognized that the language of the text was modernized, as well as that there were factological discrepancies, this was attributed to the lack of professionalism, particularly of the necessary philological precision, on the part of Zakhariev. However, the provenance of the text from the seventeenth century was not in doubt. Very early on also, scholars had noticed the similarities between Metodi Draginov’s chronicle, and another two chronicles which described the same events. One is the so-called Batkunski chronicle published in 1893. It was supposed to be a Bulgarian translation of the Greek translation of a lost and undated Bulgarian original made a couple of decades previously by a Greek doctor in Plovdiv.4 The other is the Belovo chronicle (Belovski letopis) which exists in two versions. The first version was published in 1898, and was dated by its publisher Nachov from the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century.5 Since this chronicle is the only one whose original has been preserved in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, it was definitively analyzed and dated by Khristo Kodov in his authoritative 1969 inventory of Slavic manuscripts as coming from the beginning of the nineteenth century.6 The second version was published by Petîr Mutafchiev, who explains that this was a copy from a destroyed or lost book of the priest Georgi from Belovo who was killed during the April Uprising of 1876. The original of the copy, however, has not been preserved.7 While all scholars recognized the similarities between the three chronicles, their genealogical relationship was not convincingly determined. The historian Petîr Petrov, who in 1965 offered the most detailed historical analysis, concluded very generally that all three chronicles have as their base a common source.8 In more specialized historical circles, either in unofficial discussions or in university lectures, the chronicle 4  Khristo P. Konstantinov, “Pisma or Rodopite. Pismo XIV. Istoricheski pregled na pokrainata Chepino,” Svoboda, VII, 1070, 7 April 1893. Reprinted in Khr. P. Konstantinov, “Chepino (Edno bîlgarsko kraishte v severozapadnite razkloneniya na Rodopskite planini),” Sbornik za Narodni Umotvoreniya, 15, 1898, 230–231. 5  Nikola Nachov, “List ot khnonika, namerena vs. Golyamo Belovo,” Bîlgarski pregled, 5, 1898, 2, 149. 6  Khristo Kodov, Opis na slavyanskite rîkopisi v Bibliotekata na Bîlgarskata Akademiya na Naukite (Sofia, 1969), 256–258. 7  Petîr Mutafchiev, Stari gradishta i drumove iz dolinite na Strema i Topolnitsa (Sofia, 1915), 73– 74. Reprinted in P. Mutafchiev, Izbrani proizvedeniya, I (Sofia, 1973), 366–367. 8  Petîr Petrov, “Bîlgarskite letopisni svedeniya za pomohamedanchvaneto v Chepino,” Rodopski sbornik, I, Sofia, 1965.

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of Metodi Draginov, while not at the very center of debates, clearly produced polarized evaluations, with some professors using it as the ultimate argument about mass conversions and evidence for a sustained policy of assimilation, and others refusing to credit it as a reliable source and describing it as a ­nineteenth-century forgery. In 1984, the literary historian Iliya Todorov published what has since become the definitive verdict on the chronicle. Todorov gave the source a close linguistic reading, and while he carefully reasoned that the language itself cannot be sufficient proof for or against its authenticity, the dialectological, orthographic and onomastic analysis prompted him to conclude that the source was too remote from the language of seventeenth century documents, and that it reflected nineteenth-century forms and conventions. Moreover, the factological analysis exposed obvious inconsistencies, among them that the Ottoman documentation clearly shows the villages of the Chepino region as parts of a vakıf at least from the middle of the sixteenth century and on into the nineteenth century, while the chronicle describes them as voynuk villages. Todorov also pointed out the clear anti-Greek feeling emanating from the document which also reflects an anachronism: the ecclesiastical conflicts between Bulgarians and Greeks hardly predated the latter half of the eighteenth century and become wide-spread only in the 1nineteenth. The most important contribution of Iliya Todorov, however, was to critically and historically situate the chronicle of Metodi Draginov in the general oeuvre of Stefan Zakhariev. He first succeeded in proving that Zakhariev was familiar with the Belovo chronicle and had reported on it in a newspaper article from 1860. His conclusion was that the chronicle of Metodi Draginov “was nothing else but a literary arrangement based on the really existing Belovo chronicle.” By carefully juxtaposing it to the two preserved versions of the Belovo chronicle, Todorov concluded that, most likely, Zakhariev had used a lost common predecessor of the two versions.9 But Todorov went further in his analysis. He demonstrated that Zakhariev often resorted to such literary devices. In the same edition in which he printed the chronicle, he also published the inscription of a marble plaque he had found in a fortress in the same region, which was supposed to date from the tenth century. In this case, the fake is pretty obvious although it did spawn several archeological expeditions. On at least three other occasions, and in other works, Zakhariev produced what Iliya Todorov carefully defines as “literary mystifications.” These were documents, compiled 9  Todorov, “Letopisniyat razkaz,” 60–62, 77. Todorov also maintained that the Batkun chronicle was the earliest and, had its original been preserved, it would have been the closest to the original version (written or oral) of the conversion story.

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from different written sources and also based on oral tradition, and enriched by facts and twists of the author himself, that he would pass for his copies of lost “originals.” As Iliya Todorov’s analysis demonstrates, Metodi Draginov’s chronicle was a close literary version of the authentic nineteenth-century Belovo chronicle. The motive of the Greek metropolitan’s betrayal was also not invented by Zakhariev. There existed the legend that in the early sixteenth century, Sultan Selim, incited by the Greek Patriarch, took off to Tîrnovo, ruined the Bulgarians lands, destroyed the churches, and converted the survivors to Islam. The origin of this legend has not been determined yet but it is documented in written form in the 1792 history of Spiridon, and from there made its way into later copies of Paisii’s history.10 There was also an oral legend about Chepino implicating the local Greek hierarch which had been reported qua legend in the local press in 1860.11 The motives of Stefan Zakhariev were obvious. He was working in a period when the cultural struggle for emancipation among the Bulgarians had reached a critical degree, and he was totally engrossed in this struggle. The 1860s, in particular, saw the culmination of the ecclesiastical conflict with the Greek Constantinople patriarchate, and all intellectual efforts were directed at proving the “rights” of the Bulgarians to an independent church. That an independent church for the Bulgarians meant independent national existence was correctly suspected both by the Patriarchate (which therefore opposed it), and by the Porte (which backed it in the hope of placating the growing radicalization of the political movement). It was also a time when history was the foremost legitimizer of nationhood in terms of “historic” versus “non-­ historic” nations. Zakhariev himself lamented in 1860 that “we do not have antiquities from which we can explore our bygone deeds so as to put together a detailed and true history of our past life.” He ascribed this not to the lack of 10  Ibid., 64, n. 37. 11   Bîlgariya, II, 91, 24 October 1860. While Zakhariev was the most likely author of this newspaper article, the context in which this legend appears leaves no doubt about its authenticity. It reports the visit of the Greek metropolitan Illarion in the town of Panagyurishte. When he admonished the flock to pay their church taxes, a peasant countered that he had heard from his grandmother and grandfather that a prelate like him had “turkified” with taxes the Bulgarians in Chepino, and that it seemed he was about to “turkify” them too with his zeal. One should be aware that in Bulgarian “turkify” has, besides the literal meaning of convert, also the idiomatic sense of ruin, devastate, destroy completely. In 1861, the Russian consul in Plovdiv Naiden Gerov replicated in one of his dispatches the explanation that the Bulgarians of the Dospat region converted to Islam because of the unbearable pressure of their hierarchs. It is not clear whether he based this on the above-mentioned newspaper article or whether he was familiar with the legend (Arkhiv na Naiden Gerov, vol. 1, Sofia: Bîlgarska akademiya na naukite, 1931, 230).

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such antiquities which were plentiful but, on the one hand, to the ignorance of “our people whose national feelings are not developed” and who cannot, therefore, appreciate them and, on the other hand, to the poverty of the scholars who, even when interested, had not the means to research and acquire them.12 Nor was Zakhariev alone in his endeavors, either at home or abroad. This was the height of romanticism which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced famous “mystifications” or outright “forgeries” in practically all European countries: France, Spain, Germany, Scotland, Italy, Russia, etc.13 In the Bulgarian case, the classical and most successful case is the famous “Veda Slovena,” arguing for the existence of a whole Slavic pre-Homeric poetical cycle, but there are a number of others too.14 In the context of this paper, it is important to see what this de-authentication or de-mystification of the Metodi Draginov chronicle achieves. The obvious one is that it cannot be used as an example of a seventeenth-century document, nor as a reliable witness account of a mass conversion. Does this, however, completely de-legitimize it as a historical source? It is in this context that one has to understand the heated debates about how to classify this document: whether to dismiss it as “primitive falsification” or insist on the delicate distinction between “fake” or “forgery,” and “literary mystification.” Proponents of the latter view insist that, despite accretions or outright distortions, the document still is based on a number of real historical facts, and earlier written or oral information.15 The problem with this is, of course, that any falsification is 12  Quoted in Todorov, “Letopisniyat razkaz,” 60. 13  There is an abundant literature on the topic of which a few titles are worth mentioning here: Ian Haywood, The Making of History: a Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteeenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986); Paul Lehmann, Pseudo-antike Literatur des Mittelalters (Leipzig, Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1927); Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage: a Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988); Evgenii Lann, Literaturnaya mistifikatsiia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe isdatel’stvo, 1930); Edmund Kerchever Chamber, The History and Motives of Literary Forgeries (Norwood, Pa: Folcroft Library Editions, 1975); Joseph Rosenblum, Practice to Deceive (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2000). 14  Stefan Verkovich, Veda Slovena: bulgarski narodni pesni ot preistorichna i predkhristiyanska doba (Belgrade, 1878); Alexander Chodzko, Etudes bulgares (Paris: E.Leroux, 1875); Mikhail Arnaudov, Verkovich i Veda Slovena:prinos kîm istoriyata na bîlgarskiya folklor i na Bîlgarskoto Vîzrazhdane v Makedoniy, s neizvestni pisma, dokladi i dokumenti ot 1855 do 1893 godina (Sofia: Bîlgarska Akademiya na Naukite, 1968); Ivan Bogdanov, Veda Slovena i nasheto vreme (Sofia: Uiversitetsko izdatelstvo “Sv.Kliment Okhridski,” 1991); Boris Khristov, ed., Veda Slovena (Sofia: Izdatelstvo “Otvoreno obshtestvo,” 1997). 15  Elena Grozdanova, Stefan Andreev, “Falshifikat li e letopisniyat razkaz na pop Metodi Draginov?” Istoricheski pregled, 1993, 2, 146–157.

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based on a number of real historical facts, and the more effective and trustworthy it is, the greater its accordance to historical fact. One the other hand, the ones who utilize “falsification” insist with a Puritanical zeal on purging these sources from the repertoire of historical argumentation altogether.16 In the end, it seems to me that there is no profound cognitive difference between the categories “falsification” or “mystification.” There is, however, a clear evaluative difference among authors who use one or the other category, but this is a historiographical problem to which I will turn in the next section. As for the “chronicle of Metodi Draginov,” it is an authentic nineteenthcentury artefact which, among other things, reflects and transmits perceptions about conversions. What is most important, the emotional center and emphasis of the story is not the conversion but the act of betrayal on the part of the Greek clergy, and this is what in the end produced the literary mystification. It is, therefore, an authentic historical source for the history of nineteenthcentury ideas, and cultural and ecclesiastic struggles. Especially because of the intentionality and anti-Greek penchant of the document, the story of the conversion which only serves as a background, and is documented in a preserved and authentic early nineteenth-century chronicle, is a valid illustration of perceptions that were broadly shared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and were clearly based on popular legends that may or may not go back as early as the seventeenth century. However, when the chronicle was lifted from its politically activist mid-nineteenth-century context and entered the realm of academic production where national historiography had a slightly different activist agenda, it was re-described, re-interpreted, or rather re-emphasized, and the background became the foreground, giving it a new positional meaning. 2

History and Historiography

The Polish historian Jerzy Topolski has pointed out that while the production of the historical narrative is to a large extent a re-description of one narrative 16  In the same vein, Machiel Kiel ironically comments on the fact that, even as the chronicle of Metodi Draginov was exposed as a “forgery” or “mystification,” the village Korova, the alleged birthplace of the fictitious Metodi Draginov, bears the name Draginovo since 1966 “commemorating a man who did not exist”: Machiel Kiel, “Razprostranenie na islyama v bîlgarskoto selo prez osmanskata epokha (XV–XVIII v.): kolonizatsiya i islyamizatsiya,” in: Rositsa Gradeva, Svetlana Ivanova, eds., Myusulmanskata kultura po bîlgarskite zemi. Izsledvaniya (Sofia: Mezhdunaroden tsentîr po problemite na maltsinstvata i kulturnite vzaimodeistviya, 1998), 82. Quite apart from the possible political repercussions, the fact that he “did not exist” is not in itself a reason to expunge him altogether from any mention. Do we have to rename Athens because the goddess Athena did not exist in reality?

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(the one in the sources) to another (historiography), it should not be reduced to this re-description. He accordingly differentiates between epistemological and non-epistemological functions of historical sources. The conventional metaphors used for sources—“traces left by the past” as in a “hunting” metaphor, or “glass, window, lenses, mirror” as an allusion to the access into the “other” world, the world of the past as a totality—correspond to a theory of truth in which “sources are regarded by the historians as an element of the epistemological chain which gives them a more or less straight access to the past reality.”17 Topolski himself rejects the metaphor of access and, instead, refines the epistemological function of historical sources by employing the metaphor of the thread which, in his opinion, describes a limited or weak contact with reality without, at the same time, excluding the interpretation of the historiographic narrative in terms of the historian’s non-epistemological construction. The latter is regrettably not elaborated on but it invokes the use of sources on the part of the historian not only as a stock of concrete data but also as an inspiration, as emotion, or as nourishment for the imagination.18 It functions within what Topoloski has elsewhere called narrative totality, the medium in which individual sources of information lose their personality, and become imbued with the general content and tenor of the totality.19 Approached from this angle, the chronicle of Metodi Draginov need not be judged simply as a false trace, a broken mirror or a severed thread, or to put it differently, it will be judged as such only within the paradigm which posits it as an element in the epistemological chain that leads to a more or less straight access to past reality. But its excision from the body of the “narrative totality” does not necessarily change the tonality of the totality. Thus, Petîr Petrov, one of the few professional historians directly and ardently implicated in the renaming campaign of the 1980s, and a long-term popularizer of the chronicle, left it out of the first volume of the second edition of his documents on conversions to Islam.20 When the volume was published in 1987, it left the impression that Petrov had heeded, after all, Iliya Todorov’s analysis. Instead, he included 17  Jerzy Topolski, “Historical Sources and the Access of the Historian to the Historical Reality,” in T. N. Sevost’ianov, ed., Problemy istoricheskogo poznaniia (Problems of Historical Knowledge), (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), 26. This volume with interesting papers from an international conference in Moscow is predominantly in Russian, with Topoloski’s paper rendered, unfortunately, in very clumsy English. 18  Ibid., 30. 19  Jerzy Topolski, “A Non-Postmodernist Analysis of Historical Narratives,” in Topolski, ed., Historiography Bteween Modernism and Postmodernism, Amsterdam, Atlanta, Ga: Rodopi, 1994), 30–71. 20  Petîr Petrov, Po sledite na nasilieto. Dokumenti i materiali za nalagane na islyama (In the Traces of Violence. Documents and Materials About the Imposition of Islam), Part I (Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo, 1987); first edition: Po sledite na nasilieto. Dokumenti i materiali

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a newly translated (by Asparukh Velkov) document from the Oriental department of the National Library: an authentic defter of expenditures for newly converted Muslims in the period from June 1679 to May 1680. There were altogether 239 converts (193 men and 146 women), of whom 22 men and 2 women were specified to have converted during the Sultan’s hunting. The title to the document is: “Islamization in Eastern Thrace during the Sultan’s hunt.”21 The allusion to Metodi Draginov’s chronicle was transparent. The chronicle may have been a late mystification or forgery but the real trace—the document— has been uncovered. The narrative totality was unharmed. Moreover, a year later, when Petrov published the second volume of the collection, he had recanted from what was seen as a “scholarly” weakness. The Metodi Draginov chronicle was back in, without a mention about its dating.22 The general tenor of the narrative had also hardened. Where the abstract to the first volume mentioned that the documentation “gives the possibility to illustrate concretely the Bulgarian roots of the islamicized population in the Bulgarian lands,” the second volume spoke of the “categorical way to demonstrate the big truth that the islamicized population in Bulgaria has Bulgarian origins and has always belonged to the Bulgarian people.” In the Bulgarian national historiographical context, the chronicle’s function was somewhat different from the one which it was given at its inception. The anti-Greek element was de-emphasized or simply not noticed; it was the conversion that came to be highlighted. The social context for this was the process of nation-building, specifically the attempts at integration and homogenization of the population. It concerned first the Bulgarian speaking Muslim population (Bulgarian Muslims, or the so-called Pomaks), and its place in the newly independent state which at first did not attempt to integrate it but treated it as indistinguishable from the larger Muslim group. In all censuses of the late nineteenth century (1880, 1885, 1888) the Bulgarian speaking Muslims were entered under the heading “Turks.” It was only in the 1905 census that a separate group—“Pomaks”—appeared. Beginning with the 1890s but especially during the 1920s and 1930s a sustained campaign in the press urged public opinion to discriminate between religious and ethnic allegiance, and to accept the Pomaks as part of the Bulgarian nation. This idea was most intensely espoused by a small educated elite among the Pomaks (principally teachers) who strove za pomokhamednchvaniya i poturchvaniya (In the Traces of Violence. Documents About Islamization and Tukification) (Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo, 1972). 21  Ibid., 150–151. 22  Petîr Petrov, Po sledite na nasilieto. Dokumenti i materiali za nalagane na islyama, Part II (Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo, 1988), 357–358.

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to elevate the economic and cultural level of their group, and to rescue it from its ever-growing marginalization. In 1937 the organization “Rodina” (“Motherland”) was formed whose principal aim was to foster a Bulgarian ethnic consciousness among the Bulgarian Muslims. Its activities covered mostly the Central and Western Rhodopes; it proved unsuccessful in the Eastern Rhodopes. In the course of seven years the organization introduced Bulgarian language worship in the mosques, translated the Qur’an into Bulgarian, created a Bulgarian-Muslim establishment separate from the Turkish, promoted the creation of a local elite by enrolling Bulgarian Muslims in secondary and higher education establishments. It also attempted to reform everyday life by casting away the traditional costume, by improving the lot of women, by ending the practice of circumcision. Most importantly, in 1942 it embarked on a campaign to change the names of the Bulgarian Muslims by promoting Bulgarian, although not Christian, names. It has been estimated that by September 1944, two thirds of the Pomak population in the Central Rhodopes had changed their names. Immediately after the war, the “Rodina” organization was dissolved, on the grounds of being a nationalistic Bulgarian, reactionary and racist formation. The Muslim names of the population were restored by 1945. The “Rodina” movement of the 1930s and 1940s was regarded as a revival (“Vîzrazhdane”) of the lost ethnic/national consciousness of the Bulgarian Muslim converts. This very concept and the accompanying discourse, as well as the geographic span and the character of its activities is very important to keep in mind when considering the obvious continuities with later assimilation campaigns directed at the Pomaks (in the 1960s and the 1970s), and the internationally much more publicized campaign directed at the Turkish speaking Muslims in Bulgaria, the so called ethnic Turks, in the latter half of the 1980s. Although the activities of “Rodina” are less than controversial, and its assessments even more so, ranging from limitless idealization to complete repudiation, the substance of its efforts, the evaluative element aside, can be seen as an attempt to bridge existing religious boundaries through linguistic unity, and to replace or at least subordinate the heretofore dominant religious identity by ethnic/national consciousness. At least in its initial conception it was essentially a grassroots effort to blend with the dominant majority and thus acquire the mechanisms of social vertical mobility (despite the utilization of sometimes questionable methods, and although it soon came to be used by the authorities).23 This is the proper background for understanding the 23  See Maria Todorova, “Identity (Trans)formation Among Pomaks in Bulgaria,” Laszlo Kürti & Juliet Langman, eds., Beyond Borders (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1997), 63–82;

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r­ hetoric, motivations, and mechanisms of the renaming campaign launched against the ethnic Turks in the 1980s but in a completely different regional and global geopolitical context. This is also the proper context for understanding the new “valency” that the chronicle of Metodi Draginov acquired after the creation of independent Bulgaria. Its great value lay in its witness character and the rare genre that it represented—a chronicle—but it was only one in many sources on conversions that were being uncovered and publicized, and these sources all did have the epistemological function of gaining access to past reality. Conversion to Islam as a historiographic trope can be thus interpreted as serving a particular internal social and political function. At the same time, it has to be assessed in view of the agonistic field between Bulgarian (and, in general, Balkan) and Turkish national historiographies, especially in their respective attempts to explain the Ottoman conquest, the long-term Ottoman presence and the sizeable Muslim population in the Balkans. What is at stake is the attempt to prove the “blood-kinship” of the contested groups to the larger nations in the area. Turkish historiography, or at least a significant part of it, has focused on the size of the Turkic/Turkish masses arriving from Anatolia as a principal factor for Ottoman success. The history of the Ottoman Empire, in this view, could be re-interpreted as the history of migrations of great masses of people who had a numerical superiority over the indigenous population. In this interpretation the conscious and planned colonization of the Balkans on the part of the Sultan’s government held a central place.24 In contrast, Balkan historiography has made considerable efforts to refute, or rather relativize, the significance of Ottoman colonization in explaining both the success of the Ottoman conquest, and the significant size of the Muslim population by the last centuries of Ottoman rule. It pays due attention to the population transfers from Anatolia to the Balkans between the fourteenth B. Aleksiev, “Rodorpskoto naselenie v bîlgarskata humanitaristika,” in: Myusyulmanskite obshtnosti na Balkanite i v Bîlgariya (Sofia, 1997). 24  Ömer Lûtfi Barkan, “Osmanli imparatorlugunda bir iskân ve kolonizasyon metodu olarak sürgünler”, Istanbul Üniversitesi Iktisat Fakültesi Mecmuasi, 11, 13, 15, 1949–1951; “Rumeli’nin iskâni için yapilan sürgünler”, Istanbul Üniversitesi Iktisat Fakültesi Mecmuasi, 13, 1950; M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, Rumeli’de Yürükler, Tatarlar ve Evlâd-i Fatihan (Istanbul, 1957). I wish to thank Cemal Kafadar for pointing out to me that Turkish historiography itself is not unanimous on this issue, and that there had been an interesting internal debate, specifically around the activities of Sari Saltuk, and whether he had arrived in the Balkans in the company of other Anatolian Turks, or whether his followers were converted Balkan Christians. While this information enriches our view of Turkish historiography, it does not change the initial mutual perception of Balkan and Turkish historiography in which the polemical stance originated.

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and sixteenth centuries, and the character and main geographic areas of the Muslim colonization but demonstrates that the colonization did not significantly change the demography of the peninsula.25 Conversely, the first reliable statistical data from the nineteenth century, while preserving the predominance of the non-Muslims, demonstrated considerable changes in the ratio between Muslims and non-Muslims. The explanation for this has been seen in the processes of conversions to Islam, especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.26 It is widely accepted nowadays that the vast majority of the Balkan conversions were individual ones, although this particular point, whether the conversions were the result of a centrally planned and systematically implemented policy of assimilation or, on the other hand, whether they were an individually initiated policy of social, political, and religious adaptation, was itself the object of internal debates or differences within Bulgarian historiography. The non-enforced or so-called voluntary conversions can be viewed as the result of indirect pressure or coercion (economic and social, but not administrative) with the goal of attaining social re-categorization. It is moreover the individual and predominantly single character of these conversions which explains the fact that the integration into the new religious and social milieu was accompanied with a subsequent loss of the native tongue. The exceptions are the cases where these conversions occurred en masse in larger or smaller groups, irrespective of whether they were voluntary or e­ nforced: 25  Strashimir Dimitrov, “Za yurushkata organizatsiya i rolyata ï v etnoasimilatsionnite protsesi,” Vekove, 1982, 1–2; Nikolay Todorov, Asparukh Velkov, Situation démographique de la péninsule balkanique ( fin du XVe s. début du XVIe s.) (Sofia, 1988); Antonijevic D., “Prilog proucavanju stocarskih migracija na Balkanu,” Balcanica, 1976; Marie Mathilde Alexandresku-Derska Bulgaru, “La politique démographique des sultans à Istanbul (1453– 1496),” Revue des études sud-est européennes, XXVIII, 1–4, Bucarest, 1990, 45–56; for a critical view, see Machiel Kiel, “La diffusion de l’Islam dans les campagnes bulgares à l’époque ottomane. Colonization et conversion,” in Revue du monde musulman et la Méditerranée, 66, 1993/94, 39–54. 26  Elena Grozdanova, Bîlgarskata narodnost prez XVII vek. Demografsko izsledvane (Sofia, 1989); Strashimir Dimitrov, “Demografski otnosheniya i pronikvane na islyama v Zapadnite Rodopi i dolinata na Mesta prez XV–XVII b.,” Rodopski sbornik, I, 1965, 63–114; Strashimir Dimitrov, “Nyakoi problemi na etnicheskite i islyamizatsionnite protsesi v bîlgarskite zemi prez XV–XVII b,” in: Problemi na razvitieto na bîlgarskata narodnost i natsiya (Sofia: Bîlgarska akademiya na naukite, 1988); Antonina Zhelyazkova, Razprostranenie na islyama v zapadnobulgarskite zemi pod osmanska vlast, XV–XVIII vek (Sofia: Bîlgarska akademiya na naukite, 1990); Sami Pulaha, Aspects de démographie historique des contrées albanais pendant les XVe–XVIe siècles (Tirana, 1984); M. Sokoloski, “Islamizatsija u Makedonija u XV i XVI veku”, Istorijski _asopis, 1975, 22; for the earlier period, see Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

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Bosnia, Albania, the Rhodopes (the Pomaks), Macedonia (the Torbesh), Serbia (the Gorani). There are two things that ought to be mentioned in this cursory overview of Bulgarian historiography, especially after World War II. Firstly, despite the fact that the treatment of conversions can be inscribed as a whole within the overarching framework of the national paradigm, it was and continues to be far from unanimous in the details. There have been passionate and, often, contentious debates on the general evaluation of the Ottoman period, and the problem of conversions in particular. Some of these found their way in print, others were well remembered and influential oral debates; finally, even in the absence of debates, the coexistence of diametrically opposite approaches, evaluations and even rhetoric gives a relevant idea of the deep differences.27 It bears reminding that, among others, the definitive exposing of Metodi Draginov’s chronicle as a literary mystification by Iliya Todorov took place during these decades.28 27  An intense discussion which defined opposing approaches and interpretations raged in the early 1970s around the issue of the demographic consequences of the Ottoman conquest: Khristo Gandev, Bîlgarskata narodnost prez XV vek (Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo, 1972), with critical reviews of Strashimir Dimitrov, “Mezrite i demografskiya kolaps na bîlgarskata narodnost prez XV vek,” Vekove, 1973, 6, 50–65, Vera Mutafchieva, “Za tochnite metodi v istoricheskata demografiya,” Istoricheski pregled, 1973, 4, 134–141, and others. Another exchange concerned the authenticity of the so-called Istoricheski belezhnik (Historical diary), a later counterpart of the Draginov chronicle (Nikolay Khaitov, “Rodopskata istoriya v nyakoi statii i knigi na prof. Petrov” and Petîr Petrov, “Predizvikan otgovor,” Istoricheski pregled, 1977, 2, 103–109; G. Kuzmanov, “Istoricheski dokument li e Istoricheskiyat belezhnik?” and P. Marinov, Istini i zabludi,” Rodopi, 1977, 11, 26–32. For an example of the different assessment of the period, one can compare Istoriya na Bîlgariya, vol. 4 (Sofia, 1983) covering the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and edited by Bistra Tsvetkova and vol. 5 (Sofia, 1985) on the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries, under the editorship of Strashimir Dimitrov and Nikolay Todorov. For a general assessment, see Maria Todorova, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint in the Balkans and the Middle East, ed. L. Carl Brown, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, 45–77, as well as “Bulgarian Historical Writings on the Ottoman Empire,” New Perspectives on Turkey, No. 12, Spring 1995, which is an abbreviated but updated version of “Die Osmanenzeit in der Bulgarischen Geschichtsschreibung seit der Unabhängigkeit,” Die Staaten Südosteuropas und die Osmanen, Hrsg. Hans Georg Majer (München: Selbstverlag der Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft, 1989), 127–161. 28  Michiel Kiel, who otherwise praises Iliya Todorov’s work for having shown that the language of the document is from the nineteenth century, seems not to have actually read it. Otherwise, he would not have attributed the comparative historical analysis of Todorov who pointed out both the anti-Greek tenor of the chronicle and situated it in the context of European romanticism, to Antonina Zhelyazkova who, writing in 1990, endorsed and popularized Iliya Todorov’s original argumentation (Kiel, “Razprostranenie na islyama” 67). Zhelyazkova’s article is “The Problem of the Authenticity of Some Domestic Sources

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The second point to be stressed is that the de-legitimization of the narrative totality does not de-legitimize the individual sources; it simply absolves them of the general content inscribed in them by the totality. The thousands of sources that were published in documentary collections or smaller publications, especially in the 1980s, in an effort to provide a historical base for the lamentable assimilation process, may not any longer be used as proofs for the alleged assimilation politics of the Ottoman state. They continue to be, nonetheless, individual statements on the incontrovertible existence of a conversion process, which are subject to different interpretations. Moreover, they too, like works of historiography, were of uneven quality. Some were substandard propaganda editions;29 others were of high academic quality and have not lost their value even today. An example of the latter kind is the volume of newly translated documents from the collection of the National Library which was initiated and carried out during the 1980s and received the special financial support of the Ministry for Science.30 The preface to this volume was written by Strashimir Dimitrov, the undisputed doyen of Ottoman studies in Bulgaria. The volume itself presented 239 documents, all from the Oriental collection of the Sofia National Library, grouped in four genres: a) registers; b) fermans, petitions, reports; c) sicils; d) fetvas. The detailed Janissary registers from the sixteenth and seventeenth century give interesting detail on the span of the economic activities of the Janissary corps. They also allow a correction of Hammer’s assertion, which has become dominant in the secondary literature, that by 1639 the practice of the devshirme was voided.31 Since in very many cases the ethnic and/or local provenance was registered, there are numerous mentions of Bulgarians, Croats, Russians, Albanians, Bosnians, Hungarians, Circassians, Franks, Serbs, Greeks, etc. One can hardly quibble with the very cautious way Dimitrov phrased his conclusion, especially given the time and circumstances he was writing in: “I have not counted how many of the ulüfeciyan (paid soldiers) have been rendered as Bulgarians, Albanians, Serbs, Greeks, Hungarians, etc. Others will surely do this on the Islamisation of the Rhodopes, Deeply Rooted in Bulgarian Historiography,” Etudes balkaniques, 1990, 4, 105–111. 29  An example of this is the tiny 33-page booklet Archives Speak Volumes (Sofia: Sofia Press, 1986). 30  Maria Kalitsin, Asparukh Velkov, Evgenii Radushev, Osmanski izvori za islyamizatsionnite protsesi na Balkanite (XVI–XIX v.), Seriya izvori—2, (Sofia: Bîlgarska akademiya na naukite, 1990). The volume had been completed and in print before the political changes at the end of 1989. 31  Strashimir Dimitrov, “Predgovor,” in: Osmanski izvori za islyamizatsionnite protsesi, 11, and document 7 (there is also a French introduction to the volume, 23–42).

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but it is clear, nonetheless, that there existed a constantly operating system for the absorption of people from different provinces and ethnic groups ‘under the influence of Islam and the Turkish milieu.’”32 Strashimir Dimitrov notes an interesting shift occurring in the seventeenth century. While in previous centuries strict measures were taken against runaways among the newly converted recruits, by the seventeenth century there was practically no case of attempted escape, clearly indicating that the ocak of the acemioğlan had become attractive, effectuating a social rise for the recruits. Instead, there were individual petitions from Christians asking to be converted to Islam and allowed to enter the Janissary corps or some other military detachment. The most interesting contribution of this volume may have been the introduction of a new genre of sources: individual petitions of local Christians who beg for admission to Islam, and ask for a variety of privileges: monetary help, new clothes, appointment to the military or the administration, etc. Over 130 such petitions were published. These were actually generic documents following a formulaic text, and were meant to begin financial transactions, sanctioning the petitions’ material requests. The calculations of Dimitrov showed that the monetary help given to the “new Muslims” was very substantial: a newly converted young man received the equivalent of the annual salary of an acemioğlan; a family of converts consisting of a man, his wife, and child would receive a sum equal to the price of a house.33 Of course, the implicit conclusion was that the Ottoman authorities, without officially condoning proselytism, were creating economic and social incentives for conversions. These documents, located within the narrative totality of reconstructing the islamization processes, had obviously not mere epistemological functions. They did “nourish the imagination” and they did “evoke emotions” (Topolski). But the point I wish to make is that these emotions were not necessarily the intended or expected ones. Here is an “oral history” contribution: In the 1980s, I was teaching Balkan and Ottoman history at the University of Sofia. In seminars, when trying to get across to my students the 32  Ibid., 8. The phrase ‘under the influence of Islam and the Turkish milieu’ is a quote but Dimitrov does not indicate its source. In the Bulgarian original “Turkish milieu” is rendered as “Turkism” which does not have the same connotation as in English. I have, therefore, in this case used the French translation of Dimitrov’s preface which the author supervised himself: “Je n’ai pas calculé le nombre exact des ulüfeciyan, qui, suivant des indications, devaient être d’origin bulgare, albanaise, serbe, grecque, hongrois, etc. D’autres vont sans doute le faire, mais cela ne nous empêche pas de voir que nous sommes en presence d’un système fonctionnant en permanence, dans l’objectif d’absorber des gens de différentes provinces et nationalités se trouvant ‘sous l’influence de l’Islam et du milieu turc.’” (26). 33  Ibid., 17, and documents 16, 232.

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motivations for converting, I would jokingly make the analogy with entering the Communist party. In the climate of these years, this was a calculated and more or less tolerable risk. What was totally not tolerated was open public criticism of the policies against the Turks, the infamous renaming process. There, one could resort to metaphors, to body language, to intonation, in a word, to the famous East European “periphrastic.” The above-mentioned “petitions” for conversion to Islam were for me a very useful tool. If one could make the logical analysis and conclusions about the fictitiousness of these “voluntary” and “enthusiastic” petitions of the past, one thereby was ipso facto subverting the legitimacy of the contemporary “voluntary” and “enthusiastic” petitions which the ethnic Turks were forced to sign after 1985. The logical proposition both upheld and undermined the official line, and its emotive power or meaning came from its extratextual baggage.34 It is in this context that I would wish to contemplate briefly on another type of historical memory, namely historiographical memory. It is only understandable and justifiable that some sort of revisionism would set in after 1989, and that it would affect the highly contentious and politicized issue of the Ottoman past. In this respect, an interesting article was published in 1998 by one of the best Ottomanist Evgenii Radushev, himself one of the editors of the above-mentioned volume of Ottoman sources on the islamization processes. The article, dealing with demographic and ethno-religious processes in the Western Rhodopes between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries is subtitled “an attempt to reassess fixed historiographical models.” It is Radushev’s central contention that the documentation coming from the Ottoman archives, newly accessible to Bulgarian researchers, “makes it imperative to speak of a process of islamization, instead of periodically carried out terrorist acts of mass imposition of the new religion.”35 But this, as I have tried to argue all along, has been a strong and convincingly argued thesis all throughout the postwar period, and especially by Strashimir Dimitrov. As even Machiel Kiel, no sympathizer of “fixed historiographical models,” recently acknowledged, 34  The beauty of the proposition lies, of course, also in the fact that it can equally well counteract the opposing interpretation, which I have heard from Turkish or Western Ottomanists who prefer to take the petitions of the past as literal proofs of zealousness and enthusiasm on the part of the new converts. Do we have to apply the same literal reading to the “petitions” of the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Turks at the end of the twentieth century? 35  Evgenii Radushev, “Demografski i etnoreligiozni protsesi v zapadnite Rodopi prez XV– XVIII vek (Opit za preosmislyane na ustoichivi istoriografski modeli),” Istorichesko bîdeshte, 1, 1998, 48. See also Evgenii Radushev and Rumen Kovachev, Opis na registri ot Istanbulskiya osmanski arkhiv kîm Generalnata direktsiya na dîrzhavnite arkhivi na Republika Turtsiya (Sofia: Narodn biblioteka “Sv.sv. Kiril i Metodii,” 1996).

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“thirty years ago, Strashimir Dimitrov had shown on the basis of cizye registers from the Western Rhodopes, that islamization was not the consequence of one mass coercive campaign but rather of a long-term process.”36 Radushev’s otherwise quite excellent contribution is to strengthen and refine this thesis but he certainly is not its pioneer. His valuable insights based on new sources about one particular region—the Mesta valley—refer, in particular, to refuting the thesis of the predominantly nomadic Turkmen colonization. Instead, he shows that the majority of the Anatolian population which settled in this area in the 15th century consisted of skilled agriculturalists, especially ricecroppers.37 Very important also is his conclusion that, unlike the dominant view in historiography maintaining that cities were leading in the process of conversions, the area of Nevrokop clearly demonstrates that this was a process going on intensively at the level of the village. In this particular respect he is able to emphasize the interesting role of the Janissary corps as a motive for conversions. There are a number of cases of Janissaries who have been recruited outside of the devshirme system. These were already Muslims of at least the second generation, i.e. Pomaks, something reminiscent of the Bosnian case. Other converts explicitly indicated that they would like to change their faith in order to enter the corps, something Radushev convincingly interprets as a desire for recategorization from the reaya to the askeri status. Again, convincing as it is, this interpretation was not new: it had been already forwarded by Strashimir Dimitrov in the above-mentioned preface. On the other hand, Radushev usefully draws the attention on the role of Sufi Islam by introducing the work of H. T. Norris and others, an area of research which is only beginning in Bulgarian historiography.38 From a completely different angle, Radushev’s latest article is not only a valuable contribution to Bulgarian historiography; in itself, it will serve as an interesting source in future historiographical works, for what and how it tells us about the social and intellectual context in which historical works were produced, about the intellectual climate and

36  Kiel, “Razprostranenie na islyama,” 66. Kiel refers to the work of Strashimir Dimitrov cited in note 26 above. 37  One should not be tempted, however, to overgeneralize on this score outside the particular geographic area of Nevrokop. Kiel, “Razprostranenie na islyama,” 61, 81, demonstrates the continued and significant presence of yürük in other regions of the Rhodopes, particularly in the valley between Ksanti and Komotini, as well as in the Chepino region. 38  The above-mentioned volume edited by Gradeva and Ivanova, Myusulmanskata kultura, offers two articles by Harry T. Norris in translation as well as other contributions on heterodox Islam in the Balkans by Nathalie Clayer, Nevena Gramatikova, Lyubomir Mikov, and Valeri Grigorov.

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intergenerational academic relations, in a word, it will be an apt illustration about the problems of historiographical memory. I am perfectly aware that I may be accused of “defending” a past historiographical project, or at least some of its representatives. This does not matter. It still validates my point that we remember differently, and how and what we remember is predicated on our tastes, outlooks, and conscious or unconscious decisions to filter memory. The more concrete and finer point to make, of course, is that historians should be imbued with a greater degree of humbleness when they interpret motives, i.e. when they venture into the history of mentalité without the requisite types of sources (personal letters, diaries, confessions, etc.). And even these are hardly unequivocal materials as the historiography of regions where such testimonies abound, has demonstrated (in particular, attempts to discern longue durée mentality cycles). New documentation of the type that is usually found in Ottoman archives (registers, government documentation, judiciary sources) may allow us to make more plausible hypotheses but it is also high time to become more critical of Ottoman archival fetishism.39 3

The Novel

As we have seen in the preceding section, the positioning of a source within a narrative totality—historiography—fine-tunes it so as to adjust it to the general melodic line. At the same time, there is no evidence of a direct link between the development of narrative totalities in historiography, belles lettres, let alone film. In 1964, the writer Anton Donchev published the historical novel Vreme razdelno (Time of Parting).40 The novel was written in a gripping prose and was, in my opinion, one of the best historical novels of the conventional genre written by a Bulgarian author.41 The novel is written in the 39  To his credit, Machiel Kiel stresses the fact that Ottoman sources cannot enlighten us about the motives for conversions or resistance to Islam (“Razprostranenie na islyama,” 81). At the same time, he cannot resist to suggest several possibilities, among others the “fashion” over Islam in the sixteenth century (76) which does not seem too convincing in the village setting. 40  The book was almost immediately translated into English and published first in England (1967) and then in the United States (1968): Anton Donchev, Time of Parting, trans. Marguerite Alexieva (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1968). 41  I thought this was the case when I read the book as a teenager, and still think so, although my ability to consume earnest romantic literature without the antidote of parody and humor has seriously depleted with age. Of the other writers of historical fiction, I would single out Dimitîr Talev, Emiliyan Stanev, and Vera Mutafchieva. Anton Donchev himself

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form of ­consecutive excerpts from two contemporary chronicles or first person witness accounts: one written by the Bulgarian Orthodox monk Aligorko; the other by a French nobleman known as “the Venetian” who had fallen captive to the Turks and had converted to Islam, had learned Bulgarian in captivity, and was serving as interpreter during the conversion campaign. The story of Aligorko is without any doubt a fictional and elaborated rendering of the basics of the chronicle of Metodi Draginov. Although it is easy to place this novel in the historical context of the 1960s and see it as a talented legitimation of the coming assimilation campaigns launched against the Pomaks that culminated in the early 1970s, I would suggest that this interpretation is too rigid and mechanistic. What follows is not an exhaustive and lege artis literary analysis of the text. I have neither consulted the reception of the novel by literary critics or the public, nor tried to reconstruct the authorial motives through interviews. Instead, this is a rather pedestrian reading of the literary text by one historian in order to highlight how the conversion trope has been used, and what message it sent off at the time, at least to this reader. I could only say in my defense that this would be the literary analysis employed at the school level, and that this book’s audience would be mostly school youth. An additional explanation about the 1960s is in order. While it is true that there was mounting pressure to integrate the Pomaks, as far as the community of the so called ethnic Turks goes, this was a time when they still enjoyed the affirmative action privileges installed in the first decade of communism, and which were lifted only subsequently and gradually.42 It was also a period of general liberal “thaw” which lasted until the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In my reading, this was certainly not a piece that was meant to, or even possibly could, cultivate ethnic hatred. It did not employ any ethnic or national stereotypes; moreover, it did not paint national types but human types. If one were to go down the list of protagonists, the principal villain is Karaibrahim, a Bulgarian Janissary recruited by the devshirme, whose overzealousness is at the bottom of the human tragedy. Suleyman aga, the ruler of the valley, who falls is the author of several other historical novels covering mostly the Bulgarian medieval period: Stranniyat ritsar na sveshtenata kniga, Nachaloto na nashata vechnost: krayat na skzanieto za khan Asparukh, kniaz Slav i zhretsa Teres, Skazanie za vremeto na Samuila, Legendi za dvete sîkrovishta. 42  For several recent publications which interpret the history of the Bulgarian Turks from different, even opposing historical perspectives, see Valeri Stoyanov, Turskoto naselenie na Bîlgariya mezhdu polyusite na etnicheskata politika (Sofia: Lik, 1998); Krîstyo Petkov, Georgi Fotev, Etnicheskiyat konflikt v Bîlgariya, 1989: sotsiologicheski arkhiv (Sofia: Profizdat, 1990); Boncho Asenov, Vîzroditelniyat protses i Dîrzhavna sigurnost (Sofia: 1996); Orlin Zagorov, Vîzroditelniyat protses: teza, antiteza, otritsanie na otritsanieto (Sofia: 1993).

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victim in the end, is cultivated, wise and just, a seemingly relaxed man with a sense of humor who drinks coffee and makes a point of having knocked down a Janissary. He despises Karaibrahim as someone who “thinks he can set the world to rights” and is “like a horse in blinkers.” Suleyman’s own justice is cruel and despotic, and his religion is order, not human empathy. But this is not a depiction of the standard Turkish administrator. Suleyman is the descendant of Bulgarian aristocrats who have ruled over the valley from times immemorial and have converted to Islam preserving their domains. The Grand Vizier, the Albanian Ahmed Köprülü, is a desperate misanthrope. The emphasis in the Sultan’s portrait is on his “round Russian face, the face of a kindly man” born of a Slav, Pole or Russian, and whose personal tragedy is that he cannot summon the courage to execute his brothers. The only “true” Anatolian Turk is the yürük Ismail, the kindest and most humane character in the novel, alongside the martyred Galushko, the father of Karaibrahim. Among the Christian Bulgarians, Manol is the indubitable hero, the manly man, the material of which folk songs and legends are made. Yet, he is “a hard, grim man, perhaps cruel.” He cannot betray, he has honor and responsibility; but he also cannot adjust, he does not know the word compromise. His female counterpart is the centenarian Srebra, the leader of the devastated refugees who founds a new Bulgarian village up the mountain. She is wise and kind, yet she, too, does not understand deviation; she cannot pardon but actively seeks vengeance. It is the Christlike figure of Galoushko, the father to most of the main characters (Karaibrahim, Elitsa, Goran, Manol as a foster child), that articulates the all-encompassing philosophy of a kind of pantheism: God is in everything, he lives in the grasses, in the beasts, in all men, good and evil. In the end, Galoushko, with his final refusal to accept the True Faith and, at the same time, his reluctance to engage in a struggle and resort to vengeance, becomes the symbol of the Christian sacrifice. And yet, if one were to ask who is celebrated in this book, the answer would not be the obvious heroes but the two chroniclers, both converts, both compromisers, both in their own ways anti-heroes. The “Venetian,” the man who no longer knows whether he is a French nobleman who remembers he has lived in the Rhodopes, or a Rhodope man who remembers that he has lived in France, is the paradigm of what it means to be uprooted from locale, from religion, from language, from class, and all of this several times in the course of his life. But it is he who becomes the keeper of the torch in the end. Father Aligorko is the other complex character in the book who is looking for the middle road. True, at moments he is made to speak with the somewhat anachronistic voice of a century later when, during the eighteenth century, Bulgarian began to slowly displace Christian and Orthodox as the premier self-identification, or

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even with the voice of two centuries later, when at the end of the nineteenth century Bulgarianness was seen as the common ground to overcome the abyss between Bulgarian speaking Moslems and Christians. And yet, just like with the “Venetian,” the strongest message coming from this character is the assertion of life. But enough of defending the book at face value, and with a rather simplistic literary analysis. I would further maintain that the conversion trope as a well domesticated form served as a mold for new material and a new message. The whole story could be reinterpreted as an allegorical narrative about power and tolerance, about political fanaticism and existential compromise, taking stark choices in life and politics, about law and order, about despotism and arbitrariness, about heroism and sacrifice, about lust and love, with a very strong and decided contemporary relevance. At least, this is how I read the novel at the time. Nor is this necessarily an extravagant interpretation. Vera Mutafchieva’s historical novel about Cem Sultan which came out three years after Time of Parting, and in the same intellectual atmosphere, was understood by many intellectuals as a metaphoric autobiographical reminiscence on the fate of uprooted emigres, triggered by the recent defection of her brother to France.43 The idea that there is no middle road, that one cannot stand aside, that one has to choose, had very clear resonance with the rhetoric of the dominant ideology; moreover, the incantatory repetition of the right/left choice in several instances in the book clearly made the switch into another symbolic code, that of modern politics. All of this is not to say that Anton Donchev’s novel has to be understood only or even mainly as an allegory. There is little doubt that the author himself shared in the ethos of the integrated nation, although not through violent means. My point is that the novel can also be read as an allegory and, depending this time not on the authorial intentions (whatever they are) but on the intentions of the reader and the general discursive field in which the text is launched, a meaning is imparted onto the text which is produced in the common social space and through a complex internal dialogue between the independent text, once it is severed from its creator, and the equally independent and different intellectual world of the reader with his/her idiosyncratic lens. Erving Goffman’s notion of keying can be useful in this instance: “the set of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen by the participants to be something quite else.” This process of transcription may only slightly 43  Vera Mutafchieva, Sluchayat Dzhem (Varna: Izdatelstvo “Georgi Bakalov,” 1967) and many subsequent editions.

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alter the activity, but it utterly changes what it is a participant would say was going on. “A keying, then, when there is one, performs a crucial role in determining what it is we think is really going on.”44 True, Goffman insists that the process of transcription should be conscious and open, that the participant in the activity is meant to know that a systematic alteration is involved, and that this alteration should be indicated by cues—temporal and spatial brackets. In our case, we could say that the obvious bracketing of the alteration is consciously avoided given the political conjuncture and is relegated to the space at the receiver’s end and to his/her initiative. 4

The Film

The film “Time of Violence” was shot in 1986 and was released the next year. It did not reach the broad Bulgarian audience, however, until after 1990 when it was shown both on the screen and in a televised version. In view of the growing dominance of the media, especially television, much attention has been paid lately to the problem of whether and how these new visual genres modify the dominant view of history produced heretofore by historians. Marc Ferro urges us to seek in a film not merely the illustration, confirmation, or contradiction of another knowledge—that of written tradition, and Robert Rosenstone wants us to see historical film not in terms of how it compares to written history but also how its own rules of representation govern its recounting of the past.45 It has to be said already from the outset that “Time of Violence” belongs to the genre of traditional costume dramas, and falls largely under the category of what Rosenstone describes as popular historical films. Rosenstone continues: “Popular historical films, that is, those which might carry historical consciousness of a post literate culture, are historically shallow and visually uninteresting. [They] suffer from same problem as certain sorts of ‘old-fashioned’ history. [They] suffer from both intellectual and aesthetic amnesia.”46 Attempting to be a moving historical epic, “Time of Violence” does not present, therefore, the fortuitous material which allows us to contemplate on the links between 44  Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974, 45. 45  Marc Ferro, Cinema and History, trans. Naomi Greene (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 29; Robert A. Rosenstone, “Introduction,” in: Robert A. Rosenstone, ed., Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 46  Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 237.

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film and history. On the other hand, precisely because of these weaknesses, it makes my task easier. Being essentially a costume drama, and very consciously pitching itself as an illustration to the text of the book, all that was said before about Anton Donchev’s novel applies to a great extent to the film. And yet, there are some differences. When the film was released in 1987, it was shown at the Cannes film festival, and received some positive reviews in France, Italy, and Belgium.47 In Bulgaria itself, it was shown only for a limited time in Sofia, the speculation being that the authorities wanted to avoid an intensification of the ethnic conflict.48 They might have also wanted to prevent foreign journalistic coverage, and accusations that they were using the medium of cinema for propaganda purposes. That they were doing it is beyond doubt, of course. In the few cases I know of students in the lower grades who did see the film through organized school visits, the children were supposed to see the film as a literal illustration, a kind of fictional documentary. The fact remains, however, that it was only after 1990, when measures were taken to reverse the renaming process (1985–1989), and the potential for ethnic confrontation subsided, that the film was shown to the broad public, and to great acclaim. It was also released in a televised and more detailed version. In this period, it was also dubbed in Italian and shown in Italy under the title “In the name of the faith,” and the English soundtrack was released at about the same time.49 Given the timing of its making and release, at the height of the assimilation campaign against the Turks, is it correct to see the film as much more politically implicated than the book? This is surely how the student at Wellesley perceived it. And I myself have been arguing all along that the positioning of a work often confers upon it as much meaning as the author. But, again, the answer is more complicated. Cinematographers could not but recognize the potentials of the novel to be turned into an attractive screenplay bringing together three tried and truly popular cinema genres: the combat movie, the sex and rape drama, and the religious epic. When Lyudmil Staikov, the film director, and 47  Most of the information in this paragraph comes from interviews with Momchil Karamitev, the actor who plays Momchil in the film. He resides nowadays in the United States and is trying to pursue a career in the Hollywood area. 48  According to Momchil Karamitev, there was an incident when, at one point, members of what he called “the Turkish movement” had stolen part of the negative of the film which was preserved at the Boyana studios, and it had to be restored. I have not checked on this story which sounds a bit farfetched, but it gives at least an idea about the atmosphere surrounding the release. 49  There had been negotiations with Paramount or Columbia for its release in the United States but, according to Karamitev, they fell through, mostly because of the ineptitude of the Bulgarian negotiators (again, unchecked information).

