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Macedonia changes name, ending bitter dispute with Greece
- djif 8y ago"...ending...": in fact, it has just begun.. There's a long way until this 'agreement' becomes a 'reality' (referendum and constitutional changes in FYROM and then vote in both parliaments). But most importantly the will of the people has been ignored so only the near future will show what will actually happen. For a historical reference about this issue and the Greek identity of Macedonia: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/6265/was-alexander-the-great-greek-or-macedonian https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/6265/was-alexand...
- fifnir 8y agoWhich will of which people was ignored?
- shp0ngle 8y agoBoth. Nationalist Greeks are angry and so do nationalist Makedonians. I would think both countries have more important things to protest about than name change, but then I don't live on Balkans.
- ben_w 8y agoWill of the people != will of the nationalists. Can’t really say the will of the people is being ignored when referenda are planned, referenda which one can reasonably still presume will be binding.
- v_lisivka 8y agoBoth Greece and Macedonia are national countries, so in this case will of the people == will of the nationalists.
- newfoundglory 8y agoGreece probably shouldn't have elected an anti-nationalist governing party then.
- v_lisivka 8y agoSome nations have home: their own country, so in these cases people == nation, and will of the people == will of the nation.
- immigrantsheep 8y agoThings like these are, sadly, very important in the Balkans sigh
- FactolSarin 8y agoI'm pretty sure the name of your own country is important to most people everywhere.
- nspattak 8y agothe first part of your last sentence: Welcome to Balkans!
- phobosdeimos 8y agoStrange AFAIK the Greek-Macedonian border is not contested. Both countries acknowledge eachother sovereignty.
- v_lisivka 8y agoBecause of rules of NATO.
- djif 8y agoThat will: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-42937889 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-42937889 And before you speak again about nationalists, etc read a bit about Mikis Theodorakis who was the main speaker addressing the crowd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikis_Theodorakis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikis_Theodorakis
- detaro 8y agoSo on both sides, the people that are unhappy would have wanted the other side to make more concessions?
- fifnir 8y agoThat's exactly why I poked him. Only nationalists are displeased. source: I'm Greek and I think this is a great deal
- djif 8y agoI can see you can't really understand what a nationalist means despite one representative source I cited with regards to Mikis Theodorakis. I won't mock you for that -as you did- however to make my point easier for you here is a hint: M. Theodorakis has been a communist all his life and was imprisoned during the Greek dictatorship (Junta) in 1967-74. Junta is the 'dream' of Greek nationalists (see Golden Dawn). I think that'd be helpful
- macns 8y agoTo my eyes Miki is reading someone else's opinions. Happens a lot lately. It looks like he is being used every time he steps up publicly regarding national matters. IMHO.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago>> But most importantly the will of the people has been ignored so only the near future will show what will actually happen. If "the will of the people" is to cling on to nationalist and irredentist ideas, then it's imperative that the people are givent he opportunity to reconsider their "will". We know all too well what happens in Europe when we let nationalism guide us. In the Balkans, even more so. The "will" of the people can certainly not be that we are constantly up in arms, killing each other for petty malakies (yes, I'm Greek). The only "people" who "will" this are populist politicians who stand to profit from constant unrest.
- Xerces2018 8y agoNow that Greece recognizes Macedonias heritage as it's own, it's time to pay back reperations to Turkey, Iran and India for plundering and killing by Alexander the Great.
- everydaypanos 8y agoIsn't it ironic that things like Mickey Mouse are super copyrighted that even if you name your son that you will get in trouble. On the other hand things like historical references(Macedonia) are up for grabs by anyone and they even attract supporters of the type "self naming is a right"..
- djif 8y ago"On the other hand things like historical references(Macedonia) are up for grabs by anyone and they even attract supporters of the type "self naming is a right".." absolutely agree... unfortunately common sense is extinct nowadays
- dalbasal 8y agoDisney hasn't had a "regime change", and the regime question was quite clear at the time Mickey was invented. Macedonia (Kingdom? Empire? Ancient ethnicity?/dialect?/polity?) had lots of regime changes. We can't even be sure that the Greeks, at the time of Philip & Alexander considered Macedonia to be "Greece." You could argue either way. You could also argue that half the world is the "real" Macedonia. Bagdad has a decent claim. I can see how Greece sees it, that naming may lead to territorial claims. That aside, Names are just names. I don't think this name is a crime against logic/history. This is like insisting that what gay "really" means is happy. It's neither true or false statement. It's nonsensical.
