Macedonian nationalism
Macedonian nationalism, sometimes referred to as Macedonianism, is a general grouping of nationalist ideas and concepts among ethnic Macedonians that were first formed in the second half of the 19th century among separatists seeking the autonomy of the region of Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire. The idea evolved during the early 20th century alongside the first expressions of ethnic nationalism among the Slavs of Macedonia. The separate Macedonian nation gained recognition during World War II when the Socialist Republic of Macedonia was created as part of Yugoslavia. Macedonian historiography has since established links between the ethnic Macedonians and various historical events and individual figures that occurred in and originated from Macedonia, which range from the Middle Ages up to the 20th century. Following the independence of the Republic of Macedonia in the late 20th century, the country's neighbours have disputed the existence of the Macedonian national identity, which is referred to in a derogatory way as Macedonism. Also, issue arose over what they consider an aggressive Macedonian nationalism, which holds more extreme beliefs such as an unbroken continuity between ancient Macedonians and modern ethnic Macedonians, also views connected to the irredentist concept of a United Macedonia, which involves large portions of Greece and Bulgaria, alongside smaller portions of Albania, Kosovo and Serbia.
The designation "Macedonian"
During the first half of the second millennium, the concept of Macedonia on the Balkans was associated by the Byzantines with their Macedonian province, centered around Adrianople in modern-day Turkey. After the conquest of the Balkans by the Ottomans in the late 14th and early 15th century, the Greek name Macedonia disappeared as a geographical designation for several centuries. The background of the modern designation Macedonian can be found in the 19th century, as well as the myth of "ancient Macedonian descent" among the Orthodox Slavs in the area, adopted mainly due to Greek cultural inputs. However, Greek education was not the only engine for such ideas. During the early modern era, some Dalmatian pan-Slavic ideologists like Mavro Orbini believed the ancient Macedonians were Slavs. Under these influences in the 19th century some intellectuals in the region developed the idea on direct link between the local Slavs, the early Slavs and the ancient Balkan populations.The local Slavs self-identified as "Bulgarian" on account of their language and socioeconomic status, thus the word Bulgarian had the connotation of poor, Slav-speaking peasant. Also, the local Slavs considered themselves as "Rum", i.e. members of the community of Orthodox Christians. This community was a source of identity for all the ethnic groups inside it and most people identified mostly with it.
At that time, the Orthodox Christian community began to degrade with the continuous identification of the religious creed with ethnic identity, while Bulgarian national activists started a debate on the establishment of their separate Orthodox church. Until the middle of the 19th century, the Greeks also called the Slavs in Macedonia "Bulgarians", and regarded them predominantly as Orthodox brethren, but the rise of Bulgarian nationalism changed the Greek position. As a result, massive Greek religious and school propaganda occurred, and a process of Hellenization was implemented among the Slavic-speaking population of the area. The very name Macedonia, revived during the early 19th century after the foundation of the modern Greek state, with its Western Europe-derived obsession with Ancient Greece, was applied to the local Slavs, which led to some "Macedonization" among Slavic-speaking population of the area. The idea was to stimulate the development of close ties between them and the Greeks, linking both sides to the ancient Macedonians, as a counteract against the growing Bulgarian cultural influence and Bulgarian Exarchate propaganda in the region. In 1845, for instance, the Alexander romance was published in Slavic Macedonian dialect typed with Greek letters. At the same time the Russian ethnographer Victor Grigorovich described a recent change in the title of the Greek Patriarchist bishop of Bitola: from Exarch of all Bulgaria to Exarch of all Macedonia. He also noted the unusual popularity of Alexander the Great and that it appeared to be something that was recently instilled on the local Slavs. However, Macedonian intellectuals, such as the Konstantin Miladinov, continued to call their land Western Bulgaria and worried that use of the new Macedonian name would imply identification with the Greek nation.
File:MacedonianQuestion1.jpg|right|200px|thumb|The Macedonian Question an article from 1871 by Petko Slaveykov published in the newspaper Macedonia in Carigrad. In this article, Petko Slaveykov writes: "We have many times heard from the Macedonists that they are not Bulgarians, but they are rather Macedonians, descendants of the Ancient Macedonians, and we have always waited to hear some proofs of this, but we have never heard them. The Macedonists have never shown us the bases of their attitude."
As a consequence, since the 1850s some Slavic intellectuals from the area adopted the designation Macedonian as a regional label, and it began to gain popularity. In the 1860s, according to Petko Slaveykov, some young intellectuals from Macedonia were claiming that they are not Bulgarians, but they are rather Macedonians, descendants of the Ancient Macedonians. Another basis on which they distinguished themselves from Bulgarians was that Macedonians were pure Slavs while the Bulgarians were Tatars and so on. Furthermore, they believed that the Bulgarian Exarchate is as oppressive as the Greek Patriarchate in terms of local ecclesiastic and scholarly matters. In a letter written to the Bulgarian Exarch in February 1874, Slaveykov reports that discontent with the current situation "has given birth among local patriots to the disastrous idea of working independently on the advancement of their own local dialect and what’s more, of their own, separate Macedonian church leadership." Per Slaveykov, the main task of his newspaper "Makedoniya" during 1870s, was to educate such misguided Grecomans there, who he called Macedonists.
