Session 7: The Recourse of Culture and Ethnicity

3rd Global Conference

Tuesday 10th November – Thursday 12th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Preserving Arab Culture in the Kingdom of Bahrain
Magdalena Karolak
NYIT, Bahrain Campus, Bahrain

This paper aims at assessing the efforts of preserving Arab culture in the Kingdom of Bahrain initiated by the Bahraini Parliament in recent years. With a population of roughly 1 million inhabitants, one third of whom are expatriates, Bahrain has been under a constant pressure of immigrant cultures. The lack of integration of residing foreigners added to the effects of country‘s rapid modernization putting the Bahraini cultural identity at stake. This danger was recognized by the Bahraini Parliament. With the political reform that culminated in the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in 2002, the Parliament became the unique though limited form of popular representation. Although no major tensions between expatriate and local population have been yet observed, these could arise in the future if the problem is ignored. The situation in Bahrain is all the more vulnerable since local population is divided between Sunni and Shia’a Muslims, which led to conflicts in the past. It is no surprising that the first steps in the exercise of democracy addressed the problem of national culture. Although Bahraini authorities have recognized that multiculturalism is an asset, it is an extremely delicate question how to establish a balance between foreign influences needed for a future development of country’s economy and local culture. This paper examines the work of the Parliament aimed at preservation of Bahraini identity, its successes and lessons to be drawn from its failures.

The case study of Bahrain is representative of problems faced by other Arabian Gulf countries and answers the question: Is an eradication of national identity a necessary evil of rapidly developing countries of the Gulf region?

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

The Consequences of the In-Effect Dissociative Policies in Australia: Practiced Macedonian Ethnicity and Empty –Shelled Slav-Macedonian Ethnicity
Irena Veljanova
School of Social Sciences, University of Western Sydney, Australia

Macedonian ethnicity is one of the many ethnicities which contribute towards the ethnic diversity in Australia. While the contribution of Macedonians towards the Australian cultural diversity and nation-building is undeniable, the contestation of their ethno-national identity has been a long standing issue.

Focusing on the Macedonian experience in Australia, the first aim of this paper is to demonstrate that a particular ethno-culture can be officially disassociated from the respective ethno-nation by the means of politically negotiated change of Governments’ discourses/policies irrespective of the opposition of the ethno-nationality in question. The policies that have the effect of official disassociation of ethno-culture from the respective ethno-nation will be referred to as dissociative policies in effect.

In the last two decades, the Australian Government’s contestation of the Macedonian  national identity is notable through its policy of diplomatic non-recognition of the Macedonian state under its constitutional name and by the act of  ‘[unilateral] redefining [of the Macedonian] ethnicity as Slav-Macedonian’ (Wright 1994: 26).  While the effect of these policies is an official disassociation of the Macedonian ethno-national community from the Macedonianness and artificial perpetuation of a new ethno-national category of Slav-Macedonians, in actuality, Macedonians in Australia continuously imagine themselves as ethno-national Macedonians.  As no ethnic group imagines its existence as Slav-Macedonian, the Slav-Macedonian ethnicity remains an empty-shelled ethnicity.

The second aim of this paper is to illustrate the connection between the contemporary official Australian national policies regarding Macedonians and the foreign policies of the ‘Great Powers’ regarding the Balkans in the first half of the twentieth century. The findings presented in this paper are mostly based on the investigative inquiry into the selected intelligence material compiled and archived by the relevant Departments within the Australian Commonwealth Government, directly or indirectly referring to the matters of Macedonian nationhood and statehood until the mid twentieth century.