European History Quarterly

European History Quarterly http://ehq.sagepub.com 'Imagined Communities' and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans Paschalis M. Kitromilides European History Quarterly 1989; 19; 149 DOI: 10.1177/026569148901900203 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ehq.sagepub.com Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for European History Quarterly can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ehq.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ehq.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Paschalis M. Kitromilides ’Imagined Communities’ and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans Nationalism has been one of the most powerful - and perhaps also one of the most destructive - forces shaping the course of Balkan history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After a century of national assertion the Balkans came to be known as the ’powder keg’ of Europe on the eve of World War I. The explosiveness of regional politics was due to the interplay of great-power imperialisms with the conflicting claims and aspirations of the region’s nationalities. How these claims and aspirations were shaped and articulated, and what were the origins of the national assertiveness that underlay them, are not only major questions in the political and intellectual history of south-eastern Europe, but also important issues with intrinsic theoretical significance for the understanding of the phenomenon of nationalism. The origins of militant Balkan nationalism can be traced in the so-called period of Enlightenment and ’national awakening’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An examination of this process of intellectual and cultural change, free from the pre- conceptions and sensitivities of national attachments, can provide a revealing case study of how ethnic consciousness is cultivated so that a sense of national identity may be imprinted upon a social group. This process has been aptly described as the mental construction of nations as ’imagined communities’.1 I do not propose to address this broad range of substantive and theoretical issues. On the contrary, my objective is to approach analytically three particular but inter-related historical problems which have been totally obfuscated by nationalist mythology: first, the initial construction of concepts of ethnic identity in the writings of Balkan intellectuals; secondly, the role of the modern state 149- Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 150 in the process of national definition; and, thirdly, the antinomy between Orthodoxy - the dominant religious doctrine of the area - and nationalism. The approach is comparative and analytical, attempting to bring some concepts of the social sciences to the reinterpretation of the mass of historical material that bears on the subject. In this task the method has to be genuinely interdisciplinary, combining perspectives from political science, anthropology and sociology in an effort to test the applicability of some influential recent theories of nationalism against the evidence of the historical record. As a matter of fact, nationalism constitutes one of those fields of social science research whose fluidity and invertebrateness make interdisciplinarity imperative, in order to avoid the simplicity of the various methodological monisms and the tautology of universal explanatory propositions. This methodological approach is geared toward a revisionist substantive objective. The comparative analysis of the evidence seeks to challenge two assumptions prevailing in the historiography of eastern Europe. The first assumption to be questioned might be described as the ’national awakening’ assumption. This pervasive view posits that the ’nation’, as a community of culture and social sentiments, preceded the state. This is an assumption with a long and distinguished intellectual genealogy in European thought, traceable to the writings of Herder and Fichte. It was precisely this assumption that guided the work of the greatest historians of south-eastern Europe, men like Konstantinos Paparigopoulos and Nicolae Iorga. Balkan nationalists appropriated these ideas and tried to endow their states with a long pre-statehood history of nationality and national assertion, glorifying as a rule their medieval past and seeking to establish uninterrupted continuities of national existence since the remotest antiquity. Western historians have shared and reproduced this assumption in their writing on Balkan politics and history, despite their critical and often ironic attitude toward the aspirations of Balkan nationalism.2 The second assumption which should be re-examined is the view of Orthodoxy as the champion of nationalism. According to this assumption the Orthodox Church played a major role in preserving and cultivating the ethnic identity of the nations of south-eastern Europe under Ottoman rule and in guiding their national ’awakening’. An explicit claim of this assumption is the identification of Orthodoxy with nationality, while an unstated implication points to the recognition of the Orthodox Church as Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 151 a vanguard of nationalism. This assumption, whose intellectual origins are easily traceable to the second half of the nineteenth century, has prevailed in twentieth-century Balkan historiography with tenacity equal to the ’national awakening’ assumption.33 In considering the issue of the origins of ethnic definition I would simply like to transpose our historical understanding of a phenomenon now taken for granted, the fact of articulate national communities in the Balkans, to the point on the continuum of cultural fermentation when these communities came to ’be imagined’ for the first time. If historical perception manages to recapture that moment, our analysis of the Balkan case might shed some light on the broader phenomenon of the articulation of national communities. By focusing on a few characteristic pieces of evidence from the sources of the Greek Enlightenment I will attempt to recover some indications of the imaginative construction of national communities in the Balkans. These origins can be traced in the definitions of national communities and ethnic groups that surface for the first time in the literature of the closing years of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth century. It was precisely in that period that an articulate movement of cultural change, reflecting the influences and espousing the values of the Enlightenment, made its appearance in south-eastern Europe, using the Greek language as its medium of transmission. The literature produced in Greek under the impact of the ideas of the Enlightenment introduced for the first time the concepts of distinct ethnic identities in Balkan society. The appearance of national definitions, which registered an awareness of ethnic distinctions among the Orthodox Christian groups of Balkan society, illustrates in a precise and documented manner the transition from the ecumenical community of Balkan Orthodoxy and the religiously defined millets to a still inchoate, inarticulate and uncertain world of modern linguistic nations. Early modern Balkan society, as it was politically unified by the Ottoman conquest and culturally homogenized by the Orthodox Church, was ideologically and psychologically held together by the bonds and traditions of eastern Orthodoxy. Headed by the Great Church of Constantinople as the supreme locus of spiritual and political leadership and with its central focus unsnakeably fixed on the old imperial capital of the East Roman emperors Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 152 and the Ottoman sultans, Balkan society in this guise remained the heir of the imperial ecumenical ideas of medieval Byzantium. It was precisely in this context that the Orthodox Church, with the Ecumenical Patriarch at its head, was transmogrified into a polity in captivity. Against this background, modern concepts of secular statehood and nationality associated with the ideas of the Enlightenment and Western rationalism came to disrupt and subvert both Ottoman rule and Orthodox unity in the Balkans. The eventual conflicting nationalisms which sprang out of this ideological transformation were the forces that brought the shared Byzantine legacy to an end in Balkan society.44 The earliest evidence of this transformation can be traced in the recordings of ethnic distinctions we encounter in Enlightenment literature. These texts register for the first time the consciousness taking root among Balkan intellectuals that their society could be conceived as a composite mosaic of nationalities rather than as a unified Christian community. I will attempt to survey this evidence as well as the debates engendered by the awareness of ethnic distinctions as to how national diversity

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