Common values for the European Union : a view from a candidate state

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Steven Seegel. Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe

Steven Seegel. Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. xv, 346. Cloth $55.00.PostprintPeer reviewe

Encounters with antisemitism

The Holocaust destroyed Jewish communities across Europe and in Poland. Subsequently, in the Soviet bloc, most Jewish survivors were expelled from or coerced into leaving their countries, while the memory of the millennium-long presence of Jews in Poland was thoroughly suppressed. Through the lens of a scholar’s personal biography, this article reflects on how snippets of the Jewish past tend to linger on in the form of absent presences, despite the national and systemic norm of erasing any remembrance of Poles of the Jewish religion. This norm used to be the dominant type of antisemitism in communist Poland after 1968, and has largely continued unabated after the fall of communism.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Nations in the bubble of social realitylanguage and all that

In the last century and a half scholars from different disciplines began to distinguish between material reality (the universe), the biosphere, and social reality (the semiosphere), as three important heuristic categories. In the latter half of the 20th century, the philosophers John L. Austin and John Searle proposed that language and its use enable humans to generate social reality. They also analyzed the mechanisms of the process. From another perspective, the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar offered an explanation of how language was selected in the process of human evolution, and argued that its primary function is group-building, that is, the generation of social cohesion. Drawing on these insights, the article proposes that the dilemma of whether nations exist objectively or are subjective entities can be resolved by analyzing this problem in the light of Searle’s distinction between ontological objectivity / subjectivity and epistemic objectivity / subjectivity.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Global language politics : Eurasia versus the Rest

Globalization in the early 21st century can be considered as the age of inequality that splits the world into the rich North and the poor South. From the perspective of language politics, only very few discussed the division across the globe, especially, between Eurasia and the “Rest of the world.” In Eurasia, indigenous languages and scripts are used in official capacity, while the same function is fulfilled almost exclusively by non-indigenous (post/colonial) European languages in the Rest of the world. In the countries where they are spoken, non-Eurasian languages have limited presence in the mass media, education, or in cyberspace. This linguistic imperialism par excellence is a long-lasting and pernicious legacy of European (western) colonialism. The aforementioned divide is strongly associated to the use of ethnolinguistic nationalism in state building across many areas of Eurasia, while this ideology is not employed for this purpose outside the region.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Between politics and objectivity : the non-remembrance of the 1989 ethnic cleansing of Turks in communist Bulgaria

Cold War Europe’s largest and most intensive act of ethnic cleansing, namely, the 1989 expulsion of Turks from communist Bulgaria, remains a neglected subject three decades on after the event. When it took place, the term “ethnic cleansing” had not been invented yet, so in light of international law this expulsion was a “population transfer.” Population transfers (even unilateral) were deemed legal until the mid-1990s. Subsequently, under the influence of the atrocities committed during the wars of Yugoslav succession, population transfers were criminalized and relabelled as “ethnic cleansings.” For a variety of reasons, the 1989 Ethnic Cleansing has been also neglected by scholars and politicians in both, Bulgaria and Turkey. The neglect continues to this day, despite the Bulgarian Parliament’s momentous 2012 Declaration, which officially recognized the expulsion as an act of ethnic cleansing. This Declaration – which could become a basis for successful Turkish-Bulgarian reconciliation – largely remains unknown in both countries, while the propagandistic terminology employed for referring to the 1989 Ethnic Cleansing deepens the oblivion and obfuscates the nature of this tragic event. Both, in Turkish and Bulgarian, official and scholarly terminology employed suggests – incorrectly – that it was a “kind of emigration.”PostprintPeer reviewe

The idea of a Kosovan language in Yugoslavia's language politics

Not only are nations invented (imagined) into and out of existence, but languages and states are as well. Decisions on how to construct, change or obliterate a language are essentially arbitrary, and as such dictated by political considerations. The entailed language of politics (often accompanied by the closely related politics of script) is of more immediate significance in Central Europe than elsewhere in the world, because in this region language is the sole and fundamental basis for creating, legitimating and maintaining nations and their nation-states. Since 1918, the creation and destruction of ethnolinguistic nation-states in Central Europe has been followed (or even preceded) by the creation and destruction of languages so that a unique language could be fitted to each nation and its national polity. This article focuses on the politics of the Albanian language in Yugoslavia's Autonomous Province of Kosovo and in independent Kosovo with an eye to answering two questions at the level of language politics. First, what was the kind of Albanian standard employed in Kosovo before the 1968/1970/1974 acceptance of Albania's Tosk-based standard Albanian in Yugoslavia? Second, why is Kosovo the sole post-Yugoslav nation-state that has not (yet?) been endowed with its own unique (Kosovan) language?Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Place-names and objectivity in historiography : the case of Silesia in the 19th and 20th centuries

