After a protracted dispute between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia over the name of the latter, the Prespa agreement was finally reached in 2018 changing its name to the Republic of North Macedonia. On July 4, 2018 the Bulgarian-North Macedonian joint commission on historical and educational issues, set up according to the Friendship treaty between the two states signed in August 2017 in Skopje, held its first meeting. After a number of subsequent meetings most of the vexed issues remain unsolved, while the disputes have grown even more exasperated. Not only divisive issues of modern history but even Tsar Samuil’s state of ten centuries ago remain a fiercely contested topic. Bulgaria went as far as to obstruct the accession of the Republic of North Macedonia to the EU. Instances such as these lay bare the unabating significance, political no less than academic, of historical disputes in the Balkans.
Nations in the Balkans emerged within the matrix of the Ottoman (and partly the Habsburg) empires during the national “Revivals” in the course of the nineteenth and, to a lesser extent, the twentieth century. Most of the modern Balkan nations were formed from medieval ethnies or peoples, and some could even look to antiquity for ancestors. History became a major tool in forging national identities, and unlike in the West, the Middle Ages (along with antiquity in the case of the Greeks, the Rumanians and the Albanians) were the glorious and bright era, in contrast to the Ottoman “Dark Ages.” National(ist) educators and amateur historians of this Romantic period of historiography enthusiastically discovered the ancestors of their peoples or nations and took pride in their deeds and creations. Ethnonyms, origins, ethnogenesis, and political formations under the ethnic name became extremely important in the process of sorting out one’s past and disentangling it from that of others. Military glory, a state, and a church of one’s own were especially treasured, as well as cultural feats of literary and artistic creativity. At the same time, “hereditary” enemies were resurrected in current rivalries.
Nation-states in the Balkans emerged at different points in time through secession from the Ottoman Empire with Great Power backing, usually around a small nucleus that was gradually extended at the expense of the Empire. The states developed their national education systems and national academic institutions (universities, academies of science, museums, etc.), where history was again a primary resource for building the nation. “Romantic” history-writing was replaced by “scientific” or “critical” history, which was nonetheless nationalistic. Master national narratives were created that sought to establish the early existence and continuity of the “nation” in history and its rights to a present or a coveted territory. The general drive was to neatly separate peoples and territories and appropriate them for one’s nation, in sharp contrast to the rather “messy” ethnic and dynastic picture of the past of wandering barbarian tribes, ethnically mixed empires and similarly mixed feudal “states” with ever-changing territories and borders. Moreover, the young nation-states all had their own irredentist and “unification” ambitions and claimed territories and populations outside their territory. In this thrust as well, history was of utmost importance for legitimating “historical rights” over territories and populations that had belonged to “their” medieval states. Historians of neighboring nations fought battles and, in some cases, led protracted historiography wars over the previous possession of specific territories, historical entities, and legacies in order to prove their nation’s “right” against rival claims. Some nations (such as the Albanian and the Macedonian) came onto the scene later, and their historians were at greater pains to carve out a place for them in history already occupied and divided by other national historians in favor of their nations.
The best-known and most influential professional Balkan historians of the “first generation” elaborated the master national narratives and became embroiled in historiographical battles. Suffice it to mention the Greek historian Constantine Paparrigopoulos, the Serb historian Stojan Novaković, the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga, and the Bulgarian historian Vasil Zlatarski. In all fairness, these were excellent scholars, who mastered many languages and a variety of research methods. They believed in “scientific” history, “objectivity,” and (unitary) “truth.” Yet their interest in, and passion for, history came from serving their nation: by proving its “historical rights,” nourishing national pride and what can generally be defined as the “justification” of their own nation. The contradictions between the professed ideals of “objectivity” and nationalist partisanship were hardly noticed or acknowledged. This nation-building type of historiography dominated until the Second World War and, after a brief “internationalist” interlude during the early postwar socialist period, returned with vengeance in the 1960s. This kind of historiography I, and the research team, intend to revisit in a critical and comparative way and expose its underlying ideological premises as well as interactive mechanisms of mutual constitution.
