Nikola Jordanovski, PhD Candidate, GSSR-Warsaw,

Between the necessity and impossibility of a ‘national history’

             In my text I would like to explore the socio-historical and to a limited extend anthropological background of the ‘Macedonian question’, and the complications it causes to every Balkan historiography in principle, especially the one in Republic of Macedonia. Let’s say immediately on the start that the Macedonian identity is a modern product par excellence, but thanks to special socio-historic circumstances the whole process underwent in quite a genuine way. Every example tends to be exceptional, so does this one, and yet some general paths and  rules were followed.

            What I hope to refer to would be how unusually difficult is to explain in classic history text-book the effect of nationalism(s) when they try to   force ‘sacred rights’ on a disputed territory.  Although elsewhere we can say that the nationalism played emancipating and progressive role, on a multicultural and multiethnic ground - such as Macedonia was  (and still is) - it turned into a mere producer of both intra and inter-ethnic divisions, promoted unseen intolerance for ‘the other’ and degraded the socio-economic cohesion (as poor as it might had been before) of the country in the name of which it had arisen.

            What has been written upon the ‘Macedonian question’ in the region is too much burdened with emotions derived from ‘historicism’. What we have is a vast production of XIX and XX century Balkan historiography of mutual contradiction and denial, leaving behind an inheritance of apologetic thinking (and writing). In this sense, what we basically need is to accomplish some balance between the historical data and the sociological interpretations and analysis. The ultimate goal would be a better understanding of the questions about individual and collective identity, national ideologies and ethnocentric-policies, and the results they produce when more of them interact in a society unprepared for any higher level (political, religious, linguistic) of homogeneity.

            Starting point for every historiography should be to present the case of Macedonia as a territory of overlapping historical heritages, explaining why this territory ‘belongs to everybody’, thus giving ‘legitimacy’ to different claims. Centuries of Roman, Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serbian and finally Turkish rule left behind layers of specific cultural material spread vertically and horizontally over the social strata. Linguistic interactions, combined customs, fatalistic mentality, oral traditions in the range from Alexander the Great to King Marko, oriental life (nutrition, architecture, habits and values), all this going together with racial parallelism and social immobility, leading to preservation of archaisms of every kind. The weight of these pre-existing culture features has not been fully measured yet in order to understand better the pre-modern roots of modern nations in the South Eastern Europe. This is especially important if we want to understand the XIX century anti-Ottoman nationalistic movements in the Balkans, which soon enough turned into ideologies of expansionism. This type of nationalism, unlike some western socio-economic nationalisms from the epoch, derived its main strength and power from the myths, memories, traditions, and symbols of ethnic heritages. As Anthony Smith writes "...These cultural and historical elements ... form the basis of competing claims to territory, patrimony and resources. Where there are clashing interpretations of ancestral homelands, and cultural heritages - as for example in Macedonia, Kashmir, Nagorno-Karabagh, and Palestine - normal conflicts of interest are turned into cultural wars, and moral and political crusades replace everyday politics. History and culture provide the motives for conflict as well as solidarity"[1].

            Macedonia faced the ‘Age of Nationalisms’ fully unprepared, sort to say, lacking her myth of a medieval state under that name (the call of the past glory), consequently not possessing any potentially usable national idea or figure of a hero in the existing pre-culture (for instance above mentioned King Marko in Macedonian folk tales, version, unlike in Serbian, is totally deprived of any national aura or real and positive heroism). Additional disadvantage was the divergence of vernaculars in parallel circulation - Albanian, Greek, Vlach, Ladino and South Slav idiolects spread in the linguistic space between Bulgarian and Serbian - with the Turkish as the lingua franca, a situation sustained by the institutionalised channels for penetration of neighbouring influences through education and the church.

            A following horizontal and vertical analysis of the social groups within Macedonia in the period under consideration will help us to understand the complicated internal divisions in an agrarian and mostly illiterate society, in a broader frame of the Ottoman Empire’s peculiar conditions. The only ‘aristocracy’ being the one of the Turkish chiflik-holders, the only ‘bourgeoisie-like’ layer composed by Greeks - or Vlachs feeling themselves as Greek - and to a lesser extent Jews and Slavs, reduced to the Levantin type of trade & business, all of them, together with the small hand craftsmen, making the ‘urban’ population. The peasantry was for the most part Slav and Orthodox. The superior status of the Greek-speaking people inside the Rum Millet led to a kind of dominance of Greek culture over other Orthodox Christians. Men of wealth took pride in being called Greek; as for peasant - he felt himself first of all as a member of a family, a village community and his culturally distinguishable unit. This was the core of the existing pre-culture, with the religious identity as the paramount spiritual affiliation.

