Victims and avengers of the nation: the politics of refugee legacy in the Southern Balkans

Irwin Sanders was one of the pioneer social anthropologists who performed fieldwork in the Balkans. In the 1930s he was stationed in the outskirts of Sofia. Four out of the eight teachers in the village school, he wrote, were not natives of Bulgaria. They originated either from Macedonia or Dobrudja, both recently lost to Bulgaria. In one classroom, on top of the blackboard, he saw a sign: [There will be no peace as long as the Treaty of Neuilly stands]. This sentence was the cornerstone of Bulgarian inter-war revisionism. Within 10 years both teachers and students would discover in the most unpleasant way the bitter surprises which the memory of vengeance holds in store. The case of inter-war Bulgaria is anything but exceptional. Refugee memories are a common trauma for all Balkan peoples. In fact the dislocation of populations was practised in the region as a most effective recipe to secure the existence of nation-states. However, dislocation and ethnic cleansing were only one side of building ethnic nations. In recent years this particular side has been discussed and explored mostly within the context of a worldwide polemic launched against ethnic nationalism by the proponents of civic nationalism. By exposing the refugee drama as a proof of ethnic nations’ inability to handle minority issues, they point out the dangerous side effects that the quest for homogeneity and historicity has. In short, the objective of this tactic is to make such ideological concerns look ‘imagined’, to the extent that any relevant political