1.1.Rudometof Unthiniking the Clash of Civiliz

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Nationalism, Globalization, Eastern

Orthodoxy

‘Unthinking’ the ‘Clash of Civilizations’

in Southeastern Europe

Victor Roudometof AMERICAN COLLEGE OF THESSALONIKI, GREECE

Abstract

Although the historical process of globalization has promoted the nation-

state as a universal cultural form, national ideologies are far from uniform.

This article explores how the competing discourses of citizenship and nation-

hood evolved in Southeastern Europe throughout the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries. By comparing the articulation of Serb, Greek and

Bulgarian identities, the essay examines how regional historical factors led

to the concept of nationhood becoming central to the formation of national

identity among the region’s Eastern Orthodox Christians. It demonstrates

that the subsequent regional national rivalries have been the consequence

of the local peoples’ route towards modernity, and cannot be attributed to

a ‘clash of civilizations’. Rather, the history of Southeastern Europe suggests

that the production of heterogeneity is inherent in the globalization

process.

Key words

s Balkans s ethnicity s globalization s minorities s nationalism

In this article I examine how globalization is intimately involved in the historicalprocess of the articulation of local nationalisms and national identities. In

particular, my argument aims to illustrate the manner in which the process of globalization is deeply involved in the production of local national rivalries inSoutheastern Europe. While one outcome of globalization has been the prolifer-ation of the nation-state as a model of social organization (Roudometof, 1994),this does not imply uniformity in the content of national ideologies. Over the

European Journal of Social Theory 2(2): 233–247

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last two centuries, the global discourses of citizenship and nationhood haveshaped local ideologies and national identities in distinctly different ways. Innineteenth-century Southeastern Europe, both citizenship and nationhood werepursued, but the historical factors discussed in this essay led to the success of nationhood. Subsequent national rivalries, or so-called ‘ethnic conflicts’, inSoutheastern Europe have been a product of the region’s reorganization accord-ing to the Western European model of the nation-state; they cannot be attrib-uted to a ‘clash of civilizations’.

Globalization and the Nation-state in SoutheasternEurope

One of the most disturbing aspects of many commentaries on ethnic conflict inSoutheastern Europe is the (neo-)Orientalist portrayal of these societies as proneto violence due to their cultural features (for example, Kennan, 1993; Rezun,1995; Mojzes, 1994; Kaplan, 1992). Huntington (1993) in particular argues thatthe ethnic conflict in the Balkans is a civilizational conflict (Islamic versus Ortho-dox versus Western), an illustration of his broader point, that conflicts amongcivilizations will be the most significant conflicts of the post-communist ‘new

world order’. Although the conceptual and historical inaccuracies of theseperspectives have been pointed out in the literature (see Todorova, 1994; Bakic-

Hayden and Hayden, 1992; Prodromou, 1996), such biased views show remark-able persistence in policy-making and historical discourse. They persist becausethey are an extension, indeed an outcome, of the way in which social theory hastraditionally conceptualized ‘society’ and the nation-state.

Therefore, in order to ‘unthink’ (e.g. Wallerstein, 1991) the ‘clash of civiliz-ations’, it is necessary to reconsider some key ideas of the sociological tradition.Social theory itself has absorbed into its vocabulary aspects of the philosophy of civil rights, especially with regard to political culture, civil society and democracy (Somers, 1995), and the theoretical biases resulting from this influence are

revealed in the treatment of nationalism in scholarly discourse. While a numberof authors (e.g. Kohn, 1961; Greenfeld, 1991; Bendix, 1978; Lipset, 1963) haveinterpreted citizenship as the fundamental element of the national idea, a secondgroup (e.g. Kedourie, 1985; Berlin, 1981; Smith, 1986, 1991; Alter, 1989) usenationhood as their main element and disregard the earlier civic connotation of the ‘nation’. The discourse of citizenship represents the approved, universalisticdimension of ‘nationality’, whereby rights and duties are distributed on an egali-tarian basis; to be set against the disapproved, particularistic discourse of nation-hood, which excludes those who do not share the defining characteristics of a

particular community. However, citizenship and nationhood do not receive equaltreatment. Civic-oriented forms of nationalism are conceived of as natural anddesirable; while other nationalisms are viewed as deviations from this earliernormative standard (for example, Greenfeld, 1991; Kohn, 1962: 12). In massmedia, peripheral or non-Western nationalisms are routinely discussed in terms

