Nationalism vs. transnationalism
I was recently reminded that this year marks the 25th anniversary of the late author, academic and political scientist Samuel Huntington’s (1927–2008) classic work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. His work, published in 1996, came only a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and, in fact, was published in the same year that I made Macedonia my second home…but that’s another story for later this month.
While the central thesis of The Clash of Civilizations was about emerging and future conflicts and clashes between various groupings of civilizations based on a combination of factors including geography, religion, ethnicity, and more, one current conflict he did not foresee, or at least write about in that book, were the internal clashes and conflicts within Western civilization itself.
In an essay he wrote about eight years after The Clash of Civilizations, entitled Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite, Huntington wrote “The public is nationalist, elites transnationalist.” While the essay focuses, as the title suggests, on American elites, that elitism, especially now, 17 years after the essay first appeared, transfers over to all Western countries, and many developing countries. The elites in every country live and breathe transnationalism while their publics are, to one degree or another, nationalist, or, if I can put it slightly differently, sovereigntist: they like having independence and sovereignty and do not enjoy farming out that independence and sovereignty to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in faraway places that do not care about them.
Let me now apply this to Macedonia.
Having been involved now with Macedonia for 25 years, I have had privilege, as it were, of seeing Macedonia both from the inside (as I lived there from 1996 through much of 2003, and then again spent a great deal of time there during the aughts, and of course return as often as I can) as well as from the outside, being an outsider, a non-Macedonian, myself. And as a keen observer of human nature, cultures, policy, and politics, I have seen how certain classes of individuals in Macedonia became transnational elites. While there were elites in Macedonia while it was part of Yugoslavia, shortly after independence in 1991 these elites “transitioned,” for lack of a better word, into transnational elites. They were courted by their transnational Western counterparts (who actually still look down on them with contempt but find them to be useful), groomed, seduced and weened on the “benefits” of transnationalism and so became seduced by the siren song of power, accolades from foreign politicians and others, all-expense-paid foreign trips, job, and more.
Who are these Macedonians? They are, broadly, Macedonian government officials, Macedonians working in the foreign embassies and other international organizations both private and public, academics, the leadership and staff of civil society organizations, and many in the media. Not every Macedonian working in these institutions is a transnationalist, but a majority of them are. They have more in common with their counterparts in Paris than they do with Macedonians in Prilep. And they are just fine with that.
While I look at someone like Xhabir Deralla of the Macedonian NGO Civil, complaining bitterly about “anti-Western propaganda against civil society” in Macedonia, I see a transnational elitist who has much more in common with his counterparts in the American and Western European taxpayer-funded political institutions and foundations in and out of Macedonia than with ordinary Macedonians. When he writes, as he recently did, that those attacking him and his fellow NGOs, “openly oppose the Euro-Atlantic aspirations” of the country, well, that is merely a smokescreen to say “anyone who opposes EU membership” is an enemy and must be defeated. For an organization that preaches tolerance and diversity, it ain’t. And in fact Deralla writes that his organization promotes “antinationalism” which to my mind translates to progressive transnationalism, while praising the current Macedonian government writing that they are “sincerely dedicated to EU integration and promoting equality and justice in the country.”
(To be fair to Deralla, in the article referenced above he is bringing up the fact, on World Press Freedom Day, that he and his colleagues have endured death threats, threats of bodily harm, insults, bad language, and much more from those who disagree with him. And it must be said that death threats and other threats of bodily harm have no place in discourse and are wrong. But insults, so-called “hate speech,” bad language, and the like are part and parcel of the give and take of social media.)
My question to these transnational elites in Macedonia, specifically, is what is wrong with keeping your name, Macedonia, your identity as Macedonians and your Macedonian history, culture, educational curricula, and much more? Why do you so despise it and why do you so loathe those who want to keep all of this? Is it mere money? Power? Prestige? A combination of all of these? Likely the latter.
While there are real differences between the political right and left, at the end of the day this is the real battle the world faces and especially within democracies, of whatever flavor, whether parliamentarian, presidential, or something else: the desire, mostly by the publics, to hang on to the “mystic chords of memory,” tradition, history, faith, the ways and the wisdom of the past, and all that makes a nation — a people and a place — what it is, versus the transnational elites who are ready — and willing — to jettison all of that in favor of an amorphous, ambiguous, anyplace that knows no loyalty except to a few ephemeral and fleeting things like money and power.
