COMPLEX NATURE OF
ETHNICITY
Mgr. at Mgr. Michaela Straapcova
Outline
 Syllabus, Questions
 Theoretical aspects of Ethnicity
 Citizenship as a Part of Identity
 History and its impact on Kosovo’s character and
development
 Group projects
 Next lecture
2 Theoretical aspects of Ethnicity
Identity
Ethnicity
Approaches to ethnicity
What does it bring? Why does
it matter?
Identity
The fact of being who or what a
person or thing is
The characteristics determining
who or what a person or thing is
(Oxford dictionaries)
What is IDENTITY
 “people’s concepts of who they are, of what sort of people they
are, and how they relate to others” (Hogg and Abrams 1988, 2).
 „the way individuals and groups define themselves and are defined
by others on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, language, and
culture” (Deng 1995, 1).
 „the ways in which individuals and collectivities are distinguished in
their social relations with other individuals and collectivities” (Jenkins
1996, 4).
 “relatively stable, role-specific understandings and expectations
about self” (Wendt 1992, 397).
IDENTITY
 unique self
 sense of sameness social identity
 multifaceted, deeply contextual character
 by referring to those who lie outside the identity group
(females vs. males, Serbs vs. Albanians)
What is Ethnicity?
 a component of the identity profile
 ascriptive identity based primarily upon assumed kinship
 expressed by a combination of appearance, culture,
language, religion, origin, and so on
(Horowitz 1985)
 central to understanding ethnic conflict and interethnic
relations
Primordialism
 natural, objective feature of human identity
 genetic bonds
 equal footing with race and gender
 Conflict outcome of essential differences
 obsolete in the academic world
 holds power with many people
Constructivism
 socially imagined
 Constructed and reconstructed
 Created throw social interaction
 Contextual
 Dynamic, changeable
 dominant paradigm in the study of ethnicity and
nationalism
 Re-constructed when changes occur in the subjective
identification of individuals or in the entry rules for belonging to
a community
Max Weber
 „mode of drawing boundaries between individuals and
hence group-making.“
 Common origin
 Role of political community in fostering sense of common
ethnie and solidarity
 Perceived non-members avoided, despised
 Subjective aspects of reciprocal reaction (sexual
relationship)
Percentage of heterogamous marriages in
Yugoslavia by republics and autonomous regions
Thomas H. Eriksen
 Identity and its relation with a culture is a key component of
ethnicity
 „aspect of social relationship between agents, which
consider themselves as culturally distinctive from members of
other groups with whom they have a minimum of regular
interaction
 infinite number of versions of each culture - none of which
is more true than the others
Gerd Baumann
 concept of ethnicity is often reflexively ‘reified’ in a
way that places ethnicities beyond change
 ‘ Thingification’ or turning concepts into things
 Putative identity is turned into something hard,
unchangeable and absolute
 „Intuitive sceptics“ over entry rules
.. As the battlefront is nearing Zagreb and stories about atrocities are
creeping in, a certain transformation begins to shape. Whereas
before, she felt Yugoslavian and her putative Croatianess meant
nothing to her, she now feels this identity is closing in on her.
She compares national identity with wearing an ill-fitting shirt. … its
tight, short you don't like the colour but there is nothing else to
wear… Its hard to shrug off this Croatianess when at the same time
people are killed and massacred only because they are Croats.
In new state of Croatia, no one is allowed not to be a Croat. Even if
this is not what one would called freedom, perhaps it would be
morally unjust to tear off the shirt of the suffering nation …
(Balkan Express 1993: 52)
Slavenka Drakulic
Anthony D. Smith
 Ethnie
 "human population with shared ancestry myths, cultures,
histories, specific territory association sense of solidarity"
widespread in history, emerged and reemerged in different
period, continents, culture areas right up to the modern area
 ethnie as a precursor of nations, power of symbols, rituals,
traditions in construction of shared identity among members
of particular group
3 Ethno-symbolic components underlie all nations and
explain PERSISTANCE & VARIETY:
1. Ethno-Histories: the Golden Age of ethnic groups
2. Ethnic Election: the ethnic community as a Chosen
People
3. The Ancestral Homeland
Nationalism ethnic / civic
Benedict Anderson
 Cultural roots of the nation
 Convergence of capitalism, print technology and rise
of certain languages created a new form of
imagined community which set the stage for the
modern nation
 imagined political community inherently limited and
sovereign
(Anderson 1991: 6-7).
