southeastern europe

Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey. By Umut Özkırımlı and Spyros A. Sofos. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Pp. viii220. $45.00. We have long been told by the literature on nationalism that identities, and the nations to which they attach themselves, are “invented”; that nations have no core “essence”; that territories are not inscribed with national meaning by any internal, inevitable, “natural” mechanism or process but are read and shaped as having such meaning by the peoples and polities that lay claim to them. And all of this is true, of course. The trouble is, all of these theoretical interventions haven’t much helped, at least in the sense that the world today is no less fraught with bitter nationalist conflicts than it ever was—if anything, it is more fraught. As Umut Özkırımlı and Spyros A. Sofos put it in their new, collaborative volume, Tormented by History, “in an age pervaded by the logic of nationalism, the mere recognition that

I must admit I am envious of the linguistic capabilities of many of the citizens of the republics that used to make up Yugoslavia who, on top of already mastering "Serbian", "Croatian" and "Bosnian" - languages that I was taught back in the early 1990s as variants of "Serbo-Croat" -  and being able to understand and function in Slovenian, in a single day, on the 27th of July, became proficient in yet another, little known language, Crnogorski - Montenegrin. Jelena Susanj from Matica Crnogorska holding a book on the Montenegrin language Thanks to the dilligent efforts of Montenegro's Skupština, the country's students who were taught a language that comprised Serbian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Bosnian as its regional variants, will from now on be instructed in Montenegrin (Crnogorski). This is the newest chapter in a long history of language politics in the small post-YUgoslav republic. In 2004, in a clumsy yet potentially positive a

A voice of desperation originally published in http://www.lalibre.be Balkans La Macédoine, une démocratie en danger Mis en ligne le 01/07/2010 La Grèce continue fermement à bloquer toute candidature de la Macédoine tant que la dispute sur le nom qui oppose les deux pays ne sera pas résolue. Une opinion de Tanja Milevska de la TV macédonienne Van Gijsel La présidence belge de l’ UE a commencé et malgré la tempête politique, s’il y a une chose à laquelle la Belgique a toujours été dévouée, c’est bien l’ Europe . Le Premier Ministre sortant, Yves Leterme , l’a confirmé, l’élargissement restera une priorité européenne sous présidence belge. Mais pour nous qui suivons de près ce dossier, il est très clair qu’une fois encore, il sera réduit surtout à des paroles d’encouragement pour les pays des Balkans occidentaux à continuer le processus de réformes visant à les rapprocher des standards européens, et encore une fois il sera répété que la destination finale