Post on 04-Mar-2023
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PREPRINT. To appear in Kamusella, Tomasz & Nomachi, Motoki & Gibson,
Catherine (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and
Borders.
Conflicting Nationalist Discourses
in the Balkan Slavic Language Area Jouko Lindstedt (University of Helsinki)
The Balkan Slavic language area forms the south-eastern part of the
South Slavic dialect continuum. This area consists of the Bulgarian and
Macedonian languages and the south-eastern dialects of Serbian (the
Torlak or Prizren-Timok dialects). As all the Balkan Slavic dialects are part
of the Balkan linguistic area,1 the external boundaries of the Balkan Slavic
area can be defined in terms of certain structural features, which are
referred to as Balkanisms. The important Balkanisms in Balkan Slavic are
the loss of the infinitive, the loss of case declension, and the use of
enclitic definite articles. In addition to the Balkan Slavic languages, the
Balkan linguistic area encompasses the Balkan Romance languages,
Greek, Albanian, and the Vlax and Balkan dialects of Romani. (Asenova
2002; Lindstedt 2000)
The external boundary of Balkan Slavic is not clearly delineated; as
is usual in linguistic geography, there are transitional dialects between the
Torlak and other Serbian dialects. (Miloradović and Greenberg 2001)
However, more problematic is the internal division of Balkan Slavic into
different languages. This division is a matter of social convention that was
established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and which remains
a point of contention among the different nationalist discourses. In this
debate, linguistic arguments are routinely proposed. However, choosing
among the different structural features that are used to characterise
languages, and the weight that is assigned to such features, invariably
1 A linguistic area or Sprachbund (‘linguistic league’) was first defined by Trubetzkoy (1928). The term refers to a group of at least three contiguous languages that have common convergent features in their grammar and phonology that are due to their prolonged contact, but not to their possible genetic relation.
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involves a rather arbitrary decision that tends to be motivated by
nationalist agendas. This chapter presents a discussion of the conflicting
linguistic discourses in the Balkan Slavic area, their historical and
nationalist backgrounds, and some possible ways of dismantling them.
The Discourses of Domestic Nationalism and Cross-Border
Nationalism
In relation to a nation-state, nationalism comes in two varieties. The first
is domestic nationalism, which aims at creating an ethnically and
linguistically homogenous state by either the voluntary or forced
assimilation of various minorities. The second is cross-border nationalism,
which declares that the nation-state should have a special interest in
some of the regions and people across its borders owing to their ethnic
and historical connections with the state-forming ethnic group. The
strongest form of cross-border nationalism is irredentism. This demands
the outright annexation of some regions of a neighbouring state based on
factors that are ethnic, linguistic, or historic. For instance, Greek domestic
nationalism may be reflected in the relations of the Greek state or its
majority population to the Slavic, Turkish, Romani, or Aromanian
minorities of the country. In contrast, Greek cross-border nationalism
may concern the Greek minority in Albania, or the Greek-speaking
Sarakatsani2 in Bulgaria and Macedonia.
Cross-border nationalism is common in the Balkans. I have heard
people from more than one Balkan country claim, ‘ours is the sole country
in the Balkans that is surrounded only by people of the same nationality
everywhere across its borders.’ Various linguistic versions of cross-border
nationalism also manifest themselves in the Balkan Slavic area. The
prevailing opinion among scholars and non-academics in Bulgaria is that
all of Balkan Slavic is linguistically only Bulgarian. This means that there
2 A Greek-speaking pastoral ethnic group (also known as karakachani in some Slavic languages) living in several Balkan countries. (Wardle 2003)
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is no Macedonian language. Furthermore, what Serbian dialectologists
consider to be south-eastern Serbian dialects are also at least structurally
Bulgarian, although there is some vagueness regarding the present ethnic
affiliation of the speakers of those dialects in Serbia. In addition, the
Macedonian standard language is referred to as ‘a regional standard of
Bulgarian’ and is compared to the literary language of the small Catholic
Bulgarian minority (Paulicians) living in Banat and Transylvania.
