Are we witnessing the Macedonian question of the 21st century?

The developments in Iraq and Syria today bear strong resemblances to the dynamics of political competition that unravelled in the Ottoman Balkans in the late 1890s and early 1900s. In both settings, albeit a century apart, local actors have carried out their political fights by manipulating existing international rivalries. Both settings have seen the use of extreme violence as an important tool in forging political loyalties and sustaining new ones, resulting in floods of refugees to neighbouring countries. In both regions, Western nationals were targeted for diverse purposes, as in the kidnapping of Ellen Maria Stone by the Macedonian revolutionaries in 1901 and the recent murders of James Foley and Steven Sotloff by the “Islamic State” (ISIS). While the responses by the international community to both conflicts has featured a similar political language that highlighted lofty humanitarian ideals, the same international actors persisted to take part in these seemingly local confrontations where they continued to invest monies, armies and energies in fighting aggressively what were essentially proxy wars.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the term “Macedonian question” was oft-used in European political discourse to designate the political future of the three Ottoman provinces located in the Balkans. Ottoman officials avoided the use of the name “Macedonia”‘ for fear of consolidating it but a regional and transnational battle was underway in the name of the rights of the region’s Christians then under what many saw as the repressive rule of the Ottoman sultan/caliph seated in Istanbul. After the turn of the twentieth century, the region began to see a rise in guerrilla warfare and military violence, muscled and supported by the locals and funded by a handful of external and domestic sponsors. The political destiny of the Ottoman territories in the Balkans thus constituted the core of the Macedonian question in Western capitals, a question that not only kept Russia, Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and others invested deeply in the region but also came to animate the political scene on a local level. Armed with new weapons such as dynamite as well as a print media handy for propaganda purposes, a host of revolutionaries emerged in Ottoman Macedonia and began to advance competing political claims on a daily basis which included, but were not limited to, the declaration of statehood now and then and the sudden but unlikely shifts in alliances.

The inhabitants of Ottoman Macedonia lived next to one another for centuries with little or no problem. As a result, they constituted truly mixed communities where Bulgarians spoke and prayed in Greek; Muslims and Christians were intermarried; Jews traded with Arabs; and some remained Catholic or Orthodox, while others insisted on more heterodox beliefs. Confessional, ethnic, religious and class lines of identification were overlapping, and loyalties thus remained multiple. Let’s make no mistake, though, the region was far from an ideal society devoid of any socio-economic and political problems. In the end, the Ottoman metropole had developed a chronic inability to address the diverse issues that have beset the region, partially because of the unfavourable shifts in power dynamics that constrained the Ottoman reformist efforts. Yet, what made things particularly violent in Macedonia was the complex relationship that developed between local and international actors. Revolutionaries continued to find sponsors and leverages abroad to advance their causes, and Western and regional capitals in turn used the local revolutionaries in pressuring the Ottoman sultan to their will.

Today, the patterns of co-dependency between local actors’ agendas and inter-state rivalries do not seem to have changed at all. In Iraq and Syria, the interests of regional and international powers continue to help spawn and nurture dangerous intra-state competitors like ISIS. However, the latter cannot be picked-on as the odd one out, for the international competition over the region, with a set of unintended consequences, has multiple historical precedents in the post-WWII period. The larger context of competition over the Middle East dates back to the consolidation of the Islamic Republic of Iran after the revolution of 1979. As Shi’ism gained a strong political platform complete with a charismatic leader in Ayatollah Khomeini, a Sunni backlash across the entire Middle East, sponsored generously by oil-rich Saudi Wahhabism, turned Saddam’s Iraq into a warzone with Iran, resulted in the politicisation of Shi’ism and Sunnism in places like Lebanon, and led to outright massacres such as that which took place in Hama, Syria, in 1982. This first phase of competition over the region was complete as the USA, together with a host of other Western powers, decided to take things into their own hands instead of playing behind the curtains. The result was a fragile but pro-Western democratic state of Iraq.

Then, by 2011, the waves of uprisings began which shook the foundations of the stable but authoritarian regimes in the region; all of the latter were products of the particular political economies established in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Arab Spring, as many termed it then, was rooted locally in the popular dissatisfaction with such authoritarian regimes that had ruled over the region since the fifties. While the uprisings were an expression of genuine popular desire for a better future, it would have been naïve to imagine that political transformations of this magnitude would have remained immune to the powerful thrusts of regional and global political competition. The destiny of the revolution in Egypt illustrated the point only too well; those saluted by one country as the true heroes of democracy were seen by others as fundamentalists with deep authoritarian roots. In just three years, as we have all seen, the politically unsettling push of the revolution in Egypt was reversed by a regime that proved to be deeply resilient within the military and justice system.

Nevertheless, it was not Yemen or Egypt but Syria where the ugliest episode of the inter-state competition of the twentieth-first century would get a fresh head start. The conflict in Libya was in this sense only a dress rehearsal, where the failure of Russia and China to veto the UN resolution translated into a swift air-strike campaign by the NATO-led forces with a semblance of international backing. The spill over effects of Libya — both in terms of growing Russian and Chinese distrust and the transfer of battle-hardened jihadists to Syria — turned ancient Syrian towns and their hinterland into the setting for the proxy-wars waged by international and regional powers. The amount of money and the number of guns poured into Syria by a host of regional and international powers has come to create new political platforms such as ISIS as well as a host of other groups with diverse agendas and membership, waiting to capitalise on the next political opportunity to reach an operational and thus sensational level. This seems to be an inevitable path, as the regional and international powers led by the USA have continued to “contain” the threat of ISIS, which certainly means not only the dispatch of more funds and guns to the region but also the emergence of more political factions in the near future.

It is shocking to observe the tactical and rhetorical similarities between the way the West tried to “solve” the Macedonian question in the early 1900s and the manners in which regional and Western capitals are trying to address the threats that emanate from the Middle East today. The discourses that highlight civilisational values and human rights as well as the notions of national, regional and international security do not seem to have changed at all, nor does the vicious cycle of problems that constantly “require” urgent outside attention and intervention. The Macedonian question in the Ottoman Balkans came to a “resolution” after two-decades of protracted guerrilla warfare, followed by two regional wars and then a global conflict in the shape of the First World War. For the past few decades, the situation in Iraq and Syria has proved to be similarly resilient in the way that it has constantly renewed and determined the course of regional and global political competition. One can only hope that the resolution of the conflict in the Middle East will differ from its Macedonian precedent.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.