European Journal of Social Theory 2(2)2 3 4



of ‘tribalism’ or ethnic unrest, interpretations that confirm assumptions of cultural superiority and inferiority. The concept of ethnonationalism crystallizesthis line of interpretation (Connor, 1994).1

Since the end of the Second World War, the rise of world-system analysis(Wallerstein, 1974), the revival of world history as a focus of scholarly discussion(Allardyce, 1990), and the emergence of historically oriented and post-modern-ist perspectives have led to the questioning of such Eurocentric narratives. The‘historic turn’ (McDonald, 1996) in human and social sciences has reshaped theirorientation and has reconfigured conventional disciplinary boundaries. Duringthe 1990s, these factors have coalesced into regional, disciplinary and ideologi-cal discourses on globalization (Robertson and Khondker, 1998), in which thedominant trend has been to concentrate on contemporary aspects, such as thereconfiguration of state sovereignty, the articulation of post-national forms of

citizenship, or the floating finance and labor markets. The subsequent neglect of the historical dimension has been duly criticized (Harvey, 1995), but I wouldsuggest that this neglect is not inherent in the perspective itself.

In fact, globalization, that is, ‘a social process in which the constraints of geog-raphy on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which people becomeincreasingly aware that they are receding’ (Waters, 1995: 3) should not be viewedas a twentieth-century phenomenon. At least since the closure of the globalecumene in 1500, the world has been moving towards becoming a single place(McNeill, 1963; Wallerstein, 1974; Wolf, 1982). However, the fundamental

historicity of globalization leads to a reconsideration of the linear character of modernity (i.e. turning Gemeinschaft into Gesellschaft ), whereby, instead of following the idea of a transition from a presumed ‘tradition’, into an English-style (or French-style or German-style) ‘modernity’, it becomes possible toconsider the existence of divergent routes to modernity (see Therborn, 1995;Gran, 1996; Featherstone et al., 1995).

In order to cast modernity in a new light, it is necessary to conceive of modernization projects as inherently reflexive (cf. Beck et al., 1994), that is, asinvolving comparison with Others and the construction of national ‘authenticity’

out of a process of selective incorporation of organizational and cultural models.Such comparisons are political enterprises, shaped as much by internal culturaland institutional configurations as by the availability of external options. Thus

while nationalism, an ideology of clearly Western origin, has served as an organiz-ational principle for the overwhelming majority of states worldwide (Meyer andHannan, 1979), this similarity in form does not imply similarity in kind. Indeed,the very term ‘nation’ defies definition.2

Therefore it is perhaps more salient to treat nations and nationalism as adiscourse, in which the ‘nation’ stands for a cultural form of worldwide import-

ance, but one whose meaning is determined by different discourses, varyingbetween contexts. The implosion of time and space inherent in the process of globalization (Harvey, 1989), facilitates the global cultural flows which allow local communities to appropriate ideas, practices and organizational forms devel-oped in other places. Since the nineteenth century, a key epoch for the ‘take-off’

Victor Roudometof Nationalism, Globalization 2 3 5



phase of globalization (Robertson, 1992: 49–60; Geyer and Bright, 1995),citizenship and nationhood have operated as discursive formations. They havebeen disseminated by travel, printing and other forms of cross-cultural communi-cation, and thus made available to, and adapted by, a variety of peoples.

Greenfeld (1991), although biased in favor of English civic nationalism, showshow the development of French, German and Russian national identities hasbeen shaped by reactions to their English counterpart. Similar processes also took place in Southeastern Europe. During the eighteenth century, cross-culturalcontacts with the Western European intellectual currents led to a secular trendde-legitimizing the Ottoman Rum millet system, the confessional model of socialorganization, dominant within the Ottoman Empire for almost four centuries(Roudometof, 1998a). The search for new models, largely adapted from the

Western European and American experience, was a pervasive characteristic of

nineteenth-century Balkan social life, particularly after the 1820s, as a series of (mostly international) events transformed the region.3 The creation of new statesin the Balkans, together with the general crisis of the Ottoman empire, indicatedthe necessity for political reorganization.