By identifying Balkan Slavic with the Bulgarian language, Bulgarian
scholars clearly hold a minority position in Slavic studies. This is evident
graphically on the pages of the multi-volume Slavic Linguistic Atlas, a
major international project that has been in progress for nearly half a
century. (OLA 2014) This Atlas does not delimit languages – because it is
not necessary in dialectology – but during the initial stage of the project,
Bulgarian scholars could not agree with their Macedonian colleagues as to
which dialects each of the two teams should investigate (among the
Slavic minority of northern Greece, for instance). As a result, Bulgaria
withdrew from the project and on all the first maps of the Atlas, Bulgaria
appears as a completely white area. It was only at the Kraków meeting in
2005 that the Bulgarians returned to the International Commission of the
Atlas. (Protokol 2005)
Despite renewed contacts with the Slavic Linguistic Atlas, official
Bulgarian dialectology has not changed its position on the Bulgarian
language area. For instance, the most recent general dialect atlas of
Bulgarian, Bŭlgarski dialekten atlas (BDA 2002), still covers the whole
Republic of Macedonia and parts of Serbia (to the west of Niš), Albania,
Greece, Turkey, and Romania. While there is no doubt that Slavic dialects
are either currently spoken, or have been spoken in the recent past in all
these areas, it is highly controversial to label them all as indistinctively
‘Bulgarian.’ The area of Bulgarian in the atlas is delimited by ten
structural features. (BDA 2002: 55) This is a quasi-objective approach
that does not address the question of how the features have been
selected nor why it is precisely these features that can be used as ethnic
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markers. As a matter of fact, the features chosen are predominantly
typical Balkanisms, so they are bound to equate Bulgarian with all of
Balkan Slavic.
Of course, the definition of what is ‘Bulgarian’ originates from
outside linguistics and the dialect maps merely follow this preconceived
notion. But this definition has a cost in terms of scientific accuracy. What
the first dialect map in the atlas (BDA 2002: 55) seems to claim is that
the isoglosses of these ten defining structural features coincide
completely. In other words, only one outer boundary of the Bulgarian
language area is found on the map, and no separate maps exist for any of
these language-defining features. Such a compact bundle of ten
isoglosses would be truly sensational in linguistic geography, but it seems
highly unlikely that this bundle reflects the actual dialect data.
As for Macedonian dialectology, it does not lay claim to any Serbian
territory, but it considers the dialects of south-western Bulgaria to be
Macedonian, despite the lack of any widespread Macedonian national
consciousness in that area. The standard map is provided by Vidoeski.
(1998: 32) It would be futile to tell an ordinary citizen of the Macedonian
capital, Skopje, that they do not realise that they are actually speaking
Bulgarian. It would be equally pointless to tell citizens of the south-
western Bulgarian town of Blagoevgrad that they (or at least their
compatriots in the surrounding countryside) do not ‘really’ speak
Bulgarian, but Macedonian. In other words, regardless of the structural
and linguistic arguments put forth by a majority of Bulgarian
dialectologists, as well as by their Macedonian counterparts, they are
ignoring one, essential fact – that the present linguistic identities of the
speakers themselves in various regions do not always correspond to the
prevailing nationalist discourses.
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The Legacy of the Exarchate
If Bulgarian dialectologists follow a pre-established notion of the outer
boundaries of ‘Bulgarianness,’ where does this presupposition come from?
As argued by Hranova, (2005: 307ff) the boundaries of the ‘Bulgarian
nation’ are often defined in Bulgarian history textbooks as the farthest
borders of the medieval Bulgarian state. According to this historical
narrative, it was the conquests of the most powerful Bulgarian rulers that
separated the Bulgarians from the massive, indefinite ‘Slavic sea’ of
people, so that ‘a Bulgarian’ came to refer to ‘a Slav from the Balkan
Peninsula.’
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman
Empire had no administrative unit that could have defined the borders of
the emerging Bulgarian nation. As a consequence, the activists of the
Bulgarian national revival shifted their attention to medieval history to
defend their cause. Nevertheless, the borders of those medieval tsardoms
had already been shifting and were therefore unreliable as an actual basis
for the exact definition of the boundaries of ‘Bulgarianness.’
According to Benedict Anderson, (2006: 163 ff) nations are defined
by three institutions: the census, map, and museum. I maintain that the
historical turning point in the Bulgarian case was the founding of the
Bulgarian Exarchate. This was established by Sultan Abdülaziz of the
Ottoman Empire in 1870 as a Bulgarian church organisation, breaking
with the old administrative practice of having all Orthodox Christians of
the Empire in the same millet (confessional community) led by the
Patriarch of Constantinople. The Exarchate was the first modern Bulgarian
national institution that could be placed on a map, and it assumed the
roles of both the ‘map’ and ‘census’. (The first genuine museums were
established only in independent Bulgaria approximately twenty years
later.) Local communities (obshtini) were partly allowed to decide for
themselves whether to join the Exarchate or to remain in the Patriarch-
led church. This resembled a collective census that distinguished those
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that espoused nascent Bulgarian national consciousness from other
Orthodox Christians. (Nikov 1971: 222–254; Istoriia 2004: 651) In this
process, the boundaries of the Bulgarian language and ethnicity were
defined, and they have not essentially changed thereafter in the popular
consciousness, although an independent country with such wide borders
never came into existence.
It is instructive to compare the maps and territorial definitions of
the Exarchate (IB6: 158–159) with modern dialect maps. The main link
between the Exarchate borders and the Bulgarian dialectological tradition
of today is the map of the Bulgarian language area in Stefan Mladenov’s
fundamental work, Geschichte der bulgarischen Sprache (1929).