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himself one of the screenwriters (the others being Georgi Danailov, Mikhail Kirkov, and Radoslav Spasov) produced the film, he had on board almost every big actor’s name from the world of cinema and theater: Iosif Sîrchadzhiev, Rusi Chanev, Ivan Krîstev, Anya Pencheva, Kalina Stefanova, Stefka Berova, Vasil Mikhailov, Momchil Karamitev, Konstantin Kotsev, Todor Peev, Bogomil Simeonov, etc. In the two decades that separated the publication of the book from the release of the film, however, they could not receive the support for a mega-production. The opportune moment came with the “revival” process in the mid-1980s when, I suspect (although this can be proven only after looking at the archives of the cinematography and the Ministry of culture), someone managed to persuade somebody to support a “patriotic” venture.50 Using the political conjuncture for support is certainly not confined to the former communist world, and the complex question about political complicity in the production of knowledge (or emotions) has yet to be properly described and theorized (the whole evaluation of the discipline of “Sovietology” falls under this rubric but there are comparable problems raised in the field of Ottoman studies whenever and to the extent at which the Turkish government is behind academic ventures, etc.). This is certainly not meant to alleviate responsibility but to complicate the analysis of the film’s reception. Moreover, when the film was broadly shown after 1990, it received the imprimatur of popular approval. What accounts for this, given that specialized film critics did not consider it a great achievement in any way?51 Is it, as a superficial and hasty explanation would have it, that it fit in with a heightened nationalistic mood? Not necessarily. My evidence in this respect is highly impressionistic, and it does not pretend to have any kind of sociological validity but there are also no surveys about the reception of the film that one could step on in order to make a more generalizable statement. I have interviewed at random young people (mostly from Sofia, and all well-educated) who have liked the film, and my impression is that one of the reasons for their approval is that, ironically enough, the film came with a kind of “liberal” and even “dissident” pedigree. These young people did not ask themselves when the film was produced but were impressed that it was not widely released during the “totalitarian” period. Thus, all those elements which I pointed out in the 50  The film had as historical consultants the university professor Tsvetana Georgieva, herself the author of works on the Janissaries but not implicated in the campaign, and nowadays a spokesperson for and practitioner of a non-nationalist historiography; General Atanas Semerdzhiev, and two historians Ganka Mikhailova and Khristo Dermendzhiev. 51  Dina Iordanova in her review article “Conceptualizing the Balkans in Film,” Slavic Review, 55, 4, Winter 1996, 882–890, does not find it even worth mentioning “Time of Violence” among the half dozen Bulgarian films.

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analysis of the novel—the celebration of compromise, the appreciation of life over religion and strict principles (read ideology), the dignity in resisting arbitrary rule and violence, the lack of overt ethnic stereotyping (was not the culprit of the only explicit rape scene in the film, I was told, a Bulgarian?)—were seen (in a, granted, rather naive fashion) as reasons for the “suppression” of the film. It also helped that the actor playing Karaibrahim—Iosif Sîrchadzhiev, an excellent theatrical actor, the son of an outstanding theater director, and of Jewish decent—had become a prominent political figure in the UDF (Union of Democratic Forces), at the time the opposition and nowadays the ruling party. A last and brief reflection on the power of film. Should it bear, because of the potency of its medium and the extent of its outreach, a larger portion of responsibility? Again, this is a question for sociologists and historians of cinema, but I would like to invoke the exchange on this problem that occurred between a professional historian (Eric Foner) and a celebrated director (John Sayles). Film, Foner contended, “was a brilliant example of manipulation of the highest order.” “While the movie is happening,” Sayles replied, “and I think that’s an important point about movies. They exist during those two hours. If you make them, you hope that they have some echo, but the only thing you really have to do for the audience to buy in is to be true to the world you create for those two hours. If it’s a world in which people have superhuman powers and can jump higher and faster—if you set that up early and stay true to it—then people will buy it.”52 But, then, this last and brief reflection may be just my way of finding a justification for showing the film. 5 Conclusion There are obvious concluding points to be made. This is in way a cautionary tale about the dangers of overinterpreting the permanence and inflexibility of sources, tropes and their message. Instead, the emphasis is on the variability of meaning, depending on one’s position in the chronotope. This positional meaning, on its part, derives its strength partly from the power of an established image or trope, and is legitimized through the refracted light of the latter’s strength. Another related point is to question the posited absolute power of national(ist) entrepreneurs, and the respective manipulability of any historical message. As we have seen, there are more possibilities and niches for subversion than is occasionally assumed. 52  Mark Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect. History According to the Movies (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995), 23.

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Finally, to end where I started, I wonder whether, had I had the time to say all this before the screening of the film at Wellesley College, it would have convinced the student and prevented her reaction. But, of course, this is an illusion. After all, it would have been only an extension of my proleptic prologue, and its persuasive power would have hinged as much on the quality of the argumentation as on the positionality of the recipient. Clearly, although we might possibly both agree on the epistemological evaluation of the sources and the works, their non-epistemological functions would be very different in our respective visions. In addition, I have not yet squarely addressed the space between us where the meaning is created in a silent dialogue. It is not only that we have approached the same material with different “frames.”53 The space in-between is one that, according to me, becomes an apt illustration of the meeting of memory and history or, as Kerwin Klein puts it more precisely, between the historical imagination and the memorial consciousness.54 I have come in with an analytical agenda, and am speaking essentially of a cognitive process. The student approached the event—the screening of the film— through the prism of her personal memory. As a form of awareness, as we are reminded by Lowenthal, memory is wholly and intensely personal.55 Yet it is also, as Halbwachs definitively demonstrated, located within the conceptual structure of the community, i.e. it is intrinsically social or collective.56 And the social coordinates of the student’s memory are deeply embedded in the communal experience of Bulgarian Turks in the 1980s. Her memory narrative, as is usual with memories created by trauma, promises empowerment even when it cannot deliver justice. But, “pain inevitably lapses, and with it, as Friedrich Nietzsche suggested, real memory.”57 So, in the end, although we may not reach and probably should not seek a resolution, we can still achieve mutual understanding, by acknowledging our different referential ground.

53  Erving Goffman explains that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events—at least social ones—and our subjective involvement in them, and he uses the word frame to refer to these basic elements (Goffman, Frame Analysis, 11). 54   Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in the Historical Discourse,” Representations, Winter 2000, n. 69, 129. 55  David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 194. 56  Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper Colophon, 1980), 22–30. 57  Thomas W. Laqueur, “Introduction,”Representations, Winter 2000, n. 69, 5.

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The Balkan Wars in Memory: the Carnegie Report and Trotsky’s War Correspondence This is a new text, comparing two influential works on the Balkan Wars, written by contemporaries. I have used excerpts from my previously published article “War and Memory: Trotsky’s War Correspondence from the Balkan Wars,” in: Perceptions— Journal of International Affairs, Special Issue—From the Balkan Wars to Balkan Peace, Spring 2013, 5–27, for which I have received permission from the journal. This chapter is also forthcoming in a volume dedicated to the Carnegie Report.

The year 1993 saw the republications of two famous works: the Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars and Trotsky’s Balkan war correspondence.1 For the first time, the archrevolutionary Bolshevik Trotsky and the 1909 Nobel Peace Prize winner, the redoubtable French aristocrat Paul-Henri-Benjamin Balluet d’Estournelles, Baron de Constant de Rebecque, who penned the introduction to the Report, would be mentioned together. After the 1990s these two works often would be filed in library shelves and in catalogues next to each other as shedding light on the consecutive Balkan wars. The reason for this was the spurious analogy between the Balkan wars at the beginning of the twentieth century and the Yugoslav war of disintegration, named “a Balkan war” at end of the century. This would have been unthinkable at the time when the two works were produced in 1913 and 1914. It would have been even more impossible in the 1920s when Trotsky would be recorded under “Red Army,” “Bolsheviks,” “communists” and “permanent revolution” as against the established scions of the European aristocracy and university professors, filed under “peace,” “international system,” 1  The Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914), was reprinted with a new introduction by George Kennan as The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993); Leon Trotsky, The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky. The Balkan Wars 1912–13, transl. Brian Pearce (New York: Monad Press; Australia: Pathfinder Press, 1993, first published 1980). Trotsky’s war correspondence was also translated into German in the same period: Leo Trotzki, Die Balkankriege 1912–13. Aus dem Russischen übersetzt von Hannelore Georgi und Harald Schubärth. (Essen, Arbeiterpresse Verlag, 1996).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_027

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“law,” and “ethics.” In fact, as will be argued here, the motivation and tenor of these works at the moment of their production does not set them very far apart, which explains why, despite the diametrically opposed political stance of their authors, they were evoked side by side in the 1990s. Both memory and political expedience inflect the assessment of historical facts which are decontextualized from their immediate historical mise-en-scène and inevitably seen in a presentist mode. In the particular case of these two works, what was highlighted after eighty years in the 1990s was almost exclusively their moralist register. On the other hand, there are significant differences in both content and form between these two publications. The present paper aims at bringing together and comparing these two important witness accounts and explaining how and why they later became notable commemorative pillars. In the first decade of the twentieth century and practically right up to the beginning of the Great War, the “civilized world” harboured the belief that devastating wars should and could be avoided, at least on European soil. Indeed, Karl Polanyi has defined the century as “the hundred years’ peace.”2 Jürgen Osterhammel qualifies this somewhat but only for Europe: “the hundred years from 1815 to 1914 in Europe was a period of relatively little violence among states, a peaceful interlude between the early modern age and the twentieth century.”3 It was also a period of regulated international relations, beginning with the Concert of Europe, and the adoption of the Geneva and the Hague Conventions, establishing the conduct of warfare and humanitarian relief. Not that wars were not waged and there was no human sacrifice, but “they were neither protracted, not ‘total’. The distinction between combatants and civilians was observed to a greater extent than in earlier or later European conflicts or in wars fought outside Europe.”4 While the only total war of the nineteenth century was the American Civil War, the “epoch prepared the ingredients of total war but did not suffer its consequences until 1914.”5 Of course, outside Europe, horrific colonial wars were waged, but these were seen as no more than punitive expeditions.6 It was in this atmosphere that the brutality of the Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913 shocked the leaders of the international community. This was a conflict on European soil and between whites, which challenged the peace movements 2  Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, previous editions 1944, 1957), 3. 3  Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2014), 491. 4  Ibidem. 5  Ibid., 490. 6  Ibid., 488.

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that were gaining strength in Europe and were beginning to be institutionalized. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, founded in 1910, established an international commission “to inquire into the causes and conduct of the Balkan wars.” The report of the commission, which consisted of well-known public figures from France, the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, was published in 1914. The report was truly an outstanding achievement, meticulously executed, which looked into the historical roots of the Balkan conflict, presenting the points of view and aspirations of the belligerents, as well as the economic, social and moral consequences of the wars, and their relation to international law. It included an introduction by Baron d’Estournelle de Constant reiterating the main principles of the peace movement: “Let us repeat, for the benefit of those who accuse us of ‘bleating for peace at any price,’ what we have always maintained: War rather than slavery; Arbitration rather than war; Conciliation rather than arbitration.”7 There was a difference between the first and the second Balkan wars according to d’Estournelle. The first was defensive and a war of independence, “the supreme protest against violence, and generally the protest of the weak against the strong … and for this reason it was glorious and popular throughout the civilized world;” the second was a predatory war in which “both victor and vanquished lose morally and materially.”8 Still, for all their distinctions, both Balkan wars “different as each was from the other, finally sacrificed treasures of riches, lives, and heroism. We cannot authenticate these sacrifices without protesting, without denouncing their cost and their danger for the future.”9 While not optimistic about the immediate political future of the region, the commission concluded: “What then is the duty of the civilized world in the Balkans? … It is clear in the first place that they should cease to exploit these nations for gain. They should encourage them to make arbitration treaties and insist upon their keeping them. They should set a good example by seeking a judicial settlement of all international disputes.”10 As for the issue of culpability, d’Estournelle concluded: The real culprits in this long list of executions, assassinations, drownings, burnings, massacres and atrocities furnished by our report, are not, we repeat, the Balkan peoples. Here pity must conquer indignation. Do not let 7  Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914), 1. 8  Ibid., 4. 9  Ibid., 5. 10  Ibid., 273.

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us condemn the victims … The true culprits are those who mislead public opinion and take advantage of the people’s ignorance to raise disquieting rumors and sound the alarm bell, inciting their country and consequently other countries into enmity … The real culprits are those by interest or inclination, declaring that war is inevitable, end by making it so, asserting that they are powerless to prevent it. The real culprits are those who sacrifice the general interest to their own personal interest which they so little understand, and who hold up to their country a sterile policy of conflict and reprisals.11 The Report of the International Commission continues to be an important publication that has not lost its significance as a valuable primary source. At some 450 pages, this impressive volume contains the lengthy report itself (271 pages), which shines with all the qualities of a meticulously and rigorously researched scholarly work. Its detailed and nuanced analysis is penetrating, it is carefully supported by documents, the efforts at verification are laudable, and its conclusions are even-handed and judicious. Aside from the referenced documentation of the report, it has nine rich appendices, ranging from comparative statistics of the different belligerents, to military and medical reports, and soldiers’ and politicians’ letters. The volume is also supplied with excellent maps reflecting the contestants’ claims and is richly illustrated with over fifty photographs and facsimiles of documents. The most impressive feature of this fact-finding mission is the length to which it went to collect personal testimonies, a truly ethnographic project. In a fine assessment of the contributions of the Carnegie report, the anthropologist Keith Brown analyses a particular photograph capturing the commission at a moment when it listens to testimonies in the town square of the provincial Bulgarian town of Samokov: “What this picture demonstrates is an example of the process whereby oral narrative, the spoken word, is converted into textual record, the first draft of history, through the institution of the interview, and the presence of the note-taker.”12 While not explicitly commenting on its methods, the report used the inductive method of informationgathering and demonstrated a keen desire to corroborate the evidence from

11  Ibid., 19. 12   Keith Brown, “How Trauma Travels: Oral History’s Means and Ends,” in Dimitris Stamatopoulos, ed. Balkan Nationalism(s) and the Ottoman Empire. Vol. II. Political Violence and the Balkan Wars (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2015), 133.

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different sources in its aim “to uncovering facts behind the propaganda campaigns waged by the different governments and their proxies.”13 What is most remarkable about the Carnegie Report is that, while reporting in great detail about the bestiality of endless atrocities, it never fell into the trap of explaining them through the theory of atavistic “ancient hatreds” typical of the Balkan region. This changed 80 years later. In 1993, the Carnegie Endowment reprinted the Report, preceding the title with a gratuitous caption, “The Other Balkan Wars.” This time it did not launch a fact-finding mission. Instead, it added an introduction by George Kennan (1904–2005), former ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and to Yugoslavia in the 1960s, best known as the padre padrone of the US policy of containment vis-i-vis the USSR. For Kennan the greatest value of the report was to reveal the deep roots of today’s problems. He saw the problems of the Balkans in the fact that they had been effectively separated from European civilization, “thrusting into the southeastern reaches of the European continent a salient of non-European civilization which has continued to the present day to preserve many of its non-European characteristics.”14 He went on to identify these “very deep historical roots”: “Turkish domination,” “Byzantine penetration,” and most of all the “deeper traits of character, inherited, presumably, from the distant tribal past … And so it remains today.”15 Some of these traits could be encountered among other European peoples as well but It is the undue predominance among the Balkan peoples of these particular qualities, and others that might have been mentioned, that seems to be decisive as a determinant of the troublesome, baffling and dangerous situation that marks that part of the world today.16 This almost racist and clearly infantilizing verdict over whole peoples where “no particular country … wants, or should be expected, to occupy the distracted Balkan region, to subdue its excited peoples and to hold them in order until they can calm down and begin to look at their problems in a more orderly way”17 stands in stark contrast to the self-critical and wise conclusion of de Constant: 13  Ibid., 136. 14  George Kennan, “The Balkan Crises 1913 and 1993,” in The Other Balkan Wars, op. cit., 13. 15  Ibid., 11. 16  Ibid., 13. 17  Ibid., 14. For the detailed critique of the 1993 publication see Maria Todorova, “The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention,” Slavic Review, vol. 53, No. 2, Summer 1994, 453–482.

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The real struggle in the Balkans, as in Europe and America, is not between oppressors and oppressed. It is between two policies, the policy of armaments and that of progress. One day the force of progress triumphs, but the next the policy of rousing the passions and jealousies that lead to armaments and to war, gets the upper hand … The most suitable title for this report would have been “Europe Divided and her Demoralizing Action in the Balkans.”18 The contrast is even more powerful when we keep in mind that de Constant wrote before the outbreak of the First World War and Kennan wrote with the full knowledge of the butcheries of the two world wars committed by the civilized nations. The original Carnegie Report had the enviable quality not only of scrupulously drawing on original witness accounts, but itself being a monumental witness account of the era of the Balkan wars. It did not use, however, the witness accounts of the long-term Russian correspondent to the Kiev-based journal Kievskaya Mysl, Leon (Lev) Trotsky. Unawareness of Trotsky’s dispatches or the language barrier could not have been an excuse, since there was a prominent Russian member on the commission, Professor Paul (Pavel) Miliukov, at the time the leading member of the Duma. A young participant in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78, Miliukov (1859–1943) was an accomplished historian and member of the radical student movement. Imprisoned for political agitation, Miliukov went to Bulgaria after his release and taught at the University of Sofia until 1899 when he returned to St. Petersburg. He was considered the high authority on Balkan and Near Eastern affairs, jokingly referred to as “Miliukov of the Dardanelles.” He was the founder in 1905 and leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets), himself a moderate liberal but a right-wing Slavophile and promoter of Russian imperialism. Miliukov was editor-in-chief of Rech, the organ of the Kadets, an opponent of the radical Kievskaya Mysl. Rech and Miliukov were the true bêtes noires of The War Correspondence. Not only would Miliukov, who considered himself the genuine specialist on Balkan matters, not consult Trotsky’s accounts, but he would not refer to him for ideological reasons.19 Given the fact that the Carnegie report has received broad attention and that the present volume is dedicated to it, but that practically no critical 18   Report of the International Commission, 14, 19. 19  An intractable foe of Bolshevism, it was still Miliukov who, as a Foreign minister in the Provisional Government, wrote an official request to the British and secured Trotsky’s release from the Amherst Internment Camp at Halifax in the spring of 1917 (National Post, 11 July 2014, retrieved 8 April 2017) http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/ na0712-trotsky

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analysis exists of Trotsky’s war correspondence, in this paper more attention is allotted to the latter. In the fall of 1912, Trotsky was sent from Vienna to the Balkans as a military correspondent of Kievskaya Mysl to cover the events of the Balkan Wars under the pen name Antid Oto. Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, had escaped from his exile after the 1905 Russian Revolution and by 1907 had settled in Vienna. Most of his efforts were spent on reuniting the different Menshevik and Bolshevik factions in exile. From 1908 until 1912 he published the hugely popular Pravda (not to be confused with the later Leninist Pravda), which was smuggled into Russia.20 He also contributed to the Bolshevik (Proletary) and the Menshevik (Luch) papers, as well as to German and Belgian socialist periodicals. However, he earned his living, supporting his family as well as Pravda (co-edited and co-financed by Adolph Joffe and Matvey Skobelev), almost exclusively from the articles that he contributed to Kievskaya Mysl’. At the time, this was the paper with the largest circulation in Kiev, and the most popular liberal and leftist paper in the south of Russia. Trotsky wrote on diverse topics, from Ibsen, Maupassant and Nietzsche to the plight of the Russian peasantry. He jestingly coined the pen name Antid Oto, having stumbled across the Italian word “antidote,” in order to “inject the Marxist antidote into legitimate [sic] newspapers.”21 From October 1912 until November 1913, Trotsky wrote several dozen articles published in Kievskaya Mysl as well as in Luch and Den. These correspondences, supplemented by some additional articles as well as a few unpublished items from his archive, appeared in book form in 1926 as the sixth of the twelve volumes of his uncompleted Sochineniya [Works], published between 1924 and 1927.22 The original title of volume six was ‘The Balkans and the Balkan 20   Pravda had 25 issues between 3 October 1908 and 23 April 1912, and with its non-factional politics became popular with industrial workers as well as with different émigré factions. In 1910, for a brief period from January to August, it was made the central, and thus partyfinanced, organ of the temporarily reunified Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. 21  Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at Autobiography, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1930, 127. This is the official English translation, rendering the Russian “legal’nyi” as “legitimate.” A better translation would have been “legal.” 22  L. Trotskii, Sochinenia, Seria II. Pered istoricheckim rubezhom. Tom VI. Balkany i balkanskaia voina. Moskva, Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1926. The collected works of Trotsky—Sochinenia—were conceived as a major enterprise comprising 23 volumes in seven series. Editorial work began in 1923 and the volumes began to appear from 1924 onwards. In fact only 12 volumes were published (3 appeared in two parts, thus 15 volumes altogether) before work was suspended in 1927 when Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In January 1928 he was banished to Alma Ata and in February 1929 was exiled to Turkey where he stayed until 1933. A digitized version of all volumes in Russian can be accessed at: http://www.magister.msk.ru/library/trotsky/

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War’ [‘Balkany i balkanskaia voina’] and it was part of the second sub-series ‘On the Historical Threshold’ [‘Pered istoricheskim rubezhom’] of his collected works. The editorial introduction of the 1924 volume provided a brief historical background of the Eastern Question and grouped Trotsky’s writing in three parts: the first—‘On the Threshold of War’ [‘U poroga voiny’]—comprising articles written between 1908 and 1912; the second on the war itself [‘Voina’]; the third dedicated to post-war Romania [‘Poslevoennaia Rumynia’]. This volume was translated into English only in 1980 under the slightly misleading title The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky. The Balkan Wars 1912–13, highlighting the second (and, granted, the largest) part. It was reprinted in 1993 to great acclaim as a primary source on the Balkans, at the height of the Wars for the Yugoslav Succession, named the Third Balkan War.23 The War Correspondence has been hailed as a masterpiece, and Isaac Deutscher compared Trotsky’s experience ‘as a conscientious military correspondent [that] would one day be of use to the founder of the Red Army’ to Edward Gibbon’s experience as a Captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers, which he utilized as a historian of the Roman Empire.24 When, seventeen years later, in 1929, Trotsky penned his autobiography in Istanbul, he reiterated the significance of his experience: ‘In many respects, this was an important preparation not only for 1914, but for 1917 as well.’25 Yet he devoted barely a page and a half to this episode, and did not explain in any depth what it was that was so significant about it. He summarized his articles in one sentence as an ‘attack on the falsity of Slavophilism, on chauvinism in general, on the illusions of war, on the scientifically organized system for duping public opinion’, and on Bulgarian atrocities against wounded and captured Turks, which put him at odds with the Russian liberal press. This, then, encapsulated Trotsky’s memory of his Balkan experience. While he cautioned that “memory is not an automatic reckoner” and “never disinterested,” he was disingenuous about the stated deficiencies in his memories of different types. He claimed that his topographical and musical memories were weak, his visual and linguistic memories fairly mediocre, but his memory for ideas trotsky.htm from Lubitz’ TrotskyanaNet (LTN). Volume 6 is at: http://www.magister.msk .ru/library/trotsky/trotm083.htm. 23  The phrase ‘Third Balkan War’ is sometimes used by journalists and historians to refer to World War I (as in Joachim Remak’s famous 1971 article in The Journal of Modern History) but is mostly used to refer to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s: Misha Glenny, (1992) The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War. London: Penguin Books. 24  Deutscher, Isaac, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879–1921 (Oxford University Press, 1954), 228. 25  Trotsky. My Life, Op. cit., 227.

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considerably above average.26 In fact, only some of his earlier ideas persisted, only the ones that did not contradict the narrative persona that he constructed to make sense of his memory. His brilliant, biting and not always fair attacks on liberals, both in The War Correspondence and especially in My Life,27 neatly omitted the liberal persona he himself inhabited in 1912. The War Correspondence moves from analytical pieces to impressionistic dispatches, to what de facto amounts to interviews, and to political portraits. There are excellent surveys of the internal economic, social and political situation in each of the belligerent countries (Serbia, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire after the Young Turk Revolution, and Romania) as well as their mutual relations; a prescient section on the Armenian Question; colourful and well-informed portraits of a whole array of politicians and literary figures (Nikola Pašić, Lazar Paču, Stojan Novaković, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Christian Rakovsky, Andranik Ozanian); in-depth analyses of great power interests and especially Russian diplomacy and its aims in the Balkans. Trotsky is especially informative on the state of social democracy, in particular in Bulgaria, where the socialist parties were strong. His descriptions of and conversations with wounded soldiers and officers as well as with prisoners of war are heart-rending. He also writes powerfully on the larger framework of the war, describing in detail the feelings in the rear, the queues, the anticipation and the fear. Throughout, his prose shines with vitality, often with verbal brilliance, especially when his polemicist temperament is challenged. And still, one wonders what is left of these articles today, one hundred years after they were written? While the analyses are interesting, do they have a cognitive significance aside from their historical value of being written by such a major figure as Trotsky? Are they more informative than the dispatches of 26  Ibid., p. viii. 27  He wrote dismissively of the remarkable Georgian Menshevik Tsereteli (1881–1959), who had joined the Provisional Government after the February Revolution as Minister of Post and Telegraphs, and returned to Georgia after the Bolshevik Revolution, from where he finally emigrated to Paris in 1923, that he “had a profound respect for liberalism; he viewed the irresistible dynamics of the revolution with the eyes of a half-educated bourgeois, terrified for the safety of culture. The awakened masses seemed to him more and more like a mutinous mob,” and “it took a revolution to prove that Tsereteli was not a revolutionary” (Trotsky, My Life, p. 289). And he did not mince his words about the tragic leader of the Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970), whom he thought “personified the accidental in an otherwise continuous causation. His best speeches were merely a sumptuous pounding of water in a mortar. In 1917, the water boiled and sent up steam, and the clouds of steam provided a halo” (ibidem). Trotsky’s greatest wrath, however, was heaped on Pavel Miliukov, the editor-in-chief of Rech, and leader of the Kadets, seen as the true adversary.

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dozens of other war correspondents of major European papers? Were they revolutionary in their analyses even at the time? Apart from being a testimony to Trotsky’s rhetorical and polemical brilliance, would we care to go back to them? Some people actually did go back to them in the 1990s, in order to find confirmation of their often completely opposing political preferences or prejudices.28 There are three aspects that make them interesting and relevant today. One is the very detailed information and personal evaluation that Trotsky gives of the socialist movement in the Balkans at the time. This, to my knowledge, has been little if at all utilized. Secondly, there are the several sections made from testimonies of wounded Bulgarian officers and soldiers, as well as witness accounts of Turkish prisoners of war, reproduced in extenso as quotes. There are also lengthy citations from the interviews with politicians. Lastly, there is the question of The War Correspondence’s formative significance on Trotsky himself as well as the question of memory in general, which is the principal topic of this article. What is most striking (and unexpected) about the tenor of Trotsky’s war correspondence is the curious mix of conventional Marxist dogma, Russian revolutionary patriotism with notes of great power condescendence and, most surprisingly, classical liberal posturing reminiscent of this undying breed in praise of Western civilisation, especially in American classrooms. The first section of the volume provides the background to the Balkan Crisis of 1912 by collecting Trotsky’s newspaper articles on the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, as well as on issues of Balkan social democracy (mostly the Bulgarian but also partly the Serbian case). The two articles on the Ottoman Empire “The Turkish Revolution and the Tasks of the Proletariat” and “The New Turkey” came out in Pravda (#2, 17/30 December 1908) and Kievskaya Mysl (#3, 3 January 1909). Turkey, this “hornet’s nest of the Near East’ had been a tyrannical state “from times immemorial”;29 it was unreformable, the epitome of backwardness, stagnation and despotism. Its industrial development was obstructed 28  See readers’ reviews of the book on Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/War-CorrespondenceLeon-Trotsky-1912-13/dp/0913460680 and www.amazon.com/War-Correspondence-LeonTrotsky-1912-13/dp/0873489071. Some read it because it is ‘an indispensable background to the fighting going on in the region today’ providing a déjà vu picture. Others appreciate it for its anti-imperialist passion and materialist analysis. Still others see precursors of Serbian mass murder of the Albanians or read it for the roots of anti-Semitimism in Romania. Some are fascinated (or perhaps nostalgic given the paucity of today’s print journalism) by the profundity of discourse, the ability to bring in complex analyses of the economy, politics and religion in an expressive style. 29   The War Correspondence, 3–4.

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because of the Sultan’s fear of the proletariat;30 had they read his writing, the Young Turks would have been surprised to learn that their revolution was ‘the most recent echo of the Russian Revolution’ [of 1905], which caused a fiery surge of proletarian movements in Western Europe and woke up the peoples of Asia.31 Otherwise, Trotsky welcomed the 1908 revolution and the newly convened parliament, but in a succinct and prescient analysis clearly described the fault lines between centralisers and federalists. What to him was the only desirable solution for the Eastern Question—a democratic Turkey as the basis of a larger Balkan federation on the model of Switzerland or the United States of America—was passionately opposed by the Young Turks. Nevertheless, in these articles Trotsky primarily exposed the stance of the Russian government concerning the fate of the Serbs living under the Austrian occupation and annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908. The tsarist government used liberal Slavophilism as a fig leaf to legitimize its imperial ambitions and Trotsky rightly pointed out that fellow Slavs, like the Poles, were faring far worse under Russian rule than the Serbs under Austrian rule. Trotsky’s writings on the Balkans and his war dispatches shed important light on the socialist tradition in the southeastern margins of Europe during the period of the Second International. Trotsky was no stranger to the region, having been sent there on several occasions, among others on an unsuccessful mission of the Socialist International, alongside Krîstiu (Christian) Rakovsky and Camille Huysmans, to mend the split within the socialists’ ranks.32 He was particularly close to Bulgarian social democrats and lavished praise on their activities, their press and other publications. He had been the Russian delegate to the congress of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Narrows) in July 1910 in Sofia. He heaped praise on the Bulgarian socialists who had invited delegates from several Slavic social democratic parties—Poles, Russians, Serbs, Czechs and Ruthenians—as a counterweight to the all-Slav congress, this “all-Slav comedy”,33 that had been convened a couple of weeks earlier in Sofia. They not only demonstrated that there were two Bulgarias, Serbias, and Russias—the one reactionary-dynastic, the other revolutionary-proletarian, but also showed that “the only way out of the national state of chaos and the bloody confusion of Balkan life is a union of the peoples of the peninsula in 30  Ibid., 3, 12–13. 31  Ibid., 3. 32  Genchev, Dimitîr, Pîrvoapostolite na ideala (Sofia: Izdatelska kîshta ‘Khristo Botev’, 2006), 23. 33   The War Correspondence, 38.

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a single economic and political entity, underpinned by national autonomy of the constituent parts.”34 This was the only way to rebuff the “shameless pretensions of tsarism and European imperialism” and enjoy the advantages of a common market of the Balkans.35 That a common market was the best solution came from the antipathy Trotsky shared with (or derived directly from) Marx and Engels towards Kleinstaaterei, especially the Kleinstaaterei of the southern Slavs. His derision of the “Lilliputians,” the “dwarf states,” the “broken fragments of Balkan Slavdom,” and the “broken pieces” of the Balkan Peninsula, could be assuaged only if they unified in a federal republic in order to create a common Balkan market as a precondition for industrial development.36 The Balkan countries that he depicted in detail—Serbia and Bulgaria—were backward, and the trope of backwardness was ubiquitous: there was a “lag in Bulgaria’s historical development,” they had a low level of social differentiation,37 their literatures lacked tradition and were unable to develop their internal continuities, their cultures were “obliged to assimilate the ready-made products that European civilisation had developed,”38 their bourgeoisie, like the bourgeoisie in backward countries in general, was not organic,39 and, worse, “it had not yet managed to throw off its Asiatic features.”40 Sitting on the train to Belgrade, Trotsky commented derisively on the “multilingual, motley, culturally and politically confused East, an Austro-.Hungaro-Balkan International!”41 The Bulgarian peasant democracy was primitive, because it was “rooted in elemental relations of everyday life, like our own Russian village community.”42 Trotsky knew very little about the peasant question in Bulgaria but assumed it followed the Russian model.43 It gave him, however, an opening to ridicule the Narodnik utopia of a direct way to socialism.

34  Ibid., 39. 35  Given the fact that Trotsky lived at the time and place of the blossoming of the sophisticated Austro-Marxism, his own views on the rise of the national ideal were deterministic, not to say dogmatic: ‘Economic development has led to the growth in national self-awareness and along with this a striving for national and state self-determination.’ (ibid., 157). 36  Ibid., 12, 39–41, 152. 37  Ibid., 49. 38  Ibid., 82. 39  Ibid., 76. 40  Ibid., 53: The Zaječar revolt in Serbia was brought down with ‘Asiatic ferocity’. 41  Ibid., 58. 42  Ibid., 54, 157. 43  In the chapter on post-war Romania, however, he juxtaposes the Bulgarian army of ‘free, literate peasants, possessing the vote’ and the ‘Romanian army of serfs’. (ibid., 390).

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Though much of his portraits of Balkan politicians were witty, they were deeply marred by his contempt for their peasant origins. In his subtle evaluation of Nikola Pašić as a politician, Trotsky insisted that he was primitive, since he spoke German, Russian and French badly,44 and Trotsky felt very much his superior. In his autobiography, as in many of his articles, Trotsky constantly fended off criticisms of his attitude towards the peasantry. In Moya zhizn, he emphatically denounced the allegation that in 1905 he had ignored the peasantry.45 It is instructive, therefore, to read the unpublished memoirs of a Bulgarian activist of the agrarian party (BANU-Bulgarian Agrarian National Union), Khristo Stoianov, a lawyer and later minister of the interior in 1923 during the time of Alexander Stamboliiski’s agrarian regime, who found refuge in Yugoslavia after the regime’s fall. Back in Bulgaria, following World War I, he was active in the left agrarian movement, which, however, opposed the communists. In the period preceding the Balkan Wars, he had been charged with closely observing the rival activities of the social democrats in the villages, and he was fairly well acquainted with Krîstiu (Christian) Rakovsky, Trotsky’s close friend and collaborator. During the war, when Stoianov served as an officer, he spotted Trotsky, who had missed the train to Çorlu (present-day Turkey), at a provincial railway station. Stoianov invited Trotsky to his tent, and Trotsky stayed there for eight days. Trotsky gave lectures on the workers movement, on the Second International, on Jules Guedes, Jean Jaurès, August Bebel, Emile Vandervelde. Stoianov remarked: “Trotsky could not bear to be contradicted. He did not like the peasant movements and did not recognize the peasantry as a class. We did not contradict him. We were buying, not selling.”46 The most astonishing aspect about Trotsky’s war correspondence was that he actually did not see the heat of war; journalists as a rule were not allowed on the front line. The value of his dispatches comes from the witness accounts he took from officers and soldiers, but also from interviewing prisoners of war: “We have to form our picture of the life and death of the army on the battlefields through interrogating participants, with the bias this inevitably implies.”47 Some of his informers were casual acquaintances, but most often they came from his own social-democratic circles, “men of high principle who had proved their personal courage and high character both in their political struggle and on the battlefield”, and Trotsky gave their accounts greater credence.48 44  Ibid., 73–74. 45  Trotsky, My Life, 204; Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, 155–157. 46  Bulgarian Central State Archives, TsDA, Sp 3049 B, pp. 35–37. 47   The War Correspondence, 117. 48  Ibid., 288.

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The evaluation of these texts as a rare primary source is somewhat delicate. That most are not attributed, given the restrictions of wartime, is understandable. We read about “A Wounded Man’s Story,” “An Officer’s Story,” “Two Monologues” about the political parties and the war, “Among Officers [and] Prisoners,”49 direct quotes “From the Stories of Participants,” “Conversation with a Bulgarian Statesman,” “Behind the Curtain’s Edge,” but all of these sources remain anonymous. It is unclear whether the large number of direct quotes can be taken literally in a period when journalists did not go around with tape recorders and Trotsky explicitly states that he knew stenography.50 Some of the testimonies are suspiciously well crafted, almost philosophical. They display an educated authorship, either Trotsky’s own or of some of his Bulgarian comrades. In any case, although they are a rare glimpse into the genuine voices of the time, they should be used with a proper dose of scepticism. The subsequent two world wars have produced such an enormous amount of literature, both documentary and fictional, illuminating all aspects of war at the front and in the rear that Trotsky’s dispatches, while extraordinarily moving, can add little in terms of knowledge about war trauma, atrocities, or the psychology of the soldiers. Yet when they appeared at the time, the detailed first-hand accounts must have been a rarity. Being Russian, Trotsky had no difficulty understanding Bulgarian and Serbian but, more importantly, he constantly had with him some socialist friend who would be his interpreter, and often his informer. In fact, a few of the articles in the volume are not dispatches, but fragments from Sketches of Bulgarian Political Life by Trotsky and Kabakchiev,51 a book published in 1923 and to a great extent authored by the latter.52 Comparing the stories of wounded soldiers and prisoners, Trotsky remarked that their views were extremely subjective and prone to simplistic generalisations, since they had seen only a small patch of the battlefield and had no idea of the complex strategic operations. There was, however, one significant difference. While the Turkish prisoners of war were already demoralized from the outset of the war: 49  In this article Trotsky describes prisoners, some of whom were officers and who enjoyed special treatment, and others who would be ordinary soldiers. 50   Ibid., 134. 51  Khristo Kabakchiev (1878–1940) was a leader of the Bulgarian Workers Social Democratic Party (the ‘Narrows’). Educated as a lawyer, he was the editor-in-chief of its print organ ‘Rabotnicheski vestnik’ (1910–1923). In 1927 he emigrated to the USSR. 52  Trotskii, L. & Khr. Kabakchiev, Ocherki politicheskoi Bolgarii, Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo. 1923. The articles in question are ‘The Balkan Countries and Socialism’ (The War Correspondence, 29–37) and ‘Echoes of the War’ (ibid., 213–225).

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the Bulgarian soldier regarded this war as necessary and just, as his own war … The terrible burden of militarism is accepted by every Bulgarian, right down to the most ignorant peasant, as a burden that has been placed on Bulgaria’s shoulders by Turkey … For the ordinary man in Bulgaria, therefore, the concept of Turkey combines the Turkish tyrant, official and landlord of yesterday, with today’s oppressor of his Macedonian brethren, and, finally, with the primary cause of the burden of taxation in Bulgaria itself.53 Heartbreaking are the accounts given by Christian soldiers (Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians) in the Ottoman army. On the one hand, they complained of constant abuse by their Muslim superiors.54 On the other hand, their inclusion in the army “inevitably destroyed the belief that Islam is the one and only moral bond between the state and the army, thereby introducing the gravest spiritual uncertainty into the mind of the Muslim soldier.”55 Standing out among the articles is “An Officer’s Story” which came from Trotsky’s archive and was first published in this volume. The six printed pages are extremely well written and are presented as a single quote. This could be the diary of a highly educated Bulgarian officer, who may have given it to Trotsky. It gives an account of the Bulgarian army’s advance to Lüle Burgas, and the discrepancy between military theory and practice. It gives a disturbing depiction of being wounded and expecting death, and is full of incisive psychological reflections on fear: Fear? You feel no fear while you are fighting—that is, when you are actually under fire. Before and after, though, you are extremely frightened— it’s the same sort of fear that you feel, even if not so badly, when you have to sit for an examination, or make a speech in public … Fear vanished completely, and its place is taken after a certain time by indifference. Cowards and high-strung men sometimes have sudden moments when they seem quite heroic … Fear, as an acute response to mortal danger, disappears, but through the whole organism, through all your muscles and bones, there spreads a languor of fatigue. You are dreadfully, unbearably, infernally tired … As every day draws to its close you think: this is the end,

53   The War Correspondence, 194. 54  Ibid., 194–197. 55  Ibid., 194.

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things can’t go on like this anymore. But then another day passes, and another. You find yourself longing for the sight of the enemy.56 Trotsky exposed the horrors of war and the atrocities committed by the allied forces of Serbs and Bulgarians.57 While he did not doubt that the Greeks and the Turks committed comparable massacres (he did give appropriate accounts), he protested that the Russian Slavophile press ignored the reports of Bulgarian and Serbian acts of violence and wrote only of the rest.58 His indignation was strongly argued, especially when he defended himself against accusations of not having checked the smallest of details: But however little and insufficient my knowledge, am I not obliged to raise my voice in protest to the Russian press? Is a journalist a prosecutor drawing up an indictment on the basis of investigation of all the conditions and circumstances of the crime committed? Is a journalist an historian who calmly waits for materials to accumulate so as to be able, in due course, to put them in order? Is a journalist only a belated bookkeeper of events? Doesn’t his very description come from the word journal, meaning a diary? Doesn’t he take upon himself obligations towards the very next day?59 This was a passionate and eloquent manifesto on the duties of moral journalism. And yet there was some truth in the allegation by Ivan Kirillovich, a Kadet, scientist and journalist, when he exclaimed listening to Trotsky: “For you, it seems history exists for one purpose only, in order to demonstrate the illusoriness, reactionariness and harmfulness of Slavophilism.”60 Trotsky was especially livid about the Bulgarian military censorship, which wanted to “keep from the eyes of Europe’s reading public all facts and comments which […] might show the seamy side of any department of Bulgarian social life whatsoever, whether connected to the war or not.”61 Several times he 56  Ibid., 211–212. 57  Ibid., 117–131, 266–271. While Trotsky does not acknowledge his source, this was most likely Dimitrije Tucović, the founder of the Serbia Social Democratic Party and the editor of Borba and Radničke Novine. During the Balkan War in which he was mobilized, Tucović wrote extensively about atrocities against the Albanians, later published as Srbija i Albanija: jedan prilog kritici zavojevačke poliike srpske biržoazije (Beograd: Kultura, 1946). 58   The War Correspondence, 287–312. 59  Ibid., 304–305. 60  Ibid., 329. 61  Ibid., 258.

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successfully challenged the censors, explaining that he was reporting on issues removed from purely military matters. He wrote several fiery articles against the stupidity of the censorship and the compliant press which “is tuned to make a cheerful sound,” while the “opponents of the war have been reduced to complete silence.”62 Trotsky’s particular vitriol was directed towards the chief military censor Simeon Radev, whom he described as a “former anarchist” greedy for power, “a thoroughly demoralized creature,” “a vulgar careerist,” who did everything “his uncouth nature is capable of to poison the existence of the European journalists who were obliged to have dealings with him.”63 He wrote also against his erstwhile acquaintance Petko Todorov,64 a romantic poet who only two years earlier had stood next to Trotsky protesting the PanSlav Congress in Sofia and now participated alongside other intellectuals in imposing the military censorship. Trotsky’s blanket pontification on the war censorship, in a rhetoric almost as if lifted from present-day liberal think tanks, provoked the wrath of Petko Todorov, who sent him a letter that Trotsky published in Kievskaya Mysl on 30 November 1912 alongside his own response. Todorov protested that “all reproaches that you level against Bulgarian democrats, and me in particular, are due to the misunderstanding that constantly arises between us and the Russians who come to Bulgaria, and which results from the facts that all of you, to employ a splendid Russian saying, try to apply your own rule in someone else’s monastery.”65 In a style paralleling Trotsky’s own liberal pathos, he extolled Bulgaria’s democratic traditions, its constitutionalism, rule of law and civic discipline. In a war that had been viewed widely as a patriotic enterprise, even by the anti-war parties and individuals,66 foremost among them the 62  Ibid., 26–261. 63  Ibid., 263–264, 282. Given the eminent stature of Simeon Radev (1879–1967) as one of the major political and intellectual figures in the modern history of Bulgaria, this abuse is especially jarring. Trotsky admits that Radev was ‘a journalist not without talent’ (263), but his condescending dismissal is ridiculous. By 1912 Radev, who had graduated in law from the University of Geneva and was an active journalist and diplomat, as well as a highly cultivated intellectual, had published his major history of post-1878 Bulgaria—The Builders of Modern Bulgaria—a work that is still considered a masterpiece. 64  Petko Yurdanov Todorov (1879–1916) was a major poet, dramatist and writer. As a high school student he was influenced by socialist ideas and was in contact with Jean Jaurès. He studied law in Bern and literature in Leipzig and Berlin. In 1905 he became a co-founder of the Radical-Democratic Party. In 1912 he was on Capri where he befriended Maxim Gorky. He died in 1916 from tuberculosis. 65   The War Correspondence, 277. 66  To his credit, Trotsky saw the Balkan War as having “more in common with the Italian War of Liberation of 1859 than it has with the Italian-Turkish War of 1911–1912” (ibid., 152). He even agreed with a Bulgarian officer, who admonished Trotsky that “the duty of Russian

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s­ ocialists and the agrarians, Todorov saw his participation as the fulfilment of his duty as a citizen: “Just as hundreds of thousands of my fellow countrymen have been sent, some to fight at Çatalca, others to besiege Odrin, so I have been placed in a position where I am entrusted with the safeguarding of our task of liberation from all those conscienceless spies and marauders with whom the press organs of Europe’s usurers have now inundated our country.”67 He accused Trotsky of irresponsibility and intransigence and contrasted this to a sense of proportion, which was the most valuable legacy bestowed by the Ancient World: You see how far we Bulgarians are from your Russian flight from responsibility. We, unlike you, see in this the very foundation of our civic spirit, and it with this sentiment that we, like European democracy, seek to secure our rights as men and citizens. Similarly alien to us is your uncompromising attitude, which we are inclined to see as an anomaly that has been fortified in you by the regime under which you are obliged to live without rights; though also, it seems to me, behind this intransigence of yours, you hide from yourself your social impotence and lack of any practical sense.68 Trotsky dismissed this as “a very primitive level of political culture.”69 He confronted Todorov with the crimes committed by the Bulgarian army “that must evoke shudders and nausea in every cultured person, in everyone capable of feeling and thinking.”70 He further detailed the atrocities: the destruction by artillery fire of a Pomak village with its entire population; the killing of prisoners and of the peaceful Turkish inhabitants of Dimotika; the particularly heinous deeds of the Macedonian Legion; the corpses lying on the roads of the victorious army; the stabbing to death of wounded Turkish soldiers in the fields with the knowledge and under the orders of Bulgarian commanders. All this he had learned from the returning Bulgarian officers and soldiers who had told him these stories with “complete frankness […] turning their eyes away.”71 Some told the stories of stabbing to death wounded men and shooting journalists, and especially of those who are combating the reactionary nonsense of the Slavophiles, is to explain the role and significance of a free, independent, and strong Bulgaria for the destiny of Southeastern Europe” (ibid., 346–347). 67  Ibid., 278. 68  Ibidem. 69  Ibid., 279. 70  Ibid., 282–283. 71  Ibid., 283–284.

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­ risoners “with instinctive disgust, others “in passing” and indifferently, yet p others with conscious moral indignation,”72 Trotsky’s indictment was as harsh as it was just: You, the radical, the poet, the humanist, not only did not yourself remind your army that, besides sharp bayonets and well-aimed bullets, there exist also the human conscience and that doctrine of Christ in whose name you are alleged to be waging your war—no, you also tied the hands of us European journalists behind our backs, and placed your military censor’s jackboot on our chest! Light-heartedly you put on your poet’s head a uniform cap with a censor’s cockade in it you assumed responsibility to and for your general staff, to and for your diplomacy, to and for your monarchy. Whether your red pencil contributed much to the extension of Bulgaria’s frontiers, I don’t know. But that the Bulgarian intelligentsia was a fellow traveller, and therefore an accomplice in all those fearful deeds with which this war will for a long time yet, perhaps decades, poison the soul of your people—that will remain an indelible fact that you will be helpless to alter or to delete from the history of your country. Your public life is still only in its cradle. Elementary political and moral concepts have as yet not been established among you. All the more obligatory is it for the advanced elements of your people to watch intransigently over the principles of democracy, the politics and morality of democracy.73 Was this one of the important lessons Trotsky carried over into preparations for 1914 and for 1917? He clearly shared this state of mind at the beginning of the Great War in 1914. Immediately after the end of the Balkan War, he commented that civilisation inspires the false confidence that “the main thing in human progress has already been achieved—and then war comes, and reveals that we have not yet crept out on all fours from the barbaric period in our history.”74 This was the viewpoint of the peacetime liberal habitus Trotsky 72  Ibid., 304. Trotsky evidently used the dispatches of Vasil Kolarov from his diary as an officer in the Balkan War, which he published regularly in Rabotnicheski vestnik. They were published separately as Pobedi i porazheniia. Dnevnik (Sofia: Izdatelstvo ‘Khristo Botev,’ 2001). Kolarov (1977–1950) was a lawyer and one of the leaders of the Bulgarian Workers Social Democratic Party (the ‘Narrows’). After 1923 he lived in emigration in the USSR. 73  Ibid., 284–285. 74  Ibid., 148. The famous report of the Carnegie Commission came to a similar conclusion that ‘war suspended the restraints of civil life, inflamed the passions that slumber in time of peace, destroyed the natural kindliness between neighbours, and set in its place the will to injure. This is everywhere the essence of war’ (Report of the International Commission, 108).

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i­nhabited at the time in Vienna, and it came in a period when he was enamoured by a modernising and civilising pathos. Deutscher describes this stage as the mission of all Marxists to ‘Europeanize’ Russian socialism, but each fighting faction followed its own way. This cry to Europeanisation came most naturally from Trotsky, as the most ‘European’ of the Russian émigrés, according to Deutscher.75 To the surprise of Deutscher, his close ties were not to Luxemburg, Liebknecht or Mehring, ‘but to the men of the centre group’.76 He continued his internationalist stance as one of the leaders of the Zimmerwald movement. As legend has it, Karl Kraus, when told that Trotsky organized the Red Army and saved the revolution, exclaimed: “Who would have expected that of Herr Bronstein from Café Central!”77 This state of mind was in apparent contrast to another celebrated war correspondent of the Balkan Wars, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944). The author of the 1909 “Futurist Manifesto” wrote for the Parisian daily L’Intransigeant. Earlier he had covered the Italo-Turkish War in Libya (1911). Arriving in Sofia, he seemed to have had much better luck than Trotsky, because not only was he allowed on the front, but he was flown in an airplane during the siege of Odrin (Adrianople) (November 1912–March 1913). He had already been aware of the new role of aerial war during the bombing of Ain Zara in Libya in 1911, the first use of airplanes in war. The following year, the Bulgarian army experimented with air-dropped bombs and conducted the first night bombing on 7 November 1912. As a result, Marinetti started looking at “objects from a new point of view, no longer head on or from behind, but straight down, foreshortened; that is, I was able to break apart the old shackles of logic and the plumb lines of the ancient way of thinking.”78 In 1912 he published his “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” where he promoted parole in libertà (words-in-freedom), foregrounding sound and sensation over meaning. He himself said that wordsin-freedom were born in the battlefields of Tripoli and Adrianople. Marinetti’s experience in Adrianople inspired him to start working on a visual and verbal account, a combination of letters, pictures and sound, whose very title—Zang Tumb Tumb: Adrianople 1912: Words in Freedom—evoked the sounds of bombs, 75  Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, 180–181. 76  Ibid., 182–185. 77  Cited by Slavoj Žižek, ‘Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism, or, Despair and Utopia in the Turbulent Year of 1920’, in Leon Trotsky. Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (London: Verso, 2007), vii. 78  Marinetti, F. T., ‘From the café Bulgaria in Sofia to the courage of Italians in the Balkans and the military spirit of désarrois’, quoted in Leah Dickerman, (ed.). Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 136.

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artillery shells and explosions.79 He finished his work in 1913 and performed it in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and St. Petersburg, before publishing it in 1914. For Marinetti, neither the Balkan Wars, nor the ensuing First World War were a rupture. Already in the ‘Futurist Manifesto’ Marinetti had proclaimed that ‘We want to glorify war—the only cure of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman. We want to demolish museums, libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunism and utilitarian cowardice’.80 He might have wanted (and succeeded) to shock, but he was also serious not only in his aesthetics but also in his politics. In many ways, some disagreements with the specific policies of Mussolini’s regime aside, he remained consistent in his views and support for fascism to the end, although his individual radicalism was blunted. Similarly for Trotsky, and despite his own verdict, neither 1912 nor 1914 served as a breakthrough. Until his final return to Russia in May 1917, he remained loyal to his liberal democratic beliefs. Only half a decade after the Balkan War, however, he had become a very different person. At Brest-Litovsk, as the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and as the leader of the Red Army, he was framed as a barbarian. He refused to allow the Red Cross to move across the fighting lines, despite Lenin’s permission, so as not to let them witness the devastation from the bombardment of Kazan’.81 Trotsky had “forgotten” some of his own ideas that he espoused in 1912. Trotsky’s most strident attack on the illusions of liberal democracy came in 1920, at the height of the Civil War in Russia, when he published his Terrorism and Communism as a polemical response to Karl Kautsky’s book of the same title.82 Kautsky had made the prophetic statement that, while bolshevism had triumphed in Russia, socialism had suffered a defeat.83 He lamented the violence of the ‘Tatar socialism’ and wrote that ‘when communists assert that 79  Marinetti, F. T., Zang Tumb Tumb: Adrianopoli: Ottobre 1912: Parole in libertà (Milano: Edizione Futurista di Poesia, 1914). 80   Le Figaro, 20 February 1909, English translation from James Joll. Three Intellectuals in Politics (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 140. 81  Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, 421. 82  Trotskii, L. Terrorizm i kommunizm (Peterburg: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1920). The book was immediately translated into English and published as Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism). New York: Workers party of America, 1920. It was republished, with a foreword by Slavoj Žižek, in Verso, 2007. Online access: www .marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/index.htm. 83  Kautsky, Karl, Terrorismus und Kommunismus: ein Beitrag zur Naturgeschichte der Revolution. (Berlin: Verlag Neues Vaterland, 1919), 133.

