Historiography in North Macedonia

rdf:langString Historiography in North Macedonia

rdf:langString Historiography in North Macedonia is the methodology of historical studies used by the historians of that country. It has been developed since 1945 when SR Macedonia became part of Yugoslavia. According to the German historian it has preserved nearly the same agenda as the Marxist historiography from the times of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The generation of Macedonian historians closely associated with the Yugoslav period who worked on the actual national myths of that time are still in charge of the institutions. In fact, in the field of historiography, Yugoslav communism and Macedonian nationalism are closely related. According to the Austrian historian , modern Macedonian historiography is highly politicized, because the Macedonian nation-building process is still in development. Diverging approaches are discouraged and people who express alternative views risk economic limitations, failure of academic career and stigmatization as "national traitors". Troebst wrote already in 1983 that historical research in the SR Macedonia was not a humanist, civilizing end in itself, but was about direct political action. No such case of reciprocal dependence of historiography and politics has been observed in modern Europe. Because of the complexity of the case, the Macedonian historiography could be described as a state "ideology". Additionally, in North Macedonia, the discipline of archaeology has often been placed in the service of the state and used to legitimate nationalist claims to history, culture, and territory. Although ethnic Macedonians do not appear in primary sources before 1870, medieval history is extremely important for the traditions of modern Macedonian nationalism. Macedonian historians fabricated after 1960 the myth that Samuel of Bulgaria was Macedonian by nationality. Moreover, after 2010 a nation-building project was promoted to impose the deceptive idea that the Macedonian nation was the oldest on the Balkans, with an unbroken continuity from Antiquity to Modern times. Some domestic and foreign scholars have criticized this agenda of a denialist historiography, whose goal is to affirm the continuous existence of a separate Macedonian nation throughout history. This controversial worldview is ahistorical, as it projects modern ethnic distinctions into the past. Such an enhanced, ethnocentric reading of history contributes to the distortion of the Macedonian national identity and degrades history as an academic discipline. Under such historiographies generations of students were educated in pseudo-history.