Make Macedonia Great Again! The New Face of Skopje And The Macedonians’ Identity Dilemma

Papers

- Make Macedonia Great Again! The New Face of Skopje And The Macedonians’ Identity Dilemma
  From 2010, the Macedonian government has undertaken a project called “Skopje 2014”, aimed to renew the capital city Skopje not only by adopting neo-baroque style and building statues but also renaming the major streets, the stadium, the airport and the schools after the names of alleged ancestors that lived in “a glorious past”. Considering the turbulent past of the Macedonian nation-building, the paper seeks to analyse more in detail this “making Macedonia great again” by means of architecture, paying particular attention to the new state-promoted ‘ethnogenesis’ and the national narratives attached to it.
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- Ukraine’s East-West Regional Division
  The Ukrainian East-West division constitutes a part of the European East-West dichotomy. This dichotomy was well retranslated in Ukrainian settings. The paper aims to deconstruct the myth of the infamous Ukrainian East-West division. Apart from that, taken into the account the current developments, it is important for the author to show how Eastern Ukraine with its region Donbas have been trapped to the stereotypical Orientalism in the political and intellectual discourses and how the notion of Eastern Ukraine have been shifted eastwards in the course of war and reduced to the Donbas region.
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- The Angel of Nostalgia Trapped between East and West
  The paper focuses on the problem of East and West and the Central European paradigm as constructs for Western Europe to define itself against a distorting mirror where cultural, political and historical opposites of the hegemonic western story are contained. To address this issue, the article chooses to explore the literary works and debates of some writers trapped between East and West, always being pushed to the East, willing to flee to the West or rather opting for a vanishing point to liberate themselves from an etiquette in which they cannot recognize themselves.
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- Re-Inventing Eastern Europe or Re-Inventing Europe?
  ontrary to this position, I address the intellectual and literary imagination of the European margins from within and conclude that the inhabitants of the imagined geopolitical entity of Eastern Europe, to which I also belong, are bound to have more differentiated, even though at times colliding perspectives. I compare essayistic, historical, and fictional works to do justice to the different perspectives in mapping the European continent, and I also posit the questions of cultural and political belonging to the European continent in the context of spatial theory, as elaborated by Irit Rogoff and Edward Soja.
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- Cold War and Helsinki: Eastern Europe Defined by Human Rights
  Local groups in Communist countries were inspired by the mention of civil liberties as a rallying call for action. One grassroots organization was Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, formed by human rights defenders - including playwright Vaclav Havel - in a manifesto on January 1, 1977 to monitor the faulty observation of the Helsinki standards proclaimed exactly seventeen months earlier. Another manifest was the Solidarity movement in Poland. Organized by Lech Walesa, an electrician in Gdansk's Lenin shipyards, felt empowered by such civic liberties as the rights to freedom of expression and forming political parties.
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- The Puzzles of Turkey’s EU Accession Negotiations: Discursive Constructions of the EU in ‘Loosely-Coupled’ Two-Level Games
  The paper will argue that neither the conditionality approach nor the clash-of-civilization thesis can explain major puzzles in Turkey’s EU accession negotiations, in particular the changing positions of the German and Turkish government. The paper will suggest the model of 'loosely coupled two-level games', in which government parties on both sides mainly act with a view to the domestic political arena.
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- Baltic Identities in Quest between the Competing Memory Discourses
  In my research I am taking identity formation process in conjunction with social memory. Approaches to memory are seeking an agency behind the practice of remembering and representation of the past. While individuals ‘do remembering’ the content of memory comes from outside the individual, and rests on different collectives (Olick 1999).
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- Subaltern Youth Identities in Bosnia-Herzegovina
  This paper examines how the 2014 social unrest in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) manifested on the Spanish Square in the divided city Mostar, revealing how counterpublics reimagine citizenship and identity. Here citizens reimagined space and identity by using the Square as a site of occupational protest, embodying the counterpublics of resistance and giving life to alternative identities through the language of rights.
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- The Role of Collective Identities Management in Offsetting the Ethno – Social Distance (Case of the Republic of Macedonia)
  The Macedonian case of managing the collective identities offers a comprehensive restructuring of the society, using both positive and negative social and historical memory narratives.
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- Representing the Margins: ‘Gypsy’ in Early Modern Ottoman Discourse
  Drawing upon Ottoman narrative and visual sources such as dream manuals, literary texts, travelogues and miniatures, this paper will first examine how Gypsies were imagined and represented in early modern Ottoman-Turkish discourse.
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