Politics, Territory, and Nationalism: A Conceptual Framework

Stjepanović, Dejan

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-58585-1_2

Politics, Territory, and Nationalism: A Conceptual Framework

Dejan Stjepanović⁵

Chapter
First Online: 20 September 2017

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Part of the book series: Comparative Territorial Politics ((COMPTPOL))

Abstract

This chapter develops the conceptual tools of the book. It offers a much-needed analysis of the relationship between regionalism, nationalism, and statehood by focusing on the issue of self-determination as the key differentiating factor. Unlike the dominant literature that primarily analyses West European cases and considers regions developing into nations and not vice-versa, this chapter challenges the existing paradigm. It further foreshadows the constellations of plurinational, multinational, and sectional regionalism in Istria, Vojvodina, and Dalmatia that developed after 1990. The argument is tilted towards a more nuanced understanding of territorial challenges. Finally, it provides a historical and political background of nation and region building in former Yugoslav countries.

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Notes

1.
Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 183–5.
2.
Karl Renner, “State and Nation”, in Ephraim Nimni (ed.), National Cultural Autonomy and its Contemporary Critics (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2005).
3.
Dominik Zaum, The Sovereignty Paradox: The Norms and Politics of International Statebuilding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 28.
4.
John A. Agnew, Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy (London: Routledge, 1995).
5.
John Agnew, Making Political Geography (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 112.
6.
Agnew (1995).
7.
Andreas Fahrmeir and H.S. Jones, ‘Space and Belonging in Modern Europe: Citizenship(s) in Localities, Regions, and States’, European Review of History—Revue europe´enne d’histoire Vol. 15, No. 3, June 2008, p. 244
8.
Peter J. Taylor, “Beyond Containers: Internationality, Interstateness, Interterritoriality”, Progress in Human Geography 19, 1 (1995).
9.
See Michael Keating, Rescaling the European State: Rescaling the European State – The Making of Territory and the Rise of the Meso (Oxford: OUP, 2013).
10.
Michael Keating, Plurinational Democracies: Stateless Nations in Post-Sovereignty Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 16.
11.
Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975), p. 9.
12.
Ibid., p. 3.
13.
Deutsch (1966), p. 79.
14.
On nested constellations between polities and citizenship, see Rainer Bauböck, “Cold Constellations and Hot Identities: Political Theory Questions About Transnationalism and Diaspora”, in Rainer Bauböck and Thomas Faist, Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), p. 302.
15.
Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536–1966 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).
16.
George W. White, Nation, State and Territory: Origins, Evolutions and Relationships (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
17.
Ibid., p. 23.
18.
Ibid., p. 73.
19.
George W. White, Nationalism and Territory: Constructing Group Identity in Southeastern Europe (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000).
20.
Ibid., p. 203.
21.
Ibid., pp. 226–228.
22.
Ibid., p. 241.
23.
Stein Rokkan and Derek W. Urwin, Economy, Territory, Identity: Politics of West European Peripheries (London: SAGE, 1983), p. 6.
24.
Ibid., p. 6.
25.
Ibid., p. 124.
26.
S.M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan (eds.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross National Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967).
27.
Ibid., p. 14.
28.
Ibid., p. 11.
29.
Peter Mair, “Cleavages” in Richard S. Katz and William Crotty (eds.), Handbook of Party Politics (London: Sage, 2006), p. 371.
30.
Bartolini understands boundaries in an analytically wider sense than borders that are nearly synonymous with physical frontiers.
31.
Stefano Bartolini, Restructuring Europe: Centre Formation, System Building and Political Structuring Between the Nation-State and the European Union (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 16.
32.
Rainer Bauböck, ‘Multilevel Citizenship and Territorial Borders in the EU Polity’, IWE Working Paper No. 37, 2003, p. 1.
33.
Bartolini (2005), pp. 4–12.
34.
Michael Keating, State and Regional Nationalism: Territorial Politics and the European State (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), p 18.
35.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
36.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983).
37.
Pierre L. van den Berghe, “Does Race Matter?” in Nations and Nationalism (Volume 1, Number 3, November 1995), p. 361.
38.
Steven Grosby, “The Successor Territory” in Athena S. Leoussi and Steven Grosby (eds.), Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 99–112.
39.
For a detailed account of such tendencies, see Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002).
