Identity and Conflict in Bosnia and Macedonia - Essay Example

 Identity and Conflict in Bosnia and Macedonia Historical actualities - Civil war in the Balkans exacerbated long-held ethnic tensions and fragmented communities, for which the end of socialism meant freedom and the promise of democracy. In a region once marked by national unity and a tenuous sense of common purpose, the Balkan conflict created a political vacuum in which social order broke down. The psychological transformation that resulted not only raised questions about how different ethnic and religious groups could continue living together, but how the evolving Balkan nations might fit into the greater world community, particularly, within a democratic Europe (Thiessen, 2007, p. 34). The 2007 book Waiting for Macedonia: Identity in a Changing World and the documentary film We Are All Neighbours consider such matters. Thiessen writes of an “Us and Them” paradigm in Macedonia, an “Otherness” that Macedonians have adapted to meet their own perspective on the world and to gauge their place in that world (2007, p. 40). Identity in Macedonia is a fluid concept, with the country’s Slavic population reaching into the country’s ancient past in the effort to construct a national identity (Ibid). Macedonians have had only to consider the existence of a strong European identity in Germany, no stranger to fragmentation, to recognize the benefits of identification with the nation Name 2 states that comprise the European Union. In Bosnia, identity was compromised in the wake of the Tito regime’s demise. Socialism in Yugoslavia, though coercive, fostered a form of national unity, which, when independence came to the former Yugoslav states, resulted in a gradual social incoherence. The ethnic violence that ensued was, perhaps, unsurprising given the conditions in the 1990s. But the suddenness with which it occurred, and its effects on a multi-ethnic Bosnian village, is the subject of We Are All Neighbours. The lingering effects of socialism and of life under a totalitarian regime have been blamed for the cataclysm of the 1990s. In Macedonia, Thiessen contends that it was not the absence of socialism but an absence of a national context that stirred up ethnic unrest (Thiessen, 2007, p. 25). Identity lay at the heart of the matter. Whereas the existence of Yugoslavia allowed Macedonians to think of themselves in terms of Europe, the post-socialist reality produced nostalgia for Yugoslavia that was tantamount to the desire for a future as part of the European community (Ibid). The conclusion one may draw from the post-socialist Macedonian and Bosnian experiences is that national identity has at least as much to do with a nation’s future as it does with its past and present. Conflict and changing identity In her 1995 documentary We Are All Neighbours, Tone Bringa found that unity can be an illusory and transitory force. Bringa’s subjects, the citizens of an anonymous village near Sarajevo, ruminate on the nature of the friendships that exist between Muslims and Catholic Croats, and the possibility that it could all be brought to nothing by war. The conversations take place against a looming backdrop of violence, with the sounds of war literally present in the Name 3 background. Bringa’s protagonists gradually adopt identities that marginalize their fellow villagers, in the process becoming separate and distrustful of the “others” in the village. While the community shares a common Croatian ethnicity, the Muslims are descendants of Croats that had been forced to convert to Islam during Ottoman rule in the Balkans. In the film, any sense of shared ethnicity, common language and simple friendship becomes eroded as each side begins to assume a position of superiority, or moral superiority, in light of the fact that their people face deadly conflict (Bringa, 1995). From a practical standpoint, the great change in Bosnian life was that villagers were forced to become refugees. This represented a truly radical lifestyle change for the ethno-religious groups that had learned to co-exist. Muslims and non-Muslims could freely pursue friendships, even seek marriage with a partner from another religion (Bringa, 1995). Post-Tito Bosnia had, evidently, made considerable progress in working through problems of religious difference and ethnic identity, which the war has thoroughly undone. In the documentary, women from the village gathered together in the home of a neighbor to socialize, sing songs and share every day experiences. When Bringa returned to the village after the violence had swept through it, the Muslims had either fled or been killed and social interaction was a distant memory. In Macedonia, national and ethnic identity is bound up in a desire for “Europeanness” that was present in other parts of Yugoslavia in the years after the Tito regime came to an end. In Skopje, the young female engineers of whom Thiessen wrote proudly claimed to have achieved a fully Westernized, professional lifestyle (2007). This stands in stark contrast to the Name 4 image of Albanian women, cowled and subservient to their husbands, who are typically considered part of a backward and anachronistic