Mladenov’s map is still adopted as the point of departure in most work on
Bulgarian dialects. (Todor Boiadzhiev, p.c.) A closer reading of Mladenov’s
text (1929: 1–10) reveals, however, that he constantly vacillated
between the national essentialism that was required by politics and the
relativism that was taught by the best traditions of linguistic geography.
The establishment of a Bulgarian national church organisation in 1870–
1872 soon caused a schism in the Orthodox Church, because the
Patriarch-led church administration did not accept the secession of the
Bulgarian Exarchate. Macedonia especially witnessed a particularly bitter
strife between the ‘patriarchists’ and the ‘exarchists,’ and the dividing line
did not always follow the ethnic or linguistic identity of the faithful. As
pointed out by Lory, (2005: 181) this schism alienated a part of the
Macedonian Slavs from the Bulgarian national movement. In addition,
some of the educated Slavs preferred the Romaic3 identity – that is to
say, they wanted to remain part of the Greek-speaking civilisation without
necessarily adopting a Greek ethnic identity. (Detrez 2008; Lindstedt
2012)
3 In the Byzantine Empire, and later in the Ottoman Empire before the rise of the Greek national movement, Orthodox Christians with Greek as their cultural (but not necessarily native) language referred to themselves as ‘Romans.’ The ethnic ‘Hellenic’ identity was a later construct.
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During this time, there was also one very visible linguistic difference
between Bulgaria and part of Macedonia: the South Macedonian Slavs,
even the priests, were no longer familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet, but
resorted instead to using Greek letters when writing in their mother
tongue. (Lindstedt 2008b: 395–396) As an example, several Slavic
Gospel translations that were written in Greek letters in Macedonia have
been preserved. The oldest of them is the Konikovo Gospel, dating back
to the late eighteenth or to the early nineteenth century. This manuscript
contains parallel Sunday Gospel texts both in the Greek vernacular and in
the Macedonian Slavic vernacular. (Lindstedt et al 2008)
Current Bulgarian public discourse rarely explicitly invokes the
territorial dimension of the Exarchate; instead, the term used to refer to
the notion of a Greater Bulgaria is ‘San Stefano Bulgaria’ (sanstefanska
Bŭlgariia). Nonetheless, the geographical extension is approximately the
same. According to the Preliminary Treaty of San Stefano, which ended
the Russo-Turkish War in 1878, the new Principality of Bulgaria was to
acquire the territory of the Exarchate. The main exception was the
Morava Valley with the towns of Niš and Leskovac, which was to be ceded
to Serbia as a form of compensation for its war efforts. (Rajchevski 2008:
50–51) However, at the Berlin Congress of the same year, a much
smaller Bulgaria was created. (IB6: 468–469; Magocsi 2002: map 26b)
One important political figure supported both the Exarchate and the San
Stefano borders, Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignat’ev (1832–1908), who
served as the Russian ambassador to Istanbul from 1864 to 1877. As a
representative of the greatest Slavic and Orthodox state of that time,
Ignat’ev lobbied the Sublime Porte (the Ottoman government) to
establish a Bulgarian national church in the Ottoman Empire. He also
worked for the international recognition of the Exarchate borders as
ethnic boundaries in the Istanbul Conference of diplomats in 1876–1877.4
4 The Istanbul Conference in 1876–1877 was an attempt by both British and Russian diplomats to persuade Sultan Abdülhamid II to grant autonomy to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria. (Hupchick 2002: 260–262)
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Later, Ignat’ev was instrumental in negotiating the San Stefano Treaty on
the basis of the Exarchate borders – but with the aforementioned
concession to Serbia in the Morava Valley. (IB6: 428–431; Istoriia 2004:
651–663, 717–718)
Although a San Stefano Bulgaria was never established, the
territory of the Exarchate remained the mental map of the Bulgarian
nation for decades to come, and it is still reproduced in modern dialect
maps. It is important to note that in the Morava Valley, those maps follow
the Exarchate borders, not the San Stefano borders. When Bulgaria
gained autonomy in 1878 and full independence three decades later, a
long dispute arose between Serbian and Bulgarian scholars over the
linguistic status of the dialects on both sides of the state border, between
the rivers Iskŭr, Timok, and Morava. The famous Serbian dialectologist
Aleksandar Belić (1905, e.g. pp LXXXIV–LXXXV) explained that the
common Balkanisms of the easternmost Serbian dialects and Bulgarian
were not essential to defining which language they represented. This was
because Balkanisms were due to external influences on Slavic and did not
represent the authentic internal development of these dialects. Bulgarian
scholars countered with other arguments. Needless to say, no objective
linguistic arguments could be found for this region, either; the language
boundary was to be defined by the political boundary.