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democracy is the method of bourgeois rule … the alternative to democracy, namely dictatorship, leads to nothing else but the method of the pre-bourgeois law of the jungle’.84 His conclusion about the world revolution asserted that it would be fulfilled not through dictatorship, canons and guns, and the destruction of political and social adversaries, but through democracy and humanity. ‘Only thus can we reach this higher form of life whose creation is the historical task of the proletariat.’85 Trotsky’s response was devastating. While this is not the place to evaluate this most controversial of Trotsky’s works, suffice it to say that it was a passionate defence of the ruthlessness (‘besposhchadnost’) of revolutionary methods. In chapter 4, “Terrorism,” Trotsky confronted the accusation that his tactics differed little from the tsarist ones. His response was that tsarist terrorism was directed against the proletariat, while the revolutionary terror shot landlords, capitalists and generals who strived to restore the capitalist order. No mention about “human conscience” and “the principles of democracy, the politics and morality of democracy” addressed to Petko Todorov seven years earlier. All of this is not intended to establish and expose Trotsky’s alleged “inconsistencies”, let alone his bloodthirstiness. The latter is based on the naïve belief in the immutability of some basic core identity. Nor is it intended to enter into the intractable debate about revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It seeks to make one simple point: the Revolution was Trotsky’s war. Our wars are usually capitalized: they are the Civil Wars, the Wars for Independence, the Liberation Wars, the People’s Wars, the Peasant Wars, the Revolutionary Wars, the Great Patriotic War, the War on Terror, even the Great War, and they are mostly just wars. Other people’s wars, whose motif is unclear or not immediately appealing, are just wars, calamities. With time this befalls gradually the capitalized wars too, once they pass from memory into history. This happened both with the Balkan Wars and with the October Revolution.

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There are some obvious points and conclusions to be made. Firstly, memory alone is meaningless. We make sense of it through a framework. In his first chapters, describing his early years, Trotsky did not want to impose a framework, a “meaning” to his childhood, and they are full of vivid memories that belie his claim of a weak memory in the absence of ideas. Their impressionistic character, however, cannot be subsumed in a single consistent narrative, which 84  Ibid., 152. 85  Ibid., 154.

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begins only with his adolescence, when he is swept by the revolutionary ideas, and subsequently “the revolution” becomes the overarching framework of his whole life. Memory thus is “packaged” and the historian’s task is to un-pack it, but, even more importantly, to study the packaging itself in its different forms: autobiography, biography, memoirs, academic histories, popular histories, journalism, novels, poems, monuments, cemeteries, museums, each having their specific narrative sways and consistencies. Equally, the Carnegie Report was “remembered” in the framework of the Yugoslav wars but extracting from it almost the opposite of what it had set out to do. By selectively using its assembled facts, George Kennan and other politicians and journalists started a wholesale discrediting, demonization, and condemnation of a whole region, all this (but not always) in the framework of the specific policies pursued by the USA, the EU and NATO. Secondly, “making sense” of memory comes at a moment of rest, sometime after the event, usually during peacetime, or as Trotsky himself called it a moment of “pause in the author’s active political life.”86 For him this was the year 1929 in Istanbul. It is at relative moments of peace, after the bloodshed in Kenya in the 1950s, the atrocities in Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda, the war in Iraq, that the effects of trauma come to the fore. It is in this context that Brown sketches the continuing importance of both the content and the form of the Carnegie report, especially for trauma studies and for work on commemoration, which can “redirect the study of traumatic history toward forms of resolution”: “The challenge—as it was for the producers of the Carnegie Inquiry—is to reflect on the outcomes we anticipate for our inquiries into a troubled past.”87 And, finally, there is the all too obvious conclusion that it is immediate experience that not only most decisively inflects memory, but that also most decisively legitimizes commemoration. Witness accounts may not necessarily be the most accurate testimony, but they have a particular legitimacy. History offers accurate accounts of past events and has credibility, but witness accounts, just like myths, possess both credibility and authority.88 The power of personal testimony, its authority, is at its height for three generations. There is the Swahili saying that the deceased who remain alive in people’s memory are the “living dead.” It is only when the last to have known them passes away 86  Trotsky, My Life, v. 87  Brown, “How Trauma Travels, op. cit., 141. 88  I am adapting the argument by Bruce Lincoln on fables, legends, history and myth: Discourse and the Construction of Society. Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 24–5.

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that they are pronounced completely dead.89 Thus, the premium of immediate experience goes beyond the individual who has experienced an event; it also anoints those who have had immediate knowledge of that person. But it can go even further and anoints any testimony which has the aura of a witness account even as the emotional reaction it evokes would subside with the growing distance of time. It is for this reason that both the Carnegie report and Trotsky’s dispatches were used as powerful legitimizing proof to muster emotional support during the 1990s.90 The memory of war is today a formidable business, in a very literal sense, with tourism at war sites, principally of the First and Second World Wars, but also going as far back as the Napoleonic Wars, and in some rarer cases medieval battles, in addition to commissions to sculptors, architects, filmmakers, fiction writers, and academics. The most lucrative topic in US history is the Civil War; one can be certain to find work with this topic and with its paraphernalia, violence and its containment. All of this is packaged under the rubric “learn in order to prevent.” There is undoubtedly an idealistic element in this appeal, but one suspects that in many cases there is also a certain degree of voyeurism about violence, garnished with a puritan moralising and hectoring. Pierre Nora has become an obligatory footnote to any study of memory, but few pay attention to the fundamental distinction he made between lieux and milieux de mémoire. English does not translate milieux, although there are quibbles over lieux, ranging from ‘realms’ to ‘sites’ to ‘places’ to preserving the French original. Milieu indicates sites of living or lived memory, or rather sites that provide direct access to living traditions. Once these traditions have passed away, the sites evoke only intimations, often nostalgia. Nora uses lieu to designate the exterritorialized sites of collective memory. Speaking specifically about contemporary France, he maintains that a shift has occurred from a kind of naturalized collective memory to a self-conscious, uninspired and rather mechanistic activity of preserving memory. He thus posits a transformation from sites of internalized social collective memory to fixed externalized locations. These sites form an exhaustive inventory, consisting of architectural and textual artefacts: monuments and shrines, histories and textbooks, museums and archives. Commenting on the lieux, Nora says, ‘It is no longer

89  Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 195. 90  Interestingly, the Carnegie Report received its first full translation into Bulgarian only in 1995 (and it was from the later reprint, with the Kennan preface); Trotsky is yet to be translated, but he will probably have to wait, since his name has little neo-liberal appeal.

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genesis we seek but rather the deciphering of who we are in light of who we are no longer.’91 This seems to be happening with the Balkan Wars. Between 2012 and 2013, there was a proliferation of celebrations, commemorations, documentary and photo exhibits in all participant countries. Now, but to a lesser extent, the period of the First World War is added. There were school and academic competitions on the topic. Academia was using the centenary to organize national and international workshops and conferences all over Europe and North America. There were reprints and new publications, especially memoirs and other witness accounts.92 The press in the Balkan countries did not miss the opportunity to publish interviews with historians, literary scholars and politicians. The web was a particularly rich source of activities.93 However, no new monuments were erected, and there have been merely calls to repair the older ones that have been allowed to crumble. It seemed that they had lost their function as milieux, and now there was a desire to turn them into attractive lieux. The passage from milieux to lieux is inevitable, because in the broadest sense it hinges on the immediacy of lived experience. There is nothing tragic about it. If only it were possible in the future that “war and memory” would be enshrined solely in lieux de mémoire! 91  Nora, Pierre, ‘Entre mémoire et histoire’ in Les lieux de mémoire, Paris, 1984, vol. 1: xxxiii, cited in Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993), 148. 92  In Bulgaria, alongside a plenitude of other minor publications, the Institute for Historical Research, A de luxe edition of war memoirs: Balkanskite voini 1912–1913. Pamet i istoriia (Sofia: Akademichno izdatelstvo Prof. Marin Drinov, 2012). 93  Bulgaria alone has more than 700 websites dedicated to some aspect of the centennial. A game by Joseph Mirand, Balkan Wars, can be downloaded. It is only on these websites that one can gauge the reaction of the younger people to the anniversary, ranging from openly nationalistic ones to others critical of any display of jingoism. Even these blogs, however, are relatively subdued.

Section 4 Socialism and Communism in Memory

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Shared or Contested Heritage? Commemorating Socialism and Communism in Europe This text was delivered as a keynote to the international conference “Sites of Memory of Socialism and Communism in Europe,” organized by the University of Basel at Schloss Münchenwiler in Switzerland, in September 2015. Its immediate background was the centenary of the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915, organized by socialists who opposed the war and were disappointed by the majority of socialist parties who voted for the war credits. Together with the following Kienthal and Stockholm conferences, this conference inaugurated the anti-militarist movement known as the Zimmerwald movement, and the subsequent unraveling of the Second International. For 100 years, the memory of the conference was actively “forgotten” in the village of Zimmerwald, the installation of plaques was banned, and the house in which Lenin was thought to have slept was razed. It was only in September 2015 that the local authorities allowed a memorial event to take place for the first time. The keynote is published here as it was written in 2015, with factual updates in note 1.

I would like to begin with two present-day examples. Ottawa, Canada’s capital, has the reputation of a self-effacing and boring city that Canadian filmmakers themselves mocked in a documentary, “The city that fun forgot.” Recently, the conservative government of Stephen Harper has championed and partly financed a plan to build an astonishing monument in the parliamentary district that will dwarf any architectural site in the city, although it hardly will make up for the fun deficiency. It is conceived as a concrete memorial to the victims of communism around the world, covering 54,000 square feet (17,000 square meters), and rising four stories high. There were six submissions to the jury for the monument and it was won by Abstrakt Studio Architecture whose founder, Voytek Gorczynski, explained that he wanted to create something visceral and brutal which would illustrate that communism has killed 100 million people. Accordingly, the monument would feature 100 million 5.6-milimeter squares, laid over in 14 concrete walls joined in seven inverted V shapes. The squares would become pixels forming images of which one is the mass grave of Polish officers in the Katyn forest. Critics of the project noted that this does not commemorate any direct event in Canadian history and that it is an unacceptable break with tradition. Others denounced the disappearance of the only green

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_028

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park in the district. Yet others objected on aesthetical grounds or to the fact that there was no appropriate public process when turning over the site to the non-profit group Tribute to Liberty which is behind the project. Finally, there is the accusation that this is a pre-election ploy of the government of Stephen Harper, who caters to the conservative vote of Eastern Europeans, largely Ukrainians and Poles. No one has dared raise an objection as to the veracity of the claim of the number of victims. The Tribute to Liberty group, headed by Ludwik Klimkowski, has yet to raise the 2.5 million dollars for the project, which is supposed to cost a total of 5.5 million. Yet, the government has said that the project is scheduled to break ground in the summer of 2015 and be completed within twelve months.1 My other example comes from Greece. On the day of his inauguration, 26 January 2015, Alexis Tsipras’s first act was to lay roses at the National Resistance Memorial in Kaisariani. Most of the news media ran titles such as: “In a symbolic first act as prime minister, Alexis Tsipras pays his respects to 200 Greeks executed by the Nazis in World War Two.”2 The monument was referred only neutrally as a war memorial. Only the Guardian’s title specified: “Alexis Tsipras pays homage to Greek communists at site of Nazi atrocity.”3 And indeed, the 200 political activists executed by the Nazis in 1 May 1944 were communists, many of them leading party cadres, and they are remembered as such by the Greek Left. These two illustrations raise several conceptual problems. We encounter here two types of commemoration. One, even as stressing the grimness of the crimes committed by communist regimes, celebrates essentially the triumphalist victory over communism. Being erected in Canada, a country that has little to do with communism, but has a large and growing Eastern European (mostly 1  The New York Times, February 27, 2015, A 11. Eventually, the project was transformed following the federal elections that brought to power the liberals and Justin Trudeau. At this point the price is capped at $3 million, and the government’s pledge reduced by half. The site has also been moved, and a new design was selected. The monument has been renamed Canada: A Place of Refuge, emphasizing Canada’s “role as a place of refuge for people fleeing injustice and persecution, and honour the millions oppressed by communist regimes.” The mionument’s completion is expected by early 2019 (Memorial to the Victims of Communism—Canada, a Land of Refuge, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Memorial_to_the_Victims_of_Communism_%E2%80%93_Canada,_a_Land_of_Refuge). 2  http://news.sky.com/story/1415233/greece-alexis-tsipras-visits-war-memorial, http://www .ad-hoc-news.de/greece-alexis-tsipras-visits-war-memorial--/de/News/41537921, http://www .newsingreece.com/protothema/alexis-tsipras-visits-war-memorial-in-a-symbolic-firstact-as-pm/ and many others. 3  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/26/alexis-tsipras-greece-syriza-kaisariani-nazi -german.

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Polish and Ukrainian) emigration, it creates a site of memory which exports to North America a specific European (and Asian) memory and universalizes the commemorated occasion. And the occasion itself comes not from memories of experience but is a direct illustration of the controversial Black Book of Communism.4 The Greek execution site, on the other hand, was for a long time a site of memory without any visible commemorative symbol. On 1 May 1950, when for the first time after the war, the celebration of International Workers’ Day was permitted (it had been banned since 1936), it was held at this site. The site, however, had been given after the war to the rifle association which used it as a shooting range. In 1987, the German president Richard von Weizsäcker paid tribute there to the Greek victims of World War Two, and had to endure the criticism of both German and Greek conservative circles. It was only in 2005 that the current monument was erected at the Kaiseriani rifle range, and it took a long struggle for this to be achieved, including the hunger strike of the mayor.5 In many ways, it is a testimony to a vanquished project, the communist resistance, which is celebrated with nostalgia by the Left. When tacitly accepted as legitimate in the general public sphere, it is commemorated as a specifically anti-Nazi (and in the present Greek atmosphere) anti-German event. These two examples and the topic of our conference thus invite us to reflect on several theoretical issues: the use of the category “sites of memory,” the notions of triumph, defeat and nostalgia, the problems of shared or contested heritage, and finally, the categories of socialism and communism.

…

Introduced by Pierre Nora, the notion lieu de mémoire has been variously rendered in English as sites, places or realms of memory. As much of French intellectual produce in general, the transmission of Nora’s work has resulted in lifting it out of its local context, universalizing it, and rendering it as abstract theory. In its original inception, the grand opus of Nora and his team of 120 leading French historians was conceived as a huge historiographical response to the crisis of French national identity two centuries after its most defining event: the French Revolution. Pierre Nora and his colleagues set themselves 4  Stéphane Courtois, Nicholas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošsek, Jean-Loouis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror Repression (Harvard University Press, 1999; the book appeared first in French in 1997 as Le Livre noir du communisme. Crimes, terreur, répression). 5  http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?art=434&secName=proletarian&subName=display.

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the task of helping construe French national memory for the contemporary age, at a time when the Revolution no longer resonates as its central event, and there are broader prospects to be uncovered and recovered from the more distant past. It is in this context that Nora’s team began locating sites of memory where the French collective identity had materialized over time.6 These sites formed an exhaustive inventory, consisting of architectural and textual artifacts: monuments and shrines, histories and textbooks, museums and archives. In Nora’s words: “It is no longer genesis we seek but rather the deciphering of who we are in light of who we are no longer.”7 This situates the whole project squarely at the interstices of two types of historiographies: the traditional (or modern) nineteenth-century positivist historiography with its obsession with origins and the national telos, and deconstructivist postmodern historiography. Nora engaged in something more than simple deconstruction. As noted by Patrick Hutton, postmodernist historians focused exclusively on memory’s significance for political mobilization, dismissing, or at least underestimating, the value of tradition itself. They accordingly developed a very functionalist approach, in which commemoration was treated as “a form of mnemonics for the modern age, self-consciously designed by leaders of the nation-state to prompt the desired recall.”8 In reaction to this one-sided approach, scholars began devoting more attention to tradition and counter-memory, using Foucault’s “archaeology of knowledge” as their philosophical basis. In Nora’s reading, in modern historiography there is an organic link between the milieux of inwardly experienced values and the places of their external commemoration. In contrast, this link has been broken in the postmodern period. Nora maintains, therefore, that a shift has occurred from a kind of 6  Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). This second, three-volume edition comprises the seven volumes of the same title published from 1984 to 1992. This first publication was conceived as a 3-part, 3-volume work around three topics: La République; La Nation; Les France. La République came out in 1984. La Nation swelled into three volumes and came out in 1986. So did the final part Les France whose three volumes were published in 1992). There are two American translation: the three-volume set Realms of memory: the construction of the French past, ed. Lawrence B. Kritzman, transl. Arthur Goldhammer, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, which rearranged the French material and presented 44 of the original 127 French chapters; and the above-mentioned, Chicago published Rethinking France. Les lieux de mémoire, ed. David P. Jordan, which groups 45 articles in four volumes with a different organization. 7  Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire” in Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), xxxiii, cited in Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1993), 148. 8  Hutton, op. cit., xv–xvi.

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naturalized collective memory to a self-conscious, uninspired and rather mechanistic activity of preserving memory. He thus posits a transformation from an internalized, social collective memory (milieux de mémoire) to fixed, externalized locations (lieux de mémoire). For the postmodern historian, “history ceases to be a mnemonic reconstruction and becomes instead an archaeological deconstruction.”9 The fundamental distinction that Nora introduces concerns milieux and lieux de mémoire. English does not translate milieux, although there are quibbles over lieux, ranging from “realms” and “sites” and “places” to preserving the French original. The milieu indicates sites of living or lived memory, or rather sites that provide direct access to living traditions. Once these traditions have passed away, the sites evoke only intimations, often nostalgia: in the words of Nora, “the true sadness is to suffer no longer from what one has suffered so much, and henceforth to understand only with the mind’s reason, no longer with the unreason of the heart.”10 It is important to understand exactly Nora’s use of the term lieu de mémoire. He had borrowed it form Frances Yates but did not employ it like her as the tangible ordered places/palaces, to which information is attached in order to be individually preserved as memory in oral tradition. Instead, he used it to designate the exterritorialized sites of collective memory. While he employed the category ‘collective memory,’ he utilized it as a metaphor for history that imposes on society one particular vision to be remembered. At the same time, Nora captured the whole process at a moment when the identification with living memory had disappeared. The sites of memory he described are like “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned. No longer quite alive, not yet dead, they are like seashells on the shore from which the sea of living memory has retreated.”11 As already mentioned, this is a particularly French context, where a single event—the French Revolution—was conferred foundational status but where, on the other hand, unseating this event from its crowning pedestal after two centuries of contested but nonetheless unthreatened primacy, did not entail social destabilization and collective anomie. French society at the bicentennial of the French Revolution could complain of all kinds of malaise but it was no doubt one of the most successful and affluent societies in the post-Second World War era. Introspection and deconstruction on the part of intellectuals

9  Hutton, op. cit., 149. 10  Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire” in Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, xlii, cited in Hutton, op. cit., 149. 11  Ibid., 152.

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are affordable indulgencies in this context, but not readily, or at least not innocently, exportable. This does not deny the magnificent achievement of Nora’s work and the universal significance of many of his insights. Particularly valuable is his historicizing of the nineteenth-century modern historiographical project. Even though it is based entirely on French examples, the predominant place and influence of France and French culture in the nineteenth century secures its general significance. Nora interprets this historiographical project as an attempt to take possession of collective memory. In the previous oral tradition, memory focuses on habits, cultures, mores and is passed on unreflectively from generation to generation. In the modern period, memory is recorded rather than voiced and by taking possession of it, history materializes it. In this written tradition, historical method was trying to find ways to link history to memory. French historians of the early and mid-nineteenth century were the last generation of historians to experience, according to Nora, the coincidence of history and memory.12 This abruptly changed in the last third of the 19th century, “when history became a science and the Republic turned it into a national institution.” The result was a conscious privileging of history over memory: “national history was becoming the French memory.” This continued until the 1930s, when both the Annales school and Marxism challenged the national project and “set out on a divergent path, signaling the moment when history … ceased to coincide with the nation’s memory.” It was taken up in the 1960s by the “New History,” and then again in the 1980s with the “acceleration” of history. As far as France was concerned, Nora maintained, there was a clear sign that “the present is being enslaved to memory, that is to the fetishism of signs, an obsession with history, an accumulation of the material remains of the national past, and to the infinite ways of expressing the national life—not only its history, but also its landscapes, its traditions, its ways of eating, and its long-gone methods of production. Everything is historical, everything is worth remembering, and everything belongs to memory.”13 Where the memory palace of oral tradition had been an imaginary structure where factual knowledge is interiorized in specific places and thus internalized (put to memory), the postmodern historian visits these palaces in order to unveil their mechanism, not to partake in their function. He deconstructs not only the archive but other architectural places of memory: museums, monuments, shrines. He visits them to disassemble them, not to reconfirm the

12  Nora, “General Introduction”, in Rethinking France, op. cit., xv–xvi. 13  Ibid., xvi–xviii.

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message that a generation of earlier historians would have found there.14 As an interpretation of a common intellectual endeavor, this is valid far beyond France’s borders, although one can argue about the details and emphases in different national and regional historiographies. It is also difficult to accept Nora’s insistence that this practice is a predicament only of postmodernity: past periods have seen similar processes, and postmodernity constructs its own idiosyncratic sacred sites. While not sharing his cultural pessimism, I still take seriously, but in a narrower sense, Nora’s distinction between milieux as realms of lived or transmitted lived experience and tradition, and lieux as formalized sites lacking spontaneity, without, however, privileging the former and without sharing Nora’s melancholic (if not conservative) chagrin over what he terms as the loss of the sacred.15 Where I think this distinction is useful, as can be seen further in this text, is when discussing the approaches of a given polity towards its realms of memory.

…

In light of this, how do we re-approach the Ottawa and Athens sites? The memorial at Kaiseriani is definitely at the moment a milieu de mémoire not only of lived and living memory but also one of contested memories and contested interpretations and use, and thus, one of memory making. The memorial to the victims of communism, on the other hand, being an exterritorialized site of collective memory is not a lieu de mémoire yet, but strives to become one. It can never become a milieu like the Katyn forest which it seeks to invoke. And even the Katyn forest which unquestionably is a powerful milieu of a living memory at the moment, in a few generations will likely cease to be a milieu, insofar as it will have lost its direct access to living traditions. Live contemporaries are the carriers of the living tradition: when they personally pass it along, it still has the emotive flame. No wonder a Swahilli saying contends that the deceased who remain alive in people’s memory are the “living dead.” Only when the last to have known them passes away, they are pronounced completely dead.16 Still, Katyn could certainly stay a powerful lieu, especially if relations between Poland and Russia stay fraught, and it is instrumentalized as a symbol. On the 14  Hutton, op. cit., 9, 149–150. See also Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 15  For a critical, although respectful, review of Nora’s work, stressing its “Frenchness,” see Jay Winter, published in H-France (October, 1997), https://www.h-net.org/reviews/ showrev.php?id=1354. 16  David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 195.

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other hand, if relations in the course of time are normalized, and there is no need to politicize a memory site, it can become a neutralized and aestheticized lieu. This is where I think the distinction between mileu and lieu is important. Both can, of course, be equally successfully mobilized and instrumentalized by groups and the state. However, elites ought to be very careful when handling these different sites. A visceral memory or tradition cannot be obliterated, short of killing off its carriers. Only time (the passing of several generations) can turn this spontaneity into a more ritualistic and composed attitude. Take the example of the monument of Minin and Pozharsky in front of St. Basil’s cathedral on Red Square. While it is not a socialist site of memory, it served as a potent site of memory during communism and post-communism. Commemorating the end of the Time of Troubles, and especially the PolishLithuanian invasion and occupation of Russia (1612), it was erected some 200 years after the event (1818) as a lieu de mémoire. This was a time, under Alexander I, when Russia had imposed itself as a major great power following Catherine the Great’s expansionist policies and the partitionings of Poland. The monument itself was conceived during the decade when Russia was vacillating over its policies toward Napoleon, and it was mostly the Polish question which brought her firmly into the anti-Napoleonic coalition. But given the passage of time—200 years—the monument was never a milieu de mémoire. It was initiated by the patriotic Free Society of Lovers of Literature, Science and the Arts not at a site linked to some immediate (or preserved immediate) experience, but in Nizhny Novgorod, from where Pozharsky and Minin came. It was Tsar Alexander’s decision to place the statue on Red Square. The event (and the monument) has been exploited for different purposes by both Russian and Polish politicians and historiography. In the Russian case, the trope of the heroic struggle for independence has been mythologized, completely sparing the complicity of the future victorious dynasty of the Romanovs in their complicated maneuvering during the civil war. Conversely, in Poland the Dimitriads have been seen as the epitome of their Golden Age, the only time Moscow fell to a foreign invader. In the interwar period, this became a useful tool both for Pilsudski and for the Bolsheviks in the Polish-Soviet war. And yet, the Soviets seriously discussed the demolition of the monument or its removal to an indoor museum because it obstructed the parades on Red Square. Its transfer to the side of the cathedral was a Stalinist compromise in 1936, and it had subsequently low-key functions. Only after the demise of the Soviet Union, has the site been summoned again to become the focus of a newly restored commemoration from before 1917: National Unity Day. Celebrated since 2005 on November 4, it is an attempt to sideline November 7 which is no longer official but remains a popular holiday. Yet, while a miniscule

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percentage of Russians (5 %) know that 4 November commemorates the liberation of Moscow from Polish troops, more than 63 % are against the termination of the celebration of the October Revolution on 7 November, hadly distanced by three to four generations from the present.17 The fact of the physical presence of Lenin’s mausoleum, on the one hand certainly helps keeps the memories alive and, on the other hand, testifies to the prudency of the elites not to temper with what is still an important milieu de mémoire.18 It is the immediacy of the gradually passing socialist (or commmunist) heritage that makes the struggles over the sites of memory so intense. But this is not a quarrel between groups that are bearers of different shared memories. Shared memories have always existed and they can quietly co-exist even when they are irreconcilable. They become contested only when they begin to compete, to occupy the public space, to demand exclusive attention and make monopolizing claims, i.e. when they are being politicized. Political recognition in its various forms—monuments, museums, textbooks or special legislation, awards and reparations—necessarily implies the privileging of one group (and its memories) over another. And the way this is done nowadays is through comparative and competing victimhood. This is not the place to tackle the fraught issue of creating a common European memory, and the ensuing competition between the memory and commemoration of the Holocaust versus the memory and commemoration of communist repression. It is essentially a political problem rotating around the discourse of victimhood as “a universal source of legitimacy, offering a new language in which to formulate collective claims.”19 17   В.Козляков, П.Михайлов, Ю.Эскин, День народного единства. Биография праздника (Москва: Дрофа, 2009); Владислав Назаров, “Что будут праздновать в России 4 ноября 2005 года?”, Отечественные записки, 2004, N. 5, (http://scepsis.net/library/id_198.html); День народного единства (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/День_народного_единства). 18  While working in a different context, the Assmans make a similar distinction between lived and learned memory. In the framework of their work on trauma they introduce three concepts: communicative memory, longer-term cultural memory, and connective memory. The communicative memory lasts three to four generations after trauma and is strongly focused on oral traditions that see that the story is experienced and re-experienced. Once (or if) the story becomes part of a common cultural memory, the specifics of trauma are lost, and they give way to a more generalized attitude. Most often this is achieved through connective memory, i.e. the implementation of „imposed, selected, enforced, inevitably politcized memories designed to create a closely guarded group identity.” Douglas J. Becker, “Memory and trauma as elements of identity in foreign policy making,” in Erica Resende, Dovile Budryte, Memory and Trauma in International Relations: Theories, Cases and Debates (New York: Routledge, 2014), 62. 19  For an excellent treatment of the notion of victimhood, see Pieter Lagrou, “Europe as a Place for Common Memories? Some Thoughts on Victimhood, Identity and Emancipation from the Past,” in Muriel Blaive, Christian Gerbel and Thomas Lindenberger eds., Clashes

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All of the above examples are around sites in the sense of places. They are embodied, mostly in monuments of different dimensions and type (from group memorials to statues, busts and plaques) but also in museums, cemeteries and national park arrangements. But a site does not necessarily have to be corporeal. Thus a film, a theater piece, a poem, a book, a song (or a conference) can play the role of a compelling commemorator. There is hardly anything more powerful than people singing L’Internationale. It has been appropriated by many opposing and often battling groups of the left—by self-defined communists, socialists, social-democrats, and anarchists of different factions. It was the official hymn of the Second International (1889–1916) and of the Soviet Union after 1944, two bodies that, had they chronologically co-existed, would have been at loggerheads. It is one of the rare human artefacts that are very broadly shared by a left that is notoriously fractious. To what extent it is a visceral milieu can be illustrated by a facetious anecdote told about a Bulgarian social-democrat, notorious for his cautiousness and political equilibristics. In the interwar period, when May Day was banned, he did not join the spontaneous and dangerous demonstrations, but still remained true to his beliefs: he crept at night under his bed, covered himself with his quilt, and sang the Internationale in his mind.

…

So how about Zimmerwald where l’Internationale, sung aloud, must have been heard exactly one hundred years ago? Theoretically, it should have all the trappings of a still influential if fading milieu given that the institutions that descended from it, like the Socialist International, albeit in a transformed shape, are still alive; or like the Third International (the Comintern), which ceased to exist but is still alive in the memory of living contemporaries. That this is not the case and that Zimmerwald did not turn even into an important lieu has to do chiefly with the imminently following geopolitical conjuncture of Europe after the Bolshevik Revolution and especially after the Second World War, dominated by the Cold War arrangements. The place could not even become a contested site given the divisions of Europe, and after the fall of communism it lacked the impetus and commercial possibilities to turn it into a tourist attraction like, for example, the Karl Marx House in Trier. in European Memory: The Case of Communist Repression and the Holocaust (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2011), 281–288 (the quote from p. 286). On the proliferation of trauma and its functions, see Sabine Sielke, “Why 9/11 is [not] unique, or: On Troping Trauma,” Amerikastudien/ American Studies, vol. 56, N. 3, 2010, 385–408.

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However, the name Zimmerwald became an important designation, firstly for the peace faction within the Second International known as the Zimmerwald movement, encompassing all social democrats participating in the Zimmerwald and the subsequent two conferences in Kienthal and Stockholm, and secondly for the secessionist revolutionary group, the Zimmerwald Left of Lenin, which subsequently gave birth to the communist parties in most European countries. Even professional historians would have difficulties positioning Zimmerwald on a map, but the designation has its established place in historiography. One is tempted to name it a nom de mémoire. In the annals of the communist parties, Zimmerwald is the starting point for the ensuing rupture from the Second International, in many ways the insemination that would produce four years later the Third International. This process of radicalization, the adoption of Lenin’s revolutionary program, is described in the communist historiography by the term “bolshevization.” Of course, Lenin had pronounced the Second International dead already in September 1914 in his Seven Theses on the War and was calling for the creation of a new international. He nevertheless participated at the Zimmerwald conference where his position for turning the imperialist war into a civil war against one’s own government, and for the foundation of a new International was supported only by eight (out of 38 delegates) who formed the Zimmerwald Left: Lenin and Zinoviev (representing Russia), Radek (Poland), Bērziņš (Latvia), Borchardt (Germany), Platten (Switzerland), Höglund and Nerman (Sweden). The behavior of the Bulgarian delegate at the conference, given the subsequent stereotype of Bulgarian communism as the most faithful follower of the Bolsheviks, is noteworthy. The most authoritative (and detailed) history of the communist party of Bulgaria in English by Joseph Rothschild starts thus: “The Communist Party of Bulgaria was shaped by the Socialist movement from which it evolved. The distinctive factor in the history and development of the Bulgarian Socialist tradition was that it was the offspring of the Russian, not the German or French one.”20 Nor is this denied in the Bulgarian communist historiography. To the contrary, it went out of its way to stress the early kinship with Lenin. But there was a reason for this zealousness. The earliest writings on Bulgarian socialism were written in the interwar period (starting in the late 1920s) in the Soviet Union by Bulgarian emigrés, with the explicit goal to posit the closest ties and direct influence of Lenin’s

20  Joseph Rothschild, The Communist Party of Bulgaria. Origins and Development, 1883–1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 1.

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ideas.21 It was a period of acute (and often ugly) struggle between different factions of the Bulgarian emigrants, reflecting, among others, a generational shift. The ones who had been radicalized and had thoroughly embraced the Bolshevik ideology (later designated as “left sectarians”) were accusing the former leaders of the Bulgarian Social-Democratic Party (narrows), which was renamed into the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) in 1919, of having been essentially an unreformed party of the Plekhanov type. While in retrospect this allegation seems to be ironically true, at the time it meant a serious denunciation with immediate, often existential, consequences, given the atmosphere in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. No wonder then that Soviet historiography would also insist on the formative influence of Russia, without necessarily making the polarized claim of exclusive impact. Thus, there exists a certain collusion between communist and western writings in which the agency of the Bulgarians thoroughly disappears. The Bulgarian delegate to Zimmerwald was Vasil Kolarov (1877–1950). After graduating from high school, he became a teacher for a short period and joined the Bulgarian Workers Social Democratic Party (BWSDP) in 1897. He was a university student at Aix-en-Provence and Geneva, and upon his return to Bulgaria became a lawyer. Proficient in eight languages, he was the preferred delegate to the congresses of the Second International. In 1903, during the split of the party, he joined the so-called “narrows” around Blagoev, and was head of the organization in the second largest Bulgarian city, Plovdiv. Since 1905 he became also a member of the Central Committee of the party, a position he held to the end. In 1913 he was elected to Parliament, where he sat until 1923. In 1919 he became secretary of the newly renamed BCP. As the Bulgarian delegate to the Comintern, he was elected its general secretary (1922–24). In 1923, he, alongside Georgi Dimitrov, imposed on the communist party the decision of the Comintern to begin an armed revolt against the coup which toppled the agrarian government of Stamboliiski. After the bloody crackdown of the September rising, he emigrated to Moscow, and spent the next over two decades as a high functionary in the Soviet Union: he continued to be a top official of the Comintern until its dissolution in 1943, he headed the Krestintern (1929–1931), and he was director of the Moscow-based International Agrarian Institute (1931–1940). After 1945 he returned to Bulgaria, and was consecutively chairman of the National Assembly, deputy prime minister and foreign 21  Bakalov, G., “Staraia ‘Iskra’ sredi bolgar,” Proletarskaia revoliutsia, 1929, N. 91–92; Bakalov, G. “Kogda i kak bolgarskie rabochie vpervye poznakomilis’ s V. I. Leninym”, Proletarskaia revoliutsia, 1929, N. 93; Kh. Kabakchiev, “Lenin i bolgarskie tesniaki,” Istorik-marksist, 1943, N. 1.

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minister, and served as prime minister for a few months before his death in 1950. This is not the place to evaluate this complex and, oftentimes, controversial figure. One thing, though, can be said: this was a very intelligent, highly educated and cultivated individual. He left an enormous archive and wrote carefully crafted memoirs that have to be often read between the lines. His memoirs were published posthumously in 1961, eleven years after his death. This huge volume of 640 pages, printed by the publishing house of the BCP, was almost immediately sequestered from bookstores, on account of a few lines about the Second International and Zimmerwald.22 The Zimmerwald conference is described in only five pages, in a vivid but highly predictable prose, and it deals mostly with Lenin. According to Kolarov, Zimmerwald was the first international meeting, which singled out Lenin as the future leader of the international proletariat. Kolarov praises Lenin’s position, his deep analysis and foresight in pleading for a new International. “This idea, however, seemed so bold as to perturb the conference, which in its majority was still permeated with the traditions of the Second International.”23 Kolarov did not specify that he himself had voted with the majority against the draft resolution of the Zimmerwald Left. This was a wellknown fact, and he was always on the alert for the possible price he had to pay. In Moscow, his activities and contacts in the Second International were seen as a liability, and although he escaped the critique of the “left sectarians” because of his stance in 1923, he always felt vulnerable. He was the only Zimmerwalder of the ones who ended up in the Soviet Union, who survived the Great Purge.24 And indeed, already in 1931 Stalin had criticized in writing all communist parties who had not voted with Lenin in 1915 for their insufficient bolshevization.25 Later he would maintain that the Bulgarian narrows should not be considered a movement akin to the Bolsheviks, but rather to Plekhanov, “since repeatedly the narrows have been against Lenin and the Bolsheviks”, having in mind the particular vote at Zimmerwald.26 In a meeting with the BCP on 29 July 1949 Stalin was more specific: “Do the Bulgarians know that Kolarov has taken 22  Angel Vekov, “Vasil Kolarov v istoriata na bulgarskia sotsilizum,” in Vasil Kolarov. Statii, denvnitsi, rechi, pisma, spomeni, vol. 1 (1877–1919) (Sofia: Izdatelska kushta “Hristo Borev,” 2001), 19. 23  Kolarov. Statii, op. cit., 226. 24  Julia Richers, “Zimmerwald als sowjetischer Erinnerungsort,” in Bernard Degen, Julia Richers, Hg., Zimmerwald und Kiental: Weltgeschichte auf dem Dorfe (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2015), 174. 25  Stalin’s letter “Some questions from the history of bolshevism” was published in the journal Proletarskaia revoliutsia and reprinted in Kommunisticheskii internatsional, cited in Vekov, “Vasil Kolarov,” op. cit., 229. 26  Vekov, “Vasil Kolarov,” op. cit., 21; Georgi Chankov, Ravnosmetkata (Sofia, 2000), 280.

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right-wing positions in the past? We considered him an opportunist. At the time, he harmed Lenin badly. Later Kolarov improved. But he used to have an affinity to the right. He is unquestionably our man but relapses are not to be ruled out.”27 This was said at a time when the 72-year old Kolarov was foreign minister and deputy prime minister. Despite his proverbial and judicious caution, Kolarov had let slip a phrase in his otherwise bland account of Zimmerwald, which triggered the confiscation of his volume. He starts his description with the official invitation by the Swiss socialist Robert Grimm, sent to the Central Committee of the BWSDP (narrows). He also mentions that a letter had been sent by Lenin, insisting that the Bulgarians take part. And he adds: “We wanted to clarify Lenin’s position toward the concrete issues around the war and the International. Blagoev said only that he did not know for sure, but it seemed that Lenin’s views contained some elements of Blanquism.” In a later document from his archives dating from 1938, when he was preparing for a commemorative celebration for Blagoev (who had died in 1924), he specified Blagoev’s admonitions: “You will stick to the decisions of the Second Balkan conference … He [i.e. Blagoev] thought, that Lenin exhibited some elements of Blanquism. Blagoev warned me to be very vigilant. This is why in Zimmerwald we voted for the united resolution, and not for the minority one.”28 Even if we characterize some of this as a way to shift the blame to one who was already dead and was becoming an icon as the founder of the party, the information is not to be discounted and tallies well with other evidences. In the interwar period, during the fierce ideological struggle among the Bulgarian emigrés in the Soviet Union, there was harsh criticism against the “narrows” in the sense that they had sided with Plekhanov and had criticized Lenin for his “conspiratorial and blanquist centralism.”29 Hristo Kabakchiev (1878–1940) was one of the most prominent Bulgarian Marxists and intellectuals, who had studied medicine and law in France and Switzerland, and later was in the Central Committee of the party and editor-in-chief of the party newspaper Rabotnicheski vestnik. He was elected member of Parliament (1914–1923), and after the abortive September uprising of 1923, was imprisoned between 1923 and 1926. He later emigrated to Vienna, and from there to the Soviet Union, 27   Vostochnaia Evropa v dokumentah rossiiskih arhivov 1949–1953. Vol. 2 (Moskva-Novosibirsk, 1998), 193, cited in Vekov, “Vasil Kolarov,” op. cit., 21. 28  TsDA (Tsentralen dîrzhaven arkhiv), Fond 147 Б, op.2, a.e. 449, cited in Vekov, “Vasil Kolarov,” op. cit., 21. 29  TsDA (Tsentralen dîrzhaven arkhiv), Sp 399 Б, Article of Peter Georgiev from 1950, later Director of the Institute for the history of the Bulgarian Communist Party, on the tenth anniversary of the death of Hristo Kabakchiev.

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where he was forced to repent for his errors and worked for the Comintern, joining the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute as a research associate. All his biographical accounts give a brief anodyne explanation of his death “after a severe illness.”30 In fact, he was arrested in 1939 and disappeared. It was only after the personal intervention of Georgi Dimitrov that he was found terrorized in the Sukhanovski monastery, one of the most notorious Stalinist prisons. He was freed but as a physical wreck and died shortly thereafter.31 In 1915, even after his patriotic turn in the wake of the war, Plekhanov still was the great authority for the Bulgarians. In 1906, he had accused Lenin of Blanquism which was then considered a great sin and a deviation from the Marxist orthodoxy. This was based on the analysis of Engels who considered Blanqui simply a man of action who believed “that a small and well organized minority, who would attempt a political stroke of force at the opportune moment, could carry the mass of people with them by a few successes at the start and thus make a victorious revolution …” Engels then charged the blanquists that what followed from this view was the imposition of a dictatorship “not of the entire revolutionary class, but of the small minority that has made the revolution, and who are themselves organized under the dictatorship of one or several individuals.”32 In a spirited riposte to Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg defended the Bolsheviks, on the ground that “we need to know if the tactic recommended by comrade Plekhanov and his Menshevik comrades, which aims to work through the Duma as far as possible, is correct now; or, on the contrary, if the tactic we are applying, just like the Bolshevik comrades, is correct—the tactic based on the principle that the centre of gravity is situated outside the Duma, in the active appearance of the popular revolutionary masses.”33 The BWSDP (narrows), despite the widely held stereotype, was a party that had “parliamentary illusions” and was working from within the system, even as it refused any compromise and collaboration with bourgeois parties (unlike the broads from whom it had 30  Tatiana Koleva, Khristo Kabakchiev: Bio-bibliografiia, (Sofia, 1958); https://bg.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Христо_Кабакчиев; http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Kabakchiev%2c+ Khristo+Stefanov; Dimitîr Genchev, Pîrvoapostolite na ideala (Sofia: Hristo Botev, 2006), 143–153. 31  TsDA (Tsentralen dîrzhaven arkhiv), Fond 321 Б, op.1, a.e.48 (also under ChP Б 1818, a.e.48). 32  Friedrich Engels, “The program of the Blanquist fugitives from the Paris Commune, 1873,” first published in Der Volksstaat, N. 73, 26 June 1874, English translation in the International Socialist Review, vol. IX, 2, August 1908 (https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1874/06/26.htm). 33   Rosa Luxemburg, “Blanquism and Social Democracy,” first published in Czerwony Szandar, N. 86, June 1906, English translation in Weekly Worker, N. 753, 22 January 2009 (https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/06/blanquism.html).

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split in 1903). Its understanding of revolution was one of a radical change but not one of an armed, violent overthrow. Kolarov was sent to Zimmerwald with the explicit directive to hold on to the decisions of the Second Balkan conference. This latter conference had been held in July 1915 in Bucharest and the BWSDP (narrows), alongside the Serbian, Greek, and Romanian parties, had issued a manifesto denouncing the imperialist war and the ambitions of the Great Powers, calling for a Balkan federation as the only guarantee for the liberty of the Balkan peoples. Unlike their western colleagues, both the Serbian and Bulgarian social democrats who were represented in Parliament voted against the war credits. In the Bulgarian case, the social democrats insisted for strict neutrality, and fended off the pressure exerted by foreign socialists (Parvus and Plekhanov) to adhere to one of the camps. Their principled position is even more remarkable, given the tremendous authority that Plekhanov enjoyed among Bulgarian socialists. The conference never even raised the question of a new International. In Zimmerwald Kolarov, as well as his compatriot Christian Rakovsky who represented the Romanian Social Democratic Party, voted in accordance with the mandate given to them by the Second Balkan conference and, in the case of Kolarov, with the explicit instructions from Blagoev. Both of them represented not only the Romanian and Bulgarian parties, but also the international socialist Balkan federation.34 Although critical of the socialists supporting the war, they both stood for the organizational unity within the old International and were not prepared to sever connections with the International Socialist Bureau.35 Zimmerwald as a nom de mémoire is thus crucial in understanding the evolution of Bulgarian social democracy and the history of Bulgarian c­ ommunist historiography.

…

This brings me to the paradoxical use of the concepts socialism and communism both in scholarship and in everyday speech. Zimmerwald, in the accepted orthodoxy, is intimately linked to the final divorce between these two notions. Or is it really a final divorce? To answer this question, we have to look back and recall the long common history these two concepts have had. The saga of their semantic peregrinations is fascinating and certainly merits detailed and closed scholarly analysis. Luckily, this has been broached not only by a 34  Angelica Balabanoff, Die Zimmerwalderer Bewegung 1914–1919 (Leipzig: Verlag von C. L. Hirschfeld), 1928, 12. 35  Rothschild, The Communist Party, op. cit., 66.

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respectable literature, but has been synthesized, among others, in the magisterial Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, which charted the turn from history of ideas to conceptual history.36 We thus possess an exemplary Begriffsgeschichte of the two concepts in the languages in which they have been first articulated. While both terms have an etymological pedigree in Latin (communion, communis, socialis, socialibis), in their modern usage they are both neologisms from the time of the late ancien régime. Their wide-spread use in practically all European languages dates from the 1840s. Both were future-oriented concepts, and although there were substantive differences more in the perception, rather than in the contents of these two terms, until the Great War they were often used interchangeably. Communism has had a theological tradition in the German-speaking realm reaching back to the sixteenth and seventeenth century among the Anabaptists, many of whom called themselves communistae and defied private property. In eighteenth-century France and Italy, communistes, communisti was an ascriptive judicial term describing the common use of land property by a village commune. When it entered the vocabulary of the late Enlightenment thinkers (Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne), the revolutionary language of Babeuf and his disciples, and the terminological apparatus of Etienne Cabet and Théophile Thoré, it was oriented to the future, and subsumed all kinds of theories that aimed to achieve an equitable society on the basis of the abolition of private property, and in most cases, through revolutionary means. In was in this sense that it was adopted in Germany where Wilhelm Weitling can be identified as “the first German communist,” but also alongside such figures as Moses Hess, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.37 The official judicial overreaction against Weitling and the perceived danger from communism in the German space (initiated, as it were, in Switzerland), created an actual “Communist Scare” (Kommunistenfurcht) in the 1840, culminating with the revolutions of 1848–49 and thereafter. It is in this atmosphere that Marx and Engels’s ironized the fear of the communist specter in the Communist Manifesto and laid a monopolizing claim to the use of the concept.38 Looking back forty years later, Engels wrote: “We could not have called it a Socialist manifesto. In 1847, Socialism was

36   Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexicon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuutgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972–1997). See also Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 37  “Kommunismus,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Bd.3, 1982, 477, 488–494. 38  “Kommunismus,” op. cit., 496.

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a middle-class movement. Socialism was, on the continent at least, respectable; Communism was the very opposite.”39 In an interesting twist, in England at the time, communism was the tamer word. Robert Owen preferred to use socialist which suggested the secular reorganization of society as a whole, whereas communism, at least until the Paris Commune, had a religious tinge and was not associated with atheism, as socialism was.40 On the continent, however, communism had acquired the sense of a militant movement and, without being denounced by the left, was cautiously eschewed. Ferdinand Lasalle, while accused as a communist, was careful to avoid it as a designation. He never referred to himself as a communist, and only once as a socialist.41 Both August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht avoided the term, although they tried to emancipate it in speeches and writings from its alarming reputation. Even Engels and Marx showed a frustrating ambivalence toward the term. They did use it sparsely, referring mostly to the Vormärz period. After the death of Marx, Engels spoke of “the dialectical method” and the “communist worldview” but used the concept “scientific socialism” not “scientific communism.”42 Like communism, socialism also had an earlier tradition. The accusation of being socialistae was leveled against Hugo Grotius and his followers, especially Samuel Pufendorf in Germany and John Locke in England, who developed the system of natural law in the seventeenth century. In its modern sense, however, the concept took roots around the social reforms of Robert Owen in England. Interestingly, it was not the Owenists themselves, but their adversaries who put the concept socialism on the national agenda, bemoaning “the abominable and atrocious system known by the disgusting name of Socialism.”43 By the late 1830s Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen were understood to be “socialistes modernes.”44 As already said above, in England, unlike on the continent, socialism was considered to be the harder word. And yet, even from the outset, socialism as a concept had a life outside the revolutionary critique of society, and thus as a concept proved more acceptable and tamable. The reason for this may have been purely semantic as the term social could also be used in a purely descriptive and neutral way and, in this sense, politically it could be understood as a continuation of liberalism, i.e. social, including radical, reform in the name of the main liberal values—political freedom 39  Williams, Keywords, op. cit., 288. 40  Williams, Keywords, op. cit., 74, 288. 41  “Kommunismus,” op. cit., 507. 42  “Kommunismus,” op. cit., 510–11. 43  “Sozialismus,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Bd.5, 1984, 934–939, quote on p. 939. 44  “Sozialismus,” op. cit., 940.

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and social justice—but not upsetting the base of capitalist society, the private ownership over the means of production that was at the center of the revolutionary reading.45 The reception of the term in Germany goes back to the key role played by the publication of Lorenz Stein’s book in 1842 on French socialism and communism.46 Stein privileged socialism as a positive force and communism as a destructive one, but his book in fact served to couple the two concepts together. The link between the two notions, which should not be taken for granted given their different pedigree, had already been made in France in 1840.47 And while Marx and Engels opted for communism over socialism, their typology of socialism in the Communist Manifesto was less than clear. There were three types of socialism: there was reactionary socialism, there was bourgeois socialism, but there was also critical-utopian socialism and communism as a sub-species of the general phenomenon.48 During the revolutionary years of 1848–1849, the evangelical church articulated a version of Christian socialism which was to save throne and altar from the social revolution.49 And it was a first step to imbuing socialism with the national spirit. In 1895, Friedrich Naumann, whose views were close to Christian socialism, coined the locution “national socialism”: “We need a socialism that is capable of governing. Such socialism must be German national.”50 Naumann’s liberal version was not carried through, but the phrase has been forever bound to designate Hitler’s ideology. The Paris Commune sealed the militant reputation to communism, although there is a continuing debate whether communard is equivalent to communste. And, of course, one should not forget Otto Weininger’s 1903 dictum in Geschlecht und Charakter that “Socialism is Aryan (Owen, Carlyle, Ruskin, Fichte), communism is Jewish (Marx).51 Be that as it may, the preferred designation for the workers’ parties from the 1870s until the end of the First World War everyway was socialist and even more so social-democratic. It was only after Lenin consciously appropriated the word “communist” that it came into wide use again. He did so already in December 1914 when he wrote “whether it would not be better to avoid the stained and abased 45  Williams, Keywords, op. cit., 286. 46  Lorenz Stein, Der Sozialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Ein Beitrag zur Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig, 1842). 47  “Sozialismus,” op. cit., 958. 48  “Sozialismus,” op. cit., 965. 49  “Sozialismus,” op. cit., 968–970. 50  “Sozialismus,” op. cit., 994. 51  Otto Weiningher, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 277.

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word social-democrat and go back to the old Marxist designation communist,” and the following year he started, with Bukharin and Pyatakov, publishing the journal Kommunist in Genf.52 After the war and the creation of the Third Communist International, all participating former socialist or social-­ democratic parties changed their names to communist. And from 1925 on, when the Comintern started an official campaign for bolshevization, bolshevism became synonymous with communism.53 The interwar period saw an unmitigated and often bloody struggle between socialists and communists, abating only during the common struggle against fascism. After the end of the Second World War the trend to identify communism with the Soviet (and its satellites’) experience continued. Of course, within the reigning orthodoxy of the time, the system was one of “real socialism” as a step toward the yet unattained communist society. This is the basis for the existing historiographical debate whether one should speak about a “socialist system,” “socialist heritage,” “socialist or post-socialist nostalgia” and the like, or respectively about a communist system, heritage and nostalgia. The Soviet domination was interrupted only in the 1960s when China broke the Soviet monopoly over communism, and the 1970s with the emergence of Eurocommunism. At the end of his essay on communism, written in the early 1980s, Wolfgang Schieder, the author of the masterly entries on socialism and communism in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, voices his hope that the concept of Eurocommunism opens the possibility to rescue it from its dependence on Soviet communism: “The future of the communist concept could thus be free again.”54 Less than a decade later, “real socialism” ended on the dustbin of history, and the communist parties of Eastern Europe, just like in 1919, switched en masse to a new name—socialist—and entered the Socialist International. Communism has been relegated almost exclusively to the role of a Schimpfwort, a generalized term of abuse. And yet, its future may still be open, not only because there are here and there diehards and oddballs, calling themselves communists. Georgi Andreichin, born in 1894, immigrated to the United States in 1914. Working first as a miner in Minnesota, he became an active leader of the Industrial Workers of the World. Settling in New York, he was a workers’ organizer and a frequent contributor to the socialist press. In 1921 he was the American delegate to the Profintern (the Red International of Labor Unions) and became a member of its Executive Board. In 1922 he entered the Bolshevic Party and 52  “Kommunismus,” op. cit., 516. 53  “Kommunismus,” op. cit., 522. 54  “Kommunismus,” op. cit., 529.