Over the nineteenth century, the Balkan peoples struggled between theoptions of nationhood and citizenship. First, ideas of citizenship as articulatedoptions were pursued unsuccessfully by a number of Balkan activists. Second, thediscourse of nationhood was institutionalized by the native intelligentsia of theBalkan states. I should emphasize that this conclusion was neither inevitable nor

predetermined. The analytical differentiation between citizenship and nation-hood cannot be transferred to an empirical differentiation between ‘Western’ and‘Eastern’ nationalisms (cf. Plamenatz, 1976). This not only confuses the analyti-cal and empirical levels of scholarship but also disregards historical contingency.For example, even in Western Europe, the second half of the twentieth century has witnessed the rise of peripheral ‘ethnic’ nationalisms in Northern Italy, Spain,France and Britain. Citizenship and nationhood are not necessarily antitheticalto each other; and it is likely that they are present in every national culture. Theirplace in a specific social formation is a matter of cultural ordering, a hierarchy

that allows one or the other to become the foundational principle of a specificunderstanding of a ‘nation’ (Brubaker, 1992). While, for Southeastern Europe (or any other historical setting), nationhood

and citizenship should be taken as a priori considerations, their success or failureshould be examined in concrete historical terms. This relational mode of analy-sis offers particular advantages. First, it avoids the over-determination of socialprocesses by external or internal factors. Second, it allows for interactive and rela-tional factors to be incorporated into the analysis; and more important, it uses acommon set of variables for explanatory purposes in varied social contexts and

different historical cases. Third, it illustrates how the global discursive formationsof citizenship and nationhood interact with local internal factors. Instead of trying to discover the ‘primordial’ element that determines the nature of national-ism per se, a more fruitful approach is to ask how citizenship and nationhood areadapted in different contexts round the globe.




The Pursuit of Citizenship

Historically, the discursive formation of citizenship was articulated within theconfines of the Western European and Anglo-American political formations(Navari, 1975: 13–28; Bereciatru, 1994: 3–16; Grew, 1984). The concepts of citizenship and citizen are intimately tied to the historical development of theGerman, Dutch, French, British and American political institutions, and theirgradual redefinition and expansion over the last two centuries has been influencedby the particular context in each country.

In order to understand the discourse of citizenship as it manifested itself inSoutheastern Europe, it is necessary to break with historiographic interpretationsthat assume an ‘essential’ quality to national identity. Simply put, for the vastmajority of peoples in Bosnia, Macedonia, Greece, Albania and other parts of the

peninsula it was still the religious, and not the secular, that provided the majorcultural marker of their identity (Malcolm, 1994; Karakasidou, 1997; Vermulen,1984; Skendi, 1980). Therefore the development of national identity was theproduct of a deliberate ‘imagining’ (Anderson, 1983), and not the ‘natural’ real-ization of a quality inscribed in the people themselves.

Citizenship entails the proposition of equal, formal membership of a state’spolitical body, without other ascriptive criteria. By the 1790s, the idea of a feder-ation had been put forward by Rigas Velestinlis, who, heavily influenced by French republican ideas, suggested that the peoples of Southeastern Europe over-

throw the sultan and establish a republic (Roudometof, 1998a). The recognitionof ethnic variety led to an endorsement of multiculturalism and civic rights as ameans to ensure the cooperation of the local ethnic groups, and during the nine-teenth century institutional arrangements were postulated that would allow theethnically heterogeneous population of the region to continue living together.Such arrangements were the basic goal of the Balkan federalists and the Yugoslav movement (Djordjevic, 1970; Shashko, 1974; Todorov, 1995), but the federalproject was not successful as the geopolitical rivalry among the emerging ‘nationalcenters’ of Belgrade, Athens, Bucharest and, later on, Sofia prevented its im-

plementation. State elites would have had their authority curtailed, and this wascontrary to their interests. Federalism was pursued only as a tactical option, in sofar as it aided a particular state’s or movement’s goals.

Yugoslavism was a predominantly intellectual movement, promoted by someHabsburg Serbs and by many among the Croatian intelligentsia (Djordjevic,1980; Gross, 1977; Zlatar, 1997). During the nineteenth century, its ascent wasfostered by the weakness of the Croat national movement, which lacked strongpopular support, and by its employment as a means to counter Magyar or Habs-burg domination. It was also a response to the uncomfortable reality that many

of the lands claimed by the Croat nationalists were inhabited by large numbersof Serbs. In the early twentieth century a rising Croat intelligentsia of mostly middle-class background was able to form coalitions with the local Serbs andpromote Yugoslavism. These visions materialized with the creation of thekingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1917–18), but from the very beginning




the position of non-Serbs within this kingdom remained unclear. The elites of the Serb state viewed Yugoslavia as an extension of Serbia: Serbia was the Pied-mont of the South Slavs. Their claim to power was contested by the Croat elites,

who envisioned Yugoslavia as a confederation of equal nations, and this conflict was to plague the new state for most of the twentieth century (Djilas, 1991;Banac, 1984; Ramet, 1992). In many respects, the problem was similar to theproblems faced by other federal solutions, but Yugoslavism was unique in that ithad succeeded in becoming a real political solution.