- trab 8y ago>> We can't even be sure that the Greeks, at the time of Philip & Alexander considered Macedonia to be "Greece." This is plain wrong. There is absolutely no dispute what so ever among historians about the Greek origin of Macedonia. The new country of Northern Macedonia in no way disputes this either. Comments like yours are the prime proof that what happened is very very wrong. This is a quote from Wikipedia about Alexander the great. >> Alexander was awarded the generalship of Greece and used this >> authority to launch his father's pan-Hellenic project to lead >> the Greeks in the conquest of Persia.
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- Svip 8y agoSo can Luxembourg claim the Belgian province of Luxembourg back then?
- black_puppydog 8y agoGreece didn't claim the country for itself, it claimed the name for it's own northern province.
- Svip 8y agoGreece's logic in disapproving of the name Macedonia is that they fear that Macedonia (the republic) could some day claim the Greek province of Macedonia. By that logic, so should Luxembourg (the grand duchy) be able to claim the Belgian province of the same name.
- seszett 8y agoThere's a difference though, in that the province of Luxembourg was indeed a part of Luxembourg (the country) not even 200 years ago. So it would be a much more legitimate claim.
- Tharkun 8y agoI don't think the rich Grand Duchy would be terribly interested in acquiring the empoverished Belgian province.
- fibbra 8y agoThat is not an official stance. Macedonia is part of the Greek identity. FYROM (still the official name until the agreement gets implemented in a few months) have been claiming this Greek identity by misappropriating history. Think of it as a trademark violation.
- jcranmer 8y agoA more appropriate parallel is the US state of California, which is named as it was once a part of a region named after Alta California, the name California first being applied to the then-thought-to-be-an-island peninsula in modern Mexico. The country of Macedonia was part of a region generally called Macedonia for over a thousand years, as the initial named unit of Macedonia (which was in Greece) expanded to cover a wider area.
- Lucadg 8y agolast time I was in Macedonia I saw a man pulling a big plough by hand. No horse or tractor. Unrelated, I know.
- crypt1d 8y agoConsidering how strong nationalistic propaganda is these days in the Balkans, if this thing passes all the referendums, etc needed to make it a reality, it will be a huge win. Congrats
- emptyfile 8y agoA total embarrassment for both nations that it lasted so long.
- fibbra 8y agoIt has been a big embarrassment. The 'macedonian' (irl: south slavic) language was recognized as a language in 1977 at a UN standards meeting that took place in Athens. When Yugoslavia was broken in pieces, the issue of the name for FYROM should have been resolved then and there. The most promising name was North Macedonia. Oh the irony.
- NeoBasilisk 8y agoI think that relative to the other issues that occurred with other former Yugoslav republics, a naming dispute was easily ignored at the time.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoGreece has objected because they can; they have a veto on new EU members and have made this a red line. Other EU countries technically can tell Greece to accept Macedonia as it is (was) or no aid etc, but that's an extreme. Considering that "Macedonia" extends also into Greece it's not unreasonable to differentiate, into Northern and the other part. Without wanting to start a war, today's "Macedonians" are mostly slavs, and Albanians make about 25-30%.
- ninjamayo 8y agoI really hope things change for the better. Being from the north of Greece I know first hand the difficulties with the name. I am very passionate about it but I understand we live in a different world. My feeling is that the Greek government and their NATO, EU allies pushed this forward now in order to stop the imperialistic plans of Erdogan in the region. I think with more Balkan countries in the EU, NATO influences start and stop with the West not the Russians, not the Erdoganites.
- ryanlol 8y ago>I am very passionate about it Could you perhaps expand on this a little? I have a very hard time understanding why someone would be passionate about something like this.
- fibbra 8y agoFYROM is a neighboring country to Greece. For the last 20+ years, the two countries were on a stalemate on this. Greece did not invest much into their northern neighbor. Turkey with Erdogan has more economic involvement in FYROM than Greece, even if there are no traditional links between them.
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- newfoundglory 8y agoI don't think the question was "what is Macedonia" but more like "please explain why this matters to you".
- deninho 8y agowell, as an Albanian neighbor of mine says: "We, Balkan people, see flags and react like morons". It describes Balkan people to the point. PS As a greek citizen, i couldnt care less about the name of our neighbors, as long as we live together in peace (and we do live in peace with them)
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- elorant 8y agoIn Greece there's quite an uproar for this agreement. 70% of the population is against it and in the northern parts of the country the government's acceptance rates have dropped to single digit percentages.
