Graduation Year
2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies
Major Professor
Golfo Alexopoulos, Ph.D.
Co-Major Professor
Bernd Reiter, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Abdelwahab Hechiche, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Michael Scott Solomon, Ph.D.
Keywords
Divided Consciousness, Ethnicity, Identity, Nationness, Statehood
Abstract
Once ethnically the most homogeneous among the South Slavs, Montenegro is now deeply divided between two factions over statehood and identity. Notwithstanding the expansion of national institutions and elite efforts to mobilize upon them, with independence in 2006 has come less unity, internal harmony, and loyalty to the state, and intensified division and contention. Accompanying the lack of political integration that reaches across ethnic divides has been the further erosion in the popular support for the Montenegrin identity.
This study explores why and how the nation-building efforts of Montenegrin ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, rather than fostering national cohesion, political integration, and titular identification, resulted in a more divided and less ‘Montenegrin’ society. Combining the analysis of the politics of nation-building from above with popular responses from below, it examines the reciprocal relationship between the nation-builders and the masses and, thus, seeks to explain why attempts to make the boundaries of the national community and the state congruent failed.
I argue that the key to the failure of nation-building in Montenegro is twofold: the power-centric design of the Montenegrin nation-building project, which was based on forming a limited community that would ensure its architects’ position of dominance, and the ensuing power competition between two rival national projects pursuing competing ethnic boundary-making strategies: Montenegrin (green) and Serbian (white).
The analysis also highlights the contingent and contested nature of ethnicity and nation-building as well as the limits of ethnopolitical entrepreneurship. Although the competition at the elite level precipitated the consolidation of ‘Montenegrin’ and ‘Serb’ categories as mutually exclusive, it failed to crystallize the two as distinct and bounded groups.
Scholar Commons Citation
Erdem, Muhammed F., "Nation-Building, Ethnic Boundary Making, and Situational Nationalism: Why did Montenegro become more divided and less 'Montenegrin'?" (2023). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/10035