On the basis of an introductory analysis of the intimate bond established between territory and the nation/nation-state, the author points out that the main instrument of this bonding is the naming of places in the national language. When writing about the past of an area, deciding to use this or that language to render place-names is not an innocent choice. This is especially true of the 19th and 20th centuries when nationalism became the only globally accepted ideology. Such a choice may amount to repossessing the past of a territory in the interest of this or that nation/nation-state.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The History of the Normative Opposition of “Language versus Dialect”: From Its Graeco-Latin Origin to Central Europe’s Ethnolinguistic Nation-States

The History of the Normative Opposition of “Language versus Dialect”: From Its Graeco-Latin Origin to Central Europe’s Ethnolinguistic Nation-States The concept of “a language” (Einzelsprache, that is, one of many extant languages) and its opposition to “dialect” (considered as a “non-language,” and thus subjugable to an already recognized language merely as “its” dialect) is the way people tend to think about languages in the West today. It appears to be a value-free, self-evident conception of the linguistic position. So much so that the concept of “language” was included neither in Immanuel Kant’s system of categories, nor in the authoritative Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. This paper sketches the rise of the “dialect vs language” opposition in classical Greek, its transposition onto classical Latin, and its transfer, through medieval and renaissance Latin, to the early modern period. On the way, the Greek and Latin terms for “language” (and also for “dialect”) sometimes functioned as synonyms for peoples (that is, ethnic groups), which – importantly – contributed to the rise of the normative equation of language with nation in the early nineteenth century. It was the beginning of the ethnolinguistic kind of nationalism that prevails to this day in Central Europe.   Dzieje normatywnej dychotomii języka i dialektu: Od greko-łacińskich źródeł po państwa etnicznojęzykowe Europy Środkowej Pojęcie języka jako jednego z wielu (Einzelsprache) stawiane w diametralnej opozycji do „dialektu” (czyli „nie-języka”, który normatywnie musi zostać przyporządkowany jakiemuś już wcześniej uznanemu językowi jako jeden z jego dialektów) stanowi formę pojęciową, poprzez pryzmat której postrzega się języki i dyskutuje o nich we współczesnym świecie Zachodu. Z powodu powszechnego uznania owa forma pojęciowa wydaje się tak oczywista i wolna od nacechowania ideologicznego, że Immanuel Kant nie uwzględnił języka w zaproponowanym przez siebie systemie kategorii filozoficznych, podobnie jak i autorzy niezmiernie wpływowego dzieła z zakresu historiografii i socjologii politycznej o znamiennym tytule Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. W niniejszym artykule przedstawiam wyłonienie się opozycji języka wobec dialektu w starożytnej grece oraz jego recepcję na gruncie łaciny od starożytności rzymskiej po okres nowożytny. W ciągu wieków utarło się używanie greckich i łacińskich terminów w odniesieniu do „języka” jako synonimów na określenie ludów (czy też grup etnicznych), co we wczesnym XIX stuleciu silnie wpłynęło na wykształcenie się normatywnego zrównania języka z narodem. Stanowiło to początek fenomenu znanego pod nazwą „nacjonalizmu etnicznojęzykowego”, który na poziomie państw dominuje po dziś dzień w całej Europie Środkowej

North Macedonia : a surprise

Following the wars of Yugoslav succession, during the last two decades, Macedonia evolved from central Europe’s (‘Balkan’) typical ethnolinguistic nation-state into a studiously and painstakingly negotiated and constructed polyglot and multiethnic civic national polity for all the country’s inhabitants— or ‘Macedoners’—irrespective of any linguistic, religious or ethnic differences. This form of statehood is commonly, but rather shortsightedly, seen as characteristic of western Europe. However, in many ways, civic national identification, as practiced now in North Macedonia, draws at the Ottoman tradition of the peaceful coexistence of the millets, or ethnoreligious groups that used to be organized as non-territorial autonomies in this Islamic empire. The article takes stock of the political and ideological situation in Macedonia after Skopje / Shkup reached the long awaited rapprochement with Athens in 2019. The price of changing the country’s name to ‘North Macedonia’ appears to have been well worth paying, because the Macedonian-Greek agreement opened the path to NATO and EU membership for this country. Obviously, only the future will show whether Skopje / Shkup successfully seizes this rare opportunity, and if North Macedonia’s neighbors and western Europe facilitate this process.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe