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Subject: On Macedonian Nationality
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Slavic Review, Winter 1986
Horace G. Lunt


                     ON MACEDONIAN NATIONALITY
                     =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=


La Dinamite e la mezzaluna: le questione Macedone nella publicistica
italiana 1903-1908. By marco Dogo. Civilta del Risorgimento, vol. 20
Undine: Del Bianco, 1983. 221 pp. 16,000 lire, paper.

Lingua e nazionalita in Macedonia: Vicende e pensieri di profeti
disarmati 1902-1903. By marco Dogo. Le Edizioni Universitarie,
no. 11. Milan: Jaca, 1985. 165 pp. 11,000 lire, paper.


   Terrorist bombs, random assassinations, kidnapping of foreigners
to finance arms for revolution - during the first decade of our
century all this would at once be associated with the Macedonian
question, which in turn was the heart of the Near Eastern Question.
Historians and observers of current Balkan politics are continually
drawn back to this chaotic period, for Macedonia is an early example
of postempire communal conflicts involving intimately intertwined
strands of religion and ethnographic elements. The seemingly
senseless acts of violence were symptoms of the breakup of the
five-hundred-year-old polyethnic, multicultural Ottoman Empire in
Europe. The crucial controversy involves the emergence of an
individual Macedonian nationality, with its own separate language.
Bulgarian scholarship stubbornly denies the existence of any such
ethnic group or language, vociferously denouncing it as a scurrilous
invention of a group of Titoist agents and traitors during 1944.
Yugoslav Macedonians tend to push the origins back at least to the
middle of the nineteenth century, if not to Phillip and Alexander of
Macedon. The torrent of bitter polemics on the topic has tended to
obscure rather than illuminate.

   Ordinary words and related assumptions about social arrangements
have misled both observers on the scene at the time and later
analysts attempting to understand the local societies and their
relationships to neighbouring groups. Prime culprits are the words
'nation' and 'language'. Nation (with its derivative 'nationality')
has two major senses: the rather vague traditional meaning of a
group united by awareness of shared kinship, language, and culture
(like smaller groups called 'tribe' or 'clan') and the post-1789
doctrine of nationalism that sees nation as a basic and natural
subdivision of humanity, a political unit. [1] Neither language nor
territory is necessarily a part of this kind of ideology, but
frequently both are taken as part of the "natural" and self-evident
peculiar characteristics of a proper nation. Thus Bulgarian
ideologists, adhering to a particularly romantic national myth of
this sort, have at least since 1870 taken for granted that
'nation = language = territory = state', whereby the terms nation
and language are absolutely equal and primary, while nation = language
ordinarily equals territory, and finally nation = language = territory
ought to correspond to state. Against this background, a definition
of Bulgaria that includes all of Macedonia has motivated the
irredentist policies of virtually every Bulgarian government of
whatever hue during the past century. Because the territory is
Bulgarian, the dogma goes, the people who inhabit it are Bulgarians.
Because they are Bulgarian, they must speak the Bulgarian language
and should all be in a single nation-state. [2]

   This modern view of nationalities, which spread with the effects
of the Industrial Revolution into European Turkey, clashed with the
definitions of community that underlay the intricate social
adjustments in the polyglot, multicultural Ottoman Empire. The
primary criterion was religion; Moslems ruled, non-Moslems were
subordinates. Beyond that, non-Moslems were subdivided in ways that
allowed but did not require grouping by language. In Macedonia - a
region whose very name typifies mixture - Slavs, Greeks and
Albanians all could be Moslem or Christian, with a bewildering set
of possible subgroupings, particularly among the Slavs. Greek,
Serbian, and Bulgarian nationalists excluded Moslems, for the
ideology put religion above language in the hierarchy of criteria
for belonging to a nation. [3] Language was important, however, and
it was a major issue by 1890 and perhaps the chief bone of
contention after 1918.

