Fixing national subjects in the 1920s southern Balkans: Also an international practice

Abstract

The momentous transition from empire to nation‐state in the early 20th century entailed a challenge for European states to produce “national” subjects–citizens. Scholars examining how diverse populations were incorporated into national projects have typically taken the nation‐state's territorial boundaries as analytical boundaries and have rarely considered nation‐building comparatively or investigated the creation of national subjects as an international practice. Taking the case of the League of Nation's supervision of the Greco–Bulgarian Convention Concerning Reciprocal and Voluntary Emigration in the 1920s, I explore collaboration between international and national agents in disambiguating multistranded affiliations of certain subjects in pursuit of homogeneous nation‐states. [international institutions, nation‐building, supervision, subjects, migration, borders, minorities]

A catalogue of vice: a sense of failure and incapacity to act among Roma Muslims in Macedonia

“…12 In this paragraph, the quote is deliberately arcane to demonstrate the dervishes' perplexity at Sufi figures of speech. 13 The critical essays by Candea (2010), Cowen (2008), and Stolcke (1995) are of great interest. 14 Anthropologists draw the line between performance as a theatrical metaphor that connotes illusion and per-form-ance as something that substantiates, materializes, and gives form to practice (Meyer 2009: 7).…”

Migration in the Southern Balkans

“…The area had already been partitioned at the Bulgarian refugees in the interwar period. On nationhood and nationalism, and how it influenced the interpretation of national minorities in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, see Brubaker (1996), Cowan (2008), , Kitromilides (1989), Sugar (1995).…”

Resettlement Waves, Historical Memory and Identity Construction: The Case of Thracian Refugees in Bulgaria

“…The area had already been partitioned at the Bulgarian refugees in the interwar period. On nationhood and nationalism, and how it influenced the interpretation of national minorities in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, see Brubaker (1996), Cowan (2008), Karakasidou (1997), Kitromilides (1989), Sugar (1995 All of these shifts in the partitioning of Thrace and in state rule of the area resulted in altered configurations of minority and majority groups and created a pulsation of migration flows in various directions: of Muslims and Christians to states with prevailing Muslim or Christian religious identities; of Bulgarians, Greeks, and Turks to their respective nation states; and of Armenians, Jews, and Roma in circumstances of exasperated nationalistic hatred. In most cases, population movements were carried out forcibly, under conditions of territorial occupation (whether Greek, Turkish, or Bulgarian), and were accompanied by enormous human losses.…”