According to the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine (1919), which marked
the end of World War I for Bulgaria, the country had to cede some of its
western regions to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (after
1929, Yugoslavia). Those South Slavs in the Morava Valley who had been
made Serbian citizens after the Berlin Congress of 1878 had become
ethnic Serbs, but those who were made Serbian citizens now in 1919
were to become the Bulgarian minority of Serbia that exists today. This
means that approximately forty years were sufficient to construct a
completely new ethnic boundary. It was only after World War II that the
father of modern Bulgarian dialectology, Stojko Stojkov, formulated the
principle of the relative character of the Serbian/Bulgarian boundary as
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well as other similar boundaries in the Slavic world. (Stojkov 2002
[1968]: 76–77) Stojkov used the state boundary in his dialectological
studies. This was a pragmatic move that was not approved by all of his
followers.
The main external goal of newly independent Bulgaria was to
acquire Macedonia. This was depicted as re-acquiring Macedonia, because
it had been included within the chimerical San Stefano borders that
resurrected the lost grandeur of the mediaeval Bulgarian Empire.
(Hranova 2005: 309) In all wars of the twentieth century – the Balkan
Wars of 1912–13, World Wars I and II – Bulgaria’s goal was to annex
Macedonia, and all these wars ended in disaster for Bulgaria.
The part of Macedonia acquired by Serbia in the Balkan Wars
(Vardar Macedonia) became one of the republics of Yugoslavia after World
War II, when Yugoslavia was reconstituted as a federal state. The
Macedonian standard language, which had a history of advocates dating
back to the late nineteenth century, finally acquired an official status in
1944. Before the split between Tito and Stalin in 1948, this new standard
language was also taught for one school year (1947–1948) in the schools
of the Pirin region of Bulgaria. This was in preparation for a future
Communist South Slav Federation where all parts of Macedonia were to
be united. The new Macedonian standard was not widely adopted by the
local population, which had been using the Bulgarian standard for several
genarations. (Marinov 2009: 481–492; Istoriia 2009: 381–387) As a
consequence, the recognition of a Macedonian minority in Bulgaria came
to be associated with Stalinism, not with liberal politics.
The Locked Linguistic Conflict
After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria was the first country to
recognise the independence of Macedonia in 1991. However, officially
Bulgaria has yet to acknowledge the Macedonian ethnic and linguistic
identity. In fact, post-Communist politicians have accused their
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Communist predecessors not of alienating Macedonians from Bulgarians
with their nationalism, but on the contrary, of ‘national nihilism,’ meaning
harbouring complacency toward Macedonian identity-building. In short,
what is at stake is excessive national symbolism and common history. As
recently noted by the historian Raymond Detrez (2009), ‘in relation to
Macedonia, Bulgarians still have a hangover.’
One of the reasons for the intransigence of Bulgaria’s official
attitude is the prestige of Old Church Slavonic, the Slavs’ first written
language created by Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius in the ninth century
CE. This is the starting point of Slavic literary culture and the classical
language of Slavic studies. The official Bulgarian position is that this
language should properly be called ‘Old Bulgarian’ because Cyril and
Methodius based it primarily upon the Slavic dialects around the city of
Thessaloniki, and because it first acquired official status in the Tsardom of
Bulgaria (which Cyril and Methodius themselves never visited, as far as
we know). The problem is that the Slavic dialects around Thessaloniki, as
well as those in the literary centre of Ohrid in the south-western part of
the Tsardom, would currently be regarded as Macedonian rather than
Bulgarian. However, for Cyril and Methodius, neither Bulgarian nor
Macedonian were considered to be separate languages. Recognising
Macedonian as a separate language might therefore mean that Bulgarian
linguists would also have to abandon ‘Old Bulgarian’ as a term – with all
the scholarly prestige associated with it.
The majority of Bulgarian linguists define the Macedonian standard
language as a ‘regional standard’ of Bulgarian, having a status similar to
the written language of the Catholic Bulgarian minority in Romanian
Banat. (for example, see Georgiev & al., eds., 1986: 307–315) This
definition implies that the Macedonian standard has a lower status than
the Bulgarian standard, which is never defined as ‘regional’ but rather as
‘national.’ Moreover, even the definition of Macedonian as a ‘regional
standard’ is not observed in Bulgarian linguistic practice. For instance,
learning the structure of the Macedonian standard is not part of the
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curriculum of the students of Bulgarian language at Bulgarian universities,
though one could suppose that a specialist in a language should know
something about all of its codifications. Widely known Macedonian words
that occur in the Bulgarian scholarly editions of the nineteenth-century
authors from Macedonia are always labelled as ‘dialectal’ and
consequently non-standard.