According to Kuzman Shapkarev in 1888, as a result of outsiders' activity, the Slavs in Macedonia had started to use the ancient designation Macedonians alongside the traditional one Bulgarians by the 1870s. However, Shapkarev noted that the name "Macedonians" had been "imposed on them by outsiders", and that the Slavs in Macedonia were using the designation "Bulgarians" as peculiarly theirs.
During the 1880s, after recommendation by Stojan Novaković, the Serbian government also began to support those ideas to counteract the Bulgarian influence in Macedonia, claiming the Macedonian Slavs were in fact pure Slavs, while the Bulgarians, unlike them, were partially a mixture of Slavs and Bulgars. In accordance with Novaković's agenda this Serbian "Macedonism" was transformed in the 1890s, in a process of the gradual Serbianisation of the Macedonian Slavs.
File:OrohidrografijaNaMakedonijaPocetnaStranica.jpg|right|200px|thumb| The first page of Orohydrography of Macedonia by Vasil Kanchov – 1911. Here he concluded that the local Bulgarians and Kutsovlachs who lived in the area, already called themselves Macedonians, and the surrounding nations also called them so. He also noted that the Turks, Albanians and Greeks do not call themselves Macedonians.
By the end of the 19th century, according to Vasil Kanchov, the local Bulgarians called themselves Macedonians, and the surrounding nations called them Macedonians. In the early 20th century, Pavel Shatev witnessed this process of slow differentiation, describing people who insisted on their Bulgarian nationality, but felt themselves Macedonians above all. However a similar paradox was observed at the eve of the 20th century and afterwards, when many Bulgarians from non-Macedonian descent, involved in the Macedonian affairs, espoused Macedonian identity.
During the interwar period, in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia ruled Vardar Macedonia, in the context of the Serbianization policy of the local Slavs, the name Macedonia was scorned, and the name South Serbia was imposed, while some also used simply South or Povardarie as neutral names. This was done intentionally to subvert any Macedonian national identity and to foster a common Yugoslav one. In the 1920s, Serbian army officer Panta Radosavljević argued that the locals identifying as Macedonians were a result of Bulgarian propaganda and manipulation in his attempt to demonstrate the Serbian character of Vardar Macedonia. Ultimately, the designation Macedonian changed its status in 1944, and went from being predominantly a regional, ethnographic denomination, to a national one. However, when the anthropologist Keith Brown visited the Republic of Macedonia at the eve of the 21st century, he discovered that the local Aromanians, who also call themselves Macedonians, still label the ethnic Macedonians, and their eastern neighbors as "Bulgarians".
Origins
Some authors maintain the earliest documented statement of a Macedonian linguistic separatism is found in an 1848 letter written by from Bansko to the Bulgarian philologist Nayden Gerov, in which he expressed dissatisfaction by the imposition of Eastern Bulgarian in Macedonia and noted that the children could hardly learn it. He proposed creating a common Bulgarian linguistic standard. Popfilipov’s remarks indicate that the introduction of Eastern Bulgarian dialects in education generated increasing tensions in people's schooling. The first assertions of Macedonian nationalism arose in the second half of the 19th century.During the final decade of the anti‑Phanariot struggle, Macedonian national and linguistic identity began to crystallize in two directions: a unitarian current, which supported a joint Macedo‑Bulgarian literary language, and a separatist current, which advocated a distinct Macedonian standard. Partenij Zografski emerged as the leading early figure of the unitarian group. He authored the first Macedono‑Bulgarian textbooks and promoted a compromise literary language based on Western Macedonian dialects, publishing his ideas in Tsarigradski Vestnik and Bălgarski Knizhitsi in the late 1850s. Zografski argued that the Macedonian dialect should represent the basis for the common modern literary standard called simply "Bulgarian" in an article published called "Thoughts about the Bulgarian language". His textbooks provoked criticism in the Bulgarian press, where his language was described as a mixture of Bulgarian and Serbian and his efforts were denounced as separatist. Per Victor Friedman, the appearance of these textbooks, and the reactions they generated, reflected the development of some form of Macedonian consciousness.
