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Recent imagological scholarship about the Balkans has revised the Balkanism thesis by examining the sympathetic lens through which British liberals viewed the peninsula's Christian and Slavic nationalities following the 1903 establishment of the Balkan Committee. Revisionist historiography has, however, overlooked how non-Christian and non-Slavic communities were represented in Britain beyond overgeneralized orientalist stereotypes of 'the villainous Turk'. This article aims to correct this imbalance by examining representations of Albania in the travel writing and political commentary of Mary Edith Durham and Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert, Britain's most notable supporters of Albania's national movement in the early twentieth century, who came to sympathize with the country because of their own peripheral position in relation to the British cultural and political mainstream, by virtue of gender and an unfashionably conservative worldview. Focusing on their published travel writing and political commentary between the 1904 publication of Durham's first narrative, Through the Lands of the Serb, and Herbert's untimely death in 1923, this article proposes that they articulated a counter-discourse to liberal writing on south-eastern Europe and that their representations of Albania foregrounded the capacity for self-governance, in contrast to the cultural chaos attributed to the country by liberals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an economic policy, currency substitution – the use of a foreign currency in lieu of a domestic currency – is rarely associated with nationalism. This is due to a natural tendency to equate nationalism with economic mercantilism and with the political need to foster nationalist feelings among the population. This need not to be the case, though, as the case of the newly independent Montenegro demonstrates. How can we explain the apparent inconsistency between nationalist leaders fighting for independence and opting to use the currency of the European Union (EU), the quintessential supra-national entity? This paper suggests that conventional explanations need to be complemented with a contextual historical analysis of nationalism. By incorporating the fluid and multifaceted nature of nationalism which, in the hands of skilful political elites, can be reframed to include apparently contradictory positions, I suggest that euroisation has been extremely consistent with nationalist goals. As the content and directionality of nationalist discourse shifted, the euro was transformed into a symbol of national identity in this Newly Independent Country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the end of the 19th century approximately a quarter of the Orthodox Bulgarians in the historical and geographical area of Macedonia remained loyal to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which served the Greek national idea. Both, in the past and today, this fact has raised the issue of the national affiliation of the Bulgarian-speaking population in the European dominions of the Ottoman Empire. Why did these people remain loyal to the Patriarchate, despite the long-lasting efforts of the Bulgarian Exarchate to attract them to itself ? The author highlights the unequal status of the two ecclesiastical institutions in the Ottoman administrative system as a leading factor that hindered the normal functioning of the Bulgarian Church and severely limited its ability to guarantee the political, religious, cultural and educational rights of the Bulgarian Exarchists. On the border between the two centuries, being at the heart of the struggle for the distribution of the Ottoman inheritance in the Balkans, the Bulgarians in Macedonia were faced with difficult choices, which determined not only their personal well-being, but sometimes even their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New information technologies increasingly allow autocrats to shape public opinion outside their borders. Regimes like Russia and China spend millions on such efforts, raising concerns that they may be swaying foreign publics through their illiberal nationalist appeals. We know little, though, about the actual impact of such endeavors. We ask here: Where such regimes can find foreign audiences who support them and the values they represent, does this translate into an ability to sway public opinion on important foreign policy issues through their endorsements? We focus on the Putin regime's ability to shape orientations toward US President Donald Trump's foreign policy through an experiment-bearing survey in two countries that share EU aspirations but have different baseline orientations to the USA and Russia: Serbia and Albania. We first establish that Putin has a considerable number of sympathizers in both countries and that this sympathy is indeed linked to illiberal nationalist ideas. We show, however, that these sympathies do not translate into an ability to move public opinion, and that where pro-American priors are strong, illiberal nationalist endorsement can actually backfire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new events and phenomena that appeared in the 19th century marked a new era for the peoples of Balkans, that of national Renaissance. The 19th century for the Balkans is also known as the century of national movements and revolutions, because most of them formed an independent state and were freed from foreign invasions. This era of the formation of nations in the Balkans also affected the Albanians, who formed their independent state and nation. Namely, the birth of Albanian nationalization marked the historical period of the years 1830-40 until the Declaration of Independence of Albania in 1912. In this paper we will deal with the political causes such as the League of Prizren and the creation of national consciousness by the renaissance as a cultural community, linguistic and historical. The articulation of the Albanian nation as a cultural community built on the basis of language made them stand out from other nations in the Balkans. Above all, Albanian nationalists considered language as the main element, turning it into a national symbol. In conclusion, we affirm that the Albanian nation was built on