It is interesting that in the Bŭlgarski dialekten atlas (Bulgarian
Dialect Atlas) that has been criticised above, the first real isogloss map,
namely that of the reflexes of the Common Slavic strong back yer5 sound,
could easily be used to delimit the historical area of the Macedonian
language from Bulgarian, if that delimitation were politically possible.
(BDA 2002: 59) The isogloss in question is actually older than the ones
that are cited as defining the Bulgarian language in the atlas. Even Stefan
Mladenov (1929: 101–102) noted that Bulgarian is the only Slavic
language divided internally by the back yer isogloss. Of course, he did not
conclude from this that what he referred to as Bulgarian could, in fact, be
considered to be two distinct languages.
The Bulgarian linguists are aware of the fact that the yer isogloss
could be used, and is used, to delimit Macedonian from Bulgarian on
structural grounds. Their standard answer is that this isogloss does not
fully coincide with the proposed language boundary. (Georgiev & al., eds.
1986: 311–312) However, the requirement that an important isogloss
should precisely coincide with a proposed language boundary would make
it impossible to draw boundaries with closely related languages in
general, not only in the Slavic group, but also in other genealogically
defined language groups. Although Bulgarian linguists consider the unity
of the Bulgarian language to be a ‘genuine scientific truth,’ (op.cit.: 310)
5 In Slavic historical linguistics, the two yers are the Proto-Slavic reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European short /i/ vowel (the front yer) and the short /u/ vowel (the back yer). In a ‘weak position,’ the yers disappeared in all Slavic languages, whereas those standing in a ‘strong position’ (called the strong yers) became other vowels – but different vowels depending on the language.
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the only truth in these types of questions is in fact the relativity and social
character of any proposed criteria.
The Minorities Caught Between
Several linguistic minorities who speak Balkan Slavic have been
particularly targeted by the nationalist discourses of Bulgaria and
Macedonia. For example, the Macedonian minority in Bulgaria is
supported by the cross-border nationalism of Macedonia, whereas the
domestic nationalism of Bulgaria denies its existence. For the Bulgarian
minority in Macedonia, the reverse is true: Macedonian domestic
nationalism does not accept the existence of this minority, whereas
Bulgarian cross-border nationalism strongly supports it. Finally, as for the
speakers of the Balkan Slavic dialects in other Balkan countries, both
Bulgarian and Macedonian cross-border nationalist discourses lay claim to
most of these minorities.
The main political organisation of the Macedonians in Bulgaria is the
United Macedonian Organisation OMO ‘Ilinden’ – PIRIN.6 (OMO 2014;
Narodna volja 2014) This organisation has succeeded in attracting the
support of only a small number of the inhabitants of Pirin Macedonia in
south-western Bulgaria. Declaring a Macedonian identity offers few, if
any, benefits in Bulgaria, but is met with ridicule or overt hostility in the
dominant public discourse. Because the OMO ‘Ilinden’ – PIRIN
organisation is allegedly a separatist group, the Bulgarian authorities have
repeatedly denied it an official registration under various pretexts. On 21
October 2005, and again on 18 October 2011, the European Court of
Human Rights convicted Bulgaria of violating the freedom of assembly
6 The acronym OMO stands for Obedinena makedonska organizatsiia, the ‘United Macedonian Organisation’; ‘Ilinden’ refers to the Macedonian Ilinden (Elijah’s day) uprising against the Ottomans in 1903; PIRIN refers to the Pirin Mountains, but is also an acronym for Partiia za ikonomicheskoto razvitie i integratsiia na naselenieto ‘Party for the Economic Development and Integration of the Population.’
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and association with respect to the Macedonians’ organisation. (ECHR
2011a; see also BHC 2005)
On the other side of the state border, the Macedonian ‘citizens with
Bulgarian national consciousness’ founded an association called RADKO
(RADKO 2014). The name of this association, though always written in
capital letters, is derived from the nom de guerre ‘Radko’ of Ivan Mihajlov
(1896–1990), a leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary
Organisation (IMRO). Under Mihajlov’s leadership in the 1920s and 1930s,
IMRO became a terrorist organisation that fought against the Serbian
administration in Vardar Macedonia. (Micheva 2009) In 2009, the
European Court of Human Rights convicted the Republic of Macedonia of
violating the freedom of assembly and association, because its
Constitutional Court had banned the RADKO organisation in 2001. (ECHR
2011b)
Bulgaria and Macedonia have thus both been convicted of banning
an organisation of citizens that declares an ethnic identity that is linked to
the other country, and both states continue to defy the verdicts of the
European Court of Human Rights in this respect. However, regarding the
arguments used, these two cases are not fully symmetrical. The dominant
Bulgarian discourse maintains that a Macedonian ethnicity simply does
not exist as distinct from Bulgarian, anywhere in the world, and thus the
OMO ‘Ilinden’ – PIRIN cannot represent a Macedonian minority in
Bulgaria.7 In contrast, the dominant discourse in the Republic of
Macedonia merely maintains that no Bulgarian minority exists in
Macedonia. Finally, the members of RADKO maintain that all Macedonians
are Bulgarians and that they should recognise this reality.