The other major attempt to institutionalize citizenship took shape under theaegis of the Ottoman reformers. From 1839, the Ottoman bureaucratic elitesattempted to develop the concept of Ottomanism as a means to create bonds of social solidarity that could transcend religious or ethnic differences among theirsubjects. However, the growing economic gap between the Muslims and the

Orthodox Christians presented an obstacle to the success of this approach. Politi-cal liberalism would further the interests of the wealthy urban Ottoman Greek communities, against the impoverished, and predominantly Muslim, peasantry.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Orthodox commercialcommunities benefited from the growing incorporation of the empire into the

world economy, by serving as intermediaries between Western firms andOttoman markets. Their aspirations called for a reconstitution of the empire asa multi-ethnic state, where they could exert influence beyond their status as reaya(subject). This philosophy found support among Ottoman statesmen, and led to

the abortive effort to establish a constitutional monarchy in 1876 (Svolopoulos,1980; Lewis, 1979; Braude and Lewis, 1982). The plan failed when Muslim tra-ditionalists protested against the abandonment of Islamic principles, and Sultan

Abdul Hamid manipulated the situation to his own ends, ruling as absolutemonarch until 1908.

The reign of Abdul Hamid saw the growth of the dissident Young Turk move-ment, itself divided into multiple factions. Two main groups dominated theagenda: a liberal wing calling for political liberalism, which was supported by theOttoman minorities; and a more nationalistic wing calling for a revitalization of

Turkish identity (Hanioglou, 1995; Kitsikis, 1978; Kushner, 1977). The nation-alistic tendency was more successful in the long run. From the 1890s, OttomanMuslim intellectuals re-evaluated their Turkish heritage and increasingly calledfor a Turkish, as opposed to an Ottoman, identity. After the 1908 revolution, the

Young Turks became the dominant political force. Although widespread promises were made to the Ottoman minorities, the Young Turks were in favor of cultural,rather than political, Ottomanism. Their goal was to acculturate the minoritiesin a common culture – and not to grant them equal status as minorities. Thechoice was, to use contemporary vocabulary, one between assimilation, promoted

by the Young Turks, and multiculturalism, favored by the Ottoman minorities.The Young Turks’ assimilatory policies after 1908 were greatly resented, andprovided the Balkan states with a rationale to unite against the Ottomans. By 1913, the Balkan states had defeated the Ottomans in the 1912–13 Balkan wars,and had conquered most of the peninsula for themselves. Still, there remained




the problem of Ottoman minorities in Anatolia (mainly Ottoman Greeks and Armenians), who gradually came to be seen as obstacles to state modernization(Arai, 1992; Landau, 1981; Kitsikis, 1978). The Young Turks promoted econ-omic nationalism and began a campaign of terror against the minorities in aneffort to undermine their class position and create a national bourgeoisie(Ahmad, 1980; Ergil, 1975), effectively putting an end to all previous Ottomanpromises.

The Triumph of Nationhood

The specific reasons outlined above meant that citizenship failed to become thedominant political feature in the emerging national societies of the region. While

these options were being pursued, the discourse of nationhood was also beingarticulated within the confines of the new Balkan nation-states. Indeed, itspromotion by the local states was one of the factors that inhibited the success of Ottomanism.

Nationhood implies a complex of ideas and mentalities concerning the politi-cization of cultural life. Within the discourse of citizenship, membership of a‘nation’ becomes a political issue of rights and duties, thus creating room for theconcept of ‘ethnicity’, which serves to designate distinctions of race, class, religionor skin color within the industrialized democracies of the West (Gran, 1996;

Hobsbawm, 1996: 256–8). However, whilst ‘ethnicity’ serves in that case as acomplementary category, within the discourse of nationhood it provides the very foundation of national identity, where cultural markers (religion, language, folk culture) are elevated into determinants of the legitimate membership of a nation.

