Front Matter - Part 01

The Balkan Mega-ethnos National Doctrines of Macedonia’s neighbours

By Dimitar Mirchev

(Translated from Macedonian to English and edited by Risto Stefov)

The Balkan Mega-ethnos National Doctrines of Macedonia’s neighbours

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January 7, 2015

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THE BALKAN MEGA-ETHNOS - National Doctrines of Macedonia’s neighbours

NOTE:

At first, when I started working on this paper, my wish was that this subject did not exist, that the national doctrines of our neighbours had simply not been written. I wished that these doctrines, which have been collected, as well as those from the older generation, simply did not exist. I thought that the Balkans and particularly Macedonia would be much happier without them. Yet, realistically, they are part of the objective positions of Macedonia’s neighbours and, like it or not, they are well shaped. And thus they could not be denied. No matter how subjectively, nationally and ethnically biased they are, they influence policy and relations in the Balkans, and still not resolved, they are current in the relations between Macedonia’s neighbours and will probably continue to be that way.

And us such, I took on the task to research and critically look at them. I simply could not resist the temptation not to do it. And this is the result of my contribution. The essence here is to understand that relations in the Balkans and around Macedonia do not occur randomly and spontaneously. They have their genesis, social history and social development base. They have their own motives, actors, promoters, supporters and formulations. And understanding all these complexities can help crystallize relationships, procedures and policies among the countries in the region, between Macedonia and its neighbours, and even inside some state systems. And as such the neighbourhood will start thinking differently. It will no longer think that we here amongst us do not care about these doctrines. We want them to know that we know about them, that we carefully studied them, that we have analyzed them and that we have not kept silent about them. We don’t want them to think that we are not influenced by their reality and that we ignored them. I truly believe that these people, this nation, this country, regardless of the doctrines and current politics and challenges, will survive and hold on, and will not succumb to the temptations to which they have been exposed. And as our great poet Gane Todorovski once said: “We are as many as we are, that’s for sure!”

Many of my co-workers, friends and colleagues encouraged and helped me in this endeavour. Therefore, I would like to mention a few of them. First I want to mention my editor and publisher of this book, my friend Gligor Stoikovski who, for a long time, motivated me, gave me his support and helped me with the editing of my work. I also want to mention my colleagues and reviewers Dr. Branislav Sarkaliats and Dr. Dalibor Iovanovski and thank them for their valuable suggestions and guidance, as well as my friend Dr. Zlatko Kramarich, who I want to sincerely thank and M.Sc. Eng. Melita Ianchevska for her help with the technical editing.

Most gratitude, however, goes to my wife, Aneta Mircheva, who not only encouraged me but also put up with me with much benevolence while I was preparing this book.

The author

Foreword: Balkan Mega-Ethnos – From Ethno-Romanticism to Ethno-Violence

1. Introduction and Background

This book contains ten articles, more like fragments of texts which represent the ethno-political platforms of Macedonia’s neighbours. These are: “Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences” from 1986, published in several places, taken from the Zagreb “Our themes”; after that fragments of V. Shesheli’s work “Ideology of Serbian nationalism” from 2002, and an extract from Momchilo Subotich’s paper “The Serbian state in the Serbian political party programs to the Dayton Agreement” from 2006. Included are two Greek texts “the Macedonian Question. Overview of attempts to create an artificial nation”, by the Institute for International Political and Strategic Studies in Athens, released in February 1993 and “Skopje searching for an identity and international recognition”, released in Solun in 1994. Also included are three fragments of Bulgarian texts “Bulgaria in the 21st century, The Bulgarian national doctrine, Part One”, prepared by the Scientific Centre for Bulgarian National Strategy, issued in Sofia in 1997. Part Two of the same doctrine, released the next year in Sofia, and after that a long fragment of the booklet “Bulgarian policy towards the Republic of Macedonia”, published ten years later by another publisher, also in Sofia. The Albanian doctrine included is called “Platform for solving the Albanian national question”, adopted and published by the Academy of Sciences of Albania, Tirana, 1998. At the same time there was another of the league’s program specification documents released in New York, in the Albanian American Civic League web site. The document was entitled “Challenges to democracy in multiethnic states”, by Arben Xhaferi, which is also contained in this book.