   Now, everyone knows that languages are divided into dialects,
which by definition are less important than the superordinate
language. Bulgarian scholars flatly declare all varieties of Slavic
spoken within their dream frontier (established by means of
historical and ethnographic definitions, often of dubious validity)
to be "dialects of the Bulgarian language" and produce more of less
reliable objective comparative lists of differences in phonetics,
phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon from selected villages to
prove their point. But some of the same lists have been used by
Serbs to demonstrate the most meticulous classification, based on
well-reasoned conclusions that speech-type A is a dialect of B, but
C is a separate language, is a scholarly artifact, a taxonomic
decision that is useful in a specific heuristic framework. In the
real world, the speaker decide what language they speak; linguists
ought to respect their decisions. We know very well that the natives
of one region may deem radically different dialect types to belong
to one language (eg., Germany-Switzerland-Austria, Italy, Slovenia),
while elsewhere (eg. Czechoslovakia, Byelorussia) speakers declare
objectively very similar language types to be separate units. Such a
declaration by Macedonians is labelled treason by Bulgarians and
seems strange to outsiders who accept the "scientific" definition of
Macedonian Slavic speech-types as "Bulgarian dialects."

   Modern knowledge of south Slavic dialects has not changed the major
controversies about the Slavic dialects spoken in Macedonia. [4]
Using at least twenty-five traits to provide approximate contrastive
definitions, we can see that if one starts at any point in Serbia
and moves south and east into Greece and Bulgaria, the local
dialects form a gradual spectrum of differentiation. [5] If we have
only two points of reference, Serbian and Bulgarian, then every
dialect has some degree of mixture. Slavists long ago found it
convenient to set up Macedonian as a third point of reference,
against the protests of both Serbs and Bulgars. The protests were
even louder when Macedonians claimed that "neither Bulgarian nor
Serbian" meant a third, independent, language. At this point I can
only say once again that I accept the decision of the native
speakers because I believe in the right to self-determination (see
my discussion in the above cited-article).

   Americans should not have to be reminded that both nationality
and language are subjective; they are cultural matters subject to
the choice of individuals. While one cannot change one's
blood-relationships, one may, under favourable political conditions,
chose to change either language or nationality or both. [6] The
Macedonian problem has thus been largely a question of the
recognition or nonrecognition of the existence of options and the
right to make choices.

   The crucial sociohistorical question remains: Why did Macedonian
Slavs insist on their separateness, at great personal cost? Further,
since political separateness does not require linguistic separatism
(compare Belgium, Switzerland, Austria), why insist on building a
new Macedonian standard language? Accepting the fact that
Macedonians did insist, when did this linguistic separatism start
and what sources help us explore the process?

   Marco Dogo, who teaches history at the University of Trieste (and
thus presumably is aware of nationality conflicts involving the
rearrangement of societal structures in the former polyglot
polyethnic Habsburg Empire), has concentrated on Italian sources,
and in 'Dynamite and the Crescent' he focuses on the critically
shifting scene in the period between the brutally suppressed armed
uprising of July-August 1903 and the spectacularly successful Revolt
of the Young Turks in the summer of 1908. Setting the stage, Dogo
observes that in the 1850s western travellers perceived Macedonia
merely as another picturesque Ottoman province (though particularly
variegated and backward), but by the early 1870s tensions among
Christian groups were seen as major problems for the Turkish
administration and, more significantly, as undesirable complications
for Austria, Russian, and other European plans for the economic
exploitation of the region.

   Dogo's great merit is that he does not simplify; he recognizes
that the immensely complicated societal arrangements involved
paradoxes and ambiguities. He refuses to accept the kind of
reductionist, not to say procrustean, explanations that vitiate or
nullify much of the voluminous journalism produced during the last
century, as well as, sad to say, a good part of the work of
professional historians. He is not mesmerized by labels particularly
Bulgar, Bulgarian, which are applied to heterogeneous quantities
with bewilderingly kaleidoscopic variations in meaning. (For
example, a prominent Italian observer divides the inhabitants of
Macedonia into five 'religious' groups - Muslims, Bulgars [!],
Orthodox, Catholics, and Jews; in the context of the Ottoman
'millet' system of religious communities and the special position of
the Bulgarian Exarchate at the time, 'Bulgar' is a perfectly
comprehensible as "member of a particular subdivision of Christians.")
Dogo is far too aware of the slipperiness of any definition of
'nationality' to commit himself as to whether a Macedonian
nationality existed at this time, but he clearly believes that the
Bulgarian and Serbian claims to the Slavs of Macedonia were
unjustified. He has a thorough command of the vast array of sources
in English, French, and German that are known to authors of many
general surveys, along with the more infrequently used materials in
Serbian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian, and he skilfully separates out
religion and social factors in the various conflicts, presenting a
convincing and balanced view of the whole situation in a series of
different phases.