underclass. Thiessen notes that “young women in Skopje came to signify modernity and change, came to signify Europe” (2007, p. 76). As such, the young female professionals were proud of the fact that, they could be said to have “belonged to an elite of European women” (Ibid). Nationality and religion The question of nationality is a problematic one in Macedonia. The historical idea of Macedonia, the home of Phillip II and Alexander the Great, has decidedly Greek cultural overtones and the Greek nation retains an interest in maintaining this sense of “Greekness” concerning Macedonia. The fundamentally Slavic nation that today calls itself Macedonia is descended from a massive folk migration from central and eastern Europe into the Balkans, a process that took place gradually beginning approximately 1,500 years ago. Thus, the question of nationality becomes a question of politics, in which a group, or collection of groups, become predominant and perhaps supplant another group. In the modern era, the question takes on a somewhat more complicated aspect. For modern, predominantly Slavic Macedonians, nationality is of relatively minimal importance: being Macedonian is less important than being European, or belonging to the European family of nations. “We have no feeling of nationality. That’s just our life,” one of Thiessen’s female subjects is quoted as saying (2007, p. 33). The majority of those interviewed indicated that feelings of nationhood are superseded by a fear of being considered inferior by Europeans, and of being excluded from the European family of nations. Name 5 Thiessen asserts that religion presents the most obvious solution for a nation that has “thrust off its socialist past” (2007, p. 59). But in a nation where Slavs and Albanians are sharply divided, the question of religion and the role it should play in building Macedonian nationhood is a thorny one. The Orthodox Slavs and the Muslim Albanians comprise a substantial religious-ethnic divide that has yet to be bridged. “It is hard to assess accurately the strength of Orthodox religious belief in Macedonia but it appears that many see the church as the key to nationhood. This role of the church as an essential constitution, inevitably alienates the predominantly Muslim Albanians” (Ibid). Consequently, the inclusion of Christian rituals in certain state functions has caused disquiet among the nation’s considerable Muslim population (Ibid). Bringa illustrates that Islam is a religion that is lived and practiced and, as such, represents an ideology as much as a religious system; this is part of the “otherness” that comes to encroach on the thinking of Croat Catholics. The distinction between Muslim and Catholicism is palpable, is something that can be observed on a day-to-day basis. It is a lifestyle difference that helps to undermine feelings of friendship and kinship between Catholic and Muslim. Under pressure of violence and daily uncertainty, the documentary shows how perception of what it means to be Catholic or Muslim in Bosnia changes under the pressure of impending violence and the fear and uncertainty of what it might mean for their lifestyles, religious beliefs and social habits. The threat of the “other” felt by Catholic Croats had a great deal to do with the perceived alien nature of Islam as a faith that imposes itself in every aspect of life. Name 6 Conclusion In the West, the perception persists that the former Yugoslavia is a tinderbox of ethnic volatility based on ancient religious and national hatreds. But nationality is a fluid idea in this region, where the Tito regime sought for so long to subsume ethnic differences within the socialist state. As has been noted, this repression exacerbated old ethnic friction points, religion being prominent among them. It appears that the tendency in such a fragmented situation, where ethnic groups were forced together in an artificially conceived and coercively maintained model, is for religious differences to become exaggerated. In Macedonia, religion is a sticking point in the quest for modernization (or Europeanization), with Islam representing a backward and repressive way of life that damages the country’s image and its attempts to take its place among the nations of Europe (Thiessen, 2007, p. 43). In Bosnia, differences between Catholic and Muslim drove villagers to violence over the alienating fear of the “other.” The threat posed by the “other” has different meanings in Macedonia and Bosnia, but its affect on how the people in both countries regard themselves is equally persistent. In Bosnia, a psychology of stress led to internecine violence; in Macedonia, the ordering of social context has created an atmosphere in which Albanian Muslims are marginalized because the perception among Orthodox Macedonians is that it is in their country’s best interests to do so (Thiessen, 2007). In Macedonia and Bosnia, perception and identity are matters for unilateral and uncompromising action. Name 7 Works Cited Bringa, Tone. We Are All Neighbours. London: Granada Films. 1993, Film. Thiessen, Ilka. Waiting for Macedonia: Identity in a Changing World. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2007. Read More