The documents are sorted in alphabetical order by country and then by the time of publication; they have been translated from the original and are analyzed and qualified in the preface. Bibliographies and short explanations are included.

There is no doubt that these documents were the basis and, in some places, a prelude and a precursor of many political movements in the

region; some even played a direct role in events (riots, clashes and violence) in the Balkans in the last decade and a half (prior to 2013). After all, this is the case with all foreign policy doctrines, especially those of the Great Powers. Here are some of the more famous historical doctrines; The American Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century, the Wilson Doctrine and the Marshall Plan of the 20th century, the Japanese Maidzhi Doctrine, the German Drang-naht Osten Doctrine, the Soviet Brezhnev Doctrine of limited sovereignty, etc. The ones that originated in the Balkans don’t have far reaches but, no doubt, have impact on regional and on a wider range of political relations. They appeared like a second wave of national or ethno-political doctrines, in the last twenty years or so (prior to 2013), after the major system and state political changes in the Balkans that followed after 1990. The first wave of doctrines was established in the nineteenth century, the era of national revival and romanticism, the era during which the Balkan countries were established and consolidated, when they all established and followed expansionist programs, conquests and other similar concepts.

Let us mention a few here. The Serbian Foreign Minister Ilia Garashanin’s “Nachertania” was released in 1844. It had aims at restoring Dushan’s empire. The same year (1844) the “Megali idea” (Greater Greece) was launched by Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Koletis. It had aspirations to restore the Byzantine Empire. A mention of the “Megali-idea” can be found in a speech made by Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Koletis to the Constituent Assembly in Athens in January 1844. After that came the Order (Constitution) and the program of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee released to the workers for the freeing of the Bulgarian nation, prepared in 1869 in Bucharest by G. Rakovski, L. Karavelov, V. Levski, H. Botev, I. Tsankov and T. Peev. Then there was the 1878 Program of the Albanian League of Prizren. Following that was Kemal Pasha Ataturk’s Doctrine of 1925 entitled “Peace at home, peace over the world”. The Doctrines examined and analyzed here are mainly a modernization of the texts from the past two centuries, adapted to new circumstances.

The point of this analysis is not to criticize or to disdain the texts, even less to turn them into historic or other arguments, though in some places it can not be completely avoided. Neither can the

legitimacy nor right of every ethnicity, nationality, nation, and so on, be ignored. And no social group or human community should be inhibited from focusing on its problems, from envisioning its future and from pursuing its dreams... Ethnicity and nation, regardless of the dynamics of globalization and the rise of civil society in the world, are a reality and, of course, not a short future of human social organization and spirituality. Hence, they are not an anachronism, nor a tide of modernism as an alternative or a competition of ethnicities, in a nation-centrism.

And as such, the sum of social ties, reproduction patterns, emotions, feelings and transpositions of people in the future, who will carry their ethnicity and nation with them, which in fact are similar to the religious forms and transpositions, deserve a real and legitimate existence, even when social and especially political contradictory and retrograde obstacles exist. But then from here on, just as legitimate, responsible and called to account, is the analytical and critical approach to the research of these social phenomena.

The problem, as it is highlighted in the scientific texts about nations and nationalism, by Anthony Smith, famous researcher of modern nationalism, originated as a result of contradictions between laws that are not intrinsic to science: those between the “essence” of the nation and its “designed” quality; between the nation’s antiquity and its purely immediate appearance, as well as between the cultural basis of nationalism and its confrontation with exclusive political aspirations and goals. Born in those contradictions in law are one-sided and twisted ethno-symbolisms which include scientific and rational attempts to identify and legitimize nation centrism. They often deeply affect historical scholarship and political activities of the so-called “new nations”, and also their nationalist circles (Smith, 1998 p.170). In sociology, in a more general way, the problem as identified by Berger and Lukman more than 30 years ago belongs to the “social construction” of reality, in which science plays only a small part (Berger and Luckman, 1967).