The basic IDEA of this project is to study the controversies or historiographical “wars” led by national(ist) historians in the Balkans from the emergence of the modern nations and nation-states to the present day. Historiographical “wars” should be taken to (metaphorically) mean protracted and embittered disputes between historians of different nations on certain issues, which go beyond the normal difference of opinion and variance of interpretations toward radically opposed understanding of “historical realities,” attesting to deliberate and fierce “politics of history”. This will be done for a wide range of issues of contention between several Balkans states. The bones of contention lie mostly in the medieval era, the late Ottoman, and the early post-Ottoman period – and understandably so. Most of the Balkan nations had “their own” polities and glorious times in the Middle Ages (the Greeks lay also claim to antiquity, as do the Romanians and the Albanians), whereas the late Ottoman Empire provided for the Balkan peoples the groundwork of their nation-building, where the absence of ethnically circumscribed boundaries spurred rival aspirations and national claims over territories with ethnically mixed or undecided populations. New controversial issues arose from the Balkan wars at the beginning of the twentieth century (themselves the result of previous claims and irredentist agendas), which, too, were typically dealt with by historians of the next generations, including those operating under authoritarian and communist regimes, in the light of previous historical experiences and grievances – a kind of (perverse) “historical memory”. It is for that reason that we insist on the pivotal role of these periods in engendering most of the controversies that reverberate to this day. The disputes themselves basically took shape after the establishment of the independent Balkan nation-states with the breakthrough of “scientific” or “critical” historiography. But they had antecedents in the patriotic “Romantic” attempts at history writing in the period of national formation (national “Revivals”) within the matrix of the late Ottoman Empire.
As regards the concept of the Balkans, there are various definitions, some more and some less geographically inclusive, usually drawing on historical (civilizational) and cultural (“ethnographic”) arguments, yet often being the product of geopolitics. I would avoid a definition at this point and take a more pragmatic approach by stating that we will be dealing primarily with history writing in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and North Macedonia from the former Yugoslav space, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania, and Turkey.
The contested issues and disputes in question were of great variety, but one can simplify the picture by arranging them in types without claiming comprehensiveness. To begin with, some disputes concern the ethnic origins or “national” consciousness of important historical personalities. Others relate to the ethnic makeup of medieval (especially short-lived) states, as it implies historical rights of a later nation over its territory. Connected to these are disputes over the boundaries of a certain medieval state and its political, religious, and cultural influence on others. One issue that proves especially intractable is the participation of a given people in the “ethnogenesis” of another one – obviously a question involving national sensitivities, pride or humiliation. Further controversies concern imperial legacies, especially the Byzantine and the Ottoman, connected as they are with (and often blamed upon) the Greeks and the Turks, respectively. As national/ist historiographies recounted former animosities – battles, cruelties, domination, etc. – contemporary peoples were turned into “hereditary enemies”.
Below are examples of types of disputes from each era to be explored. Some relate to the ethnic origins or “national” consciousness of key historical personalities, respectively the national appropriation of their achievements. Among the best-known example are the brothers Cyril and Methodius, creators of the Slavic script and Byzantine missionaries, whose origins are claimed by Greeks and Bulgarians alike (also by Macedonians) and whose all-Slavic deed has been “Czechified” on account of their initial mission in Greater Moravia or “Bulgarianized” on account of the subsequent success of their endeavor accomplished through the work of their disciples in Bulgaria. Another example is the Asanides dynasty, founders and rulers of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom in 1187, whose ethnic allegiance became a matter of long-standing dispute between Romanians (claiming a Vlach descent) and Bulgarians – one that further extends to claims over the “national character” of the state they had founded and the prominence of the respective ethnic element in it. Another disputed personality is Janos Hunyadi (1406–1456), whose origins and, consequently, greatness and glorious deeds are claimed by Hungarians and Romanians as well as Serbs. Contested leading representatives of the nineteenth-century national Revivals are a number of men of letters in Macedonia like the Miladinovi brothers, Rayko Zhinzifov, Kuzman Shapkarev, and Grigor Parlichev, considered to be Bulgarians by Bulgarian historians but claimed by Macedonian historians. Certain participants in the Greek revolution endowed with a heroic status, such as Markos Botsaris, are claimed by both Greeks and Albanians, whereas the names of many others were Bulgarized by Bulgarian historians, and some heroes from the Serb uprisings are claimed by both Bulgarians and Serbs (for example, Velko Petrov[ić]). Such battles over the national allegiance of key figures in the national movements essentially amount to zero-sum competition over prominence, prestige, and influence.