When social bonds are created by such a process, a different kind of nationalidentity is born, as membership of existing ethnies or ethnic communities ispoliticized (Smith, 1986; Rothschild, 1981), thus transforming them intonations.4

The articulation of nationhood found fertile ground in nineteenth-century

romanticism, which exerted considerable influence on the expression and thereception of French, Italian and German nationalisms (Bereciatru, 1994: 42–6).The ‘nationalities’ principle emerged after the 1789 French Revolution and afterthe 1830 Revolution it gained considerable popularity. Throughout Europe,movements such as Young Italy, Young Germany, Young Turkey, Young Irelandand Young Switzerland proceeded to utilize the romantic spirit to create socialand cultural cohesion. Its ultimate codification was in the 1917 principle of self-determination, which paved the way for the reconstruction of the political mapof Eastern Europe.

These international currents did not escape the attention of the newly formedBalkan states, whose intelligentsia was eager to show its modernity by adaptingitself to the intellectual currents of the time. Between 1830 and 1880 a roman-tic nationalist intelligentsia shaped the Greek, Serb and Bulgarian version of the‘nation’ through such devices as historical narrative, religious symbolism, the




reinterpretation of folklore and the writing of nationalist literature and poetry (Roudometof, 1998b; Castellan, 1985). In their collective production of localnational narratives these intelligentsias developed grandiose irredentist dreamsthat gradually brought the local states into conflict with each other. The Serbs

wished for the reconstitution of Tsar Dusan’s medieval empire, the Bulgarians forthe reconstruction of the medieval Bulgarian empire and the Greeks for the resur-rection of the Byzantine empire. In line with European romanticism, theseempires were conceived of as national states and not as imperial non-nationalformations.

Underlying this process of nation-building was the long-term process of secularization of Southeastern Europe, beginning with the Grecophone BalkanEnlightenment of the late eighteenth century (Roudometof, 1998a). Given thatthe ties connecting the Balkan Orthodox population were predominantly

religious, it is not surprising that for Balkan nationalists, the first step was tomanipulate religious institutions so as to transform these ties into national ones(Castellan, 1984). This choice was dictated by the widespread illiteracy of theBalkan peasantry: the shortest route for nation-building was to shift the meaningof church affiliation and turn it into an equivalent of national affiliation. Theinstitution of separate national churches (Greece 1832, Serbia 1832, the Bul-garian Exarchate 1870) provided the means through which the traditional ties of Orthodox Balkan peoples could be severed, and new national ties constructed.

The establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate was the most visible and

dramatic manifestation of the fragmentation of Eastern Orthodox universalism.The Greek–Bulgarian ecclesiastical schism (1872) signified a major shift in thenature of church affiliation, with national secular identity gaining dominanceover the religious identity of the Rum millet . During the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries the authority of the Patriarchate of Constantinoplebecame identified with Greek irredentism, resulting in the total collapse of theexisting organizational structure. Membership of a church became equivalent tomembership of a nation. The Patriarchate was a rather reluctant agent in thisprocess, but it was constrained by the rising Greek and Bulgarian nationalisms,

and the continuing process of secularization (Kofos, 1984: 347–75; 1986:107–20). As church affiliation became the domain of nationalists, there was a redeploy-

ment of religious symbolism as national symbolism, and of Orthodoxy as part of the Balkan peoples’ national identity. St Vitus’ Day, Annunciation Day, the Fallof Constantinople, SS Cyril and Methodius’ Day, all of which had initially religious connotations, were reinterpreted as national symbols of the emergingGreek, Serb and Bulgarian nations (Roudometof, 1998b; Meininger, 1974). Thepolitical cleavage between Christians and Muslims was reinterpreted as a national

cleavage between ‘oppressed’ Balkan peoples and Ottoman ‘oppressors’. The useof poetry, prose and journalism for nation-building further contributed to thisprocess. Education provided the means through which the Orthodox Balkan peas-antry was socialized into the emerging Serb, Greek and Bulgarian ‘imaginedcommunities’. Secular schools taught national identity alongside literacy; and the




use of nationalist rhetoric in the education system contributed to growing animos-ity among the Balkan peoples. For example, prior to 1910, Serb educational text-books did not even recognize the Croats as a nation (Jelavich, 1990: 54), and inOttoman Macedonia, education provided one of the main sites of competitionamong Serb, Bulgarian and Greek nationalist organizations (Georgeoff, 1973;Vouri, 1992).

