The project “MACAUTH: Screening Souls, Building Nations. Macedonia(s) as a Laboratory for Balkan-wide Authoritarianism” aims to investigate a little-explored and usually neglected aspect of the Macedonian Question throughout the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century: namely, the function of the Macedonian Question as a catalyst and a testing ground for the emergence, development and consolidation of authoritarian state policies on a nation-wide scale in all the Balkan nation-states involved. In other words, how the tools used by the rival nation-states to extract national loyalty in late Ottoman Macedonia, where nation had been widely conceived first and foremost as a political party, were subsequently transformed into a far broader method of social and political control.
In order to attain this goal, MACAUTH explores the transfer of particular administrative practices of surveillance, control and political indoctrination, as well as state-sponsored violence and its ideological justification in the name of national expediency, from the initial field of their application in Ottoman and post-Ottoman Macedonia to the mainstream political and social life of Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia/Yugoslavia, as well as to the respective diasporic communities. The impact of the same heritage in Romania, Albania, the Ottoman Empire and its successor nation-state, the Turkish Republic, is also assessed.
The project’s research team consists of eight researchers from the five Balkan countries that have been mostly involved in the Macedonian dispute (Greece, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Serbia and Romania), dealing with their countries of origin and /or their Diaspora, four experts on Albania, the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic plus two PhD students with their supervisors.
MACAUTH is hosted at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of the Foundation of Research and Technology – Hellas (IMS/FORTH), situated in Rethymno, Greece, with the collaboration of the Institute of National History (Skopje, North Macedonia) and Maynooth University (Ireland), as Beneficiary Institutions.