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became a Soviet citizen. While employed in leading positions in several economic commissions, the ministry of commerce and Inturist, he was arrested twice for his links to Trostky, and deported to Siberia. Released in 1941, he became deputy chairman of the propaganda department for the Anglo-Saxon countries (Sovinformbiuro). After 1945, he returned to Bulgaria to become Head of the Office of the Interim Presidency of the Republic (a position held by Kolarov) and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (again under Kolarov). He was arrested on April 29, 1949 and disappeared. Years later, when he was rehabilitated after the death of Stalin, it was established that he had been executed by the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, in 1950.55 After 2000, a small museum opened in his birthplace, the small village of Belitsa in southwest Bulgaria. During a school visit, the museum guide explained the details of Andreichin’s life and concluded that he was killed by the communists. The accompanying teacher parried: “But he himself was a communist!” “No,” responded the guide, “he was a victim. He was a real communist.” What this anecdote captures is a moment of slippage in a concept that otherwise seems to have reached a fixed meaning. It is this dynamism, the fact that concepts are never frozen, that is our task as historians to bring to the fore.

55   Йордан Баев, Костадин Грозев, Българинът Джордж. Одисея в два свята (София: Труд, 2008).

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1917 in the Balkans: Divergent “Horizons of Expectation” This chapter was given as a paper to the conference “Revolutionary Longings: The Russian Revolution and the World, 1917–1929,” organized by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, University of Michigan, March 8–11, 2017. It is published here for the first time.

In 1923, at the height of his power, the Bulgarian prime-minister Alexander Stamboliiski summed up the significance of his policies not simply for Bulgaria but for European and for world history: “Today there are only two interesting social experiments: the experiment of Lenin and my own.”1 This quote captures beautifully the argument I am going to develop here, namely that, on the one hand, the Great war created a common political and psychological atmosphere in Europe which struck a mortal blow to the status quo, created extraordinary space for the agency of the radicalized masses, and to a great extent saw a generational rupture. Especially with the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution, the “horizon of expectations” was expanded to unforeseen perspectives. On the other hand, and against much of the literature which describes the revolutionary upsurge in an imitative key, I am arguing that the response was multifarious and country-specific, varying from, in some cases indeed, imitation of the Russian events, but more often to alternative visions and programs (agrarianism, fascism, military dictatorships, social-democracy), and primarily to a horrific fear of revolution and, consequently, an international counterrevolutionary mobilization. In many respects, the Bulgarian example is unique. Whereas elsewhere in Europe the revolutionary wave was quelled by 1919, in Bulgaria, sole among the European countries, a left-wing agrarian government with a bold social reformist program, held the reins of power until 1923. The other interesting differentia specifica of Bulgaria was the existence of a strong

1  Bulgarian Central State Archives, Fond 361k, opis 1, a.e. 9, p.7, cited in Alex Toshkov, Rescuing Alternative Modernity: The Golden Age of the European Peasantry, Columbia University, 2014 (unpublished dissertation, cited with the permission of the author).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_029

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social democratic movement flying in the face of the doxa about the untypicality of socialism in a rural context.2 Since my charge is to present the Balkans as a whole, let me first say that there was no regional Balkan response. This was the era of high nationalism, and responses were highly nation-specific. The grouping of the Balkans as a whole is usually following a reductionist sociological model (rural societies coming out of the Ottoman legacy) or is done in order to simplify dealing with a highly complex region. The similar social structure did not result even in a comparable receptivity to socialist ideas, let alone in political behavior. Still, I will try to first offer a brief Balkan survey, and then get into more detail in the Bulgarian case. The history of the Balkan states, newly seceded from the Ottoman Empire in the course of the 19th century, was utterly dominated by the national question. Nowhere was this stronger than in Greece where the preoccupation with the Megali Idea (the resurrection of the Hellenistic and Byzantine Empires, at least territorially) was obsessive until the 1920s, and ended only with the national catastrophe of 1922 and the subsequent emigration of circa 1,600,000 refugees from Asia Minor, the Caucasus and the Balkans. The dominance of an extremely self-confident national imperative, nurtured by the conservative establishment and clientelistic policies in the small and irredentist Greek Kingdom, was fed by the (almost delusional) internalization of the philhellenic fascination of Europe. This was combined with a relatively stable parliamentary practice that “absorbed and neutralized political tensions,” and resulted in “the deformation of the social factor, and the subordination of the social by the political” in the apt formulation of Augusta Dimou.3 Not that radical democratic ideologies were entirely absent from the Greek landscape, but they did not challenge the political practice and were confined mostly to the intellectual academic milieu or were absorbed in the existing party formations. This was true also for the single Marxist intellectual Greece produced until the end of the First World War, Georgios Skliros (1878–1919), who “supported Venizelos’s liberal cause as a genuine step toward social reform.”4 Socialism was not a political alternative and, in these circumstances, its institutionalization came relatively late. The Greek social-democratic party 2  A third element that was to play not a negligible role in the 1920s was the presence of White Russian emigres, Wrangel’s army, and the ensuing power struggle with Soviet infiltration. 3  The first quote is from an article by Antonis Liakos, “The potential to conceptualize Marxism in Greece in the 19th century” (in Greek, 1991), cited in Augusta Dimpou, Entangled Paths Toward Modernity: Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism in the Balkans (Budapest: CEU Press, 2009), 334; the second is from Dimou, op. cit., 306. 4  Thanos Veremis, “From the National State to the Stateless Nation, 18210–1910,” European History Quarterly, vol. 19, 1989, 146.

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was formed only in 1918 as the Socialist Workers Party of Greece (SEKE). For comparison, the other Balkan parties had been actively functioning for over two decades. “The grey zone in which the Greek socialists would oscillate in their first attempts to connect to the international socialist movement” was bookended between the bankruptcy of the Second International and the victory of the October Revolution.5 The SEKE accepted the connection to the Third International in 1920, but then retreated in 1922, due to internal dissent. By 1924 it became a full member as the Greek Communist Party (KKE), as a result of the push toward bolshevization. The radicalized younger generation which exerted this push was the one that had reached adulthood during the war, had experienced the catastrophe of 1922 and the influx of a large radical, mostly urban and educated, emigration from Asia Minor. The clearly not seamless, but nonetheless total bolshevization in the Greek case is to be explained also by the fact that it had not had a tradition of organized social democracy standing in its way. Still, during the 1920s the KKE never managed to occupy a major political space. For one, although it had opposed the war, in the Greek constellation it never achieved a monopoly over the anti-war discourse.6 Secondly, and more importantly, the party had to contest the hegemony of the Liberal Party and its charismatic leader Elephterios Venizelos, who with his Bismarckian politics had succeeded in creating “a catch-all party, which addressed simultaneously various social strata while trying to keep their emancipatory strivings within controllable limits.”7 During the 1920s, the party received 4.36% of the vote in 1926, but in 1928 after the return of Venizelos, it shrunk to 1.4 %. Its best result—9.59%—was in 1935, when it reaped protest votes from the liberals who had abstained from the election. A year later, the party was outlawed, more than a decade after the other Balkan parties, precisely because it had not been seen as a threat. Its greatest moment came only with the German occupation and the subsequent Civil War, when the social question came to the fore and was fused with the national. Nationalist euphoria had also gripped Romania. At the end of the war, despite a blistering German defeat and occupation, the country’s territory had doubled, notably with the acquisition of Transylvania and Bessarabia. Romania had become an important constitutive link in the cordon sanitaire against Bolshevism. All this came, however, with the burden of unifying disparate territories and dealing with large ethnic minorities. Unlike Greece, socialism in 5  Dimou, op. cit., 373. 6  Dimou, 383. 7  Dimou, 380.

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Romania had made inroads since the middle of the nineteenth century and with the acceptance of Marxism, the Social Democratic Party of Workers of Romania was formed in 1893, the “first nation-wide working-class party.”8 Chronically weak, it imploded in 1899, due to the crisis following its electoral failures, and the defection of many intellectuals to the Liberal party. When the party was reconstituted in 1910 as the Social Democratic Party (RSDP), it had little success and “was beset by lack of funds and apathy” as well as by factional struggles.9 Until World War One, the socialists remained unrepresented in parliament.10 Like in Greece, Romania had a strong executive branch of government, an obedient bureaucracy, and a small but powerful upper bourgeoisie which successfully held the opposition in check.11 The chief effects of the Bolshevik revolution in Romania seem to be twofold. Romania had the most downtrodden peasantry in the region, and land reforms, promised in 1917, were implemented between 1918–1921, mostly for social and political, rather than for economic reasons.12 The memory of the bloody peasant revolt of 1907 was too fresh, and the example of the Bolshevik “Decree on Land” was dangerously next door. As far as the weak socialist movement was concerned, October 1917 crystallized the looming divisions between legalists favoring evolutionist social change, and radicals, calling themselves “Maximalists” and later Communists, impatient for militant action. The Romanian socialist movement’s position was further complicated by the fact that Romanian revolutionary groups in Russia were organized in the Romanian section of the Russian Communist Party in 1918. Especially after 1919 they exerted pressure for the purging and reorganization of the RSDP and its subordination to the Balkan Communist Federation, a branch of the Comintern.13 In 1921 the RSDP accepted affiliation with the Comintern, and in 1922 was transformed into the Communist party of Romania. In 1924, the party was outlawed and its subsequent activities were confined to work through front organizations. Its policies were increasingly dependent on the Comintern, including the right to choose party leaders.14 The party was plagued also by the suspicion of 8  Keith Hitchins, “An Outline History of the Communist Movement in Romania, 1917– 1944,” in Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung. 1998. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998, 54. 9  Keith Hitchins, Romania 1866–1947 (Oxford: Clarendon Pres, 1994), 134. 10  The party had elected one deputy in 1895 (Hitchins, “An Outline,” 54). 11  Hitchins, “An Outline,” 60. 12  Keith Hitchins, A Concise History of Romania (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 178. See also Keith Hitchins, “The Russian Revolution and the Romanian Socialist Movement, 1917–1918,” Slavic Review, XXVII, N.2, June 1968, 268–289. 13  Hitchins, “An Outline,” 57–59. 14  Hitchins, A Concise History, 171.

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national betrayal, fed by the disproportional membership of minorities: Jews, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and others.15 Weakness and ineffectiveness aside, one of the most interesting features of this party, already “Bolshevized” and pliable to Soviet pressure, was its adherence to Dobrogeanu-Gherea’s doctrine of development throughout the 1920s. Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea (1855–1920), the grand figure of Romanian Marxism, had argued in his 1910 work Neoibăgia (Neo-Serfdom) that social democrats should support the development of capitalism in the countryside and especially the independent peasant proprietor, in order to create a basis for the future bourgeois-democratic revolution. The communist party adopted his views in 1924 and as a result supported the Romanian Peasant’s Party, which promoted industrialization and foreign investment in the countryside, and was in power between 1928 and 1933. It was harshly criticized by the Comintern in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which posited that Dobrogeanu-Gherea’s theory was essentially non-revolutionary.16 The newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia after 1929) ended likewise in the victorious postwar camp, but economically devastated and with enormous population losses, especially for Serbia. Even though the minorities were a smaller proportion of its population compared to Romania and Poland, its make-up was more complex and unstable. It was plagued from the very outset by a bifurcated and incompatible vision for its new state’s organization along centralist versus federalist lines, or rather, as Stevan Pavlowitch has argued, between unitarism and dualism.17 The two main parties that dominated the postwar decade of the 1920s—the Democratic Party and the Radical Party—advocated a centralized parliamentary government and land reforms, which were carried out until the early 1930s. Even as they did not resolve the agrarian problem, they met the most urgent demands, and

15  Hitchins, “An Outline,” 62. 16  Keith Hitchins summarizes it thus: “A strengthening of capitalism through support of bourgeois and peasant parties now ran counter to the Soviet Union’s assessment of Romania as a base for a ‘Western imperialist attack.’ Thus, Comintern leaders admonished, only revolutionary struggle which aimed at undermining existing political and social structures was a permissible tactic in Romania.” (Hitchins, “An Outline,” 67–68). Here he follows the Romanian interpretation on the receiving end of Comintern policies, explaining everything through a nation(ist) lens. Rather than a strategy to weaken Romania, this had to do with Stalin’s first five-year plan (1928–1932), which began the collectivization of the countryside. Eventually, collectivization proved to be a tragic fiasco, but the reason it was implemented at the outset was the turn to rapid industrialization through the heavy industry. 17  Stevan Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans, 1804–1945 (London: Longman, 1999), 260.

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“economic questions were no longer the major issue for the ­political class.”18 There were two powerful newcomers after the war, both of which were in opposition and both of which espoused republican ideas but different internal arrangements. The Communist Party was created by unifying the social-democratic parties of Serbia, Montenegro and the former Austro-Hungarian territories in April 1919. At their Second Congress in April 1920 it became the Socialist Labor Party of Yugoslavia (Communists), acceding to the Comintern. Its position on the national question was unitarist and anti-federalist, as the party considered the national question to have been solved with the creation of a unified state. As elsewhere, the Bolshevik revolution had polarized the social-democratic movement and hastened the split that was maturing in the previous decade between reformists and revolutionists. In the case of Yugoslavia, Bolshevik influence entered not merely from the news, but literally, with the return of tens of thousands of radicalized former prisoners of war who had experienced October 1917.19 A number of the leadership, the so-called centrists (Centrumaši), denouncing the Bolshevik revolution and opposed to the Comintern, were expelled and eventually merged with the social-democrats to form the Socialist Party of Yugoslavia. The communists emerged as the third party in parliament during the constitutional assembly elections in November 1920.20 They enjoyed only a very brief period of legal activity. Within a month of the elections, using as pretext a bloody miners’ strike, the government banned all communist activities and seized the party’s property. Only the communist deputies were exempt until they were fired, following the assassination of the minister of interior by the terrorist group Red Justice (Crvena Pravda) in June 1921. With wide arrests (circa 70,000) of communists, the party was decimated. It lost considerably in popularity and the underground interwar period was characterized

18  Pavlowitch, A History, 264. 19  Ivan Očak, author of a specialized monograph on the return to Yugoslavia of soldiers and officers from Soviet Russia, maintains that the number of Yugoslav POWs from the Austro-Hungarian army, was around 300,000. By 1919, 200,000 had left Russia. Another 100,000 POWs returned to Yugoslavia in 1921, the majority in Croatia, Slovenia, and the Vojvodina. They had brought the “Bolshevik epidemic.” Ivan Očak, U borbi za ideje oktobra. Jugoslavenski povratnici is Sovjetske Rusije (1918–1921) (Zagreb: Stvarnost), 1976, 152–154. 20  The communists won 58 seats, against 92 of the Democratic Party, 91 for the Radical Party and 50 for the Croatian Peasant Party. In terms of popular vote, they emerged fourth, with 12.4 %, against 19.9% for the democrats, 17.7 % for the radicals, and 14.3 % for the CPP.

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by fierce factional struggles, principally over the imposed Comintern views of breaking up Yugoslavia into constituent independent states.21 The Croatian Republican Peasant Party (CRPP), on the other hand, under the charismatic leadership of Stjepan Radić, was the most powerful peasant party in Eastern Europe alongside the Bulgarian BANU. Deeply suspicious of Serbia’s centralist drive, the CPP worked for Croatian autonomy and a federal arrangement. While a truly peasant organization, with a radical social program, in the specific circumstances of the newly created state, it became effectively the national party for the Croats, thus subordinating the social component to the national imperative. It is with the CRPP’s policies that one can see yet another role assigned to the Soviet experiment and a different opening of the “horizon of expectations.” In 1924, Radić’s visited Moscow. This was part of a long European trip, in which he toured England for five months, Austria for another five, and the Soviet Union for two months. The trip was undertaken to garner support for Croatian republicanism from the great powers, and in general to assess what external support could be gained for an adjustment of the domestic system of the Triunine Kingdom. It came at a moment when Soviet Russia was coming out of diplomatic isolation, after the Treaty of Rappalo (1922) and its recognition by the British Labor government (1924). In Moscow Radić officially acceded to the Krestintern, but on his own terms, without ceding the independence of his party. While accepting the program of the Krestintern which coincided with the program of the CRPP—the necessity for a worker-peasant bloc, the provision of land to the peasants, the right of workers to nationalize factories, the freeing of national minorities, the formation of a Yugoslav federation as well as a Balkan federation—he was adamant that his party would “preserve its program and tactics” and the priority of the agrarians: “Thus, the realization of the Peasant republic in Croatia will be at the same time the realization of a Workers republic and all the aims of the working class.”22 Arrested in January 1925 and charged with high treason for having joined the Peasant International and thus having become an integral part of the Comintern, Radić insisted on the complete separation of the two organizations. In effect his trial was merely a pretext to weaken the peasant movement. Nikola Pašić was perfectly clear about this: “I know very well that Radić is as 21  This policy was reversed with the adoption of the 1935 “popular front” line, but a considerable number of Yugoslav communists perished in the Great Terror in the USSR, and the party emerged as a strong player only during the war under the leadership of Josip Broz-Tito. 22   Ревякина, Луиза, Коминтернът и селските партии на Балканите: 1923–1931 (София: Академично издателство “Проф. М. Дринов,” 2003), 87.

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far from communism as am I. I know very well that it was Radić himself that saved Croatia from bolshevization in the years 1919–1920 through his peasant movement. But politics cannot be sentimental, so I have to use methods that can lead me to the finish.”23 The resolution came with a compromise in July 1925 when Radić was amnestied and his party dropped the republican label, renaming itself in the Croatian Peasant Party (CPP). In the case of CPP, one can see that the Soviet Union functioned in its hypostasis of an important international player, even if not quite yet a leading great power, rather than an ideological inspiration. The impact of the Bolshevik revolution in Turkey coincided with the Turkish War of Independence that utterly dominated events, and by the complete volte face in the relations with Russia, which had been the major foreign policy foe of the Ottoman Empire in the previous two centuries. Soviet emissaries had met with Atatürk already in the summer of 1919, striving to secure Turkey as a buffer state at the very least or maybe even as an ally. Itself in a state of civil war, Soviet Russia provided decisive military and financial help to the Turkish army, and with the Treaties of Moscow and Kars in 1921, settled the territorial disputes. It was thus crucial in securing Turkish victory again the occupying allies, especially the Greek invasion.24 This also explains the ambivalent role of the Bolsheviks vis-à-vis the nascent Turkish communist left during this early period. Social democracy had made some inroads in the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, but primarily among the European minorities. The Bulgarians were organized in the Macedonian Revolutionary Social-Democratic Union, de facto attached to the Bulgarian social-democratic party, and after the Young Turk Revolution in the short-lived (1909–1910) People’s Federative Party (Bulgarian Section), made up from the leftist wing of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Radical Jews, with Bulgarian participation, organized the Socialist Workers’ Federation of Salonica. Affiliated with the Second International, looking for a solution within the framework of the Ottoman Empire and espousing the idea of a Balkan democratic confederation, these movements were constrained by their weak social base, and the hostile and aggressive attitude of the increasingly nationalistic Committee for Union and 23  Maček, Vladko, Memoari (Zagreb: Dom i Svijet, 2003), 105, cited in Toshkov, Rescuing Alternative Modernity 218. 24  Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B.Tauris, 1997), 159–160; Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1977), 344.

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Progress.25 After the end of the Balkan wars and the end of Ottoman rule in the European territories, the activists of these movements became part of the Greek and Bulgaria social-democracy, or members of the Ottoman Socialist Party, founded in Istanbul in 1910 and receiving its chief support from among Armenians, Bulgarians and Greeks. Outlawed in 1913 after the Young Turk military coup, it was revived in 1919 as the Turkish Workers and Peasants Socialist Party (TWPSP) and finally disbanded in 1922. The Turkish Communist Party was formed in Baku in September 1920, out of the nucleus of communist proselytes among the Turkish prisoners of war (there were some 60,000 in Russia), by the revived socialist party TWPSP, and by the so-called Green Army, a nationalist but leftist group founded in 1920 in Ankara.26 It was immediately recognized as a section of the Comintern. Characterizing the diverse organizations of the Turkish left of the early 1920s, Paul Dumont points out a surprising and unique feature: their deep and central involvement with Islam. While Ottoman socialists before the world war were looking westward and were mostly operating in the European domains, completely neglecting the issue of Islam, for the Turkish left after 1920, ensconced in Anatolia and looking eastward, “Islam, on the contrary, constituted a permanent obsession.”27 This, as Dumont points out, may look banal with the flourishing of today’s Islamic socialist movements, but for the time it was an original, even if short-lived, development. After 1922, suppressed at home, the communist movement had become doctrinaire and entirely domesticated by and subservient to the Comintern.28 In January 1921, the leadership of the communist party headed by Mustafa Suphi entered Turkey attempting to join the liberation war, and was assassinated in a still controversial and not definitively resolved case.29 The assassination was followed by sweeping arrests. What is remarkable is that the Soviet government displayed a remarkable sang-froid and expressed the view that a social revolution in Anatolia was premature and the communists had committed 25   Paul Dumont, “Une organization socialiste ottomane: La Fédération Ouvrière de Salonique (1908–1912),” Dumont, Du socialisme ottoman, 71–87. See also Paul Dumont, “La naissance d’un socialism ottoman,” ibid., 89–100; Georges Haupt, “Le début du movement socialiste en Turquie,” Le mouvement social, 45, oct.–déc. 1963, 121–137. 26  Paul Dumont, “La révolution impossible: Les courants d’opposition en Anatolie 1920– 1921,” Dumont, Du socialisme ottoman; 348–368; Paul Dumont, “Bolchevism et Orient: Le parti communist turc de Mustafa Suphi, 1918–1921,” Dumont, Du socialisme ottoman, 247. 27  Dumont, “La révolution impossible,” 382. 28  Ibid., 381. 29  Paul Dumont, “Bacou, carrefour révolutionnaire, 1919–1920, Du socialisme ottoman, 301– 302; Dumont, “Bolchevism et Orient,” 276–282.

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tactical errors.30 It was little perturbed by the cooling of relations with Ankara and the flagging of Atatürk’s anti-communism, understanding this correctly as tactically preparing the ground for Turkey’s international acceptance on the eve of the Treaty of Lausanne.31 Even more remarkable was the position of the Comintern at a time when it was promoting social upheavals elsewhere. In November 1922, Karl Radek explained to the Turkish communists: “You have to understand that the time has not come for the final struggle and that you have still a long way to go in conjunction with the bourgeois elements.”32 The Soviets showed understanding for and were themselves enacting raison d’état, not raison de révolution. It was not only the left that was fascinated by 1917, seeing in it an unforeseen and unexpected opening, a possibility to attempt something that seemed desired but until then, utopian. The curious career of Enver pasha, the redoubtable leader of the Young Turk triumvirate, speaks to this. With the capitulation of the Ottoman army at Mudros (October 1918), Enver (as well as Talaat and Cemal) who had fled to Germany, were court-martialed in absentia and sentenced to death. Becoming the virtual leader of the Young Turks in exile, Enver was inspired by the anti-imperialists stance of Moscow, and participated in the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku in 1920. He developed a curious merger of Islamism and socialism with strong elements of corporatism.33 A passionate advocate of Pan-Turkism, Enver’s goal was the liberation of the Muslim nations through revolution. In their struggle against imperialism, socialists were their natural ally. But they would accept socialism, only so long as it would “adapt itself to the religious doctrines that govern the internal order of the Muslim countries.”34 Posing as a left-wing alternative to Atatürk and in close relationship with the leaders of the Soviet government and the Comintern, Enver was sent to appease and suppress the Basmachi revolt in Turkestan. Instead, he stood at its helm, proclaiming himself “Commander-in-Chief of all the Armies of Islam, Son-in-Law of the Caliph and Representative of the Prophet.”35 Enver pasha died in a skirmish with the Red Army in August 1922. 30  Dumont, “Bolchevism et Orient,” 283–284; see also G. S. Harris, The Origins of Communism in Turkey (Stanford University Press, 1937), 94. 31  Paul Dumont, “L’axe Moscou-Ankara. Les relations turco-soviétoques de 1919 à 1922,” Du socialisme ottoman, 194–195. 32  Hélène Carrère d’Encausse et Stuart Schram, Le marxisme de l’Asie, 1853–1964 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), 265, cited in Dumont, “L’axe Moscou-Ankara.” 195. 33  Paul Dumont, “La fascination du bolchevisme: Enver pasha et le parti des soviets populaires 1919–1922,” Du socialisme ottoman, 135. 34  Ibid., 141. 35  David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 487; Zürcher, Turkey, 165–166.

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This brings me full circle back to Bulgaria. The complete fiasco of the Balkan wars and the First World War, from which Bulgaria emerged as a loser, and the sole revanchist country in the Balkans, discredited the army and the old parties, and caused the abdication of the king. It brought to the fore the two parties and movements that had been consistently against the war: the agrarians and the communists. The elections for the National Assembly in 1919 gave the Agrarian Union (BANU) 28 % of the vote, the BCP 18 %, and the “broad socialists”36 13 %, thus controlling almost 60 % of the vote. In March 1920, BANU swept 38 %, the communists over 20 % (mostly from the retreating broads who won 7 %). This huge parliamentary swing to the left—65 %—was unprecedented in Europe (for comparison in Germany the SDP won 37.8 %, and the Independent SDP another 7.6 %), and it brought to power the regime of Alexander Stamboliiski. This was the sole agrarian regime in power in the decades of agrarian activism in Eastern Europe, when the peasantry became a political agent. It came with all the general characteristics of peasantism, but had peculiar features, being the most radical among the agrarian movements. It espoused a corporatist ideology, arguing that society consisted of productive estates (peasants, artisans, workers and entrepreneurs) and non-productive (parasitic) ones (merchants and bureaucracy, including the army and intellectuals). It not only advocated but implemented land reform, progressive income tax, compulsory labor service, legal reforms, rural education. The reforms and particularly the way they were implemented, coupled with a shortsighted overestimation of the effectiveness of popular support, alienated the rest of society, and in the particular constellation of Bulgaria, with a humiliated officer corps, the presence of terrorist Macedonian bands and armed regiments of the Wrangel army,37 led to a bloody coup in June 1923, and the assassination of Stamboliiski. Much can be said, though, about the opening of the horizon of expectations: despite the following merciless white terror and decimation of BANU, most of Stamboliiski’s social achievements remained intact. 36  For an explanation of the meaning of “broad socialists,” see note 45. 37  The agrarian regime’s relations with the White Russians evolved from initial co-operation to open hostility. By 1921, Bulgaria had about 20,000 officers and soldiers from Wrangel’s army, apart from another 12,000 civilian emigres (Дончо Даскалов,”Професионален и културен профил на бялата емиграция в България,” Бялата емиграция в България. Материали от научна конференция, 23 и 24 септември 1999. София: ИК Гутенберг, 2001, 71). They were admitted by Stamboliiski under pressure of the allied forces but also because he saw in them an active deterrent against the activization of the communists. Wrangel’s army, however, coalesced around the right-wing opposition parties who by 1923 accused Stamboiliiski of bolshevism (Людмил Спасов, “Руската военна емиграция в България,” Бялата емиграция в България, 128–129).

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One of Stamboliiski’s most significant, although in this case not lasting achievements, was the creation of the so-called Green International, as a “third way” between communism and capitalism. Stamboliiski was explicit that this was “a means to differentiate ourselves from the communists,” considered the closest competitor.38 Created in 1921 as the International Agrarian Bureau, the organization began serious work only in the fall of 1923, after the collapse of the agrarian regime and the emigration of Bulgarian agrarians to Prague, where it had its headquarters. The most interesting framework in which to understand its later work is the existence of its rival, the Krestintern, which itself was formed as a response to the growing role of agrarian parties. The immediate stimulus was the Bulgarian coup of June 9, 1923, and at the Third Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, which held its sessions on 12–23 June, 1923, the decision was taken to create a Peasant International (Krestintern).39 Officially formed in October 1923, after the demise of the Bulgarian September Uprising, it was modelled on and de facto subordinated to the Comintern.40 The communists looked at the agrarian movement as a catalyst to accelerate the coming of the revolution, and raised the slogan of a “workers’ and peasants’ government,” a theory developed by Lenin after the experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905–1907 and 1917.41 One can see here not merely a one-sided repercussive effect of the Russian revolution, but a mutual rivalrous dialogue. I am arguing that, ironically, with the creation of these centralized organizations in the Soviet Union, the “horizon of expectations” for the communists was actually narrowed to a tunnel-like vision, and in the particular case of Bulgaria, had grave consequences. While the effects of 1917 on BANU can be interpreted mostly as an inspiration to further develop its alternative social vision, accompanied by a grudging respect for a different social experiment, the influence on the communists was direct. One can discern an implicit tension between, on the one hand, the unanimous triumphant acceptance of the revolution, the unreserved enthusiastic support it engendered, the unparalleled encouragement for further struggle and, on the other hand, a benign reticence to follow blindly the Bolshevik example. It is this tension that I want to explore further in more detail. 38   Геновски, Михаил, Александър Стамболийски отблизо и отдалеко (София: Издателство на БЗНС, 1982), 101, ited in Toshkov, Rescuing Alternative Modernity, 58. 39   Ревякина, Коминтернът и селските партии, 23–24. 40  George D. Jackson, Jr. Comintern and Peasant in East Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 68–71; Ревякина, Коминтернът и селските партии, 26–29. 41   Ревякина, Коминтернът и селските партии, 10.

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In particular, the so-called bolshevization of the communist movement, pursued by the Comintern, was especially tortuous in the Bulgarian case, despite the fact that it has received little analytic attention in the literature. This inattention takes the form of subsuming Bulgaria into a putative Russian model, and ascribing to it a thoroughly mimetic character, mostly by maintaining that practically all the socialist cadres were entirely socialized in Russia.42 A careful prosopography of early socialists (I am preparing one based on over 2000 cases of individuals born before 1900) shows that the leading group was overwhelmingly educated in universities in Switzerland, Germany, and France. The main bridge and channel of socialist ideas, judging from the remarkable quantity of translations and original publications, was Germany. My purpose is not to deny the role of Russia and Russian connections, which were very close and significant but to insist on the Bulgarian movement’s autonomous agency. The cultural proximity between Russia and Bulgaria is unquestionable. It stems from the linguistic closeness as well as from their shared Orthodoxy, although neither of the two played any role, of course, in the case of the atheistic socialists opposed to Slavophilism. Yet, how did it come to the deep-seated conviction of Russia’s exclusive influence? One of the reasons for the parallels between the Russian and Bulgarian parties was the coincidence of the split of the BRSDP in 1903 (the Bulgarian in July and the Russian in November).43 However, they were fought over completely different issues, and the Bulgarians were unfamiliar with

42  Jacques Droz, ed. Histoire générale du socialism, Tome II: De 1875 à 1918 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), 12–14; Joseph Rothschild, The Communist Party of Bulgaria. Origins and Development, 1883–1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 1; Nissan Oren, Bulgarian Communism: The Road to Power, 1934–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 3. 43  BSDP is the acronym used for the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party between 1891 and 1894. In 1892 the group under Sakîzov split to form the Bulgarian Social Democratic Union (BSDU). The differences were over the appropriateness of overt political activity, the Unionists arguing that it was premature, and at this stage the struggle should be confined to educational and economic activities. The two formations merged in 1894 to form the Bulgarian Workers Social Democratic Party (Bulgarian acronym BRSDP). They experienced a final split in 1903 over the issue of collaboration with bourgeois parties, and their differences in their attitude toward the peasantry. In the aftermath of 1903, Bulgaria had two bickering social democratic parties, both recognized by the International and both known as BRSDP but with qualifications in parentheses. The “broads” of Sakîzov, i.e. the ones working for a broad common cause, obshtodeltsi or shiroki, used (o) or (sh). The “narrows” (tesni), the Blagoev faction advocating no collaboration, used (t.s.). Further in the text I will refer to them as Narrows and Broads.

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the conflicts in the Russian movement.44 The 1903 rift between Broads and Narrows was analogous to the reformist (Bernsteinian) versus the orthodox wing of the German party, except that there the cosmetic unity was preserved through Kautsky’s efforts until the war.45 The so-called Broads corresponded to and shared the philosophy of Bernstein, especially on the issue of collaboration with bourgeois parties, but also in their attitude toward the peasantry. The Narrows espoused the Plekhanovite/Kautskian, i.e. Marxian orthodoxy of the Second International. Another comparison was the economic backwardness which generated analogies about the societal response. But the Bulgarian social structure was notoriously different from the Russian, having had a very different social tradition in the Ottoman Empire. Most importantly, a fundamental difference was that, unlike its Russian counterpart, Bulgarian social democracy functioned legally, in a very imperfect and constrained, but still democratic parliamentary rule and this had a direct effect on its lack of militancy from its inception well into the early 1920s. The assertion of the mimetic character of Bulgarian socialism stems from different sources and reasons, but it results in a curious, although not specially coordinated consensus. In the few western writings one can trace this directly to an assertion by Trotsky, who was irritated by the Narrow’s refusal to bend to his mission to mend the split between the two factions. His failure prompted Trotsky’s dismissing critique of the Narrows claiming that “the Bulgarian movement is merely a branch of the Russian” of which he was disdainful at the moment.46 A close textual reading can definitively prove that this is the Urtext from which the subsequent western writings (with all their tiny errors) stem.47 44  John Bell, The Bulgarian Communist Party from Blagoev to Zhivkov (Stanford: Hoover Press, 1986), 10. On the efforts of the International to restore socialist unity in these parties, see Georges Haupt. Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972), 133. 45  According to Lukács, had Bernstein’s “arguments really been discussed and their consequences properly analyzed, the Social Democrats would inevitably have been split.” “Bernstein’s triumph: Notes on the essays written in honor of Karl Kautsky’s seventieth birthday,” Die Internationale, VII, N. 22, 1924. See http://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/12/30/ lukacs-on-the-rapprochement-between-bernstein-and-kautsky-after-world-war-i-democracy-reformism-and-the-dialectic/. 46   The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky, 42–43, 45. Trostky developed his analysis in further articles in which he wrote about the “lag in Bulgaria’s historical development and the low level of social differentiation,” the “primitive social basis of Bulgarian democracy,” and its embryonic bourgeoisie which “had not yet managed to throw off its Asiatic features” [sic] (49, 53, 54). 47  One can trace this even textually in Rothschild, The Communist Party of Bulgaria, which is the only detailed and influential history in any western language. In his case, it is my

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This produced an immediate and equally heated riposte by Dimitîr Blagoev (1856–1924), the founder and leader of Bulgarian social-democracy, who wrote that “our party has developed and continues to develop not under the influence of the Russian party, but under the influence of the German party. It is not the Iskra, but the Neue Zeit and German socialist thought that is a living concept for us.”48 Nor is this assertion denied in the Bulgarian communist historiography but for entirely different reasons. To the contrary, it went out of its way to stress the early kinship with Lenin and bolshevism. But there was a serious motive for this zealousness and it goes back to the specific events that shaped the destiny of the socialist movement. Two ostensibly “revolutionary situations” put the BRSDP to the test. One was the so-called Radomir rebellion or Soldiers’ Uprising in September 1918. With the breaking of the front lines in Macedonia, the Bulgarian army fell in disorder. Stamboliiski, released from prison in order to contain the soldier’s rebellion, used the opportunity to proclaim a republic and invited the Narrows to co-operate with him. Blagoev refused, citing the weakness of the party and the unfavorable international situation. Indeed, this decision was made after the attempt of the Narrows to get in touch with the deserting soldiers. It was clear that they wanted simply peace; they threw their arms away and went back to their homes. It was inconceivable to effectuate a successful coup with a deserting army and with German military units in Sofia.49 While sympathetic to the demands of the soldiers, the Narrows retreated in their official stance that the peasant masses could not be consistently revolutionary and that the revolution in Bulgaria could happen only after the successful revolution in the developed capitalist countries. This was Blagoev’s famous formula that the revolution “depends three quarters on

belief that the explanation of his assertion that the Bulgarian socialist movement “was the offspring of the Russian, not the German or French one” lies not only and even not so much in the Cold war atmosphere during which his work was written in 1959 but rather in his close and uncritical reliance on Trotsky who was especially popular among American leftists. 48   Димитър Благоев, “Статията на др.Троцки,” Работнически вестник, 7 September 1910 (in Leo van Rossum, “Einleitung,” in Georges Haupt, Janos Jemnitz, Leo van Rossum, Hg. Karl Kautsky und die Sozialdemokratie Südosteuropas. Korrespondenz 1883–1938 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1986), 26. On the relationship between Bulgarian and German social democracy, See Мария Маринова, Българските марксисти и германското работническо движение, 1900–1912 (София, 1979). 49   Върбан Ангелов, Неизвестни страници от миналото: 1919, 1923, 1925, 1944, 1956, 1968 (София: Военноиздателски комплекс “Св. Георги Победоносец,” 1993), 42.

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external circumstances, and only one quarter on internal ones.”50 This episode was held, however, as proof and reprove that Blagoev and the BRSDP were not Leninist enough. As John Bell nicely summarizes it, “if Blagoev was no Lenin, Stamboliiski was no Chernov or Kerenski.”51 The more serious event was the aftermath of the coup against Stamboliiski in June 1923. Officially, the Narrows (by 1919 they were renamed into the Bulgarian Communist Party, BCP and had entered the Third International) proclaimed a policy of neutrality over the overthrow of a government of the “peasant bourgeoisie.” Khristo Kabakchiev reported to the Comintern that the masses met the coup “with indifference and even a certain amount of relief.”52 Within the ranks of the party, the motivation was clear: the party was too weak, it was basically unarmed, and the coup, accomplished by an effective army, was successful. Any militant move would be adventurous, jeopardizing the organization.53 This decision, however, was met with strong disapproval by the Comintern and Karl Radek delivered a scathing critique, accusing the BCP of narrow sectarianism, proclaiming that this was “the greatest defeat ever suffered by a communist party” and announcing that the party should be thoroughly reorganized.54 Zinoviev dispatched Vasil Kolarov and Georgi Dimitrov to implement the Comintern line for an armed rebellion. This was rejected by the Party Council in July by a vote of 42 to 3.55 By August, however, with Blagoev ailing and absent, and four new members irregularly coopted to the Central Committee, the Comintern line was reluctantly adopted. In September, Kolarov and Dimitrov unilaterally made the decision for an armed uprising, and they imposed it to a rump CC over the strong objections of the then general secretary of the party, Todor Lukanov. What followed was an abortive revolt, knowingly conceived as such by its leaders who prudently moved themselves close to the Serbian border and within five days of the bloodily suppressed uprising emigrated to Yugoslavia, and subsequently to Vienna and the USSR. From there they dictated a permanent “course for armed struggle” culminating 50   Димитър Благоев, “‘Тесни социалисти’ с анархистически глави,” Съчинения, Т.18 (София: БКП, 1962), 552. 51  Bell, The Bulgarian Communist Party, 24. 52   Христо Кабакчиев, “После переворота,” Коммунистический интернационал 28–29 (1923): 7695–96, cited in Bell, op. cit., 34. Even the Broads supported the coup against Stamboliiski in 1923 and the crushing of the abortive September uprising, and participated in the subsequent dictatorships in analogy to the Eberts and Noskes, although in secondary roles. 53   Ангелов, Неизвестни страници, 48; Rothschild, The Communist Party of Bulgaria, 128–130. 54  Rothschild, The Communist Party of Bulgaria, 122–126. 55  Bell, op. cit., 35.

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with a major terrorist act in 1925. The idea was to stir revolutionary enthusiasm, weaken the ruling regimes and prepare the ground for the worldwide socialist revolution. The result was the decimation of the Communist party, triggering a huge emigration of agrarians and communists (in the latter case, mostly to the Soviet Union, where the Bulgarians were numerically second only to the Poles, but proportionately first). It was from among these emigrés that the earliest works on Bulgarian socialism were written in the interwar period in the Soviet Union, with the explicit goal to posit the direct influence of Lenin’s ideas.56 It was a period of acute (and often ugly) struggle between different factions of the Bulgarian immigrants, reflecting, among others, a generational shift. The ones who had been radicalized, especially by 1917, and had thoroughly embraced the Bolshevik ideology (later designated as “left sectarians”) were accusing the former leaders of the BRSDP (t.) of having been essentially an unreformed party of the Plekhanov type. In retrospect this allegation seems to be ironically true, but at the time it meant a serious denunciation with immediate, often existential, consequences, given the atmosphere in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The “old guard” had good reason to fear because in 1915 Blagoev had warned Kolarov, the Bulgarian delegate to the Zimmerwald conference, to be very vigilant, because “Lenin exhibited some elements of Blanquism.”57 As a result, the Bulgarian vote was given to the united resolution and not to Lenin’s minority position. This was something that Stalin would never forget until his very death, and he blackmailed the Bulgarians with not having been true disciples. Kolarov was the only 56   Георги Бакалов, “Старая ‘Искра’ среди болгар,” Пролетарская революция, 1929, N. 91–92; Георги Бакалов, “Когда и как болгарские рабочие впервые познакомились с В. И. Лениным,” Пролетарская революция, 1929, N. 93; Христо Кабакчиев, “Ленин и болгарские тесняки,” Истoрик-марксист, 1943, N. 1. 57   ЦДА, Фонд 147 Б, op.2, a.e. 449, cited in Ангел Веков, “Васил Коларов в историята на българския социализъм,” Васил Коларов. Статии, дневници, речи, писма, спомени, Т.1 (1877–1919) (София: Христо Ботев, 2001), 21. In 1906, Plekhanov had accused Lenin of Blanquism which was then considered a great sin and a deviation from the Marxist orthodoxy. This was based on the analysis of Engels who considered Blanqui simply a man of action who believed “that a small and well organized minority, who would attempt a political stroke of force at the opportune moment, could carry the mass of people with them by a few successes at the start and thus make a victorious revolution …” Engels then charged the blanquists that what followed from this view was the imposition of a dictatorship “not of the entire revolutionary class, but of the small minority that has made the revolution, and who are themselves organized under the dictatorship of one or several individuals” (Friedrich Engels, The program of the Blanquist fugitives from the Paris Commune, 1873,” first published in Der Volksstaat, N. 73, 26 June 1874, English translation in the International Socialist Review, vol. IX, 2, August 1908 (https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1874/06/26.htm).

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Zimmerwaldian who survived the Soviet purges but always felt threatened.58 He was secretary of the BCP after 1919 and general secretary of the Comintern 1922–1924 and, after he emigrated to the USSR in 1925, continued to be a top official of the Comintern until its dissolution in 1943. He headed the Krestintern (1929–1931), and he was director of the Moscow-based International Agrarian Institute (1931–1940). After his return to Bulgaria in 1945 he was consecutively chairman of the National Assembly, deputy prime minister and foreign minister, and served as prime minister for a few months before his death in 1950. As late as 1949 Stalin warned the BCP against their prime minster who was 72 at the time: “Do the Bulgarians know that Kolarov has taken right-wing positions in the past? We considered him an opportunist. At the time, he harmed Lenin badly. Later Kolarov improved. But he used to have an affinity to the right. He is unquestionably our man but relapses are not to be ruled out.”59 After the Second World War, communist historiography emphasized the crucial role of 1917 and of bolshevism, effectively downplaying the history of early socialism. More attention was paid to the interwar and the post-war generations who were considered already “bolshevized.” The earlier ones were accorded due respect but were seen as not entirely enlightened and were altogether given short shrift. No wonder that Soviet historiography would also insist on the formative influence of Russia, but without necessarily making the polarized claim of exclusive impact. In an early scholarly article, A. Shnitman accurately quoted Blagoev when he wrote about the main influences on his ideas: Marx, Lassalle, Darwin, Bagehot, Chernyshevsky, and Plekhanov.”60 Plekhanov did indeed become a major influence in the spreading of Marxism in Bulgaria, so much so that when Lenin published his famous article “Shto delat’?” (“What is to be Done?”) in 1902, it was assumed that this was a pseudonym for Plekhanov. Once the Bulgarians were disabused of this, they continued to refer to Lenin as Lyonin.61 There exists thus collusion between communist and Western writings in which the agency of the early Bulgarian socialists thoroughly disappears. It would be erroneous, however, to shift the entire responsibility to the Comintern and explain the events in the 1920s as solely an outside manipulation. There was indeed an already radicalized cohort as a result of the 58  Julia Richers, “Zimmerwald als sowjetischer Erinnerungsort,” in Bernard Degen, Julia Richers, Hg., Zimmerwald und Kiental: Weltgeschichte auf dem Dorfe (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2015), 174. 59   Восточная Европа в документах российских архивов 1949–1953. Том 2 (МоскваНовосибирск, 1998), 193, cited in Веков, “Васил Коларов в историята,” 21. 60  Ibid., 42. 61  Ibid., 52–53.

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consecutive Balkan wars, World War One and the Russian revolutions. What happened was that the war generation (roughly the ones born around 1900 and socialized during the war decade) shifted its allegiances from its own avantgarde (socialized in the pre-war arrangements) toward the new prophetic avant-garde of the Bolshevik revolution which had opened an endless (if teleological) perspective. This perspective was offering not practical and immediate earthly hopes and goals, but a fabulous and heavenly “horizon of expectations.” But, on the other hand, it offered very earthly means, through financial and military support (the export of revolution) to achieve these lofty aims. The radicalization of the Bulgarian socialists came with the depravities of the wars, and especially the influence of 1917, and it reflected this deep generational shift. Both Bulgarian socialist parties before the wars espoused a revolutionary ideology, but “revolution” was understood as a fundamental transformation of the social order, not necessarily a violent and militant rupture. In this they adopted literally the interpretation of “revolution” as understood by the Second International. Before and during the wars (both Balkan wars and the First World War), socialists of every ilk embraced the antimilitarist propaganda and worked ceaselessly for it, especially (and illegally) within the army, risking imprisonment. It was only after the Bulgarian Communist Party was formed in May 1919 that it adopted the slogan of arming the masses. But it took some time before the slogan was turned into practice. In the meantime, there were hot debates and harsh and impatient accusations of the party leadership for avoiding confrontation and “blindly following the West European counties in their legal forms of struggle.”62 Blagoev responded with a vehement critique warning against “the blindest and most uncritical following of the Russian and Hungarian bolshevism and German Spartakism.”63 In the next two years the party leadership began secret discussions on how to organize an illegal military structure and only in 1921, a Supreme Military Revolutionary Association (Върховна военна революционна колегия) was created, attached to the Central Committee. All of this was closely correlated with the Comintern, and reflected the generational shift in the leadership of the Bulgarian party, but was put to the test only in September 1923.64 To reiterate, from the subsequent viewpoint of achieving bolshevization, considered to be the peak of communist tactics, the Blagoev Narrow party can 62   Димитър Благоев, “‘Тесни социалисти’ с анархистически глави,” Съчинения, Т.18 (София: БКП, 1962), 547. 63  Ibid., 548. 64   Филю Христов, Военно-революционната дейност на българската комунистическа партия, 1912–1944 (София: Държавно военно издателство, 1959), 70–77.

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be said to have indeed been essentially an unreformed party of the “Plekhanov type” and doctrinally (and dogmatically) following the Second International’s precepts. It held strictly to “the Second International’s commitment to historical stagism and to the achieved completion of bourgeois revolution as a necessary condition in the final transition to proletarian socialism.”65 But its position can be interpreted also, at least from the point of view of tactics, as an unconscious practical precursor of national roads to socialism. In light of this, the September Uprising of 1923 and the terrorist act of April 1925, the bombing of the “Sveta Nedelya” Cathedral, can be seen as the one last practical experiment and implementation of the concept of “export of revolution” that otherwise stayed on the level of theory, and served as a scarecrow and justification for the White Terror and periodical Red Scares. The result for Bulgaria was the decimation of the communist party and its disappearance from the political scene for a considerable period of time. Its leadership was taken over by younger cadres, militant and deeply conspiratorial. Blagoev died a crushed man in May 1924, saying; “They destroyed (razstroikha) my lovely party.”66 This became the epitaph to the experience of Bulgarian social democracy from its founding in 1891 until its demise in the 1920s. Had he lived another two years, Blagoev would have probably agreed with the remarkable Amedeo Bordiga’s speech at the Sixth Plenum of the Comintern in 1926, when he parted ranks and confronted Stalin and Bukharin (after all, Italy’s “liberal-­parliamentary capitalist State” was less than 20 years older than the Bulgarian one): Russian development does not provide us with an experience of how the proletariat can overthrow a liberal-parliamentary capitalist State that has existed for many years and possesses the ability to defend itself. We, however, must know how to attack a modern bourgeois-democratic State that on the one hand has its own means of ideologically mobilizing and corrupting the proletariat, and on the other can defend itself on the terrain of armed struggle with greater efficacy than could the Tsarist autocracy. This problem never arose in the history of the Russian Communist Party.67 Some forty years ago, when I lived under “real socialism,” and especially after the crushing of the Prague Spring, I was taking seriously Max Weber’s much 65  Harry Harootunian, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 73. 66  Blagoev to Krum Tikhchev after the uprising, cited in Ангелов, Неизвестни страници, 49. 67  Cited in Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, op. cit., 106.

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cited adage from 1919 that the audacious Russian experiment would bereave socialism of its reputation and authority for a hundred years.68 Later, and especially after 1989, I realized the impoverishing nature of Weber’s dictum. Not only was it (West) Eurocentric but it was as monolithic as its Soviet foil. They both closed off the possibility of multiplicity in the periphery. Now that we have reached the centenary of “the audacious experiment,” I am trying, at least in this chapter, to rescue this multiplicity and argue for the groundedness of divergent “horizons of expectation.”

68  Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, and Gyorgy Markus, Dictatorship over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 299.

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Was there Civil Society and a Public Sphere under Socialism? The Debates around Vasil Levski’s Alleged Reburial in Bulgaria This chapter was first published in Ulf Brunnbauer, Andreas Helmedach, and Stefan Troebst, eds., Gesellschaft, Gedächtnis und Gewalt in Südosteuropa. Festschrift Holm Sundhaussen zum 65. Geburtstag, (Muenchen: R. Oldenburg, 2007), 163–173, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. It is part of my book Bones of Contention: the Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria’s National Hero. (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009, paperback, 2011) and translated into Bulgaria as Zhiviiat arkhiv na Vasil Levski. Sîzdavaneto na edin natsionalen geroi. (Sofia: Paradigma, 2009).

The absence of civil society and a public sphere under “real-existing socialism”1 has acquired an axiomatic status. Moreover, there attainment was posited as the highest and loftiest of opposition efforts as well as of the endeavors to build up a working democratic post-communist society. This article attempts to complicate this stark verdict by matching general theory to the empirical evidence and challenging the uncritical application of normative categories. It does so by centering on what might seem a comparatively innocuous and insignificant episode that managed, however, to inflame public passions during the period of late socialism (1970s and 1980s) in Bulgaria. Vasil Levski (1835–1873)—one of the major figures of the national struggles in the nineteenth century—has arguably become the only uncontested Bulgarian hero. The saga of Levski’s posthumous fate not only parallels the evolution of Bulgarian nationalism, it is its embodiment. In the Bulgarian pantheon of national heroes, Vasil Levski, hanged by the Ottomans in 1873, became the greatest martyr of the national revolution and has been on every banner: believer and atheist, republican and monarchist, conservative and radical. His 1  I am not touching upon the debate about the proper nomenclature raised most recently by Andrew Roberts, “The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology,” Slavic Review, 2, Summer 2004, 349–66. For the purposes of this text, socialism and communism are used as synonyms, purposely overlooking the official ideological distinction made by state socialism between the two consecutive stages of socialism and communism.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_030

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hero worship does not necessarily unite the nation, but precisely the efforts at appropriation for opposing causes underlie the claim for his unique and truly national status. Levski’s consecutive and simultaneous appropriations by different social platforms, political parties, secular and religious institutions, ideologies, professional groups, and individuals illustrate how boundaries within the framework of the nation are negotiated around accepted national symbols. In the past three decades Levski’s figure was embroiled in several disputes in Bulgarian social life, two of which assumed the shape of mini-scandals. One was the dispute over the unknown remains of Levski involving archaeologists, historians, architects and the writer Nikolai Khaitov. This reburial controversy, however, has a meaning different from the reburial mania which swept over the post-communist space.2 The other scandal was the quarrel between the two patriarchates of the newly split Bulgarian Orthodox church, in which the secessionist church resorted to a legitimizing tool very different from its usual political argumentation: the canonization of Levski in 1996. These ­controversies—one belonging to the late socialist period, the other to the postcommunist one—assumed the characteristics of what Victor Turner defines as social drama, and became a metaphor for professional and political rivalry, an illustration of the great fight over “who owns history.”3 Social dramas, as Turner describes them, are “in large measure political processes, that is, they involve competition for scarce ends—power, dignity, prestige, honor, purity—by particular means and by the utilization of resources that are also scarce—goods, territory, money, men and women. Ends, means, and resources are caught up in an interdependent feedback process.”4 Social dramas are not merely a representation of discord or conflict but universal processual forms. Because of their universality, they can take on different forms; yet, all cases can be aptly studied as having four phases: “breach, crisis, redress, and either reintegration or recognition of the schism.”5 In April 1956, the archaeological institute began salvage excavations at the church “Sv. Petka” in Sofia prompted by plans to restructure the capital’s center. A week after they began, a newspaper editorial under the title “Are Levski’s 2  Katherine Verdery, The political lives of dead bodies: reburial and postsocialist change, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999; Istvan Rev, “Parallel Autopsies,” Representations, 49, 15–39. 3  Victor Turner, “Social Dramas and Stories about Them,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed. On Narrative, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 137–164. 4  Turner, “Social Dramas,” 148. For his extended argument, see “Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors,” in Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974, 23–59. 5  Turner, “Social Dramas,” 145.

