Contested Ethnic Identity: The Case of Macedonian Immigrants in Toronto, 1900-1996 by Chris Kostov (review)

Treatments of intraethnic relations between successive waves of immigrants remain understudied in Canadian immigration historiography. In using Macedonian immigration to Toronto during the twentieth century as a case study, Chris Kostov successfully illustrates the similarities and differences between successive waves of immigrants. Kostov views the interethnic conflict over Macedonian identity in Toronto as multidimensional (159). The author proposes that the underlying basis of the conflict is the fact that ethnic Bulgarian, Greek, and Macedonian communities in Canada all claim ‘Macedonia’ and ‘Macedonian’ as terms that historically belong to them. As a result, Contested Ethnic Identity evaluates each group’s attempt in the postwar period to deny their neighbours’ historic claim to Macedonia.

Due to the historic and political events that led to the geographic division of Macedonia among the countries of Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, the immigrants that came to Toronto developed three distinct identities: Bulgarian, Greek, and Macedonian where ‘Macedonia’ and ‘Macedonian’ held different meanings for each of the three groups. Kostov argues that until the late 1940s, Macedonian immigrants in Toronto held a strong ethnic Bulgarian identity (4). Hence, an overwhelming majority of ethnic Bulgarian immigration to Canada also came from the historic region of Macedonia. These same immigrants primarily settled in Toronto and became a major centre of the Macedonian Diaspora. As a result, the founders of the Bulgarian community in Canada were ‘Macedono-Bulgarians’ – Macedonians who viewed themselves as ethnic Bulgarians due to a shared history, belief in Orthodox Christianity, and a common language (275).

Contested Ethnic Identity successfully demonstrates that individual immigrants along with community elites contested Macedonian identity through history, language, control of local churches, and even disputed the heritage of prewar Bulgarian immigrants from Macedonia (232). Macedonian ethnic identity was first propagated by left-wing intellectuals under the direction of the Comintern in the 1920s and 1930s, and gained mass support only in the late 1940s with the codification of a Macedonian language in 1944. Interestingly, Kostov notes that prior to the Second World War, immigrants in the United States and Canada used the words ‘Macedonian’ and ‘Macedonia’ as geographic terms, thus avoiding any link to ethnicity. Ethnic Bulgarian communist immigrants from Macedonia founded the Macedonian People’s League in an attempt to support Yugoslavia’s claim that Macedonia was a distinct ethnic nation (192-193). In 1959, Yugoslavia cemented its position and claimed it was the true representative of Macedonia and Macedonian identity in an attempt to undermine the majority Bulgarian ethnic identity of Macedonians in Europe and elsewhere. During the period between 1950 and the 1980s, proponents of an ethnic Macedonian identity in Canada were largely opposed by the ethnic Bulgarian community.

Kostov utilizes Peter Vasiliadis’ Who Are You? and Lillian Petroff’s Sojourners and Settlers to illustrate their important contributions to the history of Macedonian immigration to Canada. In his view, both monographs use archival sources and oral interviews to inaccurately argue that an ethnic Macedonian community existed in Toronto prior to 1939 (118). Kostov’s own consultation of archival and primary documents in Bulgaria, Library and Archives Canada, and the Multicultural History Society of Ontario – where oral and textual sources identified by ethnolingual group as Macedonian were in fact Bulgarian – led him to determine that the pre-1939 immigrants from Macedonia came to Canada with a Bulgarian ethnic identity. Kostov’s oral interviews illustrate the subjectivity of oral testimony and demonstrate how ethnic Bulgarian, Greek, and Macedonian identity among members of the three groups remains fluid to the present day.

Contested Ethnic Identity includes an intriguing assessment of the role of Bulgarian, Greek, and Macedonian scholarship in disseminating history to their respective populations. Kostov notes that in the past, Bulgarian and Greek scholars continuously denied the existence of an ethnic Macedonian identity. With the exception of Yugoslavia, the predominant ‘nation concept’ in the Balkans is that of the ethnic-nation. Balkan intellectuals have, in recent times, sought to...