Ernest Gellner
 “Nations as a natural , God-given way of
classifying men, as an inherent…political destiny,
are a myth: nationalism, which sometimes takes preexisting
cultures and turns them into nations,
sometimes invents them, and often obliterates preexisting
cultures: that is reality.” (1983: 48).
 Focus on socio-economic conditions.
 Ethnicity matters because modern nation-state is build
on ethno-national principals of political legitimacy
Eric Hobsbawm
 liberal nationalism, economic expansion and
unification
 I. economic or liberal nationalism based on
economic viability.
 the nation was based on the THRESHOLD principle
a state had to be of sufficient size to form a viable
unit of development. If it fell below this threshold, it
had no historic justification
 Issues such as language, ethnicity, religion were not
relevant
 Nationalism as a political programme.
Rogers Brubaker
 group as core concept for many fields
 a discrete, sharply differentiated, internally
homogenous and externally bounded, basic
constituent of social life, fundamental unit of social
analysis, interest and agency can be attributed,
unitary collective actor with common purpose
 ethnic, racial, national conflict still often framed as a
conflict of ethnicities, nations and races
 How categories are transformed into groups?
(political, psychological, social process )
 High level of groupness is result not the cause of
conflict
 Organisations = Protagonist/ icons NOT ethnic
group (PLO, LTTE)
UNITARY TRAP
EVERYDAY PRIMORDIALISM
(Brubaker 2004, Fearon and Laitin 2000)
3 Citizenship as a Part of Identity
 Outline
 Definition
 Citizenship / Nationality
 State/ Democratic
 State heterogeneity?
 Citizenship regime in Western Balkans
 Kosovo citizenship
CITIZENSHIP
 Identity & status in society
 Objective / subjective
 rights &duties
 universality & equality, solidarity
 Active / passive
 inclusion/ exclusion
 Political / ethno-cultural
 CITIZENSHIP V. NATIONALITY
 STATE CITIZENSHIP
 FORMAL general membership status
 WELFARE
 DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
- Common membership of a shared and imminent
community (citizenship as a political activity
addressing collective and general concerns)
 Political state-centric identity
 Marginalization of groups (race, class, gender,
ethnicity, language, nationality, sexuality..)
 Community membership (inclusive and occlusive) X
heterogeneity
 Universal identity X particular interests (Purvis, Hunt
1999: 461)
Citizenship regime in Western Balkans
 Dissolution?
 Redefinition of citizenship status
 Political tool
 Nation-building
 Ethnic engineering
 Legal continuity of only republican citizenship
 Self-designed criteria
(national state Croatia, diasporas right, near abroad
Kosovo
 Nationhood political/ ethno-cultural (Brubaker)
 Joppke´s Citizenship
 Status openness/ inclusiveness (all pre-war citizens, dual
citizenship Serbs/diaspora? , public service )
 Rights (individual supplemented by community)
 Identity (international design, post-national state, Kosovo
nation?)
4 History and its impact on Kosovo’s
character and development
 Map
 Pre-war
 Post-war
 Post-Independece
'Kosovo is a plain
where the Serbs bend over to work the soil,
Albanians sweat in the mining shafts
underground,
Turks (largely spent and reminiscing about past
fame) grow poppies and peppers,
while the Gypsies fill the air with the sounds of
life.'
A. N. Dragnich and S. Todorovich, The Saga of Kosovo, East European
Monographs, New York, 1984, p. 5
Early history
Illyrians
12th century Serbian kingdom
June 28 1389
1974
80s
1990
1993-97
March 1998
March 1999
June 1999
Post-war
2003 First direct talks between Serbian and Kosovo
Albanian
2003 March Mitrovica clashes
2006 July First direct talks between Serbian and Kosovo
Albanian about the future status
2007 February Ahtisaari plan
2008 February Kosovo declares independence (111/193;
23/28)
Entities that recognise Kosovo as an
independent state
Post-Independence
2008 December Eulex takes over police,
justice and custom services
2011 March Serbia and Kosovo begin direct talks
2011 December Agreement on regulating border
crossing
2012 September the end of international supervision
(Eulex monitors, NATO peacekeepers)
2013 April The Brussels Agreement
2013 September opening talks with Kosovo on an AA
2013 November first local elections supported by Serbia
2014 June parliament election
Now War Crimes Court, an Association of Serbian
Municipalities