Societal Insecurities in Western Balkans. A Case Study on Macedonia

Abstract

Societal security is particularly efficient as an analytical tool to understand the security concerns of “multiethnic states”, the relationship between the country's regime (the majority group) and the minority groups. During the dissolution of Yugoslavia, nationalism, disintegration, ethnic identity were the main security issues in the Western Balkans in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. In this paper, the relationship between the Macedonian and Albanian population in Macedonia is considered in the perspective of the social insecurity established after the creation of the independent Macedonian state as a “national state” of the ethnic Macedonian majority and not a “citizen-state” of all ethnicities and identities as well as in the perspective of linguistic disparity between Macedonians and Albanians, both cases constituting two application instances of this analytical approach.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n13p407