Theories of Nationalism and the Modernization Processes in South Eastern Europe. Between Myth and Realpolitik

In the scholarship on nationalism in the 20th century, a recurrent tendency has been to regard nationalism in essentialist or substantial terms. Anthony D. Smith, Ernst Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson were all in different ways all building on the French sociologist Emile Durkheim for whom society was to be analyzed as an organism or a system in itself. The Durkheimian legacy is moreover also present in much scholarly literature on nationalism in South-Eastern Europe. A crucial component in the project Many Roads in Modernity has been to analyse The Ottoman Empire and the post-ottoman states as partially determined by a common past, partially by their inter-relations and partially by their internal development. The project has sought to emphasize how each state has sought to use the common history in their specific historical context that to a large part has been determined by the other post-ottoman states.

Niels Reeh's sub-project has contributed with a relational theoretical perspective in which nationalism (or civil religion) is not to be understood as the result of a specific culture that can be described and analyzed in itself. Drawing on the philosopher John Searle, the sociologist Norbert Elias and the ethnologist Thomas Højrup the sub-project has sought to establish a theoretical framework in which religion and national identity can be described as the result of a struggle for mutual recognition or a serious existential game with the significant other states, which in this case to a large extent is comprised by the post-ottoman states. A consequence of Reeh’s relational approach is that there are many roads to and through modernity and that these different roads must be seen as a complex result of internal and external forces in each of the states that succeeded The Ottoman Empire. The theoretical analysis and framework thus suggest that not only were the states that succeeded The Ottoman Empire bound by a common history but also by being each other's significant other. As a parallel to the theoretical framework for the study of nationalism, Niels Reeh has also established a framework for a relational study of religion and that the fall of Constantinople had a crucial impact on the formation of the modern notion of religion itself.