   The Italians had a specific interest because the Great Power
imposition of reforms on Ottoman Macedonia placed Italians in charge
of reorganizing the gendarmerie in Bitola-Monastic, the major urban
center of Macedonia, after Salonika. Although Dogo quotes Italian
diplomatic sources from time to time, he apparently found nothing
really new or surprising. The body of his book shows that even the
relatively informed journalists whose reports not only shaped
Italian public opinion but strongly influenced foreign policy - keep
in mind that Italy was vitally interested in Albania - were not able
to provide the full materials that should buttress independent
opinions. Unable to talk to the natives, or even to rank and file
Turkish officials, they -like most of their European colleagues -
relied on French, German, or English versions of biased and
self-serving proclamations from the official and unofficial Balkan
state propaganda bureaus. What mattered were the opinions and
decisions of the Russian or Austro-Hungarian consuls, or of the
Turkish governor. The observers heard what the Turks, Greeks,
Bulgars, or Serbs wanted them to hear; their task was to choose
among these conflicting assertions with virtually no input from the
local inhabitants whose lives were involved. Dogo's book again
demonstrates vividly how little the opinions of Macedonian Slavs had
to do with political and economic decision affecting Macedonia. The
prejudiced (and often uninformed) pronouncements of outsiders were
far more influential.

   Dogo's discussion of the unreliability of the reputedly informed
observers in Macedonia surely has a lesson of current relevance.
Even intelligent and generally experienced journalists can easily be
misled if they cannot handle the local languages in polyethnic
situations - particularly if they are too lazy to attempt to
separate out conflicting labels for local social and political
groups. How reliable, for example, are the reports we are currently
receiving from Lebanon - another area where old multicultural
institutions inherited from the Ottoman Empire have finally broken
down? Readers of this journal are, I hope, aware of the
insensitivity of many American and European observers to the ethnic
divisions in the Soviet Union, along with the potential problems
that policy makers should know about.

   Dogo's second book, in spite of its title, does not really deal
with language, but rather with Macedonian attitudes toward
language and its connection with communal and ethnic identity and
therefore nationality. [7] His "disarmed prophets" are the band of
Macedonian advocates and local self-determination who struggled to
make themselves heard in the din of Bulgarian, Greek, Serbian, and
Great-Power declarations about what was, and should be, proper for
the region. The introduction (pp. 7-68) presents the evolution of
Macedonian national self-awareness as a growing separatist feeling,
as the Macedonian Slavs sought an answer to the question "separate
from what?". in the eyes of outsiders, particularly the neighbouring
Slavic nationalists, it was a negative development, for the
Macedonians denied being Moslems, Greeks, Serbs or Bulgars (not to
mention Albanians, Jews, or Gypsies). Dogo cogently argues that this
"act of ethnic repudiation" was a mark of emergent Macedonian
nationalism. it puzzled, angered, and finally infuriated Bulgarians,
whose definition of 'nation' did not allow the right of
self-determination. [8] Indeed, a major stimulus for Macedonian
separatism after 1870 was the insistence of Bulgarians on full
control in Macedonia: the opinions of the local inhabitants were
ignored, and they were expected to follow all directives from Sofia.
[9] Especially in matters of building a common standard written
language, Macedonians were continually rebuffed and Macedonian
dialect features were disdainfully thrown out as unacceptable. Yet
many Macedonian Slavs did choose to accept Bulgarian nationality,
for the term Bulgari had long been the indigenous label for these
people and their ancestors; having made the decision, they were
particularly upset by the separatism espoused by brothers and
neighbours.