language and did not allow regional and religious ideas to influence national identity. In fact, the national identity was created in difficult time conditions, but above all the most powerful arguments such as the element of language and culture made the preservation of national, cultural and ethnic unity for the creation of an ethnic Albanian state. On the argument of language and culture, we will build the argument of the creation of the Albanian national identity based on the ideas of the Albanian renaissance of that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyze the changing nationalist narratives of golden age in the Balkans. By zooming in on the case studies of the late nineteenth‐ and early twenty‐first‐century South‐East European societies, I explain how and why the images of the mythical past are articulated differently in the two historical periods. I argue that in the nineteenth century golden age rhetoric was mostly a top‐down phenomenon centered on transforming Balkan peasantry into the loyal members of their new nation‐states. By the early twenty‐first century, this process has reached its institutional limits and the golden age narratives have become a bottom‐up phenomenon: the key agents of their creation and dissemination are members of civil society, social movements, and ordinary people. I focus on the structural processes that underpin this change to explain the historical dynamics of nationalisms. The paper is based on the qualitative text analysis using nineteenth‐century and early twentieth‐century archival materials and the documents from the contemporary mass media, official records, educational materials, and popular culture in the Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Mikom Zeqo's (1949–2020) work Syri i Tretë ("The Third Eye", 2001) as a New Age reworking of Albanian Bektashism. The success of this book, and the recognition that Bektashi authorities themselves accorded it, make it highly representative of Bektashi neo-intellectualism and beyond: it is a cross-section that enables us to investigate the complex reworking of Sufi knowledge in a post-secular environment, such as Albania. This article examines this specific work while outlining a history of the Bektashiyya from the Ottoman era to the post-socialist Albanian period and highlighting its doctrinal and practical developments. Syri i Tretë is the expression of a secularist engulfment of post-socialist or even post-secular religion, which Bektashism embodies. Thus, Zeqo's work expresses a common trend in Albanian society that is beyond the members of the Bektashi community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How were monarchy, gender, and nationalism entwined? Through contextualized comparisons of selected case studies (two generations of royal women in four countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia/Yugoslavia), this article explores, in gendered terms, the instrumentalization of nursing as an evolving relationship between state building, warfare, welfare, and voluntary organizations. It argues that certain queens' interventions in nursing successfully contributed to the "naturalization" of the ruling foreign dynasties in the Balkans and to the militarization of charity. Through such "soft power" they mobilized nursing in different ways to carve out an autonomous space and visibility in wartime as queen-nurses and in peacetime as queen-benefactors. In both cases, royal women personified the "curing" and "caring" dimensions of the modernizing state. Queens' honorific leadership clearly linked the monarchy and the philanthropic sector but also discreetly expanded the power of the nationalizing state. Queens skillfully promoted a gendered culture of sacrifice, by representing women as caring "by nature," and thus reinforced neo-traditionalist patriarchal regimes and weakened women's effectiveness in pursuing their political and economic demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article focuses on the period between 1848 and 1906—between the politicized "discovery" of Balkan Aromanians as a kinfolk by Romanian nation-state builders and the aftermath of the community's recognition by the Ottoman government. Examining how Romania imagined its own entanglement in the Macedonian Question, the article aims to raise the broader question of how a nation-state imagined the agency of kinfolk beyond its borders and, as part of a geographically distributed national division of labor, ascribed a specific task to one part of its ethnic body. In Romania's case, this had a double thrust. One, Aromanians were imagined as the natural bourgeoisie of the southern Balkans, a people superior in their origins, culture, and mores to other ethnic groups—and a natural vanguard for Romania's economic interests in the region. Two, they were imagined as a vanguard for catalyzing the internal development of a native merchant class in Romania proper, which was understood as a primary agent for economic and social progress but perceived to be problematically absent. Thus, this study hones in on the process of ascribing the status of a "prosthetic bourgeoisie" to the Aromanians, and its insistent discursive recurrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Albania and its around has been a crucial geography in the region with the means of geostrategic position from the archaic history to today and it is understood that will be later. The geographic compound as a base, harbor, a mass and a sanctuary place with its entrance for the Balkans, has been located on critical passing routes. This situation has aroused the interests of Europe and the Balkan states for the region and it seems will be. The geography which was hosted by Albanians 445 years under the protection of Ottoman Empire, was exposed to revolts during the governing of the Commmittee of Union and Progress. The nationalism of Albanian which was started before the second constitutional monarchy and got stronger with the effects of Commmittee of Union and Progress, had been in existence with the problems of taxes, language and the alphabet. The revolts turned into seperatist movement with the effects of nationalism waves in the geography of Balkans and the macroprudential policy of Ottoman Empire on them. The actions of Albanian which were first Müslim seperatist