Other disputes concern the ethnic makeup of certain (especially short-lived) medieval states. A case in point (besides the above-mentioned Second Bulgarian Kingdom) is the state of Tsar Samuil (Samuel) in Macedonia (ca. 976–1118), with its mixed population including Slavo-Bulgarians, Vlachs, Greeks, Albanians, etc., which has developed into an object of longstanding historical controversies between Bulgarian, Serbian, and Macedonian historians. Another example are the medieval statelets in the thirteenth and fourteenth-century Macedonia (like the one reigned by Dobromir Chrys(os) and Marko Kraljević), which are claimed by Serbian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian historians. Related with such claims are contentions over a certain state’s political, religious, and cultural influence over others, for example, of the Byzantine (“Greek”) influence on all others, or of the First Bulgarian Empire on the populations to the north of the Danube river (the future Romanians), or of the Serb Empire under King Dušan (1308–1355) on the Greeks and the Bulgarians, etc. One should also add the disputed participation of a given people in the “ethnogenesis” of another one, for example the Slavic element in Romanian ethnogenesis, as implied by the abundance of Slavic words in the admittedly Romance Romanian language, or of the Albanians, Vlachs and Slavs in the modern Greek ethnogenesis—an object of endless quarrels since the nineteenth century.
Ensuing from controversies over the ethnic complexion of the inhabitants of a certain region during a given historical period is the question of the “historical rights” over that territory in the present (alongside arguments concerning current ethnicity and “natural borders”). It is not by chance that only territories disputed at a given moment in the past have become objects of such historiographical wars. Such notoriously disputed regions in the Balkans are Macedonia between Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, to which Macedonian claims were added based on assertions of an ethnically Macedonian character of that province from very early on; or the historical regions of Dobrudja (between Romania and Bulgaria), Western and Eastern Thrace (between Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria), Kosovo (between Serbs and Albanians), and Epirus (between Greece and Albania). Characteristically, territorial claims raised during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and the politico-territorial rearrangement following the First World War were substantiated by research on the Middle Ages, and historiography directly served politics.
Further controversies concern imperial legacies, especially the Byzantine, the Ottoman, and the communist. For example, Bulgarian and Serbian historians blame the Byzantine “Greeks” for having Hellenized their Slav subjects and exerted corrupting influence over the neighboring medieval states, and the Ottoman Greeks for having Hellenized other Orthodox Christians. Conversely, Romanian historians have bemoaned the “robbery” of Byzantium by the Greeks (since Romanians claimed to be the true heirs of the Romans) and have boasted of having rescued its legacy after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. An irreconcilable historiographical war is still being waged over the nature and effects of the Ottoman domination, while its legacy is still strongly rejected by the historians of most Balkan nations except the Bosniaks and, in some cases, the Albanian Muslims. After an initial period of Kemalist rejection, Turkish historians have appropriated and reinterpreted the Ottoman empire in a positive light as socially just, ethnically diverse, religiously tolerant, etc. Some of the controversies pertained more to the sphere of political journalism and were fomented mainly by journalists, writers, politicians, etc., while others remained confined to the “autonomous” academic field of historiography and were conducted by professional historians. However, the boundaries between these two spheres – and between public and professional history, generally – remained blurred.
The establishment of the new Balkan states is also a matter of conflicting interpretations, being presented either as liberation from despotic and regressive foreign domination or as brutal expulsion of the Muslim population in the region and eradication of the Ottoman civilization. A number of disputes have originated around the assessment of the military conflicts between the Balkans states in the post-Ottoman period, especially the Second Balkan (“Inter-allied”) War and the First World War. Some national historiographies go to great lengths to reveal the atrocities committed during wartime occupation by a neighboring state (for example, the Bulgarian occupation of parts of wartime Serbia or Romania), while others insist on the oppression of their compatriots following the postwar redrawing of borders (such as the fate of Bulgarians, Turks and Albanians in neighboring states). Accordingly, the fate of the Serbs during the Toplica uprising of 1917 is a major focal point in Serbian historiography, while Bulgarian historians have published extensively on the fate of the Bulgarians in the regions of Bosilegrad and Tzaribrod (present-day Dimitrovgrad in Serbia) after 1919.
Communist historiography initially tried to break with the existing “bourgeois” tradition and attempted to put economic development and class struggle at the center of analysis and avoid nationalist rhetoric. But this was done in a rather superficial way and was short-lived as the communist regimes soon turned to nationalism, whereby the communist version of history was grafted upon the national narrative. The change of regime from state socialism to liberal democracy and the resulting “reshuffling” of the past brought about its own roster of controversies, such as the nature of the war-time regimes and the existence of fascism; the atrocities committed by pre-1945 regimes, involving mutual allegations of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and complicity in the Holocaust; the role of rival resistance movements; the forces behind the imposition of communism and (the scale of) crimes it perpetrated, etc. The Serbian and Croatian cases are especially interesting in this respect with their recasting of the making and characteristics of the First (interwar) and the Second (communist) Yugoslavia as well as the weaponization of history, in particular that of the mass atrocities during the Second World War, reverberating until today in interpretations of the atrocities committed during the Yugoslav wars of secession.
In what concerns contemporary history, the most fervidly disputed questions are related to the Second World War, when Bulgaria not only sided with Germany but occupied and annexed territories from Greece and Yugoslavia. For instance, the suppression of the Drama uprising in 1941 is interpreted in quite different ways by Greek and Bulgarian scholars. The Albanian case is more complex: occupied and annexed by Italy it can be regarded as the first victim of foreign aggression in the region, but its territorial extension under Italian control is sharply criticized by scholars from neighboring countries. The deportation of Jews from Vardar Macedonia, Northern Greece and the region of Pirot by Bulgarian wartime authorities is an issue of bitter dispute between Bulgarian and Macedonian historiography, and to some extent in Greek and Serbian historiography. The nature of wartime regimes is primarily a matter of internal debate in each country, but still it is closely linked with disputes at the international level. The paradox is that many professedly critical historians in countries like Romania and Bulgaria tend to “defend” the policies of their respective state during the Second World War against critiques from abroad, especially those coming from historians from neighboring countries, which suffered under the occupation. Ethnic cleansing remains an important topic, although population exchange after the Second World War was relatively less extensive compared to previous decades. It reached a new height with the forceful eviction of hundreds of thousands of Turks and Muslims from Bulgaria in 1989 and later on with the war in former Yugoslavia. On the whole however, it is important to stress that even during the communist and post-communist period historiographical wars far more often concentrated on the remote past than on recent events.
Attempts to overcome mutual prejudices and even write joint schoolbooks after 1989 have met with suspicion and master national narratives did not change much, apart from abandoning certain nationalist and communist clichés. Nationalist history-writing survives into the present day, albeit admittedly not unchallenged. In fact, with the disintegration of former Yugoslavia, the “demand” for national/ist narratives and national exclusiveness even increased in some successor states like Croatia and North Macedonia. The disintegration of Yugoslavia made clearly visible the need to highlight and explore more carefully the divergences and internal differences within what was once dubbed “Yugoslav historiography”. These include not only bilateral tensions (such as between Serbian and Croatian historians), but also different evaluations of the Ottoman and the communist past or of the role of the different resistance movements active in the Yugoslav space during the Second World War.
