NGO (Greek Helsinki Monitor) Report on Greece - Part 2 - The legacy of the past
The specificities of Balkan nationalisms

Greek Helsinki Monitor and Minority Rights Group - Greece have been the first Greek Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) to publicly use the term ‘Macedonian minority’ in Greece, to be followed, in 1995, by some other groups or individuals, too few though.

A comprehensive understanding of ethnic conflict and, therefore, of the plight of nearly all minorities in the Balkans requires a reference to the, usually overlooked, particular characteristics of Balkan nationalisms. They certainly belonged to the second wave of nationalisms, the romantic and linguistic, mostly nineteenth century European, nationalisms.
At the heart of each such nationalism was the elevation of a usually vernacular to the status of a literary language-of-(actual or potential) state by (Anderson, 1991:79):
“a coalition of lesser gentries, academics, professionals, and businessmen, in which the first often provided leaders of ‘standing,’ the second and third myths, poetry, newspapers, and ideological formulations, and the last money and marketing facilities.”
So, from the multitude of - nevertheless linguistically similar- Southern Slavic dialects and the archaic Church Slavonic emerged the (internationally but not locally considered today) common Serbo-Croat literary language, based on the neostokavian (ijekavian or ekavian) dialects; Slovenian, based on the Ljubljana dialect; Bulgarian based on the Northern Bulgarian dialect; and Macedonian, based on the Bitola dialect. It should be mentioned that the differences among the various Southern Slav languages are smaller than among the various Italian dialects or those between French and the Occitan dialects (Garde, 1992:125- 141).
In the same period, emerged the other Balkan literary languages-of- state: ‘purified’ Greek, based mainly on the Alexandrian ancient Greek; Romanian, based on the Daco-Romanian dialects but with the replacement of the Cyrillic by the Latin alphabet to distance Romanians from Slavs; Albanian, based on the spoken dialects in modern times Albanian territories; and, finally, as was the pattern at the time, modern Turkish, different from the official Ottoman language, a mixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic (Anderson, 1991:72-5).
Generally (Anderson, 1991:195):
“In Europe, the new nationalisms almost immediately began to imagine themselves as ‘awakening from sleep’, a trope wholly foreign to the Americas.” “The ‘founding intellectuals’ of the various dormant people of Europe will rediscover -or sometimes fully invent - national epic literatures bearing founding myths. One after the other, the nations rediscover heroic and unfortunate ancestors.” (Plasseraud, 1991:49).
Today, it is considered commonplace that there have therefore been three stages in the development of that national consciousness (Hroch, 1968:24-5, as summarized in Banac, 1992:28):
“In the first stage a group of ‘awakened’ intellectuals starts studying the language, culture, and history of a subjugated people. In the second stage, which corresponds to the heyday of national revivals, the scholars’ ideas are transmitted by a group of ‘patriots,’ that is the carriers of national ideologies, who take it upon themselves to convey national thought to the wider strata. In the last stage the national movement reaches its mass apogee.”
Moreover (Banac, 1992:30):
“The ideology of nationalism (...) found its fulfillment in national self-rule and invariably promoted state independence either through a separation of national territory from a larger multinational state (secessionism) or through incorporation of kindred territory within the already established matrix-state (irredentism).”
Irredentism is also known as ‘piedmontization’ after the model of the Italian unification, built around the Piedmont state.
The first peculiarity of Balkan nationalisms, and the most crucial to understand the historical evolution of the area to this day, is that, in most cases, national self-rule was the product of both secessionism and irredentism, unlike in all other non-Balkan countries. If one looks at the maps of the first, initially autonomous and then independent, Montenegran (respectively 1516 and 1878), Serbian (1829, 1878), Greek (1829, 1830), Bulgarian (1878, 1908) and Romanian (1861, 1880) states, and compares them to their maps in the 1990’s, s/he will immediately notice that the first states included no more than half the territory these states rule over today. All of them were the product of secessions from the Ottoman Empire, first in the form of autonomy then as independent states. From the very beginning, they perceived themselves as matrix- states with an irredentist mission to conquer all as yet ‘unredeemed’ territories (Sellier & Sellier, 1991). No other European state has lived through a similar experience, as the current ‘external’ West European frontiers are very similar to the 1815 or the 1885 ones, while the non-Balkan Central and East European frontiers are very similar to the post-World War I 1924 ones. The fact that the early modern Balkan states had to adopt an irredentist attitude would not by itself have inevitably led to the serious ethnic conflicts which have plagued the region in the last two centuries: witness the irredentist formation of Italy and Germany. However, in the Balkans, the unredeemed territories targeted by each new nation-state conflicted with those targeted by other(s) state(s), because of the mixed populations and, usually, their lack of a clear national consciousness in these territories. This specific Balkan situation resulted in:
• one century of diplomatic and armed conflicts in the area (1810’s-1920’s), often accompanied by ethnic cleansing;
• official policies of assimilation of the minorities which were not eliminated or expelled, a characteristic absent from the other romantic or linguistic nationalisms but present in the third wave of ‘official nationalisms’, which were the belated reaction of the native speakers of the official vernacular of the imperial states (England, Russia, Turkey, etc.) to the emergence of the second wave or romantic nationalisms (Banac, 1992:28; Anderson, 1991:78-111);
• development of historical revisionism in the popular culture and, often, the official policies of the Balkan states, as in almost all cases the dream of a large state including all irredenta was materialized for a short period to be shattered soon after: Great Bulgaria (in 1878 and between 1941-1944), Great Romania (1918-1940), Great Serbia (Yugoslavia between 1918-1941 and 1945-1991), Great Greece (1918-1922), Great Albania (1941-1944), Great Croatia (1941-1944); as for Great Macedonia, its creation was envisaged during the post-World War I negotiations, but the idea was in the end rejected by a combined British-French effort (Wilkinson, 1951:233); this led to the emergence of the concept of ‘lost fatherlands’ (the frustrated irredenta) which explains why the large majority of the citizens of the Balkan countries today consider that their countries’ frontiers are bad, although they are not ready to fight wars to change them;
• repression of the remaining minorities, which survived ethnic cleansing, population exchanges or expulsion, and assimilation, more than in other European countries; this often means the refusal to recognize the presence of such minorities, just like the competing Balkan nationalisms had in the past refused to acknowledge each other’s legitimacy.