movements on the region, developped differently and forcedly from the other independence aims of Balkan states. The situation which was been the aims of autonomy under the protection of Ottoman Empire at the beginning, had taken the path of independence under the unrest of occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Balkans have traditionally been established as a region of endemic conflict. This has meant that along the history its borders have been under continuous review, shaping a landscape of numerous multi-ethnic states and territories. The current global scenario of change towards a new multi polar order has caused the main global actors to review their interests in the area and once again regional actors, with nationalist projects, have regained strength. This situation suggests the possibility of conflicts ' return in the Balkans and a new redefinition of its borders limits. If this possibility arises, the humanitarian scenario could be catastrophic, at a historical moment in which European efforts in this regard are focusing on the displaced people caused by the Ukrainian crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

of the 21st century has not been such and each state suffers internal problems derived from a deficient rule of law where corruption, abuses of power or social injustices continue to be a constant, while emigration represents both a threat and a reflection of general precariousness. The imaginary of war is still being used politically and nationalism is revealed as the hegemonic ideology in political mobilization, despite the fact that in recent years we have seen a more vibrant civil society that is more critical with political power. The area lives in a state of unstable stability, in the face of enlargement fatigue and the new geopolitical disorder, but more integrated than a decade ago into continental ideological, economic and social dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the theoretical and methodological principles in the process of regionalization and analyzes the criteria used during the designation of the region as a category of special importance in geographical research. Methodological principles of regionalization were applied during the differentiation of the Preševo Valley as an individualized region. The Preševo Valley is a small region in South Serbia with a very favorable geographical position because it is located in the central part of the Balkan Peninsula between the Morava and Vardar valleys. Theoretical and methodological discussion highlights elements of a geographical and socio-economic basis that contribute to a regional-geographical differentiation of the area, as well as those elements that appear as an obstacle in attempts to differentiate this area in regional terms. A critical overview of the use of the name ‘Preševo Valley’ between scientific argumentation and political usage is also given. A survey was carried out to identify the main elements that constitute Preševo Valley’s regional identity. The main results show that this region is characterized by a mostly Albanian population, poor economic development, high migration rates, strategic position, and a strong national consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An often underrated but significant debate among Serbian intellectuals is how best to interpret Serbia's political development from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Conventional, mainstream understanding is that this period culminated in the golden era of Serbian democracy that lasted from 1903 to 1914. I identify this approach as a liberal‐national interpretation of this period. On their part, Serbian critical historians envision this period in terms of failed modernisation that led to the development of Serbian populism and ethnic nationalism. Even though these depictions involve opposing historical framings of Serbia's past, they both reproduce an ideological picture of the Serbian past rooted within a binary civic/ethnic nationalism framework that constrains analyses of this period to either a modernising civic era or a period that fostered the foundations for ethnic nationalism. Moreover, I argue that, at the discursive level, the debate is not about the past at all. It is primarily about interpreting the contemporary Serbian political system, the role Serbian intellectuals play in it, and whether successful democratisation in a Serbian society could be organised on the principles of further expansion, centralisation, and national homogenisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Balkans have been on the agenda of international relations and the international community in recent years. Wars and massacres have taken place in this post-Cold War region of the world, and have had a negative impact how people perceive it. Scholars often use the terms "Balkan" and "Balkanization" interchangeably to express the birth of new nations and independence in light of any number of events. Balkanization can also refer to confusion occurring in other parts of the world. We therefore must examine the Serbs, as they are one reason why the region is remembered the way it is after the Cold War, and because they had ignited the wick of the events. Serbian nationalism structurally has the potential to change regional dynamics periodically - hence the need to examine it the conceptual level. This study aims to do exactly that. In order to achieve that aim, we have drawn from various approaches and theories from [academic] literature on nationalism literature, and will thus analyse Serbian nationalism within the frameworks of religion, language, and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares different strategies of legitimation deployed by the nationalist movements in the Balkans and Ireland in the 19th and early twentieth century. In contrast to the traditional accounts that posit nations and empires as mutually exclusive projects, I show how imperial and nationalist discourses can reinforce one another. The paper zooms in on the changing dynamics of imperial and national legacies by exploring how specific social movements strategically deploy concepts such as the 'small' or 'greater' nation to facilitate different nationalist projects. By contrasting the historical experiences of the Balkan states