Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MACAUTH (Screening Souls, Building Nations. Macedonia(s) as a Laboratory for Balkan-wide Authoritatianism)
Période du rapport: 2023-03-01 au 2025-08-31
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.
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.
Archival research has been carried out in a total of 213 archives in Greece, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Serbia, Romania, Albania, Canada, the USA and the UK, while the Ottoman Archives, the National Archives of Australia and the League of Nations Archives (in the Geneva-based UN Archives) have been explored online.
Literature review has generated a significant corpus of published sources in eleven languages (English, French, German, Greek, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Romanian, Turkish, Albanian and Russian). An annotated bibliography will be uploaded on the project’s database during 2025 and subsequently updated.
Three workshops have been organized in the framework of the project, with a total of 32 papers presented (27 of them by members of the MACAUTH research team): (a) a kick-off workshop in Rethymno (24-26 September 2023); (b) a thematic one in Skopje (3-5 October 2024), dedicated to the taxonomy and classification of the citizens’ alleged national or socio-political beliefs by various state agencies, and (c) an international meeting on Balkan history, in cooperation with the École Française d’Athènes (EFA), also in Rethymno (25 February 2025).
A collective thematic volume, mostly - but not exclusively - based on the papers presented at the project’s second workshop and dealing with the taxonomies used for the classification of the citizens’ national or socio-political proclivities by the Balkan nation-state apparatuses, is under preparation and will be published by the IMS-FORTH.
In order to disseminate the project’s output to broader audiences a webpage has been created (https://macauth.ims.forth.gr/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)). Additionally, to further coordinate the research team’s work, a relational database has been set up; upon its completion, it will be hosted on the project’s webpage.
Literature review has generated a significant corpus of published sources in eleven languages (English, French, German, Greek, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Romanian, Turkish, Albanian and Russian). An annotated bibliography will be uploaded on the project’s database during 2025 and subsequently updated.
Three workshops have been organized in the framework of the project, with a total of 32 papers presented (27 of them by members of the MACAUTH research team): (a) a kick-off workshop in Rethymno (24-26 September 2023); (b) a thematic one in Skopje (3-5 October 2024), dedicated to the taxonomy and classification of the citizens’ alleged national or socio-political beliefs by various state agencies, and (c) an international meeting on Balkan history, in cooperation with the École Française d’Athènes (EFA), also in Rethymno (25 February 2025).
A collective thematic volume, mostly - but not exclusively - based on the papers presented at the project’s second workshop and dealing with the taxonomies used for the classification of the citizens’ national or socio-political proclivities by the Balkan nation-state apparatuses, is under preparation and will be published by the IMS-FORTH.
In order to disseminate the project’s output to broader audiences a webpage has been created (https://macauth.ims.forth.gr/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)). Additionally, to further coordinate the research team’s work, a relational database has been set up; upon its completion, it will be hosted on the project’s webpage.
During the project’s first two years, considerable discoveries have been made in the hitherto unexplored field of bureaucratic taxonomy of citizens’ national or socio-political proclivities by the Balkan nation-state apparatuses, in surveillance and remote control of diasporic communities by the diplomatic, political and intelligence apparatuses of rival Balkan kin-states, as well as in topics such as the contradictory “nationalization” of traditional local folklore. Processing of this material by the MACAUTH research team will elucidate a number of crucial aspects dealing with the interaction of state policies with the citizenry’s identity-building in the Balkans, far beyond the current State of the Art.