Retrieving Historical Processes: Transitions to a Modern Story

Abstract

Modern nationalist mythologies prove self-limiting in that they ignore counternarratives most scholars acknowledge exist. As elsewhere, western Balkan mythologies resorting to clichés that, for instance, assert that “Turks” were usurpers of a primordial Christian social order or agents who suppressed the nationalist yearnings of intact national peoples surrender the past to a spurious modernist foundational narrative (Wheatcroft 1993: 231–248). In the end, what remains is a resilient fallback story that perpetuates what so many now acknowledge is intellectually untenable: the essentialist claim of a primordial ethnonational community (Campbell 1998: 62; Tuastad 2003). Despite the acknowledged shortcomings of nationalist mythology, the dominant narrative of post-Ottoman historiography still insists that incommensurate cultures and not “common ground” are the foundations of modern societies in the Balkans (Green 2005). To many, this accounts for the region’s rather bloody experience after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (Stolcke 1995: 1–13).