The OBJECTIVES of this project consist in reflection upon, and critical analysis of, the Balkan historiographical battles and wars. Besides attesting to political (especially nationalist) uses of history and presenting strong cases of “politics of history” turned into politics through history, the intriguing and non-trivial phenomenon to be explored is how master national narratives became crisscrossed and intertwined in the process of their confrontation. Furthermore, we are interested in how self-serving national interpretations square with the widely held belief of positivist historians in the scientific status of the discipline and in “objectivity” or “truth”. How did political partisanship interfere with their professed empiricism and affected the results of their work? In this connection, it is particularly interesting to look for differences of opinion on the contested issues within a particular national historiography as signs of non-partisan and pluralist scholarship. It would also be important to explore which controversies acquired social-political significance under what circumstances (the “public life” or public uses of academic historiography) and which have remained confined to the “autonomous” academic field. Finally, what can all of this tell us, the historians of today, about the relations between history, politics and historical culture and can it throw light on current debates about “politics of history” in our own times that are much more skeptical about the ideals of scientific positivistic historiography? These are all general questions to be repeatedly addressed during the research and hopefully to be illuminated through its findings. They combine varied fields of research, such as epistemology, the social conditioning of scientific activity, identity politics and models for constructing one’s image in contrast the Other(s), transnational processes of transfer and reception of knowledge, etc. Such questions and perspectives will also lend theoretical depth and coherence to the inquiry, which go beyond the regional framework and touch upon general issues of the production of historical knowledge.
This being said, research itself boils down to a number of concrete tasks. First, to identify the issues that generated heated debates between historians of two, three, or more nations. Second, to analyze the (often conflicting) formulations, concepts, arguments, logic, strategy, and rhetoric used, as well as their evolution over time. Third, to reveal the motives, intentions, assumptions, implicit ideas, implications, etc. that propel a dispute. Fourth, to situate the contested issues in their contemporary socio-political and cultural context as a way of unravelling their public function. Fifth, to compare the older views with present day scholarly treatment of similar subjects. Sixth, to look at how the debates are inserted in the master (grand) narratives of the respective countries and analyze their effects upon them as well as their intertwinement. Finally, as an effect of the above, to neutralize and relativize the historiographical battles and wars, and thus beget a different vision of Balkan history based on shared experiences, connections on many levels, and similar challenges.
In the last analysis, this means applying the transnational and relational perspective to the complex and entwined historical reality of the Balkans. Such an approach has a huge cognitive potential and innovative power in that it not simply challenges the rather parochial national paradigm from a more “cosmopolitan” and “international” standpoint, but also brings insights to a number of topics and new meanings to historical objects. Looking at the modern history of the Balkans through the lenses of historiography in this inter-connected and entangled way that subverts the sense of national “cultural autarchy”, puts into relief new features of historical phenomena and alters the entire historical landscape.
One thing has to be made clear from the outset. In studying the nationalist historiographical disputes, we do not mean to arbitrate who was right and who was wrong. Leaving the truth of certain elementary “facts” aside, on a higher (or more basic) level of generalized representations and accounts of the past, the question is about “relevance,” namely the relevance of a nationalist vision of the pre-national past and of the fallacies of nationalizing and compartmentalizing the past (Berger and Lorenz 2010). However, in order that our results appear not as high-handed and superficial, questions of the “truth” or verisimilitude of nationalist interpretations on both “factual” and interpretative level cannot be disregarded either. We will inspect primary sources in order to get a sound footing in the evidence, on which these interpretations rest. As for the medieval sources, the Byzantine and the Latin are available in translation in the major Western languages and Russian as well as in (often selective) editions in Balkan languages. We will take special interest in the way they were used, but also in manifestations of tendentiousness in their selection for publication and commenting.