40.
Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
41.
Gat, Azar, and Alexander Yakobson, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
42.
Anthony D. Smith, “Nations and History”, in Montserrat Guibernau and John Hutchinson, Understanding Nationalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
43.
Ernest Gellner, Nationalism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997).
44.
Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
45.
See Miroslav Hroch, “From National Movement to the Fully Formed Nation: The Nation Building Process in Europe”, in G. Eley and R.G. Suny (eds.), Becoming National (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
46.
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London & New York: Verso, 1993.)
47.
Wayne Norman, Negotiating Nationalism Nation-Building, Federalism, and Secession in the Multinational State (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2006), p. 34.
48.
Michael Mann, “The Emergence of Modern European Nationalism” in John A. Hall and I. C. Jarvie (eds.), Transition to Modernity: Essays on Power, Wealth, Belief (Cambridge: CUP 1992).
49.
John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 64.
50.
Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 10.
51.
Brubaker (2004), p. 14.
52.
Brubaker (2004), p. 54.
53.
Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 16.
54.
Rogers M. Smith, “The Politics of Identities and the Task of Political Science” in Shapiro et al. Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 61.
55.
Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 98.
56.
Ibid.
57.
Ibid., p. 96.
58.
Anthony D. Smith, “States and Homelands: The Social and Geopolitical Implication of National Territory”, Millennium, Journal of International Studies (Vol. 10, No. 3, 1981), p. 193.
59.
Bartolini (2005), p. 87.
60.
More on historiography will be said in each of the cases.
61.
Tomislav’s title of Rex Croatorum and Dušan’s as the Christ-loving Emperor of Serbs and Greeks are maybe the most obvious representations of that. Dušan’s legal code, based on the Code of Justinian, even goes as far as to regulate relations between ethnic or linguistic groups and prescribes certain rights, duties, and taxes for Arbanas (Albanian) and Vlach populations, for example, which are differentiated from those of the ‘majority’ Serbs and Greeks.
62.
For example, the legends and the epic poetry surrounding the fourteenth-century nobleman Marko Mrnjavčević were collected by Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian folklorists who attributed them to their respective national traditions.
63.
Gellner (1997), p. 41.
64.
Ivo Banac, “The Confessional ‘Rule’ and the Dubrovnik Exception: The Origins of the ‘Serb-Catholic’ Circle in Nineteenth-Century Dalmatia”, Slavic Review, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 448–474.
65.
Such as, for example, Statuta Valachorum, an instrument similar to the millet based on religious affiliation and awarded initially to Christian Orthodox populations settled on the Habsburg border with the Ottoman Empire. See Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
66.
For example, registries of births, deaths, and marriages in regions under Habsburg rule in today’s Croatia and Serbia were kept by the Catholic and Orthodox (later some other) churches rather than by the state’s bureaucracy. This system was abolished only after the Second World War.
67.
It should be noted that an ethnic element is important in defining membership in the Serbian nation, but religious identity trumps it sometimes. Prominent figures in Serb national projects, such as the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Prime Minister of Serbia , Nikola Pašić, his contemporary and one of the most well-known novelists and politicians, Branislav Nušić, as well as the writer of the first Serbian theatrical drama, Jovan Sterija Popović, were born into ethnic Vlach families but were identified as Serbs largely due to their Orthodox creed.
68.
Fernando Veliz, Nationalism and the International Order: Re-interpreting the Politics of Banal Croatia, 1908–1918 (Florence: European University Institute, 2010).
69.
There were few exceptions nevertheless, one of them being the Croat fascist Ustashe ideologists who claimed Bosnian Muslims, were in fact Croats of Islamic faith, something that was done due to strategic reasons and expediency. See Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New Disorder: The Second World War in Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
70.
See Christopher Harvie, The Rise of Regional Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
71.
This is a provisional reference and does not imply a reification of the (nation-)state as a primary political field.
72.
Kenichi Ohmae, “The Rise of the Region State” in Foreign Affairs,72 (2), Spring 1993, p. 78.
73.
Ibid.
74.
Some authors have even suggested that transnational “[i]ntegration was not the suppression of the nation-state by another form of governance as the nation-state became incapable, but was the creation for their own purposes, an act of national will,” Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 18.
