Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey. By Umut Özkırımlı and Spyros A. Sofos. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Pp. viii220. $45.00. We have long been told by the literature on nationalism that identities, and the nations to which they attach themselves, are “invented”; that nations have no core “essence”; that territories are not inscribed with national meaning by any internal, inevitable, “natural” mechanism or process but are read and shaped as having such meaning by the peoples and polities that lay claim to them. And all of this is true, of course. The trouble is, all of these theoretical interventions haven’t much helped, at least in the sense that the world today is no less fraught with bitter nationalist conflicts than it ever was—if anything, it is more fraught. As Umut Özkırımlı and Spyros A. Sofos put it in their new, collaborative volume, Tormented by History, “in an age pervaded by the logic of nationalism, the mere recognition that
from triglav to caucasus
Commentary on the political and cultural developments in Southeastern Europe