No Borders, No Nations: Making Greece in Macedonia

Abstract

Macedonia's centrality to the making of Greece over the past century provides the empirical grounding for an exploration of how cultural-symbolic borrowing rather than cross-border othering has been crucial for border making in Modern Greece and, by extension, everywhere in the world. There has been a recent revival in studies of borders between states and what they mean in relation to both the history of state formation and the effects of globalization on state power. Typically, however, the borders between modern ''nation-states'' are seen as originating in cross-pressures between pairs of neighboring states just the same in Africa today as, say, in nineteenthcentury France. The wider contemporary geographical context may be invoked in terms of the ''sides'' taken in particular border disputes by other nearby states or by the Great Powers. Rarely, however, is the wider historicalgeopolitical context invoked as the primary source of the practices, simultaneously material and symbolic, that produce the desire for precise borders in the first place. With increased globalization, however, the making of Greece in Macedonia may become increasingly problematic because the political logic of all national bordermaking is increasingly in question.

Places of lower rank: Margins in conversations

“…The history of nationalism is replete with efforts to apply concepts that evolved in northwestern Europe into very different geographical contexts; such efforts plague places in Europe as much as those outside that region (Agnew, 2007b). Much of the twentieth-century bloodshed in Europe can be traced to such a reordering of places and peoples deemed not-yet-national and hence lower-ranked in hegemonic understandings of space.…”

Narrative claims on regions: prospecting for spatial identities among social movements in Finland

“…Nevertheless, the constructed narrative of regional identity is not a stagnant edifice, since both regions and such narratives are processes, sociocultural artefacts that emerge, become institutionalized and at times deinstitutionalize or disappear (Paasi 1996). Storying regions' distinct time -spaces can, of course, be important references for the identities of people (Agnew 2007;Bialasiewicz 2003;Tomaney 2007). If a region is transmuted into an encompassing story, it can 'perform pedagogical, emotional, and taxonomic work' (Price 2010).…”

Wounds that won't heal: cartographic anxieties and the quest for territorial integrity in Georgia

“…However, there has not been much exploration of cartographic anxieties outside the South Asia region. The few exceptions include analyses of Greece and Australia, with scholars explicitly making the connection between employing discourses of fear with concern over national borders (Agnew 2007, Chaturvedi and Doyle 2010a, Chaturvedi and Doyle 2010b; see also Painter 2008). By focusing on Georgia, this article serves to provide another new place for a detailed case study of cartographic anxieties, highlighting the role of national maps as a critical element of territorial integrity discourses.…”