75.
Rune Johansson, ‘The Impact of Imagination: History, Territoriality and Perceived Affinity’ in Sven Tägil, Regions in Central Europe: The Legacy of History (London: Hurst & Company,1999).
76.
Ibid., p. 5.
77.
Michael Keating, “Thirty Years of Territorial Politics” in West European Politics Vol. 31, January–March 2008, 72.
78.
Michael Keating, The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1998), p. 89.
79.
Ibid., p. 9.
80.
Ibid., p. 13.
81.
Romain Pasquier and Catherine Perron, “Régionalisations et régionalismes dans une Europe élargie : les enjueux d’une comparison Est-Ouest” in Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest, 2008. vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 5–18.
82.
Michael Keating, “Regionalization in Central and Eastern Europe: The Diffusion of a Western Model?” in Michael Keating and James Hughes (eds.), The Regional Challenge in Central and Eastern Europe: Territorial Restructuring and European Integration (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2003).
83.
Michael Keating, “The New Regionalism: Territorial Competition and Political Restructuring in Western Europe” (working paper) (Florence: European University Institute, 1998).
84.
Michael Keating, John Loughlin and Kris Deschouwer (eds.), Culture, Institutions and Economic Development: A Study of Eight European Regions (Cheltenham & Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2003), p. 3.
85.
David Miller, Citizenship and National Identity (Malden: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 125–41.
86.
See Michael Keating, Plurinational Democracies: Stateless Nations in Post-Sovereignty Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
87.
Luis Moreno, The Federalization of Spain (London: Frank Cass, 2001), p. 5.
88.
See for example Henk Dekker and Darina Malova, “Nationalism and Its Explanations”. Paper presented at the First Dutch–Hungarian Conference on Interethnic Relations (Wassenaar: NIAS, 1997).
89.
Luis Moreno, “Local and Global: Mesogovernments and Territorial Identities”, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Volume, Issue 3 & 4 Autumn 1999, p. 69.
90.
Xose-Manoel Núñez Seijas, “The Region as Essence of the Fatherland: Regionalist Variants of Spanish Nationalism (1840–1936)” in European History Quarterly 2001; 31; p. 483.
91.
Ibid., p. 485.
92.
Miroslav Hroch, “De l’ethnicité à la nation. Un chemin oublié vers la modernité”, in Anthropologie et Sociétés, vol. 19, no. 3, 1995, pp. 71–86.
93.
Zoe Bray and Michael Keating, “European Integration and the Basque Country in France and Spain” presented at the Conference in Divided Nations and European Integration, Queen’s University, Ontario, July 2007.
94.
Michael Keating, “Plurinational Democracy in a Post-Sovereign Order”, Queen’s Papers on Europeanisation, No. 1 (2002), p. 10.
95.
See for example, Arjan Schackel and Regis Dandoy (eds.), Regional and National Elections in Western Europe: Territoriality of the Vote in Thirteen Countries (Palgrave, 2013).
96.
Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences: An Essay in Historical Epistemology”, International Migration Review 37(3), pp. 576–610 (2003).
97.
Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 1957), p. 24.
98.
Kris Deschouwer, “The European Multi-Level Party Systems: Towards a Framework for Analysis”, EUI Working Paper (Florence: EUI, 2000).
99.
Kris Deschouwer, “Towards a Regionalisation of Statewide Electoral Trends in Decentralised States? The Cases of Belgium and Spain”, in Wilfred Swenden and Bart Maddens (eds.), Territorial Party Politics in Western Europe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–30.
100.
Charlie Jeffery, “Multilevel Party Competition in Federal and Regional States”, in Hendrik Enderlein, Sonja Wälti and Zürn (eds.), Handbook on Multi-Level Governance (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2010), p. 145.
101.
Wilfred Swenden and Bart Maddens (eds.), Territorial Party Politics in Western Europe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–30.
102.
Lori Thorlakson, “Patterns of Party Integration, Influence and Autonomy in Seven Federations”, in Party Politics 2009, Vol. 15. No. 2, pp. 157–177.
103.
Otto Kirchheimer, ‘The Transformation of Western European Party Systems’, in Joseph La Palombara and Myron Weiner (eds.), Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 177–200.
104.
Dawn Brancati, “Pawns Take Queen: The Destabilizing Effects of Regional Parties in Europe”, Constitutional Political Economy, Vol. 16, No. 2, (2005), p. 156.
105.
Marc Weller and Stefan Wolff (eds.), Autonomy, Self-Governance and Conflict Resolution (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 2. (This is a direct quote and the use of the word remedy might be somewhat problematic. Responses are related to claims rather than remedies.)
106.
Luis Moreno, “Local and Global: Mesogovernments and Territorial Identities”, in William Safran and Ramón Máiz (eds.), Identity and Territorial Autonomy in Plural Societies (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 63.