and Ireland I show how geopolitical and historical contexts shape the complex and contradictory relationships between imperial and the national projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nueva Revista del Pacífico is the property of Universidad de Playa Ancha de Ciencias de la Educacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Barukh Mitrani was an Ottoman maskil who wandered between the Balkans, Istanbul and Palestine. While living in Edirne, Mitrani established his first periodical, Carmi (Pressburg 1881). Carmi 's issues were an ongoing maskilic sermon, drawing on a deep acquaintance with the Jewish bookshelf. This paper examines selections from the fifth article in Carmi , 'Our Nationhood.' Influenced by the moderate Haskalah, Mitrani idealized a 'Golden Mean,' which sought to balance the agendas of 'the two poles': insular Ultra-Orthodox Jews on the one hand, and secularized 'Westernizers' on the other. Mitrani also espoused a Jewish nationalism which had affinities with the Hebrew 'republic of letters' and the national resurgence in the Balkans. He perceived every Jew as part of three circles: the individual, the family, and the nation. Yet his nationalism was not separatist; he obliged Jews to remain loyal Ottoman citizens and promote the Sultanate while also settling in Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the declaration of the second Ottoman Constitution, Albanian nationalists played a major role in the organization of The Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) on the Balkans. It is noteworthy that the chain of events that enabled Abdulhamid II to declare the Second Ottoman Constitution and that the main actors of these events were Albanians. The Albanians, who saw the Ottoman State rapidly losing land in Rumeli, both during the reign of Abdulhamid II and after the declaration of the Second Ottoman Constitution, they made a great national cultural movements and nationalist organizing activities. Albanian nationalists have been with CUP because they think that the declaration of Second Ottoman Constitution will create an ideal environment for the development of the Albanian national movement. As CUP has adopted a centralist and Turkish politics when it comes to power, the Ahrar Party, which follows decentralization policy, is suitable for the Albanians, and Ahrar's British support has also started to be seen as a guarantee for the future autonomous or independent Albania. The purpose of this article is to briefly evaluate the Albanian actors who took part directly or indirectly during the March 31 Incident. The preparation process of the 31 March Incident, roles during the event, Albanian nationalism and the independence of Albania were evaluated by those directly involved (such as İsmail Kemal Bey, Müfit Bey, Esat Paşa Toptani, İbrahim Temo). The general activities of Albanian nationalism and the independence of Albania were evaluated, indirectly (such as Hasan Pristina, Şahin Kolonya, Necip Draga, Avlonyalı Süreyya Bey, Mithat Fraşeri) who took part in the 31 March Incident [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of nation-building in Eastern Europe in general and in particular in the territories that were under Ottoman occupation in the Balkans, the formation of the Albanian national identity is the most atypical and perhaps the most complicated case. This is due to the fact that the Albanians as a nation, after the Ottoman conquest, faced a situation of confrontation with some very strong identities or sub-identities, such as religious identity, provincial identity, dialect-linguistic identities, etc. Particularly problematic is the fact that Albanians as a population and as a nation even today belong to at least three major religious traditions: Catholicism, Islam and Orthodoxy. The clash with these religious sub-identities in the face of the emphasis on ethnicity and language as the projected foundation of the Albanian nation by the intellectuals of the Albanian national Renaissance, but also of the state power of independent Albania, presents the object of study and the importance of this scientific research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the role of metonymy, especially place-for-people, in current constructions of national identity. The corpus consists of ten political speeches (commemoration and election speeches) from Germany, Montenegro and North Macedonia used to detect and examine different levels of variation: from text type to cross-linguistic differences in the use of metonymies. The analysis showed that the most frequent metonym in two Western Balkan countries is the country name, referring to both the speaker as representative of an institution, and population. By contrast, the country name is rarely used in German speeches due to particular communicative and cultural factors. At the pragmatic level, metonymies perform a number of functions, such as legitimization, collectivization and evaluation. Moreover, they are used also as euphemisms and argumentation topos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article revisits the history of the 'Eastern Question' and its impact in late Victorian England through the lens of the British scholar Arthur J. Evans. Evans is best known for his archaeological discoveries in the island of Crete in the beginning of the twentieth century. His journalistic and archaeological ventures in the Balkans in the 1870s and 1880s have received scant attention. The article recovers Evans' activities which straddled humanitarianism, political activism, archaeology, anthropology/ethnography and journalism. Although Evans was not a systematic thinker on international affairs, his writings typified the liberal internationalist ambivalences on the 'plight' of eastern christians in southeastern Europe and the Balkans. The article argues that his thought fused two interrelated temporal frames: the deep anthropological and archaeological time of ancient civilizations and the modern framework of nationalist politics. These different horizons guided his understanding of the world of international affairs and underpinned the key role he played in debates on the Bosnian and Albanian questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the consular reports of a European power having a notable geopolitical