- andmarios 8y agoThis is just a poll from a right (I would argue even far-right) paper, so better take it with a grain of salt.
- elorant 8y agoTrue dat
- fifnir 8y agoI have a really hard time believing this 70% I appreciate that we all live in a bit of an echo chamber since we choose our friends, but I don't know anyone who is not okay with the "two names" solution What more could anyone else want? That they call themselves Skopje? We are the only ones to clal them that while E V E R Y O N E else just calls them "Macedonia" and wonders "what the hell is wrong with you greeks".
- fibbra 8y agoMost likely they did not even read the agreement. Either side.
- Grue3 8y agoWhat do they even want?
- zerostar07 8y agoYet Guardian still calls it macedonia though
- JumpCrisscross 8y agoI continue to regard this as the stupidest geopolitical dispute our reality can safely support.
- fibbra 8y agoHistory is full of such issues. This case reached up to economic sanctions. It is good there was no war about this.
- jcranmer 8y agoWhat about the Persian Gulf naming "dispute"?
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> What about the Persian Gulf naming "dispute"? Silly dispute, but much less stupid. The Persian/Arabian Gulf dispute is the product of an ongoing and relatively-new geopolitical tension. Both sides have military assets in the Gulf, and those assets threaten a major trading corridor. As a result, there is a genuine threat of one side seizing strategic ground from the other. Neither side is losing economic activity as a result of the naming dispute per se. (Lots of other things would need to be resolved before they could trade with and invest in each other.) And given the lack of intermingling (or common allies), they can each call it what they want without the other side noticing.
- jcranmer 8y agoI bring up the "dispute" in quotes because it's something that was entirely manufactured for the purposes of manufacturing a dispute. The Persian Gulf is an appellation that is millennia old, and the Arabs decided to call the gulf something else because they didn't like the Iranians... and then pretended to make up the entire fact that it's called the Persian Gulf as some weird Iranian conspiracy. At least the dispute of Macedonia has some kernel of truth to it (the Slavic peoples who moved into the Balkans during the Age of Migrations bear no relation to the Ancient Macedonians).
- everdev 8y ago> By agreeing to rename itself the Republic of North Macedonia the country will replace an interim accord under which it joined the UN 23 years ago as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. > The agreement means Skopje will need to make more than 150 changes to its constitution before Greece brings the pact before its own parliament for ratification – a task replete with challenges for Zaev, who like Tsipras has taken a progressive view on the issue, and faces considerable opposition from nationalists. Macedonia’s president, Gjorge Ivanov, has refused to support the deal, presaging a stormy few months ahead. Seems silly that a name change means that legal agreements have to be re-ratified.
- asymmetric 8y agoThey should've used a COUNTRY_NAME global variable.
- andmarios 8y agoIt is not just a name change, this is only the most title-worthy part of the deal. The FYROM constitution includes claims to Greek territories. Part of the deal (among others) is for these claims to be removed.
- shapiro92 8y agoI personally do not care about the naming. Name each place / country whatever you want. What I care about is the political games that are being played behind it. People in this thread miss one point about FYROM, they want to use the name Makedonia with relations to the ancient Makedonas. Which in turns creates issues with the Greek nation. Now with the new "deal" they will take the name North Macedonia but they strictly mention that they do not have any relation to the Ancient Makedonas. So at the end of the day, why didnt the two goverment or EU or UN take 20 historians and ask them, "guys do they bare the right to have that name?" Whatever the historians say should be the verdict. Now as for the name, there is a reason it is being pushed right now. The balkans are a chessboard for many many years and we will see soon the effects on "North Macedonia".
- csomar 8y ago> "guys do they bare the right to have that name?" Oh really? We need to have an authority deciding if we can have a name or not. Why not just let people label themselves what they want. I'm pretty sure if I name my island the "United States of America" people will not start paying their taxes to me anytime soon.
- shapiro92 8y agoOn a side note, try to name your cheese "Feta" or any other commercial product with a licensed name and you would be getting a lawsuit. I dont understand why the same does not happen here.. or wait capitalism :P
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> Which in turns creates issues with the Greek nation It creates zero issues for Greece. Alexander the Great died over two millenia ago [1]. Shortly after his death, the ancient kingdom of Macedon fell to Rome [2]. Again, over two millennia ago. Instead of working on something productive, these two nations found something totally irrelevant to squabble over. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_(ancient_kingdom)#Conflict_with_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_(ancient_kingdom)#Co...
