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rfmcdonaldTwo weeks before the European Commission is set to give its verdict on Macedonia’s EU candidate status, the prime minister, Vlado Buckovski, has headed off to the United States to seek support for his country’s integration into the EU and NATO.
The government is turning to Washington out of fears that the decade-long name dispute with Greece may seriously harm its EU aspirations, after Athens warned it might veto a Brussels decision on Macedonia because of the row.
Without a strong partner or patron inside the EU, Macedonia is turning to Washington in the hope that the US may persuade Greece not to make a resolution of the name dispute a condition for Macedonia’s EU integration.
The Greek_Macedonian dispute, arguably one of the first international disputes to be publicized on the Internet in flamewars, goes back decades. To begin, the republic of Macedonia is not the same thing as the region of Macedonia, an area much larger than that of the current republic, including part of southwestern Bulgaria and most of northern Greece. Apparently in the Bulgarian sphere of influence before Ottoman conquest, by the late 19th century Ottoman misrule had made Macedonia little more than a failed state. This accentuated the ongoing and profound identity confusion of Macedonians, regardless of their mother tongues and claimed ethnicities.
Macedonia was the first of the Yugoslav lands to fall under the Ottoman Turks and the last to be freed from Ottoman rule. The dark centuries of Ottoman domination left the region's Slavs backward, illiterate, and unsure of their ethnic identity. In the nineteenth century, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Greek clergymen established church schools in the region and worked to spread their respective national ideologies through education. Families often compromised by sending one child to each type of school, and whole villages frequently passed through several phases of religious and national reorientation. After the end of Ottoman rule, control of Macedonia became the most inflammatory issue of Balkan politics. After a period of guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and savage reprisals ending with Bulgaria's defeat in the Second Balkan War in 1913, an anti-Bulgarian campaign began in the areas of Macedonia left under Serbian and Greek control. Bulgarian schools and churches were closed, and thousands of Macedonians fled to Bulgaria, which then was viewed as a place of refuge. The process was repeated after Bulgaria's World War I occupation of Macedonia ended. In the interwar period, Macedonian terrorist groups, with intermittent Bulgarian support, continued armed resistance against the Yugoslav government. The Yugoslavs refused to recognize a Macedonian nation, but many Macedonians accepted Yugoslav control in the 1930s and 1940s. Bulgarian occupation in 1941, first greeted as liberation, soon proved as offensive as the Yugoslav assimilation program it replaced; the sense of confused allegiance among Macedonians thus continued into the postwar period.
As Wikipedia notes, after the Second World War Tito promoted the formation of a distinctive Macedonian identity. One reason for this was to weaken Serbian dominance of post-war Yugoslavia; another, the weakening of Bulgarian claims to this knot of Yugoslav territory. Still another was Tito's desire to annex all of Macedonia, including Greek Macedonia, into a broader Balkan Communist federation under his control.
The Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito separated Yugoslav Macedonia from Serbia after the war. It became a republic of the new federal Yugoslavia (as the Socialist Republic of Macedonia) in 1946, with its capital at Skopje. Tito also promoted the concept of a separate Macedonian nation, as a means of severing the ties of the Slav population of Yugoslav Macedonia with Bulgaria. Although the Macedonian language is very close to Bulgarian, the differences were deliberately emphasized and the region's historical figures were promoted as being uniquely Macedonian (rather than Serbian or Bulgarian). A separate Macedonian Orthodox Church was established, splitting off from the Serbian Orthodox Church. The Communist Party sought to deter pro-Bulgarian sentiment, which was punished severely; convictions were still being handed down as late as 1991.
Tito had a number of reasons for doing this. First, he wanted to reduce Serbia's dominance in Yugoslavia; establishing a territory formerly considered Serbian as an equal to Serbia within Yugoslavia achieved this effect. Secondly, he wanted to sever the ties of the Macedonian Slav population with Bulgaria as recognition of that population as Bulgarian would have undermined the unity of the Yugoslav federation. Third of all, Tito sought to justify future Yugoslav claims towards the rest of Macedonia (Pirin and Aegean), in the name of the "liberation" of the region. The potential "Macedonian" state would remain as a constituent republic within Yugoslavia, and so Yugoslavia would manage to get access to the Aegean Sea.
Tito's designs on Macedonia were asserted as early as August, 1944, when in a proclamation he claimed that his goal was to reunify "all parts of Macedonia, divided in 1915 and 1918 by Balkan imperialists". To this end, he opened negotiations with Bulgaria for a new federal state, which would also probably have included Albania, and supported the Greek Communists in the Greek Civil War. The idea of reunification of all of Macedonia under Communist rule was abandoned as late as 1949 when the Greek Communists lost and Tito fell out with the Soviet Union and pro-Soviet Bulgaria.
Across the border in Greece, Macedonian Slavs were seen as a potentially disloyal "fifth column" within the Greek state. The existence of a Slav minority was officially denied, with Macedonian Slavs referred to in official censuses as being merely "Slavophone" Greeks. Slavonic names were forbidden, and a strip along the border (where most of the Macedonian Slavs of Greece still live) was subjected to security restrictions. Greeks were resettled in the region to dilute the Slav population, many of whom emigrated (especially to Australia) in the face of official pressure. Although there was some liberalization between 1959 and 1967, the Greek military dictatorship re-imposed harsh restrictions. The situation gradually eased after Greece's return to democracy, although even as recently as the 1990s Greece has been criticised by international human rights activists for "harassing" Macedonian Slav political activists.
This theme of possible territorial dispossession was a major factor in the Greek civil war of the late 1940s. It is true, as some have said, that Belgium is able to co-exist with the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg even though Belgium has its own Province of Luxembourg. Leaving aside the fact that when Belgium gained independence from the Netherlands, it accepted the definitive loss of what was then the eastern half of Luxembourg only reluctantly, I suspect that the Belgians would be rather more twitchy about the Grand Duchy if that state inherited claims to Belgian Luxembourg. Luxembourg province does have a Letzeburgisch-speaking minority, after all. I'm leaving the question of likely-spurious claims by Macedonia to by the inheritor of Greek Macedonia regalia and insignia entirely to the side.
That said, as Douglas Muir pointed out a while back, independent Macedonia has rejected these claims. No one in positions of power in Skopje is interested in claiming Greek Macedonia. With good reason: Greece's relatively developed economy and large military ensures that a Greek-Macedonian war would be less a competition and more a one-sided blitzkrieg conquest of independent Macedonia, even if you excluded the European Union. Macedonia just isn't going to toy with irredentism. Greek sensitivity might be explicable, even understandable, but past a certain point--long ago reached, certainly exceeded--it is purely destructive. Greece should get over it.