interest in Ottoman Albania especially since 1878, this article highlights the Dual Monarchy's consuls' appreciation on the diffusion and reception of Albanian periodical press in the western parts of the Balkan Peninsula in 1903-1904. The article thus analyses this perception while pointing out various factors of diffusion and non-diffusion of the "nationalist" press and tackles the issue of the receptivity among the Albanian population of this rising nationalist propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article explores the role nationalism has played in the world dominated by the Eastern Orthodox Churches. The focus is on the recent contributions of Paschalis Kitromilides who has written extensively on this topic. The article assesses the four books dealing with the relationship between religion, politics, Enlightenment and nationalism in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The analysis emphasises the complex and contradictory relationship between nationalisms and the Orthodox Churches pointing to the profound transformation that has taken the place in this relationship over the last 250 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate on the 'where' of the Balkans seem to be stuck between national paradigms and a nostalgia for cosmopolitanism. This essay explores an alternative spatial mapping of the region, opening it up to the wider Eastern-Mediterranean, in particular the fuzzy and contested notion of the Levant. First, it looks into various instances of 'the Levant' and 'the Levantine,' ranging from Turkish and Greek to Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian examples – with a particular focus on the latter. Secondly, by then 'levantinizing' the Balkans, in an explicit analogy to Édouard Glissant's understanding of 'creolization' in the Caribbean, it attempts to draw the outlines of a geography of encounters. Finally, it offers a sample of what such a geography might look like and what its literary-historical repercussions might be, bringing together the work of Semezdin Mehmedinović and Etel Adnan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how some prominent and less known Albanian activists perceived their Southern Slav neighbors at the turn of the twentieth century. The research explores the way in which the spread of nationalism conditioned the positioning of Albanians and Slavs in the process of identity construction and how such identities mirrored their reciprocal political claims. Recent scholarship has often emphasized that the affirmation of national ideas led to the fragmentation of Balkan communities by turning Albanian-speaking populations and their Slavic-speaking neighbors into "others." My analysis expands this assertion by elaborating a theoretical approach that allows us to explore the impact of nationalism on the post-1878 Balkan context from a more dynamic point of view. National discourses did not only lay the foundation for a differentiation between the Balkan communities, but were also tools for promoting joint political activism. National activists often felt it necessary to cooperate in order to deal with the challenges posed by the surrounding environment, which was common to both Albanians and Slavs. Various contingent circumstances led Albanian activists to project long-term forms of coexistence with their neighbors, and to imagine forms of political, cultural, and social synthesis with the Slavs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban transformations taking place throughout the region of former Yugoslavia are best exemplified in the capitals of the once-communist federation's successor states. The recent urban developments in the cities of Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo illustrate the realities of contemporary societies in the Balkans and the socio-political shifts of the period of transition. The built environments of the newly capitalist countries serve as exaggerated, yet emblematic examples of nation-building projects and their deep entwinement with economic processes unfolding throughout post-communist South-Eastern Europe. However, the links between the post-socialist urban and national identity, as well as politics and economy, remain understudied. In this paper, I enquire into the present-day urban transformations of Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Zagreb. I examine these cities within the context of post-Yugoslav economic and political space, exploring the particularities of the creation of built environments that no longer exist on the Yugoslav periphery, but now are at the centre of newly democratic societies. Through the investigation of the political, economic, and architectural particularities of Belgrade Waterfront and Zagreb Manhattan development projects, and Sarajevo City Center commercial complex, I examine the influx of foreign funds -- mainly from the Middle East -- and their impacts on the construction of regional urban centres. I argue that the modern-day capitals of post-Yugoslav states are developing as products of the interpolation of a communist past into the capitalist present characterised by the perpetual quest for "Europe", and in line with the broader socio-political and architectural trends in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. In post-Yugoslavia, urban practices are problematically interwoven with politics: the cities simultaneously serve as displays of geopolitical change and catalysts for social transformation in post-socialist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What universal features of the mind interact with specific ecologies to produce expressions of violent religious nationalism? To shed light on this question, we focus on a case study of the Yugoslav Wars, asking: How did different religious groups in the Balkans move from cooperative relationships to violent ones? We argue that the most prevalent theories invoked to answer this question fail to adequately explain the change, namely, both the rise and fall of violent religious nationalism in the Balkans. To that end, we employ a systemic framework of religious change to examine historical data and ethnographic interview excerpts from ex-fighters and survivors of the Yugoslav Wars. This framework takes religion as it is practiced by communities to be a