Why South East Europe?

Perhaps it is best to start off my blog with the reasons for my subject matter being the region of ‘South-East Europe’, and then go on to set out what I will be writing about in the future.

I have been fascinated with maps for as long as I can remember. They were the only books I would ‘read’ as a child, possessing many in my pre-adolescent years. Perhaps I was drawn to the order that borders gave states, yet curious as to how they changed over time. I don’t recall remembering different regions, but was obviously drawn to those areas where borders altered.  Hitherto, my view of the world was flat.

South-East Europe first made its impression on me via the British media reporting the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. My memories of these reports on the siege perhaps turned my flat view of the world into a three dimensional one. One that involved real people. My focus may not of been on the region, per se, but this acknowledgement of the region at an early age stuck, and when a BBC documentary appeared in the mid-1990s called The Death of Yugoslavia, I recall asking my parents to record it. Disregarding the more critical eye upon which I can now view the content of the programme, the images and (hi)story of the region that it displayed provoked my now growing curiosity. Fundamentally, the only question I asked was – why do people want to kill each other?

A basic question, I give you that, and one not just angled towards South East Europe, but it was one I sought an answer to (or as it turns out, still am seeking). The conflict in Kosovo and the bombing of Serbia in the late 1990s underscored my interest in the region, yet added further dimensions, as I had grown more socially aware.

Coincidentally, my interest in South East Europe ran parallel to my burgeoning need to ask and get answers to other questions. This took form in my interest in politics. So I went on to study this at college, then university at Manchester Metropolitan. It was here that I was able to begin my more academic interest in the region, but also study adjacent themes (as I saw them at the time, now I see them as integral), most notably political ideologies. Here I grew interested in Socialism, was drawn to Communism, but also conscientious of Nationalism. The latter ideology, along with a couple of courses I took, came together and began to partially answer my fundamental question. But conversely, it also threw open the door to other questions - ones on identity, belonging, violence, nations, borders, boundaries, history, culture, ethnicity, and much more.

So this explains my interest in South East Europe – but up to the point of leaving university, it was more a fascination than a determination, and so can’t explain why I am here writing about it. This comes from where my main interest at the time, politics, took me. I subsequently went on to become a member of, and then employed by, the Labour Party. My career with them spanned almost five years. Yet, I had always carried the urge to go back to university and study for an MA degree. In what, I was unsure. After a working trip to Skopje, South East Europe became a favoured subject.

The Westminster Foundation for Democracy provides funds to UK political parties to help their sister parties in emerging democracies. I was naive as to the history of both Macedonia and our sister party – the Social and Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM) – but was excited to be asked to develop and present a training weekend on the theme of ‘What it means to be a Social Democrat’ in their Skopje headquarters. I soon discovered that the SDSM was the former League of Communists of Macedonia who ruled Macedonia since World War II. So this piqued my interest in Macedonia and the SDSM’s history, with the city also catching my attention on my visit. After this I was more adamant to study for an MA.

I was still unsure about what to study and where. Returning to Manchester Metropolitan was a choice I considered, as I wanted to study Nationalism and Nazism in Germany between the wars. But I was then made aware of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at University College London (UCL). Reading their varied and innovative syllabus whet my appetite to study there. I was sold. Prior to my studies, I embarked on a tour of South East Europe, taking in Thessaloniki, Skopje, Nis (due to missing a connection), Sofia, Bucharest, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb and Slovenia. Albeit cities, images and thoughts you are preloaded with are brushed aside when you actually experience the region. I knew I had made the right decision to make this area my academic focus.

I went on to study for a year, which culminated in they third trip to Skopje to interview people for my dissertation. My choice of topic was easy, fusing my Labour Party experience and contacts with my affinity to Macedonia. I chose to examine the nature of social democracy in Macedonia. This looked not only at the SDSM, but also the wider social democratic movement, and circulated around the legacies of nation building, communism and democratization. And this is where I am today.

I want to use this knowledge and experience, as limited or expansive as you may judge it, to have my say on the past, present and future of a region I have grown fond of. I may tend to focus on Macedonia when commenting on current political/social/economic events, but will endeavour to expand to other countries (noting the links between these states will inevitably lead me to do so). I will provide my thoughts on certain themes, or ideas, from a critical academic point of view, for example irredentist movements, syncretism, economic transformation, symbolism and identity, and so on. I will also comment on books I have read, or programmes I have watched, regarding states in the region at present and their predecessors – providing my thoughts on their content and conclusions. But to begin with, I will present edited versions of the essays I submitted as part of my MA programme. These will not be presented as ‘academic’ in their layout, but I will obviously accredit quotes and ideas to their rightful owner. Until then, here’s a quote to provide you with a flavour of my ideological bearing…

“No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.”

Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780