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bones going to be discovered?” disclosed the widespread belief, documented in a testimony from the 1930s, that the remains of Levski had been reburied in the church, either in its western part near the narthex or in its eastern part in the sanctuary, and there was great public interest.6 On 30 May 1956 the archaeologists discovered a well-preserved skeleton in the sanctuary, to the left side of the altar stone which became known as skeleton No.95. The excavations were visited the same day by a professor from the Theological Academy who informed the leader of the excavations that these might be Levski’s bones and offered him the collection of memoirs he had compiled in support of this view. The leader was unimpressed. For him, the fact that the lower limbs of the skeleton were positioned beneath the sanctuary wall was an irrefutable argument in favor of an early burial, one before the construction of the church at the end of the fourteenth century. The theology professor published an article in the journal of the Theological Academy in 1959 but there was no follow up.7 Two years later the archeologist’s publication on the excavations appeared.8 This was the definitive scholarly view on the problem and it took the form of a single paragraph and a footnote, in which the Levski link was refuted by indicating inter alia that No.95 may have been a female skeleton. It was only twenty three years after the excavations, in 1979, that a journal article revived the reburial thesis.9 What was remarkable was that one of the authors, an architect, was a direct participant in the excavations, and he had believed from the outset that N.95 was Levski. This marked the real beginning of the social drama: “[A] social drama, first manifests itself as the breach of a norm, the infraction of a rule of morality, law, custom, or etiquette, in some public arena … Once visible, it can hardly be revoked.”10 The breach was occasioned by the fact that the dominant thesis was challenged from within the scholarly community, indeed from within the same institution—the archaeological institute. True, there had been the alternative opinion gestating over all these years. It had been even articulated by a scholar and published in 1959.

6  Trud, # 118 (2995), 17 May 1956, published as text and facsimile in Nikolai Khaitov, Grobît na Vasil Levski. Sbornik s istoricheski i arkheologicheski dokumenti i svidetelstva, Sofia: Goreks Press, 2002, 44. 7  Khristo Giaurov, “Grobît na V. Levski,” Dukhovna kultura, XXXIX, 1959, N. 2. 8  Stamen Mikhailov, “Tsîrkvata ‘Sv. Petka Samardzhiiska’ v Sofia”, Izsledvaniya v chest na Karel Shkorpil. Otdelen otpechatîk (Sofia: Arkheologicheski institut i muzei, BAN, 1961), 167–178. 9  Sava Bobchev and Eduard Baltadzhian, “Kîde e grobît na Levski,” Sofia, 11, 1979 (reprinted in Nikolai Khaitov, Grobît na Vasil Levski (Plovdiv: Khristo G. Danov, 1987), 14. 10  Turner, “Social Dramas,” 146.

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In these days, however, a publication in a theological journal did not carry the necessary scholarly, let alone ideological clout. To summarize, since the end of the 1950s a breach had occurred starting the social drama that came to be known as the affair around Levski’s grave. It played itself out as a challenge to the entrenched authority of a scholarly consensus on the problem. Voiced by a challenger, albeit a scholar himself, outside the mainstream academic infrastructure, at the time it was not experienced as a breach; moreover, it never even really caught the public eye in the next couple of decades. However, beneath the seeming quiet, there were deeper divisions that were waiting for an opportune moment to come to the surface. This moment came at the end of the 1970s and was facilitated by the atmosphere accompanying the patriotic and cultural upsurge on the eve of the 1300th anniversary of the foundation of the Bulgarian state. Once it came into the public eye, a mounting crisis followed, yet it somehow kept short of an explosion. A temporary truce set in, a kind of general consensus of divided spheres where the scholars were dealing with the general ideas and the scientifically provable truth, and the writers and journalists with some factual details, which feed the popular imagination but were not really considered to be of major significance. And, of course, it was the scholarly sphere that was the dominant one. Or so it seemed for a very brief period. This precarious equilibrium was broken with the interference in the conflict of Nikolai Khaitov, widely believed to be one of the greatest contemporary writers, who died in 2002. Khaitov was closely and actively watching the developments of the conflict but had not participated in any of the public fora in the early 1980s. When he came out with his detailed account of the controversy and strong endorsement of the reburial thesis in 1985, all hell broke loose: the breach had turned into a crisis. This time the challenge did not come from within academe but from a different field which was not under the control of the scholarly sphere. In addition, the new challenge was articulated in a forceful and effective polemic prose, popular enough to reach a broad readership. In 1986, a big debate at the Academy of Sciences took place between the two sides. Conceived as a form of arbitration, its most important aspect was that the two sides were talking to one another for the first time: the “scandal” had matured to the point where it had reached the phase of redress. In the course of these, often very technical and specialized exchanges, neither of them changed their initial version. The final report weighed the two contending theses and reached the convincing conclusion that irregular burials had taken place in the church and there was the technical possibility that one of the skeletons might have belonged to Levski. At the same time, the report agreed that since the bones had not been preserved, a definitive conclusion

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could not be reached, and suggested a compromise formula: a plaque should be placed at the church with the tentative and scholarly formulation that according to some historical data Levski had been reburied there by patriotic Bulgarians. The report was explicit that the archeological data were insufficient, and it did not preclude future discussions.11 Looking at the motivations of the participants, Khaitov’s passion stemmed from his de facto religion: nationalism. He had exclaimed once that Levski is the God of the Bulgarians and had devoted himself to rectifying what he thought of as the assimilationist and de-nationalizing tendencies of communism, and after 1989, of globalization. At first Khaitov was not out to get the archeologists and put a blemish on their institution, let alone on their discipline. What he wanted was the public acceptance of the reburial version because this would clean the damaged reputation of Bulgarians who had not saved their greatest hero from an ignoble death and subsequent dishonorable burial. Had the archeologists agreed to such a solution, Khaitov might have left them in peace. But such a solution came with a price for the archeologists, the cheapest of which was a tacit admittance of sloppiness and unprofessionalism. This, they decided, was not worth paying, and they also reckoned that they had enough power and influence to win the contest. A completely new element in the equation was the involvement of the mass media: the press, radio and television. This, added to Khaitov’s immense popularity, made sure that the discussion, unlike during previous decades, could not be confined within professional circles. The result was the barrage of citizen’s letters and petitions to the Academy and this public pressure should not be underestimated. Numerous citizens’ letters had reached the Presidium of the Academy, asking about its official position on the issue of Levski’s grave. Most archeologists were quick to dismiss these letters as organized pressure on the local level by the Khaitov propaganda machine, but they deserve a closer look. One of the most striking items in this collection of petitions is a thick student’s notebook consisting of a cover letter and collected signatures.12 The letter, from 18 February 1986, summarized the interest that Khaitov’s book had generated among the reading public. It was the object of passionate conversations in every Bulgarian home and working place, because it dealt with Vasil Levski, “who is not only our national hero but our national saint, with whose 11  Nikolai Todorov, ed., Arkheologicheski danni po spora za groba na Vasil Levski v tsîrkvata “Sv. Petka Smardzhiiska.” Dokumenti i stanovishta (Sofia: Izdatelstvo na BAN, 1988), 417. 12  Archives of BAN, Personal archive of Academician Nikolai Todorov. The petition, as well as the other letters analyzed below, are in a file entitled “Others.” The quotes in the next pages come from this not paginated file.

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name we all have received our first patriotic Holy Communion.” It then states that since Levski is in the hearts of every Bulgarian, “it is imperative that we have a temple, a sacred place, our Bulgarian Jerusalem, where we can bow and feel the materialized presence of this great Bulgarian in Bulgaria’s past, present and future.” The letter ends with the request that the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences give Khaitov the opportunity to defend his thesis about Levski’s reburial to the historians, writers, journalists, and politicians at a level, usually reserved for a dissertation defense. “And if he manages to defend it as brilliantly as he did in his book, let the church ‘Sv. Petka’ be officially pronounced to be the grave of Vasil Levski.” The letter also asks that the responsible ones for squandering Levski’s bones be taken to task, and concludes: We, the undersigned, are not the whole Bulgarian people. We are only part of it. But weren’t also the ones, who 113 years ago reburied the Apostle’s remains by transferring them from the criminal graveyard to the church’s altar, while risking their own lives, also a small part of our people? However, they sufficed, in order to wipe the shadow of dishonor from the face of our whole nation. The signatures consist of 589 individual entries, all from Varna, and a separate collective one stating that at their meeting on 10 February 1986, several hundred railway workers at the locomotive station supported the letter. The individual signatures give the name, profession and address of the signatories. Among them we encounter captains and sailors, workers, doctors, dentists, school teachers, painters, engineers, students, retirees, drivers, construction workers, economists, actors, pilots, housewives, musicians, singers, a ballerina, economists, officers, athletes, accountants, seamstresses, mechanics, librarians, lawyers, journalists, cooks, etc., people of all walks of life, and different levels of the social or professional hierarchy. Obviously, the petition was following a route from work place to work place, explaining clusters of “drivers” or “sailors” and the like. The petition may have been the result of Khaitov’s organization and lobbying. Most likely, however, it was initiated and seen through by the efforts of a local journalist in Varna, Dora Nikolova. She herself addressed a letter to the president of the Academy, in which she forwarded the above-mentioned letter of the over 500 citizens of Varna, adding her own explanations. She had brought the notebook with the signatures to the writer Evtim Evtimov and asked Khaitov to see it. The latter, however, scolded her and asked her to take it back, because the “academicians would think that this was a campaign organized by Khaitov himself.” Even if this was the case, however, how does it defy

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the character of a popular address? After all, these people were not forced to sign the petition. It did not come through any kind of existing official channels. Dora Nikolova herself was clearly a local enthusiast. In a second letter, she commented on the public lecture of an archeologist who had spoken before the public in Varna against Khaitov’s thesis. Nikolova was unimpressed and concluded: “Where are the bones? Is this simple negligence or a conscious deed? The Bulgarian people want Levski to have a grave and this is why it celebrates the church and will celebrate it to the end of days, no matter what the scholars think. But still, let our scholars remember that they are eating the bread offered them by our people. And nobody is bigger than the bread.” Nikolova also appended a poem written on the topic of the Apostle’s remains, dedicated to Khaitov. Even weak poems testify to strong feelings … Nor was this the only poetic epistle. Another poem in impeccable rhyme was authored by Kamen Rilski, an obvious pseudonym. A retired teacher— Mitra Stoyanova—also sent her letter to Balevski. It was triggered by a radio show on Levski’s birthday, written by Marko Semov, a well-known writer and psychologist. Stoyanova was deeply moved by the lofty assessment of Levski whom she considered “the only Bulgarian political saint,” but was also worried by what she called “the scholarly drama” which wanted to negate that Levski had been reburied in the “Sv. Petka” church. For Stoyanova, the argumentation of Khaitov was impeccable and Stamen Mikhailov was moved solely by professional pride and ambition. She addressed the academicians whose “moral duty and lofty task it is to tear the dark curtain of deceit.” She further proposed to place the hair of Levski in a large box in the church. On top of the box Levski’s portrait should be hanged, flanked on both sides with small electric bulbs in white, green and red, the colors of the national flag, so that “eternal light should stream over the holy relic: Levski’s hair.” Stoyanova wanted all this to be put in place by 1 May 1986. Yet another powerful letter was sent to the editorial office of the historical journal Vekove with a copy to Angel Balevski. Vekove had published a negative article of Khaitov’s book by Stanislav Stanilov from the Medieval section of the Archeological Institute and this provoked the letter of the priest Todor Vodenicharov from the village of Karan Vîrbovka, Ruse district, dated 18 February 1986. What is most interesting about this long—three-page singlespaced letter—is its language. First, the priest’s addressee is not “Comrade” but “Mister,” the accepted address before 1944 and after 1989. The language itself is extremely vivid and colorful, poetic and at the same time colloquial, using a lot of general folkloric and regional terms and phrases. It is also peppered with Turkisms, something Bulgarian nationalism was careful to cleanse the written language of, but which has been thankfully, although also very sparingly,

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preserved in oral speech. The priest writes about the effect Khaitov’s book, that he had difficulties obtaining, had on him and of his dismay at the lack of official support for the reburial thesis. “As for the people’s support, it is there. If the book goes through a second edition, I have the feeling that it will be as difficult to get it.” He then makes his point about the need for holy places. Even if, he reasons, the unconvincing thesis of Mikhailov were true, this should not prevent us from marking the church as a possible sacred place. After all, Botev’s obelisk in the Balkan mountain was not erected at the exact place of his death which has been contested, as well as the manner of his death. The important thing is to mark and remember not the something but the somebody, “to see from afar and to know that Botev had existed, no matter whether the bullet had pierced him at the very place of the obelisk.” Priest Vodenicharov also gives the example of the 1950 Vatican congregation which revisited the list of saints. In the course of this revision it turned out that data about some saints were missing and they had to be taken off the list. One of the affected was to be St. Cecilia, the patron saint of church musicians. “And so, you see what happens, everything was left as is, because what has been assembled in history should not be wasted but built upon.” Especially interesting are the priest’s thoughts about the production of history. He is incensed that the debates are being confined behind closed doors within the strictly “scholarly sphere” and is ironic about the selective use of “professionals’ and “dilettantes” in Stanilov’s article. According to him, “scientific objectivity” in Stanilov’s vocabulary is simply an euphemism for esprit de corps. Most striking is his comment on Stanilov’s stated disregard for memoirs which the latter calls the litter or leftovers of history. According to Vodenicharov this is simply a strategy to classify uncomfortable facts or sources into a rubric which carries less clout, like “memoirs.” In a clear reference to some of the great discoveries of ancient archeology, he writes: “Isn’t it clear to these professors that what somebody wrote or said at some point of time rests in the popular memory and in time under the name of history? And archeology as a scholarly discipline has in fact attached itself to this history reduced to ‘litter’ and has been only following its traces. Tell me, then, what here should be denoted with the word ‘litter’?” There is also the letter of the then metropolitan of Nevrokop Pimen. Given his later ascendancy to the post of patriarch of the alternative Synod in 1996 and his role in the future canonization of Levski, this letter is of particular interest. Dated 19 June 1986, it states its approval of the concluding report of the BAN debates. Pimen shares that, while carefully having followed the

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argumentation of both sides in the press, he finds Khaitov position more convincing. His careful phrasing can serve as a model: It is not in my competence to judge but it seems to me that during the excavations there have been deviations from the scholarly precision of the work, which necessitated a more serious handling and preservation of the artifacts, so much so as informed individuals had been affirming that Levski had been reburied in this church. The timely signals of Professor Giaurov were also ignored. I know him personally and he is widely respected for his serious and critical mind. It was therefore a missed opportunity not to preserve the archeological material for detailed study at an opportune moment. All of this deserves some, if only preliminary and tentative, theorizing attempts. My central question is: What is the proper category to describe the initiative of the Varna journalist and the petition signed by nearly 600 people? Or the numerous private letters by people from all walks of life? Or poems written for the occasion, even if they are bad poems? Clearly, as far as the Levski debate goes, there was, even within the perceived constrains, a remarkable openness for discussion: in the press, in the institutions and, what is most unexpected and surprising, a popular initiative to express opinions and pressure for their acceptance. Is all this not covered by the category ‘civil society’? There are different strategies to pursue here. One is to explain off these and similar facts as being outside the realm of ‘civil society’ as it has been applied for Eastern Europe in the 1980s or, at very best, as modest sprouts of an embryonic civil society. Another is to abandon the strict definition and its normative overtones and enrich and complicate it by the concrete historical ontology. Yet another is to discard the notion altogether. My inclinations are in the direction of the second option, and while my immediate interest here is not so much in reaching a new theoretical explanation and in system building, the concrete goal is to contravene the intellectual straightjacket which the strict application of political science categories impose on the historical record.13

13  For an excellent recent analysis civil society from the perspective of historical social sciences, see Jürgen Kocka, Paul Nolte, Shalini Randeria, Sven Reicharrdt, Neues über Zivilgesellschaft. Aus historisch-sozailwissenschaftlichem Blickwinkel, Veröffentlichungen der Arbeitsgruppe “Zivilgesellschaft: historisch-sozailwissenschaftlichem Perspektiven”, P 01–801, December 2001.

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There are varying and often contradictory definitions of civil society—beginning with Hegel’s designation of civil society as a sphere of needs distinct from the family and the state, and Tocqueville’s understanding of it as a realm of secondary associations, to present classifications including non-profit organizations only, or only self-organizing communities of common interest, or all forms of nongovernmental cooperation including big business, and finally, all forms of non-institutionalized human activity. Equally, the critique of civil society, whether coming from a normative (Hanna Arendt, Habermas), historicist (Schmitt, Koselleck, and Habermas), genealogical (Foucault) or systems-theoretic critique (Luhmann), implies a different understanding of the categories state and society and their relationship, with both Foucault and Niklas Luhman squarely considering their posited stark opposition a false dichotomy.14 Even within the same perspective, while for Marx civil society was first and foremost embedded in the market, for Gramsci its principal realm was public opinion and culture. There is little doubt that if we apply a strict definition of civil society, under communism it was, if anything, largely curtailed, controlled and for all practical purposes marginalized. But it is equally imperative to revisit the famous paradigm of a lack of civil society bar the church (especially in its Catholic variety in Poland or its evangelical one in East Germany), and dissident or semi-dissident groups like “Solidarity” in Poland, “Memorial” in Russia, and the mushrooming ecological groups of the last decades under communism.15 If we look at the historical genealogy of the concept, it is remarkable that after its early use in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was largely abandoned, to re-emerge powerfully only in the 1970s, notably within the context of the crisis of the East European socialist regimes. It is the specificity of the East European context that effected an interpretation of civil society such that the very notion as applied to the 1980s was premised on a complete opposition between society and the state, and the rhetorical claims of “antipolitics” were taken seriously.16 The turn to political society after 1989, 14  For a review of the notion and different approaches and critiques, see Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 1992). 15  Janine R. Wedel, “US aid to Central and Eastern Europe, 1990–1994: an analysis of aid models and responses,” in East-Central European Economies in Transition: Study Papers submitted to Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1994), 323, cited in Chris Hann and Elizabeth Dunn, eds, Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 1. 16  György Konrád, Antipolitics: An Essay, trans. Richard E. Allen (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984). For a critical view see Chris Hann, ed., Market Economy and Civil Society

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however, made a joke of these claims. Pace Cohen and Arato’s noble hopes that East Europeans “would be able to resist the ‘oligarchic’ tendencies of modern political parties” and would avoid the dangerous example of Latin America where the turn to political society implied demobilization of civil society, this is exactly what happened.17 This is not to question the lack or weakness of the principal norms of civil society under late socialism—the absence of realistic guarantees for individual rights, privacy, voluntary association, formal legality, plurality, publicity, free enterprise—but these have been institutionalized heterogeneously and in a contradictory manner also in western societies. Nor am I preaching a pedantic ban of the category of civil society because of the multifariousness of its meanings. It is important, however, to emphasize more its historical and contingent appearance and reappearance at particular junctures of the historical process, and to contextualize the concrete purposes for which it was mobilized. In Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s (much like for Enlightenment absolutist Europe), civil society was starkly posited as an emancipatory counterweight to the state, validated only by its potential oppositional qualities.18 Yet, concrete research has shown not only the great variability between the separate societies of Eastern Europe, but has questioned the dichotomy itself. In particular, Chris Hann has suggested a useful distinction between political society in the narrow and in the broad sense. In the first case, he accepts it as an element of the dualist scheme that contrasts the state and its people, and where the political is encompassed entirely by the state institutions. In the broad sense, however, which is the main sense employed by anthropologists, it would correspond to a looser notion of civil society that does not presuppose an absolute opposition between state and society, or the political and the social. This is so, among others, because “in the communist context, virtually all social behavior had political implications.”19 The notion of public sphere and lack thereof under communism poses similar problems. There is no doubt that as a Weberian ideal type Habermas’s public sphere is difficult, if not impossible to locate under state socialism, even in its later decades. Nancy Fraser has pointed out the failure of the dominant socialist and Marxist tradition to distinguish between state apparatus and the citizens’ public arena: “the conflation of the state apparatus with the public in Hungary (London: Frank Cass, 1990) and Chris Hann, “Introduction,” in Hann and Dunn, eds., Civil Society, 7–10, 23. 17  Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, 67–68. 18  Adam Seligman, “Civil Society as Idea and Ideal,” in: Simone Chambers and Will Kymlicka, eds., Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society, Princeton, 2002, 13–33. 19  Hann, “Introduction,” in Hann and Dunn, Civil Society, 13, 23–24.

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sphere of discourse and association provided ballast to processes whereby the socialist vision became institutionalized in an authoritarian statist form instead of in a participatory democratic form. The result has been to jeopardize the very idea of socialist democracy.20 If one were to stick to its theoretical elaboration as a space distinct from both the state and the official economy, “a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state”21 one could posit the existence of an embryonic public sphere under socialism where people outside the immediate experts engaged in public debate. On the other hand, one can go a little further than simply apply the normative category, which dooms the description and analysis of historical contexts outside of the western “original” to narrative tropes depicting “lack,” “lag,” “backwardness,” etc. To evoke Shalini Randeria’s thoughtful appraisal of the category for India: Rather than see civil society with Hall and Gellner as a unique Western achievement and using its successful realization elsewhere as a yardstick to measure the difference or backwardness of non-Western societies, it may be important to see that the substance of the idea is inherently elusive both in the West and outside it. This is in part due to the complex intellectual history and uneven political realization of the ideal of civil society over several centuries in the West as well as to the chequered history of its translation and conflictual domestication within the framework of colonial rule in most of the non-Western world.22 But even in the Western world, as revisionist historiography has demonstrated, there are “other, non-liberal, non-bourgeois, competing public spheres,” and it is the failure of Habermas to examine these alternative spaces which may have led him to idealize the bourgeois public sphere.”23 There is legitimate discussion, for example, about a black public sphere under the regime of Jim Crow.24 If anything, citizens in East European socialist countries after Stalinism fared 20  Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus. Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1996), 70. 21  Ibidem. 22  Shalini Randeria, “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in Post-Colonial India,” in Yehuda Elkana, Ivan Krastev, Elisio Macamo, Shalini Randeria, eds. Unraveling Ties—From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness (Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, 2002), 290. 23  Fraser, Justice Interruptus, p. 74. See also Nick Crossley, John Roberts, eds., After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere (Blackwell, 2004). 24   The Black Public Sphere, ed. by the Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Elizabeth Brooks-Higginbotham, Righteous

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incomparably better than blacks in segregationist America. Extending his work on multiple modernities and critiquing the assumptions of the liberal conception of civil society, Shmuel Eisenstadt introduces the notion of a nonliberal civil society.25 More importantly, instead of denying the existence of a public sphere under state socialism, one should better speak of the specific characteristic deformations of civil society and the public sphere under different regimes. The limitations under communism are self-evident and have been emphatically pointed out in numerous deliberations: party constraints, censorship, administrative and extra-administrative pressure, and so on. The Western liberal democracies have suffered from an alternative set of limitations: corporate, legal, or mediarelated. There are also a number which paradoxically seem to be common to both of these different social regimes and which cry out for comparative work, most blatantly the amount and character of self-censorship. Paraphrasing Mark Beissinger’s apt adaptation of Wittgensteinian philosophy to the application of the notion of empire in the Soviet context, one could say that civil society is not a clearly bounded transhistorical model but a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” with significant variability over space and time.26 Again, the purpose of this excursus is not to attack the (uses of the) categories, but simply to appeal for their careful contextualization. The significant point to make here is that, constrained as they were, these illustrations of an embryonic or different type of public sphere or civil society (depending on the approach we prefer) had to be taken and were taken into account, and not necessarily for demagogic reasons. As already said, the Levski grave affair was not of such political importance that the party or state authorities would want to capitalize on it by either responding to or neglecting public pressure. A similar case occurred in 1987, again focusing on Levski, although leaving out the reburial debate. An open letter, signed by 72 prominent intellectuals was sent to Todor Zhivkov on the eve of the 150th anniversary of Levski’s birth in 1987.27 It appealed to Zhivkov to support and facilitate a number of initiatives: Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993). 25  Shmuel Eisenstadt, “Multiple modernities, public spheres and social movements in the contemporary era,” Dieter Grimm, ed., Jahrbuch 2004/2005, (Berlin: Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2006), 45–47. 26  Mark R. Beissinger, “Soviet Empire as ‘Family Resemblance’,” Slavic Review, 65, 2, Summer 2006, 303. 27  The letter, dated 20 May 1987 was sent to Zhivkov with copies to the Politbureau member Iordan Iotov, to the Chairman if the Committee for cultural development Georgi Iordanov, to the secretary of the Central Committee Stoian Mikhailov, to the President of BAN Angel Balevski, to the chairman of the society “Bulgarian books and press” Valentin

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1. the publication of Levski’s documentary legacy in a big circulation; 2. the reprint of two authoritative works on Levski by Dimitîr Strashimirov, out-ofprint since the 1920s; 3. a second edition of Nikolai Genchev’s book on Levski; 4. the publication of Radoi Ralin’s film script on Levski; 5. the publication of Ivan Kolarov’s new novel on Levski. At first glance, the demands of the intellectuals seem so trivial as to make the form of their request incomprehensible. However, if one knows the context and the personalities, then the gesture makes sense. Radoi Ralin was a famous poet, most known and beloved for his incisive epigrams, who had fallen in disgrace after he had published a collection of epigrams, illustrated by Boris Dimovski, with an obvious allusion to the signature of Zhivkov. Nikolai Genchev was a highly popular history professor who had made a reputation as an original and quasi-dissident thinker. This is not the place to focus on whether these reputations were deserved or authentic. The point is that they were perceived as such, and to a great extent the open letter to Zhivkov can be read as an attempt to rehabilitate their work by making use of the social capital invested in Levski’s theme. It was clearly also understood in this sense, because Radoi Ralin’s book was published only in 1994 and Genchev’s next edition also had to wait until after 1989. It is also symptomatic that the letter was signed by most of the figures that later emerged as members of the “Club for glasnost and democracy” and “Ecoglasnost” and who, after 1989, headed the opposition.28 In this case, there would be no question that this was the gesture of a miniature civil society. To go back to the reburial debate, a dense reading of the events and their consecutive recreation shows that the authorities were indeed responding to grass-roots pressure. In a way, this is what one would expect to happen in a “normal” democratic society. And this is the reading that I am proposing. As long as they were not seen as directly challenging the existing political superstructure (either ideologically or personally), some kind of civil society and Karamanchev, to the editor-in-chief of “Narodna kultura” Stefan Prodev, to the editor-inchief of “ABV” Filip Panaiotov, and to the chairman of the regional council in Karlovo. A copy of the letter is in Nikolai Todorov’s personal archive, now at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAN). 28  Among the signatories were the future democratic president Zheliu Zhelev, his close collaborators Ivailo Trifonov, Nina Zhelyazkova, Dimitîr Ludzhev, Zina Markova, Simeon Angelov, the university professors and academy fellows Nedialko Merdhanov, Khristo Kiosev, Dimitîr Avramov, Miliana Kaimakamova, Andrei Pantev, Nikolai Vasilev, Lambo Kiuchukov, Anisava Miltenova, Tsvetana Georgieva, Kiril Vasilev, Ani Gergova, Georgi Gunev, Todor Petev, Evgenia Ivanova, Stefan Doinov, Angel Dimitrov, the writers Georgi Mishev, Georgi Velichkov, Ekaterina Tomova, David Ovadia, Stefan Tsanev, Nevena Stefanova, the painter Boris Dimovski, the actor Konstantin Kotsev and a host of others.

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public debate were tolerated and even encouraged from the late 1960s on. What was not normal was that this “normality” was not expected and not seen as normal. After all, the memory of the late 1940s and 1950s, when party meddling was ubiquitous in culture, was too close to be forgotten, and had created a knee-jerk cautiousness among the generation which had lived through these decades. In addition, my emphasis on seen adds the element of arbitrariness and always expected “surprise” that was so typical for late socialism. One could never be sure whether what was logically totally innocuous, might not be seen by some appartchik as dangerous in a most unexpected manner. And reverse, often serious and often calculatedly serious challenges were not noticed, i.e. seen by someone who was supposed to watch. I would add that the noticing or “seeing” procedure was not unconscious, a matter of oversight or stupidity but most often deliberate As Miklós Haraszti has perceptively observed in his notes on the “velvet prison,” communication between the lines was the dominant feature of socialist culture in the post-Stalinist decades and “the opinions expressed there are not alien to the state but perhaps simply premature.”29 It is this arbitrariness of the regime, rather than the easy totalitarianism-informed explanations of its behavior, that proved to be intellectually and emotionally exhausting.

29  Miklós Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism, trans. Katalin and Stephen Landesmann (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 145.

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Blowing Up the Past: the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov as Lieu de Mémoire This is the slightly expanded and bibliographically updated version of an article originally published as “The mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov as lieu de mémoire” in The Journal of Modern History 78 (June 2006): 377–411 and reproduced with permission of the journal. Inspired by the literature on memory and forgetting, and especially the meaning of categories such as lieux and milieux de mémoire, this article takes as its cue the destruction of the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov at the center of Sofia in August 1999. It analyses the facts around the building and upholding of the monument, its diverse significance for different groups, the discussions around and interpretations of its demolition, and the possible strategies for changing the symbolic order at times of political and social transformation. The article was also published in a reworked version as “Blowing up the Past: The mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov as lieu de mémoire,” in Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation, New York: SSRC, Columbia University Press, 2010 and appeared also in Bulgarian translation in Fakel, 2005, 371–400.

1 Reminiscence “Years ago,” (the formula which best introduces “memory”) I used to meet my friends at choice locations in Sofia. A meeting place reserved for one of one of my best friends was the space between “our Goethe and Schiller:” That was what we called the huge bronze statues of Khristo and Evlogi Georgievi, two wealthy nineteenth-century merchants, whose endowment provided the basis for building of Sofia University—my alma mater—and who today are comfortably seated on either side of the main entrance. The statues’ name was our idiosyncratic designator. The problem is that my friend later decided that everything before 1989 would be encompassed in her personal amnesia; in her words: “I don’t remember anything before that.” And while in my mind I still call the two bronze giants “our Goethe and Schiller,” I cannot use this any longer as a designator: its function of denoting a common space for at least two minds has been dispelled. I still meet people there but between “the brothers Georgievi.” So, the question arises: does my earlier site exist? Physically, of course, it does, but its significance is completely different now. For all practical

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004382305_031

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The University of Sofia with the statues of the brothers Georgievi

purposes “our Goethe and Schiller” have been disappeared, although Khristo and Evlogi Georgievi are still there. (Illustration 2) My other preferred location was the pharmacy at the corner of my own San-Stefano Street and the Bridge of Eagles. The pharmacy no longer exists; it has been transformed into a store for so-so women’s clothes with the flashy name “Aggression.” Yet there is some vestige of the pharmacy: the huge letters PHARAMACIE have not been taken off the building. I still easily meet friends there. The ones who remember the original store wink with complicity; the others need some explanation, but then they are helped by the physical trace of the site. The last location I used as a meeting place. was the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov. I did not use it often since I did not live nearby, but it was nonetheless my usual marker for the space in the center of town. In the summer of 1999 the mausoleum was blown up, and today its blank space is used consecutively as a garden, a summer opera stage or stalls for the Bierfest (the local version of the Oktoberfest beer drinking festival, which happens at unpredictable times of the year in Sofia). The square between the mausoleum and the old king’s palace (now housing the National Gallery) was formerly called “September 9” commemorating the government takeover in 1944; now it has been duly renamed

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“Battenberg Square,” in honor of Bulgaria’s first Prince after 1878, the German Alexander Battenberg. There is no physical artifact in place where the mausoleum once stood, nor is there any sign to remind passersby of its long presence. Yet, in a curious way, the mausoleum still exists, and the joking “Let’s meet at/ in front of/ behind the mausoleum” needs no explanation: even the younger generation knows its ghostly location. It seems to be still there—no longer as a site of historical memory but still as a marker for everyday orientation. To paraphrase Derrida, it is “the presence of an absence.” 2

Sites of Memory

All three locations can literally be described as places of memory. When Pierre Nora introduced his notion of lieu de mémoire, he probably did not expect that it would become what the Germans define as a Schlagwort, a catchphrase. It is variously rendered in English as site, place or realm of memory, and it is used and misused, although not nearly as much as “imagined communities” or “orientalism.” As happens with many French intellectual product, the transmission of Nora’s work has resulted in its removal from its local context: it has been universalized and rendered into abstract theory.1 In its original inception, the grand opus of Nora and his team of 120 leading French historians was conceived as a huge historiographical response to the crisis of French national identity two centuries after its most defining event: the French Revolution.2 Nora and his colleagues set themselves the task of helping construe French national memory for the contemporary age, at a time when the Revolution no longer resonated as its central event, and there were broader prospects to be 1  David P. Jordan, the editor and author of the thoughtful introduction to the Chicago edition of Les lieux de mémoire, who does a lot to carefully contextualize the project, cannot resist introducing Nora in his opening sentence as “the theoretician of historical memory” (Pierre Nora, Rethinking France. Les lieux de mémoire, ed. David P. Jordan, transl. Mary Trouille, vol. 1 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), xxiii. 2  Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt explain this renewed interest in memory as “a response to the acceleration of history, to rapid social change, and to the problems of identity that such changes are pressing home with growing urgency.” It is noteworthy that this erupted at a time when France, “a country blessed with, if not overwhelmed by, a long and glorious past …, moved from the front ranks to the status of a middling power. The rise of memory is thus contemporary with a cruel twist in the nation’s history” (Revel and Hunt, 1995: 631). Nora himself considers the explosion of memory a worldwide phenomenon, but thinks it came earlier to France because of the confluence of three major factors: the aftereffects of the economic crisis of the 1970s; the fallout from the post—de Gaulle (d. 1970) era, and the exhaustion of the revolutionary idea. (Pierre Nora, Rethinking France, vol. 1, x–xi.).

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uncovered and recovered from the more distant past. It is in this context that Nora’s team began locating sites of memory where the French collective identity had materialized over time.3 These sites formed an exhaustive inventory of architectural and textual artifacts: monuments and shrines, histories and textbooks, museums and archives. In Nora’s words: “It is no longer genesis we seek but rather the deciphering of who we are in light of who we are no longer.”4 This situates the whole project squarely at the interstices of two types of historiographies: the traditional (or modern) nineteenth-century positivist historiography with its obsession with origins and the national telos, and deconstructivist postmodern historiography. In Nora’s reading, in modern historiography there is an organic link between inwardly experienced values and the places of their external commemoration. This link has been broken in the postmodern period. Nora maintains, therefore, that a shift has occurred from a kind of naturalized collective memory to a self-conscious, uninspired and rather mechanistic activity of preserving memory. He thus posits a transformation from sites of internalized, social collective memory (milieux de mémoire) to fixed, externalized locations (lieux de mémoire). For the postmodern historian, “history ceases to be a mnemonic reconstruction and becomes instead an archaeological deconstruction.”5 At the same time, one has to note that Nora engages in something much more than simple deconstruction. As noted by Patrick Hutton, postmodernist historians focused exclusively on memory’s significance for political mobilization, dismissing—or at least underestimating—the value of tradition itself. They accordingly developed a very functionalist approach, in which commemoration was treated as “a form of mnemonics for the modern age, self-­consciously designed by leaders of the nation-state to prompt the desired

3  Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). This second, three-volume edition comprises the seven volumes of the same title published from 1984 to 1992. This first publication was conceived as a three-part, three-volume work around three grand topics: La République; La Nation; Les France. La République came out in 1984. La Nation swelled into three volumes and came out in 1986. So did the final part Les France whose three volumes were published in 1992. There are two American translation: the three-volume set (Pierre Nora, Realms of memory: The construction of the French past, ed. Lawrence B. Kritzman, transl. Arthur Goldhammer, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), which rearranged the French material and presented 44 of the original 127 French chapters; and the abovementioned, Chicago published Rethinking France (2001), which groups 45 articles in four volumes with a different organization. Among the numerous reviews, see Wood 1994: 123–149. 4  Cited in Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1993), 148. 5  Ibid., 149.

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recall.”6 In reaction to the one-sidedness of this approach, scholars began devoting more attention to tradition and countermemory, using Foucault’s “archaeology of knowledge” as their philosophical basis. Nora belongs to this distinct frame of mind. The fundamental distinction that Nora introduces concerns milieux de mémoire and lieux de mémoire. English does not translate milieux, although there are quibbles over lieux, ranging form “realms,” “sites,” or “places” and others preserving the French original.7 The phrase milieux de mémoire indicates sites of living or lived memory—or, rather, sites that provide direct access to living traditions. Once these traditions have passed away, the sites evoke only intimations, often nostalgia: in the words of Nora, “The true sadness is to suffer no longer from what one has suffered so much, and henceforth to understand only with the mind’s reason, no longer with the unreason of the heart.”8 The difficulty is to understand exactly Nora’s use of the term lieux de mémoire. Nora had borrowed it form Frances Yates, but he did not employ it, as Yates did, to designate the tangible ordered places/palaces, to which information is attached in order to be individually preserved as memory in oral tradition. Instead, he used it to designate the exterritorialized sites of collective memory. The category “collective memory” itself is utilized as a metaphor for history, which imposes on society one particular vision to be remembered. Nora captures the whole process at a moment when the identification with living memory has disappeared. The sites of memory he describes are like “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned. No longer quite alive, not yet dead, they are like seashells on the shore from which the sea of living memory has retreated.”9 When Le Grand Robert included the phrase in 1993, it used as its definition this explanation of Nora’s which approached les lieux de mémoire as objects, places or ideals transformed by human agency or time into “a symbolic element of the inherited touchstones of memory of a community.”10

6  Ibid., xv–xvi. 7  As David Jordan points out, in French itself Nora’s neologism—lieux de mémoire—finally entered Le Grand Robert de la langue française only in 1993. The first English translation (Columbia University Press) employed the notion of “realms of memory,” whereas the Chicago one refrained from translating it at all. Apparently, there was much agonizing over the title as Nora had first approved Memory of France for the Chicago edition, which was then changed (Nora, Rethinking France, vol. 1, XXV). 8  Cited in Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, 149. 9  Ibid., 152. 10  Nora, Rethinking France, vol. 1, xxx.

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As already mentioned, this is a particularly French context. A single event— the French Revolution—was granted foundational status but toppling this event from its pedestal after two centuries of contested but nonetheless unthreatened primacy did not entail social destabilization and collective anomie. French society at the bicentennial of the French Revolution could complain of all kinds of malaise but it was no doubt one of the most successful and affluent societies in the post-Second World War era. Introspection and deconstruction are affordable indulgencies in this context, but not readily, or at least not innocently, exportable. This does not deny the magnificent achievement of Nora’s work and the universal significance of many of his insights. Particularly valuable is his historicizing of the nineteenth-century modern historiographical project. Even though his interpretation is based entirely on French examples, the predominant place and influence of France and French culture in the nineteenth century secures its general significance. Nora interprets this historiographical project as an attempt to take possession of collective memory. In the previous oral tradition, memory focuses on habits, cultures, mores and is passed on unreflectively from generation to generation. In the modern period, memory is recorded rather than voiced; thus, by taking possession of it, history materializes it. In this written tradition, however, even after the Revolution, which “brutally distanced the past and lumped together several centuries as the ancient régime,” historians tried to find ways to link history to memory. The French historians of the early and mid-nineteenth century were, according to Nora, the last generation of historians to experience, according to Nora, the coincidence of history and memory.11 This abruptly changed in the last third of the nineteenth century, “when history became a science and the Republic turned it into a national institution.” What it brought about was a conscious privileging of history over memory: “National history was becoming the French memory.” This state of affairs continued until at least the 1930s, when both the Annales school and Marxism challenged the national project and “set out on a divergent path, signaling the moment when history, abruptly and quite self-consciously, ceased to coincide with the nation’s memory.” It was taken up in the 1960s by the “New History,” and then again in the 1980s with the “acceleration” of history, “the increasingly rapid disappearance of things and the move into an increasingly uncertain future.” As far as France is concerned, Nora maintains, there is a clear sign that “the present is being enslaved to memory, that is to the fetishism of signs, an obsession with history, an accumulation of the material remains of 11  Ibid., xv–xvi.

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the national past, and to the infinite ways of expressing the national life—not only its history, but also its landscapes, its traditions, its ways of eating, and its long-gone methods of production. Everything is historical, everything is worth remembering, and everything belongs to memory.”12 The memory palace of oral tradition, as splendidly described by Frances Yates, had been an imaginary structure where factual knowledge i\was interiorized in specific places and thus internalized (committed to memory). But the postmodern historian visits these palaces in order to unveil their mechanism, not to partake in their function. He deconstructs not only the archive but other architectural places of memory: museums, monuments, shrines. He visits them to disassemble them, not to reconfirm the message that a generation of earlier historians would have found there.13 As an interpretation of a common intellectual endeavor, this is surely valid far beyond France’s borders, although one could argue about the details and emphases in different national and regional historiographies. We can hardly expect Iraqi historiography to take up soon the tired posture of the “self-­ conscious, uninspired and rather mechanistic activity of preserving memory,” when the country’s patrimony is swiftly and mechanically disappearing in the direction of the capitals of Old Europe and New York.14 It is hardly to be expected that historian in Eastern Europe will obsess over “long-gone methods of production” or “ways of eating,” when these methods are hurled back on the existential scene involuntarily and without a whim of nostalgia. The domestic canning industry, for instance, is flourishing not because there is suddenly the quirky notion of boredom with the present and an appetite with “grandmother’s ways” but because people are making ends meet. The first time in my life that I saw a working plow outside a museum or a textbook, was after the fall of communism. Ironically, for parts of Eastern Europe, it is in this particular respect that the communist episode may have set the scene for the role of the postmodern voyeur. For a couple of generations, the immediate link to the premodern past had been broken and its artifacts served as sites merely of pedagogical memory.15 Still, one can maybe domesticate these counterexamples as temporary deviations from an otherwise systemic phenomenon. 12  Ibid., xvi–xviii. 13  Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, 149–150; Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966). 14  Timothy Potts, “Buried Between the Rivers,” The New York Review of Books, L, 14, 25 September 2003, 18. 15  Such an evaluation clearly fits in an interpretive framework emphasizing primarily the modernizing aspects of the communist episode. There have been many contending approaches trying to fit communism/socialism as a historical phenomenon in a broader

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So, then, how should we employ this seemingly innocuous notion of “­places of memory” in a post-Nora historiographical era? Do we cling in a ­pedantic— although, one can maintain, also purist—manner to the meaning that Nora has conferred on the phrase, which leaves us with the option of applying the definition structurally to non-French contexts, and seeking out convergences and divergences? This has happened over time with notions such as feudalism, capitalism, imperialism, industrial revolution, nation, modernity, not to speak of the numerous categories defining ideological, philosophical, artistic and other intellectual trends. Each was created initially by extrapolating from a local (usually West European) context whose factual or historiographical priority made it a model to be abstracted as systemic. Choosing this option would be very much in a tradition that is today slighted by many as Eurocentric, although, employed with some sophisticated caveats, it seems almost unavoidable. Another option would be to “naturalize” the category and elevate it in its most abstract parameters to a systemic status, overlooking the original context in which it was created. The original context would thus revert to the status of a case study (although one with a temporal priority), an “alternative” hypostasis of a “multiple” phenomenon. This is a procedure that has been practiced lately with considerable success, especially around the category of modernity.16 It avoids the problems of the previous option, but at the price of a certain ahistoricism. Finally, one can stick to the most conventional, everyday, literal, common sense use of “memory places,” consciously disregarding the fact that the category has become inhabited with a particular meaning in a particular historiography. These are all possibilities, but the choice between them has to be made. A good historian today is plagued much more by “historiography” than every human being is by “history,” because in the end, despite declarations and protestations, s/he knows that there is no difference between the two. But let us go back to the Dimitrov mausoleum, a site that was meant to have the theoretical perspective: communism as totalitarianism, as state capitalism, as hypermodernity, as a specific version of paternalism, as the economy of shortage, as elitist political voluntarism, etc. If I obviously privilege the modernization paradigm, it is because for me it gives the most convincing overall framework. This, however, does not mean that it has to be applied in an unimaginative rational choice model to the exclusion of a host of other explanations, complicating and enriching our understanding, especially with anthropological and psychological insights. 16  Samuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” in the special volume of Daedalus, 129, 1, (2000), 1–29; Jan N. Pieterse, “Hybrid Modernities: Mélange Modernities in Asia,” Sociological Analysis, 1, 3, (1998), 75–86.

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greatest historical significance, to be the veritable communist lieu de mémoire and that, relegated to a lieu d’oubli, continues to have all the makings of a place of memory. 3

The Absent Site: Facts

This section introduces the facts about Dimitrov and his mausoleum that are needed as a basis for analysis and evaluation. I am not theorizing on the notion of facts here; rather, I am using the term simply to refer to the stock of concrete incontrovertible data.17 It seems appropriate to begin this exposition with the figure of the protagonist himself: Georgi Dimitrov.18 Since encyclopedia entries are supposed to be (at least in theory) the briefest, most neutral compendia of facts, I have chosen the entry from the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, an ostensibly unbiased source, one that is certainly above any suspicion of pro-communist leanings. The caption of its brief article reads: “Bulgarian communist leader who became the post-World War II prime minister of Bulgaria. He also won worldwide fame for his defense against Nazi

17  Emile Durkheim, in particular, distinguishes between several classes or categories of facts (among them biological, social, psychological, etc.), of which he focuses specifically on the notion of social fact. This he defines as “every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general enough throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.” (Durkheim 1963: 28). While there is a whole array of social facts enumerated in this text, my criterion is that they are generally accepted, no matter what the evaluation. 18  The literature on Dimitrov is numerous although, as is to be expected in the period dominated by the Cold War, the bulk of this historiography was produced in Bulgarian and Russian, with some translations in French, English or German, mostly published in Bulgaria. The late 1940s and early 1950s constitute an exception, when his name was still a byword in revolutionary and leftist circles, and biographies had been published in many languages around the world. One intriguing late exception is a splash of interest in Dimitrov in the 1980s in India, when several monographs were published in Delhi. In German, in the former DDR, at least a couple of serious studies were published, mostly linked to the Leipzig trial, and a documentary series was initiated, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the event: Alfred Kurella, Dimitroff gegen Göring, nach Berichten Georgi Dimitroffs über den Reichstagsbrandprozess 1933 (Berlin: Dietz, 1963); Der Reichstagsbrandprozess und Georgi Dimitroff: Dokumente (Berlin: Dietz, 1982); Dallin, Alexander and F. I. Firsov, eds., Dimitrov and Stalin: 1934–1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Ivo Banac Ivo, ed., The diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

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accusations during the German Reichstag Fire trial of 1933.”19 Here immediately it links Dimitrov’s hypostases in the collective memories of Bulgaria and Germany, as well as the international memories of fascism and communism. After a prolonged and acute illness, Georgi Dimitrov, the first prime minister of communist Bulgaria, died in Moscow on 2 July 1949.20 The next day the 19  The full entry runs as follows: “Dimitrov, Georgi Mikhailovich, b. June 18, 1882, Kovachevtsi, Bulg; d. July 2, 1949, near Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R. Bulgarian communist leader who became the post-World War II prime minister of Bulgaria. He also won worldwide fame for his defense against Nazi accusations during the German Reichstag Fire trial of 1933. A printer and trade union leader, Dimitrov led the Bulgarian socialist parliamentary opposition to the voting of national war credits in 1915 and played a major role in the formation of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1919. Briefly imprisoned for sedition in 1918, he later journeyed to the Soviet Union, where he was elected to the executive committee of the Comintern (Communist International) in 1921. In 1923 he led a communist uprising in Bulgaria that provoked ferocious government reprisals. Under sentence of death, he was forced to live abroad, from 1929 in Berlin as head of the central European section of the Comintern. After the Reichstag Fire of Feb. 27, 1933, which provided Adolf Hitler, the newly appointed German chancellor, with an excuse for a decree outlawing his communist opponents, Dimitrov was accused with other communist leaders of plotting the fire. At his trial Dimitrov thoroughly bested his Nazi prosecution and won acquittal. He settled in Moscow and, as secretary-general of the Comintern’s executive committee (1935–43), encouraged the formation of popular-front movements against the Nazi menace, except when his patron, Joseph Stalin, and Hitler were cooperating. During 1944 he directed the resistance to Bulgaria’s Axis satellite government, and in 1945 he returned to Bulgaria, where he was immediately appointed prime-minister of a communist-dominated Fatherland Front government. Assuming dictatorial control of political affairs, he effected the communist consolidation of power that culminated in the formation of a Bulgarian People’s Republic in 1946.” (http://www.britannica.com/seo/g/ georgi-mikhailovich-dimitrov/). 20  There have been persistent, but hitherto officially unsubstantiated, suspicions that Dimitrov, though ailing, did not die a natural death but was poisoned by Stalin. Most have been in the oral domain, chiefly among circles close to Dimitrov, both Russian and Bulgarian. It was only recently that a detailed written account appeared in a book about the fate of the Bulgarian political emigration under Stalin. The author, Nasko Petrov, reports on the different versions about Dimitrov’s end and concludes that it is quite possible he was indeed removed by Stalin. On the other hand, Dimitrov suffered from a number of diseases—diabetes, kidney, asthma—and his close friend and advisor Iliia Kiuliovski believed he had passed away from a natural death. Most of the other opinions that support this, point out that Dimitrov had been Stalin’s obedient henchman. Stalin himself had visited him in the sanatorium and had held warm conversations with him. Petrov, however, suggests from a close reading of Dimitrov’s diary as well as a handful of memoirs and conversations with family members that there had always been a tension between the two. He also reports on the arrival of the Soviet aircraft, which took Dimitrov from Sofia to escort him to the sanatorium “Barviha” close to Moscow. The aircraft carried Beria himself on board, and Dimitrov was not allowed any time to gather personal belongings, all under the pretext that they were in a hurry to start stabilizing his health. The strongest

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Council of Ministers decided “to construct a special mausoleum, in which the body of the great deceased would be put to rest and further preserved. The mausoleum will be built on the ‘9 September’ square in the front part of the City garden until 10 July” (Gergov 2000: 7). In one night, a group of architects and engineers under the leadership of architects Georgi Ovcharov and Racho Ribarov and engineer Nisimov prepared a plan for the building, which was approved on 4 July. The design for the interior decorations was the work of Ivan Penkov, with the participation of a group of eminent artists and sculptors, notably Dechko Uzunov, Ivan Neshev and Valentin Starchev.21 The structure was erected in six days, and was overseen by general-major Blagoi Ivanov, the commander of the army’s labor corps. According to different sources, between 2 and 6 people died during the construction works.22 The army provided the bulk of the construction force, supplemented by professionals (engineers, technicians, construction workers, architects, sculptors, artists) and a host of volunteers. Even heavy rains could not delay the work and on 10 July 1949, Dimitrov’s embalmed body was laid in the mausoleum. (Illustration 3, 4) The building itself covered 560 square meters, its height was 12 meters and its solid outer walls were 1.2 meters thick. It contained a cubic inner hall encircled by a 2-meter wide corridor. Under the memorial hall there was the laboratory and a small room for the doctors. There were also several smaller rooms for the air conditioning unit, for instruments, and so on. An underground tunnel was added later to connect the mausoleum with the party headquarters (today housing the offices of the Parliament).23 The argument in Petrov’s book, which I have not double-checked independently, is that after Dimitrov’s body was removed from the mausoleum, Dr. Petîr Gîlîbov, who was in charge of the mummy, took some hair samples as well as the brain of Dimitrov, which had been preserved in the laboratory of the mausoleum. Gîlîbov, a researcher at the Institute of experimental morphology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, had been in charge of the mummy for the past 15 years, and had inherited this position from his father, who headed the team from 1949 on. Gîlîbov initiated a criminal investigation, and three independent tests in three different laboratories concluded that the mercury content in the hair was far above the normal. This tallied with rumors that the writing desk in Dimitrov’s room had a double bottom filled with mercury, which caused or hastened the death of the asthmatic Dimitrov (Nasko Petrov, Stalin i razgromît na bîlgarskata politicheska emigratsiia (Plovdiv: VTU “Sv.sv. Kiril I Metodii,” 2002), 117–123). Ivo Banac, in his preface to the diary of Dimitrov, while not bringing in any factual evidence, also voices his belief that Dimitrov did not die a natural death (Banac, op. cit., xliv). 21  Georgi Gergov, Istinata za mavzoleia (Sofia: Sibiia, 2001), 8; Duma, X, 161, 19 August 1999, 3. 22   Standart, XI, 3817, 19 August 2003, 4. 23  It was the existence of this tunnel as well as the difficulties in blowing up the mausoleum that produced the rumors that it had been constructed as a nuclear bomb shelter for the Politburo (Demokratsiia, 224, 25 August 1999: 17). Gergov 2000: 38, categorically denies

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The funeral demonstration

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Final respects

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exterior was covered with white stone from the Vratsa region, and the side tribunes were made of granite. On the inside there were precious stone mosaics accomplished by the artist Dechko Uzunov and his group. The structure was renovated and consolidated several times, with a major reconstruction of the façade and the interior in 1974–1975, and the installation of a highly sophisticated lighting system in 1984.24 While the mausoleum was being erected, the body of Georgi Dimitrov was returned by train from Moscow to Sofia, and was embalmed in the Vrania palace, itself a veritable milieu and lieu de mémoire: it was the tsarist residence in the interwar period and one of the government residencies in the communist period, and it is presently the residence of the former prime-minister of Bulgaria, Simeon Saxcoburgotski, the son of the last Bulgarian king Boris III. The embalmers were a group of Soviet specialists led by Professor Boris Zbarsky, who had been an assistant in the team of Professor V. P. Vorobev during the 1924 embalming of Lenin.25 Dimitrov’s was only the second such embalming in the twentieth century after Lenin’s. The embalming process, known and practiced by some ancient civilizations, notably the Egyptians, had been put into disuse, mostly because it was not part of the Christian burial tradition. In addition, the ancient methods could not preserve facial features; that had not been a goal previously since the mummies were inaccessible to outside viewers. After Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, a method was sought that would preserve the physical appearance of the communist leader and create an accessible monument with an immediate and strong effect. Numerous scientific proposals for the preservation of Lenin’s body (among them a French one) were submitted, and that of the Kharkov professor Vorobev was approved. Vorobev’s embalming was in fact the second one, following the first temporary one by Academician Abrikosov. Vorobev started work on Lenin’s body in March 1924 and finished in June. On 1 August 1924 Lenin’s mausoleum was officially opened to the public, and with a short spell during the war when it was evacuated in the Urals between 1941 and 1945, and it is still functioning today. While the technology of embalming has been developed and finessed, the secret appears to be a particular solution of alcohol, formalin, glycerin, acetic acid, and some organic ingredients, whose this, maintaining that the tunnel was meant only for evacuation purposes. Demokratsiia, the official government paper admitted that even if the building was a bunker, there should be no problem in blowing it up, and the fault was with bad planning and work of the detonators (221, 22 August 1999: 3; 223, 24 August 1999: 3). 24  Gergov, op. cit., 9, 35, 37–38; Duma, X, 161, 19 August 1999, 3. 25  Ilya Zbarsky & Samuel Hutchinson, Lenin’s Embalmers (London: The Harvill Press, 1998), 172–178; Ilya Zbarsky, Ob’ekt No 1 (Moskva: Vagrius, 2000), 211–215; Gergov, op. cit., 9–12.