complex adaptive system, and models how religions adapt to local socioecologies. In employing this framework, three questions are addressed: (1) What features of cognition contributed to religiously motivated mass violence; (2) Which constituents of the religious system triggered those features; and (3) What socioecological factors were those constituents responding to? We argue that popular support for religious violence--and eventually its rejection--involved a set of higher-order functions, which McNamara calls the centralized executive self. This decision-making system was decentered by religious specialists who raised social pressures; group rituals that sustained community engagement; and identity-markers that signaled group commitments. While support for violence was a response to community threats during state-level succession, the eventual rejection of violence by religious leaders and communities was due to socioecological factors, such as rising health threats and declining birth rates brought about by the wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Macedonia, with its ethnic diversity based on linguistic and religious differences, has always maintained its strategic importance. Since the declaration of independence in 1991 when it left the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Republic of Macedonia, which is largely based on Vardar Macedonia, had a dispute with its neighbor Greece on the name of the country. This question, which was exacerbated by different nationalist approaches, was resolved on 17 June 2018 by the mediation of Western states that wanted to end the unrest in the Balkans. This study evaluated the Macedonian name question with reference to the typology of nationalism based on territorial and ethnic nationalisms and analyzed the historical background of this question and the negotiation process. In this respect, whether nationalism has a unifying force or a dissociative effect was examined. In this article, it was concluded that national identity and constitutional citizenship, which corresponds to a regional-geographical identity rather than a national identity preference based on the ethnic identity of the Slav- Christian Macedonian majority, which constitutes only 64 percent of the total population in Macedonia, is a prerequisite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Western Balkan countries are stuck in a hybrid status quo on their way to democracy. Traditional arguments related to cost–benefit calculations, national identity or conflicting objectives fail to explain the observed decoupling between gradual improvements in formal compliance with membership criteria and stagnating, if not declining, democratic performance. We explain the limited impact of the EU's political conditionality in the Western Balkans with rampant state capture and proceed to unpack how EU conditionality has effectively contributed to the consolidation of such detrimental governance patterns. First, EU pressure for simultaneous economic and political reforms opened opportunities for business actors to build powerful clientelist networks that reach into politics. Second, top-down conditionality has weakened political competition and mechanisms of internal accountability and deliberation. Finally, formal progress towards membership and high-level interactions with EU and member state officials legitimize corrupt elites. A congruence analysis of the Serbian case provides empirical evidence for the hypothesised linkages between EU conditionality and state capture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a strong tendency in Turkish historiography to approach Kemalist policies as purely domestic affairs that emanate from the centre in a top-down manner, reflecting the clear ideological positions of Ankara. The existing scholarship on the Settlement Law (1934), too, has read the development of Kemalist demographic policies in ideological terms, framing them in top-down modernist trajectories that were long in the making since the late Ottoman times. These perspectives often remained analytically singular and nation-centred, failing to engage with the broader transnational developments that were in fact crucial to the making and timing of a range of Kemalist policies. As such, the processes of demographic engineering are framed as devoid of historical conjuncture and immune from unintended consequences or the constraints presented by state capacity. In this article, I seek to overcome such limitations by situating the Settlement Law within its due transnational context of heightened interstate rivalries since the 1930s. Unfolding in myriad ways across the borderlands of Eastern Europe, the complex dynamics of interstate competition created the necessary push and pull factors that started dislodging the Balkan Muslims from those areas coveted by various territorially revisionist states in the region. The demographic engineering their arrival triggered in Turkey, I argue, was therefore as much national as international. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ars & Humanitas is the property of Ars & Humanitas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Albanians are among the oldest and most autochthonous people in Balkan. Known as the "Illyrians", "Albans", "Arberesh" and "Albanian", the Albanian people are among the founders of the Balkan Peninsula and among the most authentic contributors to the culture and civilization of the European continent. Historians and great scholars of the world and Albanian schoolars such as Thuman, Hahn, Shuflai, Stipcevic, Hosch, Çabej, Buda, Zheliskova have confirmed with their historical and linguistic studies the autochtonity, authenticity and contribution of Albanians in this region of more than three thousand five hundred years. This study investigates the early period of the Albanian National Renaissance and its repercussions on the establishment of the Albanian Nation State. Felt alone and without any support from international protection of any Greater Power and especially from the Othoman Empire, Albanian National Identity started to be seen as one of the main idea, which remained to be proclaimed by Albanian Renaissancers. So the Albanian National Renaissance movement began later than all the other Balkan peoples and not well-prepared in