At this point I would like to point out the first feature of Balkan historiographies (including the Macedonian one) that leads us in wrong direction. That is the tendency to apply strictly and almost exclusively approaches like the primordial or the perennial one[2]. These approaches lead us to imposing a retrospective nationalism onto communities and cultures whose identities and loyalties were local, regional, and religious, but barely national. For Instance, claims that the core of what consists now the Macedonian nation was awaken in the course of the XIX century, assumes that there was a sleeping Macedonian identity which only needed to be properly motivated and put on it’s feet. I think this is not true, for one thing, and for another, this leads to misunderstandings and disappointments when later faced with unexplained and systematically avoided basic historical data. The evidences of existing of ‘Macedonians’ already in the early Middle Ages onward are rather thin, to say the least, and even the toponym ‘Macedonia’ appears and disappears in the course of the centuries. In my opinion, literally reading of historical sources do not explain things too well, but ignoring them is not any better. Both methods are in the service of national myth making. The real, complicated story still waits to be cleared up.

            Let us now go back to the second and most problematic segment of the history of the region - the appearance of the preaching nationalism on the ground of Macedonia, or so called propaganda before it’s violent phase. Macedonian historiography covers this period in its geographical totality, which is not the problem, taking into account that the territory was indeed one geographical and economic entity. What is not true is the assumption of its cultural entity, taken as a potential for ‘national unity’. That was not the case, and the mistake is based on “wishful writing” kind of partialism, so broadly manifested in the Balkans in general. The same partialism that in the past century lead to adjusting the present for the purposes of the future, on second instance of writing history leads to adjusting the past for the purposes of the present.

            In fact the neighbouring national propaganda, all starting from different socio-historic realms, put a  new choice before the populations of Macedonia: people had to choose a national identity. For the traditional peasant communities, such choices did not always offer obvious answers.  The preparatory work of ‘nation-building’ was undertaken according  to the general rules - language, culture, race, faith, ethnology were used as arguments in the struggle of contesting nationalisms. Quickly afterwards two things appeared on the surface:

-         the name ‘Macedonia’ and the powerful reference to Alexander of Macedon, dating back from the ancient times and bearing Hellenic connotation (as emphasized by the Greek propaganda);

-         1the term ‘Bulgars ’ as a synonymous to Slavs, supported on the ground by infrastructure of Bulgarian origin (not without some initial instructing and guidance by Pan-Slavic circles in Russia), even before the creation of the Bulgarian state in 1878. The later propaganda was emphasizing the role of the medieval enlighteners of the Slavs St. Cyrilus and Methodius, born in Thessalonica.

The adoption of both mythical concepts - instead of choosing one, for example - has inflicted much ambiguity and it is reflected even nowadays in the circulating syntagm ‘Slavo-Macedonians’. But this duality is not fully shown in the mainstream of the Macedonian historiography. The bitter cultural struggle is depicted merely as a clash of hegemonic cultures, with confused Macedonians in between. The point has been to promote impostors acting on an essentially Macedonian ground, without deeply analysing what had really been the context of this clash, and what this Macedonian ground had really been like, without implanting nowadays realities back in time.

At this point, I think  another moment is worth mentioning, and that would be the input of linguistic historiography. It cannot be avoided if we try to understand some divergences that occurred in this situation of splitting identity. Dealing with different resource material, it brought up some light on the ‘language problem’, which apparently dates back far beyond the latest political dispute between Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria. This linguist aspect of the historiography revealed another ‘anomaly’ of the Macedonian question - the surprising loyalty to the Slav vernacular spoken in Macedonia and the resistance, sometimes quite vigorous, to the standard Bulgarian language introduced on the ground. The Macedonian historiography in its quest for all kinds of particularities might have overstressed this “vernacular loyalty” as the main formative element in the XIX century, but also  the Bulgarian historiography systematically neglects, if not consciously ignores or diminishes this phenomena. I mention here briefly this issue only because it is widely accepted that the language is one of the key instruments in the national identity building process. As we know from Benedict Anderson, when certain dialect becomes raised to the level of « ...new politico-cultural eminence »[3] (as was the case with the Bulgarian in the given context) , later that same product feverishly defends itself, but also imposes itself as unification dogma, a weapon for assimilation, ‘ironing’ of differences. Every attempt for new transcription prepared for some other of the regional dialects (another potential language?!, more or less closely related), which is in the sphere of political interests standing behind mentioned lingual eminence, is being proclaimed a major heresy. That is how same persons in one historiography are celebrated as enlighteners, cornerstones of identity, pioneers of national languages, while in the other they are depicted as lunatics, mercenaries, uneducated amateurs, dreamers etc[4].

