7 Ambiguities of an emancipatory discourse: the making of a Macedonian minority in Greece Jane K. Cowan Introduction In 1991, in the wake of Yugoslavia's violent disintegration, the Federal Republic of Macedonia bid to establish itself as an independent state. It sought international recognition under the name Macedonia. On its ¯ag it placed a sixteen-pointed symbol ± identi®ed as a star south of the border, and a sun north of it ± drawn from archeological ®nds in a recently excavated ancient tomb claimed as that of Phillip of Macedon in the Greek village of Vergina. These actions were read by many Greeks as a `theft of history' and tantamount to territorial claims upon the portion of Macedonia incorporated into Greece in 1912±13. Greek reaction was swift and intense. Shop receipts, telephone cards, bill- boards and graf®ti proclaimed `Macedonia is one and it is Greek'. On St Valentine's Day 1992, Greeks in their thousands poured into Salonika to demonstrate support for this claim. The `Macedonian Question', dormant since the close of the Second World War, was reawakened. The tumult of these mass demonstrations and of Greek diplomatic manoeuvres within the European Union over the name obscured another dimension to the controversy. It concerned the revival of the never fully resolved controversy within Greece over the existence within her borders of a distinctive Slavic Macedonian people. As early as the mid-1980s, self-de®ned Macedonian activists had come into con¯ict with police and local authorities when they sang songs in Macedonian and used Macedonian terms for dances and for local place names during village festivals YDanforth 1995: 121). Signi®cantly, activists' gestures, like their complaints about of®cial attempts to suppress them, were framed in terms of a discourse of human rights and minority recognition. The Macedonian case is just one example of the recent proliferation 152 The making of a Macedonian minority in Greece 153 at the global level of rights discourses used by and on behalf of `oppressed' groups. In making cultural difference both the grounds for, and the object of, claims, it also exempli®es what Nancy Fraser, in Justice Interruptus, has called `the shift in the grammar of political claims-making' from struggles for social equality to those for group recognition I1997: 2). This grammatical shift has occurred in the context of a wider `politics of recognition', `the name [which] political theorists have given to ``an emancipatory politics that af®rms group difference'' and to the demand by minority groups for ``recognition of their identity and accommodation of their cultural differences''' IRosen- blum 1998: 321). International and transnational institutions of law and human rights have responded to this clamour for group recognition by opening up the previously narrow legal-political space devoted to cultural difference. Once perceived as a challenge to a universal human rights regime, cultural diversity is now celebrated, and an archipelago view of a world composed of discrete, bounded islands of culture prevails Isee Eriksen in this volume). The conceptual and ethical commitment to distinct cultures has enabled the invention of new categories of rights for collectivities, such as indigenous rights, that were previously unrecog- nized in international law. It has also underpinned an expansion ± and simultaneously, a rephrasing ± of the more established area of minority rights, where the pendulum has swung away from exclusive reliance on protecting individual rights and towards some recognition of group rights.1 The greatly expanded scope for recognizing culturally distinctive sub-national units Ipeoples, cultures, and minorities), as well as increas- ingly vigorous monitoring and adjudication procedures by international and supranational bodies for ensuring their rights, is widely viewed as constituting an emancipatory trend. In this paper, I explore certain ambiguities of the emancipatory discourse of protecting and promoting vulnerable cultures and em- battled minorities by examining the making of the Macedonian minority in Greece. In describing this as a `making', I do not mean that it has been invented out of thin air. Rather, I want to highlight the ways in whicha speci®c population's social and linguistic distinctiveness, whose nature and salience have long been contested, have been recast in the past two decades through transnational legal categories and institutional prac- tices. A discourse of `minority', `culture' and `human rights', I argue, dictates how difference can be formulated and defended, and is thus partially constitutive of the groups the international community purports merely to recognize. Claims for the recognition of the Macedonian 154 Jane K. Cowan minority, its culture and its human rights, have therefore not been simply concurrent with its construction as a novel cultural-legal category and socio-political constituency; they have been the very means of that construction. Since the mid-1980s, activists within a movement for Macedonian human rights have pursued what I call a `minoritization of culture'. They have attempted to narrow and ®x the meanings of certain cultural forms such that they may underwrite and authenticate a particular minority identity. They have also urged a reformulation of the subject from one whose identities are multiple, ¯uid and situational ± grounded as they are in an array of cultural practices, only some of which are distinct from those of the majority Lin particular, the use of a Slavic language) ± to one prede®ned in terms of separateness and subordination vis-aÁ-vis the Greek majority, oppression vis-aÁ-vis the state, and entitlement to special rights guaranteed by the international community. The project of constructing and consolidating minorityhood has been taking place in different domains. At a local level, activists and their supporters have sought, and continue to seek, to persuade people who today call themselves dopii L`locals') or dopii Makedones L`local Mace- donians') to embrace the name `Macedonian' for themselves, their language and their culture, and to think of themselves as a `minority'. At the same time, they are seeking to consolidate the existence of `the Macedonian minority' in the international law and the human rights community, and by that means to compel the state to recognize it. Yet the population to which this designation is meant to apply is politically fractured, with multiple subjectivities re¯ecting different histories, different modes and degrees of accommodation to a hege- monic Greek national culture, and different levels of interaction with neighbours of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The acti- vists' reformulation of identity has consequently met with considerable suspicion and even hostility from within the dopii population. Most members of this population identify themselves today as `Greeks'. This has already raised within the population, and signals for us, important issues of representation and accountability. My analysis reveals a plethora of ambiguities: about the intended referent for the term `Macedonian minority', about its scope, and about the activists' `real' objectives. Above all, I am concerned with the ethical ambiguities of a discourse which may constrain, as much as enable, many of those it is meant to empower, by forcing their expressions of difference into a dichotomous interpretive frame that misrepresents their complex identities and rests on the same logic as the nationalism it ostensibly contests. The making of a Macedonian minority in Greece 155 Minority and minoritization Within discourses of international law and human rights, the older legal concept of `minority' functions very much like the concept of `culture'. Although the international community has never found a universally- acceptable de®nition of `minority', the category is normally construed through reference to cultural criteria. Consider the widely-cited de®ni- tion of `minority' by Francesco Capotorti: a group numerically inferior to the rest of the population of a State, in a non- dominant position, whose members ± being nationals of the State ± possess ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population, and show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards preserving their culture, traditions, religion or identity. Icited in Thornberry 1991a: 11) A minority is considered as a matter of `fact', whose existence can be ascertained on the basis of certain objective or subjective criteria, or some combination of both IEide 1996; Thornberry 1991a, 1991b). Even without state recognition, a minority's existence may be acknowl- edged within the international sphere. As a legal or technical category, `minority' partakes of the essentia- lising and rei®cation entailed in all legal regimes, which demand clearly de®ned, context-neutral categories of identity and membership. `Minor- ity' and `majority' are presented as discrete, clearly bounded entities. A minority is normally taken to be a pre-existing social group into which individuals are born. However, given the individualist human rights framework within which minority rights are situated, international law recognizes that `members of a minority have two ways of expressing their identity': either By associating themselves with the strong desire of a group to preserve its characteristics, or by exercising their choice not to belong and instead to assimilate into the majority IUN 1992: 10).