Читать книгу The Alphabet of Discord - Giustina Selvelli - Страница 6

Both the end of imperial rule in the Balkan Peninsula (Ottoman and Habsburg Empires) and that of socialism triggered complex cultural processes and political mechanisms, ushering in an era marked by the search for an “exclusive” national identity and by the clashes between the various nationalities that emerged from the ruins of the empires. During this period of upheaval, many cultural symbols and mythographies were deployed to meet the needs of modern nation-building processes, in order to create a more homogenous identity for the new nation-states, while many other elements were excluded from the prevailing rhetoric. Political and cultural elites undertook multiple operations of “rewriting” national history with the aim of restoring supposedly “pure” and “original” identities.

The implication was (and still is) that the true identity of the groups somehow lay in a past that had to be recovered: depending on the phase, this was a pre-imperial, medieval or pre-socialist past. In any case, it resided in an ethnically individual past characterized by glorious moments and precise, circumscribed markers of identity. The potential embodied by certain cultural traits was thus also evident at the ideological level: each successor state became much more national and homogeneous than it had been in the imperial period. The builders of the new nation-states in the Balkans continued to refer to the imperial past as a negative term of comparison, used “homogenizing” ideological tools, and often pursued discriminatory policies towards minorities.

More than a century after 1918, it is still useful and appropriate to study the politics of nation-building in the Balkan countries by taking into account the post-imperial context of their history at the political, cultural and ethnic levels, as this is an important aspect in the development of specific discourses of identity. In relation to their dynamics of “self-representation,” many countries in Southeast Europe (including Turkey) still seem to be applying a perspective that minimizes internal ethnic differences and the history of diversity that has shaped them for centuries. They prefer to affirm instead a unified and homogeneous vision of the nation that ideally makes them more similar to the countries of the West to which they aspire to belong and towards which they harbor a kind of inferiority complex that could never be fully appeased. Such notions of homogeneity, on the other hand, favor greater control of the state and national discourse over the population, whose potential diversity could endanger the ideal stability and historical mythography constructed in a largely mono-ethnic sense.

On the path of nation-building and identity reconstruction, the countries of the region availed themselves of various rhetorical strategies in public discourse, strategies which concealed the various existing identity ambiguities (mainly in the form of minorities) that could sound a discordant note in the idea of a direct correspondence between ethnic, linguistic and religious identities (Ivanov 2007). Hence, even after a number of years, there was still resentment within the Balkan majority groups against certain minorities (and their cultural elements, including language and alphabet), to whom the characteristics of “enemy” and “foreigner” were attributed. Not surprisingly, this phenomenon also characterized the post-socialist period, when countries had to resort to a new rhetoric of identity based on discourses of the “distinction” and “continuity” of their historical and cultural existence, in which elements such as the alphabet played and continue to play a crucial role.

In Croatia, the problematic history in question corresponds to that associated with the presence of the Serb minority, which is a “disturbing” reality that re-actualizes a part of the past associated with the figure of the enemy. In Bulgaria, on the other hand, the unwanted history is perfectly embodied by the Turkish minority, which brings back into the present the Ottoman, Islamic and foreign past from which the national narrative still tries to distance itself. In both cases, the minority group in question is the majority in a neighboring country, one which has enjoyed greater power in the past and was feared precisely because of this, having been accused of engaging in underhanded collaboration with the independent nation’s ethnic minority, as well as threatening renewed oppression and making territorial claims (Kymlicka 2002: 19-20).

These minority communities constitute a kind of Significant Other (Triandafyllidou 2003: 34-38), but in the negative sense, i.e. tabooed, troublesome, although indispensably part of an identity construction that uses the “Other” to affirm what one is not, to achieve a stronger affirmation of the nation and its values. As stated in the preface to Entangled History of the Balkans. Volume 3, a work that moves in a critical direction by attempting to deconstruct the individual historiographies (and mythographies) of the Balkan states:

they tell more or less the same story with different actors—a long and illustrious history with remarkable continuity starting from ancient times; the deeds of a unique people who demonstrated an immense capacity to survive in difficult circumstances and in endless struggles with enemies; a people who, even after falling under brutal domination and suffering horrible losses in lives and territories, managed to resurrect themselves again and again. (Daskalov Vezenkov 2015: 1)

This description, then, could apply to any country in the region that suffers from a kind of “victim complex,” whereby it experiences a conflicted and unresolved relationship with its past and carries the seeds of conflict into its present and potential future. These emotional aspects, which are at the same time subjectively experienced and collectively represented, have the power to trigger animosities and rigidities in large segments of the population, bringing to the surface traits of the past that people are still struggling to come to terms with.

Nationalism feeds on national myths (Đerić 2005), on ideas about a supposed historical continuity of identity that has remained unchanged in its essence over the centuries despite foreign domination and the multiple influences to which it has been exposed. The Balkan countries have invested a great deal in the (re)construction of specific narratives of their national history: no country in the region is an exception. National myths are largely tied to historical figures of great “mythopoetic” importance and to cultural elements of the greatest possible prestige, often claimed by several nations, in an exclusivist logic that is a fundamental feature of nationalism itself. In this context, it easily follows that the very idea of minority is problematic, as it can jeopardize the history and image of the nation as it has been propagated and conveyed since the beginning of the country’s new post-imperial (or post-socialist) history.1

In this context, the decline of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires can be put in relation with the development of the ideal of the nation-state in Western Europe, compared to which these state entities appeared anachronistic. Indeed, the “heterogeneous” legacy of the post-imperial states was largely incompatible with the ethno-linguistic model of the nation-state, as they were multiethnic, multi-linguistic and often even multi-confessional territories (Dogo 1999: 10-15). The only type of identity that took its place was instead a nationalism based on the centralizing model of national unification of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, in which the diversity of identities found no room for legitimization (Hobsbawm 1997: 16).