During the nineteenth century, then, the process of nation-formation in theregion was determined by the strong influence of the Western organizationalmodels, and the attempt to transplant these models into a social context that hadbeen developed along vastly different historical trajectories (Stokes, 1987: 73–4).Ironically, the megalomania of the Balkan nation-states, all of them possessed by ‘anachronistic’ imperial visions out of proportion to their size, was an expressionof their peculiar internal connection with the ‘West’ (Skopetea, 1992: 105). Such

visions were the product of their efforts to mimic Western history in their ownnational genealogies, and their attempts to participate in it through their irre-dentist projects. The 1912–13 Balkan wars and the two world wars offered theopportunity to turn these irredentist visions into reality. Of course, not one of the local nation-states was able completely to satisfy its aspirations, and theseremained alive at least until the 1940s.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the successful productionand reproduction of national ideologies in the region has owed much to the well-crafted relationship between the local intelligentsia and the nation-state (Salecl,

1994; Karakasidou, 1994; Verdery, 1993). Since 1989, mass media and intellec-tual support have been instrumental in the success of nationalist agendas. Evenso, the ‘new world disorder’ of nationalism, as expressed in the region during thelate 1980s and early 1990s, did not emerge in a vacuum. As my discussion hasdemonstrated, it was the latest twist to problems that have plagued the politicsof relations in the region since the nineteenth century.

After the Second World War, the resurrection of Yugoslavia under Tito post-poned, but did not remove, nationalist tensions. In the 1960s and 1970s, thesetensions were expressed in the debates about centralization (Ramet, 1992; Shoup,

1968; Rusinow, 1977), which, alongside charges of Serb ‘domination’, propelledthe recognition of the ‘Muslim’ nation in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1971, and thenew, decentralized federal structure in 1974 (Rusinow, 1982). According to thenew arrangement, Kosovo and Vojvodina became autonomous units withinSerbia, thus offsetting Serbian power within the federation. The new arrange-ment fostered Serb resentment, and by the 1980s this fueled a new cycle of ethnicand national rivalry (Dragnich, 1989).

The dynamics of the ‘national question’ in the former Yugoslavia are similar tothose of the less publicized cases of Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania (or the more

well-known case of Cyprus). The origins of these problems lie in the political, econ-omic and cultural reorganization of Southeastern Europe according to the modelof the homogeneous nation-state over the past two centuries. Due to the historicalfactors outlined in this essay, this reorganization led to the elevation of nationhoodinto the foundational principle in regional nation-formation. Consequently,




discrimination against minorities has been legitimized via reference to culturaldifference: Muslim Pomaks, Bosnian Muslims, Macedonian Slavs and a host of others were, and are still, not viewed as ‘genuine’ members of the Bulgarian, Serbor Greek nations. In such an environment, minorities’ status as equal citizenscomes under question, and their inclusion in the national political body becomesunrealistic (Roudometof, 1996a, 1996b). While these policies are being imple-mented, rival nation-states promote a conception of nationhood that emphasizesthe genealogical, historical and ethnic claims of a particular ethnic group over thenation’s ‘soil’. For minority groups outside a nation-state’s boundaries this concep-tion entails a view of the nation-state as their external national homeland(Brubaker, 1995), and when their status comes under question, they reasonably develop a propensity for ‘exit’ (i.e. secession) from the state they inhabit. The pres-ence of large numbers of minority groups throughout the region further exagger-

ates the tensions created by such a pattern of intra-state and inter-state relations.

Conclusion

The argument in this article is that actual or potential ethnic conflicts in South-eastern Europe are related to rivalries generated by the region’s reorganizationaccording to the Western European model of the nation-state, and not to a ‘clashof civilizations’. The adoption of the nation-state was a manifestation of the

Balkan peoples’ ‘modernity’, not of their ‘backwardness’. The recurrent phenom-enon of ethnic conflict is due not to ‘tribalism’, but to the adoption of nation-hood as the foundational form of national identity among the Eastern OrthodoxChristians of the region. Thus, the experience of Southeastern Europe illustratesthe importance of the concept of globalization as part of historical and culturalanalysis, since it reveals the modernity of ‘local’ regional problems and theirconnections to global processes.5