- bovermyer 8y agoSo, naming is important, then? Would never have guessed that.
- Nihilartikel 8y agoIf their troll game were more on point, they could have gone with "SuperGreece".
- mishkovski 8y agoRelevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Macedonia#Macedonian_Question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Macedon...
- risto1 8y agoI was born in what was then Yugoslavia (now North Macedonia). In order to get a good full perspective of this issue I think you have to talk to several Greeks and North Macedonians. This has been my perspective and experience: It's mostly split between the population -- half (probably most) of us don't really seem to care about this issue, the other half feels pretty upset about it. It's really important to note that not a single Macedonian I've ever talked to has ever claimed that Ancient Macedonia isn't part of Greek history, I really don't know where Greeks are getting that from. Almost everyone here goes to vacation in Greece every year, and concedes when some Greeks say "Skopje?" to suggest that we're not Macedonians. We just nod and shrug it off, and say "Yeah, Skopje". Most people really don't care about this, if we did we wouldn't be going to Greece on vacation or buy Greek products, both of which we do a fair amount of. Some of us even wonder why we're celebrating a serial killer at all (Alexander the Great). In order to understand what's going on, I think you need to separate yourself from what politicians are thinking and doing compared to what the people are thinking and doing. Also let's face it, governments love to manipulate group identities to serve their interests. What Macedonians are upset about is that they feel like Macedonia has a shared history and Greece doesn't want to acknowledge it, and it's leveraging it's strong international influence to set us back and/or make us look bad. We're a small, formerly communist, landlocked country in the Balkans, we barely have any international influence at all. It's a no-brainer that most countries will side with Greece, and why there's EU pressure for us to change the name. We definitely wouldn't be able to dispute Greece's territory, especially since 1952 when Greece became part of NATO. We're seriously no threat to them even without NATO. I don't think this is about the name or territorial ambitions, or if it was it was like that a long time ago and is no longer relevant. It's deeper than that. People on the thread and the previous one have talked about the Balkan Wars being relevant to understanding this, and that the then conservative Greek govt in the mid-20th century suppressed a lot of North Macedonian speaking peoples living in Greek Macedonia to force them to say that they're Greek and that they can't speak slavic, much like how Bulgarians forced us to say that we're Bulgarian and speak Bulgarian when we were occupied by them, or how some people think we should be part of Greater Albania, or how some Serbians view us as South Serbians, and that Greece wants to cover this up. There's probably something there to look into, the Balkans is full of territorial grabs like that. I don't really know anything about this part of history. A lot of us just feel like we're being bullied to an extent, and that Greece is basically being a d*ck about it. Ancient Macedonia has mostly been part of Greece, but Paeonia (North Macedonia) has for a large part of it's existence, either been a dependent territory of Ancient Macedonia or has been fully a part of Ancient Macedonia when it was at the height of it's power. We didn't just pull the name out of nowhere, we've been called Macedonians since forever. Some of us that are upset about this think that we shouldn't be giving in to powerful external forces and that we should just make a stand. And that by giving in we're showing ourselves as weak and easy to manipulate, and would affect future negotiations. Some of us others think we're being stubborn, and that we should be the bigger person and just concede, because it's a pretty stupid dispute and I agree. A lot of us just don't care, or if we used to care we're jaded now after all this time and don't care anymore. We have a lot of shared history, we're neighbors after all. We don't have the same language, sure, but our traditional dress and textiles looks similar, our dance is similar, we both say "Opa!", we have similar traditional food. We used to be the same country several times in history, during the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. I don't think this is really about the name, it's more about that North Macedonia is mostly made up of slavic people with a large Albanian-Macedonian population and from a formerly communist country, and Greeks just don't want to be associated with former communists or slavic people. It really sucks because I like a lot about Greek history and culture, one of my favorite college professors taught Greek Philosophy to me. Greeks gave us democracy and the best philosophers along with India and China, all of which is still extremely relevant today. I'm glad we've come to a consensus about the name. We've both wasted a lot of energy over something pretty stupid, and we really should be getting along a lot better. We've wasted our time with what could've been quality time with our families or more richer life experiences, or improving the human condition. Nationalism, tribalism and groupthink are all diseases that I hope the 21st century will rid itself of.