BULGARIAN-SPEAKING MUSLIMS - Lalev

disintegration of the last surviving multiethnic empires – Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman
Turkey – during the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. Within these empires, the fledgling
nations existed under a feudal social order and nation-building was a sudden and violent process for
them. With no foundation of sovereign government or tradition in democratic rule, these newly
independent peoples altered the original meaning of nationalism from respect for individual liberties
to patriotic imposition of – what was perceived as – the collective will of the leading ethno-religious
communities. 5
Several decades after Hans Kohn (and others 6 ) formulated the definition of nationalism, in
the 1980s and 1990s, one of the most prominent modern theoreticians of nationalism, Benedict
Anderson, continues to analyze the emergence of nationalism in predominantly positive terms as a
unifying force within the nation-state. Anderson’s signature argument is that nationalism, “nationness,”
and national state – taken as synonyms – are “cultural artifacts” 7 which ruling elites
formulated in response to pressing socio-political needs at certain points in history to consolidate the
masses under one leadership and under common ideology. Although Anderson’s analysis appears to
be in line with Kohn’s positive idea of nationalism, his concept of the socially constructed nature of
the phenomenon also condones the negative notion of nationalism as totalitarian, coercive, and
violent ideology. On one hand, Anderson says, the very idea of nation-state evokes the image of
(imagined) community, i.e. an entity of fraternity or comradeship based on equality among people
from within. And it is this notion of imagined (socially constructed) egalitarian fraternity among the
(majority) members of the national state that makes people willing to fight and die for an ideal. 8 On
the other hand, the national ideal makes people willing to mutilate or kill for it. This proves to be
particularly true for the people of those budding nation-states which have just emerged from
oppressive foreign rule. For previously subjugated people, the ultimate goal of nationalism was the
5 Kohn, 87.
6 See footnote 1.
7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York:
Verso, 1991), 4.
8 Ibid., passim.
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