| The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina early this decade confounded the international community to the point of inaction. Was that war to be understood as intra-national, and thus a civil war, or as international, and thus falling under the jurisdiction of international law? That befuddlement continues as the specter of ethnic cleansing now threatens the Muslim Albanian-speaking population of Kosovo, Yugoslavia. As we continue to justify our inaction, attributing the violence to misplaced borders and ancient ethnic hatreds, the question emerges: can different nations share the same sovereign territory and maintain their cultural integrity or must geographic distance always accompany cultural difference?;Although the recent explosion of ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia is attributed by the West to ethnic hatred, I believe the inability to accommodate the multi-ethnic society lies deep within our present state system. Because of its extreme ethnic diversity and the contemporary threat to its national security attributed to that diversity, Macedonia emerged as the venue in which to investigate the apparent contradictions between an integrated past and segregated future. There, the transition from integrated, interdigitated populations sharing the same space, to segregated societies demanding their own, mirrors the transition from Ottoman dependent to independent state. The Ottoman Empire, inheriting Middle Eastern traditions, administered people through their millet, their religious affiliation. That system politicized religious identity, yielding little heterodoxy within each religious group but a high degree of integration and interdigitation of the various peoples geographically. The development of extremely intricate dress and the evolution of a grammar shared between several distinct languages allowed integrated populations to maintain their cultural integrity while sharing the same space. Following World War I, the nation-state was imposed there as a result of growing romantic nationalisms and the dictates of the Paris Peace accords. Those new states effectively politicize identity based on place of residence. Consequently, integrated populations began to dis-integrate, both legally, with the transfer population between Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey in 1923, and violently, with ethnic cleansing during this decade. |