Several endangered or even moribund Balkan Slavic dialects are
spoken in other Balkan countries: Albania, Kosovo, Greece, Serbia, and 7 Article 11 (4) of the Bulgarian Constitution stipulates that ‘there shall be no political parties on ethnic, racial or religious lines,’ but it is difficult for the Bulgarian authorities to enforce this prohibition with respect to the OMO. First, ‘Macedonian’ is not officially acknowledged as an ethnic designation; second, one major Bulgarian party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, has not been banned, even though it is generally seen as representing the Turkish minority in the country.
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Romania. (Asenova et al 2007) In some regions, identifying their
speakers as Bulgarians or Macedonians is quite straightforward; in others,
the speakers face several alternatives, such as identifying themselves as
being either Bulgarian or Macedonian or, regardless of their native
languages, as members of the main nationality of their country. For
Muslim Slavs, an additional alternative is to consider their primary identity
to be defined in terms of local religious and linguistic designations (such
as Goran, Torbesh, or Pomak).
The Slavs of Greek Macedonia have been variously labelled as
‘Bulgarians,’ ‘Macedonians,’ ‘Slavo-Macedonians,’ and ‘Slavophone
Greeks.’ These Slavs have no official minority status in Greece, and it is
difficult to assess their number. (Karakasidou 1997; 2002) They have a
political party of their own, called ‘Rainbow’ (Mac. Vinožito, Gr. Ouránio
Tóxo). (Rainbow 2014; Nova zora 2014). This political party promotes a
Slavic Macedonian identity, which now seems to prevail among this
minority.
In 2005, the European Court of Human Rights convicted Greece of
violating the freedom of assembly and association with respect to the
Rainbow party. This occurred because the local authorities of Florina,
where the party headquarters is situated, had ‘contributed through their
conduct to arousing the hostile sentiment of a section of the population’
against the party, and the local police had refused to protect the party
members when a mob demolished the party headquarters. (ECHR 2011c)
Yet unlike its counterpart in Bulgaria, the Rainbow party has not been
denied official registration and it has been able to participate in elections,
resulting in a turnout of approximately 5,000 votes. (Rainbow (political
party) 2014)
Greek Thrace has a Slavic-speaking Muslim minority called the
Pomaks. The Thracian Muslims are an officially recognised religious
minority in Greece, but ethnically and linguistically, this minority includes
Turks, Pomaks, and Roma. The Pomaks’ confessional solidarity with the
Turks seems to be stronger than any cross-border linguistic solidarity with
15
the Bulgarians. Moreover, attempts to create a local Pomak standard
language that is written in Greek letters have not been very successful.
(Steinke 2007; Voss 2007) The Pomaks live in a trilingual situation in
which both Greek and Turkish are more prestigious than their native
language. (Adamou 2012)
The Slavic minority in the regions of Mala Prespa in Albania had a
recognised minority status in Communist Albania, although they had little
contact with the neighbouring Republic of Macedonia in Yugoslavia. The
Macedonian standard language was, and still is, taught in some primary
schools in Mala Prespa, and the contact with Macedonia is currently
intense. (Steinke & Ylli 2007; Macedonian Alliance 2014) The Muslim
Slavs who live in Golo Brdo (Golloborda) in Albania did not have, and still
do not have, a recognised minority status. They are reported by Novik
(2013) to not possess a well-defined ethnic identity that would closely
connect them to the Macedonians, nor to the Bulgarians (see also Steinke
& Ylli 2008). All the Slavic minorities in Albania are targeted by Bulgarian
cross-border nationalism, although Bulgaria and Albania do not share a
border. It is interesting to note that the English Wikipedia articles entitled
‘Macedonians of Albania’ and ‘Bulgarians in Albania’ in fact refer to the
very same people. (Macedonians of Albania 2014; Bulgarians in Albania
2014) As a member of the European Union, Bulgaria can offer these
minorities more benefits than the less affluent Macedonia. (Novik 2013:
179)
A Slavic-speaking Muslim minority living in the Gora region is
divided among three countries: Albania, (Steinke & Ylli 2010) Kosovo, and
Macedonia. One of the six stars in the flag of Kosovo represents these
Gorani (the other five stars stand for the Albanians, Serbs, Turks, Roma –
including the Ashkali and ‘Egyptians’ – and Bosniaks). As for their
language, the Gorani have been claimed to be Serbs (Torlak dialect
speakers), Macedonians, or Bulgarians. Their self-designations include
gorani or goranci ‘the inhabitants of Gora (Highland)’ and našinci ‘our
people.’ Sometimes they are also included in the group of Torbeshi, which
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is a general name for Macedonian-speaking Muslims, whereas the
Bulgarian Wikipedia oddly characterises this minority as Pomaks,
apparently because that would link them to the Bulgarian-speaking
Muslims in Bulgaria. (Pomatsi 2014)
There are many Gorani websites on the internet; some present their
own Islamic traditions and connect these to the Bosnian Islam, while
