The Construction of National Identity and its Challenges in Post-Yugoslav Censuses

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874 Social Science Quarterly Censuses are tools to make, reaffirm, and also reject identities. They provide crucial data, and allow for states to categorize their citizens. Their importance has increased with the rise of the modern state and its needs, which range from economics to taxation. It is also a major logistical enterprise that reaffirms the state in its capacity. A U.N. study notes: “The traditional census is among the most complex and massive peacetime exercises a nation undertakes” (U.N., 2008:23). Census takers in modern and colonial states sought to recreate a complete and comprehensive picture not only to govern better, but also to impose and normalize certain categories of identity. As Benedict Anderson notes, colonial censuses introduced racial, or ethnic, categories that were not just part of “divide-and-rule” strategies, but also were born out of a genuine, if misguided, desire to understand and to categorize (2008:164–66). In some cases, population counts in Balkan nation states served to legitimize competing territorial claims, as can be seen in the censuses conducted in the Ottoman-ruled Macedonia in the early 20th century (Yosmaoğlu, 2014:129–68). Whether their purpose is benign or manipulative, censuses require clear, measurable categories that allow for the aggregation of a large number of citizens. Most of the questions censuses ask, from a respondent’s household size, to a respondent’s level of education, or profession, might be intrusive for an individual, but not necessarily controversial. When it comes to identity categories, however, markers such as religion, language, and ethnicity introduce a significant element of subjective choice. It is at this juncture of a seemingly objective exercise and the subjective nature of identity that the controversies of census taking are most pronounced. As Simon and Piché have noted, “[t]he statistical representation of diversity is a complex process which reveals the foundations of societies and their political choices. Thus there is a gap between the apparent ethnic and racial diversity in most countries in the world and the way these societies perceive themselves and are portrayed in official and social statistics” (2012:357). Considering the ambiguity of identity we know to be case in all societies, an inevitable tension arises between the fiction of steady, objective categories, and the reality where belonging varies and does not necessarily fit into easily identified boxes. We need to be careful neither to fall into the trap of uncritically accepting the logic of ethnic numbers, nor to simply dismiss them, or those who “roll out census results and maps” as primitive and primordial (Jansen, 2005:51). A two-fold strategy allows us to take censuses into account without falling into the trap of inadvertently attributing a fixed quality to them. First, we need to accept the political use (and abuse) of numbers. As such, they are used for bargaining over competing claims, just like history (and its myths), international support, and victims on one’s side. Second, even if census results are snapshots that grant us an admittedly reductionist view of a more complex reality, they can serve as a useful tool to determine both the categories of the state and the response of its citizens. The Argument This article argues that censuses are an important site of contestation that establish, enforce, and negotiate national identities, which are in turn either accepted or rejected. By examining both the process of category making, and the response of citizens, the article seeks to highlight not only the production of identity boundaries, but also the response of citizens. In doing so, it seeks to explore the following hypotheses. First, censuses are politicized and the categorization of, and responses to, choices available to respondents are significant for the state and the organizations (such as parties) that represent ethnonational groups. Second, individuals have a choice to confirm or reject proposed identity categories. The scale of rejection is expected to result from two factors: (a) the availability of
The Construction of National Identity and its Challenges 875 choice (i.e., whether more than one identity category with which individuals can identify is available), and (b) the social and political polarization resulting from recent conflict. The main hypothesis of this article is that top-down nation-building processes, epitomized by census policies, require considerable efforts by ethnic entrepreneurs to mobilize citizens to choose particular national identities, and that they encounter considerable contestation among citizens, especially in deeply divided postconflict societies such as the states of former Yugoslavia. The efforts by ethnic entrepreneurs to impose groupness are greater in cases of ambiguous identities. Similarly, this article argues that the number of citizens that will opt out of prevailing identity categories depends on (a) the degree of interethnic polarization and (b) the availability of alternative identities that constitute possible choice. Ethnic entrepreneurs seek to block defection from the nation by extensive campaigning, and, depending on the options available to them, to mobilize (presumed) members of the constituency or to seek support from groups at the margins of group identity. By taking this approach, the article follows Rogers Brubaker’s call to focus less on groups themselves, and instead focus on the processes through which groupness is established and categories of identity imposed (2006:27). Understanding these processes highlights the mechanisms of group making and the discrepancies between top-down identity imposition and bottom-up responses. The article argues that national identity is more ambiguous, and boundary lines are more blurred, than the creation of the nation-state and the ensuing violence during the 1990s would suggest. Competing ethno-nationalist claims may shape contestation in the public arena, yet private choices made during censuses often refute these categories. As we shall see in the next section, the literature on censuses outside the United States, and other immigrant societies, has played scant attention to hybrid and complex identities. Furthermore, the literature gives little attention to the role of ethnic entrepreneurs rather than just the state in mobilizing individuals to opt for particular groups. As this article will show, the process of identity building through censuses is complex, contingent, and contested. It thus supports and contributes to the study of ethnic boundary making that Andreas Wimmer (2013) recently emphasized as a productive way to study ethno-nationalism. Literature Review Since Benedict Anderson (2008) singled out censuses as one of the tools of nationbuilding, a wealth of literature has appeared on the interrelationship between race, nation, and census politics. The claim by Peterson (1995) that there is no systemic discussion of censuses could hardly be made today. This interest in censuses in the United States and elsewhere challenges a positivist reading of censuses as an objective indicator of identity. This is part of the larger constructivist turn in the literature on race, nationalism, and ethnic identity, which views these categories as socially constructed, and changeable (Leets, Clement, and Giles, 1996). However, census results are still routinely used in quantitative studies of ethnicity. The reliance on ethnic, racial, and national categories in census results is useful and helps to identify diversity, yet bears the risk of “methodological nationalism,” of naturalizing the nation (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002). Thus, scholars of race and nationalism have to reflect on how to “document and analyze racial identity without reifying race as a social construct” (Rockquemore, Brunsma, and Delgado, 2009:14). Studying censuses as a site of identity contestation by critically observing the mechanisms through which states and ethnic entrepreneurs construct these identities and the responses of citizens can be an effective approach in addressing this challenge.
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The Construction of National Identity and its Challenges in Post-Yugoslav Censuses

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