There is no doubt that ethno-symbolism with everything that reflects social reality, coupled with ethno-politics, have essentially affected the lives of modern people living as ethnic groups within a social group as a community and as groups of communities in multiethnic

or multinational compositions. Much influence is also placed on events and developments in the region and on the international community in general. It follows that all social phenomena or processes that focally examine sociology, for example, social groups and grouping, production and reproduction patterns, mobility and social dynamics, cultural and spiritual production and expression, all fall under the strong influence of ethno-phenomenology and ethno-symbolism. The study of them and thinking about them is also under great influence. It equally applies to processes studied in political science, economics, culture and other basic sciences, for example, management and governance, marketing and ownership, manufacture, and especially distribution, etc.

Hence, the purpose of publishing this book was to add to the familiarity of ethno-symbolism, ethno-centrism and ethno-politics in the region in which we live, and not with a different aim than to be better able to understand and to respond more appropriately to manifestations and expressions. Why precisely these documents and not others? Why not more documents, other documents or older documents? Because, namely, it is known that the region, the Balkans, and particularly the countries of the former Yugoslavia, were so fertile a ground that the fertility fertilized the ethno-political platforms, documents and acts as much as it did the movements and drives.

In the wider region, for example, in the other republics of the former Yugoslavia, there are variations of such doctrinal documents; the Slovenian, and especially the Croatian and Bosnian, influenced the conflicts, and the violence, especially in 1990 to 2000. Let us also mention here the “Contributions to the Slovenian National Program,” published in December 1987 in number 57 of the Ljubljana “New show,” authored by Hribar, Urbanchich, Rupel, Puchnik, Ianchar, Grafenauer, etc., after that, in late 1989, the political programs of HDZ in Zagreb, created by a group of scientists from the Lexicographical Institute, led by Franjo Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovich’s Bosnian SDA in Sarajevo.

It is worth studying all these texts and documents together, historical and recent, using the same methodology and analytical procedures. However, in the selection of papers we opted for one of the more

modest documents, one of the new ones belonging to a bordering neighbour, with whom we live and communicate directly and with whom, by them or by us, we share ethnic communities “behind our borders”. In addition to all that, there are significantly more doctrinal documents, in addition to the collection available through the media, through scientific, journalistic and even literary papers. Yet, we had to put boundaries on our scope, and those boundaries were their importance and influence on policy.

The documents we made available are of more recent testimony. Even though they are built on the concept of historical role, rights, merits and contributions to ethnicity, they are shaped in an effort to face modernism and to create and reconstitute some kind of order that has its basis in the current changes and dynamics in the Balkans, in Europe and in the world beyond. In that, they have serious problems not only in redefining nationalism and ethno-centrism, as they were known in the 19th century, but by overcoming the apparent contrast with the modern trends of civil society, development, globalization and regionalization, of the new market democracy and human rights (especially the latter), etc.

We cannot say that in many of them, or in part of any of them, there is no realism and objectivity in the evaluation of the then state of affairs and conditions, as well as in transformed and libertarian rhetoric. As there is much ethno-centrism, destruction, threats of violence and in passing on the other sides of the rights of other ethnicities, nations, states and communities. Therefore, despite the criticism of abstinence and denial or disqualification, we can not look at these documents as “not nationalistic”, and some of them as “not aggressively nationalistic”.

The question is where in this collection is the Macedonian ethno-political program or national doctrine? There isn’t one, simply because such documents do not exist. And if they existed, we could not find any. Otherwise, of course, we would have included them in our study. It is understandable, of course, that there are national doctrinal elements in many sources from the revival period, from the uprisings and from later periods. Let us mention a few here. The Constitution (Rules) of the Kresna Uprising Headquarters belonging to the Macedonian Revolutionary Committee of 1878; The 1890

Constitution of the Macedonian League in Sofia; The nation building program and Manifesto of the Provisional Government of Macedonia 1880/81; The MRO (TMORO) and later VMRO statehood documents, etc. (Minoski 2008, part one, chapter 3, Popovski, 2002). The purpose of these documents, and others like them was to defend the liberation and statehood character, and not to indoctrinate conquest, expansionism and aggressive tendencies towards the neighbours. Most of these national doctrinal elements were there to advance cooperation and joint action against outside aggressors.

