BIBLIOGRAPHY
Title | "Yugoslav Communism and the Macedonian Question" |
Author | Palmer, Stephen and Robert King |
Publisher | Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books |
Annotation | A ‘classical’ study of the political usages of Macedonian national identity by the Yugoslav communist leadership. Palmer and King describe thoroughly the development of the CPY’s official line concerning the identity of Macedonia’s Slavic population during the Interwar period and throughout the Second World war. They explain the promotion of the view of a separate Macedonian nation as a means to achieve the loyalty of the locals through the acknowledgement of certain national particularity of theirs. In the same time, Palmer and King indicate the reasons why the Yugoslav communists nevertheless failed to mobilize an important support before 1941 and demonstrate that it was only under the slogan of ‘unified Macedonia’ that Tito’s emissaries finally achieved such a support from 1943 on. They likewise suggest a detailed overview of the post-1945 political situation in the newly proclaimed Yugoslav Popular republic of Macedonia and of the socio-economic and cultural aspects of Macedonian ‘nation building’ directed by Belgrade. However, Palmer and King’s approach remains too ‘top-down’ based and lacks a perspective ‘from below’. In this both instrumentalist and essentialist manner, they tend to present the Macedonian nationalism as a purely Yugoslav Titoist invention and fall short to explain the national ‘transformation’ of what they see, together with the scientists from Sofia, as ‘Macedonian Bulgarians’. (also relevant to sub-field 2) |
Author of Annotation | Tchavdar Marinov |