   A clear definition of and justification for a separate Macedonian
nationality, including details of the proposed new standard
language, is set forth unequivocally only in the works of Krste P.
Misirkov (1874-1926), especially his short book "On Macedonian
Affairs," published in Sofia at the end of 1903 and immediately
confiscated by the Bulgarian police. The one published work treating
Misirkov's book seriously was a very long review by the linguistic
scholar Alexander Teodorov-Balan, which appeared in the leading
Bulgarian scholarly journal. [10] It starts with a detailed and
generally fair-minded resume, including long citations in Misirkov's
Macedonian wording. Dogo points out that the availability of this
review made Misirkov's ideas available to subsequent generations.
Balan acknowledges the vagueness among Macedonian Slavs. He
dismisses the syllogism that the non-Bulgarian non-Serbian character
of the dialects justifies the establishment of a third language by
attempting to show that the Bulgarian features predominate. Further,
though he perceives Misirkov to be saying that history involves
change and the rise of new elements, he denies the creation even of
a brand new Macedonian nationality by saying that the region has
always been Bulgarian and the Slavic inhabitants Bulgarians. [11]
While it is understandable that emigres tend to remember in somewhat
idealized pictures the land they left behind and are unwilling to
admit that it may have changed in ways they might not like, it is
sad that most Bulgarian historians refuse to recognize various
stages of change that affected society in Macedonia again and again
from 1870 to the present.

   Apart from Misirkov's suppressed book, and a single issue of a
journal, Vardar, which was printed in Macedonian in Odessa, but
never distributed, we have little direct evidence about Macedonian
nationalist ideology. It consists chiefly of records of the
activities of a Macedonian student committee in St. Petersburg, of
which Misirkov was a founder and leading member, along with scraps
of information about some of the same individuals in Belgrade and
Sofia. Yet the existence of like-minded separatists is manifest from
the impassioned denunciations by the Bulgarian authorities and
agents whom Dogo appropriately calls irredentists, and the
opprobrious term 'Macedonist' appears for these "traitors" and
"Serbia (or Austrian, Turkish, Greek) agents" as early as 1871.
Their message, anathema to Bulgarian and Greek religious and secular
authorities alike, was not particularly attractive to the Serbs and
found limited approval only with a few Russian officials. It simply
did not reach European opinion-makers, because it was not
transmitted by journalists and official observers. The Macedonists,
lacking funds and access to international public opinion, perforce
fell silent. Their ideas survived, however, to be revived in
post-1918 Yugoslavia and brought fruition in 1944.

   Altogether, Dogo's background presentations, briefly though they
have been, provide the major points without slighting the
difficulties outsiders have in defining the painful choices that
faced the inhabitants of Macedonia between 1870 and 1910, and his
distinctions among various points of view are generally clear. I am
puzzled that he fails even to mention the earliest native
declaration of Macedonian separatist sentiment, Georgi Pulevski's
"Trilingual Dictionary of 1875", which was purposefully written in
Macedonian for non-Serbian non-Bulgarian Macedonian Slavs. [12]
Dogo's judicious selection of "texts and documents" (pp. 71-161)
illustrates his theses very well. He includes two anti-Macedonist
letters of 1874, pro-macedonist items produced by Macedonian
students in Belgrade and St. Petersburg (1902), a long section from
Misirkov's book (after the disastrous revolt of 1903), and an
article from 'Vardar' (1905), along with two particularly revealing
letters by one of the active Macedonists, denouncing his comrades to
the Bulgarian authorities (1903, after the failed revolt), and
sections from Teodorov-Balan's review of Misirkov.

   Marco Dogo's books and related articles are solid, insightful
scholarly contributions to a field greatly in need of careful and
independent analysis. They surely will help Italian students to
appreciate the social and historical questions of recent Macedonian
history in all their complexity.

             - - - - - -

1. To compress, at risk of oversimplifying, a definition of "core
nationalist doctrine," 'nation' in this sense further entails that
each nation has its peculiar character; the source of all political
power is the nation, the whole collectivity; for freedom and
self-realization, men must identify with a nation; nations can only
be fulfilled in their own states; loyalty to the nation-state
overrides other loyalties. This particular list is derived from
Anthony D. Smith, 'Theories in Nationalism, 1971', and is treated
more fully in my discussion of Macedonian and Bulgarian nationalism,
in "Some sociolinguistic aspects of Macedonian and Bulgarian,"
'Language and Literary Theory, Papers on Slavic Philology, vol. 5,
ed. B. A. Stolz, pp. 83-132 (Ann Arbor, 1984).

