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Which Land Is Our Land? Domestic Politics and Change in the Territorial Claims of Stateless Nationalist Movements

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09636412.2014.964996

1556-1852

Harris Mylonas, Nadav G. Shelef,

Political Conflict and Governance

AbstractWhy do stateless nationalist movements change the area they see as appropriately constituting the nation-state they aspire to establish? This article draws a number of hypotheses from the literature on nationalism and state formation and compares the predictions of each about the timing, direction, and process of change to the empirical record in two stateless national movements in the post-Ottoman space: Fatah and the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Based on this investigation, the article argues that shifts in the areas stateless nationalist movements seek as their nation-states occur as a byproduct of the politically competitive domestic environment in which these movements are embedded. As nationalist movements engage in the competition for mundane power and survival, their leaders may alter their rhetoric about the extent of the desired national state to meet immediate political challenges that are often only loosely related to territorial issues. If these, initially tactical, rhetorical modulations successfully resolve the short-term challenges that spurred their adoption, they can become institutionalized as comprising the new territorial scope of the desired national state. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSFor their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article, the authors would like to thank Vemund Aarbakke, Nadine Akhund, Boaz Atzili, Nik Biziouras, Nathan Brown, Wilder Bullard, Ahsan Butt, Fotini Christia, Keith Darden, Evgeny Finkel, Basil Gounaris, Henry Hale, Lisel Hintz, Stathis Kalyvas, Ian Lustick, Aleksandar Matovski, Iakovos Michailides, Simeon Nichter, Sarah Parkinson,Wendy Pearlman, Annelle Sheline, Gerard Toal, Elpida Vogli, İpek K. Yosmaoğlu, Yael Zeira, and the editors and anonymous reviewers of Security Studies. We would also like to thank the participants at the Fletcher School-Political Science Department Joint Faculty Seminar; the Comparative Politics Workshop, George Washington University; the Ethnicity Data Workshop, University of California, Los Angeles; the Order, Conflict, and Violence Speaker Series, Yale University; the 16th and 17th Annual ASN World Conventions; the Ethnic Politics Workshop, George Washington University; and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.NotesTanisha M. Fazal and Ryan D. Griffiths, “Membership Has Its Privileges: The Changing Benefits of Statehood,” International Studies Review 16, no. 1 (2014): 79–106.Monty G. Marshall and Ted Robert Gurr, Peace and Conflict, 2005: A Global Survey of Armed Conflicts, Self Determination Movements, and Democracy (College Park, MD: Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, 2005). Others have identified sixty-two secessionist wars between 1940 and 2008. See, Monica D. Toft and Stephen Saideman, “Dynamics of Self- Determination,” in Peace and Conflict 2010, ed. J. Joseph Hewitt, Jonathon Wilkenfeld, and Ted Robert Gurr (London: Paradigm, 2010).Barbara F. Walter, Reputation and Civil War: Why Separatist Conflicts Are So Violent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Duke of Litta-Visconti-Arese, “Unredeemed Italy,” The North American Review 206 (October 1917): 561–74.Carole McGranahan, Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 39–45.Nadav G. Shelef, “Testing the Logic of Unilateral Withdrawal: Lessons from the History of the Labor Zionist Movement,” Middle East Journal 61, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 460–75.The MRO had many different names. In order to avoid confusion, we use the abbreviation “MRO,” even for periods when the organization used another name.Nadav G. Shelef, Evolving Nationalism: Homeland, Identity, and Religion in Israel, 1925–2005 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).On increasing returns in political contexts, see Douglass C. North, “A Transaction Cost Theory of Politics,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 2, no. 4 (October 1990): 355–67; Paul Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,” American Political Science Review 94, no. 2 (June 2000): 251–67.Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 52–53; Philip G. Roeder, Where Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Hein Goemans, “Bounded Communities: Territoriality, Territorial Attachment, and Conflict,” in Territoriality and Conflict in an Era of Globalization, ed. Miles Kahler and Barbara F. Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); David B. Carter and Hein E. Goemans, “The Making of the Territorial Order: New Borders and the Emergence of Interstate Conflict,” International Organization 65, no. 2 (April 2011): 275–309.Abd El-Fattah Ibrahim El-Sayed Baddour, Sudanese-Egyptian Relations: a Chronological and Analytical Study (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), 185, 194–200; P.M. Holt, A Modern History of the Sudan (New York: Praeger, 1963), 161, 178–79. Holt, however, also notes that Egyptian assertions of sovereignty over Sudan began to decline already in the aftermath of the Free Officers coup in 1952, suggesting, perhaps, that the change was already underway before Sudanese independence.For example, Chaim Kaufmann, “When All Else Fails: Ethnic Population Transfers and Partitions in the Twentieth Century,” International Security 23, no. 2 (Autumn 1998): 120–56; Stephen M. Saideman and R. William Ayers, For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore, The Size of Nations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).This account, however, raises potential concerns about endogeneity since the many “settlement projects” around the world suggest that the target of population movements may be shaped by beliefs about the extent of desired national state.Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 46.Harris Mylonas, The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 26–35; Bridget Coggins, “Friends in High Places: International Politics and the Emergence of States from Secessionism,” International Organization 65, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 433–67.Maria Theresa O’Shea, Trapped Between the Map and Reality: Geography and Perceptions of Kurdistan (New York: Routledge, 2004), 149.See, for example, Walter, Reputation and Civil War.George Finlay, History of the Greek Revolution (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1861).O’Shea, Trapped Between the Map and Reality, 143.A prominent example is the Biafra movement. See John Boye Ejobowah, “Who Owns the Oil? The Politics of Ethnicity in the Niger Delta of Nigeria,” Africa Today 47, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 29–47.See Shelef, Evolving Nationalism.For a detailed discussion of how a “lock-in” process works, see Stacie E. Goddard, Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).Shelef, Evolving Nationalism.Alvin Rabushka and Kenneth Shepsle, Politics in Plural Societies: A Theory of Democratic Instability (Columbus, OH: Merrill, 1972), 66–88; Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 349–64.Roger Eatwell, “The Rebirth of Right-Wing Charisma? The Cases of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Vladimir Zhirinovsky,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3 (2002): 1–23.Stephen M. Saideman, “Inconsistent irredentism? Political Competition, Ethnic Ties, and the Foreign Policies of Somalia and Serbia,” Security Studies 7, no. 3 (1998): 51–93; Kanchan Chandra, “Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability,” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 2 (June 2005): 235–52.Shelef, Evolving Nationalism. Saideman and Ayers's finding of a tradeoff between irredentism and xenophobia is also consistent with this logic. See Saideman and Ayers, For Kin or Country. For a more general treatment of the ability to trade “sacred values,” see Jeremy Ginges, Scott Atran, Douglas Medin, and Khalil Shikaki, “Sacred Bounds on the Rational Resolution of Violent Political Conflict,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 18 (2007): 7357–60.This level of analysis builds on the recent attention paid to endogenous processes of institutional transformation more broadly. See, for example, James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, “A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change,” in Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, ed. James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also Ian S. Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).For an elaboration of the likelihood of such contestation see, Rawi Abdelal et al., “Identity as a Variable,” Perspectives on Politics 4, no. 4 (December 2006): 695–711.Following Wimmer and Feinstein, we define stateless nationalist movements as political organizations in which the membership is formally defined, the leadership roles are institutionalized, the representation of the relevant national community as a whole is claimed, and the goal is to achieve either independence or autonomy. See, Andreas Wimmer and Yuval Feinstein, “The Rise of the Nation-State across the World, 1816–2001,” American Sociological Review 75, no. 5 (October 2010): 764–90.For instance, there is an important debate about the identity and aspirations of the population inhabiting