More recently, there were several attempts to make, or at least to sketch, such a platform or program. From 1990 onwards, there were incentives and appeals to different forums, advisors, intellectuals and academic circles, asking for suggestions and proposals for an all-party or inter-party team, to lay some groundwork and set some “benchmarks” for our national interests. Unfortunately all those attempts failed. There was, and today there is much criticism from intellectuals and from the media for the lack of such a platform. There is a serious problem facing Macedonia and the Macedonian people, not only because there is no such platform but because no effort has been made to put one together. The lines followed by policy development, movements, etc., are not known and are creating some of the problems we are facing today. And as such we are powerless against the unilateral challenges of other nations and nationalities, and the modernism of the uncertainties of the future. Perhaps in these demands and criticism there is a grain of rationality and truth. But, what is essential is to develop a strategy that reflects the plural, civic and multicultural character of this country and to have a clear and long-term government policy, democratically shaped and legitimately adopted. And of course that it must work.

By saying this we don’t mean that no Macedonian nationalism, ethno-centrism or ethno-romanticism exists in Macedonia. We do not say that there are no party documents, program documents, or journalistic texts, which express nationalistic sentiments. Plenty of them do exist but are not shaped, designed, ideologically and systematically rounded, to counter those other documents in our collection.

Macedonia has its own perspectives and a future as a developed civil society, with strong harnessed production and human resources, economic prosperity, stability in its democratic institutions and a market economy, as a multicultural society in its composition and reproduction, liberal and tolerant in its spiritual values and aggregates. Macedonia’s direction and benchmark is European and global integration. The Macedonian national identity, language and culture can survive and thrive only in such developmental conditions, included among which must be the survival of the Macedonian minorities and the Diaspora outside the Republic of Macedonia. The Macedonian people have no other national interests outside of these qualifications. This means that the identity sign, historical foundation, potential, outlook, challenges and ambitions of the Macedonian people can materialize and positively focus only in conditions of modernity, democracy and human rights, development, good neighbourliness, tolerance and dialogue. These values, however, are common, and not against, or at the expense of Macedonia’s neighbours, nor at the expense of the ethnic communities in Macedonia who live together. If so, and if the development of internal relationships and structures in the country are moving in that direction, the Macedonian nation will have a legitimate claim to a moral authority to fight and to not give up its identity, national independence and statehood, for anyone, no matter with what plans, doctrines, platforms, ambitions and illusions they are presented which will prove to be powerless and out of perspective. It is necessary, therefore, to develop a state and civic strategy, which will open space for the flourishing of our national and cultural independence.

2. Issues in the Balkans

And yet, in relation to Macedonia and the Balkans there is a basic question that needs to be put forward: “From where did all that nationalism, ethnocentrism, ethno-political charge get its meaning and will it have future tragic events, conflicts and doctrinal debacle failures or disappointments from the events that occurred in the last two decades in our country and the wider region?”

The dissolution of socialism in Eastern and Central Europe, especially during the dramatic last decade of the last century, was

not necessarily the cause or challenge of nationalism and ethnocentrism. Nor did the break-up come as a result of external pressures, blows or isolation to which socialism was eventually exposed. And as a Slovenian analyst concluded, contrary to many expectations, the socialist political and economic systems were not beat by their generic opponent, Western capitalism. The situation did not explode through a revolution and a counter-revolution. But rather it imploded, dissolving in its own contradictions, bursting with accrued problems which could not be resolved internally (Kocijančič, 1996, p.7-8).

These systems actually pulled apart the very basic stitches that held them together: the economic and production efficiency, freedom and democracy, human and civil rights, living standards. The implosion released a great energy directed at these stitches and freed the deeply hidden potential to renew progress and the stunted growth and to get into the modern flow of our civilization.

Nothing less, that energy was not a national emancipator: namely, to reaffirm national freedom, culture, value systems, traditions and creativity, part of the human and civil liberty and culture, which, until then were held in the hall of “liberation of labour”. Yet, some societies and communities were able to develop and grow, they were truly capable of creating growth, with the rise of civil society, market and democratic institutions and benefits, including a mechanism for solving extremely sensitive, and explosive issues. For example, in question were the fates of the major USSR, CHSR federations, the position of minorities, which in some of these newly formed countries amounted to 40% of the population. In other societies and communities, like the ones in the Balkans, for example, and in the former Yugoslav federation. The national energy here often widened into a destructive conflict, taking a violent direction. Why exactly did this happen in the Balkans and perhaps Chechnya and occasionally in a Caucasus republic?

