Victor Petroff's "Unfashionable" Balkan Nationalism
sîmbătă, martie 15, 2008
Pe agenda mea de lucru încep cu greu să se bifeze sau să dispară tot felul de puncte. Încep să mai văd şi capătul, pe care îl preconizez cândva prin prima jumătate a lui aprilie, când o să pot intra - în sfârşit şi din nou - pe redactarea tezei de doctorat. Dar până una-alta, cum în viaţa mea nu se întâmplă mare lucru din lipsă de timp, mai bine vă dau un articol excelent care ne foloseşte tuturor, atâta vreme cât încercăm să fim sinceri unii cu alţii. Pentru cine nu ştie englezeşte, îmi pare rău...
"Unfashionable" Balkan Nationalism?
Victor Petroff
The Balkan nations share more things than they would like to admit. The fates of the nations in the supposed “powder-keg” of Europe are closely intertwined, not least through myths and cultures – Krali Marko is a hero for Serbians, Bulgarians, Macedonians; slivovica has its counterpart in rakia or raki…and of course minorities get left on the “wrong” side of the border. What the Second World War managed to achieve in Central Europe with more or less ethnically homogenous states (there are a few exceptions of course) being created thanks to a genocidal policy and mass movements both East and West in the last months of the war, it didn’t do in the region between the Black and Adriatic seas.
What runs through the mentality of the region is also, thus, nationalism. When cultures are closer than they want to admit, they accentuate the traits that are unique to them and adopt a neurotic defensive reaction – a term once used by a historian to describe Irish political culture – against their neighbours. However, as the recent example in Serbia and Kosovo shows, the problem always stems from an uneasy domestic situation. The history of the Balkans is actually littered with some surprising tolerance of minorities – Tito’s Yugoslavia was a good example; Mazower paints a picture of a heterogeneous but prosperous Salonica in his City Of Ghosts; Bulgaria saved its Jews from the Holocaust.
Yet the nineties and the first years of the 21st Century have seen the same conflicts arise again. After the horrors of the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, many things remained unsolved – Kosovo’s independence and the consequences for the diminishing, shrinking Serbian republic; the status of the Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia, poised precariously between a true independence, claims to its name by Greeks and conflicts over history with Bulgaria; and the root cause of all this – nationalism of the peculiar Balkan variety.
Continuarea aici.
şi-am scris povestea asta eu, Agrigoroaei, medievistu' @ 1:40 PM,