            The next, maybe the most interesting problem for the historiography(s), is the phase of armed resistance and it’s aims. This period of ‘Macedonian struggle’ (to use the Greek term for it) is the main source of persons to be promoted into heroes, martyrs for the cause and consequently national myths. The symbol of this phase is the I.M.R.O. As more or less we know, this secret organization, by taking a paternalist attitude towards the peasants, also offered them a certain sort of illusion of alternative state within the state. Always in between outright terrorism and organizing a mass uprising that would come ‘one day’, between being  autochthonous internal movement and outside based  irredenta, was domed to internal frictions and deep disagreements on matters of strategic and tactical goals, methods and directions. Furthermore, IMRO did not find (nor managed to create) a critical mass within Macedonia for a really mass uprising and a really united movement that could offer a dominant  and unchallenged vision for promotion of a future autonomy[5]. Nevertheless,  this organization, when compared to similar armed movements inspired directly by the neighbouring governments, remained undoubtedly the most authentic one on the ground, consequently the most respected by the population. The subsequent promotion of (some of) its leaders and (some of) its rank and file members into apostles of the people and the founders of the nation was probably inevitable. The impression is still that  the ruling dogma in the Macedonian historiography, despite some very fruitful polemics and expressions of different opinions in the last decade, continues to avoid deeper contextualization, and even the de-ideologization of this part of the past has not been fully accomplished[6]. There is still a room for more accurate evaluation of IMRO’s goals, methods, motives and hopes. Was-it really a national movement or just a revolutionary patriotism with more energy than political vision? How did-it affect the population, except of increasing it’s sufferings by performing planned provocations that history later calls mass people’s uprisings? Did-they contribute to the process of separate Macedonian identity, by promoting the credo of strict political separatism? What were their strategic and tactical mistakes, because of which the organization lost control over it’s domain and was cast out by far more serious players? Have-we really estimated the benefits and the harms coming out of the ‘Macedonian struggle’? How many crimes had to be diminished or overstressed depending on to which national historiography we belong? And finally, what ultimate impact the chain of murderous atrocities in the first two decades of the XX century had upon Macedonia?[7]

            My first assumption is that this dangerous genocidal ambient expired the capacity of the people for absorption of any more sacrifices. The peasantry, the backbone of Macedonia’s population, got exhausted and indifferent to national rivalries. The Balkan wars and the First World War, with Macedonians being recruited in the armies on the both sides of the frontline only to see a final division of their country, ruined what was left of their faith in the neighbours.  The violence only increased the conviction that the ‘politics’ (term used with the meaning ‘national identification’) is dangerous and futile. The only incontestable, and consequently the least harmful identification, the one with the homeland’s name, conquered the domain of the political folklore. New mythology blossomed about the « mournful mother Macedonia », victim of the « greedy neighbours ». Thus an old-new nationalism entered the political scene, still too embryonic to be considered anything more than ‘proto-nationalistic’, but irreversible in direction. The local ethno-history (oral tradition and the ethnic members' understanding of their communal past) suffered dynamic ongoing changes within only several generations after the  interest in possessing  their own history appeared in the first place[8] . In my opinion, the post Ottoman history of the region, the two Yugoslavia projects and the impact of national self-determination policy under the auspices of the Communist Party went along the already advancing separate Macedonian identity, providing it with a state, national institutions and everything that goes with it. Instead of following ethnogenetic golden wires, stretching through the centuries, I assess the formative process to be not longer than about 100 years, roughly put between the two halves of the XIX and XX century. The modernity of the nations is far from being a sacrilege for any national historiography to consider it seriously nowadays. It does count for the whole area of South Eastern Europe, and it definitely counts for Macedonia and the Macedonians. As my humble contribution to these everlasting considerations, a few conclusions and a final digression of mine to finish this short essay:

- It is clear that the Macedonian nation is a specific construct in South Eastern Europe;

- There is more than one Macedonian nationalism, although in my opinion the difference between irredentist and autonomist claims makes also a substantial difference in the quality of the various Macedonian-originated nationalisms (Bulgarian, Greek, Slav-Macedonian);

            - The autochthonous Macedonian identity is a clear case of self-definition by exclusion; the differences that  otherwise might have been  insufficient for creation a separate nationality, in the given circumstances got crystallized and (after 1944 in Federal Yugoslavia) institutionalised;

- The only really functional myth in this case is the name « Macedonia » itself - it surpassed all other loyalties and identifications, as well as scientific and pseudo-scientific arguments (common - or not? - history, economic prospects, geo-strategic calculations). It obviously emanates absurd disputes on semantic and symbolic level, but nevertheless it has all the ‘stubborn’ but stable features of every other Balkan nationalism, on its way towards transformation into positive political values.

At last, but definitely not the least, a small but significant digression deserve to be mentioned - during all this time under consideration (i.e. the formative period of the nation and the state),  the Turks (and to a varying but constantly growing degree the Albanians)  were a very important political and demographic factor  in the geographic territory of Macedonia. I suppose our historiographies inherited the general diplomatic and academic European belief, dating back from the earliest stages of the Eastern Question, about the ‘abnormality’ of the Turkish presence in Europe. This is projected as a form of indifference for the interests and political aspirations of the common Turkish population and it’s elite in European Turkey. A similar type of ethno-religious outlook actually has been ignoring the substantial presence of the Moslem Albanians in the regions out of Albania proper (Macedonia included), attributing them the role of a mere remnant of the Ottoman infrastructure, with all the negative connotations that go with it. This arrogance is to build up a ground for further clashes of opposed national myths overlapping on the same political scene. Something should be done about it!

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