Volume 66, Issue 4

While recent studies on Macedonia have mostly focused on ‘Skopje 2014’ as a uniquely excessive project of nation-building, this article analyses local developments in monument culture elsewhere in Macedonia. Disentangling the processes of nation-building since the Ohrid Agreement of 2001, the author distinguishes three coexisting, but competing, repertoires of monument culture, namely a Yugoslav, a Macedonian, and an Albanian one. Each repertoire has been closely associated with ethnicity and the legitimation of ethnopolitical claims, as well as party politics and ideology. The past has continued to divide Macedonians. The author argues that these divisions in Macedonian monument culture reflect the competing and diverging Albanian and Macedonian historical narratives, and amount to effectively mutually exclusive ethnic and ideological nation-building efforts in post-Ohrid Macedonia.

Twenty-first century Serbian nationalism has had little serious analysis. Most works concentrate heavily on the nineties and the wars of Yugoslav secession, which produced a wide variety of rampant forms of nationalism throughout former Yugoslavia. Since 5 October 2000, right-wingers have somewhat softened their line in public discourse and lost some of their popular appeal, but strong nationalist tendencies have remained, taking their place in Serbia’s social and political discourses. These tendencies have been concentrated around certain extreme right-wing groups, chief among them Dveri srpske , which has been active since the early nineties. After organizing itself politically, this movement has refurbished its image and discourse, and, in the April 2016 elections, has even succeeded in entering parliament. Here, the author analyses Dveri ’s agenda and key convictions: antisemitism, an anti-EU stance, support for Putin’s Russia, clericalism, and homophobia. He also reviews Dveri ’s change of image and discourse over time.

The article unravels the ties between conservatism, the state, and the far right in Greece. It explores the complex social and political reasons which facilitated the emergence of far-right groups in Greece during the civil war and have allowed them to survive for seven decades and to flourish from time to time. The author pays particular attention to paramilitarism as a distinct component of the Greek far right. He follows the activities of ‘Golden Dawn’ and other far-right groups, in particular their paramilitary branches. To the wider public, among the most shocking aspects of the rise of ‘Golden Dawn’ was the use of violence by its paramilitary branch, tagmata efodou . The article examines the far right’s relationship to the state and the security services, and explores its overall role in Greek politics and society. He demonstrates how an understanding of the decades following the civil war are indispensable to making sense of recent developments.

Traditional home slaughtering of animals is a widespread social practice in the Western Balkans, bringing together families, neighbours, and friends, and contributing to the rise of social capital. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a multicultural country where traditional home slaughtering of animals is mostly practised as seasonal slaughtering by Christian communities and as religious slaughtering by Muslim communities. In the framework of existing EU legislation, meat that comes from home slaughtering can be used for private consumption only. However, these rules are not fully aligned with the practices existing on the ground. This article argues that the Western Balkans’ integration into the EU can affect the sustainability of these practices, and it is therefore necessary to amend the relevant legislation and policies to ensure the implementation of EU regulations while respecting the traditional way of communal meat sharing.

In 2015, Montenegro’s oppositional alliance Democratic Front (DF) launched ‘Freedom Calling’, a contentious campaign demanding regime change. Although presented as non-partisan, it did feature a party-stemming background. Thus, politics turned civil—meaning that the civil character was a disguise for a planned, creative party endeavour. Methodologically, the authors interpret the DF’s campaign, elaborating on process tracing and applying Tilly and Tarrow’s ‘contentious politics’ approach. They enquire into how the political-party background of the organizers influenced the unfolding of the contentious campaign, thereby addressing the role of parties as initiators of movements. This is especially pertinent in hybrid regimes with formally democratic institutions and persisting authoritarian practices. The Montenegrin case study of contentious (party) politics reveals that, while resources are available, the strong (ethno)political identity label of the party imposes constraints on the construction of a programmatic campaign.

The agreement reached at Lake Prespa on 17 June 2018 between Greece and Macedonia should be welcomed, insofar as it promises to end the Greek blockade—in any case unnecessary—of Macedonia’s accession to the European Union and to NATO. Yet conceptually, the author argues, the agreement’s text is explosive, having been crafted to fundamentally confirm and consolidate a radical ‘otherness’ of the two parties involved (that is, Greece and Macedonia), encompassing their populations and histories. Any expert tasked with supervising the re-writing of history textbooks in the spirit of this agreement, as stipulated therein, will quickly find it impossible to reconcile the definitions and concepts put forth there with the methodological and theoretical knowledge about the need to de-essentialize and de-construct ‘ethnicity’, ‘history’, ‘culture’, ‘nation’, etc. This knowledge has been the basic standard in international scholarly debates over at least the last thirty years.