My discussion also highlights the structural and cultural difficulties involvedin any future EU expansion into Southeastern Europe. As Judt (1996: 41)

suggests, the foundational myth of modern Europe is to be found in the EU’sclaim that its rules, regulations and cosmopolitan culture should be extended tothe other European states. This proposition creates serious problems for a numberof Southeastern European states, where the institutionalization of nationhood hasbeen codified in their post-1989 constitutions (Hayden, 1992). Such a trend isincreasingly at odds with the prevailing international and EU standards. Duringthe second half of the twentieth century, state sovereignty has been radically reconfigured, while human rights have become an issue of international import-ance. The efforts of the local states to construct cultural homogeneity within their

territories has thus come under scrutiny by an international community whichno longer views such projects favorably.However, this outcome is only one facet of the broader point supported by this

discussion, that is, that by understanding the impact of Western organizationalmodels in non-Western contexts we can better understand how homogeneity and




heterogeneity are simultaneous outcomes of globalization (Robertson, 1992). While Southeastern Europe underwent a reorganization according to the nation-state form, this did not include adherence to the standard of citizenship, whichconstitutes the dominant discourse in the Anglo-American world. Hence, this‘odd’ (to Western eyes) combination of global and local factors has produced anadmittedly turbulent ‘route to modernity’.

Notes

Partial support for the writing of this article was provided by the 1996–7 Mary SeegerO’Boyle Post-Doctoral Fellowship of the Program in Hellenic Studies at PrincetonUniversity. Earlier versions were presented at the 1998 World Congress of Sociology and

the 1998 American Sociological Association Annual Meetings. The article is in large parta preview of an unpublished manuscript. The author would like to thank ProfessorsRoland Robertson (Sociology, University of Pittsburgh), Elizabeth H. Prodromou (W. Wilson School, Princeton University) and Gerard Delanty (Sociology, University of Liver-pool) for their helpful remarks in revising earlier drafts of the manuscript.

1 In particular, Connor (1993: 374–6) claims that nationalism is an irrational primor-dial force that arises in ethnic groups that claim common origins of blood. National-ism, he claims, is absent from immigrant states such as the US, Australia, ornon-Quebec Canada. Connor differentiates between ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’: the

former is a property of the US, the latter a property of other peoples. This differen-tiation allows Western authors to situate ‘nationalism’ in other societies and to be wilfully blind to the nationalism of their own societies (cf. Billig, 1995: 56).

2 Whilst in English the word indicates membership of a sovereign state (note the use of the adjective ‘national’ instead of ‘inter-state’ in organizations such as the UnitedNations), in German a sharp distinction is drawn between Nation and Staat (Alter,1989: 4–22; Krejci and Velimski, 1981: 32–41). The term ‘narod’ is used in a numberof Eastern European languages, but this lacks the connotations of the English ‘nation’since it refers to culturally integrated units displaying strong sentiments of collectivesolidarity.

3 This list includes the recognition of Serb autonomy (1830), the organic statute of theDanubian principalities (1831), the creation of the Greek kingdom (1832), the initialstirrings of the Bulgarian national movement (1838), the two Egyptian crises(1839–42) and the gradual emergence of an Ottoman bureaucracy following the 1821Greek revolution. Earlier revolutionary movements had their origins in a variety of causes (including elements of nationalism), but to consider them as ‘national revolu-tions’ is to accept the nationalistic biases of local historiography at face value (see Chirotand Barkey, 1984; Stokes, 1976; and Veremis, 1989).

4 The postulate of nationhood as a discursive formation resulting from the politicizationof ethnicity solves the theoretical problem of clearly differentiating ethnie from nation.

Smith’s (1991: 40) definition of the nation is a circular one, making it difficult toanalytically differentiate between ethnie and nation.

5 Robertson (1992) and Barber (1995) have acknowledged the simultaneous productionof homogeneity and heterogeneity as a corollary of globalization, however their mainfocus has been on contemporary facets of globalization.




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sVictor Roudometof is assistant professor of political sociology at the American

College of Thessaloniki, Greece. He is the editor of The Macedonian Question:

Culture, Historiography, Politics (forthcoming, Boulder, CO: East European Mono-graphs) and co-editor and co-author of American Culture in Europe: Interdisciplinary

Perspectives (1998, Westport, CT: Praeger). He has published articles on globalization

and social theory, nationalism and national minorities in the Balkans. Address: PO

Box 1548, Kavala 65110, Greece. [email: [email protected]]


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