It is indeed instructive to recall that, in the last two centuries, there has been ‘an almost systematic will to refuse the existence of the neighbor’ nation (Raufer & Haut, 1992:11) in the Balkan peninsula. The Illyrianist movement in its Pan-Croatian form (19th century) considered all Southern Slavs as Croats (Banac, 1992:71-6); it was reciprocated (in the 20th century) by a denial of the existence of separate Croat and Slovene identities by Pan-Serbian nationalists like the interwar Radicals (Banac, 1992: 161-2). Likewise, the Bulgarian distinct nation was challenged by Croats (Banac, 1992:71-6), Serbs (Ancel, 1992:164) and Greeks (Jelavich, 1991:41). Serbian nationalism also considered Albanians ‘lost Serbs’, who had become ‘savages’, and ‘their nationalism was the product of Austrian and Italian intrigue’ (Banac, 1992:293-5); the latter view was shared by Greek nationalists too, who contested the existence of a separate, non-Greek Albanian nation (Lazarou & Lazarou, 1993:171; Vakalopoulos, 1994: 246). Naturally, the irredentist Croat and, especially, Serbian nationalisms had no room for the Bosnians, demeaned as ‘Asians, unstable, perverted’ etc. (Banac, 1992:371-7). Likewise, Serbs, Bulgarians and Greeks have never come to terms with the presence of culturally distinct Macedonians and Vlachs in the area: the Macedonians have been considered as ‘Southern Serbs’ by the Serbs, ‘Western Bulgarians’ by the Bulgarians, and ‘Slavophone Greeks’ by the Greeks (Raufer & Haut, 1992:11), who have regularly demeaningly called in 1992-3 the Republic of Macedonia ‘Skopjan statelet’ and its inhabitants ‘Gypsy-Skopjans’, ‘Balkan Gypsies’, ‘Skopjan Vlachs’ (Elefantis, 1992:39). On the other hand, the word ‘Vlach’ has often had a pejorative meaning among Croats and Albanians (derogatory for Serbs) (Banac, 1992:257 & 300-2) and Greeks (meaning ‘coarse’) (Tegopoulos & Fytrakis, 1993:152). For the generalised use of ‘hate speech’ in modern 1995 Balkan electronic and print media, see Dimitras, Lenkova and Nelson (1995).
This attitude has hardly changed in recent years; in fact, the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe has led to the reappearance of nationalism as strong as ever (Plasseraud, 1991:13-4; see also Garde, 1992:344):
“There is a point on which the nations of Central and Eastern Europe differ substantially from us; it concerns their relation to time and history. Contrary to the Westerners who hardly have an historical memory and today gladly place themselves in the instant, the people in the East often forget to live in the present as a result of an acute historicist consciousness. Their thought and their instinctive reactions are usually located in an historical perspective even if that reference handed down from parents to children is often largely mythical.”
This is particularly true in the Balkans, ‘whose people are loaded with more history than they can bear’ according to Winston Churchill (quoted in Rupnik, 1992:11). Throughout the region’s recent history, with rare exceptions, minorities were perceived, sometimes not without reason, as being manipulated by the fellow ethnic state at the expense of the national interests of the state they lived in. Since in the ‘new order,’ imposed by Hitler at the height of World War II, their presence was used as an excuse to redraw the frontiers at the expense of the winners of World War I, once the ‘protecting curtain’ of the Cold War collapsed, the populations started fearing the return of the ‘old ghosts’, i.e. the ‘border games’ that shattered Europe in the first half of this century; in some nationalist sectors in almost all Balkan countries, nevertheless, such a return was seen in a positive way, in the hope that it could restore some of the ‘lost fatherlands’.
To be Continued …
This report was prepared by Greek Helsinki Monitor (GHM) and Minority Rights Group-Greece (MRG-G)