What is the diagonal in those countries which closed or closes the possibility, the energy of national or ethnic empowerment or affirmation to be involved in the transition from the current system into a civil democracy, with human rights, entrepreneurship, and to have a liberal culture of freedom? Is this the legacy of socialism, to

tighten the knots of national and ethnic inequality to a point of making it impossible to coexist and to have permanent conflicts?

On the eve of the collapse of socialism in the late 1980s, all expectations and forecasts in the Balkans, in South East European countries and in the West, were that development in these countries was going to follow the track of liberal democracy, civil society and state, and that the so-called “Nation-building” Western models of democracy would follow. For example, citizens living in equality would participate in the new forms of communication, urbanization, mass education and political processes, through the institutionalization of the so-called nation-state and nation. This was going to be the model that was going to produce national affirmation and cultural development, rapid and balanced economic growth and prosperity, open channels of expression, a responsible and organized public, maturity and pro-actively reacting elite. Such a nation-building process was expected even before the collapse of socialism, for example, from the process of decolonizing Africa and Asia. In part of the dictionary and conceptual sources of the time, that model was equated to nationalism, which in some of the documents in our collection was comically accepted as a way of “becoming nationalists.” And that is “the others against the others”.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, this optimism proved to be touchingly naive, as was earlier mentioned by Anthony Smith, British theorist of nations and nationalism. Namely, not only were the early democratic dreams of the African and Asian nations not realized, but even the developed Western countries began to experience tremors of discontent and ethnic fragmentation, while in the East, the disappearance of the last great multiethnic empire crumbled and so did the cosmopolitan dream of brotherhood and its ethno-national components. Smith wrote: “The great waves of immigration and massive growth of information technology has put into question old beliefs that a single civic nation with a homogenous national identity can be used for ‘healthy’ national development...” Deconstruction of the nation (unitary - D .M.) will place conditions and will pull apart the theory of nationalism. (Smith, ibid. p.3).

Some of the documents in our collection, not only hold onto the concept of “nation building” as it was applied the old way, but

actually transpose or reconcile Marxism with other, older and more traditional theories, such as those of primordial-ism and ethno romanticism.

3. Appearances and stereotypes

In any case, the tragic events that took place in the Balkans in the nineties, contributed to the renewal and even to the traditional performances cemented in the arena of inter-ethnic hatred, strife and violence, wars, fragmentation and continuous struggles and aspirations for secession. The “powder keg” syndrome and the violent and primitive-tribal region stereotype of the Balkans, is deeply rooted in the consciousness of the international community, science and politics, whether deserved or not. This is undeserving, because there never is conflict or significant events in the Balkans, which are not instigated by the foreign factor and which do not play a certain, often primary role in the initiation or conduct of such events. Unfortunately, outside beliefs are that these events and causes of conflict are internal and native to the Balkans. The persistence of this syndrome is reflected in the documents in this collection. But, no matter what the people or ethnicities were, earlier or now, be it they were victims, participants, or perhaps the “users” of the conflict, no one is immune or innocent in the “Balkan syndrome”.

This idea that the Balkans should succumb to critical analysis, review and change is ripe. There are indications that as much as this perception is unfair it is that much more inappropriate. It has become a mental block for the current transformations in the region. For example, it is in the way of a speedy and integrated socio-economic development of the region and of each country individually. It is in the way of opening investment, communications, tourism, culture, etc. It carries risk everywhere in the region. And the reason for that is not because of certain opinions from the public or from the media or from factors outside of it, but primarily because of the movements that are taking place internally.