others link the traditions to Serbian folk culture. There are also pages that
identify the Gorani with the Bulgarians. Most of these web addresses can
be found in the English Wikipedia article entitled ‘Gorani people’. (Gorani
people 2014)
The interest that Bulgaria takes in Gora may seem surprising, given
the fact that Bulgaria does not border on the region and is not a
predominantly Islamic country. One example of this interest is the
valuable 1,384-page dictionary of the ‘goranski (nashinski) language’ by
Nazif Dokle (2007), published by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. This
dictionary is written in the Albanian orthography and the headwords are
explained in Albanian. But the dictionary presents the dialect as belonging
to the Bulgarian language, which seems to have been a sufficient reason
for the Academy to finance the publication. This can be interpreted as
being a type of scholarly pincer movement. In other words, if the dialect
spoken by the Gorani is Bulgarian, it follows that all Macedonian dialects
that are spoken between Bulgaria and Gora must likewise be Bulgarian.
The Gorani are consequently a target of both Great Bulgarian and Great
Serbian aspirations, although this occurs only on the level of language
and folklore.
Analysing and Dismantling Nationalist Discourses
The first of Benedict Anderson’s ‘three paradoxes of nationalism’ is ‘[t]he
objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective
antiquity in the eyes of nationalists.’ (2006: 5) Bulgarian historians
readily mention the recentness of any clear manifestations of a distinct
17
Slavic Macedonian ethnic identity. Their Macedonian counterparts must
significantly strain their historical narrative to distinguish the Macedonians
in the Middle Ages, when no distinction was made between Macedonians
and Bulgarians. (Brunnbauer 2005) On the other hand, however, another
constructed historical narrative is a direct line from the mediaeval
tsardoms to the Bulgaria of today.
Sampimon’s (2006) monograph, Becoming Bulgarian, reveals how
the Bulgarian national identity was consciously constructed in the course
of the nineteenth century, which was a process that was slower than the
forming of the Serbian, Romanian, and Greek (or Hellenic, as opposed to
Romaic [cf Detrez 2008]) identities. If we date the initial stage of the
construction of the Bulgarian national identity to the late eighteenth
century, and that of the Macedonian identity to the late nineteenth
century,8 we cannot assume this difference of one hundred years to be a
distinction between a ‘real’ and a ‘false’ identity. It is of course easy to
imagine a past in which the Macedonians would have adopted the
Bulgarian identity, especially if the San Stefano borders would have been
established. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the actual history was
of the wrong type, as the dominant discourse in Bulgaria maintains.
A peculiar feature of the Bulgarian cross-border linguistic
nationalism is that the overwhelming majority of its targets do not define
themselves as Bulgarians, but as Macedonians, Slavophone Greeks,
Pomaks, Torbeshi, Gorani, Serbs, etc. To a lesser extent, a similar
argument applies to the Macedonian cross-border nationalism in Pirin
Macedonia, which is the Blagoevgrad region in Bulgaria, where a vast
majority of the inhabitants identify themselves as being Bulgarians, not
Macedonians.
8 See Friedman (2003: 261–264). It is difficult to acquire an overview of what the representatives of the emerging Macedonian intelligentsia actually thought and wrote about the Macedonian identity in the nineteenth century. This is probably because any declarations of Macedonian identity at that time would have occurred too early for those Bulgarian historians who would now want to present Macedonia as Tito’s creation, and too late for those Macedonian historians who would want to construct a significantly longer past for their nation.
18
One important question is how possible it is to maintain a discourse
in which a large group of people is attributed a specific identity even when
they themselves deny it. I propose that this is made possible by three
distinct fallacies: the essentialist fallacy, the primordialist fallacy, and the
fallacy of objective language boundaries.
Firstly, the essentialist fallacy assumes that an identity is based on
the objectively observable properties of people, and can therefore be
contrary to what they say and think themselves. In reality, ethnolinguistic
identities are social constructs and, at the boundaries that are ethnic,
linguistic or cultural, these identities are even a matter of choice. This is
not to deny that people’s identities are restricted by the objective social
context and by other circumstances. For example, having been born in
Finland, I cannot simply decide to become Japanese.9 But my Finnish
identity is a social construct that I and my fellow citizens support, and it
would be absurd to claim that we Finns would somehow represent some
other identity that we ourselves are not aware of. Nevertheless, this is
precisely the type of claim that is told to the Macedonians. Social
constructs (such as the value of money) exist because people are aware
of them and support them in their behaviour (for example, the exchange
of goods for money).
