VOLKSWAGENSTIFTUNG_Ambiguous Nation-building Process in South-Eastern Europe

Aims of the project The proposed project examines four nation-building processes in South-eastern Europe from historical and anthropological perspectives: the Bosniak (Bosnian), Macedonian, Moldovan and Montenegrin cases. The comparative study of these nation-building processes promises new insights into important, and politically as well as scientifically relevant, problems: the nature of the Yugoslav and Soviet nationality policies; the consequences of the disintegration of the socialist federations for collective identities; the role of "ordinary" people for the creation of national identities; the nature of nation-building in a multiethnic environment; the interrelation between war, ethnic violence, economic decline, political instability and national, as well as other collective, identities; the creation of symbolic boundaries of the nation vis-à-vis others; the creation of "national folk cultures" and popular folklore; the consequences of European integration on collective identities in countries which have no immediate EU access perspective. All four examples illustrate the contingencies and intricacies of nationalism in the multi-ethnic and post-imperial South-east European political and cultural zone. One of the problems at hand is the divergence between official concepts and notions of national identities, and the identities of everyday interactions, which can lead to the de- legitimisation of the political system, as it is not seen by the people to correspond to their vernacular identities. Our major research interest, therefore, are the collective identities of "ordinary" people and how they relate to official identity ascriptions. Under which circumstances were people willing to accept new national identities, how did they accommodate their entrenched pre-national identities with them, how did they relate to other social identities, and did a popular push towards nation-building exist or was is only elite-driven? What happened to national identities in the process of being predicated upon a certain population? What are the contents of national identities, how do they accommodate established cultural practices, and which cultural boundaries do they draw? These questions are essential for understanding the post-World War II and the post-socialist political and cultural developments in the four countries under investigation. During the last 15 years, all these countries have be embroiled in violent conflict, and they still harbour significant potential for conflict. To understand the identities of their majority populations is therefore also an important pre-condition for conflict prevention. Project design The project is based on the close co-operation between applicants in Germany, Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Moldova, and Serbia and Montenegro. All participants have significant experience in historical and anthropological studies as well as in the study of national identities. The project partner in Graz, furthermore, hosts the "Halpern Collection", a unique collection of ethnographic and historical sources from the former Yugoslavia, which forms an important body of sources for our project. Research will carried out by interdisciplinary research teams and individual researchers in Berlin and Graz as well as the four participating Southeast European countries. Thus the project also contributes to the still very loose international co-operation of history and anthropology in the four countries under question. The project shall last three years.