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nature and exact proportions were kept secret (and were recently patented as behooves the vocabulary of a commercial society).26 Dimitrov’s embalming was carried out using the exact same technology that had been employed by the Soviet specialists. So were the ensuing embalmings of Stalin (1953), of Klement Gotwald in Czechoslovakia (1953), of Ho-Shi-Minh in Vietnam (1969), Augustino Neto in Angola (1979), Guyana’s leader Linden Forbes Burnham (1985), and Kim Il—song in North Korea (1994).27 The only exception is the body of Mao Tse-Tung (1976), which was embalmed by a team of exclusively Chinese specialists. The preservation of the body required constant care. Twice a week doctors refreshed the face and the hands, and once every two years the body was re-embalmed. During the re-embalming process, the body was immersed for ­thirty-five days in a special bath. Until 1954 it was managed by an exclusively Soviet team; after that, Bulgarian doctors were trained to manage the procedures. The mausoleum opened for visitors on 11 December 1949, and it kept open hours from 3p.m. to 5 p.m. each Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. During the 50 years of its existence, 18 million people passed through the commemorative chamber, among them political figures like Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Aleksey Kosygin, Fidel Castro, Indira Ghandi, Angela Davis, and many others. There was a strict protocol concerning the laying of wreaths at the mausoleum, the movement of visitors, the arrangement of the party leaders during public events, and a veritable ritual around the honorary military guard, beginning with their stylized uniforms, through their poses and the specific music for different occasions. According to Colonel Gergov, who served as the mausoleum’s 26  Zbarsky & Hutchinson, op. cit., 191–207; Gergov, op. cit., 10–11, 35. Today, the Institute in charge of Lenin’s body has offered its embalming techniques for sale. It has signed a contract with a funeral parlor for the provision of all services to prepare corpses for burial, including long-term embalming: Itar-Tass, 21 January 1999, http://www.wayan.net/exp/ rus_exp/lenin.htm. 27  Ho Chi Minh’s body was placed in a mausoleum very reminiscent of Dimitrov’s, and it remains there today. Stalin’s body was removed from the mausoleum on Red Square following the denunciation of the cult of personality in 1956, Klement Gotwald’s mummy was cremated in 1956 and his mausoleum destroyed, and the bodies of Dimitrov and Neto were removed in response to pleas from the relatives of the deceased (in 1990 and 1992, respectively). The Mongol leader Marshall Choibalsan was enbalmed but he was entombed next to Suhe Bator rather than displayed in a mausoleum. There are also cases in which virtual mausoleums were erected as sacred shrines but without containing the mummy, as is the case of Kemal Atatürk. The most comical story is that of Guyana’s leader Burnham, who was embalmed by Soviet specialists in 1985. His mausoleum in Georgetown was built on an American design, but the State Department threatened to stop its aid program if the body went on display. Burnham was eventually buried there. There is also a mausoleum in Nankin preserving the remnants of Sun Ya Tsen.

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Cover pages of Gergov’s book

commandant from 1980 until 1988, the guards underwent special selection for both their physical appearance and their family background. They were supposed to originate from anti-fascist and communist families, and they were not supposed to come from Sofia or nearly towns.28 (Illustration 5) The mausoleum became an important fixture of the communist landscape of the capital and was featured in all guidebooks. It was the site for all important celebrations and military parades: 9 September (the beginning of the People’s Democracy), 7 November (the October Revolution), 1 May (Labor Day), 24 May (St. Cyril and Methodius Day or the Day of Culture and Education). Following the changes of 1989, and after the removal of Dimitrov’s body, the mausoleum’s raison d’être came into question. It still served as an important symbolic site but this time rallying anti-communist forces. Throughout the 1990s there were numerous debates concerning its meaning and potential future (to be discussed in the next section). The building itself was not kept up and became one of the prime sites of anti-communist and/or anti-government 28  Gergov, op. cit., 12, 14–21, 24, 32–34, 41–44.

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graffiti, next to the Monument of the Soviet Army.29 In the late 1990s, it was used with great success as the splendid theater sets for different opera performances in the open, notably for Verdi’s Aida. Then, all of a sudden, without any previous public discussions, at the height of the vacation season in August 1999, when Sofioters are away on vacation, Parliament is in recess, and most of the public institutions (like the National Library, the University, etc.) are closed, the newspapers published an order, issued by the Ministry for regional development and planning, and signed by its minister, who was also vice premier, Evgeni Bakîrdzhiev: Order No. RD-02-14-1531 from 9 August 1999 With the purpose of accomplishing the provisions of the Law for Regional Reconstruction, approved with order No. RD-50-09-100/ 05.04.1998 of the Chief Architect of Sofia, and based on article 66 of the Law of State Property and article 31 of the Law of Architecture, it is ordered that the destruction of the building of the mausoleum and the [subsequent] shaping of the space should begin. The construction dismounting works should begin on 13 August 1999 and should finish by 8 September 1999.30 The order was immediately put into practice, and the inside walls of the mausoleum were drilled to place explosives. Some of the mosaics on the inside were dismounted. In the following weeks the newspapers regularly covered the deconstruction, and even carried out interviews and questionnaires, although the process never reached the front pages until the day of the explosion. This came in the early afternoon of 21 August, a very hot Saturday with temperatures between 35–40 degrees Celcius (95 to 105 Fahrenheit), when many of the few Sofioters who are staying in the city in August had moved to their village or vacation homes. Prime-minister Ivan Kostov came back for the occasion from his vacation, and, together with the Speaker of Parliament Yordan Sokolov and assorted ministers, observed the explosion from the roof balcony of the adjacent building of the National Archives. At precisely 2:35 p.m. a loud explosion caused clouds of dust but after the dust set, it turned out that “the mausoleum, like the Tower of Pisa slightly bent toward Hotel ‘Bulgaria’, had

29  Radost Ivanova, “‘Down with BCP, Down with UDF, and Down with Both BAP Parties!’: Political Slogans through the eyes of the folklorist,” Journal of Folklore Research, 1991, 28, 1: 23–34. 30   Duma, X, 159, 17 August 1999: 1.

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After the second explosion

not even cracked.”31 A second explosion followed at 4:50 p.m. but the building remained intact. Some papers even reported that it had straightened up.32 (Illustration 6) Journalists couldn’t resist the humor of the situation. One of them suggested that the vice-premier Bakîrdzhiev call on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for help; NATO planes should bomb the site, he suggested, and this would not be considered an act of aggression but, rather, 31   Demokratsiia, X, 221, 22 August 1999, 2. 32   Duma, X, 165, 24 August 1999, 1.

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“a peaceful contribution to our civilizational choice.”33 It has to be noted that the destruction of the mausoleum came only a couple of months after the bombing of Serbia by NATO. Finally, it was decided to dismantle it mechanically by hand, and with the help of smaller detonations. This was finally accomplished during the next days, and in the late afternoon of 27 August the last debris was removed from the square. The demolition had taken 7 days, more than it took to build. For the first time in fifty years, the view from the former king’s palace across from the mausoleum was unbroken. 4 Meanings The mausoleum as an institution was controversial from the very outset, and while it would be an exaggeration to speak about an actual struggle over its meaning, given the authoritarian atmosphere that prevailed wherever this type of monument was installed, there was certainly a latent conflict. Some of those who were embalmed had themselves given explicit instructions for the fate of their bodies. Thus, Lenin had wanted to be buried next to his mother at St. Petersburg’s Volkovo Cemetery, and Ho Chi Minh had wished to be cremated and to have his ashes buried in three parts of the country.34 In the case of Georgi Dimitrov, we are not in the possession of a special document testifying to his last will in this regard, but his family always maintained he had desired to be buried.35 How did people look at the whole event when it took place? Naturally, there were supporters and detractors, but how was each position actually articulated? As an important party/government decision, the determination to embalm Dimitrov and display him in a mausoleum emulating the one on Red Square was not meant to be publicly discussed, only publicly appreciated. Disapproval could hardly be articulated in a written form at the time, except outside the country, so evidence for that reaction exists mostly in the form of actions and personal memories. In 1956, for instance, there was a plot to 33   Duma, X, 165 24 August 1999, 7. 34  All through the 1990s, debates have gone on in Russian society about the possibility of reburying the body of Lenin not only as fulfilling his own will, but in keeping with Christian tradition (http://www.wayan.net/exp/rus_exp/lenin.htm). On the other hand, some have doubted that Lenin’s explicit will may be a myth. I owe the last piece of information to Ron Suny. 35  It is curious to add that all existing evidence points to the fact that Todor Zhivkov never harbored the idea of joining Georgi Dimitrov in the mausoleum. At least such a provision had been never rumored, let alone discussed or circulated (Gergov, op. cit., 44).

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blow up the mausoleum during a demonstration so that the whole Politburo of the Bulgarian Communist Part (BCP) could be eradicated.36 This was a case where the mausoleum was targeted less as a symbol than as a functional site, more accessible than other places where the party assembled.37 Beyond this, the commandant of the mausoleum, Colonel Gergov, reports only of two serious incidents of disrespectful behavior: one anonymous, the other involving a foreigner. The first was when a bag was found left at the mausoleum’s wardrobe but, after a brief period of concern, it turned out to be full of stones and bricks. The other occurred when the rather inebriated deputy military attaché of the French embassy began marching behind the mausoleum’s honor guard. He was sent away but returned in half an hour trying to take one of the soldiers’ guns.38 Disapproval over the mausoleum did not come only—and not even principally—from anti-communist circles. Among many communists, it was disliked as a symbol of Stalinism and the cult of personality. Gergov notes, for example, that Dr. Vasilev, the first secretary of the regional communist party in Botevgrad and a personal favorite of Zhivkov, he had voiced his opinion that “the mummy should be taken away.”39 The commandant writes that the information was shared with him in one of the subterranean rooms of the mausoleum by a friend to whom Vasilev had personally spoken, and Gergov was afraid because of the ubiquitous microphones. In my own family, Georgi Dimitrov was never held in high esteem, especially by my grandfather who, at the time when he served as the chief lawyer (jurisconsult) of the Ruse commune after the Social-Democratic Party there won the municipal elections in the wake of the First World War, was adamantly opposed to the 1923 September revolt, which he blamed on Dimitrov

36  This information comes from the State Security archives and was filed under the code name “Mushrooms” (Gîbi), No. 255, 27 February 1956, mentioning a certain T.Z. as the chief organizer. It was published after 1989 in the newspaper Trud by the journalist R. Bîchvarov (cited in Gergov, 21). 37  That it was widely taken as the most powerful symbol of the new regime is without any doubt. The famous Gorunia plot (of the former partisan and acting general Ivan TodorovGorunia) in 1965 had envisaged two tanks appearing on the square in front of the mausoleum. On a personal note, I remember Nina Zheliazkova, then a researcher at the Institute of Balkan Studies, and who later was involved in the dissident group around Zhelyu Zhelev, and now the director of the nongovernmental organization for minority issues—making a statement in private circles to the effect that she would burn herself in front of the mausoleum were Bulgaria to become the Soviet Union’s sixteenth republic. 38  Gergov, op. cit., 21–22. 39  Ibid., 45.

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and Kolarov’s irresponsibility and on their acquiescence to the dictates of the Comintern.40 For my parents, both active participants in the anti-fascist resistance and communists believers, the mausoleum was a repellent symptom of primitive idolatry, and unenlightened practice that emulated the megalomania of the pharaohs. The phrases they actually used included “Oriental despotism”, “Asiatic megalomania,” “barbaric idolatry,” “Egyptian mummy,” “pharaonic pretensions.” I never visited the mausoleum with my family. The only time I was inside was with my classmates in elementary school. I do not believe my grandparents ever set foot in the mausoleum despite the fact that they were life-long communists and lived into the 1970s and early 1980s respectively. I am not sure about my parents, simply because I know that they had visited Lenin’s mausoleum as graduate students in the Soviet Union, while Stalin’s body was still there. I distinctly remember my mother’s revulsion over Stalin’s presence, whom she blamed for the whole “idolatry.” At the same time, while my parents were all for the closure of any mausoleums, Lenin’s included, they showed nothing like disrespect for Lenin’s mummy; they regarded Lenin more like Stalin’s posthumous victim. I combed through our family albums, which are numerous but well arranged and which have detailed photo coverage from the beginning of the twentieth century, with sporadic entries from the previous, as far back as the mid-­nineteenth century. Obviously, the bulk of the photos comes from the post-­Second World War period, but the mausoleum was nowhere to be 40  In June 1923, the agrarian government of Stamboliiski was ousted following a coup d’état of the army, and Stamboliiski himself was cruelly murdered. At the time, the then renamed Communist Party announced its “neutrality” in what it pronounced to be a fight between two factions of the bourgeoisie. That this was a tactical explanation for its passivity and weakness, rather than a rigid and dogmatic ideological stance, can be discerned from its attempts, before June 1923, to warn the agrarians of the coming coup and ask the government to be armed, so that the coup could be prevented. Stamboliiski’s government refused, no doubt a mistake which cost it a lot, but a mistake which was completely understandable, given the suspicions it harbored against the communists for having organized a devastating strike in 1919 against the newly established agrarian government. In June 1923, the left-wing forces were completely powerless, and the “neutrality” formula was just the cover for their impotence. However, the Moscow-based Comintern, at that time still hoping to foment a “permanent revolution,” ordered the Bulgarian communists to rise. After bitter discussions, which divided the leadership of the BCP, the faction represented by Dimitrov and Kolarov prevailed. The accusation of quiescence to the dictates of the Comintern and of conscious adventurism, raised against them by other communists in the country, was based on the fact that they organized the uprising hastily and in the most remote western province of the country, from where they quickly escaped into emigration, whereas the subsequent “White terror” threw the country in bloody reprisals.

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seen. Finally, in a small album containing stray images with no obvious theme, I found a small photograph of my parents with my Greek uncle Dimitris Trakidis from Thessaloniki. The photograph was taken by someone on my uncle’s camera during his visit to Sofia in March 1957 and then sent by him to my parents. This “uncle” was really my father’s cousin from Varna, who had emigrated to Greece as a high school student with his parents in the late 1930s but had continued his involvement with the Left. In the early 1960s, as a lawyer, he was one of the defendants in the famous Lambrakis case and has remained a communist to this day. This photograph I found is not only a gesture of memory from my uncle but a gesture of defiance of his own authoritarian regime in Greece in the 1950s, which banned and persecuted communism. Ironically, then, as a lieu de mémoire it would be classified more properly under the rubric of “­remembering unrealized communism” (in Greece) than under “remembering real communism” (in Bulgaria). (Illustration 7) Apart from this, there is no other family photo-memory of the mausoleum in the pre-1989 period. From my childhood, naturally, I remember it as the parade square, the mimesis of Red Square. But it is not merely, and arguably not even chiefly, this public memory that dominates over my recollections. It is not so much the image of Politburo members waving to the crowds, or the slogan shouting, the songs, the posters that I remember. It is rather the boys who were selected to be banner bearers in the school, and the fierce competition among us girls to be elected to flank the “heroes,” and the dilemma of what kinds of shoes, socks, or hair bands we would be able to select from the rather limited assortment dictated by the uniforms. This was when we nine or ten years old and were members of the pioneer organization. A little later, as teenagers, we referred to Dimitrov in our circles, but without any venom, as “George-in-thecan.” In my own album, the mausoleum figures only from the post-1989 period. I first recorded it for the sake of the graffiti in 1994, and particularly the one targeting the then-president Zhelev: “All frogs are green, only ours is red.”41 I also took photographs a few days before the destruction in August 1999. The already-mentioned memoirs of the mausoleum’s last commandant give the best summary of the official motives for the building of the mausoleum. It was because “we wanted to preserve Georgi Dimitrov’s image,” because he was to be added to “mother Bulgaria’s iconostasis,” because it was preserving the 41  An obvious allusion to Zhelev’s physical appearance, this graffito was mounted by backers of the UDF at a time of exacerbated political polarization. Zhelev, crucified between his two incompatible roles as, on the one hand, the leader of the anti-communist opposition and, on the other hand, as president of the whole nation and thus a unifying symbol aside from political sympathies, was perceived by the anti-communist forces as too soft on the communists.

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Family photo, March 1957

sense of memory, because it was to serve as a symbol, as a house of worship.42 This was the array of official generic motives, organically internalized by a number of people, most notably communist supporters. There were some more obviously nationalist motives. In a paragraph following his description of the many foreign leaders who had laid wreaths in front of the mausoleum, Gergov concludes: “Let future generations remember that the tribute paid by Europe and the world is not simply before a sarcophagus 42  Gergov, op. cit., 5, 7, 12, 15.

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in a mausoleum, not a simple ritual, demanded by protocol! Let our children know that the respect for Dimitrov was respect for proud and strong Bulgaria.”43 Gergov is very much aware of the pharaonic analogy, but, amazingly, he is not defensive about it. For him this is simply part of human culture. Here is what he has to say: This human experience [embalming] has been passed on from remote antiquity. The unique Egyptian art erected the famous Egyptian pyramids … These monuments were erected in order to aggrandize the pharaoh and his relatives, to emphasize his divine nature and to perpetuate his power … This amazing cult existed more than 5,000 years ago. In an unprecedented way, it was revived in the new twentieth century. The idea is not so much the significance or genius of a given person, but the revival of a monument dedicated to a cult, which is supposed to impart immortality. In such a way, the pharaohs’ ghosts emerge through the millennial dusk and enter the mausoleums of Lenin, Ho-Shi-Minh, Augustino Neto and Mao … Today we don’t know who begot the idea to embalm Lenin’s body, to erect a mausoleum, to make a sarcophagus for the tiny body, so that millions of people would believe in his immortality. Whoever these initiators, it is an indubitable fact that they were atheists, partaking in the construction of a symbol which would remind one of immortality, greatness, everlasting power….44 The more unexpected motive and/or rationalization which emerges from these memoirs—unexpected because so abundantly evoked—is the mausoleum as the apotheosis of science. The constant refrain of the mausoleum staff’s activities is that “… everything was put on a strictly scientific basis.” Many more pages in these brief memoirs are devoted to the secrets of embalming, rather than to the ideological significance of the mausoleum. A good quarter of the text deals with the intricate lighting with its halogen lights and reverse mirrors, the special angles at which the lamps were installed, the electronic installations that preserved the exact temperature and humidity. What emerges from these pages is an uncanny pride in a purely scientific achievement: the embalming and preservation of the body was unprecedented in global science; the staff serving the mausoleum did everything based on scientific principles. This portrayal reminds one more of a surgeon’s team than of a high priest’s assistants. Amazingly, the whole memoir closes not with comments on Dimitrov or the 43  Ibid., 14. 44  Ibid., 46.

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mausoleum but with a two-page eulogy of Nikolai I. Pirogov, the nineteenthcentury Russian surgeon and scientist who took part in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78, and after whom one of Sofia’s premier hospitals is named. Pirogov was a champion of embalming and had done fundamental research in this field, as well as introducing antiseptics and ether anesthesia. His own body had been embalmed and then buried in 1881 in his home town of Vinitsa.45 There is one more interpretation that ought to be covered in this survey of meanings but since it is centered on the mummy, rather than on the building itself, and since it inevitably evokes the category of balkanism, it merits its own section. 5

Balkanism as Memory

Earlier in this text it was observed that sites serve as orientation markers, and as such they are reminiscent of the helpful function of stereotypes, which assist us through the unpredictable chaos of daily life by ordering it in a more or less familiar fashion. I would like to argue a concrete case of such juncture based on an example of anthropological exegesis. The symbolic language of monuments and how they are mobilized in bringing about or sanctioning social change has become a favorite topic of research, especially with the embarrassing richness of examples accompanying the nervous transformation of the cultural landscape in the post-communist world. A few years ago, an Austrian anthropologist and historian, Bertold Unfried, published an article on the fate of Stalinist monuments in Eastern Europe, with special attention to the Czech Republic and Bulgaria.46 In the Czech case, he was looking at the dismounting of monuments, but particularly at what preceded this dismounting: the satirical graffiti, the splashes of paint converting a tank into a pink—Elvis-like automobile, the added artifacts which turned the symbols into their opposites. All this was interpreted within a framework which the author himself defined as “between iconoclasm and museifying (Musealisierung),” the point being that the symbols are exposed or subverted within the same language of expression: the rhetoric of modern art, a centerpiece of modern identity. While Sofia abounds with analogous examples, Unfried chose to make a different case for Bulgaria. He focused on the fate of Dimitrov’s mummy, 45  Ibid., 11–12, 32–37, 47–48. 46  Bertold Unfried, “Denkmäler des Stalinismus und ‘Realsozialismus’ zwischen Ikonoklasmus und Musealisierung,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 5, 1994, 2.

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which had been kept in the mausoleum since his death in 1949. On 18 July 1990, Dimitrov’s family decided to remove the mummy which it cremated and buried in the family grave in the Orlandovtsi cemetery. Here is Unfried’s reading of the events: “Under the pressure of permanent profanity, one night Dimitrov’s mummy was removed, burnt [the verb used in German is verbrannt, not kremiert or eingeäschert] and buried in the family grave. The burning of a mummy is the worst thing that can happen to it in the belief of mummifying death rituals, because it means the second, final death. In popular belief the mummy is also linked with the fear of ghouls. In Sofia, however, there was an additional consideration in the air: the purification of a corrupt relic in the dazzling flames.”47 Based on this analysis of Dimitrov’s cremation, the author concluded: “Thus, we witness in Sofia a more archaic form of dealing with the symbols and monuments of the old regime. The enemy is burnt in effigy, and there is a dance of celebratory oblivion around the fire.”48 This latter sentence must be an allusion to the so-called dances of the nestinari, walking barefooted and in a trance on burning coal, which have been convincingly interpreted as an ancient Thracian and Greek ritual. These dances had been preserved into this century in some outlying areas of the Strandzha mountain in southwestern Bulgaria, and in the last few communist decades were revived exclusively as part of a commercial enterprise: they were favored stage-shows in cabarets and restaurants catering to foreign tourists, one of the few sources of a steady flow of hard currency for the Bulgarian tourist agency Balkantourist. Unfried’s analysis is very learned but patently untrue. Dimitrov’s mummy was burnt not in effigy and not in public but in a private cremation ceremony by his immediate family.49 Actually, the burning of the mummy might and 47  Ibid., 257. 48  Ibid., 258. 49  Dimitrov’s adopted son, Boiko Dimitrov, had been a career diplomat, and his grandson was a history student in the 1980s. The remains may have been cremated principally to avoid desecration in the highly politically charged atmosphere of the moment but, in any case, it is illogical that the immediate family would like to burn the mummy in effigy. Unfried, however, is not alone in adhering to stereotypes. Lenin’s Embalmers, the memoirs of Ilya Zbarsky (who assisted and inherited his father’s position as one of the chief embalmers of the USSR and participated in Dimitrov’s embalming) have been adapted for a western public by the journalist Samuel Hutchinson. According to this text, “in July 1990, the Bulgarian democrats decided to take [the body] away and bury it in a cemetery, close to the grave of Dimitrov’s Protestant parents” (Zbarsky & Hutchinson, op. cit., 178). In 2000, Zbarsky’s original memoirs were published in Russian. The sentence is the same, except that the phrase “The Bulgarian democrats” is absent. In his rendering, much more logical, “the body was taken out and buried” (Zbarsky, op. cit., 215).

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should be approached from a diametrically opposite standpoint from that of Unfried’s. Not only is it not a symptom of archaic beliefs, but it is actually the most modern, secularized action. Cremation is not particularly popular in Bulgaria, especially not among practicing Christians. It is considered either a pagan ritual or a secular innovation but, in any case, distinctly un-Christian, and people resort to it nowadays simply because of lack of space. In fact, it is a privilege to find place for a real burial, and cremation is accepted very reluctantly, although nowadays with resignation on a mass scale. In the case of Dimitrov’s family, cemetery shortage would not have been a problem: they have their family graves, and there is the reserved cemetery space for statesmen. The mummy was removed from the mausoleum during the first mandate of the socialist (former communist) government of Andrei Loukanov, in which Boiko Dimitrov, Georgi Dimitrov’s son, served as foreign minister. By opting for cremation, the family, with its long atheist and communist past, chose the non-religious, non-traditional, “Western” model of dealing with the corps. Unfried’s article itself can be approached in different ways. One can see in it a case of speculative interpretation, based not on first-hand research but on a priori models. This is, of course, the more charitable way of saying that it is a case of sloppy research, given the fact that by the time he was writing his article there had already been numerous Bulgarian publications on the novel cultural treatment of former monuments, the mausoleum included.50 But one can also treat it as a case of scholarly balkanism: the notion that explanatory approaches to phenomena in Southeastern Europe often rest upon a discourse (in the Foucauldian sense)—or on what might be called a stable system of stereotypes by those who shun the word or notion of “discourse”—that places the Balkans in a cognitive straitjacket. In Imagining the Balkans, I refrained from generalizing about scholarly output, maintaining that the scholarly project moves along a line different from the production of popular mythology, and only occasionally intersects with it. My caveat was: “This is not to say that a great number of the scholarly practitioners of Balkan studies in the West do not share privately a staggering number of prejudices; what it says is that, as a whole, the rules of scholarly discourse restrict the open articulation of these prejudices.”51 I still believe this to be true, and if I have erred, it is only in the direction of too much lenience.

50  M. Elchinova and V. Raicheva, “Kîm kharakteristikata na edin vid novi kulturni iavleniia (Grafichnite tekstove na studentskata okupatsionna stachka i ‘Grada na istinata’),” Bîlgarski folklor, 3, 1990, 22–40. 51  Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20.

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Memory Holes

In 1984, George Orwell described the shredding machine, which was supposed to erase all inappropriate memories. Remembering and forgetting are, naturally, two sides of the same coin, and memory holes are constructed with as much effort as memories themselves. Small wonder that the destruction of the mausoleum—this symbolic blowing up of the past—produced polarized opinions. What is more surprising was that this polarization remained almost entirely in the verbal (written and, to some extent, oral) domain. There was no significant public debate about the future of the mausoleum. Moreover, there was no debate in parliament or on the cabinet level. As already mentioned, it was the abrupt publication of Order No. RD-02-14-1531 from 9 August 1999 that set the events in motion. The only political force, which could be expected to stage some resistance—the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP)—made only halfhearted pronouncements about the illegality of the decision and the ensuing act. It never even attempted to gather mass support against the move, to stage demonstrations, protests, and so on. The one public event it organized was an open discussion about the future of the mausoleum that took place ten days after the publication of the order and two days before the actual blowing up. The event reportedly gathered about three hundred people, mostly veterans of the party who came with red flags and Che Guevara images.52 One can only surmise that the BSP wisely gauged that it would never be able to muster a large public following and made only the minimum expected gestures so as not to finally drive away any of its already alienated supporters. As already pointed out earlier, even among devoted communists, the mausoleum was not a popular site, let alone a site of vested interest. The decision to remove Dimitrov’s mummy in 1990 did not encounter any protest; on the contrary, it was accepted as the long-overdue respect for the wishes of Dimitrov’s immediate family. At the same time, it went hand in hand with a general and genuine respect for the figure of Dimitrov among socialist supporters. Dimitrov’s stature in communist Bulgaria never suffered the tides of extreme adulation and then equally extreme rejection and, more than anything else this had to do with his life history. When he returned from exile in Bulgaria in 1945, he came with the international aura of the “lion of the Leipzig trial” and the leader of the Third International. While the suppression of the non-communist as well as intra-party, opposition occurred during and under his leadership as prime-minister, the whole period from 1945 to 1948 had nonetheless been characterized by a certain pluralism in public life. In fact, the open Stalinist 52   Demokratsiia, 219, 20 August 1999, 10; Duma, 162, 20 August 1999, 2 set the number at 700.

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grip on the country occurred after Dimitrov’s death (July 1949) and after the show-trial against Traicho Kostov and his group (December 1949), although it had already been prepared with Dimitrov’s active participation. The very circumstance, however, that Dimitrov was not alive at the time of the trial against and the subsequent assassination of the very popular Kostov, coupled with the rumors that he himself might have fallen victim to Stalin, explains why, in the aftermath of the de-Stalinization process and the rehabilitation of Kostov, his reputation did not suffer. The roles of both Stalinist henchman and bogeyman in Bulgaria was played by Vîlko Chervenkov, who had concentrated power in his hands as prime minister and general secretary (1950–56) and whose rule saw, besides his personality cult, a drastic collectivization of agriculture and far-reaching purges and police terror. He also became the scapegoat on whom all Stalinist excesses were blamed, and he was even expelled for some time from the communist party before his death in 1981. After 1956 and the rise of Zhivkov, the latter was careful to preserve the unblemished reputation of Dimitrov, although in an ever-receding background. This explains why the ceremony in July 1990, when the body was removed and then buried, attracted a staggering number of people, who gathered to pay their last homage to a prominent historical figure. Dimitrov the figure and Dimitrov the mummy had been totally decoupled in the imagination of these people. (That is clearly not the case with the mummy and mausoleum of Lenin; its symbolic value is still very high, and any talk of its removal is perceived by a majority of communists as a direct onslaught on the personality of Lenin and the overall ideology, as well as a nihilist attack on a whole historical period.)53 This, I think, also explains why the square in front of the mausoleum did not become the exclusive space for communist demonstrations, while the square in front of the Alexander Nevski Cathedral did became the symbolic opposition site in the early days of democracy. The September 9 (later Alexander Battenberg) Square between the palace and the mausoleum was a shared political space, the playground of different political and nonpolitical performances. A couple of other places in Sofia did became the preferred locations that were reserved for socialist demonstrations: one is the area around the monument marking the common grave (Bratskata mogila) in the former Liberty Park (now the Boris garden), and the other is a sort of self-fashioned 53  See the striking website of the Lenin Mausoleum with a web-voting for or against the mausoleum which offers six options (http://www.aha.ru/~mausoleu/). On the other hand, there are indications that the younger generation is not vested in, is, indeed, ignorant of, the past. A young twenty-three-year old Russian woman interviewed on Red Square muses: “Lenin, was he a communist?” (C C. J. Chivers, “Russia Weighs What to Do With Lenin’s Body,” The New York Times, October 5, 2005).

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communist Hyde Park corner in the South Park, unmarked by a special monument but nonetheless drawing a steady crowd, especially on weekends. The battle over the mausoleum was exclusively a press affair, and it triggered the expression of a number of strong opinions.54 Some of the defenders’ arguments were purely political. They accused the mausoleum’s destroyers of fascism, barbarism, vandalism, restoration, and so on. One of the most effective posters was run in the BSP newspaper Duma (Illustration 8). It drew an explicit parallel with the rise of Nazism in Germany, and the caption, composed as a rhymed limerick, read: “The Leipzig trial is continuing. Today the mausoleum is on trial. Coming from Leipzig, in our state today, Goering’s grandsons are destroying it.”55 Other objections were legalistic, stressing the fact that there was no previous public discussion and that the decision itself was illegal, ­according to the existing rules.56 Most of the objections, however, were historical and preservationist. One journalist caustically remarked that nobody touches the pyramids, despite the fact that most house the mummies of rather undemocratic pharaohs.57 Another commented on the fact that the destruction of the mausoleum would 54  In the following exposition I have confined myself exclusively to the two newspapers symbolizing the polarized attitudes: Duma, the official publication of the Socialist Party (at that time in opposition), and Demokratsiia, the official organ of the Union of Democratic Forces and, at the time, the government newspaper. I am excluding the huge number of other papers—Trud, 24 chasa, 168 chasa, Monitor, Sega, Pari, Kapital, etc.—that might be characterized as occupying the middle ground between the two poles simply because their coverage was much poorer, essentially reiterating (often literally) the information in the two main newspapers. The “middle-ground” papers actually testify to the relative apathy about the issue in the broad public. What is remarkable is that even Duma and Demokratsiia, while openly standing for preservation versus destruction, both provided a rather objective coverage of the spectrum of public opinion, ironic and polemic jibes notwithstanding. 55  “Protsesît v Laiptsig oshte prodîlzhava. Izpraviat Mavzoleia dnes na sîd. Doshli ot Laiptsig, v nashata dîrzhava pravnutsite na Gyoring go rushat,” Duma, 161, 19 August 1999, 16. The images on the poster recall the famous photograph of Georgi Dimitrov at the Leipzig trial in 1933, and the figures of prime-minister Ivan Kostov and the vice-premier Evgenii Bakîrdzhiev. A few days later, the same paper, no. 167 (26 August 1999) published a photograph of Kostov as “Gauleiter” and made the visual comparison to the Reichstag fire in 1933, the fire of the Party headquarters in 1990, and the attempt to raid the parliament in Sofia in 1997. 56  These objections were voiced by architects such as Ventsislav Yochkolovski and Khristo Genctchev, Velo Mirchev, the chief secretary of the Union of Bulgarian Artists, as well as political figures such as Velko Vîlkanov, Atanas Bogdanov and Georgi Pirinski. The last three deposited a protest letter to that account with the chief prosecutor Nikola Filchev (Duma, 161, 19 August 1999, 3; 162, 20 August 1999, 2; 167, 26 August 1999, 7). 57   Duma, 159, 17 August 1999, 1.

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cost around forty thousand leva (around twenty-five thousand dollars) that would be gathered from donations. The first one thousand leva having been donated by Bakîrdzhiev himself, the journalist added: “Throughout the world as well as according to the Bulgarian traditions, donors give for construction, not for destruction.58 Prominent public figures spoke against the destruction. The now-deceased Petîr Dertliev, head of the Social Democratic Party, a 58   Duma, 160, 18 August 1999, 3.

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­ olitical prisoner after 1944, and one of the most revered leaders of the demop cratic transition, exclaimed: “We are going to stun the world with our narrowmindedness and political savagery” (Ibidem. Stefan Gaytandzhiev, the leader of Ekoglasnost (the ecological movement) as well as the member of parliament Rumen Vodenicharov, the cinematographer Anzhel Wagenstein, the historian Ilcho Dimitrov, one of the BSP leaders Nikolai Kamov, the writer Kalina Alena, all spoke and wrote against the destruction as an uncivilized act, bespeaking antihistoricism.59 Some of the strongest arguments stressed that the communists did not destroy the palace but transformed it into a National Gallery. Moreover, they left intact the mausoleum dedicated to Alexander Battenberg, the Prince of Bulgaria between 1878 and 1887, even though it did not have any public function during the communist era. On the other side of the barricade, the supporters of the destruction also had a variety of motivations. Some were unabashedly anti-communist, considering it an arrogant symbol of totalitarianism. Prime-minister Kostov said the mausoleum was giving a false impression about Bulgarian identity; it was a negation of parliamentary democracy and therefore had to go. The most ardent activist of the destruction campaign, Bakîrdzhiev, regretted he had not pushed the button for the explosion himself: “Then it would surely have occurred already the first time.”60 The other vice-premier, Alexander Bozhkov clearly identified the blowing up with democracy, and commented: “In Bulgaria nothing happens the first time. Everything is tortured, difficult: democracy, the transformations, the destruction of the mausoleum. Everything we do we have to do twice.” The journalist Georgi Daskalov hailed the blowing up as a spiritual liberation for all Bulgarians, who were previously “forced to pay homage to fabricated, mythical (izmisleni) deities” (apparently implying that there are unfabricated one).61 Yet, the political argumentation did not carry much weight. After all, according to Reinhart Koselleck, “memorials are taken down when they are felt to be a threat or when a tradition that is still living is intended to be suppressed.”62 The political force and tradition of which the mausoleum had been a symbol was certainly not, nor was it perceived to be, a threat. Besides, as an alternative vision, it was hardly still linked symbolically to the mausoleum. 59   Duma, 160, 18 August 1999, 3; 162, 20 August 1999, 7; 163, 21 August 1999, 3; 164, 23 August 1999, 16; 166, 25 August 1999, 5. 60   Demokratsiia, 221, 22 August 1999, 3. 61   Demokratsiia, 222, 23 August 1999, 3. 62  Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing, History, Spacing Concepts, transl. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Pres, 2002), 325.

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There were weightier and more convincing arguments, revolving around aesthetic and functional considerations. The controversial but popular mayor of Sofia Stefan Sofiianski, rightly accused the BSP of having neglected its own symbol. He pointed out that it had been the ruling party several times and that between 1993 and the end of 1996 it had an absolute parliamentary majority. Yet never once did it come up with a plan for the future of the mausoleum, which could have easily gathered support. Sofiianski’s objections to the mausoleum were based on what he characterized as its illegal construction, because it had been built on land donated almost a century earlier for a garden. He recognized the nostalgic value of the mausoleum for a great number of people but, in yet another analogy to Germany, concluded that the destruction of the Berlin wall had also had its opponents. “Yet its destruction became, in its turn, the symbol for the unification not only of Germany, but also of Europe.”63 The art scholar Dimitîr Avramov expressed his aesthetic aversion toward the mausoleum, calling it “the ugliest building in Bulgaria.” Moreover, he added, “I would say, there is no uglier building in Europe, although I know many European capitals.”64 Its demolition, according to him, would return some of the “old European spirit” to Sofia. Entitled as he was to his aesthetic tastes, Avramov added a curious “analytical” pronouncement. He based his main objection to the mausoleum on the fact that it was not original and authentic but “foreign” and a case of “architectural plagiarism.” The project was meant to emulate Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow, and therefore copied its base and upper colonnade. There has never been a question that the mausoleum was meant as a mimesis of Red Square, and, quite apart from its doubtful aesthetic basis, the argument against “architectural plagiarism” would destine all churches, palaces, and public and private buildings, not only in Sofia but all over the world as well, to demolition. The most interesting, if not necessarily the most logical, comments on the mausoleum (because they focused on historical and social memory) came in an interview in Demokratsiia with Georgi Fotev, the director of the Institute for Sociology. He began on an acceptable note, arguing that, in contrast to Rome, where Mussolini’s architecture was preserved, Sofia could not bear the presence of the mausoleum architecturally. This was so because of the smaller size of the city, whose center was overwhelmed anyway with totalitarian architecture. If the mausoleum had been erected somewhere in the outskirts, or at least not in the very center of the city, one could still debate its removal, but under the circumstances it was simply “thrust in the heart of the capital” 63   Demokratsiia, 219, 20 August 1999, 10. 64   Demokratsiia, 224, 25 August 1999, 17.

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and had to go. Fotev stressed that while the mausoleum had lost its function as a sepulcher almost ten years ago, making it redundant, “the historical and social memory refuse to forget precisely that.” He therefore concluded that, even as he was tolerant of the preservationist views of many intellectuals, he could accept them only in the abstract: they failed to recognize the social reality and negative symbolic significance of the mausoleum. At the same time, in an illogical and symmetrical volte-face, Fotev opined that the destruction was not necessitated by fear of restoration or the danger that a totalitarian symbol could mislead the younger generations, for whom “communism does not mean anything and has become an incomprehensible memory.” He reiterated the argument of Avramov that the mausoleum was a “foreign body” in authentic Bulgarian sensitivity, identity and culture and that it burdened “our historical memory.” Asked whether the demolition of the mausoleum would not also obliterate the important memories of the evils of communism, as well as the historical memory of communism itself, Fotev responded that there was no alternative to the destruction of the mausoleum. It could not be successfully transformed, according to him. At the same time, he asserted a duty “to preserve the memory of this darkest page in our modern history, which lasted close to a century.” An authentic Bulgarian monument dedicated to the victims of totalitarianism was mandatory. In the years after this interview, a monument was indeed erected in the garden of the People’s Palace of Culture to commemorate the victims of communist terror. It is an almost exact replica of the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C.65 (Illustration 9) Summarizing the reasons for the urgency of the demolition, Fotev enumerated three chief ones: “First, this is something foreign, planted in the Bulgarian 65  The inscription specifies that the list of names includes both people who lost their lives, as well as the ones who served prison sentences, were sent to labor camps, or were relocated. The names do not follow any obvious arrangement, alphabetical or otherwise, except that they are grouped under administrative regions. A quick perusal of names under the city of Sofia reveals the presence of Bogdan Filov, who served as prime minister to Tsar Boris III between 1940 and 1943, and who became one of the regents to Simeon after the king’s death. A well-known archeologist with strong pro-German leanings, Filov brought the country onto the side of the axis powers. Along with other members of the regency, he was sentenced to death and shot by the communist-dominated People’s Court in 1945. Another name that stands out is that of the retired general Khristo Loukov, who was assassinated by a communist cell (the urban counterparts of the partisan formations during the Second World War) on 13 February 1943. Loukov had been leader of the Legion, the pronounced racist, antisemitic and pro-Nazi organization in Bulgaria. Even in these days of antiterrorist fetishism, eyebrows would be raised, if a monument appeared in France, Italy or Germany, commemorating the “victims” of the anti-fascist resistance.

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Monument to the victims of communism

identity in a manner, which is absolutely unacceptable. Second, this is a symbol which, naturally, could be reinterpreted and this is very interesting, but we should not forget that this is [not ‘was’] the tomb of the Bulgarian statesman who crushed Bulgarian democracy in our newest history. Third, after all, we continue to be partial to Modern Europe and aspire to become part of it. The mausoleum’s very existence contradicts the basis of Christian civilization that is valid for the whole Old Continent.”66 Clichés are a natural and expected resort for politicians, but their presence in the statement of a prominent scholar is somewhat embarrassing. It was not only opinions of the famous that the press disseminated. In the absence of a genuine public debate, the mass media tried, in the ten days after the decision for the blowing up had had been published, to substitute with opinion polls and random street interviews. An express poll, taken by the National Center for the Study of Public Opinion among 528 citizens of Sofia showed that while 64 percent did not like the mausoleum (as against 36 percent who did), only 34 percent wanted it removed. A full 42 percent thought it could be transformed into something different, while 24 percent wanted it preserved as it was. A Gallup poll, without disclosing its sample, published the following results: 43 percent for the preservation of the mausoleum, 27 percent 66   Demokratsiia, 223, 24 August 1999, 12.

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for its destruction, 16 percent for a transformation, and 14 percent without an opinion.67 The narrative reactions, as usual, were more personal and more interesting. Dolia Stoilova, a retiree, didn’t particularly like the mausoleum and preferred a garden in its place but she thought it was a pity to blow it up. She thought it was a pre-election move on the part of the government.68 Miglena Stoicheva, a student, liked it in its function of an opera set. Toni, a saleswoman, opined: “I am not sure, but it seems to me that the mausoleum is a historical monument, and should be preserved.” She was not sure why it would be removed but “if they have decided, we cannot stop them.” The businessman Krassimir Sendov heard of the blowing up only after the fact: “Good or bad, the mausoleum is an architectural artifact, which is part of our history. I think it was not right to destroy it.” Zheko Khubenov, working in a private business, approved of the demolition: “It ought to have been removed because it disturbs the city. I’ve never been there. The building is ugly and there shouldn’t be a grave in the center of Sofia.” Ivo Matrakchiev, a computer programmer, had also never been in Dimitrov’s mausoleum and didn’t think he particularly needed to but added that he had seen Lenin in his mausoleum. Elka Koleva, an engineer, was adamant: “This is a historical monument and I don’t understand why it should be destroyed. Everywhere, all the great capitalist countries preserve all their historical monuments. This is our history. Besides, the building is an excellent set for the open air operas.”69 Indeed, references to what the “civilized” countries were doing often cropped up in the discussions: Franco’s monument was evoked, as were Mussolini’s buildings. Interestingly, none of the defenders of the demolition ever brought up as an honorable example the obliteration of Carthage by civilized Rome. Another example that no one mentioned, but what struck me during the time I lived in Vienna in 2001, was the continuous presence of the monstrous Flacktürme, the anti-craft towers built during the Nazi period to house up to thirty thousand troops. (Illustration 10) There are five of them in Vienna, two of which I could not avoid seeing regularly: one in the Augarten in Leopoldstadt, where I often used to take walks; the other in a prominent location in the very 67   Demokratsiia, 219, 20 August 1999, 10; Duma, 164, 23 August 1999, 7; Duma, 166, 25 August 1999, 6. 68  There were municipal elections scheduled for the fall in an atmosphere of general political apathy, when the anti-communist edge after the fall of the Videnov government in early 1997 had been considerably blunted. In these circumstances, the destruction of the mausoleum can be seen as a gesture on the part of the government to placate the hardcore anti-communist electorate of the UDF and mobilize it politically. 69   Demokratsiia, 221, 22 August 1999: 3; Duma, 160, 18 August 1999, 3.

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illustration 10 Vienna, Flackturm

heart of Vienna, dwarfing the big baroque Mariahilferkirche behind which it was built. True, there had been public discussions, and many Viennese feel hugely embarrassed by the presence of these ugly giants, but for whatever ­reason—the price of the demolition not the least—they are there to stay. In Germany, on contrast to Bulgaria, the memory of Dimitrov is preserved, at least at the official level, not perhaps as collective memory but certainly as historical memory. A plaque serves as a lieu de mémoire at the building where Dimitrov used to live in Charlottenburg in Berlin between 1930 and 1933. It had been put there by the former Senate of West Berlin and stands at its place to this day. If it is true that Germans today would hardly know who Georgi Dimitrov is, it is not because he has been officially removed from historical memory—that is, the memory produced by historians and state institutions and meant to be internalized by the population through the channels of school education and propaganda, thus becoming what we call collective memory.70 70  However, the memory of Dimitrov in Leipzig, where the trial of 1933 was held, is minimal. The imposing building of the Federal Administrative Court, where the trials against Karl Liebknecht in 1907, and Dimitrov in 1933 took place, was transformed after the Second World War into the Museum of Fine Arts; it housed also the special museum devoted to the memory of Dimitrov, which had opened in 1952. In 2002, the building was given back to the administrative court. While a new building is being constructed to house the artifacts of the Museum of Fine Arts, nobody could answer my inquiries about the whereabouts

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This may point to one of the few but significant distinctions between historical and collective memory: the first is actively produced by individual historians, who tend to see themselves as ventriloquists for and preservers of collective memory; the second frequently, but not exclusively, triggered by the official historical narrative, and while it is often passively received and sometimes excessively manipulable, it also has its own autonomous sphere and unpredictable agency.71 A last example from a country that, in a humorous extension of Bush’s juvenile pronouncement about the Axis-of-Evil (Iraq-Iran-North Korea), was joined with Serbia and the Sudan in the troika of the Axis-of-Somewhat-Evil: Cuba. Along the broad Boulevard Paseo in the Vedado district of Havana there is a small garden, and in a little corner, almost hidden under the rich foliage, is a monument to Dimitrov. It consists of a huge bronze bust mounted on a concrete obelisk. A graffitist has added in black, above the bronze letters JORGE DIMITROV 1882–1949, the words LOS HUEVOS DE (the eggs/balls of) and adorned the stone with a depiction of a penis. (Illustration 11) Cuba is a country in which the project of “remembering communism” is still in the future, albeit in the near future, but it already has begun its good-humored transformations. Not that there were no suggestions for the transformation of the mausoleum in Bulgaria. They were plentiful and diverse. Some were in line with the Havana spirit: turn the mausoleum into a brewery, a discotheque, public toilets. There was an elaborate proposal to create a Madame Tussaud museum in the mausoleum with the figures of kings, political and revolutionary leaders, writers, composers, athletes.72 Most were serious, even solemn. The famous artist Svetlin Rusev thought the structure could become a museum of sculpture.73 The British historian of Bulgaria Richard Crampton, in an of the materials from Dimitrov’s museum during my visit in Leipzig in December 2003. A plaque in front of the federal building explains its history and mentions the Leipzig trial, but there is no respective explanation in the famous trial room. 71  This view clearly departs from the standard notion of collective memory as an important and formative agent, the principle feeding ground for historical memory, “le sol d’enracinement de l’historiographie.” Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 2000), 83. 72   Duma, 161, 19 August 1999, 3. The letter with the proposal, signed by Petîr Shurkov, specified, without exhausting, some of the names: the khans Kubrat, Asparukh, and Krum, the tsars Boris and Simeon, Paisii, Petîr Beron. Rakovski, Levski, Botev, Prince Battenberg, King Ferdinand, Stambolov, the war generals, Alexander Stamboliiski, Alexander Tsankov, Georgi Dimitrov, Nikola Petkov, Todor Zhivkov, as well as the soccer stars Georgi Asparukhov, Nikola Kotkov, Stoichkov. The names of famous writers, poets, artists, actors, composers, singers etc. were not mentioned. 73   Duma, 161, 19 August 1999: 3; 164, 23 August 1999, 7.

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illustration 11 Havana, Cuba, January 2003

interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, suggested the mausoleum be turned into a monument for victims of totalitarianism.74 The historian Nikolai Genchev thought it appropriate to make it into a monument dedicated to the fallen in different wars.75 The Bulgarian Communist Party leader Alexander Paunov wanted it transformed into a Pantheon of martial glory.76 74   Duma, 167, 26 August 1999, 2. 75   Duma, 163, 21 August 1999, 3. 76   Duma, 161, 19 August 1999, 3.

