No Borders, No Nations: Making Greece in Macedonia

Abstract

Macedonia's centrality to the making of Greece over the past century provides the empirical grounding for an exploration of how cultural-symbolic borrowing rather than cross-border othering has been crucial for border making in Modern Greece and, by extension, everywhere in the world. There has been a recent revival in studies of borders between states and what they mean in relation to both the history of state formation and the effects of globalization on state power. Typically, however, the borders between modern “nation-states” are seen as originating in cross-pressures between pairs of neighboring states just the same in Africa today as, say, in nineteenth-century France. The wider contemporary geographical context may be invoked in terms of the “sides” taken in particular border disputes by other nearby states or by the Great Powers. Rarely, however, is the wider historical-geopolitical context invoked as the primary source of the practices, simultaneously material and symbolic, that produce the desire for precise borders in the first place. With increased globalization, however, the making of Greece in Macedonia may become increasingly problematic because the political logic of all national border-making is increasingly in question.

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