It is true that historically and traditionally, the Balkans are considered the earthquake prone region in Europe. There has been no greater serious crisis in Europe and the world in the last two

centuries, than the ones that took place in the Balkans. The Balkans have been the epicentre. Let us for example, go back to the Great Eastern Crisis of the 1870’s, the Russo-Turkish War in 1877, the Ilinden Uprising in 1903, the two Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913, the two World Wars, the first of which began in the Balkans, and finally the five “wars” that reflected on the disintegration of Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2001. Included in those was the Macedonian conflict. But the list would be much longer if we were to add the national liberation wars and numerous bilateral armed conflicts, such as the Serbian-Bulgarian conflict, the Greek-Turkish conflict, etc.

True, all these conflicts, wars and feuds, reflect, and actually create a huge amount of negative and destructive energy, ethno-nationalism, chauvinism and hatred, which has shown, say, tendencies towards fragmentation, separatism, division and self-isolation. Hence, in the dictionary and encyclopedia of literature, the terms Balkans, Balkan-ism and Balkan-ization have become synonymous with conflict, fragmentation, ethno-egoism, ethno-primitivism, synonymous with endless divisions and demarcations.

And as such, The Random House dictionary has defined Balkan-ism to mean the division of a country, a territory etc., into small, diverse and ineffective states (The Random House. 1966. p. 113). A long time ago, in 1922, historian Ferdinand Schevill, defined the term Balkan to mean a country, which, contrary to the other parts of Europe that are compelled by geographic forces to aspire to national, economic and political unification, is “divided into many geographically separated units, each separated from the others by natural boundaries, populated by different peoples living in those areas which did much to help them hold their one instinctive desire to have their separate personalities which to this day are successfully opposed to all efforts of political unification”. Some years ago, the Shevil thesis was repeated. (Schevill, reprint, 1995, p.13).

Well known is also Ambassador George Kennan’s assessment presented in the revised preface of his published report for the Carnegie Foundation about the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, written in 1993, which speaks of the same Balkan world where “ancient hatreds” persist and generate inter-ethnic violence and wars, with

the only differences between now and then being military technology (Kennan, 1993, p. 9). In his well-documented study of social sources and causes of the crisis in the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans, and in search of sociological explanations for the events, British sociologist John Allcock, cites a number of sources from the violent history of the region, which recently led to the rise of fanatic nationalism and hatred of other peoples. He then asks the question: “What do you expect from a region whose name became synonymous with violence, fragmentation and disorder?” It follows that the Balkan nations are almost genetically designed for violence, mutual confrontation and conflict. “Hatred,” Allcock writes, “was apparently endemic in the Balkans, stretching back almost to its antediluvian past... It would be difficult to fully document the assumptions for the irreversible irrationality and violence that is endemic in the Balkan societies.” (Allcock, 2000, p. 2- 5).

In his often-quoted travel book “Balkan Ghosts,” publicist Robert Kaplan even connected the Balkans with the rise of Nazism. He wrote: “The history of the twentieth century begins in the Balkans. Here people were marooned in misery and ethnic rivalry, convicted of hatred... Nazism, for example, may have its roots in the Balkans. It was in the inns in Vienna where fertile was the soil for ethnic resentment, so close to the world of the Southern Slavs, where Hitler learned how to hate so contagiously.” (Kaplan, 1993, c. Xxiii). Even some modern writers, when they seriously looked at the violent nature of the Dinaric and Balkan “anthropo-kind” or tribe, always added a little spice to the meal. Catherine Carmichael, English professor of social psychology, in her illuminating study of nationalism and the destruction of tradition, concentrated mainly on inter-ethnic violence, brutality and atrocities in the Balkans, especially relying on testimonials from recent wars. She tries to construct and outline some historical analogies, typical of cults and rituals of violence and destruction, albeit with much sense of importance of context: “We need a science of human behavior ‘in extremis’, which is sensitive to the locality, history and politics. Also, we should make a clear distinction between what happened in the Balkans and what is from the Balkans.” (Carmichael, 2002, p. 107).