2. In 1985 this doctrine was applied to ethnic Turks in Bulgaria -
something over 9 percent of the populace; they were required to take
"Bulgarian" names, and the use of the Turkish language in public was
restricted if not altogether forbidden. See eg. Torsten F. Baest,
"Neues von der 'einheitlichen sozialistischen Nation': Die VR
Bulgarien und ihre turkische Minderheit (1944-1985)," Ost Europa
Info, no. 61 (1985): 92-118. This is available in English
condensation in "Bulgaria's War at Home: The People's Republic and
its Turkish Minority (1944-1985)", Across Frontiers 2, no. 2 (1985):
18-27, and also in State Department Report to the 2nd Session of the
99th Congress, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1985,
February 1986, esp. pp. 921-921, 930-934.

3. Note that the old view of 'nation', where the terms 'tribe' and
'nation' are essentially synonyms, became mixed up with the
post-1789 political concept. The warm emotional closeness of the
first sense (implied by traditional ethnic terms like Serb, Bulgar,
Slav) was embodied in such works as the 1762 Slavo-Bulgarian History
by Paisi of Hilendar or, with additional romantic nuances derived
from herder, the 1861 Bulgarian Folksongs of the martyred Macedonian
brothers Dimitar and Konstantin Miladinov. The fiery political
imperatives of newer "blood and soil" (Blut und Boden, sang et sol)
doctrines are added, confusedly and confusingly, in nationalist
Bulgarian literature (and politics) after about 1850, for example,
by Petko R. Slavejkov. Contemporary Macedonians try to keep the
senses separate by no means an easy task, for geographical, ethnic,
and political meanings blend too easily into one another. Another
example: Western European Slavists have been informed by irate
Bulgarians that Yugoslav republications of Miladinov's collections
are entitled "Macedonian Folksongs." This seems to be simple
disinformation, for such a title is not used, and facsimiles of the
original title page, including the epithet 'Bulgarian' are routinely
included. Macedonians, in turn, might accuse Bulgarian scholars of
"Bulgarizing" the Miladinvos' language, for example, by changing
'od' to 'ot' (on the title page, twice). What is "up-dating" or
"normalizing" for one party is vile falsification for the other.

4. It should be noted that the geographical definition of Macedonia
varies in time and also, in too many cases, according to the
political bias of the definer.

5. For specific details and pertinent literature, see Victor A.
Friedman, "The Sociolinguists of Literary Macedonian," International
Journal of Sociology of Language 52 (1985): 31-57.

6. Unfortunately, political force may disallow change or impose it,
compare note 2.

7. Dogo's presentation is entirely compatible with the linguistic
information detailed in my article (cf. note 1) and in Friedman's
(cf. note 5).

8. Note that, of all the Christian Slavic inhabitants of "Greater
Bulgaria" (defined by the shortlived treaty of San Stefano, 1878),
only the Macedonians felt it necessary to repudiate the label
'Bulgarian', though they allowed the superordinate label 'Slav'. The
attitudes of Slavic-speaking Moslems and their roles in the
conflicts of 1870-1945 are not dealt with in any of the literature I
have seen.

9. The Hitler-backed Bulgarian occupation of Macedonia in 1941-44
also announced in effect: "You are our brother Bulgarians, but you
are junior and ignorant; shut up and do are you are told!". This
authoritarian intransigence turned even pro-Bulgarian advocates into
separatists.

10. "Edna makedonska teorija," Periodicesko spisanie 64 (1904): 780-833.

11. Bulgarian polemicists are forced to mention Misirkov and go to
great lengths to denigrate his person and career and to ridicule his
ideas; I find it odd that Teodorov-Balan's review in never cited and
welcome Dogo's references.

12. See my article, cited in note 1. For more details about
nineteenth-century linguistic evidence of Macedonian individuality
(including authors who do not necessarily reject the label
'Bulgarian'), see now Trajko Stamatoski, 'Borba za makedonski
literaturen jazik' (Skopje, 1986).