Are we witnessing the Macedonian question of

the 21st century?

Ramazan Hakki Oztan

Thursday, 16 October 2014 11:09

The conflict in Libya was in this sense only a dress rehearsal, where the failure of Russia and China to veto the UN
resolution translated into a swift air-strike campaign by the NATO-led forces with a semblance of international backing

The developments in Iraq and Syria today bear strong resemblances to the dynamics of political
competition that unravelled in the Ottoman Balkans in the late 1890s and early 1900s. In both
settings, albeit a century apart, local actors have carried out their political fights by manipulating
existing international rivalries. Both settings have seen the use of extreme violence as an important
tool in forging political loyalties and sustaining new ones, resulting in floods of refugees to
neighbouring countries. In both regions, Western nationals were targeted for diverse purposes, as in
the kidnapping of Ellen Maria Stone by the Macedonian revolutionaries in 1901 and the recent
murders of James Foley and Steven Sotloff by the "Islamic State" (ISIS). While the responses by the
international community to both conflicts has featured a similar political language that highlighted
lofty humanitarian ideals, the same international actors persisted to take part in these seemingly

local confrontations where they continued to invest monies, armies and energies in fighting
aggressively what were essentially proxy wars.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, the term "Macedonian question" was oft-used in European
political discourse to designate the political future of the three Ottoman provinces located in the
Balkans. Ottoman officials avoided the use of the name "Macedonia"' for fear of consolidating it but a
regional and transnational battle was underway in the name of the rights of the region's Christians
then under what many saw as the repressive rule of the Ottoman sultan/caliph seated in Istanbul.
After the turn of the twentieth century, the region began to see a rise in guerrilla warfare and military
violence, muscled and supported by the locals and funded by a handful of external and domestic
sponsors. The political destiny of the Ottoman territories in the Balkans thus constituted the core of
the Macedonian question in Western capitals, a question that not only kept Russia, Britain, France,
Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and others invested deeply in the region but also came to
animate the political scene on a local level. Armed with new weapons such as dynamite as well as a
print media handy for propaganda purposes, a host of revolutionaries emerged in Ottoman
Macedonia and began to advance competing political claims on a daily basis which included, but
were not limited to, the declaration of statehood now and then and the sudden but unlikely shifts in
alliances.
The inhabitants of Ottoman Macedonia lived next to one another for centuries with little or no
problem. As a result, they constituted truly mixed communities where Bulgarians spoke and prayed
in Greek; Muslims and Christians were intermarried; Jews traded with Arabs; and some remained
Catholic or Orthodox, while others insisted on more heterodox beliefs. Confessional, ethnic, religious
and class lines of identification were overlapping, and loyalties thus remained multiple. Let's make
no mistake, though, the region was far from an ideal society devoid of any socio-economic and
political problems. In the end, the Ottoman metropole had developed a chronic inability to address
the diverse issues that have beset the region, partially because of the unfavourable shifts in power
dynamics that constrained the Ottoman reformist efforts. Yet, what made things particularly violent in
Macedonia was the complex relationship that developed between local and international actors.
Revolutionaries continued to find sponsors and leverages abroad to advance their causes, and
Western and regional capitals in turn used the local revolutionaries in pressuring the Ottoman sultan
to their will.
Today, the patterns of co-dependency between local actors' agendas and inter-state rivalries do not
seem to have changed at all. In Iraq and Syria, the interests of regional and international powers
continue to help spawn and nurture dangerous intra-state competitors like ISIS. However, the latter
cannot be picked-on as the odd one out, for the international competition over the region, with a set
of unintended consequences, has multiple historical precedents in the post-WWII period. The larger
context of competition over the Middle East dates back to the consolidation of the Islamic Republic
of Iran after the revolution of 1979. As Shi'ism gained a strong political platform complete with a
charismatic leader in Ayatollah Khomeini, a Sunni backlash across the entire Middle East,
sponsored generously by oil-rich Saudi Wahhabism, turned Saddam's Iraq into a warzone with Iran,
resulted in the politicisation of Shi'ism and Sunnism in places like Lebanon, and led to outright
massacres such as that which took place in Hama, Syria, in 1982. This first phase of competition
over the region was complete as the USA, together with a host of other Western powers, decided to
take things into their own hands instead of playing behind the curtains. The result was a fragile but
pro-Western democratic state of Iraq.

Then, by 2011, the waves of uprisings began which shook the foundations of the stable but
authoritarian regimes in the region; all of the latter were products of the particular political economies
established in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Arab Spring, as many termed it then,
was rooted locally in the popular dissatisfaction with such authoritarian regimes that had ruled over
the region since the fifties. While the uprisings were an expression of genuine popular desire for a
better future, it would have been nave to imagine that political transformations of this magnitude
would have remained immune to the powerful thrusts of regional and global political competition.
The destiny of the revolution in Egypt illustrated the point only too well; those saluted by one country
as the true heroes of democracy were seen by others as fundamentalists with deep authoritarian
roots. In just three years, as we have all seen, the politically unsettling push of the revolution in
Egypt was reversed by a regime that proved to be deeply resilient within the military and justice
system.
Nevertheless, it was not Yemen or Egypt but Syria where the ugliest episode of the inter-state
competition of the twentieth-first century would get a fresh head start. The conflict in Libya was in
this sense only a dress rehearsal, where the failure of Russia and China to veto the UN resolution
translated into a swift air-strike campaign by the NATO-led forces with a semblance of international
backing. The spill over effects of Libya both in terms of growing Russian and Chinese distrust and
the transfer of battle-hardened jihadists to Syria turned ancient Syrian towns and their hinterland
into the setting for the proxy-wars waged by international and regional powers. The amount of
money and the number of guns poured into Syria by a host of regional and international powers has
come to create new political platforms such as ISIS as well as a host of other groups with diverse
agendas and membership, waiting to capitalise on the next political opportunity to reach an
operational and thus sensational level. This seems to be an inevitable path, as the regional and
international powers led by the USA have continued to "contain" the threat of ISIS, which certainly
means not only the dispatch of more funds and guns to the region but also the emergence of more
political factions in the near future.
It is shocking to observe the tactical and rhetorical similarities between the way the West tried to
"solve" the Macedonian question in the early 1900s and the manners in which regional and Western
capitals are trying to address the threats that emanate from the Middle East today. The discourses
that highlight civilisational values and human rights as well as the notions of national, regional and
international security do not seem to have changed at all, nor does the vicious cycle of problems that
constantly "require" urgent outside attention and intervention. The Macedonian question in the
Ottoman Balkans came to a "resolution" after two-decades of protracted guerrilla warfare, followed
by two regional wars and then a global conflict in the shape of the First World War. For the past few
decades, the situation in Iraq and Syria has proved to be similarly resilient in the way that it has
constantly renewed and determined the course of regional and global political competition. One can
only hope that the resolution of the conflict in the Middle East will differ from its Macedonian
precedent.
The author is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, University of Utah, USA