National Indifference in Post-Ottoman Spaces: A Case from Northwest Bulgaria

Abstract

This study represents an application of the concept of national indifference in the Post-Ottoman Balkans. It addresses the question of why two minority communities in Northwest Bulgaria in the first half of 20th century – the Protestant Voyvodovo community and the Catholic community of Bărdarski Geran, both marked by a strong principle of religious endogamy, intermarried. The author maintains that the main reason why these two communities intermarried was – despite all the differences between them – their national indifference, a parameter that both communities shared. These marriages did not cross the ethno-national boundary (the communities were nationally indifferent and thus ethno-national borders did not divide them). Contrary to standard understandings of the concept of national indifference, the author emphasizes that national indifference can be said to have two sides. On the one hand, nationally indifferent groups represent those in which the “we-they” opposition does not follow national lines, while on the other hand these groups identify and organize themselves on the basis of principles other than national ones. In the example of the inhabitants of Voyvodovo and Bărdarski Geran, this principle was religion. The appreciation of the “positive” side of national indifference enables us to grasp “the native’s point of view,” how people themselves perceived and understood their reality, their identities, and loyalties.

Possibilities and pitfalls of the concept of national indifference

“…1 1 Subsequent authors building further on the concept, include: Bolin and Douglas (2017), Brüggemann and Wezel (2019), Feest (2017), Ficeri (2020), Jakoubek (2018, 2021), Kamusella (2016), Leustean (2018), Lichtenstein (2012), Pergher (2012), Polak‐Springer (2020) and Stergar (2012). …”

“…Tara Zahra, for one, has explicitly defined national indifference as a reaction to the demands of modern mass politics and not as a pre‐modern remnant of ‘eastern’ or ‘ethnic’ societies (Zahra, 2010, p. 98). Recently, the geographic reach of national indifference research has been extended beyond Central/Habsburg Europe, to the Post‐Ottoman Balkans (Jakoubek, 2021), the Russian empire (Brüggemann & Wezel, 2019; Cusco, 2019; Musgrave, 2019; Paert et al, 2022) and the interwar Carpathians (Dabrowski, 2020). Yet the continued ‘eastern’ focus of most research has unintentionally reproduced the idea that Western Europe's supposedly more successful nation‐building projects entailed less national indifference than in Central and Eastern Europe.…”