the Balkans at the end of the 19th century. Scholars have argued that people in Macedonia were either a-national, ethno-national, or even supranational. For more see, Tchavdar Marinov, “Famous Macedonia, the Land of Alexander: Macedonian Identity at the Crossroads of Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian Nationalism,” in Entangled Histories of the Balkans: Volume One: National Ideologies and Language Policies, ed. Roumen Dontchev Daskalov and Tchavdar Marinov (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2013), 273–330; Tchavdar Marinov, “We, the Macedonians: The Paths of Macedonian Supra-Nationalism (1878–1912),” in We, the People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe, ed. Diana Mishkova (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009), 107–38.Anderson, Imagined Communities, 52–53; Roeder, Where Nation-States Come From; Goemans, “Bounded Communities.”For instance, our study of the territorial changes in the scope of the national state desired by the MRO ends when the MRO was completely captured by Bulgarian interests and began acting as Bulgaria's proxy. There are, of course, other potential reasons for organizational discontinuity. See Verta Taylor, “Social Movement Continuity: The Women's Movement in Abeyance,” American Sociological Review 54, no. 5 (1989): 761–75. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 173–75.For empirical approaches to distinguishing “strategic” from “sincere” talk in nationalist contexts, see Shelef, Evolving Nationalism; Saideman and Ayers, For Kin or Country; Mylonas, The Politics of Nation-Building.Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and the Indivisibility of Territory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 16.Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “Taking Stock: The Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 4, no. 1 (June 2001): 391–416, 402.Dustin H. Tingley and Barbara F. Walter, “Can Cheap Talk Deter?: An Experimental Analysis,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 55, no. 6 (December 2011): 996–1020.For more on this aspect of case selection, see John Gerring, Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 56–150.See Shelef, Evolving Nationalism.There were other conceptions of the appropriate borders of the Palestinian national state. These included both those of Arab nationalists who saw Palestine as part of a larger pan-Arab state and those who sought some link between Jordan and Palestine. By the time Fatah emerged, however, these views were considerably less significant than the vision of Palestine in the borders of the 1922 British Mandate.Palestinian National Council, “Political Programme for the Present Stage of the Palestine Liberation Organization Drawn up by the Palestinian National Council, Cairo, June 9, 1974,” Journal of Palestine Studies 3, no. 4 (Summer 1974): 224–25 (emphasis added).“Palestinian National Liberation Movement, Fatah: The Political Platform (ratified by the Sixth General Congress of the Movement on August 8, 2009).” Reproduced in Michael Bröning, The Politics of Change in Palestine: State-Building and Non-Violent Resistance (New York: Pluto Press, 2011), 204.Dan Williams, “Abbas Hints Has No ‘Right of Return’ To Home in Israel,” Reuters, 1 November 2012.Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian Movement, 1949–1993 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 284. See also Muhammad Muslih, “Towards Coexistence: An Analysis of the Resolutions of the Palestine National Council,” Journal of Palestine Studies 19, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 3–29.Joost R. Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women's Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 40–45.Alain Gresh, The PLO: The Struggle Within (London: Zed Books, 1987), 81–86.See the arguments by Abu Iyad, one of Fatah's founders, in Palestinian Leaders Discuss the New Challenges for the Resistance, ed. Mahmoud Darwish (Beirut: Palestine Research Center, 1974); Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, 361.Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, 349.Ibid., 286, 447–48; Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada, 12, 43–45.Helena Lindholm Schulz, The Reconstruction of Palestinian Nationalism: Between Revolution and Statehood (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1999), 57; Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization: People, Power and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 171–73.The Israeli (Arab) Communist Party accepted partition in 1947, and the Jordanian Communist Party did so in 1969. Gresh, The PLO, 72–73, 133.The continued relative moderation of the West Bank population (as well as the economic benefits of maintaining this position) help explain why competition with Hamas has not led to outbidding by Fatah.Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, 334.Ibid., 338.For more on the rise of the West Bank Palestinians in Palestinian politics, see Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State; Schulz, The Reconstruction of Palestinian Nationalism, 52; Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization, 178; Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada, 13–14.Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, 688–89.See, for example, Hanan Ashrawi, This Side of Peace (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); Abu Iyad (Salah Khalaf), My Home, My Land: A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle (New York: Times Books, 1980), 139; Issa Al-Shuaibi, “The Development of Palestinian Entity-Consciousness: Part 3,” Journal of Palestine Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 99–124, 105.Sabri Jiryis, “On Political Settlement in the Middle East: The Palestinian Dimension,” Journal of Palestine Studies 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1977): 3–25, 5; Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, 335.Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, 155.Ibid., 51, 82–83, 223, 341.Ibid., 173.Khalil Shikaki, “Refugees and the Legitimacy of Palestinian-Israeli Peace Making,” in Arab-Jewish Relations: From Conflict to Resolution? Essays in Honour of Professor Moshe Ma’oz, ed. Elie Podeh and Asher Kaufman (Brighton, England: Sussex Academic Press, 2006).Moshe Ma’oz, “The Palestinian Guerrilla Organizations and the Soviet Union,” in Palestinian Arab Politics, ed. Moshe Ma’oz (Jerusalem: Academic Press, 1975), 96; Galia Golan, “Moscow and the PLO: The Ups and Downs of a Complex Relationship,” in The PLO and Israel: From Armed Conflict to Political Solution, 1964—1994, ed. Avraham Sela and Moshe Ma’oz (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 121, 26–27; Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, 342.Ma’oz, “Palestinian Guerrilla Organizations,” 100. For another skeptical assessment of the role of Soviet influence in this regard, see Golan, “Moscow and the PLO.”See the explicit arguments by PFLP secretary general George Habash for resisting Soviet pressure in Darwish, Palestinian Leaders, 23.For more on the cartography of Macedonia, see Henry R. Wilkinson, Maps and Politics: A Review of Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1951); İpek K. Yosmaoğlu, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878-1908 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 91–130.Krste Misirkov, Makedonikes Ipotheseis [On Macedonian Matters] (Sofia, Bulgaria: Liberalnij Klub, 1903; Athens, Greece: Petsiva, 2003), 94. To be sure, claims for “Macedonia to the Macedonians” were made by elites who at different points in time had self-identified as Bulgarians or even Serbs; these individuals were mostly subsumed in the respective Bulgarian or Serbian national movements. The Greek national movement understood Macedonia as part of its national territory on the basis of Hellenistic times. See Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, Historia tou hellenikou ethnous [History of the Hellenic Nation] (1853; repr., Athens, Hermes E.P.E., 1970).Misirkov, Makedonikes Ipotheseis, 96; Keith Brown, Loyal Unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013); Duncan M. Perry, The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Liberation Movements 1893–1903 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1988); Nadine Akhund, “Muslim Representation in the Three Ottoman Vilayets of Macedonia: Administration and Military Power (1878–1908),” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 29, no. 4 (December 2009): 443–54.Perry, The Politics of Terror, 42. The San Stefano treaty influenced the territorial claim made by the MRO, but the San Stefano borders did not perfectly overlap with the Ottoman vilayets. The boundaries of the vilayets claimed by the MRO corresponded to the 1864 restructuring of the Ottoman administration. See Raymond Detrez and Barbara Segaert, Europe and the Historical Legacies in the Balkans (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008).Perry, The Politics of Terror, 40–41, 57.Ibid., 65. Despite use of the term “Bulgarian,” this group had its origins and its headquarters within geographic Macedonia and repeatedly denied the charge that it was subordinated to Bulgarian interests (although it did receive help from Bulgaria). See Vemund Aarbakke, “Who Can Mend a Broken Heart?,” in Macedonian Identities through Time. Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Yannis Stefanidis, Vlasis Vlasidis, and Evangelos Kofos (Thessaloniki, Greece: Epikentro, 2010). This tension within the MRO ultimately led to the internal split between its left and right wings (see below).Perry, The Politics of Terror, 109–10.To be sure, some argue that the MRO always had strong Bulgarian influences. See Aarbakke, “Who Can Mend a Broken Heart?,” 239–77; Evangelos Kofos, Nationalism and Communism in Macedonia (Thessaloniki, Greece: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1964); Dimitar Benchev, Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Macedonia (Lanham, MA: Scarcrow Press, 2009). Perry, The Politics of Terror, however, convincingly argues that the MRO lost its independence only after this period.Perry, The Politics of Terror; Manol Pandevski, “The Macedonian Revolutionary Organization between 1893 and 1918: Foundation and Development,” Balkan Forum 1, no. 5 (1993): 137–51, 144.Perry, The Politics of Terror, 141.Fikret Adanir, “The Macedonians in the Ottoman Empire, 1878–1912,” in The Formation of National Elites, ed. Andreas Kappeler (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Institute of National History, A History of the Macedonian People (Skopje, Macedonia: Macedonian Review, 1979); Aarbakke, “Who Can Mend a Broken Heart?” For a different view that sees the MRO as Bulgarian proxy all along, see Spyridon Sfetas, I Diamorfosi Tis Slavomakedonikis Taftotitas. Mia Epodini Diadikasia [The Configuration of the Slavomacedonian Identity. A Painful Procedure] (Thessaloniki, Greece: Vanias, 2003), 53.Pandevski, “The Macedonian Revolutionary Organization,” 149. For additional evidence of the capture of the MRO's right wing by Bulgarian nationalists, see Perry, The Politics of Terror; Sfetas, I Diamorfosi Tis Slavomakedonikis Taftotitas; Aarbakke, “Who Can Mend a Broken Heart?”British National Archives, FO 371/14317 [C5316,/82/7], “The Origins of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and its History since the Great War,” memorandum from Central Department, 1 July 1930, 9; Pandevski, “The Macedonian Revolutionary Organization,” 149.Ivan Katardziev, “VMRO and the Macedonian Liberation Movement after the First World War,” Balkan Forum 1 (1993): 151–64.Perry, The Politics of Terror; Katardziev, “VMRO and the Macedonian Liberation Movement.”To be sure, the Bulgarian Exarchate, the Greek and the Serbian national movements, as well as the Ottoman Empire, were also competing for their loyalty.For more on the origins of the two movements and the historiographical disputes between Skopje and Sofia, see Nadine Lange-Akhund, The Macedonian Question from Western Sources (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 35-54.Duncan M. Perry, Stefan Stambolov and the Emergence of Modern Bulgaria, 1870–1895 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).Christ Anastasoff, The Tragic Peninsula: A History of the Macedonian Movement for Independence since 1878 (St. Louis, MO: Blackwell Wielandy, 1938), 63.Ibid., 22.Basil C. Gounaris, To Makedoniko Zitima apo ton 19o eos ton 210 aiona. Istoriografikes proseggiseis [The Macedonian Question from the 19th to the 21st Century. Historiographical Approaches] (Athens, Greece: Alexandria Publications, 2010), 148.Perry, The Politics of Terror; Frederick Moore, “The Macedonian Committees and the Insurrection,” in The Balkan Question: The Present Condition of the Balkans and of European Responsibilities, ed. Luigi Villari (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1905), 185.Brown, Loyal Unto Death.Vemund Aarbakke, “The Region of Macedonia,” unpublished manuscript.Dimitris Livanios, The Macedonian Question: Britain and the Southern Balkans, 1939–1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6. For more on the Ottoman census, see Vemund Aarbakke, Ethnic Rivalry and the Quest for Macedonia, 1870–1913 (New York: East European Monographs, 2003). See also, Wilkinson, Maps and Politics; Aarbakke, Ethnic Rivalry and the Quest for Macedonia; Carlyle Aylmer Macartney, National States and National Minorities (London: Oxford University Press, 1934).Perry, The Politics of Terror.For instance, these dynamics continued to shape the territorial claims of Zionist movements even after the establishment of the state of Israel. See, Shelef, Evolving Nationalism.Stateless nationalist movements that seek the revision of territorial borders are, by definition, unrestrained by this norm. For arguments about the impact of norms against changing borders on states, see Mark W. Zacher, “The Territorial Integrity Norm: International Boundaries and the Use of Force,” International Organization 55, no. 2 (March 2001): 215–50; Tanisha M. Fazal, State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Boaz Atzili, Good Fences, Bad Neighbors: Border Fixity and International Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).