Contested Nation-Building within the International “Order of Things”: Performance, Festivals and Legitimization in South-Eastern Europe

Abstract

This volume is a collection of essays focusing on performance and public rituals in four South-Eastern European countries: Macedonia, Montenegro, Moldova, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The “ambiguous” nation-building of the four nation-states is a process of imagining the political community of the nations that “always necessitates—even presupposes—the imagining of an international community, a ‘Family of Nations’” (Malkki, Liisa. 1994. “Citizens of Humanity: Internationalism and the Imagined Community of Nations.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 3: 41–68, 62). Thus, we offer an approach to nation-building that is revealing of how performance, rituals and politics are at the heart of the new and ambiguous nation-building in the region of South-Eastern Europe. The articles address the intersection between nation-building, the state and public performance/rituals in (post)socialist timeframes and show how sovereignty of a nation-state is constructed, performed, and disseminated through public rituals, festivals, and practices.

Keywords:

• Performance
• Nation-building
• South-Eastern Europe

Notes

For more on the complex configuration of the Balkans and of Macedonia, see Berman (1993), Sharp (1997), Mazower (2000), Dimova (2006), and Cowan (2008).

Funded by the VW foundation and the Austrian Science Fund, this comparative research project examined four nation-building processes in South-Eastern Europe after 1945: the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), Macedonian, Moldovan and Montenegrin cases. The main focus of the research was to explore popular perceptions of nation-building and the appropriation—or rejection and modification—of national identities. By providing historical and anthropological perspectives, the study aimed to provide new insights into various problems of nationalism and national identity in South-Eastern Europe. All four countries illustrate the contingencies and intricacies of nationalism in the multi-ethnic and post-imperial South-Eastern European political and cultural space. One of the main concerns of this project was the divergence of official concepts of national identity and identities of everyday interactions; a political system that regularly clashes and contradicts with local and vernacular identities can become de-legitimized. The project's major research interest, therefore, was to examine the collective and alternative identities of “ordinary” people and to assess how these related to officially ascribed identities.

In his study of the production of Englishness through class distinctions, James Donald argues that language is both external and internal to the speaking subject; thus, it is not only both pedagogical in teaching Englishness to students but also performative, in that it is only through speech that the nation is given voice and so redeemed (Donald cited from Kohli 1999).

“Transnistrianism” is a product of Soviet ideology. The creation of the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1924–1940) as a part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was conceptualized as being a launching pad for the extension of the Soviet Union in South-Eastern Europe based on the ideas of the world revolution of the proletariat. After 1991, these ideas emerged through the secessionist, self-proclaimed Transnistrian Moldovan Republic in the Transnistrian nation-building project. The project of “the Moldovan multinational people” competed with the project of “the Transnistrian multinational people”, building on the concept of “multi-secular friendship between peoples” and facing the same problem of defining an official language, history, and means of implementing these ideological projects.

“Moldovanism” is an “ideological bureaucratic” project and not an intellectual one, which can pave the way for a social consensus. The majority of intellectuals share a Romanian identity. This generates a fundamental conflict in Moldovan society. Intellectuals have made many efforts to democratize Moldovan society, but these efforts have been interpreted as attacks against “multinationalism” and the state.