Could it be true that the Balkans and our neighbourhood are what they think they are? Could it be that the documents found in our collection are only a stone in the ethno-myth of the Balkan mosaic? It is not coincidental, that we can successfully deal with ethno-centrism and nation-centrism, only if we deal with its wider created historical reflection. Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova, in her remarkable study entitled “Imagining the Balkans”, makes a clear distinction between the production of scientific knowledge and popular mythology rooted in debates on the Balkans. She very rightly claims that a good part of the reasons for the causes of intra-Balkan conflicts are actually imported from abroad, and that a myth is created in the Balkans, instrumental for the identification and self-identification of the Western Europeans and of Western culture and values in general. “As it is in the Orient, the Balkans serve as a dump for negative characteristics against which is constructed a positive and self-serving ‘European’ and ‘Western’ performance...” (Todorova, 1997, p. 188).

Todorova and many other authors are struggling to resist the Balkan negative myth with successful and even masterful historical debates in “defense” of the Balkans which clearly shows that unfavorable ethno-models still exist in Western European and so-called general Western civilization countries; the past can be projected into the present, and very often into the future. In other words, the Balkans are what they were, but even other regions or parts of humanity were not and will never be any better. They will stay where they are because the Balkan Region, for a long time, was the way it was and will stay that way, because that’s how the Balkans are stereotyped. On top of that, one not so small group of reports and modern strategic studies has added to the Balkans and its ethno-profile, inclinations of corruption, organized crime, trafficking in human beings, drugs and weapons, as well as other “civilian” criminal activities. John C. Dick from the British Academy of Defense recently assessed that: “It is hard for Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, most of the countries of former Yugoslavia and Albania, not to mention Belarus, to use their imagination in this light (Europe-anization-D.M.). None of them, in recent times, own or show any willingness to develop a stable civil society, with common Western values, the rule of law and an effective, more or less, honest bureaucracy. The transition will likely move towards ultra-

nationalism and authoritarianism (quite possibly to neo-fascism) than to liberal democracy... These countries, from the other side of the EU border, in the new division of Europe, will likely remain relatively underdeveloped in economic areas and substantially deprived of the fruits of globalization. Politically, they are inclined towards instability and vulnerability or towards authoritarianism and suffering.” (Dick, 2003, p. 41-42). The diagnosis of this author is that the region of former Yugoslavia, for example, has not only lost its potential for conflict, but the wars of succession are probably not finished. And this is only the first round...

4. Counterpoint and development

However, there is another line of analysis, which confirms that the crisis in the Balkans can be interpreted differently, if applied thorough scientific discourse. It raises the very notion of Balkan-ism and the “State of Balkania”. Victor Friedman from the University of Chicago, an expert on Balkan linguistics and cultural history, in many of his papers has shown that public and political stereotypes about the Balkans are nothing more than an attempt to project the modernity of the region on the basis of its past, especially on the basis of specific understanding of its past. “Balkan-ism” he writes, is not primarily a clue or a synonym to “political and ethnic fragmentation”. “There is a widely accepted meaning of the term ‘Balkan-ism’ which is quite different from the term fragmentation. In linguistics, Balkan-ism is a property that is shared by unrelated languages of the Balkans. The grammatical structures of the languages in the Balkans confirm centuries long multilingual and multiethnic coexistence, even at the most intimate level.” (Friedman, 2001/2, p. 152).

It is true that since ages ago, the Balkans has been exposed to an intense process of interaction, inter-influence, interdependence and coexistence between the majorities of nations. It is also true that most of the disputes and wars in the Balkans were not ethnic or religious; they were either part of a much broader conflict or were imported from abroad. Friedman’s emphasis, and that of many other authors, above all, is that Balkan-ism and therefore the emergence and expression of nationalism in the region should be studied and treated not as a primarily mental and ethno-mental phenomena, not

as historical and geo-genetic formation, but as a social and developmental phenomenon, i.e. a phenomenon that can thoroughly explain the causality of sociology and culture-ology. Exactly on this point, psychogenetic explanations of nationalism, of ethno-collisions and of the matrix matching of the tangled and twisted ethno-symbolism and the notion that in all the Balkan people, in principle, forms of conflict prevail, and in their hand the power in their argument is significantly minimized.