Viewed against the backdrop of the STATE OF THE ART, the study of the historiographical wars between Balkan national/ist historians stands out as challenging and path breaking. To my best knowledge, no study has made such controversies a subject matter of research or attempted to analyze them in a comparative, cross-national and non-partisan way. A partial small-scale precedent touching upon the historiography–politics nexus, yet methodologically quite different and focusing only on Macedonia over a short period, is the study of the Bulgarian-Yugoslav controversy by Stefan Troebst (1983). In principle, the more balanced and “neutral” accounts of Balkan history, especially by historians from outside the region, try to avoid the conflicting national viewpoints (e.g. Mazower 2002, Glenny 2012, Castellan 1992, Stavrianos 2000, Brunnbauer and Buchenau, 2018, Schmitt, 2019). Theirs are studies of history, not histories of historiography, which sideline the historiographical battles as excesses rather than confront them in a reflexive and critical manner in the way proposed here. It is the intention of this proposal to position itself, so to say, at a certain remove behind the backs of the national/ist historians and study the games they were involved in, the stakes of those games, the strategies they employed, and the rhetorical means they utilized to convince their readers – in short, to unpack and expose the mechanics of the “politics of history”. This certainly has not been done before. Such an ambition is also driven by the present-day public prominence and political significance of such disputes.
Apart from the originality of the particular object of research, the history of historiography is sadly neglected by the historians in the Balkan countries and is still considered an “auxiliary” discipline. What goes under the rubric “historiography” (as the history of history-writing is traditionally called in the region) is the insipid presentation of a certain book of history or the oeuvre of some “classical” author, with regard to what is currently accepted as true and what has been proven to be erroneous (“facts” and interpretations). There are some notable exceptions, the best known being a study on myths in Romanian “historical consciousness” by Lucian Boia (2001), Effi Gazi’s study of Greek historiography (2000), Antonis Liakos’ work on modern Greek “historical imagination” (2001), Koulouri (2020), Kosta Nikolić’s study of the polemics in Yugoslav historiography (2003), and perhaps my three books on Bulgarian historiography of the medieval and the modern period (2004, 2011, 2021). Yet in all these cases a certain national historiography is treated from “within,” so to say. The present project is far more ambitious in proposing to engage transnationally with several Balkan national historiographies by looking specifically into the “wars” they waged against each other, which, at the same time, constitute points of crisscrossing and intertwining between their national master narratives. This is the truly novel idea behind this project.
The proposed research is also highly innovative as far as the European history of historiography, generally, is concerned, although I certainly cannot presume complete originality. Historiographical debates have, of course, been studied many times (the Historikerstreit comes immediately to mind), and so has the way history writing was influenced by, and in turn fueled, many conflicts. Other studies have investigated the influence of nationalism on historiography (Berger, ed. 2007, Berger, Eriksonas and Mycock, eds. 2008, Berger, Donovan and Passmore 1999) and the way nationalism used and abused representations of the Middle Ages in particular (Bak et al., eds. 2009). Still others compare national historiographies and look at their similarities and differences as well as mutual influences and exchanges (Conrad and Conrad, eds. 2002). There is some research on the role of historians as nation-builders (Berger and Lorenz, eds. 2010, Deletant and Hanak, eds., 1988). But complex multi-lateral studies of the kind proposed here, which look at disputes between several national historiographies, “cross” national historiographical perspectives on “sensitive” questions, and explore the intertwining of entire (canonical) national narratives are hardly available. A notable exception is Frank & Hadler’s collective volume on “overlapping national histories” in Europe, which focuses on historiographical disputes that arose from territorial intersections between states (2011). As can be seen from the above tentative typology of the issues of contention, I propose an encompassing and much more variegated agenda and the application of a quite different set of methodologies (see further down). Thus I and my team hope to not just replicate existing studies by incorporating a different (Balkan) “subject matter,” but go beyond the state of the art by employing new approaches and heightened reflexivity.