In the late 1860s, the Bulgarian revivalist described the situation in Thessaloniki, noting that some teachers from Western Macedonia were promoting a plan thought from long ago to have Macedonian youth educated exclusively in the Western Macedonian dialect, and for that goal, they had begun publishing school textbooks written in that dialect. He also quoted a teacher there, that claimed "I am not a Bulgarian, nor a Greek, nor an Aromanian, I am purely Macedonian..." Salgandzhiev also wrote that the teacher was of mixed Slavic-Aromanian origin, spoke broken Slavic and lived in Athens before. Per historian Tchavdar Marinov, these factors probably made it difficult for him to embrace Bulgarian nationalism. At the same time, the Slavic Macedonians who were loyal to the Patriarchate of Constantinople considered themselves descendants of Alexander the Great and opposed the Bulgarian identity. Kuzman Shapkarev also criticized the dominance of Eastern Bulgarian. In his Great Bulgarian Textbook from 1868, written in Western Macedonian under the pseudonym "One Macedonian", Shapkarev stated his intention to write in a language understandable to his compatriots, the Macedonian Bulgarians. After the compromise for common languages failed, Shapkarev convinced the citizens of Resen to return Bulgarian textbooks previously ordered for their local school and to adopt his own Macedonian textbooks. This action prompted an anonymous letter to the Constantinople periodical Pravo, in which the language of Shapkarev’s textbooks was criticized as "non‑Bulgarian, or at least not sufficiently Bulgarian". Shapkarev also announced a dictionary translating between Macedonian and Upper Bulgarian dialects. The Bulgarian press condemned these initiatives, accusing Shapkarev of promoting a separate Macedonian language and history. His textbooks, however, were welcomed across Macedonia. Many parents preferred Shapkarev’s books because they found them more comprehensible than the Bulgarian textbooks for their kids. Although his published writings continued to advocate for a compromise between dialectal groups, this controversy contributed to Shapkarev’s reputation as a Macedonist.
The origins of the definition of an ethnic Slav Macedonian identity arose from the writings of Gjorgjija Pulevski in the 1870s and 1880s, who identified the existence of a distinct "Slavic Macedonian" language and expressed the idea that the Macedonians were a distinct people. Pulevski analyzed the folk histories of the Slavic Macedonian people, in which he concluded that Slavic Macedonians were ethnically linked to the people of the ancient Kingdom of Macedonia of Philip II and Alexander the Great, based on the claim that ancient Macedonians were Slavic, and modern-day Slavic Macedonians were their descendants. The Macedonian myth of Alexander the Great appeared in two documents related to the Kresna Uprising in 1878, whose authenticity is disputed by Bulgarian historians. In one of them the revolutionaries, including Pulevski himself, saw themselves as heirs of the army of Alexander of Macedon and were prepared to shed their blood as he once did. However, Slavic Macedonians' self-identification and nationalist loyalties remained ambiguous in the late 19th century. It is not wondering that, drawing on the same arguments, some earlier Bulgarian "revivalists" claimed that the Ancient Macedonians were Bulgarian.
Early Macedonian nationalists were encouraged by several foreign governments that held interests in the region. The Serbian government came to believe that any attempt to forcibly assimilate Slavic Macedonians into Serbs in order to incorporate Macedonia would be unsuccessful, given the strong Bulgarian influence in the region. Instead, the Serbian government believed that providing support to Macedonian nationalists would stimulate opposition to incorporation into Bulgaria and favourable attitudes to Serbia. Another country that encouraged Macedonian nationalism was Austria-Hungary that sought to deny both Serbia and Bulgaria the ability to annex Macedonia, and asserted a distinct ethnic character of Slavic Macedonians. In the 1890s, Russian supporters of a Slavic Macedonian ethnicity emerged, Russian-made ethnic maps began showing a Slavic Macedonian ethnicity, and Macedonian nationalists began to move to Russia to mobilize.
The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization grew up as the major Macedonian separatist organization in the 1890s, seeking the autonomy of Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire. It devised the slogan "Macedonia for the Macedonians" and called for a supranational Macedonia, consisting of different nationalities and eventually included in a future Balkan Federation. The IMRO initially opposed being dependent on any of the neighbouring states, and especially tried to hold back the influence of Greece and Serbia in the area. However, its relationship with Bulgaria was more ambiguous, but there was a fraction which firmly opposed any annexation from Bulgaria. Despite that the autonomism and separatism of IMRO members were supranational, they undoubtedly stimulated the development of Macedonian nationalism, particularly from the leftist activists.
In the late 19th and early 20th century the international community viewed the Macedonian Slavs predominantly as a regional variety of the Bulgarians. At the end of the First World War there were very few ethnographers who agreed that a separate Macedonian nation existed. During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Allies sanctioned Serbian control of Vardar Macedonia and accepted the belief that Macedonian Slavs were in fact Southern Serbs. This change in opinion can largely be attributed to the Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijić. Nevertheless, Macedonian national ideas increased during the interbellum in Yugoslav Vardar Macedonia and among the left diaspora in Bulgaria, and were supported by the Comintern. During the Second World War Macedonian national ideas were further developed by the Macedonian Partisans, but even at that time it is questionable to which extent Macedonian Slavs had any nationality. The turning point for the Macedonian ethnogenesis was the creation of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia as part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia following World War II.