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BIBLIOGRAPHY
| Title | "IMRO+100=FYROM? The Politics of Macedonian Historiography". In The New Macedonian Question, edited by James Pettifer, 60-78. |
| Author | Troebst, Stefan |
| Publisher | Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press |
| Annotation | The article is divided into two major parts the first of which deals with ‘the construction of tradition through the interpretation of history’. Troebst focuses on the historical narratives and the political usages of certain historical events and personalities in Macedonia and in Bulgaria as well as on the politico-historiographic polemics between the two countries. The second part contains Troebst’s own evaluation of the different historiographic claims and suggests an original vision of the history of the Macedonian national mobilization. The author asserts the ‘difficult phase B’ of the Macedonian case: according to him, there were two failed attempts for national agitation (between the foundation of the IMRO in 1893 and the uprising in 1903 and between the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and the final left-right split of the Macedonian movements in 1924) while the ‘phase C’ of the mass movement is identified with the critical decade after the proclamation of the Macedonian state in 1944. For Troebst, the picture is even more complicated by the ambiguity of the concept of ‘Macedonian people’ as well as of the one of ‘autonomy’ developed by the local revolutionary movement, by the role played by dissimilar Macedonian diasporas etc. Finally, he rejects the direct continuity between IMRO and the contemporary Republic of Macedonia claimed by ‘Skopje’s politicized historiography’. Unfortunately, Troebst fails to offer an analogous deconstruction of the highly politicized Bulgarian historiography on the Macedonian question. (also relevant to sub-fields 1, 2, 11) Apart from Drezov’s and Troebst’s texts, the collective volume of James Pettifer contains also other valuable articles dealing with diverse historical and political questions. |
| Author of Annotation | Tchavdar Marinov |