Observing the current state of historical research further afield, one can note studies of “history wars”, i.e. clashes between the views on certain historical issues espoused by professional historians and the historical “memory” or “consciousness” of a national public, especially journalists, history teachers, public figures, politicians, etc. (see, for example, Liakos for Greece [2008], Iordachi for Romania [2004], Vezenkov for Bulgaria [2010]). But this is a different kind of conflict – professional historiography versus “amateur” (yet popularized) historical notions – and again confined to a given national public. Still another type of enterprise is the post-1989 initiative (following West European examples) of cleansing school textbooks in the Balkans of “images of the enemy” and searching for more conciliatory ways of presenting past conflicts (Koulouri 2002). Though these are enterprises of a different kind, the present study will aim to indicate ways of avoiding one-sided perspectives in treating conflict in textbooks.
The present project has a number of INTERDISCIPLINARY aspects and features, next to being situated within the history of historiography – itself a truly innovative field (in contrast to the more traditional field of “theory and methodology of historical knowledge”) informed by other disciplines. In so far as historians often apply linguistic arguments in their debates due to the presumably close links between language and ethnicity, we will need the support of historical philology (especially Slavistics) and present-day linguistics, but also to have recourse to the political history of the local languages or “dialects”. Critical in this respect is the linguistic proficiency of the selected team, who in its entirety master virtually all Balkan languages (pertaining to six disparate language families). Central to the project is the study of the impact of nationalism on historiography, hence the relevance of nationalism studies – an inter- and multi-disciplinary field par excellence, involving (beside history) sociology, (cognitive) psychology, cultural anthropology, political science, etc. Sociology (particularly of institutions) will be instrumental, too, especially when studying the institutions and networks, within which historians operated and interacted. And in approaching national narratives, one cannot but draw on the interdisciplinary “narrative turn” in the social sciences and the humanities (inspired by literary theory or poetics) and narrativity in history, master (or meta) national narratives in particular (Megill 1995, 151-174, Jarausch and Sabrow, eds, 2002, Eckel 2007).
The study of historiographical “wars” between national(ist) historians over contentious issues in the Balkans is aimed to exert strong IMPACT on regional historiography and have some wider practical effects. It should be clear that at stake here is not a “cold” object of research of purely “academic” interest. On the contrary, since they have not been analyzed and neutralized (still less “deconstructed”), every now and then such latent battles break into the open. By bringing into focus two- or multi-lateral national/ist controversies on historical issues, we will throw into relief ways of undermining and transcending the one-sidedness of the national perspectives. By demonstrating the potential of new research methodologies and viewpoints that go beyond the national paradigm, we hope to invigorate and give new direction to historical scholarship in the region. Finally, a comparative, reflexive and critical study in the field of the history of historiography will demonstrate the latter’s theoretical relevance and huge critical potential. In the process of work on the project, a network of like-minded historians will be created in the region around the nucleus of our team, who will propagate our ideas and methods.
The proposed research has potential for a broader public IMPACT. The study of phenomena as negatively loaded as the disputes between rival national historical traditions is instructive in various ways when it reaches a broader public. Paradoxically put, the hope is to reduce actual conflict by studying conflict in historiography. Thus, becoming cognizant of, and being confronted with, other perspectives, different from the ingrained national one, probes one’s perception of others and opens new horizons. Juxtaposing the different perspectives balances them and, to a certain extent, also neutralizes them. Such is at least our reasonable expectation. This may prove instrumental in reducing hostile perceptions within the region and facilitate its European integration by incorporating the Western Balkans (North Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Kosovo) in the near future.
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The “Balkan Historiographical Wars” project is funded by the Bulgarian Science Fund in the framework of the “Vihren 2021” grant scheme (contract no. KP-06-DV/7 of December 15, 2021).