107.
William Safran, “Spatial and Functional Dimensions of Autonomy: Cross-National and Theoretical Perspectives” in William Safran and Ramón Máiz (eds.), Identity and Territorial Autonomy in Plural Societies (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 14.
108.
Ruth Lapidoth, Autonomy, Flexible Solutions to Ethnic Conflict (Washington, DC: ISIP Press, 1996), pp. 25–26.
109.
Hurst Hannum, Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination: the Accommodation of Conflicting Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), p. 279.
110.
Erin Jenne, Ethnic Bargaining: The Paradox of Minority Empowerment (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 39–44.
111.
Roeder, Philip G., Where Nation-States Come from: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
112.
For a more detailed analysis of the teleological accounts of autonomy demands, see Dejan Stjepanović, “Rethinking Nationalism after Yugoslavia: Multi/Plurinational Regionalisms as Alternatives to Statehood”. In Stephen Tierney (ed.) Nationalism and Globalisation: New Settings, New Challenges (Hart Publishing, 2015).
113.
Bartolini (2005), pp. 4–12.
114.
Rainer Bauböck, “Why Stay Together? A Pluralist Approach to Secession and Federation”, in Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, Citizenship in Diverse Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 374.
115.
Michael Keating, “The Political Economy of Regionalism”, in Keating and Loughlin (eds.), The Political Economy of Regionalism (London: Frank Cass, 1997), p. 38.
116.
Absorbed into Romanian and Bulgarian nation-states in the late nineteenth century.
117.
It must be noted that, despite having contrasting understandings of the region at different points in time, a significant segment of Dalmatian elites advocated its institutional independence (most often under the Habsburg crown) despite having different ethnic origins and rising ethnonational projects in neighbouring territories.
118.
Malešević convincingly argues that the reasons for Serbia’s territorial expanision in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not primarily driven by the sense of national identity and the desire for unification of ethnic Serb or South Slav territories but by reasons of state development and internal elite politics within the Serbian state. This is underscored by the fact that “Serbia’s military prowess remained heavily dependent on large external loans. In this context territorial expansion was in part regarded by the political and military establishment as a way to obtain new resources to finance the existing debt.” Siniša Malešević, “The Mirage of Balkan Piedmont: State Formation and Serbian Nationalisms in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Nations and Nationalism 23, no. 1 (January 1, 2017): 129–50.
119.
This was not constitutionally necessarily but rather a perception. For example, Croats were the constituent ‘people’ or nation in both Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, while Serbs were constituent in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia , and Serbia . See Steven L. Burg, “Republican and Provincial Constitution Making in Yugoslav Politics”, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, no. 12 (Winter), 1982, pp. 131–153.
120.
Susan Woodward, “Varieties of State-Building in the Balkans: A Case for Shifting Focus,” Martina Fischer et al., (eds.) Berghof Handbook in Conflict Transformation, Vol. 2 (Berlin: Berghof Center, 2010), p. 326.
121.
The Constitution of the Socialist Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (1974), unlike other sub-state constitutions of the Yugoslav Federation at that time does not explicitly mention any national group or groups as titular nation(s) of the province. Instead, there is a reference to the equality of Serb-Croat, Hungarian , Slovak, Romanian, and Ruthenian languages and their respective scripts/alphabets. In the Soviet Union, there were autonomous republics in which the state-wide ethnic majorities were regional majorities as well but the autonomous republic had a titular nation at least symbolically. One such example is the Karelian ASSR, established for the Karelian ethnic group which was a regional minority while ethnic Russians represent a regional majority.
122.
Ustav Socijalističke Republike Hrvatske (Zagreb: Narodne novine, 1974).
123.
See the chapter on Dalmatia.

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Politics & IR, School of Social Sciences, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK
Dejan Stjepanović

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Stjepanović, D. (2018). Politics, Territory, and Nationalism: A Conceptual Framework. In: Multiethnic Regionalisms in Southeastern Europe. Comparative Territorial Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58585-1_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58585-1_2
Published: 20 September 2017
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