Secondly, the primordialist fallacy is linked to Anderson’s first
paradox of nationalism that was mentioned above. Primordialism
considers that for a nation to exist, a long historical continuity and
distinctness is both a necessary and a sufficient condition. Assuming it to
be a sufficient condition, the prevailing Bulgarian discourse assumes that
because Bulgarians and Macedonians once formed a single ethnic group
for centuries, they must continue to be a single group. On the other hand,
assuming a long historical continuity as a necessary condition, many
Macedonian historians have attempted to construct a distinct Macedonian
9 Nonetheless, in principle this road is not closed for me, as is demonstrated by the example of the Finnish-born Marutei Tsurunen (in Finnish: Martti Turunen), a member of the Diet of Japan, who consciously decided to become Japanese having arrived in the country at the age of 27. (Marutei Tsurunen 2014)
19
identity that existed prior to the Middle Ages. We can therefore conclude
that the Bulgarian nationalist discourse has problems with the present,
while its Macedonian counterpart has problems with the past, but they are
both erroneous to assume that present-day national and linguistic
identities can be, and must be, projected into the past. (Brunnbauer
2005; Detrez 2009; Hranova 2005; Lory 2005)
It is interesting to note that Blaže Koneski (1921–1993), who was
the key figure in establishing the Modern Macedonian standard language
after World War II, and who was also instrumental in creating its
belletristic tradition, seems not to have been a pure primordialist. In his
essay, ‘The Macedonian Language in the Context of the Development of
Slavic Literary Languages,’ (1968) Koneski discusses the ‘historical rights’
of the Macedonians to the mediaeval Ohrid Literary School, but he does
not hesitate to refer to Macedonians as a ‘young nation.’ (Koneski 1968:
34) What he defends, however, is their right to envision a long historical
tradition as culminating in the establishment of the Macedonian nation.
Perhaps this development was unavoidable in Koneski’s view, but it does
not necessarily involve a long, continuing existence of that nation as an
unchanging historical entity.
Thirdly, and finally, the fallacy of objective language boundaries
assumes that every language is defined by an objective set of features
that are shared by all of its dialects. For this reason, the ‘unity of
language X in all of its dialects’ is an expression that can be found in the
dialectological studies of more than one Slavic language. As a
consequence, certain Balkan Slavic linguistic features are seen as
objectively defining the boundaries of the Bulgarian language, even
though the choice of particular features is always subjective.
Furthermore, presenting those features as a compact bundle of isoglosses
may distort the actual linguistic evidence on the ground. To return to
Koneski, he again seems to have been more realistic when he stated, ‘the
M[acedonian] dialects have been a part of a continuum with the
20
S[er]b[ian] and B[ul]g[arian] dialects for so long, that today it is not
possible to draw distinct boundaries between them.’ (1983: 2)
Even for a foreign linguist, the questions of language boundaries
and linguistic identities may become a question of research ethics.
(Lindstedt 2008a) Nonetheless, a linguist should become aware that
conflicts among nationalist discourses cannot be resolved by linguistic
arguments alone, but must also take into account the self-identification of
the speakers. Moreover, the myth of the objectivity of structural and
dialectological features and isoglosses should be dismantled.
Bulgaria and Macedonia also compete on symbolic levels other than
that of language. In Sofia, the University is named after St Clement of
Ohrid, and the National Library after St Cyril and St Methodius. In the
Macedonian capital of Skopje, the reverse occurs: the city has a ‘Sts Cyril
and Methodius’ University and ‘St Clement of Ohrid’ National and
University Library. The Macedonians do not approve of the Bulgarians’
claiming St Clement as a Bulgarian saint and writer. In contrast, the
Bulgarians reject the Macedonians’ opinion that the saint was not
Bulgarian (and Clement of Ohrid himself would not have comprehended
that question).
A pertinent question is why common history and linguistic closeness
poses a problem. A linguistic example may be found in Scandinavia: the
closeness of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish does not fuel attempts to
deny the existence of any one of these languages, although mutual
intelligibility, for instance, between standard Swedish and standard
Norwegian is better than between some of the extreme dialects of
Swedish. Instead, the shared Scandinavian heritage is seen as a unifying
symbol, not grounds for disagreement. The difference may lie in the fact
that contrary to Scandinavia, where the statehoods of Denmark, Norway,
and Sweden have continuity since the Middle Ages, the nation-forming
processes in the Balkans are historically still relatively young (despite
their claim of mediaeval roots), and therefore the need for self-affirmation
is strong.
21
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