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This book examines the main plots in Bulgarian literature of 18th and 19th centuries through which the Bulgarians were building and still build their self-image and their mental maps. These plots and the main figures in them formed one relatively homogeneous mythical structure, presented in the literature. From this perspective, this study examines key tests in the national canon, from Paisius of Hilendar to Ivan Vasov and beyond.
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The point of departure of the following paper is the question how and why Istanbul, or Tsarigrad, as Bulgarians used to call the capital of Ottoman Turkey in 19th century and later, has been inscribed in different spatial frameworks during the second half of 19th century. My interest is how representations of big cities, i.e. Tsarigrad/Istanbul, participate in the construction of a unifi ed national identity or, to put it another way, how the multiethnic city of convergent cultures has been appropriated in the imaginary geography of the diverging culture of nationalism.
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Admittedly, collective identities are specific and complicated intellectual constructions. Apart from the obvious contemporary scientific controversies between the concepts of “the leading constructionist” Benedict Anderson and the critics of provable collective identities, an attempt will be made at retracing some aspects of collective identities in the Balkans associated with or expressed in relevant economic terms. Pride of place is accorded to the feelings of belonging both as a self-consciousness, self-determination, self-recognition and as mutual/reciprocal perception. The necessary admission of their multiple layers predetermines the acceptance of fl uctuating imaginary maps where frontiers could be optional. Identity as a specifi c sociological term will be used as a determinant toward neighbours, Europe as a whole, the Great Powers and other historical and political constituents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - a period of significant political and economic changes in the region’s life. Admittedly, all this relates more or less to the process of nation building. The study is focusing on contemporary uses of the Balkans before the Balkan wars, rather than on later political discourses and present-day scientifi c discussions on sense, essence and non-sense of the Balkan(s) as a construct .[...]
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The traditional sociological notion of the role combines the presumption of rationality with the metaphor of theatrical performance. On the one hand, the role notion presupposes typization and instrumentality, or setting up and upholding certain normative prescriptions. On the other hand, it refers to a situation of communication and representation – assessment and orientation of your own acts in accordance with the “presence” of the others’ roles – that comes to the fore. As two ultimate explications of these two characteristics we can treat the ideal model of Webber of bureaucracy and the interactive symbolism of Goffman; and as an attempt to bridge them together we can view the definition of Berger and Luckmann.
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In national ideologies and definition of the nations, the issues of „race“ and ethnicity were in many cases central ones. In the 19th century the emerging national consciousness in many cases received rational shape through a scientific revolution. At that time nationalism was, in fact, the driving force behind „racial“ differentiation. In the scientific investigations one obvious area was that of „race,“ which often had political objectives as an attempt to assert the existence of a national identity based on innate „racial“ characteristics. As Barkan emphasizes, the intensification of national rivalry in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century stimulated pursuit of still greater „racial“ differentiation as a mode of justifying nationalism that was sanctioned by the growing repute of biology and evolutionary theory. Part of this process of constructing national ideologies in the 19th century was the search for racial antiquity, „ancestors“ and common descent. Special importance had been assigned to different branches of modern science where the idea of inherent difference found legitimacy, and „race“ was perceived primarily as a scientific concept.2 Inasmuch as national ideologies played a crucial role in the public political domain, the intersection between „race,“ „ancestors,“ ethnogenesis, science and politics was quite obvious.
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The present paper sheds light on the most important patterns of Macedonian political emancipation, from the period subsequent to the Congress of Berlin (1878) and prior to the Balkan wars (1912–1913). It focuses on a number of problems addressed by this volume: different modalities of nationalism (supranational, inter-national, etc.); paradigm shifts of national discourses; the relationship between confessional and national identities, and between ethnicity and different political ideologies (liberal, socialist). The timeframe is by no means arbitrarily chosen: while the so-called "Macedonian Question" was generally perceived, already in this period, as a result of a political setting provoked by the decisions taken in Berlin, the context that followed the first division of the region brought about different political commitments deserving further special attention and survey.
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Are Bulgarians barbarians or civilized? Answering this question consumed a considerable part of the intellectual energy of the Bulgarian elite in the 19th century. The dilemma was first put up for discussion at the beginning of the century and ever since then, each new generation has been joining a fresh round of the debate. Interest in the topic has been sufficiently lively to lend legitimacy to the "barbarism-civilization" taxonomy as the main framework within which the nation builds its identity. This research aims to explore the origins of this process. The analysis covers the period from the 1830s to the rise of the independent Bulgarian state in 1878. This is the chronological framework in which the intellectual elite imported and promoted the ideological grammar of modernity and the taxonomies of progress. The objective is to shed light on the history, mechanisms and results of their transfer.
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The existence of a specific Transylvanian Romanian liberalism, either in the sense of being a fully-fledged movement, or only a more or less clear-cut affective community of individual theorists and politicians, is not taken for granted by the national historiographies of 19th-century Transylvania, either Hungarian or Romanian. The theorists and activists that this paper groups under the heading of Transylvanian Romanian national liberals are most commonly described as members of the national movement in Transylvania, that is, the movement that fought for the emancipation of the Romanian people in Transylvania. It is the argument of this paper, however, that the identity politics devised by the theorists discussed cannot be understood without taking seriously their allegiance to the liberal project of modernity (and modernization) besides their commitment to the national cause. They themselves thought that the two projects, liberal modernization (and its economic corollary, capitalism) and national emancipation were not only reinforcing each other, but could not be conceived of separately. It is this apparently paradoxical concatenation of a progressive and a conservative idiom of political thought, liberalism and nationalism, that the present paper intends to describe through a reconstruction of the Transylvanian Romanian version of liberal identity-building, both political-institutional and cultural.