Sociologically speaking, the entire Balkans and some of its wider region, is significantly less developed than other European regions, especially if compared to Western Europe. In European social and economic history, the Balkans has been left behind the longest in the stage of pre-industrialization and agricultural production in phase with pre-civil social stratification and structure; actually, the reality is that most typical civil revolutions and changes in this part of the continent, which had no typical civil political institutions, came under pressure from the developed bourgeoisie. The national liberation and revival movements in the 19th century, as a rule in all the Balkan countries, were popping up and led mainly by uneducated peasants from the rural and agricultural lands, with the exception of the few elite who were educated outside of the Balkans, in other countries. This fact has prevented the creation of nation-states in the interest of the civil class and civil society which fashions nations after itself, but in the interest of capital-relations and a market economy.

Because of this, most of the small Balkan states became somewhat dynastic, oligarchic and authoritarian with strong and tighter internal contrasts, contradictions and uneven development. They in turn each individually experienced large developmental differences, meaning, inside of each there were great differences and that was in line with the centre-periphery. After that, between them as countries, and in the end, the Balkans as a whole periphery, developed as regional European centres. This aspect of the well-known sociological theory of development and centre-periphery ratios was thoroughly studied by Dr. Denko Maleski (Maleski, 2001/2002). In fact, despite all the claims that the Balkans, and certain individual states, are located at the central geo-strategic position in Europe, that they virtually control the passage between West and East, that hold the bridge that

bridges the continents, economies, cultures, religions and so on…, it is true that the Balkan countries always, especially after the 14/15 century, were the peripheries of the great empires - the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Reich. Uncertain and insecure in their relationship. Hence, there was no interest to invest in their development, or to secure and homogenize their culture or civilization. Some regions or states, however, were closer to the centres and away from the peripheries. Typical examples are Slovenia, Vojvodina and to some extent Croatia.

In conditions of underdevelopment, poverty and isolation such as these, the Balkan countries, namely the ruling circles in the Balkan countries, as a rule, saw their future in wars of conquest, conquering new territories in order to become the great nations they wanted to be. By doing so they played right into the hands of the Great Powers for support or to receive a dynastic lineage from them. These moments, important stages of the social history in the Balkans, are documented by a set of well-known authors (M. Glenny, S. Troebst, St. Pribikjevikj). In the remarkable study of the Balkan economies up to the First World War, M. Palairet has evaluated how economies evolve without development (Palairet, 1997). These are more endogenous reasons for the contrasts in the Balkans, on which the external stakeholders can build and exploit.

The second significant sociological-developmental moment and explanation of ethno-genesis and ethno-relations in the Balkans, especially in the relations in each Balkan country, is expressed in the fact, and in the total fact-ography, that some people are located and exist outside of their home country, in underdeveloped peripheries of other countries. For example, the Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish and Vlach minorities in Northern Greece live in a region which, according to Greek and EU standards, is underdeveloped. And so is the western region of Macedonia, in which most of the Albanian population lives, according to national standards. But then if we look across the border in the same region, but in Albania where mostly Macedonians and Vlachs live, we see that it too is undeveloped. The same is true in the northwestern region of Albania where Montenegrin, Serbian and Macedonian minorities live. The Pirin part of Macedonia in Bulgaria also falls into the same undeveloped category, a region which is, in good measure, inhabited

by Macedonians and other minorities. Let’s not forget Kosovo which, in great measure, is inhabited by Albanians. Former Yugoslavia and later the FRY and Serbia-Montenegro are also examples of underdeveloped regions. Similar differences in economic and social development can also be seen in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including in the spaces inhabited mainly by Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. However, if a systematic study is conducted we will see that we can even make a case for Slovenia and for some small regions inhabited by Hungarians in Međimurje along with some Serbs in Bela Krajina, and in Kninska Krajina in Croatia.

The aim of this introductory analysis is not to research and illuminate the whole issue of relationship of ethnicity-development-standard in the Balkans; this subject will not be examined in depth. But it is true that it deserves special consideration, about which, recently, we published two articles in foreign mediums (Mirchev, 2003, Mirchev, 2008). The studies that we are referring to are examples relating to the former Yugoslav federation which, even after a half a century of oriented production, politics, accelerated progress and investment in the underdeveloped regions, republics and provinces, did not succeed in making any difference in the development of living standards for the population… more or less they were kept in balance. In some important aggregates, there were total failures and living standards took steps backwards.