its political projects. In the cultural, civilizational and spiritual plan, the Albanian National Renaissance was as broad and western as many other peoples of the region. This paper will study the efforts, challenges and in general the elements in the context of creation of the Albanian nation, by bringing the main elements, which characterised this period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to inquire how recent and more consolidated historiographical trends consider the impact of nationalism in the late Ottoman Balkans. I focus on historical accounts of Albanian–Slav interaction in the late Ottoman Macedonian context, although the inquiry also includes texts that do not only engage with this epistemological field. I confront research efforts that have been published from the early 1960s to the present in order to understand the continuities and the discontinuities that characterize the work of historians. A preliminary investigation has allowed me to outline two main historiographical approaches: the national historiographies and the postnationalist approach. Such a distinction has become tangible especially after the end of the Cold War when a new generation of historians started to question the validity of the studies conducted by their colleagues in the past decades by pointing at the methodological and ideological issues that limited their work. In this article I evaluate to what extent the work of postnationalist historians is different from that of traditional historiographies and finally reflect on the possibility and benefits that might come from a dialogue between the two approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article provides a comprehensive analysis of Albanian regional policy from 1992 to 2013. Situated in a conflict-ridden region and surrounded by co-ethnics living in Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, Albania has successfully resisted pressure to undertake interventionist regional policies. However, there are no structured accounts as to how Albania fashioned its non-interventionist regional policy. This article fills this gap and retraces the development of Albanian regional policy as a function of its inter-mingled domestic politics and regional and international dynamics. The article concludes that the Albanian regional approach has been shaped by its legacy of communist isolation, pro-Western predisposition and recognition that accommodation of Western interests would overcome its constraints and advance the rights of Albanians living in the Western Balkans. The analysis is important not just for understanding Albania's actions but also for disentangling the relationship between regional policy, nationalism and a kin state's domestic and international constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses specifics of the process of ethnic identity formation in the Balkans in some comparison with Western European national identity construction. It ascertains that Balkan nationalism is based not on assimilation of local communities into the national whole as in the West but on dissolution of local communities by constructing out of them ethnic communities. Ethnicity construction was born from a severe rivalry around which one of the ethnic definitions would be imposed on a single local group. The article concludes that civic vs. ethnic models of nation-formation are applicable for the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article titled "The current situation in the Balkans" talks about the important decisions that have affected the region in recent years. It mentions the conflict in the Balkans in the 90s and criticizes the rampant nationalism that led to war and hatred. Despite thirty years having passed since the start of the wars, the region still faces problems such as weakened economies, political and historical revisionism, and nationalist populism. The objective of the article is to reflect on the current situation in the Balkans and offer possible future scenarios for the region. [Extracted from the article]

This manuscript uses recently declassified documents to examine the factors shaping US policy toward Bosnia from 1993 to 1995. Drawing upon IR theoretical insights from constructivism and realism, these documents reveal that the halting and inconsistent nature of US actions during this period can be explained by a mismatch between US identity-driven goals and the constraints of the post-Cold War world. Having committed themselves to bold yet largely unattainable objectives in the region, US officials feared a loss of credibility and, for much of the period under investigation, did just enough not to ‘lose’ Bosnia without taking the kinds of decisive actions that would have made a difference on the ground. Eventually, atrocities in Sarajevo and Srebrenica convinced the US that more forceful action was necessary to preserve US and NATO credibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This special issue investigates contemporary transformations of Islam in the post-Communist Balkans. We put forward the concept oflocalized Islamas an analytical lens that aptly captures the input of various interpreting agents, competing narratives, and choices of faith. By adopting an agent-based approach that is sensitive to relevant actors’ choices and the contexts where they operate, we explore how various groups negotiate and ultimately localize the grand Islamic tradition, depending on where they are situated along the hierarchy of power. Specifically, we outline three sets of actors and narratives related to revival of Islamic faith: (1) political elites, mainstream intellectuals, and religious hierarchies often unite in safeguarding a nation-centric understanding of religion, (2) foreign networks and missionaries make use of open channels of communication to propagate their specific interpretations and agendas, and (3) lay believers tend to choose among different offers and rally around the living dimension of religious practice. Contributions in this issue bring ample evidence of multiple actors’ strategies, related perspectives, and contingent choices of being a Muslim. Case studies include political debates on mosque construction in Athens; political narratives that underpin the construction of the museum of the father of Ataturk in Western