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As in most European cases, some aspects of the Romanian discourse of national peculiarity can be traced back to the humanist genre of "Descripţia" of the land, narrating the origins and political history of the respective people, a genre which in the Danubian Principalities reached its climax in the works of the erudite Moldavian prince-scholar Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723).1 The works rooted in the humanist chorographical paradigm of course had a very different discursive function and referential basis than the characterological constructions underpinning the projects of modern nationhood and statebuilding, emerging from the late 18th century onwards, making "national individuality" a key argument of political self-legitimization. Some references to this national individuality can be identified in the political and cultural works of the Transylvanian Greek Catholic elite, which sought to anchor the historical-institutional identity of Transylvanian Romanians in a genealogical construction. They were stressing customs and behavior as the proof of continuity with the Roman colonists of Dacia and accidentally, even the concept of "character" surfaced in some of their writings. Simultaneously, the culturalgeographical literature stemming from the Danubian Principalities (often by travelers or cosmopolitan intellectuals, whose work can be related to more than one national tradition, such as the Greek Daniil Philippide or Dionisie Fotino, both of whom authored geographical descriptions of these lands, or the French Encyclopédiste, J. L. Carra) sought to put these polities on the map of Europe, making references to the customs of the inhabitants. Significantly, the concept of character was already able to become politicized in the late 18th century, as was the case with the reformist discourse of the Moldavian boyar Ionică Tăutul, who deplored the loss of patriotic identification and the growth of egoism on the part of the ruling elite.
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Preparadigmatic and early paradigmatic ethnographic imagination and practice played a crucial role in mid- and late 19th-century Hungarian nationbuilding. Different versions of national identity competed within the new discipline called ethnography. They used, translated, transformed, and remade the emerging discipline. In order to map these transformations, I will focus both on the ideological transfers and on the internal cleavages to simultaneously see the sources, and the reception of texts and phenomena that are used in the crossings and interactions of this disciplinary formation. At the same time, this train of thought is also a broad history of the early (preparadigmatic and early disciplinary) phases of Hungarian ethnography. As such, it will try to follow the history of the professionalization and „disciplinarization“ of ethnography along several shifts: from the mainly textual interest of Hungarian ethnography of the 1840s-1860s to the „visual turn“ and exhibition of folk objects of the 1870s, and to the complex interaction of the phenomena of tourism and ethnography in the last two decades of the 19th century. In following these shifts, it will attempt to understand and analyze how the emergence of this new discipline coincided with the rise of the nation-building process of modernity, and what were the consequences of their complex and multi-layered relationship.
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This paper deals with representative writings of an Ottoman intellectual, Shemseddin Sami Frashëri (1850–1904), who has simultaneously been represented in contemporary Turkey and Albania as one of the fathers of Turkish and Albanian nationalisms, respectively. Accordingly, he is known with two different names in these countries: „Sami Frashëri“ in Albania and „Şemseddin (or Şemsettin) Sami“ in Turkey. In order to avoid partisanship in this question, either his full name (as in the title) or the short version „Sami“ will be used in this paper.
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The Yugoslavs entered their Balkan home from the direction of the Carpathians in the sixth and seventh centuries. Probably speaking more than one dialect of Slavic even then they later became divided geographically in religion and in written language, as well as in economic, social, and cultural life. Historically, they had been forced to live under Magyar, Italian, German, and Turkish overlords, each of whom left a legacy of disunion and chaos in which the guiding principle had been the golden rule of imperialism: divide and rule. It is therefore nothing short of miraculous that the movement for unification was achieved as early as 1918. With the destruction of Yugoslavia in 1941 at the hands of Germans, Italians, Magyars, and Bulgars, Yugoslav unity again became the ideal toward which the nation turned.
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From the treaty of Berlin to the Serbian Revolution of 1903 the rulers of Serbia and their governments were under the domination of Austria-Hungary, even though in the last years of his life King Alexander Obrenović had proved difficult to manage. The cabinet of Vienna evidently did not expect the change of dynasty to affect this situation, for the Emperor Francis Joseph was the first monarch to recognize Peter Karageorgević as King of Serbia; the Austrian government was apparently confident that the commercial treaty of 1893 would continue to provide the means for keeping Serbia in subjection.
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Yugoslavia, like Czechoslovakia and Rumania, was one of the pioneers in building the Little Entente. Moreover, like Greece, Turkey, and Rumania, Yugoslavia played a significant role in constituting the Balkan Pact of February, 1934, and in developing the Balkan Entente, which was constructed on the foundations of the Balkan Pact. Yugoslav statesmen and the people whom they served must be accredited with vision and wisdom in anticipating those institutions on which Danubian and Balkan unity were to be built. To the peoples of Yugoslavia, the dream of some sort of union was not new, though it took many forms as it moved along the paths of historical evolution. One might turn to the era of Tsar Stephen Dušan the Mighty, in the mid-fourteenth century, or move rapidly into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and not mistake the dream. Along with Rhigas Pheraios, one remembers Dositej Obradović and Vuk Karadžić, all of whom thought in terms of a union of the South Slavs of the Balkan Peninsula, as did the Croatian, Ljudevit Gaj, the leader of the Illyrian movement and the editor of the Ilirske Narodne Novine. Nor could one overestimate the lifework of Bishop Strossmayer, the great Croatian priest-statesman, who also envisioned a Balkan union.
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After the cessation of hostilities in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, with the signing of the Treaty of San Stefano, some factual frameworks are outlined that affect the territory inhabited by ethnic Bulgarians, but whether they are legally sufficient to claim that there is already a new subject of international law, a new state, to celebrating its liberation on the third of March?
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