SCREENING SOULS
BUILDING NATIONS

MACedonia(s) as a Laboratory for Balkan-wide AUTHoritarianism

Principal Investigator: Dr. Tasos Kostopoulos
Funded by: European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC-STG 2022), G.A. 101077076
Hosted by: Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece
Start date: 1 March 2023, End date: 29 February 2028

The Project

The project “MACAUTH: Screening Souls, Building Nations. Macedonia(s) as a Laboratory for Balkan-wide Authoritarianism” aims to investigate a little-explored and usually neglected aspect of the Macedonian Question throughout the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century: namely, the function of the Macedonian Question as a catalyst and a testing ground for the emergence, development and consolidation of authoritarian state policies on a nation-wide scale in all the Balkan nation-states involved. In other words, how the tools used by the rival nation states to extract national loyalty in late Ottoman Macedonia, where nation had been widely conceived first and foremost as a political party, were subsequently transformed into a far broader method of social and political control.

MACAUTH examines the transfer of particular administrative practices of surveillance, control and political indoctrination, as well as state-sponsored violence and its ideological justification in the name of national expediency, from the initial field of their application in Ottoman and post-Ottoman Macedonia to the mainstream political and social life of Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia/Yugoslavia, as well as to the respective diasporic communities.

The impact of the same heritage in Romania, Albania, the Ottoman Empire and its successor nation state, the Turkish Republic, is also assessed.

Axes of Research

MACAUTH explores four different but complementary research axes:

  • The elaboration of comprehensive bureaucratic taxonomic systems for the assessment, monitoring, and classification of the citizenry’s national and/or social “beliefs”, and the impact of these practices on the everyday life of ordinary citizens.
  • The development of paramilitarism and/or the systematic exercise of state-sponsored violence as means of regulating internal political conflict.
  • The transfer of such close surveillance to the Diaspora, of both Macedonian and non-Macedonian origin, in order to control it from a national and/or political standpoint.
  • The use and mobilization of the Macedonian Question for the ideological legitimization of authoritarian governance, an endeavor whose long-lasting impact is still felt today.