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The political movement Gergiovden initially suggested that the mausoleum be left and made into a futuristic symbol.77 Later, it backed the initiative of its members from Dimitrovgrad, the city built by the enthusiastic labor of communist brigades in the 1940s and 1950s and that refused to change its name in the 1990s: these citizens asked for the remains of the mausoleum, which they wanted to place in a “lane of the rejected” together with other communist monuments that had been pulled down in the past decade in different parts of the country.78 Other suggestions involved turning it unto the largest disco club in the Balkans, or a department of the National Library or of the National Historical Museum, or an exhibition place with a large sundial measuring the time after the regime’s collapse.79 Trying to make sense of the square between the National Gallery/ former palace and the mausoleum as a semiotic space, the cultural historian Dafina Dicheva laments the victory of destruction. She notes that, while the two buildings were indeed entangled in an epic metaphoric struggle, their physical presence side by side secured not only a synchronic but also a diachronic representation of the city’s historical meanings, like a palimpsest. Transition periods always vacillate between rewriting and reassessment, but one would hope that any act would bring in some new meaning. The demolition of the mausoleum, according to Dicheva, left only a “desemioticized center and the debilitating power of the symbol of destruction, threatening in its insistence that anything can disappear.” In this context, she interprets the subsequent Bierfest in the square as a symbolic demolition in the wake of the physical one. It does not invert reality into the carnivalesque and thus integrate culture; instead it disintegrates culture by transforming reality into carnival, where the Bierfest is experienced as total reality. “Destruction does not allow the reconstruction of the social and cultural order … On the contrary, it is a mirror inversion, which blocks the social and individual experience at the level of anticulture.”80 The fact that the destruction of the mausoleum came not as a spontaneous act on the heels of a popular upheaval at the time of the “velvet revolution” but as a hastily organized and sloppily executed performance a full 77   Duma, 164, 23 August 1999, 7. 78   Duma, 165, 24 August 1999, 1; Demokratsiia, 222, 23 August 1999, 3. 79  Nikolai Voukov, “Monuments beyond the Representations of Power: Monuments of the Socialist Past in Post-1989 Bulgaria,” in Arnold Bartetzky, Marina Dmitrieva, Stefan Troebst, eds. Neue Staaten—neue Bilder? Visuelle Kultur im Dienst staatlicher Selbstdarstellung in Zentral—und Osteuropa seit 1918 (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2005). 80  Dafina Dicheva, “Genealogiia na bîlgarskata stolitsa—resemiotizatsiia i desemiotizatsiia na konteksta,” in Svetlana Khristova, ed., Gradît: simvoli, obrazi, identichnosti (Sofia: LIK, 2002), 140–142.

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decade after “the changes” contributed, of course, to the general indifference to the fate of this particular site, despite the emotional pathos of some of the articulated opinions. Most importantly, it explains the richness and diversity of nuanced assessments as well as the complete freedom of their expression. Indeed, if the demolition had taken place in the fall of 1989 or even at the beginning of 1990, one would be tempted to make sense of it in the framework of revolutionary struggles over meaning. As Christopher Winks appropriately observes: “Revolutions are as much struggles over meaning (symbolic and semantic alike) as over the allocation of social wealth.”81 The destruction of the Vendôme Column on 16 May 1871 came two and a half weeks after the proclamation of the Commune. It was a highly theatricalized spectacle, with a crowd of over twenty thousand assembled, waiting for three hours while a brass band played “La Marseillaise”.82 In contrast, the 1999 mausoleum spectacle was a poorly staged mimicry of a revolutionary act, minus the music, minus the public, exactly ten years after the triggering event—a mimicry that raised again all the conceptual questions of how exactly the original event of 1989 should be designated and assessed. Should it be called a revolution (even if “velvet” one), thus focusing on its quality of rupture? Or should it be seen as an internal coup that, despite denoting a break, emphasizes the agents’ continuity? Or can its significance best be captured by the innocuous and meaningless term “changes” which, however, has in its favor the fact that it has become the preferred and most widely utilized expression by the public, no matter what their political preferences, and has thus withstood the withering effects of time? 7

Recalling the Reminiscence

Memory has been defined in philosophical terms as “our capacity to retain what we sense, enjoy and suffer, and thus to become knowing in our perception and other activities.” As such, it is subsumed under intellect and is hardly distinguishable from other activities or states, most dramatically from amnesia, where the power of retention is preserved. But retention is only one side of the memory process: its other aspect is recall, the capacity to recollect past events and to recognize people, places and facts. Psychologists refer to these two aspects as semantic memory, the basis for procedural knowledge (i.e. 81   Christopher Winks, “Ruins and Foundation Stones. The Paris Commune and the Destruction of the Vendôme Columns,” in Max Blechmand, ed., Revolutionary Romanticism (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1999), 103. 82  Ibid., 107–108.

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knowledge of how to do something, that may be retained even in amnesiacs), and episodic memory, the basis for declarative knowledge (i.e. knowledge of specific facts). It is the attempt to characterize the connection between experience and episodic memory, or recall, that has attracted most of the current research on memory.83 It is appropriate at this point to go back and “recall” the opening reminiscences of this text. This recollection is no longer the same as the initial experience, of course; it is inflected by the thoughts that have come in between. Strictly speaking, only the statues in front of the university would correspond entirely to the notion of lieu de mémoire as utilized and defined by Nora. For the generations who were part of the institution-building efforts of the young state and for whom the figures of the “pre-Liberation period”84 were an important component of their immediate childhood memories, and not just textbook entries, the monument to the Brothers Georgievi (placed in 1934) used to be a veritable milieu de mémoire.85 To didactic historians, probably the most widely distributed breed among the species, these figures stand as symbols of genuine patriotism and selfless charity to be admired and emulated. To contemporary students, their names mean very little, and few actually know anything about their lives and other exploits. If not entirely forgotten, their huge bronze images, “like seashells on the shore from which the sea of living memory has retreated,” tease the historical memory of college students who pass by them every morning. There is nothing exceptional or unexpected in this. As Koselleck has remarked: “Memorials, like all works of art, have a surplus potential to take on a life of their own. For this reason, the original meaning of countless memorials is no longer recognizable without recourse to inscriptions or other empirically comprehensible reference signals”.86 In some sense, the statues could have served as an appropriate, though ironic milieu de mémoire for the present moment. During the communist decades bourgeois charity was despised as hypocritical, a means of soothing the guilty 83  Max Deutscher, “Memory,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig, vol. 6 (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 296; Mark H. Ashcraft, Human Memory and Cognition (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 77–79, 352–353; Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 163–176. 84  “Pre-Liberation period” is the matter-of-fact term with which the period before the secession of the autonomous Bulgarian Principality from the Ottoman Empire in 1878 is designated in Bulgarian historiography and everyday speech. It has the same status as ancien régime in French history. 85  Dochka Kisiova-Gogova, “Skuplturnite figure na daritelite na Sofiiskiia universitet i tekhniiat avtor,” in Daritelite. Evlogii i Khristo Georgievi (Sofia: Sofiiski universitet “Sv. Kliment Okhridski,” 1998). 86  Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 324.

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conscience of the wealthy. While the brothers Georgievi were celebrated during this period, they were seen as “patriots” and “revival figures,” if not quite revolutionaries, in contrast to today’s emphasis on their role as “donors.”87 After all, we are now in the era when the merchant and banker is seen as social hero, not the revolutionary. After 1989, especially with the new “primary accumulation” of capital, one would have hoped, even expected, that charitable activities would be revived, and many directed toward education, but this is not happening—at least, not yet. Could perhaps my “Goethe-Schiller” site have acquired some collective significance, at least as a sign or a name, since it utilizes a public historic monument and a monumental metaphor? Theoretically this is not impossible, although it is most unlikely, even as I make it public with this text. It may be borrowed, but it is too idiosyncratic, too ironic, too much a parody of conflated layers of historical memory from different national contexts to be turned it successfully into a shared historical site and memory. This, of course, poses the question of the relationship between the personal and the collective. By no definitional stretch, except in the most conventional sense, can the pharmacy qualify as a lieu de mémoire. Yet, the pharmacy is the only one of the examples that, with its immediacy and its first-hand, not transmitted, significance, can be seen as a milieu de mémoire, albeit an individual one: my own. Of course, it can never become collective memory, if collective memory is individual memory shared by a significant number of people. The pharmacy is a lieu whose functions were always exclusively orientational, purely ones of convenience, without any symbolic value, and it is precisely the symbolism that invests a place with some transcendent meaning. Yet, while this site cannot become one of collective experience, let alone collective memory, by subjecting it to this analysis, I am dealing with it as a historical fact or place. In a different context, Susan Crane asked: “When is the personal historical?” She replied to her own question: “Whenever one is thinking about oneself historically.”88 Crane herself was concerned primarily with the nature of historical consciousness as perceiving individually but signifying collectively and with the fine line running between autobiography and historiography. By looking at myself as a historian describing and reflecting on a certain period and approaching myself as an agent of this period who is 87  This is the title of the excellent collection of scholarly articles dedicated to the 175th anniversary of Khristo’s birth, the 170th anniversary of Evlogii’s birth, and the 110th anniversary of the University in 1995 (Kisiova-Gogova, op. cit.). 88  Susan A. Crane, “(Not) Writing History: Rethinking the Intersections of Personal History and Collective Memory with Hans von Aufsess,” History and Memory, 8, 1, 1996, 22.

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utilizing my own living memory as a historical source, I inevitably make some of this personal historical. For the duration of this text, at least, even the pharmacy assumes some historical meaning—metaphorically embodying, with its makeover from medical to clothing store, and with the physical although not functional presence of its former designation, the complex story of rupture and continuity between the communist and post-communist era. The mausoleum, although there is no trace of it any longer, may still qualify as a lieu de mémoire, or, rather, lieu de mémoire détruite, a curious site of destroyed memory with the preserved memory of the destruction. If it had not been blown up, it too would have still been a milieu de mémoire, given the timeframe in which it was erected within the living memory of several generations. Now, with its disappearance, it is but a phantom without even a trace of its existence that would serve as a sign of memory—unless, as behooves the changing nature of our times, we designate the garden, the stalls of the Bierfest, and the opera stage constructions as these shifting signs of memory through which lurks the silhouette of the phantom structure.89 So, in the end, maybe the destroyers were correct. It is only by removing the sign altogether, that one can assure the lifting of a site as milieu or lieu de mémoire. Of course, this cannot happen immediately. For the ones with the living memory, it will not happen at all. For someone, so closely entangled with the life of the mausoleum—its commandant Gergov, “in the evening, when the night falls on the adjacent buildings and the sky is clear, the silhouette of the mausoleum rises with the first stars. One can still see passers-by leaving a bunch of flowers … to memory. One can destroy a building, with hatred one can even kill, but historical memory cannot be erased by any mortal.”90 Well, actually it can. It can be and is being erased precisely by mortals, either physically or intellectually, because historical memory is itself the creation of mortals. But the mausoleum is alive even for the ones who have been indifferent or may have loathed it, as long as they belong to the generations that have seen it. A young twenty-five-year old architect in Sofia, Julia, laughingly tells her American colleague, pointing to the empty space: “the vacuum should contain 89  I have borrowed the category “sign of memory” from the excellent article by Mikhail Yampolsky 1995: 101. He employs it when describing the non-existent buildings of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the Palace of Soviets in Moscow—one demolished, the other one never erected—and how their phantom structures are inscribed into the swimming pool, which is transformed into a sign of memory. 90  Gergov, op. cit., 6.

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the now vacant Georgi Dimitrov mausoleum.”91 She had no strong feelings about it and was musing over the reasons for its demolition: maybe lack of public funding for renovation, maybe other urban plans, most likely a political gesture. She described herself as anti-communist, but she thought that there should be reconciliation between the past and the future, and that there was no need for drastic exorcisms. Commenting on the demolition of monuments as well as on the renaming of cities and streets, Julia said she liked New York, where she and her boyfriend wanted to emigrate, “because all the streets are straight and there are only numbers and letters to remember.”92 History becomes unbearable occasionally. The paradox is that the mausoleum was imposed in 1949 as a public symbol and barely existed as private thought. Today, it is physically excised from the public space but is present as an architectural specter in one’s private spatial memory: “Let’s meet at the mausoleum!”93 This will be the case until the generations that have seen it will themselves have passed away, and with them any trace of individual memory of the mausoleum will be demographically cleansed. This should bring at last the private and public closure of the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov in Sofia. Koselleck has remarked that: “political experiences or messages can only be passed down beyond the death of a particular generation with great effort. To this end, societal institutions are required. In any case, the memorial, the supposed guarantor of sensory transmission beyond death, does not appear to be capable of achieving this task by itself. A conscious adoption of the message is always necessary.”94 The demolishers seem to have overestimated the power of the memorial.95 91  Elisabeth Dubin, “Ever Forget: A Story of Monumental Confusion in the Eastern Bloc”, Paranoia, vol. 3, issue 3, 1999 (http://www.binginit.com/loudpaper/articles/ever_forget .html). 92  Here the interesting issue of the frequent change of urban and rural place names is being raised. Yet clearly the changing of names and the changing of landmarks, despite being seemingly identical, evokes different emotional responses, although both have had a long historical tradition in all societies. Somehow the changing of names is accepted, no matter whether triumphantly or grudgingly. So is the changing function of a landmark, as long as it is still preserved. In both cases, the signifier is changed, but the signified stays. However, the signified’s complete erasure is strongly and passionately contested, probably because of its imposing materiality. 93  There is a comic poignancy with the expression “to meet behind the mausoleum,” because the garden behind the mausoleum was used during the communist period as a meeting place for gay couples. 94  Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 324–325. 95  In his excellent article on the destruction of the mausoleum Voukov makes a similar point by pointing to the paradox “that one would not need a site to visit in order to remember,”

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To follow up on Koselleck, the centerpiece of the memory process is not the material object. The structure of King Mausolus at Halicarnassus has perished but not its name, and many of us carry memories of its imagined reconstructed appearance from art and history textbooks. Examples can be added ad infinitum, but the objection rests not only on analogies. In contemporary work on memory, significant attention is paid to the role of imagery. Until about a century ago, the dogma was that “memory is a present image within which one must discern pastness and valid indications of the past.” Philosophers like Wittgenstein, Ryle and J. L. Austin demonstrated, however, that remembering has little to do with imagery: “The recall may leave us with images; images of the past need not have provided the recall”.96 The act of the destroyers was based on a somewhat passé theory of memory. It presumed that by erasing the artifact, recall is prevented because there is no direct image—except, of course, for the generation where the image has left a trace. But the recall, as new research demonstrates, need not be produced by a literal trace; recall itself, prompted by a context—a book, a discussion, a thought—can produce an image.97 What is even more essential is the emotional component. In the absence of specific imagery, it is feelings that become essential in reliving the past. “So, while memory does not consist in a memory image, the existence of a complex interplay of image and affect in the processes of recall is important to the cluster of ideas brought together under memory.”98 The mausoleum will remain as an image in the purview of the collective and personal memories of the generation that has seen it. It is likely to remain at least in the verbal memory of the next generation as one of the prime symbols as well as to the “aged-old truth that a killing often sticks more to memory than a peaceful presence would, and this paradox was what perplexed and blocked in a way the destruction of the mausoleum until 1999.” Nikoloai Voukov, “The Destruction of Georgi Dimitrov’s Mausleum in Sofia: The ‘Incoincidence’ between Memory and Its Referents,” in Places of Memory, ed. Augustin Ioan, special issue of Octogon, Bucharest, 2003. 96  Deutscher, “Memory,” 297. 97  As Christopher Winks perceptively observes: “Buildings and monuments can inspire leaps of memory and association, but they are not the stuff of which memory is made. That belongs to lived moments: a word, an encounter, a glance” (Winks 1999: 118). 98  Ibid., 298. The field of memory studies is still underdeveloped, although most efforts today are concentrated in the direction of neurobiology. Some research circles have revived the ancient idea of a memory trace, which preserves the information received from experience. Only when there is activation of such a trace does the highly specific causal connection occur, which is required for true remembering. Others contest this idea, basing themselves on the very little knowledge we have about the physiological processes involving the memory of specific events. They insist that memory is highly dispersed in alternative neural networks rather than encoded in specific brain cells.

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of the period. After all, as Umberto Eco observed: “Language—like all semiotic systems—has the ability to render present what is not present.”99 This is quite apart from the evaluative component of how we remember communism. Remembering communism, however, is not easily blown up with powder: the processes are too complex and the stakes too high. One is tempted to conclude that one can remain skeptical about the success of Orwell’s shredding machine. Oblivion cannot be imposed by decree. And yet again, one is compelled to add this qualification: at least for the near future, at least for a number of people. True, Umberto Eco has declared a putative ars oblivionalis (the art of forgetting) to be part either of the Department of Adynata or the Department of Impossibilia, containing the sciences that are historically impossible. Or, if we were seriously to consider it as a semiotic project, part of the Department of Oxymoronica, containing sciences that are self-contained and analytically impossible. For him, there can be no phenomenology of forgetting.100 Paul Ricoeur, in contrast, is one of a few philosophers who offer, however briefly, a phenomenology of forgetting, although he too voices skepticism about an ars oblivionalis on par with the ars memoriae. He distinguished between three levels or approaches to memory and forgetting. These are obstructed memory and forgetting (l’oubli et la mémoire empêchée on the level of the psychopathological), manipulated memory and forgetting (l’oubli et la mémoire manipulée on the practical or instrumental level), and controlled memory and forgetting (l’oubli et la mémoire commandée/oblige on the ethicalpolitical level).101 In the last context, forgetting and pardoning are intrinsically linked through the problematic of the past: forgetting, to memory and fidelity to the past; pardoning, to culpability and reconciliation with the past. “Indeed,

99  Umberto Eco, “An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 103, 3, May 1988, 258. Eco invokes the famous example given by Abelard— “nulla rosa est” (there is no rose, such a thing like a rose never existed)—that actually brings to mind the image of a rose. He also brings in the dialectic of contiguity and similarity, according to which “if object x has been in some way imagined to be in contact with object y, or if object x presents any sort of homology with object y, every time object x is evoked, object y will be as well” (Ibid., 254). 100  Eco, op. cit., 254, 260. Eco does not deny natural and accidental forgetting, such as one induced by drugs, cerebral trauma or repression. But he maintains that there cannot be a conscious technique for forgetting on par with the memory techniques, because semiotics is “by definition a mechanism that presents something to the mind and therefore a mechanism for producing intentional acts … a device that stalls natural processes of oblivion” (259, 260). 101  Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 83–97, 575–589.

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a happy forgetting is the horizon of the pacified memory.”102 Ricoeur further differentiates between forgetting through deletion and a more measured, reserved kind of forgetting, closely connected to the opposition between amnesia and amnesty. In considering amnesty as institutional forgetting, Ricoeur notes that it aims at reconciliation and civil peace.103 In this sense one can hypothesize by analogy that persecution, punishment, eradication, even if explicitly articulated as forgetting, may serve as institutional reminders but can also (sometimes consciously) exacerbate societal tensions. Eco, while dismissing what Harald Weinrich calls a lethatechnics (as the obverse counterpart to mnemotechnics), still allows for the possibility to forget “on account not of defect but of excess.” He gives the simple example of an assertion pronounced aloud, whose meaning cannot be destroyed but it can be distorted if another assertion is pronounced at the same moment and the two are superimposed. “There are no voluntary devices for forgetting, but there are devices for remembering badly; it is necessary to multiply the semiosis.”104 All the numerous proposals to convert the structure of the mausoleum into something with a different function were intuitively based on this semiotic rule: “[o]ne forgets not by cancellation but by superimposition, not by producing absence but by multiplying presences.”105 This could have been the only intelligent and effective strategy to transform the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov from a lieu de mémoire into a lieu d’oubli.

102  Ibid., 536. 103  Ibid., 586, 650–656. 104  Eco, op. cit., 259; Harald Weinrich, Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997). 105  Eco, op. cit., 260.

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Remembering Communism: Similar Trajectories, Different Memories In the last decade, I have been leading a project (together with my colleagues Stefan Troebst and Augusta Dimou) on “Remembering Communism.” It resulted in a number of workshops, conferences, and three volumes: Maria Todorova, ed. Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation, (New York: Social Science Research Council, Columbia University Press, 2010); Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, eds. Postcommunist nostalgia. (New York: Berghahn Publishers, 2010, paperback edition 2012); Maria Todorova, Stefan Troebst and Augusta Dimou, Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe, (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2014). This chapter, using excerpts from these introductions, is mostly based on the introduction to the latest volume, reproduced with the permission of the publishers.

The most remarkable thing about the spontaneous streets demonstrations in different Bulgarian cities in February 2013 was not their surprising (and totally unexpected) success in toppling the center-right government of Boiko Borisov, but two features that made them unique: the demography of the protesters and their slogans. The crowd was mostly composed of young people, university and high-school students in their teens, and there was an almost complete avoidance of political sloganeering. The protests started over the high electricity bills but were generally directed against the corruption of the political class, the arrogance of the nouveaux riches and the abject poverty. Some of this was noticed in passing, but not given much weight. Yet, this was the most important lesson: the neo-liberal covenant was broken, and there was no memory whatsoever of the past, no allusion to communism. Political commentators were comparing the street protests to 1989 or 1997 (the fall of the socialist government of Zhan Videnov), and were bemoaning the potential for chaos and lack of political maturity.1 One journalist matched 1  Instead of hailing it as an expression of political activism after decades of passivity, even anomie, the writer Georgi Gospodinov and some other intellectuals, patronizingly mused that this was not the way “to tame sorrow in a civilized society” and that it was a manifestation of a lack of civil society, reminiscent of ochlocracy (http://www.dnevnik.bg/

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them up to “Occupy Wall Street.” The essence of both movements, she wrote, was a protest against the social and economic inequality: If the idea of ‘Occupy’ has the chance to win in a single country (according to Lenin’s famous formula about communism), this country seems to be ours. After we proved that socialism is not social, and democracy not democratic, we are about to show that this global romantic movement can be pragmatic … According to the theory, the situation is revolutionary when the upper classes cannot go on any more, and the people does not want any more. Well, we are again contrary: the rulers do not want any more, and the people cannot go on.2 The transition is officially over. In fact, it was over already by the turn of the millennium everywhere in Eastern Europe with the end of the privatization process and the legitimation of the new property class. This was the case not only in East-Central Europe, but across the whole region (with the possible exception of Belarus), except that in the rest it took another decade for the realization to sink in. Less and less people have immediate memories of communism, and the pockets with positive memories—among the older and poorer—are marginalized or disappearing. Already in 2002, sociological surveys found that 33 percent of Bulgarians had no immediate memory of the socialist period.3 A razvlechenie/2013/02/23/2008771_georgi_gospodinov_vuprosut_ne_e_koi_shte_plati/); see also http://www.kultura.bg/bg/article/view/20671. In contrast, the same writer referred to the ongoing protests that started in June and which have turned increasingly into a theatrical happening, as a rebellion of the “beautiful,” “educated” and “intelligent,” (http://www. presseurop.eu/en/content/artcile/3895871-citizens-head-back-streets) in line with analyses (Georgi Ganev, 24 chasa, 8 July 2013) which defined them as the rising of the middle class against the symbiotic alliance between oligarchy and poverty. 2  Veselina Sedlarska, (http://reduta.bg/v2/aricle/революя-народе), 3 March 2013. Ironically, this was the only comment with some allusion (even jestingly) to communism. The protesters were not looking back, and even bloggers commented on this text that it might be of interest 15–20 years from now as a historical analysis, but now people did not need interpretations on why this is happening, but how to proceed. An excellent analysis of the language of the protests between the hegemonic liberal and national registers and in the face of a complete disenchantment with the political system is Jana Tsoneva, “Real Power to the People,” Novi Levi Perspektivi (New Left Perspectives), 22 March 2013, http://novilevi. org/nlpenglish/87-real-power. This latter internet publication, patterned after the New Left Review, has as its motto “It is now easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (here attributed to Frederick Jameson but in fact belonging to H. Bruce Franklin. 3  Standart, 9 December 2002 (http://stndart.news.bg/article.php?cid=7&pid=0&aid=116536). A commensurate number of the poorest Bulgarians (34 percent) still voted for the socialist

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decade later, this figure is dramatically smaller. Just as in Poland where Edward Gierek was becoming as remote a personality as Boleslaw I, socialism was at best (if it was taught in schools at all) as distant as the medieval period and certainly less known.4 At the turn of the century, Charles Maier concluded that while the memory of Nazi crimes had not faded, it had done so for communist ones, and he dubbed them “the hot memory of Nazism versus the cold memory of Communism.”5 In a useful synthesis of the attempts to equate the crimes of the two regimes, he came on the side of the ones like Robert Conquest who for all his scathing condemnation of Soviet atrocities, felt that the Holocaust was “worse” than Stalinist crimes.6 Among the factors he distinguished between targeted and stochastic terror, the qualitative and quantitative differences of complicity and shame, and the incentives to memorize. Maier’s analysis continues to be valid a decade later, even if there are periodical attempts to “warm up” the cold memory of communism.7 While he did not develop it further, Maier’s was the rare and very careful voice of the historian, who spoke not of fascist memory in general, but of the particular memory of Nazism, which he juxtaposed not to communism in general, but solely to Stalinism. The memory of Italian, Spanish or Portuguese fascism is arguably as cold (with analogous sporadic “hot flashes”) as the memory of communism. Maier correctly observed that historical memory is never universal, and that what counts in a proper analysis is investigating who does the remembering, and what is being remembered. Pierre Nora would add that the recent upsurge of memory has seen a dramatic increase in the uses of the past for political, commercial and touristic purposes, and that there is no monopoly over the interpretations of the past, certainly not the monopoly of the historian. The latter has to share this place with judges and legislators, victims and perpetrators, journalists and writers: “To claim the right to memory is, at bottom, to call for justice.”8 Memory wars party in 2002, but by 2009 this number dwindled down to 17.7 percent, as the use of socialist rhetoric could not mask the neo-liberal consensus across party lines. 4  Eckert. Das Bulletin, Nr.12, Winter 2012, 38. 5  Transit (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen), 2002, N.22. 6  Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, New York, 2000, xii. 7  These come in most acute form from the newly established former Soviet republics (the Baltics and Ukraine). In the academic realm, the latest attempt in this direction has been Vladimir Tismanenanu, The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2012), Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), and the discussion their books have generated. 8  Pierre Nora in Das Gedächtnis des Jahrhunderts, IWM Report, Newsletter 72, 15 April 2005 (http://www.iwm.at/a-con103.htm, 4).

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are waged essentially over the attempts to impose a universal and mandatory memory on everyone.9 Yet, outside the purview of these concerns remains how people understand their own lives in light of how official public memory is constructed. At a preliminary workshop, a colleague shared that his dominant—and perhaps only memory of communism—was the constant and thoroughly permeating suspicion and fear. This can very well be an authentic emotional recollection and many, especially among the intellectuals, would corroborate this verdict. Such a recollection undoubtedly provokes disgust with the regime that generated such a reaction since emotions can be generalized as moral positions. Was this, however, a widespread and pervading feeling? What if this was not the dominant recollection? What if it is not generalizable across the social spectrum? Documenting also other cases and showing that fear did not overtake every corner of lived experience and that other emotions (also positive ones) were at play, does not imply taking an immoral position. This interest in concrete subjectivity and the relation between individual and public memory is what inspired the long-term project on “Remembering Communism” which spanned the last decade. 1

Ideas and Goals

The general goal of the project was to study the processes of remembering communism10 by bringing together two approaches and two diverse bodies of theoretical and historiographical literature: one on memory, the other one on communism.11 While the project was motivated initially by a critical stance 9  Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, eds. A European Memory: Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York: Berghahn, 2010). 10  In this text, socialism and communism are used as synonyms, since the purpose is not an intellectual history of these currents, but an investigation of the period conventionally called socialist (as self-designation) or communist (as ascription). This use also purposely overlooks the official ideological distinction made by state socialism between the two consecutive stages of socialism and communism. In addition, since post-communism, rather than post-socialism, has become the broadly used and accepted category, communism too emerges here as the preferred, but not exclusive, category. 11  Instead of referencing here the weighty literature on memory, from the classics to the memory boom in the past decades, I will mention only a few important review articles and works that have assessed the state of the field in different periods: Alon Confino, “Collective memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” The American Historical Review, vol. 102, December 1997; Gavriel Rosenfeld, “A Looming Crash or Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory ‘Industry’,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 81,

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toward existing assessments of communism, especially the transitology enterprise, its emphasis was on the processes of remembering rather than on providing a definitive study of a past period.12 This attention to the processual aspects of memory lays stress on the constant and consecutive reassessments and rearticulations of the communist experience, and seeks to emphasize lived experience as inflected by present day political and social exigencies. Of course, this is not to posit an “authentic ontological” experience which is to be compared to later memories. Nor does it posit an authentic primary memory; in a word, it is not about nailing down the past but about an ongoing process of double-take. This, by definition, makes the project long lasting because it entails the periodic revisiting of subjects and objects of memory, which is why the notion of remembering is favored over the concept of memory. The project comes out of the basic premise that there is no single practice of communism. While one can argue that there was frequently an attempt to impose a blueprint of socialism, hence the “similar trajectories” of the title, there was also no single idea of socialism. The communist experience was extremely diverse not only geographically and diachronically, but it was pluralized across national, ethnic, social, professional, gender, and generational borders, hence it engendered different memories.13 We tried to avoid questions whose answers are entailed or suggested already in the query. Of course, we too unavoidably were working from some premises, the most important one being that we took seriously the memories of people who had experienced communism and showed respect to their claims of having lived a full and dignified life, in contrast to claims that all that is remaining from communism is a collection of exotic memories or that people had at best lived halfway normal lives.

No. 1, March 2009; Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Serouusi, Daniel Levy, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford University Press, 2011); Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge University Press, 2011). 12  The transitology enterprise needed a dozen years before it was robustly critiqued: Valerie Bunce, “The Political Economy of Postsocialism,” Slavic Review, Special Issue: Ten Years after 1989: What Have We Learned? Vol. 58, No. 4, 1999, 756–793; Valerie Bunce, “Rethinking Recent Democratization: Lessons from the Postcommunist Experience,” World Politics, Vol. 55, No. 2, 2003, 167–192; Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13, 2002, 5–21; Charles King, “Post-Postcommunism: Transition, Comparison, and the End of ‘Eastern Europe,’ ” World Politics, 53, 1, 2001, 143–172. 13  As a long-term endeavor, this project could cover the whole communist and post-communist world in a global setting, including China, Central and South-East Asia, Africa, and parts of Latin America, but also spaces where communism was never in power, but was strong and is remembered nonetheless (e.g. Greece, Spain, Italy, France, Latin America, etc.).

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There are multiple ways to make the case for “remembering communism.”14 On a philosophical plane, it allows us to learn about alternative ways of organizing society, or of thinking about or of hoping for the “good life.” Philosophers are divided in their attitudes toward the historical past. Some, especially the ones belonging to the analytical tradition, disregard the historical legacy by treating it as something that relates to present-day philosophy as the history of science relates to science. Others, however, argue that one can and does periodically turn to predecessors for glimpses of truth, or at least valid insights, such as can be brought back to the present. Given the concrete situation today, it would be instructive to look not only at the record of violence of communism, of authoritarian and totalitarian practices, but also at the communist legacy in education, culture in general, health care, and welfare. More broadly, this is part of the memory of the Left alternative (social democratic, anarchist, communist, etc.) in Western Europe and North America as well, something that will highlight in a proper comparative perspective the place of the communist experience as one of the major (the evaluative component quite apart) reformist and modernizing drives of modernity. While it is not to be idealized, it would be difficult to dismiss it. This is definitely not a nostalgic look back, but an attempt to broaden the “horizons of expectations” while staying true to the “spaces of experience.”15 As Plato reminds us, there is no city so corrupted that it does not realize something of the true city. Closely linked to that is a certain political imperative. We still need serious explanations of a couple of across-the-border phenomena: one is the periodic return of the Left (not necessarily only former communists) in the political leadership of Eastern Europe;16 the other is the general phenomenon of postcommunist nostalgia, its mechanisms, and articulation. It is a problematic that cries out for comparative study. More specifically, it poses the question under what conditions can terrible, or at least unpleasant things, be forgotten? This 14  A version of this argumentation was made in the introduction of Maria Todorova, ed., Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation, New York: SSRC, Columbia University Press, 2010. 15  Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Cambridge University Press, 1985, 270–275; David Engerman, “Introduction: Histories of the Future and the Future of History” AHR Forum, The American Historical Review, vol. 117, N. 5, Dec. 2012. 16  At the early stages of post-communist development, one could read politically correct and superficial analyses about the fundamental distinction between the Central Europeans who had rid themselves of their communists, and the rest (the Balkans, Russia, and the former Soviet Republics) who were irredeemable. As usual, the practice challenges great models, and there is the uncomfortable fact that this happened also among the “best”: Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.

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has important implications for social reconciliation. It also underscores the gap between legal and institutional change on the one hand, and the public opinion’s perception and attitudes toward democracy, on the other hand. But the problem has a wider resonance and it has to do with the worldwide reception and reactions for/against globalization. Not only is there no “end of history,” as well as no end of ideology, the symptoms point to an incipient rise of leftist orientation and a renewed interest in leftist politics. Thus, the elaboration of a concrete, historically grounded, and nuanced scholarly perspective on the communist experience and its legacy remains mandatory. There is a historical and existential urgency about approaching the problem: simply put, people who “remember” the beginnings of communism in Eastern Europe as a lived experience are quickly dying out. The ones who were born under communism and spent all their formative years under this regime—the ones forty to seventy years old—are busily adapting, or actively forgetting. At the same time, in the societies that in the past quarter century have moved away from communism, research on the communist past understandably focuses on the oppressive side of the system. This makes rather pressing the scholars’ task to rescue from oblivion or from disappearance the artifacts, but especially the thoughts, about this past. Although the oral record is the first to fall into oblivion, the cultural heritage in general is fragile. There is already an enormous body of memoirs waiting to be collected and systematically interpreted. What at first glance might seem a simple rescue operation is methodologically challenging: it entails creating, systematizing, and/or preserving an incredibly rich and unique source for scholarly analysis. One of the challenges is to try to capture and salvage from oblivion not only a memory of a particular past and its cultural heritage that belongs to the less wealthy part of the world and is, accordingly, more endangered, but also one that today (and quite apart from the reasons and justification for it) is publicly denigrated, producing a culture of defeat and politics of regret.17 The politics of memory, which is a work of progress in itself with no clear outcome, can be successful only if it relies on or is in agreement with (some) lived experience. Because memory is polysemic by nature, there will always be memories that would resist the politics of memory produced by authorities and institutions, which is reductive by definition. In a fine exegesis of Halbwachs, Marie-Claire Lavabre speaks of memory as a milieu de rencontre, literally a meeting place, but conveying something more, a place of exchange, 17  Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003; Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility, New York: Routledge, 2007.

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a place of communication.18 Collective memory, she explains, is not the simple adding up of individual recollections. In this respect, Jeffrey K. Olick makes the useful distinction between collected memory (as an aggregate of individual memories) and collective memory as “a social fact in and of itself,” though he warns against the implicit transcendentalism of this formulation.19 Individual recollections are made possible by collective memory, which is a fact of communication between individuals. Collective memory, in its turn, is a product of individual remembrances. It too follows eventually a process of homogenization and reduction but at every level it is dynamic, a work of progress. Located at the intersection of individual and personal memory with the politics of memory, the project seeks to express their complex dialectic. Written by contemporaries, eye-witnesses and participants in the events and processes described, it attempts to convey the dynamism of the encounter between personal recollections, the communicative shaping of collective memories, and their encounters with the politics of memory. 2

Understanding Communism by Analogy

The project followed two parallel and at times combined objectives. On the one hand, with a view to memory studies, it aimed at analyzing the social and political circumstances that condition the way memory is constructed, transformed, stabilized or canonized. To this end, researchers resorted to different methodological tools and sources from oral history projects, sociological questionnaires, the analysis of memoirs and diaries, press and internet sites, to popular media of visual mass culture such as feature films, advertisements and documentaries. Part of the research aimed at capturing the attitudes of specific target groups such as artists, young people or members of the nomenclatura, different social groups such as workers, peasants and the intelligentsia, as well as specific age groups. On the other hand, more with a view toward communist studies, the project tried to supplement the above picture with analyses of sources produced by the regimes themselves. Here studies on different aspects of political and everyday life under communism were undertaken, focusing on the relationship between social actors and the state. These included state 18  Marie-Claire Lavabre, “Usage et mésusage de la notion de la mémoire,” Critique international, 2000/2, no. 7, 54–55. See also Marie-Claire Lavabre, “Can we influence memory?” History and Memory: Present Reflections on the Past to Build our Future. International Symposium by the Macau Ricci Institute. Macao: Macao Ricci Institute, 2008, 471–477. 19  Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret, op. cit., 7, 23–33.

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policies towards the family, women and ethnic minorities, as well as the workings of the secret police. The aim was to identify several clusters in which analogical readings could be achieved by circulating the relevant country chapters, so that appropriate cross-references and adjustments could be made. In the end, a number of themes emerged, covering topics such as the everyday in material, visual, and popular culture, exploring themes ranging from the semiotics of food and kitsch to cinema and the internet, the politics of memory and commemoration; schooling, socialist childhood and generational memories; the disappearing spaces of labor and the fragments of memory left of them, dealing chiefly with industrial sites in urban centers and the issues of class consciousness; remembering the ubiquitous state, from the unfading problem of the secret police to its complex relationship with the artistic and academic intelligentsia; the differences between remembering the system as a whole and specific, sometimes extraordinary events; as well as comparing the state-of-the-art in the different countries. The general euphoria following the end of “real socialism,” the opening of the archives, the pouring out of memoirs, the immodest but enthusiastic predictions of a revolution in historical assessment, the gradual if uneven institutionalization of research on communism created at first the deceptive impression of a systemic and undifferentiated approach to the recent past across the board. The reality amply belied these early predictions. What followed, however, was an avalanche of hasty typologies and the attendant generalizations about societies that had allegedly come to terms with their communist past, and such where the communist legacy was persisting. In most cases these typologies served as the academic legitimation of political decisions concerning the speed and direction of European Union accession. By general consent, the East German case was unique: the transition was abrupt resulting in a complete institutional rupture and overhaul. The dominant paradigm in the ensuing decades has been the theory of the two dictatorships in German history and how to deal with them. This became effectively a double-edged paradigm. On the one hand, it easily equalized the Nazi and the SED dictatorships, something that has been followed, especially in some of the former Soviet republics (notably the Ukraine and the Baltic states), but also in the countries of the former Warsaw pact, by comparing Nazism to communism at large, and not only to Stalinism. On the other hand, by continuing to be alert about fascism, the German paradigm deviated from a trend that can be seen in all of the rest of Eastern Europe, namely the denigration of the anti-fascist struggle, accompanied by the rehabilitation of fascist figures, the embellishment of the interwar regimes as vanished utopias, their treatment

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as a lost golden standard, after which communism caused “a detour from its ‘natural’ development.”20 The way communism is perceived and assessed may be a function of the different speeds of exit from communism: very abrupt in the German case, negotiated, but at a different pace elsewhere, perhaps most protracted in Romania, and less so in Bulgaria. Poland, like Bulgaria and unlike the German Democratic republic, had a negotiated and more gradual transition, but especially in the last decade it has demonstrated a much greater sophistication in the scholarly study of the communism, due in no small measure to the continuity of a strong sociological tradition already from the communist period. As in Germany, the archival revolution in the whole region was the central occurrence that triggered interest and numerous projects. But unlike Germany, there was not a comparable immediate explosion of attempts to confront the recent past, the striving for Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the untranslatable German term, meaning reassessment, coming to terms with the past, coping and dealing with it, but also including redress, even retribution). The Hungarian writer Péter Eszterházy said to this effect, “It is no wonder there is no corresponding word for Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Hungarian,” because there is no corresponding activity, which he called “work, a European duty.”21 Indeed, Timothy Garton Ash posits the existence of a new norm of integrity, a DIN-standard (i.e. Deutsche Industrienorm) in history writing.22 On the other hand, James McAdams poses the question whether this is not yet another German Sonderweg.23 To counter this moralizing and patronizing motif, it should be pointed out that it is not only the East Europeans who are not following this road: it took a whole generation in post-Franco Spain after 1975 to reach the climactic moment of opening mass graves in 2000 and putting the issue on the table, not to mention the lag of a generation and over two 20  The quote comes from the contribution of Cristina Petrescu and Dragos Petrescu, “The Canon of Remembering Romanian Communism: From Autobiographical Recollectyions to Collective Representations”, in Maria Todorova, Stefan Troebst and Augusta Dimou, Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2014), 45. It may be most pronounced in the Romanian case, but it is also very characteristic for Poland, Bulgaria and the rest of Eastern Europe. 21  Péter Eszterházy, “Also: die Keule,” Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, no. 237, October 11, 2004, 7. See also Alfred Gosser, “Response to Péter Eszterházy.” Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, no. 248, October 23, 2004. 22  Timothy Garton Ash, “Mesomnesie”, in: Transit. Europäische Revue, Heft 22, 2001/2002, 32–48. 23  James McAdams, “Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung nach 1989: Eind deutscher Sonderweg?” Deutschland Archiv, 5, 2003, 851–860.

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decades for the Germans to begin to come to terms with their legacy, a process that is still incomplete.24 Besides, it is not entirely true. Practically all capital cities of Eastern Europe have a monument to the victims of communism, and most have museums, not commemorating but condemning communist rule: from the House of Terror in Budapest to the Occupation Museum in Riga and the Museum of Genocide Victims in Lithuania, the Stasi headquarters in Berlin, and so on. In this, the other East Europeans as a whole are following the two-decade lag typical for West Germany, rather than East Germany where the Vergangenheitsbewältigung was imposed. Everywhere, the first years of the transition were dominated by the totalitarian paradigm. In the study of East Germany, the promise of the totalitarianism theory virtually crashed under empirical scrutiny, and what becomes highlighted are aporias, antinomies, and paradoxes, rather than the rigid contours of a regime formula. Elsewhere, there continues to be heated debate about the applicability of totalitarianism, and there is the quest for alternative theoretical approaches. Romania seems to remain one of the few places where totalitarianism remains dominant and unquestioned for the time being. In none of the countries has the research of communism been organized so early and in such prominent centers as in Germany, and nowhere has it been so well funded, but the growing tendency of the institutionalization of such research is discernible everywhere. One characteristic that sets the German case apart is its early internationalization. This was a result of the general internationalization of scholarship on Germany following the Second World War, but in the aftermath of 1989 it produced work by foreign scholars that was less exposed to and constrained by the local politics of history. This is a tendency whose influence begins to be felt slowly but gradually also in other East European countries,25 but it is far from reaching the level of ­historiographical 24  It also bears mention that a U.S. law requiring the disclosure of classified records related to Nazi war criminals was only passed in 1998, but the CIA has been effectively subverting it by arguing that the law only requires disclosure of records for war crimes, not war criminals, thus effectively blocking information about the agency’s postwar collaboration with former Nazis. In February 2005, the CIA finally agreed to reverse this legal stance and for the first time acknowledged the existence of such a relationship (Jehl 2005). 25  Very important in this respect, especially for Romania, is the work of Katherine Verdery and Gail Kligman, Peasants Under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962 (Princeton University Press, 2011); Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender After Socialism (Princeton University Press, 2000); Gail Kligman, The politics of duplicity: controlling reproduction in Ceaușescu’s Romania

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de-nationalization. The opening of the files of the secret services of the former Eastern bloc is unprecedented in the history of modern statehood and is beginning to produce a new academic genre: scholars confronted with and analyzing their own files.26 3

Post-Communist Nostalgia

In a 2004 issue of the Balcanis Book Review printed in Ljubljana, the Slovenian sociologist Mitja Velikonja opened his rubric with a spoof of Churchill’s cold war speech: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” In Velikonja’s words “Od Szczecina na Baltiku do Trsta na Jadranu” what has descended is … nostalgia.”27 The journal dedicated to the theme is in itself a monument to nostalgia. Balkanis is printed in Ljubljana by two publishers (the cultural society Balkanika in Slovenia and the Balkanis society in Belgrade, Serbia), with two co-publishers (the companies buybook in Sarajevo, and attack in Zagreb). The publication’s organization is already evoking the specter of the lost nostalgic space: Yugoslavia. I personally happen to prefer Marx to Churchill, so my own post-spoof is based on the Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunting the world of academia: the study of post-communist nostalgia.” From Berlin, Warsaw, and Sofia, to Toronto, Philadelphia and Urbana, academics seem obsessed with this

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). For Bulgaria, equally important are the works of Gerald Creed, Domesticating Revolution: from Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Deema Kaneff, Who Owns the Past: The Politics of Time in a ‘Model’ Bulgarian Village (Berghahn, 2004); Kristen Ghodsee, The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Ghodsee, “Red Nostalgia? Communism, Women’s Emancipation, and Economic Transformation in Bulgaria. L’Homme: Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 15 (1): 33–46. See also Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff, Post Socialist Peasants?: Rural and Urban Constructions of Identity in Eastern Europe, East Asia and the Former Soviet Union (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Chris Hann & the “Property Relations” Group, The Postsocialist Agrarian Question: Property Relations and the Rural Condition (Münster: LitVerlag, 2003). Much of this work has been translated in the local languages. 26  See Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History (Vintage, 1998); Katherine Verdery, Secrets and Truths. Knowledge Practices of the Romanian Secret Police, Oskar-HaleckiVorlesungen (Leipzig: Universitätsverlag, 2013). Verdery has also announced that she is working on a book My Life as a Spy: Memoirs of a Cold War Anthropologist. 27  Mitja Velikonja, “Tistega lepega dne: Značilnosti sodobnega nostalgičnega diskurza,” Balcanis, 12–16, Letnik 5, pomlad-zima 2004.

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most elusive of concepts. But then, as Jürgen Kocka (2004) has perceptively observed: “The attractiveness of a concept rarely correlates with its precision.”28 It may not be too bold to state that there is a broad consensus on the fact that the phenomenon (or at least something which is represented as a phenomenon under the designation “nostalgia”) exists from Central Europe to Central Asia. It is certainly not confined to the former communist world. While practically all studies of nostalgia start with brief accounts of its history and etymology (as a neologism diagnosing a medical condition in the eighteenth century—yearning for lost home, and expanded to mean a desire to return to lost place or time), it is clear that as a concept it has long ago traversed the boundaries of the medical profession and has entered the terrain of writers and poets. More importantly, in the past two-three decades the term has been expanded, and it also has been heavily theorized (mostly critically and negatively for what has been seen as its inherent conservatism and distance from real history). It has been linked to memory, history, affect; it has been attached to political allegiances and models of consumerism; it has been variously approached as “a form of psychological whiplash, a cultural style, the abdication of memory, an aesthetic treatment, an ornament, a technique, a part of the narrative of history, or a part of the narrative of critical theory.”29 More importantly, as Sean Scanlan reminds us in the special 2004 issue of The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies dedicated to nostalgia, and featuring pieces on rock music, history, film, African American, American Indian and émigré literature), nostalgia is no longer treated as the programmatic equivalent of bad memory, as a social disease (Susan Stewart), the abdication of memory (Christopher Lasch), or the symptom/cause of the rifts between historical signifiers and their signifieds (Frederic Jameson): “Now, nostalgia may be a style or design or narrative that serves to comment on how memory works. Rather than an end reaction to yearning, it is understood as a technique for provoking a secondary reaction.”30 Linda Hutcheon proclaims nostalgia to be “transideological,” something that “can be made to ‘happen’ by (and to) anyone of any political persuasion.”31 For Kathleen Stewart “nostalgia, like the economy, is everywhere. But it is a cultural practice, not a given content; its forms, 28  Jürgen Kocka, “The Middle Classes in Europe,” in Hartmut Kaelble, European Societies during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004). 29  Call for papers for the 2004 issue of The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, dedicated to nostalgia with guest editors Sean Scanlan and Tom Lutz. https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn. edu/cfp/2004/02/08/cfp-nostalgia-5704-journal-issue (last visited 21 July 2017). 30  Sean Scanlan, “Introduction,” The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Issue 5, 2004. 31  Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, Studies in Comparative Literature, 30, 2000, 189–207.

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meanings, and effects shift with the context—it depends on where the speaker stands in the landscape of the present.”32 But how about the specific case of post-communist nostalgia? Is it so different from “normal” free-world nostalgia? Media coverage would let us believe this is the case. It consistently treats the phenomenon as a malady. In the conceptual apparatus of journalism (but also in plenty of academic discourse) the comparative notions are communism and fascism, or communism and Nazism, not capitalism and communism, or liberalism (including neo-­ liberalism) and communism. Roger Cohen (2005: 2) in the International Herald Tribune regrets that “years of debate have not resolved how the terrible twins of the 20th century, communism and fascism, should be viewed on a scale of evil.”33 For him, communism was more murderous than Nazism, and the “dirty laundry of communism has not yet been hung in the sun.” In such circumstances post-communist nostalgia can be subsumed only (and appropriately) under the Marxist notion of false consciousness. And it is not only journalists. The famous moral philosopher Tsvetan Todorov moralized in an interview on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, that in Russia, communism was less dead than anywhere else, and that “nationalism can keep an illusory hope, a nostalgia for communism.” Chuckling, and unabashedly cutting off Russia from “the European world”, he explained that in Europe “we don’t have this problem” because there is not the conflation of imperial or state grandeur with communism: In Eastern European countries, we were slaves. I think that today it is a much more important task to acquire a sense of lucidity about the communist ideology than about Nazism. Because apart from a few cranks in Germany and other countries, nobody extols the Nazi ideology anymore. Whereas the communist ideology continues to be extolled by significant minorities. [… The idea of communism, unfortunately, is not definitively compromised …] In France, in the Third World. Therefore, it is important to recall that this ideology, which at a certain level of generality can be seductive—it will bring us all fraternity, a glorious radiant future—, is a deadly one. It is important to call in mind that nothing good can come from this ideology.34 32  Kathleen Stewart, “Nostalgia—A Polemic,” Cultural Anthropology, 3/3, 1988, 22. 33  Roger Cohen, “Unraveling the truth from a painful history,” International Herald Tribune, 11 May 2005, 2. 34  Tzvetan Todorov, “Memory of evil, enticement to good,” Eurozine (www.euroxine.com), 19 August 2005 (first published in a Latvian version in Rigas Laiks 5/2005).

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Only a few pages earlier in his interview he had explained that the appeal of communism in France, when he arrived in the country in the 1960s, came from the communists’ premier role in the Resistance and also that “the Communists were the only ones who were ready to go from house to house, to do the shopping for an old lady who didn’t have a car, to help an old handicapped man and so on. They did what Christians do, as a rule.” This at the end is summarized as seductive but deadly. But then, Todorov is a moral philosopher, not an ­analytical one. Scholars who do on-the-ground research tend to refrain from big moralizing lectures (although their research contains big moral lessons). A lot of precious studies are already accumulated although not quite yet coordinated. What they have come up with is a serious symptomatology. Here is a kaleidoscopic and impressionistic overview: A study, carried out by two Polish sociologists and presented at the American Sociological Association’s 2003 meeting, discovered strong symptoms of nostalgia among middle class, middle aged Poles “the social group which is commonly thought to have been the chief beneficiary of the process of market transition.” All opinion surveys report vast majorities of respondents with positive attitudes toward socialism but since these are scorned in the public discourse and the media, they are subject to self-censorship. The study concludes that the main source of nostalgic attitudes is the merging of economic and social status after the transition: “The ongoing fusion of social and economic status gives those less financially successful a feeling of being deprived of both social position and of economic wellbeing.” More ominous is the other conclusion of the authors that this “is likely to transform itself into a more militant opposition to the principles underlying the transition to market-based economy.”35 Another study on Poland points out that “what people remember about socialism is a pride in production and in their labour and also a sense of being part of a project that was modern and directed towards the general good. When people speak angrily about Poland being turned into a ‘Third World’ country, their anger is both about economic decline, about what they see as a two-sided coin of dependency and exploitation, and about being transformed not into the (even more modern) capitalist future but back into a pre-socialist past.” This “trauma of deindustrialization” has brought about alcoholism, drug abuse, 35  Wieliczko, Barbara and Zuk, Marcin, “Post-Communist Nostalgia Among the Middle-Aged Middle-Class Poles,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Atlanta Hilton Hotel, Atlanta, GA, Aug 16, 2003 http://www.allacademic.com/ meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/0/6/7/0/p106706_index.html.