Macedonia; politicians’ and imams’ competing interpretations of the Syrian war in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania; the emergence of practice communities that perform Muslim identity in Bulgaria; the particular codes of sharia dating in post-war Sarajevo; and veneration of saints among Muslim Roma in different urban areas in the Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous rise of the Serbian state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is often described as a typical example of the Piedmont-style of national unification. The conventional historiography emphasises the role popular nationalism has played in this process, making little if any distinctions between the forms of Serbian nationalisms within and outside of the Serbian state. This article challenges such interpretations and argues that the formation and expansion of Serbia had less to do with society-wide national aspirations and much more with the internal elite politics within the Serbian state. Moreover, the paper makes a case that, rather than being a driving force of national unification, the expansionist nationalism was a by-product of the state development. This argument is articulated further through the comparison of the different nationalist trajectories in Serbia and among the ethnic Serbian populations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents in brief several rather unusual sources of Balkan social history, placing them into macro-historic context. It refers to three Greek itineraries produced for the needs of itinerant traders, which contain records that could contribute to our better understanding of Balkan national identities formation at the end of 18th and the beginning of 19th century. On the micro level of history these itineraries give us direct information, but viewed from the perspective of macrohistory they become really interesting. The first one of them is a MS written during 1769 and 1773, now at the Elenka and Cyril Avramovi Library Club, Svishtov, Bulgaria. It follows the route Trieste - Brasov via Graz a nd Vienna. The other two itineraries are printed publications from 1824 and 1829. A ll these three itineraries together eventually mirror theformation of national identities, the national programs in the Balkans at the time, and all those changes of mentalities that occur during the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of the national identity apart that it can take a particular form ojthe collective identity, it can take as well as a way of the transformation of an ethnic group in a multiethnic state into a self-conscious political entity, or eventually as Paul Brass suggests by the amalgamation of diverse groups and the formation of an inter-ethnic, composite or homogeneous national culture through the agency of the modern state. Use identities of nations are mainly defned through the common traditions, history, and culture of their people. But in the case of divided nations it is not easy to structure their identities solely on this basis having in mind that, at the time of partition each parts of the nation it has been almost identical in ethnical, linguistic and cultural view. Ethnicity and ethnic groups are the key players when we speak about the holders of cultural diversity in the political sphere. Ethnic groups are a central source of values and identity, signifcantly more so than class, so much so that the modern state has been unable to absorb them. The paper explores the political importance of the process of creation of the national identity as a particular form of collective identity through comparative analyses of the politics in ethnically plural societies. The emotional link between place and national identity is a crucial factor in the Balkans region, having in mind that one and the same place is often claimed by several nations attached to the politics of ethnically plural societies. Discussing the contemporary dividing line between ethnic and national identity, the paper aims to identify the factors and scenarios of the inability of the nation-states and unclear future of the multi-ethnicity concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Balkan Wars in 1912/1913 as well as the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 as results of a historical clash between the traditional European power system and newly established nation-states in Southeastern Europe. On the eve of the 20th century, great powers like the British Empire or Tsarist Russia pursued their political and territorial interests on the Balkan Peninsula. In doing so, they either ignored or tried to exploit new political players like Serbia or Bulgaria and promoted the image of a protecting power. Emancipating from the old European system, the Balkan states, on the other hand, utilised this image to realise own nationalist aspirations. Whereas academic discourses on First World War and the European crises of 1912-1918 mainly focused on great power rivalries, the article argues for a conscious consideration of the role and the influence of so-called small players in European history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the connection between war and state making in the ascendancy of the western state system has been well explored, the war-state linkages in the peripheries of the Great Powers, especially in times of imperial decline and collapse, have attracted insufficient attention among peace and conflict studies analysts. This contribution helps to fill this gap by revisiting the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 to underpin correlations between state making and political violence in this case which scholars are only now starting to research in more detail. The article contributes above and beyond the existing state of scholarship by grounding the analysis in a focused and explicit comparison between state formation processes in the Balkans and those in western Europe, which have provided the template for modern state making in the rest of the world. The focus is primarily on the initial stages of state formation in the context of the growing influence of the Great Powers in the region and the emergence of nationalism as a rationale for the nation-state notwithstanding the multiethnic setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]