Abstract
Theodora Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria: 1900–1949, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2011; xvi + 267 pp.; £27.95 hbk; ISBN 9780801449451
Cold War divisions seem to have created an artificial ‘Iron Curtain’ between Greeks and Slavs in the historiography of Southeastern Europe. The communist-versus-capitalist experiences, as well as East-versus-West alliances, have certainly separated the Greek experience from that of neighboring Slavs, but only after the Second World War. Yet that as well as the onerous (to many of us) task of learning Greek in addition to Bulgarian and other Slavic languages has contributed to a lack of cross-border work on Greeks and Slavs, even for periods prior to the divisions of the Balkans along Cold War lines. Yet Balkan history, especially as it pertains to the Eastern Balkans prior to the Second World War, is inseparably tied to the Greek question. No scholar has addressed this question as well as Theodora Dragostinova, who has both the languages and conceptual skills to take on this important task.
Dragostinova’s Between Two Motherlands provides a conceptually rich foray into Bulgarian-Greek historical interactions in the first half of the twentieth century.
First and foremost, this is a study of identity in which the utter complexity and ambiguity of Bulgarian and Greek identities in this formative period takes center stage. Certainly, a range of scholars have long taken note of the intricacy of national identity in the region. But Between Two Motherlands is the first systematic study that traces just how unstable ‘Greek’ and ‘Bulgarian’ identities still were in the first half of the twentieth century. Exploring the interrelated issues of the so-defined ‘Greek’ minority of Bulgaria, population exchanges, and the ever present issue of Macedonia, Dragostinova weaves a tale in which state officials, national activists and ‘ordinary citizens’ tried to define the boundaries of the Bulgarian and Greek nations. As Bulgarian and Greek-speakers were both predominantly Orthodox Christian, bilingualism, local rootedness, social allegiances, and the ‘national indifference’ of individuals left the field of dreams wide open for both sides to make national claims.
Significantly, Dragostinova’s work promises to bring the Balkans into an academic conversation with a body of literature now centered in East Central Europe – namely the recent work of Pieter Judson, Tara Zahra, Jeremy King, Chad Bryant and others on Bohemia. Like these authors, Dragostinova is informed by the theoretical work of Rogers Brubaker that has greatly nuanced prevailing ‘constructivist’ frameworks for understanding nationalism. But as Dragostinova notes, there has long been a body of anthropological work on the Balkans that has reached many of the same conclusions and dealt with very similar shatter-belts of empire and nation, language and religion. Namely, the work of anthropologists such as Anastasia Karakasidou, Loring Danforth and Keith Brown has unpacked the ‘amphibious’ nature of identities in the Balkans – in their case, centered in Macedonia – since the early 1990s. Amazingly, this Balkan story is more often than not left out of the Central European story or pathologized as a backwards anomaly on the periphery of the ‘Orient’. As Dragostinova points out, however, the processes at work and the paths taken were quite similar to certain Central European cases – for example the untangling of German and Czech identities in Bohemia.
Remarkably, scholars of East Central Europe have been reluctant to recognize the remarkable similarities in the Habsburg and Ottoman cases, in the untangling of peoples that preceded and followed the rise of national identities and collapse of empires. Dragostinova points this out and makes fruitful comparative connections in her quest to ‘normalize’ the Balkans and place them in the ‘European’ context. One wonders, however, how much of ‘Europe’ shared this experience or how ‘European’ it really was? Rather than trying to ‘Europeanize’ the Balkans, perhaps it would be more profitable for Dragostinova to talk about the transition from empire to nation, the ‘murkiness’ of identities, the displacement of peoples, as a global phenomenon. At the same time, the Ottoman and Habsburg experiences need to come into a closer conversation – one that Dragostinova encourages – for a profitable understanding of the empire-to-nation experience on Europe’s periphery.
Well-researched and engagingly written, Between Two Motherlands taps into a wealth of sources, archival and printed, in both Bulgarian and Greek. One of the strengths of the book lies in its excavation of the complex set of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ criteria – often conflicting, overlapping and alternating – that are used by bureaucrats and nationalist thinkers to include or exclude or to maximize the reach of constituent nations. This is a fascinating line of analysis, one that helps us understand the workings not just of Balkan nationalisms, but of all nationalisms, their inherent inconsistencies in theory and practice. Yet Dragostinova also looks beyond official policy and action or elite discourses, profitably using engaging personal narratives, and exploring the actions and thoughts of individuals, which often go against the grain of national discourses.
Dragostinova’s book, then, reveals the utterly constructed, contingent and transnational nature of national identities on the ground in the Eastern Balkans. It will be of interest for specialists in East European history, as well as for scholars with an interest in comparative issues of identity, migration, and the politics of population exchange.
University of Texas