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homelessness, and the feminization of poverty. Frances Pine is very cautious in her conclusion, however: “Rather than a case of collective amnesia or even nostalgia, I think this should be taken partly as an invocation of a past in order to contrast it with, and thereby criticize, the present. Social memory is selective and contextual. When people evoked the ‘good’ socialist past, they were not denying the corruption, the shortages, the queues and the endless intrusions and infringements of the state; rather, they were choosing to emphasize other aspects: economic security, full employment, universal healthcare and education.”36 I purposely start out with Poland because of its paradigmatic status as the A-grade transitioning country. Another unlikely, because unexpected, carrier of the affliction is Romania. David A. Kideckel in his study on the unmaking of the Romanian working class, describes the alienation of workers who decry politicians of all stripes and “see the whole process as designed to keep workers down” (through unemployment, low salaries, deindustrialization, education toward business, foreign languages etc. rather than engineering and others needed for the industrial work place): Reacting against the increased class divisions and insecurities of neocapitalism, many workers long for a return to the security and predictability of socialism. Like miners and workers elsewhere in Russia and East-Central Europe, from the best case of the Czech Republic, through war-torn Serbia, to prostrate Russia and Ukraine, declining economic circumstances encourage a turn to socialist nostalgia, nationalist cant or frustrated inaction. In Romania some workers even display portraits of Ceauşescu on lathes, lockers and workbenches. When they are asked what is needed to put Romania right, they say ‘an iron hand’, ‘a six-month military dictatorship’, or ‘Hitler, Stalin, and Vlad the Impaler rolled into one’.37 Ruth Mandel has documented striking percentages of the population preferring the old system in Central Asia, and the “Barometer of the New Europe,” a 2005 study by the Institute for social research in Budapest, which polled 36  Frances Pine, “Retreat to the household? Gendered domains in postsocialist Poland,” in C. M. Hann, ed. Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia (London: Routledge, 2002), 111. 37  David A. Kideckel, “The unmaking of an East-Central European working class,” in C. M. Hann, ed. Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, London: (Routledge, 2002), 124; David A. Kideckel, “The Undead: Nicolae Ceaușescu and Paternalist Politics in Romanian Society and Culture, in John Borneman, ed. Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End of Political Authority (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 123–147.

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Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenians, Estonians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians and Byelorussians, found smaller but still significant numbers in Eastern Europe.38 In China, the nostalgia for Mao is not even post-socialists: the regime still claims to be communist, and the rural unrests accost the state for not being faithful to this claim.39 In Bulgaria, the traditional response both before and after the fall of communism has been jokes. A popular one is about a woman “who sits bolt upright in the middle of the night in panic.” She jumps out of bed and rushes to the bathroom to look in the medicine cabinet. Then, she runs into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. Finally, she dashes to the window and looks out into the street. Relieved, she returns to the bedroom. Her husband asks her, “What’s wrong with you?” “I had a terrible nightmare”, she says, “I dreamt we could still afford to buy medicine, that the refrigerator was absolutely full, and that the streets were safe and clean.” “How is that a nightmare?” the husband asks. The woman shakes her head, “I thought the communists were back in power.” Kristen Ghodsee has convincingly analyzed the gendered consequences of emerging capitalism. While women’s experiences in any society are mixed, she shows that in Bulgaria but also in other East European countries, women are more likely to be represented in leftists and centrist parties (Green, liberal, socialist, and communist, rather than in right-wing ones (people’s parties, Christian parties, etc.).40 The joke captures nicely the ambivalence of attitudes toward the communist past. It has been asserted that the nostalgic discourse is binary by definition, with the past always depicted as better.41 This is certainly not the case in Eastern Europe. Even the polls reflecting the positive attitudes are most often responses to questions of the type: “What predominated: the good or bad parts of the system?” “Would you evaluate the past in extremely negative, moderate 38  Ruth Mandel, “Seeding civil society,” in C. M. Hann, ed. Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia (London: Routledge, 2002). More than 60 percent in Kazakhstan, 27oercent in Uzbekistan; about 50 percent in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The result of the East European poll shows about a quarter of the population preferring the old regime, with up to 38 percent for Bulgaria, 36 percent for Russia, 31 percent for Slovakia. Czechs (52 percent) and Estonians (37 percent) seems to be the most satisfied with present arrangements (Standart, 10 March 2006—www.standartnews.com). 39  Geremie R. Barmé. On Contemporary Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999; Joseph Kahn, “A sharp debate erupts in China over ideologies,” The New York Times, 12 March 2006. 40  Kristen Ghodsee, “Red Nostalgia? Communism, Women’s Emancipation, and Economic Transformation in Bulgaria,” L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft, 15, 1, 2004, 33, 45–46. 41  Velikonja, op. cit., 39.

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or even positive terms?” Ivan Klima, the great Czech novelist, told United Press International in an interview that “Nobody is nostalgic for the Stalinist era but many old people are nostalgic for their youth. They miss the security of communist times when they knew they would get a pension they could live off, prices were stable and they couldn’t lose their flats or their jobs.”42 Klima shook off the phenomenon apologetically, by confining it exclusively to an aging and passive minority, but given the stereotypes expected in the western press, this is understandable. What he could have said is that the longing for security and stability often leads people toward stupidity but it is not a stupid longing. And it is not only the longing for security, stability and prosperity. There is also the feeling of loss for a very specific form of sociability, and of vulgarization of the cultural life. Above all, there is a desire, among the ones who have lived through communism, even when they have opposed it or were indifferent to its ideology, to invest their lives with meaning and dignity, not to be thought of, remembered, or bemoaned as losers or “slaves.” Lastly, there is a new phenomenon: the tentative but growing curiosity among the younger generation. This brings us to the agents of nostalgia, and to the whole range of analytical questions we ought to ask about the issues we are dealing with. Who is speaking or performing nostalgia? After all, none of the subjects of nostalgia, the ones who are producing its artifacts and who are identified as its agents, define it as nostalgia. Nostalgia or “post-communist” nostalgia is an ascriptive term, and when it was first used, mostly in journalistic accounts, it had a strong tinge of censure. It continues to be avoided as a self-description. But the obvious analytical parameters should follow divisions such as rural-urban; different generation clusters, especially within the generations having the lived experience of the system; the pronounced gender differences; and political orientation. What does nostalgia express? What is its content? It was already pointed out that there are the elements of disappointment, social exhaustion, economic re-categorization, generational fatigue, quest for dignity, but also an activist critique of the present using the past as a mirror, irony, alongside a purely consumerist aesthetics not much different from the one that we see in the West.43 Can we offer a typology of post-communist nostalgia, one that is also sufficiently discriminating between regional and national differences? 42  Gareth Harding, “East Europe’s communist nostalgia,” Washington Times, 11 August 2004. 43  Rainer Gries, “‘Hurrah, I’m Still Alive!’ East German Products Demonstrating East German Identities,” in Sibelan Forrester, Magdalena Zaborowska, and Elena Gapova, eds., Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures Through an East-West Gaze (Indiana University Press, 2004), 181–199.

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After all, the communist experience was diverse enough to produce different post-­communist responses despite the systemic similarities. There is the post-communist nostalgia with a certain tinge of imperial or colonial nostalgia (the case of the USSR and even Yugoslavia); Svetlana Boym introduces the distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia which she uses to differentiate between national and social memory.44 In her reading restorative nostalgia is about truth and tradition, whereas reflective nostalgia, ironic and ambivalent, calls absolute truth into doubt. But one could distinguish between restorationist (in the sense of the desire to restore the past) and restorative or curative nostalgia. As Gerald Creed wisely observed, the embrace of the term nostalgia came at a time—the turn of the century—when attempts at reviving or sustaining elements of socialism became no longer sustainable. He suggests, contrary to Boym, that nostalgia always involves the impossibility of return. The impossibility of restoration validates nostalgia, which indexes a particular type of memory, based on lived experience, yet one that despite being relatively recent is not reversible or restorable. The very concept not only invalidated the complaints of the disenfranchised but through the commodification of nostalgia furthered the consolidation of neoliberal capitalism.45 What are the spheres of life and particular genres in which nostalgia is expressed? How much is it censured and self-censured? Here we have everything in the oral domain from casual conversations to scholarly interviews, and formal genres, from song and literature to film. Monumentalization (the proliferation of theme parks, sculpture gardens and museum exhibits) as well as celebrations belong to this domain. How we document nostalgia, how we analyze and represent it—with what kinds of analytical tools and within what kinds of narrative or other genres—also falls within this rubric. And finally, what is our stake as scholars, in this endeavor? Why would we pay such attention to something ephemeral (even if a real phenomenon) and something which is most often represented as reprehensible, something which is destined (according to the ones who believe in the “end of history” to “the dustbin of history”? This goes, it seems to me, beyond the usual motives to describe and analyze a significant social phenomenon. Communism had been at its outset, and there exists broad consensus on that, a powerful utopia. It continued to exert a forceful influence as a utopian project even after it was 44  Boym, Svetlana Boym. The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), viii, 41–56. 45  Gerald Creed, “Strange Bedfellows: Socialist Nostalgia and Neoliberalism in Bulgaria,” Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, eds., Post-Communist Nostalgia (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 42–43.

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wedded to the state in 1917. It was only after 1956, and especially after 1968 that communism, in the words of one of its greatest analysts, the Polish philosopher Lezsek Kolakowski, “seized to be an intellectual issue and was transformed into a power problem.”46 Despite the fact that Tsvetan Todorov is my compatriot and namesake, I prefer another French philosopher, Alain Badiou, who wrote an essay on philosophy and the “death of communism” in 1998. He premised his reflections on a simple hypothesis that the political and subjective history of communisms is essentially divided from their state history. He admitted that “at the level of the order of the State (of things) there is the ‘death of communism.’ But for thought, it is no more than a second death.” For Badiou, communism, which he saw as a philosophy of the community existing in political thought not only since 1917 but since 1793, had become obsolete at least since 1968. Yet, he argues, ‘communist’ is not reducible to “the finished sequence during which parties attributed the term to themselves, not to the sequence during which the idea of a politics of emancipation was being debated under this name” and he exclaims: “how could the ‘death of communism’ be the name of an event once we remark that every historical event is communist, inasmuch as ‘communist’ designates the trans-temporal subjectivity of emancipation?”47 Speaking specifically about the fall of state communism in 1989, he bemoans the fact that this was entirely a state affair. He is aggravated that East Europeans did not come up with something new, a real social alternative, a new utopia: “And how could it have been otherwise if it is true, as affirmed by all and sundry, that what they think and want, the people of Russia and Hungary and Bulgaria, is nothing other than what already exists, and has done for quite a while, in our sad countries called, who knows why, ‘Western’?” This desire, he contended, could do nothing but “comfort the pre-eminence of the state and constitutional views of these processes. Elections and property owners, politicians and racketeers: is this all they want?”48 Post-communist nostalgia is a partial answer to this question. As far as scholars are concerned, one can hear in Badiou’s lament overtones of Benjamin’s activist stance: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger The danger affects both the content of the tradition 46  quoted in Iskra Baeva “1956-a—nachaloto na dîlgiia zalez na sîvetskiia komunizîm, Kultura, 7 (2402), 23 February 2006. 47  Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London, New York: Continuum, 2003), 96–97, 103. 48  Ibid., 101.

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and its receivers. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it Only the historian that will have the gift to spark hope in the past is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” I am a great admirer of Benjamin but lest this sounds too melodramatic, I will end by evoking a co-regionalist, a Polish wit who commented on this—the Sixth of Benjamin’s theses “On the Concept of History”—that we don’t know yet what our past is going to be.49 49  Daniel Singer, “Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noire,” The Nation, 25 November 1999.

Index Abdülaziz 429 Africa 18, 26, 34, 37, 56, 66n, 68–69, 72n, 78, 88, 93n, 100, 101, 106n, 118n, 145, 190, 224, 304, 478, 479, 645n Ahmad, Aijaz 170, 403n Albania 32, 36, 50, 76, 85–87, 99n, 103, 141, 160, 188, 189, 210, 216, 237, 239–243, 247, 252–254, 257–258, 276, 283, 288–289, 319, 322–323, 342, 345, 361n, 380n, 382, 389, 395n, 417n, 435, 441n, 443, 459, 463n, 474n, 496–497, 503, 519n, 525n Algeria 178, 429, 436 allochronism 19, 30, 41 alterity 5, 37, 70–71, 102, 169–173, 197–198, 200–207, 469 Anderson, Benedict 14–16, 18, 24–25, 419 Andreichin, Georgi 556–567 Angola 436, 607 Annales 3, 13n, 542, 599 antemurale christianitatis 477 antipolitics 588 antiquization 188, 195 Aprilov, Vasil 375, 377–378, 397 Arabs 60, 66, 68, 129, 166–167, 170, 178, 260, 383, 399, 403, 406, 414, 428, 431, 481 area studies 2, 200, 250, 459–461, 464 Argentina 190 Armenia 129, 154, 326, 331, 335, 404, 430, 518, 524, 566 Ash, Timothy 144n, 435, 650, 652n Asia 26, 31, 62, 63, 67–70, 84, 89, 97, 144, 165, 181, 217n, 301n, 332, 363, 479, 520, 539 Asia Minor 36, 64, 66, 106n, 126, 153, 189, 254, 388n, 495n, 559, 560 Asian studies 2, 112, 116n Asianism 61, 448, 481, 521, 571n, 613 Atatürk 153, 567, 607n Ausgleich 50, 429 Australia 190, 510n Austria 50, 51n, 86, 117n, 122n, 126n, 145, 147n, 190, 211n, 216n, 241, 296, 323, 343, 437, 463 Austria-Hungary 118n, 157, 184–185, 210, 239, 241, 512, 520 Avramov, Dimitîr 592n, 625–626

Avramov, Roumen 445n ayans 278 backwardness 4, 6, 13, 19–41, 47, 52–54, 145, 281n, 332, 344, 382, 463n, 521, 571, 590 Badiou, Alain 660 Baghdad 428, 476n Bakîrdzhiev, Evgeni 609, 622n Balkan culture 220–231 Balkan federation 228, 352, 520, 552, 564 Balkan identity  5, 28, 218, 221–231 Balkan mentality 226–228 Balkan nationalism 17–18, 21n, 23n, 34, 36–38, 55n, 56n, 73–74, 91, 101, 107, 122, 139, 147n, 152–153, 176, 188–189, 321–365, 374–396, 408n, 418, 420, 438, 431–432, 443, 483–484, 513n, 559, 579, 583, 585 Balkan Peninsula 29, 84, 127, 143, 319–323, 342, 389n, 521 Balkan Political Club 221 Balkan Wars 7, 86, 88, 118–123, 140, 160, 184, 204, 227, 240, 242, 253–254, 322–324, 341, 345, 347, 389n, 392, 393n, 454–455, 466n, 510–534, 566, 568, 576 balkanism 5, 70, 84, 88–89, 93–114, 115–118, 134–149, 162, 168–169, 171, 203–206, 227, 617–619 balkanization 86–89, 94, 115, 141, 237 Balkans passim and Central Europe 208–220 as name 83–85 as metaphor 85–90 as region 19n, 31–34, 29, 64, 66–72, 102–103, 124–128, 160, 197–198, 559 as legacy 60, 73–74, 90–92, 103–111 Baltics 38, 208, 216, 217n, 229, 262, 288, 300n, 643n, 649, 652 Barth, Fredrik 70n, 206, 370n Barthes, Roland 147 Bauman, Zygmunt 14, 48, 49n, 110 Bebel, August 522, 554 Becker, Carl-Heinrich 60–64, 70 Beissinger, Mark 591 Belgium 152, 175, 210, 242, 286, 506 Bell, John 466n, 571n, 573

664 Belgrade 66, 122n, 151, 155–156, 226, 268, 521, 652 Belgrade Circle 93–94 Benjamin, Walter 14, 43n, 58, 660–661 Berisha, Sali 152 Bernath, Mathias 143–144 Beron, Peter 375, 630n Bessarabia 322, 342, 560 Billig, Michael 181–182 Bismarck, Otto 69–70, 159, 560 Bjelić, Dušan 93–94, 96n, 101n Black Book of Communism 539 Blagoev, Dimitar 293, 297, 548, 550, 552, 570n, 571n, 572–577 Blanqui, Louis Auguste 550–551, 574 Blîskov, Iliya 378 Blount, Henry 128–129 Bodnar, Judit 113 Bogomils 83, 326, 357n Bogorov, Ivan 375 Bolsheviks 7, 326n, 351, 510, 516, 518n, 544–549, 551, 558, 561, 563, 565, 569, 574, 576 Bonner, Elena 300, 301 Boris I 327, 357n, 359, 630n Boris III 606, 621, 626n Borisov, Boiko 641 Bosnia-Hercegovina 68, 118n, 122n, 133, 145, 151, 153–155, 157, 188–189, 239, 242–250, 252, 257, 273, 276, 288, 361n, 389–390, 394, 396n, 415, 417, 479, 481, 496–197, 500 Botev, Khristo 328, 378, 586, 630n Boué, Ami 127, 423n Bougres 83 Boym, Svetlana 659 Bozveli, Neofit 375 Braudel, Fernand 3, 13, 24 Britain 17, 18n, 39, 66, 118, 124, 125, 132–134, 146, 152, 166, 179, 182, 190, 212, 223, 242, 512 Brown, Edward 125–126 Brown, Keith 465n, 513, 532 Bucharest 217, 337, 373, 429, 431n, 432, 552 Bulgaria passim and Balkan wars 510–534 and Central Europe 210–220 and Islam 95n, 199, 226, 386–419, 483–509

Index Bulgarian civil society 579–593 communism 56n, 546–562, 565–577 demography 239–257, 262–279, 286, 288–29 education, see under Education language 366–385 nationalism 22n, 23n, 26, 28, 34, 36, 38–39, 55n, 176–177, 184–187, 319–365 post-communism 435–455, 594–642, 650, 652n, 657, 660 women 300–315 Burnham, Linden Forbes 607 Burov, Kamen 403–405, 412n, 413–414 Byzantinism 74 Byzantium 68, 72–74, 83–84, 91, 95, 106–108, 121n, 127, 144, 163, 184, 216, 217n, 224, 321n, 341–342, 357, 375, 381n, 440, 470, 478, 481, 514, 559 Callimaco 84 Canada 190, 416n, 537–538 Čapo Žmegač, Jasna 295, 297 Carnegie report 74, 118–120, 123, 510–515, 528n, 532–533 Castro, Fidel 607 Catholicism 84, 193, 216n, 263, 395, 477 Caucasus 99, 300n, 559 Ceasaropapism 160 Ceauşescu, Nikolae 14n, 87, 354, 360n, 466n, 467n, 651n, 656 Central Asia 72n, 76, 92, 99, 106n, 108, 481, 653, 656 Central Europe, see Europe Chatterjee, Partha 22n, 97n, 114, 181 Chepino 485–488, 500n Chervenkov, Vîlko 621 Chile 190 China 56n, 66, 92, 108, 179, 181, 189, 191, 226, 462, 556, 645n, 657 Chintulov, Dobri 378 cholera 252–253 çiftlik 277, 290 Circassians 264–265, 432–433, 497 civil society 7, 21n, 35n, 54n, 68, 448n, 467n, 579–593, 657n Cold War 19n, 88, 103, 108, 120, 146, 166, 198, 220, 354, 391n, 459, 560, 572n, 602n, 652

Index Comintern 444, 546, 548, 551, 556, 561–577, 603, 613 communism 72n, 91, 108, 150, 184, 224, 230, 301–302, 325, 339, 351–354, 408n, 446, 461, 464, 467–469, 477, 480, 502, 530, 537–539, 544, 553–556, 569, 579n, 588–591, 594, 600–603, 614, 626–627, 630, 639, 641–661 Conquest, Robert 643 Constantinople 68–69, 95, 121, 125–126, 132n, 184, 221, 226, 243, 252, 321, 336, 339, 343–344, 373, 379, 382, 383, 387n, 391n, 392, 422, 427–428, 430, 478, 479, 485, 488, 495n, 499n, 517, 532, 566 Crampton, Richard 336n, 340n, 630 Crane, Susan 635 Crete 64, 485 Crimean war 241, 253, 336, 373, 429, 432, 478 Croatia 101–102, 151–154, 185–189, 214, 216–217, 240–254, 257–258, 273, 276, 288, 380n, 417, 477, 480, 481, 564–565, 663n Cvijić, Jovan  84, 128 Cyprus 126, 214, 216, 331, 361, 415, 445, 447n Czech Republic 77, 145, 213–215, 617, 646n, 656 Czechoslovakia 50, 86, 88, 115, 209, 211n, 305, 332, 449, 459, 502, 607 Czechs 26–28, 35, 39, 51, 210, 212, 319, 447, 465n, 481, 520, 657–658 Dalmatia 102, 128n, 224–225, 250–251, 254, 470n Danube 68, 125, 210, 321–322, 339, 342–343, 356, 379, 431, 478 Danube province 241, 420–422, 427, 433 Davidov, Branko 399 Davis, Angela 607 Davison, Roderic 65n, 421n Deak, Ferenz 429 Delchev, Gotse 358n, 403n, 407, 414 Demography, see population history Denmark 190 Deutscher, Isaac 517, 529 Dertliev, Petîr 623 d’Estournelle de Constant, Paul-Henri 118n, 119, 510, 512, 514–515 Dimovski, Boris 592

665 Dimou, Augusta 56n, 467n, 559, 641 Dimitrov, Boiko 618 Dimitrov, Georgi 7, 548, 551, 573, 594–595, 601–608, 611–623, 628–630, 640 Dimitrov, Ilcho 329, 362–364, 391n, 624 Dimitrov, Strashimir 388n, 390n, 483, 496n, 497–500 Dîrvingov, Petîr 349–350 Djordjević, Vladan 32 Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Constantin 518, 562 Dobrudzha 319, 321–322, 342, 346n, 425n, 432 Dogan, Ahmed 331–332, 412, 417 Donchev, Anton 483, 501, 504, 506 Draginov, Metodi 483, 485–492, 494–496, 502 Drinov, Marin 340, 379, 486, 534n Drumev, Vasil 378 Duara, Prasenjit 181, 206 Dukhovnikov, Svetoslav 398 Eastern Rumelia 184, 240, 339, 340, 379, 380n, 392 Eco, Umberto 639 Education  29, 38, 50, 60, 130, 131, 180, 182, 190, 201–203, 226, 228, 230, 296, 334, 369, 372–373, 387, 394, 440, 656 Bulgarian 305–309, 326–329, 336, 338, 340n, 355n, 361, 364, 372, 375–377, 379, 380, 383–385, 393, 397, 407, 410, 420–422, 426–427, 429–432, 441, 444n, 450, 493, 502, 506, 534, 557, 568, 570n, 608, 629, 635, 643, 649 Egypt 62, 66, 128n, 129, 141, 168, 606, 613, 616 Ehrenpreis, Marcus 141–142 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 57, 591, 601n Engels, Friedrich 521, 551, 553–555, 574n Entangled history 3, 60, 64, 470, 473, 482, 590n Enver pasha 567 Environment 180, 278–279, 290, 301 Epyros 252, 323 Eszterházy, Péter 650 Estonia 50, 86, 210, 214, 216, 217n, 257, 267, 269, 270, 657 Ethiopia 68, 436 Eurasia  37, 64, 72, 78, 92, 106n, 108, 144–145, 162, 224, 460, 462, 656n, 657n

666 eurocentrism  16, 57, 62, 65, 118, 163, 205, 470, 578, 601 Europe passim Central 5, 19n, 25, 34, 35, 37, 42, 49–51, 57, 76, 88, 121, 144, 145, 179, 205, 208–220, 252, 257, 335, 363, 447–448, 462, 475, 477, 642, 653, 656 Eastern  18–20, 23, 25, 34–35, 37, 42, 49–51, 57, 76, 88, 92, 98, 99, 106, 108–109, 205, 215, 257–258, 270, 273, 300, 335, 360, 417, 438, 447–448, 450, 466, 468, 469n, 472, 88, 642, 646 Southeastern 19n, 22n, 33–35, 67, 72–74, 83, 85, 88, 90–92, 95–96, 106–108, 121n, 127, 270, 277, 290, 363, 415, 469n, 514, 520, 619 Western  18–19, 27, 56, 92, 109, 200, 206, 242, 277, 290, 363, 415, 469n, 514, 520, 619 Europeanization 74, 108, 309 European Union  65, 70, 78, 175, 212–214, 220n, 460, 482, 649 eyelet 420, 421n, 423 Fabian, Johannes 14, 40–41 fascism 301, 467, 481, 530, 556, 558, 603, 643, 649, 654 feminism, see gender Ferdinand von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha 121, 139, 630n Finland 190 Fotev, Georgi 502n, 625–626 Fotinov, Constantine 376 Foucault, Michel 58, 116, 170–171, 203–204, 540, 588, 598 France 21n, 76, 118, 124, 133, 166, 175–176, 182, 190, 212, 217, 245–246, 268, 304, 346, 417n, 423, 429, 475, 477, 478, 489, 503, 504, 506, 512, 533, 542, 543, 550, 553, 555, 570, 599, 654, 655 Fraser, Nancy 589–590 fratellanza 164, 277, 292n, 471 frérèche 164, 272, 273, 277, 471n Gellner, Ernest 18, 116n, 368, 590 Genchev, Nikolai 592, 631 gender 7, 39, 56n, 88, 90, 96, 178, 190, 200, 205, 207, 215, 223, 224, 245–247, 263,

Index 295, 300–315, 381, 405, 461, 468, 469n, 645, 651n, 652n, 656n, 657, 658 genocide 154–157, 331, 532, 651 Georgievi, Khristo and Evlogi 594, 634–645 Germany 17, 18, 39, 60, 85, 118, 143, 152, 159, 160n, 164, 182, 185, 190, 191, 198, 210, 212, 215, 226, 246, 257, 267–268, 284, 330, 338, 347, 353, 376, 423, 437, 472, 477, 489, 512, 547, 553–555, 657, 568, 570, 588, 603, 622, 625, 629, 650, 651, 654 Gerov, Naiden 488n Ghandi, Indira 607 Ghodsee, Kristen 469n, 652n, 657 Giddens, Antony 43, 45, 47n Gierek, Edward 643 Gîlîbov, Konstantin 323–325, 349n, 350–351, 364 Gladstone, William 133–134, 138 Gorbachev, Mikhail 33, 153n, 446–447 Gospodinov, Georgi 641n Gotwald, Klement 607 Gramsci, Antonio 34, 164, 577n, 588 Grandits, Hannes 295 Grant, Bruce 167, 168n Greece 16n, 58n, 68, 77, 84–85, 102, 103, 109, 121n, 127, 129, 130–131, 141, 144, 159, 160, 189, 199, 210, 217n, 237, 298–303, 336, 338, 342–345, 371–384, 395n, 397–399, 411, 415, 428–430, 460, 477–478, 485–492, 496n, 497, 524–525, 538–539, 552, 615, 618, 645n ancient 61–62, 64, 73, 91, 106, 107, 165, 224, 618 demography 239–244, 247–251, 253–255, 257, 263 nationalism 18, 26, 30, 34, 36, 38, 39, 49, 55, 153, 176, 183–185, 319–323, 373, 391, 463n,, 465n, 559–561, 565 Grossfamilie 184, 277, 471n Guedes, Jules 522 Gupta, Akil 19, 33 Gypsies, see Roma Habermas, Jürgen 47n, 48, 58, 588–590 Habsburg Empire 7, 21n, 30, 34, 37–38, 49, 51n, 86, 99–100, 108–109, 179, 209, 212, 216, 241, 250, 253–254, 376n, 461, 465n, 474–482

667

Index Haemus 84, 125–127 haiduts  326–328 Hajnal, John 273, 284–287 Halbwachs, Maurice 509, 647 Halpern, Joel  270, 276, 279, 289, 292, 295, 297n Hanebrink, Paul 474, 477, 481 Hann, Chris 589, 652n, 656n, 657n Haraszti, Miklós 593 Hatt-i Humayun 430 Havel, Václav 144, 145n, 213, 214n, 452, 466n, 467n Healy, Maureen 474, 477, 480 Herder, Johann Gottfried 135, 147, 233, 238, 368, 371, 375, 376n, 384 heroes 119, 136, 138, 185–187, 193, 195, 224, 328, 365n, 503, 504, 512, 579–583, 614, 635 histoire croisée, see Entangled history Hitchins, Keith 185, 464n, 561, 562n Hitov, Panayot 432 Holocaust 123, 153–155, 295, 468–469, 545, 546n, 643 Ho-Shi-Minh 607, 616 Hroch, Miroslaw 22n, 26–27, 35–36, 181, 212, 335, 372 Hungary 50, 51n, 53n, 77n, 85–86, 88, 102, 126n, 128n, 145, 160, 185, 190, 209, 211n, 213–216, 270, 287, 305, 319, 410n, 440, 446, 449, 459, 465n, 477, 481, 646n, 660 Huntington, Samuel 63, 160, 216, 218, 225 Hutton, Patrick 484, 534n, 540, 597, 598n, 600n Ibn Khaldun 79 Iceland 175, 190 identity 5, 99, 111, 169, 171, 179, 204, 206, 209, 386–387, 472n, 531, 617 and alterity 70, 102, 200n ascriptive 228, 397 Balkan 28, 218, 221–231 collective 17, 42, 291, 418, 480–481, 545n, 652n cultural 52, 115, 292 ethnic 26, 154n, 401, 407, 412, 443n European 115, 144n, 165, 203, 482 linguistic 345, 368

national 36n, 190, 202, 308n, 333, 344, 366, 465, 466n, 539, 540, 596 religious 394, 400, 493 self-identity 395, 397, 399, 402, 404 industrialization 20, 22, 39, 43, 53, 306, 315, 334, 351, 369, 410, 439, 601 Iran 61–63, 66, 126n, 382–383, 445, 460, 630 Iraq  66, 101, 123n, 156, 159n, 436, 476n, 532, 600, 630 Irby, Adelina 132, 133 Ireland 181, 189, 190, 246 Iser, Wofgang 147, 148 Islam 2, 7, 23n, 60–64, 68–70, 84, 116–117, 124, 128–129, 133–134, 155, 167, 169–170, 187, 198–199, 202n, 205, 254, 331, 345, 361n, 364, 386–419, 422–425, 431, 441n, 442–445, 460, 469n, 475–509 Israel 66, 156, 181, 182, 190, 446, 460 Istanbul, see Constantinople Italy 17, 18, 85, 102, 114, 126n, 185, 242, 246, 257, 267, 269, 270, 280, 323, 447, 489, 506, 553, 577, 626n, 645n Jancar, Barbara  302, 308n, 314–315 Japan 66, 178, 179, 189–191, 408, 437 Jelavich, Barbara 22n, 51n, 132, 395n Jireček, Konstantin 486 Jaurès, Jean 522, 526n jus valachicum 278 Jusdanis, Gregory 56, 101 Kabakchiev, Khristo 523, 548n, 550, 551n, 573 kadi 426, 433 Kanitz, Felix 397, 423n Karadžić, Radovan 154 Karakachans 200 Kara Mustafa Pasha 475, 478 Karavelov, Lyuben 328, 378 Kaser, Karl 72n, 95n, 127n, 144n, 290–294 Katranov, Georgi 433 Katyn 537, 543 Kautsky, Karl 529n, 530, 571, 572n kaza 42, 485 Kazakhstan 158, 657 Kennan, George 12–123, 145–148, 510n, 414–515, 522, 533n Keyserling, Hermann von 63, 141–142

668 Khaitov, Nikolai 496n, 580–587 Khalid, Adeeb 162–166 Kideckel, David 656 Kim Il-song 607 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, see Yugoslavia Kîrchovski, Joakim 378 Kissinger, Henry 416 Kitromilides, Paschalis 227, 395n Kizilbaş 386 Klima, Ivan 658 Knight, Nathaniel 162–172 Kocka, Jürgen 3n, 587n, 653 Kodov, Khristo 486 Kohn, Hans 22, 27 Kolakowski, Lezsek 660 Kolarov, Vasil 528n, 548–552, 557, 573–575, 613 Konrad, Gyorgy  448, 588n Koraïs, Adamandios 38n Koselleck, Reinhart 13, 19n, 40n, 53n, 553n, 588, 624n, 634, 637, 646n Kosovo  28, 101, 150–160, 188–189, 227, 229, 243, 249, 250, 322–323, 361, 399, 415 Kostov, Ivan 609, 622n, 624 Kostov, Traicho 621 Krestintern 548, 564, 569, 575 Kundera, Milan 209 Kurds 101, 123n, 156–157, 331, 391 Lacan, Jacques 64n, 364, 366, 367 Language 366–385 Latour, Bruno 46 Latvia 50, 86, 214, 216n, 547, 654n Lavabre, Marie-Claire 647, 648n Lenin, Vladimir 76, 326, 352–354, 516, 530, 537, 545, 547–551, 555, 558, 569, 572–575, 606, 607n, 611, 613, 616, 618n, 621, 625, 628, 642 Legacy 70–77, 84, 90–110, 117–118, 145, 147n, 224, 230, 286, 335n, 337, 338, 362, 364, 374–375, 387, 394, 396, 417, 462, 467–469, 481, 496n, 559, 646–651 Leopold I 125n, 477 Le Play, Frédéric 285 Levski, Vasil 185, 186, 195, 328, 465n, 579–587, 591–592, 630n Liebknecht, Karl 529, 629n

Index Liebknecht, Wilhelm 554 Lithuania 35n, 50, 86, 210, 214, 216n, 485n, 544, 651 Llobera, Josep 16, 17, 21, 27n, 49 Lüdtke, Alf 40 Luhman, Niklas 46, 48, 558 Lukanov, Andrey 453 Lukanov, Todor 573 Luxemburg, Rosa 175, 529, 551 Lybia 403 Macedonia historical 86, 126, 128n, 131, 139, 140, 184, 239, 243, 245, 249–250, 252, 257, 276, 288–289, 319–324, 331n, 339, 342–345, 352–353, 379, 380n, 382, 389–390, 396n, 397n, 427, 465n, 524, 527, 565, 568, 572 contemporary 35, 151, 159–160, 177, 187–189, 194, 195, 216n, 218, 358, 361, 364, 390, 394, 402, 408, 417n, 496 Mackenzie, Georgina 132, 133 macrohistory 2, 470 Magris, Claudio 209 Mahler, Gustav 30 Maier, Charles 643 Mao Tse-Tung 165, 607, 616, 657 Marinetti, Filippo  529–530 Marković, Svetozar 292 Marx, Karl 58, 93n, 99, 110, 135n, 521, 546, 553, 554–555, 575, 577n, 588, 652 Marxism 20, 26, 27, 40, 43n, 53, 163, 301, 308, 314, 328, 351–355, 358, 436, 464n, 467n, 470, 516, 519, 529, 542, 550, 551, 556, 559, 561–562, 571, 574n, 589, 599, 654 Matejko, Jan 480 mausoleum 7, 545, 594–640 Mazzini, Giuseppe 38, 178 Megali Idea 559 Mehmet Giray 478 Mehmed Sokollu 199 memory 4n, 7, 461, 465, 466n, 468, 484, 509, 519, 532–534, 540, 594, 596–602, 620, 633–653, 659–660 Balkan 228, 617–618 collective 541–546, 561, 586, 593, 614, 630, 635, 648, 656 communist 537, 539, 629

Index historical 225–226, 499, 501, 531, 596, 625–626, 635 Mensheviks 326n, 516, 518n, 551 mezzadri 269–270 microhistory 213, 179, 242, 250, 260, 470 Middle East 2, 60–64, 66–70, 74n, 78, 117, 132n, 147n, 167, 170, 178, 181, 189, 436, 460, 464n, 464, 482, 496n, 567n Midhat pasha 7, 420–434 migration 29, 72n, 91, 106, 184, 189, 237, 248, 251, 253–254, 259, 280, 306, 389, 410, 412, 429, 431, 432n, 443–444, 448, 466, 494, 528, 539, 560, 569, 574, 603n millet 344, 396, 401, 417–418, 422 Milošević, Slobodan 32 Milosz, Czeslaw 208–209 Miliukov, Paul 515, 518n Mishkova, Diana 35n, 46, 47n, 472n Mitterauer, Michael 282, 285n, 288, 290–291, 294–295 modernism, see modernity modernity  4, 13, 14–18, 21, 24, 26, 33, 41–59, 67, 110, 113, 150, 223, 335, 369–370, 463, 467n, 471, 472n, 543, 558n, 559n, 565n, 601, 646 modernization 4, 20, 42–47, 51–53, 55n, 56n, 57, 96–97, 104, 110, 116, 145, 335, 352, 371, 438, 468, 601n Moldova (Moldavia) 77n, 126, 216, 237, 242–243, 252, 260, 264, 265 Montenegro 49, 85, 121n, 188, 189, 210, 237, 239, 243, 246, 249, 251, 252, 257, 276, 288, 322–323, 363 Morritt, John 125, 127, 130–131 Mowrer, Paul Scott 87 Mount Athos 26, 125 Mouzelis, Nikos 48, 53n Mozambique 436 Muslims, see Islam Mussolini, Benito 530, 625, 628 Mutafchiev, Petîr 486 Mutafchieva, Vera 496n, 501n, 504 Nationalism 5, 14–19, 30, 33, 42, 43n, 49, 50n, 51, 54, 96, 100n, 155, 301, 309, 366–374, 460, 461, 463–464, 481, 654 Balkan, see Balkan nationalism

669 East European 13, 21–28, 34, 37–40, 50n, 319, 465n, 468n perennialism 15, 364, 367–369 primordialism 178, 352n, 367–369, 371 types 178–179 weak 5, 175–192 NATO 87, 88, 145, 150, 153, 155–160, 185, 212–219, 412, 460, 532, 610, 611 Naumann, Friedrich 210, 255 Near East, see Middle East Nestinari 618 Netherlands 190, 210, 242 Neto, Augustino  607, 616 Neumann, Iver 208, 209n, 211, 215 New Zealand 190 Nicaragua 44, 436 Nicholas II 120 Nish 319, 321, 322, 420–423 nomads 72n, 73, 91, 106n, 107, 253, 278, 284, 388, 500 nomenclatura 648 Nora, Pierre 533, 534n, 539–543, 596–601, 643 nostalgia 108n, 439, 462, 468, 533, 539, 541, 556, 598, 600, 641, 646 post-communist 652–660 Novaković, Stojan 518 Numune Çiftliği 423 Nüremberg laws 28, 227 Obrenović, Alexander 122 Obrenović, Milan 121 Öcalan, Abdullah 156 October Revolution, see Russian Revolution Olick, Jeff 645n, 647n, 648 orientalism 5, 42, 67n, 77, 89, 94–97, 116–118, 147–149, 162–171, 204, 205, 293, 382, 463n, 596 Orašac 270 Orthodoxy 18, 23n, 25–26, 68–69, 84, 95, 117, 144, 160, 217, 218, 241, 254, 263, 313, 327, 345, 395–396, 401, 406, 407, 414, 441n, 448, 452, 477–480, 484–485, 502, 503, 570, 580 Osborne, Peter 15–16, 25, 49 Osterhammel, Jürgen 2n, 6, 511 otherness, see alterity

670 Ottoman Empire 7, 21n, 23n, 34, 37–38, 49, 63, 65–69, 124, 125n, 127–134, 144, 146, 147, 159, 163 164n, 179, 183, 200, 201, 224, 226, 227, 237–247, 252–254, 278, 290, 308, 321n, 336, 448, 460–463, 470, 474–485, 507, 518, 519, 524, 565–567, 571 and Bulgarians 264–283, 288, 304n, 305, 326, 336, 339, 343, 345, 355, 373, 377–379, 382, 387–396, 420–423, 429–434, 444, 446n, 485, 487, 494–501, 579, 634n as legacy  29, 72–77, 84–87, 91, 95, 96–102, 106–111, 117–118, 121n, 417, 559 Ozanian, Andranik 518 Paču, Lazar 518 Paisii Khilendarski 26, 327, 336–337, 372, 374–375, 378, 384, 488, 630 Pakistan 37, 66n, 403, 446 Pan-Turkism 567 Panichkov, Dimitîr 430 Parsons, Talcott 48 Partsch, Joseph 210 Pašić, Nikola 518, 522, 564 path dependence 60, 75–78 patriarchy 283, 298, 304 Patterson, Patrick 474, 477, 480 Pavlovich, Khristaki 376, 378 Pavlowitch, Stevan 562 peasantism 568 periphery 5, 6, 20, 44, 53n, 103n, 208, 212n, 447, 448, 462, 483, 578 Persia, see Iran Philhellenism 124, 130, 183, 189 Philippines 190 Piedmont 183 Pikolo, Nikola 384 Pîrlichev, Grigor 384 Pirogov, Nikolai 617 plague 252–253, 388, 477 Plekhanov, Georgii 548–552, 571, 574 Poland 50, 86, 88, 126, 145, 156, 181, 209. 210, 211n, 213–217, 305, 313, 319, 410n, 446, 449, 450, 459, 464n, 465n, 467n, 468n, 469, 475, 477, 543, 544, 547, 562, 588, 643, 646n, 650, 655, 656 Polanyi, Karl 45, 511 Pomaks 187, 200, 345, 386–419, 441n, 485, 492–493, 496, 500, 502, 527

Index Pope Benedict XVI 69, 480 Pope Pius II 69, 479 Population history age pyramid 245, 264–265 birth rates/fertility 151n, 237, 245, 248–251, 255–256, 258–260, 262– 264, 267n, 279, 307, 440 census 199, 240–243, 245–248, 261, 273, 392, 393, 401, 402, 404, 406–411, 441, 445, 492 death rates/mortality 251, 252, 258, 440 demographic transition 254, 255n, 258–259, 261, 264 family 6, 75, 110, 164, 237, 256–258, 262–299, 302–304, 307n, 309, 312, 402, 414, 440, 463n, 471n, 498, 558, 649 growth 151, 237–238, 242, 342–246, 259, 278, 280, 388, 440 household 256–257, 262–263, 266–283, 285–291, 304n, 481, 656n marriage/nuptiality 237, 241, 254–256, 259–267, 270–272, 279–281, 284–287, 304n, 383, 396 neolocality 266, 279 Portugal 109, 190 postcolonialism  93–94, 98–101, 112, 162 Profintern 556 Protestantism 108, 160, 224, 241, 286, 357n, 295n, 406, 618n Public sphere, see civil society Radek, Karl 547, 567, 573 Radev, Simeon 526 Radić, Stjepan 564 Radomir rebellion 572 Radushev, Evgenii 497n, 499 Rakovski, Georgi Sava 328, 378, 383, 384, 630 Rakovsky, Christian 518, 520, 522, 552 Ralin, Radoi 592 Rambouillet 157 Randeria, Shalini 587n, 590 Reifeisen banks 423 Rhodopes 257, 276, 288, 389–393, 397n, 400–403, 405n, 407, 410, 415, 483, 485, 493, 496, 497n, 499–500, 503 Ricoeur, Paul 13n, 141, 630n, 639–640 Rifental, Ulrich 67–68, 478–479 Rilski, Neofit 133, 375, 378 Rizoff, Dimitar 319, 341–346, 351, 364

Index Roma 187, 188, 200, 306, 403, 404, 406, 407n, 441n Roman Empire 18n, 28, 72, 73, 83, 91, 101, 106, 107, 108, 127, 224, 227, 517 Romania 18, 50, 77n, 85, 87, 102, 121n, 126n, 159, 183, 193, 216, 237, 240, 252, 305, 417n, 460, 517, 518, 519n Rosenstone, Robert 505 Ruse 421–423, 426–428, 431, 585, 612 Rusev, Svetlin 630 Russia 65, 68, 78, 108–109, 139, 146, 159, 176, 183, 190, 192, 241, 343, 351, 357n, 417n, 428–429, 448n, 449, 459–462, 473n, 475, 477, 479, 485, 488n, 489, 497, 503, 588, 603n, 611n, 617, 618n, 621n, 646n, 654, 660 and Eastern Europe 19n, 144, 154, 181, 209, 211–214, 216–219, 300n, 363, 450, 460–461, 656–657 as great power 21n, 34, 37, 50, 87, 100, 108n, 118, 120, 125, 126n, 131–132, 179, 184, 322, 330, 338–339, 376, 392, 415, 432, 446n, 462, 512, 518, 520 family history 257, 262, 267. 269, 270, 273n, 284, 288, 298, 471n orientalism 5, 162–172 Soviet, see Soviet Union Russian language 1, 26, 378–379, 382, 384, 491n, 522, 602n Russian Revolution, influence 543–548, 558–578 Said, Edward 65, 67n, 89, 93–98, 116, 162, 165–171 sancak 420, 421, 524–525 Sandanski, Iane 328, 358n Sandzhak 415 Sarajevo 86, 143, 463n, 652 Sarîev, Boyan 400, 413 Sartre, Jean-Paul 99, 171, 203 Saudi Arabia 403 scale 1–4, 36, 74–75, 110, 175, 182, 189, 192, 301, 654 Schweigger, Solomon 84 Second International 520, 522, 537, 546–552, 560, 565, 571, 576–577 Segalen, Martine 262, 282, 288, 304, 307n Seldzhikovo 368–273

671 Seliminski, Ivan 384 Sforza, Luigi Cavalli 31 Shaw, George Bernard 122, 136–140 Simeon Saxcoburgotski 606, 608 Simeon, Tsar 327, 359, 630 Skliros, Georgios 539 Slaveikov, Petko  378, 427 Slavophilism 124, 517, 520, 525, 570 Slezkine, Yuri 167n, 168, 467n Slovakia 85, 145, 213, 214, 216, 417, 657n Slovenia 101, 102, 145, 151–153, 214, 216, 239–246, 249–251, 254, 258, 380n, 563n, 652, 657 socialism 7, 17, 19n, 23, 53n, 56n, 110, 178, 292, 301, 302, 351–354, 438, 451, 466–469, 480, 521, 523n, 529–530, 537–557, 559, 560, 566, 567, 570n, 571, 575, 577–593, 600n, 642–645, 651n, 652n, 656, 657n, 659 Sofia 221, 223, 226, 263n, 331, 391n, 408, 420, 422, 440, 451, 498, 515, 520, 526, 594, 595, 603n, 606, 608, 614, 617, 618, 621, 622, 625–628, 636–638, 652 Sonderweg 164, 165, 278, 471, 472, 650 Soviet Union/ USSR 37, 50, 66n, 87, 98n, 99n, 100, 120, 144, 153n, 179, 300, 301n, 326, 330, 355, 359n, 410, 415m 417n, 436, 437n, 446, 447, 460, 462, 469, 514, 516, 523, 528, 544, 546–550, 556, 564, 565, 569, 573–575, 603n, 612n, 618n, 613, 649, 652, 659 Spain 18, 19, 53, 100, 178, 190, 242, 277, 477, 489, 643, 645n, 650 Spengler, Oswald 63, 225 Spivak, Gayatri 93, 96, 112 Spurr, David 98–99, 111, 145n, 147 Stalin 353, 466n, 549, 557, 562n, 574, 575, 577, 602n-604n, 613, 621, 656 Stalinism 52n, 437, 438, 449, 467n, 544, 551, 590, 593, 612, 617, 620, 643, 649, 658 Stamboliiski, Alexander 185, 341, 380, 522, 548, 558, 568–569, 572–573. 613n, 630 Stambolov, Stefan 139, 630 Stein Erlich, Vera  292–293, 295, 299 Stephansdom 201, 475–476 Stettenheim, Julius 139–140 Stoianov, Khristo 572 Stoianovich, Trajan 273, 283

672 Stoyanov, Peter Strashimirov, Dimitîr Sugar, Peter I-13, 16–20 Suleyman Kanuni Sundhaussen, Holm I-21, 23, 27 Suphi, Mustafa 566 Sweden 190, 286, 436, 547 Switzerland 138, 152, 180, 210, 346, 520, 537, 547, 550, 553, 570 Syria 66, 126n, 436 Szücs, Jenö 21, 25n, 34n, 54, 144n, 209, 448n Tanzimat 1, 132n, 420, 421 temporality/time 13–41, 48, 71, 90, 103, 110, 113n, 124, 224, 370, 646n, 652n Third World 15, 19, 20n, 33, 37, 87, 97, 98n, 147, 654, 655 Thrace 84, 125, 127, 128n, 132n, 324, 327, 353n, 356, 359, 381n, 390, 391, 492, 618 Tîrnovo 266, 426, 428, 454, 455, 488 Tito, Josip Broz 87, 98n, 151, 152, 396n, 466n, 564n Todorov, Iliya 485n, 487–488, 491, 496 Todorov, Nikolai 143n, 421n, 425n, 683n, 592n Todorov, Petko 526, 531 Todorov, Tsvetan 654, 660 Topolski, Jerzy 490–491, 498 Torbesh 200, 394, 496 Totyu, Philip 432 Toynbee, Arnold 63 tradition 43–47, 53–59, 71–72, 90, 95, 101–108, 115, 124, 135, 142, 145, 190, 197, 201, 295, 300, 307–308, 312–315, 321, 325, 341–342, 440, 449, 463, 520–521, 533, 540–545, 553, 589, 597–601, 606, 611, 659 Trakidis, Dimitris 614 transitology 109, 645 Transylvania 126n, 179, 240–245, 254, 342, 390, 465n, 560 Treaty of Berlin 28, 86, 341, 343 Treaty of Lausanne 567 Treaty of Neuilly 347 Treaty of Rappalo 564 Treaty of San-Stefano 28, 339, 355, 378, 379 Troebst, Stefan 51n, 175, 360n, 441n, 444n, 468n, 579, 632n, 641, 650n

Index Troeltsch, Ernst 62–63 Trotsky, Leon 510–533, 571–572 Tulcha 420, 422 Türkenlieder 478 Turkey Ottoman 63n, 68–69, 84, 125–127, 132n, 133n, 239, 243, 319, 320–321, 341, 344, 380, 420n, 475, 478–481, 496n, 519–520, 522, 524, 565–567 Republican 26, 37, 50, 52, 66, 77n, 78, 79n, 85, 87, 96, 101, 102, 109, 117, 144, 146–147, 151n, 156, 159, 160, 175, 176, 210, 214, 218, 332, 361n, 363, 387, 390, 391n, 396, 406n, 411–415, 418, 444, 446–447, 460, 462, 473n, 481–482, 516n Turner, Victor 231n, 580, 581n Tutiaux-Guillon,Nicole 65 Ukraine 216n, 300n, 465n, 643n, 649, 566 Unfried, Bertold 617–619 United States 85, 101n, 118, 120, 141, 146, 152, 155n, 156, 160, 182, 190, 192, 218, 301, 302, 304, 310, 313, 362, 404, 415, 416, 459–462, 477, 501n, 506, 512, 520, 556, 580 Ustaša 154 utopia 19, 222, 228, 354, 439, 454, 521, 529n, 556, 567, 649, 659, 660 Uzunov, Dechko 604, 606 vakıf 487 vali 420, 433, 478 Vandervelde, Emile 522 Vaskidovich, Emmanuil 378 Vazov, Ivan 355n, 356, 378 Velikonja, Mitja 652 Venezuela 190 Venice 126, 128n, 241, 253, 470n, 485 Venizelos, Elephterios 323, 559, 560 Verdery, Katherine 14n, 345n, 464n, 465n, 467n, 580n, 652n Vergangenheitsbewältigung  182, 469, 650, 651 Videnov, Zhan 628n, 641 Vienna 32, 66, 125n, 143, 202, 212, 219, 226, 421n, 463n, 475, 477, 478, 480, 485, 516, 529, 550, 573, 628, 629 vilayet 420, 421, 427 Vlachs 200, 254, 381

Index Voinikov, Dobri 378, 382n, 430 Vojna Krajina 294 Vojvodina 151, 152, 248, 257, 276, 288, 583n Wałęsa, Lech 446 Wallachia 68, 126, 237, 242, 243, 252, 342, 378 Walsh, Robert 126–127, 132n Weber, Max 45, 57, 58, 110, 436, 577–578, 589 West, Rebecca 134, 135n, 140–143 women, see gender Yeltsin, Boris 607 Young Turk Revolution 429, 520, 567 Yugoslavia 7, 29, 77n, 85–88, 98n, 99n, 120, 144n, 151–160, 185, 189, 211n, 216n, 228–229, 239–240, 248–249, 257, 276, 288, 292, 294–296, 305, 319, 353, 396n,

673 415–416, 444, 445, 459, 466, 483, 510, 517, 522, 532, 562–564, 573, 652, 659 Zadruga 164, 256–259, 262–363, 270–278, 288–293, 471n Zakhariev, Stefan 485–489 Zbarsky, Boris 606, 618n Zeune, August 84, 127 Zhelev, Zhelyu 442, 453, 592n, 612n, 614n Zhivkov, Todor 187, 325, 330n, 355–360, 363, 444–446, 449–450, 591–592, 611n, 612, 621, 630n Zhivkova, Lyudmila 325, 328n, 359, 360 Zimmerwald conference 529, 537, 546–550, 552, 574–575 Žižek, Slavoj 64n, 529n, 530n Zveno group 185