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| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Konijn, could you give your point of view on this issue?  |
lol - i'd rather not, as i find these debates (and i use the term loosely) to be pointless and circular.
but...
i will say that nationalism, broadly construed, has wrought much of the world's ills during the past 200 years precicely because it's used as means of masking a country's internal problems, distracting its citizenry and creating tenuous national narratives.
both greece and macedonia are using the language of nationalism and culture to lay claim to some wider political truths, albeit for different reasons.
macedonia is young, developing and globally insecure so this 'naming' quest is designed to link a diverse group of slavs to an imagined -- and singular -- past, thus creating a unified whole today (lira, i know you study japan, so this is very similar to what happened under the meiji restoration during its modernization project). for greece, which is plagued perpetually by a weak economy and internecine political problems, the whole issue is nothing more than a distraction and a way of settling possible minor territorial claims in the future.
the real loser in this is alexander 'the great' (or 'the accursed', as persians call him) who has now become a historical hand-puppet for both sides: greeks refuse to acknowledge his slavic lineage and macedonians refuse to acknowledge that the guy embraced everything greek (including the language) and did more to spread hellenic culture and philosophy around the world than anyone in history.
benedict anderson's Imagined Communities is a fantastic book (and required reading in most 1st year graduate seminars or colloquia) that wonderfully deconstructs the nature of nationalism.
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